Let’s start with what we don’t know, for when we seek knowledge, we are seeking an unknown. But how then do we know what to look for, and how do we know when we’ve found it? This is another one of those longstanding philosophical pseudo-conundrums – the seeming paradox that if we know what we’re looking for, we don’t have to look, because we’ve already found it, and if we don’t know what we’re looking for, we could never find it.
But no one just starts out blindly looking for knowledge — like trying to find reverse in a Soviet tank with no owner’s manual. That’s not how any of this works. Rather, we begin with anything from a hunch to a hypothesis to an intuition, theory, paradigm, etc. Moreover, in each of these we ultimately begin with a pre-cognitive faith in the link between intelligence and intelligibility. This faith is an implicit certitude that there is something to find, and why not? Seeking knowledge obviously presupposes a great deal, at the very least that knowledge exists and that seeking it will be fruitful, i.e., that the link between our seeking at one end and the Great Unknown at the other that never stops flowing. Thus there is a generative dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, a systematic and methodical -- AKA critical -- ignorance.
In short, if you’re ignorant and you know it, clap your hands. Conversely, if you’re ignorant and you don’t know it, there is a cure, but there is some pain involved, i.e., the pain of not knowing. Supposing you are trapped within an ideological matrix, then some disassembly is required before you can step into the real Cosmos.
Here again there is always a movement from unknown to known, which is actually an endless spiral—
A perpetual notion machine?
Yes, in that we never stop generating notions about Being, which generate further notions: “The order of discovery is just the opposite of the order of doctrine. In doctrine you start from the principles and draw the conclusions, but in discovery you discover one conclusion after another and gradually you move on to your principles” (Lonergan). Induction and deduction respectively, up and down and back up again, in a hypothetico-deductive spiral. Science works this way because this is the way the Cosmos and Anthropos together work.
∞
Only man can intentionally render himself puzzled and thereby open to surprise. Nevertheless, some folks put a premature end to this bewilderness adventure via ideological closure, but no one needs to stop wondering in the cosmic desert and being nourished with daily insights from above, below, and in between. The scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi built a whole career of this recognition, that “Today’s discovery becomes tomorrow’s clue, to be relied upon in the hopes of making an even more superior contact with reality” (Meek). Normative science is never a one-and-done proposition, and we know reality has been discovered when the discovery yields further unspecifiable-in-advance discoveries.
If you can’t trust reality, what can you trust?
Which is why trusty physics continues to develop, whereas astrology or phrenology are untrustworthy companions in the search for knowledge. The result of the genuine discovery, writes Meek, is “the gradual extension of ourselves into the world,” which means there is always a subjective component to our objective discoveries.
This goes to “the essential and positive nature of the personal: it is a power that enables man to transcend himself and grab hold of reality in his understanding,” for without our contribution, “such contact would not be possible at all.” Reality is both rational and relational, which “must be assumed by anyone who believes in the possibility of knowledge that is not entirely of his own making: if we are to make sense of the world, it must be susceptible of having sense made of it…” (ibid). This is a rejection of the negative delusion of Laplacian objectivism – the idea that we can have a view from nobody nowhere.
Instead, the Anthropos is at the tripartite center of cosmotheandrism, which is why Dávila can say that The truth is objective but not impersonal. For without the person, there is no contact, and without the contact reality remains unknown and unknowable. Even Laplace had to be someplace in order to pretend to have a view from noplace.
I have no use for his vacuous hypothesis.
This is another way of talking about ultimacy, for there is no ultimate scientific answer, rather, there is only the ultimacy of our endlessly fruitful and deepening dialogue with nature. For Polanyi this is the very definition of reality: it is “something that attracts our attention by clues which harass and beguile our minds into getting ever closer to it, and which, since it owes this attractive power to its independent existence, can always manifest itself in still unexpected ways.”
Thus, “Our knowledge is achieved in submission to the real” (Meek), not by forcing reality to submit to our a priori categories. For Polany, this simply affirms what every working scientist believes – “that science offers us an aspect of reality, and may therefore manifest its truth inexhaustibly and often surprisingly in the future. Only in this belief can the scientist conceive problems, pursue inquiries, and claim discoveries” (in Meek). Which is why “reality is pregnant and abundant with as-yet-unnameable dimensions and prospects,” so our partnership with the Cosmos involves a “commitment to the inherent inexhaustibility of reality” (Meek).
You have reminded me of a quip by Eckhart, that From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing.
Let’s not get carried away. Save that kind of perfect nonsense for Book III. Nevertheless, you have a point: the scientist is essentially a Socratic midwife, not inventing the truth but assisting in its delivery. Every discovery is a birth that reveals the inexhaustible fecundity of the Source that shall not be named.
