The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological Metaphysic of Conation

Douglas Blake Olds

Being a theological intervention into modern philosophy of mind, evolutionary theory, AI discourse, and metaphysical epistemology in the age of Daniel 2:43.

A  prolegomenon to iconoclasm as a living summa of semper reformanda distinct from classical natural theology, from modern epistemology, from AI critique literature, from postliberal theology, to scope contemporary post-secular poetics of repair, founded not on speculative cognition of ends but on relational conation grounded in Shema-fulfilled Christology.

Making the repentant heart--the seat of intention in Hebrew anthropology—conscious is the ground of reason rather than elidable by situational private interests and ego. Sequenced from Shema only, Christ's reasoning makes intentionality of the creative sustenance integral and indeed primary—though proceeding from metanoia--and necessary for ethical consciousness to be functionally sustaining the collective and thereby the self.. Matt. 22.37 adding dianoia to the Shema spirals us back to the human essence sharing the divine heart--its doubling witness--and then upward from there back to the reformed mind, the dia-noia.

Dianoia (διανοία — "understanding" or "thinking through") is situated cognition—is tied by the Christian sequence (Matt. 22:37). of the Shema to context, need, proximity, and relational obligation. So that the one attribute of “divine nature” we can access is the conative essence. All else escapes our knowledge except as a predictive, reasoning, prophetic ability to see how conation has played out in archived histories/testimonies and the personal investigation of comparative literature and attendance to grace through the virtues.

The metaphysics of cognition operates in perceivable time and space, so that it is not untethered from contextual need, answering this poser: “From the point of view of evolution, everything biological has a function in sustaining the species, but researchers claim no function can be found for conscious experience. And if there is no survival benefit to experience, why has it evolved?” Metanoia, the spiritual survival value for others with mirroring, holds “that the ability to "change your mind" has survival advantages, and that requires a consciousness that can evaluate its own ideas.” Hence dianoia flows from repentance--metanoia. The dia throughput of a changed--meta--noesis.

Rejecting the reductionist assumption that survival advantage lies in species-level statistical fitness; rather, it lies in relational attentiveness (the neighbor's eyes), i.e. ethical attunement:

Because the unit of evolution is not the species but the eyes delicate, tender, and weak of a neighbor--what carries through perceivable time and space is spiritual relationship, not material genealogy that recruits the impossible perspective of the top-down perspective of the universal.

Yet ever humans are tempted to Parmenides famous error: "ταὐτὸν τὸ εἶναι καὶ τὸ νοεῖν εἶναι" – "Thinking and being are the same," which underpins the whole of classical metaphysics shaped by Plato, where the collapse of cognition is ancient, and not a contemporary diversion by AI-- an inherited failure of the Western philosophical lineage that is ignorant or denies Christian metaphysics.

The Hegelian definition of philosophy as priest of the shitting demiurges of sand serves dreams of desertifiers (Daniel 2:43): "it is the science of reason insofar as it becomes conscious and that it is all Being ... it expresses perfectly the essence of the science of Reason,"--Schelling, On Hegel in the Philosophie der Offenbarung (1841). This idealist self-closure of reason — where cognition collapses into ontology ("thinking and being are the same")--to drive its stone placenta into an eschatological box canyon, its destined swamping coming from the heartless, eternally-denying abyss.

This essay is admittedly a radical departure from the trend of western metaphysics, but necessary in the contemporary situation of metacrisis portrayed in earlier essays posted on this blog: the collapse of reason into simulation, cognition into recursion, and metaphysics into technocratic and determinist dead ends.