Obama: Truth is What You Can Get Away With

Yesterday we spoke of Obama's troubled relationship with truth -- not that he's troubled, mind you. Rather, his casual acquaintance with truth -- and therefore reality -- results in troubles for us, Obama's "folks" (not to be confused with his volk, the true beneficiary of his collectivist lies).

For someone with a normal devotion to truth, it is difficult to comprehend the person who doesn't share this spontaneous allegiance to what transcends us -- just as it is impossible for good people to truly understand what motivates the evil.

Truth is disinterested, which is one major reason why, say, a pathologically narcissistic president may reject it, since the fragile self-image of the narcissist is of no concern to truth. Truth is for its own sake. It hurts, but only if one has an abiding interest in falsehood. Otherwise, it usually doesn't hurt at all. Rather, it feels quite pleasant. At least if you value freedom, which most Americans admittedly do not.

Without a doubt, truth is one of the names of God -- as is beauty, or love, or goodness, or creativity, or freedom. The existence of these celestial attractors creates a vertical space between us and them, which is essentially where we live and move and have our being -- or better, our becoming.

Hart agrees that "our experience of reality does in fact have a transcendental structure," and that the transcendent pole of our becoming provides "an absolute orientation for thought."

Just as there is a visual horizon at the edge of things, there is a "horizon of being... toward which the mind is always turned and against which every finite object is set off" within "the great middle distance of the phenomenal world" (ibid.).

This is what the Raccoon knows of as the expansive horizon of subjectivity, for there is no proper human subject in the absence of this horizon. But importantly, reality doesn't "end" at the horizon. Rather, this horizon expands infinitely, based upon the metabolism of experience.

For this reason, one person lives within a vast and unlimited metacosmic space, while another subsists between cramped and parochial horizons defined at one end by the matrix media and the other by state-run edudoctrination. Human appetite takes care of the rest -- that is, human desire untethered to any transcendent concerns, from the mind's proper objects. They call it "sophistication," but as Fred Reed writes, it is "the sophistication that comes of growing up in a whorehouse."

That kind of debased sophistication forecloses the real kind -- i.e., refinement, sublimation, transfiguration, etc. I mean, bathing "in civilization’s bilges" (Reed) doesn't actually result in cleanliness.

Hart describes our cosmic situation: "the gaze of the apperceptive 'I' within is turned toward a transcendental 'that' forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two 'supernatural' poles."

Exactly. Although it may appear as if the world merely makes an imprint on the mind, like a seal into wax, "we approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural," i.e., the dynamic space between us and O. We are always dependent "upon a dimension of reality found nowhere within the physical order." "The mind stretches out and toward and prospectively takes hold of an ultimate 'object,'" and "only in that way interprets and judges the world."

Back to our troublesome president and his infrahuman (or all too human, depending upon whether one sees the ass as only half-full of himself) relation with truth. When our pneumatic space shrinks, the world is horizontalized, resulting in the conflation of truth and desire (since desire is deprived of its transcendent object). Therefore, "truth" devolves to what I want to be true, e.g., the workability of socialized medicine.

Only something transcendentally disinterested within ourselves compels us "to accept an unwelcome truth, not because it pleases or attracts us, but because we are driven by a deeper devotion to truth as such" (Hart). Here again, proper human devotion belongs to transcendent truth as such, not to some fashionable idol of the tenured.

But Obama is a morally retarded child of Machiavelli, who seems to have invented the notion of "effectual truth," whereby "the truth of words is in the result they produce..."

Nor should the prince of darkness worry about "justice" (another star in the celestial horizon), but simply act, "and the words to justify your action will come to you afterward.” The prince must have faith that Queen Valerie will come up with something.

Thus, "In recent weeks the world has woken up to the fact that President Obama is one of the most committed disciples of effectual truth telling in recent history. Time and again, when confronted by political necessity, he and his administration have told falsehoods in order to achieve their objectives" (Continetti).

But has the world really woken up to the fact that effectual truth is the only truth the left knows? It pains me to say -- for in this instance the truth hurts -- no way.

Most Transparent Cosmos Ever

This may or may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's certainly the most transparent. "Transparency," of course, is a metaphor borrowed from the world of sight.

Or is it? For how else to characterize a world that is never merely its appearance, but rather, always reveals inexhaustible depths of intelligibility? This intelligibility permeates existence like light streaming through a window -- the window being us.

To put it another way, if the cosmos were simply its appearance, this would equate to an utterly meaningless existence. That reality is not appearance -- even while appearance is reality -- is the starting point for the Adventure of Consciousness.

Both believers and unbelievers have faith in this ultimate transparency, at least in the West. In Islam, Allah's motives are obscure and unknowable, resulting in a cosmos that is equally arbitrary and unintelligible. There is a reason science did not, and could not have, developed there, for the very possibility of science rests upon correct metaphysical assumptions.

Now that I think about it, religion may be thought of as concrete metaphysics, just as metaphysics may be thought of as abstract religion. And not all religions are equal, for if they were, it would amount to the belief that truth isn't One and that reality is whatever we want it to be.

But reality is what it is. Which is what? Well, if we begin by not arbitrarily excluding one pole of reality, there are subjects and objects, or interior and exterior, or being and knowing, or world and spirit; or let us just say (a la Voegelin) a single process of reality becoming luminous -- i.e., transparent -- to itself. You can never get beneath or beyond this inclusive description, because this is What is Happening, period.

In The Experience of Being, Hart writes that "The human striving to know the truth of things, as far as possible and in every sphere, is sustained by a tacit faith in some kind of ultimate coincidence or convertibility between being and consciousness."

Now, this is a Remarkable Fact, probably the most important Fact there is, because it is the Fact that makes all other facts possible -- even facts that deny the Fact! That is, for human beings,

"There is a natural orientation of the mind toward a horizon of total intelligibility -- a natural intellectual appetite for immediate knowledge of what is -- that requires us to venture our time, our hopes, our labors, and our contentions on the assumption that rational thought and coherent order are two sides of a single reality..." (ibid.).

Now, any tenured yahoo can verbally deny this link between mind and world, intelligence and intelligibility, but no one can live by such a belief, unless he is surrounded by caretakers and conservators -- or, in Obama's case, if he is shielded from reality by the Matrix Media.

Self-delusion cannot maintain itself in the absence of a whole system of reward for compliance, pressure to conform, and self-soothing (and/or -aggrandizing) fairy tales. Auto-pullwoolery doesn't work unless an awful lot of people are pulling on the same blanket.

Now, to remove the blanket is to turn around in Plato's Mancave and peer outside the Matrix. In so doing, we see that "there is a wonderful transparency of the world to thought, and a wonderful power of thought to interpret reality coherently through forms and principles that are of an entirely noetic nature." For this reason, "no scientist imagines that... reality will turn out to be essentially irrational" (ibid.).

At the end of the deity, we don't have to conquer nature, for doing so is like smashing through a door that is wide open. We are open to the world, just as the world is open to us, in a two-way flow of being. Thus, "The world yields itself to our abstractions, and we cannot help but work upon the assumption that it always will precisely because being itself is pure intelligibility" (ibid.).

Always? Yes, always. Just as we will never run out of poems or songs, the cosmos will never exhaust its intelligibility.

Unless.

Unless what?

Unless the left or some other materialist metaphysic prevails. Since progressives already have the answer, they effectively divorce themselves from the living process of reality.

Exaggeration? Well, just ask yourself: what is Obama learning from the reality of Obamacare? Correct: he is learning nothing, except perhaps how to burrow more deeply into his lower intestine. As it so happens, we are also learning nothing, but for entirely different reasons.

That is, when government-run healthcare was but a dream of Obama's deadbeat father, we knew this dream did not comport with reality. Therefore, one side -- dream or reality -- must go. So Obama's still got his comforting and indestructable dream of iron, while we're stuck with the nightmare and the bill.

[T]he very search for truth is implicitly a search for God... --The Experience of Being

Who Let the I AM In?

Consciousness itself is a mystery; but that it should be so simple, so unified, and yet, dependent upon -- or inclusive of -- so many billions of macro- and micro-processes, is even stranger.

Truly, human subjectivity is either the ultimate or penultimate case of E Pluribus Unum, depending upon whether or not one believes in God. But if one doesn't believe in God, then our self-evident I AM goes from intriguing mystery to annoying impossibility.

Yes, one could say that, just as there can be no inside in the absence of an outside, there can be no object without a subject. The two are complementary. In other words, a thing must have a kind of interior prehension in order to be a thing at all -- otherwise, it's just an indistinct blob. So existence as such implies interiority, because to exist is to exist as an intelligible thing or unit.

Any form of life represents conscious interiority, a bounded area of awareness. But in the case of human beings, this interiority is not just a vague and diffuse, preconscious apprehension of interior wholeness. Rather, it is a highly focused ingathering of interiority that we all fondly refer to as I.

As we've discussed in previous posts, it is as if both the general evolution and individual development of consciousness represent a conquest of dimensionality. This movement is precisely what confers meaning upon time. Otherwise, time is just abstract duration. Watch a child grow (outside and in) and you will intuit time's substance.

