It's Perichoretic - Participatory Turtles all the way down and, apocatastatically, back up again!
a qualified endorsement of David Bentley Hart's "Mind, Nature & Emergence"
Below is my riff on David Bentley Hart’s
That article’s behind a paywall, which I wholeheartedly encourage you to pay & thus penetrate!
What's been most interesting to me regarding reality's hierarchical layers of novel aboutnesses is how each level has invited a plurality of competing interpretations.
Empirical facts regarding 1) quantum mechanics have thus yielded many quantum interpretations; 2) cosmic origins - cosmogonies; 3) life origins - biopoietic accounts; 4) sentience origins - philosophies of mind; & 5) sapience origins - approaches exploring mostly phenomena like language & symbol useage.
While scientists have interpreted these layers of complexity in terms of entropy, the more savvy among them do so analogously, which is to recognize that entropic phenomena (reflecting decreases & increases in order) are qualitatively different from one layered aboutness to the next. For example, the Shannon entropy of biosemiotic information systems is neither epistemically nor ontically reducible to the Boltzman entropy of thermodynamics.
A short end to the long story is that, so far, none of our competing interpretive accounts of the empirical data, which have been afforded us regarding each layer of reality's novel aboutnesses, have been robustly explanatory. They haven't revealed which relevant in/determinacies are epistemic, ontic or both. The most robust exploratory heuristics, especially in biosemiotic interpretations, have recognized some phenomena as obviously immaterial & thus, at least, have incorporated some minimalistic conceptions of formal causation. Even nontheists (at least, the nonmilitant cohort)) have conceded that much, nowadays.
One theoretic upshot of this - what I have called my - emergence sans supervenience account, which I had found a most useful heuristic as a young neuroscientist, is that, from a philosophical perspective, it really boils down to a participatory ontology of analogically related natural properties coupled with an account of successive entitative hypostatic coinherences.
I had then labeled my layers, thusly: quantum origins or veldopoietic - teleopotent; cosmic orgins or cosmopoietic - teleomatic; life origins or biopoietic - teleonomic; sentience origins or sentiopoietic - teleoqualic; language origins or sapiopoietic - teleologic. As layers of epistemic phenomenal aboutnesses, there are no implicit pretenses in them regarding what may be ontologically primitive or emergent.
Once my primary focus segued from science, academically, to theology, avocationally, imagine my surprise when I encountered the hypostatic logics & analogia, perichoretic & participatory logics and semantical grammars of Philo, Origen, the Capps, Cyril, Eriugena, Maximus, Scotus & Bonaventure et al. Those theo-giants had anticipated, often influenced, my old interlocutors - Peirce, Royce, the German idealists, Aurobindo et al!
Altogether, they gifted me my own hermeneutic, which I've called a Neo-Chalcedonian, Franciscan, Universalist Cosmotheandrism.
Below, my original comment on DBH’s essay
Джон
I've enjoyed every single post immensely. And agree with this one most wholeheartedly.
In my understanding, emergence has never gifted us an ounce of explanatory adequacy. Strong emergence with weak supervenience remains question begging; weak emergence with strong supervenience - trivial.
I still employ it in an epistemic sense, as an exploratory heuristic, but only to bookmark those intractable aporia that present for each of reality's novel aboutnesses, e.g. origins of the quantum, cosmic, living, sentient & sapient.
In biology, I was taught that ontogeny (embryological individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary ancestral development). It seems to me, that, in the only coherent account of theological anthropology, our phylogenetic logoi recapitulate the ontogenetic Logos. From the One, the many tropoi are multiplied. The many tropoi then journey toward the One concrete social Absolute, of - not a supraindividual unitary being, but - an interpersonal unitive doing.
Addendum Regarding Hypostatic Phenomena
While we integrally experience both aspects of our secondary human natures, there's no ontological parity between the vicious & virtuous.
B/c any authentic human volition will integrate the efficient causes of the will & formal causes of the intellect, any acts that ignore the telic potencies of the latter are - not really efficient, but - deficient.
Such acts, when habitual, are situated (to various extents) between human potencies & acts, as subcontrary, parasitic existences, which can hinder but never obliterate those potencies.
I consider all virtuous acts eternalizations & all vicious acts & habits as self-nihilating ephemeralizations, which can't, by nature, transist into eternity.
We thus transist into eternity with our essential logoi & co-creative virtuous tropoi, having self-nihilated any vicious tropoi.
Any eternality of vicious tropoi would have to be borrowed from God.
Why would He loan being to THAT???!!!
The univocal predications applied to divine & human hypostases would refer to certain aspects of a shared perichoretic logic vis a vis unique hownesses of personal doing, but not to any descriptions of divine & human persons that would include references to their natural whatnesses.
In my view, we can employ univocal predications of personal hownesses
to refer to
1) hypostatic primacy,
2) enhypostasized essences,
3) enessenced hypostases,
4) perichoretic logic of coinherence
5) hypostatic idiomata as
a) incommunicable,
b) irreducible,
c) inseparable from & not exhaustive but expressive of nature, and
6) efficacious agency (freely, willing, loving).
