transcendentals

The What and Why of 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. I. The Desire for Perfect and Unconditional Truth In his famous work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,[8] Bernard Lonergan presents an argument substantiating the existence of our desire for (and awareness of) perfect and unconditional truth (which he terms “complete intelligibility”). The argument may be set out in seven steps: (1) Lonergan begins with the frequently experienced phenomenon of asking further questions immediately upon arriving at answers. We may remember our childhood when we besieged our parents with questions such as: “Why is this?” And our parents would respond, “Oh, because of that,” and we would immediately ask, “Well, why is that?” And they would respond with yet another answer, to which we would ask another question. This ability to continuously ask questions reveals our awareness that an answer is incomplete, that is, that the answer is not completely intelligible; that it does not explain “everything about everything.” If we did not know that an answer was incompletely intelligible, we would not ask any further questions “What?” “Why?” “How?” etc. We would be very content to know our names, and to respond to biological opportunities and dangers – nothing more. It is the awareness of “something more to be known” at the very moment when something is known that drives the further question. (2) Lonergan affirms that he has a pure unrestricted desire to know, that is, he desires to know all that is to be known; and that he has the capacity to ask further questions when he has not yet grasped “all that is to be known.” (3) Now, the question arises, how could I have the power to ask a question every time I understand something that does not meet the expectation of “all that is to be known?” It would seem that I would have to have some awareness (at least a tacit awareness) of “all that is to be known” sufficient to know that whatever I have grasped has not yet met this objective. Thus, I might move from analytical geometry, to the calculus, to non-Euclidean geometries, to the tensor, and know that the tensor does not adequately describe the whole of mathematical intelligibility – and it truly does not. Similarly, I can attain an understanding of space-time fields, electromagnetic fields, quantum fields, the grand unified field, etc., and realize that the grand unified field still does not exhaust all that is to be known – and it truly doesn’t. This applies to every area of inquiry and every field of knowledge, and I would know if my idea did not explain everything about everything. (4) The question again arises, how would I always know that there is more to be known when I have grasped even the highest ideas through the highest viewpoints? How would I know that those ideas and viewpoints did not explain everything about everything? How do I know what qualifies for an explanation of everything about everything? How can I have a “pre-knowledge” (an awareness) of the explanation of everything about everything sufficient to keep on asking questions, and to know what will fail to meet the objective of an explanation of everything about everything? This last question presents an essential clue to our transcendentality. How would I be able to continuously recognize incomplete intelligibility (even in the highest and most grandiose ideas) if I did not have some tacit awareness of those ideas failing to qualify for complete intelligibility? Wouldn’t I have to have some sense of what complete intelligibility is in order to recognize the limits of the intelligibility of the idea I have already grasped? Doesn’t the recognition of a limit mean that I have to be beyond the limit? If I weren’t beyond the limit, how could I recognize it to be a limit? A limit of what? Therefore, it seems that I must have a tacit awareness of “what is sufficient to qualify for an explanation of everything about everything.” Obviously, I cannot explicitly know all the contents that I do not know; but I could have a tacit awareness of what would be sufficient for an explanation of everything about everything. This would explain how I could reach very high viewpoints of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, and still know that I did not have an explanation of everything about everything – and even have a sense of where to turn to find such an explanation. (5) What could be the origin of this awareness? It cannot be a physical or restricted source (empirical data, finite data, or the contents of restricted acts of understanding) because the tacit awareness of “what is sufficient for an explanation of everything about everything” is always beyond every “intelligible reality which leaves a question unanswered,” and every restricted intelligible always leaves a question unanswered. Why? Any restricted intelligible must leave a question unanswered because the intelligibility (information) available to answer questions about it is restricted. Thus, there can always be more questions about a restricted reality than there will be intelligibility (information within the restricted reality) available to answer them. Why? Inasmuch as the answers from a restricted intelligible have an intrinsic limit (i.e., they do not keep on going indefinitely), they will eventually be open to further questions which cannot be answered by the restricted