Memo to the Universe from a Post-Disenchanted Inhabitant

We left off yesterday's post with a couple of aphorisms:

The nominalist lives among facts. The realist lives among gods.

“Intuition” is the perception of the invisible, just as “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

That last one touches on the left-brain/right brain differences discussed in the post, while the first is reminiscent of Richard Weaver's coon classic Ideas Have Consequences, the ideas in question being realism and nominalism. For Weaver modernity is characterized by the eclipse of the former by the latter. 

In short, nominalists ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak. If your world is drained of magic, blame a nominalist. 

Nominalism has a positive and a negative content: on the one hand it affirms that only particular things exist, and that any purported abstractions from them are just names. But in so doing, it denies universals, essences, transcendence, and even the intelligibility of the world -- or the adequation of intellect to reality. 

I'm feeling lazy. Let Prof. Wiki explain:

In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. 

Most nominalists have held that only physical particulars in space and time are real, and that universals exist only subsequent to particular things. 

Nominalism is primarily a position on the problem of universals. It is opposed to realist philosophies which assert that universals do exist over and above particulars...

And now you know why the nominalist lives among facts while the realist lives among gods. These are no no doubt the same gods as those in the title of All Things Are Full of Gods -- not to mention the structure of the book, which is a dialogue between four gods. 

But there's only one God.

True, but a hierarchical cosmos is chock full of "living presences" and intelligent structures. Dávila is as Catholic as they come, but has more aphorisms about gods and mysterious presences than I could count. I'll just select some at random:

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

God does not die but, unfortunately for man, the lesser gods, like modesty, honor, dignity, and decency, have perished.

After experiencing what an age practically without religion consists of, Christianity is learning to write the history of paganism with respect and sympathy.

The gods punish by depriving things of their meaning.

When man refuses the discipline the gods give him, demons discipline him.

The historian of religions must learn that gods do not resemble forces of nature but that forces of nature resemble gods.

Now, nominalism collapses the space between immanence and transcendence -- the "home of the gods," so to speak -- and thereby eliminates the very phenomena for which religion provides the keys to symbolize and think about them. Which is why the Aphorist says

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores...

Thus,

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

Now, if we're talking about the re-enchantment of the cosmos, these two are quite important:

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Let's get back to the final chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods. Recall that in the nominalist vision, words do not imply essences or universals, rather, they're just names for things. The universe isn't really communicating to us. 

But for human beings, "their nature dictates that they can never be at home in a world that doesn't speak." Even in our "disenchanted age" we are drawn to 

stories that infuse inanimate objects with consciousness and personality, and in any other kind of tale that tells [us] there's a subjective depth in all things.... The proper habitat of a living soul is an enchanted world... (emphasis mine).

The proper habitat of a living soul is a living cosmos? Well, "in the absence of those numinous or genial presences human beings feel abandoned, and very much alone." Cue the Aphorist:

The most dispiriting solitude is not lacking neighbors, but being abandoned by God.

Moreover, 

God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything. 

 Memo to the universe: you're not all that. Nevertheless,

[A]fter four centuries of mechanistic dogma, the inability to view the natural order as a realm of invisible sympathies and vital spiritual intelligences is very much the essence of the late modern human condition. 

The history of modern disenchantment is the history of humankind's long, ever-deepening self-exile. So, naturally, no longer believing that the world hears or speaks to them, they find themselves looking elsewhere for those presences....

We can't go back to the enchanted world, but is there a way forward to a post-disenchanted world? Because the contemporary perspective

seems not only a folly -- a ridiculous way of seeing a world that's manifestly filled with mind and life and communion -- but a disastrous condition, which can have only ever more dreadful consequences if not corrected by some saner view.  

Gosh. Not to boast, but with 5,000 posts, I feel like I'm doing my bit.

Do You Believe in Magic?

Maybe. Recall that in the previous post we were discussing enchantment, synonyms of which include allurement, bedazzlement, splendor, wonderment, mystical, and magic. 

Sounds like the same old warmed-over romanticism to me.

Perhaps, in the sense that romanticism itself was a kind of intuitive right-brain reaction to a rationalistic left-brain hegemony. I just looked up what McGilchrist says about this in The Matter With Things, and it checks out:

It will come as no surprise, then, that a disposition toward God is largely dependent on the right hemisphere, the hemisphere we already know brings us closer to the truth than the left. 

In particular, I'm looking at chapter 28, The Sense of the Sacred, in which he discusses the ineffability of God, or whatever we choose to call this ultimate principle or ground of being:

there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using reason alone. Such an expectation itself would be irrational.

McGilchrist continues: "The proper response to this realisation is not argument, but awe." And "To be human" 

is to feel a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable, that, if we can just for once get beyond words and reasons, is a matter of experience...,

This realm of vertical experience is  

something outside our conceptual grasp, but nonetheless present to us through intimations that come to us from a whole range of unfathomable experiences we call "spiritual."

Call it romanticism if you like, but the ineffable something toward which we are pulled is O, the thing pulled is (¶), and the intimations between are (↓). These are like abstract left-brain symbols for concrete right-brain knowledge and experience.

You have to outsmart, as it were, the left hemisphere, because it tends not to know its own limits. It is very much beset by a neurological Dunning Krugery, whereby "it has no sense of the limits of its own understanding":

It operates inside a framework, within which all questions are referred back, and all answers form part of a reassuringly familiar schema; if they don't they are simply pronounced nonsense. 

It's a closed loop, so anything outside the loop is nonexistent or imaginary. It doesn't have an appropriately humble meta-view of itself:

it doesn't see the bounds of its own world view; in order to to that, it would have to see there is something beyond the bounds -- and that is something it cannot do.

Or, cannot do in the absence of its complementary hemisphere. 

Now, I have no idea whether this is "neurologically true," but it's true in every other way, so it might as well be. Humans are forever confining themselves to their own ideological matrices. It's been a permanent temptation since Genesis 3. 

Well, that's a coincidence. David Bentley Hart pops up in this chapter, on p. 1199, in the context of a discussion of the poverty of physics to account for existence below and everything above, AKA the whole problem of verticality and transcendence. 

How about that. A precise explanation of the need for the symbol O:

The problem is that if we are to say anything about it [the ground of being], we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend

 McGilchrist, adds that

What we need, in fact, is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word.

O is precisely such an un-word. McGilchrist further explains the need for this un-word:

Here is the dilemma, and why I speak of an un-word: if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved.

