How Renaissance art led to modernity and the mathematization of the cosmos.

Johannes Hoff’s The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa is remarkable, he posits an “alternative modernity” in which Renaissance accounts of space, perspective, and perception leads to modernity’s narcissistic hyperreflexity, and use of analytic rationality and individuality. He instead offers Cusa’s doxological epistemology” - doxology = right praise - where one loves to know.

Here is a part of John Betz’s take on the book, and a snippet of Hoff’s response, found HERE :

“…modern dialectics have blinded us to reality—either in the way that modern scientific rationalism tries to extort from creatures a univocal meaning they have never had, or in the way that postmodernism denies that creatures have any intrinsic meaning at all that is not a function of culture, the will to power, or the play of différance. In short, both of these extremes—“the univocity of modern scientific rationality and the ambiguous equivocity of post-modern pop culture” (xv)—have rendered reality opaque. And so we need to go back to Cusa’s analogical rationality if we are to go forward into an apocalyptic future in which the world will be seen for what it is, a transparency of divine things, and one can “see in every creature an image of the divine amabilitas”

Hoff traces back to the work of Cusa’s contemporary and fellow priest, Leon Battista Alberti (1406–72), who “applied the mathematical methods of Euclid to the art of painting” . On the face of it, there does not seem to be anything problematic here: Alberti’s mathematical mapping of perspective can subsequently be seen in the geometrical art of Piero della Francesca, who is best known and admired for his paintings of gospel scenes (e.g., The Baptism of Christ from 1450). Nevertheless, Hoff sees a problematic turning point here that will subsequently define the “world picture” (in the Heideggerian sense) of the modern age.

The problem, as he sees it, is that the vanishing point of the work of art mirrors that of the viewer, eo ipso “putting the latter in the position of a sovereign observer who can control the space of his perception as if it were nothing but a mirror image of his subjective position” (48). In other words, from this point on, Hoff argues, modern perspective is defined not by a “being seen” (as one is seen by the gaze of an icon) or by a misty seeing of the invisible through the visible—one could just as well say, of the infinite through the finite—but by the dominant viewer (the new and only topos noetos) and this viewer’s imaging of reality in narcissistic terms, according to his conception of it. In short, reality is now configured in my image and according to my representation of it. Thus, according to Hoff’s genealogy, the “winged eye” of Alberti (which appears on the flipside of his portrait medallion) leads directly to the “thinking I” of Descartes’s cogito —and thence, one might add, to the synoptic transcendental ego of Kant.

At this specular point a distinctly modern perspective is established (which for Hoff is also the presupposition of modern individualism).

.....the symbolic universe of the Middle Ages gives way to the “digital universe of Descartes and Leibniz” . Corporeal entities, as for Descartes, come to be regarded as “nothing but ‘extended things’ (res extensae) that can be represented analytically, based on functions and equations, without remainder” (; and so, inspired by visions of a mathesis universalis, matters of symbolic concern are “pushed aside in favor of simpler strategies of scientific progress”

Thus, as Hoff keenly observes, it was ironically modern artistic innovation...

.....he nevertheless maintained that “mathematical comparisons can only provide us with conjectures and not precise descriptions of our analogical world” (67). In other words, anticipating Kurt Gödel mutatis mutandis by nearly half a millennium, Cusa argued that because the world is structurally analogical, and opposites coincide in God alone, an exhaustive mathematical account of reality is impossible. In short, nothing can be pinned down and mastered; the Continental, Hegelian desideratum of a complete system and the Anglo-American desideratum of a final analysis are equally impossible. 

For in our world, in which everything is “enmeshed in the comparative logic of excedens (exceeding) and excessum (exceeded), of larger and smaller” (68), “nothing has the analytic ‘property’ [of being] one with itself. We may make rational conjectures about the identity of individual substances, but they are never analytically precise”

..

Whereas, on the modern model, which funds “the liberal societies of the modern age,” “every singularity is identical with its essence” and thus a “one” unto itself, for Cusa “nothing but God is One and identical with itself” .

....but, as Hoff notes, as analogical singularities, “the uniqueness of created individuals is neither analytically accountable nor conceivable as a ‘property’ that creatures ‘have’” . Rather, “the miracle is that every creature and every person is a singularity, not despite, but exactly because it owes everything it is to a giver whose perfections cannot be owned” . Indeed, rather than being one’s own property, according to Hoff’s Cusa-inspired metaphysics I cannot but “receive the gift to be one with myself” .

But, once again, such a metaphysical vision is inaccessible to the modern man, who is immured in his modern perspective—the perspective of “the modern Narcissus,”1 who puts himself “in the position of the eye point of a mathematically generated picture” , and precisely thereby makes his eye unreceptive to the light of the vision of God. As Hoff puts it, quoting Kleist, “it’s just a pity that the eye molders that is called to the vision of glory"

- John Betz

Now here is Hoff’s partial response to the above :

“The Cartesian promise that everything will straighten out if we only stick to the linear principles of representational security and analytical rigor has failed on every level of philosophical, mathematical and scientific research.

In the wake of thinkers as different as the early Romantics Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel and Martin Heidegger, we have learned that scientific reason is not reducible to true or false propositions.

I have outlined this more extensively in my publications on the necessity of replacing the radicalized phenomenological reduction (or epoché) of Foucault and Derrida by a “doxological reduction.”3 The above summary of Cusa’s method built on this research when it distinguished between two aspects of “truth” that interfere with each other and undermine every attempt to think in straight lines:

Our selection of true propositions (truth2) is regularly crossed by acts of wonder and praise (truth1) that guide our decisions about what deserves our attention and what does not.

If every knowledge starts with the commitment to a truth that transcends our reflexive comprehension, then it is no longer possible to draw a clear demarcation line between the straight lines of evidence-based, secure thinking patterns and the tentative, helical lines of walking paths that are sensitive to delusive shortcuts and attentive to performative indicators and narratives that structure the space that we inhabit.

As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, only subsequent to the fifteenth century did the “maps” that guide our cognitive and spatial movements become “disengaged” from the nonlinear “conditions of the possibility” of space.

( In another place, Hoff puts the matter like this, “…philosophers resisted the inclination to draw a clear demarcation line between the scientific cultivation of rational arguments and the religious cultivation of the symbolically charged spiritual practices that guide our attention”)

Cusa built on this Dionysian tradition—although he emphasized more than Albert (and in line with Aquinas) the unity of theology and philosophy: As in the case of doxological acts of prayer and praise, our intellectual power is a gift that we receive from the “father of lights.” And this gift is never received passively. Rather, the gesture of attentive receptivity coincides with the gesture of return: To receive the gift of the father of lights is tantamount with the realisation that my whole being is a gift that actualizes itself through acts of giving.”

