Here is a whole section left out of Book I: Cosmos due to redundancy, banality, pretentiousness, forced humor, etc. But since there may be a new reader out there, the redundancy won’t pose a problem. And supposing this reader is not burdened by rudimentary literary standards, then nor will the banality be an issue. By way of context, it contains some further discussion of celebrity atheist Carl Sagan’s ultimate humblebrag that The cosmos is all there ever is, was, or will be. If this is true it is false, since it fails to take into consideration the primate who knows this to be the case.
What Sort of Monkey Is This?
I certainly don’t mean to pick on Carl Sagan, for man is forever trying to contain infinitude within finitude — or absolute within relative, subject within object, vertical within horizontal — but it would be easier to drink the ocean or jump over the moon, since these at least involve a finite volume or distance. Our best map is never the territory, which is why Dávila reminds us that Reality cannot be represented in a philosophical system. Whatever else the Cosmos is, it cannot be reduced to our abstract conceptions of it.
Ours is the same as Sagan’s shrunken post-Enlightenment Cosmos, only looked at in a very different way: one that emphasizes process and development; telos, purpose, and intrinsic meaning; organicism and interior relations; the creative advance into novelty; and an implicate transcendent ground of which the physical Cosmos is but the explicate expression.
For again, man’s perceptions are not restricted to some evolutionary niche, rather, to the totality of being: this alone is man’s proper “environment,” which Sagan himself presumes. For was Sagan free to articulate his vision of the Cosmos? If so, then his vision does not account for his freedom to understand and express it. We too are of course free to accept or reject this vision, and whence this freedom? For any argument for or against free will presumes its existence, since it proves the reality of the subject who is free to either accept or reject it. Conversely, to affirm that free will doesn’t exist is to void one’s argument at the outset, since the argument can appeal to neither truth nor to the subject who may know it. As Poincaré commented, “no determinist argues deterministically,” so “all arguments against free will are so many proofs of it” (Jaki)
Freedom is indeed key to our Cosmos, but does this freedom have a telos? Is it ordered to anything beyond itself? Dávila suggests that Freedom is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.
To accomplish what, exactly?
Among other things, to accomplish this book. Otherwise I could just sit here and wait for it to be written.
∞
Here we may propose another binary: Either the Theos exists, or it does not exist. And: If the Theos exists, then the Cosmos is intelligible; if it does not exist, then it is unintelligible. But the Cosmos is intelligible. Therefore the Theos not only exists but is the very Principle of both intelligence and intelligibility in dynamic relation herebelow. Lonergan expresses a similar syllogism: If the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists. But the totality of reality is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.
I don’t think that’s going to convince anyone who wants to believe otherwise.
That is true. When is the last time you changed someone’s mind using facts and logic? People have all sorts of unconscious reasons for believing what they believe, and one of my tasks as a psychologist was to bring these willful darklings to the fore and interrogate them in the light of day.
The above syllogisms bridge the gap between the subjective mind and the objective world by proving that the Cosmic Area Rug is composed of a single rational and relational fabric known as the Logos through which we might propose a marriage of Thought and Thing. Which implies that the grammar of our minds matches the grammar of the Cosmos because both are in-scribed by the same source.
Among other reasons, theories are often judged by their fruitfulness, and just look at the fruitfulness of this one, for all knowledge is a product of the prior union of logocentric mind and logospheric world, without which there could be no genuine knowledge at all. In other words, the ontological proof is in the existential pudding: since we do perform science, we do understand math, and we do navigate reality, we have already implicitly chosen our intelligible spouse. To cheat on our spouse by fooling around with reductive scientism means our cosmic house is a broken home where the Anthropos is no longer welcome.
Here we might use the analogy of the suspiciously male and female key and lock to illuminate the relationship between knowing and being, respectively. Now, any halfway decent locksmith presumably makes not just a lock but a key to open it, since neither alone is of much use. Thus, not only does our intellectual key fit into and open the lock of nature, but the very existence of this clever mankey is an important factsimian in its own right, because it is an echo of the unity of being. The Anthropos, we might say, is this unity in silhouette.
As above, so below, meta-Cosmos to micro-Cosmos.
Correct. This single fact must be the most important one in all of existence, since in its absence the world would be a locked door with no key. Which makes no sense, because who creates a lock with no key, a safe with no combination, a joke with no punchline?
All other animals are bereft of these keys, but somehow the Anthropos got ahold of the very skeleton key that opens all locks. What gives? Darwin explained a lot, but what explains Darwin? And what not only made him so curious about nature, but made his key insights so fruitful? He certainly explained how we evolved, but not now how we understand how we evolved.
