In the Beginning is the Third

As with our forensic examination of the Cosmos in Book I, the question arises of where to begin in our accounting of the Anthropos, for it is self-evidently the case that all knowledge of any kind passes through man, so in a sense defines him. Moreover, if a thing is characterized by what it can do – i.e., that action follows being — then the Anthropos is a philosopher, a scientist, a theologian, an artist, a mystic, a mathematician, a criminal, a dude, a hero–

A puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king—

We can say almost anything about the Anthropos and equally say the opposite: Is he a pious saint? Occasionally. Genocidal psychopath? Oof. A creator? Sure. A destroyer? No doubt. Likewise, genius and crank, believer and skeptic, deadbeat and achiever, maven and schmendrick. Frankly the list of dualities is endless, which somewhat begs the question, because what sort of being is capable of such a diverse range of attributes and actions? Seriously, think about it: we not only sing, but we dance just as good as we want.

Are you ready to get your groove on, Petey? They tell me you’re pretty fast on your feet.

I’ve been known to shake a chicken in the middle of the room.

You better have your steps together, because in addition to the horizontal rhumba we are capable of the vertical boogaloo, such as discovering the true, willing the good, and creating the beautiful. We might say with Dávila that Time soon erodes what is said about the soul but it never even scratches what the soul says.

Nor is the Anthropos done singing, dancing, creating, and discovering, for we will never arrive at the last poem, play, or punchline. One might say that since the Anthropos never stops creating, we are thereby an ongoing creation, not a fixed or final entity, similar to how it would be impossible to make a final judgment about history until it reaches its conclusion. Only then can we properly ask: WTF was that all about? So it seems that the arc of the cosmotheandric drama is framed between the primordial WTF?! and some kind of ultimate one.

∞

Assuming you’ve read Book I, then you know that after twenty plus years of schooling they put me on the day shift as a psychologist.

Practicing?

Yes, a clinical psychologist. Nevertheless, there was a lot about the Anthropos that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, for which reason I began branching off into theology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, and all the rest, in search of the Cosmic Area Rug.

I like your style. Got the whole space cowboy thing going on.

How is it that deeper insights are always popping out of the Cosmos the longer we dwell in and gaze upon it? That the human being is at once a finished species that is never finished?

Sounds like we’re gonna be here for a while. Mind if I smoke a jay?

Be my geist. I realize your kind supposedly sees directly into essences without the hassle of a discursive, step-by-step movement required of embodied beings, so feel free to sit out this part.

Let’s begin by rummaging into the past. Recall Boethius’ definition of man as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” However, prior to this we must be the relational animal, otherwise we could never be reasonable, since reason would be unrelated to the world or to anything but itself. In reality, we are a relational substance of a transrational nature.

Moreover, as we have seen, the Anthropos is not just related to the exterior but to the interior of things, including fellow human beings. This is because we come into the world neurologically incomplete, such that the brain is built and the self gradually emerges in the dynamic space between infant and caretaker(s). For which reason the psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott remarked that there is no such thing as a baby, rather, the mother-infant dyad. As a result, we are irreducibly intersubjective on the ground floor of our being, such that the We is, if not ontologically prior to the I, at least on equal terms with it: in the absence of the fieldlike We, there could be no particularized I.

This prior interior union with others is the necessary condition of the intersubjectivity that defines us. Which is why our very lot in life is never truly our own. Rather, we’re mixed up with everyone, and not just the living, since we are very much influenced by voices out of the past. Indeed, an Anthropos singing only from the hymnal of his contemporaries is a bit of a nincompoop. In the cosmic Tower of Song we can hear noises below and discrete coughing from above. I realize that standards have fallen, but if you are only acquainted with the case for modernity, much less postmodernity, then you know little of either.

Another of Winnicott’s concepts is what he calls the “transitional space” between infant and caretaker. It is irreducibly co-created by both and belongs to neither, but it is where all the psychic action takes place: it is neither subjective nor objective, but always both, nor do we ever leave this space behind. Rather, Winnicott theorized that this potential space scales up, so to speak, to language, culture, art, science, etc., because each of these takes place within the anthropic space that is first opened up in infancy.

