Going on with my project (1)

     Start with something simple. I am taken by contemplating the night sky. This is a memory from my life in Camburg (near Jena). It was on a Friday, after work. I was returning home from a walk in the woods up on the ridge. The evening sky was crystal clear as the humidity was very low. The first planets had appeared. Venus is brightest and Jupiter was very close to Venus. Clear, pure points of light in the sky, the sky almost like glass or crystal.  I know they are planets and can roughly picture their place in the solar system. But I think of a verse from Dante’s Purgatorio, a poem that in those days I read every year during Lent. It think it was Lent when this happened.

The gentle hue of oriental sapphire

gathering in the serene aspect of the sky,

pure as far as the first horizon,

restored delight unto my eyes

soon as I issued forth from the dead air

that had afflicted both my sight and heart.

The lovely planet that emboldens love

was making all the orient smile,

veiling the Fishes that escorted her.

 

Dante had just come into the sweet light from the darkness of Hell. The contrast was not so abrupt for me, but I am sure it had been a hard day, and the beauty or quiet sublimity of the evening sky with the Evening Star shining brighter than I had ever seen it in my Kentucky home, where the air humidity is so thick, somehow struck me and reminded me of that verse – which I looked up, I don’t know it by heart; but I recall the feeling when I read it.

    Now a lot of this description is personal. Not many people will think of the Purgatorio when contemplating the evening sky. Not many will see God’s love in the light of the stars. But beneath the symbols standing in for and expressing from a particular perspective the mood in question, I suspect many people will connect to that mood. It is difficult to put into words. A kind of quiet awe, reverence, and something even deeper: an almost wordless recognition of beauty that was not just aesthetic but seemed to mean something. It was not merely a passive observation but a response to something beyond me self, a response that felt as though it had been elicited rather than self-generated. This mood was not the shock of the sublime as in terror before the vast or the overwhelming. It was gentler, more intimate, yet still filled with depth. The words that come to me now are serene, clear, pure, delight – these are significant. There is something about the clarity itself, the sharp distinction of Venus, Jupiter, and Mars against the crystalline sky, that seems to call forth a sense of meaning rather than mere visual appreciation. Above all, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s joy: the mood evokes a certain kind of longing or Sehnsucht that cannot be fulfilled in this world but a desire so intensely pleasurable in a painful way that you are sad when the mood passes.

       What deductions about reality can one make, if we choose not to reduce the mood to social constructions or subjective-psychological wiring? – and nothing rationally forces us to choose such a reduction. I am using deduction here in a special sense (for philosophy nerds akin to Husserl’s term eidetic deduction). To put it simply: Instead of asking what happens in my brain or psyche when I experience love or beauty, I ask what must be true of love or beauty for them to be what they are. This is not empirical deduction (which derives conclusions from observed facts: the glove didn’t fit, therefore it does not incriminate O.J.), but a kind of essential seeing (Wesensschau), in which one attempts to grasp the necessary conditions that make a given experience possible. For example, if I reflect on the experience of grief, I come to see that it necessarily involves a relation to a beloved person lost, a sense of irreplaceability, and an implicit recognition of the value of the lost person (place, animal, etc.). These are not contingent aspects of my own grief, but essential features of grief as such. In my example, I might ask: What must be true about reality for this experience to be disclose something about it? Does this experience disclose an essential relation between the human mind and Being? Does it suggest that beauty, order, or meaning are real features of the universe rather than mere projections? This form of deduction is thus a philosophical method that seeks to articulate features of reality from lived experience. It does not "prove" anything empirically but reveals that which gives intelligibility to our experiences.

       So what can be ontologically deduced from such a mood, assuming we do not live in a Matrix of illusions?

1.    Beauty is Real. The experience of beauty, even in its quietest forms, is not just an arbitrary projection of the mind onto an indifferent world. The world offers beauty, and we receive it. If beauty were purely subjective, it would be strange that so many different people, across different cultures, respond to things like the stars, the ocean, or certain harmonies in music with similar awe. This intimates that beauty is not an illusion but something disclosed.

2.    Being is Good. The experience of this gentle awe does not feel like an encounter with a cold, indifferent universe. Instead, it feels like a silent gift, as if existence itself is gracious. This fits with Aquinas’ idea that being and goodness are interchangeable. If existence were neutral or meaningless, why would it seem to us, in these moments, luminous with something good?

3.    Reality invites a response. The fact that we respond to the stars with something akin to recognition suggests that reality is not just a brute fact but is intelligible in a way deeper than mere scientific explanation. If I felt my children were precious because I bestowed that meaning upon them, that would be one thing. But the feeling in these moments is that the world presents itself as meaningful, as if reality invites a response rather than being arbitrarily imposed upon by our emotions. Like thoughts, moods and emotions can be more or less in tune with reality’s invitation.

