Western thought in the twentieth century had a love affair with motion—and a powerfully monistic leaning too. This combination produces process theologies and theories of wholeness (like David Bohm’s). The operant word becomes becoming; being is relegated to the flat-earth past. The impulse is permeating and pervasive; thus for instance consciousness becomes the stream of consciousness; I chuckle to think that we’ve even abandoned peace for the peace process.
The inner motivation for such modes of thought fascinates me. Fluxologies of this sort strike me as detectably counter-intuitive; mind you, counter-intuitive is also supposed to be deep. Sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine that I am a deterministic process, free only in the sense that an uncertainty principle introduces randomness into nature, and that my sense of being me is therefore an illusion. In this I’m not alone, of course. We all feel, think, and act like agents (some of the time, anyway), but the theories suggest that we’re in fact deluded. Therefore, it seems to me, a very strong will must be present in those people who construct monistic theories rather than yielding to intuition. Intuition teaches a self-evident dualism. It teaches that life is different in kind from inorganic matter, that we have but are not bodies, that we have but are not feelings, thoughts, and intuitions.
What is the nature of this will? This will appears, it seems to me, because the people who manifest it cannot deal with the notion that a genuine mystery is present behind reality, the very mystery that makes us who we are, the mystery that, as the Sufis say, is closer to you than your jugular vein. If a genuine agency is detected, even if only in all-too-humble us, it forces a dualistic frame on thought. This problem arises because agency cannot be derived from motion and random processes at all. This means that science can’t quite reach everything; that human lordship isn’t absolute. The presence of a humble agent logically forces us to posit a higher agency, perhaps a hierarchy of beings that, just like us, stand out from the flux and cannot be explained by it. Liberation from this knowledge, which promised such future delights in the past, produces vistas of meaninglessness now in which no one sees the ever becoming process actually land on anything concrete even long enough to order its feathers.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Hungry Ghost
Here is a curious paradox inherent in the notion of a body-soul duality. Such a duality (I here note) only signifies something meaningful if we assume that the soul is immortal. But if the soul survives the body’s passing, what role does the body play? I like to ponder such mysteries without reference to revelation, thus, as it were, as a scientific problem; by “science,” here, of course, I understand a strictly rational approach rather than hypothesis formation followed by confirmation or falsification by experiment. The hypothesis of duality cannot be tested experimentally—not while we continue to breathe. But suppose that it is true?
One strictly rational hypothesis would be to say that the soul needs the body for some very practical, down-to-earth reason. A corollary is that this need is temporary; all bodies die, and that we know as a matter of fact.
This line of thought recurred to me reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior, in which she speaks of a curious entity. It is the hungry ghost of Chinese folk belief. Who is this ghost? This ghost is a departed soul, an ancestor deprived of proper worship by neglectful descendants—and is thus starved of a kind of spiritual nourishment. It becomes a potent symbol if you think about it sitting in the summer shade watching the bees and butterflies visiting the herbs and flowers. Suppose that souls need food of a certain subtle kind, if not to live at least to unfold their higher potentials. And then suppose that subtle energy occurs quite naturally but very, very thinly in the dimension in which we find ourselves; never mind how we got here. It may be a—to us—immeasurable part of ordinary energy especially potently present in material situations that manifest complexity. Thus the hungry ghost able to link itself to complex bodies may gain access to a nutrient it needs—needs in order to develop, first of all, and then to develop those organs that enable it, by spreading wings, even to depart this dimension for realms where “grace” flows richly and unimpeded by the coarser energies that dominate at the diminishing end of an ever out-flowing reality.
Reading Kingston’s book coincided with our discovery of a wonderful green-black caterpillar feeding on our dill plants here. We soon learned that it is the larva destined to become the magnificent Black Swallowtail butterfly (black wings, golden dots). The caterpillar and the butterfly, earthbound and then, transformed, taking flight, has long served humanity as an apt symbol for what may be our destiny.
