Reality is a Person-to-Person Call

To review: like all animals we have instincts ordered to the things of this world that draw us like magnets. However, the Anthropos has an ineradicable instinct for transcendence, such that we are pulled vertically toward its fulfillment; 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.” Only in this direction can we locate the Cosmic Area Rug that really pulls the Cosmos together.

To repeat: it is as if the infinite positive plenitude of Celestial Central is mirrored by a “negative plenitude” in us, this latter being “an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.” Note that this is only possible because we are as internally related to the metaphysical ground of the Cosmos as we are to the peripheral entailments disclosed by science. Thus, “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.”

                                                                   ∞

The Academy of Cosmotheandric Arts & Sciences is proud to announce the winner for best — and worst — performance in a supporting role: Homo sapiens sapiens!
Best because of his capacity for the Infinite, worst because in choosing the wrong tree and enclosing himself in finitude, man started a joke which started the whole world crying.

Oh no.

∞

As we approach the end of Book II, it is time to proclaim the disquieting part out loud: the Anthropos is not am accidental feature of the Cosmos, rather, a reflection of its first principle, which is to say, the Person.

He’s the man for his time ’n place.

But to repeat what was said in the Introduction, this ultimate principle has a triune structure, and while we will be alluding to the Christian Trinity, for our more purely metaphysical purposes we will treat it as a necessary principle of being, as opposed to an arbitrary dogmatic assertion. This is not to downplay the Christian claim, rather, in order to include everyone in our meta-cosmically ecumenical discussion, for cosmotheandrism may be expressed in a diversity of ways.

It’s all pretty harmless.

Yes, no offense intended to Christians or non-Christians. For again, there is more than one way to skin the cataphasis of this mysterious whole in three, the Trinity being just one of them. Moreover, irrespective of the words we use, they always point to the thing itself which is beyond words, especially in this case, where we are trying to express the Absolute via the relative, or Infinitude via the finite.

Language problem!

Analogously, as Einstein said of physics, it “is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.” Likewise, here we will deploy this triune language as an abstract means for expressing the concrete nature of the noumenon — the Theos — and by extension, the Anthropic phenomenon.

Sure, I gotcha.

∞

Clarke asks “What is so special about the person that situates it at the apex of the order of being?” What makes us think we’re so special? The answer is that the ultimate Ground of the Cosmos must be “personalized being,” such that “the rest of the universe derives from personal being.” And in order for the Cosmos “to make full sense it would have to include personal created beings within it — in a word, it would have to be for persons.”

The main point here is that persons by definition are intersubjective, and therefore presume an other, which is to say, an I-Thou relationship, or an underlying unity of persons. Put conversely, “What could possibly be the point of a created universe entirely plunged in the darkness of unconsciousness, unable to know or appreciate that it is there at all?”

Now, we are all persons, but what is a person? And how is such a thing possible? By virtue of what principle? Physics? Biology? No, in neither case can we get here — especially in here — from out there. This is the One Free Miracle of personal subjectivity without which nothing could be known:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence — or consciousness or subjectivity — and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon).

Clarke maintains that Christian thinkers have tended not to adequately appreciate the paradigm shift entailed by the revelation of a triune Godhead. He quotes Ratzinger to the effect that “person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.”

Therefore,

In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.

This revolution in thought involves the recognition that ultimate reality is a personal substance-in-relation (Axioms 11 and 12). For it means that Ultimate Reality is neither substance nor relation, but rather, an irreducible complementarity of the two. This has extraordinary metaphysical implications, none of which, by the way, negate what science reveals about the world, but extend and deepen it (not to mention explaining how the scientific enterprise is even possible).

Again, a great many metaphysical implications follow. For example, with the recognition that reality is substance-in-relation, we could recognize a priori that the Newtonian paradigm of reality, useful as it was, had to be wrong in the ultimate sense, since the Cosmos does not and cannot consist of extrinsically related atomistic units. For the same reason, we can say on the political plane that Lockean individualism is way off base, since its anthropology is a non-starter.

In an abstract sense, the person as such features an “indissoluble complementarity” between an “in-itself dimension of being” and a “towards-others aspect” (Clarke). This extends to being itself, which is intrinsically diffusive and self-communicating. Ultimately, this is why the Cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence, for these two — intelligence and intelligibility — are intrinsically related. Again, if this isn’t the case, then we end up in a closed, Kantian universe of metaphysical ønanism.

Being itself is an ec-static process of self-communicative being-in-action. Which not only explains a lot, but explains everything — literally, because it explains how we can explain anything. What is the alternative?

Suppose a being that really exists, but does not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to other beings. There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all — it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being (Clarke).

If this were the nature of reality, then each existent thing “would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe” (ibid.). There might be individual substances but no intrinsic relations, like discrete particles with no unifying field, so to speak.

‘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.

And the Last Axiom Shall be First

To repeat what was said yesterday, our final Axiom cannot possibly be impersonal or infrapersonal. Rather, whatever it is, it must be personal or transpersonal. It subsumes the other eleven Axioms, as it is ultimate, certain, intelligent, relational, creative, complementary, open, interior, dynamic, free, and the only intellectually consistent and complete One Free Miracle that accounts for all the others. 

                                             ∞

Now, if thinking is an engagement with the limitless horizon of O, then it is drawn by a telos, arrival at which would represent its complete fulfillment. As per Axiom 7, we are an embodied reflection of the Absolute Principle, making the latter “convex” to our “concavity,” so to speak. In our intellectual striving, we are implicitly engaged with

the presence of something perfect, unconditional, and unrestricted within our consciousness that beckons us ahead of any imperfect and finite idea or ideal..., a “transcendent horizon” that can neither be described nor explained through any set of restricted, conditioned, or imperfect categories or realities (Spitzer).

