Of Bloggers and Dung Beetles

To pick up where yesterday's post began: It seems that man is the clue he is looking for. This is such an important point that it's worth even a second post. 

How, you (or I) may ask, did I end up a psychologist? Partly because one morning, more or less, I woke up and found myself interested in everything, and how everything relates to everything else. 

Well?

Now clearly this Question of questions involves a lotta in, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's, and a whole lotta strands to keep together and synthesize in the old Bobber's head. 

Problem is, the old Bobber's head -- among other issues -- is only so big. New writ is always coming to light, which then has to be integrated with the old writ. Hence the 5,000+ posts. Will it ever end? Are we getting anywhere? Or are we always beginning Where We Left Off, like old Sisyphus? 

And how is this essentially different from what a dung beetle does?

"One morning, after troubled dreams, Bob woke up and found himself transformed into an insect rolling another pile of BS into a post."

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human. 

Still, I dream of rolling those 5,000 into one compact ball. Could there be some secret formula to boil them all down? This has been my summer project, but truly truly, it's an endless summer. 

Back to our story, at the same time, I noticed that all of This -- everything -- runs through man. Take man out of the equation, and there's just nothing and nobody to know it. About this Schopenhauer (correction: Kant) is correct, as far as he goes, which is simultaneously too far and not far enough:

If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject...

The Aphorist says something similar but deeper, that

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world; Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent. 

We might go so far as to say

That which is not a person is not finally anything. 

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

So the nature of this subject -- man, the human subject -- is pretty, pretty important, so important that everything else hinges on it. To study anything requires a human being, but what is that? Answer: psychology. Or rather, surely psychology would provide me with some answers? If not, what is it good for? 

So I became a psychologist in order to get some answers about the nature of this entity through whom everything runs and without whom there isn't anything at all. Truly truly, it all goes back to the perennial question,

In the course of this frantic search I went through various phases, from existentialism to psychoanalysis to evolutionary psychology to Vedanta, but -- to advert to a title of one of Schuon's books -- it's like one big Play of Masks. But who is this masked man, beneath the masks? Or is it masks all the way down?

That would be absurd. Which doesn't rule out absurdity being the Answer. But we still have the problem of the man who dons the mask of absurdity. Who is this man? And is absurdity just another mask he may choose to wear?

Choose? How did that get here? Supposing we can choose absurdity, then man must first be free to choose it, but how? What is the sufficient reason of freedom?

Time out for aphorisms:

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

Man is the animal that imagines itself to be Man.

When it finishes its "ascent," humanity will find tedium waiting for it, sitting at the highest peak.

In a word, existentialism: "let us take note of that suicide of reason -- or 'esoterism of stupidity' -- which is existentialism in all its forms; it is the incapacity to think erected into a philosophy" (Schuon).

Noted. Also noted:

Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.

At the same time, the modern universe of scientism treats man like an idiot treats an absurdity. 

Which segues into our next project, which will be a close review of David Bentley Hart's new book, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, which promises to be an "unprecedented exploration of the mystery of consciousness," in which the author

systematically subjects the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for four centuries to dialectical interrogation. Powerfully rehabilitating a classical view in which mental acts are irreducible to material causes, he argues... that the foundation of all reality is spiritual or mental rather than material. The structures of mind, organic life, and even language together attest to an infinite act of intelligence in all things that we may as well call God.

Engaging contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind, free will, revolutions in physics and biology, the history of science, computational models of mind, artificial intelligence, information theory, linguistics, cultural disenchantment, and the metaphysics of nature, Hart calls readers back to an enchanted world in which nature is the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences. He suggests that there is a very special wisdom to be gained when we... devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines.

Same attractor? Or just another dung beetle rolling his own? We shall see. 

Back to what Man is beneath the masks:

the object of his existence is to be in the middle: it is to transcend matter while being situated there, and to realize the light, the Sky, starting from this intermediary level. 

It is true that the other creatures also participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit.

A bold claim, which reminds me of another aphorism:

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but only through the roofs. 

Man has a skylight? Through which the light of truth, beauty, and freedom streams? 

Hold that question.

Get a Clue

It seems that man is the clue he is looking for. 

In other words, we must turn the homoscope around and examine the examiner, for we at once see and know "through" the human state, but we are also uniquely capable of looking at this state from a transcendent position that is partially "outside" or "above" this very state. 

Am I wrong? Or is man incapable of introspection and self-awareness?

Now for Schuon, "Man -- insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth -- is intelligence." And "if nothing proves that our intelligence is capable of adequation," then "there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt."

What this means is that logic is perfectly consistent only when surpassing itself.

And we're back to Gödel -- to the direct perception of trans-logical truth.

That's a bold claim, but it is implied in the name: Homo sapiens sapiens, the double-wise homo. 

We've spoken in the past of the proper ensoulment of man some 60 to 75,000 years ago, coinciding with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens. (Or at least the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens was a necessary condition for ensoulment.)

Prior to this is mere Homo sapiens: intelligent but not the double intelligence that both turns upon itself -- hence objectivity -- and knows the Absolute -- hence transcendence.

What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept -- whether explicit or implicit -- of the Absolute (ibid.).

Resetting the stage, we left off with the question of whether human intelligence is essentially no different from the intelligence of animals, or whether there is something absolute, unlimited, and transcendent about it. 

First, is this a false binary? Could there be a third kind of intelligence that doesn't fall into these two categories?

You can't be a little bit unlimited.

Not so sure about that, because it seems the human spirit is a tapestry of limit + unlimited. Only God -- supposing he exists -- would be Unlimited as such, without qualification:

the same intelligence that makes us aware of a superiority, also makes us aware of the relativity of this superiority and, more than this, it makes us aware of all our limitations (ibid.). 

And "Man, like the Universe, is a fabric of determination and indetermination; the latter stemming from the Infinite, and the former from the Absolute" (ibid.). 

Nevertheless, 

What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition. 

Argument from authority.  

Maybe, but let's consider a few additional authoritative claims: the Intellect is

At once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light. 

