Layers

I delight in analytical discussions and sometimes wish I could engage in them myself—but the right subject never occurs to me. The Maverick Philosopher here comes to mind; his essays are often delightful. Sorting this I realize that some matters are suitable for the analytical approach; others escape it. My own concerns always stray beyond the factual regions, one of the realms where Reason is at home. I like to read essays, for example, that try to sort bodies and souls logically—to take a factually marginal subject, and marginal because objective data are unavailable; but an argument concerning that subject does not fit the analytical category very well either. It fades off into the collectively unprovable, private, experiential sphere. One can gain interior knowledge here, but “making a case” based on logic is impossible. And why would anyone want to? In that context arises the generally ignored (perhaps it also resists analysis) subject of adequacy. Why are some people seemingly constitutionally unable to discern the transmaterial? Those who can, by contrast, do not need analytical arguments to persuade them—although reading them might be fun. They know it in their bones.

Reason is also comfortable in the realm of concepts. There the factual may be ignored, but definitions rule. Given consensus on a definition, analysis can flourish—and if the definition is contested, that only opens even wider vistas for debate. But concepts are ultimately private labels for clusters of more or less crystallized experience—more or less crystallized because we constantly redefine them based on our experience. Nothing “coordinates” or governs these redefinitions. Concepts also hold quite different ranks in the heads of different people.

The concept of being is a case in point for me. It plays an enormously important role in major branches of philosophy, but shorn of any attributes beyond the bald fact of existence, it is meaningless for me; and with attributes added, it becomes unnecessary. Life, by contrast, is very interesting, and in my own modes of thought has a real conceptual role to play quite apart from specific instances where it might manifest. When I use a word like real, the meaning ranges way, way beyond the word’s etymological root of res, thing. The genuinely real for me is infinities beyond the thing.

Layers and levels become visible here, translucent, to be sure. The analytical here forms two: the fact-based beneath the conceptual. Under those layers lies the common speech of ordinary experience in which a kind of muddy order reigns but contradictions are a common weed; beneath that lies mute feeling. And above the analytical shimmer other layers of mind freed somewhat of the turbidities of this, our current, realm: the poetic and, above it, the mystical. At those levels the sound of debate is but a muted rustle.