The Single Intelligible Object--Repost

Repost of Blogger from 9.3.08

The Academy's Blogger of 9.01.08 on the subject of "world views," specifically that of the Atomist Lucretius as he described his own view in his historic poem "On the Nature of Things," allows us to take up the subject again, this time from other perspectives than those of Atomists.

"It is because atomism [naturalism] views matter as independent of God," I wrote, "that atomism was demoted by St. Augustine from the predominating world view, a view that held sway for nearly 1000 years. St. Augustine turned it into the skeptical position against theism. All men have a world view that for each, in some way, is his explanation of the meaning of existence, of the world." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/08/atomism-is-incompatible-with-judeo.html

The purpose of the mind of men turning to thoughts of the meaning of life is to summarize it, and the briefest summary is the one that describes everything in the least possible words. A definition of a word in a dictionary is the meaning of a word, in the least number of words.

"A definition must identify the nature of the units, i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are. But it is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhaustive, characteristics..." Ayn Rand; "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology"; p.42

It is that idea that creates the need to describe the world in which we live, not as a single word, which would leave out so much of the essence of existence and our emotional reaction to it; but the fewest number of words which describe that essential characteristic, as a single intelligible object, as any dictionary definition turns the concept(s) described by a word as a single intelligible object.

What follows is a very brief condensation of my book, The Search for the Single Intelligible Object. The purpose of the book is to address the need for such a description, and to explain the naturalistic, objective description of a world which neither knows about us, nor cares about us, and can become anything we have the capacity to turn it into. Or, we can become whatever we let it makes us become, for better or worse and usually for the worse, by ignorning thatexistence has no cognizance of us, and by believing that we cannot over come genetic predispositions, and environments, and a "world we didn't make.

But to do so is a return to Plato's Cave, to astrology, the "reading" of cards and tea leaves and spilled toothpicks on the kitchen floor. It is a return to the belief that there is a wrathful intelligence in the universe, rather than one of justice and truth, and that it is us.

I
The Single Intelligible Universe

Imagine, for a moment or two, floating way away from Earth. Float away to the outside of the universe itself, outside of all known and unknown existence, and then look at the universe as the astronauts on their way to the moon saw Earth, as a whole. Except that instead of seeing only one-half of the global universe at a single moment, there is no "dark side of the moon," so to speak. You are able to turn the universe over and over in your hand and examine it in minute detail as if it was a snow globe. You are able to look into any part of it of which you are aware. The examination, and the detail you discover, will be determined by your own capabilities.

Those of us who are least aware of the concept of “cosmology” easily understand what it means when it is explained as an awareness of the universe, an awareness one has when one “holds the world before his mind as if it were a single intelligible object.” To which it must be added, “While holding the universe in one's hand and mind, he decides what his place is or is to be, in that universe as he comes to understand it.”

Aurelius wrote, “He who does not know what the world is does not know where he is, and he who does not know for what purpose the world exists, does not know who he is, nor what the world is. But he who has failed in any one of these things could not even say for what purpose he exists himself." Such a conscious examination is formal cosmology, not in the science of physics which deals with very different questions and information; but in the sciences pertaining to formal Philosophy. Sometimes that "science" is quite simply the meditations of people who find the time to think about the world, because it requires a deeper thread of thoughts, and deep thinking is the science of philosophy.

Deciding, i.e., evaluating, one’s place in the world in which he lives, means: holding before his conscience (as if in his hand, as well) the evaluation of one's judgment of his world, for the mind does not operate in a moral vacuum, but is attached to its moral center of judgment. Deciding what one’s place in the world "is or is to be" means looking, sometimes deeply, into one’s conscience, because that is where the real results of evaluations take place. The conscience is the one place where one cannot lie to oneself about who and what one is, and where he is.

Conceiving of the universe as a single intelligible object and then trying to perceive it in metaphysical terms [the theory of everything that exists,] and placing oneself in that universe, leaves us with a "sense of life." The human mind cannot not think in metaphysical terms; it is the first science of Philosophy without which the mind would not be conscious. The mind works in strict terms of philosophical principles whether or not one has evaluated them or is even conscious of them.

“Holding the universe as a single intelligible object," William Watson wrote of it using, not epistemology, the philosophical science of proving the truth of what we believe, but by using literary aesthetics, another philosophical science, in “Dawn on the Headland.” His words ring with an emotional truth, a truth that scares some people and comforts others:

Yet I know that I dwell in the midst of the roar of the Cosmic Wheel

In the hold collision of Forces, and the clangor of boundless Strife,

Mid the sound of the speed of worlds, the rushing worlds, and the peal

Of the thunder of Life.