It seems to me that he's describing an illicit left-brain misappropriation of what properly belongs to the right. McGilchrist again perfectly describes the problem for which O is the answer: 

[T]he word God is obfuscated and overlaid with so many unhelpful accretions in the West that it is not surprising that people recoil from this idol.

Back to the beginning of this post, we're just trying to review the last chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods, called The Voice of Echo. Which in fact echoes what was said above about left-brain disenchantment and right-brain re-enchantment, and about the human need for the latter:

The proper habitat of a living soul is an enchanted world..., where one believes one can always find places of encounter with immortal -- or at least longaevous [long-lasting] -- powers; and in the absence of those numinous or genial presences human beings feel abandoned, and very much alone.

Here again, the proper human habitat must be a place where both left and right brains are at home. Because it is not as if one can ever actually eliminate the latter, rather, it will return in some form, whether spiritually silly or ideologically toxic. 

Whatever the case, after four centuries of mechanistic dogma, the inability to view the natural order as a realm of invisible sympathies and vital spiritual intelligences is very much the essence of the late modern human condition.

To which a couple of aphorisms come to mind:

The nominalist lives among facts. The realist lives among gods.

“Intuition” is the perception of the invisible, just as “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

The Gagdad melon is running out of steam and glucose. We'll try to wrap it all up in the next post...

Nihilism and Re-Enchantment

History commits suicide by denying all transcendence. For history to be of concern to us, there must be something that transcends it: There must be something in history more than history. --Dávila 

I fear -- I dread -- a nihilistic narrative reaching it ineluctable nihilistic terminus.

That second sentence is how the penultimate chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods begins. It's one thing for an alienated adolescent to read Nietzsche and affect a cynical, nihilistic attitude. Society can tolerate a few Bill Mahers. But a society consisting of nothing but Bill Mahers is literally unsustainable. 

But then, I happen to know that there are no little Mahers on the way. And I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy comes to a grinding halt.

Point is, a lot of people have to buy into the system in order for it to keep perpetuatin' itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time until --

Ramblin' again. But if our nihilistic assumptions ever truly arrive at their nihilistic conclusions, well then, game over? Could a truly nihilistic culture survive?

Aww, fuck it Dude. Let's go bowling.

A tempting offer. As Lord Henry says, "I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."

But even then, strikes and gutter, ups and downs. The fluctuating cosmic rhythm of contingency, turbulence, oscillation, and malicious novelty. 

That's still only half the story, because there is also creativity, upside-surprise, increasing vertical depth, etc. But modernity is well on the way to "a fully realized nihilism," that is, "the belief that there's no eternal scale or realm or horizon of meaning and moral verity..." 

But again, this is not a sustainable culture. Certainly it is not a culture fit for human beings and human flourishing. It is entirely

unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self's dependency upon a higher order of truth.

Nevertheless, garbage in, tenure out: "It was inevitable"

that in time the mechanistic method should mutate into -- or perhaps be revealed as -- a metaphysics... and an ideology (Hart).

An ideology "not merely for investigating nature as if it were a machine, but also for actually transforming the world into a machine."

And here we are. 

As we've been saying, it's easy enough to explain why the world is not, and cannot be, a machine. But what to put in its place? It reminds me of an important aphorism:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

So, Christianity is not enough. Rather, we need a metaphysical whatchamacallit --

Praeambula fidei?

Yes, if that means what I think it means, we need a metaphysical account of the cosmos in which Christianity can be situated and makes sense, instead of it being in violation of the current vision. Of course Christianity is absurd in a materialistic cosmos. But so too is any other belief, including materialism.

A top-down vision?

No, I think we need a harmonious and more capacious vision that includes both. This would be a properly human environment, one that meets man's legitimate horizontal needs and mirrors his vertical aspirations. One that, in the words of Schuon, "does justice to the rigor of objectivity and to the rights of subjectivity." 

Such an integral vision is "anchored in man's deiform nature, without which life is neither intelligible nor worth living" (ibid.).

The current vision, thought through to its "ineluctable nihilistic terminus," proves life "to be nothing more than a somewhat more elaborate modality of death," just a statistically unlikely arrangement of matter. 

It likewise reduces mind to a "mindless realm of the quantitative," denuded of all the experiential qualities that make it mental, precisely: "intentionality, consciousness, unified subjectivity, rational thought, and immediate intuition."

We know that none of this is really real or rational: "None of it conforms to any reality that could actually exist in any possible frame of being." It's even a kind of Chestertonian "pure insanity" -- that of the man who has lost everything but his reason:

Systematic disenchantment is, as it turns out, a mad and destructive delusion, which sees everything as machinery and so makes everything into a machine...

"So many very special savageries and superstitions and practical evils follow from this uniquely modern form of 'rationalism.'"

Again, no one actually lives, or could live, this way, in a fundamentally lifeless and mindless world. But this chapter ends before offering any solution.

Actually, there was a hint of one in the comment about the systematic disenchantment of the world. Disenchantment. It is

the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. [It] describes the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society in which scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, in which "the world remains a great enchanted garden."

I want my enchanted garden back. But is this the same garden from which we are permanently exiled?

As long ago as grad school I've been thinking about the "re-enchantment of the world," which is apparently a thing. According to wiki,

although disenchantment was the inevitable product of modernity, many people just could not stand a disenchanted world, and therefore opted for various "re-enchantment creeds," such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, phenomenology, [etc.].

Given the partial list of bad ideologies mentioned above, now I'm wondering if the appeal of ideologies in general is the faux re-enchantment they offer? 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries. 

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity. 

This one is important:

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores... 

This too:

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

This implies a mysterious vertical "enchanted" world, always intertwined with the horizontal one, and why not? We can only pretend to make the former go away, by suppressing, displacing, or denying it altogether. Besides,

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition, it is a perception of a special order of realities.

God is not an inane compensation for lost reality, but the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality. 

Well, we're not going to re-enchant the world in a single post. Rather, it will require at least one more.

What Have We Learned?

Recall that All Things Are Full of Gods is in the form of a dialogue -- quadrologue? -- between four pagan gods, each seeming to stand for an aspect of Hart. The Coda begins with a question and answer:

Hermes: Tell me brother, has any of what's been said over these six days convinced you of anything? 

Hephaistos: [After a moment's consideration] No.

What have we learned over the course of this lengthy review, which started three weeks and twenty one posts ago? Anything we didn't already know? 

I can sympathize with Hart, because 5,000 posts later I can't say that my own inner skeptic -- the dreaded anti-Bob -- has been silenced. He too is ineducable in these matters, especially when the mood strikes. What mood is that? Oh, just the usual futility and absurdity of it all. An attack of existential nausea.