In short, we are aware that any restricted or finite LH conception of a particular segment of reality can never exhaust or encompass the whole. Thus, “we must have at least a tacit awareness of what might be called a ‘supercategory’ of the whole of reality,” which is to say, O. It is the source of our “pure unrestricted desire to know, that is, a desire to know all that is to be known (everything about everything)” (ibid.).

And if we have an explicit desire to know it all, this implies a tacit recognition that all is knowable and just waiting to be discovered. Therefore, according to Spitzer,

When we arrive at an answer that is only partially intelligible, (that is, is not “everything about everything”), our desire is only partially satisfied, and we naturally ask a subsequent question of why it is so in our quest to achieve the fulfillment of our desire, namely, complete intelligibility (the knowledge of everything about everything).

The Cosmic Area Rug.

Correct. The point being that an explicit awareness of partial intelligibility implies a tacit awareness of what complete intelligibility would constitute — somewhat analogous to Aquinas’ argument from gradation, that there is an implicit standard by which we measure degrees of perfection, in this case intellectual perfection (or completion).

Given this strange situation, it is beginning to look like the complete intelligibility of the world — the Cosmic Area Rug — might just result from an act of unrestricted thinking at the other end. If so, it is as if our Theos Principle “shares His mind with us sufficient to engender a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility, giving rise to every form of free intellectual inquiry and creativity” (ibid.).

Of course Gödel is relevant here, because he provides ineluctable proof of our transrational nature. For again, his theorems demonstrate that “human creativity in mathematics cannot be explained from ‘below’ -- from previous sets of rules and algorithms,” rather, “that human mathematical creativity must be explained from ‘above’” (ibid.). We may not know exactly what is above, but we can certainly know we are below it.

Conversely, no offense to Grok, but “Artificial intelligence has no consciousness of a horizon of greater intelligibility,” let alone “a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility,” because “such a horizon can only be created by ‘complete and unrestricted intelligibility itself’” (ibid.). Therefore, we cannot create in a machine what we could not possibly have created in ourselves, rather, we are the reflected images of an unrestricted intelligence which bifurcates herebelow into anthropic intellect and cosmic intelligibility.

All of this goes to the teleological pull whereby our orientation toward the Infinite horizon of being is prior to our thinking about it — which is to say, we are oriented to, and drawn by, O, the Great Attractor.

O represents “the lodestar that draws my intelligence ever onward, even though this ultimate goal remains for me at present only obscurely discerned” but which “renders all else intelligible” (Clarke). Which, in colloquial terms, sounds like the true Light that gives light to everything else.

I’ve underestimated you. It appears you are not just clever monkeys but teleological vacuum cleaners designed to hoover up the Infinite.

Yes, but why all the hate for teleology in the modern era? I suppose that’s a question for the history of science, up to its old tricks again, tossing out the better halves of causation — formal and final — in favor of material and efficient.

Clearly, the ability to predict and plan for the future is a hallmark of intelligent behavior. Thus, supposing man is intelligent, then we are anticipatory systems dynamically engaged with the future. Which goes to the point made above, that the dynamism of our intelligence is a radical absurdity in the absence of an actually existing final term, since a dynamism without goal would be unintelligible.

Thus we live within the bipolar horizons of being, immanence at one end, transcendence at the other. Which implies that this dynamic structure possesses an “a priori orientation, an aptitude or affinity, for the totality of being -- an aptitude that constitutes it precisely as knowing nature in the intellectual and not merely the sensible order.” From the jump, our personhood reflects a “conscious movement from emptiness toward fulfillment, a kind of implicit, pre-conceptual, anticipatory grasp or foretaste of being as the encompassing horizon and goal of all its inquiries” (Clarke). Thus,

The entire mental life of man consists in gradually filling in this at first conceptually empty and indeterminate but limitless horizon of being with increasingly determinate conceptual comprehension, as we step by step come to know one part of this totality after another.

In his Philosophical Approach to God, Clarke talks about “the existence of God as the necessary a priori condition of the dynamism of human intelligence,” which on the surface goes against the usual Thomistic approach of beginning with the objects of the senses, i.e., the outward path

But the inner path does not begin by examining “the objective contents of man’s knowledge about the world,” rather, “turns inward to search out the necessary a priori conditions of possibility of the inner life of the human spirit in its activities of thinking and willing, and... studies the dynamic structure, the form rather than the content, of human thinking.”

This is fully in accord with cosmotheandrism, because no amount of examining or observing external objects would result in the ability to think about them if this ability weren’t already implicitly present. Again, this dynamism is “inscribed in the very nature of man as the a priori condition of possibility of both his knowing and his willing activities.”

In another chapter, Clarke fleshes this out this binary choice, and let’s face it, should we take the wrong path, “Our restless, unquenchable search has no actually existing goal.” Instead, “It trails off endlessly into ever-receding, always finite horizons, its inexhaustible abyss of longing and capacity ever unfulfilled and in principle unfillable.”

Sad!

I think so, because it implies that there is no proportion between the abyss of reality and the depths of our intellect, thus arousing “a profound metaphysical restlessness and sadness within us,” because then “the dynamism of our mind turns out to be a strange existential surd, an anomaly. It is a dynamism ordered precisely toward a non-existent goal; a drive through all finites toward nothing; an innate, inextinguishable summons to frustration: a living absurdity.”

