Spotty, Lossy Self-Awareness

Consciousness fascinates me. Take for instance consciousness in dreams. We seem to be conscious, but we are not. We do and see things, but it is not the same as genuine awareness. Take half-awake or other passive states. Engrossed in a pleasing TV drama without ads or interruptions, we become identified with the action. Our surroundings almost completely disappear. When the drama ends, there is a sensation of awakening. I watch women shopping. Sometimes their faces reveal that they might as well be asleep. When their cell phone rings, their faces change dramatically; suddenly they’re human again. I can mow my lawn almost entirely in a state of trance, my mind repeating the same phrase over and over again. I’m active. I seem to be awake. Yet this is not what I’d call self-consciousness.

It seems that we have the potential to be genuinely conscious, thus self-conscious; and we frequently are. But all depending on our way of life, self-awareness may be much more enduring or much more paced out, as it were, arising only now and then. The phrase itself, self-consciousness, is ambiguous. In that state the self is conscious; we’re not conscious of the self as such. But when the self is not aware, where has it gone? It seems then to have been absorbed, captured, submerged in pure experience. It has disappeared. Some label this as identification. Self-awareness comes into being when the self separates itself from its experience. Then it stands aloof.

Only when the self detaches can it genuinely think and will. In all other situation—and these can be extraordinarily complex—habits and reflexes operate. Now it is worth noting that all child-raising and educational efforts of humanity are bent on awakening and training self-awareness. And its utility is undeniable. And, strictly speaking, it isn’t necessary for survival. The animal kingdom survives very well without it. The higher functions of the self point beyond biology. Living in bodies—and when we are self-conscious, we know that we’re not our bodies—we may be living in a prison (as Plato has Socrates say) or we may be in some stage of development. What is certain is that our conscious awareness is a lossy sort of power, very often absent. What we value is its presence. Our real lives are in the mental/spiritual dimension, even in this life. We eat in order to experience meanings; we don’t manipulate meanings in order to live. It is a struggle to separate the self from the fascinations of experience that can pull it into forgetting and a kind of waking sleep.

Where Rigor is Necessary

In certain contexts rigor is simply understood as part of the situation. Mathematics comes to mind. If a famed mathematician claimed that he’d discovered rational irrational numbers (say numbers simultaneously odd and even), the world of mathematics would sadly assume that senility had set it. In other contexts rigor is present in the logical operations, but if no agreement exists about the elements of the argument, so what? Such is the case in philosophy where the crucial issue is agreement on a definition. Suppose a person refuses to accept that there is such a thing as an “accident,” thus that an attribute of something has a different mode of existence than its essence. Such a person might asserts that the redness of this apple and the greenness of that one is, in each case, part of each apple’s essential reality. For that person logical handling of essences and accidents in argument is neither here nor there.

But rigor is necessary for establishing the facts of reality, thus in reaching definitions or in determining the course of a series of events. We expect rigor in scientific and in legal investigations. The interesting difference between the two is that legal investigations are more comprehensive than the scientific. The latter excludes subjective testimony unless it can be corroborated by physical findings; in legal investigations one person’s subjective testimony may be corroborated by another’s; to be sure, the more people corroborate an alibi, for instance, the better. The legal world recognizes the reality of deliberate deception.

In the regions of the borderzone especially—and that region includes the paranormal—rigor is particularly necessary for establishing whatever claims are made. The claim that reincarnation really happens serves as an illustration. There are two approaches, both claiming scientific validity. One consists of the collection of past life memories from individuals and, once these are recorded, work to corroborate them. The corroboration takes two complementary paths. One is the discovery of evidence that the remembered life really did leave something behind. The complement is to establish that the person making the report could not have reasonably learned about that evidence in the course of his or her current life. The late Ian Stevenson (see elsewhere on this blog) undertook such studies. The other approach is to use hypnotic regression. People are put into trances and are then coaxed to “remember” earlier and earlier experience until they pass the threshold of their birth and remember an earlier existence. Once such trance reports are recorded, the corroboration takes the same route.

