Participatory Coherence and Real Abstraction, III
Descartes' Search and Man's Need for Divine Guidance
Man, as created in God’s image, was not himself the creator of the dust of the earth out of which the Lord had formed him; neither was he the architect of that ancient Garden into which he was placed. He likewise, being a chronologically predicated mortal, is not tasked with the constructing of those systems of thought to which he appeals for coherence, and is therefore obliged to refer outside of himself to ground his knowledge. Coherence is granted to him from Above, to be received with thanks.1 If, however, each man were burdened with the duty of establishing for himself a framework through which his sense data and mental abstractions could be processed and interpreted, he would be endlessly trapped in the circular attempt to justify his senses by way of his senses. One’s mind would be the judge and arbiter of itself and its own contents, and a logically valid basis of knowledge would thereby be made entirely inaccessible.
It is therefore a metalogical concern that is in focus here, one which pertains to the very wiring, or logic, of logic itself, and how it serves to confirm real knowledge to the fallible, mortal mind. The nature of this inquiry necessitates appealing outside of oneself in order to ground one’s knowledge, that is, to refer to those aforementioned abstractions which exist outside of one’s own mental abstractions; yet, not so as to ground one’s knowledge primarily in those external abstractions themselves only, but in the personal divine God in Whose mind they exist and cohere. It is the loving fellowship with the knowing Creator by which man comes to be in his right mind and make sense of his own considerations—by inheriting his Heavenly Father’s wisdom and knowledge as a familial gift.2 As the Messiah says, the pure in heart will see God.3
This formulation conceives of knowing primarily as a participation in the mind of God which subsumes both proposition and intuition, while itself subsisting independently of both. Whether one accesses truth propositionally, by comprehending statements that cohere with reality;4 or, by intuiting reality directly, without verbiage, by way of the nous,5 the knowledge itself remains extant apart from his mind. Righteous Job’s answer to his foolish interlocutors illustrates this principle.
No doubt you are the people,
And wisdom will die with you!6
Though clearly sarcastic, Job’s retort perfectly distills the logical outworking of non-revelational epistemic theories: they do not secure knowability, and they are only as “accurate” as one’s own mind considers them to be—and that only so long as they are the direct object of consideration. All such theories are ultimately solipsistic in the final analysis, failing to justify the very possibility of coherence that one must take for granted in the defense of said theories.
While it is indeed the case that there is nothing new under the sun,7 and that the most fundamental presuppositions of knowledge have been attacked before,8 naive skepticism is thereby made no less destructive to the conceptual climate of the present age. But whence arises this conceptual climate? Is there a way to detect the origins of our estranged time, let alone know that it could be accurately described as such? Why are we speaking of these things in this way?
The Cogito
The estrangement which injures our minds so greatly is the supposed severance, or abstraction, of our very minds from their context, their being supposed to be self-consisting and conceptually autonomous, as it were. When Rene Descartes (1596-1650) uttered his famous “Cogito Ergo Sum,” that is, “I think, therefore I am,” this was the summit of Western philosophical inquiry of his time, and predicted its course to the modern day. The principle of man’s existence was located in himself. In his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes calls into question the reliability of his senses, writing,
All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived.9
One can trace the progress of Descartes’ doubt quite clearly here. He first tells how it seems to him that he came to hold his convictions, even up to the time of writing: “from…or through the senses.” But, since those same senses have at times been mistaken, and have been corrected, he notes that it is “wiser not to trust entirely” that which is known to deceive.
Yet, not satisfied with merely recognizing their fallibility, Descartes goes on to entirely disembody his mind from the senses in his search for certainty. There must be, he thinks, some way to avoid the dubious actors of one’s senses so as not to be vulnerable to their mistakes. However, this would not be possible if one’s mind is inextricably intertwined with his senses in such a way that they are constantly operating with reference to one another. Descartes, perceiving this difficulty, posits a method of reasoning which is able to exist and occur completely without referencing the senses. A purely mental terrain, in which one is unencumbered by the fallible misperceptions of the senses, is where Descartes finds his epistemic refuge. He writes:
I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things…and with firm purpose avoid giving credence to any false thing, or being imposed upon by this arch deceiver, however powerful and deceptive he may be.
The “arch deceiver,” to which Descartes refers, is said to be an “evil genius” that is constantly laboring to pull the wool over his eyes, as it were. Descartes considers not only his bodily faculties and senses to be dubious, but the external world itself to be the means by which he is deceived. In order to prevent such deception from interfering with the attainment of epistemic certainty, Descartes, having already severed his mind from his corporeal body, now asserts a separation between his mind and the external world entirely, saying:
I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are [nothing] but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity.
Such a pointed rejection of the knowability of the external world is not predicated (at least, not explicitly) on Descartes' disbelief in its being ordered and sustained by God Who is wise.10 Rather, he locates his principle of withholding judgment by the senses in the fallibility of his senses,11 and that this fallibility gives a foothold for an evil external entity to deceive him. The senses, therefore, are considered by Descartes to be potentially reliable for data reception on the one hand, but principally untrustworthy at the bottom line, that is, they do not yield certainty.
Thus the mind itself, conceptually severed from sense data and the external world as a whole, is the only trustworthy means of knowledge based upon a self-evident knowledge of one’s own existence. One’s thought processes confirm one’s own existence, and his existence refers back to those thought processes as its validation. In this way, the inherently circular nature of metalogic has been imprisoned in the endless, self-referencing of one’s mind to itself. What ensues in the course of Western thought is the outworking of this fundamental confusion, that is, the attempt at funneling all of reality into solipsistic mindscape.
Isaiah 28:23-29 | Proverbs 2:6
Proverbs 3:1
Matthew 5:8
It seems that the existence of statements which “cohere with reality” implies an ontological link between such statements and that aspect of reality to which one’s propositional faculty coheres.
That is, the heart of man, or his innermost mind; the faculty by which man knows God. St. Thalassios writes in his work On Love, Self-Control, and Life in Accordance with the Intellect (IV, 13), concerning the nous, that God created man “with a capacity to receive the Spirit and to attain knowledge of Himself; He has brought into existence the senses and sensory perception to serve such beings.”
Job 12:2
Ecclesiastes 1:9
See Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV.4 and St. John of Damascus’ Philosophical Chapters III, which both refute the ancient sophists’ objection to the Law of Non-contradiction.
Meditation I
Much to the contrary, Descartes in the same Meditation refers to God as He Who Is “supremely good and the fountain of truth.”
Since Descartes’ goal is certainty, he views fallibility on par with falsehood. When considering how he was able to in some way doubt those opinions he once held as certain, he writes: “Henceforth I ought not the less carefully to refrain from giving credence to these opinions than to that which is manifestly false, if I desire to arrive at any certainty.”