The universe as Divine argument, Pierce’s Logic of Musement

Charles Sanders Pierce is one odd duck. The greatest philosopher since Aristotle according to some, much admired by the likes of William James to Bertrand Russell, his own thought anticipating several strands of philosophy from semantics to phenomenology. Unfortunately his work is scattered, a drug addict with an irritable, erratic personally, scarcely employed, scraping by in utmost poverty, living off the bread crusts of the local baker and so poor he couldn’t even afford stationary. He would scribble on the back of old papers and reports.

Nevertheless, the essay he wrote, “A Neglected Argument for God” or the “N.A” is bizarre, charming, and obscure. I confess I read the essay, got to the end, and found no argument for God at all ! Indeed it took me awhile, and left me with a deepening appreciation, and explanation for why, truly, we must become as children to see Him.

In essence he merely recommends one saunter about in reverie, as a child with the, mind free and in full play, and, he says, it is certain you will come to the vague belief in something like God.

“If one who had determined to make trial of Musement as a favorite recreation were to ask me for advice, I should reply as follows: The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; but I have found no watch of the nychthemeron that has not its own advantages for the pursuit. It begins pas- sively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes [Pierce calls our experience of the world the three “universes” of Ideas, brute actuality, and signs of experience - semiotics ]. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self….”

Pierce, anticipating phenomenology, says we live in three “universes” of experience, distinguished by modalities of being, the first of possibility, the first is one of free undetermined play of imagination, which is the mindset he recommends. It is one of vagueness and becoming, of ideas.

The second is of matter, physical facts, existents and actuality, completely determined and the most capable of conceptual exactness.

The third mediates between them -  Mind, Necessitants, signs, and laws.

Pierce claims that in revelry we can achieve a kind of perception of the intertwining of the three universes of experience, the universe of feeling, the universe of brute fact, and the universe of reason that mediates between the other two.

Just as begins any other inquiry, the experience of God starts by “drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes”  That’s the musement, free play of mind that makes the muser aware of the connections and homogeneities among these three universes and in nature in general. 

It is Wonder he speaks of, similar to what Heidegger termed “Sein” or Being. We take for granted THAT things exist, that they appear to us, that they “be”. Heidegger means more than this though, he means the intelligible dimension that we encounter in the world.

As Brain Temple explains it, it is “The truth that we may know the objects of our experience in themselves, as over and above their contexts of referentiality.

We perceive the proper and common sensibles alike through our external sensory organs, but we—through another organ— conceptually perceive things as intelligible through another.

For instance, I sense the color, size, and shape of my coffee mug (slate gray, stone-like roughness to the finish, rounded, etc.) but I perceive that it is a coffee mug, a perception incidental to the facts of its sensory qualities.

Its “being a coffee mug” is not something which could reduce to any of its sensory qualities, but which must be inferred from them.”

So, "musement" is an Ideal state of freedom of mind, a heuretic mental state. The muser in this amorphous state of mental freedom will pay attention to what is unique, different and resistant to classification, not distinctively contained in an universe, but capable of being a part of any of them.

Pierce says,

“By giving free play to our minds in contemplating our experience of the world, capable of any thought, we will see how our nature is continuous with the cosmos, we will see connections everywhere, and the more we ponder the more we will wonder at our minds response to reality, it’s fittingness,  especially our reactions of wonder at it’s beauty, that we are fitted for truth,  and behind this phenomena will be discerned the ideal of God spontaneously, if only vaguely, as an explanation between the concurrence of our experience and Nature. This hypothesis will appear so beautiful that man cannot but help adore this explanation.”
 

The ideal is esthetically attractive to one’s mind, not logically compulsive. 

The force that the ideal impels upon the mind is not as forceful as a projectile colliding against an object, but more like the influence of the sun upon a flower. For Peirce,  “Beauty is our ultimate telos” and “puts mind in a state of ‘infinite determinableness’ so that it can turn to any direction and is in perfect freedom” .

God influences the conduct of those who contemplate it and provides a purpose for life, just like a supreme ideal, which he defines as the growth of concrete reasonableness. 

Of course, it then can be further explored and defined, but 

“in the Pure Play of Musement the idea of God's Reality will be sure sooner or later to be found an attractive fancy, which the Muser will develop in various ways. The more he ponders it, the more it will find response in every part of his mind, for its beauty, for its supplying an ideal of life, and for its thoroughly satisfactory explanation of his whole threefold environment. “

“…from what I know of the effects of Musement on myself and others, that any normal man who considers the three Universes in the light of the hypothesis of God's Reality, and pursues that line of reflection in scientific singleness of heart, will come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life and all the springs of action into conformity with that hypothesis. Now to be deliberately and thoroughly prepared to shape one's conduct into conformity with a proposition is neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that proposition, however long the conscious classification of it under that head be postponed."

Over time, Peirce’s philosophy will accept the fundamental reality of mind and that the physical laws are derived from it. In other words, reality is objectified thought; “the universe can be seen as a vast personality, an Absolute Mind, living and growing”. 

