David Bentley Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods: A Review

A straightforward title for a change, for the sake of some lonely future reader who will search those terms and, to his surprise and delight (or annoyance), end up here. 

Seems to be a popular book: #1 on amazon in metaphysics, #3 in religious philosophy, and #4 in consciousness and thought, some of our favorite subjects. 

No real reviews yet. Ours began a couple of posts back, and is an open ended process that will go on for as long as it takes to get the job done. We're up to part one, chapter III, called Fallacies of Method. It begins precisely where we left off in the previous post:

I take it as axiomatic that the quantitative by itself cannot explain the qualitative.

This is a point we've been belaboring for nearly two decades, only without ever reaching #1 in religion & philosophy, although we are presently bubbling under the top 2,500 in that category. 

Yesterday we spoke of the literally infinite gap between man and animal. There is a similarly infinite one between the largest quantity and the teensiest quality:

The difference -- the abyss -- separating these realms is, well, qualitatively absolute, and no increase in third-person knowledge can close that abyss.

Think about it: you can add multiples of one forever, but it will never add up to a single first-person experience of subjective interiority, of I am. No amount of math adds up to the mathematician who understands math. Why pretend otherwise? 

Oh, a lot of reasons that we'll no doubt be getting into. 

Now listen closely: an infinite distance can never be bridged by any number of finite steps. By definition, infinity is not something that can ever be reached, and it is a fallacy to imagine otherwise, for this constitutes 

the error of thinking that an infinite qualitative distance can be crossed, or even diminished, by a sufficient number of finite quantitative steps.

Here again, pay attention: "The distinction between objective physical events and subjective episodes" represents "an infinite, untraversable distance." And no amount of mindless steps or mechanical processes "would ever be enough to add up to even the most elementary of mental powers."

True, but where then does this leave us? It awakens us from the dream of materialism, but what do we put in its place? Yes, you could say "religion" or "spiritualism" or some other vague idealism, but we demand specificity. 

In a way, we want to be every bit as rigorous and precise as the quantitative approach, but is there such a thing as a rigorously qualitative approach? Or is this a job for the poetry department?

Come to think of it, I did once write a post called Precision Poetry. Let's have a look down there and see if anything is salvageable.   

Back in 2017, it was, and it touches on precisely what we're presently discussing,

the mystery of how subjectivity enters the cosmos and existence becomes experience -- or, how mere existence starts to experience itself. 

Nor can we properly speak of subjectivity "entering" the cosmos, or of existence "becoming" experience. Neither of these can be accurate; they are loaded with preconceptions that will lead us astray if taken at face value. It is 

similar to the mind-matter dualism, which is just a conclusion masquerading as a premise. The one is defined in terms of the other, but neither is defined in terms of itself. In other words, to say "mind-matter" is a way to conceal the fact that one has no earthly idea what mind (or matter) is. The terms are just placeholders for certain properties.

Another reminder that we -- human beings -- are always already situated between immanence and transcendence. The state is permanent and ineradicable, but the content changes. 

We also suggested that truly productive religious writing 

must always navigate between two shores, dogma or doctrine on one side, and a kind of indistinct cloud on the other. Geometry and music. Default to the former, and language becomes dead and saturated; veer toward the latter, and one is reduced to deepaking the chopra.

We also made the claim that "Precision poetry is not only possible, it is necessary. This is because truth and beauty converge and are ultimately two sides of the same reality."  

About this unity, Hart objects

in principle to all dualistic answers to any question. Every duality within a single reality must be resoluble to a more basic unity, a more original shared principle, or it remains a mystery.

As we have often argued, what look like dualities turn out to be complementary aspects or modes of a deeper or higher reality -- for example, immanence-transcendence. However, in all such complementarities, one must be ontologically prior. 

Thus, for example, no amount of immanence could ever add up to transcendence, but transcendence implies immanence. Likewise, no amount of inanimate matter adds up to Life, but Life is obviously present in matter. The same applies to time and eternity, subject and object, or even wave and particle. "If body and mind," for example,

are distinct and yet interact, then there's some ground of commonality that they share, more basic and encompassing than the difference between them....

