‘Round the Bend & Up the Tree

Previously on One Cosmos—

Skip Introduction.

Go right ahead. We’ll keep it brief: we are faced with two, and only two, existential alternatives in the cosmotheandric Garden of Being. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argumentativeness, that there are two metaphorical trees, one being a right hemispheric Tree of Life with its roots aloft and branches down below, the other one.…

Not exactly a tree of death, but it might as well be, for its roots extend in the other direction, where they vanish into the quantum soil which shades off into nothingness. This latter redounds to more of an undead condition resulting in an unavoidable “living frustration, an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal,” for which we use the symbol Ø. This latter pole is “magnetized, so to speak, by the abyss of nothingness, of what is not and can never be -- a dynamism doomed eternally to temporary gratification but permanent unfulfillment.” Only in the transcendent direction do we have any hope of locating the Cosmic Area Rug.

Go north, young man!

∞

Now, what goes for the intellect goes double for the will. That is to say, if the intellect is ordered to the true, the will is ordered to the good, so a bad will takes down the intellect along with it. Which is why intellectual dishonesty is a sin against both the good and the true. For even supposing something is true, the will must nevertheless assent to it. It must desire and even love the truth, but it can certainly prefer to live in the comfort and safety of fantasy, delusion, and ideology.

Hey, it takes two to lie: one to lie, and one to listen.

The unfortunate events of Genesis 3 indeed result from a liar and listener, or from a bad will, beginning with the Serpent. He knew the truth but willfully propagated the lie. What was Eve’s excuse for swallowing that snake’s tale? Perhaps a weak will, but what was Adam’s excuse? A weaker will, I suppose.

Like Homer, your one weakness is that you’re weak.

For Clarke, the dynamism of the will again presupposes “an a priori orientation toward the good as such.” It “is written into the very nature of the will as dynamic faculty before any particular experience of an individual good.”

Denying this transcendent object — O — eliminates the object of the intellect, thus rendering the latter absurd and unintelligible. In order for the intellect to know reality, it must be ordered to its proper end. This end “can be nothing less than the totality of the good,” which involves “a pre-conceptual ‘background consciousness,’” or “anticipatory grasp”

of the good as somehow present in its depths [of the will], magnetizing and attracting it, luring it to actual fulfillment of its innate potentiality by distinct conscious appropriations of actually existing concrete goods. This is what it means to live volitively in the horizon of the good.

So, the Great Attractor is what renders the dynamisms of both will and intellect intelligible and fruitful. It is where we find the Cosmic Area Rug, precisely. Conversely, “A totally unrelated multiplicity of final goals would fragment the unity of the dynamism into an unintelligible, unintegrated multiplicity of drives,” and the Rug comes apart at the seams. Then we wander the earth like zombies in search of a promised land we will never reach.

Just as “my truth” is no truth at all, “my will” equates to the amoralism of a Nietzsche. It is a blind willfulness that is “ordered precisely toward a non-existent final goal; an active potency ordered toward nothing proportionate to its potentiality; an innate drive toward nothing.” This being the case, our lives again reduce to a frustration of the will and absurdity of the intellect.

I don’t get it. All my life I’ve had only one goal: to achieve my many dreams.

This is only possible if we dream in the proper direction. Downward dreams end in those prisons of our own design, e.g., scientism, eliminativism, and ismism more generally. It is as if we live our lives in chains and never even know we have the key.

I hate the flippin’ Eagles.

In that case, let’s catch a ride to the end of the highway and meet by the big red Tree of Life.

In any event, “whether we like it or not we are committed by the dynamism of final causality built into our nature to affirm implicitly the actual existence of the Infinite Good.” But each human is free to reject this RH treelos, and no merely rational — or LH — argument can force us to choose one tree over the other(s). Nevertheless, “the luminous fullness of meaningfulness draws me with the whole spontaneous pull of my nature toward the real existence of the Infinite Good as a magnet.”

Vote for O and your wildest dreams will come true!

Yes, “Full intelligibility lies only this way.”

Again, it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a kind of pre-conceptual or potential plenitude in man, which is “an image of the divine infinity in silhouette — in reverse so to speak — within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.”

This negative image points unerringly toward the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential capacity

In short, “our dynamism for the infinite turns out to be a remarkably eloquent reverse image and pointer toward God as He is in Himself, beyond all possible finites.”

We are nearing the end of Book II, and the only way to even begin Book III is to at least not be out of our tree.