Returning to my starting thought, we may need the temporary body—not to be, not to persist. For that, no matter what our condition as a soul, we may always have enough. But to achieve our natural ends we may need the body to realize our full potential. Here is another interesting thought. It might be that the whole vast structure of our civilization—of our moral, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual life—may be an early and primitive manifestation of what happens when we are enabled to exist in our normal, grown-up way.
One strictly rational hypothesis would be to say that the soul needs the body for some very practical, down-to-earth reason. A corollary is that this need is temporary; all bodies die, and that we know as a matter of fact.
This line of thought recurred to me reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, The Woman Warrior, in which she speaks of a curious entity. It is the hungry ghost of Chinese folk belief. Who is this ghost? This ghost is a departed soul, an ancestor deprived of proper worship by neglectful descendants—and is thus starved of a kind of spiritual nourishment. It becomes a potent symbol if you think about it sitting in the summer shade watching the bees and butterflies visiting the herbs and flowers. Suppose that souls need food of a certain subtle kind, if not to live at least to unfold their higher potentials. And then suppose that subtle energy occurs quite naturally but very, very thinly in the dimension in which we find ourselves; never mind how we got here. It may be a—to us—immeasurable part of ordinary energy especially potently present in material situations that manifest complexity. Thus the hungry ghost able to link itself to complex bodies may gain access to a nutrient it needs—needs in order to develop, first of all, and then to develop those organs that enable it, by spreading wings, even to depart this dimension for realms where “grace” flows richly and unimpeded by the coarser energies that dominate at the diminishing end of an ever out-flowing reality.
Reading Kingston’s book coincided with our discovery of a wonderful green-black caterpillar feeding on our dill plants here. We soon learned that it is the larva destined to become the magnificent Black Swallowtail butterfly (black wings, golden dots). The caterpillar and the butterfly, earthbound and then, transformed, taking flight, has long served humanity as an apt symbol for what may be our destiny.
Returning to my starting thought, we may need the temporary body—not to be, not to persist. For that, no matter what our condition as a soul, we may always have enough. But to achieve our natural ends we may need the body to realize our full potential. Here is another interesting thought. It might be that the whole vast structure of our civilization—of our moral, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual life—may be an early and primitive manifestation of what happens when we are enabled to exist in our normal, grown-up way.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
On “Teleology” and “the Fall”
The end-seeking character of the life phenomenon has long been of great interest to me. Organic life surrounds us—and human-made products all of which are purposive. It is therefore very easy to feel that the teleological is a dominant feature of living reality. But any even minor contemplation of the wider cosmos, especially with modern observation giving us a great deal more information than earlier times had on hand, suggests the very opposite. It suggests that end-seeking entities are only found on earth, at least so far as we’re able to determine. Even just an examination of the solar system reveals an enormous number of bodies, large and small, bereft of any teleological performance. A favorite of mine is the asteroid belt, most likely the result of a planetary collision: countless rocks move there on orbital paths, have moved for millions of years, in darkness; they give nary the breath of a hint of what purpose they could possibly have. And as best as our telescopes can tell us, the cosmos is filled with inorganic objects just like these rocks, by the billions of trillions. We only see the very big and hot ones; they’re all moving but not by inner causes; they’re chained in space by gravity. Using the presumption of the uniformity of nature, we project very large numbers of other planets featuring life; statistical projection would yield such a result, but we have no positive proof at all that anything lives out there in the sense of moving itself and reproducing.
