Q: So what's at stake for Hart in his writing of All Things Are Full of Gods?
A: The overthrow of the mechanistic-materialist metaphyiscs that provides the underlying logic and justification for the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
Q: Is that all?
A: No. He wants to replace it with a well-reasoned alternative metaphyiscial imaginary that will provide the intellectual architecture, the cultural operating system, if you will, without which the re-enchantment of the world is impossible.
Hart, of course, does not use the phrase Techno-Capitalist Matrix, but I don't think he'd object to my use of the term. There is no greater impediment to the re-enchantment of the world than humanity's continued imprisonment within the TCM because there is no greater force at work in history that seeks to seal us off from the Living Real. Our having been sealed off is bad now, but it's not as bad as it's going to get. We could reach a point of no return. That's what Transhumanism represents
Ok. So let's talk about some of the themes addressed on Day One of the colloquy of the gods in Hart's Intermundia.
The book has been primarily a debate between Psyche, the primary representative of Hart's perspective, and Hephaistos, the representative of the materialist/mechanistic metaphysics on which the Techno-Capitalist Matrix runs. Two other gods, Eros and Hermes, are part of the conversation, but remain mostly in the background listening, chipping in once in a while, usually to support Psyche. So Hephaistos is outnumbered in this debate 3 to 1. But perhaps that's turnabout fair play, because in our world, Psyche's/Hart's position is by far the minority position.
So on the first day, many topics are broached in an effort to set the table or to define the stakes of the argument that Hart wants to make. Psyche's goal is to show how Hephaistos's materialist/mechanistic metaphysics and epistemology are not really rational, but as I quoted her in "Rescuing Aristotle.2," she says Hephaistos's metaphysics has legitimacy not for its intellectual rigor but because it's simply the reigning dogma. When push comes to shove, she argues ideas like"emergence", so central to evolutionary theory, become fanciful attempts to square the circle.
When mechanistic method became a metaphysics, and the tinted filter through which it viewed nature was mistaken for an unveiling of nature’s true colorations, all explanations became tales of emergence, even in cases of realities—life, consciousness, language, and even existence itself—where such tales seemed difficult to distinguish from stories of magic. (p. 89)
Again, this has to be argued rather than simply asserted, and that's what the book is about. But the idea that consciousness could possibly emerge from purely materialistic processes is one that Psyche seeks to obliterate once and for all.1 Hart, btw, is not some Intelligent Design theorist; he rejects it--
Understand, when I talk about the “mind of God,” I’m not engaging in any kind of “Intelligent Design” argument, of the typical sort. I think that that’s just another version of the mechanistic picture of nature, albeit with a divine artisan added to the picture, a supreme mechanic to put the machine together. Life isn’t mechanism, nor does any living thing exist as a mere external artifact of the divine intellect. I’m talking about the existence of all things within the divine. I mean precisely what I say when I liken the order of nature to the structure of mind—in fact, to the structure of consecutive thought: I mean that nature, in its essence, literally is thought. (p. 106).
Again, a lot to unpack here for the uninitiated reader, but the outline of the basic argument is laid out here. Life comes from Life, Consciousness comes from Consciousness. Neither comes from random, lifeless atoms and molecules bouncing around in infinite space no matter how much time they have to do it.
Also, when Hart talks about the 'mind of God', it's not a statement of faith but an assertion of a metaphysical principle in the way Greeks like Heraclitus use the term "Logos" or the Chinese philosophers used the term "Tao". I feel the need to stress this because, the argument that Hart is making is very vulnerable to be dismissed because we are inured to think that any talk of God must be circumscribed by the faith/reason binary. It's too easy then for Hart's argument to be pigeon-holed as an apologetics for the irrationality of faith. But on the contrary, his argument is to show how un-reasonable the current mechanistic/materialist imaginary is, and how reasonable the older Neoplatonic imaginary was and can be again.
This does not take away from faith; faith has its own imperatives and does not need to justify itself by reason. But faith must always be at odds with 'reason' in the TCM. It need not be--and wasn't--in societies whose imaginaries were shaped by Neoplatonic or Taoist or Vedantist metaphysics. These imaginaries were embraced not out of some irrational leap of faith but because they made sense; they were reasonable; they gave a good account for a broad spectrum of human experience, and these accounts were far subtler, richer and broader in scope than the materialist-mechanistic account that reigns in the TCM. And they are not incompatible with what science tells us about the mechanisms of the material world. If these older metaphysics don't seem reasonable to us, it's because we've been unconsciously acculturated into a metaphysical imaginary that is at its root unreasonable. That's the argument that Hart wants to make.
Now what Hart is referencing in the phrase "tales of emergence" in the first excerpt above is what has become axiomatic wherever evolutionary theory gets out over its skis and starts to present itself as a metaphysics. The concept of emergence is important for the materialistic/mechanistic metaphysics in that it assumes that first there were just random atoms and molecules that somehow randomly started to form into objects from which over long passages of time "emerged" consciousness, which after billions of years "emerged" the special kind of reflective consciousness possessed by humans, a consciousness that is aware of itself. The idea that there might be a Mind or Minds or the operation of final causation influencing these developments is rejected a priori because that would require bringing in ideas that are not empirically verifiable.
Hart wants to argue that evolution is at root an evolution of life and consciousness, that it has been from the very beginning, and that when you really think it through, it makes more sense that life and consciousness were there from the beginning. This idea of the ontological priority of Mind/Spirit was broadly accepted in the West as late as the mid 19th Century when there was no philosopher more influential than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hart is not a Hegelian, but he has more in common with Hegel than certainly someone like Dawkins or Dennett.
