"Seeing and Being Seen Coincide": Freedom as Contemplation in Nicholas of Cusa and G. M. Hopkins

Figure 1.

Icon of Christ Pantocrator, Constantinople, mid-6th century, Encaustic on Wood, Mt. Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine.

In Veritatis Splendor (1993), John Paul II remarks on a fundamental contradiction in modern anthropology: on the one hand, the dominant tradition of Western, liberal-secular thought construes human freedom as a story of progress whereby the modern individual is gradually unshackled from both external norms and internal constraints (i.e., virtues) that, prior to the Enlightenment, had substantially restricted religious, political, economic, artistic, and sexual self-expression. On this account, freedom is construed as unfettered self-realization, less a rational appetite (as Aquinas defines the "will") than an unconditional "right" for which there no longer appear to exist any corresponding obligations. At the same time, various naturalistic and in tendency reductionist explanatory schemes associated with today's "hard" sciences attempt to trace the uniquely varied, fluid, and interactive manifestations of consciousness to their measurable, neural underpinnings. Indeed, by their very tendency (if not intent), such reductionist accounts end up conflating the explanandum (i.e., consciousness) with its somatic, neural and biochemical foundations. Hence, John Paul writes, "side by side with its exaltation of freedom, yet oddly in contrast with it, modern culture radically questions the existence of this freedom" (VS, 33.1). As a result, it often appears "as if a dialectic, if not an absolute conflict, between freedom and nature were characteristic of the structure of human history" (VS, 46.1). Now, whether the efficient causes shaping consciousness are located in our environment (as behaviorism posits) or in our biochemical constitution (as neurobiological accounts would have) does not substantially alter the conclusions to which their reductionist methods point. For in either case, consciousness is not so much explained as it is explained away, seemingly unmasked as a chimera, a mere epiphenomenon of causal forces the impact of which science may capture in quantitative terms and ex post facto, to be sure, yet which individual consciousness can never grasp, let alone transcend, in actual experience.

Let us provisionally accept John Paul's characterization of modernity's strictly immanent explanatory framework as having, however inadvertently, saddled us with an "absolute conflict between freedom and nature." We appear to be confronted with a particularly virulent instance of the old antinomy between freedom and necessity, between a claim to total self-realization unconstrained by any norms and obligations, and a wholly deterministic account of nature asserting explanatory authority over all phenomena, including that of human consciousness. Such a conflict, I submit, cannot be solved within a purely immanent explanatory frame, because the antinomy in question is itself a result of our having, over the course of centuries, embraced this matrix to the point that it now categorically defines what shall count as legitimate knowledge.

Knowledge, on this view, is exclusively construed as a product, not a gift. It has been reduced to impersonal, quantifiable information, valued either as a means for obtaining further information, for its applicability in various technological contexts, or for generating revenue as a patented commodity. While this understanding of knowledge as the fruit of what Augustine calls curiositas is surely here to stay, having utterly transformed our world for several centuries by now, it is also, at the very least, alarmingly incomplete. Thus, quantitative information about the biochemical and neurological operations subtending what we call consciousness surely is not the same as actually being conscious and, thus, experiencing the astounding fluidity and complexity of its manifestations: for example, finding oneself in the presence of (and truly attending to) another being, say, the face of a stranger or someone close and dear; being transfixed by a bird that happens to soar above; or the myriad qualities that we associate with remembering, feeling anxiety, experiencing sadness, grief, creative passion, love, hope, and many other human acts and experiences. Add to these the second-level awareness whereby our primary intentionality is superseded by an awareness that, just now, I am experiencing one of these...