To its credit, the Bible doesn't yada yada over this existential futility, for example, in Ecclesiastes: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

It goes downhill from there.

We've mentioned in passing a few times that it's easy enough to debunk reductive materialism. The trick is to replace it with a more plausible metaphysic, one with more explanatory reach. Hart's skeptic concedes that

the topics we've been arguing over are so intractable that the work of destroying our inadequate theories concerning them is far easier than that of constructing better theories.

Indeed, 

In the areas we've been struggling over, every theory is, strictly speaking, indefensible.

You needn't even oppose such theories with rational argument, rather, with nothing more than a snarky Bill Maher voice. 

But another character counters the skeptic, reminding him that his scientistic model "is radically incomplete and doesn't capture more than a shadow of reality in its fullness." Any tenured yahoo can reduce the world to a mechanism, but there is "no such world" in reality. Rather, "it's a figment of materialist dogma and nothing more."

But here again, to know something is false is not to know what is true: "the critical task is easier than the constructive." And -- this according to the skeptic --

Atheism will always be the dialectically weaker position for the simple reason that it can't account for much of anything -- not being, not mind, not life, not the realm of absolute values that you say preoccupies our intellects and wills...

Why then cling to it? Precisely because it doesn't pretend to explain the inexplicable, but accepts our cosmic absurdity with a manly resignation.  

Tempting.

Yes, it does explain the contemporary interest in stoicism. About which the Aphorist says

I do not want to conquer serenity, like a stoic, but to welcome serenity in, like a Christian.

That would be nice. One of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Or in Vedantic terms, the old sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-beatidude.

Serenity now!

Serenity is to keep oneself so to speak above the clouds, in the calm and coolness of emptiness and far from all the dissonances of this lower world; it is never to allow the soul to immerse itself in impasses of disturbances, bitterness, or secret revolt (Schuon).

Yes, but really? Really? This world? Hart's skeptic looks down upon the world and sees

a vast abyss of darkness, pain, death, and hopeless sadness.... all the world's enchantments, considered in proportion to the whole of cosmic existence, are at most tiny evanescent flickers of light amid a limitless darkness.  

Definitely a cosmos half-empty kind of guy. Go on, get it out of your system:

Really, what does it matter if there truly is this transcendent God you go on about so often? Why shouldn't that God be an object of indifference? Or even vehement hatred? 

That's one way of looking at it. But -- just a feeling, but -- 

as I live on, I find myself more susceptible to a sense of the grandeur and sublimity of the mysteries we've been discussing and less susceptible to aggrieved alarm at cosmic suffering.

 "I don't understand entirely why I feel that way," but "it's a truth that can be expressed only in the dream-images of myth and spiritual allegory and religious experience." There's also that "infinite act of mind in which all things exist," and who's to say what other surprises it has in store for us?

Cue Bill Maher voice: "Well, then, everything's all right. I can't wait." 

The hopeful voice continues: "Mock if you wish. All I can say is that it's very much a matter of personal temperament." Again it's that top-down or bottom-up choice we face, and which determines everything else:

It's up to you whether you trust in the mysteries of mind and life and language -- their miraculous strangeness, which seems always to promise the revelation of a greater meaning, or to adumbrate a higher reality, a world beyond the world we know...

Floating upward on wings of Slack?

It reminds me of something the Aphorist says, that 

The universe is not difficult to read because it is a hermetically sealed text, but because it is a text without punctuation. Without the adequate ascending and ascending intonation, its ontological syntax is unintelligible.

The universe is a text. That checks out, since it never shuts up -- it never stops disclosing its secrets to man's questioning intellect. And not just in the form of science, but all sorts of numinous experiences:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

About this Logos-saturated world-text, Hart's more poetic character says that

To me, all of existence is a realm of positively eloquent communication. All of reality is the manifestation of that infinite reason that dwells in God; all of it's composed of signs and symbols, through which infinite mind is always speaking to us... and inviting us to respond.

In short, -- reverting to the question of What We've Learned -- well, strictly speaking this isn't new, but it does seem that the cosmos is open at the top, so to speak, and that we must consciously engage with the vertical energies flowing therefrom, but that's the end of this chapter.

The Metaphysical Science is Settled?

This next chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods is called Atman Is Brahman, which, translated into plain English, means that the deepest Self and the highest God are not-two. 

Schuon also regards Vedanta as metaphysically normative, so to speak: 

The content of the universal and primordial Doctrine is the following, expressed in Vedantic terms: "Brahman is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahman."

And "the soul, not being 'other than Brahman,' its vocation is to transcend the world" and realize the deeper identity of Atman.

Well, good. But what if we prefer to express the Content of the Primordial Doctrine in traditional Christian terms? After all, we live in Christian civilization, so why not deploy the resources and vocabulary of our own tradition? Why the oikophobia? 

Hart, who is at least a nominal Orthodox Christian, agrees with Schuon that the formula "Atman is Brahman" is "the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike."

But if there is a "first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth" of Christianity, it must be the Trinity, and how do we square this with the whole Atman-Brahman thing? 

Perhaps Father is to incarnate Son as Brahman is to Atman, and the Son assumes human nature that we may too become participants in the divine nature, i.e., Brahman. 

And maybe "I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" can be taken to mean "The Atman-Son is in the Brahman-Father, so if you are taken up into my nature, then you too are one with Brahman." 

Indeed, if God becomes man that man might become God, this is similar to saying the soul's vocation is to realize the unity -- or non-duality -- of Atman and Brahman. The point is, ultimate reality is irreducibly relational, whether we're talking about Father to Son or Atman to Brahman, am I wrong?

Wait, I know -- the fall represents the severing of Atman from Brahman, while Christ comes down to restore the lost unity.

Or maybe I'm too simple a man to appreciate all the subtleties. Probably if I thought about it for longer than five minutes I could make a better case. Let's get on with the chapter. 

There it is again: relation. We cannot 

explain mental agency coherently except in terms of this experience of a relation of God as dwelling in the inmost depths of each of us to God as dwelling beyond the utmost heights to which our minds and wills aspire (emphasis mine).

There is an "I" that is deeper than the "mere psychological ego" and a "Thou" that is "more ultimate than the mere physical universe," and these two are dynamically linked in some mysterious way, as if they "coincide in essence with one another," or are "in principle already one and the same in the mind and being of God."

