The Great Attractor Over the Subjective Horizon

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

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

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

Yes, it seems to be a common enough sentiment:

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

But in reality, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of chapter.

Exact Science and Science of the Inexact

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

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

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

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

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

And 

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

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

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

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

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

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

So we just give up?

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is God's fingerprint in human clay.

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore, fill in the blank. 

Life is always already mind? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, but we can:

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

Hmm. Can you say a little more?

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

But 

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

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

Metaphysical Yada Yada and Reductive Belowviation

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

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

Elsewhere he suggests that 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If interiority isn't irreducible, than nothing is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put conversely,

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

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

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

2,500 Year Argument Resolved by Obscure Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

But for Aristotle,

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

This is no doubt oversimplifying, but 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vertical Rawdoggin' in the Counterworld

Word of the day: rawdoggin'. The term

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

The meme seems to have been popularized by a fellow

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

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

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

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

Then again, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution is one thing, but evolutionism 

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

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

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

Bottom-Up or Top-Down?

Here's where we are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well,

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

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

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

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

This morning I ran across a comment by Einstein:

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Phenomenon and the Transcendent Logos

Just a short post. To reset, we're looking into two main subjects: the nature of the human phenomenon and the possibility of a coherent non-absurdity to describe all of reality. 

But these two are deeply related, because if the human phenomenon is itself absurd, then so too is everything else. 

To put it another way, the possibility of non-absurdity -- of meaning -- passes through the human subject.

Here's a thought:

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence....

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon, emphasis mine).

So, let's be honest: remove the divine from the divine-human complementarity, and a total collapse of meaning takes place, with no possibility of its resuscitation.  

If you don't like "divine-human," then just say "immanence-transcendence" and the tension between, where man qua man always resides. To collapse man into total immanence is to destroy any possibility of meaning.

How does this accord with Hart? Well, there's lots of arguing back and forth about whether the mind could be a machine, but in reality, "Even the most ordinary mental acts" "depend on this rational appetite for the absolute." "No machine ventures out from itself... toward the whole of reality," whereas "in living minds"

knowledge becomes actual only as a result of that prior orientation toward the [transcendent] absolute. In rational natures, there's an immanent and indeterminate power of discovery that's prompted into action by the rational will's transcendent determinacy toward being as a whole...

"We enjoy an intrinsic capacity for unlimited novelty of apprehension without prior constraints on what we may find or create,"

because thought is in its essence an "open system" of discovery and therefore precisely what computation is not.

So basically -- as we've been saying for two decades -- man is a vertically open system, open to the transcendent pole of being, to the Great Beyond. Or, in Schuon's words, 

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, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.

Now, from what I understand, Hart is an orthodox Christian, but he (like Schuon) expresses a lot of sympathy for the metaphysics of Vedanta, for example, "that mind is the ground of reality, and that infinite mind is the source and end of finite mind." 

"Consciousness comes first or it comes not at all," and

I do believe Indian philosophical tradition addressed the conditions and mysteries of consciousness far earlier in history, and with considerably greater subtlety, than its Western counterpart did....

And "it's not just the interior mystery of consciousness that informs my convictions regarding the real nature of mind. There's also the mindlike structure of the world, and especially of life."

That's the end of the chapter, so where does it leave us? 

It seems that the human mind partakes of Mind as such, and that Mind as such is bound up with Life and with Language-Logos, but we shall have to wait and see where this is all leading... 

Absurcular vs. Genuine Humanism

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when asked why he hasn't abandoned Catholicism, Stephen Dedalus replies 

What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

It seems there can be coherent and incoherent absurdities, but what we really want to know is whether there can be a coherent non-absurdity that describes all of reality, from top to bottom and both inside and out. 

Recall what Hart said yesterday about another coherent absurdity, eliminatvism:

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity. 

It reminds us of an aphorism:

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence. 

It also reminds us of Gödel, in that a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete. Trying to force it to be both results in absurdity. 

Hart cites one thinker who promulgated a thoroughly rigid and complete scientism, the result being "a bizarre combination of absolute irrationality and absolute logical consistency."

In this chapter -- called Behaviorism and Epiphenomenalism -- Hart rightly observes that "every materialism must become an eliminativism in the end." And what is eliminated is precisely the most interesting, important, and shocking fact in all of existence, the human subject. 

