Precision and Pattern

The philosophical and the scientific ways of looking at the world seem closely related. Both aim at precision. The philosophical aims at precision in the management of concepts, the scientific at precision in measuring phenomena. There are problems in both encampments. Concepts are damnably fluid and heavily dependent on the cultural atmospherics present where they arise and, for a while, abide. Nature is very coy and hides herself from measurement at the extremes—yet it is at the extremes where the doubts are: quantum physics and astronomy.

By contrast the poetic way of perceiving reality seeks meaning in patterns. Its operant faculty is intuition and imagination. In all three of these categories, needless to say, intellect, imagination, and intuition are at work, and if one of these faculties is weak, the results are merely so-so. But there is what might be viewed as a temperamental difference or leaning involved; some people are comfortable with precision, others with a much fuzzier gnosis. The great merit of the poetic view is that it produces a sense of certainty—its chief drawback that the poet can’t turn his insights into dogma or into technology; no money in it, you might say. The reason is that the poet is denied precision. The philosopher cannot reach closure; he or she might stare at the inaccessible noumenon, as Kant did—but the poet is right at home with Noumy. The scientist is denied meaning, but in seeking the mechanics of reality, his horizons keep expanding just like the universe is supposed to do; back to the drawing board is a recurring theme.

Borrowing brings happiness to all. Borrow a little science to enlarge the patterns, a little poetry to admire the shifting phenomena of nature, a little science to bolster concepts, a few eternal ideas to give them radiance.

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.

Reading—or Not Reading—Philosophy

I can never seriously attend philosophers. That would require reading them carefully and slowly, cover to cover, accepting the rules of their thought. I’ve only ever made the effort here and there—and in those few cases, finally, only with a kind of grim determination that I apply to certain stains—the kind that only ultimately yield to steel brush and razor blade. Thus, for instance, I once made that effort reading Sartre’s opus, Being and Nothingness, in English, and then, in that grim mood, even acquiring a French version to check those passages that struck me as incoherent; and they still were. More recently I read Whitehead’s Process and Reality, after which my main reaction was that all this effort for this pathetic conclusion appears to have been a waste. And, of course, I’ve read often huge chunks of many other philosophers just to keep the secondary commentators and summarizers honest. An almost tangible savor, odor, or aura of the philosophers’ personalities reaches me in about a hundred pages or thereabouts, which, in combination with the content, is most valuable and informative—and lacking in secondary renditions. I’ve also read, in full and many times over, the works of people classified as philosophers who, however, transcend the subject. They might be better labeled as theologians or, put more generally, students of the ineffable. And no. I’m not here using other phrases for “metaphysics.”

The best way to explain my own behavior to myself is to assume that all works minimally contain intellect and intuition. The more the ratio favors intellect, the less the work will draw or hold me. But intellectual content is also necessary to focus my attention. Pure clouds of intuition repel me just as surely as pure cathedrals of abstraction. Intellect is sometimes present with large doses of passion, such as I find in Schopenhauer. But passion isn’t interesting in this context.

One night, long ago, at a party, I spent a good part of it in intense conversation with a man. When the time came to break up, he asked: “By the way. Are you a mathematician?” I had to laugh. Quite the contrary, I said. He said: “Well, you certainly think like one.” Then I to him: “You must be one yourself.” And he nodded.

The mathematician must have an intuitive relation to numbers. Numbers leave me cold—and their relations, one to the other, strike me as self-evident if I spend enough paralyzingly boring time to trace them. As stellar a math great as Bertrand Russell agrees with me. And what applies to numbers also applies to abstractions stripped down to empty concepts.

Today, following some links into the nineteenth century, as it were, I encountered “a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing.” The example given was the unity of a lump of sugar which holds a multiplicity of properties. And these are? Sweetness, whiteness, and hardness. This is the sort of thing that, when I encounter it, makes me roll my eyes.

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.

Science and Natural Philosophy

When push comes to shove, I define myself as a “hard,” top-down spiritualist. By that I mean that reality comes from a single conscious agency. From this vantage reality appears to me as hierarchically arranged. If that word jars, I suggest a glance at this recent post. This viewpoint clashes with materialism but is yet entirely compatible with a scientific approach to reality. Science can and should be viewed as a discipline, one of the disciplines of thought. Its focus is the observation and explanation of observable reality based on the rules of reason. The western world has excelled in this discipline and has vastly enlarged our understanding of organic and inorganic nature. This is a marvel and a triumph—and all of humanity has benefited. The determination of how things work and how they are arranged is subject to objective determination and, in very large regions of reality, even to experimental verification. In this sense I’m also a “hard” scientist.