To investigate any aspect of the universe is, for Peirce, a kind of dialogue between minds:

“….the mind of that who inquires and the mind of the Creator. This fine communication produces some effects upon conduct, just as “long acquaintance with a man of great character may deeply influence one's whole manner of conduct…contemplation and study of the physico-psychical universe can imbue a man with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great man's works or conversation”.

It is this analogue of a mind is what he means by 'God.'

After all, from Plotinus on, the Ancients could not help but notice how mind-like the Cosmos appeared - ordered, rational, and intelligible, fitted to human knowing.

Tracy Witham comments,

“His point is that as we can recognize the cast of a strong mind's effect on the world without being able, even in principle, to say precisely what or how that cast of mind produces its effect, since it is bound up with a holistic impression of a person's character and cast of mind, so we can get from the world as a whole an impression of "that analogue of a mind..." called God.

One might recall Einstein's famous opinion that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Peirce's argument can be reduced to the simple fact that the universes comprehensibility can be taken to suggest an analogue of mind.

Peirce claimed that an analogue of mind is "suggested" by the universal feature of a scientific understanding of the universe, as Chomsky comments, "...our mental constitution permits us to arrive at knowledge of the world insofar as our innate capacity to create theories happens to match some aspect of the structure of the world." 

Presumably, then, the human mind's unfolding understanding of the world and the world's unfolding that the human mind studies share common features. Peirce's God hypothesis simply notes this.

That the universe works like a mind cannot be doubted by a mind that claims to understand the universe. And a mind that doesn't claim to understand the universe cannot comment…

This musement leads to a belief in an organized unity of the three universes of experience we name God.

Peirce goes on here to argue that “to believe in reasoning about phenomena is to believe that they are governed by reason, that is, by God.” 

Many have pointed out the remarkable success of science, that the scientist purposely confines himself to a set amount of data to investigate, but even then he is presented with innumerable facts, that can be combined in near infinite ways, and it is the mysterious, almost supernatural, process if insight that a mind will pick out the exact facts combined rightly to guess at the correct hypothesis.

This is miraculous and virtually inexplicable.


In this process of evolution the human mind has developed, as an instinct, a capacity that makes it able to guess the course of natural events, of which it is also a part, ruled by the same laws. 

This is Reason: “In other words our Reason is akin to the Reason that governs the universe; we must assume that or despair of finding out anything.” . There is a principle of continuity, based upon which the co-naturalness between mind and matter is claimed.

Pierce, as the ancient philosophers also affirmed, claims man was made for truth, and our success with science proves it. He rejects any alternative explanation that it is through mere trial and error science advances :

"….it is pretty clear that the number of facts with any one of which a conjecture might conceivably connect a surprising fact is, at the very least, a million. Consequently, if the conjecturer were completely in the dark ... he would, on the average have to make some half million of utterly wrong conjectures before he lit on the right one ...

The darkest mysteries of nature, instead of half a million false conjectures, have not called for a score.”

Peirce then gives as examples the orbit of Mars (18 false hypotheses by Kepler before the true one), the acceleration of a falling body (only one by Galileo), and the nature of light (seven by various people over the centuries). He also cites "Bernoulli's kinetical theory of gases" and "Dalton's atomic theory" as instances when "the very first definite theories were right”

Peirce says, 

"A man must be downright crazy to deny that science has made many true discoveries. But every single item of scientific theory which stands established today has been due to Abduction. But how is it that all this truth has ever been lit up by a process in which there is no compulsiveness nor tendency toward compulsiveness? Is it by chance? Consider the multitude of theories that might have been suggested. A physicist comes across some new phenomenon in his laboratory. How does he know but the conjunctions of the planets have something to do with it or that it is not perhaps because the dowager empress of China has at that same time a year ago chanced to pronounce some word of mystical power or some invisible jinnee may be present. Think of what trillions of trillions of hypotheses might be made of which one only is true; and yet after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses, the physicist hits pretty nearly on the correct hypothesis. By chance he would not have been likely to do so in the whole time that has elapsed since the earth was solidified."

For Peirce the explanation of this surprising phenomenon of the human ability to choose easily and rightly between those innumerable hypotheses lies in "that man's mind must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to discover what he has discovered. It is the very bedrock of logical truth" 

Nubiola presents this as a properly formulated abduction :

The efficiency of the scientist (guessing right between innumerable hypotheses) is a really surprising fact. 

If God were the creator of human cognitive abilities and of nature this efficiency would be a matter of course. 

Hence, there is reason to suspect that God is the creator of human minds and nature.


Given the success of our spontaneous conjectures in mathematics, phenomenology, and the special sciences, why would metaphysics be any different? 

Now, returning to musement, Peirce says: 

“So, continuing the counsels that had been asked of me, I should say, “Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.” It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments. “

For Peirce, trust best describes authentic faith. For Peirce, faith arises from perception, emerges as trust, and leads to beliefs about particular religious propositions. In relation to perception, faith is a distinctive attitude towards the testimony of a perceptual judgment. Trust is inherently fallible and requires constant vigilance, but it is nonetheless reasonable. 

