A Grand Metaphysical Experiment, Part the Last? Almost!

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Amid all the fun and excitement of social distancing, lockdown, wondering whether my family and friends will still be alive next month, and drinking in the afternoon, I quite forgot that yesterday was Sunday.

Nevertheless, for your edification and entertainment, we have the next and nearly the last part of our epic cosmological experiment; and only a mere 24 hours later than intended, give or take an hour or two.

3.1 The Grand Metaphysical Experiment Continues!

Conscious participation in willing the will of an Ideal Other aligns the self with its own ideals.  Only then can it fulfil its potential humanity.  Interaction; and the projection of mutual projects; even the form of mutual address: these provide a religious consciousness with direct experience of the divine Will in action.  What, after all, could be more divine, Farrer asked, ‘than… the fire of genius, the steadfastness of virtue, the unselfishness of love?’ This is the realisation of first “being” in and as personal doing.  ‘These things are not merely the masterpieces of God’s hand, they are the sole revealers of his nature.’  Without the aspiration to imitate and embody them, we have no concept of the divine; for ‘if the highest, most voluntary part of human behaviour is not the act of God, then nowhere in the universe do we directly meet the divine love.’

That love is reflected in the conscious re-appropriation of a dialectic which inspirits us.  By reconstructing the dialectic in which it first becomes, consciousness uncouples itself from self-limitation, re-enacting itself as self-conscious transaction with transcendent ideas and ideals.  Simply put, participate in the becoming of another and we participate in the divine mode.

Clearly, then, consciousness can’t be constrained to determinate patterns of physical operation.  ‘[O]ur voluntary powers’ are not, Farrer reminds us, ‘fixed to a single level of performance, or a set range of concerns.’  Feuerbach’s point in a nutshell.  If the cosmos is, as Huxley maintains, full partner in consciousness then the mythico-religious mind shall countenance no constraint on personal participations.  For a ‘limited consciousness,’ Feuerbach declared, ‘is no consciousness’ at all; no consciousness of the cosmos or its interpersonal affirmations, that is.  ‘Consciousness, in the strict or proper sense, is identical with the consciousness of the infinite’. The infinite nature of consciousness lies in conscious appropriation of and by the dialectic.  In such transcendent ideals we see 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’.

So consciousness coincides with religious consciousness.  Recognising its own “infinitude”, the “self” re-conceives itself as essentially transcendent or transactional. As the sciences have ably shown, consciousness of the infinite finds its apotheosis in our active exploration of the world. 

By the 19^th Century, when Feuerbach was writing, the sciences had already made a bid for omniscience. Through telescope and microscope, he observed, we had begun to count ‘the stars in the sky, the ova in the spawn of fish and butterflies, and the colour spots on the wings of insects’. And while one has her gaze fixed on Venus, or the intestines of a caterpillar, someone somewhere is looking at Uranus.

Such “objective” explorations, of course, reflect another more primal, more personal one: the participation in the other, which constitutes my own self-construction. In plain, Feuerbachian, speech, limitation lies in isolation; in combination and participation, we strive for the infinite.  In participation, the infinite supplies the conditions for becoming as overcoming.  As consciousness extends itself indefinitely, overcoming and appropriating the impersonal obstacles presented by a physical universe, so religious consciousness extends itself infinitely, overcoming the separation of “self” and other.  The “self” is literally embodied in the acts of the other.  Oriented towards the open horizon of its own realisation, consciousness transcends its self. 

That’s why Feuerbach saw the reflection of divinity enacted in the transactions of consciousness. It’s also why human ideals are not ‘merely theoretical, inert conception[s];’ they are essentially practical, ‘calling me to action, to imitation.’ Constructed in the image of the other, Susan Langer notes, projections of “perfectibility” reflect actual aspirations: modes of action worthy of replication.  Hence, those of us who strive to embody them, follow by the light of their divinity. Grounding aspirations and ideals in the vitality of concrete relation, Farrer remind us that the wellspring of all physical and personal being is no ‘shy secret hidden somewhere under the root of our mind….  God’s will is written across the face of the world.’ God is the ‘participated life.’ Invited to imitate this divine Imago, our cosmological projects reclaim the psychology from which they are born.

In an amplificatory move which allowed Feuerbach to deny the charge of reductivism and stake his claim to ‘exalt anthropology into theology’ the process of imitation and investment drive the dialectics of consciousness “upwards”. In doing so, they initiate the anthropological reconstruction of our cosmological projects; they complete the ‘anthropotheistic’ drive of consciousness embodied in both science and religion.

Anthropologising cosmology and metaphysics like this is, of course, no mere anthropomorphic projection. At best, such an obscure notion sees ‘the transposition of the internal contents of consciousness into [or onto] the external world.’ But that just constrains creative agency with the analogies used to conceive it, condemning the conception – along with the relation it connotes – to be ‘what our thought never quite overtakes.’ Such literal projections limit our idealised conceptions, first by the range of immediate interactions predicable of personal agents, and second, by the analogies we use to overcome that immediacy. 

But even a child wouldn’t be taken in by such an ontology.  Neither modern physics nor modern metaphysics imagines, in their innocence, that the creative action of the cosmos is a person; no more, says Langer, than our primitive ancestors imagined celestial bodies were. Where they once saw the moon as a ‘round fire, a shining disk’, we now recognise the universe as a ‘free-for-all of elemental forces’. We recognise this but, like those mythical and metaphysically minded ancestors, we see “personhood” in it; and, like them, what interests us are the ‘acts and relationships… which carry out that significance.’ How else, she asks, should mere empirical facts acquire importance and obviousness [but] from their analogy to human relations and activities.

Anthropic images are more than literal projection because our images and symbols don’t just represent, they present, the primal connections in which we become. This is not a personification of the cosmos, it’s a cosmologising of consciousness.

And so we reach another ill-timed and ill-judged cliff-hanger. If you survive another week, however, remember to come back next week for the final finale! Probably!