Before resuming our side trip into the world of philosopher-theologian Thomas Torrance, I want to briefly address something that came up — or into — my mailbox yesterday, a new essay by David Bentley Hart which seems to go to our final Axiom of cosmotheandrism — that ultimate reality is irreducibly personal and therefore interpersonal. I’m not exactly sure, but this is how he puts it: personhood
is the original power from which substance is born, the expressive taxis of the paternal depth becoming filial and spiritual fulfilment. The Concept (Hegel again) does not await its actualization as subjectivity here below. Rather, the ontological structure of methexis comes to its fullest expression in the realm of the finite as personhood because that structure is personal all the way up to its divine source, and so is always the primary act of all being. To treat subjectivity as existentially prior or posterior to this general ontology, or somehow something distinct from nature in its power of actualization, is a phantom doubling caused by an incoherent subordination of that ontology to an already secretly dialectical metaphysics. Better to say that finite subjectivity, in its psychological particularity or individuation, is a modal overflow of the eternal dynamic unity of spirit and being, a unique expression and contraction of that original actus into a dynamic play between mind and being. Each person is a finite but infinitely related, infinitely open expression of the infinite Logos, speaking itself in all the words of creation.
It goes on and on in that vein. Granted, I am only an amateur, but I’m not sure I would put it that way even if I could put it that way. It is also amusing, but not in the same way I endeavor to be amusing, which is to say, intentionally.
Shots fired!
Not at all, in that our target audiences are completely different, being that he has one and I have not. I am also more of a blue collar pinhead, so I prefer to express myself in such a way that my pool guy could understand where I’m coming from. This follows Dávila’s advice for wannabe writers, such as
Among a few words it is as difficult to hide as among a few trees.
Only ideas save us from adjectives.
Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.
Prolixity is usually the defensive mechanism of insignificant ideas.
Clarity is the virtue of a man who does not lack confidence in what he says.
The idea is the true syntax of style.
The ordinary writer does not express his idea; he dresses it up.
For example, I find Torrance to be exceptionally clear and concise, but one of the things that makes him a challenging read is that there is practically an idea in every sentence as opposed to a dissertation for every idea — more like a needle than a firehose. One must focus on each sentence instead of just skimming through adjectives for the naked idea.
Like the difference between prog rock and punk.
Yes, 50 years ago (!) the latter was the antidote to the former.
To pick up where we left off yesterday, Torrance correctly regards the Cosmos as a multi-leveled rational order in which each level is open upward but not reducible downward. Therefore, the contingent universe itself is only completed beyond itself, in what we call O. Herebelow, the Cosmos “is what it becomes and becomes what it is,” but this is not a closed absurcularity but an open spiral. Lower levels “are left indeterminate or open for control by those ‘higher’ levels of more open and flexible order” — for example, as body is to mind, or neurobiology to psychology.
Torrance contrasts this with existentialism, in particular Sartre, for whom life is also contingent, except not ordered to any transcendent, necessary, or Absolute pole. In other words, he makes the rookie error of absolutizing contingence, when contingence and necessity form one of our primordial complementarities (Axiom 2). Thus existentialism plunges us into a “‘perpetual contingence’ cut off from any reference beyond itself.” This absurd and unintelligible contingence in turn “collapses in upon itself like a meaningless black hole,” much like a black steer’s tuchus on a moonless night.
You could say this is a postmodern version of G3AOA, because
through this utterly contingent existence of man for himself, cut off from God, there is posited at the very heart of immanence a ‘transcendent nothing’ [Ø] to replace the transcendent God [O] as the ultimate ground of being and its intelligibility.
But this is a perverse and unintelligible intelligibility that ultimately “falls back into sheer nothingness and meaninglessness,” so the whole Area Rug falls apart “into disorder and pointlessness,” and here we are.
In reality, contingence can only be meaningful if it is relative and not absolute, which is to say, both related and inter-related to and with “the continual creative source of its contingent intelligibility and of its astonishing freedom and variety”:
It is precisely in virtue of the contingent freedom thus given to it that the creation constantly manifests a capacity for change and development through novel variations that surprise and astonish us. As such the universe is to be regarded as a created reflection of the unlimited freedom of the Creator.
Or at the very least the creative Principle of O. Note that there can be no merely logical bridge between either Theos and Anthropos (theology) or Anthropos and Cosmos (science), otherwise we would be essentially closed in both directions, instead of both Cosmos and Theos disclosing themselves to us in surprising, creative, and novel ways. To say “open” is to say uncontainable by logic or abstraction.
One might say that the Cosmos is bisected by the vertical axis of a “higher-level order” that pervades it, this being the Logos. If O is the apophatic or negative symbol for total reality, the Logos provides its endlessly positive content. Should this axis or arc be broken, well, that’s just G3AOA, such that the reference of our contingent order is obscured, busted, bent, spindled, or mutilated.
Having said that, in order for there to be the possibility of an ascending order, there must be the possibility of disorder, otherwise the Cosmos could not be host to dynamic, living, and open process structures that gain order by dissipating entropy. This is a somewhat peripheral point that we won’t develop here, but the whole advancing cosmic order must likewise be an open system, open to something beyond it, for only then do we have a principle “of order and development against the persistent downward drag of entropy.” I guess you could say that O is the principle of negentropy.
And man is at the center of this negentropic enterprise, “the focal point in the interrelations between God and the universe,” for “All lines of rationality and order, of purpose and fulfillment in the creation converge on him as a [RH] man of God and a [LH] man of science and depend on his destiny.” We know from Book II that “There is a profound harmony between the rationality of the human understanding and the rationality of the universe,” which makes us the Crown of Creation.
Or Clown of Creation.
Yes, the choice is nevertheless ours, for “we have to reckon with a deep split in man himself when he breaks loose from a proper interaction with his Creator and therefore from the ultimate ordering of his rationality from above.” This split appears as a gap “between what he is and what he ought to be.”
Why I oughtta!
Correct. We ought to avoid the temptation to think of our Cosmos “as a self-existing, self-containing, self-ordering, and self-explaining system,” for “such an objectification is no more than a mythological projection of fantasies arising out of man’s inner schizoid condition…”
In other words, properly understood, “Each person is a finite but infinitely related, infinitely open expression of the infinite Logos, speaking itself in all the words of creation” (Hart).
No comments:
Post a Comment