There is, for those not frightened of it, an exciting and moral challenge in dwelling “in the midst of the Cosmic Wheel.” For those who find the words chilling more than comforting, they may, after understanding the sense of life, the cosmology, found in metaphysical naturalism, discover instead the excitement of that moral challenge, and find it uplifting. It is a challenge often posed in the questions and answers of theology.

Religions have cosmologies.

“The term ‘Logos’ in Christian theology marries, through the revelation of St. John’s Gospel and the Epistles of Paul, its Greek philosophical meaning of an all encompassing rational order uniting humans and divinity into a ‘great cosmos,’” says a long article called “Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition," by Vincent Rossi, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2465/is_1_30/ai_59520591 and is “thus the supreme ordering principle uniting all levels of being, from the sublimity of the divine to the deepest density of the mineral kingdom.”

This “all encompassing rational order” certainly exists. It exists, though neither as a miracle nor as something intelligently designed either from within, or from without as a chef might design a wedding cake.

It is an all-encompassing rational order only when made comprehensible through an act of rationally ordering what one knows about it, in other words, putting its parts in a hierarchy of rational meanings. This rational ordering is done by the only thing capable of such ordering: the mind of Man. It is Man's mind that decides what his place is or is to be in the "all encompassing rational order."

Any human thought, sentence, expression of language, or fully developed work of fiction, non-fiction or art can and usually does contain a sense of life, an idea that expresses the place of men in the world in which they live.

The Declaration of Independence, is one of those, placing into an all-encompassing rational order the exact purpose for its existence, i.e., it rationally says all it has to say about why the signatories signed it. It does this in its very first paragraph, which is incredibly only one long sentence, part of which is: that often it "becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," the colonies from England. The Founders knew their place in the world in which they existed, and they knew where they wanted their place to be and it was not in the world as seen by the British Empire. The Founders' sense of life was one of political freedom from tyranny.

Metaphysics are the values of philosophy, and epistemology is the method of "proving" the values. These two manifestations. these elements of consciousness, help make up the subject of cosmology as far as the humanities are concerned. There is also a science of cosmology that deals almost specifically with what are commonly called the "laws of nature," and it is called Physics. Physics has its own "cosmology," described in phrases meant for other physicists.

This sort of cosmology "attempts to measure the immeasurable in mega parsecs and speak rationally about the immensity of space, to explain how its incalculable number of astronomical bodies occupy their incalculable vastness. Cosmology is the human effort at locating us and our environment in relation to all the other environments and their possible inhabitants."[a]
But it has always been the profession of philosophy to put into perspective the ideas of all the other professions. It is why there are ethics of law, ethics of medicine, ethics of warfare, and of journalism, to mention only a very few.

Not one person on Earth needs formal training to make a judgment about the world he lives in, in the sense with which this book deals. We all make those kinds of judgments everyday of our lives.

In the connotation of cosmology as a sense of life, it must be recognized that this sense is as automatic a function of Man's consciousness as his "five senses" are. It cannot be turned off any more than sight can be turned off. We can close our eyes and ignore what would otherwise be visibly before us. We can also choose to ignore the cognitions of our sub-consciously, automatically, evaluating mind: cognitions of impending marital doom, or of something simply being amiss, such as the bad behavior of a child when our evaluation of his behavior turns us toward thoughts of mental illness. Who wants to jump right to that conclusion? So we put off jumping until jumping is no longer a choice. That is, we put it off if we are not rigorous in the integrity of our minds. Most of us are not, sometimes. Many are not, most of the time, suppressing the unasked question, "What should I do?"

Naturalist Loren Eiseley, in his own tranquil and unique cosmological styling, wrote in his classic work, "The Immense Journey," http://www.amazon.com/Immense-Journey-Imaginative-Naturalist-Mysteries/dp/0394701577 of an archaic Homo sapiens, an early Man, having the experience of pondering the meaning of existence. It was about the “Adam” of men, about the first Man to have such contemplation, the first man to think in philosophical terms.

“For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated
himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the
wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill
waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness.”

In the art world Grandma Moses described in paint on canvas a sense of life which obviously was not formed of the elements of say, a Van Gogh or a Rockwell. Her skills and her cosmology are described as "Primitive." No matter the skill of the artist to depict her world, the way in which any artist sees it, good, bad, ugly, or wondrously beautiful, gives us a look into the soul of the artist. Hers was a productive soul, intent on journalizing the world in which she lived.

"Her images of rural life provided soothing respite from otherwise turbulent times, and fifty years later her vision of the simple life still strikes a resonant chord." [with examples of her work] http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/7aa/7aa76.htm

Dow Chemical's world view was presented in its advertising, giving the world a gift of Romanticism, i.e., the world view of the ideality of what it means to be alive in the best sense of "alive." Dow called their advertisement The Human Element. It is rare anymore to see Romanticismi expounded so elegantly, not to mention unabashedly.