Nevertheless, just because we eliminate eliminativism, it doesn't automatically provide the coherent non-absurdity we seek. We can easily replace it with another coherent absurdity, i.e., an ideological second reality.

Maybe we just have to face the fact that reality is an irreducible mystery, and 

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

In the past, I have suggested that we can reverse engineer an argument for God via the following: first, 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

But man is not an absolute insignificance. Therefore God.

This is really just another way of saying that meaning -- significance -- is real, and that it is a top-down phenomenon. As Hart describes it, "meaning exists at another level of agency, distinct from the merely physical, and is therefore irreducible to a physicalist description."

This is very much in Polanyi's wheelhouse, but thus far his name hasn't come up. Indeed, his last book was called Meaning, and its bottom line is that we give meaning to science, rather then vice versa, and why not?

I don't want to get sidetracked, but the main point again is that meaning is conditioned from the top down. It is an irreducibly vertical phenomenon, which is why a purely horizontal and immanent cosmos not only eliminates any possibility of meaning, but tosses out man in the bargain. To repeat what Schuon said the other day,

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

Hmm. Yesterday we were wondering what would be the opposite of reductionism. How about humanism? No, not secular (AKA absurcular) humanism, but rather, the human phenomenon and all it entails. I've always felt that Schuon is a true humanist. For example, he writes that

There is a great deal of talk these days about “humanism,” talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly “human.”

On the one hand, "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial." A false humanism

is the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. 

But in reality, 

the “human miracle” must have a reason for being that is proportionate to its nature, and it is this that predestines -- or “condemns” -- man to surpass himself; man is totally himself only by transcending himself. 

Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals.

Bottom line: "What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition." 

I think we've arrived at our coherent non-absurdity: a true humanism that doesn't cut itself off from the divine, but rather, is open to it and thereby conditioned from the top down. But let's see if Hart is anywhere near the same attractor. 

Regarding a completely consistent reductionism, he writes that "to deny the evidence of one's own experience on purely doctrinaire, abstractly metaphysical principles... is an abdication of reason." But to then go so far as to 

produce an entirely intentional artifact like a book arguing that intentionality is an illusion isn't merely odd; it's stirringly perverse, almost to the point of a mad heroism.

Again, this is so radical a humanism that it destroys the human. It is a completely consistent and coherent absurdity, but "Its chief defect, it seems to me, is that it's self-evidently false."

Again, if your theory can't accommodate the phenomenon at issue, eliminate the damned theory, not the phenomenon.

The human phenomenon. Can we explain it without explaining it away? To be continued...

Grandiose Reductionism and Humble Expansionism

What would be the opposite of reductionism? Expansionism? In any event, Schuon is a practitioner of the latter, writing of the

principles that by their nature elude empirical investigations but not pure intellection, intellectual intuition being rooted in the very substance of the human spirit, without which homo would not be sapiens.

So, these nonlocal and timeless principles are not to be found in the horizontal, material, empirical world, but rather, are intuited via a nonlical intellect that is ultimately of the same substance as that which it intuits. Which is not so strange if we are indeed the image and likeness -- or prolongation or reverberation -- of the First Principle. 

Back to Hart, much of the book's dialogue comes down to an argument between a rigid reductionist and a loosey-goosey expansionist, neither one convincing the other, at least so far. Which is not surprising, for reasons Nicolás made plain yesterday:

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

It seems that there is a surface structure to thought that is rooted in a deeper structure of principle, and unless an argument penetrates to the latter, it will be inefficacious.

For example, Hart's materialist claims that

there's no actual mystery to consciousness to begin with, and only our own bad habits of language make us imagine there is.

Clean up your language and the mystery of consciousness is solved? Clean it up by what standard? Presumably the standard of immanence, empiricism, and materiality, so this is a circular argument, or an assumption -- a principle -- masquerading as a conclusion.  

For the reductionist, what we experience as mental properties are just the other side of material properties reducible to the latter: a "brain-state" and a "mental state" are "simply one and the same thing."

But one of these things doesn't seem anything like the other.

Doesn't matter if your first principle is that what we call "mind" is just an epiphenomenon of neurology -- that subjects are just objects in disguise. 

I know where I would go with the argument: if mental states are just a side effect of neurology, isn't your truth claim likewise reducible, and if so, why should we believe it? There can be no such thing as truth, rather, only brain states.

