I Think Therefore I Am, or Maybe I'm Just a Little Oxygen Deprived

Now, when we say that the ultimate order of the cosmos is Love, the irony is that the modern materialist is the one who is anthropomorphizing things, not us. Rather, we are... theomorphizing in an utterly impersonal way. It just turns out that doing so results in a personalization of reality.

In other words, just because we say the world is personal, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have a personal interest in it being so, any more than we have a personal stake in two plus two equaling four. It's just the way it is, and we assume that it's good to conform ourselves to the way things are, i.e., for mind and reality to be attuned.

Was that clear?

No?

Okay, let's try to explain. As we know, all of western civilization went off the rails one cold night in Bavaria, when Descartes shut himself inside with the oven turned up to 11, and had several hypoxia-induced visions as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning -- similar to the first time Paul McCartney took LSD and concluded that THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS!

In Descartes' case, he concluded that THERE ARE TWO LEVELS! Or rather, that there is one level divided by two: I and AM, matter and mind, object and subject.

This resulted in the infamous "mind-matter problem," in that people immediately forgot that the problem was only a chronic residual of the original carbon monoxide poisoning. It is very much like the man who keeps smashing his head against the wall while complaining of a headache. In other words, the dualists are suffering from a problem of their own making: they are laboring under a persistent metaphysical or ontological neurosis.

Oddly enough, I am not the only one who thinks this way. For example, Schindler alludes to "the anthropocentric Cartesian horizon that has largely prevailed since the seventeenth century, which makes subjectivity coextensive with human subjectivity" (emphasis mine).

Well, who says? That's right: some giddy mathematical genius with too much time and too little oxygen. If that's our standard, then let's filter carbon monoxide into every math department and see what they come up with, instead of just filtering it into humanities departments.

Let's go back to step one, before the bifurcation of reality. "What I have in mind," writes Schindler, is "a subjectivity that takes its first meaning in terms of a properly metaphysical interiority."

In other words, rather than splitting the world into interior and exterior, why don't we begin with the way things actually are, and recognize that interior and exterior are entangled in an irreducible way?

As alluded to in yesterday's post, this was one of Whitehead's central conclusions (although realization is probably a better word). As Harthsorne describes, Whitehead recognizes not only that "the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere" (emphasis mine), but that this somewhere "can only be in a primordial mind."

Whitehead's "doctrine is that experience is the principle of all being" and "ground of order." This is why everything doesn't happen at once, or why there isn't pure chaos or entropy: his point is that "a multitude of agents could not select a common world and must indeed simply nullify one another's efforts, unless some common limitation or bias pervades their acts."

Thus, among other conveniences, God is what you might call limitation-on-probablility; or in other words, he provides the boundary conditions through which he exerts a top-down influence on creation. So we got that going for us.

All splitting aside, "only a being with universal influence" could exert such order, even while maintaining freedom -- the freedom of potential (which are two sides of the same reality).

Therefore, God must be a person. After all, he's certainly personal. And "personality, as any psychologist knows, is a sort of cluster of habits and purposes and ideas," with the caveat that analogies to God must be balanced by the lack thereof. Or in other words, you might say that we are like God, but God is not like us. So to speak, yada yada.

But in any event, "God's influence is supreme because he is the supreme actuality, supremely beautiful and attractive." And "there is no 'power' anywhere, on earth or in heaven, except the direct and indirect workings of [divine] attractiveness."

In other words, God is not force, but attraction (to beauty and truth), persuasion, surrender-in-freedom. Or one might say that love is his force. May it be with you. And take your head out of that damn oven.

You Are Ordered to Love!

This is the sort of idea that I would have once considered hopelessly sappy -- maybe not even sappy -- but now believe to be not only truth, but the Truth of truth. "Thus my fundamental claim" -- hey, mine too! -- "is that, in our understanding of the basic structure of the cosmos, logos and love are convertible" (Schindler).

Thus, way before it is a human emotion or attitude, it is "the meaning or order basic to the universe, even as the meaning or order basic to the universe is now understood always to include love." Or as God said to creation, "I order you to love!"

First, of all, no, I can't sell you any pot. Second, what does this even mean?