And

Man is first of all characterized by a central or total intelligence, and not one that is merely peripheral or partial; secondly he is characterized by a free and not merely instinctive will; and thirdly by a character capable of compassion and generosity, and not merely of egoistic reflexes.

On the other hand, animals "cannot know what is beyond the senses" and cannot transcend themselves:

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality.... There lies the mystery of the human vocation...

 Put another way, it may also be said of man 

that he is essentially capable of knowing the True, whether it be absolute or relative; he is capable of willing the Good, whether it be essential or secondary, and of loving the Beautiful, whether it be interior or exterior. In other words: the human being is substantially capable of knowing, willing and loving the Sovereign Good. 

Now, where does this leave us vis-a-vis man being the very clue he seeks? 

Well, to say man is to say intellect ordered to truth or to the Real (as opposed to appearances); a disinterested will ordered to the good; and sentiment ordered to objective beauty. 

Or let us say intelligence-freedom-creativity, ordered to the true, good, and beautiful, which are at once "transcendent" but the very substance of which we are made. In other words, going back to what Schuon says above,  

What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition.

And that's all there is to it. At least this morning.

The Revelation of Intelligence and the Intelligence of Revelation?

To review where we left off, Gödel believed man could see mathematical realities directly through a kind of perception, no different in principle from the perception of empirical reality.

He further believed that human beings "will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition" which "can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine." 

But again, the theorems only reveal what the mind cannot be; to know our mind is not a computer is not to know what it is. 

In fact, depending on the premises we plug in, we can conclude anything we like. But no rational operation can furnish its own premises.

For Schuon, "The effectiveness of reason essentially depends upon two conditions," neither of which can be reduced to reason. There is first "the value and extent of the available information" with which to reason upon, and garbage in, tenure out.

But secondly, there is "the acuity and profundity of the intelligence" in question, which bears a kind of vertical relation to reason itself, going "beyond the indirect processes of reason in calling upon pure intellection."

Again, as discussed in yesterday's post, Schuon's pure intellection seems to share something in common with Gödel's direct perception of mathematical realities.

If mathematical realities can be directly perceived in this way, why not other realities? God is a mathematician, but surely not only a mathematician. Come to think of it, I'll bet God cannot be limited to a formal system for the same reason we cannot be. 

That's just a hunch, but perhaps it can in turn help account for the bad religion bemoaned by Gödel, because people are forever absolutizing their religion instead of understanding it to be about the Absolute. 

Here again, I wonder if this is an ultimate entailment of the theorems, since reality can never be contained by any formal system. 

It's a tricksy business, because we have a word -- reality -- that can lull us into thinking we have domesticated that to which the word refers. 

In any event, the rationalist -- which is to say, someone who irrationally encloses himself within the constraints of logic -- can never reason adequately "in light of the total and supralogical intelligence" that must be prior to logic itself. 

Such a person "thinks he can solve every problem by means of logic alone," but this is to put the cart of rationalism before the horse of intelligence. By way of analogy, "A line of reasoning that is square in shape" will "reject a spherical reality and replace it with a square error." 

Or worse, a line of reasoning with a circular shape won't even see the higher dimensional sphere; at best, it will reduce the three dimensional sphere to a two-dimensional circle. 

Reason divorced from intellect be like... like left cerebral hemisphere divorced from right, or letter from spirit, words from music, prose from poetry, abstract concept from concrete experience, particle from field, etc.

In a footnote to this essay, Schuon makes the rather important claim that

Revelation is a kind of cosmic intellection whereas personal intellection is comparable to a Revelation on the scale of the microcosm. 

Now, I happen to believe this, especially the idea that the human subject is probably the first and most important revelation of them all. After all, without it, there could be no other revelation, because there would be no one to whom to reveal it. 

Intelligence is the First Miracle? Why not?

The first thing that should strike man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

 Is he wrong? 

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence, is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be.

Now, at the other end, is Revelation "a kind of cosmic intellection"? 

Surely not just any revelation, otherwise we might be tempted to believe that the revelation of mistakes in the TV Guide is a result of sabotage.

This will take us Far Afield -- too far for a single post, but -- just spiritballin' again -- but could there be some extra-Revelational standard by which to judge Revelation? Or perhaps some way to harmonize all the good ones? The ones deemed Good Enough by Intelligence itself?

For example, I think the Tao Te Ching does a pretty, pretty good job of describing the ultimate Principle. Now, is this Principle the same one described in Genesis and then in John? And are these the same as the one described in the Upanishads?

I say, why not? Which was kind of the implicit point of the opening and closing sections of the book, but I could probably do a better job of it today. 

It's today. Let's see you try.

Today I also know better than to try such an outlandish and impudent exercise. Rather, let this guy have a crack at it -- to present the Tao Te Ching in light of the Christian revelation, and vice versa -- "a Gospel according to Lao Tzu."

Before light was made

There was the Primal Light that was not made:

The Primal Essence,

Dwelling in the Darkness of incomprehensibility.

Yada yada, "There is no name whereby the Primal Essence can be named,"

For He is a sea of Essence,

Indeterminate and without bounds...

He is wholly Essence, and solely Essence,

Yet He is above essence,

Because He is not the essence of anything that is. 

If this is an attempt to describe the metacosmic intellect, our own intellect must again be its reflection, 

for how could the intelligence limit itself, seeing that by its very nature it is in principle unlimited or it is nothing? 

In other words, who or what places this so-called limit if not intelligence itself? "For an intellectual limit is a wall," 

hence one of two things: either the intelligence by definition includes a principle of illimitability or liberty.

Either this, or 

on the contrary the intelligence includes -- again by definition -- a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer includes any certainty and can function no differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to "critical philosophy" is vain. 

Recall yesterday's bottom line:

In place of limits on human knowledge and certainty, he [Gödel] saw only the irreplaceable uniqueness of the human spirit. 

 Compare this to what shall have to be today's bottom line: 

Man is intelligence, and intelligence is the transcending of forms and the realization of the invisible Essence; to say human intelligence is to say absoluteness and transcendence (Schuon).

Limited animal intelligence or unlimited human spirit? Just asking.