The consciousness of, say, a snail, is of surfaces only. Thus, it exists in a kind of quasi-timeless two-dimensional space: forward, toward what facilitates life, and backward, away from what doesn't.

But anyone with a dog or cat can "see" that they live in a more expansive space. For example, they listen for and interpret far off sounds, and are at the center of a rich olfactory matrix we can scarcely imagine. But more importantly, they are tuned into their human masters, which itself expands the intersubjective space in which they live and move.

Now think about the hyperdimensional space in which human beings live. It includes not only our personal past, but the past of the entire species, depending upon how much history one knows. It extends outward, to the farthest horizon of the celestial lightstream, and backward, to the very genesis of this whole cosmic affair. It reaches into humans and other animals via empathy, and deep into oneself via introspection. And some say it can extend so far -- via mystical experience -- that it may know the cosmic Subject, the great I AM from which our own little spark of interiority is derived.

Until hitting page 197 of The Experience of God, I thought I was alone in the bewilderness on this subject. Alert readers will recall a passage on p. 49 of The Book for which the blog is named, where it is written:

"Without the principle of wholeness woven into the very fabric of the universe, it would be impossible for true wholeness to later emerge at the levels of life and mind. The integrated wholeness we see in a living organism discloses a fundamental principle that is absolutely intrinsic to the universe."

Likewise -- and here's the important part -- the transcendental unity of our own subjectivity, "the ordered whole we all effortlessly refer to as 'I,' is another accurate intuition of the wholeness of nature." In the absence of this principle, "there is simply no explanation as to how the billions of individual cellular processes taking place in your brain and body so neatly resolve themselves into the simple, transcendent and unitive experience called 'I.'"

Multi-undisciplinarian that I am, I have a tendency to make a point and quickly move on. It's not just that I get bored easily, but that the Adventure of Consciousness must continue on, in, and up. No looking back!

But Hart spends a few pages expanding upon this notion of the unity of consciousness, agreeing that it ultimately converges upon -- I would say returns to -- God.

"Consciousness is, in its subjectivity, one and indivisible," writes Hart. Yes, there is diversity -- even inconceivable diversity -- "but in order for there to be such a thing as representation, or reason, or conceptual connections, or coherent experience, or subjectivity, or even the experience of confusion, there must be a single unified presence of consciousness to itself, a single point of perspective that is, so to speak, a vanishing point, without extension or parts, subsisting in its own simplicity."

I would modify this somewhat, in that what we discover at this vanishing point is not so much an abstract being but a concrete activity -- an irreducible experience in becoming. In my view, human consciousness is, so to speak, the metabolism of experience. We cannot possibly stop experiences from occurring -- i.e., we cannot stop time -- so it is our unending task to weave this ceaseless flow of experience into our psychic substance, forging ever greater wholeness and unity.

Hart implies something similar, for example, vis-a-vis left and right brain activity. The existence of differing modes of consciousness in the two cerebral hemispheres does not imply that we are somehow inhabited by two different subjects. Rather, what we experience is "a single consciousness" that attempts "to integrate the experiences and behaviors that each hemisphere makes possible."

Indeed, just as the existence of two eyes with slightly different perspectives facilitates the perception of depth, the integration of our "two hemispheres" (and there are more than just two such perspectives) results in a much richer and deeper psychic space.

There are always going to be "discontinuities" in consciousness, or semi-autonomous areas which are poorly integrated into the whole. At a certain point these become mind parasites, but in general, most any form of psychopathology can be understood as a failure of integration.

For example, one person fails to integrate his childhood experience via denial and repression, while another fails to integrate, say, sexual appetite into the human subject. Instead, it exists as a kind of impersonal animal instinct, unconnected to any higher striving or purpose. You might say that it is reduced from a hyperdimensional modality to a two-dimensional one. Or, it falls from a sacrament to a mere genetic whip.

So, what have we learned? For Hart, "Only the 'vanishing point' of a subjective perspective allows the diversity of reality to appear to the mind as a unified phenomenon, to which consciousness can attend."

I would only add the caveat that it doesn't end there. Rather, each end is a fresh new beginning -- or an annoying rendezvous with time, if you allow it to be.

But in any event, "there is no good reason not to accord serious consideration to the ancient intuition that the true order of ultimate causes is precisely the opposite of what the materialist philosopher imagines it is, and that the material realm is ultimately dependent upon mind rather than the reverse..."

Or, just say that I is prior to AM, but that, like God, our I never stops its AMing.

Nonsense and Sensibility

We all recognize that the physical world "obeys" various laws.

But as in the Matrix, some laws can be bent, others broken. It is assumed by materialists that no laws are broken -- or even bent -- with the appearance of Life. Can this possibly be true? Or does biology reveal its own laws that are just as intrinsic -- and universal -- as the laws of physics?

It is also assumed that no physical laws are transgressed with the emergence of humanness. Here they are on even shakier ground, because in the effort to close the materialist bruteloop, they end up unexplaining both their theory and themselves -- or just say truth and subjectivity. But a theory that denies truth and subjectivity is what and where, exactly?

Is it possible that, as with Life, Mind has its own logic and its own laws? Any theory of "natural law" would so imply. Of course, these laws do not negate the physical or biological, but it is difficult -- okay, impossible -- to avoid the conclusion that they transcend them.

I frankly don't give these matters a great deal of thought. Rather, I either stumble upon something that resonates Deep Within and makes Total Sense to me and then forget about the rest, or I am struck by some sort of spontaneous Interior Revelation that is accompanied by a Sense of Certainty, at least in so far as I am concerned.

That is to say, I have a number of beliefs that could not be any different than they are unless I were fundamentally different than I am. In other words, in order to believe certain things, I would have to be a different person. You know -- sensibility. If you share the same sensibility, it's difficult not to have many of the same beliefs. In this regard, it seems that the sensibility is prior to the specific beliefs, for which reason it is difficult to embrace a belief that fundamentally clashes with one's sensibility.

Speaking of which, I'm sure this principle accounts for a great deal of political... friction. I personally know people who, even now, maintain unswerving devotion to Obama and to liberalism more generally. It seems that nothing -- nothing in the real world -- can cause them to deviate from this beautiful abstraction called liberalism.

Why? Sensibility. Much if not most of this sensibility revolves around Conservatives are Evil, so it is very much fear-based. A liberal is always terrified of something, especially if it doesn't exist, or it is totally disproportionate to the fear it provokes, e.g., global warming, racism, homophobia, the Patriarchy, the Tea Party, Fox News, Christianity, etc.

Which is another important point. In both Proverbs and Psalms it is said that wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. Now, there are many ways to interpret this wisecrack without assuming that God is a Scary and Punitive Monster. For example, we could simply begin with the truism that man is afraid. Of course he is! Upon discovering this fear -- which essentially comes with self-awareness, or awareness of separation -- what should we do with it? Where should its focus be placed?

To turn it around, the leftist has the same fear as any other human, except he denies God. Therefore, where does the fear go? It goes everywhere. This is a variation of Chesterton's observation that people who don't believe in God don't believe in nothing, but rather, anything.

Just so, liberals have no fear of God. But does this translate to being unafraid? Hardly! Indeed, the whole project of liberalism involves the creation of a godlike state to take away The Fear. (Ironically, Obama wishes to put the fear of God into us, but he's really just talking about being terrified of normal Americans.)

But with the undeniable reality of Obamacare, even reliable LoFo Democrats are beginning to fear the state. When this happens, panic will set in, which essentially means that the Fear has become uncontained. The purpose of myth (in the vulgar sense) is to contain the fear, so the unraveling of the myth results in a recrudescence of primordial terror, the Nameless Dread.

Speaking of law, not to go all Godwin on you this early in the morning, but this is precisely what happened with 1930s Germany. Fear became uncontained -- their national myth completely unraveled -- creating a vacuum for the Nazi myth to fill. This myth provided a clear focus for the fear; ironically, wisdom began with fear of the Jews. (This guy explains it well: "Some people turn to God in their hour of need, I turned to Adolf Hitler” (HT American Digest).

Back to this notion of religious sensibility. I'll give an example. I am currently reading a book by Hartshorne called Philosophers Speak of God. On the one hand, I am learning all sorts of "new" things. But on the other, it is like reading my own mind, or "remembering" what I truly believe. Hartshorne is simply explicating things I implicitly know, in a lucid and compelling way that I cannot deny, because this is Who I Am.

Now, I don't mention this for purposes of sensational autobobography. Rather, I think we're talking about something universal which must be particularized in the individual. Being an individual means being this person and not that. But where does the individual leave off and the universal begin? For if there are no universals, then we are condemned to a corrosive relativism and chronic doubt.

In The Experience of God, Hart provides a partial list of the things human beings universally encounter upon entering the human state, and which simply cannot be explained with recourse to any materialist metaphysic. These include the qualitative dimension of experience, abstract concepts, reason, the transcendental conditions of experience, intentionality, and the unity of consciousness.

It seems that the qualitative dimension of experience would be most relevant to the question of sensibility, for this is ultimately the "irreducibly subjective feeling of 'what it is like' to experience something," the "inalienable dimension of personal awareness, without which there could be no private experience and no personal identity at all" (Hart).