[T]here must be some broader, simpler, more encompassing unity in which they participate, some more basic ontological ground, a shared medium underlying both and repugnant to neither. 

This is true, but again, can we be more precise? 

We'll get there -- I think -- but for now it is precisely clear "that all our quandaries begin with the mechanical philosophy" that simply reifies "one dimension of the real" while pretending to eliminate the other. 

It reminds me of what Robert Rosen says, that the rejected dimension of the real always returns through the back door, e.g., subjectivity, teleology, meaning, etc., leading to metaphysical contradiction and incoherence.

Hart keeps making the same point in different ways, e.g., "whatever the nature of matter may be, the primal reality of all things is mind," which cannot possibly -- in principle -- arise "from truly mindless matter." 

But here again, the converse is eminently possible, that "mind can become all things," such that "infinite mind" is "the ground and end of all things."

Certainly this was the premodern view, but we know better.

Do we? Not to go all Hegelian on you, but there is a kind of thesis (spiritualism), antithesis (materialism), and synthesis going on, but what is the synthesis?

The unification of Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit? 

Someone ought to write a book. Or start a blog. Call it One Cosmos.

End of Chapter III.

Downward Causation and the Infinite Distance Between Subjects and Objects

We have often written of the literally infinite distance between man and animal, and it's nice to see someone else literally saying the same thing, because it's not a popular opinion, among neither hardheaded materialists nor softhearted pet lovers (of which I am one). But facts are facts.

Why is this opinion unpopular among our materialist friends and tenured apes? Because to acknowledge a fundamental and ineradicable discontinuity between man and animal is to open the door to no end of immaterial, transcendental, and metaphysical mischief. Better to not let it open even a crack, lest the crackpots rush in -- for example, one of our own commenters.

If natural selection is not a complete, consistent, and final explanation of how we got here, then what is? It reminds me of the Taranto Principle, whereby liberals never learn how to properly argue because the media protects them from having to do so. Therefore, they confidently put forth transparently lame arguments that go completely unchallenged, thus encouraging further lameness (for example, last night).

According to the Taranto Principle, the media's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans.

Likewise, it would be difficult to imagine a more philosophically repellant and metaphysically repugnant doctrine than materialism, but here we are. 

Hart calls the Neo-Darwinian model "a partial, local, restricted truth within the embrace of a far larger, more vastly encompassing truth about the origin of life," and he's not wrong. Nor can "a strictly quantitative method"

illuminate a strictly qualitative phenomenon like consciousness, and a strictly third-person method can't illuminate a strictly first-person experience.

Like everyone else, my pronoun is I AM, and no amount of HE IS adds up to the first-person subjective interiority of the former. Indeed, "The sciences don't even have a means of asking the correct questions here," for 

We're talking about merely apparent quantitative associations between totally qualitatively dissimilar phenomena.

Our own private life "is wholly inaccessible to any scrutiny from outside." This first person experience of cosmic interiority may be a qualitative experience, but it is a primordial fact -- even the first fact -- we can know with absolute certitude. No one is going to mispronoun me with I AM NOT.

Give Schopenhauer credit for being on the right track. In Magee's biography, he writes that

Anyone who supposes that if all the perceiving subjects were removed from the world then the objects, as we have any conception of them, could continue in existence all by themselves has radically failed to understand what objects are. 

This is "the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself." Let's not do that. Rather, let us not lose sight of the subject who is correlate to all the objects experienced within its horizon. 

We know that subjects and objects exist. But why leap to the absurd conclusion that the former can be reduced to the latter? That's not an explanation, it's the failure of one, precisely -- an unexplanation.

Hart says something similar to Schopenhauer, that

everything that exists for us does so wholly within consciousness, and that's part of why consciousness isn't some discrete phenomenon among other phenomena..., it's the very ground and possibility of any phenomenon -- phenomenality as such -- the mind's openness both to itself and to the whole of reality.