Having Said That,

Gödel was legitimately nuts, subject to paranoid delusions, hypochondria, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Of course, this doesn't affect the validity of the theorems, but it may impact his opinions about them -- about the kind of world they imply. 

When depressed he dwelled on the fact that "all of his contributions" to philosophy "were of a negative kind -- proving that something cannot be done, not what can be done." 

About this he is correct: the theorems tell us only what definitely cannot be the case, not necessarily what is the case. 

They tell us, for example, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself," but they do not tell us what truth is. Likewise, they tell us a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete.

Gödel's leap to a Platonic conception of truth is in no way entailed by his own theorems. For example, postmodernists go to the other extreme and say the theorems bar us from knowing any truth at all, enclosing us in language about a reality we can never reach.

Thus, before he was a logician, mathematician, or anything else, Gödel was a seeker of truth, which already implies a worldview -- one in which truth exists and is accessible to man. He would have rejected the alternative a priori. 

Again, he regarded mathematics as not only a search for truth, but for "pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind." He was likewise "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning."

But his forays into *mere* philosophy 

dismayed more than a few of his mathematical colleagues, who did not hide from him their disappointment that he seemed to be squandering his genius on trivialities.

Now, the mind is designed to detect connections between things, but for this reason man can be prone to the over-detection of agency -- thus the sometimes fine line between genius and madness. 

Gödel found "hidden meanings, or mystical significance in things large and small," for example, in "the incorrect listings of movies shown on television." ("One has the impression it is sabotage.")

Ironically, this means that, although he considered himself a seeker after extra-mental truth, he was often very much confined to his own intra-mental projections. Even more ironically, such delusional ideation could crystallize into a kind of rigidly consistent and pseudo-complete system the theorems forbid.

Nevertheless, he argued that the human mind "could not have come about through any mechanistic process," and disagreed "with the entire worldview that 'regards the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.'" But it seems his paranoia made him vulnerable to finding too much meaning, and in all the wrong places.

On the one hand, a possible interpretation of the theorems is that mathematics -- and by extension, language -- is "a mere game played with symbols according to certain rules." Again, this would be the postmodern view. But this is not how Gödel saw it; rather, he believed

that the human mind can literally see mathematical realities through a kind of perception, no different from the direct sensory perceptions that the empiricists decreed to be the only valid basis of physical laws.

Here again, this latter interpretation is in no way a necessary consequence of the theorems. Moreover, it begins to converge upon someone like Schuon, for whom the necessary truths of existence are indeed directly "perceived" via intellection:

Intellectual intuition comprises essentially a contemplativity which in no way enters into the rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative.... 

[Rationality] perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition (Schuon). 

Gödel saw no reason "why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception" than in the lower kind, and he's not wrong. Nor was he wrong to wonder

what kind of sense would there be in bringing forth a creature (man), who has such a broad field of possibilities of his own development and of relationships, and then not allow him to achieve 1/1000 of it.

In other words, what kind of irrational -- not to say perverse -- Creator gives infinite potential to a finite being? Gödel thought this was sufficient proof of an afterlife: 

it follows directly that our earthly existence, since it in and of itself has at most a very dubious meaning, can only be a means to an end for another existence.

Again, he had little use for religions but was very much open to Religion, perhaps one that hadn't yet been discovered. He thought that the great majority of philosophers were as guilty as "bad churches" in turning people away from these deeper questions.

"Gödel's public renown continued to grow after his death" in 1978, partly because "The general idea that there are truths that cannot be proved has an irresistible appeal." 

But in his own way he has been misappropriated for as many dubious agendas as quantum physics: "probably more wrong things have been said about his proof than any other mathematical theorem in history."

Interestingly, his ideas seem to inspire two kinds of skeptics, those who recognize "that their knowledge is limited," which "troubles them deeply." The other kind acknowledge "the same thing but find it liberating." Gödel was in the latter camp, believing that

Humans will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition..., that can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine....

In place of limits on human knowledge and certainty, he saw only the irreplaceable uniqueness of the human spirit. 

So, having said all this, where does it leave us?

A Pleasurable Journey to the Edge of Reason, and Beyond

What is beyond reason? Madness? Or Truth? Or both?

All other animals are confined to the fixed nature assigned by heredity. Only in human beings do we see the peculiar combination of a fixed "species nature" with an open-ended process of personal development -- as if the task of each man is to become his own species, so to speak. 

Which they say is true of angels, each being its own unique species. But aren't we a little like that -- as if freedom is individuality lived or actualized? 

In any event, human nature doesn't change on a collective basis, but we never stop changing on an individual one. What's going on here? How did we escape genetic necessity? And I wonder if Gödel has anything to say about it? (I'm reading a biography of him called Journey to the Edge of Reason.) 

If passing along one's genes is the Prime Directive, how to explain someone like Gödel, for whom "the highest aim" of his life was the "pleasure of cognition"? It seems he was a hedonist, but on an immaterial plane which isn't supposed to exist, certainly not in any real way (i.e., as real as the material/biological realm to which it may be reduced.) 

Nevertheless, in college Gödel was increasingly drawn "away from the more practical worlds of physical science to the ethereal realms of pure thought."  

How does pure thought get detached from pure biology, anyway? Or even pure physics, from which Gödel decided to turn away because the discipline was "logically so messy to him."  

I wish I had thought of that one back in 11th grade physics. "These equations are all very nice, Mr. Lamberth, but isn't this whole subject of physics a bit of a mess compared to pure thought?" 

For Gödel's "abiding interest" was "in getting to the very root of things," in both "science and in life." So he switched majors from physics to logic, and why not?

Gödel could never reconcile himself to the positivist standpoint that knowledge derives solely from empirical observations of natural phenomena. Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could directly perceive.

He regarded mathematics as

a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind. 

Then -- to the embarrassment of all and sundry -- he went and proved it, i.e., that "it is impossible ever to prove the consistency of a consistent system" from within the system, or in other words, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself." For him this meant that

the human mind can perceive evident axioms of mathematics that can never be reduced to a finite rule -- which means the human mind "infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine."