- Hoff

The Christian Platonist Cudworth on materialism and atheism - by D. Hedley

Cudworth was a Christian member of the Cambridge Platonsist's in the 17th C, The following is a portion of 'Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and his Ancient Theology" by Douglas Hedley, 

Cudworth on materialism and atheism

The Cambridge Platonists were the first Platonists to accept modern science. Cudworth notes of Ficino that he “lived before the restoration of this mechanical philosophy, and therefore understood it not” (A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 37). The curious historiography is not an exercise in the study of history but a rather convoluted justification for the fusion of atomism and Platonism. Ancient philosophy is discussed because of the contemporary significance of atomism, and not least the philosophical deployment of the new science by Hobbes and Descartes. Cudworth discusses Gassendi (cf. TIS, I, 105) or Hobbes (ibid., I, 108–109) and explicitly refers to res extensa and “extended substance, body or matter in the philosophy of Descartes” (ibid., I, 117–118).

 Cudworth was building on Pierre Gassendi’s seminal work. Gassendi (1592–1652) was the key figure for the dissemination of Epicureanism in the 17^th century. Levitin writes: “The historiographical obsession with labelling Cudworth a Platonist has obscured the fact that the contemporary with whom he engaged most on the issue of matter theory was Gassendi” (Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 355). It is true that Cudworth draws upon Gassendi’s work but he is far from supporting the Frenchman. Philosophically, Cudworth is utterly opposed to Gassendi:

We may observe the Fraud and Juggling of Gassendus, who…extols and applauds Epicurus, as one who approached nearer to Christianity than the other Philosophers, in that he denied the World to be an animal; whereas according to the language and Notions of those times, to deny the Worlds animation, and to be an Atheist or to deny a God, was one and the same thing (TIS, II, 175).

One might note that Cudworth accuses Gassendi of “Fraud and Juggling” and that his atheism was cognate with his denial of the animating presence of the Divine in the world. Cudworth’s key hermeneutical principle is that “All great errours have ever been intermingled with some truth” (True Notion of the Lord’s supper, 1). 

The problem of ‘atheism’ is a defining question for the Cambridge Platonists as a group. Henry More published his Antidote Against Atheism in 1652. Smith’s Select Discourses, published posthumously in 1660, contains chapters on atheism or the soul’s immortality, where he attacks “the Epicurean herd”, presents the true metaphysical and contemplative man in whom the soul has already attained to communion with the Divine Nature (Smith, Select Discourses, 17). 

The splendid frontispiece of the 1678 first edition of  The True Intellectual System of the Universe constitutes a visual image of Cudworth’s thesis (the engraving is by R. White after a painting by Jan Batista Caespers). On one side we see the “Theists”, including Socrates, Pythagoras and Aristotle, contemplating or gesturing towards the heavens. There is a wreath with the word “Victory” inscribed upon a column behind them. On the other side are the wilting atheistic ancients, Anaximander, Strato and Epicurus, appearing somewhat dejected and gazing downward. Next to them we see crumbling wreath bearing the word “Confusion”. The presence of Pythagoras rather than Plato expresses what Gerson calls the Ur-Platonism thesis.

As we shall see later, much of the controversy depends upon the philosophical questions about the nature of mind and cause. One aspect of this is the acceptance of atomism or corpusculareanism. This is not an argument for claiming that the ‘Platonism’ is diluted or misattributed. The sundering of atomism from Democritean fatalistic atheism was a central aim of the True Intellectual System (cf. Clucas, ‘Poetic atomism in seventeenth-century England). Cudworth cites Posidonius, Sextus Empiricus and Strabo in attributing the doctrine of atomism to a Phoenician called Moschus and the first Greek atomist was Pythagoras. Democritus and Leucipus, however, took atomism as a materialistic theory. They “derive the original of all things in the universe from senseless atoms…so that there could not be any God…” (TIS, I, 33–34). 

Lloyd Gerson in his recent book From Plato to Platonism has argued that Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak, was produced out of a matrix he calls “Ur-Platonism” (Lloyd Gerson, From Plato to Platonism, 9–19). On Gerson’s account, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five robust refusals: the rejection of naturalism, nominalism, mechanism, materialism, relativism, and skepticism. Gerson plausibly and powerfully represents Plato’s Platonism as the endeavour to attempt to develop a coherent alternative to the various forms of skepticism, relativism, materialism, mechanism, nominalism and naturalism that flourished in Antiquity and which remerged with great force in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. 

Cudworth’s position overlaps neatly with Gerson’s approach. Through Hobbes’s radical nominalism and mechanistic determinism, Cudworth could harness anew the ancient arguments employed by Platonists against Stoic materialism and Epicurean reductionism and the skepticism of Sextus, not the least the problems linked to mind and causality. This is the age of Hobbes and Spinoza, and the de facto atheism of these critics of traditional theism. Plato in the tenth book of the Laws presents mechanistic materialism, what we would call reductive materialism, as the source of atheism. Plato’s counterargument is that the harmony and order, i.e. techne of the universe cannot be the product of accident, tyche, and requires a governing mind. This is the position that Aristotle presents in book twelve of his Metaphysics, as do all Platonists afterwards, not least Plotinus and Proclus. Only a top down metaphysics, in that sense a theological metaphysics can explain a genuinely intelligible universe.

The subtitle of The True Intellectual System is significant: Wherein, all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted: and its impossibility demonstrated. The true intellectual system is concerned with the question of the existence of God, in which Cudworth endeavours to show that monotheism is natural to mankind, yet the confusion of atheism can be traced to very ancient sources. One of the quotations is from Book 10 of the Laws 887d: 

φέρε δή, πῶς ἄν τις μὴ θυμῷ λέγοι περὶ θεῶν ὡς εἰσίν; ἀνάγκη γὰρ δὴ χαλεπῶς φέρειν καὶ μισεῖν ἐκείνους οἳ τούτων ἡμῖν αἴτιοι τῶν λόγων γεγένηνται καὶ γίγνονται 

Well now, how is it possible, without getting angry, to argue for the existence of gods? Clearly, one necessarily gets cross and annoyed with these people who put us to the trouble and continue to put us to the trouble of producing these explanations (The Laws, 414).

One might perhaps sense some of Cudworth’s own frustration at the length of his own endeavour to defeat atheism, a target he depicts in dramatic terms as “a certain strange kind of monster, with four heads, that are all of them perpetually biting, tearing, and devouring one another” (TIS, I, 143). The emergence of powerful critiques of theism in Hobbes and Spinoza and the development of Neo-Stoicism and Neo-Epicureanism drove Cudworth to the opinion that Plato was right that the metaphysics of atheism needs to be challenged. Cudworth viewed the essential debate in the mid to late 17^th century as an instance of Plato’s perennial conflict of the Gods (friends of forms) and the Giants (materialists) in the Sophist 246a–c:

Wherefore the same Plato tells us, that there had been always, as well, as then there was, a perpetual war and controversy in the world, and, as he calls it, a kind of gigantomachy betwixt these two parties or sects of men; the one, that held that there was no other substance in the world besides body; the other, that asserted incorporeal substance (ibid., I, 35).