Now I submit that the first of these methods is at least potentially rigorous. The second contains a major flaw. Hypnosis is very poorly understood and powerfully associated with suggestion. People can be told to do things while in trance, told to forget that they were told these matters, and will then be observed to perform the actions suggested in trance after they are brought out of it. Hypnotic regressions, therefore, cannot be rid of the suspicion that the subject in trance is merely obeying the subtle suggestions of a credulous hypnotist. Now the famous cases of remembered lives all come from the second approach, not from the first. But that’s not a surprise. You might say that it is rigorous proof of human gullibility.

Concerning Rigor

I’ve never explored the source of irritation philosophy sometimes produces. A knee-jerk response is that it lacks integration—not in the sense of rigorous internal consistency, which is present in it in spades, but in that it relies exclusively on conceptual operations and leaves out everything mysterious and intuitive; those latter aspects need a poetic expression and a different kind of cognition. Philosophy tends to the purely intellectual. This flaw is least present in Platonic dialogues, although these too can be reduced (good word that, reduced) to conceptual tokens. In that process, however, something is lost, whereas, by contrast, in cooking for instance, reduction can often concentrate essences and something then appears to have been added. The very virtue of philosophy, precision, is also its limitation. It cannot render the whole. π is not a round number, you might say. But the poetic, the mystical also has its limitations. It produces a total knowledge, an absolute certainty that matters, unlike logical compulsion, which may not really persuade. But it lacks precision. Ah, total integration… Maybe in heaven.

More Notes on Real and Nominal

One of the most ancient philosophical debates is rooted in that seemingly magical power of the human mind to form what are called universals. All humans innately understand the difference between this particular dog, let’s call him Blackie, and the concept of dog meaning that category of animal to which all dogs belong. The first is a particular dog, the other is a universal. And the debate has swirled around the actual existence of the universal. Does that all-encompassing umbrella, Dog, under which all canines belong, really, substantially exist? Apart from people? Apart from human thought? If all people disappeared, indeed if all dogs died out—if the planet were engulfed by our sun going into nova, would there still be Dog the Universal somewhere out there, somewhere in the cosmic whole?

Plato answered Yes, and his eternal forms or ideas are precisely these universals. He was therefore a realist: universals are real. Aristotle answered No, but he is viewed as a moderate realist because he said that they do exist, but only ever if instantiated. If only the earth had dogs, and the earth blew up, Dog the Universal would disappear. (I for one consider Aristotle a nominalist, but never mind.) The nominalist position holds that universals are simply concepts, thoughts in the mind, objects of language. Redness, for instance, does not exist by itself separate from red things in actual existence. These three positions might be rendered as universals before the thing, universals in the thing, and universals after the thing. The last might be rephrased universals in the head.

This subject has fascinated me for years. My own intuition is Platonic. If the distinctions we perceive out there are real, that distinction must come before its manifestation. Plato certainly thought of his forms as generative principles. Only this view produces a meaningful cosmos in my view; the nominalist position, however, is compatible with a materialistic take on reality in which pure chance is the only causative principle. And I find moderate realism incoherent: the world is either meaningful or not. You can’t stop half way between these two positions.

At the same time, I’ve always had problems with Plato’s eternal forms out there, especially if used as an explanation for universals. A tricycle is a universal. Has it been eternally in the sky? Pondering this matter some years ago, and working from the bottom up—thus looking at human creations first—it occurred to me that Plato’s forms suddenly become quite meaningful if conceived of more dynamically as divine intentions. Other universals, in turn, may be referred to as human intentions. Now intentions derive their substantial reality from the agent who has intentions. God is God and humans are immortal; therefore all intentions retain their substantial reality, whether manifested or not, because the agents remain in existence.  This, I submit, is a nice solution to the problem of universals, favoring the Platonic view.

To this I might add another note yet. There is a difference between an intention on the one hand and its perception on the other. We did not intend the dog or redness. Those universals we merely perceive. But we perceive them because someone intended them and they do actually manifest.