Therefore "If the human mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections."

But it's a catch 22, because supposing the mind "is nothing but a calculating machine," then it too "is subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem," so we once again escape its presumed completeness. Thus, "if I am not mistaken," there is

a whole world which is the set of mathematical truths, into which we gain access only through intelligence, just as there is a world of physical realities...

Gödel was "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning." 

So, Plato wins again? For what is this "immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" but the light streaming in from outside the cave? 

Here are some of his bottom line truths:

--There are other worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind.

--The world in which we now live is not the only one in which we live or have lived.

--Materialism is false.

--There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)... which deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness.

He also concluded that "Religions are for the most part bad, but not religion." (His early religious exposure was pretty inadequate, as is true for most people.)

Perhaps such-and-such a religion is the attempt to symbolize Religion as such? And religion as such "deals with concepts of the highest abstractness?"

Exact philosophy and theology. I don't know about you, but this is something I'm always thinking about. As things stand, it seems that both philosophy and theology are a bit messy. Is it possible to clean them up via pure thought? 

I don't know, but it would be a pleasure to try.

A Few Words About the Wordless

If we -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- are 75,000 years old, and philosophy doesn't get underway until a few thousand years ago, what did we argue about for 70+ thousand years? 

We all know about the so-called "axial age," which involved "broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE." New symbols for new experiences, apparently.

I remember reading a book by William Irwin Thompson called The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, in which he claims that "at the edge of history is myth," such that "the matrix out of which events arise does not appear to be an event at all." 

Which reminds me of dreaming, which we can also never trace to a "beginning." Rather, we always already find ourselves in the middle of the dream, before which is.... 

Whatever it is, words can't go there. Rather, they can only come out of there. It is pregnant with language, even while being beyond speech. Like the Logos-Tao or something: once you name it, it is no longer the thing -- or experience -- named.

Or Eckhart's ground, which he symbolizes in various paradoxical ways, for example "The naked God is without a name and is the denial of all names and has never been given a name." And "For the intellect to be free, it must become naked and empty and by letting go return to its prime origin."

But let's not get carried away, at least yet. Supposing we could drill down to the bottom of the psyche, what might we find there? Or is it like quantum physics, whereby our perceptions are conditioned by what we expect to see, i.e., wave or particle?

Grad school was much like this, involving various theories of the mind which were all plausible and consistent within themselves, even if they contradicted every other theory.

Now do religion.

It's difficult to do religion for the same reason one cannot know the beginning of a dream. Dreams must start somewhere, or come out of something, but we cannot go there, at least while awake. Joyce of course tried, but that's another post.

Voegelin refers to this mysterious and inexhaustible matrix as the unKnowable depth which we symbolize in more or less adequate ways. 

The depth itself is "beyond articulate experience"; it is "the one depth underlying all reality experienced in the primordial field of God and man, world and society," and "a mode of participation in the process of reality as a whole." This participation is the "site" where the depth "becomes consciously luminous."  

Now, is any of this helpful? Does it have any practical implications? Or is writing about this just a weird way to spend one's retirement? Back before Mr. Google changed the comment box, there was a quote there by Voegelin to the effect that

The quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. 

If this is true, then we need to do something about it, because man has been going about things in the wrong way.

What Was the Question?

This essay on Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History is just too obscure. I'm moving on to the next one, called The Gospel and Culture, in which Voegelin discusses one of our perennial concerns, which is

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

It seems I already wrote a number of posts on this very essay, so let's find out if any of it still makes sense.

***

Voegelin takes a "scientific" approach to revelation, seeing it as a long historical process of successive insights into the ground of being: thus, "in the end,"

the Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long "historical drama of revelation."

 ***

Now, if we are still trying to make sense of the Word in our historical time and cultural context, this is no different from what the early fathers did; and furthermore, if they hadn't -- if 

the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history. 

At the time of the early church, "the culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

***

If Christ is the answer, what is the question?

Voegelin cites the Dutch Catechism, which "begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist?"

We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence (Dutch Catechism).

Now, there is a kind of answer that is technically correct but existentially wrong, or at least incomplete. It is the difference between, say, knowing how to swim and actually diving into the water and doing so; the former is abstract and secondary, the latter embodied and primary.

Except this relation can often be reversed, such that one begins living in the abstract theory, so everything one sees is conditioned by it. Such a one has all the answers but has forgotten the Question. 

In this way, the Answer becomes a kind of existential defense mechanism -- a matrix or second reality superimposed on the first. (Which is reminiscent of how ideologies are lodged in the LH, to such an extent that they can eclipse RH contact with reality.)

***

One of Voegelin's main themes is how we deploy symbolism in order to capture and convey a more primary experience. Again, whatever the field or discipline, this relation can be reversed, such that the dogma displaces the experience:

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man (Voegelin).

Harsh, but we all know the type. This process occurs when

the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as "non-Christian attitude." 

*** 

The very "life of reason" is 

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer... 

Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however..., can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... 

The answer will not help the man who has lost the question, and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer...

***

Back to the present, I suppose we need to recover the question to which Christ is still the answer.  

Seems to me that the Question of questions is always the same -- pardon my French, but it is a startled  WTF?! in the wake of the raw experience of being. And many layers of superficial, ideological, conventional, and defensive answers must be peeled away before we get down to the experience of this Question.

An extreme question calls for an extreme answer? 

"Existence," says Voegelin, "is not a fact." Rather, "if anything," it

is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.

Only "in this In-Between of darkness and light arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life."

So, where does this leave us? I don't know, but it calls to mind the alcoholic who must hit bottom before putting his faith in a greater power that can restore him to sanity. Come to think of it, there's an aphorism for that:

We should not believe in the theologian's God except when He resembles the God Who is called on in distress.

On the Experience and Symbolization of Cosmic Depth

Next up is an essay by Glenn Hughes on Voegelin's essay Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History. Records indicate that I too wrote a meditative essay on this essay back in 2012, and let's see if anything holds up. 