"We have no world other than the one that comes to us in private awareness, and there's no method, scientific or otherwise, that allows us to get around this fact." 

Nor is this because of some lack of data that will eventually be discovered by science. Rather, we can confidently affirm in principle 

that no purely empirical explanation of the relation of physical to mental events will ever be found.... The problem has nothing to do with the limitations of our current scientific techniques or knowledge; it's entirely one of logic. 

To repeat, there is an infinite gap or "qualitative abyss between the objective and subjective dimensions of reality." One can always posit a mind-matter dualism to paper over the abyss, but the Raccoon finds this metaphysical barbarism to be unacceptable on aesthetic grounds alone. 

Rather, one suspects a deeper order in which these two are seen as complementary poles of a single reality, more on which as we proceed. We might even call these poles -- with Voegelin -- immanence and transcendence, but let's stick with Hart, who rightly affirms that

the notion that first-person experience could be reduced to third-person functions is utterly devoid of rational content. It is like claiming one's height is reducible to one's charisma.

In other words, the naive reification of a category error. In reality, "the logical constraints that govern the sciences absolutely prohibit them from any meaningful empirical or theoretical investigation of the mind's inner states," so stop pretending otherwise.

We're still only in the second chapter, and the rest of the book promises to fill in the details, but Hart previews his conclusion that

mind is the ground of reality and that, moreover, infinite mind -- the mind of God -- is the source and end and encompassing element of every finite mind. 

I would turn this around and say that finite minds are a kind of prolongation of Infinite Mind, but hold in abeyance for the moment whether this is what folks call God. Again, that's too loaded a term, which is why I prefer the empty symbol, or cosmic placeholder, or pneumatological variable O. O simply is. We have plenty of time to determine exactly what it is.

Suffice it to say that "as long as our thinking is confined within that barren paradigm, the presence of mind within this supposedly mindless material order will remain an enigma without solution."

One solution is to "reject the underlying premise that matter is something essentially dead and unthinking." This was Whitehead's organismic approach -- that biology is the study of larger organisms, while physics is the study of the smaller ones. And cosmology is the study of the largest organism of all.

Here at One Cosmos we often talk about vertical causation, AKA (↓), and it is nice to find out that someone else I think is in our tree:

Mind and life -- and language too -- are possible only by way of a kind of "downward" causation that informs their "upward" evolution in particular beings.

Perhaps the whole existentialada is "form descending into matter, matter ascending into form, producing... life... producing everything." 

It's also nice to see our favorite theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen, listed in the index. I don't know if he inspired the following passage, but it sounds like something he'd say:

Why not see the laws of life as primary rather than as the accidental effects of lifeless causes? 

Who says biology can't be our paradigmatic science instead of physics? "It stands to reason, at least, that if life and mind are one, then life is also a kind of rational semantics and syntax," and one of Rosen's main points is that semantics (meaning) can never be reduced to syntax (order).

As for the evolution of language, it "can't simply have been an ascent from 'below,'" but rather "exists primarily as a 'higher' causality informing 'lower' levels of causality..."

Which reminds us of Polanyi, and of how the higher levels use the boundary conditions of the lower, in the way words rely on letters, sentences on words, paragraphs on sentences, story on paragraphs, and meaning on story, all conditioned from the top down.

End of chapter II. Chapter III tomorrow.

Absurcular Closure to the Infinite Horizon of Intelligibility

To repeat what was said yesterpost, there is a fundamental and ineradicable difference between man and animal, and that's all there is to it. Indeed, to deny it is to affirm it.  

In the final unalysis -- or synthesis -- man is "Total intelligence, free will, and disinterested sentiment," with the consequent vocation to know the True, will the Good, and love the Beautiful, and why not? What's the alternative? Believing the false, doing bad, and celebrating the ugly?

Leave progressives alone!

Moreover, man is an open system, both vertically and horizontally: he "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven" (Schuon). 

Maybe you don't like the word "heaven." If so, just say "transcendent telos." And if that's too fancy, just say O.