intelligible itself. Thus, we might say that every restricted intelligible is more questionable than answerable. There will always be a domain of answers which give rise to more questions than the intelligibility of the restricted reality can answer. Therefore, the tacit awareness of “what is sufficient for an explanation of everything about everything” is always beyond any restricted intelligible. Therefore, the source of this “tacit awareness which is always beyond restricted intelligibility” must be unrestricted intelligibility. Lonergan asks himself what unrestricted intelligibility could be. He knows it cannot be a physical reality, because the intelligibility of physical reality is restricted by space, time, and other algorithmically finite structures. He therefore settles upon a trans-physical or transmaterial reality such as an unrestricted idea (within an unrestricted act of understanding). Needless to say, such an unrestricted act of understanding cannot be viewed as a brain (which is material and restricted by space, time, and other algorithmically finite structures); so Lonergan refers to it as a “spiritual” reality. This spiritual reality, this unrestricted act of understanding which is the ground of the idea of unrestricted intelligibility, would seem to be the source of my tacit awareness of “what is sufficient for an explanation of everything about everything.” (6) Even though the idea of complete intelligibility is the source of my tacit awareness of “what is sufficient for an explanation of everything about everything,” I cannot say that I understand this idea, because it must be grounded in an unrestricted act of understanding, which I, evidently, do not have. But how can this be? Lonergan uses the terminology of “notion” (“the notion of being,” or what I would term, “the notion of complete intelligibility”). What is a notion? It is a presence to consciousness – not a presence that is held or controlled by my consciousness, but one that is held or controlled outside of my consciousness while still being present to it. Now if I don’t understand this presence, then how am I aware of it? I must be aware of it as something on the horizon; as something beyond my understanding, but, nevertheless, something which can act as a backdrop over against which I compare the ideas which I have understood. This would explain how I would know that there is more to be known at the very moment I have understood something new, and would explain how I would know that the tensor is not the complete explanation of mathematics, and that mathematics is not the complete explanation of intelligibility itself. I am comparing it to a backdrop that is so much more than the highest possible viewpoints, so much more than any restricted intelligible, so much more than any content of a restricted act of understanding.[9] Now, as I said, I do not understand, hold, or control this idea; it is, as it were, held and controlled for me as a backdrop to compare the intelligibility of the ideas that I have understood. But what is holding and controlling this idea for me as a backdrop? I must adduce that It would be Its source, namely, the unrestricted act of understanding. (7) This would mean that the idea of complete intelligibility, that is, the content of an unrestricted act of understanding, that is, the divine essence, is present to me as a horizon, that is, as a backdrop which can be compared to every intelligible content I grasp through my restricted acts of understanding. The presence of the divine essence, therefore, must be the impetus for my awareness of incomplete intelligibility, the impetus for every question, the impetus for every act of creativity. If the divine essence were not present to me, I would only be capable of recognizing objects of biological opportunity and danger, such as food, snakes, my name, affection, etc., but nothing more, for I would not ask questions about intelligibility (such as “What?” “Why?” “How? – which penetrate the nature of reality). My curiosity would be limited to biological opportunities and dangers, to discerning the mood of my master, to detecting whether an herb smells right, or a creature is dangerous. Intelligibility (the nature of things, heuristic contexts, “What?” “Why?” “How?”) would be quite beyond me – totally unrecognized by me. Therefore, I would not have a pure desire to understand – let alone a pure, unrestricted desire to understand. Without the notion of complete intelligibility (the presence of the idea of complete intelligibility, the presence of the divine essence), I would find fulfillment through a fine piece of meat and ignore the tensor. The above argument for the existence of our transcendental awareness of complete intelligibility (and the presence of its trans-physical, unrestricted source to our consciousness) is remarkably probative. Regrettably, the cost we must pay for this probity is the nuance and complexity of the argument. The reader will be relieved to know that the other arguments for the existence of our desire for perfect and unconditional love, goodness/justice, beauty, and being/home are less nuanced and complex, but consequently have less probity. Perhaps it is best for the reader to use the above argument as a foundation for and a light through which to see the other four transcendental desires, which express the fullness of our communion with their trans-physical source.