7) mutually constituted via multiplicative dynamics that generate mutual oppositions that are not obliterative
8) eschatological & ecclesial totus Christus
9) co-eternal creation
10) pre-existence of Christ, Who exists in some sense “without flesh” or asarkos (extra-revelatory form of the Logos) as well as “enfleshed” or ensarkos – this referring to a constitutive reality distinct from the revelatory manifestation of same
11) a qualified passibility and real changes in the properties of God's experience/consciousness beyond mere Cambridge properties
12) qualified open theism re undetermined realities
13) pneumato-Christo
universal & Christo-pneumato
particular presences & manifestations
14) intrinsic, essential esse naturale as primary nature vs esse intentionale, self-determined secondary nature, which can be affected (by more than just Cambridge properties), hence, thinly passible
15) Christ eternally exemplifies an essential & nondeterminate primary nature and volitional & self-determinate secondary nature
Regarding Divine Natures – essential & assumed
We must reject these notions:
1) epistemology = ontology
2) God's essence = teleological
3) counterfactual possibility = not applicable to God
And adopt, rather, these:
1) epistemology ~ ontology
2) God's essence = protological but His self-determinate nature = teleological & eschatological
3) counterfactual possibility = applicable to divine esse intentionale re the self-determined & undetermined realities of the divine aesthetic scope
HOWEVER
Might our temptation to refer to a putative "Logos asarkos" parallel that of those who caricatured Bonaventure's emanation account by claiming it implicated a proto-Father?
Perhaps we best turn to Bonaventure's ad intra emanation account to shed some light on the dynamics of creation & Incarnation?
After all, if we buy into his hypostatic Trnito-logic, then, aware that it was first illuminated by his Christo-logic, we'll want to discern any "principle of the totus Christus" precisely in that light provided by what Bonaventure's account has to say about the "principle of the total divinity."
What we'd first consider, then, are the uniquely expressed, primal, donative powers of the divine persons, particularly regarding the constitutive role of their emanative acts, both ad intra & ur-kenotic and ad extra & kenotic.
While the distinctions between the divine nature & volition, esse naturale & intentionale, remain indispensable for much of my own thought, for me, they don't come to the fore, here. Because the pure acts of divine persons are either nondetermined or self-determined, and because they absolutely integrate both the divine nature & will, divine necessity & freedom, why would an essential, self-determinate downward emanation of the Son compromise His intrinsic perfection? After all, no one imagines that the Father's original, essential, nondetermined emanation threatens His intrinsic perfection in the least.
As it is, our primary focus here is on nonformal, hypostatic realities, where it has been specially revealed to us "how" divine persons act. They act, then, simultaneously, both constitutively & relationally, to share a power that generates both difference & identity. Such primal acts, both Paterological & Christological, remain utterly ineffable, in and of themselves, although we can gain a modicum of intelligibility from observing their effects, which are proper to no known natural causes.
The constitutive primal acts of Monarchical & Creational-Incarnational emanations - don't follow, but - respectively generate the principle of the total divinity & the principle of the totus Christus, in both cases, generating principles of unity and distinction, which we discern in our Trinitology, Anthropology & Cosmology, from what has been first revealed, Christologically, as self-diffusive love.
There, neither "Proto-Father" nor "Logos asarkos," neither our Paterology nor Christology, will conceive the divine persons apart from their essential kenotic relations, whether Trinitologically or Cosmotheandrically, due to their intrinsic, constitutive hypostatic identities, which relate perichoretically, a mode pertaining to otherwise analogical natures.
The principles, as logoi (of identity & difference), precisely express the eternal divine will & intellect, with which our own communal agency may cooperate toward divine ends, and determine how we participate in divinity per our relative perfections.
Divine creation's inevitability & fittingness are very tightly intertwined, then, as are its esse naturale & intentionale, and shrouded in ineffable hypostatic dynamics that are essentially kenotic. It's their intrinsic donative nature of self-diffusive love that gifts both creation & grace to us as divine gratuities and not our feeble conceptual parsings of the divine nature over against the will, which is not only absolutely noncompetitive ad intra but ad extra, too, between Creator & creatures. This noncompetitive dynamic comes from divine acts that are either nondeterminate or self-determinate with no hint of divine indeterminacy when it comes to determined realities, like imagoes Dei, who are apokatastatically predestined vis a vis an essential primary beatitude (aesthetic intensity of beatific vision), whose inviolable freedom only ever self-determines its secondary, eschatological beatitudes (aesthetic scope).
Our theotic trajectories only ever determine the range of our intimacies & the hows of our unique, co-creative theotic trajectories (spiritualities) and not whether we shall otherwise realize our essential teloi. There's not a scintilla of arbitrariness or anything left to chance in the divine economy.
We can't otherwise (quidditatively) refer to divine & created hypostases & persons per se univocally since they refer to - not only the hownesses of idiomata, but - the whatnesses of natures, which are analogical.
So, I'm yet wondering what an essential generic neo-Chalcedonianism might be and whether & which divergences might differentiate specific versions.
Grammars & Concepts for Hypostases
hypostatic primacy, implicates enhypostasized essences & enessenced hypostases
efficacious agents
hypostatic volition
intellect & will volitionally co-causal
formal & efficient causes
natural & idiomatic
naturale & intentionale
logos & tropos
participatory & perichoretic
sin isn't efficient but deficient causation of a subcontrary
noncompetitive divine & created volitions
co-ordinated complementary lines of efficient causation
accidentally ordered causes of agents of same nature, horizontal
essentially ordered causes of agents of different natures, vertical
participative, essentially ordered co-causes or partial causes, where superior determines inferior, like the imago Dei of logoi, apocatastatic trajectory of primary beatitude
autonomous, essentially ordered co-causes or partial causes, where inferior causes undetermined, each cause necessary, neither sufficient, like the created will of tropoi, theotic trajectory of secondary beatitudes
Scotus as amended by Adams vis a vis foreknowledge
Jesus acts via exemplification of both divine & human natures
We act via signification of both divine & human natures but, eschatologically, our tropic theotic trajectories are ordered to our exemplifications of divinized human nature & will signify the divine nature