Some Anthropic Certitudes

Recall that the first of our cosmotheandric Axioms is certitude, and among the things we can know with certitude are the principles of non-contradiction, of sufficient reason, of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, of the impossibility of the greater coming from the lesser, and the absurdity of a contingent being containing its own sufficient reason. It is equally self-evident that the conduct of any discipline, from physics at the bottom to theology at the top, is determined by its proper object. We don’t use meditation or introspection to study rocks or chemicals, just as we don’t use calipers to measure the soul. Different objects, different methods.

The object of philosophy is being itself, which is to say, everything and beyond, up to and including the cause or Principle of Being. Thus, philosophy is guided by the implicit assumption that we indeed inhabit a Cosmos, i.e., a single order ordered by a single principle. This Big One cannot be a mere (immanent) object, no matter how big, because this would exclude the vastly larger world of subjectivity, personhood, and verticality more generally. If reality is a material object, then there goes the sufficient reason for both science and philosophy.

Stuck inside of Plato’s cave with the solipsistic blues.

It is certainly the case that only the Anthropos can philosophize, so any total philosophy must account for its own possibility. To argue, for example, that thinking is a side effect of “selfish genes” is just weaseling past the academic knaveyard. This common form of reductionism is actually a grotesque expansionism, in the sense that it expands the method appropriate to a lower level to enclose — and thereby eliminate — the higher. Which is not possible in the absence of One Free Miracle, since the ideological reduction must magically exclude the anthropic reducer, let alone his own certitude of the truth of reductionism.

The point is, any philosophical explanation must first justify the existence of the anthropic explainer, otherwise we have no reason to even suspect that the explanation might be true. Who could deny this, when the denial only constitutes more proof?

Mansplaining God and Godsplaining Mankind

Let’s not bleat around the burning bush: In the cosmotheandric vision, to say Anthropos is to say Theos -- which of course doesn’t necessarily mean the Theos exists, because what if man doesn’t? A nominalist or existentialist, for example, says there is no human nature, only individual humans (never mind the performative contradiction of using the word “human” to begin with).

Whatever else the Anthropos is, it is an irreducible union of matter + spirit. Looked at this way, materialism is the denial of the spirit by the spirit, but why, and for whom?

Nobody?

Correct: a nobody proving nobody exists. It’s like saying everything is reducible to matter except for the doctrine of materialism. But a Cosmos of matter alone would simply be unintelligible, period, full stop, end of story. In other words, matter devoid of intelligible form is the very essence of unintelligibility.

But in reality we never encounter uninformed matter, rather, exterior matter + interior form or structure. For again, everything in existence somehow communicates its intelligibility to us, interior to interior.

Now, to be human is to sense the world and to know that we sense it. Even if one reduces the senses to a material process, knowledge of this process cannot be similarly reduced. Rather, the advent of the thinking process discloses a new world at a right angle to the material world, a universe of ideas somehow liberated from their sensory-material fusion. The reach of this new capacity is for all practical purposes infinite in its understanding, proceeding from the sensory surface to intellectual depth, then back up to principles, and there is scarcely anything less material than a principle.

So, the Anthropos is the animal that may know reality. If we can’t, then what are we debating? Whose delusion is true?

Let’s stipulate that intelligence is only intelligent to the extent that it knows the truth of reality. If an object of the senses is sensible, an object of intellect is intelligible. The former must somehow be rendered immaterial in order to be understood, otherwise it remains entirely unthinkable. Granted, we only ever experience reality in terms of the appearances in which it is clothed. Animals too only have contact with appearances, except they don’t know it. Nor do they not know it. Rather, they only know what they know, in a closed neuro-instinctual loop.

Now, how did human beings ever exit this loop? Some people insist we never did. But if that’s the case, how do they know this, and communicate this idea to us? Via the idea that there are no real ideas? For we cannot deny ideas without reverting to animality, and what do animals know about ideas?

Let’s just cut to the choice: it turns out that knowing and being, or epistemology and ontology, are very much linked. In fact, if they are not linked, then there’s nothing to talk about except our own neuropsychology. Either we are enclosed in neurobiological absurcularity or there is an exit from this dark nul-de-slack.

No form of reductive materialism makes sense, because it cannot make sense; it is the denial of intelligibility, of intelligence, and of any real onto-relation between the two. Literally nothing can be understood of matter except insofar as it is immaterial, precisely. In other words, immateriality is a necessary condition of its intelligibility.

To recognize a tree, for example, requires the abstract concept of treeness. In fact, it is humanly impossible for us to imagine a world of absolute singularities. Like any good materialist, we begin with material objects. However, we don’t just end there. In truth, neither does the materialist, except he has no coherent explanation for the ontological leap from matter to his immaterial thoughts about it. But the leap from matter to thought isn’t just a baby step, it is a step from immanence to a transcendence that shades off to infinitude.

Now, if the unexamined life is not worth living, then it seems that man has the duty to philosophize: it is something we ought to do, on pain of a life that is not worth the trouble of living it. On the other hand, what gives the Anthropos -- a supposedly randomly evolved animal like any other -- the right to philosophize?

To affirm that man has intrinsic rights of any kind is already to philosophize, since rights must either be grounded in a higher principle – a natural right – or as arbitrary as the genetic shuffling that ostensibly landed us here.

Supposing the existence of rights, they cannot be autonomous and freestanding but must be a consequence of duties; or at the very least, genuine rights and duties must co-arise. We don’t give rights to animals with no ability to exercise them responsibly. We don’t say the lion has an unalienable right to eat us, even if it is its genetic duty to do so.