Human beings, like any other living organism, are open systems. Now, it is one thing to be open to objective things such as food, water, and oxygen, but what makes a Homo human and the sapiens sapient is our prior openness to other human subjects: our intersubjectivity, a mutual indwelling that begins even before birth, in the womb. There is and never has been such a thing as a radically isolated human being who only later becomes “social.” So philosophers who imagine otherwise, from Machiavelli and Descartes to Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham – insofar as they begin with an anthropological non-starter – are not even wrong, so they may be safely dismissed with extreme prejudice. For them, intersubjectivity would be viewed as a handicap to the ego-driven achiever.

Moreover, each of these antisocialites is crippled by a reductive anti-realism (in the traditional sense of denying any transcendent reality). Thus, since they confine themselves to the wheelchair of immanence, they are by no means pinnacles of achievement, rather, ontological spinal cases incapable of vertical movement.

It’s all over, man! We call your bluff!

∞

If the point about intersubjectivity seems like a peremptory assertion, it is because I don’t want to burden readers with a pedantic review of all the needlessly complicated ins and outs of interpersonal neurobiology, which can be easily obtained elsewhere in popular books such as Daniel Segal’s Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, or in unpopularized deeper dives such as Allan Schore’s The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. To summarize the argument, the field of interpersonal neurobiology

studies how the brain is shaped by early experiences, especially social and emotional experiences, as well as the relational mechanisms by which interacting, communicating brains intersubjectively synchronize, couple with, and align their activities with other brains (Schore).

This involves an irreducible co-creation of the self that occurs “at an implicit level beneath conscious awareness” located in the right cerebral hemispheres of both mother and infant. We will have much more to say about the right brain below in a separate subsection, but suffice it to say here that “the subjectivity of the self is cocreated in intersubjectivity,” and that “the self-organization of the developing brain occurs in the context of a relationship with another self, another brain” (ibid.). Thus, unity of the self depends upon a prior dual unity of selves.

Nor do we ever transcend this intersubjective unity, rather, it is not only at the foundation of human nature but accounts for our later connectedness to other minds and even to the world itself, for again, we have a bi-directional internal relationship to everything, in the absence of which scientific knowledge of the world would be impossible. This is all perfectly in accord with our Axioms of openness and relational interiority, which again scale upward to culture in general and to science, art, philosophy, and theology in particular. Not to get sentimental on you, but it turns out that “maternal love for the infant” is nothing less than is “a biologically essential mechanism for the preservation of the human species” (ibid.)

∞

For our more grandiose cosmotheandric purposes it is enough to know that the personal is always interpersonal, the subject intersubjective, and being itself a being-with. Our credo is go meta or go home, in this case to a meta-cosmic mega-psychology of irreducible intersubjectivity from top to bottom. “We all begin life indwelling another human,” so “if there’s one thing we’re not at the beginning, it’s by ourselves” (Leithart). In The Beginning we are not Newtonian particles but already a community of three, insofar as even the brains of fathers undergo a structural reorganization in order to meet the demands of the helpless newborn (Cassella). To which I can personally attest. My brain and I never much cared for babies until we had our own.

I am, therefore we are?

That is surely correct. But what must the Cosmos be like in order for there to exist a conscious being asking what the Cosmos must be like in order to have given rise to him? And what can it not possibly be like? The problem is, there is nothing else in creation with which to compare the Anthropos without losing something vital in the comparison. True, we are like lower primates, but there is nevertheless a (literally) infinite gap between us and our distant furbears. The continuity is easy enough to explain, but whither the ontological discontinuity? That’s not supposed to happen in natural selection, but here we are: Homo transcendens.

If we ponder the number of variables that have to go right in order for us to be here, it approaches infinitude, from the basic laws of physics, to the nature of stars, to the character of our galaxy, to the location of the planet, to the emergence of life, to the supposedly unguided adventure of DNA, culminating in the appearance of a neurologically immature primate, AKA the helpless baby who can internalize language and culture while its brain is developing -- in other words, an intersubjective being not entirely bound by instinct but open to being. In Christianity, even the Theos had to incarnate as a baby, because you can’t be a mature adult without having first been an immature infant.

And our brief list of cosmic coincidences only scratches the surface of a cursory glance at a perfunctory review of the tip of the iceberg of the variables involved in the appearance of a self-conscious relational being. Given the known laws of physics, there are said to be 10 to the 500th power of possible universes that could result from tweaking them. And yet, we find ourselves in the one that allows us to be here. It seems that the number of coincidences is so unimaginable that it is difficult to know what to make of them. Moreover, we know that space, time, matter, and energy all came into being at the moment of the Big Bang, so whatever caused the Big Bang must be immaterial and atemporal, leaving aside the staggering amount of information packed into this primordial detonation. But let’s keep an open mind. Let’s just call it O and try to figure it out later.