But the argument boils down to this: Where do you start--with Mind as the foundational ontological principle or Matter? Which starting point provides the more reasonably robust explanation for our experience of the world we live in? Until about 150 years ago, everybody assumed it was Mind, and there are no good reasons why we shouldn't now.
Hart has no beef with science. He's fine as far as the claims that science can make within its methodolgoical constraints. But that doesn't mean it tells the whole story. As Hart argued in a quote I excerpted in "Rescuing Aristotle.2" regarding Aristotelean causation--
Nothing in the modern sciences obliges us to think of form or finality as logically superfluous concepts or to believe in a physical nature that’s really thoroughly mechanical. Standard evolutionary theory tells us that the semblance of purpose in nature is the accidental result of ages of phylogenic attrition and selection; an older vision of things might tell us instead that the process of attrition and selection is the actualization of a certain purposiveness in the structure of things, a certain tendency toward the fullest realization and expression of potentialities inherent within nature and its laws. Logically, neither claim can be proved over against the other purely from the observable physical evidence, and in fact neither actually excludes the other; either might be a licit perspective on the whole of things as interpreted from one vantage or its opposite. The issue then becomes which perspective can accommodate all the phenomena better, including the various phenomena of mental agency. (89-90)
Now by "finality" he means what I was talking about in the last post--the idea that anything alive has a telos, an end, a goal. If you took Philosophy 101, the instructor probably used the example of how the diminutive acorn becomes the mighty oak in discussing final causation. All living things seek to be most fully what they are. Survival and propagation are a part of that, but why is that a thing? Where does the imperative to survive come from, just from random molecules bouncing off one another given enough time.
Well that's probably what you've been taught to think as the only way to think about it. But Hart wants to argue that when you really think it through, it makes no sense. More on this as we proceed, but I want to end today with a reflection on "Intentionality".
Intentionality is a huge concept with a long history, and understanding its significance is essential for Hart's argument. Consciousness is always "about" something--even when we're day-dreaming, we're dreaming about something. There is always something going on in consciousness. It seems to have a 'mind' of its own. Indeed so much attention is being given to 'attention' because of all the ways, especially in the brave new world of social media, our attention is continuously grabbed by things that are wasting our time at best and corrupting our souls at worst.
So much focus lately is on how we can become the masters or our own attention rather than letting it be continuously hijacked by algorithms or demagogues. My pessimism about democracy in America and elsewhere is directly linked to what is clearly obvious--too many Americans attention is too easily seduced by whatever shiny object grabs it, and too few have the virtues, the self-mastery, to direct their attention away from delusion and toward reality. Nothing is more important for the human future than how we direct our attention, and such virtues are anathema to the smooth operating of the TCM which wants to keep you distracted from distraction by distraction.
A big part of what I want to argue is that Neoplatonism offers a way of thinking about this, and a key concept here is a retrieval of teleology or final causation. So in what follows I anticipate some questions you might have about all this:
Q: What is the human telos?
A: Wisdom and Eudaemonia.
Q: Okay. I'll bite, what do you mean by Wisdom?
A: Wisdom is the movement from foolishness/delusion toward the attainment of a firmer, deeper grip on or more intimate relationship with "reality" along both axes diagrammed below. The attainment of the vertical axis is Sophia and its attainment on the horizontal axis is Phronesis--look it up. You should have been taught this in high school.
Q: Why should people be motivated to become more wise?
A: Because Wisdom and Eudaemonia are innate drives in every healthy human being--they are together the human telos. Both Sophia and Phronesis work hand in hand, and progress in one leads to progress in the other, and one is always a check on the other. Eudaemonia is the experience of the happiness or grace that comes from the movement away from foolishness toward wisdom.
Q: You're kidding about this being an innate human drive, right? Look around you. What's the evidence for that?
A: That's my point. Everything about the TCM is designed to thwart this healthy drive in humans. Nothing would be more subversive of its goals than people actually seeking and becoming more wise. If you are comfortable living in the TCM, you proably feel no need for wisdom. If you are uncomfortable, you do. Problem is that too many people who do feel uncomfortable trade in one form of foolishness for another. They mistake being red-pilled by some crackpot conspiracy theorist for wisdom.
Q: So why should I believe there is such a thing as 'true' Wisdom, and even if there is, how do you get it?
A: Well, it's up to you to consult the deepest longings of your heart. If there's nothing there that longs for Wisdom, it could be that you are too far gone, too sealed off from 'reality" by the TCM to care about being related to it anymore. You would be like the Cypher character in The Matrix. But I don't think you'd be reading this post in the first place if that was true. All I can say is that the ancestors understood this; we have almost completely forgotten it, and now the most important task is to remember it.
How do you get it? Well, Life itself is usually the best teacher if you're open to be taught, but there are traditions, practices, and disciplines that the ancestors understood and taught and that we've forgotten. But perhaps even more damaging than our forgetfulness is how these practices are 'remembered'. More often than not they have been coopted by the logic of the TCM, and when that happens, wisdom and eudaemonia are not the telos, but something else is--like advancing your career, feeling healthier, or having more energy to defeat your opponents in sports or business. Everything, even wisdom, becomes reduced to a commodity in the TCM.
But more on this as we proceed.
Note
- Later in the book Psyche makes clear why Evan Thompson's attempts to justify emergence in terms that seem very sympathetic to Hart's postion don't work either. That argument is important to understand, but we'll get to that later. BTW, some ATF readers are familiar with my appreciation of John Vervaeke's work in 4E Cognitive Science (one of the Es is 'emergence'), but also that I part ways with him for essentially for the same reasons that Hart parts ways with Thompson--his commitment to a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of consciousness.