This situation produces certain problems for me. The problem, you might say. It has different facets like a diamond. One might put it this way. In the absence of teleology the universe displays no meaning. Even if life—and conscious life—existed on trillions of planets equally as hidden as ours—the only meaning of the cosmos would be concentrated in the living entities on them. Yet in each such solar system, in addition to a vast sun which made this life possible, there would (uniformity of nature, etc.) be the mass of other big bodies, rocks, and comets, an enormous (call it administrative) overhead for the bit of flowering life. But the purpose of this overhead, assuming that life is its aim, is not discernible to me, the sun aside. It seems in fact to be irrelevant. Realistically considered, life appears much more like an infestation, like a fungus on a statue, an infestation on an otherwise stalwartly and stoically meaningless order of simple being. The cosmos doesn’t point to humans (or birds, bees, or bacteria) despise Brandon Carter’s Anthropic Principle, which in turn is based on the notion that all kinds of other universes could exist. I think of this facet as the “incommensurability” —of life and cosmos.
The problem of incommensurability remains even if we assume that the story told in Genesis is at least poetically true—if the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is assumed to be part of the story rather than already present as the chaos or the void. The aim of the act is Man. What purpose then does the creation of billions of galaxies serve? Or is this just a tiny episode in a more colossal creation story of which we have no inkling—in which those galaxies have some kind of meaning? And we’re still, as it were, too little to be told?
Another facet of this problem is that teleology is meaning—a genuine marker which says that meaning does exist in the cosmos. What life displays, however, is not really divine design. What life shows is a tour de force by means of which some agency—but well short of divine—coaxes law-abiding but otherwise meaningless inorganic matter to manifest self-moving entities with purposive and even conscious behavior. To study life in its details, the details of its manifestation, thus its mechanisms—which are far from explaining life itself—is to come face-to-face with technology orders of magnitude more sophisticated than ours but similarly “evolved” by what seems to be a process of trial and error, intention and serendipity. This technology operates against a tremendous inertial resistance. But an omnipotent being needs no technology and faces no resistance in manifesting a creature or, for that matter, a vehicle for it. It says “Be!” and there you are. But life is a technology. It behaves like a super-complex log-rolling performance during which we use solar power to roll that log in the water until our bodies just can’t any more. Our manifestation of teleology is also inconclusive. It does not show its true end. We die. The purpose of this physical manifestation is not to continue forever; no; its evident purpose is to achieve something while it is alive. The only way in which the manifest teleology of life points towards divinity is in displaying agencies, by means of bodies, and agencies, furthermore, that lack omnipotent powers and must struggle against inertia. Something must have caused them to Be. But to infer that this command, to Be, meant to be inside bodies—that conclusion is not at all evident, despite the poetic image of God forming Adam from the clay of the earth.
That image I find problematical. Man is an artificer, a limited creature, not God. Another aspect of the Genesis story, however, I find oddly attractive and informative. I like the idea of the Fall, considered here as a raw concepts without specification, in the sense that it might be taken for a calamity of some sort, never mind how it was caused. The effect of such an idea, that of a calamity, is to defer any cosmological consideration to another phase of my existence, anyway, a time when I shall have succeeded in extricating myself from this mess, not before. It narrows the focus to the task at hand. To put this another way, this existence appears to be an adaptation to a most unnatural situation for beings like ourselves (logrolling, etc.).
How this calamity came about and how we got here is only captured symbolically by the concept of the Fall, but the Fall is not only a useful concept but also intuitively matches our experience—that of suffering as well as having aspirations, thus the teleological character of life. The very fact that we can’t do better than that—better than talking about a Fall without specifying precisely how it came about, the mechanism of it, etc.—may be due to what the Fall did to us. It plunged us into deep ignorance (the Buddhist version of it). For my purposes, of course, the Fall should not be detailed. To speak of sin, error, or disobedience has no proof either way. Our sinful nature here may be due to ignorance, thus caused by the Fall rather than causing it. It could have been our fault, of course; we take it to be our fault, but that may be the same reaction we sometimes have when misfortune befalls us even in those cases when we did nothing to bring it about. We don’t know. Either way.