If this is the case, then Sartre is correct after all, that “every human being longs for the infinite, but since God is dead, ‘man is a useless passion.’”

Which is reminiscent of the Buddhist image of the hungry gods with swollen, empty bellies and pinholes for mouths, symbolizing their immense and unfulfillable desires. They can never feel full or satisfied, no matter how much they consume. Even if they find something to eat or drink, they can barely swallow it, leading to constant frustration, torment, and suffering.

On the one hand, this might be true, but there is something about the structure of the mind that implies that it is impossible for it to be true, for “somewhere hidden within this unlimited horizon of being there exists an actually infinite Plenitude of Being, in which all other beings participate yet of which they are but imperfect images” (Clarke).

For Thomas, this infinite plenitude is “the act of existence itself,” which “now becomes the adequate, totally fulfilling goal of the dynamism of our minds, matching superabundantly the inexhaustible abyss of our own capacity and desire to know: one abyss, a negative one, calling out to another, positive one.”

This again adverts to the concavity of our own abysmal intellect mirroring, as it were, the convexity of the divine abyss. This “now gives full intelligibility to the horizon of being itself, as its unifying center and source, and also confers full and magnificent intelligibility on the natural dynamism of my mind and the whole intellectual life arising out of it.”

So, you’re a useful passion after all?

Unless we detach ourselves from Celestial Central and thereby render ourselves useless.

Given that we live in a vertical space between immanence and transcendence, the question is whether the latter has a “top,” or whether it is just the existential anomaly described by Clarke, in which case our nautical freedom reduces to being lost at sea. But if there is a toppermost of the poppermost, then “This at once launches us in a new direction, no longer along merely horizontal lines at the same level of things, but a vertical ascent toward qualitatively ever-higher and richer realities” (Axiom 8, the Open Spiral of Dynamic Becoming).

Similarly, Clarke writes of how, in considering this vertical dynamism, we “suddenly become aware in a kind of epiphany of self-discovery precisely that its very nature is to be an inexhaustible abyss that can comprehend and leap beyond any finite or series of finites, unending or not.”

We can never fully identify with the source, because it is more “a fullness out of which continually and spontaneously overflow free creative expressions” of “endless novelty.”

Faced with our two choices in the existential garden of being, which is the more reasonable? On the one hand, “a living frustration, an existential absurdity, ordered ineluctably toward a simply non-existent goal, 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.” Or, on the other, an a priori commitment not just to locating the Cosmic Area Rug but finding its real owner.

Man’s Godward Tendencies and God’s Manward Tendencies

That’s the title, anyway — of the last section of Book II of the Cosmotheandric Trilogy.

After 300 pages, this had better be good.

You’ll have to settle for plausible. I’m breaking the material up into several parts, also editing it for the first but not last time, so it’s a work in progress. Sections may also need to be rearranged in the final draft.

∞

Way back in the Introduction, we said This about That, or rather, about the ontological distinction between This and That. This distinction

is not always kept clear in Western circles: that there is God and there is our speech — dogmas, doctrines, symbolic representations — about God, and two don’t always harmonize. The Bible, for example, is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him. Thus it is about God, and one of the rules of cosmotheandrism is that it is the moon that counts, not the lunatic pointing at it.

Of the subject of revelation, we said that

although it will at times appear in these pages, we will not be granting it automatic authority, rather, we agree with Berdyaev that “no religion stands on a higher level than truth,” or in other words, do not confuse any religion with that to which it points. And if it doesn’t point to truth, I fail to see the point.

In other words, supposing it is what it purports to be, then revelation reveals — or ought to, at any rate — Big Truth. For example, one such Truth, according to Rabbi Moses — whom they say encountered God — is that the Theos wishes to be known as I am that I am, which can be variously translated as I am who am, I will be what I will be, or even I will become what I choose to become.

However, adding the I to the AM implies that being is personal — that it has a subjective — and therefore intersubjective — interiority. And this personhood is free from necessity, as implied in the last version, i.e., choose to become.

But to whom is God speaking? In this case to Moses, with whom he has a relationship, but by extension to all of us, for this is not the kind of thing one keeps to oneself. In fact, we could know nothing of God if he weren’t a priori related to us. Nor could we know anything at all if there weren’t a relationship between knowing and being, which is to say, between I Am and It Is (and You Are).

But we do know being, and if the Theos is the unrestricted act of being, this implies that in any act of knowing we know the Theos, even if only an itsy bitsy. This was Aquinas’ opinion, and why not? An explicit finite truth points toward, and is related to, the implicit infinite source of Truth; our very ability to know and understand is a participation in the divine intellect.

Facts may be stubborn, but principles are positively intransigent, one such principle being that no amount of objects adds up to a subject, much less a personal one. Which goes to our final Axiom, which we might call primordial and irreducible Personhood:

Truth and Person. Just try to talk about one without the other. Only persons can be involved with truth, and truth can only be known by a person. This is the ultimate axiom that accounts for all the others, as it is certain, intelligent, creative, complementary, open, interior, dynamic, free, and the only intellectually consistent and complete One Free Miracle that accounts for all the others. To circle back to our first Axiom, the Person himself partakes of both Absolute and Infinite, and is the prior unity of both. The Person is also the last word in intersubjective relationality, for “Relation,” writes Ratzinger, “is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.”

∞

As said at the very outset of this book, one can reason upward from the objects of experience to their ultimate principle, which Clarke calls the cosmic or outer path, as exemplified (for example) by Aquinas’ five ways. Alternatively, one can begin by “exploring the depths of our own inner conscious life to find God as the Ultimate Goal of one’s inner drive toward the fullness of Truth....”