The Dow TV ads are a collage of video clips of real people in their own real environmental "elements," on four continents. Dow says it describes their company's vision for the future in their interactions with cultures and environments and people. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I saw it, and I have not been disappointed yet, seeing it over and over again.

It is a brilliant, shining star of Romantic cosmology, of what Man means in the universe, in an environment that would have no purpose without him.

The Human Element
For each of us / there is a moment / of discovery.
We turn a page. / We raise a hand. / And just then,
in the flash of a synapse, / we learn that life / is elemental.
And this knowledge / changes everything.
We look around / and see the grandness / of the scheme.
Sodium / bonding with chlorine.
Carbon / bonding with oxygen.
Hydrogen / bonding with oxygen.
We see / all things connected.
We see / life unfold.
And in the dazzling brilliance / of this knowledge
we may overlook / the element not listed / on the chart.
Its importance so obvious / its presence / is simply understood.
The missing element / is the Human Element.
And when we add it / to the equation / the chemistry changes.
Every reaction is different.
Potassium / looks to bond / with potential.
Metals / behave with hardened / resolve.
And hydrogen and oxygen / form desire.
The Human Element / is the element of change.
It gives us our footing / to stand fearlessly
and face the future.
It is a way of seeing / that gives us / a way of touching.
Issues. / Ambitions. / Lives.
The Human Element.
Nothing is more fundamental. / Nothing more elemental.

"We see all things connected. We see life unfold. And in the dazzling brilliance of this knowledge we may overlook the element not listed on the chart. Its importance so obvious its presence is simply understood. The missing element is the Human Element." What more can be said about a cosmology of wondrous delight in being human, of human interaction, of human bonding; of "a way of seeing that gives us a way of touching issues, ambitions, lives?"

Philosophical Romanticism is the benevolent cosmology described (by me) as, "From each according to his ability, then he ought to be rewarded ten times over." It is the cosmology of ideals that are attainable by the best of Men (qua Men,) and it allows for the rest of us to look up to things as having possibility, e.g., the performance of Olympic Athletes; wealth created by men of vision in any endeavor, but look at the founders of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, and at Warren Buffet and others, for inspirational examples. They came, they created, they took, and now they give back a hundred-fold.

Cosmology is demonstrated in every piece of art, which is created by psychological action. Scottish novelist George MacDonald wrote of a young man in a story about the title character called "Malcolm."

Malcolm is a fisherman about whom there seems to be a mystery that he himself is not too aware of; and honestly, he does not much care about the mystery. His mind is on things that matter, and the mystery about him is not high on his hierarchy of values. Malcolm has a blind father he loves more dearly than anyone in the world, yet who he knows is not his biological father and believes to be his grandfather. This is part of the mystery about which he cares little, because Malcolm is as devoted to his father and to the people of his Scottish fishing village and to the Lord of the manor, as anyone could be to anyone or anything. It is not that he does not think about the future or the past, but he lives in the present and his values are not of things he cannot control, but of things he can control. He is loved and revered by the fisher folk, and the only person in the town who treats him badly is a woman who treats everyone badly and who is considered by some to be a witch. Malcolm has serenity.

MacDonald wrote about Malcolm that;

“Joy itself seemed embodied in the wind blowing on him. When it came on to blow hard, instead of making him feel small and weak in the midst of storming forces, it gave him a glorious sense of power and unconquerable life.” [italics added]

Those words in italics are a world view, perhaps caused only when Macolm felt the wind blowing, as you might guess by this excerpt. But is describes Malcolm's overall sense of life, and he carried it with him throughout each page of the book.

The cosmology of Malcolm made it one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had, and indirectly, along with Moby Dick, set me to thinking about writing this book. Malcolm's psychology is one that ought to be emulated much more than it is. There was a time not so long ago when a reasonable and "decent respect"i for "the opinions of others," as Malcolm demonstrates toward everyone he meets, was expected, even if it was a surprise when it came as gracefully as it came from Malcolm.

Today, many people seem to be in spiritual agony, skeptics, hatefilled for life itself, or at least for most other human beings. We are losing our grace in the face of people, places, and things we cannot change and over which we ought not have control. But we want people to be the way we want them to be, and we let it eat at us like acid on metal. And that, in itself, is a world view, that people are objects to be changed into what we disire them to be in order to make our own world better, and that when we don't get what we want the world throws acid on us.

Although Malcolm was not thinking in the metaphysical terms of "glorious" and "unconquerable," the author clearly was thinking of Malcolm’s psychology—Malcolm was “feeling” the impression upon his soul in those seconds of living in the moment of the wind, and his reaction was automatic. Few of us contemplate our own minds when we are "feeling the moment"; we are too busy enjoying the feeling; or too busy wishing the problem would go away; or too wrapped up in trying to make others be what we want them to be.