The above as an elaboration to the mention of Ochkam’s nominalism toward the end of yesterday’s post.

He Sold More than Razors

My reference here is to William of Ockham (1290-1349), famed for the principle of parsimony, usually rendered as Ockham’s Razor, which says that we should always prefer the simplest hypothesis able to explain the available facts. I came across Ockham in a conscious sort of way a couple of days ago, pondering the subject of the unity of the soul or self—and discovered that he asserted that intellect and will were a single unity. He is not alone in this. Among scholastics Duns Scotus held similar views; Aquinas said that “will and intellect mutually include each other,” but he set the dominant tone in scholasticism and gave the nod, the priority, to intellect.

Interesting, all of this. I’ve concluded long ago, based on little else than the sovereign power of intuition—and the lame sort of feelings I always get when abstractions begin to multiply and take on life—that the soul is a single unity in which intellect, will, and feelings are all facets of one thing; by feelings here I don’t mean sensory experiences but inward motions of the self—joy and revulsion, attraction and repulsion. The more I learned of Ockham—and it’s difficult to find things—the more I felt myself in sympathetic company.

Mortimer Adler, whom I admire, opted to omit Ockham from the Great Books of the Western World, a reliable source I managed to get cheaply long ago. (People buy such works with best intentions, but when the kids leave home, out they go, never read.) Internet summarizers of Ockham’s thought opt to focus on matters of modern interest, of which the soul does not happen to be one. My source of knowledge is therefore principally the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, W.L. Reese, editor, where, for instance, I discovered that Ockham held man to be “a complete rational being, incapable of inhering in anything and not supported by anything” [p. 629, emphasis added]. Ridiculous although that sounds, bound as we are to our bodies, I’ve long, long felt the same intuitive certainty in the very face of all contrary evidence.

Perusing that article, I noted that Ockham’s views on matter and form are also more simpatico. He saw matter simply as matter (“body”) and form as its arrangement (“structure”) —which strikes me as much more pleasingly parsimonious than the ultimately Aristotelian notions of prime matter and form together somehow fusing to make substance. Prime matter must be conceived of as pure potential lacking all actuality, and form a kind of agency of actualization. The energy involved in this fusion is never seemingly addressed.

I also lean in Ockham’s direction in seeing intuition as the genuine source of knowledge. The Aristotelian/Thomistic division of intellect into a passive (read matter) and an active or “agent” (read formal) duality—rejected by Ockham—also strikes me as carrying the concept of substance-dualism too far—especially if you think of the soul as the real thing and intellect as one of its powers.

Ockham’s thought developed as it did, it seems, because he was intent on simplifying scholasticism. If I were intent on such a project, I too would be tempted to attack substance dualism and to examine such strange notions as, for instance, that God creates essences and then, in a separate act, gives them existence. Labors along these lines made Ockham a nominalist (“universals don't exist independently of minds”). It makes sense in Ockham's context, but when it comes to universals, my own intuition leans the other way. I plant myself in the realist camp (“universals have real existence”) because it seems to me that that something, the something that makes a horse a horse, simply has to have an independent existence somewhere. I can't help myself. I see real patterns out there. I don't “abstract” them from anything. I see them. I deal with the weirdness of “form” in the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition by thinking of that idea as intention. In the greater cosmos, the intentions are divine. In the narrow, human, I see a lot of universals that spring from human intentions.

My survey courses in college omitted Ockham too. Thus it was fascinating to meet the maker of the razor late in life. Much of what he appears to have said resonates. I like his notions of the soul’s unity, at least as I find it expressed in the singleness of will and intellect. And I like his reliance on intuition.

