Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Ladies and germs – well, maybe not germs. But
welcome all the rest, assuming that you’re still alive and haven’t coughed your
last all over granny and finally corked it. I’m talking about you, America – or
as you’ll come to be known in the future, Plague Island #1 (finally, that whole
“build that wall” thing begins to make sense).
Nevertheless, welcome one and all to the nearly
final part of my adventures in psycho-cosmology. Nearly final? Nearly final. This
“last chapter” ran a bit longer than expected and there’s only so much of this
stuff that I’m willing to foist upon the innocent reader at anyone time.
Besides, hanging it out like this buys me another week before I have to start thinking
of something else to say.
So, as I say: welcome! Welcome! Welcome, to
this, the nearly final chapter of…
3. A Grand Metaphysical
Experiment
This is the story so far: a cosmos
of concrete connections; the analogy of action by which they are known and
understood; and a philosophical psychology which grounds that analogy in the
dialectics of consciousness, the concrete connections by which we come to be. Here’s the final chapter
(nearly). And this is where the story really starts.
Those
interpersonal transactions aren’t exclusive to philosophical psychology.
‘Otherness’ belongs as much to cosmological schematics as it does to social
semantics. Reductive minds dub them
fairy-tales and fantasies, insisting we abandon them; and yet, images of
‘otherness’ do keep bursting forth in
cosmic metaphor. This is because the cosmos is not built of ontological
independents. It’s primitively
interpersonal; not just there but given to us. Being given, it wears the mantle of living
process, so becomes a manifold
energised by the quickening of a consciousness that constructs itself by
passing itself through such images.
Even the
unity, wrought by science from the constant collision of forces, which is our
universe, can’t belong to the universe per
se any more than it belongs to consciousness in se. Scientific laws, like
beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. So Huxley reminds us: ‘their generation
requires the participation of human minds and their interactions with objects.’
“Coherence” and “unity” are, likewise, transactions wherein the universe and consciousness are actualised. Hence, the processes and activities which
constitute consciousness and the cosmos aren’t just physical; they’re also
projective: in short, personal.
This is a
manifold to which consciousness most assuredly belongs. If that cosmological revolution which
transformed inert matter into participative agency is correct, as both modern
physics and modern metaphysics insist, then we who explore it must also belong
to it. We are, as Einstein avowed, ‘part
of the whole, called by us
“Universe”.’ Huxley agreed, 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’. Our exploratory
activities are an integral feature in the nexus of process and pattern which is
the universe we explore. Those
activities make what we call “The
Universe” a uni-verse, a whole.
Transacted between consciousness and its “objects”,
these mythopoeic projects are inter-constitutive of the agencies enacted
there. In the prescient words of the
great Carl Sagan, ‘[t]he cosmos is… within us,’ in every sense; ‘we are made of
star-stuff.’
It’s in these
unifying projects, in the coalescing of consciousness, ‘including all [its]
spiritual properties and achievements, with the rest of the universe’, that the
downgraded analogue of our agency is fully upgraded. So Goethe, in theological
mode, saw that same unity as a divine reflection of our ‘own inner unity’; a
unity which, Cassirer adds, only reveals itself in the concrete structures of
language and myth that embody it. What began as projection returns as
self-reflection, an image of longed-for harmony and wholeness, of completion or
perfection, of infinite Otherness.
Here, the
transformative potential that such evocative constructs hold for human
development and for the universe of which it is a part, become clear. These images reveal the uni-verse as it is known and
the mind that knows it. Echoing Huxley’s earlier remarks, Sagan reminds us of
the real import of Delphi’s Oracle: ‘[w]e are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’
In 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. This empowers our own infinite extensions, psychologically
informed metaphysics reminds us, because
it is essentially dialectical, interpersonal. It reflects 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 meaningless mechanism, but as
creative participation in its own projects.
It works like
this: in downgrading the analogy of action, the scientific mind “externalises”
or “objectifies” it. This is a mirror image of the classical onto-theological
project, which idealises and objectifies the concept of consciousness,
stripping away all personal predication in search of Absolute Being, Necessary
Being, Being-just-being-itself. But this is where scientific ideals get the
better of both theological and
philosophical realism. The scientist’s
“objectivist” pose takes us out of the picture of natural forces; not to
provide a description of a world of independent “reals”; what practical purpose
could that possibly serve? No, the scientist adopts the pose because, as Farrer
puts it, ‘by taking ourselves out of…[the picture of physical agencies] and
studying the lines of it objectively, we put ourselves in the position to
re-enter it with better effect.’ Our scientist does just that: puts us in a
position to exercise control over the forces diagrammatised.
Now this is
where the scientifically and psychologically enlightened metaphysician
doubles-down on both the scientific objectivist and the onto-theologian. Bringing these analogical extensions and
abstractive acts to self-consciousness puts us in a position to re-enter them to vastly greater effect. It puts
us in a position to exercise control over the diagrammatising forces and, consequently, of the development of
consciousness that goes with them. In so doing, it returns us to the primal
dialogue in which that development takes place.
Self-consciously
re-entering the matrix of interpersonal connections, I enact myself as a
genuine other, as Thou to some other.
That other – whatever it may be – is addressed as a reality in its own right, a
being with a distinct ‘charter of existence’. By participating in this
‘charter’, I transcend the limitations of my own. Overcoming the limits of determinate
existence, I re-enact the dialogue my recognition reflects. I recognise the other as a reflection of
myself, one, like me, in need of othering.
Recognition re-establishes the connection allowing me to reclaim what
Feuerbach called my ‘relinquished self’, my ‘species being’. In short, I
reinvest myself in my own projections.
In that
reinvestment, cosmic speculations coincide with psychologically informed
theology, Feuerbach’s anthropo-theology. Returning to our projects as
self-consciousness participating in
cosmological constructs, embodying such images in acts of othering, we find
both the clue to, and instantiation of, Prime Creative Will. More, in the
mutual transactions of consciousness, we put ourselves in the way of that
Will.
And here we are at another
classic cliff-hanger ending! Will consciousness mutually transact itself? Will
the Prime Creative Will have washed his or her massive hands? Can we
participate in Creation while maintaining a safe social distance? Have you seen
Ludwig Feuerbach’s beard? Will Jessica find out about Chester’s mistress? Will
Burt and Mary ever make up? All this and more, in the next episode of…
Soap.
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