MacDonald’s words describe in psychological framing a beautiful moment, for while a cosmology can be descriptive of the entirety of a man’s evaluation of his place in the universe, it is most often consciously experienced at pivotal moments. The rest of the time, we just go on about our lives.

Some persons, perhaps most, never know that such a thing as a "sense of his life" exists, at least not in conscious terms. They may simply experience life as “generally happy,” for example, or “generally drab;” or they may feel that "sense" suicidally, or with melancholy or joy, or with any other emotion within Man’s range. One does not have to be aware of his own cosmology in concrete conceptual terms as described here. Yet in concepts of the connection between mind and soul, reason and heart, it can be seen to exist automatically, as automatically as consciousness itself, for it is “first consciousness.” That is why metaphysics which describe it is the "first science."

Without cosmology we humans would be not even be Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, the “Vulcan” who denies the effect of emotions upon his logic and must subjugate them to it, as do all Vulcans. We are not Vulcans; whether you believe the soul to be eternal or to die with the body, to be real or fantasy, to be mentally or biologically mechanical, or mystic and religiously spiritual, or to be the sum total of a man’s evaluation of what the world is and who he is and where he is in it—your emotion-perceiving soul is demonstrated through your actions, and your soul can often be seen in the way you live and in the way to treat and speak to others.

One’s reaction to his own cosmology demonstrates him as he sees himself in the cosmos, or in the chaos if he believes that is what the world is. His cosmology demonstrates the humor, the pathos, or the travesty of the drama, or the serenity of what he believes existence to be. Spock's logic is not the highest ideal a thinking creature can achieve. Discurse is a tool of reason, and logic is a tool of reason. Irrational logic can be proven to be illogical. A Vulcan's subjugation of his emotions to his "logic" is not an ideal for a thinking feeling being. Subjugating emotions to reason is an ideal. Just ask the Stoics, or Aquinas.

But in some ideas there is a very ugly, hurtful, hurting emotion about life. Most of us would want to suppress that, or get help for it before the suppression destroyed him. We can see the soul of ideas when we look at them.

French philosopher Montaign painted a very different and ugly picture of life than MacDonald did when he described Malcolm’s joy.

“Man,” Montaign wrote, “is this miserable and wretched creature who is not so much master of himself,” yet who “should call himself master and emperor of the world?”

His miserable description of cosmological evaluations did not end there. He continued: “Man feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe.”

Other persons have felt these same things about life, and it is a pity. This is a man’s “first consciousness” expressed overtly consciously, and they are demonstrations of each author's recombinants. Imagine Montaigne's evaluation as your sense of life. You would not have to do harm to anyone else with your denigrating ideas, but you certainly will not rise out of the "deadest part of the universe."

I prefer Malcolm’s joy, or Hermann Melville’s rapturous declaration that, “Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellow creatures should run to throw their costliest robes.” Amen; Melville's declaration is a cosmology of Romanticism.

At the other end of the metaphysical/ epistemological/ psychological scale from Melville, Byron wrote in Manfred that man is “half-dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.” Dryden, on the same sink hole, wrote of man as a “dull and…insensible… beast,” and Thomas Brown called Man “splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.”

There are stark differences between cosmologies that see man in filth and unable to climb out of it, and in one that refuses to be nailed, that values the feelings of joyfulness, gloriousness, life unconquerable, noble, sparkling, grand, and glowing.

A character in Moby Dick has a cosmology of the universe being not so good a place, life in colonial New England being what it was, and the profession of whaling being even harder; but in that cosmology he found himself a good place in which to be.
"[A]nd while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy," he says.

These demonstrate differences, psychologically, of each author’s valuation of Man qua Man. And every living human demonstrates in one way or another his or her cosmology, his or her evaluation of man-in-the-cosmos. Some see his status "qua Man" as filthy, some see him as the highest form of being. But the descriptions say more about him or her who demonstrates these overtly conscious ideas than about reality, because a reality not comprehended of the highest standards of personal worth and behavior do not reflect a “sense of life” of possibility, probability, serenity, virtue, or value, nor of an existence—environmental or psychological—recombinant to Man’s will.

The Human Element / is the element of change.
It gives us our footing / to stand fearlessly
and face the future.

©The Dow Chemical Company. Permission granted.

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On Free Will, the Soul, and the Single Intelligible Object

Little did I know several years ago that I would write a book on metaphysical cosmology, a subject I had barely even heard of. I had heard statements like, “Copernicus changed our cosmology with his heliocentric theory,” and, “Einstein changed it with his theory of relativity.” But I did not comprehend the magnitude of such "changes."