It means that the universe cannot be subjected to that naughty cartesian dualism without doing it great harm. You could even say that Descartes ushers in a metaphysics of hate. Or at least a lot of hateful ideologies eventually spring forth from that initial bifurcation of reality -- for example, Marxism, scientism, reductionistic Darwinism, etc. I don't mean this in a polemical way, but rather, quite literally. I'm just sayin'.

Explain.

Okay, assuming the convertibility of Love and Logos, "it follows that the basic order of the universe -- hence the primitive meaning of object(-ivity) and subject(-ivity) -- is not mechanistic; and that love -- hence subject(-ivity) -- in its primitive meaning is not arbitrary" (ibid.).

There are so many new age books on how cartesian dualism is all wrong blah blah blah that it has become an empty cliché. And you hear so much from those divine salesmen about how God-is-luv-yada-yada-now-give-me-money that it too can become a platitude.

But put the cliché and the platitude together, and now you've got something: "In short, the Christian understanding of creatures as made in the image of Jesus Christ entails a convertibility of 'logic' (logos) and love," and therefore -- and this is the key to God's whole thingdom -- "a convertibility of object(-ivity) and subject(-ivity)."

In other words, no-thing is merely a thing, if by thing you mean something radically separate from the primordial love of the Divine Subject.

I came to this coonclusion long ago, at least insofar as the Subject is concerned. Six years ago I wrote a post about it, called Getting Intimate with Sophia. Let's see if it contains any memoirs or premumblings of this future post we're working on right now.

Not surprisingly, the old post is discussing Balthasar, who seems to be Schindler's main influence too. There is a quote from von B. to the effect that "The intimate character of being, which reaches its completed end in the conscious spirit, has its preliminary stages in unconscious nature. There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be."

Realizing this latter was a major (?!) WTF moment for me. It even says so: "I was idly contemplating something Whitehead had said along similar lines, when the Gagdad coconut 'snapped' in such a way that the inside was now out, and the outside in. I suppose you could say that it was like the sudden solution to a koan, which is not an intellectual affair, but more of a breakthrough into the ground of being."

And "once you have secured this realization, then so many other pieces of the puzzle naturally fall into place. In other words, once one understands that interiority is not somehow magically confined to animal brains in such a way that it defies all explanation, then the most intractable problems of philosophy more or less vanish. We see that these 'problems' were just the inevitable residue of our defective mode of knowing" -- you know, the cartesian mode.

You could say that the cartesian split is literally a kind of brainwash, to the point of brain sterilization: like chemotherapy, it kills everything living, both the good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful. It makes sense of one narrow dimension while making nonsense of a much larger one. It is precisely what renders the infertile eggheads infertile and their yolks so laughable.

In the old post there's even a riff on how the end is the beginning and all that, just as we -- or Balthasar -- were riffing on about yesterday. Coincidence? I don't think so.

HvB: "Here every ending becomes a beginning...." Me: "O me ga!" is "the shocking realization of the end (omega), the telos, which tells us all about the beginning [the Bigending referred to yesterday and forever]. Thus, we can 'explain everything,' but only in the eternal now, where there is no longer a radical disjunction between the 'it' and the 'I,' or subject and object (no 'it'). It's the same place, but now we know it in an entirely different, participatory manner."

And this "participatory manner" is none other than Love. "'It is accomplished' by the One who has already rejoined heaven and earth, inside and outside, man and God. And he's always happy to extend a little nonlocal assistance to get it accompliced" (note the same stupid pun with which we ended last Friday's post. The prophecy has been foolfilled!).

"With regard to scientific law, one could never say 'it is accomplished,' since the laws apply only to a finite realm that has already been unnaturally split into rigid categories of subject and object." Or, conversely, one could say that it is too facilely accomplished, as I was telling my friend Victor yesterday. Oddly enough, we were speaking in a place called Paradise Cove, and it was Easter Sunday, and a Victor was present... In any event, we agreed that the world described by science is infinitely smaller than the one described by theology. The more you know about latter, the bigger it gets. Exponentially.