Forgotten Bricks

It amused me to note today, again, how selective humanity is in choosing what to remember and what to emphasize. I was looking up Plato’s views on the “simplicity of the soul,” which, I’d noted, reading another post, had come to be reduced, by twists and turns, to the simplicity of intellect. Now Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s immortality, based on its unity, immateriality, lack of any parts, and its invisibility is widely known, indeed has become a kind of token. But in the very same dialogue, the Phaedo, in which this conception of the soul is artfully developed, we also get the equally fascinating doctrine that souls pre-exist their births, that life results in death but that death generates life as well—a doctrine that Socrates explains by the analogy of sleep and waking, each generating the other. Ancient intellectual structures remain forever sound, as it were, but it is nevertheless possible to mine them for just those bricks and stones that fit a current fashion in architecture—while others are left untouched in their places. With Origen (185-254 AD), among the ancients, the notion of metempsychosis was still alive until purged from Christianity in the Second Council of Constantinople held in 553. That was at least one kind of fundamental change in the way doctrines of the soul had to be built in the future.

Are We Volunteers?

A stunningly elegant emanationist cosmology results if we picture the Whole as a spiral-shaped creation divided into cycles. Each cycle of emanation, call it creative outflow, ends with the completion of an open circle, its beginning point is on the spiral below, its end point at the termination of the spiral above. Each cycle transcends the previous, thus represents either another degree of perfection or a new divine idea. The emanation itself contains the idea, a means of its realization, and the agencies required for its manifestation. The agencies may be understood in two ways: as laws designed for the present cycle and as free agents who may indeed oppose the divine intention—and, if they do, that too is part of the creative idea: it is foreseen, it is permitted (to use one of Swedenborg’s favorite notions), it is part of the creative intent. Whatever is is because God is.

Concerning the last point, I’d draw attention to “Ainulindalë,” the creation story in Tolkien’s Silmarillion. That title translates as “The Music of the Ainur,” beings created by Ilúvatar, the ultimate divine. One of the Ainur, the brightest and the best, Melkor, represents Lucifer, ever intent on destroying the splendid harmonies the Ainur produce, but Ilúvatar introduces themes in which the discord becomes the source of yet finer harmonies, showing how, despite the freedom of that the Ainur enjoy, nothing destroys the divine intent and everything contributes to Ilúvatar’s foresight.

This cosmological conception would assert that creation is eternal delight—of which Blake’s energy is merely a facet. Creation, even at the human scale, is an inexpressible totality in which intellect, love, and act are permanently fused. That the act of creation expresses itself through agencies and takes places with their free participation—of which opposition is itself a contribution—is also a matter of human experience. In religious cosmologies it is clearly mirrored in Mazdaism, the oldest higher religion, and echoed in the Kabbalistic tradition of Judaism.

If agencies participate in the creation, their descent into the void of possibilities is not some kind of punishment, fall, or banishment but is, instead, a freely chosen act. Thus it is depicted in Mazdaism, where each human is seen as a volunteer—and voluntarily assumes great risk in leaving the mansions of light to battle with chaos to save the creation; nay, it is also echoed in Tolkien’s great myth, where the Ainur are shown visions of Arda and invited to participate in its shaping. Now Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Ah, yes!

The Freedom of Free Will

Free will is one of those abstractions rarely examined in its vast complexity. Its existence is denied in the materialistic conception of reality. Let me spell out the reasons why. Any action whatsoever is traceable to antecedent stimuli; these can be viewed both as causing the choice and as themselves caused by others. In any purely brain-based conception of action, we can trace the “decision” back to two kinds of cell structures: those hierarchically arranged and those based on what might be called legislative structures; concerning the last, a brain node will only fire if a majority of brain cells forming it signal yea. These structures may operate alone or in combination, but all of them respond to stimuli ultimately traceable to physical causes. And in that thoughts themselves are mirrored in brain action, they can be reduced to brain activity alone, the seeming immateriality of thoughts declared as illusory. In this view all action is chemico-mechanically determined. What we call freedom of will therefore translates into saying that we’re ignorant, unconscious, of the precise process that necessarily leads to this action rather than to that one. The roots of the action are theoretically—but not practically—traceable to a status quo ante in which everything experienced by the actor up to that point contributes something, however minimal, including habits, memories, even forgotten memories—the last by absence.

