Transcendentals

The following adds to the previous Units’ discussion of human trans-materiality by examining five transcendent desires (which reveal five kinds of transcendent awareness): the desire for perfect and unconditional truth, love, justice/goodness, beauty, and home. These five kinds of transcendent desire (and awareness) distinguish human consciousness from animal consciousness, and explain why humans have creative capacity beyond preset rules, algorithms, and programs (Gödel’s proof), and why human beings have a natural propensity toward the spiritual and transcendent.

So why do philosophers, scientists, and people of common sense assert that human beings have such a special value? The answer lies in several interrelated observations which will be discussed below. These observations are present in the works of many philosophers and scientists,^[1] beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, moving through St. Augustine, Moses Maimonides, Averroes, St. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suarez, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, John Henry Newman, and into the 20th and 21st centuries (e.g., Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Jacque Maritain, Henri Bergson, Emerich Coreth, Bernard Lonergan, and many others). This idea is also central to the works of many prominent physicists and biologists in the 20th and 21st centuries. Two examples of this will suffice to make our point. The first comes from the great physicist/astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, who observed, after detailing the equations of quantum physics and relativity physics:

We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammelled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds the fulfillment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born within our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours. Science can scarcely question this sanction, for the pursuit of science springs from a striving which the mind is impelled to follow, a questioning that will not be suppressed. Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead and the purpose surging in our nature responds.^[2]

The eminent geneticist Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, expresses a similar insight:

As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan. …Can you both pursue an understanding of how life works using the tools of genetics and molecular biology, and worship a creator God? Aren’t evolution and faith in God incompatible? Can a scientist believe in miracles like the resurrection? Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers.^[3] I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.^[4]

If the human genome can be viewed as the language of God, then human beings can be viewed as the consummate expression of that language, and it is not unwarranted to say, from a scientific and faith perspective, that human beings are made in the image of God (Gen 1:27 – “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”).

So what is the philosophical and scientific origin of this belief in the specialness (and transcendence) of human beings? It is predominately grounded in a longstanding observation about nonhuman animals, which continues to be verified in recent empirical investigations. Bernard Lonergan expresses it as follows:

…[I]t is only when [animals’] functioning is disturbed that they enter into consciousness. Indeed, not only is a large part of animal living nonconscious, but the conscious part itself is intermittent. Animals sleep. It is as though the full-time business of living called forth consciousness as a part-time employee, occasionally to meet problems of malfunctioning, but regularly to deal rapidly, effectively, and economically with the external situations in which sustenance is to be won and into which offspring are to be born. … ¶ When the object fails to stimulate, the subject is indifferent; and when nonconscious vital process has no need of outer objects, the subject dozes and falls asleep.^[5]

This might be summarized quite simply as follows. When animals run out of biological opportunities and dangers, they fall asleep. When you stop feeding your dog, or giving it affection and attention (biological opportunities), and introduce no biological dangers (such as a predator) into its sensorial purview, it will invariably and inevitably fall asleep.

In stark contrast to this, when human beings run out of biological opportunities and dangers, they frequently ask questions, seek purpose or meaning in life, contemplate beauty, think about the goodness (or imperfections) of their beloveds, think about unfairness or injustice and how to make their situation or the world better, and even think about mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology – for their own sake.^[6] When human beings run out of biological opportunities and dangers, they generally do not fall asleep; they engage in what Plato and his followers (the neo-Platonists) called “transcendental activities.” These activities reveal the specialness of human beings, which makes them deserving of special value.

The neo-Platonists identified five areas of transcendental activity (termed “the five transcendentals”): the awareness of and desire for truth, love, goodness/justice, beauty, and Being/home. They are called “transcendental” because they all seem to have a limitless horizon, and human beings seem to be aware of their limitless possibilities, and seem to desire their perfect (limitless) fulfillment. Thus, in the view of many philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, human beings seem to have an awareness of and desire for perfect and unconditional truth, love, goodness/justice, beauty, and Being/home. Since these five transcendentals are necessarily beyond all algorithmically finite structures (which determine all physical realities and laws constituting subatomic particles, molecules, cells, and complex organic structures such as a brain), many philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists have held that human beings are more than mere matter. Human beings seem to have a transmaterial or spiritual power or dimension which enables them to move beyond every algorithmically finite structure (physical structure) and to be creative in ways that defy the possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Interestingly, this claim is corroborated in the domain of mathematics by Kurt Gödel (in the famous theorem named after him). He anticipated the limits of artificial intelligence which are defied by human intelligence on a regular basis. Essentially, Gödel showed that there will always be unprovable propositions within any set of axiomatic statements in mathematics. Human beings are able not only to show that consistent, unprovable statements exist, but also to prove that they are consistent by making recourse to axioms beyond those used to generate these statements. Artificial intelligence is incapable of doing this. This reveals that human thinking is not based on a set of prescribed axioms, rules, or programs, and is, by nature, beyond such prescribed rules and programs.^[7]

If one is to deny this transmaterial dimension, one will simply have to ignore the stark differences between animal and human consciousness; to ignore human awareness of limitless horizons of truth, love, goodness/justice, beauty, and Being/home; to ignore the remarkable properties of human creativity explicated by Gödel; and to ignore the natural human capacity to seek a transcendent God. If one feels uncertain about writing off this body of evidence, then it is unjustifiable to rush into materialistic reductionism, naïve identifications of animal and human intelligence, and a denial of the human capacity for self-transcendence. But if one stops short of these simplistic positions, one remains open to the specialness of human beings, and therefore open to their special value.