Science is said to have emerged from “natural philosophy”—and said to have displaced the latter. I rather think that speculative or contemplative thought about Nature remains alive and well to this day; science hasn’t displaced it at all. The more disciplined approach to observation, augmented by experimental and statistical methods of verification has, instead, greatly empowered philosophical thought about the observable and measurable world. The task of natural philosophy, indeed of all philosophy, is to work with why rather than with how or what questions. And those questions remain perennially new. They remain—and shall remain—open. We may gain much better and firmer answers to those questions—but not in our current state of existence.

Materialism, in effect, is one school of natural philosophy. It interprets and makes assertions about the meaning of scientific discoveries. Its conclusions, much like those of any philosophy, natural or metaphysical, must be assessed comprehensively in view of our total understanding of all facts and values available to us. And no philosophy produces a “final solution” to the questions that we pose. All of them have a tentative character. They’re all approximations.

I emphasize this distinction because there is a distinction. The very definition of science suggests that, with appropriate study, qualifications, effort, and (often) sufficient funds, anybody should be able to replicate the findings of science to his or her own satisfaction. Problems arise at the edges of genuine science—where science gradually slips away into the speculative mode. Examples of such regions are those where “hard” data are impossible to obtain. Not that these regions are off limits to investigation (the very deep past, the very tiny, the very large, the origin of life); but in these areas a certain kind of humility is necessary—not least the open admission that the investigator, if he or she offers conclusions that cannot be replicated by experiment, may be practicing natural philosophy rather than science. But, as I say, conclusions of that philosophy may also be examined. It’s simply that the rules to be applied to that kind of result are not scientific but—philosophical.

How to Judge Borderzone Posts

Those interested in the Beyond as a serious study are a minute fraction of humanity. But lest I be misunderstood, let me make some distinctions. Lots of people are into lots of peripheral or adjacent matters like channeling spirits by means of mediums, into psychic phenomena, the paranormal, UFOs, magic, serendipity, etc. And huge numbers are active in all manner of religious studies and participate in the social interactions of believers. But society has never produced—surprise!—a recognizable specialization in the study of the borderzone, the kind of study recognizable by name, e.g., a name like “astronomy” or “anthropology.” The nearest thing we have is mysticism, which is in part a theory of union with God; in common parlance the word is more analogous to a sport than to a science. It is applied to people who cultivate “states” rather than people who comprehensively study the reality—or possible reality—of a … well… a greater Reality. We have no mystonomy (thus a structure of laws) nor a mystology (a doctrine or theory). Such studies do take place, but they do so under other umbrellas, these days in fields like philosophy, theology, psychology, parapsychology, and paranormal investigations. In the past the same studies were hidden under early studies of chemistry, known to us today as alchemy.

Here is the interesting fact. In religious eras (or today in religious regions) studies of this sort are suppressed by militant, doctrinaire religious institutions. In secular times (like now, here) they are dismissed, marginalized, and explained away as unreal. They are deprived of any societal standing and hence somewhat starved of talent too. The very few who wander into these thickets are originals. People who visit this site very often click the About tab—and I can just feel what they feel. They are looking for credentials. But in this field, you’ll never get credentials in the field. There is no field. Here and there you’ll discover credentials or certifications in some other specialty (philosophy, anthropology, etc.). But on my site you’ll find what? A novelist, a man of affairs? Not exactly what people seek. The authority, such as it is, lies in the postings themselves and what meanings they contain—and the inner agreement they elicit or the negative emotions they trigger in the reader. But many a reader doesn’t trust his or her own reaction. He or she wants additional confirmation, reassurance. Sorry about that, folks. Believe it or not, in these zones on the border, you are on your own. You’ve got to go by your own light.

What Draws People to the Spiritual?

Here it may be best to start with a distinction—between “religious practice” and “personal spiritual endeavors.” The first may be a spiritual activity, but for most of us the practice began in the family; and later, possibly, especially for those educated in parochial schools, it was socially reinforced by the broader community. I want to focus on the voluntary and the personal spiritual quest—something we undertake on our own without any kind of social nudging.

I would propose three distinct motivations. In any one case, these may appear in mixed forms as well. They are pain, the attraction of magic, and curiosity. I’m not an authority, mind you; I don’t have statistics. I’m just an old man—but rich in experience. My guess is that most people are drawn by pain, frustration, suffering of some kind, even feelings of despair: the feeling that there must be a solution, there must be something better than this one-damned-thing-after-the-other. The sheer problems of ordinary life eventually move some people to wonder; they seek out groups and thus, gradually, develop their own spirituality. This kind of questing is almost always spontaneous, sincere, and motivated by an intuition that another range of reality is needed to complete the individual; albeit the intuition arises because of suffering. To be sure, such people wish to be rid of their pain as well.

The second motive is opportunistic. It springs from a hope of gaining dominance, power, wealth, attention by learning methods, formulae, or procedures. The dominant idea here is that the spiritual is a realm of magical power which might be harnessed to improve life here and now. There is a rather extensive industry on hand to satisfy this need; the Christian brand is usually called the Prosperity Gospel. It has a large footprint in the New Age movement as well. Many, many would be disciples of cults from other cultures are moved by the promise of magical powers. We might call this spiritual materialism because the spiritual is pursued to gain something here and now.