Instead of proceeding from down to up and outside in, try looking from the top down and inside out?

Yes, let’s look into path #2, because it explores the concept of meaning in an open Cosmos with an indeterminate future. Thus, it is the absence of a predetermined outcome that facilitates the very possibility of meaning.

In our restless engagement with the limitless horizon of being, any finite, limited, determinate truth only causes us to “rebound beyond it and search for more”: the intellect is such that it “can never be completely satisfied or fulfilled by any finite being or good.” Rather,

I must always implicitly refer each one to a wider, richer horizon beyond, to which I then spontaneously tend. It follows that only an unqualified infinity, or unlimited fullness of being and goodness could ever satisfy this innate drive.... my very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite [AKA O] (Clarke).

While there is no possibility of meaning if the dynamism of the intellect isn’t ordered to the Absolute, it seems that the meaning is located more in the vertical quest than in the finding per se, since we could never actually arrive at this end, only engage with it.

Now, could an endless series of finites be sufficient to satisfy our drive for the Infinite? No, because this would be a caricature of infinitude, just an endless series of finites, so “there would still remain a deep unfilled void within us, a radical emptiness that nothing could ever fill” (ibid.).

In other words, Infinitude or nothing. Literally. But it is nevertheless a choice, since we are of course free: “Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being..., which is somehow possible to be attained by me,” in which case -- good news -- “my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, [and] sense-making.”

Alternatively — and again, in an indeterminate Cosmos there is no alternative to alternatives —

there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness; a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, a “useless passion”..., oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion.

When you put it that way, it doesn’t seem like much of a choice.

“Thus, either God exists or I am absurd: that is the basic option that confronts me, if I am willing to go to the depth of the human condition” (ibid).

However, this choice of choices of course assumes the freedom to make it, and where does the freedom come from? Clarke suggests that “there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible.”

Therefore, “it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd.” Having said that,

what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not?

G3AOA, maybe? For that particular text relates the timeless tale — some might call it a repetition compulsion — of choosing relative over Absolute, appearances over reality, illusion over meaning, but even more deeply, it is rejecting the prior truth that to be is to be in relation, in particular, in relation to an infinite Theos who is himself relational, both internally and externally, the latter by way of creation.

Clarke points out that “there is no knowledge more useless than to know all the future now,” since we couldn’t do a thing about it. It would turn even God into a passive witness of his own creation, nor could he “exercise any providence at all, since everything would already be unchangeably fixed without his active cooperation with us that can only be in a real now.”

The real now. Not to go all hippie-dippie or dopie-Chopra on you, but there is something awfully weird about the now. It is so fleeting, and yet only it has the fullness of reality, or is fully real. The past, to be sure, is -- or was -- real, but it is clearly lacking something. Those of you who have tried to live in the past will know what I mean.

Nor does it make sense to live for the future only, because only when we arrive there is it real, and if you haven’t learned to live in the Real Now now, what makes you think you’ll be able to do so then? Not to criticize people for prudential planning, but taken to an extreme it can be a way to avoid and flee from the existential reality of the present.

It seems we should adopt a more moderate stance: live a little bit in the past and future, but mostly in the now. For my part, the older I get, it seems that it works the other way around: my primary means of escaping the ever-shortening future is to burrow down into the now, which is the location — the safe space — from which this book is being written. Nevertheless, the older we are, the nearer the end.

Act now before offer expires!

Clarke goes on to say that

God can know what will happen to you only if he first takes the risk of creating you and working with you all the way through to the end, trying to steer you in the right direction, but with the final outcome determined only by your last free choices at the end, to which God himself is always present, but only in the immanent order in which they actually occur existentially.

So, life is a gamble. But is God the “Ultimate Cosmic Gambler”? Understood properly, “Yes -- but also an infinitely skilled player at the game!”

I once played chess with Death.

Yes, but that was no doubt only two-dimensional. Conversely, God plays hyperdimensional chess.

The Imaginarium of Rationalism

To summarize: yesterday’s post ended with the repeated claim that our contingent Cosmos is dependent upon a non-contingent Principle. The anthropic intellect is a mirror of this Principle, such that the event of knowledge occurs in the dynamic space between the poles of immanence and transcendence (or Ø and O, respectively). To deny this “is to shut oneself off from the truth,” since it is necessary for us to remain open and thereby burn the anthropic candle at both ends. Being that the world is contingent, no scientific map can ever be complete, rather, the scientific method must remain open to the world. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute?

The cosmotheandric method?

Well, one must first acknowledge the a priori truth that the Absolute is what cannot fail to be, since it is the non-contingent ground of being, so any contingent truth we discover necessarily partakes of it. Conversely, “man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational” (Schuon).

In short, nothing could be more irrational than a reason enclosed in the LH imaginarium of rationalism. Again (as per Gödel’s Hammer), reason has its limits, so an “unlimited reason” is a contradiction in terms, an absurdity even.

In such a totalitarian rationalism, “an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality.” The consequence is a “false lucidity” (ibid.) that only replaces the old sentimentalities with fashionable new ones, i.e., with novel passions, intoxications, and projected ideological mirages.

Schuon begins and ends with those immutable principles “which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence,” one of which is the Absolute referenced above. This Absolute bifurcates herebelow into subject and object, or intelligence and intelligibility.

Now, “logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything” (ibid.).