Cudworth views all forms of atheism as emerging out of “pneumatophobia” or “a fear of spirit and a near superstitious reverence for matter as the only numen” (ibid., I, 200. See Kroll, The Material Word). The motivating idea of the entire True Intellectual System of the Universe is whether matter should be understood as derived from mind or the other way around. The atheist position, and here Cudworth is agreeing with Plato’s diagnosis of the atheist in book 10 of the Laws, is that “all animality, sense and consciousness, is a secondary, derivative and accidental thing, generable and corruptible, arising out of particular concretions of matter organized and dissolved together with them” (ibid., I, 202–203). The debate about atheism and theism is inextricably linked to the problem of the “stubborn necessity of matter” (ibid., II, 594) and the claim that “the divine Mind and Wisdom hath so printed its seal or signature upon the matter of the whole corporeal world, as that fortune and chance could never possibly have counterfeited the same” (ibid., I, 602). 

Materialism seemed in part vindicated if nature could be explained in exclusively physical properties of location, shape and size without recourse to immaterial or spiritual causality. The radical Cartesian sundering of spirit and extension seemed to threaten the intelligibility and presence of the Divine. The existence of spirit on the Cartesian model, and indeed the supreme spiritual Divine substance, was thereby shut off from the physical world. 

Cudworth observes: “They make a kind of dead and wooden world, as it were a carved statue, that hath nothing vital nor magical at all in it. Whereas to those, who are considerative, it will plainly appear, that there is a mixture of life or plastic nature, together with mechanism, which runs through the whole corporeal universe” (ibid., I, 221). The physical world is likened to a physical artefact, wholly distinct from its source and maker, or without any transcendent informing principle. Henry More is cited with a reference to his Enchiridion Metaphysicum as an expert defender of the thesis that “all the effects of nature come to pass by material and mechanical necessity, or the mere fortuitous motion of matter, without any guidance or direction, is a thing no less irrational that it is impious and atheistical” (ibid., I, 220). 

The upshot and conclusion of all is, that [according to the Atomists] there is no such scale or ladder in nature as Theists and Metaphysicians suppose, no degrees of real perfection and entity one above another, as of life and sense above inanimate matter, of reason and understanding above sense; from whence it would be inferred, that the order of things in nature was in way of descent from higher and greater perfection, downward to lesser and lower, which is indeed to introduce a God (ibid., III, 341).

It is not philology but metaphysics and theology that provides the motor of Cudworth’s thought. He is intent on employing the riches of an ancient tradition in order to contribute to the debates of his own age. Philology is the ancilla theologiae and the aid to metaphysics. Other philosophers saw Cudworth as an expert guide. Locke endorsed the “Accurateness and Judgement” of Cudworth’s narrative of the “Opinions of the Greek Philosophers” (Hutton, ‘Some Thoughts concerning Ralph Cudworth’, 146). 

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is another example. In the case of Hume, history is employed in a manner diametrically opposed to Cudworth. As to the “theists of antiquity”, “polytheism is the original religion of mankind” (sentence?). Cudworth’s genealogy of religion is turned on its head. Rather than history supporting ‘orthodoxy’, history becomes an organ of critique. And it is buttressed by Hume’s naturalism: “What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?“ (Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, 50). It is hard to conceive of Hume not writing with Cudworth’s ‘system’ in mind, whether he is criticizing causation or received histories of monotheism. George Berkeley was a great admirer of the “learned Dr Cudworth”. He notes:

Proclus, in his Commentary on the Theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed Body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that Body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense, and by virtue of that. Others, making all corporeal things to be dependent upon Soul or Mind, think this to exist in the first place and primary sense and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from and presuppose that of Mind (The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, V, 124). 

Berkeley may have been thinking of a passage like:

Mind [...] is a greater reality in nature, [...] the things, which belong to souls and minds, to rational beings as such, must not have less, but more reality in them, than the things in inanimate bodies. [...] it being impossible for a greater perfection to be produced from a lesser, [...] from whence things gradually descend downward, lower and lower, till they end in senseless matter“ (TIS, III, 434–435).

The issue for Cudworth is that of rational explanation of the universe, and a top down explanation that avoids the randomness of Epicurean and Neo-Epicurean theories of nature. 

Nature, transcendent Causality and Divine Will

Le Clerc noted that “Cudworth also correctly and excellently remarks that the being, whose property it is to make another being commence its existence, must not only be possessed of all the perfections which the being produced by it is supposed to enjoy; but must also have a power of action by which it can be the cause of something” (TIS, III, 133–134). The theism advocated in Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe is distinct from the ‘mechanic theism’ of Descartes. Cudworth is the inheritor and exponent of a form of Neoplatonic theism that could be called “mystical monotheism” (I am using the terminology of Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology). 

Plotinus, Scotus Eriugena and Eckhart would all constitute instances of the downplaying of creatio ex nihilo in favour of creatio ex Deo. The whole world is Deus explicatus (cf. TIS, I, p. 515). Cudworth’s discussion of the ‘Pagan Theists’ and ‘Theologers’ should include some consideration of the thorny problem of the metaphors of procession or influx or emanation. The much-used (but little understood) word ‘emanation’ does not correspond to any one Greek philosophical term but a group (some might say cloud) of metaphors in Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (usually of light, water or seeds). 

The roots of this language lie in the materialistic Stoic theory of the fiery breath that comes from and returns to the sun. Plotinus, however, always rejects the pantheistic implications of such Stoic language. It is the correspondence or analogy between the κόσμος νοητός and the κόσμος αἰσθητός that is crucial. It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the intelligible cosmos (κόσμος νοητός, kosmos noetos, sometimes νοητικός, noetikos, Latin mundus intelligibilis) and the physical cosmos (κόσμος αἰσθητός, kosmos aisthetos or in the Latin mundus sensibilis). This contrast between an intelligible world and the physical cosmos is of Platonic provenance, and was firmly established in Middle Platonism, drawing especially upon Plato’s Timaeus 27d-47e. 

The κόσμος νοητικός is the eternal world of ideas, while the κόσμος αἰσθητός is the image of that in the changing physical world. In medieval philosophy the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), and the manifold commentaries written on it, employs the language of procession, influx or emanation. Cudworth wishes to sustain the vision of a universe originating in its transcendent Cause and suffused with the energy of that First Cause into the lower levels of Being as “radii Deitatis” and “rays of the Deity” (TIS, I, 515). “God expanded or unfolded, and when they call the creatures, as St. Jerome and others often do, radios Deitatis, ‘the rays of the Deity’ System (TIS, III, 80–81).

The Neoplatonic structure of Cudworth’s thought, as opposed to some more generic ‘Platonism’, can be seen in the stress upon the following four tenets of ‘emanative power to create’. These can be listed as:

1. Procession or causality is a movement from the greater to the lesser: 

In the things Generated from Eternity, or Produced by way of natural Emanation, there is no progress upwards, but all Downwards, and still a Gradual Descent into Greater Multiplicity…’ That which is Generated or Emaneth, immediately from the First and Highest Being, is not the very same thing with it, as if it were nothing but that Repeated again and Ingeminated; and as it is not same, so neither can it be Better than it. (Plotinus, Enneads, 5, Bk 3, chp 15). From whence it follows, that it must needs be Gradually subordinate and Inferiour to it (TIS, II, 391.).

Cudworth refers explicitly to Plotinus but equally he could have taken this from Proclus: “Accordingly every cause properly so called, inasmuch as it both is more perfect than that which proceeds from it (prop. 7) and itself furnishes the limits of its production, transcends the instruments, the elements, and in general all that is described as a by-cause” (Proclus, Elements of Theology, 73).