One reason this essay interests me is that it confronts one of the problems addressed in the bʘʘk, which is to say, the equivalence of experiences that use diverse symbols to describe them (or sometimes the same symbol for different experiences).

Because these symbols differ, people may be misled into believing they are describing different realities.

Voegelin writes that "What is permanent in the history of mankind is not the symbols but man himself in search of his humanity and its order" (emphasis mine). Too often, it seems that we either conflate symbols that are distinct, or else distinguish symbols that are roughly equivalent (or symbolize the equivalent experience).

For example, the Allah who is so akbar to Islamic terrorists is not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Conversely, Schuon maintained that Buddhists have the experience of God even if they lack the name. 

Voegelin criticizes philosophers who adopt "the belief that the truth of existence is a set of propositions" which are "demonstrably true and therefore acceptable to everybody." 

"In vain [the philosopher] will look for the one set of true propositions," for which reason we can "hardly blame him if in the end he decides that skepticism is the better part of wisdom and becomes an honest relativist and historicist."

Voegelin suggests that "The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason, whether Greeks or barbarians, have in a sense been Christians." 

Regarding that last comment, a later essay in this book has a quote by Justin Martyr to the effect that

"Christ is the Word (logos) of whom every race of men were partakers," so that "those who lived reasonably [in accordance with the Word or reason] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists."

Hmm. It seems that this Logos is always available to man in the experiential order, for example, "among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like them," not to mention Abraham, Moses, Elijah, "and many others."

And why not? To put it the other way around, why reduce the living experience to a narrowly objective proposition? The letter killeth, and all that.

In the past we've often spoken of the "depth" dimension of the cosmos. Without it, we would have no way of perceiving the shallowness of so many people, philosophies, experiences, explanations, politicians, works of art, etc. 

I attribute this perception of cosmic depth to what we call the soul, which is why soullessness (relatively speaking) and shallowness are always found together, change my mind.  

Voegelin says something similar, and now I wonder if it's the symbolization of an equivalent experience (such equivalences again being the subject of the essay under discussion). "For Voegelin, the 'depth of the cosmos'"

is an elementary fact; further, it is a fact that requires... for each of us adequate expression, or "symbolization," if we are to successfully orient ourselves in existence.

So, we all must find a way to adequately symbolize the experiential depth of cosmic existence, or, -- as described in yesterday's post -- 

We lock out one part of reality, we ridicule it, deconstruct it, psychologize it, and then throw it out the window, with nothing seemingly having been lost or destroyed, since there was nothing there to begin with.

Depth is one of the things we can toss out the window and then fail to notice it because it has been tossed out the window: experientially "there was nothing there to begin with" and no one there to experience it.

Now, some -- many -- people recoil from depth, in my experience because it covaries with unity, or with making connections between things they would prefer to leave unconnected. Which is why it is difficult to conduct psychotherapy, since there is a part of the patient fighting against the unsettling depth and the disturbing connections.

On a societal level this is of course the role of journalism, i.e., to fail to notice obvious connections and to always keep things on the surface. But at some point in the past half century academia began to serve the same function, and here we are. 

But these are all just my opinions. We've hardly touched on the essay. Hughes goes on to say that "symbols of the cosmic depth may be more adequate or less adequate to the reality of this depth," and ain't that the truth. 

What happens when one has an experience of the depth but there are no symbols available to symbolize it? I'm pretty sure that a religious vocabulary is perhaps the most common way to express this vertical depth for the average man.  

There's also poetry or music, but to try to use a scientific vocabulary to symbolize the experience is to deny the experience. Indeed, how can a world-immanent ideology speak of transcendence?

Now, to say there are different expressions of equivalent experiences is not to say that some expressions aren't more adequate (nor some experiences more deep), for "some articulations are superior to others in representing a more refined or more differentiated understanding of a particular truth."

Sorry to leave you hanging, but it's getting late, so that's about it for this morning. To be continued...

Immortality While We Wait?

Our next essay is on an essay by Voegelin called "Immortality": Experience and Symbol. If that sounds familiar, it's because we blogged about it ourselves way back in 2014. Let's see if anything is worth recovering: 

For Voegelin, religion begins in a religious experience that is codified via symbolism. Thus, "the symbols in question intend to convey a truth experienced." 

Unlike more conventional symbols, these "are not concepts referring to objects existing in time and space but carriers of a truth about nonexistent reality." As such, the symbols are meant to facilitate "a consciousness of participation in nonexistent reality."

And when he says "nonexistent," he doesn't mean "unreal," rather, immaterial and transcendent. For example, the statement "all men are created equal" is not derived from any empirical observation, but is nonetheless real and true for all time. And it is true even if no one has discovered it, or if people have forgotten the experience that engendered it.

One of Voegelin's great concerns is what happens when the experiential reality from which the symbols derive their meaning is no longer conveyed or accessed. 

Sometimes this can occur because the symbol is overly reified in such a way that it excludes experience of the engendering reality that brought it about. Then religious symbolism becomes a kind of empty shell, or shadow of itself. 

For when "misunderstood as propositions referring to things in the manner of propositions concerning objects of sense perception," this provokes "the reaction of skepticism." 

Now, what could be the engendering experience symbolized by the word "immortality?" For it seems that no human group is unfamiliar with the concept. Indeed, one definition of humanness could be "awareness of mortality," and therefore immortality. 

That's about as far as we got before discretely changing the subject. Now let's see if this new essay advances the discussion. As alluded to above, Voegelin does not 

speak in terms of an idea. He wants to get to the heart of the experience that has engendered the symbol of immortality (which in turn has become an "idea" or even a "dogma").

Yes, but who has experienced immortality? Well, as we know, "Human existence is existence in tension 'between time and the timeless.'" And

the variety of symbols that point toward the timeless, immortality among them, are ways in which we as human beings attempt to understand and make sense of that larger reality and the structure of existence. 

So, the word immortality is a symbol of the experience of timelessness? Perhaps, but in any event,

When symbols such as "immortality," "soul," "spirit," or even "God" become dogmatic assertions, unmoored from the engendering experiences in which they were grounded, the skeptic or ideologue can demolish the symbols as meaningless...  