This view of the matter is strongly compelling because, in most of our day-to-day decisions we do act pretty much as above described. Real choices, free choices (assuming they exist) are rare. These rare, free choices do, of course, also habituate us, form memories, attitudes, and leanings that later produce moral behavior automatically. Free choices therefore also become part of the deterministic background that produces our total behavior, most of which arises from our animal heritage. The question that looms, then, is this: How can we discover that we really do have free choice. The curious answer, I would suggest, is that we cannot do so by looking at the will as such. The answer comes from another source, the examination of intelligence or, put more broadly, consciousness. It must have freedom to function.

The basic premise I want to present here, and I’ll cite the source for it in a moment, is that thoughts may be legitimately viewed as mechanical presentations of a brain mechanism, the brain drawing material from memory by association. This presentation, of course, is on a much more sophisticated level than a computer’s search based on key words, for instances, but functionally equivalent. Now if a stimulus produces such a presentation, selection of some part of this presentation for relevance to our situation must take place. Just as Google can and will present a vast number of items in answer to a search, it cannot and does not select the relevant answer. That selection involves an activity outside of the system that produces the thoughts themselves.

David Bohm, the physicist, develops this approach in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1996, p. 50-53). Let me quote from the cited passage:

There is in this mechanical process [of stimuli producing thoughts] no inherent reason why the thoughts that arise should be relevant to the situation that evokes them. Then perception of whether or not any particular thoughts are relevant or fitting requires the operation of an energy that is not mechanical, an energy that we shall call intelligence. This latter is able to perceive a new order or a new structure, that is not just a modification of what is already known or present in memory. For example, one may be working on a puzzling problem for a long time. Suddenly, in a flash of understanding, one may see the irrelevance of one’s whole way of thinking about the problem, along with a different approach in which all the elements fit in a new order and in a new structure. Clearly, such a flash is essentially an act of perception, rather than a process of thought…, though later it may be expressed in thought. What is involved in this act is perception through the mind of abstract orders and relationships such as identity and difference, separation and connection, necessity and contingency, cause and effect, etc.

We have thus put together all the basic mechanical and conditioned responses of memory under one word or symbol, i.e. thought, and we have distinguished this from the fresh, original and unconditioned response of intelligence (or intelligent perception) in which something new may arise.

Now if the exercise of intelligence, of consciousness, requires an act that arises in an unconditioned (read free) order, the will, which is part and parcel of consciousness, is also rooted in that same order and is, therefore, capable of acting freely.

More Notes on Anxiety

This dimension, and half-awake living along, produces anxiety in me directly in proportion to experiencing ordinary animal awareness. Strange. Poor animals. Too many impending events: a trip up north, a not-too-distance family parting, a septic-to-city sewer transition in the family, workmen doing plastering in this house, the demolition of our backyard, the building of a new garage… All this, vaguely felt, impending, produces the anxiety I feel. It is likely to diminish as I write this, as I take on a more adult stance. And that is little other than a state of concentration.

Concentration seems to open up channels to the influx of a higher energy. But is that really the case? Let me look. The first consequence of concentration is simply calm. Something neutralizes the stimuli that otherwise cause the anxiety. But what is anxiety? It seems to be caused by a barrage of reflexive inner “movements”; they are starts, beginnings of reactions; but they are immediately stopped again because no action can actually start: all of these stimuli come from the future. Still, the body echoes each impulse by producing chemicals—and just as rapidly terminates their production only to start again when the next thought triggers the same foolishly anticipatory and automatic reaction.

This process is interrupted when I focus my attention. What I here call a “higher energy” is simply the awakened presence of a faculty corresponding to what David Bohm called the unconditioned order, thus the order of “agency.” What really happens is that ordinary energy, wasted by mechanical reactions, is no longer wasted, becomes available, and a sensation of higher potency becomes perceptible.