I too miss the '60s: 

all that is has its being as... one great thought. 

our individual minds are are like prisms capturing some part of the light of being and consciousness... or, rather, are like prisms that are also, marvelously, nothing but crystallizations of that light... 

we enter into it at the beginning of life as into a kind of dream that was already being dreamed before we found ourselves within it.

Good times. 

No, really:

teleologically considered, the mind is God, striving not only to see -- but to become -- infinite knowledge of infinite being, beyond any distinction between knower and known.

So, at the end of all our exploring we arrive at nondual mysticism? 

The only "science of mind" that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental world would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world's religions.

"There can be no science of mind" that isn't "to put it bluntly, a spiritual science."

And we're back to a science of the inexact. Nevertheless, the science is settled:

all the great contemplative and philosophical traditions, East and West, insist that the source and ground of the mind's unity is the transcendent reality of unity as such, the simplicity of God, the one ground of both consciousness and being...

In many ways Hart leaves us with the same transcendent unity of religions rooted in mystical experience, as elucidated by Schuon, and both anchor their metaphysic in a Vedanta seen as normative. Indeed, the last sentence of the chapter is as follows:

Once more, simply enough, in both its origin and its end, Atman is Brahman -- which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.

After this is a Coda consisting of three more chapters, so perhaps there's more to it. We shall see... 

Abiding in the Mind's Transcendent Horizon

Apparently these are tricky ideas we've been discussing. I was reading another review of  All Things Are Full of Gods, in which the reviewer confesses to being "lost in all the arguments Hart presents. To say that this book broke my brain would be an understatement."

Although the book isn't breaking my brain it does sometimes try my patience, because these important ideas need to be expressed more clearly, concisely, and systematically. But how many philosophers in general do that? Prolixity is an occupational hazard.

The idea that does not win over in twenty lines does not win over in two thousand pages.

A challenge: can we get this done in twenty lines, or at least twenty short paragraphs? I doubt it, because that would require more time than blogging permits.

Let's begin with the idea that being is intelligible -- that "being and intelligibility are conceptually indistinguishable." Or as we like to put it, the universe is endlessly intelligible to intelligence, which implies a meta-cosmic ground of intellect. In short, 

If the physical order can't be the ground of mind, mind must be the ground of the physical order.

Now, this intelligible order persists no matter how deeply we pursue it:

no matter how relentless our quest for an ever deeper coincidence between the being of the world and our mental agency, there's always more rational content available to our intellects. 

This ordering of intellect to intelligibility demands a sufficient reason, for it is "anything but intuitively obvious that the... structure of rational thought should correspond so fruitfully to the structure of the world," or that thought and being "should somehow be fitted to one another."

As we always say, revelation is the poetry of metaphysics, so to say that man is the image and likeness of the Creator is to articulate the very principle that accounts for both the rationality of the world and our access to that rational structure. 

But some people -- Kant and his acolytes -- say that reality isn't actually intelligible, but that there is an ontological division "between an unknowable objective realm and an illusory -- useful, that is, but still illusory -- subjective realm."

But no one lives this way, or could live this way, least of all the scientist who relies upon "the power of the mind to penetrate the nature of things" and to "draw upon a potentially inexhaustible wellspring of objective truth in order to learn more and more about the contours of the real." 

And "this can only be because you [or scientists] presume an original harmony and connaturality" between mind and reality:

If you believe the structure of reality can truly be mirrored in the structure of your thinking, then you must also believe that there's an ideal or abstract or purely intelligible dimension of reality that truly corresponds to the concepts that allow you to understand the world.

And if you believe that, then it is no leap to say that "intelligibility and intelligence are simply one actuality," or two sides of a single act. Thus "the world continually yields itself to mind and mind opens itself to the world," in a kind of in-spiraling mutual indwelling: the mind penetrates 

more deeply into the mystery of being, and as being continues to shine forth more radiantly within the mystery of mind, you continue to amass concrete evidence that this coincidence between mind and world is real, that being is essentially intelligibility, and that... knowing and being known are one inseparable act of manifestation -- one act of reality.  

I mean, how much more evidence do you need?  

the structure of your mind's ascent into ever greater knowledge of the truth reveals the structure of being's descent in its ever greater manifestation of truth... 

What else could account for this mysterious identity of being and mind but... an identity of being and mind? 

Is this too much of a leap? "The very structure of knowledge is a primordial relation of the mind to God. The very end of all knowledge is God."

But this is just a repackaging of classical metaphysics for our Age of Stupidity:

Intellect is the first author and mover of the universe.... Hence the last end of the universe must necessarily be the good of the intellect. This, however, is truth. Hence truth must be the last end of the whole universe (Thomas). 

At this point Hart does in fact bring in the Catholic philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, whose Big Idea was that "the very search for understanding" -- this "insatiable desire to know why and why and why" -- 

discloses the reality of what he calls the "unrestricted intelligibility" of being, and thereby the reality of God as the one "unrestricted act of understanding." 

Works for me: the "transcendent horizon" "abides, as the absolute or divine dimension of depth in our... rational vista": 

Reality gives itself to the mind as mental content because mental content is the ground of reality. 

In the ground of being -- in God, if you like -- pure intelligence and pure intelligibility "are no longer distinguishable." We implicitly know that "the human mind can be a true mirror of reality because we're also assuming that all reality is already a mirror of the mind." 

Hart starts to repeat himself, but perhaps it's required in order to get it through our thick skulls:

The marvelous reciprocal relation of our power to understand and being's power to be understood... unremittingly indicates an ultimate identity between reason and being in their transcendent origin and end. 

Or again, just say man is the image and likeness of the Creator.

One Cosmos, One Light

I've been vertical cross-training, reading a new edition of Schuon's The Play of Masks at the same time as All Things Are Full of Gods. 

My hobby -- or infirmity, depending on how you look at it -- is noticing connections between disparate things, and I can't help seeing some links between these two. I'll be brief, because I really want to finish with Hart.

Recall yesterday's post about the two poles of consciousness. In an essay called Delineations of Original Sin, Schuon comes close to saying that what we call "original sin" results from a rejection of the transcendent for the immanent pole, or the inward for the outward, the vertical for the horizontal.

Most every man is vulnerable "to the temptations of 'outwardness' and 'horizontality,'" which means that -- in order to turn things around and get right with O -- "the pole of attraction that is the 'kingdom of God within you' must finally prevail over the seductive magic of the world." 

To be "horizontal" is to love only terrestrial life, to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path; to be "exteriorized," is to love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values. Or again: horizontality is to sin against transcendence (emphasis mine).

There you have it: turn away from the vertical-transcendent pole and default to the horizontal-outward, and what mischief follows. 

