Time continues to fly as days
smudge and blur into one another like streetlamps in autumn rain. And while we sit
gazing wistfully out of the window, pondering the implications of this global
shutdown and how many Americans will survive their defiance of it, at least we
may be comforted by the shining sun. I, for one, never imagined that the Mad
Max-style, post-apocalyptic wastelands would be so pleasant and balmy.
However,
before we don our big hair and big shoulder pads and head to the nearest
Thunderdome, we have some philosophical business to conclude. Kindly maintain a
medically advisable distance, for here is the very final (no, honestly) part of
my first pass at a Grand Metaphysical Experiment.
3.2 A Grand Metaphysical
Experiment: The Finale!
Personally fortified and
interpersonally redoubled or returned, Creative Agency responds by adopting the
mode of expression most natural to us.
In theistical terms, God comes as social outreach. This is no ontological transformation from
Being to “being”, or vice versa. It is an epistemological and, more
importantly, psychological transposition
via a divine act of self-disclosure.
Epistemology
first: Adopting a human mode of being
places the emphasis on human modes of knowing. Anthropology thereby supplies the logical
conditions for, and constraints upon, cosmological speculation. In this way our anthropo-theological
projects, our myths and metaphors, privilege the ordo cognoscendi over the classical ordo essendi. “Being”
categories are subordinated to, and ultimately displaced by, the
mythico-religious consciousness which charters them as an explanation. So, for
Feuerbach, anthropology first discloses and then elevates ontology as both a
co-efficient and function of consciousness.
That resolves the oscillation between the personal and brute physical
which haunts all our attempts to find a place for natural minds, human and
divine, in a physical universe.
Psychologically,
the enactment of God in Creation is reflected in our commitment to others
“high” and “low” because (in Conti’s terms) our investment in those objects and
others cannot but remind us, ‘crypto-theistically, of the Divine Investment in
us.’ Commissioned by the presence of another, we ‘live under the shadow of an
“ought” and in the presence of a holy “Thou”. Defining the co-operative nature
of the project, Farrer reminds us that we are limited not only by what we are,
but more importantly by what we are called
to be. What we are called to be is the reflection of our ideals. Consciousness, in other words, is conditioned
by the practical demands of a divine Will which, significantly, Farrer found in
the “claimingness” of others.
To turn
towards our humanity, our ‘species being’, ‘is to look for what the believer
calls the divine image in us’. As Farrer explained, the ‘particular content of
that notion may be given, not by awareness that man is made in God’s image, but
by the functioning of that image in man.’ ‘Functioning’ here means the
reflection of divinity in a life that is fully human; that is, given for and invested in humanity.
In Feuerbach’s
words: ‘[t]he image of God is…the “mirror of man”.’ Farrer would use these same
terms to describe the transformative capacity of a consciousness ‘gazing into
the glass of God.’
The glass shows us
no face of ours; it shows us the face of our glorious Lord. And the relation of looking-glass to gazer is
reversed: instead of the mirror-image taking form from the gazer’s face, the
gazer’s face takes form from the image (Farrer, ‘Soul-Making’ in A Celebration of Faith, 160).
Again, the “mirror” of this
ideal is no literal self-reflection. Inert “self-certainty” offers no motive
for self-(re)construction. Strictly no
reflection, then, our ideals offer refractions;
a pluri-focal collision of images, framed by the projection of an Ideal Other:
the goal at which participation and transformation aim.
That’s why there’s no risk of all this succumbing
to speculative idealism. Like Feuerbach, I’m looking for a concrete, morally
enlivened, and transcending archetype.
It is a projection of the self, passed through the filter of its own
personal becoming. In becoming,
consciousness thinks, or rather enacts, itself in relation to that image. By entering into those shared modes of
self-conscious construction, consciousness replicates the teleological
structure of its projection, the self emplots itself in the narrative of its
own ideal.
Speaking theologically, Farrer put it like this: we
construct ourselves in relation to a double object: ‘God in our neighbour and
our neighbour in God.’ The person-concepts bodied forth by modern metaphysics
and the speculative cosmology to which it responds, reflect this through their
own diagrammatisations, mythopoeic ideations. Conceptions of our ‘double
object’ unfold to embrace the whole wide sweep of creation. Now we can
construct ourselves in relation to the cosmos and the Creative Agency that
inspirits it: in more traditional parlance, God in Creation and Creation in
God. Here is an Ideal reflected in, and embodied by, concrete relation to the
other. I become by participating in the
becoming of that other, thereby enacting the relation of my “self” to the
Ideal. The Infinite is mediated by the
other who is, in turn, mediated by the Infinite.
This places
the weight on the immediate reality of interpersonal relations. As creative agency, is reflected in the
conjunctions of an I and a Thou, we become in and as the agents of
divine disclosure, so birth the cosmos into consciousness, in every possible
sense. That is the truth of our metaphysics and our astrophysics, the story
behind the myths that map our great cosmological adventures. The mythopoeic
mind, chartered by One who both presents and represents its own progenesis; our
birth into and out of ‘a life that
ceaselessly mirrors himself in the
face of all creation.’ The mirror shows us the essence of our humanity: that
exploratory, explanatory, “upwardly”
oriented modality of consciousness those adventures simultaneously manifest and
pursue. Gazing into the glass, we live our belief in those myths and
adventures, so participate in their becoming, a becoming which is, in turn,
reinvested in our own transformations, infinite extensions. That, in the end,
is why Huxley called such a consciousness ‘the jumping-off place for infinity.’ And to leap from there is
surely to undertake the grandest of metaphysical experiments.
And that is where the
story really starts
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