(Here, parenthetically, I note that my use of the concept of energy—higher, lower—is usually sloppy. The higher does not belong to the material order where energy properly belongs.)

Over and over, time and time again, I’ve noticed that anxiety disappears as soon as I become conscious. Nothing changes. Impending events are still there but are no longer threatening. Not surprisingly, I’m never anxious about unpleasant medical procedures on the day when they occur, only in anticipation. States of anxiety, it seems to me, are states of inattention—and readily distinguishable from states of concentrated tension on the one hand and calm control on the other. Neither has that tendency of rattling us. Too bad it is so difficult always to be attentive; turbulent distraction certainly doesn't help me focus. There is a great temptation to float along pleasantly on the stream of time in childish bliss—but the stream sometimes becomes a little rough.

Ah, Point of View

Is the cosmos really a wasteland? Or does it just look like that? Herewith yet another angle on the naturalistic view of life and everything. One unavoidable feature of that approach is that the cosmos, at minimum, has ranges (regions) where meaning in our sense, thus as displaying purpose, is undetectable; at maximum it means that the cosmos lacks meaning as a whole. Modern materialism votes for the latter. My own view differs. I feel that meaning is present in us but not, discernibly, in the inorganic realm, The limitations of our view are really my subject this morning, and I’ll get there soon, but to continue with the build-up: If meaning is present in us, it seems to me logical to expect it to be present beyond us as well, and “writ large,” too. This makes me a dualist in that I conceive of “carriers of meaning” and of “matter” as realities different in kind. Materialism envisions degrees of difference only. Thus it supposes that common elements, arranged appropriately and moved by energy, at some point suddenly break into consciousness. I find that view a great deal more difficult to swallow than belief in God; belief in God merely means that if I have consciousness and a sense of agency, that feeling must also have an origin. I didn’t cause my own awareness.

The notion of a dualism, of a passive and of an active principle, is deeply embedded in human thought. It’s there as prime matter and form in the Aristotelian stream, as the receptive and the creative in Taoist philosophy (or, Okay, call it poetry, if you like); it’s present as indestructible matter and immortal soul in traditional western thought, as particle and wave in physics. We even encounter it in matter; it is dualized as energy and matter, and the announcement of their equivalence in Einstein’s e=mc² is one of the moments of “revelation” in our times. Genuinely fascinating. Matter turns out to be a kind of congealed or crystallized form of energy; matter is therefore extraordinarily, if only potentially, energetic. The energy is still there, holding quarks together by the strong force and holding the particle-waves, the electrons, statistically hovering over atomic nuclei. The quarks themselves may be, for all we know, the tiniest balls of purest fire, and it isn’t all that outrageous to imagine the cosmos itself as a vast echo of a (for us) inconceivably great burst of energy. Indeed that is today’s orthodox doctrine concerning the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory. The universe is running down, to be sure, hence we find its congealed, crystallized residues as solid matter—but only from a particular point of view—thus only as seen by creatures of our size. And that’s a potent qualifier, when I ponder it.

I enjoy vastly to enlarge or greatly to miniaturize the scale of things, the speed of time. Doing so reminds me that we may be living in a reality which is a whole, whole, whole lot greater than we imagine. Thus something that looks like a wasteland to us at our scale, may very well be full of fascinating meaning to another agency at a scale greater than ours. Similarly, processes that look extraordinarily mechanical to us—thus, for instance the chemical processes inside our cells—may be chuck full of agency. Sometimes I playfully think of that as “chemical civilization,” actually organized and managed by “little people.” Here is an analogy. Many decades ago now, long before superfast computers were available for modeling, at a research institute where I was working we used an inclined board on which we created grooves to represent traffic systems. We covered this board with glass and then poured rice kernels into this system to detect where traffic jams would likely occur at different times of day. We modified the design until traffic flowed with optimal smoothness at rush hours—and submitted that arrangement to our client. Rice kernels worked perfectly well to simulate cars each driven by a conscious person. From certain points of view, human behavior is altogether predictable statistically, and never mind free will, day dreams, genius, sainthood, and all the rest.