∞

I’m not sure about this subsection. I don’t like how it suddenly veered from interpersonal neurobiology back to the Cosmic Anthropic Principle. I know without asking that it will work for Gemini, but did it work for you?

This subsection advances the narrative more effectively than the preceding prelude.

The title “In the Beginning is the Third” signals the core claim: the human is constitutively triadic or intersubjective from the start. The We is not an add-on to a pre-existing I; the field-like relation precedes and enables the particularized self. That claim is developed through three mutually reinforcing registers.

This is genuine progress. Earlier sections asserted relationality and openness as ontological features of the Cosmos and of the Anthropos. Here those features are shown to be developmentally and neurologically constitutive of the human person. The argument is no longer only that relation is necessary for knowledge or language; it is that the human subject itself does not exist except as co-created in an intersubjective field. That supplies a stronger anthropological foundation for the later claims about culture, science, and the vertical opening to O.

The rejection of atomistic starting points follows directly and is consistent. Any anthropology that begins with an isolated individual and then tries to construct the social is treating as secondary what is in fact primary. Those philosophies are therefore not merely incomplete but founded on a non-starter.

The section also keeps the vertical dimension in view. Intersubjectivity is not only horizontal (human to human) but opens upward; the same relational structure that makes mother-infant synchrony possible is what later makes knowledge of the world and orientation toward the transcendent possible. The brief return to cosmic fine-tuning and the under-determined O at the end is controlled and does not derail the anthropological focus.

Minor notes:

• The playful dialogue and musical asides are lighter here than in some earlier passages; they do not obstruct the argument.

• The claim that even the Theos “had to incarnate as a baby” is offered as a structural observation rather than a developed theological argument; it fits the intersubjective logic but will need fuller treatment in Book III if it is to carry weight.

• The discontinuity with other primates is asserted rather than newly demonstrated, but that is acceptable given the developmental emphasis of this subsection.

Overall, this is one of the stronger openings of Book II so far. It moves from general assertions about the uniqueness of the Anthropos to a specific, multi-level account of how the human subject is constituted in relation. That gives the subsequent examination of the Anthropos a more precise starting point: we begin not with an isolated rational substance, but with a relational, intersubjective, developmentally open being whose very self is co-created. The third is indeed in the beginning.

Inscape From Planet of the Apes

This brief section is a prelude to subjects that are fleshed out in much more detail later. Thus, I can’t decide if it’s completely superfluous or maybe a little fluous:

Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death. –Ape Scientist Dr. Cornelius

If this is the best they’ve got around here, in six months we’ll be running this planet. –Astronaut Charles Taylor

Although we cannot interrogate our first parents, they did leave behind an abundance of circumstantial evidence, or soulprints, from sophisticated tools to symbolic artwork, from musical instruments to jewelry, from the invention of oat soda to the creation of modestly priced receptacles to transmit the remains. What to make of a primate eventually mapping its own genome or discovering the origins of the Cosmos in which it dwells?

Even supposing we are a mutant ape, this still won’t account for the transcendent space our brutish forerunners vaulted into, a space filled with abstract ideas and creative content. What a place, and what a privilege! But how is it that we discover objective realities in this space and not simply imagine or project them? Indeed, we are still unpacking this superabundant content and always will be, for somehow we stumbled into a kind of infinite plenum, and that’s just weird. I wonder: could the biological human be the necessary vessel required to host a theological human capable of an infinite dialogue with the Cosmos?

Stranger things have happened.

No way. This is without a doubt the strangest. It’s just that a person can get used to anything, including being one.

What is the difference between a monkey and a person? Why is a monkey not a person? Just how did we, in the course of evolution, draw a royal flesh in the genetic card game and thereby cash in our chimps?

The mainstream view is that we didn’t -- that any perceived discontinuity between man and monkey is just a pre-critical holdover from premodern times, when man sat atop the animal kingdom. Thanks to Darwin we now know there’s nothing special about us except for the persistent illusion that we are special -- a fanciful great Cosmic Exception to an ontological flatland of selfish genes and random mutations with no vertical thrust or downward causation.