This next chapter in Hart is called Desire for the Absolute, which I suppose is another way of saying "love of God." In fact, "the transcendental horizon for which the soul yearns is really, in its full revelation, the infinity of God beyond all things." 

On the one hand, we are here and the Absolute is there; but it's also here -- within reach, as it were -- in the sense that "the things of this world become intelligible for us only by being set off against the infinite intelligibility for which we naturally long":

we can have an explicit knowledge of the finite only in light of an implicit knowledge of the infinite, and can have a grasp of nature as a totality only in light of a prior grasp of the supernatural that infinitely exceeds every totality. 

I'm trying to think of what this is like, and perhaps it's like language, which expresses explicit meanings on the surface while relying on an implicit deep structure. Or maybe it's like the whole that is ontologically prior to the part, and apart from which the part makes no sense. 

The order of the parts of the universe to each other exists in virtue of the order of the whole universe to God (Thomas).

And "every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge" (ibid.).  

Whatever the case may be, it seems that in explicitly knowing the finite we implicitly know the infinite: 

we recognize any given finite object as confined within its own limits and definitions because we also perceive a kind of nimbus of greater meaning around it, distinguishing it from the inexhaustible horizon of truth itself.

This is true, but can it be said more clearly, or are we approaching the limits of the expressible? And is this limit precisely where revelation takes over, providing us with a vocabulary to meaningfully speak of these things? Perhaps it's no coincidence that there's much more talk of God per se in this chapter, for example,

that which is most deeply within us is also, at its origin and end, that which is most beyond... God knowing God, an unrestricted act of which every finite mental act is a restricted instance. 

God is the "proper end" of "all conscious mental agency." "Thought and consciousness strive not only toward, but actually to become, infinite knowledge of infinite being."  

God becomes man that man might become God?

Yes, not to say we get there in this life, but he's always there over the transcendental horizon drawing us further up and in. The soul is driven "to transform all things into itself and itself into all things -- until it becomes the whole universe -- in its desire for God."

Perhaps this sounds more than a little woo woo, but Thomas himself says that "every intellectual being is in a certain manner all things, in so far as it is able to comprehend all being by the power of its understanding." In short, "Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity." And 

This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.

Similarly, Hart writes of "rational nature's intellective ecstasy toward God's infinity," in a journey that is -- speaking of limits of the expressible -- ultimately "from God who is beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end."  

Vedanta makes another appearance here: "all desire to know is, most originally, the desire to know Brahman, the source and fullness of all reality that is also the self's innermost Atman..."

Concur: "the very structure of thought is nothing other than this perpetual engagement with a transcendent horizon." 

One Cosmos, One Light: 

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light... (Thomas).

The Great Attractor Over the Subjective Horizon

We're down to the last of six days of dialogue in All Things Are Full of Gods, and I'm not sure what we've learned thus far except that a bottom-up metaphysic just won't cut it. Which is certainly true. 

They used to say that Christianity is Platonism for the masses. In Hart's case, it almost seems that his top-down metaphysic is theology for the embarrassed Christian. 

Well, it doesn't matter what religion you practice so long as you're sincerely ashamed of it.

Yes, it seems to be a common enough sentiment:

Today's Christian is not sorry that no one else agrees with him but is sorry that he does not agree with everyone else. 

But in reality, 

Nothing remains of Christianity when the Christian tries to seem to the world not to be stupid.

Or maybe the only thing that remains is the abstract skeleton of top-down causation. Not much, but something to build on? 

In any event, much of this chapter reminds us of Voegelin, for example, that "there's no such thing as mental agency devoid of a transcendental, extra-physical dimension or horizon." Even nature itself "is always exceeding what we think of as nature." 

Like Voegelin, Hart posits "two distinct kinds of directedness: one toward the empirical realm and one toward the transcendental." Indeed, "we know reality only as occurring within two encircling horizons."

There's the near or immanent horizon of the realm of finite things, the empirical order..., but, prior to this and encompassing it, there's also a far or transcendent horizon of universal values.... We know and desire that further horizon tacitly in all that we do. 

Exactly. Compare to Voegelin's definition of the metaxy (or In-Between):

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles; man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, the world and the Beyond.  

As for this latter -- the Beyond -- it is "That which is ultimate and is itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding." Nevertheless, it is the telos or "goal of the fundamental tension of existence."

This is Hart, but it could just as easily be Voegelin: "All the mind's operations arise between two poles," one of which being "an irreducibly transcendental realm of absolute values beyond the reach of any of us..."

Or this:

I might almost speak of two "supernatural" poles -- two vanishing points where nature either sinks down into foundations deeper than itself or soars up into an exalted realm higher than itself. 

And our consciousness is in between, "always reaching out to something outside us that's more ultimate than the world." 

Around here we just call it O, for reasons just stated by Voegelin, i.e., it is indefinable and surpasses all categories of understanding.

The other thinker Hart reminds me of is Bernard Lonergan, and like Voegelin, his name doesn't appear in the book. But this sounds like straight-up Lonergan: our minds are "turned dynamically toward the whole of reality -- the whole of being -- as irresistibly attractive to our minds." 

That's what we around here call the Great Attractor to which the mind is ordered. It is why we have "this 'rational appetite' for the ideal intelligibility of things," or the "natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of being as intelligible truth."

Told you so: we seek nothing short of all there is to know about all there is: we are animated by

an intrinsic purposefulness that stretches out toward the whole of things; every operation of the will and the intellect, however slight, is lured into actuality by a final cause beyond all immediate ends.

Correct: there is a "limitless directedness of consciousness toward that limitless horizon of transcendental aspiration." Indeed, "all of nature is filled with the desire to find that horizon," at least implicitly. I suppose we could say that this implicit drive becomes explicit and self-aware in human consciousness. 

Hart keeps repeating himself, but we don't need the repetition. We get it: "All finite longing is a longing deferred toward an infinite end."

End of chapter.

Exact Science and Science of the Inexact

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. --Dávila 

Schuon speaks of a "defect of imagination" whereby "One tries to explain 'horizontally' that which is explainable only 'in a vertical sense.'" 

Via a kind of reductive reversal, the very science which only man can conceive presumes to enclose and explain man. Which I suppose is one of the themes of Frankenstein, a manmade creation who turns on the man who created him. 

Anthony Fauci famously proclaimed that I AM THE SCIENCE. Maybe, but I AM is inherently beyond the reach of science, which is limited to IT IS. As the Aphorist reminds us, 

If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is.

And 

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but unable to explain the consciousness that explains it, will not have explained anything.

