All Things Are Full of Gods, page 47
HEPHAISTOS: Could you be just a wee bit more concrete, laddie?
EROS: It seems rather obvious to me. As rational beings, we know reality only as occurring within two encircling horizons, one wholly contained within the other. There’s the near or immanent horizon of the realm of finite things, the empirical order, the great middle distance of the world; but, prior to this and encompassing it, there’s also a far or transcendent horizon of universal values, composed from absolute objects of volition and thought. The former horizon, moreover, is known to us only as set off against the latter, and comprehensible to us only as illuminated by the latter; otherwise we have no index of recognition and judgment . . . no capacity for evaluation. We know and desire that further horizon tacitly in all that we do, before knowing and desiring anything else, in each act of judgment and each act of perception. I suppose that what I want to say is that, just as finite subjectivity can be founded only upon a prior, deeper, purer subjectivity, so too the finite terminus of intentionality can be supported and sustained only by a prior, fuller, purer finality. It’s our principium testudinis again, but now at the other end of experience, so to speak: not only turtles all the way down, but turtles all the way up as well. All the mind’s operations arise between two poles—an irreducibly unified subjectivity within each of us and an irreducibly transcendental realm of absolutes beyond the reach of any of us—and neither of them is actually to be found anywhere within the physical order. Neither that simplicity nor that ultimacy—neither the unity of the apprehending mind nor the transcendental terminus of the intending mind—is a reality that can be found within the composite and finite structures of nature as a closed totality; and yet we know nature as an intelligible phenomenon, at once infinitely diverse and irreducibly unified, only as it appears to us in our mental ascent from the one to the other. There’s an apperceptive “I” in each of us, more original than the finite ego each of us takes as his or her “me,” and this “I” is forever directed toward a transcendental “that” or “Thou” exceeding the perceptible world, a realm of values or purposes in whose light the world of things becomes an open field of knowledge and judgment. 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. We know the world because something within us that’s more original than ourselves is always reaching out to something outside us that’s more ultimate than the world. I take this to be not merely an epistemological truth, but an ontological truth as well. I think this is what Plato understood in saying that all the knowledge we acquire is really a kind of remembering: that deepest and most original yearning within us recalls that last and highest end beyond all things and, in doing so, open us to all things.
HEPHAISTOS: Sheer poetry—at least, the part about the turtles . . . I like turtles—but, like a good deal of poetry, more expressive than explanatory. Could you take smaller steps?
EROS: My apologies. Really, though, I’m saying nothing you can’t confirm from your own experience. Consciousness doesn’t and can’t merely passively reflect a world “out there,” objectively composed of discrete objects, presenting itself gift-wrapped and beribboned to the purely receptive faculties of the mind. All experience is also an active labor of the mind. We know the world only in intending the world’s presentation of itself: only in moving dynamically toward the world, that is, as an object of attention, in a single operation of intellect and will. This much I think we talked about some days ago: our conscious knowledge of reality becomes actual only through intentionality, and intentionality is always agency directed toward an end. Only by intending things under various finite aspects of meaning can we truly attend to them as what they are, because awareness and intentionality increase or decrease in direct proportion to one another. [Holding out the rose blossom:] I know this flower in many ways, under any number of aspects and in varying intensities, precisely as my love for reality itself moves me toward it as something real with a meaning I can interpret; I see it perhaps only as an object, or perhaps as a collection of colors and shapes, or more precisely as a flower, or yet more precisely as a rose plucked from a tree, or yet more precisely still as plucked from a tree by my beloved wife, and as the particular flower that has fascinated her and by extension all of us for days now as a revelation of the manifold mysteries of consciousness—each layer of recognition and evaluation appearing to my mind only in such degree as I direct my mind consciously toward it. [Handing the blossom to Psyche with an affectionate smile:] This is the structure of all mental agency. To know anything at all, the mind requires a real disposition toward things outside itself, by which it perceives, interprets, and judges. The world becomes intelligible to us the more we actively reach out to it; but we can reach out toward it in all its diversity only because we’ve already reached out beyond it as a whole, toward ends desirable as absolute objects of intellect and will.
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, for goodness’ sake, stop repeating yourself. Are you trying to hypnotize me with that dulcet, winsome voice of yours? Why isn’t it enough simply to say that the world we represent to ourselves has been refined by evolutionary retention and attrition out of physiological process of stimulus and response to have a certain structure of intellectual desire in it? Why must you invoke the transcendent?