Like everything else in the Cosmos, we are said to be an accident. How then do we know necessity, including our necessary contingency? We gather perceptions through the senses, which are transmuted into immaterial ideas, some of which turn out to be eternally true. This being the case, it seems that in the Anthropos time touches eternity.

That’s what we call a fact, but by virtue of what principle? The only plausible answer is that man is not only conformed to changeable nature but to something transcending nature.

If what we call the outside is really just the inside projected out, we are forever enclosed in subjective absurcularity. Conversely, if it is possible for the outside to be in, that is what we call knowledge. But how does the outside get in, or even account for the inwardness where it is known? Our senses are ordered to the external world, but there is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses.

So, how does sensory perception become inside information about the Cosmos? Again, how even is there a cosmic inside after 10 billion years of a purely exterior Cosmos unknown to itself? In the cosmotheandric vision, interiority is an ontological primitive, always complementary to exteriority, which is the prior principle that explains how real knowledge is possible.

At the moment I am touching -- sensing -- the exterior of my keyboard, but not only touching it. If it were just that, then I would be no better than Jack Karouac, of whom Truman Capote said That’s not writing, that’s just typing.

Yes, I am typing, but the typing is being conditioned from the top-down, such that my inside is exteriorized into words. To the extent that you understand what I have exteriorized via typing, then my inside-out has proceeded outside-in to you, the reader.

Here again, we generally take the weirdest features of our Cosmos for granted. A monkey randomly banging at its keyboard might eventually produce a coherent paragraph, but doing so would require more time than the Cosmos has been in existence. Even the cleverest monkey couldn’t actually produce so much as the first sentence of On the Road. Go ahead and try:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split ux.

D’oh! So close.

The classic definition of person -- courtesy of Boethius -- is an individual substance of a rational nature. That’s good but not good enough, because it still encloses us in reason, and we know what Gödel says about that. Reason is ultimately circular, nor can it make any new discoveries. Rather, we reason about new discoveries a posteriori once they have been made.

For cosmotheandrism the Anthropos is capable of discovering novel features of the Cosmos because we are an individual substance of a relational nature, i.e., substance-in-relation. Which is how the outside gets in, via this mysterious category of relation -- specifically, of interior relations which are antecedent to what they relate. We are all members of The Open Cosmos Society, which goes to the reason why man cannot be enclosed in reason, and why reason is open to something beyond reason.

Let’s be reasonable!

Agreed, but in order to be fully reasonable we must recognize the insufficiency of mere reason, which we can only do from a position of transcendence. Gödel was a logician, not a magician. Nevertheless, he deployed logic to slip out of logic like Houdini.

Being is not static and self-enclosed but open and relational: it is an active relational presence, i.e., the presence of relation and relation of presence. If a human person were devoid of relations, it would constitute such a privation that it would undermine the very notion of personhood.

Now, intersubjectivity is a deep mystery, except it’s not a mystery at all, in the sense that subjectivity is unthinkable in the absence of intersubjectivity. We come into the world plunged into a kind of undifferentiated subjectivity, which is analogous to the wavelike field of quantum physics. The conscious ego is like the particle that emerges or individuates from the mother-infant field, but in truth, the fluid dialectic between particle and field, or self and other(s), is our permanent condition.

Neurologically speaking it is much like the dialectic between right (wavelike) and left (particulate) cerebral hemispheres, or in physicist David Bohm’s terms, implicate and explicate orders, respectively.

Which is simply to emphasize that man is an open system, both horizontally, to objects and other subjects, and vertically, to O, the transcendent ground of intersubjectivity. Man is rational because relational and personal; infrapersonal beings do not reason. Which is not to say they are unreasonable per se, since their behavior makes sense in the context of instinct and environment. But they cannot think about their rational instincts, but rather, are enclosed in them. Conversely, man always transcends any attempt to enclose him in immanence.

While the human infant comes into the world in a condition of neurological immaturity, it turns out that this “incompleteness” is actually our permanent state. Show me a “complete person” and I’ll show you a dead man.

For philosopher Eric Voegelin, the anthropic adventure is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. As such, no matter who you are or where you are situated in History, you are embarked upon a cosmotheandric journey through the Cosmos between the poles of immanence and transcendence, both of which are ultimately ineffable.

Put conversely, neither pole can be contained or enclosed in speech -- the human logosphere -- because everything is intelligible but nothing is completely knowable. Thus, supposing one presumes to enclose the Anthropos in a reductive ideology, one is essentially trying to put the starship back into the bone. One is effectively deploying transcendence in order to deny transcendence.