2. That which processes from its source is both like and unlike its originator. The Wisdom of God furnishes ‘its Stamps and Signatures every where throughout the World’ (TIS, III, 597) or ‘Nature is not the Divine Art Archetypal but Ectypal’ (ibid., I, 281). 

The natural order, for Cudworth, is reflecting its transcendent source, both distinct from its origin and yet participating in it.

3. The reflection in the effect of the cause is present since the effect is coterminous with the transcendent cause, just as the mirrored image depends upon the presence of its source. Cudworth says that “the Plastick life of Nature is but the mere Umbrage of Intellectuality, a faint and shadowy Imitation of Mind and Understanding; upon which it doth as Essentially depend, as the Shadow doth upon the Body, the Image in the Glass upon the Face, or the Echo upon the Original Voice” (ibid., I, 172).

4. The Source remains unreduced by its procession. The frequent misunderstanding of Neoplatonism as pantheism rests upon the failure to appreciate this point. Cudworth writes of God as the “fountain of love and goodness” (ibid., III, 463) and as “fountain of life and understanding” (ibid., III, 453). Yet the Divine is not abated by its procession. In part this is due to the doctrine of divine ideas. The mind of God contains all that is and can be and is the noetic paradigm of the physical cosmos: 

The Mind of God is nothing but the intelligible essences of things, or their natures as conceivable, and objects of the mind. [...] So that the true meaning of these eternal essences is indeed no other than this, that knowledge is eternal; or that there is an eternal mind that comprehendeth the intelligible natures and ideas of all things, whether actually existing or possible only, their necessary relations to one another, and all the immutable verities belonging to them. [...] that there is one eternal unmade Mind and perfect incorporeal Deity, a real and substantial Ghost or Spirit, which comprehending itself, and all the extent of its own power, the possibility of things, and their intelligible natures, together with an exemplar or platform of the whole world, produced the same accordingly’ (ibid., III, 401).

Proclus might seem like a philosophical apologist for Greek polytheism and an unlikely ally for Cudworth. Cudworth is not without some criticism of Proclus “who had some peculiar fancies and whimsies of his own, and was indeed a confounder of the Platonic Theology, and a mingler of much unintelligible stuff with it” (ibid., 510). Yet Cudworth’s use of Proclus as his ally has its justification. Proclus’s vision of intelligible deities, his ‘henadology’, constitutes a level of reality subordinate to the ineffable and unparticipated One. 

The seminal importance of Proclus for the works of Dionysius the Areopagite has long been recognized. Moreover, his influence upon Western theism was enormous through the Arabic paraphrase of his theology (with some elements from Plotinus) called the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), a text, based upon Proclus’s Elements of Theology, translated from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century, and attributed to Aristotle. Hence a Neoplatonic text was viewed as the culmination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Albert the Great commented upon it, as did Thomas Aquinas (on the subsequent history, see Calma [ed.], Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages: I. New Commentaries on Liber de causis). The metaphysics of the Book of Causes is a model of absolute causality. The transcendent cause is the archetype of the world and as infinite plenitude. There is a hierarchy of perfection and a gradual descent from the greater to the less. Moreover, the effect participates in the cause like the image in the archetype.

Just as the cosmos is a theophany of the transcendent Principle, so too the different religions are all reflections of a true monotheism. Yet this is different from what Assmann designates as “cosmotheism”, which Cudworth in fact critiques. Cudworth explicitly rejects the idea that matter is self-sufficient – this Stoic materialism is cognate with the foundational error of Stoicism that matter can generate mind without a transcendent intellect superior to the world. This is also linked to the monstrous error of determinism. As an Origenist (and Plotinian) Cudworth is radically opposed to Stoic determinism. Cudworth’s own adherence is to a radical dialectic of immanence and transcendence: a Platonic via media between radical transcendence and Stoic immanence. 

Hence the question is not merely the conflict between theism and atheism joined to the problem of mind. It is also about the kind of theism at stake. As Lutz Bergemann has recently argued, Cudworth’s metaphysics is a philosophy of power: God, as Plotinus insists, is δύναμις πάντων, the power and source of all/to all and yet not arbitrary power (Lutz Bergemann, System aus Transformation). Indeed Cudworth explicitly uses Plotinus’s magnificent treatise On the Freedom and the Will of the One. In this remarkably theistic treatise, the causal source of the physical cosmos is the immaterial abounding transcendent cause and is also presented through the image of the King (ὁ βασιλεὺς).

 In VI 8, 15 (cf. Leroux, Traité Sur la Liberté, 305), Plotinus writes: 

“It is this, then, and not something else, but what it ought to be; it did not happen to be like this, but had to be like this; but this ‘had to be’ is principle of all things that had to be.” 

Cudworth adds θεός (Theos) to the Greek. The passage reads: ”θεός ὅπερ ἐχρῆν εἶναι· οὐ τοίνυν οὕτω συνέβη, ἀλλ´ ἔδει οὕτως· τὸ δὲ «ἔδει» τοῦτο ἀρχὴ τῶν ὅσα ἔδει: 

God is essentially that, which ought to be; and he therefore did not happen to be such as he is: and this first ought to be the principle of all things whatsoever that ought to be” (TIS, III, 463) 

One might legitimately object to Cudworth’s resolute harnessing of Plotinus to the theistic camp, but Cudworth can draw upon a precedent in Ficino and others in identifying the supreme principle that is both transcendent and immanent in the cosmos with the Christian godhead (on Ficino’s momentous synthesis of Plotinian metaphysics and Christian theology, see Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology). The supreme being is absolute freedom but this is not to be understood in a crude anthropomorphic manner: “God’s will is ruled by his justice, and not his justice ruled by his will; and therefore God himself cannot command what is in its own nature unjust” (TIS, III, 494. Cf. ibid., III, 512).

 Indeed, the mistake of the atheists is to confuse this anthropomorphism with the genuine concept of God: “In the next place, this wish of Atheists is altogether founded upon a mistaken notion of God Almighty too, [...] His will is not mere will, such as hath no other reason besides itself; but it is law, equity, and chancery” (ibid., III, 494). This is not the voluntaristic power of the ultra-Calvinistic deity but “the abounding fecund energy that is the μέτρον πάντων or measure of all that is both ‘measureless to man’ while the gauge and boundary of Being, (omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti, “Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight”, Wisdom, 11,21). (See W. Beierwaltes, 'Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11, 21'). 

While “some fanaticks of latter times have made God to be all in a gross sense, so as to take away all real distinction betwixt God and the creature, and indeed to allow no other being besides God” (TIS, I, 513), there is no diminishing of the cause in its procession into the physical cosmos. The Cause, while not exhausted or lessened by it procession, remains within its effect. Yet the paradigm of divine immanence, Cudworth insists, is “a very ticklish point and easily liable to mistake and abuse” (ibid., I, 515). 