Which — assuming you’ve been to college — checks out: no matter how frivolous or evil the doctrine, there is a philosopher somewhere who assumes its truth or thinks he can prove it. Schuon calls these absurdities “esoterisms of stupidity,” and says that when worldly intelligence “joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.”

I hate when that happens.

Agreed, let’s not do that. Ultimately it comes down to the question of just how far thought can go. Kant, for example, would say it can’t go very far — not even as far as reality, rather, only to appearances.

Is there an aphorist in the house?!

Yes: A symmetrical pair of errors is believing: that beyond what we can know there is nothing, or that what we know is what there is.

For if RH intelligence can never exit the vicious circle of LH horizontal thinking, then truly truly, we are sealed in absurcularity. But in reality, it is absurd to posit the inaccessibility of truth as the first and last of all truths. Thus, “all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap” in pretending

that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error.... (ibid).

Schuon has a better idea: “The intellect is a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not ‘create,’ it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective.”

Which is another way of saying that intellect and intelligibility are as it were mirrors of one another; that what we call knowledge is an adequate reflection of being; and “If there were not something absolute in man -- he is ‘made in the image of God’ -- he would be only an animal like other animals.... Man alone can step outside the cosmos, and this possibility proves -- and presupposes -- that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute.”

However, at the same time, Schuon acknowledges that in our day, “the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality.”

Choose it or lose it?

It would seem:

One man can spend his whole life in searching and looking, and still know nothing, “see” nothing; another may arrive without trouble at intellectual certainties, and this proves that his ignorance was only accidental and not fundamental.

Why this difference? “[L]eaving aside mere stupidity, we would say that intelligence may be extremely acute on the rational level alone, while being quite inoperative beyond that level…”

In other words, even the best method for approaching the horizontal is entirely inappropriate for grasping the vertical.

Analogously, a degree in physics doesn’t help your vet understand what is wrong with your dog, nor a degree in veterinary medicine help to understand what’s troubling your wife. Reality has its degrees, modes, and dimensions, and one doesn’t bring a scientistic knife to a metaphysical gunfight.

Schuon expresses the cosmotheandric view in affirming that any LH “science of the finite has need of a wisdom that goes beyond it,” for “what could be more naive than to seek to enclose the Universe in a few mathematical formulae, and then to be be surprised to find out there always remains an elusive and apparently ‘irrational’ [RH] element which evades all attempts to ‘bring it to heel’”?

After all, “the man who is intelligent enough to grasp nature in its deepest physical aspects, ought to know that nature has a metaphysical Cause which transcends it, and that this Cause does not confine itself to determining the laws of sensory existence....”

In short, we ought to know better than to enclose ourselves in immanence, for blindness of transcendence isn’t just another form of vision.

Glancing Back and Glimpsing Forth

Yesterday’s post ended with a sneak peak of Book III, suggesting that religion in general “furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.”

Lot of problems with that sentence.

Agreed, if only because there are more or less adequate Grammars of Infinitude, just as there are more or less adequate grammars of finitude. Just as we don’t place critical theory on the same plane as biology or physics, nor should we place the immolation industrial complex of the Aztec on the same level as, say, Shankara or St. Thomas. But we’ll let that slide for now. On to part two of the penultimate section of Book II, as we approach vertical liftoff into O:

These points of reference are of course in the form of language. In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, Pieper discusses how “reality becomes manifested through the word.” Obviously — critical theory notwithstanding — “One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name in order... to make it known to someone else.” Language is where “human existence comes to pass,” so “if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed.”

Regarding this corrosive truth decay, words can be false only because it is possible for them to be true. Thus, corruption occurs when this ontologically prior link between word and reality has been severed. Which is necessarily an ambiguous business as it pertains to the vertical, since it cannot be disclosed in the same cutandry way one would describe the objective/horizontal/material world. The grammar of the latter is more denotative, whereas connotations — e.g. myth, allegory, and metaphor — abound in the vertical order. There is even a sense in which one speaks transcendence into being and renders it present via language itself. One might say that the implicate transcendent meaning is rendered explicate through speech, somewhat analogous to the collapse of the wave vector in quantum physics, for both involve local specifications of nonlocal potential.

Pieper adverts to a “technologically-manufactured ignorance of the world characterized by the possession of an abundance of information.” However, all the LH data in the world doesn’t add up to RH reality, and “once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place..., a pseudo-reality which looks so real that it is virtually impossible for me to find out the truth.” This is what Voegelin calls a “secondary reality” parasitic on the first. But for Pieper, “man’s chief nourishment is truth,” and “Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must [or ought to] feed on truth,” for what is the alternative?

Feasting on delusions?

Here again, the RH intellect must be distinguished from the LH reason which is only one of the tools at our cognitive disposal. If man were literally confined to the foolbox of reason, he could never know it, because such knowledge obviously transcends reason. Mere logic in a sense encloses us in tautology: premises in, conclusions out. But there is no logical operation for choosing the premises that must be furnished by extra-logical, infra-logical, or trans-logical means.

Thus, although man is the rational animal, he also has access to a “view from above,” through which he is aware of his own rational powers. At the same time — you have noticed — he can sink beneath reason, which is to say, think and behave irrationally.

Now, even the rationalist will admit to the latter, which is to say that man can fall beneath his intellectual powers. But what he will not acknowledge is that man can also rise above himself, even though the one implies the other.

As to falling beneath oneself, this is usually handled by the psychology department, specifically, clinical psychology, AKA my old racket.

However, by mid-century—

We’re not there yet.