Hart's expansionist argues that the reductionist view "is sheer empty assertion. It answers no questions. It's just yet another restatement of the problem of mind." Surely there is correlation between the two -- brain and mind -- but why assume an identity? 

Hart's reductionist proposes an "eliminativism" whereby our commonsense view of the mind 

must be totally eliminated in favor of a more scientific, wholly impersonal neuroscientific theory, entirely purged of such mythical entities as the personal subject, intentional states, and the like...

To which the expansionist rightly asks, "how can such a view be stated without contradiction?" For "how can one take seriously the belief that there's no such thing as belief?" Is this not just "a kind of cognitive suicide?" 

Can sufficient knowledge of the brain really eliminate the mind? If so, who is the knower of this sublime knowledge?

"By that logic, taken to its end, none of the real sciences other than physics would be sciences at all." That is to say, psychology would be reducible to a neurobiology, further reducible to electrochemistry and on down to "a complete physics."

A brief word from our principial sponsor:

[W]hether he likes it or not, man is "condemned" to transcendence (Schuon).

It's not so easy to eliminate, because any truth we utter is from a transcendent standpoint. Surely matter doesn't know it is material, let alone that everything is material. That's a rather grandiose claim. It may sound modestly "reductive" but is actually insanely expansive.

Humility. We must remember humility.

man ought to show humility in relation to his own Heart-Intellect, the immanent divine spark; the proud man sins against his own immortal essence as well as against God and man (Schuon).

Free advice.

Eliminativism must be at antipodes to genuine humility, so much so that "when the theory doesn't adequately account for the phenomenon," it is the latter that is eliminated. Nevertheless,

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity. 

It's easy enough to eliminate eliminativism, but is there something positive -- and rigorous -- we can put in its place? Yes, I think so, but that's the end of this chapter.

Reductionism, Materialism, and Other Forms of Magic

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book. --Dávila

As we've been saying, some things are irreducible to anything less, e.g., consciousness, experience, interiority, and free will, but this hardly stops some thinkers from trying. 

Hart spends a lot of time arguing with these folks, but the arguments can have no traction in the face of an absolute faith-based commitment to reductionism and to a causally closed physical universe. 

I'm also reading a book by Schuon which is about a quarter of the length of All Things Are Full of Gods.  One reason for the comparative brevity is that Schuon can't be bothered to argue with these metaphysical yahoos and their "pseudo-mythologies." Rather, he

distills the quintessence of traditional wisdom without paying sustained attention to all those false and fraudulent philosophies that might hitherto have occluded our view.

Schuon's approach here is more "like that of the poet: to find simple, direct, and resonant statements" of the unchanging truths, recalling what we said the other day about "precision poetry."

In any event, the book is a pleasant diversion from Hart's turgid tome. 

Speaking of a reductively closed universe, Schuon makes precisely the opposite point but doesn't deign to try to persuade the unpersuadable: 

To say that man is endowed with a sensibility capable of objectivity means he possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open to others and unto Heaven.

Boom. This goes to the conclusion of yesterday's post. As the Aphorist says,

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right, and it's an open cosmos after all, in which freedom cannot be reduced to anything less. 

In the same essay Schuon puts it out there that

An incontrovertible proof of God is that the human spirit is capable of objectivity and transcendence, transcendence being the sufficient reason of objectivity.

One can try to eliminate transcendence and reduce it to immanence, but out goes man:

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

There is an outward man and an inward man, corresponding to horizontal and vertical (or immanence and transcendence) respectively, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except to accept this truth, regardless of how pleasant.

Back to Hart, those committed to reductionism "speak as if, in principle, all events at higher levels of physical organization must be reducible without remainder to lower" causes. It's just "a preposterous presumption and nothing more," and not even an interesting one. Unless maybe you're on the spectrum. Which is no joke, but let's not get snidetracked.

Hart claims that there exists a "basic, original, natural intentionality of the mind toward" a "transcendent end that makes all other mental actions possible." He also speaks of "that constant natural orientation of the will toward its transcendent horizon," which is certainly consistent with Raccoon orthodoxy. 

The "inner man" alluded to above is ordered to this transcendent (or vertical) horizon, and this is precisely where all the cosmic action takes place. Again, to eliminate it is to eliminate man and clear the way for the human animal.