While it is unlikely that Cudworth would have read Spinoza’s Ethics, with its strident Deus sive natura, it is most likely that he was apprised of its existence by Van Limborch and Cudworth quotes Spinoza in the True Intellectual System as ”that Late Theological Politician” (ibid., III, 4; cf. J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 152). Sections of Spinoza’s Ethics were in circulation in 1663 and a full draft by 1665 (cf. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 225). Spinoza regards the notion of the will of the Divine as an evident absurdity. 

Semiosis as theosis ? Becoming the living interpreter of the Father

Here is a shortened summary done by Taylor Somers of "Representation and Interpretation as the Basis of Participation in the Trinity," by Andrew Robinson. He uses the rich, fascinating and largely untapped semiotics of Charles Pierce.

Basically, Pierce comes up with the semiotic triad of object, representantion, and interpretation, and Robinson links this to the Trinity, the images & large text come from Jason Booms power point.

The Father is unoriginate and unknown :: Object

The Word/Son is the perfect image of the Father :: Representation

The Holy Spirit perfectly interprets the Word/Son's representation of the Father : Interpretation

Robinson writes,

"God’s life is the Spirit’s eternal interpretation of the Word as the perfect sign (representation) of the Father. Creaturely interpretations imperfectly mirror the perfect coherence of being and representation that is God’s life. When we respond to the incarnate Word we are adopted into the place occupied by the Spirit within the Trinity. By responding to the Word with the fullness of our being we are incorporated into the divine dynamic of truthful representation and loving response."

Within the divine life it is the Spirit who interprets the Word. When, as creatures, we interpret the Word, it is we who are adopted into that role of interpreter. Just as the divine Spirit interprets the eternal Word as a perfect representation of the Father, so we finite creatures now likewise interpret the incarnate Word as the image of the invisible God. We may say, then, that we participate in God’s life when we respond to the Word with appropriate feelings, thoughts, or actions.

In any interpretative response the interpreter is always changed in the process. It follows that within the eternal life of the Trinity, when the Spirit interprets the Word the Spirit must be “changed”, and hence become a new sign available for further interpretation. But within the perfection of the divine life the Spirit cannot become a sign of anything less than the perfect goodness and love of the Father....

• We participate God by being adopted into the place occupied by the Spirit within the divine life.
  
• 
  
• We participate in God's life when we respond to the Word with appropriate feelings, thoughts, and activities.
  
• 
  
• Conclusion: (Right) semiosis is theosis.
  

....the intra-Trinitarian dynamic may be understood as a continual magnification and glorification of the Word. A consequence of this way of picturing the life of the Trinity and our participation in it is that it offers a context in which to understand the scriptural claim that by responding to the Word we are progressively transformed into a closer likeness to the Word (e.g., 2 Corinthians 3: 18). For if the Spirit’s interpretation of the Word must, by virtue of the logic of the intra-divine dynamic of perfect representation and interpretation, result in further expressions of the Word, so, if we properly interpret the Word as a sign of the Father, we must be incrementally changed into likenesses of the Word [. . .]

The processes of creaturely responses to the Word ― in thoughts, feelings, and actions ― are the basis of our adoption into the place of the Spirit and our transformation into a likeness of the Word.

Knowledge of God is participation in God, where “knowledge” is understood in the broadest sense in terms of the engagement of the whole person in interpretative response to a sign. Or, one might say, semiosis is theosis: the dynamic of representation and interpretation is participation in God.


The Word’s perfect representation of the Father within the eternal Trinity establishes Being and Knowledge as ultimately related to, and inseparable from, one another. Knowledge is always mediated by representations of various kinds, so God’s eternal act of self-representation and self-interpretation is an eternal act of self-knowledge. Ontology and epistemology are indissolubly linked because Being and Representation are essential and equal aspects of God’s eternal nature. 

• Robinson's definition of sacrament: a sign that actualizes what it signifies, where what it signifies is the gift of participation in the divine life.
  
• 
  
• Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, establish right collective interpretative responses.
  
• 
  
• The Eucharist an example of habit as ultimate interpretant 

God’s eternal act of self-representation is, similarly, the basis of God’s self-revelation to the world. God’s absolute Otherness from the world would make the infinite gap between creature and Creator unbridgeable were it not for the fact that God’s eternal nature is one of self-representation. Because representation is essential to God’s nature it is possible for God’s eternal Word to reveal God’s very self, even to creatures who are not essentially divine. This requires the eternal Word to be embodied in a form that is accessible to, and interpretable by, such creatures. In other words, it requires the Word to become incarnate and the Spirit to enable creatures to be interpreters of that incarnate Word, just as the Spirit eternally interprets the Word within God’s essential being.


That the Word reveals the Father makes sense within the framework of the “semiotic model” of the Trinity. What the Word reveals about the Father is a matter of empirical experience in the lives of those who met Jesus in person or encounter him through the gospels. This perspective is able to emphasize that the primary focus of Christian experience and life lies in our responses to the incarnate Word..."

You can read more HERE

Or check out Dr Andrew Robinson's book God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution, and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C. S. Peirce 

The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism - Bernardo Kastrop

Scientist and idealist philosopher has an interesting paper I reproduce below :

Abstract

The physicalist worldview is often portrayed as a dispassionate interpretation of reality motivated purely by observable facts. In this article, ideas of both depth and social psychology are used to show that this portrayal may not be accurate. Physicalism—whether it ultimately turns out to be philosophically correct or not—is hypothesized to be partly motivated by the neurotic endeavor to project onto the world attributes that help one avoid confronting unacknowledged aspects of one’s own inner life. Moreover, contrary to what most people assume, physicalism creates an opportunity for the intellectual elites who develop and promote it to maintain a sense of meaning in their own lives through fluid compensation. However, because this compensatory strategy does not apply to a large segment of society, it creates a schism—with corresponding tensions—that may help explain the contemporary conflict between neo-atheism and religious belief.

Introduction

A worldview is a narrative in terms of which we relate to ourselves and reality at large. It is a kind of cultural operating system that gives us tentative answers to foundational questions such as “What are we?” “What is the nature of reality?” “What is the purpose of life?” and so on (Kastrup, 2014). Although many different worldviews vie for dominance today, the academically endorsed physicalist narrative defines the mainstream, despite its many difficulties (Kastrup, 2014, 2015; Nagel, 2012). This reigning worldview posits that physical entities outside consciousness are the building blocks of reality. Consciousness, in turn, is supposedly an epiphenomenon or emergent property of certain complex arrangements of these entities. As such, under physicalism, consciousness must be reducible to physical arrangements outside and independent of experience (Stoljar, 2016).

Physicalism is often portrayed as a worldview that, in contrast to, for example, religion or spirituality, is based solely on objective facts. The present article, however, hypothesizes that the formative principles and motivations underpinning the physicalist narrative—whether it ultimately turns out to be philosophically correct or not—are partly subjective, reflecting neurotic ego-defense maneuvers meant, as described by Vaillant (1992), to “protect the individual from painful emotions, ideas, and drives” (p. 3). This becomes clear when one lifts core concepts of depth psychology to the social and cultural spheres. However, as a mostly clinical approach, depth psychology requires some elaboration before being applied at a theoretical level.