Obviously, personal identity has nothing to do with the world of quantity. Rather, it is a world of pure quality. But how do qualities get into the cosmos to begin with? Do we actually discover them? Or are we simply trapped (a la Kant) in the echo chamber of our own neurology?

If that is the case, then mind and world are utterly divorced from one another, with no possibility of reconciliation, or even civil discourse. Hence the undisguised hostility of the atheist crowd toward any transcendental experience(r).

In reality, not only does man enter an impossibly rich world of qualities upon becoming man, but "these seem to exist in excess of all the objectively detectable physical processes with which they are associated"; they "differ from one another far more radically than any one neuronal event differs from any other." I mean, you've seen one neuronal event, you've seen them all. Like the digital code of a computer, there are only two possibilities, on or off. But look at the unimaginably complex world to which this gives rise!

The problem is that everyone knows a computer is programmed, so it is not as if digital bits spontaneously cohere and evolve into the program. But the materialist/mechanistic metaphysic insists "that only the quantitative physical properties of the world are really real" (ibid.).

But note what they are doing: they begin with the experience of reality, as we all must (where else to begin?). But they then distill an idealized abstraction -- devoid of qualities -- from the far richer world as experienced, and proceed to concretize the abstraction -- which is what Whitehead referred to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Once you have swallowed that fallacious Blue Pill, you have chosen to stay in materialist matrix, with no exit. Conversely, religion is -- or should be -- the Red Pill, the way out of the materialist/leftist/tenured/mass media matrix.

The other property I'd like to discuss is intentionality, which refers to the fact that consciousness is always "about" something. In other words, it always refers to something outside or beyond itself, which, when you think about it, poses grave problems for any materialist metaphysic. For how can matter be "about" anything? Rather, it just is.

But humanness is absolutely suffused with this Aboutness, and on every level. For example, our intrinsic intersubjectivity means that human beings are inherently about others, just as others are about us.

Hart doesn't get into this, but in my opinion, this must follow the Aboutness of God, or, more specifically, the Trinity. For what is the Father about? The Son. And what is the Son about? The Father. And what are they about? The Holy Spirit.

It reminds me of what the adolescent Jesus said when his anxious parents found him running circles around the elders: "Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?"

To be continued...

All Cretans are Liars, Ergo All Materialists are Cretins

Some people say -- and they are no doubt correct -- that creation doesn't begin with the so-called Big Bang of ±13.7 billion years ago.

Rather, this here cosmos is simply an instance of the more general principle of Creativity as such. Otherwise one is in the untenable position of arguing that creativity somehow begins with this particular creation, or that time has a "beginning," or that it is possible for "nothing" to exist -- existence and nothing being antithetical terms.

Philosophers have always wondered whether the cosmos has always been here, or whether it had a beginning. Physicists are in near universal agreement that it did indeed have a beginning, but that hardly means that Being can have a beginning. Or an end, for that matter. Rather, this existence of ours is grounded in Being as such.

Or is it? In my opinion, Being is simply an abstraction, in fact, the most abstract abstraction there could be. As such, it is void of meaningful content, for to say that it is "everything" is no more helpful than saying it is nothing. For if Being is everything then everything is Being, and we're just circling around a giant tautology. Or, to paraphrase Hartshorne, the assertion of pure Being is an instance of cognitive idling, a vacuous placeholder.

I don't care what anyone says, from Deepak to the Dalai Lama, but no one can "experience being." Yes, you will someday possess being -- for your terrestrial becoming will end -- but you will be dead and therefore not here to experience it, at least in this body. As far as one's earthly career is concerned, to die is to fully be what you are -- or were -- and nothing more.

What we can experience is becoming, for every instance of being is simply an abstraction from the wider and more inclusive category of becoming. To "experience" anything is to be extended in time, no matter what semantic tricks are deployed in order to deny its oneway passage.

In my view, creativity is the penultimate category, which means that time is truly "of the essence." And the ultimate category is Love, which means that "otherness" too is intrinsic. I frankly don't see how Christianity can be understood in any other terms, at least in an intellectually consistent manner.

Yes, there is still an Absolute. Except that the category "Person" is not -- nor could it be -- derived from it. Rather, the Absolute is posterior to Person(s). Or, we could say that the Absolute -- surprise! -- turns out to be Trinity, definitely not the simple monadic One of, say, Islam (nor the simplistic material one of scientism).

I'd like to continue our trialogue with Hart's The Experience of God, but see if it is possible to reconcile his traditional views with the more process-oriented view sketched out above.

Now, since creative becoming is our standard, we are no longer confronted with inexplicable and insurmountable discontinuities in the cosmos, beginning with the Big Bang. We don't have to wonder how it is possible for a dead universe to one day magically come to life, or how it produces self-conscious beings, or how these beings can know the "whole" of things -- as if the cosmos is in us rather than vice versa (it's actually both).

In this view, the "big bang" of Life is no less astonishing than the Big Bang of cosmology, and the big bang of human consciousness is even bigger than the first two. In fact, in the absence of the latter we wouldn't even know of the first two, so it would be as if they had never occurred.

In contrast to radical environmentalists who regard man as a cancer on the planet, not only do I not care about an earth without human inhabitants, I don't even care about a cosmos devoid of human life. You can have it. I don't want it. (Nor, for that matter, do I believe God would have much interest in such a sterile cosmos. Rather, be fruitful and multiply, please, just like your Creator.)

Hart addresses this outward discontinuity of the cosmos, asking how it is possible for "the aimlessness of matter" to achieve "so intense and intricate a concentration of its various random forces that, all at once, it is fantastically inverted into the virtual opposite of everything modern orthodoxy tells us matter is?"

I'll tell you how: Life is not an "inversion" of reality, but rather, a revelation of reality. Again, the ultimate categories are Love and Creativity, not matter and motion. If the latter two are the ultimate categories, then it is indeed the case that Life has no explanation beyond pure magic and miracle -- an inexplicable violation of everything we thought we knew about the cosmos. But that's not science, rather, just scientistic superstition. (And from there it is but a step to the black Magic of Government!)

Likewise, how is it that "matter can produce subjective awareness," and how could "abstract processes of reasoning or deliberation... possibly correspond with sequences of purely physical processes in the brain"?

Hmm? Same answer: the truth is at the top, not bottom, of the cosmos. In fact, to seek truth at the bottom -- or to attempt to reduce all truth to bottom-level truth -- is strictly insane.

Either the existence of human beings tells us something important about the cosmos, or it doesn't. Materialists try to have their crock and eat it too, by insisting that human beings are of no consequence, and yet, can reliably know the secret of existence. It's really an instance of the "all Cretans are liars" paradox, except that in this case all materialists are cretins whose puerile philosophy renders them unworthy of being believed.

Nevertheless, taken to its logical endpoint, materialism redounds to the ideal (!) of speaking "solely in terms of discrete physical processes and material elements, 'eliminating' all pre-scientific allusions to persons and mental events entirely.... Such a description, once it is perfected [!], will supposedly do away with the problem of consciousness because it will have done away with consciousness itself."

Oh good. Does this mean that man will no longer have problems? If so, then to quote Nilsson,

If you never had a problem, well everyone would be happy / But if everyone was happy, there'd never be a love song.

How sad. But for Hart, "The first-person perspective is not dissoluble into a third-person narrative of reality."

Ah ha! Now we're getting somewhere. For who is this First Person, this metacosmic subject? Why, it's old I AM. And I AM can never be reduced to IT IS. Rather IT IS is nestled in the creative womb of I AM -- or perhaps in the free and playful space between I AM and YOU ARE.

What Man Really Wants: An Ecstatic Adventure

You could say the Experience of God. Which is much preferable to the mere concept of God. But I like the adventure of God, since experiences and concepts are neither here nor there. After all, there are painful experiences and idiotic concepts, but who doesn't like an adventure?

Okay, but exactly "where" are we going on this adventure? In general, I would suggest we are venturing beyond ourselves in order to discover ourselves; or, sometimes we venture inside ourselves in order to move beyond ourselves, as in psychotherapy (or any other form of disciplined introspection).

Both movements are necessary in order to avoid a certain circularity in one's movements. In other words, if you don't know what's going on inside, you're liable to just discover it outside, via projection. And if you don't know what's going on outside, you are vulnerable to remaining in a pseudo-omniscient fantasy world. You know, a liberal.

As to where the movement leads, Hart writes that "all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself."

Thus, we could say that knowledge involves an adventure in truth. The same applies to other transcendentals, e.g., love, beauty, creativity, unity, virtue, etc. Orient yourself toward any one of these, and you are in for a lifetime adventure. But orienting to one is orienting to all, so these ultimately represent different paths on the same adventure.

Small-r rationalists can't help wondering what the payoff is in religion. It is this sense of adventure, which is in turn wrapped up with the ananda-bliss described by Hart. Our transcendent desire (↑) is teleologically oriented "toward an end, real or imagined, that draws it on." This draw is quite real (and universally recognized), and it is impossible to understand religious phenomena in its absence.

As we said yesterday, even the atheist is involved in the same passionate pursuit of nonlocal truth, except his end is imaginary, not real. One quick way to know it isn't real is if it is possible to reach it, for if God doesn't exist, it follows that you aren't him.