Now, this alienation from the experience can occur for the religious literalist no less than for the atheist, for both, in their own way, reify the symbol:

The only way to recover the truth is by a return to the experiences, the very real experiences... which engendered the symbols in the first place. 

Now, supposing we live in the tension between immanence and transcendence, it may equally be symbolized time and eternity, respectively. But this is a paradoxical space, because, properly speaking, we live neither in time nor eternity, but deploy those terms more as "directions" or "poles" of the tension in which we actually live. 

We are coming up against the limits of the expressible, but it seems that the immanentization of transcendence -- or the temporalization of eternity -- is both a cause and consequence of alienation "from the most basic structure of existence." As a result, 

We lock out one part of reality, we ridicule it, deconstruct it, psychologize it, and then throw it out the window, with nothing seemingly having been lost or destroyed, since there was nothing there to begin with.

Now that I'm thinking about this, something very similar must occur with the use of the symbol "providence" for the experience that engenders it. I'm thinking in particular of how easy it is to ridicule Trump for saying that it was providence that spared him from the assassin's bullet. 

Maybe, maybe not, but the experience is the experience, and he is hardly the first to experience it.

It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said, and I wish I could remember what it was -- something to the effect that one man's religious experience will be inaccessible to another, and that each of us has access to only a piece of the puzzle, with no one able to see or experience the whole area rug.

Existential Normality?

Our next essay -- called Debate and Existence -- has to do with the impossibility of debating someone who not only has a different conception of existence, but actually inhabits a different existence -- one of those second realities alluded to in yesterday's post:

rational discussion with ideologues is unlikely to succeed, since their mode of existence is willfully untrue insofar as they ignore or deform one or more constitutive elements of reality.

The most obvious contemporary example that comes to mind is the impossibility of "debating" someone who exists in a world in which it is possible for one sex to change into the other. Might as well debate a mental patient over the reality of his hallucinations. 

The essay touches on "the breakdown of rational discourse caused by the prevalence of ideological thinking in the modern age." Here again, this breakdown is not a result of

an impasse owing to disagreement between two positions within the parameters of what might plausibly be true, but rather, a conflict between "two modes of existence, existence in truth and existence in untruth."

This occurs -- you will have noticed -- when one of the disputants "refuses to recognize and live within reality as commonly experienced, opting instead to operate in a 'Second Reality.'" This latter term refers to "imaginative constructs of ideological thinkers who want to eclipse the reality of existential consciousness."

Now, it is entirely fair to ask how we know we aren't the ideologues living in an imaginary second reality. Certainly an atheistic materialist would say this of us. What could be more real than good old matter?

This is addressed in a later essay, but for now let's ponder the fact that Voegelin posits what amounts to a normative stance toward the totality of reality (for which reason he uses terms such as "deformation" and "pneumopathology" for people who fall short of the normative stance). Such ideologues

refuse to accept the human condition as it is and construct alternate realities that are more to their liking. Ideology is thus rooted in revolt rather than error -- it is a state of spiritual alienation or... pneumopathology.

The human condition as it is. Well, how is it? And please be as concrete and specific as possible. No dodging, equivocation, or Krautsplaining. 

ancient thinkers seemed well aware of the possibility of rejecting reality.... [and] that existence in untruth is a perennial possibility. 

Unresponsive. Exactly what is the reality we shouldn't reject, and what is existence-in-truth? 

Well, good: the next section is called Recovering the Truth of Existence, and let's see if it delivers on the promise.

Here we go: Voegelin defines "truth of existence"

as the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the condicio humana.

Well, what is this fundamental structure of the human condition?  It "takes place in the 'metaxy,'" by which he means

that we exist in the midst of tensions between poles of existence symbolized as transcendence and immanence, good and evil, immortality and mortality, and so forth.  

Nor can this tension ever really be eliminated -- short of death -- because we are always participants in it:

we are actors within reality rather than observers of it from afar. This means that we cannot obtain a Gods-eye view on reality -- we do not have access to complete knowledge of the whole of reality. 

At best we are participant-observers from within the Tension. We are oriented to transcendence but this nevertheless takes place in historical time and indeed constitutes historical time, for the alternative would be a static immanence (or I suppose the "static transcendence" sought by nondual mystics). 

Yada yada, does any of this have a practical application? 

Well, "everyone," it seems, is vulnerable to "the temptation to fall from uncertain truth to certain untruth," or to essentially barter the truth of existence for certitude -- to dogmatize experience in the Tension.

We all want to find a solid foundation on which to build our lives, but the participatory and metaxic character of existence means that a perfectly solid and objective foundation is unavailable to us.

Wouldn't a Christian say that this is the whole point of revelation -- to provide a rock of certitude on which to lean?

Well, yes, but with important qualifications, because it is possible for Christianity to be dogmatized and transformed into a kind of one-and-done frozen ideology, when it is the sine qua non of a dynamic, open, and living relationship with the transcendent person. Jesus doesn't eliminate the tension but renders it fruitful. 

We must bear in mind that 

forgetfulness and revolt are possibilities for each of us and that the struggle between ideologues and non-ideologies mirrors a "debate" that takes place within each individual. 

Hmm. Like a symbolic debate in a garden over a couple of trees?

Stringing together a few passages from above:

 --ancient thinkers were well aware of the possibility of rejecting reality.

-- everyone is vulnerable to the temptation to fall from uncertain truth to certain untruth.

--ideology results from a refusal to accept the human condition as it is and construct alternate realities that are more to their liking. It is thus rooted in revolt rather than error.

New Writ Has Come to Light

Or at least I'm reading a new volume on Eric Voegelin's Late Meditations and Essays. He has a ginormous body of work, but it turns out that much of what he wrote is rendered more or less obsolete in light of these last works. 

Which would have been nice to know before I slogged through all those earlier works.

Voegelin’s thought continued to develop at a rapid pace during the last two decades of his life, and his work found “not only its final but its most profound expression” during this period.... 

The meditative analyses and essays written in the culminating phase of Voegelin’s career not only expand and deepen his work as a whole, but also revise central components of it in ways that compel reconsideration of even his most widely read texts.