The modern understanding of depth psychology can be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the works of Frederic Myers, Pierre Janet, William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung (Kelly et al., 2009). Its foundational inference is that the human psyche comprises two main parts a conscious and an “unconscious” segment. The conscious segment of the psyche comprises experiences a person has introspective access to and can report. According to the analytical school of depth psychology, the “ego” is defined as the experiential center of this segment (von Franz, 1964, p. 161), and it is in this specific sense that I use the word “ego” throughout the present article. In contrast, the so-called “unconscious” segment of the psyche comprises mental contents the person has no introspective access to and cannot report. Nonetheless, depth psychologists assert that “unconscious” mental contents can, and do, influence the person’s manifest thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Because the ability to report an experience is a metacognitive capacity on top of the experience itself (Schooler, 2002), a more rigorous articulation of the difference between the conscious and “unconscious” segments of the psyche is this: Conscious mental contents are those a person both experiences and knows that he or she experiences them. “Unconscious” mental contents, on the other hand, are those the person either does not experience or does not know that he or she experiences them (Kastrup, 2014, pp. 104-110). In other words, conscious mental contents fall within the field of self-reflection and, therefore, can be reported, whereas “unconscious” mental contents escape this field and, therefore, cannot be reported. Indeed, the existence of mental contents that are experienced but cannot be reported—even to oneself—is now well established in neuroscience, which has prompted the emergence of so-called “no-report paradigms” (Tsuchiya, Wilke, Frässle, & Lamme, 2015).

However, as clinical psychologists can only gauge consciousness based on what their patients report, anything outside the field of self-reflection is indistinguishable from true unconsciousness. This explains the somewhat inaccurate terminology choice of the founders of depth psychology.

Some critics have questioned the existence of an “unconscious” segment of the psyche on philosophical grounds (Stannard, 1980, pp. 51-81). However, recent empirical results in neuroscience show the presence of broad cognitive activity that individuals cannot report, but which nonetheless causally conditions the individuals’ manifest thoughts, feelings, or behaviors (Augusto, 2010; Eagleman, 2011; Westen, 1999). Recent neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state have also corroborated the depth-psychological view that ego suppression—in the form of reduction of neural activity in the brain’s default mode network—brings otherwise “unconscious” mental contents into awareness (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012; Carhart-Harris et al., 2016; Palhano-Fontes et al., 2015).

On the basis of these empirical results, the core idea of depth psychology—that is, that a segment of the psyche that escapes self-reflective introspection can causally condition our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—cannot be dismissed. And because cultural narratives are the compound result of an aggregation of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals, depth-psychological insights are valid starting points for an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of our culture’s mainstream worldview.

In the “Ego Protection Through Projection” and “Egoic Control” sections, I review ways in which the physicalist narrative can give us permission to avoid confronting unwanted affects in the “unconscious” segment of our psyche. In “The Question of Meaning” section, I elaborate on how physicalism can conceivably even nurture its proponents’ sense of meaning in life. This latter section is based on theories of social psychology, rather than depth psychology, but it still leverages the notion of an “unconscious”: In hypothesizing that physicalism is an expression of fluid compensation, it presupposes that cognitive processes outside the field of self-reflection influence the feelings, thoughts, and opinions subjects express. Finally, the “Conclusion” section briefly sums up the key ideas defended in this article.

Ego Protection Through Projection

According to depth psychology, a neurosis is the expression of an inner psychic conflict caused by the ego’s refusal to acknowledge, confront, and ultimately integrate unwanted affects rising from the “unconscious” (Jung, 2014, p. 137). To keep these affects at bay, the ego uses a variety of defense mechanisms, among which denial, distortion, dissociation, repression, and so on (Vaillant, 1992). A particularly common defense mechanism is projection (Vaillant, 1992), whereby one circumvents the need to confront ego-threatening forces within oneself by ascribing the corresponding attributes to the outer environment. As such, projections can be said to partly hijack and manipulate one’s worldview in an attempt to prevent short-term suffering. My hypothesis is that, through projection, the physicalist worldview gives us permission to avoid confronting some of what we find disagreeable within ourselves. This can be achieved in a variety of subtle ways.

For instance, we all have a sense of our own existence and identity. Lucid introspection reveals that the root of this sense is our consciousness—our capacity to be subjects of experience. After all, if we were not conscious, what could we know of ourselves? How could we even assert our own existence? Being conscious is what it means to be us. In an important sense—perhaps even the only important sense—we are first and foremost consciousness itself, the rest of our self-image arising afterward, as thoughts and images constructed in consciousness.

From this perspective, the physicalist narrative’s attempt to reduce consciousness to physical entities outside subjectivity is counterintuitive, for it divorces the alleged nature of consciousness from our felt sense of identity. We do not feel as though we were a bunch of physical particles bouncing around inside our skull. Instead, we feel that we are the subjective “space” wherein our experiences unfold, including our ideas about physical particles. Hence, there is a sense in which the physicalist narrative can be said to project the felt essence of ourselves onto something distinctly other. According to it, we are not really “here,” grounded in our subjective sense of being, but somewhere “over there,” in an abstract world fundamentally beyond the felt concreteness of our inner lives. As such, the physicalist narrative entails an emptying out of what it means to be us, a kind of secular kenosis. “I am no ghost, just a shell,” laments the art character Annlee (Huyghe & Parreno, 2003, p. 35), whose predicament is that of many of us in contemporary society.

The kenosis entailed by the physicalist narrative can exonerate its proponents from responsibility for their choices and actions. Consider this passage by Sam Harris (2012), “Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I . . . could not inspect or influence” (pp. 7-8, emphasis added). The projection of responsibility here is clear and the corresponding release described by Harris (2012) himself: “Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal” (p. 46, emphasis added). Indeed, under the ethos of such a worldview, there is no concrete reason for guilt or regret, for we allegedly are not what we experience ourselves to be. We are not responsible for what happens here because we are not—and have never been—really here. We are not ghosts in the machine but ghosts conjured up by the machine. In a significant sense, we do not really exist.

As a matter of fact, some proponents of the physicalist narrative go as far as to deny that consciousness exists. “Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.” These words of neuroscientist Michael Graziano (2016) should give anyone pause for thought. Here we have consciousness—whatever it may intrinsically be—denying that consciousness exists. Philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991) also claimed that consciousness is an illusion, a claim that seems to immediately contradict itself. After all, where do illusions occur if not in consciousness? By appealing to metaphysical abstractions fundamentally beyond experience, such denials of our felt selves achieve a form of deliverance somewhat analogous to religious absolution. Surprisingly, as we will later see, they even help restore a sense of meaningfulness in life, following what I will call “ontological trauma.”