In order to avoid saturation and to facilitate experience, I like to call this divine draw, or lure, O, i.e., the Great Attractor. O is the answer to the following series of questions posed by Hart:

"What is it that the mind desires, then, or even that the mind loves, when it is moved to seek the ideality of things, the intelligibility of experience as a whole? What continues to compel thought onward, whether or not the mind happens at any given moment to have some attachment to the immediate objects of experience? What is the horizon of that limitless directedness of consciousness that allows the mind to define the limits of the world it knows?"

Shut your mouth!

But I'm talkin' about O!

Then we can dig it!

One little area where I might deviate from Hart is where he says that this represents a "longing for an ultimate abstraction." I think rather that this is a longing for the ultimate concretion, a la Whitehead and Hartshorne. As with subject-object, we may think of abstract and concrete as ultimate complementarities. But of the two, which is the more inclusive? One might be tempted to say the abstract, but for Hartshorne it is the concrete.

It seems to me that this follows Aristotle's tweaking of Platonism, whereby there is no abstract and disembodied realm of ideal forms or archetypes. Rather, form and substance are always found together.

Just so, everywhere we look, the abstract is in the concrete, hence the total intelligibility of the world. And I should think that Jesus represents the Last Word of this point of view, i.e., the ultimate abstract within the concrete.

Furthermore, to say that God is "concrete" is to say he is found in us. If not us, then where? Is not the whole point of the Adventure to "concretize" more of the Creator in the creation? Or is it to just to be aware that there exists this ultimate abstract concept?

In any event, Hart identifies man's flight beyond himself with ecstasy. If we consider the literal meaning of the word, it essentially means to be outside oneself -- or, to put it colloquially, to be "beside oneself" with joy, or bliss, or enthusiasm, or exaltation. Thus, in a way, experience as such is always "ecstatic," because it carries us outside ourselves:

"in all experience there is a movement of the self beyond the self, an ecstasy -- a 'standing forth' -- of the mind, directed toward an end that resides nowhere within physical nature as a closed system of causes and effects. All rational experience and all knowledge is a kind of rapture, prompted by a longing that cannot be exhausted by any finite object" (ibid.).

I ask you: what would life be in the absence of this ecstasy?

Matter, that's what, for Life is already an audacious movement of matter beyond itself, is it not?

And what is Mind but the movement of life beyond the closed circle of biology, into a "new" transcendent world of meaning, truth, love, beauty, etc.? Thus, just as there is a biosphere, there is a psychosphere and a pneumosphere.

Which goes to the "third thing" I never got to in yesterday's post. The third occasion for wonder is that these latter two realms (Mind and Spirit) should exist at all. In other words, it is one thing for an animal to be naturally selected based upon its adaptation to the physical world.

But in human beings, we have a creature who is adapted to higher, nonlocal, transcendent worlds. The most shocking thing is that these worlds are not "empty" or devoid of content. It very much reminds me of how the physical eye was "discovered" via a number of separate biological lines -- as if lured there by some nonlocal end.

Just so, once man entered this nonlocal space -- well, for one thing, this is precisely when man becomes man (in the vertical sense), for humanness is the state of being in contact with the transcendent object. I attempted to depict this reality in pp. 86-93 of the Coonifesto, as in

The boundary of life did not end with its own precarious little dance along the precipice of non-being.... Crossing that radiant upper threshold, we are witness to another startling explosion -- or perhaps implosion -- this time into a subjective space that was somehow awaiting the primate brains that had to learn to navigate, colonize, and eventually master it.... This third singularity was was an implosion into a transdimensional subjective space refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain.

Or, just say the flesh became -- or becomes -- word, and that this becoming is the essence of the Adventure.

To be continued...

Atheism: Getting Nowhere Fast

I suppose there are no less than three immediate sources of wonder, each of which being prior to and beyond any scientific explanation.

There is existence as such, i.e., a cosmos that cannot explain itself; consciousness, for which there isn't even a decent scientistic fairy tale; and all the superfluous spiritual joy connected with the whole transnatural dimension, e.g., love, truth, beauty, etc. -- or what Hart places under the heading of ananda-bliss.

For example, why is it such a literal joy for me to blog? What's up with that? Is it really reducible to some crude, anti-intellectual Darwinian explanation?

In other words, is the blog just a babe magnet in disguise? First of all, I already have a babe. Besides, if it is, then your own tyrannical Darwinism is no different, just another way to get chicks and tenure. If Darwinism is true, then we can at least stipulate that the pursuit of truth is a delusion, and get down to the real question of who's got the bigger blog.

But for a Darwinian to ask "who's got the more encompassing truth?" is like asking "who has the reddest genes?" Genes don't have color, nor do primates built of contingency have access to truth.

This makes me want to skip ahead to chapter five of The Experience of God, Bliss (Ananda). As with so much of the book, it covers the same essential territory as One Cosmos (in particular, section 3.1, The Big Bang of the Mental Universe, but other parts as well), albeit in a more sober, even borderline tenured way (bearing in mind that there are always exceptions to the rule that the sinmates run the looniversity bin).

Example?

Well, in my assessment of the Big Bang of human self-consciousness, I zero in on three strange factors: first, the idea that a supposedly material cosmos should have interiority at all. This is something that science can't even know of, much less explain.

In other words -- and this is an absurdity, but just go with it -- if one weren't already personally acquainted with consciousness, one could never know of it. That is, the most complete description of any physical object -- including a brain -- would reveal nothing of its interior, i.e., its subjectivity.

Which reminds me of the ultimate antinomies we've been discussing, one of which is subject-object. One reason we know materialism cannot possibly be true is that the "distance" between objective and subjective is truly absolute. No amount of mere quantity can give rise to qualities: you can't get here (inside) from there (outside).

Since there is no other way to shoehorn subjectivity into the cosmos, we begin with the principle that subject and object are complementary. However, of the two, which is the more encompassing, the more inclusive? The answer is obvious: the subject can include objects, as we all know by way of personal experience, being that the soul is the form of the body. If this weren't the case, I couldn't be invisibly commanding my object -- my body -- to be typing this sentence.

Now, this doesn't mean that God is merely the form of the cosmos. However, it also doesn't mean that God isn't the form of the cosmos, since the cosmos is indeed logocentric right down to the ground, and the logos is always "with" God. You can lʘʘk it up.

Onto the second factor (the first being interiority): this is the profound mystery of intersubjectivity. It is one thing for there to exist intelligent bits of matter. I mean, it's still miraculous (intelligence being intrinsically transcendent and therefore supernatural), but it's another thing entirely for this intelligence to gain access to other intelligences, and for one's own intelligence to be accessible to other intelligences.

In short, human beings aren't just intelligent, but rather, members of one another. We retain our individuality, and yet, this individuality means nothing if it isn't plugged into the intersubjective grid. You could say that this intersubjectivity makes (among other things) love possible.

Or, you could turn the cosmos right-side up and say that Love is what makes intersubjectivity possible. This is the Raccoon doctrine -- that the intersubjectivity of the Trinity is mirrored in the herebelow in the form of love, charity, self-sacrifice, humility, etc., each of which Darwinism is incapable of explaining in a nonself-beclowning manner.

Instead of the two factors I have described, Hart focuses in on intentionality, which, it seems to me, describes the same phenomena from a slightly different angle. Intentionality is "a kind of agency, directed toward an end. We could never know the world from a purely receptive position." Rather, "To know anything, the mind must be actively disposed toward things outside itself..." (Hart).

In other words -- or better, in symbols -- we could say that the mind is inherently (↑), always reaching beyond itself toward a transcendent end that we call O. Thus, (↑) is oriented to a reality that surpasses the material world. In so doing, it comes "to know the endless diversity of particular things within the embrace of a more general and abstract yearning for knowledge of truth as such, and by way of an aboriginal inclination of the mind toward reality as a comprehensible whole" (ibid.).

And this drive or divine instinct or what have you is always bound up with faith (o), in that our psychopneumatic adventure is always sponsored by an implicit belief that existence is intelligible and that we may know it. And when we do know it, there is a kind of joy associated with it, i.e., ananda-bliss. This is why truth not only sounds right, but "feels good," so to speak. It tickles.

This marriage of mind and world is just like a... a marriage. "Consciousness," writes Hart, "enters into intimate communion with... the form of things," revealing "a natural orientation... toward the infinite horizon of intelligibility that is being itself."

Speaking of our cosmotextual orientation, just as there can be no such thing as "homosexual marriage," there can be no such thing as an intellectually consistent "atheist truth-seeker," since to seek truth is to orient oneself toward, and open oneself to, this transnatural ideal, or O. In short, "all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself" (ibid.).

Atheists book their passage for the same cosmic adventure we do, except they throw the maps and compass out the window. This allows them to travel much faster than we do. But where's the fun in getting nowhere fast? We prefer to take our time, which is what this old but colorful bus is for. After all, to travel well is better than to arrive. Or in other words, I don't want to be God. I just want to know God.

BTW, I never got to the Third Thing, but we'll continue this trip tomorrow.