“If the continuity of our inward and outward sense be not real, still it proves that continuity there really is, for how else should sense have the power of creating it?”

If there’s a complete difference in nature between reality and us, how should ever get to know anything? If there were no real continuities, how would knowledge be possible? The fact that Reality is open to be understood contributes the validity of synechism: there is nothing uncognizable about it, for our mind is continuous with the rest of the cosmos: 

“The extraordinary disposition of the human mind to think under the difficult and almost incomprehensible form of a continuum can only be explained by supposing that each one of us is in his own real nature a continuum”. 

Peirce insists that “when a man has that experience with which religion sets out, he has as good reason ... to believe in the living personality of God as he has to believe in his own.”

Musement “begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self”

In this state, we are in consonance with the universal.


In another essay The Place of our Age in the History of Civilization (W1: 101, 1863), Peirce says something similar:

“A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of a God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and his imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart. In the same way, the continual change and movement in nature, suggests the idea of omnipresence. And finally, by the events of his own life, he becomes persuaded of the relation of that Being with his own soul”

Brandon Daniel-Hughes sums it up thus :

“It is the mere fact that, when the mind plays without antecedent purpose (muses) upon the variety of things that the universe contains, it hits upon and adopts the hypothesis of a creator. Its force is a product of naiveté or innocence. The muser finds the creator an attractive idea and believes.”

The "humble argument" . . . may be described as follows. Let a man begin by contemplating in all sorts of elevated general ways the three worlds, the world of sensuous experience, or physical universe; the world of minds, both high and low; and the world of pure ideas, or arbitrary hypotheses . . . which the pure mathematician studies. Let him ponder them long and without haste, until the suggestion springs up of itself, without forcing, that maybe these three worlds have a common Author and Upholder

Also interesting, is that for Pierce, in his semiotic conception of the cosmos, sufficed with signs he says, in a move anticipating much of today’s information theory within physics viewing the universe as an information exchange system, a communication system, he claims the entitre creation is quite literally an argument. God’s argument.

It’s complicated, but this is possible because on Peirce’s account, perceptual judgments are our first premises, yet they emerge as the upshot of an inferential process analogous to abduction ; and this inference ultimately depends, as interpretant to sign, upon prior “premisses of nature.”

The bursting forth from musement of the hypothesis that God is real is simply the universe qua argument “working out its conclusions in living realities” :

“A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of God”

Peirce developed his technical concept of a natural sign, genuine index. Genuine indices are effects of law-governed causal interactions that, like propositions, indicate their object while also communicating iconic content about that object.


As an exact logician, Peirce realizes that the universe is “perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs,” that, as such, it is like a vast sign combining countless premises.


“... the universe is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God's purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities. Now every symbol must have, organically attached to it, its Indices of Reactions and its Icons of Qualities; and such part as these reactions and these qualities play in an argument that, they of course, play in the universe—that Universe being precisely an argument ... The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem—for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony— just as every true poem is a sound argument.”

According to Peirce, "Reality, therefore, can only be regarded as the limit of the endless series of symbols. A symbol is essentially a purpose, that is to say, is a representation that seeks to make itself definite, or seeks to produce an interpretant more definite than itself" Moreover, "An Argument is a sign which distinctly represents the Interpretant, called its Conclusion, which it is intended to determine.” 

He predicts that musing for fifty minutes daily for six or seven years will eventually—whether through nature’s beauty, vastness, variety, growth, or by some other route—provoke the hypothesis that God is real, but only if musement becomes a daily habit. 

The surest way to God is to make wonder a daily habit.

As Saint Gregory Of Nyssa says,

'Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.'

Now, faith,ffor Peirce, is a person’s response to an experience that pulls at her instincts and sentiments, whether those be her natural disposition or the influence of others on her desires. 

Hume , as Milbank reads him, says something similar, as he understands ‘feeling’ as a category intermediate between faith and reason as a mode of cognitive relationship to the whole of immanent reality.

Milbank says,

“Within the terms of this genuinely Humean perspective …one can see how ‘feeling’ operates as the crucial third term in two respects. First (as Bergson saw), between matter in motion and mind that experiences ‘meanings’. It is not that mind ‘represents’ an external world; it is rather that natural habits in us turn reflective, more intense and more adaptable….


…he also began to break with empiricism by allowing (albeit in a highly reserved fashion) that, in being slaves to habit, human beings must acknowledge the workings of a natural power constituted through time that exceeds our capacity to observe it. This is why Jacobi argued that Hume was effectively showing that all reason requires faith….

Nature is a matter of sedimented habits and not laws: on this assumption it became possible for Ravaisson to reconcile Hume with Aristotle and restore a ‘classical’ metaphysics in terms of the view that all reality is a matter of mutually affective (passive and active) response, in which habit is both degeneration (as identical repetition) and elevation (as non-identical repetition).

