Premonitions

Herewith a link to a straightforward story presented by National Public Radio of a young boy's premonition of his own death (hat tip to a member of my family). For those of us of a modern mind but curious and hardy enough to patrol the borders of this zone, nothing is more interesting than reports from our immediate time of what counts as empirical evidence of a wider sphere of reality than is officially countenanced.

Notes on Existentialism

The formalism that this philosophy seems to represent is that there is a difference between Being and Existence, that earlier philosophies saw being as prior and durable and existence either as secondary or as something “added” to essence; thus essence before existence. Existentialism, to the contrary, turns this around: “existence precedes essence,” as formulated by Sartre.

Despite reading Kierkegaard and Sartre (now also reading Heidegger), I’ve always felt untouched by the above philosophical formulation for the simple reason that, try as I might, I can’t detect a shred of difference between existence and being. That difference must have roots in the philosophical notion that goes back to Plato, namely that form is eternal and matter is changeable and therefore instances of it are “corruptible.” Thus existence requires materiality. My own puzzling over the form-matter duality led me in other directions. Here are some points on that:

• In the modern understanding of matter, we find structure (“form”) at the lowest possible levels. In other words, we always find matter already formed.
• We understand reality in terms of processes. Any even superficial study of embryology or the development of plants from seeds reveals a process.
• I resolve the form-matter dualism by holding that form is an intention. The intention behind something that “comes about” may begin very fuzzily, but the steadfast intention guides the process of creation, sometimes by fits and starts. Intention fits my observations (and explains things) much better than a static form or matrix existing in some transcendental realm which is then expressed as a materialized form.
• I see things coming about only in two ways: by chance or by intention. Production of phenomena by chance only requires energy and matter; preexisting things have to be in motion. All other entities that come about come about by intention. And in those cases, “intention precedes existence,” not the other way around. So—if I associate intention with form and from with essence and essence with being (esse means being in Latin)—I am an essentialist.

But aside from this formulaic approach, I feel that existentialism, as it actually originated, introduced valuable new ways of thought—never mind the cosmic conclusions drawn from it by various thinkers. It might have been better if this school of philosophy had been called subjectivism. The genuine rooting of it is a focus on the actual experience of being, existence, or whatever words you wish to use. Heidegger called it “being there.”

In my own thinking about this subject—strictly privately, in hundreds of pages of diary entries extending back decades—the point of departure has always been consciousness, self-awareness, the sharp, alert, awake sort of thing—not the psychologists’ description of mentation. I realize now (my readings of Sartre and Kierkegaard took place in the 1950s and 1960s) that my approach is also grounded in a subjective polarity. I’ve always tended to put the ancient Greeks and the scholastic off to one side—not because their work wasn’t elegant and beautifully developed but because for me it has always seemed to be a game with concepts the direct likes of which I could not detect in myself or in my experience. If I consult my own experience and approach, then my methodology is certainly existentialist. Coming no, going yes—you might say.

Concentration

It strikes me that one of the distinguishing characteristics of being human, thus of consciousness and self-awareness, is the ability to concentrate at will. Animals are quite capable of concentration too, but it is not under their voluntary control. I observe this on every walk I take, especially this time of year. The squirrels are in the final phase of their preparations for the coming winter. They’re all over the place. And I can see how the environment directs their attention and compels their action. Every squirrel, every time will climb the nearest tree or hide under the nearest bush if, as I walk by them, I get close enough to them.

Voluntary action is the hallmark of transcendence. It requires a kind of separateness from the physical. The separation is rarely very great, but there it is. It is that “cubic millimeter” of separation Carlos Castaneda attributed to his real or invented sorcerer-guru, Don Juan. I am, of course, not talking about reflexive actions; controlling them requires extraordinary training. Nor do I refer to spontaneous heroism in situations of sudden crisis—self-defense or defense of the child. I once saw the strangest sight. It was a chipmunk “standing up” to one of our cats. It had been cornered; there it was, about to be killed. It rose on its hind legs and made warding off motions at the cat while making a hissing sort of sound. The cat, for whatever reasons—perhaps my immediate proximity distracted it—did not immediately act. The chipmunk then absconded. But for a moment, heroically, it was ready to face down the vast predator that over-loomed it. I don’t mean that sort of thing. We—whatever that word means—are tightly woven into our bodies. What is amazing is that we can indeed over-come the material at will.