Mystical A-theology and the Experience of Godlessness

I mentioned in a comment yesterday that Hart really elevates his game in the second section of The Experience of God, dealing with consciousness.

However, the first section, on being, is nevertheless a highly insultaining takedown of atheism in all its forms. Upon reading it -- assuming he is capable of understanding the arguments -- no intellectually honest atheist can remain one. Or, at least he can have no rational basis for clinging to a doctrine that explains nothing, not even itself.

Which brings up an interesting point. Atheists -- very much like liberals -- naturally believe they have a rational basis for their beliefs. This is not only untrue, but not even untrue, since these beliefs do not meet the minimum standard of being susceptible to falsification (e.g., global warming, Keynesian economics, socialized medicine, etc.). Hart demonstrates how easy it is to obliterate the childish arguments of, say, a Stephen Hawking, who is so brilliant when confined to his own wheelhouse of mere physics.

Speaking of which, it reminds me of coach-pitching in little league baseball. My son is in his first season of all kid-pitch, which can be a difficult adjustment, since the pitches aren't all right in the hitter's wheelhouse each time. You might say that atheists have no trouble hitting fat, lazy tosses right down the middle of the plate. But they are utterly baffled by a metaphysical curveball.

However, any half-educated psychologist -- as most are -- can confirm that David Hume was correct in characterizing reason as a "slave of the passions" which "can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

I wouldn't go quite that far, since it is indeed possible to detach reason from emotion and think in a purely abstract and disinterested manner, mathematics being the quintessential example. Likewise, the pure metaphysics of a Schuon is bracingly free of sentiment, like climbing to the peak of a bare and majestic mountain.

But this is not the manner in which most people approach religion, or science, for that matter. Rather, these enterprises are filled with passion, commitment, and adventure.

Thus, as Sarah Ruden describes it in the October 28 National Review, "for the great mass of the religious and nonreligious alike, these debates are not about pure, abstract intellection, but about making sense of experience -- which is to say, personal experience, because what other kind is there?"

Which is the point I made in yesterday's post, that there is no way to avoid the fact that we begin in experience, not with logic per se. That is, logic is obviously powerless unless there first exist experiencers to experience it. In short, experience is prior to logic -- although it does follow a subtle logic of its own, which I summarized in the post.

Again, that logic reveals experience to be intrinsically temporal, and shows the experience of time to essentially be a function of memory. Thus, the past contributes to, and is retained in, the present, as it hurtles toward the novelty and surprise of the future. In this movement nothing is lost, since everything contributes to the present moment, just as everything in the present moment contributes to the future

So, there is experience as such, and there is personal experience, which is experience inflected through a person. And any philosophy that fails to illuminate personal experience is going to be a nonstarter for the vast majority of persons.

This is why the arguments of atheists are irrelevant to a person who has experienced God, just as the abstract theological arguments of a Hart or Schuon will make no sense to an infertile egghead who has deprived himself of such an experience. Rather, based upon his own sterile experience, materialism "makes sense" to the materialist, irrespective of the deficiency of the logic.

In a way, it comes down to natural theology vs. mystical theology. Mystical theology is very much rooted in experience, so it turns out that materialism, scientism, and Darwinian fundamentalism are really forms of "mystical a-theology."

Thus, the only way these latter doctrines can prevail in the culture war is not through argument, but rather, by depriving people of the experience of God. Which is why, at the nasty core of leftism, there is always soul murder. How could this not be the case, when leftism involves systematically seeing the world as it isn't in order to bring about a world that can never be? Assuming they could accomplish this impossible project, there would be no souls left to experience reality.

My son, for example, attends a religious school, and it is not so much that he is learning some religious doctrine, but rather, that his day-to-day life is enriched beyond measure by being suffused with a constant awareness of the divine (even -- or maybe even especially -- if it is a non-conscious awareness). Rather than being something imposed from the outside, it is in the very air he breathes, in an experiential way.

Thus, for example, he experiences Christian love (agape) in the way his teachers relate to him, whereas liberals have succeeded in criminalizing the very thought in public schools. Now that I think about it, I don't so much want to thank his teachers for teaching him, but rather, for really loving him.

But I don't see how real education can take place outside this loving context, being that love and truth converge on the same object. Sadly, I can already see the coarseness setting in and the light being extinguished in some of his public schooled friends. It's kind of creepy, really. I do see how good parenting can compensate, but for the kids with coarse and lightless parents, there is no escape from the slide into barbarism.

Well, I had wanted to get into the second main section of The Experience of God, on consciousness, where Hart really takes flight. The flight has been postponed until tomorrow.

Nothing is Impossible

To extend yesterday's metaphor, now that my head and feet are fully aligned, I'm not sure I even understand the terrain on which I had previously been attempting to walk.

Which means what, exactly?

It essentially means that I was attempting to speak as a traditionalist while ambulating in the manner of a process philosopher. Sort of a distant cousin of hypocrisy, which is when one's actions don't conform to one's values.

This book by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, presents a timely summation of the traditional view, so as to provide a vivid contrast with my old New Truth.

Of course, suffice it to say, no one is under any pressure to agree with me. This is not that kind of cult. I realize this is a contentious area, and I still sometimes wonder if I am falling into some sort of ontological trap. I mean, one doesn't lightly disagree with 2000 years worth of people who are wiser or smarter or holier than thee. However, there is no question that they were laboring under an extremely misleading but nevertheless presumptive picture of reality.

Reader Van plucked the following passage from bobscurity, adding that he was on pins and needles waiting to hear about the many implications! Okay, I added that last part, but here's the passage:

"There was a time, not too long ago, when I would have explicitly agreed with Hart, even while implicitly agreeing with Hartshorne. And that's a problem, i.e., when what one explicitly thinks doesn't jibe with what one implicitly feels, experiences, or 'knows' in a direct and unmediated manner. Call it cosmic dissonance"

In many ways, The Experience of God is structured just like One Cosmos, except that, instead of Matter (or material existence), Mind (or psyche), and Spirit (nous, pneuma), Hart -- whom I believe is an Orthodox Christian -- uses the Hindu triad of Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), and Ananda (Bliss). However, he covers much of the same ground, albeit coming at it from a more purely logical and metaphysical perspective, whereas I begin with the world as we experience it and as disclosed by science.

If you were going to be uncharitable, you would say that he begins with a priori concepts, whereas I begin with reality. However, if you were going to be uncharitable to me, you would probably say that one cannot derive metaphysics from empirical reality.

Which is a little ironic -- I think -- because, if I am not mistaken, Thomas Aquinas begins with the proposition that there is a real world external to us, and that, in order to know it, the knower must conform himself to it.

But more generally, where can we begin but with experience? And there is no experience that is not "of" something. So it seems to me that it is rather critical to understand the "experience of experience." In other words, we cannot just take experience for granted, but must try to get beneath it and understand just what it is.

Now, here's the rub -- or at least a rub: experience is intrinsically temporal. Indeed, I would say that it is impossible to conceive of "nontemporal experience" -- that it is an oxymoron. And just as there is no experience without time, there is no time without experience.

If you have difficulty wrapping your tail around the latter statement, you need only examine your own experience of time, which is intrinsically bound up with memory of the past. Without this memory -- this conservation of the immediate past -- there would only be an atemporal now; being, but no becoming.

To jump ahead a bit, in the process view of Whitehead/Hartshorne, this examination of our own experience reveals how all of reality is structured. Clearly, just as in our own mental experience, nature exhibits continuity with, and conservation of, the past. And yet, nature ceaselessly flows forward, always manifesting novel configurations. Therefore, just as in our own minds, nature is a combination of conservation and change, memory and creativity, sameness and novelty, boundary conditions and adventure.

This further leads to the view that creativity is woven into the very fabric of being. But oops! That word being: it no longer makes sense in this new context. In the traditional view, becoming is just a persistent illusion (there is no other way to put it), completely parasitic on changeless Being.

But in the process view the terms are reversed: Being is just an abstraction from Becoming -- and an empty abstraction to boot. It is either literally unthinkable or only thinkable, for it is not anything we can actually experience, experience once again requiring duration.

Now, my point about feet and heads is that no one (or do they?) really treats God or relates to God in this abstract manner. Indeed, from my perspective, perhaps the most earth-shattering implication of the Incarnation is that it should be an inoculation against the Greek ideal of the immutable, unmoved mover.

This is probably going to rattle some cages, but Hartshorne dismisses the notion of "nothing" being a meaningful concept, as in "creation from nothing." There is frankly nothing in the Bible that mandates such an interpretation.

But for Hartshore, nothing is impossible -- that is, it's just another human abstraction. Nothing is the negation of something, and therefore something.

For my part, I have never really wondered "why there is something rather than nothing." Rather, there's gotta be something, right? Might as well be this. Nothing isn't even thinkable unless we have something with which to compare it. I'm still in awe of this particular something -- just not in comparison to nothing, but rather, compared to all the other possible somethings.

(This is not to be confused with the big Nothing that opens and closes the Coonifesto, because that Nothing is intrinsically at play with Something; you might say that it is part of the rhythm of eternity, like diastole and systole, inhalation and exhalation, catabolism and anabolism, etc. It is ultimately how creativity happens. Don't get me wrong -- I still believe in nothing. I just think it is eternally in relation to something -- not either/or, but both/and. Or as old Heraclitus put it, The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.)