Supposing we can know the truth of reality, then we are obligated to do so, therefore there is an ontological Ought woven into the fabric of the Cosmic Area Rug. Is there an honest scientist who doesn’t know that we ought to seek truth, and that we cannot know it in full even after we have found it? For reality is precisely that which “may yet reveal its truth in an inexhaustible range of unknown and perhaps still unthinkable ways” (Meek). Truth is at once true but the appearance of a deeper truth, implying that there is always something more to be discovered. Thus, reality is the process of its own endless discovery.
“Far beyond a one-to-one correspondence of thought and things,” writes Meek, Polanyi’s post-critical realism “is a one-to-infinity correspondence” – and it is precisely this infinitude that testifies to the One. Thus reality is “always half-hidden and, as-yet, inarticulable.” This is a quintessential description of ultimacy, in that the Anthropos is ordered to the inexhaustible infinitude of the real, as one infinitude to another in an ever-deepening spiral of discovery. “Far from being enclosed on itself,” writes Torrance, the Cosmos “is intrinsically open and elusive in its existence and structure, and constantly surprising in its manifestation of new features and patterns.”
Boo!
Boo indeed, because “nature is endowed with the kind of rational order that constantly surprises us in its manifestation of unexpected features and structures which cannot be deduced from what is already known” (Torrance). Afterwards our task is to reconcile the new discovery with what we already know, but we must always remain open to an open Cosmos that continually surprises us with its novel disclosures, as opposed to looking at it in terms of our preconceived ideas. Enclosed the latter, we are merely actively projecting our own ideas as opposed maintaining a stance of passive openness to reality.
Which is in accord with my own psychoanalytic training under the influence of W.R. Bion, who advised the clinician to approach each session by “suspending memory, desire, and understanding.” Suspending does not mean eliminating preconceptions and hypotheses, rather, just setting them aside in order to be open to what is occurring in the present between patient and therapist, emphasis on between.
∞
The meaning of humanness is not something that can be found by breaking down persons into their constituent parts, whether genes, neurotransmitters, or regions of the brain, rather, in a higher synthesis and unity of all these, and which cannot be fully captured by any lower-level description. A person is first of all a person, not a collection of the constituents that comprise the person, and must be studied as such (or at least complementary to the lower level analyses).
Moreover, as we have seen, there is always a two-way flow between parts and whole, or a hierarchy in which the higher level is governed by its own principles that cannot be fully reduced to the laws of the levels below it. “Causal connections,” writes Torrance, must “be looked at on two [or more] different levels, a lower level where subordinate centres of causation operate, and a higher level where we have to do with the operation of a central cause,” the former being a limiting case of the latter.
For example, the laws of biology govern living organisms, but organisms are not reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, even though organisms are composed of chemicals and atoms. The laws of chemistry set the boundary conditions for biology, but they do not explain the emergent phenomenon of Life Itself. The subatomic particles constituting your hand change their trajectories when you so much as make a fist. Likewise, “The matter which is caught up into the life of a dog,” writes Ward, “behaves rather differently from the matter caught up into the life of an oak, and still more differently from the matter caught up in the explosion of fireworks.”
Applying these ideas to the Anthropos, human identity and meaning are emergent properties of this vertical hierarchy. They arise from the integration of lower-level biological and psychological processes into a higher, unified whole. This is in accord with Gödel, who recognized “that we must think in terms of a series of rational levels that are open to one another upward but are not reducible downward.” Expressed in poetic terms, we might say that The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face.
Thus the meaning of the Anthropos is not to be found below but above, in the lived experience of being a person, an experience that transcends any purely objective or reductive account. Which is not to deny the influence of the lower on the higher, but nor to deny the influence of the higher on the lower. For example, if I want to tweak my endorphins below, I can make the top-down choice to engage in vigorous exercise. We are at once influenced by our hormones and neurotransmitters but can in turn influence them. The key point is that meaning is discovered in the ascent toward integration and wholeness, while meaninglessness is a consequence of descending in the other direction and dismembering this wholeness and unity. In short, meaning is at the top, not the bottom.
Our resident logician is again on the case, for his theorems show “that even a mathematical universe is more than axioms, more than computing, more than logic – and more than mathematicians can know” (John Barrow). Rather, “the whole mathematical universe” must be “understood as open-ended and incomplete, yet as completed beyond itself transfinitely in absolute Infinity” (Torrance), which is precisely what we mean when we say that being is beyond-being, every time.
Didn’t see that coming!
No one does, in the sense that reality never stops coming at us with new surprises.
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