All Things Are Full of Gods, page 50
You may claim to think all of this an illusion—though with what warrant it would be hard to say—but in actual practice you presume the causal priority of mind in the structure of reality. The opposite is impossible as a rational project; for, if materialism were true, you’d never be able to account for consciousness at all, and you’d certainly never be able to explain how mind, in its exorbitant—its infinite—difference from the great mechanical order “out there,” could actually capture any of being’s reality in concepts. And yet, again, this is no irrational venture of madly hopeless hope on your part. The more you abstract your experience into various kinds of ideal rather than empirical content—formal, conceptual, rational, mathematical, moral, aesthetic, logical, and so forth—the more you find yourself extracting knowledge and genuine understanding from the welter of brute events that the world presents to your senses, before intentionality begins to craft that world into an intelligible order. This is why I mentioned Lonergan earlier: he demonstrated with exquisite clarity that the very search for understanding—the very dynamism of that insatiable rational desire to know why and why and why—discloses the reality of what he calls the “unrestricted intelligibility” of being, and thereby the reality of God as the one “unrestricted act of understanding.”
HEPHAISTOS: Do tell. Does my desire for the love of . . . oh, let’s say, the love of your mother, my truant lady wife—does that prove its reality?
EROS: I might wish for another example, but as you will. Let me just say this: the reality of a final cause is in some sense merely its presence as a real and effective rational relation within any actuality; so, if indeed you desire the love of Aphrodite, then that love is a real cause of your action. Whether that final cause is real in itself, however, apart from your action, is something that can be discovered by the degree of success with which your action meets. If your entreaties win no kind response, if your carnal importunities are routinely resisted, if your professions of love fall on deaf ears, if she lavishly distributes her amorous favors to other gods . . .
HEPHAISTOS: [Grimacing and clearing his throat:] Now that I think of it, I too wish I’d chosen a different example. [In a subdued voice:] Actually, our marriage counseling has been going quite well as of late . . .
EROS: Well, in any case, if your desires were repeatedly frustrated, you’d have reason to doubt the independent reality of the end that draws you on. But that’s precisely why we may reasonably presume the opposite in this case. In our search to know the real, we find that the world does indeed become more intelligible to us the more we’re able to abstract it into concepts, and to arrange those concepts in categories, and then to arrange those categories under ever simpler, more comprehensive, more unconditioned concepts, finding new relations of understanding across categories, arranging those relationships into more comprehensive, simpler frames of analogy or pertinency or common principle, discovering new interpretive contexts and progressively unifying them with one another, interrogating each conclusion reached, making rational judgments and then judging those judgments, eliminating every area of ignorance or uninterpreted particularity, always ascending toward the simplest and most capacious concept our minds can reach. We discover that finite objects of understanding have to be progressively purged of their residue of the empirical in order to yield their secrets to our inquiring intellects; and we find our own desire to draw this intelligible content out into the light to be unrelenting—to be, as Lonergan says, a pure and unrestricted desire to know—precisely because the mind, in longing for complete intelligibility, is always able to recognize incomplete intelligibility. So long as thought’s power meaningfully to ask why something is so has not been exhausted, it has a tacit grasp of what would suffice as a complete and sufficient answer, and indeed a tacit grasp of being as total intelligibility as such. Yet no finite object or end within nature could instill that tacit desire or tacit knowledge in us, since all such objects provide only restricted acts of understanding; what, however, we’re constantly aware of in our questioning is something beyond any merely particular truth—any truth that, left to itself, leaves other truths undisclosed or other questions unanswered. That transcendental—that transcendent—horizon abides, as the absolute or divine dimension of depth in our rational . . . let’s say, our rational vista: the ideal of perfect intelligibility, wholly free from all empirical opacity . . . from all empirical residue . . . not limited to particular instances or single things, leaving nothing out in its universal embrace of all phenomena.