EROS: That’s simply not the world we know, so why even ask? Do we have to rehearse all the points we’ve already made about intentionality? About the world of meanings in which we actually live? About the impossibility of converting experience into abstractions without abstractions already there to give shape to experience? We know our world, imperfectly but really, under countless aspects of meaning, many of them purely conceptual, that infinitely exceed any neural stimulus or behavioral response. We know, moreover, because we wish to know, and wish to know because we already know more than we know: there’s a further horizon of truth, a perpetual surfeit of ever greater meaning, which we intuit as an inexhaustible abstract standard, always in excess of what any empirical object suffices to reveal, and toward which every finite object continues to urge us by that very insufficiency. We turn our attention to the things of the world because there’s a deeper attentiveness active within us, always already turned dynamically toward the whole of reality—the whole of being—as irresistibly attractive to our minds.
I’m not speaking of only extraordinary acts of knowledge, incidentally. I mean every perception we have, every instance of cognition, however humble. In every moment of consciousness, the mind is simultaneously receiving and composing the world for itself, grasping all things under specific finite aspects, discriminating one object from another in accord with the meanings one attributes to them. One knows each thing as a specific instantiation of meaning . . . of sense—as a quiddity, a “whatness”—which is to say, as a form inhering at once both in that object and in the mind, making each open to the other. But no finite perception would become available to us in this way were it not for this total directedness of the mind, this “rational appetite” for the ideal intelligibility of things . . . this natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of being as intelligible truth. But for this, as we’ve discussed, reality would merely impinge upon our neurology as a ceaseless and undifferentiated blaze and blare of purely sensory impressions, without aspect or content. Only by virtue of this prior natural intentionality—this compulsion of intellect and will toward the truth of the world, this primordial interestedness in the whole of things—can the mind organize sensation into sense and sensibility and significance.
HEPHAISTOS: You know, I can’t really say that I’m personally aware of quite such extravagant longings whenever I feel a desire, say, to . . . oh, I don’t know . . . pluck a blossom from a rose tree.
EROS: Oh, don’t be trivial. Obviously I’m not talking about a finite psychological state, or about some private mood that overtakes us now and then. The vocation of the mind to absolute ends is no more a simple psychological state than the unity of consciousness is a simple condition of psychological integrity; in both cases, the issue is the transcendental condition of thought, logically prior to the finite identity and impulses of the ego. I’m talking about a kind of persistent wakefulness, an openness to everything, within which we become wakeful to particular things as objects of greater or lesser immediate awareness, greater or lesser personal interest, greater or lesser determinate meaning or content. We don’t have to feel some burning affective yearning for that far horizon of desire as though it were a sensuous object we longed to possess; it’s enough to recognize a kind of constant velleity toward an index of ultimate values in the background of all our mental acts. Look, most of the things we encounter in the world can pass before us without exciting any special interest in us; but we experience them as recognizable objects, with particular aspects or meanings, because of our constant preoccupation with that horizon of intelligibility, against which they stand out as either vehicles of or obstacles to the satisfaction of our deeper desire to know. When they feed that desire, they often go unnoticed; when they thwart it, they provoke our curiosity or—if we’re mentally lazy—our denial. If there were no such longing present in our mental agency—no intentionality toward those absolute values—then nothing would appear to us as one thing rather than another: not a blossom to be plucked from a branch, not a glass of wine . . . nor, for that matter, a reason to do one thing rather than another, or to do anything at all.
After all, what makes any finite object desirable to us if not just such an index of evaluation? Even our most animal impulses—toward food, sex, sensual pleasure of every kind—are comprehensible to us, and direct us toward finite satisfactions, within the embrace of a more fundamental longing for happiness, satiety, repose, and so on. Desire is never purely spontaneous; it doesn’t simply erupt without premise from within the will and then spill outward in no direction whatsoever, with absolutely no end in view. Even at its most inexact and elemental and sheerly creative, it’s teleological: it’s a yearning for an end, real or imagined, proximate or remote, constant or ephemeral. The slightest free movement of your hand is charged with 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. And you can know this from experience, simply because you know that even in moments of absolute emotional detachment—indeed, apathy, or even repugnance—your mind continues to give shape to experience and thus allows the world ever and again to become manifest in your thought and perception. The rational mind, even when the psychological self has fallen practically dormant, continues to go beyond each object of experience, and so to comprehend that object within ever more capacious conceptual categories, and ultimately it knows the world as a unified totality because, as I say, it has always already, in its intentions, exceeded the world. It’s really quite amazing, when you consider it. That limitless directedness of consciousness toward that limitless horizon of transcendental aspiration allows the mind to inhabit the world, and—perhaps more originally—the world to inhabit the mind.
