A Grand Metaphysical Experiment, Part the first!

A thousand apologies, dear reader, for the impromptu and almost entirely unexpected hiatus. For a variety of reasons, none of which are coronavirus related, work on this, the greatest intellectual endeavour of all time had to be put on hold for a few weeks. What’s more, I cannot promise that the same or similar isn’t going to happen again in the near future. This time, however, it most certainly will be related to the current plague. Since we appear to be rapidly approaching the End of Days, there are one or two things I should like to get done before starting my new career as a cannibal/toilet paper scavenger/Thunderdome participant. 

In the meantime, however, I present for your entertainment and edification, the third instalment of my highfalutin cosmological speculations. The first, as you may be aware, is my essay, ‘A Convergence of Cosmologies: Personal Analogies in Modern Physics and Modern Metaphysics’ which can be found in Looking at the Sun: New Writings in Modern Personalism, eds. Anna Castriota and Simon Smith (Delaware/Malaga: Vernon Press, 2017). The second, as yet unreconstructed, instalment was presented on this blog some weeks ago under the title ‘Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian Reflections on Mind and Nature’. And now here we have, as I say, the third and for the time being last part.

One final thought, before we get down to philosophical business; and apologies if this is a bit off-topic, but if anyone reading this is the kind of steaming tosspot who unnecessarily hoards toilet paper or any other essentials during a time of crisis, while elderly and vulnerable people are left to struggle, kindly piss off and read something else. Your presence is not required here.

It is my sincerest hope that all such people catch cholera or something similar and so decrease the world’s overabundant and entirely surplus population of arseholes. In doing so, you would make the rest of us ever so grateful.

And so, with that out of the way, we present: 

A Grand Metaphysical Experiment

The Convergence of Cosmologies: Reprisal and Finale

1.      What’s it all about, Alfie?

This is about the fundamental fact that we are mythopoeic creatures, mythmakers, driven, apparently, to tell the universe that it is other than it really is. Truth, freedom, humanity and divinity, even the universe itself: these are myths we construct, diagrams we draw, stories we tell. And before anyone thinks about dropping a dismissive “just” or “merely” in front of those myths and stories, thereby disinterring the rotting corpse of rationalist dichotomous thinking, no thank you. We are driven to construct such myths, for only by doing so, and by living our belief in them, can they become true.

We construct narratives about ourselves and our universe so that, as Susan Langer puts it, we can orient ourselves within the universe. Myths which, in effect, embody a principle of predication whereby our thought about the whole wide sweep of creation finds a foothold, enabling us to understand our universe and ourselves.  More than that, they enable us to become ourselves, to become the kind of creature we are. Stories beget stories.

We need myths to be human, to be, as the writer Terry Pratchett so elegantly said, the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Myth and symbol, as Langer and Ernst Cassirer recognised, are vital to the development of those most essentially human, activities: talking and knowing. They are the key to understanding the exploratory, explanatory, infinitely extendable, “upwardly” oriented modality of consciousness manifest in both science and religion. Myth and symbol are the very essence of human consciousness and all its great cosmological adventures; myth and symbol and our conscious participation in them.

1.1  A Bit of Background

Before I get carried away, I’d just like to signpost where this mythological turn is coming from. This is the last part of a larger project; some of you’ve already endured bits of it at other conferences. The aim of this project has been to pursue a more perfect alignment of science and religion.

Drawing increasingly on a common storehouse of personal analogies, modern physics and modern metaphysics have begun to converge in ways that practitioners in neither camp fully appreciate. This convergence works itself out in the dialectics of consciousness and the cosmos to which it belongs, quite possibly as the vital element.

The likes of Stephen Jay Gould, and Rupert Sheldrake are the main culprits in this cosmological conspiracy; their scientific writings are rich in anthropic images and metaphysically coloured metaphor. Echoes of Austin Farrer’s interactional metaphysics; its founding construct – what it means to be, or rather to become a person – analogically extended.  Echoes, too, of Ludwig Feuerbach’s anthropo-theology, with its transformative projects, idealised self-conceptions, with which consciousness transacts and extends itself, perhaps infinitely. Together, Farrer and Feuerbach open the way for consciousness to reinvest itself in the cosmological and anthropological projects of scientist and philosopher alike.

But there is more to these echoes than a shared imagery.  There is a deeper synthesis at work here.

Consider, for example, Einstein on the strange but persistent belief that ‘our thoughts and feelings are somehow separate from all the rest.’ Urging us to free ourselves from this ‘optical delusion of… consciousness,’ he gave astrophysics an anthropo-theological flourish, calling it ‘the one issue of true religion’. Or how about the Evolutionary Biologist, Julian Huxley who said, ‘[a]s a result of a thousand million years of evolution the universe is becoming conscious of itself.’
With this in mind, I want to take a minute to recap what’s gone before so that this last stage will make sense.

And if you come back in approximately a week, dear reader, you may find me doing precisely that. In the meantime, I hope everyone stays safe and well as we all prepare for a future as cannibals and scavengers of bog roll. Until next week, keep your distance, wash your hands, and try not to act like a c***.