The book consists of essays about these late essays. I've only read the first one, which is about the rise of Nazism. How was this possible? What prior conditions were necessary for its emergence?

The same conditions that must exist for any ideology to hijack human consciousness and plunge it into a "second reality." Before this can occur, the person must somehow be alienated from primary -- AKA real -- reality. Which, it seems, is a constant temptation going back -- in my estimation -- to Genesis 3.

Man is a spiritual being open at both ends, i.e., to immanence and transcendence: closed off from the latter, "there occurs a loss of reality, insofar as this divine being, this ground of being, is indeed reality too." Again, total reality = immanence + transcendence.

The closure to transcendence typically results in the substitution of "a diminished or shrunken human reality for the Divine Ground of Being." And unfortunately, "dedivinizing is always followed by dehumanizing." 

Always? Yes, insofar as humanness and transcendence co-arise and are inseparable (or separable only in the imagination). 

Ever wonder why the rabble who disagree with us are so stupid?

First, because of a loss of reality, a human being becomes unable to properly orient his or her action in the world. Accordingly, he acts stupidly. 

Oh. That explains a lot. Because of a "defective image of reality" there is a loss of "experience of certain sectors of reality," and with it, a loss of "the language to characterize and evoke reality." Full reality, it seems. becomes an unknowable unknown:

That means that parallel to the loss of reality and to stupidity there is always the phenomenon of illiteracy. 

No offense though:

Voegelin warned his audience that terms such as stupidity and illiteracy (along with ignorance, rabble, and several others) were not terms of abuse but of concrete description.

Having said that, there is the "honorable stupidity" of the everyday dimwit, and "a higher or intelligent stupidity" that we know too well. The latter is "not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence," which "presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right." 

This is how the second realities of the contemporary ideologue "can become socially dominant," displacing the first (and only) reality. "Such a society perpetuates the highest betrayal of humanity," and here we are.

In summary, pneumopathology begins with "the initial non-recognition of reality and closure to the reality of the spirit." 

This "destruction of the ordering center" of the human being prevents "rational analysis" of the pathological appeal to disorder. There then "appears in place of the neglected reality the ersatz reality of the ideologies up to and including National Socialism."  

How does this square with present times? Conveniently, my inbox this morning contains an essay called The Importance of Knowing Reality, and let's find out what it says:

 “thought leaders” in many domains, from elite universities to athletics to airline CEOs to politics... seem to have departed from contact with reality in new and sharper ways.

No offense, but this sounds like intelligent stupidity and second realities. This malign combination

has given rise to calls for a return to prudence. Josef Pieper describes prudence as the “foremost of the virtues” and the “‘measure’ of justice, of fortitude, of temperance.” Prudence ‘“informs’ the other virtues; it confers upon them the form of their inner essence.”

Prudence is both an awareness of reality, of the order of “what is,” and the ability to act based on the reality of things. 

Prudence, it seems, is ordered to first reality. But

Modern philosophy has been skeptical of our capacity to know objective reality outside of our heads and the ideas we carry around between our ears.

Which is the very recipe for ideological second realities.

One essay down, thirteen to go.

Intellectual Abuse for My Own Demented Purposes

I wonder if the human genome -- or even the whole genetic program, from prokaryotes to humans -- is subject to Gödel's theorems? Is there something in the genetic program for which the program cannot account? How does the program even get to first base without a program to get there?

I shouldn't be abusing Gödel for my own demented purposes. However, I do have a couple books on him coming in the mail, and after digesting them I will presumably be in a more informed position to abuse his ideas. 

But let's think this through with our rudimentary understanding. Everyone knows there is a genetic code responsible for our lives. How then do we do transcend this formal system? For if we didn't so escape its entailments we could never even know of it. 

I touched on this in the book, but it is insufficiently fleshed out. But just as the mind cannot be reduced to any machine model, nor can Life be so reduced. Is DNA the secret of life, or Life the secret of DNA? Similarly, is the brain the secret of the mind, or vice versa?  

Theoretical biologist Robert Rosen writes that one implication of Gödel's theorems is that a universe "consisting of pure syntax" is "too poor to do mathematics in." 

From this he concludes that "contemporary physics is to biology as Number Theory is to a formalization of it," which means that there is always more to Life than can be contained in any reductive model: in short, semantics -- meaning -- can never be reduced to syntax -- order. 

Could Life ever be exhaustively expressed in a formal program? Nah: "Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program," and "There is always a a purely semantic residue that cannot be accommodated by the syntactical scheme."

Rosen essentially affirms that reality is always more complex than the simple formalizations in which we try to enclose it. Again, something always escapes the formal system, model, or quantification.

Let's ponder some paradoxical implications.

Can we prove free will doesn't exist? Absolutely, but only if we are free to know the truth of our condition.

Can we prove that evolutionary biology is a complete explanation of man? Sure, but only if we transcend the explanation.

Can we prove that the mind is the product of random evolutionary changes? No doubt, but only from a position outside or above those changes.

I would tie this back to what Voegelin says about our being situated between immanence and transcendence. Because there is always transcendence, no immanent explanation will ever be complete. 

Yesterday we touched on the need for revelation. What if -- just spiritballin' here -- the transcendent (Logos) becomes immanent (flesh) that the immanent may become transcendent?  

That would be a pretty good answer to Klavan's question at the end of yesterday's post -- "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"

There's still the dynamic space between immanence and transcendence, but instead of our perpetual reaching toward the latter pole, it reaches down into human nature, so our own reaching can finally get somewhere.

This would be an advance in our attempt to solve the puzzle of existence, like some kind of good news or something.

In fact, this morning Klavan's son Spencer addresses the questions posed by his father: our pre-Christian brethren -- stoics and the like -- took things pretty far in the direction of transcendence (↑). But  "magnificent as they are," they 

tend to exude a kind of weariness at their pinnacle. Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and the laughing philosopher, compassed between them the full range of human reactions to the natural world. Both of them concluded that it’s an endless flow of change -- everything always happens, so nothing ever really happens....