We are speaking of the 20th, when a number of fellow psychological theorists began to address the upper vertical as well, e.g., Abraham Maslow and his “hierarchy of needs,” with meta-needs such as self-actualization at the top. He also acknowledged aesthetic needs, which is to say, an instinct for beauty, and how did that get into our otherwise selfish genes?

So there is something in the Anthropos that allows him to not only perceive the world’s beauty but to participate in it via artistic creativity, which clearly isn’t reducible to LH reason, otherwise it could be fulfilled by pondering syllogisms or working out math problems. Not to say that math isn’t — so they say — beautiful in its own way, only that it is inaccessible to the likes of us who dropped out of Algebra 2. I found no beauty there, only toil, tears, and sweat.

Now, it is easy to see that the lower vertical has “content,” generally ascribed to the RH unconscious. And as indicated above, it is self-evident that man transcends reason, the question being “into what?”

In other words, it seems that modernity is characterized either by the loss of content, so to speak, of the upper vertical, or by an inability to perceive it due to LH capture and suppression of RH intellection.

It is a kind of forgetfulness of being, or perhaps it’s just plain carelessness. Whatever the case, it seems there is an attenuation in man’s ability to apprehend the upper vertical, even though his need for it — just like rational or aesthetic needs — remains the same as it ever was. Whatever happened to William Blake and the ability to see the world in a grain of sand and Heaven in a wild flower?

Whom do we credit for the disenchantment of the world?

Or whom do we blame? Because if the vocation of man is to know the eternal in the temporal and the infinite in the everyday, then somebody dropped the ball.

We have previously discussed this in cosmoneurological terms — of right brain capture by the left, through which a totalitarian scientism is superimposed upon the world, thus eclipsing the upper vertical. But the same occurs with the internalization of any ideology.

You could say that ideology functions as a counterfeit substitute for Maslow’s transcendent needs mentioned above. Which also accounts for the irrational passion of politicized vertical needs, i.e., secular religions.

Consistent with Schopenhauer’s crack that “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world,” then we have to somehow restore our vision from 20/20 back to 20/∞.

To improve his own infinite vision — or vision of the infinite — Schopenhauer actually relied upon revelation, just not the Christian one, rather, the Vedantic, enthusing that “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.”

Indeed, they were even his favorite bedtime story (he read them every night before turning in), “a source of great inspiration and means of comfort to my soul.... The Upanishads have been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.”

Speaking of man’s meta-needs, he wrote that “Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need.”

Likewise, similar to what was said above about ideological counterfeits, this vertical need “sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales.”

Having said that, it seems that Schopenhauer conflated the upper and lower vertical —as if the Upanishads were speaking of nothing more elevated than his concept of the world as blind will. So, he got off to a good start but ended in a metaphysical non-starter.

Oopsie! He took the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Yes, it is an occupational hazard of the philosopher, whose proper job is to love wisdom — the Logos — not pretend to possess it. Frankly, for Schopenhauer, where there is the Will, there is no Why? Such a man, in the words of Schuon, wants his answers

to be as external and as easy as that of “scientific” phenomena; in other words he wants answers on the level of his own experiences; and since these are purely material, his consciousness is closed in advance to all that goes beyond them.

Which goes back to what was said at the top of this section regarding a Cosmos that is dependent upon a higher principle and an intellect that can dynamically engage this principle. To deny this “is to shut oneself off from the truth” in order to preserve an LH model of reality, such that one’s method determines what one perceives. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute?

A metaphysical cliffhanger!

The Ecumenism of the Vertically Open System

There are two major sections left in Book II, but a note to myself indicates that this one needs more work because it may contain repetition. More charitably, perhaps it is a summary of the previous 40 posts, as we transition to Book III. Let’s find out; it is over 3,500 words, so I’ll break it in two or three:

Speaking of ontological shrinkage and metaphysical wrongthink, celebrity atheist Daniel Dennett came up with the metaphor of cranes and skyhooks to characterize naturalism and theism, respectively. According to his cosmic rules, skyhooks are not permitted, being that they posit a transcendent and immaterial intelligence that he dismisses as a gratuitous miracle.

Now, supposing we are limited to only One Free Miracle, cosmotheandrism chooses an intelligible universe mysteriously ordered to man’s intellect, including even Dennett’s. Moreover, the very existence of immanent cranes is already a miracle that cannot be explained without recourse to a transcendent skyhook — a vertical form or telos. In reality, crane and skyhook are complementary, another way of talking about the primordial and irreducible complementarity of immanence and transcendence.

To pretend that cranes are entirely self-sufficient is but another case of left-brain capture of the right — as if one can build a skylight out of floorboards, when the very act of building a crane requires a skyhook to hold the blueprint — i.e., the form — and without which the crane is a meaningless pile of metal on the ground. In the traditional view, last in the order of execution is first in the order of intention, which implies that the Why must be prior to the How. Cosmos and intellect are mysteriously ordered to one another, but why? Either for no reason at all, or for a reason that lies in the order of intention. Which implies that the Anthropos may be temporally last to arrive on the terrestrial scene, when in fact he is ontologically first — not an intracosmic afterthought but a extracosmic forethought.

The Omega is the Alpha?

That’s getting ahead of ourselves. But then again, man is always ahead of himself, having one foot in the ceaseless discovery and mapping of an ontologically prior transcendent dimension.

Indeed, what is a crane even for? There can be no horizontal answer to any Why question, for no amount of How adds up to a single Why. E no doubt equals MC squared, but why are there physical laws to begin with, to say nothing of physicists who discover and understand them?

But for Dennett, the skyhook concept is intended to ridicule the idea of intelligence grounded in a transcendent principle — or from what regular folks might call God. He contrasts this with earthbound cranes that are ultimately constructed out of immanent bits of matter.

