Consciousness and its contents

[Magnanimity]

I’m currently reading through an excellent little book on God by EO scholar David Bentley Hart. I just finished his section on “being,” which was great. For an Orthodox, he sure is Thomistic! And he begins his chapter on consciousness with these insightful reflections:

In a single movement of thought, the mind is capable of receiving the world in both its integrity and its diversity, of holding past, present and future together, of contemplating reality at once under both its particular (or concrete) and its general (or abstract) aspects, of composing endless imaginative and conceptual variations upon experience, of pondering itself as it ponders the outer world—and all the while preserving that limpid and silent presence to itself in which it indivisibly abides. Being is transparent to mind; mind is transparent to being; each is “fitted” to the other, open to the other, at once containing and contained by the other. Each is the mysterious glass in which the other shines, revealed not in itself but only in reflecting and being reflected by the other. Hart, David Bentley, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Yale University Press, pp. 152-53.

My question is this. Does this entanglement of being and mind seem right to you? Both are at once “containing and contained” by each other? And, one’s mind is never revealed in itself but only inasmuch as its reflecting (and being reflected by) being outside of the mind?

I ask because it seems that if this were true, it would undermine the autonomy of reason. It perhaps undermines autonomy of self, period. These thoughts of Hart’s seem to entail a mutual interdependency of reality (being) and your comprehension of it. I know that, in the West anyway, Modernism in philosophy and science (and even in the Reformation?) seemed to present to the world an autonomous view of self/mind.

Thoughts?