I'm partial to telovator.

Say what you want, but "Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal." 

Now, intelligence isn't just anything, rather, it is both ordered to truth and consubstantial with it: "Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, the certitude of the Absolute." Remove the latter and truth is reduced to relativism, which is no truth at all. 

The performative contradiction of "absolute relativism" is the stupid beyond which there can be no stupider, whereby "the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom," and here we are. 

Again, these are all authoritative truths vested with the authority of your own intelligence, or intelligence as such. Intelligence has the right to Truth, or to hell with it. 

Now, how does this square with the book under discussion, David Bentley Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life? For some reason he chose to write the book in the form of a dialogue with four characters, each a voice of the author himself, including a snarky materialist skeptic who speaks 

for my doubts and hesitations, my impatience with an attitude of certitude where some degree of uncertainty seems not only inevitable but virtuous, and perhaps even for my frustration at not being any better able than anyone else is to prove my convictions on these issues to be absolutely correct, to the world at large or even to myself.

Why would someone include other voices in his own writing? 

Good question, Petey.

It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.

Good observation, Nicolás.

Speaking of Gödelian incompleteness, 

almost all of the solutions regularly proposed to the question of the origin and nature of mind are not really solutions at all, but rather mere reformulations of the question itself, restating it in ways that momentarily... look like answers.  

The name "Gödel" does not appear in the index, but of course such mechanistic and reductive pseudo-explanations are circular: materialism in, tenure out. 

In many cases, the entire project of the philosophy of mind today is simply an elaborate effort to arrive at the prejudice as though it were a rationally entailed conclusion, no matter what contortions of reasoning this might require. 

I remember someone saying something about the abuse of intelligence replacing wisdom.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how fanatical this devotion to an essentially mechanistic materialism can prove at times. Otherwise seemingly sane and intelligent persons regularly advance arguments that, but for their deep and fervent faith in a materialist picture of nature, they would undoubtedly recognize as absurd and circular.

 Absurcular, to coin a word.

We know from our Voegelin how ideological second realities are superimposed on the one & only. Come to think of it, we also know this from Genesis 3. 

In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.

 Yes, you already mentioned that. 

This is the chief danger in any ideology: the power of determining our vision of the world before we have ever turned our eyes toward it.  

The idea is to check one's theory in light of the evidence: "only in modern philosophy of mind is it routinely the case that the phenomenon is eliminated in favor of the theory," such that reason becomes captive to an "arid dogmatism."

Only in modern philosophy of mind? How about in politics, academia, journalism, COVID, climate change, gender ideology, and the racial grievance industry, for starters? 

Now, one thing we've suggested in the past is that the mysteries of life, mind, and language (or meaning) converge at the top (or rather, descend from it), and are otherwise groundless and inexplicable. 

Someone ought to write a bʘʘK.

Hart agrees that not only are Life and Mind "irreducible," but "they are one and the same irreducibility." He bungs in Language "as yet another aspect of one and the same irreducible phenomenon, ultimately inexplicable in mechanistic terms." 

After all, it is One Cosmos.

We also often highlight the mysterious ordering of intelligence to intelligibility, and how these are two sides of an Infinite Act of Intelligence. Well, a careful investigation of this cosmic situation

discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities [mind, life, language], and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God.   

Or even more simply, open engagement with O. 

As we so often say, any truth is a participation in, and reflection of, the Truth without which there can be none. The material order "originates in the spiritual," and "all rational activity,"

from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind's constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God...

And "the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God."

That's the same infinite horizon of intelligibility we often call O, since God tends to be saturated with so many idiosyncratic and conflicting meanings, prejudices, and preconceptions that it may interfere with the larger point, that the only alternative to this view is the absurcular tenured animal alluded to above.

Maybe a good place to pause. This might take a while.

The Authority of Intelligence Itself

Once things in my head began to settle down a bit, I became fixated on the subject of subjects, which are literally the last thing you'd expect to pop up in a universe with nothing but objects for 10 billion years. Suffice it to say, it is an enduring mystery how to squeeze a subject out of an object.  