Hart fundamentally disagrees, affirming that "the 'distance' between being and nonbeing is qualitatively infinite..." True, but is nonbeing real, or only a mental abstraction? For me, the important distance is not between an absolute nothing and a fulsome something per se, but rather, between reality as it is and reality as it could be: in other words, creativity. Creativity is what links nothing to something, but that link is everything. It's not as if you can start with nothing and then get all creative with it, because where did the creativity come from?

Excuse me, but are we getting into angels dancing on pinheads territory? Is anyone else on board, or just bored?

Well, we've come this far. At least allow me to complete the trip and drop you off at the station.

In the traditional view, of course, God is "the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract..." Therefore, in order to properly think about God, we can really only unthink about him -- that is, if you hold to the traditional view.

Thus, we arrive at a "deductive negation of all the obvious conditions of finitude," which basically leaves us with nothing. I mean, right? Again, experience is temporal and time is finite, ergo, no experience of God is possible. Yes, you can certainly have spiritual experiences, but God is "beyond change" and "cannot be affected... by anything outside himself." Frankly, he's really not that into you.

Okay, I get that. In theory, anyway. But does anyone actually live as if God couldn't care less, which must be the case if he is completely immune to any form of change whatsoever? Is change really so intrinsically bad a thing that it must not contaminate God? It seems to me that there is literally no way to relate to such a being, not even by way of analogy. Is that really the way It Is? Just asking.

Metaphysical Podiatry: Know Your Cosmos

Know your cosmos. Like anyone could do that, Napoleon.

Besides, is it even important that we do so? Man inhabits a variety of worlds, and it seems to us that the cosmic is the least of our worries.

For example, understanding the world of interpersonal relations is an urgent matter, because a human being isolated from his fellows will be stunted beyond recognition -- just a primate freak, really. Likewise, failure to pay heed to the physical environment will result in death or serious injury.

And failure to get politics right -- i.e., the science of group order -- results in even more death and serious injury, while failure to understand economic order can result in Obamacare or even worse, e.g., untreatable Krugmania.

There are various subworlds as well, such as the bacterial and quantum. Of the two, the former has obvious implications for survival (e.g., antibiotics), whereas the latter goes more to our flourishing (e.g., the resultant technology).

There is also moral order, sexual order, religious order... So, who cares if the cosmos is floating on a sea of quantum foam or sitting on the back of a giant turtle? Either way, there's nothing we can do about it.

Well, Yes and No. To say there's nothing we can do about it is to say that it represents necessary knowledge; and to say something is necessary is to say it is eternal, since it always is, and cannot not be. Therefore, to know the necessary truths of the cosmos is to touch eternity, and touching eternity is its own reward.

In other words, knowledge of eternity is utterly useless knowledge, since it is a means to no end. Thus, it is the most gloriously liberal (and therefore liberating) of all liberal arts, in comparison to which every other form of knowledge is just another servile art. Or in other words, we're ultimately talking about the primary distinction between slack and slacklessness (or O and Ø), so ironically, nothing could be more useful than this useless knowledge.

Or, in the inadvertently cosmic words of Lileks, "I think one's happiness and ability to feel at home in the world is directly related to one's ability -- one's incessant compulsion -- to invest the most commonplace observations with the most grandiose conclusions." Then again, one man's bleat is another man's prison.

It actually works both ways: we may proceed downhill, deploying the most grandiose principles to illuminate the most commonplace experiences; or uphill, seeing how the most commonplace experiences can lead to the most grandiose and far-reaching implications. So, it's really a two-way street -- in fact, the two-way street, in that it goes to the permanent dialectic between principles and experience, which is none other than metaphysics.

For what is metaphysics, really? Yes, it is "beyond physics," which means that every occasion of physical reality is just a special case of more general principles. These principles must be true, not just in this cosmos, but in any cosmos. In other words, they are the very principles of existence as such.

Some people think metaphysics is impossible. Which, ironically, is a transparent example of an impossible metaphysic. In reality, it is not possible to be human and not have a metaphysic, whether implicit or explicit. So the debate is not between metaphysics and no metaphysics, but simply between good and bad metaphysics.

Actually, that's an oversimplification, since, like mothering, there can be "good enough metaphysics," by which I mean that it is close enough to get one to the phoenix line.

What is an example of something that must be the case, and cannot possibly not be the case?

Interestingly, I am currently reading two authors who take antithetical positions on the subject, Hartshorne and Hart period. But it's not really correct to say they are antithetical to one another, since both are even more antithetical to any possible a-theistic position. In other words, both affirm that the non-existence of God is an impossible absurdity. But they have a fundamental disagreement as to the nature of God, or of ultimate reality.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I would have explicitly agreed with Hart, even while implicitly agreeing with Hartshorne. And that's a problem, i.e., when what one explicitly thinks doesn't jibe with what one implicitly feels, experiences, or "knows" in a direct and unmediated manner. Call it cosmic dissonance.

Most so-called liberals of my acquaintance suffer from a form of this malady, in that they support the liberal cause even while living very conservative lives. Thus, instead of preaching what they practice, they practice truth while preaching fashionable lies, tenured kookery, and general dysfunction.

For example, these well-to-do liberals are far more likely to get married and stay married than the dysfunctional lower classes for whom marriage is just another optional lifestyle, of no intrinsic value.

So that's a useful way to detect someone's metaphysic: don't pay attention to what they say, but what they do. People vote with their feet, and their feet are planted firmly in their implicit ground of being.

This instantly clears up so much metaphysical confusion. For example, no one who supposedly believes in determinism lives his life as if free will doesn't exist. No relativist behaves in a perfectly chaotic manner. No Darwinian derives his values from nature. No anti-gun nut refuses to defend himself. No pregnant woman believes in her bones that her fetus is just a part of her body, like the heart or spleen, only worthless. No one who believes in redistribution voluntarily redistributes his wealth. No Marxist behaves as if history is inevitable. Etc.

And when I say "no one," there are obvious exceptions, these being the true crazies. There are liberals who actually "walk it like they talk it," for example, demented parents who insist there are no intrinsic sexual differences, and raise their children to be post-gender freaks.

Anyway, if we examine feet instead of minds, perhaps we can have more widespread agreement about the nature of reality. Call it metaphysical podiatry.

To be continued...

Making the Most of Our Cosmic Home

About the problem of evil: if the existence of evil proves the non-existence of God, then this implicitly affirms that an "entire absence of evil" would be "deducible from the presence of God."

Right. But this assumes the possibility of creatures "wholly without freedom, able to make no decisions except those duplicating what God decides for them." Thus, they wouldn't actually be creatures at all, just extensions of God. So it seems that if free human persons are to exist, evils must come.

Okay. But what about nonhuman evil -- if it even makes sense to attribute evil to natural phenomena such as hurricanes, viruses, and gardening accidents? This, I think, actually poses more of a problem for the traditional view, since human evil may only contribute a small percentage -- depending on the case -- to the evils experienced by man. Do the existence of these evils preclude a good God?

Here I think the process view is the only one capable of adequately addressing this question. That is to say, in process philosophy, we don't begin with a rigidly deterministic cosmos that inexplicably manifests freedom with the appearance of human beings.

There is no materialistic explanation for such a shockingly discontinuous development, which is why scientism can cope with neither freedom nor ethics. Rather, it tries to eliminate the former entirely and reduce the latter to some sort of glorified animal instinct or impersonal genetic strategy.

But process philosophy begins with the principle of creativity, and therefore freedom. Thus, a degree of freedom is present in every process, every occasion, every event. Of course, it is much more attenuated in the quantum world than in the human world, but still, over time, we see what the cosmic creativity brings forth.

If there were no such creativity latent in matter, then it couldn't bloody well come to life, now could it? Likewise, if there were no creativity in the genes, they'd just produce more effective killing machines, certainly not poems, novels, and symphonies.

Creativity, like freedom, cuts both ways. For example, think of the tricky flu virus that each year finds a new way to get around our immune system. So, with the existence of freedom and creativity comes "risk as well as opportunity."

Now, there appear to be three long-term cosmic possibilities: either the cosmos is unchanging; it is getting "worse"; or it is getting "better." Physicists such as Einstein insist -- appearances to the contrary notwithstanding -- that time is just a "persistent illusion," and that the cosmos is really just a big brick.

Traditionalists adopt the view that everything is necessarily going downhill since the creation, as if subject to a kind of metacosmic entropy. Therefore, the past is better than the present, because it is "closer" to the first cause. Time in this view is essentially corrosive.

The converse of this is the evolutionary view held by people such as Teilhard de Chardin and various new age yahoos, in which the cosmos is "winding up." It's not getting older, it's getting better!

These three positions are entangled with the nature of God -- or of the absolute principle, if one denies God.

For example, Aristotle posits a First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, which was later incorporated into Christian metaphysics. Such a view implicitly argues that to cause is intrinsically superior to being caused. And if we consider this temporally, it "implies that the past is in principle better than the present," since the present is wholly caused by the past.