Which is also why "at their margins, both science in general and the scientific method in particular generate metaphysical absurdities that can never be resolved within the realm of science, since they assume up front what they try to eliminate at the back. This is strictly impossible, but don't tell the tenured. It would be cruel to deprive a primitive people of their comforting myths" (Bob).

In other words, you might say that the cartesian split takes out a huge epistemological loan on future discoveries which can never happen. Or, it is like setting off in search of the back of one's head, or trying to kiss one's aseity. It encloses one in an absurcular process from which one can never escape, or his name isn't Gödel.

In fact, Gödel would agree that the realm of nature "must always remain richer than any cognition of it," such that "the truth of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time..." Ouch, that's a whole umlautta love.

To sum up, it seems possible that John Lennon was right all along, and that these lyrics aren't quite as trite as they sound:

In the Bigending

"No one is witness to the birth of a world. No one knows how the night of that Saturday's hell was transformed into the light of the Easter dawn. Asleep it was that we were all carried on wings over the abyss, and asleep did we receive the grace of Easter....

"And today is your Last Day (your youngest day), the newest, most childlike of days. No other day will ever be as young for you as this today, when Eternal Life has called you by name....

"This Now when our two names have met is my birthday in eternity, and no time shall ever be this Now. Here is where the starting point has been set. Here is creation and a new beginning....

"Through my death this has been spared you, and no one will ever experience what it really means to die: This was my victory. While I was falling and did nothing but fall, the New World was emerging....

"My descent, my vertiginous collapse, my going under (under myself) into everything that was foreign and contrary to God -- down to the underworld: this was the ascent of this world into me, into God. My victory....

"Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises. Here the two eons intersect. Here every ending becomes a beginning....

"But just as the earth rounds itself off into a ball, so, too, do the veins make a return to the Heart and love goes out and comes back eternally. Slowly you will master the rhythm.... the departure and the return are one and the same. Nothing any longer exists outside of this one and only flowing life....

"And so in the end you remain alone, all in you. You are one with yourself, and without losing yourself you pour yourself out into the many. By remaining in the multiplicity of the members, you bring them all home into the unity of the Body..."

(Hans urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World)

Mind-Matter Dualism and Incarnational Trialism

Come to think of it, we can't blame Descartes for everything. After all, there's the rest of the world. It has always been a trainwreck.

Furthermore, Descartes is hardly the first to commit the error of dualism. Rather, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, neoplatonism, and even Buddhism fall into the same cosmic heresy of dividing the world into naughty and nice, and then escaping into the nice.

Yes, but isn't this the whole point of religion? How is this different from the whole satan thingy?

There is no doubt that some forms of Christianity have and continue to fall into dualism, even though the whole Christian message is rooted in a metaphysic that is supposed to render this impossible. Rather, there is one creator, and everything he creates is good. To the extent that something fails to be good, then it is not the result of an evil co-creator or co-equal force of darkness -- as, for example, Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism.

I would suggest that it is a permanent human temptation to divide the world in this manner. In modern times it is most effectively practiced by the left, which cannot function without demonization, vilification, and calumny.

For example, one of the (admittedly many) reasons MSNBC has tanked so badly is that demonization works fine when someone else is in charge. When the left is in charge, who's left to demonize? Pizza parlors, bakers, imaginary rapists, nonexistent racists, dissenting tea partiers, etc.

As Ace wrote, "the left is now patrolling the already-won battlefield to find survivors and shoot them -- while forever casting itself as the trespassed-upon victim." Or as Iowahawk tweeted, "Don't compare yourself to a Selma marcher when you're unleashing the dogs and firehoses." Another tweetist reminds us of how "the civil rights movement really got going when Rosa Parks went door to door trying to find someone who wouldn't give her a ride." The left desperately searches for demons to account for the evils it unleashes.

I think it's fair to say that people truly long for a simplistic, dualistic world, because then it's so easy to recognize and eliminate the problem. But if the problem runs straight through the human heart, then it's not so easy. Then it's even possible for a negro to be racist, or a person with a vagina to be incompetent, or a sodomist to be a bully, or an immigrant to be a drain on the rest of us, or a man of tenure to be a retard!