I am not a scientist, unless you consider metaphysics and epistemology to be science, which I do.
Metaphysics was considered by the all thinkers to be the “first science,” above all others, because presumably without it no other questions of science could be answered, let alone asked. Then the post-Renaissance skeptics ruined metaphysics by convincing the world it was unreliable at best, and a travesty of science at worst.

My book, "The Search for the Single Intelligible Object," began not as the burning desire to cover new ground, or to hash out old, forgotten and "disproved" ideas. It didn't even begin as the desire to write a book. It began as the burning desire to read as much of a variety of material in as short a period as I had ever—or rather, never—done before. I began and finished reading seventy-three books in about twenty-one weeks, books I never believed I would ever read because I was always so previously focused on specific subject matter. I could not do today what I did then, because of my focus on the works of contemporary Naturalists.

Maybe another month from now, or another year, I could do that again, when I gain a better focus on the contemporary works of Naturalism, which I need to do. I need to do it for several reasons: 1. to comprehend contemporary Naturalism which seems to exclude many of my own true beliefs; 2. to discover which of my own true beliefs are justified and which of theirs defeat my justifications; 3. which of theirs are unjustified, and why; 4. purely for the exercise of getting back to my first love, reading.

During those few short weeks, in 2005, which I found myself writing voluminous pages of notes on most of the subjects. This is not unusual for me--I've been a note-taker all my life. But over the years I have lost or discarded many of my notes. Most were worthless except as exercises in note-taking or in composition.

Those seventy-three books ranged from cowboy novels by Louis L’Amour and other writers of Western fiction--firsts for me--to Christian novels (another first) like the “Left Behind” series, books by Bodie Thoene, and by Frank E. Peretti; and a "documented" history of the Great Flood, including photos of the supposed Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat.

I read Clive Cussler, Danielle Steele, Dashiell Hammett, Tom Clancy, John LeCarre, James Michener, John Sescroart, Robert Ludlum, Jeffrey Archer and others of that genre. I read Barbara Bush, Sam Donaldson, and Bob Woodward.

"Pilgrim’s Progress" had never been on my must-read list, but I finished it. There was a book about Holland during the Reformation, and there was the biography of a Brahman, Rabi Maharaj, who converted to Christianity and then helped to found a world wide Christian youth organization, after working for Billy Graham. I had never heard of Rabi Maharaj before. How, I still manage to wonder today, can such intelligent people have visions of Jesus, as Mr. Maharaj did? I have my theories, but those theories have more to do with certain sciences of the brain, and not the subject of today's blog.

While reading those Christian-based novels, I discovered George MacDonald. One of the factors, for me, about which novels I come to like best, have to do with the characters in the stories. I discover that if I like the characters enough to wish they were real so I could meet them, talk with them, walk by their sides and take part in their lives as friend, student, teacher, then they are great novels. If the characters are such that I would want to meet them and exist in their world, then it is because we share the same metaphysical values, the same metaphysical world view, in other words, the same metaphysical cosmology.

MacDonald was the favorite author of C.S.Lewis, or so says the introduction to MacDonald's greatest work, now retitled "Malcolm." Originally two volumes, they were called "The Fisherman's Lady" and "The Marquis' Secret." But both novels were always about the most amazingly intuitive and rational being named Malcolm, a young man who comes of age and discovers a secret about his small Scottish fishing village and the marquis' estate, and consequently about himself. Malcolm does not remind me of the modern Christians I see all around me who are so pious and evangelical. Malcolm the Christian is a passionate but studiously thoughtful rational egoist. He and Ayn Rand's Howard Roark of "The Fountainhead" would have been great friends, I think. As this linked website states, "[T]here is a strong yearning to learn more about these characters of George MacDonald's immediately after reading the first." http://www.rambles.net/macdonald_malcolm01.html

I found novels based on history, such as one about a triangle between Queen Elizabeth, Lettice Deveroux, and the Earl of Essex. On of the best historical novels I discovered was about Welsh royalty in the twelfth century who quite possibly were the first permanent European settlers in the new world. It is still a controversy to this day, but here is the background:

"In 1580, Dr John Dee, a Londoner of Welsh descent, in his 'Title Royal', a document presented to Queen Elizabeth 1st (an English Queen of Welsh Lineage), mentioned 'The Lord Madoc, sonne of Owen Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, led a Colonie and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabouts.'" So wrote Hakluyt, a writer of daring deeds and exploration, in 1582 in a report on the voyages of Madoc. http://www.madoc1170.com/evidence.htm Hakluyt got his information from Caradoc of Llancarfan, who wrote about it circa 1140. I took it to be utterly believable, although the historical writer, James Alexander Thom, http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780449149706.html was forced to create a great deal of speculative fiction based on the few "facts" that are known. Even Lewis and Clark asked a great many questions about the decendents of Madoc, during their historic trip west.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rls=GZEZ,GZEZ:2008-32,GZEZ:en-GB&q=First+Son+Madoc+novel

Most amazing of the true stories I read was of how Ross Perot did everything and whatever was necessary to get his imprisoned people out of Iran during the 1979 Wahabbi “revolution,” a rescue effort remarkable, and heroic a feat, by any standard. After reading it, I actually believe Perot had enough foreign policy knowledge and "daring do" to have been a good, if not a great President, had he not come off looking like "the funny little man" during his race for the White House.