But this arbitrarily restricted view only demonstrates how LH human intelligence may be extremely acute on the horizontal plane alone while rendering itself impotent on any level above it. For either the whole of reality is ordered to the totality of intelligence, or what are even pretending to talk about? Cages are for animals. Why escape the immanent zoo only to confine oneself to an intellectual museum full of dead artifacts?

At antipodes to the craniac perspective are skyhookers such as Wolfgang Smith, who writes that the Darwinism of our times — which is to say, the metaphysical kind — is “no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact.”

Fighting words. But if Darwinism is a faux-religion, it must have a secret skyhook of its own hidden away somewhere, i.e., the One Free Miracle that gets it off the absurcular goround.

Now, I don’t doubt the existence of cranes, but they are not self-explanatory. You could say they are built from the laws of physics, but this leads to two problems, first, the origin of those laws, and second, how these laws give rise to beings who transcend them.

Richard Dawkins, for example, writes of how human beings ought to develop a morality that is free of religion, but whence this “ought” in a deterministic world of selfish genes? There is no ought in natural selection, nor any freedom to conform to it. To even say that one morality is superior to another is to sneak in a vertical hierarchy that is forbidden by the principles of Darwinism.

He sounds just like a skyhooker with a heart of gold.

If a miracle is something that has no naturalistic explanation, then high on our list is the miracle of subjectivity in an otherwise objective universe; and if this weren’t miraculous enough, we have the human intelligence that somehow mirrors the intelligibility of the world. Which — agreed — we ought to engage in.

Is it reasonable to suppose that this immaterial intelligence was simply lifted by a material crane out of a monkey’s head? To believe this is to simply not know what intelligence is — which is to say, adequation to reality.

For cosmotheandrism man is always suspended between the crane and the skyhook, i.e., immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, respectively. The human state abides precisely in the weird vertical tension between these poles, skyhook above, cranes below, out of which the Cosmic Area Rug is weird-woven.

Looked at this way, evolution is indeed a journey through time, but to recognize the journey is to already be partly outside of it — as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges with his immaterial preference for a morality that is higher than mere survival of the fittest.

Try as we might, we can never really domesticate this weirdness. Which is reminiscent of Haldane’s suspicion that The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that

I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any [LH] philosophy.

Which is necessarily true, since being cannot be enclosed in anything from within being. Along these lines, Haldane made some similarly wise cracks:

Reality is the [LH] cage of those who lack [RH] imagination.

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of [RH] wonder.

The advance of [LH] scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our [RH] inner life in it any less mysterious.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms [or RH can be reduced to LH abstractions].

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized [LH] world, while the real [RH] universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

As the bracketed material indicates, the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it.

Ideology is one way to make the weirdness stop, but a mind constrained within an ideology renders itself a kind of “artificial intelligence” — but genuine stupidity —since it can only perceive and articulate that which is permitted by the internalized model. It can only think within the grooves of its own preconceptions, thus stifling the imagination.

Which brings to mind C.S. Lewis’ comment about his belief in Christianity — that it is less something that he sees than something by which he sees everything else — in other words, not something to look at, but rather, to see through. For among other things, like religion in general, it furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.

Anticipatory Systems and Biomusicology

Say what you want about reality, but it has stood the test of time. On the one hand, it is what it is. But one thing it always is is becoming. Thus it is more like temporal music than it is timeless geometry.

In theoretical biologist Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems, he notes that while writing the manuscript in 1979, he felt that he “had arrived upon the threshold of some entirely new perspectives in the theory of natural systems, and of biological systems in particular.” Here he is not alluding to a mere scientific discovery, rather, the meta-discovery of a new and deeper paradigm for understanding reality itself. This doesn’t render the discovery merely “subjective,” even though subjectivity is required in order to make the leap to a more comprehensive objective explanation. In other words, discoveries don’t just discover themselves, but require a discoverer.

Anticipation sounds like something that could only be present in a mind of some sort, but what if it is “fundamental in its own right” and built into the nature of things — which is to say, a feature of the Cosmic Area Rug? And in what type of Cosmos is anticipation even possible? For “Strictly speaking, an anticipatory system is one in which present change of state depends upon future circumstances, rather than merely on the present or past” (Rosen).

Which suggests that, as in music, the organism is reaching forward into its own future. This obviously touches on the question of teleology, but not in a fixed way, as in a machine, rather, in a more openended manner. For Rosen, this is precisely what “one is forced to believe if one grants that certain kinds of systems can behave in an anticipatory fashion.”

In machines the past and present are obviously coupled, but the anticipatory system couples its present state with a future that backshadows it, so to speak. This is known to occur at the quantum level, but this may be just a glitch in the math. If there is a temporal holism in our macro world, it isn’t a quantum effect but something more general, implying a vertical dimension with downward causation. In other words, the causation in question isn’t so much future-to-present as top-to-bottom.

The anticipatory paradigm does not fully replace the mechanistic, but rather, complements it, as in RH to LH, respectively. For example, in the human body — or in any organic process — there are machine-like “closed-loop” subsystems and more creative “open-loop” ones. Indeed, if the entire biosphere weren’t an open system, then evolution itself would be impossible. Rather, the identical process would simply repeat itself, as in any other machine.

Here there is a great deal of overlap with Polanyi, for whom living systems are under what he calls dual-control: such systems again rely upon the principles of a lower level — e.g., the laws of physics and chemistry — to serve as boundary conditions for the emergence of a higher level. Analogously, we require the fixed structure of grammar and spelling in order to say something novel or creative, but one cannot deduce meaning from the lower level rules. Or as Rosen puts it in a later book, semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, or meaning to order.