Yesterday I saw a clip of Bill Maher going on about how all religions are stupid. Easy for him to say, since his religion of Pure Light by definition has only intelligent and virtuous people like himself.

Along these lines, I recently read a book called At the Heart of the Gospel, which is a kind of popular summary of Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, which in turn is -- in JP's view -- a summary of Christianity itself.

For at the heart of the gospel is what? A union of God and man, of spirit and flesh, of time and eternity -- as opposed to a division of these things. Not only is this is a radical notion, but it must be counter-intuitive, otherwise why would God have to go to all that trouble of making it known to us? And one reason why it is so radical is that it goes against our tendency to reach for a facile dualism.

At the heart of the gospel are actually two principles: Incarnation and Trinity, the latter of which counters the dualistic temptation from a different angle.

West starts with a passage from the Catechism: "The flesh is the hinge of salvation," and "We believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh."

But there have always been misbelievers who split "body and soul in order to 'free' love from... the 'unflattering' and 'unholy' realities of bodiliness." Again, that is the easy way out (and a mirror of the other easy alternative into a soulless hedonism): the former is "angelism," the latter "animalism" (Descartes and his descendants are angelists).

But just as Jesus is God and man, we are human and animal, not one or the other. The task is not to repress or deny the animal, but rather, to elevate it; or better, to infuse it with the same "divine descent" that came into the flesh more generally. That descent goes all the way down.

Thus, in the words of Cardinal Newman (quoted by West), the object "is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God and have been put asunder by man." We need to re-integrate our dis-integration (or rather, recognize that "it is accomplished").

The "descent of God is intended to draw us into a movement of ascent" (Ratzinger, ibid). I find it useful to visualize this as a continuous spiral of (⇅), whereby man may participate in this trinitarian movement. The movement, of course, goes all the way down and all the way up -- to hell and back, you might say. We know it goes all the way to hell, because we have read and heard countless spiritual autobiographies of people who were reached in hell's kitchen and managed to turn their lives around.

We will get back to our main subject on Monday, but this is very much related to it, because "by fleeing the material world in search of the spirit, we actually embrace the essential tenet of materialism" (West).

In other words, one can be a materialist both by embracing or rejecting matter, i.e., by taking one side of the Cartesian dualism. In this way, the rejection only gives more force to its opposite tendency, otherwise those atheist activists would be out of business.

In short, "The Christian response to both materialism and spiritualism is the Incarnation," such that "there is no reaching the 'higher' without pondering the 'lower'"; or, "we reach the 'higher' precisely because" it "has descended into the 'lower'" (West). This is both the logic of the logos and the logos of logic.

And we can't accomplice this climb this without a body, "which has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world" the otherwise hidden mystery of God.

Abstractions, Nightmares, and the Frustrated Gods of the Left

While the old brain is warming up, let's review.

Yesterday we figured out that Descartes has been ruining everybody's lives and eating all our steak. But it's a free country and he can do whatever he wants. Or is it? Free, I mean?

That's one of the themes of Heart of the World, in that it is an inquiry into modern liberalism and its ugly twin, "liberation." (And he includes conservative liberalism in his critique, even though it is merely inadequate where left liberalism is frankly diabolical.)

For example, contemporary liberalism posits human freedom, but it is a radically disconnected freedom that isn't grounded in anything prior, nor is it rendered meaningful by having any telos. In short, it is utterly pointless, just another name for nihilism. Besides, on what basis can we say that freedom is even a good?

In the Christian view, we are first given our freedom; which means that we receive it before we act on it. Conversely, in the secular view, we just take it and act on it. But where did it come from? How did it get here?

This goes to yesterday's penultimate paragraph about how liberalism is founded upon a divided reality, with the false objectivity of bonehead scientism on one side, and the radical subjectivism and relativism of postmodernity on the other. For the former, freedom must be an illusion (since science by definition cannot account for it), while for the latter it reduces to either power or desire (or both in the case of leftist politics).

So, here's the heteroparadox -- or cosmic heresy -- at the heart of contemporary liberalism: "on the one hand, Descartes turns to the subject, making the human subject dominant in determining what is to count truly as an object, or as objective." Again, sounds harmless enough. Man is the measure of all things, and all that.