I have to say, too, that I don’t believe this longing could have arisen within us from physical causes, if only because that absolute horizon appears nowhere in nature. I don’t believe purely physical causes have the power to unite us, even if only conceptually, to non-physical entities. What I do believe, however, is that all of nature is filled with the desire to find that horizon. We began this debate by discussing what my darling Psyche called the mindlike structure of the world; but, now that we’re apparently reaching the end, we’ve found ourselves contemplating not merely nature’s rational structure, but the possibility of an actual mental agency intrinsic to it. Not only is the material order apparently disposed toward mind; it’s in fact engaged in a genuinely axiological labor, a creative project of seeking to comprehend the realm of values by embodying them in ever more elaborate and yet ever more transparent organic expressions, rising even as high as fully conscious and intentional intellect, which is at once the most elaborate and also most transparent revelation of the one mental agency in which we all live, move, and exist—the most intense, most diaphanous, most radiant expression of that desire that flows through all of nature and life. The inner mystery of rational mind is the same mystery that impels all things: every mental experience involves a movement beyond itself, an ecstasy—a “standing-forth”—toward an ultimate end that can reside nowhere within physical nature as a closed mechanical system. To know the world as the object of thought and experience is a rapture of the soul, prompted by a longing no finite object can exhaust. So what is it that lures us on into reality? I don’t believe it can be just some fruitful illusion: how could any transcendental yearning have arisen except by way of a prior transcendental yearning, already invested with an indeterminate but real knowledge of what lies beyond the physical? It would entail yet another of those infinite regresses you find it so irritating for us to invoke. But how can it be avoided in your vision of reality? Again, abstract concepts and abstract purposes can’t be just the residues of sensory experiences; they invariably depend upon other abstractions within an entire system of abstractions, and can never be grounded in anything like mechanical matter. So how could intentionality of the transcendental kind be sustained by anything other than its own objective horizon of desire—the absolute realm of values in which alone it might find its rest?
HEPHAISTOS: [Sighing deeply and a little theatrically:] The love that moves the sun and all the other stars. Now there’s a truly antique “physics” for you. May I assume—perhaps you’ve already said, but I don’t recall—that this “realm of values” you’re speaking about is simply the traditional realm of the “transcendentals”: of, that is, goodness, truth, beauty, and so forth?
EROS: Yes. We have already said as much, as it happens. You know, there’s an old scholastic debate about the priority of intellect or will in rational agency. Some argue that intellect must always come first, because one can’t desire what one doesn’t know. And yet one can never really come to know something without willfully desiring to know it. In reality, I think it wise to believe, will and intellect are actually simply two aspects of a single activity of the mind, and that each is present in that activity in direct proportion to the other. Certainly, we think about the world—we organize it in our thoughts and intentions—under the canopy of its absolute ends, but we’re aware of those ends only as they act as final causes upon our wills. I mean, there are only two ways of desiring or judging any purpose of the will: as an end either desirable or not in itself, or as an end either desirable or not with regard to an end beyond itself. But no finite object corresponds to the former tout court. We can desire a finite end only as relatively desirable in itself—say, a glass of good wine that we see both as an object of pleasure and as an object we evaluate as pleasurable in light of a more abstract longing for happiness or beauty. I mean, nothing finite is desirable simply in itself, providing the index of its own value, if only in the trivial sense that whatever we find desirable about it must correspond to some more original and general disposition of our intellects, desires, and wills. I encounter a work of art that I judge to be beautiful, and then perhaps also conceive a desire to possess it; in either case, I reach my judgment and form my purposes in light of my prior sense of and longing for beauty as a transcendental standard. There’s always some absolute value present in any particular axiological judgment, and an unconditional desire present in every conditional desire. All finite longing is a longing deferred toward an infinite end. This is true even when, within the immanent horizon of longing, one’s desires are corrupt; even greed is possible for us only on account of a more primordial and innocent spiritual appetite and a natural need for happiness and goodness and beauty and so forth. All our concretely limited aspirations of will are sustained within formally limitless aspirations of the will, and the only objects of intellect and will that aren’t subject to that deferral are precisely those transcendentals you mention—universal, abstract, unconditional, categorically desirable, free from all empirical determinants and accidents . . . names for being in its wholeness and in its highest perfection.
HEPHAISTOS: Yes, yes, I know. This isn’t my first rodeo. All these transcendentals are, as the metaphysicians say, convertible with one another, because they’re all just different names—different ways for finite minds to grasp—the single transcendent truth of Being itself, which is of course God, who is goodness, truth, beauty, oneness, being, and every other metaphysical absolute. I know where we’re going.
EROS: I have no doubt, but the question is how we get there. Metaphysics aside, what interests me most is the simple truth that our experience of reality has this transcendental structure. We have no world not given us out of the . . . generous transcendence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. How extraordinary that the mind is always engaged—rationally engaged—with a dimension of reality that necessarily stands outside the whole of nature, and so a dimension that’s invisible to natural selection.
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, please. Nature selects behaviors and capacities; it doesn’t need to see the fanciful . . . user-illusions informing them.
