Becoming to Belong: On the Relation between Infinite Consciousness and the Absolute

Abstract

My essay focuses on the relation between consciousness and reality. I argue, following Georg Cantor, that consciousness is a potential infinite driven by care to invest itself in the world historically. As human beings develop an authentic sense of self they are driven by good faith to postulate an Absolute infinite, which, following Spinoza, we may call God. Thus God, as the Absolute infinite, constitutes our reality, which I characterize as implicate information explicating itself through time. To live authentically is to recognize the nature of God and commit to Him through faith. Faith means to understand one’s self as a potentially infinite consciousness attempting to authentically participate in, and understand, the Absolute of God.

Notes

1. John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Tokyo, 1989), 354–68.

2. See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), chaps. 1 and 3.

3. See Stephen W. Hawking, The Cambridge Lectures: Life Works (New York: Dover, 1996), 3–15.

4. John D. Barrow, New Theories of Everything (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 46.

5. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 2004), 15–17.

6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Dover, 2003), 4–6.

7. My interpretation is in part guided by Russell. For his most systematic critique of Kant, see Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010), 464.

8. See David Berlinski, One, Two, Three (New York: Vintage, 2011).

9. This proof appears in Ian Stewart, Taming the Infinite (London: Quercus, 2008), chap. 17.

10. Russell elaborates on these philosophical approaches to mathematics in Principles of Mathematics. The debate continues today even in the physical sciences see, for example, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

11. The famous paradox was teased in Russell, Principles of Mathematics. He also discusses the lesser known but related Tristram Shandy paradox, which clarified Cantor’s theory of the infinite.

12. See Berlinski, One, Two, Three, 25.

13. See Ignacio Jané, “The Role of the Absolute Infinite in Cantor’s Conception of Set,” Erkenntnis 42.3 (1995): 378.

14. See Stephen Hawking, God Created the Integers (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2007), 1071.

15. Jané, “The Role of the Absolute Infinite in Cantor’s Conception of Set,” 383, 409.

16. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 110.

17. See Nagel and Newman, Gödel’s Proof, chap. 7.

18. See Hawking, God Created the Integers, especially the chapters on Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel. See also Barrow, New Theories of Everything.

19. Quoted in Barrow, New Theories of Everything, 53.

20. Spinoza, Ethics, part 1.

21. See Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 2005), and Philosophical Fragments: Or a Fragment of Philosophy, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962).

22. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Allen Wood and Gertrude Clark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

23. Sigmund Freud is most insistent on this in his first significant work, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth, 1997).

24. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1962), chap. 6.

25. Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious, trans. Graham Frankland (London: Penguin, 2005), and An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (London: Penguin, 2004).

26. I draw here on the initial sequences of G. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58–79.

27. For a rationalistic account of sapience, see Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

28. Price’s notion of a truth condition for speech is particularly informative. See Huw Price, Naturalism without Mirrors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 163–84.

29. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, esp. the introduction.

30. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953). Heteronomy also plays a major role in his path-breaking essay “What is Enlightenment?” at: http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/what-is-enlightenment.txt, 1784.

31. See Spinoza, Ethics, esp. part 3.

32. See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1962), 175–216.

33. See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, IL: HarperCollins, 1972), 28.

34. See Roberto Unger, Politics Volume One: False Necessity (London: Verso, 2004), 226–31.

35. See Heidegger, Being and Time.

36. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 2008), 40.

37. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953

38. Heidegger, On Time and Being, 14.

39. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 41–217.

40. See Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edna Hong and Howard Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Philosophical Fragments.

41. The idea of the “leap” appears in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, 95.

42. Roberto Unger’s most comprehensive account of his psychology and theory of consciousness appears in Passion: An Essay on Personality (London: Verso, 1987).

43. For the term “principle of cohesion,” see Christopher Michael Langan, “The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory,” 1.2 and 1.3 Progress in Complexity, Information and Design (2002).

44. For the term “implicate order” see Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 186–90.

45. See David Bohm, Thought as a System (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

46. Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Boston, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005).

47. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1985).

48. See the latter half of Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

49. Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” 354–68.

50. The idea of the cause of itself was originally Spinoza’s (Ethics).

51. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason.

52. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 68.

53. See Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals.

54. See Unger, Politics Volume One: False Necessity, 14.

55. Quoted in Barrow, New Theories of Everything, 120.

56. My account here relies on Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990).

57. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward Pusey (London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2006), 254.