I'm tempted to bring in Voegelin for back-up, as he talks about the paradoxical structure of "intentionality and luminosity," and of how language participates in this paradox by illuminating the in-between.  

Lots more arguing back and forth in the next chapter, but as the Aphorist says,

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

So, 

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

The Intentional Cosmos

There is "no more conspicuous example of teleology in nature" than in "the directedness of mind and will toward an end" (Hart). 

At least there can no more self-evident example, since it is our moment to moment experience, and who are you gonna believe, some tenured determinist or your own lying I?

They say reason cannot prove the existence of free will. On the other hand, Schuon says "reason becomes an infirmity" when reduced to "abusive speculation by the ignoramus who pretends to knowledge." 

Elsewhere he suggests that "The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart," and why not? 

But let's get back to Hart. Consciousness is always about something, which is the meaning of "intentionality." Now, nothing was about anything in this cosmos until suddenly it was, but how?

[L]ike consciousness, intentionality is either there or it isn't. Where and how was that abyss leapt over? At what point was there suddenly, as there had never before been, mental agency interpreting the world...?

This is really just another way of asking how subjects suddenly appear in a heretofore objective universe, or how exteriority somehow becomes interior to itself. 

Now, language -- the subject of the next chapter -- is shot through with intentionality, as its whole purpose is to be "about" something other than itself. But -- and this is me talking, not Hart -- the whole cosmos itself is permeated with aboutness, in the sense that it never stops communicating to us about itself. 

In other words, the cosmos is intelligible to our intelligence. We can learn "about" things because those things are about -- or ordered to -- the intellect. This is very strange. Let's see where Hart goes with it.

Language is "a world alongside the world, so to speak, or a plane of reality continuously hovering above the physical plane, a place in which meaning is generated and shared entirely by meaning." 

Yes, but again, the world is also a linguistic contraption that constantly speaks to us via some kind of language, from math to logic to beauty. So human language "hovers above the physical," while nature's language is embedded in the physical, just waiting for us to unpack it.

An immanent and transcendent Logos?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Rather, let Schuon do it. The Logos

presents himself either objectively as “Divine Image,” in which case he is transcendent in relation to ordinary men, or subjectively as the Intellect, in which case he is immanent; he is then like the door towards the Divine Self, the immanent Divine Subject in our immortal substance.

So, the intellect is the immanent Divine Image in man, but also the doorway back to God? Hold that thought.

One point that I think needs to be emphasized is the intrinsic "openness" of things at both ends. In other words, we are open to a cosmos that opens itself up to us, in a kind of spiraling movement. Again, very strange.

That was a short chapter. The next one is on Concepts and Reason, which rightly affirms that

a merely mechanical material system could never, out of some pre-conceptual void, produce so much as a single abstract concept. There's no feasible series of steps..., even over vast epochs of time... that could cause conceptual abstractions to arise from concrete sensory encounters.

So, how do abstract and immaterial concepts get into a concrete and material cosmos? 

Here again, they must somehow be implicit in the cosmos, just waiting for intellects to come along and explicate them: "the mind is capable of really interacting with these strictly immaterial entities," e.g., mathematical and logical principles, "none of which can be grounded" in the physical. 

Nevertheless, here they are, various necessary truths that are "true in every possible reality, and would be true if there were no physical reality at all."  The simplest mathematical equation or syllogism is "utterly unlike any kind of physical event." 

I guess we have time for one more chapter, this one on Free Will and Purpose. How did these get into the cosmos?  Free will is always ordered to a purpose, but the skeptic in Hart's dialogue calls this "the oldest illusion of all." 

We say, if man weren't free he could never know it. In other words, supposing we don't have free will, this would constitute knowledge of a truth that transcends physical cause and effect, and thereby prove the existence of free will. Or, expressed more pithily,

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist.

Thus, 

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

So, if I'm wrong about the existence of free will, it only proves I am right.

What's with this "arbitrary fundamentalist belief in the causal closure of the physical?" For it is "a purely metaphysical commitment, with no logical or empirical warrant, or any warrant at all other than want of imagination." This takes us into the next chapter, so we'll save it for tomorrow.

Maps, Models, and Blowing Smoke

Concur: "no credible modern scientific model exists that can tell us how the electrochemistry of the brain" can account for the "experience of a particular person's inner phenomenal world" (Hart). 