Which is one of the themes of the book we will soon be discussing, supposing it draws me in, which it may or may not do. I can't say I care for his -- what's the word?

Hoity toity? Highfalutin?  

Whatever you call it, his pompous prose doesn't meet the down-to-earth standards of the Raccoon Style Guide, but who does? Some have the style but not the substance, while some have the substance but not the style.  

Ian McGilchrist -- whose latest book we spent a month reviewing last year -- likes the book, even calling Hart "one of the greatest living writers on theology and the cosmos," but we'll be the judge of that. 

He goes on to call it "a telling counter-argument  to reductionist materialism" that is "subtle, imaginative, beautifully written -- and highly original."

But we'll be the judge of that.

Who are we to judge? By what authority? Who died and left us in charge of cosmic theology?

No one did. It's just that so few writers were engaging in it to our satisfaction, we just claimed the mantle for ourselves. Doing a job earthlings don't want.  

Alfred North Whitehead was one of the last serious thinkers to elucidate a grand cosmic metaphysical scheme of everything. Credit for trying -- and we don't hesitate to plunder him for all he's worth -- but we have some serious issues with process theology, full stop. It doesn't work for me to say that God exists, only not yet. 

For me this paradox of Being and Becoming is ultimately resolved via the triune Godhead, but that's a different post.

Back to this question of Authority. We know from our Gödel that any formal system cannot be both consistent and complete, but will contain truths which the system cannot justify. 

So right away we are faced with a choice: either we can, or cannot, know Truth itself. There is no system that can get us there. Rather, we either see it or we don't (or see it via "faith").

Which goes to one of the purposes of revelation, which is to convey truths that are otherwise inaccessible to us. Such truths can never be proved from our side of the veil, but must be accepted on faith. Faith in an authority.

Now, at the same time, I'm re-re-reading one of Schuon's last works, in which he -- as is his custom -- makes many authoritative statements seemingly backed up by nothing more than his own authority.  

But his type of authority strikes me as fundamentally different from Hart's kind, which is thoroughly conventional. He wants to be taken seriously by all the right people, whereas Schuon just dismisses the right people as hopelessly wrong and hardly worth refuting. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

From the foreword: "metaphysics aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe, which extends from the Divine Order to terrestrial contingencies." 

Boom. No apologies, no reservations, and no attempt to justify this view before the tribunal of Right People. The latter are not to be taken seriously except as a serious distraction, for "we live in a world wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom," and you can say that again.

We won't start our formal review of The Play of Masks this morning, but just highlight the first (authoritative) sentence of the book: 

Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures. 

Take it or leave it. Supposing you take it, read on:

Being total, the intelligence takes cognizance of all that is, in the world of principles as well as that of phenomena; being free, the will may choose even that which is contrary to immediate interest or to what is agreeable; being disinterested, sentiment is capable of looking at itself from without, just as it can put itself in another's place.

"Every man can do so in principle, whereas animals cannot."

So, there is a fundamental and ineradicable difference between man and animal, and that's all there is to it. And man in principle "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven." Similar to what we wrote in yesterday's post,

Total intelligence, free will, disinterested sentiment; and consequently to know the True, to will the Good, to love the Beautiful.

Horizontal and Vertical: the former "concerns the cosmic, hence phenomenal, order," the latter "the metaphysical, hence principial, order." 

Now, Schuon may be an authority, but supposing one understands what he just said, it is thanks to a kind of "inner authority" that assents to self-evident truth. We just need a little reminder. 

And not to get ahead of ourselves, but revelation functions as just such a vertical reminder -- again, emanating from "outside" the cosmic system but by no means contrary to it or to reason. Indeed, "Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, the certitude of the Absolute." 

At least when you think about what thinking is. Remove the Absolute and it is nothing, reducing to that shrunken world mentioned above, "wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom." 

Fasting forward to the last sentence of this essay,

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God.

Again, authoritative, but with the purpose of awakening or resonating with the inner authority that is Intelligence itself.

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.