What this suggests to me is that culture—personal as well as collective—will manifest itself in forms that signal concentration and detachment. By contrast, decadence will manifest itself as an increase in spontaneity, informality, and distraction. My classing spontaneity with decadence will rub some people wrong—rubs me wrong too, you might say. But I’ll say more about that in a moment. Processes that proceed in an automated way, stimulus followed by response, resemble the natural, the lower, the physical. Processes triggered by intentions, where the intention follows and guides the development—these are of a higher order.

The life process itself, as I see it, is the action of something high gathering strength and gradually freeing itself from its entanglement in the lower. Therefore life has direction. It is teleological. It manifests in increasing levels of order—and this order opposes, counters the random arrangement of the physical. Chance operates in the material plane, mind creates order. In humans the first possibilities of genuine detachment occur, and these manifest as concentration and conscious volition.

The process, in the human realm, has a cyclic pattern. Thus it manifests as cultural development followed by exhaustion and decay. Oddly enough our very success in organizing matter leads to decay. The pressures of necessity ease up. In consequence we relax our concentration, let go of our formalities, and permit ourselves to be distracted. Distraction requires much less effort. It is going with the flow, as it were. Ours is an age of exhaustion—and let’s not be deceived by our fantastic wealth, brilliant technology, and celebrated diversity. The whole structure of life today is organized to maximize distraction. That is what a culture of consumption produces. Things, things, things. Faster and faster. Flicker and flicker. Instant gratification is followed by equally instant dissatisfaction. Which calls for an immediate fix. And so on it goes. By contrast any activity that requires sustained, focused attention will appear as boring, old-fashioned, out-of-it rather than with-it. I maintain three blogs. Of these one is amusing, sharp-witted, and stimulating. One is cultural in focus but entertaining on a higher level. And this one is much more concentrated. Which one has the least readership? You guessed it. This one. Why? It requires concentration to follow.

Now a note about spontaneity. There is a lower kind which is reflexive. And then there is the higher kind. It is the higher kind that we actually admire and see manifested in the great works of art. But that kind of spontaneity arises from a great surplus of power built up over long periods of sustained effort, mastering higher forms of expression. And when it begins to operate, it looks effortless and yet produces wonderfully ordered structures. That spontaneity is valuable. The other kind even the drunk displays in various amusing and destructive forms.

Immortality

When we speak about the real, we are using a word derived from the Latin word res, meaning thing. The common designator “real estate” points to the most basic object of ownership, the fixed, permanent, physical, and immovable. When we use a phrase like “airy-fairy,” we mean the poetic, the imaginary—the insubstantial products of the human mind that cannot be pinned down because they’re not “concrete.” It is thus rather curious that the belief in some kind of immortality is so ancient and persistent. This belief takes various forms. In Asia the body is thought to perish but the soul or essence to move on, taking up another body to inhabit, unless the person has succeeded in escaping the Wheel of Karma and therefore rises to some higher realm. In the West we have a curious structure of beliefs. The soul is held to be immortal; the body dies; the soul exists in an imperfect manner after death; but at the end of time there is also a resurrection of bodies.

When the philosophers get involved, things get more complicated. Aristotle had the idea that if anything survives after we die, it is some “intellectual core.” As best as I can make out, this view is incompatible with Aristotle’s general scheme of things—the scheme of matter-form substantiality in which only the combination of the two is real; unformed matter and immaterial form exist in a kind of limbo called potentiality. Aristotle can be interpreted to say that personality remains in that surviving “intellectual core”—or that what survives is an impersonal intellect, hence the person disappears with death. In Plato’s view the survival of the soul is derived from its very definition; the soul is defined as simple; the simple cannot be corrupted because it has no parts, hence it is immortal. That is a neat argument, but beyond that it throws no light.