But it may have been Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick" that I got the biggest kick out of. I certainly made many notes about it and copied many quotes from it. I use many of those quotes in my book, "The Search for the Single Intelligible Object." [See the Academy Store, in sidebar]

Fascinatingly, "Moby Dick" is the second most-studied book in English after the Bible. I found a lot of metaphysical world views in it even before I latched on to the word “cosmology.” It is those world views and the fact that each and every character in the novel has one that is unique to himself, that I believe make it the second most studied book in English.

I found almost as many cosmological perceptions in MacDonald’s faith-oriented "Malcolm," and those were certainly more usable and profoundly valuable in my personal life—as well as in the writing of my book—though I am an atheist by principle and have been since I was a child.

But it was in the finding of a definition for cosmology, after I was acquainted with the word, which propelled me into my introduction to Kant and Hegel, Spinoza, Schiller, Aristotle, Camus, Plato, Aquinas, Marcus Aurelius and others. Trying to understand the meaning of cosmology, I began to pour over dictionaries and encyclopedias of philosophy, library research computers, and the most generally helpful of all references, the "Syntopicon of the Great Ideas of the Western World," a part of the "Great Books of the Western World" series found in virtually every adult library. It was there, in the "Syntopicon," that I found my working definition of the word “cosmology.”

Never before had I contemplated the world, the heavens, the entirety of existence, as one thing to be understood as one thing, the way we may look at a grasshopper as being “one thing” and understandable in its entirety, within the boundaries of our knowledge. That our knowledge may change daily, grow by leaps and bounds, or be upset by something like Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, is not the point. Of course our knowledge will change; humans grow, that is what we do. The day our knowledge base quits growing our evolution ends, and we become like the unchanging but always changing creatures of nature, like the apes who are always the same generation to generation and oblivious that there is something greater “out there” than mere lights blinking in the night sky.

What I came to see “out there” beyond myself, that was greater than anything I had ever perceived, was Aristotle’s concept that “existence exists,” irrespective of any gods or God; that, to use a phrase of philosophy, any god or power higher than existence itself was “unnecessary.”

(Yet, this does not prove that no god exists. "Proving" that is a feat I hope I never attempt, because I find it an unnecessary thing to do, not to mention logically impossible, since I believe no one has sufficiently done it yet, and those who have tried have much more education in the field that I do. I can find enough about existence itself that is common between me and theists, and enough serenity in my own beliefs, that I have no desire to rob them of their belief. I will occasionally argue against faith, but not against the existence of God. Faith is the abnegation of reason, and so it becomes a proper subject of philosophy and of theology. The existence of God is a personal belief. As long as a believer does not find it necessary to push the against "the wall of separation between the church and state," or to stand in front of me as some "street ministers" have done and proselytize, he may believe whatever he wishes to believe. It isn't my call.)

Still, I hold no problem with anyone who accepts a god, so long as the rest of his or her life is conducted with rationality. Faith, and sometimes even religion, has been a force for good. I have learned this from personal experience: there is a “whole lot of faith and religion goin’ on” in my family tree, and I have loved and admired my relatives for the places their faith has taken them.
Cosmology is, epistemologically speaking, a recombinant of metaphysics and epistemology, in the sense that for each unique human existence, there is a unique world view. I use the word “recombinant” in the book.

It is where the recombinants are in accord with other men’s recombinants that makes us a civilization; every unique thinker--of which there are not as many as there are unique humans--each thinker contributes to civilization by contributing to us his or her thinking, and in the end civilization analyzes those contributions, and the rest of us often let that unique thinker's world view change our common thoughts. His unique view may be entirely of epistemological dimensions, or of metaphysics, or of a combination of them; but it must be of one, the other, or both. Both, as recombinants, are necessary for anyone to have a world view.

Copernicus and Einstein are only two whose thoughts we let change our cosmology. Kant had a piss-poor cosmology, epistemologically speaking. That of Aurelius was very clean and well ordered. Every character Melville wrote about in Moby Dick had a unique cosmology, a unique set of recombinants.