Here my own wits only tell me that deriving our situation from an omnipotent creator isn’t helpful. We can’t know anything well enough to reach that conclusion. What we do know is that we do get help, in the form of inspiration. There is a vector. We know that even if we didn’t see the traces of teleology in all things linked to life. We also know that order is present everywhere—in both the organic and in the inorganic dispensations. A punishing God is not a concept I can buy. Therefore this process has a lawful necessity under which only that which we experience is possible (e.g., inspiration)—not the arbitrary intervention of expulsion from Paradise or miraculous rescue by omnipotence.
In summing up these various takes on teleology, teleology, it seems to me, strongly marks the presence of agency in us—not in non-living nature. In that nature lawfulness would indicate a residual sign agency, nothing else. Beyond lawfulness, it is meaningless. Teleology as we see it manifesting here appears to be a unique situation, not part of the design of the cosmos. To derive the meaning of the cosmos from teleology manifesting in life here is more of a philosophical extrapolation to dangerously fuzzy extremes than I would hazard. Our situation suggests, however, something of the truth of a genuine Fall of some sort, of a project, limited to our community of souls, to get out of the pit. And a reality vastly richer than we conceive of it—and own role in it probably rather humble.
======
The above inspired in steps beginning with a post on Siris (ht) pointing to the Gifford Lectures of Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison.
This situation produces certain problems for me. The problem, you might say. It has different facets like a diamond. One might put it this way. In the absence of teleology the universe displays no meaning. Even if life—and conscious life—existed on trillions of planets equally as hidden as ours—the only meaning of the cosmos would be concentrated in the living entities on them. Yet in each such solar system, in addition to a vast sun which made this life possible, there would (uniformity of nature, etc.) be the mass of other big bodies, rocks, and comets, an enormous (call it administrative) overhead for the bit of flowering life. But the purpose of this overhead, assuming that life is its aim, is not discernible to me, the sun aside. It seems in fact to be irrelevant. Realistically considered, life appears much more like an infestation, like a fungus on a statue, an infestation on an otherwise stalwartly and stoically meaningless order of simple being. The cosmos doesn’t point to humans (or birds, bees, or bacteria) despise Brandon Carter’s Anthropic Principle, which in turn is based on the notion that all kinds of other universes could exist. I think of this facet as the “incommensurability” —of life and cosmos.
The problem of incommensurability remains even if we assume that the story told in Genesis is at least poetically true—if the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is assumed to be part of the story rather than already present as the chaos or the void. The aim of the act is Man. What purpose then does the creation of billions of galaxies serve? Or is this just a tiny episode in a more colossal creation story of which we have no inkling—in which those galaxies have some kind of meaning? And we’re still, as it were, too little to be told?
Another facet of this problem is that teleology is meaning—a genuine marker which says that meaning does exist in the cosmos. What life displays, however, is not really divine design. What life shows is a tour de force by means of which some agency—but well short of divine—coaxes law-abiding but otherwise meaningless inorganic matter to manifest self-moving entities with purposive and even conscious behavior. To study life in its details, the details of its manifestation, thus its mechanisms—which are far from explaining life itself—is to come face-to-face with technology orders of magnitude more sophisticated than ours but similarly “evolved” by what seems to be a process of trial and error, intention and serendipity. This technology operates against a tremendous inertial resistance. But an omnipotent being needs no technology and faces no resistance in manifesting a creature or, for that matter, a vehicle for it. It says “Be!” and there you are. But life is a technology. It behaves like a super-complex log-rolling performance during which we use solar power to roll that log in the water until our bodies just can’t any more. Our manifestation of teleology is also inconclusive. It does not show its true end. We die. The purpose of this physical manifestation is not to continue forever; no; its evident purpose is to achieve something while it is alive. The only way in which the manifest teleology of life points towards divinity is in displaying agencies, by means of bodies, and agencies, furthermore, that lack omnipotent powers and must struggle against inertia. Something must have caused them to Be. But to infer that this command, to Be, meant to be inside bodies—that conclusion is not at all evident, despite the poetic image of God forming Adam from the clay of the earth.