The understanding of the man on the street—and I class myself with him—is that immortality is meaningless unless we, ourselves, personally survive and have capacities for thought, memory, feeling, will, and action. Thus immortality for me is essentially linked to consciousness, and by consciousness I mean all of its usual tooling. In theories of reincarnation there is a radical forgetting between death and birth. Functionally that sounds equivalent to materialism for me unless more is asserted. The essential something that I am is lost in the process. Therefore this kind of “survival” lacks content and meaning.

I think that belief in immortality arose because, without it, all meaning disappears. Immortality is neither narcissistic nor a self-pleasing delusion. It is a necessary condition for any kind of meaning to be present at all. Consider. We live, strive, suffer, and hope; we love others, we work together, struggle, and share joys. What is the point of all this if it leads to nothing? Why did my Mother live, love, struggle, and suffer? And yes, she did suffer a great deal. What was the meaning of her efforts, the love she dispensed to four generations, the sacrifices she made—if she just vanished, after all that, without a trace? So that immortal genes could propagate—as some would have it? So that immortal memes could pass through her mind? If her existence is considered terminal, all of her acts had meaning in a process of life viewed impersonally, but she did not.

Life takes its deepest meaning from its directional flow, its end-seeking character. All of its moment to moment experiences also take their meaning from the onward flow. If the end of life turns out to be nothing—disappearance, cessation, vanishing—then the entire process loses its meaning as well. We understand this in our depths but, faced with the rude fact of death, we find it abruptly contradicted. It doesn’t take too much puzzling about the matter to conclude that the answer to this process must lie hidden in another dimension, on that side of the borderzone.

This line of thought is of the very essence of at least personal philosophy. The public, professional forms, of course, range over a much wider field of concepts; passions run high, schools compete, egos strive, etc. I am an old man at present, over seventy, so it might be thought that this sort of thing gets urgent when you’re nearing the ultimate passage. But, I must confess, this kind of thought preoccupied me even when I was a mere youngster in the Army and quite a wild man and about as far removed from philosophy as you can get.

China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristics are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

Of course, as many, many people have observed over time, The Chinese temperament is practical and down to earth. Indeed, calling it a “temperament” is probably wrong. It is a cultural blessing, in a way—and in China the culture has been pretty continuous for at least 4000 years. No lesser person than D.T. Suzuki has elaborated this very point. Suzuki, a Japanese, is the chief introducer of Zen Buddhism to the West, and in his Essay in Zen Buddhism, he too stresses the point. Zen, as he points out, is as much a Chinese creation as an Indian, and Zen Buddhism is practical and down to earth.

This works out well. Ancestor worship enlarges the sense of living in this dimension by extending it into the invisible. The ancestors are seen as able to influence one’s banal fortunes in this dimension—and we can please ancestors by upholding the ethical norms. So at the bottom of society. At its highest levels, the concept of Heaven, impersonal but not unaware, has been developed as the sanction of rule. Those whom Heaven favors, have the Mandate of Heaven. Those whom Heaven would depose are deprived of the mandate and, no matter what they do, they will swept away. It is the only culture on the planet in which the personal virtue of the ruler is conceived of as directly related to success in governing a realm—and in which the ruler’s chief activity is to let ordinary people live while keeping the lesser lords from exploiting them. That works for me.

And then, at the very highest levels, the mystical and philosophical, the conception of divinity is appropriately high, always reverent, never inclined to suggest that you can bribe, fool, or otherwise influence the highest. It shall prevail, through any and all contingencies at precisely the distance from us which we also feel when contemplating our own puny selves.

On Love: Well Worth Reading

Herewith a pointer to what I consider to be a superb, brief post entitled “Aquinas on Amor” on Siris. It is a repost of an entry that first appeared last year. Aquinas had a crystal-clear vision, and here it is summarized with skill and parsimony. Click here to see it.