What, then, is the nature of that ideal? It’s a pure and unrestricted act of understanding; and, for being to be intelligible in the way we not only hope it is, but in all the ways in which we continually find that it genuinely is, this unrestricted act must be real, and in fact convertible with being itself. Reality gives itself to the mind as mental content because mental content is the ground of reality. After all, to say that something’s become fully intelligible to us is to say we’ve reached an idea of it that can be understood according to the simplest abstract laws and that leaves no empirical or conceptual remainder behind. This is the highest form of intelligibility. This being so, it makes perfect sense that so many ancient and mediaeval philosophers believed that the ideal dimension of things—the dimension of their intrinsic intelligibility—was not only a property inhering in them, but the very principle of their existence. Yet what’s an idea, after all, other than the content of an act of understanding . . . the content of a mind? What’s a concept other than an object of rational intentionality? And so how could being be pure intelligibility if it were not also pure intelligence—the mind of God, so to speak—an act of understanding that understands all things and therein understands itself perfectly? This, at any rate, is his reasoning: as the mind moves toward an ever more comprehensive and perspicuous knowledge of the real, it necessarily moves toward an ideal level of reality at which intelligibility and intelligence are no longer distinguishable.6
Really, isn’t this something we can confirm simply through a scrupulous contemplation of what we’re doing at every moment of our engagement with the world? Lonergan made his arguments specifically in regard to rational methods of inquiry—scientific, philosophical, and so forth—but there’s no need to confine his conclusions to the limits of any special method. As I said not long ago, all of this is already true of every act of perception and cognition and reasoning in its natural depth. In all we undertake, we assume the human mind can be a true mirror of reality because we’re also assuming that all reality is already a mirror of mind. No other comportment toward the truth of experience is possible for us. We’re always already engaged, however humbly, in that ceaseless ascent toward ever greater knowledge, and that means that when we take in the world even in its most mundane details we’re intentionally engaged in an ascent toward an ultimate encounter with limitless consciousness, limitless reason, a transcendent reality where being and knowledge are always already one and the same. The marvelous reciprocal relation of our power to understand and being’s power to be understood, to my mind, unremittingly indicates an ultimate identity between reason and being in their transcendent origin and end. Really, the best way of understanding the mind in each of us is as a restricted instance of that unrestricted act of understanding: God, that is, as the ground of both the subjective rationality of mind and the objective rationality of being, the transcendent and indwelling order of truth by which mind and world are both informed and in which both participate and through which each is given to the other. If we’re correct in saying that to be is to be manifest—to be intelligible and also consciously known—then we can also say that God, as infinite being, is also an infinite act of knowing, in whom mind and being are one and the same; and thus we can say also that, as such, God is the source of the fittedness of mind and being each to the other in the realm of the finite.
There was another philosopher, roughly a generation or two before Lonergan, named Maurice Blondel . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Ah, yet another Nazarene intellectual. Are you planning to be baptized at any point?
EROS: [With a bemused smile:] No. I don’t think superannuated gods are typically invited to participate in “the mysteries,” in any event. But you really must learn to let bygones be bygones. I’ve done so, and it’s very restful for the nerves. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean” and all that. But never mind. My point is that Blondel was an especially profound and rigorous thinker of how all free agency of every kind—how all “action,” to use his central term—in every modality of the will’s engagement with reality, is animated by this necessary orientation toward a divine horizon; and for him this orientation, properly considered, reveals the mark of the supernatural as always already impressed upon all our acts of willing. An intrinsic desire for transcendence forces us to will, and to will freely; this dialectic of necessity and freedom he defines as a relation within rational agents between la volonté voulante—“the willing will”—and la volonté voulue—“the willed will.” Think of it as the relation between the transcendental and the immanent orientations we’ve already talked about: between a constant, implicit sense of and love for a higher realm of values, found in the fullness of being, and a repeated, explicit movement of desire toward elected finite ends, prompted by our longing to rise to the level of that primordial inner impulse. Thus there’s an original immanence of transcendence, so to speak, within mental agency, and thus even the mind’s immanent pursuit of its immediate desires invites it to seek that transcendent end, because one can’t be equal to oneself, as it were—one’s deliberative or willed will can’t be equal to one’s natural or willing will—except by one going beyond oneself. And, as it’s driven onward, rational agency serially exhausts all reductive explanations for its desire—all physical, psychological, social, empirical, mysticizing explanations. In the end, one is seeking to discover oneself by freely willing what the “willing will” desires. And that means a continued commitment to something yet to be attained, from which all rational freedom is derived: something utterly beyond mechanistic or psychological determinism . . . a transcendence that sets free, that elicits any number of rational, moral, religious modes of action, that . . .7
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, please, no more. I get the point.