That image I find problematical. Man is an artificer, a limited creature, not God. Another aspect of the Genesis story, however, I find oddly attractive and informative. I like the idea of the Fall, considered here as a raw concepts without specification, in the sense that it might be taken for a calamity of some sort, never mind how it was caused. The effect of such an idea, that of a calamity, is to defer any cosmological consideration to another phase of my existence, anyway, a time when I shall have succeeded in extricating myself from this mess, not before. It narrows the focus to the task at hand. To put this another way, this existence appears to be an adaptation to a most unnatural situation for beings like ourselves (logrolling, etc.).
How this calamity came about and how we got here is only captured symbolically by the concept of the Fall, but the Fall is not only a useful concept but also intuitively matches our experience—that of suffering as well as having aspirations, thus the teleological character of life. The very fact that we can’t do better than that—better than talking about a Fall without specifying precisely how it came about, the mechanism of it, etc.—may be due to what the Fall did to us. It plunged us into deep ignorance (the Buddhist version of it). For my purposes, of course, the Fall should not be detailed. To speak of sin, error, or disobedience has no proof either way. Our sinful nature here may be due to ignorance, thus caused by the Fall rather than causing it. It could have been our fault, of course; we take it to be our fault, but that may be the same reaction we sometimes have when misfortune befalls us even in those cases when we did nothing to bring it about. We don’t know. Either way.
Here my own wits only tell me that deriving our situation from an omnipotent creator isn’t helpful. We can’t know anything well enough to reach that conclusion. What we do know is that we do get help, in the form of inspiration. There is a vector. We know that even if we didn’t see the traces of teleology in all things linked to life. We also know that order is present everywhere—in both the organic and in the inorganic dispensations. A punishing God is not a concept I can buy. Therefore this process has a lawful necessity under which only that which we experience is possible (e.g., inspiration)—not the arbitrary intervention of expulsion from Paradise or miraculous rescue by omnipotence.
In summing up these various takes on teleology, teleology, it seems to me, strongly marks the presence of agency in us—not in non-living nature. In that nature lawfulness would indicate a residual sign agency, nothing else. Beyond lawfulness, it is meaningless. Teleology as we see it manifesting here appears to be a unique situation, not part of the design of the cosmos. To derive the meaning of the cosmos from teleology manifesting in life here is more of a philosophical extrapolation to dangerously fuzzy extremes than I would hazard. Our situation suggests, however, something of the truth of a genuine Fall of some sort, of a project, limited to our community of souls, to get out of the pit. And a reality vastly richer than we conceive of it—and own role in it probably rather humble.
======
The above inspired in steps beginning with a post on Siris (ht) pointing to the Gifford Lectures of Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
A Temperamental Journey
When I was in the U.S. Army, I once volunteered to go to the Grafenwöhr firing range to carry out some tasks the nature of which I have forgotten. I knew where I was going, too. Our unit—the 8th Division Artillery—had spent a month at Grafenwöhr some time before as part of a major, theater-wide military exercise. Even getting there had taken several long, rainy days; the trip back had been similarly dreary. Grafenwöhr was (and probably remains) one of the most isolated and lonely places in Europe. It is huge and desolate. By contrast with another major firing range in Germany, Baumholder, which was also home to 10,000 troops, Grafenwöhr had a mere handful of people permanently stationed there. The nearest settlement was a tiny, dirt poor village; it didn’t even have a restaurant. Yet I leaped at the chance to go to Grafenwöhr. I’d loved being out there in the great emptiness the first time I’d gone way east to visit the place. It was the emptiness that drew me; I like such places; it’s a temperamental trait of mine.