Those who grope their way up [↑] the mountain of human wisdom seem to reach the summit exhausted by the climb. If Christianity has something to add, it must be something you can’t work your way up to from below -- something that comes down [↓] onto the mountaintop from above, like thunder onto Sinai.

Something from totally outside the system definitively enters the system? Something radically unformalizable and irreducible? Something that cannot be modeled because it is the Model? The original Semantics that can never be reduced to syntax? The Way and the Life, only quite literally?

Like I said, I need to absorb these books on Gödel and figure out which one of us is more misguided. 

A Consistent But Incomplete Post

Now, this business of revelation: is it necessary, redundant, irrelevant, neutral, or harmful?

I suppose it depends on the revelation, but who are we to pretend to judge something that purportedly comes straight from God? Nevertheless, some kind of judgment must be made, but on what basis? 

Perhaps in the same way we judge a scientific theory, which will explain a great deal -- i.e., unify the phenomena -- in such a way that it doesn't unexplain what had previously been understood. 

Looked at this way, the revelation in question needs to make more sense of our lives than anything else on offer. It must transcend science while not in any way negating it, because science (obviously) explains a great deal, even if it has necessary limits. 

Let's think this through. First of all, we either need revelation or we don't. In other words, either we can form an accurate and complete map of the cosmos via wholly natural resources, or we can't. If we can't, then there is either no remedy to our ignorance, or we are in need of a vertical murmurandom to complete the epistemological circle.

It seems that we can never arrive at a complete and consistent model of reality. Stanley Jaki, in his Brain, Mind and Computers, correctly notes that Gödel's theorems prove

that even in the elementary parts of arithmetic there are propositions which cannot be proved or disproved in that system (emphasis mine).

And if that isn't enough to put a crimp your day, his analysis implies that "no formal system" of any kind "is immune to the bearing of Gödel's conclusion."

So, the mind is not, and cannot be, a logic machine. If it were, it could never know it, because it would be confined to the closed circle of logical entailment. Which I suspect also goes to our freedom, since it too escapes necessity. 

A machine

can have only a finite number of components and it can operate only on a finite number of initial assumptions....  

Gödel's theorem, therefore, cuts the ground under the efforts that view machines... as adequate models of the mind.

A machine "can never produce at least one truth, which the mind can without relying on other minds.... No matter how perfect the machine, it can never do everything that the human mind can." 

So, it seems that our most perfect manmade system of thought will necessarily have to put its faith in at least one thought or principle or axiom or assumption or intuition or speculation or delusion or hallucination that the system cannot justify, and which comes from outside (transcends) the system.

Therefore, if I am following my argument correctly, there is no escaping faith. 

Back to our opening statement: either we need revelation or we don't. Looks like we do, but just because we need it, that doesn't mean it exists. What we call revelation could be -- and for materialist must be -- just self-deception. It is as if we are unconsciously trying to get around the theorems by pretending to a completeness that is forever inaccessible to us.

However, I recently found out that Gödel not only believed in a personal God, but thought he could prove the existence of an afterlife:

I am convinced of this, independently of any theology. It is possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning that it is entirely consistent with the known facts. If the world is rationally constructed and has a meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife] (quoted in Wang).

It is indeed ironic "that the greatest logician since Aristotle" thought "God's existence could be proved a priori" (Goldstein).  

Nevertheless, which God? What is he like?  

Andrew Klavan asks, "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"  

Good questions.

The System of God

Talking about process philosophy is an exercise in gnostaliga for me, because this was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which in part tried to reconcile developmental psychology with Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures. Now I'm wondering if the latter could also be reconciled with spiritual development. 

First let's skim to see if anything has changed with regard to the science of dissipative structures over the past 35 years. Yada yada,

A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter....

Back in the day, I understood it to be matter, energy, and/or information -- for example, the system of the economy, which is one big exchange of information centering around price signals.

If we're talking about far-from-equilibrium conditions, I suppose the conditions don't get further than Creator and creation, or man and God, finite and infinite, absolute and relative. However, at the very least, the vertical ingression (↓) of grace -- or something like it, e.g., shakti, shekinah, barakha, etc. -- implies  an open system between these terms.  

Or, more experience-near are the ubiquitous phenomena of truth and beauty to which man is always properly open. Likewise, when we understand something it is because we abstract the form from the matter -- in other words, the intellect qua intellect is open to the abstract essences that in-form it.

In the Orthodox east they talk about the distinction between God's essence and energies, the latter available to us herebelow.

It's hard to think of a more concrete example of vertical exchange than communion. Prayer too presumes an open system between man and God. In fact, all of the sacraments are vehicles of grace, therefore presupposing an open cosmos. 

We might also compare the tension between immanence and transcendence to the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for a dissipative system. Collapsing this disequilibrium kills the system. This is what Voegelin calls CLOSED EXISTENCE or CLOSURE:

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with "open existence."

So man is quite literally an open system, open to truth, love, beauty, unity, in a word, transcendence. 

Now, the Trinity is -- in a manner of speaking -- a sort of open system, is it not? Bracken touches on this, writing, for example, that "the essence or nature of God is not in the first place an entity but an activity," i.e., perichoresis. 

It seems to me that it is also analogous to the particle/field complementarity in physics, such that the Persons are the "particles," the shared substance the "field," two complementary sides of a single reality. One can also discern a kind of discontinuity-within-continuity, i.e., the Persons are distinct but not separate. 

For our purposes, 

if the Trinity is a community of divine persons, then the Trinity is a relational reality with the consequence that creation as made in the image of God is constituted by finite entities in dynamic interrelation.

And why not? As above, so below. 

I suppose this would be the last word in vertical openness:

human beings who attain close personal union with God retain their finite identity as creatures even as they enter into an I-Thou relation with the three divine persons.

In conclusion,

The triune God as the all-comprehensive system of the divine communitarian life is both the transcendent origin and ultimate goal of the cosmic process as a vast network of dynamically interrelated and hierarchically ordered finite systems whose progressive growth in order and complexity began with the Big Bang and will ultimately end with full incorporation into the divine life.

Works for me.