HERMES: [After a slightly awkward silence of several seconds:] May I at least add one final observation?
HEPHAISTOS: Would it matter if I tried to prevent you from doing so?
HERMES: I doubt it. And all I wanted to say was that all of this touches upon a point I refrained from making earlier, when you accused me of trying to turn linguistics into a mystical theology. Well, I don’t have to do that, because language reveals itself from the first to be a structure of transcendence, in just the terms Eros has been laying out. Language is nothing but pure intentionality, all the way down, and rational intentionality exists wholly within this total rational volition toward the infinite that Eros has so buoyantly described. Well, then, language is already . . . well, I suppose we’ll have to rest content with the word “mystical” for now. The most elevated and most original source of language—its unifying formal principle—is the final horizon of all rational intentionality; that’s the highest stratum, so to speak, of the top-down causal structure of the semeiotic order. That means that language is possible, even in its most indigent and impotent forms, only as the result of a prior engagement with an infinite end—a perfect coincidence of knowledge and the known, or of utterance and the uttered. This seems more or less self-evident to me. We need only reflect on that higher stratum of symbolic thought to which syntactic and semantic linguistic functions are subvenient. What, after all, is a symbol other than a privileged instance of indistinction between mind and world in a word that both utter together, in a single voice, as it were? Every symbol is a place where being gives itself to manifestation in the intentionality of mind, and mental intention yields itself up as the place where being manifests itself. But then, if it’s true that, as Peirce said, all symbols possess their meanings only in light of other symbols, within a web of symbols that has neither beginning nor end, then what sustains that web of meanings in its intrinsic intelligibility is, again, that infinite coincidence between being and knowledge—between uttered and utterance—to which the whole of the symbolic order aspires. And this would seem to mean—given both the irreducibility of language and the absurdity of the concept of strong emergence—that in every word we speak we implicitly admit that we’ve been addressed by this infinite end. What wakens us from the silence of nothingness to become speakers of the word is the need to respond to the voice of God speaking to us, and that voice echoes within every word we speak.
HEPHAISTOS: Enough. [Raising both hands before him, palms outward in a gesture of surrender:] I implore you, no more. Honestly, I understand.
IV
Ātman Is Brahman
HEPHAISTOS: Really, you have no sense of limits once you get the wind in your sails. I asked for arguments, not mystagogy. So, all right, the mind seeks immaterial ends . . . absolute ends. Well, of course it does; that’s how thought works. That’s the system, and that’s how it represents itself to itself in order to function. Honestly, I sometimes think that you three believe you can simply rhapsodize me into submission. It’s not going to happen. And let me just say here that it seems to me we might reverse a good deal of the argument you’re all intent on making today. I can grant that the internal structure of mental acts—and, I should add, of mental representations—is precisely this dialectic you describe between, on the one hand, a mental and volitional orientation toward an abstract realm of absolute values and, on the other, a secondary orientation toward particular things in the world. I’m still free, however, to conclude that this is simply how, practically speaking, the brain needs to function, and that this very fact imposes upon our minds the tendency to believe in a transcendent reality, as a convenient user-illusion. The dynamism of neural operations generates its own operative principle: that hypothesis, so to speak. “God” is merely the name we give to the supreme algorithm in our systems of behavior—the supreme user-interface. Yes, I know your objections. We’ve been over them. They’re powerful, I concede, and in certain moods I might find them persuasive; but that’s perhaps only to say that I too, as an organic system of functions, am destined to see things in certain ways by the structure of my own . . . programming, as it were.