This is because it is theology that, in terms of grace, thinks the paradox of ‘a habit at the origin’. Thus for Aquinas grace was a ‘supernaturally infused habit’

….Ravaisson, deploys this model to conclude that, if all temporal, evolutionary being is habitual, then its deepest character must be that of ‘grace’ which implies for him at once both ‘gift’ and ‘beauty…”

Milbank also brings up this co-naturalness of mind and reality, mediated by way of feeling :


“Because neither the brain nor the mind primarily ‘mirrors’, we can see how the crucial aspect of thought is to do with ‘feeling’ other realities in such a way that one is both responding to them and asserting oneself in relation to them – in terms of a rather more ecstatically-inflected version of Spinoza’s Conatus. Thought is reciprocal – it establishes a real relation, precisely because it is a species of feeling.

If other things besides ourselves belong within the space of meaning…this will be because something already approximating to mutual feeling (without necessarily being fully conscious as we experience consciousness) exists within the physical world and is indeed its most primary ontological characteristic - responsible for shaping the sedimented habits that then constitute the regular shape of the universe, and with which human ‘culture’ is in essential continuity.”

You can download Milbank’s entire essay HERE

Reason’s frailty is the very reason that, when it comes to the conduct of life, we ought to rely upon our instinctual sentiments grounded in perception. As Peirce puts it: 

“We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible,—I mean our reason,—but upon that department that is deep and sure,—which is instinct. Instinct is capable of development and growth,—though by a movement which is slow in the proportion in which it is vital; and this development takes place upon lines which are altogether parallel to those of reasoning. And just as reasoning springs from experience, so the development of sentiment arises from the soul’s inward and outward experiences.”

In fact, people normally conduct their lives based on what they trust,. It is Peirce’s account of faith as trust that emphasizes both how authentic faith “arises from the soul’s inward and outward experiences” and how those experiences are grafted in to the conduct of one’s life. 

It’s a short, but idiosyncratic, essay, which you can read HERE

Without religion, neither science nor reason is possible, says Hegel

According to Hegel, neither science nor thought nor reason itself, is possible without the mediating presence of the religious consciousness, which, he claimed, flowers most fully in the form of Christian revelation. Only this safeguards against the modern  skepticism leading to a dead end of nothingness.


Hegel, as Andrew Cole showed, was primarily a medieval thinker, his dialectics from Plotinus and later developed by the scholastics, and primarily, Hegel’s own brand, worked out by Nicholas of Cusa.

Man is a liturgical being, no brain on a stick, his consciousness, as Marx says, is shaped by his acting in the world. During the liturgy identities are performed, bodily rhythms participate in the story of Christianity which engages the heart and imagination, incarnating moral habits and ways of being. Story and Myth itself can be as reasonable (proportional to a view of the world we either have or can imagine having. The story may extend or deepen our rationality, but it must appeal to it in some way) as any philosophy.

Indeed  it is Nietzsche who makes the remarkable claim that the very notion of validly interpreted historical truth is essentially mythic, and that mythos is always prior to logos, as Paul Tyson points out, Mythos—as a richly imaginative store of pre/super-rational culturo-linguistically embedded meanings—is seen by both thinkers as the grounds of human logos. That is, human reason is not the grounds of truth and any human picture of truth is grounded itself in something more basic than itself.


Collective imaginative narratives are not optional extras that cultures may or may not have; they are inherent to human culture and linguistically expressed human reason. As such mythos always gives rise to and shapes the understanding of reason (logos) that any given cultural life form largely accepts.

It is in this context that I offer some thoughts by Ryan Haecker, the upcoming Hegel scholar who's recently garnered a lot of buzz, HERE on why Hegel see’s Christianity as necessary for any philosophical thought or reason to begin with :

“Interpreters who wish to de-Christianize Hegelian philosophy may allege that the subordinate and mediating role of religion in the system of Hegel means that the Christian religion is suppressed by the superior concept of (C.DD) Absolute Knowing and (3.3.3) Philosophy: just as the universal concept purifies philosophy of the particular content of intuition, so does it seem to exorcise philosophical reason of religion. However, this interpretation confuses the Hegelian principle of subsumption (Aufhebung), which preserves the subordinate concepts, with bad skepticism, which suppresses and rejects the subordinate concepts. Hegel describes the difference between subsumption and skepticism in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit:

  “For this view is skepticism, which always sees in the result only pure nothingness, and abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinate, is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result… The skepticism which ends with the abstraction “nothing” or “emptiness” can advance from this not a step farther, but must wait and see whether there is possibly anything new offered, and what that is — in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. When once, on the other hand, the result is apprehended, as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen; and in the negation the transition is made by which the progress through the complete succession of forms comes about of itself.” (PhG §79)

Lest we fall into the most abysmal skepticism which cannot advance a step further, thinking must incorporate the determinate negations of all concepts to “progress through the complete succession of forms”: rather than being cast into the void, the Christian religion is denied merely as absolute knowledge just as it is preserved as a concept that is essential to this knowledge, viz. the negation of negation or the determinate negation (determinatio est negatio): the concept of Christianity is negated as containing the fullness of purely conceptual truth even while it is affirmed, viz. this negation, to be altogether necessary for the emergence of philosophical truth. In the (3.3) Absolute Idea of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, (3.3.2) Religion objectifies the varied aesthetic imaginings into a sacred drama of the self-revelation of the Absolute to consciousness.