But what is temperament? Humanity’s traditional classifications are “all right,” as I might put it, meaning “so far as they go.” But whether we base it on medieval humors or somatotypes, as in the Yale classification (mentioned briefly elsewhere), such types don’t satisfy me at the gut level; the reason for that feeling, perhaps, is that I’ve never properly fitted any of these classifications. To fit ourselves into a “type” we must exercise a certain degree of force—thus to make forced choices; it’s not as simple as looking up our astrological sign. Let me illustrate this. If I had to choose between being alone or being in company—and I’d have to choose one of the two—I would choose being alone. Does that mean that I want perpetual solitude? Not in the least. But in a forced choice… Similarly. If I had to choose between working by myself or with a team, I’d choose working by myself. Hard choice: Night out dancing or out at a classical concert? Classical concert. Night out or night at home? I’d stay at home. Company picnic or group hike in the hills? The hike. Forced career choice: Politics or military? Military. Read a book or write a book? Write, of course. Lead a group or be the member of it. Lead. Give a speech or listen to one. I’d rather be giving it. Would I have answered these questions the same way at nineteen? Absolutely. Age five? Yes, if I had understood them. Does all this make sense? It does for me. I feel no contradiction here between an introverted tendency and one inclined to take the lead. The hidden tendency here is that, in virtually every situation, I prefer to reduce external stimuli in favor of stimulus that comes from within. In line with this, I’m not very interested in what people do but interested in what they are. If I have to experience external stimulus—as in being in a group—I’d prefer to lead it: the role provides a greater level of control.
Cultures have preference—now this way and now that. In my own time “extrovert” had and has a positive connotation, “introvert” a negative. William James’ interesting spin on this comes to mind. In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, he labeled extroverted types (before Carl Jung gave them that label) “the healthy minded.” And he labeled the inner-directed people “sick-minded.” I well remember reading that in my freshman year in college—in effect I was reading the book while waiting for the welcoming talk in an auditorium full of future freshmen—remember thinking, aggressively, as I first read that phrase: “Who’re you calling sick-minded, buster.” Nothing sick about it, I thought. The healthy-minded and their doings bored me to tears, put me to sleep. In my experience all the things that strongly drew most people, particularly diversions, entertainments, struck me as things people would have to pay me to enjoy.
Ages ago already—come to think of it, it’s been a while since I was a freshman—I came to see the temperaments in the context, broadly speaking, of stimulus. Temperament manifests as our general response to it. Those who feel deprived of stimulus go out to seek it; those who experience too much of it shield themselves in various ways; one way of avoiding it is to go within. This view is silent on the nature or quality of the stimulus. To take a more detailed approach, I would propose that many kinds of energies impact upon us; they range from coarse to very subtle. If our genetic shielding is of a certain kind, coarse energies will irritate us while the subtle will please. Where the shielding is quite strong, only coarse energies will act as stimulus. These differences will produce the whole range of temperamental manifestations: embrace, avoidance, irritation (the choleric temperament), melancholy (too much stimulus, not strength or skill to fight it off), etc. The most interesting situations are those in which the genetically fortunate perceive the subtle forms of energy—and are drawn to them by preference. To hear those melodies, they try to filter our the coarser kind. Such activity does not arise from any kind of virtue; it’s just an inclination to hear something perceived to have more value. This reminds me of a quote from Abdul Qasim Gurgani Idries Shah cites in one of his books. Gugrani said: “My humility which you mention is not there for you to be impressed by it. It is there for its own reason.”
I speak of shielding because temperament is clearly something that comes to us by way of our bodies. This is indicated both by traditional (medieval) categories—the humors—thus body fluids and by the body-type categorizations studied at Yale. The latter were based on somatic systems (musculature, the viscera, the nervous system). The interaction between this sort of “shielding” and the energies that reach us may very well be what actually constitutes our leanings (outward or in), our day-to-day nervous states, our irritability, the kinds of exercise we seek, whether we seek many friends or few, and whether the desolations of places like Grafenwöhr attract or repel us.