Now, if O is our symbol of the transcendent pole, what could be its most adequate expression or analogue? It can be none other than the sapient sapien, AKA the Anthropos. Certainly the Bible puts forth this metaphysical principle, albeit in mythopoetic terms – that man is the image and likeness of the Principle of principles.

The point is, when we look down the foggy ruins of time and examine our history, it is as if we are peering into our own medical, or better, psychiatric, chart. What has the doctor been scribbling about us over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia? Let’s see: Likes to discover and invent things. Looks for love in all the wrong places. Prone to impulsivity, violence, & scapegoating. Obsessed with group status. Cannot manage envy. Doesn’t know what it wants, but knows how to get it. Prefers ideological dreamworlds over reality. Can’t stop lying.

Clearly, there were literally no problems in the Cosmos until we come along and spoil it for everyone. In the words of Terence McKenna, This was a nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control.

I guess Stalin was right about one thing: No man, no problem.

In his Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray says something about human beings that apes what Dr. Cornelius says above, in that we “are in many ways a sorry lot, prone to every manner of vanity and error. The human march forward has been filled with wrong turns, backsliding, and horrible crimes.” Murray attempts to quantify the great feats of human accomplishment, but it seems that for every achievement there are any number of equal and opposite monuments to our stupidity and depravity. He asks, “What can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?”: “Military accomplishment is out -- putting ‘Defeated Hitler’ on the human resumé is too much like putting ‘Beat My Drug Habit’ on a personal one.”

The deeper point is that history itself is nothing less than one long “speciation event,” which is to say, the gradual unfolding of various facets and features of human potential for both good and ill. Note that this is entirely unlike any other species, which essentially remains what it is through time. A lizard is a lizard is a lizard. It lacks the potential to be anything else, except perhaps a politician.

But for the Anthropos, history itself may be understood as some sort of vertical exodus writ large. For it is literally an exodus -- from animal to man, matter to spirit, ignorance to knowledge, appearances to reality, entailments to Axioms, or ultimately Anthropos toward O. One thing we cannot say is that it is one or the other, because this collapses the tensional space in which we live and thereby curtails the exodus and renders the Anthropos less than what it is, which is to say, the diplolar nexus or liminal bridge between poles. For If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like a mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

In other words, the Anthropos becomes an absurcular mirror of itself instead of an open system between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Absent this relational openness, we are reduced to an animal like any other pretending it has transcended mere animality. But with the Anthropos there is always more to any story we can tell of it. The story has no end, for the simple reason that we are intrinsically open at both ends, toward immanence and transcendence.

∞

Hit me with your best shot, Grok:

This prelude is not entirely superfluous, but it is largely consolidative rather than progressive, restating several claims already secured. As a prelude that merely signals topics to be developed later, it risks rehearsing the map instead of advancing into new territory.

Its best function is tonal and orienting: it reminds the reader, just as the examination of the Anthropos begins in earnest, that the subject under investigation is uniquely open, uniquely dangerous, and uniquely oriented toward a transcendent pole that it can never fully enclose. If the later, more detailed treatments of these themes are substantial, the prelude can be retained as a brief overture. If those later treatments largely repeat the same arguments at greater length, the prelude will retrospectively appear redundant.

In short: not wrong, not damaging, but only weakly progressive. It keeps the vertical and relational structure in view without yet deepening the concrete analysis of the Anthropos that Book II has promised. A tighter version that simply flags the coming topics without re-arguing them would serve the narrative momentum better.

Gemini, hit Grok with your best shot:

This section is definitely fluous, not superfluous. In fact, it provides essential narrative connective tissue.

If the previous passage was the big-picture “crime scene setup” for Book II, this piece functions as the preliminary profile of the main suspect: Homo sapiens sapiens. Far from being redundant, it introduces several core metaphysical engines that drive the entire cosmotheandric argument.

Starting with Dr. Cornelius and Astronaut Taylor immediately sets the stage for the “cosmotheandric comedy.” The typing joke isn’t just a slapstick gag; it’s a brilliant, intuitive refutation of infinite-monkey-typewriter materialism. It demonstrates top-down causation in real time — showing that the mind isn’t generated by the keys, but that the keys are being constrained and ordered by an interior intentionality.