The Christian religion is essential as the most synthetic and dynamic form of religion which, through divine revelation, uniquely allows consciousness to imagine and know philosophical science. If religious consciousness were, on the contrary, consigned to the abysmal void of unthought, then there could be no warranted claim to scientific knowledge. This problem of the doxastic foundations of science in religious belief continues to resurface in anti-realist and anti-foundationalist critiques of natural science and scientific naturalism, such as Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975), Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (1993), and Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos (2012). The necessity of the mediating concept of Religion in the philosophy of Hegel thus inverts the common understanding of the relation of faith and reason: faith is not the ghostly shadow of reason the necessary precondition of reason itself. So Hegel may affirm, with St. Anselm, that we must have faith seeking understanding (Credo ut Intellegam), and with the proverbs that  the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” (Pr. 9:10)

Feuerbach denied the subjectivity of the Absolute to be anything other than the subjectivity of man, and consequently re-centered the Absolute Idea into the mind of man rather than the mind of God. Feuerbach’s anthropocentrism rejected the Schellingian identity between the knowledge of the finite human Ego and the absolute divine Ego, the Berkeleyan subsistence of the universe in the perception of God, and the whole Platonic inheritance of preternatural transcendent forms.

 The consequence was not only the rejection of the priority of the pure forms of logic to the extended matter of nature but the implicit denial of the very possibility of a science of true philosophy: absolute knowledge requires an absolute knower as the subject which knows the object of truth, just as the truth of the particulars is the universal in which they are altogether united.

The rejection of God, Platonic universals, and Logic from the metaphysics of Hegel, viz. the anthropocentric reduction, consequently makes true, universal and scientific knowledge impossible.

The Absolute is the truth. To deny that there is truth is just as much to deny that this denial of truth is itself true, which is to affirm, viz. the Law of Excluded Middle, that this denial is false. Thus any denial of the truth self-contradictory. This is the problem of any anthropocentric reduction of absolute truth that relativizes truth to the human mind. Therefore, according to classical logic, Feuerbach cannot affirm an anthropocentrism or naturalism that excludes the Absolute, universals, and logic, without also contradicting himself.”

Without Spirit, Hegel can only be Hell

Every de-Christianizing interpretation of Hegel, assuming a naturalistic cosmology such as the purely materialistic dialectical sociology of Marx, will inevitably collapse into absurdity philosophically, and hell socially.

“All of the concepts of nature and society are enclosed in finite vessels from which none can interact and none can escape. The castle that was intended to reach to the heavens becomes a god-forsaken dungeon in which, with the messianic yearning of the Jews in exile, mankind ceaselessly awaits an unforeseeable eschatological emancipation.

No freedom of the spirit is possible for such an interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel,”

says Ryan Haecker. You can read his entire interview HERE.


Now, Stalin quickly jettisoned much of Lenin’s Marxism, outlawing homosexuality, promoting traditional values, family, and giving the Church a bit of leeway, so it’s debatable how much of the religious spirit was truly extinguished under the Soviet Union, but many have remarked on the similarity between capitalism and marxism ending up at the same place based on similar materialistic ontologies.

It goes much deeper than that though. Haecker goes on,

“Marx and Engels re-conceived of Hegel’s Absolute as the immanent dynamic self-development of nature which they called dialectical materialism, in opposition to the transcendent spiritualist idealism which they attributed to Hegel.

This materalists-idealist juxtaposition reiterates Aristotle’s abstract opposition of form and matter in concrete substance, Spinoza’s two attributes of thought and extension in divine nature (Deus sive Natura), Kant’s division of concepts and intuition in the apperceptive unity of thought, and Schelling’s realism and idealism in the self-identity of the Absolute; for in each case the materialist-idealist juxtaposition seeks to subordinate form to matter, the thought to extension, the concept to the intuition, and the ideal to the real, so as to affirm, against the purportedly mystical spiritualism of Hegel, that dialectical materialism stands upright on the firm metaphysical ground matter. The motivation is to ground an ontologically and epistemological foundation in sensible material reality.

Kantian criticism quickly exposes the untenability of this one-sided opposition of foundational matter to epiphenomenal form. What is the essence of matter? How is the essence of matter deduced without dogmatic presuppositions? Where is matter to be sensibly intuited? How is matter without form dialectical? Can the ground of materialism be turtles all the way down? These embarrassing questions soon reveal that dialectical materialism simply subordinates one side of each conceptual dichotomy to the other, to suppress and banish the turtle from the shell, and affirm nature as the armored panoply of certain knowledge.

Not only does the promised foundation of material nature prove to be no foundation at all, but materialism poisons philosophy with its essential finitude, closure, and finality. The essence of matter is simply the self-limited and self-subsisting atomic particles of Democritus. No whole can arise from the agglomeration of many merely self-related parts. Neither can any set of formal relations join together totally self-enclosed particles.

The consequence of materialism is, then, either a tower of material bricks which reaches to the heavens but crumbles like the Tower of Babel under the weight of its own antinomies, or a spiritualized matter that is indistinguishable from Fichte’s intellective being within Schelling’s identity-philosophy.