In order to relate to the reader how it can be that each of us has his or her own cosmology, I quote in the book many of the persons I named above, plus a great many others, so that you may discover just what I mean. Some are mean, as we perceive Dickens' Mr. Scrooge to be; some are sacrificial, like Abraham and Jesus; some men spit hellfire and damnation, others pour out pity or they are all-forgiving; some see the glass empty, some see it filled with everything that is wrong with man.

The way in which each unique thinker has touched us comes to us from his psychology. His ethics and his aesthetics come from his psychology, and psychology is the result of the recominants of metaphysics and epistemology. We can sometimes “see” the recombinants that brought men to their psychology; it usually comes to us as an intuition, a conclusion about the person's character. Psychologists and psychiatrists, are trained to see it. Psychology even has a branch now called epistemic psychology. But each unique recombinant has its own naturally resultant cosmology, which in turn creates the psychology by which that person walks through this world. Some "wake to the work of a man," as Marcus Aurelius defined it. Some hide from their own shadows.

A world view, is necessary to the proper functioning of men’s minds. Not all men appreciate its function. Some fear existence so deeply, as they have evaluated existence in their world view, that fear leads them to their demise. In some others their world view, their cosmology, has been the cause of their sainthood.

Moving backward from psychology we can ascertain a man’s cosmology, or if we have the capacity to plough further, we can go right past his cosmology to observe his metaphysics or his epistemology. Philosophers are always blasting each other for having a supposed contradiction in one or the other science. More often than not it is more important to see a man's cosmology, because his world view is what he feels in the depths of his soul. All of us “feel” in the depths of our souls, even those of us like myself who “know” our soul is only the manifestation of our central nervous system in its connection to our minds.

It is the goal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalists not to take the view that the soul is metaphysically of no importance, or worse yet that it does not even exist in reality, as so many of the contemporary Naturalists believe. Contemporary Naturalism places an emphasis on the mechanics of the brain, and goes so far as to say, "We are fully physical creatures, without souls. Since we are fully caused to be who we are and act as we do, we don’t have contra-causal free will." [italics added] http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/faqs.htm

We do not “feel” our brains working nor "feel" the individual transmissions of each synapse. We can not literally feel our livers or our toenails without something else touching them, causing them to be noticeable. We can however “feel” our souls, because they are constantly being "touched," by our powers of cognition, as my book explains.

The soul is here to protect the sanity of the mind by giving it a sounding board. The soul and the mind are manifestations of our central nervous system, and upon death so go those manifestations. But I do not let that deter me from my attempt to becoming familiar with my soul. I am always amazed when someone asks me or another atheist, “If you don’t believe in life after death, why bother holding on to high standards in life?”

That my soul and mind are extinguished when my animal body dies is no reason for amorality. In amorality I might do harm to others. I might do hard to myself. But without a soul, one cannot have a world view, because to have such a view without an attachment to a soul makes us nothing but a collection of "antecedents," prior events and conditions in our lives which "program" us, making "an individual’s development and behavior [ ] entirely the result of prior and surrounding conditions, both genetic and environmental." http://www.naturalism.org/center_for_naturalism.htm

This is where I have no qualms accepting the faith of those who think God is necessary. "We shall argue that the very existence and nature of free will, purposive explanations, conscious minds, and the contingency of the cosmos are more reasonable given theism than given naturalism." Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, An Argument from Consciousness and Free Will (Great Debate) (2007) http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/atheism/free-will.html

I do not agree with that statement. I think a rational Naturalism can as easily conclude the reality of such "purposive explanations" and "conscious minds." It is the goal of this Academy to bring that (partial) world view to Naturalism, where it once existed and from which it has now been expunged. The modern scientists of cognition and of the brain are so skeptical of such things, from what I have seen, that their ideas turn us all into creatures who can have no purpose save but to go through life acting like the steel ball in a pinball machine, victims of intentional stance, [Daniel Dennett] a behavioral strategy that predicts the actions of others based on the lack of causal-free-will.



Once it became clear to me that I was compelled to write on a subject about which I had never formally studied, I had to read, research, and write sometimes twelve hours at a time, and produce all I could about all I knew about cosmology. I was compelled to find out what I didn’t know, to make connections of logic I had not found in other’s works, to hash it out in words by re-writing sections over and over again. There were so many connections to be made beginning with metaphysics and epistemology and then on to cosmology, to psychology, and finally to ethics, I had them entwined like un-entwineable vines. But a philosopher must un-entwine thoughts, his own and the thoughts of others, in order to show faults and strengths, and fallacies and truths.