Except absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You still need to a model that is more credible and convincing than a material one, and which doesn't unexplain what materialism explains.  

Look who's talking. You're not even material.

That's not the point. It's a matter of principle.

This reminds me of college. An introductory psychology course characterized the mind as a black box about which we could only formulate models to account for the phenomena. 

Analogously, imagine if we couldn't open a watch to see what's going in inside, but rather, could only construct models to account for the movement of the hands. We could never know which model was the correct one, only which one was more capable of predicting the phenomena. The inner workings of the watch -- the noumena -- would be unknowable to us in principle.

In that same introductory course we were familiarized with all the most popular models, e.g., behaviorism, Freudian, Jungian, existential, gestalt, humanism, transpersonalism, etc.

Which one is correct? It's a bit like asking which religion is correct, each religion being likewise a map of the unmappable, and no map is ever the territory. Still, it's understandable why someone would want to turn the map into the territory, which is to say, absolutize it. It certainly simplifies life and tames the ambiguity. 

Which model did you go with? 

Good question. It was more analogous to a musician who learns and assimilates all the scales in order to express himself musically. The scales aren't the music, but are subordinate to it. In the past I've highlighted this quote by Keith Jarrett:

A master jazz musician goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness.... It [music] must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.

Now, the same is true of the psychotherapeutic session. We go into it hoping to have a rendezvous with emotional truth. We know it's there -- it always is -- but will the patient and therapist (for it requires both) be open to it? 

Now do religion. 

This can't help sounding pretentious, but let's imagine that 

A metacosmic blogger goes onto the keyboard hoping to have a rendezvous with the transcendent, which we will symbolize O. He knows O is there (it cannot not be there), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness. O must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the reader, the first of whom is the blogger himself.

One has only to get out of the way -- abandon memory, desire, and understanding -- and hope for the best.

Back to Hart. At the end of the chapter, his alter-ego repeats that "no physical description of the world we inhabit necessarily entails the existence of consciousness." 

Analogously, imagine a scientist studying the electricity that flows through a telephone line. The most complete understanding of electricity would reveal nothing of the conversation taking place, let alone if it were "true." 

Rather, electricity provides only the boundary conditions that are enlisted by a higher level of reality. Truth could never be reduced to the electrical signals being used to convey it. Likewise, 

if you were unaware of the existence of subjective consciousness, no observation of the physical processes of organisms and their world... would apprise you of its existence (Hart).

Or imagine seeing smoke signals without knowing anything about the existence of Indians.

The preferred nomenclature is Native American.   

Anyway, you'd surely be able to deduce the existence of fire from the smoke. But it would never occur to you that a Native American is using smoke to send a message. No observation of smoke tells us anything about the existence of native Americans or what they're saying to one another, let alone if what they're saying is true or if they're just blowing smoke. We are entirely excluded from that loop.

Likewise, no third-person model of the mind could ever "capture the deeper enigma of subjectivity itself." Thus, "the essential question must be whether subjectivity in itself can fit within the prevailing picture of physical reality at all." 

Hart suggests that

the mind is a contraction of some larger reality, so that at its heights it opens out into something more than itself, and in its depths too opens out into the natural world at large.

This checks out, i.e., the mind opening out to transcendence at one end, immanence at the other. 

In the past I've used the analogy of a lampshade with pinprick holes in it, so it looks as if there are many individual lights, when in reality there is just the one source of Light at the center. 

Hart describes something similar. Here is the full passage

It's something anonymous, really -- so anonymous that it doesn't differ from one person to another. And I, of course, believe it's really one and the same in all of us: the same divine spark shedding its light on all that the mind contains -- the single flame burning in the lanterns of all our souls

End of Part Two, Chapter II.

Horizontal Discontinuity Within Vertical Continuity?

Yesterday I ran across a quote attributed to Herbert Spencer, that

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

This Principle of Contempt seals one in an ideological ignorance that can be religious or scientistic or anything in between. It is like a principled but closed mind, which is still closed in principle.  

To his credit, Hart doesn't do this. Rather, one of the benefits of the dialogue format is that alternative points of view are given a full and fair hearing. One of the main characters is a reductive materialist, and his ideas are treated with thoughtful patience and respect.