To be perfectly accurate, animals do possess their own limited set of keys, but not the skeleton key that opens every lock. My dog, for example, knows how to unlock a treat from me, without knowing how she knows how to do this. I know: it’s because she’s so damn cute, and the cuteness unlocks any reservations on my part.
This subject goes to the very mission of the Anthropos, which, in addition to loving dogs, is to discover its own nature — its telos — via objects, relationships, and spontaneous attractions in the environment. Although we come into the world with something like a soul — or better yet, in the words of Bertie Wooster, “I mean to say, there’s a sort of soul-thingy that — well, you know what I mean. It’s a sort of... well, it’s a soul-thingy.”
This thingy is the form of our individuality, but we don’t come into the world with explicit knowledge of its content. Rather, this form harbors implicit knowledge of what will come to be recognized as its content. In other words, our spontaneous attraction to this or that endeavor, or person, or discipline, or dog, will reveal our self to ourselves. I have no idea why some people are attracted to Chihuahuas. But it is very much as if our Anthropic soul thingy is the lock for which the Cosmos will furnish keys to open it.
Think of, say, Mozart, who was obviously born with a musical soul. Lucky for him (and for us) he was given a means of discovery and expression of what was implicit in his soul thingy. In other words, thanks to his father, a clavier was right there waiting for him to find himself — his musical potential — through it. By the age of five he was already composing, which is to say, exteriorizing his interior or explicating the implicit. True, he was a genius, but that’s beside the point, which is that the clavier was a lock Mozart seemingly picked with preternatural ease, even while his own soul was a lock the keyboard opened for him, in an in-spiraling and ex-spiraling two-way movement.
Perhaps a more subtle point is that he also opened this musical lock for the restavus, in that we are all able to enjoy the sounds of Mozart unlocking the piano, the piano unlocking Mozart to himself, and his music unlocking our appreciation of it.
Which reminds me of something my son once asked me: is everyone born with a gift? The question caused me to hesitate, because one doesn’t want to sound like some new-age happy-talk woke oil salesman: Of course! Anyone can be Mozart or Einstein! Your world is as big as your smallest—
Theodore Herzel. State of Israel. If you will it, it is no dream!
Of course we can’t all be geniuses, but that hardly means we can’t enjoy geniuses. Indeed, more often than not we can enjoy the genius more than the genius himself enjoys being one. Biographies of the Great Ones often reveal a disconnect between the greatness of the gift and the rest of their lives. For example, I enjoy the famously grumpy Van Morrison much more than he seems to enjoy being himself. The point is, you don’t have to be an accomplished locksmith to benefit from the unlocking, whether of truth or beauty.
All of this is meant literally, because this is literally how we experience the world. Things grab us, do they not? And different things grab different people. I realize this book won’t grab everyone. What is indeed so surprising is how specific our soul-attractors can be. It is by no means obvious why being should be this way, but it is impossible to understand this vital phenomenon within the standard scientific paradigm. Even in science, the most hardboiled egghead wouldn’t know what to investigate in the absence of an intuition or feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something “interesting,” something that attracts his or her attention.
In a certain sense we are what intrigues us, whether persons, subjects, objects, or activities. For example, according to psychiatrist Anthony Storr,
Hobbies and interests are often aspects of a human being which most clearly define his individuality, and make him the person he is. To discover what really interests a person is to be well on the way to understanding them.
More often than not these interests “reflect what the individual does when he is alone, or when communication and interaction are at a minimum.” One might say the soul is like a concavity in search of the convexity that will fill it, so to speak; or again, a lock in search of the key(s) that will open a man to himself.
Two words: vertical recollection.
Yes, when we grab something that grabs us, it is a case of discovering what is already within us — much in the manner of Jungian archetypes, which are inborn patterns actualized upon contact with the environment. These latent preconceptions are filled with conceptual content depending upon our particular experiences of the world. Some of these blueprints are universal, e.g., anima, great mother, shadow, hero, and trickster, while others are quite specific clueprints into our personal identities, again luring us in a top-down manner toward our own destiny, as it were. Which implies that our existential future is ontologically behind us, which is true of any anticipatory biological system wherein its present state anticipates and changes based upon a future state. In short, in a purely linear system the cause precedes the effect, but in a complex, nonlinear, anticipatory system the cause of a current statr may be predicated on a future one. Thus the cosmotheandric imperative to fully become who we already are in potential, more on which in Book II.
Me? I am interested in tonight’s Dodgers-Brewers game. Did you know that in all of playoff history there is a less than 1% chance of a matchup between the first and second best pitchers in the game?
Who cares.
That’s the point: different strokes for indifferent folks.
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