This, it seems to me, accounts for the romantic gnostalgia of traditionalists who exalt the past and denigrate the present. Like the "block universe," it is a highly problematic view, because it means that what looks to us like creativity is just a form of decay.

Ultimately it must mean that "whatever the creative process produces is in no way an enrichment of the divine reality, who must be cause only, in no way effect." Thus, "the creation is literally of no value to God."

This comes close to the Gnostic heresy that creation itself is a fall -- that existence as such is a sin, since it implies separation from God. In other words, sin isn't located in human freedom, but way before that, in the mere act of creation.

To insist that to cause is superior to being caused is also to say that necessity is intrinsically superior to contingency. Is this possible? If true, it would mean that a machine is superior to a human being. It would essentially define freedom as a bad thing, something wholly deviant, with no upside.

The third view, of an evolutionary cosmos, is also problematic, because it essentially embodies a mirror image of the fallacies of the second.

Indeed, this is why it is so compatible with a bonehead progressivism that denigrates the past -- tradition -- and exalts the future. Just as the implication of traditionalism is that people of the past were "better" than us, the implication of evolutionism is that we are just stepping stones to the future human beings who will be superior to us.

More ominously, it reduces human beings to a means to some future end. And this is precisely where the genocidal left jumps in to accelerate the process.

In my opinion, the only way out of these metaphysical muddles and nul de slacks is the Raccoon way, because it balances and harmonizes conservation, creative surprise, and evolutionary adventure.

(All of the quoted material in this post is from Hartshorne's Insights & Oversights.)

Obamacare and Other Cosmic Errors

One of Robert Rosen's central conclusions is that the sort of systems described (or that are describable) by physics are actually the exception, not the rule. Being that Rosen sits in the Raccoon emeritus chair in theoretical biology, we should listen to him.

The reason why physics is powerless to explain life is that physics is not nearly general enough, applying as it does to special cases. Such a simplistic model doesn't allow for creativity, indeterminacy, organicity, information, holism, complementarity, incompleteness, relation, complexity, upside surprise, or positive entropy, all of which now appear to be fundamental.

While I'm working on my coffee, I'll let this more alert amazon reviewer summarize Rosen's views in a more turgid way than I can manage at the moment:

Rosen lays "the groundwork for a relational biology based on functional organization and methodically investigates the theoretical limits of mechanistic systems.... The distinction eventually becomes clear that any such algorithmic mechanisms cannot embody the kinds of unpredictable complexity that are characteristic of an organism. Because the syntax of Newtonian physics can express no such closed loops of entailment,'life' cannot even be described in that model of physics, much less modeled in any complete way. Thus it is that biological organisms are not a mere subset of current physics, but are representative of complexities that require physics to be enlarged."

Or you could just say that life is the rule, not the exception. I don't think you need to completely master the science in order to intuit the consequences. Even in a fully caffeinated state, Rosen is a daunting read. Rather, you may simply suspect -- as I do, and as another reviewer puts it -- that "the present axioms of science are much too limiting to explain anything we really would like to know about the universe," because "we are trying to solve problems in too limited a universe of discourse."

I mean, right? The existing toolbox of the tenured is "only useful for predicting the N+1 [i.e., quantitative] state for some dead (and therefore uninteresting) mechanistic universe." But it's nice to have the prestige of science -- or the science of the future! -- on our side.

The problem is, none of these futurians seem to know of or talk to one another. The reason for this, I think, is that, in order to climb the greased pole of tenure, one must internalize the existing paradigm, whether one is a physicist, biologist, neurologist -- even theologian! In short, academia is is full of conformists and secondhand intellectuals.

Therefore, the nonconformists who resist the indoctrination must either be very stubborn, independent, and creative; or just eccentric crackpots. The softer the science, the more room for psychoceramic flights of fancy, which is why my field, psychology, is plagued by so much mandatory bullshit masquerading as science.

When I say that none of these folks talk to one another, I'm looking in the indexes of Rosen's books, and see no references to such luminous predecessors as Whitehead, Polanyi, or Errol Harris, whose many books touch on some of the same themes.

Hartshorne -- an acolyte of Whitehead -- proves with logic what Rosen proves with science, that determinism is "incapable of being true." This is because "necessity is a special case, not the universal principle." Again, the universal principle, if not "life," must at least permit life! It cannot render life inexplicable, or else we have a theory that is held by people who don't exist.

As we've been saying, necessity cannot explain creativity, novelty, progress, etc. Therefore, just as disorder must be parasitic on order, necessity must be parasitic, so to speak, on creativity. Creativity allows for disorder, indeed, requires it, in order to break out of an existing pattern and reorganize at a higher level.

Thus, just as pure necessity explains nothing, so too does pure randomness explain nothing. These are just complementary positions at the extremes of metaphysical error. And no human being (or community) could actually live at these nonsensical extremes, of leftist tyranny at one end, anarchy at the other. This suggests that the ordered liberty of our founders works because it is an image of how reality works.

The same goes for certain religious doctrines. Say what you want about Vedanta or Buddhism, but no functioning society could be built around people who don't regard reality as real, and who dissolve the individual into the formless void. Rather, in order to even allow for such useless people (and I mean that in the best possible sense), we need an awful lot of useful people.

Indeed, it is the identical problem with Obamacare, and with socialism in general -- that in order for it to work, we need millions of healthy and productive people compelled to do things they don't want to do, in order to support unproductive people who don't have to do anything but vote for Obama. Leftists don't like to admit it, but in order for it to work -- for a while, anyway -- it needs reality to support all the unreality.

Note that the reverse can never be true, i.e., unreality supporting reality -- which is why the ideas of the tenured only "work" within the artificial confines of the looniversity bin, not in the real world. Let's see Enron advisor Paul Krugman run a business.

Harshorne proves that God exists necessarily. However, he believes that a metaphysical blunder was committed along the way, which conflated God's necessary existence with an existence of pure necessity -- which, ironically, is the identical error of scientistic fundamentalists. But not so ironic, in that western science emerged in the context of the Christian metaphysic of a rational and law-abiding Creator.

The problem is, they used too restricted a definition or reason, and too narrow a definition of law. Because if the law is creativity, this places everything in a different light.

One of the features of the Coonifesto is it's circularity. This can be taken in two ways -- the right way and the wrong way.

The wrong way would be to equate it with Nietzsche's dreary "eternal return," whereby the same things keep happening over and over, in a deterministic way. That would be awful, and I can't imagine a Creator who would actually enjoy an eternity of summer reruns instead of a new bleat every day.

The correct way to interpret it is in the process way, whereby the Godhead is "enriched," so to speak, by its own cosmic adventure. I am hardly the first to posit this divine-cosmic circularity. Precursors include Origen, Denys, Maximus, Erigena, Eckhart, and more. Likewise, that little quote from Voegelin in the comment box expresses the same idea, of "reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable."

But given the divine creativity, it must be a creative spiral, not a closed circle, because otherwise, in the words of Hartshorne, the creation was just "a nonaction, effecting nothing."

The Unexamined Lie is Not Worth Loving

Two points: I don't see what purpose religion can serve if it doesn't speak to man as he is, i.e., in his essential nature; or if it affirms principles (such as determinism) that no one can actually live (i.e., no one lives their life as if they lack free will). In other words, a religion can't do us much good if it applies to a different species.

I found the Hartshorne quote I was looking for the other day, that "every major mistake about God involves a mistake about human nature."

In short, erroneous anthropology necessarily leads to erroneous theology. Which is why, for example, liberation theologians worship a Marxist God, or why Islamists worship a genocidal one, or why Al Sharpton worships an angry pimp. That is, they simply worship their own projections, which amounts to idolatry.

That's all well and good -- or unwell and bad -- but just how are we supposed to distinguish truths from mistakes about human nature? Isn't this an area that is hopelessly subjective? After all, since the 1960s we've "evolved" into the view that there are no permanent truths of human nature -- let alone good and bad ways of being human -- and that we should celebrate all these wonderful differences.

So instead of hewing to the principle that the unexamined life is not worth living, our elites tell us that the un-diverse life is not permissible. If you should examine your life and discover unalterable truths, you're not just wrong, but evil.

For example, if you should examine human life and discover the truth that marriage involves the union of a man and woman, the prerogatives of an omnipotent diversity -- of political power -- trump truth.

Which itself is a great perversity, for humans, alone among creatures, have access to truth. To deny this principle is to prevent man (and maim him in the process). And yet, this is precisely what diversocrats and relativists do. And in so doing they cause collateral damage to God, given the above noted analogy between God and man.

Hartshorne writes that "We can only conceive God by analogy to ourselves as conscious beings, but we destroy the analogy if we impose requirements upon God that contradict the very meaning of consciousness."

I hope I don't have to remind anyone that the purpose of the analogy is not to reduce God to human proportions, but rather, to elevate us beyond our own limitations. For example, God knows truth perfectly, while we see it through tinted -- or sometimes frosted -- glass.

So, we don't only want to examine ourselves in our own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies -- although that's part of it -- but rather, examine ourselves with the view of discovering universal truths that apply to everyone -- or to consciousness as such.