Fichte’s ideal being for-consciousness that is identical to the reality of the Absolute in-itself is simply the phenomenological movement of what Hegel calls Spirit: where materialism affirms a pre-critical mechanistic relation of static material particles, the Hegelian spirit of properly critical dialectical materialism affirms a dynamic self-particularizing totality of all thought and being in Logic, Nature and Spirit.

With the rejection of the mechanistic materialism, viz. the disjunctive inference, Hegelian Spirit is must be affirmed as the very substance becoming subject of the Absolute.

The (i) systematic and the (ii) metaphysical re-conceptions of the philosophy of Hegel are together united in the (iii) interpretation of Hegelianism as sociology. In this way, the negative re-conceptions of Hegel constitute a sort of negative dialectical triad, in which the dialectical reconciliation of opposites produces a more false and discordant rather than a more true and harmonious concept, in a way reminiscent of the negative dialectic of modern philosophy of subjectivity in Glauben und Wissen (Faith and Knowledge, 1802). The sociological re-conception affirms that the philosophy of Hegel can only be interpreted as the historical development of the self-understanding of society, and denies that any ‘metaphysical’, idealist, or platonizing interpretation is possible.

Prof. Terry Pinkard summarizes this interpretative approach in the Successor to Metaphysics: Absolute Idea and Absolute Spirit (Monist, July 1991, Vol. 74, Issue 3). Prof. Pinkard conflates Kant’s term ‘metaphysics’ with the term ‘dogmatism’ and simplistically presumes that all metaphysical reasoning is dogmatic and rejected by post-Kantian idealists.

Thus, Pinkard’s non-metaphysical interpretation simply purports  to be critical philosophy without dogmatic assumptions about the reality or structure of being. The conflation of metaphysics with dogmatism leads Pinkard to reject all of the reality of all supra-physical and supersensible entities of theology and logic as the relics of a pre-critical metaphysics of substance. This is the occamist razor which shaves Logic from Pinkard’s sociology of Spirit.

With Feuerbach, Pinkard interprets the philosophy of Hegel from the anthropocentric perspective of a historical human community, and rejects the pure Platonic forms of preternatural and pre-human logic which are posited by God’s seminal reason (rationes seminales, or logoi spermatikoi) rather than man.

With Marx and Engels, Pinkard must assume a naturalistic cosmology reminiscent of dialectical materialism. This becomes even clearer when the presuppositions of sociology are investigated: sociology is the logic of human society, which is inter-subjectively constituted by social human actors, who are each themselves either the formal apperceptive unity of transcendental self-consciousness or the empirical composite of material nature; sociology thus methodologically assumes Kantian empiricism; rejects the self-subsistence of the transcendental self-conscious and affirms only empirical and material composition; therefore, sociology reduces to materialism which reduces to absurdity.

In this way, the (iii) sociological interpretation inherits the errors of the (i) systematic and the (ii) metaphysical re-conceptions of the philosophy of Hegel: the sociological interpretation dogmatically assumes that (i) society may subsist by itself or through the activity of social actors without any further mediation of society, and (ii) assumes the self-subsistence of society and persons to be supported by the real ground of material nature.

However, the (i) unmediated self-subsistent society is merely assumed as a concept of (3) Spirit that floats alone as a postulate of thought wholly indifferent to any mediating conceptual relation to the (1) Logic and (2) Nature, which are the very necessary conditions of its conceptual possibility. 

Philosophy is for Hegel an absolute and all-encompassing science which cannot tolerate dogmatic postulates of wholly unmediated concepts, any more than the human body can tolerate gangrene infection. The (ii) materialist self-subsistence of society thus equally succumbs to materialist poison of finitude, closure, and finality, which threatens to collapse upon itself as soon as it is erected.

The whole edifice is either unsupported and simply postulated, or closed in upon itself like a windowless castle of so many finite material bricks.

In suppressing the pure forms of theology and logic, these interpretations (i, ii & iii) construct a locked and irreformable system.

All of the concepts of nature and society are enclosed in finite vessels from which none can interact and none can escape. The castle that was intended to reach to the heavens becomes a god-forsaken dungeon in which, with the messianic yearning of the Jews in exile, mankind ceaselessly awaits an unforeseeable eschatological emancipation.

No freedom of the spirit is possible for such an interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel according to the letter of the fixed proposition, in which propositions are understood simply by-themselves as the predicate of a subject and are (i) not mediated within and through the self-particularizing Absolute; (ii) exclude or suppress the pure forms of Logic; and assume an (i) unmediated and (ii) materially subsisting (iii) merely postulated society.

Every de-Christianizing interpretation, that intends to unravel the system of Hegel, either returns safely to the harbor of the speculative Absolute Idea or crashes upon the rocks of its own dogmatic presuppositions.

The stumbling-block for all of these impious interpretations is what Slavoj Žižek has called the monstrosity of Christ: it is putatively absurd to believe that God became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; was crucified; died; and was resurrected. Thus Tertulian confessed “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it is absurd”).

