by Simon Smith
Part 7: Arriving
together! Did the Cosmos Move for You?
This is a manifold to which consciousness
assuredly belongs, quite possibly as the vital ingredient. If that cosmological
revolution which transformed inert matter into participative agency is correct,
as both physics and metaphysics suggest, then we who explore it must belong to
it. We are, as Einstein avowed, ‘part of the whole, called by us
“Universe”.’[1] Huxley agreed, as we have seen,
insisting that ‘[h]uman intellectual constructions, together with machines and
societies, birds and plants, and minerals and suns and nebulae, are all part of
the one cosmic process’.[2] Our exploratory activities, then,
are an integral element in the nexus of process and pattern wherein the
universe we are exploring is manifest. Those activities make what we call
“The Universe” a uni-verse, a whole. What else, since the ‘diagrammatic
unity’ of the construct is, Farrer reminds us, nowhere but in the
diagrammatising mind. That is the lesson of Schrödinger’s famous feline
experiment. Our activities contribute to the collapse of an indefinite range of
coexisting quantum possibilities into a coherent, mapable, history; or, as
Conti trenchantly put it, ‘[a]cts become facts’.[3]
Crucially, it is in these unifying
projects, in the coalescing of consciousness, ‘including all [its] spiritual
properties and achievements, with the rest of the universe’,[4] that the downgraded analogue of
personal agency is thoroughly upgraded. With a full turn of the hermeneutic
circle, what began as projection returns as self-reflection, an image of
longed-for harmony and wholeness, of completion or perfection, of infinite
otherness.
The transformative potential of such
evocative constructs, for human development and for the universe of which that
development is a part, becomes clear. Such images - mirrors, masks, personae
- reveal the uni-verse as it is known and the mind which knows
it. ‘Know thyself’; so sayeth the Delphic oracle; don the mask and speak truth.
Wise counsel, indeed; but Sagan’s imagery echoes a more “upwardly mobile”
spirit, for ‘[w]e are a way for the cosmos to know itself’.[5] Likewise, Huxley made a lunar leap
when he said, ‘[a]s a result of a thousand million years of evolution the
universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its
past history and its possible future’.[6]
In such images of cosmic consciousness
the analogical upgrade soars far beyond its origin, towards a ‘transcending
archetype’. Farrer called it a ‘“crypto-apprehension” of Infinite Act’, where
‘Infinite Act’ is itself a divinely inspired metaphor; providential embrace
interpenetrating (pro)creative acts.[7] This hints at our own infinite
extensions, psychologically informed metaphysics reminds us, because it
is essentially dialectical, participative, interpersonal. It reflects,
simultaneously, both what we are and what we might be: consciousness engaged in
its own cosmological extensions. “Crypto-apprehensions” and reflections of
perfection invite consciousness to re-conceive itself; no chastened distillate
of thought nor unmeant mechanism, but as creative participation in its own
projects. Only by entering into them may we overcome what Einstein described as
‘a kind of optical delusion of… consciousness’: the persistent belief that ‘our
thoughts and feelings [indeed, all our activities] are somehow separate from
the rest’; species, “universe”, and all our others. The scientist advised against
taking our limitations too much to heart, be they physical, metaphysical, or
psychological. To free ourselves from them and the delusions they provoke,
that, he said, giving astrophysics an anthropo-theological flourish, is ‘the
one issue of true religion’.
Feuerbach’s point precisely. If the
cosmos is, as Huxley maintains, full partner in consciousness[8] then the theistical mind shall
countenance no constraint on personal participations. For a ‘limited
consciousness,’ Feuerbach declared, ‘is no consciousness’; no consciousness, at
any rate, of the cosmos or its interpersonal affirmations and
affiliations. ‘Consciousness, in the strict or proper sense, is identical with
the consciousness of the infinite’.[9] The infinite nature of
consciousness lies in the conscious appropriation of and by the
dialectic. Therein lies our own reflection; the image of consciousness
cognising and re-cognising, thereby realising, itself as an expression
of infinite creativity. That means ‘nothing else than the consciousness of the
infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the
conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature’.
Whether Farrer would approve of such
Germanic circumlocutions we may never know. Undoubtedly, however, he would
applaud the psychological and theological, sentiments. He called it ‘cosmic
personalism’.[10] In so doing, he sought, as William
James would say, to do the universe the deepest service he could; like
Einstein, Sagan, Huxley, Feuerbach, et al., he would say “thou” to it; more, he
would, as Whitman did, say:
‘I, turning, call to thee, O Soul, thou actual Me’.
Modelling our explorations of the universe on
such dialectical extensions – as Farrer adjured – overcomes the deadlock
between personalism and “impersonalism”. The physical and psychological
outreach of “personhood”, creative participation in the becoming of others,
where conscious acts are embodied in and as a universe becoming
conscious of itself: there is the vital clue to the re-integration of
mind-and-world.
That re-integration opens the door to
a convergence of speculative cosmology with personalist and pragmatic theist; a
convergence far deeper than scholars in their respective camps may realise;
deeper, certainly, than the “closed category”, subject/object, thinking which
still dominates philosophy, theology, and science could ever allow. That
convergence is, of course, our real beginning; for conscious exploration and
extension; for discovering the unity of our own deeper natures ‘with others and with
the rest of the universe’.[11] And in such discoveries, does
consciousness or “personhood” become ‘the root of unlimited
freedom, the jumping-off place for infinity’; or so Huxley
thought. It becomes, as we do think and Farrer might have said, the embarkation point for the very grandest
of metaphysical experiments.
Phew!
Well, I’m sure we’re all glad that’s finally over. And that really is the end –
the sexy end! Oh yeah, and so on and so forth.
[1] My
emphasis. Possibly a letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29
March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972). However, The
New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (Princeton University Press, 2005:
ISBN 0691120749), p. 206, has a different and presumably more accurate version
of this letter, which she dates to February 12, 1950 and describes as “a letter
to a distraught father who had lost his young son and had asked Einstein for
some comforting words”.
[2] Huxley,
120.
[3] Conti, Metaphysical
Personalism 184.
[4] Huxley,
120.
[5] Sagan,
‘The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean’ 6 min, 40 sec.
[6] Huxley,
‘Transhumanism’, in New Bottles for New Wine, London: Chatto &
Windus, 1957, pp.
[7] Conti,
‘Austin Farrer & the Analogy of Other Minds’ 53-4.
[8] Huxley,
122.
[9] Feurbach
2-3.
[10] Farrer, Saving
Belief, 63.
[11] Huxley,
267.
