The Transcendental Structure of Consciousness

and a bit on Mysticism and Mindfulness

This week, I went back to David Bentley Hart’s magnificent book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. This book constitutes an attempt to define the word “God” as it has been understood by the major religions of the world. Hart’s argument is that, at the highest spiritual and philosophical level, the major religions essentially agree on this.

This is not to say that all religions are the same or that they are all equally valid in every part. But it is to say that rational reflection with respect to the divine leads to various inevitable and logical conclusions.

One of the conclusions that we must draw from such reflections concerns the structure of our conscious experience of the world. I quote here from Hart’s book directly:

There are, very broadly, two ways of desiring a thing: as an end in itself or for an end beyond itself. This seems quite obvious. But, if one thinks about it, there appears to be no actual object among finite things that we can truly desire - if we desire it at all - except either in both ways at once or in the second way only. That is to say, no finite thing is desirable simply in itself, if only in the trivial sense that whatever we find desirable about that thing must correspond to some prior and more general disposition of the appetites and the will. I might, for example, conceive a longing for some particularly beautiful object out of purest aesthetic motives; but this still means that I regard that object as an index of its own value. Rather, I am moved by a more constant and general desire for beauty as such, as an absolute value of which I have some sort of intentional grasp and in the light of which I am able to judge the object before me as either beautiful or not.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, p. 241

This observation in itself should be enough to preclude a purely materialist ontology. By this, I mean that, whatever “beauty as such” may be, it is not an object within nature that can be isolated and studied by science. It is an abstract concept which has the most profound bearing upon our lives. What is it?

In the end, the only objects of desire that are not reducible to other, more general objects of desire, and that may therefore truly be said to be desirable entirely in and of themselves, are a small number of universal, unconditional, and extremely abstract ideals that, according to a somewhat antique metaphysical vocabulary, are “transcendentals.”

Ibid., p.242

These transcendentals are generally taken to be truth, goodness, and beauty. But these three are held to be convertible with one another and to be aspects of Being itself. That is, that they are all reflections of the same fundamental reality.

Hart makes the point about the transcendentals by demonstrating how our pursuit of anything that might be described as true, good, or beautiful, is, in fact a reaching out for something beyond the object itself and towards the transcendental ideal. This reaching out is ultimately characterised by a desire for joy, which is what we find when we encounter reality in its most basic form.

Again, there is no convincing sense in which a materialist paradigm - be that an evolutionary paradigm or something else - could account for the structure of our consciousness in this sense. We care about what is true because it is true, not because it is useful in an evolutionary sense. We seek goodness and engage in ethical actions because we are motivated by an abstract sense of morality and not for any other reason. The point has been made many times that, if this were not the case and our sense of morality were really a herd instinct that has developed through the evolutionary process, then morality would really be nothing at all. There would be no ultimate reason to follow those universal promptings of the human conscience and they could be ignored whenever one preferred to do so.

We must go on:

The classical theistic perspective…is quite simple: the good is an eternal reality, a transcendental truth that is ultimately identical with the very essence of God. God is not some gentleman or lady out there in the great beyond who happens to have a superlatively good character, but is the very ontological substance of goodness. The good is nothing less that God himself, in his aspect as the original source and ultimate end of all desire: that transcendent reality in which all things exist and in which the will has its highest fulfillment.

Ibid,. p.254

Here is the point then: If God were merely good then this would mean that there is some prior category into which God fits and therefore something prior to and perhaps even above God. Therefore, God cannot be good but must actually be goodness itself.

This is why Hart says elsewhere, ‘Every deed performed for the sake of its moral goodness is an act of faith’. Even if the person performing it doesn’t realise it (and almost all of the time we don't realise these things - or, at least, we don’t think consciously about them) they are carried out with a basic trust in the reality of the abstract moral realm which, as we have just seen, equates to a basic trust in the reality of God.

Again, the point here is not that everybody will agree on what is true, good or beautiful. The point is that the everybody agrees that there are such things are truth, goodness, and beauty and that they are desirable in themselves. And that this reflection should lead us beyond and to the reality to which they point.