So, consciousness explains science but science doesn't explain the consciousness that explains science. 

Well, so what. At least science tries to solve the mystery.

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

And this mystery is indeed insoluble in fact and in principle via scientific assumptions and methods. It's like trying to measure beauty with calipers, or understand a text by analyzing the ink with which it is composed. There are higher levels of meaning that are irreducible to the lower. 

Nothing proves more the limits of science than the scientist's opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.

So we just give up?

No, but maybe try a new approach, one that isn't doomed to absurdity from the start. 

There are actually certain intrinsic limits at both ends of the immanent-transcendent tension. For example, science can no more say what energy is than it can say what consciousness is. For Voegelin, the immanent and transcendent poles are more directions than destinations, and again, bestwecando is live in the tension between them. Nor can one be reduced to the other. 

There are a number of principles that we -- meaning I -- cannot do without, two of which are verticality and openness. Or just say "openness to the transcendent," which is of course one of the main functions of religion, i.e., to maintain this vertical openness via meditation, contemplation, prayer, ritual, sacrament, et al.

But in reality every remotely normal person is always open to the transcendent in some form or fashion. Language itself becomes incomprehensible without this transcendent pole. 95% of speech is about something abstract, immaterial, and transcendent. Trying to eliminate transcendence from one's vocabulary would reduce one to animality. 

So, language is pretty, pretty important, and how convenient that it's the subject of the next chapter, Language, Code, and Life. Let's see if it gets us any closer to the mystery. We'll start with an aphoristic benediction:

Poetry is God's fingerprint in human clay.

Indeed, "surely you must grasp that language is the very epitome of top-down causation" (Hart), and what is at the top? You don't have to say God, but certainly it involves vertical openness to the transcendent pole mentioned above. 

Whatever the case may be, the "entire substance" of language "lies beyond the physical altogether." It is semantics that conditions syntax from above: "meaning depends wholly upon the irreducibly higher level of symbolic thought." Regarding the language of life,

The physical syntax simply can't generate the semantical meanings; rather, the top-down causality of the semantic level determines the physical ordering that embodies it....

In short, "Life is a semantic structure that colonizes and informs its physical syntax," which is no different from human speech, which uses syntactical structure to convey meaning. And let's be honest,

meaning, intention, semantic content, finality -- all of this has its real existence solely in the realm of mind. If life is code, then life subsists only in mind; but life is code...

Therefore, fill in the blank. 

Life is always already mind? 

That's a bingo. "Mind as such" is

the essential finality, purposiveness, intentionality, cognitive depth, and pervasive consciousness that underlies all nature...

I see. We have a saying around here: Can I buy some pot from you? 

The irreducibility of mind and life and language seems to me all so very obvious that to resist its implications strikes me as sheer perversity.

Yes, but surely a little pot can't hurt?  

[S]ince mind really does exist, in all its evident dimensions and powers, and since it's obviously part of nature, it's well past time.... [to cease] attempting to mechanize the mental and begin instead to undertake the far more scientific and rational task of exploring the mental dimension of nature in the full range of its expressions, and most especially in the structure of life.

Sounds like we're gonna need a bigger science -- or at least a bigger philosophy of science:

the triumph of the mechanistic philosophy and the dismissal of form and finality as figments of a superseded science were decisions not only concerning method..., but also concerning what would henceforth be regarded as fundamental... to our picture of reality.

Analogously, "One can reduce a house to heaps of bricks and lumber and so forth in the hope of understanding its architecture," but "little has been learned except how to destroy a house." 

In conclusion, "The great act of rational intelligibility that runs through all of nature" is just the other side of an "actual intelligence -- even if of a kind we can't imagine." 

Oh, but we can:

The imagination is not the place where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled. 

Hmm. Can you say a little more?

Science cannot do more than draw up the inventory of our prison.

But 

Imagination is the capacity to perceive through the senses the attributes of the object the senses do not perceive.

Like God's fingerprint in the clay of human language?

Metaphysical Yada Yada and Reductive Belowviation

Continuing with yesterday's theme of the 2,500 year argument clinic, Schuon writes that 

Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection....

Elsewhere he suggests that 

Platonism, which is as it were “centripetal” and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is “centrifugal” and separative, tends to sever the world -- and with it man -- from its divine roots.

So, in one metaphysical corner we have inward, subjective, unitive, synthetic, and centripetal; in the other, outward, objective, separative, analytic, and centrifugal. Or interior Self and exterior World.

Now, how could we ever really do without a metaphysic that is itself a synthesis of both? Nothing short of this can describe our predicament. We don't want to exclude anything, let alone on an a priori basis.

This next chapter -- Metabolism and Mind -- mainly bats down some apparently eminent contemporary philosophers who try to do what we just said one should never do. Such approaches try to sneak in things like purpose and value through the side door, but come across as fancier modes of the same old reductionism. 

They also yada-yada over some rather important steps along the way, prompting one character to ask

Can we really move that easily from metabolism to consciousness and then to symbolic thought?

The whole scheme "could be taken to mean that life is a purely structural amplification of the laws of physics, and mental agency a purely structural amplification of the laws of life thus generated." 

But again, why even imagine that subjects could ever be reduced to objects, when in reality, this is about the most implausible thing imaginable? The project fails because it cannot overcome "any of the explanatory gaps -- or, rather, abysses" it "sets out to bridge." And why? Same old reason: it stills proceeds "in only one direction: from below to above." 

But in this world there is always (↑) and (↓), am I wrong? For that matter, there is always O, the transcendent object toward which (↑) is ordered. But we still need the immanent horizon (↓) as well for a total map of the Real.

"Once again, direction is all." The bottom-up project fails "precisely because it's an attempt to yet again ground the mental in the physical rather than the reverse," thus foundering "on all the same causal aporias that plague the mechanistic model."

If interiority isn't irreducible, than nothing is:

And the interiority of organism proceeds from mind, not the reverse.... mental interiority is the source and rationale, rather than merely the result, of metabolism.

For me, this mystery of interiority is the mystery. How does a universe of pure exterior relations -- of unalloyed outsideness -- suddenly gain an inside view of itself? Not just an interior perspective, but again, interiority as such. Truly truly, WTF?!

The next chapter slaps down another reductionist or three, but all "want to suggest that the reflective interiority and self-awareness of mind is just a structural elaboration or continuation" of lower material processes. "We never really come nearer to life or mind" via such reductive belowviating. 