The structure of these denials is fairly clear: First, consciousness weaves the conceptual notion that certain aspects of its own dynamics somehow exist outside itself; then, it projects its own essence onto these aspects. The corresponding dislocation of identity is apparent—and its neurotic character easy to grasp—with an analogy: Imagine a painter who, having painted a self-portrait, points at it and declares himself to be the portrait. This, in essence, is what physicalists do, whether it is philosophically justifiable or not. Their consciousness conceptualizes self-portraits within itself. Sometimes these self-portraits take the form of electrical impulses and neurotransmitter releases in the brain (Koch, 2004). Other times, they take the shape of quantum transitions or potentials (Tarlaci & Pregnolato, 2015). Whatever the case, their consciousness always points to a conceptual entity it creates within itself and then declares itself to be this entity. It dismisses its own primary, first-person point of view in favor of an abstract third-person perspective. Consider Dennett’s (1991) words: “The way to answer these ‘first-person point of view’ stumpers is to ignore the first-person point of viewand examine what can be learned from the third-person point of view” (p. 336, emphasis added). The contempt for the subject of experience—the primary datum of existence and one’s own felt identity—is palpable here; the kenosis nearly total.

The physicalist narrative may also give us permission to carve out and dismiss—again through the kenosis of projection—the most difficult aspects of our inner lives: our felt emotions. According to it, the feeling of an emotion is the internal perception of an “action program” triggered by certain stimuli (Damasio, 2011). Although the action program itself is important insofar as it helps us survive and reproduce, the accompanying feeling of emotion is, in a sense, a mere side effect of the program’s execution. For instance, the sight of another human being facing a predicament is a stimulus that triggers actions meant to help the victim and, consequently, increase the social cachet of the action taker. 

The feeling of compassion, in turn, is supposedly nothing but the inner perception of this evolutionarily useful reactive schema (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009); it allegedly has no primary or fundamental significance. Under such a narrative, it is easier to go into denial about our emotional lives when the going gets tough. We feel justified to dismiss or repress our traumas and demons, avoiding the often painful work of psychological integration. The physicalist narrative provides a foundation for rationalizing the choice of living an unexamined, superficial life. To a person desperate to avoid the specter of immediate and pungent suffering, the benefits of this stance may seem to far outweigh its potential long-term implications.

Surprisingly, the physicalist narrative can even offer us reassurance about death. According to it, there is literally nothing to fear about death itself, because it is allegedly the end of all experience, including the experiences of fear and pain. All of our problems and suffering are guaranteed to end at that point. The great and scary unknown of the experiential realm beyond physical existence vanishes in one fell swoop; the greatest angst of humankind is conquered. The psychological allure of this idea is powerful, yet most people do not seem to ever stop to consider it. We have come to take for granted the comforts that our mainstream worldview grants us.

To sum it up, by denying our felt sense of existence and identity, the physicalist narrative creates an opportunity to clear the ego of ultimate responsibility. By denying the fundamental reality of emotions, it creates an opportunity to protect the ego from a confrontation with far more powerful forces. And by projecting our ontological essence onto ephemeral arrangements of matter, it creates an opportunity to protect the ego from what has historically been the greatest angst of humankind: the experiential unknown of the after-death state.

Egoic Control

It has been shown that religiosity can reflect a form of compensatory control (Kay, Gaucher, McGregor, & Nash, 2010): By believing that transcendent forces aligned with one’s convictions govern the world, the ego avoids the anxiety associated with its own inability to overcome uncertainty. This way, religiosity creates an opportunity for control by proxy: Although the ego cannot determine the course of nature, an external agency far superior to it is believed to do so in a way consistent with the ego’s preferences. The ego’s need to avoid anxiety by exerting control is thus indirectly fulfilled.

Going beyond religiosity, the physicalist narrative enables a sense of direct egoic control over nature. Indeed, a recent empirical study has shown that “believing that science is or will prospectively grant . . . mastery of nature imbues individuals with the belief that they are in control of their lives” (Stavrova, Ehlebracht, & Fetchenhauer, 2016, p. 234). Of course, by associating itself with science—in a philosophically questionable move that is nonetheless widely accepted—the physicalist narrative has become the enabler and ontological foundation of this belief. And because direct control—the notion that one can personally steer or at least predict what is going to happen—is known to be a key contributor to mental well-being (Langer & Rodin, 1976; Luck, Pearson, Maddem, & Hewett, 1999), it stands to reason that the allure of physicalism in this regard could potentially be even stronger than that of religious control-by-proxy.

The opportunity for direct control offered by the physicalist narrative goes as far as conquering death itself: If consciousness is just an epiphenomenon or emergent property of physical arrangements outside experience, it becomes conceivable that, through smart engineering, we could create means to upload our consciousness into more durable substrates such as silicon computers (Kurzweil, 2005). Some physicalists even offer detailed roadmaps for achieving this (Sandberg & Boström, 2008). The possibility of eternal life thus seems to open up, provided that consciousness can be instantiated in a computer by programming the computer with the patterns of information flow found in a person’s brain.

This, however, is premised on the notion that a simulation of a mental phenomenon is equivalent, in essence, to the phenomenon itself. There are many compelling arguments against this notion in philosophy of mind, the most well known of which is perhaps John Searle’s (2004). To gain some intuition about what these arguments generally entail, consider this: Do we have any reason to believe that, by performing a perfectly accurate simulation of kidney function in a computer, the computer will begin urinating on its desk? Clearly not. There is an essential difference between a computer simulation and the phenomenon it simulates; they are not the same thing, no matter how accurate the simulation. Yet, those hoping to “upload consciousness” under the physicalist narrative seem to become so engrossed in abstraction that they lose touch with basic intuitions of plausibility. Their neurosis is, in this sense, comparable with religious dogmatism.

Although both the religious and physicalist narratives create an opportunity for conquering death, the Promethean door to immortality opened by physicalism invests the ego—not deities—with the power to control transcendence through technology. This is seductively more direct, its only weakness—from a psychological standpoint—being that it is promissory: At present, nobody has ever managed to upload consciousness. Yet, some popular physicalist authors argue that consciousness uploading may be achievable still in our own lifetime (Kurzweil, 2005; Sandberg & Boström, 2008), which actualizes the potential allure of their worldview.

As seen in the “Ego Protection Through Projection” section and this section, the implications of the physicalist narrative consistently help protect and invest the ego with authority. This is not to say that physicalism is entirely motivated by neurotic ego-defense maneuvers, for there is a philosophical argument behind it that cannot be dismissed. Nonetheless, the question is whether it is plausible that physicalism’s significant ego-defense potential has notbeen, to some degree, an unexamined motivation for its development, promotion, and adoption.

The Question of Meaning

Meaning—in the sense of significance and purpose—is probably the greatest asset any human being can possess. Psychotherapist Victor Frankl (1991), who practiced and led groups while detained in a concentration camp during World War II, asserted that the will-to-meaning is the most dominant human drive, in contrast to Nietzsche’s will-to-power and Freud’s will-to-pleasure. Meaning is so powerful that, as Jung remarked (1995), it “makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything” (p. 373). Philip K. Dick’s alter ego Horselover Fat, in the novel Valis, embodies the essence of this drive: “Fat had no concept of enjoyment; he understood only meaning,” wrote Dick (2001, p. 92). Like Fat, many of us see meaning as a higher value than power or pleasure. Our motivation to live rests in there being meaning in our lives. Today, we need meaning more than ever, for as Paul Tillich (1952)lucidly observed, the greatest anxieties of our culture are precisely those of doubt and meaninglessness.