PSYCHE: [After several seconds of silence:] Back to functionalism again, after we’ve done so much to dismantle its presuppositions? Forsooth, my dear. I honestly don’t believe you really believe what you say you believe. I believe also that we’ve already demonstrated the falsehood of what you’re saying, and that you know it. But of course there’s no way in the end of combatting a pure epistemological nihilism. If you choose to believe that you’re a machine programmed to think it’s conscious and programmed to think it wills . . . well, I’m not going to start the debate again from the beginning.
HEPHAISTOS: Once more, I haven’t claimed to believe anything in a final way. I’ve claimed only not to believe what I don’t believe.
PSYCHE: Then permit me to do the same for myself, and maybe we can move on. I don’t believe that we can explain mental agency coherently except in terms of this experience of a relation of God as dwelling in the inmost depths of each of us to God as dwelling beyond the utmost heights to which our minds and wills aspire: the striving, that is, of an “I” within me more original than my mere psychological ego toward a “that”—or really, perhaps, a “Thou”—more ultimate than the mere physical universe. I also don’t believe that anything else can make sense, existential or logical, of the spiritual agency within each of us that refuses to relent, to abandon that divine horizon, and that instead continues to seek it, consciously and unconsciously, in rational reflection and empirical investigation, but also in dreams, myths, works of art . . . visions, prodigies of inspiration, the very miracle of language . . . every movement of spirit poetically seeking its end . . . all that expresses our ecstatic essence . . . the implicit experience of the supernatural in our every explicit grasp of nature. I most definitely don’t believe that mind and being could disclose one another in the dynamic depth that they do if they didn’t coincide in essence with one another, and if they weren’t in principle already one and the same in the mind and being of God—if, that is, what exists in us and the world as a constant dynamic synthesis of mind and being were not a real participation in what in God exists as an absolute identity of mind and being. I don’t believe that the two poles of mental agency irreducible to physical causes—the foundation of the apperceptive witness within, the encompassing fullness of the unperceivable divine beyond—could give the world to us in such an inexhaustible variety of modes if those poles weren’t at one with the very principle of all that is. I don’t believe that it’s reasonable or even possible to separate the gnoseological oneness of our apprehension of the world from the ontological oneness that composes the world without thereby creating an intolerable paradox. Above all, I don’t believe that we’ve failed to demonstrate—or that you’ve failed to realize—the incoherence of physicalist reduction or naturalist metaphysics with regard to the mind or life or language, as well as the rational solvency of the contrary supposition that the reality in which we live, move, and have our being is spirit.
HEPHAISTOS: You needn’t continue to speak in the negative. The rhetorical effect is beginning to wear thin.
PSYCHE: [With a laugh:] Very well, Phaesty. Anyway, you know where I stand. I believe in the power of reason to discern truths, principally because I believe that there are real formal causes that shape the world’s reality, and that these inhabit and shape our thoughts as well, and that therefore we can truly think and speak about reality. And I believe that this is the nature and substance at once of mind, life, and language. I believe that all that is has its being as, so to speak, one great thought, and that our individual minds are like prisms capturing some part of the light of being and consciousness . . . or, rather, are like prisms that are also, marvelously, nothing but crystallizations of that light . . . as is all of nature. I believe that this is the reality in which we live and move and exist, and that we enter into it at the beginning of life as into a kind of dream that was already being dreamed before we found ourselves within it, and that—from our first moment of being aware that we’re aware—our participation in that reality comes filled with both memories of the eternal and an urgent yearning for the transcendent. All is familiar, all is impossibly strange. In the end, that reality in which we exist and in which we participate as spiritual agencies may as well be called “God,” since we have no better name for infinite mind that’s also infinite being. Moreover, I believe that the structure of all thought reveals its immanent ground to be that inner witness that is the divine light within. But then, too, it reveals its transcendent end: again, teleologically considered, the mind is God, striving not only to see—but to become—infinite knowledge of infinite being, beyond any distinction between knower and known. And all of this I take to be just so many different ways of saying that, as the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad tells us, Ayam Ātmā Brahma: this Ātman is Brahman—this Spirit within each of us is godhead.