The thing is, "mind isn't actually a structurally spatial interiority," rather, it's immaterial, so it makes no sense to say that some self-organizing physical structure like a whirlpool or tornado just one day developed an inside and decided to go on being. Again, there is a radical discontinuity between any mere dissipative structure and the merest organism.     

No, mind is before all and in all, shaping matter into living organisms; matter is always being raised up into life, and life is always being raised up into mind, and mind is always seeking a transcendental end...

(Raised up. This reminds us of mind being further "teleologically" raised up into Christ, but that's a squirrel we'll have to chase down later.)

Put conversely,

It can't really be a matter of the miraculous appearance of teleological activity within the originally atelic dynamisms of material processes. 

Again, you can't just yada yada over something as important and fundamental as interiority -- a subjective horizon oriented to a transcendent telos -- as if to say "Something very, very significant happened at this point, but let's not dwell on it." To re-belabor the point, this is "a qualitative abyss that can't be crossed from below." 

The next chapter is called Creative Evolution, but we are in need of no convincing on this score, since creativity is one of our top five transcendental categories. Indeed, it is the first thing we know about God -- that he creates, so creative evolution isn't a problem for our metaphysic, rather, what we expect of the cosmos (and of the being made in the image of this creative principle).

2,500 Year Argument Resolved by Obscure Blogger

Well, not exactly. Or not yet, anyway, but we're getting closer.

This question of a top-down vs. bottom-up metaphysic reminds me of the famous painting of Plato and Aristotle, the former pointing vertically to the heavens, the latter making a horizontal gesture. 

Is that all this is, the same old argument in new terms?

In his book The Cave and the Light, Herman articulates Plato's "most fundamental idea,"

that man is destined by his creator to find a path from the dark cave of material existence to the light of a higher, purer, and more spiritual truth. It's when we rise above the merely human..., and enter the realm of the "everlasting and immortal and changeless" that we achieve wisdom.

But for Aristotle,

There is no cave; only a world made of facts and things. "The fact is our starting point," he once said...

This is no doubt oversimplifying, but 

For  the next two thousand years Aristotle would become the father of modern science, logic, and technology. Plato, by contrast, is the spokesman for the theologian, the mystic, the poet, the artist.

People tend to choose sides, but as we've been saying, it's not a matter of either-or but both-and. However, as in all primordial complementarities one must be prior, and in this case it's the top-down perspective. As one of Hart's characters puts it,

Direction is all. What from below are untraversable abysses are, from above, merely junctures where ladders must be let down. 

Later in the chapter, the same character -- who seems to stand for Hart's more poetic side -- says that

mind informs life, life informs matter; life is always already mind, rising into fuller consciousness as it's formed from above, and matter is always already life, rising into fuller complexity and vitality and autonomy as it's formed from above.  

Mind cannot in principle arise from the mindless, so the bottom-up view is a metaphysical nonstarter. But placed in the larger context of the top-down perspective, we see that the abysses between matter and life, or life and mind, may "close of their own accord":

Matter intends life, life intends mind, which is to say that life and mind are final causes belonging to the structure of reality from the first.  

Well, good. This certainly echoes the Raccoon perspective. But again, can we tighten it up a little more? Hart's skeptic is uncomfortable with the whole idea of transcendental teleology: "I always find the word 'transcendental' rather murky, to be honest."

To which another character replies that "you shouldn't," because "You couldn't possibly be a rational agent if there weren't a realm" "toward which your intellectual appetites are all naturally oriented."

Here again, very Platonic: the mind by its nature is ordered to a higher level of transcendental truth, and "this infinite purposiveness of your mind is what equips you with finite purposes. Without that index of values, all your acts would be arbitrary, prosecuted without real rational judgments."

So, freedom is a consequence of being a rational agent ordered to teleological ends. The alternative -- the bottom-up view -- only generates contradiction and absurdity, like "a lunatic who denies his own existence or who claims to be dead." For

the very act of affirming mechanism to be true is an admission of a prior directedness toward truth as an ideal, utterly beyond the sphere of the mechanical, and so just another confirmation of antecedent finality. 

The skeptic complains that "just where some dry and sober precision is most needful," we are instead plunged into "metaphysics and mysticism." But

If mind isn't the product of mindless matter -- and it clearly isn't -- then what other narrative of the mind's origin remains?

More arguing back and forth, because it seems the mechanists just won't give up their quest for a bottom-up explanation. Which makes me suspect that perhaps one is a born Platonist. Religiosity more generally is said to be heritable, so why not? Ironically, this would be a bottom-up explanation for top-down people.

The next chapter is called Information and Form, and it is indeed a mystery where all this information comes from. Information is "at the origin," but how? Our poetic character raves that "life is language, and  language is mind, and mind is life" before the skeptic cuts him off. 

Nevertheless, "Information isn't merely mindlike; it subsists only in mind." Keep digging, and we find "a level more fundamental than the physical," a reality that starts to look very much "like infinite mind." 

That's the end of the chapter. The ball's in Aristotle's court. Or in Plato's cave, depending on how you look at it.

Vertical Rawdoggin' in the Counterworld

Word of the day: rawdoggin'. The term

has been hilariously repurposed by the internet to describe submitting to grueling life experiences without the benefit of modern distractions, luxuries, technology, and conveniences. 

The meme seems to have been popularized by a fellow

who posted TikToks of himself on 15-hour flights doing nothing but staring straight ahead at the flight map on the screen in front of him; no headphones, earbuds, phone, laptop, movies, music, books, or magazine. Not even a crossword puzzle.

"Extreme rawdoggers will even forgo food and water during the flight." 

I guess I like to think of these posts as a form of vertical rawdoggin': just staring straight ahead at the screen and seeing what kind of religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us this morning.   

Aw, who am I kidding? I'm usually interacting with another text, while real vertical rawdoggin' is Abraham dropping everything and taking off for parts unknown, or Moses going alone up the mountain, or Jesus in the desert, or the apostles lighting out for the territories with nothing but a pair of flip flops, or the desert fathers leaving everything behind....

Then again, 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

And Schuon says that "man's vocation and duty is to become what he is, precisely by freeing himself, inwardly, from the encroaching shadows of this contingent, imperfect, and transitory world."

Therefore, the luminous and noble peace of the desert must have something to do with leaving the contingent, imperfect, and transitory for the necessary, perfect, and permanent. A reminder that 

The Church's function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld to the world.   

This counterworld needn't be a literal desert. Rather, as mentioned in a different context in yesterday's post, "I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything." Thus, according to Schuon, 

If one looks at the universe exclusively with the eyes of relativity, one will see only relative things and the universe will be reduced in the final analysis to an inextricable absurdity.