4.    We participate in Something Greater. My thinking of Dante in that moment is telling. He emerges from the "dead air" of Hell into this celestial beauty, and it restores him. The mood as described shares something of this quality. It does not merely provoke an internal feeling; it feels as though it aligns us with something outside ourselves. It hints at a reality greater than ourselves but not indifferent to us.

5.    Love is a Fundamental Reality. If love is what makes the world visible in a certain way, then love is not just an emotion but an epistemic mode, one that discloses reality. If it is intelligible to see the Evening Star and think not merely of astronomy but of grace, then perhaps this is because love itself reveals something that the merely rational mind might miss. And if love reveals, then it must correspond to something real – not just as a human emotion, but as a fundamental quality of being itself.

At the deepest level, this line of thought seems to move toward the idea that the ground of being is not merely intelligent or necessary, but something closer to Dante’s vision in the final lines of the Paradiso: "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars." Not as a sentimental hope, but as the best interpretation of what this mood discloses about reality itself.

. . .

      Now I must make a distinction between the “deductions” that are more like inferences and the deductions that are colored by interpretation and clearly belong within the hermeneutic circle – in this case, within Christian mythology if I may call it that without calling its truth into question. If such experiences (when pure and not sentimental) genuinely disclose something – rather than merely project our inner states onto an indifferent universe – then it follows that the universe is not wholly neutral to our spiritual moods. There is, at minimum, a meaningful correspondence between consciousness and the structure of reality.

    From here, several inferences could follow:

1.    The universe is not indifferent to meaning. If moods like wonder, reverence, and love reveal something real, then reality is structured in such a way that it welcomes or makes room for these responses. This would contrast with a purely mechanistic or nihilistic view in which beauty, love, and longing are merely epiphenomena of an indifferent cosmos.

2.    Being is not neutral. If awe before the evening sky is not merely a subjective projection but an encounter with something real, then the universe is not simply there as brute fact. It is intelligible and potentially responsive.

3.    The Good is ontologically prior to the neutral. If the experience of beauty or love is disclosive of reality, then goodness and value are not merely subjective human constructs but have some kind of independent reality. The alternative would be to say that love and beauty arise from nothing, which seems both psychologically and metaphysically implausible.

This is where the inference to love as the ground of being becomes at least a plausible hypothesis. If the highest moments of human perception disclose something real and not illusory, then the ultimate nature of reality must be something that accommodates, gives rise to, or even is that which is disclosed. Perhaps love, beauty, goodness.

     This isn’t a strict syllogistic, logical deduction, but it has the character of eidetic necessity I discussed above: meaning, given the nature of these experiences, it is difficult to see how a fully indifferent, meaningless, or mechanistic reality could generate them in a way that is genuinely truth-revealing rather than simply subjective.

    References to Dante, Christian mythology, or even just the feeling that love and beauty disclose something real all belong to what could be called the "hermeneutic layer." They are ways of reading an underlying ontological reality. However, the existence of different cultural-religious representations does not necessarily undermine the idea that something real is being disclosed. Rather, it implies that human beings, across traditions, have encountered something common, some aspect of reality that is, in itself, beyond any one tradition's full articulation. The fact that different cultures represent the structure of reality in different ways does not entail that there is no reality. It may instead suggest that reality is complex, inexhaustible, and capable of being disclosed in multiple symbolic languages. As a poem in a foreign language is disclosed in multiple good translations over time (Dante’s Divine Comedia being a perfect example).

    Thus Dante’s Purgatorio, a Sufi poet’s vision of divine beauty, and a Daoist sense of harmony in nature may all be different interpretive lenses on an ontological reality that resists a single, exhaustive formulation. Or there may be a hierarchy of adequate “translations” with some more revealing of essence than others, although this itself is interpretive. Each tradition may capture something true, though none captures the whole. This fits well with what some of my favorite philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch claim: that attending to reality always requires humility, a recognition that what is disclosed to us is partial, mediated, yet nonetheless real.

    Thus while there is an interpretive aspect to some dimensions of these experiences, this does not mean they are merely subjective or arbitrary. It just means that humans, by necessity, grasp reality in ways conditioned by language, culture, and history. The question then becomes: is there a way of identifying convergences across traditions that point to something more universally valid? (Also part of Husserlian Wesenschau – this for philosophy nerds like me). If love, reverence, beauty, and longing for the transcendent appear again and again across cultures, this indicates that they reveal something real about Being.