The cosmic vastness certainly looks like a wasteland to me. But, ah, point of view. To repeat what I said a few days ago, the ancients had an even more limited view than ours. Their thought, their speculation forms the background, the habituation that colors ours. For these reasons a “naturalistic” cosmology, under which we would seem to be out of place, fits what I perceive—but may not be the real truth of the matter. That is why cosmology is at best a kind of playground of the mind on very hot days as we watch the bees in the backyard.

Tiqqun Olam

Some time after I’d written the last post, which happened a while back, it suddenly occurred to me that the idea that I had sketched there (namely that the cosmos is a wasteland, a detritus) was not all that outlandish. It has been proposed before in the sixteenth century by the Kabbalistic master, Isaac Luria (1534-1572). In Luria’s account of the Creation, Ein Sof, the Ultimate, first created a vacuum in the divine plenitude to make room for the creation. Ein Sof placed vessels into that void. The rest of the account I quote from Daniel C. Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, p. 15:

Into the vacuum Ein Sof emanated a ray of light, channeled through vessels. At first, everything went smoothly; but as the emanation proceeded, some of the vessels could not withstand the power of the light, and they shattered. Most of the light returned to its infinite source, but the rest fell as sparks, along with the shards of the vessels. Eventually, these sparks became trapped in material existence. The human task is to liberate, or raise, these sparks, to restore them to divinity. This process of tiqqun (repair or mending) is accomplished through living a life of holiness. All human actions either promote or impede tiqqun, thus hastening or delaying the arrival of the Messiah.

Repairing the world (tiqqun olam) thus becomes the Kabbalist goal in personal and collective life. My own notion of the cosmos as a residue of something, like accumulated dust and chips from a sculptor’s work, were based entirely on pondering the differences (and incommensurability) between life on the one hand and the cosmic surround on the other, Luria’s vision is poetic and derived from the concept of a divine creative act—which, in an interesting way, if we think about it, went awry. Some of the vessels intended to hold the light shattered. That is, you might say, a rather “naturalistic” conception of Creation.

I thought I’d note this here lest someone think that my “outlandish” claim was a disguised claim to originality…

Sketch of an Outlandish View

I want to examine the “naturalistic” explanation of life and humanity from yet another angle today. That label, “naturalistic,” is peculiar to my own thought. I’ve explored this notion numerous times on this blog before, most recently touching on it in The Hungry Ghost and, earlier, in On “Teleology” and the “Fall” as well as elsewhere. The gist of the notion is that “life” is an arrangement whereby an “out-of-place” spiritual community is making an attempt at finding its original home or attempting to return to it. I realize that this is an outlandish sort of idea in the West (or elsewhere, for that matter). But in the West particularly both the philosophical development of thought and religious belief (based on the Creation) produce a habit of thought. Some observations about that mode of perception today…

It strikes me that what we call the scientific method is one modern form of rational thought about the things we see about us. It attempts to observe accurately, to define precisely, and then to reason logically. The ancients—and here I’m thinking of Aristotle—had an observational field limited to the earth. They did not have, as we do, genuinely good pictures either of the solar system or of the enormous expanse of the galactic Out There. For them the incommensurability of life and cosmos was not really a visceral experience as it is for me. They had no knowledge or systematized evidence of what we call evolution—albeit a general idea of development was present. They hadn’t explored the immense age of the earth, named its epochs, or assembled the evidence of the Cambrian Explosion. But they did engage in rational thought in a systematic way. Their concept of “substance” as a matter-form duality actually rested, it seems to me, on an observation of life, with examples drawn from human handicrafts: the bronze or stone statue, for example, in which the material is the matter and the statue, as statue, is the form. This separation of form and matter was, in other words, based entirely on the most peculiar and rare phenomenon of cosmic reality, namely living things. This dualism, as it turns out, fits living entities very nicely indeed, but it doesn’t fit the cosmos with any kind of precision at all. Yet it’s the cosmos that is the dominant reality, becomes that when we ponder its size and extent.