To mix a metaphor, I do not believe I have scratched the surface of my un-entwining. Cognition of ourselves being cognitive is what makes Man the “rational animal,” and I can not stop cognizing, denoting and connoting everything I see, like Aristotle on the Isle of Lesbos. And though I am no Aristotle, I can share with him that I am a thinking animal, and that existence exists. I do not share the cosmologies of many thinkers I quote in "The Search;" I only quote them to make the point that such ideas are easily found, oftenly and easily adopted by others, which is why there are fewer unique thinkers than unique Men. Or I quote them to make the point that "this or that" is a great way to feel in your cognitively-manifested soul, or that “this or that idea is an ugly rap” to hang on Man.

Bad cosmologies, bad world views cause madness in the minds of those who have them. Where that mind belongs to one of those unique thinkers, who then becomes the bearer of those ideas in a culture, (people such as authors, theologians, behavioral psychologists, etc,) their ideas can cause madness in the receiver of the bearings, you and I, because we want to believe that such experts know what they are talking about but we cannot "square up" what they tell us with what we already know, either with what we have previously been taught to be true, or what we have learned from cognitive experiences.

We are left in entanglements of competing ideas, until another thinker tells us we don't have any free will anyway, nothing really matters, we are dust in the wind. And so we see the failure of culture, and we see it in the ugly acts of people who feel lost, such as those of teen girls beating each other up on UTube; or of women cutting the fetuses from the wombs of other women to steal the baby, leaving the woman to die bleeding on the floor; or people who see school shootings or other mass murders as their only way out of such mental abysses as they find themselves in.

I am happy to be alive, happy to be able to understand by un-entwining the baffling mysteries which are mere tones of grey for some, and which go totally unnoticed by others. It isn't necessary for everyone to un-entangle such mysteries if they can successfully exist in this world. Math is my "baffling mystery" when I get beyond artithmetic. I can't do higher math the way some people can't read.

But we must hold our own unique world view in our own unique hands and peer into our subjectively unique world and make sense of it, seeing it as an organic whole, underestanding it as a "single intelligible object." We must correct our metaphysical mistakes in order not to see the organic whole as something overwhelming to us; in order not to see our smallness compared to the universe as that which overwhelms, and not to see our unique individuality with a low sense of self-esteem that causes us to feel small in comparison to others. We must not to see "being human" as something to be "overcome," as many believe it to be.

Overwhelming fear of the world comes from the psychology created when we are told that we only "think" we are conscious, that our behavior is entirely predicable, that we have no such thing as "free will" or "soul." It is the incorrect psychology, that says we cannot overcome being small in a big, big place. That feeling of smallness is what must be overcome if we are to be able to understand the meaning of being Man.

We can overcome being small in a big, big place.

We need to get back on the Enlightenment-period idea that the glass is full, full of everything that is good about Man. What is good about him is that he can determine what is moral, about himself or about the world, and fix his ethics or his psychology or his view of natural sciences, so that the bad does not begin to suck out the good, as the period we call the Dark Ages did to us.

What is good about Man is that he does not have to work hard at ethics so long as he does not do harm to others; all the rest is Scholastic, yet important. Questions must be answered, but let the answers be rational or the glass begins to empty, shot full of holes.

That "single intelligible object" about which I can think of as holding in my hand as a snow globe can be held, to see it as one organic thing of which I am a part, is a greater force than all of us put together only if we turn our metaphysics topsy-turvy. Otherwise, I am greater than that which is greater than me, because I can walk through this world as a Man and do a Man’s work, to paraphrase Aurelius, with just my own cognitive abilities as guide and counselor, and just one ethical rule to guide me: do not do unto others what I would not have them do to me.

Those ethics describe a world in which Men exist equally; the epistemology of it is “I am rational; therefore all men are capable of rationality.” The cosmology is that to pursue happiness, those first two things must be accepted, and that inanimate nature, i.e., non-thinking existence, can not defeat what it means to be Man.

The psychology of that ethics is “can do,” not the psychology of being on a speeding train on a world you didn’t create, but that the universe in your hand, in your mind, can be redesigned by you because you think. And so, men’s minds are laissez-faire, being that they are each unique. And as they are unique and laissez faire in nature, they have free will.

And if you have not achieved after reading "The Search for theSingle Intelligible Object" an understanding of how to reach that Enlightened cosmology and a non-hostile will toward men and toward yourself, then may God be with you, and may your faith be enough.

That faith is often enough for most people, and people with faith are good people for the most part. Do not think my own atheism or my use of Naturalistic ideas deters me from seeing good in people of faith. It is the contemporary thinkers with dark, overwhelming world views who see men as creatures with over-blown egos and who mess things up for the rest of Mankind by misleading us, wittingly or not. Most of them actually believe the drivel they teach us.

Be cognitive of that universe you hold in your hand; it is within your power to comprehend it, and you will feel as if God, in his infinite wisdom, really did create you in his own, nonmystical image.

Curtis Edward Clark

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