However, "in making the human subject dominant, he simultaneously eliminates what is distinctly subjective about the human subject." In other words, he turns the human subject itself into a kind of object, being that it corresponds with a reality conceived of as mechanical and mathematical. Or in other words, the subject is liberated only to be pulled right back down into the object; or, quality reduces to quantity, semantics to syntax, reality to appearances.

Remember Marshall McLuhan's famous crack about the medium being the message? Well, in this case the method is the message. That's right, the scientific method, which seems so free of content, is the message if it is detached from the real world of the human subject.

Come to think of it, Al Whitehead warned of the same thing in Science and the Modern World, and probably in Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought as well if I remember correctly. And in fact, the whole thrust of Schindler's argument leads in a process direction which for some reason he seems to find a bit uncomfortable, but we'll fix that. No worries.

Back to the Cartesian Split: it "involves at once a mechanizing of the meaning of objectivity and a setting aside of subjectivity as irrelevant, indeed as intrusive..."

So, what does this orphaned and unwanted subjectivity do? It obviously still exists, only now untethered to any comprehensive view of reality. I'll tell you what it does: it runs wild all over the place while flattering itself with the name "liberation." It ruins everybody's lives and eats all our steak.

I don't know about you, but back in college I learned such idiocies as "perception is reality" so you can't judge other lifestyles and people and cultures and stuff! This liberal lunacy is an inevitable consequence of a metaphysic that renders subjectivity completely unhinged from any objective reality.

People talk about the division between red and blue, or liberal and conservative, but think of the more primordial divide between the engineering or business departments and the gender studies or queer theory departments. That is an unbridgeable cosmic abyss, and it all goes back to the idea that the human subject is anything we want it to be, because it is not first received as gift, but rather, just this inexplicable thing we act on.

This goes to the deepest of depths, in that for the Christian, essence precedes existence, while for the modern liberal existence precedes essence. In other words, for the Christian, since we receive our being from elsewhere, we are who we damn well are before we act on our freedom. But contemporary liberals make themselves into what that are. In short, they become their own gods, since they give the form to their own existence.

But even here they are never consistent, since they never run out of excuses as to why they can't be who they want to be. They are gods, to be sure, but very frustrated gods. There is structural racism, or campus rape, or gender oppression, or birth control that isn't free, or "marriage inequality," or the "wage gap," or oppressive "religious freedom," etc. It's always something!

Some god. Some freedom. It is why the so-called freedom of the left always results in less freedom. It is why the denial of sexual reality leads directly to the Cake Police and the Pizza Thugs. The little gods need a big machine-god to force reality into a shape that pleases them.

I'm a little lazy this morning, so we'll just leave off with a summary quote by Schindler:

"Thus Descartes' vaunted claim of a method essentially neutral toward any content already and in principle favors an ontology which primitively separates subject and object and dichotomizes objectivity and subjectivity."

An airy abstraction at one end, an all too concrete nightmare at the other.

The Adversary's Solution to the Mind-Matter Conundrum: Divide and Conquer

I was out late last night, and now I'm tired. Therefore, this will not be a challenging post. I'm not up for any deep pondering. Maybe just some groundwork. Plus it will no doubt be more rambly than usual. I predict that it will struggle to get off the ground before running out of steam at the end. So maybe you should just skip it.

Last night someone asked me what this book is about -- Heart of the World, Center of the Church -- but I was pretty much stumped for an answer. It kind of blows my circuits as I'm reading, which seems to interfere with memory, and certainly synthesis. There's too much to wrap one's mind around, and if I can't grasp the whole, I have trouble retaining the parts.

So, I'm going to just revisit the parts I highlighted, and try to unscramble my egghead and put my humpty back together.

For me, the author doesn't really hit his stride until about midway through the book, with a chapter called Catholicism and the Liberal Model of the Academy in America. It goes to the more general question: of what should a Catholic education consist?

I would prefer to just say Christian education, but that might be part of the problem, because -- if Schindler is correct -- Protestantism already cedes so much ground to secularism at the outset, that it loses the battle before it has begun. In other words, certain Protestant assumptions entail secular liberal conclusions.