This follows necessarily from the bottom-up perspective. But if we look from the top down, or if "one sees it with the eyes of absoluteness," then "one will essentially see manifestations of the Supreme Principle," which you could say is the very ground of the counterworld.

About the bottom-up perspective, AKA materialism, Schuon says that

nothing is more contradictory than to deny the spirit, or even simply the psychic element, in favor of matter alone, for it is the spirit that denies, whereas matter remains inert and unconscious. The fact that matter can be conceptualized proves that materialism contradicts itself at its starting point...

The same is true of the claim that man cannot know truth, or that all is relative except for relativism, or that subjects could arise from objects. Nevertheless, that's the horizontal world for which we need the vertical counterworld mentioned above:

Contingency on the one hand and presence of the Absolute on the other; these are the two poles of our existence.

Which goes precisely to the top-down / bottom-up dispute in All Things are Full of Gods.

One problem with the bottom-up perspective is that in it there can't actually be an "up." Calling it "up" is just in a manner of speaking, because any up is reducible without remainder to the lower level.

Not so for the top-down approach, which doesn't dismiss matter as an epiphenomenal illusion. True, in Vedanta it is regarded as mere appearance, but nevertheless an appearance of reality. As Schuon describes it,

Atma is conceivable without Maya, whereas Maya is intelligible only through the notion of Atma. 

In other words, there can be reality without appearances, but no appearances without reality. "Relativity is a projection of the Absolute, or it is nothing." But it's not nothing. It's just not everything.

Back to Hart, the next chapter is called Spirit in Nature, which expresses the same top-down argument that

the mind pervades all things, and expresses itself in countless degrees and in endlessly differing but kindred modes...

In this vertical counterworld, "we all belong to a vast community of spiritual beings," and why not? The spiritual is ontologically prior to the material, so "Nervous systems appeared in evolutionary history not as fortuitous vehicles for a new organic power; they were fashioned by a prior operative disposition."

I'm talking about a pervasive reality of organic life, at every level.

Yes, but are you just deepaking the chopra? No, because

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

"I believe that nature is already mind," which seems indisputable given the infinite intelligibility of the world, which is just the shadow of intelligence. 

Again, it's a matter of the direction from which we look: "I stake myself to the top-down causal narrative," of "mind 'descending' into matter and raising matter up into itself as life and thought." 

There is "an essential creative impulse within the very structure of nature, quickening it from within itself, driving it into ever more diverse and more complex forms."

This is beginning to sound like the Evolutionary Paradigm of the new age vulgarians.

Yes, perhaps a word of caution is in order before we proceed any further: 

We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable....

[W]hat has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution (Schuon). 

Evolution is one thing, but evolutionism 

is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps (ibid.). 

And we're back to the nature of the cosmic area rug, which is woven from strands of verticality and horizontality -- or immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative, stasis and change, appearance and reality, world and counterworld, etc., depending on the direction from which we look.

In any event, that's the end of the chapter.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down?

Here's where we are:

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as a formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

How about both? Just because we see them as two, it doesn't mean the divine mind sees things that way. Maybe it's more like the image to the right, showing the interference pattern between immanence and transcendence, which is precisely where we live.

Thus, from that middle standpoint both perspectives are always true. As one of Hart's characters says,

The same evidence that some might adduce as proof that mind is reducible to a mere animal capacity for processing stimuli you see as proving the presence of rational intending mind in all animals and at the ground of nature. I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything (italics mine).  

Like a left-brain right-brain thing: the same reality is interpreted very differently by the two cerebral hemispheres, but these two are nevertheless synthesized into one vision of the world. 

Speaking of which, the left brain is responsible for speech, and Hart delves into the fact that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, but that the modern world pretends otherwise, i.e., 

that the really real is the realm of abstract quantifications and unyielding structural laws, and that the realm of higher organization and relation and agency -- the semantics of life, so to speak -- are secondary and accidental, and can be understood only by reduction to those more general abstract laws.

This represents "the metaphysical triumph of syntax over semantics, of dead matter over organism" and "of physics over biology."

Now, where have we heard these arguments before? Why, from our favorite theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, who indeed makes an appearance in this chapter (called The Semantics of Life). Rosen

argued that we should reconceive our methodological presuppositions altogether, and should cease to think of fundamental physics as providing the general framework for our understanding of nature... 

Here again, this latter represents the bottom-up perspective alluded to above, and it generates absurdity if one tries to use it to explain what clearly transcends it.

Instead of seeing biology as a special case of physics, Rosen turned the cosmos right side up and proposed the opposite, such that "biology becomes our general paradigm and physics is demoted to a special case of its expression," and why not?

the laws of life aren't contained in the laws of physics, though the laws of physics are embraced within the laws of life. 

"Above all," we need to "stop thinking of life, which is an 'open system,'" "as if it were a closed system of physical determinism." Nor should we imagine that "physical syntax" alone can "reductively explain the incalculably rich and subtle interrelations of the semantics of life."

Putting all of this together, it seems that we must regard the cosmos as an open system that is conditioned from the top town -- the top being the source and ground of mind, life, language, and meaning. Hart's materialist skeptic asks,

A cosmic organicism... is that what you're proposing? Teleology as fundamental law?

Well,

At every level of life we seem to encounter cognitive and intentional systems, with real content and an orientation toward meaningful ends, right down to the cellular level. 

Bottom line: "matter is never, and has never been, dead." Rather, "life and mind have always been present": 

in every epoch of cosmic existence and at every level of causality, life and mind are already always supplying the underlying and informing and guiding laws animating the whole.

Which is pretty much the Raccoon view -- that the unification of matter, life, mind, and spirit takes place at top. Likewise, for Hart, this is the only metaphysic "capable of making sense out of countless phenomena that are evident and undeniable, but irreconcilable with mechanism."

This morning I ran across a comment by Einstein:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

To which I would add that the single most important datum of experience is experience itself, for which no mechanistic reductionism can ever account or even conceive. Again, why adopt a metaphysic that renders the one adopting it an absurd nullity? 

The latter is a "useful fiction" for scientific methodology, but when "permitted to metastasize into a metaphysical claim about the nature of realty..., can yield nothing but ridiculous category errors." 

all that I want the culture of the sciences to abandon is a metaphysical orthodoxy that's certainly inadequate to a total model of the structure of life and consciousness.

Is this asking too much? It might be, if we can't tighten up our vision of the top-down view. It needs to be made a little more rigorous, otherwise it sounds like we're deepaking the chopra. We'll think about it and get back to you tomorrow.