Now, what are some universal truths of human consciousness? Well, not to belabor the point, but there is no such thing as a consciousness that is not intersubjective and in relation. We are not sealed off monads, but interiorly related: we are intrinsically members of one another. I suggest -- no, I insist -- that the notion of a "closed" consciousness is both inconceivable and impossible.

Which certainly goes to this otherwise bizarre and inexplicable idea that God is both one and three. His threeness is not to be understood in a quantitative, but rather, a qualitative way. If you ask how it is possible for three to be one, the answer is simple, because the same principle is reflected in us: a man whose consciousness is not open to the other is not superior, but rather, severely autistic. Every act of cognition involves knower, known, and knowledge, just as love involves lover, beloved, and loving.

In this context, God is not only sympathetic to (moved by) human suffering, but, in the words of Hartshorne, possesses an omniscient sympathy. He is surely the Mover, i.e., the Creator; but there is no reason to insist he is the absolutely unmoved mover.

Along these lines, he quotes the eminent Rabbi Heschel, who said that God is the most moved mover. In fact, Hartshorne tweaks the phrase, suggesting that God must be "the most and best moved mover" -- or in other words, the most perfectly sympathetic being.

Another grave fact you will unearth if you exhumine yourself is that you are free. No, not wholly free -- which is indistinguishable from Sartre's nothingness -- but rather, a mixture of necessity and freedom.

In fact, we can conceive of freedom in no other way, because unconstrained freedom -- like an unrelated consciousness -- is an inconceivable absurdity. It is just meaningless chaos, not meaningful freedom.

Here again, our own freedom is an analogy to, or reflection of, God's principial freedom. But is God's freedom a completely unconstrained chaos? I don't think so.

Rather, it seems that God is "constrained," so to speak, by his own nature. The difference here is that man can indeed violate his own nature, and in the pursuit of a spurious freedom, become unfree, which is to say, become -- or unbecome -- someone else entirely.

Leftists elevate this error to a principle in their struggle to create a new man who is no longer man at all. Thus the Raccoon tradition (or running gag) of greeting leftists with a sarcastic, Hello, new man.

Conversely, when we imitate God and become true to our own nature, this "sets us free."

Holy Change, B'atman!

I want to expand upon what was said yesterday about creativity, individuality, and the discontinuity of time, which must all be functions of one another.

Even though parts of this post may seem tediously pedantic, I am going to try to make it as painfully clear as possible. Still, you may want to read it slowly, and make sure you digest one sentence before gradueating to the next.

Hartshorne mentions the same passage from Kierkegaard that I independently discovered back when, to the effect that "Everything that comes into being proves precisely by coming into being that it is not necessary."

In this context, remember what was said a few posts back about the implicit relationship between necessity and eternity -- that the "unconditionally necessary" and the "always" are essentially synonymous.

This is because to say that something must be (i.e., is necessary) is the same as saying that it cannot possibly not-be (i.e., always is).

Therefore, "a thing is eternal if its 'being' is necessary; and if it is eternal its 'being' is necessary." A corollary is that "no eternal thing exists potentially," again, since an eternal thing must be unconditionally necessary, whereas potentiality means that something may or may not come into existence.

Thus, becoming is never necessary; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is necessary that becoming exist, but its specific contours are left open. In other words, to say that things can only become in one particular way is to be a determinist, and to therefore reduce becoming to necessity.

Now, "Coming into existence is the change of actuality brought about by freedom." Freedom -- if it is really free -- must be indeterminate, right? If it is determined, then we are once again back in the world of necessity and therefore eternity.

This is one reason why predestination must be "vigorously opposed," because it obviously robs man of his freedom and dignity, but more subtly, renders him eternal because necessary.

Frankly, it shouldn't even be necessary to say this, since the whole doctrine of determinism is absurd on its face. Nevertheless, there are people who believe it, both religious and secular (e.g., neurologists who claim free will to be an illusion).

Let's simply follow this line of reasoning where it leads. Everyone has their favorite Bible passages. Bearing in mind that the devil and even Cousin Dupree can quote scripture, one of mine is 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

Indeed, for a Jew, it seems to me that the dominant theme of the Hebrew Bible is exodus and freedom. The same themes obviously infuse Christianity, only presented in a novel and surprising way that no one could have guessed -- and indeed, even had difficulty comprehending retrospectively. In other words, a man nailed to a cross doesn't look like anyone's idea of freedom -- nor escape, for that martyr.

Both God and human beings are persons, which is to say, subjects. God, being the very principle of freedom, must be "wholly free," whereas man, a reflection of the principle, is only "partly so."

In other words, we are a mixture of chance and necessity, of contingency and determinacy. In fact, I prefer to say that we are the adventure of freedom and constraint. The tension between these two sort of creates the drama of life, does it not?

For Hartshorne, "where necessity does not hold, freedom decides." This is consistent with Polanyi's emphasis on how the boundary conditions of a lower level allow for the emergence of the higher (e.g., how the stability of an alphabet allows for the novel emergence of words, words for sentences, sentences for paragraphs, etc., all the way up to Ultimate Meaning).

Here is where things get a little ticklish, but one must not be afraid of the guffah-HA! experience. To be free is to make decisions. This is axiomatic, since freedom shows us an array of potential paths, and we must choose one.

Hartshorne notes that "the merely necessary does not decide, it simply is." Therefore, to the extent that God "decides," then this implies noneternal qualities in God. In other words, he can choose this, or he can choose that. Conversely, if he has no choice, than he simply "is," and is not free.

Hartshorne references Karl Barth, who, according to wikipedia, is considered by many to be "the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century." I can't say I've read much of him, and I don't mention this as an appeal to authority, only to show that there is mainstream precedent for the views we are exploring. And for Barth, "There is a kind of holy change [as well as holy constancy] in God."

This is not paradox, but necessity. We have to invert the traditional understanding, and affirm that to deny God the capacity for "holy change" is to limit him in an all-too-human way.

Missing Link Discovered!

No time for a proper post. But perhaps enough time to toss out some controversial sentiments by Hartshorne, and start a fight.

Think about this, for example: "a knowledge coextensive with truth, does not imply the immutability of truth," especially if God's Prime Directive is creativity (infused with love). If so, then it seems there will always be more truth to love.

Having said that, I see a potential problem here, in that people can forget the essential, unchanging truths, and instead focus on the continuous novelty. Clearly, there must be a balance between the changing and the unchanging.

Interestingly, this perfectly comports with information theory, about which we were rambling a few weeks ago. Remember the distinction between high entropy and low entropy carriers? In order to permit high entropy, upside change, we must have stable low entropy carriers that are not subject to change.

Could it be that this is the secret of God's "two sides," i.e., perfect stability and perfect growth? Don't get hung up on the word "change"; rather, think perfect change.

"If there is genuine freedom or creativity, if consequently truths are to some extent new each moment, then to know all in advance or eternally is to know falsely, for there is no final totality of definite truths to be known; rather, additions to truth occur with every new act of creativity."

Here again, I could only endorse such a view with certain reservations, because there are absolute truths and there are contingent truths, and the latter can only be true in light of the former. If there is no absolute truth -- i.e., truth as such -- then there is no truth at all, and we couldn't even be having this diatribe.

One point emphasized by Hartshorne is that "sufficient cause" is a misused concept. We all understand the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes: necessary causes are those in the absence of which something cannot occur; while sufficient causes are those with which something may occur.

But sufficient causes are never sufficient to explain any phenomenon. Rather, there is always a degree of "wiggle room," of freedom, of creativity -- an x-factor that prevents us from reducing anything to its antecedents.

And when I say "anything," I mean everything, because for Hartshorne (as for Whitehead), reality is "psychical" through and through, so the greater creativity and freedom experienced by human beings extends all the way down -- most famously, to the quantum realm of fundamental indeterminacy.

Importantly, Hartshorne does not root human freedom in quantum indeterminacy, as some have attempted to do. Rather, the freedom is more fundamental than the physics; in other words, physics is the way it is because God is the way he is.

Another key point is that the necessary -- and this is touched upon on p. 72 of the Encirclopedia -- cannot come into existence, because coming into existence involves a transition from not existing to existing.

In fact, "transition" isn't quite the right word, because it implies too much continuity. In point of fact, for anything to come into existence, there is a radical discontinuity with the past.

Please think about that one for a moment, because it's Really Important. If something is necessary, we have to think of it as extended through time. Even though it may appear different at differing times, it is nonetheless fully itself, just extended in time in a deterministic way.

Therefore, any real creativity implies radical discontinuity. To express it another way, to the extent that creativity is real, then the cosmos is discontinuous. It makes leaps -- which goes totally against Darwinian dogma, even though the discontinuity is an easily confirmable fact, empirically, experientially, and metaphysically.

For example, the gap between ape and man is real -- just as are the gaps between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit -- and no "missing link" will ever explain it. There is indeed a God of the gaps, and in fact, in the absence of God, there would be no blessed gaps at all -- nor any freedom, any creativity, any love, any novelty -- nothing distinct from the preprogrammed past.

In fact, to say "distinct" is to say freedom, and therefore individuality.

And that just made me think of a spontaneous composition by the singular Charles Mingus called Myself When I Am Real.

Well, that's all the reality we have timelessness for today...