For example, should a "Christian" university try to be like any other university, only with a little religion sprinkled on top? Naturally it is easier in the liberal arts, where one can simply have a curriculum that revolves around the artistic treasures of western civilization instead of degrading us with the hideous gobshite of postmodernity.

But what about more generally? I look at my son's Catholic school, and sometimes wonder how it is supposed to be distinctively different from a secular school. In my mind, rather than having the religious dimension added on, his education should be infused with the Christian spirit. What would this look like, and how can we tell the difference? What does it mean to think as a Christian -- not so much the content, but the form?

"To have a Catholic university... it is necessary (also) to develop a Catholic mind." Simply learning about religion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for this transformation of the mind.

And when I say "trans-formation," it is very much as if the mind must be refashioned and re-formed by transcendental causes to which it must be open. If that fails to occur, then you haven't had a "Christian education," no matter how much theology, dogma, and scripture you have committed to memory.

"Is it meaningful to speak of a mind... internally Catholic in any discipline other than theology? What could 'internally Catholic' mean, for example, in philosophy, or in biology and physics, or in accounting and computer science?"

In short, if truth is universal, how could there be secular truth and Christian truth in the disciplines he mentions? I'll tell you how. In a minute.

But if you simply swallow these disciplines whole, without criticism (i.e., the secular approach to them), you're going to take in a whole lot of hidden assumptions with them. Then, once these assumptions are in place, they will actually interfere with a properly religious understanding. Like how a virus gets into your computer.

Very insidious, don't you know. Once this happens, to the extent that you want to continue being religious, then it will be as if religion needs to exist side by side with the other disciplines. Any possibility of Total Cosmic Unity will be lost, and you will live in a bifurcated, dualistic world in which you retain your faith in spite of what you learned in school, instead of because of it.

But -- and here I think is the key -- you actually assimilated this bifurcated world before you even began your journey. That's how they ensnare you! You think you're just learning content, when in reality you're assimilating a whole way of looking at things that is anti-religious (and, more to the point, anti-reality) to the core.

Liberalism -- and this is one of the points Jonah Goldberg drives home in Liberal Fascism -- "embodies above all the claim to neutrality" (and he's not talking about political liberalism per se, rather, the whole project of modernity). It presumes "to avoid any a priori assumption of content" which might "prejudice the (putative) pure openness of the methods."

This is what modern liberals are referring to when they accuse conservatives of being "anti-science." That is, we're the ones who supposedly approach reality with all this theological baggage, whereas they do so with a completely blank slate. They claim to accept truth where they find it, with no ideological, metaphysical, or philosophical commitments whatsoever.

The cosmos apparently went off the rails with Descartes. I personally have trouble blaming one guy for this mess, so let's just take him as the focal point of a more general trend. Descartes "strove to remove the ghostly residue of subjectivity from method and indeed to determine the form of method prior to its being conditioned by any content whatsoever."

Seems like a good idea. It's even rather seductive, isn't it? What could possibly go wrong? We'll just empty our heads of all assumptions and proceed in a purely rational manner: "We are committed in advance only to pure form and not at all to content."

Seems innocent enough, but do this and you have swallowed a whole cosmos -- an alternative cosmos. Or, one might say that you have stepped into a parallel universe, under the assumption that man has finally, after 100,000 years of wandering in the bewilderness, entered the Real World.

But remember, Descartes actually divides the world "in half" before he even starts. That is, if you begin by presupposing radically divided worlds of mind and matter, you shouldn't be surprised that this radical division will persist wherever you look and no matter how much your thinking evolves. Dude, you've rended the fabric of reality, such that there is no way to put Humpty back together, and no area rug big enough to sweep his broken fragments under it!

There is orthoparadox and there is paradox, and Descartes lands us in the latter, for in dividing reality, we end with a "false objectivity" mirrored by an arbitrary subjectivism. Or -- and this is what you'll get in a modern education -- scientism at one end and relativism at the other. Each of these is an intellectual tyranny -- for they destroy the soul's freedom -- and yet, are opposites.

I think I'll stop now, before things get too heavy for my brain to lift.