Thus, supposing we are free to know the truth means that we are not only at liberty to know reality, but again, obligated to do so. Or at least try. Teleologically the Anthropos is the truth-seeking animal, so failure to do so is intrinsically wrong, irrespective of the particular content.

They say wisdom begins with the fear of God, but perhaps, like Michael Scott, this Theos wants us to be afraid of how much we love him. For one of God’s names is Truth, which is the ground and possibility of philo-sophy, of the love of wisdom. Therefore, we can say that philosophy begins with the love of truth and a healthy fear of internalizing and propagating error, and of discriminating between the two: this, we might say, is the philosophy of philosophy, of its possibility.

Now, how is it that we aren’t just bombarded by disconnected sensations, but rather, implicitly recognize the Cosmic Area Rug that pulls the whole together?

I mean – has that ever occurred to you that it’s always both, i.e., the Rug and the threads with which it is woven?

That is precisely what we are saying, since one must have some implicit framework in order to even identify a fact. A fact is something relevant to something higher than itself, for facts don’t illuminate themselves. What is, simply is. Facts don’t come with labels telling us which ones are important or trivial. Rather, this is a matter of prudence: in order to do what is right, one must rightly know what is.

The most important facts are those which render the other facts intelligible, which is to say, the necessary conditions without which the Cosmos would not exist at all -- and certainly not one giving rise to Man the Questioner. One might say we are looking for the answer that gives rise to this questioner.

Animals cannot ask questions. Rather, questions co-arise with the first man. What, one wonders, was his first question, besides WTF?! Such an urgent question could only arise in a questionable Cosmos, which is to say, one susceptible to providing answers.

Consider this for a moment: what does it mean that such a Cosmos houses our very possibility? What does it suggest about the nature and character of things that the Cosmos comes to question itself through us? Is it plausible that human mentality is purely accidental in such a Cosmos? Or is it perhaps a finite reflection of a kind of infinite and necessary mentality underlying and giving rise to the Cosmos itself?

If these aren’t the first questions, they must be among the first: is the intellect purely accidental and contingent? Or a reflection of something absolute and necessary?

If this latter is the case, then man himself is the most important cosmic fact, since he is the key to the whole existentialada: man is not just one data point in the forest of facts, rather, our very existence is again a clue to the Cosmos itself.

Can man see the forest for the trees? Yes, in the sense that the forest is the Cosmos, the trees the numberless facts located therein. What we call the Cosmos is a symbolic expression of man’s intuition of wholeness, and every man at every time has expressed it in some form or fashion.

Alan Watts said something to the effect that we do not so much come into the world but out of it. In other words, it is not as if we are exterior to everything else, but interior to it, like mushrooms that are the visible or explicate expressions of an underground network of dense interior relations, the point being that human consciousness is only the visible expression of an implicate network of cosmotheandric interconnectedness.

Having said that, we always transcend any formal system we use to understand both ourselves and the world. Now, how did this happen? Who goofed? In other words, all other animals are bound by instinct, so they can only cause so much trouble. But humans, because they found a way to transcend biology, can cause an endless amount of mischief. I don’t know if we can literally “destroy the planet,” but we can try.

Man’s daring escape from the planet of the apes – the transcendence of our genetic programming – is either Nature’s Greatest Goof or some kind of plan. If it’s a plan, then it involves a being intended to be the image and likeness of the Theos. And if there’s a goof, then—

You are most definitely the perpetrator and not the victim.

Either way, the Anthropos is a “special” creation, even if we use the term special as a euphemism for our obvious disabilities, as we are carried along in the short bus of history. Irrespective of whether or not we accept the biblical account of our so-called fall, we are astonishingly different from everything else in all of creation, for both good and ill.

For example, my dog can neither deny nor affirm her dogginess. Rather, she’s a dog, and that’s all there is to it. In order for her to observe her dogginess, she would have to be able to transcend and reflect upon it. Which she cannot do, for she is entirely enclosed in her canine nature.

Equally self-evident is that this transcendent capacity of ours cuts both ways: supposing we can know truth, then this entails a capacity to embrace falsehood, illusion, and unreality. In short, we are free. Likewise, if we can love the good we can also – woe to us – love the bad or hate the good.

Of course, there exist self-contradictory ideologues who argue that free will does not exist, such as celebrity atheist Sam Harris. I don’t know that anyone takes them seriously anymore outside the faithful, but neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, for example, writes in his book Determined that “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Of course, no determinist argues deterministically, rather, in order to convince us of the truth of determinism. Otherwise the theory is neither true nor false, just… determined. In in which, what is happening here is that nobody is right and everybody is not even wrong: if nothing is true, nor can anything be false. In the words of our favorite aphorist, Error supposes that something happened that should not have. In reality, Necessity and freedom are not symmetrical concepts: in fact, if I affirm necessity, I deny freedom, but if I affirm freedom, I do not deny any necessity. For example, the meaning of that last sentence was freely expressed even while being constrained by vocabulary, grammar, spelling, etc.

Now, freedom itself implies the Theos principle, and perhaps that is why members of the Cult of Determinism are so opposed to it. It is one of the capacities that is entailed in being the Image and Likeness, failing which freedom is like a floating chandelier attached to nothing. Which certainly cannot be the case.

Well, the Anthropos does, as it were, float in mid-air, which is to say, suspended between immanence and transcendence. Here our potential is not literally infinite, but then again, we all have a “capacity for the infinite,” which is to say, an orientation to the Theos principle to which we are ultimately ordered, at least in potential. Depending upon which path we choose, we bifurcate from one type of system to another -- from being horizontally enclosed to vertically open. Note in this regard that it is possible for a nominally religious person to likewise enclose himself in dogma, but not be truly open to the transcendent principle we do not control and cannot contain.