But what is temperament? Humanity’s traditional classifications are “all right,” as I might put it, meaning “so far as they go.” But whether we base it on medieval humors or somatotypes, as in the Yale classification (mentioned briefly elsewhere), such types don’t satisfy me at the gut level; the reason for that feeling, perhaps, is that I’ve never properly fitted any of these classifications. To fit ourselves into a “type” we must exercise a certain degree of force—thus to make forced choices; it’s not as simple as looking up our astrological sign. Let me illustrate this. If I had to choose between being alone or being in company—and I’d have to choose one of the two—I would choose being alone. Does that mean that I want perpetual solitude? Not in the least. But in a forced choice… Similarly. If I had to choose between working by myself or with a team, I’d choose working by myself. Hard choice: Night out dancing or out at a classical concert? Classical concert. Night out or night at home? I’d stay at home. Company picnic or group hike in the hills? The hike. Forced career choice: Politics or military? Military. Read a book or write a book? Write, of course. Lead a group or be the member of it. Lead. Give a speech or listen to one. I’d rather be giving it. Would I have answered these questions the same way at nineteen? Absolutely. Age five? Yes, if I had understood them. Does all this make sense? It does for me. I feel no contradiction here between an introverted tendency and one inclined to take the lead. The hidden tendency here is that, in virtually every situation, I prefer to reduce external stimuli in favor of stimulus that comes from within. In line with this, I’m not very interested in what people do but interested in what they are. If I have to experience external stimulus—as in being in a group—I’d prefer to lead it: the role provides a greater level of control.
Cultures have preference—now this way and now that. In my own time “extrovert” had and has a positive connotation, “introvert” a negative. William James’ interesting spin on this comes to mind. In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, he labeled extroverted types (before Carl Jung gave them that label) “the healthy minded.” And he labeled the inner-directed people “sick-minded.” I well remember reading that in my freshman year in college—in effect I was reading the book while waiting for the welcoming talk in an auditorium full of future freshmen—remember thinking, aggressively, as I first read that phrase: “Who’re you calling sick-minded, buster.” Nothing sick about it, I thought. The healthy-minded and their doings bored me to tears, put me to sleep. In my experience all the things that strongly drew most people, particularly diversions, entertainments, struck me as things people would have to pay me to enjoy.
Ages ago already—come to think of it, it’s been a while since I was a freshman—I came to see the temperaments in the context, broadly speaking, of stimulus. Temperament manifests as our general response to it. Those who feel deprived of stimulus go out to seek it; those who experience too much of it shield themselves in various ways; one way of avoiding it is to go within. This view is silent on the nature or quality of the stimulus. To take a more detailed approach, I would propose that many kinds of energies impact upon us; they range from coarse to very subtle. If our genetic shielding is of a certain kind, coarse energies will irritate us while the subtle will please. Where the shielding is quite strong, only coarse energies will act as stimulus. These differences will produce the whole range of temperamental manifestations: embrace, avoidance, irritation (the choleric temperament), melancholy (too much stimulus, not strength or skill to fight it off), etc. The most interesting situations are those in which the genetically fortunate perceive the subtle forms of energy—and are drawn to them by preference. To hear those melodies, they try to filter our the coarser kind. Such activity does not arise from any kind of virtue; it’s just an inclination to hear something perceived to have more value. This reminds me of a quote from Abdul Qasim Gurgani Idries Shah cites in one of his books. Gugrani said: “My humility which you mention is not there for you to be impressed by it. It is there for its own reason.”
I speak of shielding because temperament is clearly something that comes to us by way of our bodies. This is indicated both by traditional (medieval) categories—the humors—thus body fluids and by the body-type categorizations studied at Yale. The latter were based on somatic systems (musculature, the viscera, the nervous system). The interaction between this sort of “shielding” and the energies that reach us may very well be what actually constitutes our leanings (outward or in), our day-to-day nervous states, our irritability, the kinds of exercise we seek, whether we seek many friends or few, and whether the desolations of places like Grafenwöhr attract or repel us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)