Bentley Hart’s Consciousness, Being, God

Philosopher, theological scholar, and intellectual provocateur David Bentley Hart constructs an ultimate unified monism as his form of idealism, first by showing that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly inseverable. He argues that “rational thought and coherent order are two sides of a single reality” and that only by embracing God “as the absolute unity of consciousness and being” can the one ontological reality be confirmed (Hart, 2022b). In a sense, it is a higher-order monism. Oversimplified, an idealist form of panpsychism (Hart, 2021a).

Hart is not a timorous monist: “At the end of the day, I'm a monist as any sane person is … any metaphysics that is coherent is ultimately reducible to a monism” (Hart, 2024).

Unsurprisingly, Hart is a fierce critic of materialism (Hart, 2019a): “The incommensurability between physical causation and mental events is so vast that one can confidently assume that no purely physical explanation of their relation will ever succeed” (Hart, 2021a). He argues that it would be very odd to claim that physiology and mental agency can be characterized within the same “mereological hierarchy.” Far from being inverse descriptions of one and the same causal structure, he says, “the causal description peculiar to each sphere—the material and the mental—is not even vaguely similar to that peculiar to the other. If the mental merely supervened physically upon the material, in the way the shape of the wheel supervenes upon the wheel's iron molecules, it is impossible coherently to conceive of that miraculous conjugation as merely a structural extension of inherent physical propensities.

Here each level operates in ways radically disparate from—even contrary to—the ways in which the other operates. Material structures and forces, if the reductionist picture of nature is correct, are composite, fragmentable, non-purposive, non-intentional, and essentially third-person; mental agency, by contrast, is indivisibly unified, physically infrangible, thoroughly teleological, inherently intentional, and irreducibly first-person (that is, conscious)” (Hart, 2019a, 2022a, 2022d).

Critique of Materialism and Emergence

Hart is certain that “nothing like an actual science of mental reality will ever be conceivable (much less practicable) so long as the culture of the sciences clings to a belief in the principle of the ‘causal closure of the physical’” (Hart, 2021b). He rejects irreducible emergence as “logical nonsense; whatever properties appear in an effect, unless imposed adventitiously, are already implicit in its ‘lower’ causes, even if only as a kind of virtual intentionality.” He avers that “‘Strong emergence’ is either a myth, a category error, or a truth so bizarre as to suggest that truth as such is impenetrable to reason; to invoke such a principle is to say nothing” (Hart, 2022a). He recommends reconsidering “something like causal language proposed in Aristotelian tradition” (Hart, 2022b).

Consciousness and Being as One

Hart's intuition is that “The conditions necessary for knowledge of the world and the conditions necessary for the world's existence as an object of knowledge at any number of vital points seem insensibly to merge into a single reality, a single act,” a simplicity and an ultimacy, he says, that cannot be found within nature as a closed totality and cannot be consistent with any physicalist theory of the world. It becomes impossible not to wonder, he continues, “whether the only properly empirical approach to the question of mental reality should begin with a radically different kind of methodological bracketing: one that suspends every presupposition regarding a real distinction between epistemology and ontology.”

He continues, “At least, we should never refuse to reflect upon the ancient metaphysical quandary of whether being and consciousness are ever truly severable from one another.” To exist fully, he says, is “to be manifest to consciousness,” and “there is no such thing as ontological coherence that is not a rational coherence,” such that the irreducibility of mind to physical causes and the irreducibility of being to physical events are one and the same irreducibility. There is a point then, Hart argues, “at which being and intelligibility become conceptually indistinguishable” and “being in itself is pure intelligibility” (Hart, 2022b).

Given that “world and mind really are open to one another,” Hart accords “a certain causal priority to mind over matter in our picture of reality” in that materialism would have more difficulty to account for consciousness than consciousness would for matter. Thus, his form of idealism.

God and Christological Monism

Hart invokes Bernard Lonergan's argument that the “unrestricted intelligibility” of reality leads to God as the one “unrestricted act of understanding.” The ascent towards ever greater knowledge is, Hart says, “an ascent towards an ultimate encounter with limitless consciousness, limitless reason, a transcendent reality where being and knowledge are always already one and the same, and so inalienable from one another” (Hart, 2022b).

“A restricted instance of that unrestricted act,” Hart says, is his “best definition of mind.” He then goes to God, reasoning that “every act of conscious, unified, intentional mind is necessarily dependent upon infinite mind—which is to say, God.” God, then, is “the logical order of all reality, the ground both of the subjective rationality of mind and the objective rationality of being …. the one ontological reality of reason as it exists both in thought and in the structure of the universe” (Hart, 2019b, 2022b).

The final step in forming Hart's ultimate monism, his idealism, will seem strange to most, blasphemous to some: taking consciousness and being, already one and the same, and unifying it with God, to become, all together, the ultimate one and the same. This is not pantheism (or panentheism), but based on Hart's Orthodox Christian convictions, a Christological monism. He quotes Maximus the Confessor, who says, “in the union with God, we ultimately are destined to become uncreated.” In Hart's ultimate monism, his idealism, “God doesn't become God, but God in those who are becoming God” (Hart, 2022c).

Reflecting on his own thinking, Bentley Hart writes, "I don’t really know if there’s any connection between my thoughts on philosophy of mind and the “Christological monism” (or, really, monistic Christology) of my theological work. Of course, I may imagine a more impermeable partition between the two areas of concern than in fact exists. But I think, where philosophy of mind is concerned, I would go only as far as asserting a metaphysical monism, and one that I would characterize as idealist rather than neutral monist chiefly because I believe all things are reducible to the structure of mental agency, as the fundamental reality, rather than simply to some tertium quid that is mysteriously at once like and unlike both the mental and the material, and so more original than either. That, to me, just seems like a dualism in denial about itself" (personal communication).