Unlike around here, where we don't hesitate to sling the insultainment. I'm not a very good arguer. More of a teller. A take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy. Except I am also loathe to even express my opinions in mixed company. I hate conflict. I never recommend my ideas, but may offer them if asked.

Who asked for this blog?

No one did. Except for me. It's just my own internal dialogue, or metaphysical diary, made public. We're always looking for the unity beneath appearances, and new information is always coming to light, which needs to be reconciled with the old. Reality is contradictory and argumentative enough. No need to enlist other people with whom to argue.

So your argument is with reality? That explains a lot. 

That's one way of putting it. I think it's why Voegelin's idea of the In Between appeals to me. In one sense it is the Final Answer, except it's a fluid space where the answers keep changing or evolving. 

Paradoxically, there as an Absolute and we can never know it, except implicitly, for it is the ground of our saying or knowing anything at all. This is the luminous but mysterious space where we always find ourselves, i.e., between immanence and transcendence. 

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

This is your final (non)answer? That's not very satisfying.

Hart suggests something similar -- that in reality there is a "vertical causality" that operates "upon a realm of potential." It is not "a horizontal relation between two physical things, or a physical transfer of energy that has to cross space," rather, 

a rational specification that's transcendent of time and space, an immediate translation of potency into actuality...

Nor is it inconceivable "that consciousness operates at an oblique angle, so to speak, to the texture of spacetime..., or that mind acts like a formal cause impressing itself instantaneously on the 'fabric' of spacetime in a way that would have no temporal, 'horizontal' physical history."

Here again, we are always situated in this vertical space between immanence and transcendence, and we can be either open or closed to the latter influence. 

This is in contrast to "the narrative of absolute mechanical causality" whereby "the reality we know simply arises from lower realities, giving itself form as the accidental result of mindless force..."

But Hart wants to show that there is "no possible universe at all in which mind is a natural consequence of mechanical physical causes," and that "mind is by its nature unable to inhabit an entirely physical frame of reality." Rather, it "must always already be in some sense 'supernatural' in its origin, orientation, and content."

Or as Schuon says, nature is already supernatural. Certainly it is shot through with transcendence, for example, the immaterial mathematical equations that govern it. More generally it is metaphysically transparent, i.e., intelligible to our intelligence:

I mean precisely what I say when I liken the order of nature to the structure of the mind.... I mean that nature, in its essence, literally is thought (Hart).

Which is why we can think about it: "if mind is real, it can be only because all things have their origin and subsistence in living mind; hence, ultimately, it is matter that must be reducible to an original mental reality."

I'd go so far as to say that material reality is merely a kind of phase, so to speak, of mind... a concrete state or crystallization... the way ice is a phase and state and crystallization of water.

Where have we heard this before? In Chapter 3 of Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Wisdom, called The Degrees and Modes of Reality: there are "multiple states of being, each corresponding to the objects of a degree of man's faculty of knowledge," from matter on up to the Principial Realm of the Divine Mind. 

Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson. --Joyce

In other words, the whole ball of confusion can be divided and sub-divided in many ways, but we are the ones who do the dividing, for example, between mind and matter:

Some, considering the essential identity of Creation with the Principle, may describe total reality as being one indivisible unity. Some may divide it up into two degrees: the Divine Order, and that of all that is created, namely, Creation. At the other end of the spectrum, some... have proposed forty states.

That's too many. Let's keep it simple. Bina and Ziarani propose five, beginning with "the material world that is in principle knowable to our senses." Now, to some -- for example, Hart's voice of materialism -- this is all there is. But this is again Schopenhauer's philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself. It explains everything but the explainer.

One character of Hart's dialogue doesn't shy away from the insultainment, seeing "the modern mechanistic view of things as a kind of psychological disorder," even a psychosis or at least neurosis that results in "a tragic estrangement from reality." In short,

The modern world created a new concept of matter, one into which the seemingly self-evident phenomena of mind could not be fitted.

Putting mind back into the model "became a task that was simultaneously necessary and impossible. Hence the psychosis." 

And here we are. Nevertheless, our "first-person awareness is a primary datum, the ground of all knowledge, and it simply defies physicalist logic." 

Lots of arguing back and forth, but the problem is how to get from a world of "pure exteriority" or "pure quantitative existence" to one of interiority and "subjective qualitative experience." How can it be that

at some point there was nothing but ubiquitous objectivity and then, an instant later, there was local subjectivity.... Somewhere the threshold was crossed. But how?