Christianity seems to be the most absurd religion of all because it absolutely negates itself through the self-negation of the Absolute. However this absolute self-negation is, in the philosophy of Hegel, the very unsurpassed dynamism and spiritual vitality of Christianity.

There could be no greater self-negation, and no greater dynamism, than the visible self-annihilation of the God-man in the ‘death of God’ for “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn. 15:13)”

Science tells us very little, almost nothing, about reality

Why do existent things behave in predictable patterns?

Most people think that there are “laws of nature” which cause these patterns. In reality, this is just the unfortunate reification of an old metaphor. Whereas laws in the real world are prescriptive, in science they simply describe regularities. The “laws” of nature are not causal agents, but abstractions. Naturalism seeks to explain the world in terms of these regularities, but the regularities themselves are completely inexplicable.Science describes regularities in nature, and then imbues these mathematical formulas with casual agency, as if these equations were determining the behavior of things, like a god, causing them to act in a certain way, confusing a description for an explanation.


"That world, the world defined by materialist science, is as clear a projection as the world of angels"

 - Stephan Clark.

Science is descriptive, not explanatory. It doesn't explain why all atoms act the same way, to say "it just does" is magical thinking. Mathematical equations describe regularities, they don't, like a god, actually cause objects to act a certain way. Mathematical equations are merely descriptive not determinative.

To answer "why does the Earth revolve around the sun?" with "because it's obeying the law of gravity" is almost (or completely) a tautology. 

Or an illusion, read HERE

All too often, the proponents of “scientism” think that because they can write equations for “laws of nature” they therefore somehow possess explanations of physical things. But usually they don’t; usually they are simply confusing mathematical descriptions with essential explanations.

Bertrand Russell indicates how: 

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure... All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to – as to this, physics is silent. (1985, p. 13) 

Now if, as Russell emphasized, physics gives us the abstract structure of the material world but does not tell us the intrinsic nature of that which has that structure, then not only does physics not tell us everything about physical reality, but it tells us that there must be something more to physical reality than what it has to say. For there is no such thing as a structure all by itself; there must be something that has the structure. By the very fact that physics tells us that an abstract structure of such-and-such a mathematically describable character exists, then, physics implies that there is more to reality than that structure itself, and thus more to reality than what physics can reveal. 

“Capturing the observable patterns and regularities of the elements of reality, relative to each other, is an empirical and scientific question. But pondering about the fundamental nature of these elements is not; it is a philosophical question.

They have failed to see that the ability to predict how things behave with respect to one another says little about what things fundamentally are.”

-Bernardo Kastrop

Furthermore (and as other writers with no theological ax to grind have emphasized) the very notion of a scientific “law of nature” has a theological origin, and in Nietzsche’s view retains a merely metaphorical significance when the theology is jettisoned.  There cannot be a true “law” or “regularity” where there is neither a lawgiver nor a subject which literally submits to the law:

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses.  (The Gay Science, p. 168)

“Nature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though -- why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad “philology.”  It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning… (Beyond Good and Evil 22)

And again, in The Will to Power:

“Regularity” in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact.  In the same way “conformity with a law.”  We discover a formula by which to express an ever-recurring kind of result: we have therewith discovered no “law,” even less a force that is the cause of the recurrence of a succession of results.  That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a creature always acted thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the “law.”  (632)

Form, species, law, idea, purpose -- in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction, as if events were in some way obedient to something… (521)

“Laws of nature” need not tell us anything about the natures or essences of physical things - they don’t tell us WHAT a thing is, it’s essence or nature.
 Nietzsche gives atoms as an example.  This can lead us to think we’ve actually captured something of the inner nature of the physical world as it is in itself, but in Nietzsche’s view this is an illusion.  He writes, in The Will to Power:

To comprehend the world, we have to be able to calculate it; to be able to calculate it, we have to have constant causes; because we find no such constant causes in actuality, we invent them for ourselves -- the atoms. This is the origin of atomism.

The calculability of the world, the expressibility of all events in formulas -- is this really "comprehension"? How much of a piece of music has been understood when that in it which is calculable and can be reduced to formulas has been reckoned up? (624)

It is an illusion that something is known when we possess a mathematical formula for an event: it is only designated, described; nothing more! (628)

Mechanistic theory can… only describe processes, not explain them. (660)

Science presupposes the regularity of nature without explaining it, confusing the metaphor of “laws” of nature as literal, without a law giver, the Maverick Philosopher had a piece on Dawkin’s misunderstanding of just this critique HERE 

When one understands this, one realizes how ridiculous it is to say that Newton or any physicist "explains the world without God" when they develop a theory. It's not an "explanation" in the sense that God is an explanation. These theories quantify regular patterns. If one wants to use the word "explain" in its most precise sense, then physical theories don't so much explain the world, but describe it with precise accuracy.

What we mean by “cause” here in its widest metaphysical sense, namely, IS that which fulfills a need for intelligibility, which answers the question, “What is effectively responsible for this datum x, which has turned out to be non-self-explanatory?”