It is in life that we encounter something shaping matter (or a subset of its elements) into countlessly many forms the utility of which, the “ends” of which, we can investigate and actually discover to some point. The ends or purposes of hydrogen or helium escape our attempts at discovery altogether; by a vast stretch we can give hydrogen a minor meaning as a necessary component of life—but there is far too much of it out there for life alone to justify its existence; and our bodies don’t use helium; it’s just out there. Plato projected eternal forms by way of rescuing the concept from the ever-changing flux that continuously destroys specific manifestations of them. Plato seems to have thought that forms must somehow exist somewhere, solidly, permanently, as it were, to cause physical manifestations of them to appear and to reappear. But Plato also seems to have reasoned by looking principally at life rather than, say, at clouds of nebulae, stellar collisions, or the great wasteland of our own, local asteroid belt. Would he have arrived at the same theories if he’d had access to the rich photography of the Hubble telescope?

The form-matter duality is much better explained using quite different concepts while retaining the structure of this hypothesis, thus its dualism. Instead of saying form, let’s speak of intention. Instead of speaking of prime matter, a vague sort of unformed material substrate never actually encountered, let’s think of matter simply as inorganic matter. Instead of substance let’s think of life. What we know as life is an intention manifesting in matter, forming it into entities for some kind of purpose or purposes. Of these we can certainly identify the most obvious, the act of enduring over time against all odds in specific and more or less repeating forms. It’s only in life that we encounter genuine reproduction.

But if form is intention, how do we explain the rest of the cosmos—indeed almost everything other than life; because life itself appears to be next to nothing in the universe. In life we see forms supporting intentions. In the rest of reality we also see form but no intention whatsoever. A rose bush and an amoeba, very different in size, shape, and appearance, are both nevertheless engaged in an identical project, and this project has an aim. But what is the aim of an enormous cloud of hydrogen out there? Is it to become a sun? What is the aim of suns? Their projected life is to explode in novae and to expel their now heavier elements into yet another cloud of matter or to become super-heavy dwarf stars. There is no discernible meaning in any of this—except, from our point of vantage, perhaps one.

Here I have in mind the sculptor chipping away at that rock to make a statue. All eyes are on the statue or on the sculptor. We don’t consciously, precisely notice the substantial amounts of detritus that have accumulated, and still accumulate as the sculptor works, on the floor and on the statue’s supporting structure. Particles large and small, chips tiny and sizeable, litter all of the surfaces—and at some distance from the work-space itself stand piles awaiting the dust pan…while old accumulations of waste await disposal at a landfill in battered old buckets or barrels. A highly scientific study of that floor, conducted with laser measurements and microscopes, might actually reveal the same random distribution of objects of all sizes we actually see when we look at the depth of light years into outer space. It’s a wasteland out there! It’s beautiful, awesome, full of light. But so also perhaps would the sculptor’s rubble appear to us if we were small enough to see the electrons of that waste shining brightly, each electron the size, relative to us, of a sun…

The cosmic chaos, of course, is not absolutely random. Nor is that pile of chips under the statue. Inorganic matter carries a kind of residual of meaning. We express that meaning by speaking of the laws of nature. Hydrogen is not a carbon. Something constrain matter in the cosmos to spherical and circular forms when certain degrees of density are reached. I’m tempted myself to see in this fact clear evidence that the cosmos really is a waste or residue of something meaningful but not visible to us. And this view is compatible with my naturalistic notion that our community of life may indeed be out of place. In the western religious conception, however, this view finds very little resonance—despite what seems to me obvious proof for it. In our tradition (Genesis, etc.) the cosmos is made—to be what it is—by the will of the divine. It cannot therefore be viewed as the residue of some other divine activity which only leaves, in the cosmos, the faintest of traces of agency, in the form of laws—but nothing else even enough to hint at any kind of meaning.