"How did that all that mindless quantity suddenly add up to a perceiving mind?" How can matter be "abruptly and fantastically inverted into the very opposite of everything modern orthodoxy tells us matter is?" How to account for the "sudden qualitative transition from pure exteriority to an unprecedented inwardness?"

I know how I did it. It's why the chapters of my book begin and end in mid-sentence, to suggest the local discontinuity within a nonlocal (or vertical) continuity that operates from the top-down, or via formal and final causality. 

Looked at this way, the inexplicable transition described by Hart -- from exteriority to interiority, quantity to quality, existence to experience, matter to mind, objects to subjects, etc. -- suddenly becomes un-inexplicable. 

Not to say the mystery is solved. Only that we have a sufficient reason for the mysterious space in which we live, i.e., between immanence and transcendence, but ordered to the latter in a dynamic and open communion.

So We Have Heard from the Wise

Chapter IV of All Things are Full of Gods simply defines some terms which everyone already understands -- such as consciousness -- so we'll skip ahead to chapter V, The Rise of Mechanism.

Slow your roll, son. Everyone already agrees on the meaning of consciousness?

I know what I mean by it, but it is -- like the word "experience" -- impossible to define without assuming it: to define something is already to objectify it, but subjects are precisely what can never be reduced to objects. Subjects can define objects, but objects can never define the subject.

For Hart, consciousness is "subjective experience, immediate awareness, existing in an entirely private and incommunicable way." 

For me it's much more primordial, something like luminous interiority, the crack in the cosmos where everything gets in. It is not and cannot be derived from anything less than itself. 

I would add that it is intrinsically intersubjective, so it is not private, full stop; if it were, we could never enter and share in the intersubjective space where humanness takes place, so to speak. Rather, we would be isolated monads cut off from one another. (This feature of intersubjectivity is grounded in the Trinity, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

The Kena Upanishad speaks for me: call it what you want, but there is an "ear of the ear, mind of the mind, speech of the speech," also a "breath of the breath, and eye of the eye":

Him the eye does not see, nor the tongue express, nor the mind grasp.... Different is he from the known, and also different is he from the unknown. So we have heard from the wise.

Or, put it this way: "That which is not heard by the ear but by which the ear hears -- know that to be Brahman." And if you think you know what that is, well, "know that you know little":

He among us knows him best who understands the spirit of the words: "Nor do I know that I know him not."

"He who truly knows Brahman" 

knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not. The ignorant think that Brahman is known, but the wise know him to be beyond knowledge.  

For Brahman one could substitute Tao, and both can be easily trancelighted into Eckhart's Ground, which would require a whole post to describe, but for now let's just say it is

the protean term everywhere at the center of Eckhart's mysticism, which, paradoxically, vanishes from our grasp when we try to contain it in a definable scheme, or circumference, of speculation (McGinn).

It is simultaneously employed to indicate origin, cause, beginning, reason, and "what is inmost, hidden, most proper to a being -- that is, its essence." It is both "the innermost of the soul" and "the hidden depths of God."

Atman is Brahman?

Close enough for blogging. McGinn suggests that

We are indeed "like" God insofar as God bears his "like" in me (i.e., the Son).

If the Father is in the Son and the Son assumes human nature, do the myth.

Now, to think that a mechanistic metaphysic is adequate to the task of conceptualizing the Ground is a blunderstatement. But 

our metaphysics is often nothing other than our method, mistaken for the very truth it's supposed to help us seek (Hart).  

In short, it is a rookie move to conflate method and ontology. The body and even mind can be treated like machines. But this is not to say they are literally machines. Again, rookie error. Or so we have heard from the wise.

A machine has only exterior relations, i.e., it is composed of parts that are externally related to one one another. 

Not so for organisms, which feature interior relations, not to mention the mind, which is intersubjective right down to its (triune) ground. Let those with ears hear: I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 

Or in the words of John, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

"For the truly inquiring scientific intellect, any ultimate ground of explanation must be one that unites all dimensions of being in a simpler, more conceptually parsimonious principle" (Hart).

"[T]he object of knowledge and the mind itself both together belong to one and the same source of intelligibility and being underlying all things, so that the knowing mind and the known are, at their ground, always already one (ibid.). 

 

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.