And here is where an argument is often made for the impartiality of physicalism: as a worldview that, by turning the universe into a mechanical contraption fueled by mere chance, drains the meaning out of life, it cannot possibly be a neurotic ego-defense mechanism—or so the argument goes. Instead, the physicalist narrative must represent a courageous admission by “tough people who face the bleak facts” (Watts, 1989, p. 65). It must embody an objective assessment of reality, not an emotional, irrational wish-fulfillment maneuver akin to religion. Compelling as it may seem at first, this argument fails careful scrutiny, for its premise is false.

Indeed, according to the Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) of social psychology (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006)—which is perhaps better seen in the context of a broader theory of psychological defense (Hart, 2013)—we can derive a sense of meaning from four different sources: self-esteem, closure, belonging, and symbolic immortality. In other words, we can find meaning in life through (a) cultivating a feeling of personal worth, (b) resolving doubts and ambiguities, (c) being part of something bigger and longer lasting than ourselves, and (d) leaving something of significance behind—such as professional achievements—in the form of which we can “live on” after physical death. A society’s mainstream cultural narrative conditions how meaning can be derived from each of these four sources.

The key idea behind the MMM is that of fluid compensation as an ego-defense mechanism: If one of the four sources of meaning is threatened, an individual will tend to automatically compensate by seeking extra meaning from the other three sources. For instance, threats to self-esteem may cause the individual to reaffirm his or her model of reality, thereby bolstering closure.

As Van Tongeren and Green (2010) have shown, a transcendent source of meaning, such as religion, plays the same role in fluid compensation as the other four sources. For instance, individuals tend to reaffirm their religious beliefs following disruption to their meaning system, in an effort to protect the latter. Van Tongeren’s and Green’s experiments have not only empirically substantiated the MMM, they have also shown that even subliminal threats to meaning trigger fluid compensation, strongly indicating that the “unconscious” is integral to the process.

With this as background, my suggestion is that the physicalist narrative, in addition to being a rational hypothesis for making sense of the world, may be an expression of fluid compensation by intellectual elites. In other words, instead of a threat to meaning, the physicalist narrative may actually reflect an attempt by these elites to protect and restore their sense of meaning through bolstering closure, self-esteem, and symbolic immortality. The disruption that may have originally led to this compensatory move occurred around the mid- to late 19th century.

Indeed, it was at that time that we lost our ability to spontaneously relate to religious myths without linear intellectual scrutiny. “With Descartes and Kant, the philosophical relation between Christian belief and human rationality had grown ever more attenuated. By the late nineteenth century, with few exceptions, that relation was effectively absent,” wrote Tarnas (2010, p. 311). The myths that had hitherto offered us meaning through the promise of literalimmortality and metaphysical teleology became untenable. Taylor (2007), who richly chronicled this historical transition, characterized the corresponding loss of meaning rather broadly and generally as “a wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world, a sense of it as flat, empty” (p. 302). He even hinted at fluid compensation when speaking of “a multiform search for something within, or beyond [the world], which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence” (Taylor, 2007, p. 302).

While acknowledging that this generalized malaise was the matrix of what followed, I submit that a more specific, forceful, and personal threat to meaning was necessary to mobilize the extraordinary level of academic and intellectual endorsement amassed by physicalism. After all—as Taylor himself described through what he called “the nova effect”—the malaise, in and by itself, fostered not only physicalism but also an explosion of myriad other worldviews.

I hypothesize that a profound and disturbing change in the intellectual elites’ understanding of the nature of their own being—that is, an ontological trauma—was the specific, forceful, and personal trigger that helped congeal the physicalist narrative. Having lost religion, the elites were left with the prospect of physical deterioration without the path to transcendence previously offered by an immortal soul. Hence, they were forced to face the inexorability of their own approaching death. And as we know from Terror Management Theory, mortality salience is a formidable threat to meaning (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1997) empirically shown to motivate investment in palliative worldviews (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010). Ontological trauma may have thus triggered fluid compensation and ultimately led to the intellectual elites’ championing of the physicalist narrative.

Indeed, many studies have shown that mortality salience leads to a heightened need for closure (Landau et al., 2004). This is fluid compensation in action. Notice also that the physicalist narrative is humanity’s most significant attempt yet to achieve closure in our worldview. As multibillion dollar experiments like the Large Hadron Collider—whose primary purpose is to “close” the Standard Model of particle physics, with no immediate practical applications—illustrate, physicalism embodies an unprecedented effort to produce a causally complete, unambiguous model of reality. Nothing else in millennia of preceding history has come anywhere near it. I suggest that this is not coincidental: The physicalist narrative may reflect the elites’ ego’s attempt to regain, through heightened closure, the meaning it lost along with religion. Moreover, other modalities of fluid compensation may be at play here as well: By distinguishing themselves as a segment of society uniquely capable to understand facts and concepts beyond the cognitive capacity of others, the scientists and academics who promote the physicalist narrative stand to gain in self-esteem. The cosmological scope of the scientific work they produce and leave behind upon their deaths can also be seen as a boost to symbolic immortality. Finally, recall Tillich’s observation: Doubt and meaninglessnessanxiety dominate our culture’s mind-set. Is it humanly plausible that our mainstream narrative would have evolved to tackle only doubt and leave meaninglessness anxiety unaddressed?

All in all, the physicalist narrative does not necessarily represent a net loss of meaning for the intellectual elites who produced and continue to promote it. The transcendent meaning lost along with religion may be compensated for by an increase in closure, self-esteem, and symbolic immortality. Unfortunately, however, this compensatory strategy cannot work for most ordinary people: The men and women on the streets do not have enough grasp of contemporary scientific theories to experience an increase in their sense of closure. Neither do they gain in self-esteem, because they are not part of the distinguished elites. Finally, insofar as ordinary people do not produce scientific work of their own, no particular gain in symbolic immortality is to be expected either.

In conclusion, the physicalist narrative may serve the egoic meaning needs of the intellectual elites who develop and promote it, but constitutes a significant threat to the sense of meaning of the average person on the streets. Perhaps for this reason, a large segment of society seeks meaning through alternative ontologies considered outdated and untenable by the intellectual elites, such as religious dualism (Heflick, Goldenberg, Hart, & Kamp, 2015). This creates a schism—with corresponding tensions—between different segments of society, which may help explain the contemporary conflict between neo-atheism and religious belief.

Conclusion

The physicalist narrative, in contrast to the way it is normally portrayed, may not be dispassionate. It may be partly driven by the neurotic endeavor to project onto the world attributes that help us avoid confronting unacknowledged aspects of our own inner lives. Moreover, contrary to what most people assume, physicalism creates an opportunity for the intellectual elites who develop and promote it to maintain a sense of meaning in their own lives through fluid compensation. However, because this compensatory strategy does not apply to a large segment of society, it creates a schism—with corresponding tensions—that may help explain the contemporary conflict between neo-atheism and religious belief.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for the thorough and thoughtful criticisms that helped significantly improve this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

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Author Biography

Bernardo Kastrup has a PhD in computer engineering with specializations in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing. He has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the “Casimir Effect” of quantum field theory was discovered). He has authored many scientific papers and philosophy books.