A living organism is quintessentially an anticipatory system with “one ‘foot’ in the past, the other in the future, and the whole system hovers, moment by moment, in the present — always on the move, through time.” Thus “the future represents as powerful a causal force on current behavior as the past does, for all living things.”

Which leads back to the question of music: is it like biology because biology is like music? In her preface to Anticipatory Systems, Rosen’s daughter suggests that “Perhaps time is not quite as linear as we have always presumed it to be. My father’s view, in fact, was that, ‘Time is complex.’”

The Physics Department cannot say what time is in any ontological sense, if only because the physicist must exist in time in order to say anything about it at all, whether it is regarded as a unit of measurement, a geometric dimension, or a directional gradient. No physical theory of any kind can account for subjective awareness of the dynamic flow of becoming in the present moment. The subjective presence of the now leaves no mathematical fingerprints.

You’ve dusted the place?

No need. For cosmotheandrism it matters not what physics can say about time, because the question is beyond the reach of physics in principle. Rather, the reality of time is the province of the Metaphysics Department. In the context of creative emergence, time is obviously central, since emergence not only requires time, but must reveal something about the very nature of time, i.e., its novelty and fecundity.

Put it this way: in what type of Cosmos is the creative emergence of novelty even possible? Correct: only in a temporal one, otherwise there can be no real evolutionary change, let alone the kind of dramatic transformations we see, for example, from matter to life or life to mind. Human creativity must be an image of, or declension from, a creative principle or principle of creativity. In order to not notice that a living Cosmos is fundamentally different from an inert Cosmos, one must be more than a little incurious. Or just trapped inside an ideological matrix.

In the book Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization, the authors write that “With the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century came the insistence that wholes — including living organisms — are no different from aggregates, and that secondary qualities are mere causally inert epiphenomenal and/or subjective appearances.” Thus, “Legitimate scientific methodology denied all ontological status to higher-level phenomena, insisting that any truly causal relationships between organizational levels be one-way only: bottom-up.”

Did you notice what those sneaky Enlightenment thinkers did just there?

I did: they covertly elevated a method of inquiry into an ontological reality, thereby reducing the Cosmic Symphony to the notes with which it is composed. In other words, the map was not only conflated with the territory, but any territory not depicted in the map no longer existed, even if we are standing in the territory. Which brings to mind the anecdote about visitors to the Soviet Union standing in front of an Orthodox church while looking at a state-approved map that showed no such church. Does this mean the church no longer existed?

Ha ha. Now go to gulag.

Analogously, shortly after the map of scientific materialism was developed, people started wondering about all the things that seem rather important but which do not appear on the map, many of which fall under the heading of “emergence,” beginning with how a finely-tuned Cosmos emerges out of a primeval explosion, and how this Cosmos comes to life after 9 billion years — at the very moment, by the way, that cosmic conditions permitted the emergence of life.

Emergence per se “applies in those cases where the distinctive quality that emerges is not the mere sum of separate elements, but instead embodies a new kind of relation” (Juarrero & Rubino). This goes to Axiom 4, because we are not just talking about new things, rather, new relations between existing things. Which goes precisely to Rosen’s relational biology, which argues that

organisms, and indeed all systems, have a distinct quality called organization which is not part of the language of reductionism.... [O]rganization includes all relations between material parts, relations between the effects of interactions of the material parts, and relations with time and environment, to name a few. Many people sum up this aspect of complex systems by saying that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Now, what is a relation? It cannot be in the parts, rather, in the spacetime between them. Or in other words, there can be no relation in the absence of this relational spacetime. Without it there would be the opposite of relatedness, either an undifferentiated, monadic oneness or radically unrelated units without any wholeness.

I can’t relate to that.

Nor can cosmotheandrism, since this is a relational Cosmos from top to bottom, in the absence of which there could be neither freedom nor meaning of any kind. Berdyaev writes that “Meaning lies beyond the boundaries of history, beyond the limits of personal and world history.” If it were not ordered to something beyond itself, then it would be as devoid of meaning as an endless series of unrelated moments or disconnected objects.

If the Anthropos is just an appearance living in a world of appearances, then to hell with it. In reality, we are, as it were, sparks drawn to the central fire that produced them. How exactly does this work? Here’s a start: “There is nothing higher than the search for, and the love of, Truth” (Berdyaev). Which implies that if you do not love truth, then you do not know it — or at least you do not know it as intimately as you might think you do.

Here is another clue:

Truth is meaning and may not deny meaning. To deny meaning in the world means to deny truth, to recognize nothing but darkness. Truth makes us free. To deny freedom is to deny truth.

Having said that, Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it, because the end is one of the transcendentals, i.e., truth, beauty, virtue, and/or unity.

Here again, creative freedom takes place in that vertical space between immanence and transcendence: “Truth does not mean staying within some closed ideas, in an inescapable circle of consciousness.... Truth is not objective, but rather, trans-subjective” (Berdyaev).

Or to be perfectly accurate, vertical and horizontal intersubjectivity is the objective truth of things. We are open, relational, and teleologically ordered to the very ground of trans-subjectivity: “In the final depth Truth is God and God is truth.” But be careful -- “Pure truth would burst the world apart” (ibid.).

How so?

Because no matter how tightly you pack it, you cannot stuff infinitude into a finite suitcase, nor eternity into a temporal one.

Unless—

Let’s not anticipate Book III.