Laws tell us only that such-and-such a regularity exists, and not why it exists. That is to say, on this view a law of nature (or at least the ultimate laws of nature) don’t explain a regularity, but merely re-describe it in a different jargon. Needless to say, then, this sort of view hardly supports the claim that science can provide an ultimate explanation of the world. 

"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work — that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain esthetic criteria - that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple."

 — John von Neumann (“Method in the Physical Sciences,” in The Unity of Knowledge, 1955)

Stephen Hawking himself once said,

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

Indeed, who breathes the fire ?

Science abstracts physical reality away, we now believe in an imaginary world, utterly superstitious & divorced from what’s real, as Morris Kline writes HERE :

“Contrary to popular belief, no one has ever explained the physical reality of the force of gravitation. It is a fiction suggested by the human ability to exert force.

The greatest science fiction stories are in the science of physics.

However, mathematical deductions from the quantitative law proved so effective that this procedure has been accepted as an integral part of physical science.

*What science has done, then, is to sacrifice physical intelligibility for the sake of mathematical description and mathematical prediction.

It bequeathed a mathematical, quantitative world that

What science has done, then, is to sacrifice physical intelligibilty for the sake of mathematical description and mathematical prediction. . .. The insurgent seventeenth century . . . bequeathed a mathematical, quantitative world that subsumed under its mathematical laws the concreteness of the physical world. . . . Our mental constructions have outrun our intuitive and sense perceptions.'

Kline, writing in the twentieth century, was looking back from a post—quantum theory world and saw the full import of Newton's basic assumption: "For I here design only to give a mathematical notion of these forces, without considering their physical causes and seats."

As of 1687, scientific knowledge was constituted in mathematics; "hypotheses" such as causality were no longer part of science. The full import was nor subsumed under its mathematical laws the concreteness of the physical world.

In Newton's time and for two hundred years afterwards, physicists spoke of the action of gravity as "action at a distance," a meaningless phrase that was accepted as a substitute for explaining the physical mechanism, *much as we speak of spirits or ghosts to explain unseen phenomena."
Scientific formulas ought to be studied for the sake of revealing something true about reality, but instead we have forgotten the reality, as Heidegger says, forgotten ‘being’, and study only the formal structures !

Logic, conceived on the model of mathematics rather than Logos, has stripped reality of reason; now stands a skeletal world of geometry, where once a living Cosmos throbbed with breathe.

So, if not by science than how are we to understand the world ?

John Médaille put it like this,

“The rose can be “explained” by reduction to its causes, but it cannot be understood in this way. The scientist or the rationalist philosopher can only explain the rose by ignoring its actual being.….the purchase of a rose does not have causes, but grounds.

When we look at the cosmos as a whole, we see order and beauty, and can only understand them through an aesthetic view. While the parts are governed by a strictly deterministic rationality and can be understood through knowledge of the causes, the whole is governed by order and beauty, and one that cannot be rationalized. The cosmos is cosmetic and like all things cosmetic, it escapes the purely rational in favor of pure contemplation. What it does not invite is some reduction of cosmic order to the four causes, the endpoint of all rational analysis. That is, the cosmos escapes rationalism.”


Please, read the whole thing HERE

Without love, reality cannot appear.

Why does life, as a whole, appear as such a horror, at times beauty seem entirely absent from Creation ?

How is it possible that prisoners deep in hellish gulags can affirm the goodness of reality ?

Jonathan Bieler, speaking on Ferdinand Ulrich’s epistemology, hints at an answer :  

"…the full meaning of truth is epistemologically speaking only realized in the second operation of the intellect, the judgement, with consists in assigning or separating, affirming or negating features of the object of intellection.

Actively saying “yes” or “no” is an essential part of human intellection and mirrors…the “resoluteness” with which the gift of being is given into concrete subsistence. 

Only by this judgement can the human being comprehend being (esse), as he puts himself and his existence at stake in the judgement and verdict over what is and what is not.

Thereby the human being imitates the “decidedness” of esse, which is always already handed over by God to beings in order to award them with subsistence.

….the pre-socratic rule that “like is only comprehended by like” as meaning that only by committing in a similar way to beings as God is committed to them ….can the human person conceive of being as love.

In this sense, man recreates the world within himself, so as to become a microcosm.

Knowledge and love are thus intimately related, as through love man can say ever deeper yes to what he has come to know through the intellect and realize it.

What is more, through love the human person discovers the deepest meaning of creation, which he or she cannot discover unless by imitating the love that forms the background of creation itself."

David Bentley Hart arrives at a similar conclusion :

"Thus, for Christian thought, knowledge of the world is something to be achieved not just through a reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an obedience to glory, an orientation of the will toward the light of being and its gratuity; and so the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.

Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” (indeed, it is rational precisely because of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail), and thus cannot be known truly if this order is reversed.

Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know, one must first love, and having known, one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the Trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so, in its every detail, revelatory of the light that grants it....

…beauty is present only where there has been love, but only vanity where the light of love has not fallen…love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential “mood” that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it…"

It appears that our intentional stance can either invite reality to disclose itself as gift, or shut out any apprehension of the Good and Beautiful completely.