The last motive, curiosity, arises in a small number of usually advanced, thoughtful people who, in attempts to understand the world, encounter a wall and begin to explore alternatives to the dominant ideologies on offer. They are intellectuals and artists. Many well-known converts come from this community. They enter by the paths of philosophy or art (thus reason or a strong sense for patterns); then, having gained knowledge, the seekers deepen as people; eventually they experience stronger intuitions that begin to transform them.

Here I would emphasize three things. One is that some kind of ordinary, call it worldly, impulse sets things off. For this very reason, two, the process need not and often does not continue long enough to lead to real spiritual development. It all depends. It depends, for instance, on the nature of the pain. If a person is lonely and neglected, joining a group or church may assuage that pain; he or she may make new friends, enter into new relationships, and—with the pain now lessened—stabilize on a new level. The power-seeker may never achieve that magic touch, that telepathic power, but engaging in these things may give him or her the feelings of being above the herd. Once more, the process ends prematurely. And the intellectually or artistically motivated may also stop short of penetrating very deeply into the borderzone and sit back in satisfaction when they’ve gained enough to satisfy their curiosity.

The paradoxical feature of spiritual endeavors—and this is three in the aspect I’d like to emphasize—is that such endeavors always refuse to yield ordinary payoffs in the ways imagined by the would be seeker. At the same time, once a person’s spirituality begins to develop in earnest, his or her problems tend to be transformed. They look different. Different attitudes toward them develop. Coping mechanisms are learned. The net result is that the problems diminish; they may disappear entirely. These quests therefore do have a positive worldly result, but never in the ways initially pictured.

Poets and Philosophers

There is a temperamental difference between poets and philosophers—and this difference has corollaries. Philosophers want answers. Poets want projects. Reality offers an infinity of answers, none of which is satisfactory. As a consequence the philosophical will drives on relentlessly until it has reached a concept that dissolves all further questioning. This answer, in one form or another, is God—albeit its expression may be a kind of negative, like the concept of nirvana. A brief but comprehensive formulation of this may be found here, although the context is broader.

The experience of creative endeavor is quite different. Engaged in one, the poet is totally absorbed—sometimes tortured, sometimes elated, but always completely engaged in the project. When the effort is finally done, when the feelings of regret have begun to fade (“I wish I could have done it better, this is wrong, that is weak, etc., etc.”) the poetic mind, after a brief and contemplative interlude, in which the project’s aura is still present, begins to search for what is next. The motivational structure of the poetic mind is endless creation. The sheer fact that engagement in it is to be in eternity, not, repeat NOT in time, takes away all of the negatives that usually accompany the feeling of “same old, same old.” For the creative person there is no such thing. There is the bliss (sometimes manifesting as agony) of being in the creative flow. Then nothing else matters—indeed everything else is just a distraction. And there is the void at all those times when, as yet, the new is not tangibly present, even as a seed.

Our cosmological systems are built by philosophers. They end in ways the poet can’t genuinely value. His or her reaction is, “And then…” This sort of thing is treated with negative rejection by the philosophical mind. It wants closure. The poet wants the story to go on—if not in this project then in another. Poets create mythologies. They have no problem whatsoever with a story that never ends. But it must have a wave-like pattern, with rises and falls, with obstructions, conquests, defeats, and triumphs. And like a child, when the story is over, the poet will want to— hear it again.

Mind you, poets have no monopoly over creativeness, and many philosophers are among the most creative people of all. But in that case they too are poets…

Motivation

I’ve noted long ago—when I first began pondering such matters—that thinking about the origin of life inevitably leads to speculation about cosmological origins. You find yourself going in that direction every time because, I think, the logic in the question posed, and in the facts under examination, force you to take that path. You realize that life is a transcending phenomenon—and at least one of its exemplars is an agent—ourselves. And since we did not make ourselves, seeking a transcendental origin for a transcending phenomenon leads to very basic cosmological questions.

The motivation for the search itself is the love of wisdom, the root meaning of philosophy. If you feel it you’ll certainly also know it. The activity is of its essence contemplative and justified by itself. The genuine lover strives to attain the beloved and has no other motive. The suitor of the princess who doesn’t actually care for the princess but cares only to impress the king—he is a sham. I emphasize this point for a reason.

My discussions of cosmologies—or religious faith systems, for that matter—take place in a philosophical context and are thus part of my search for truth. The last thing I have in mind is to persuade anyone of anything. I’m simply living a part of my life in contemplation. I’ve benefitted a great deal from others’ thought, hence I share mine too. My understanding of agency is that it’s sovereign. Thus every human being is free to make up his or her mind. As the German song has it: Die Gedanken sind frei.* It seems obvious to me that compelled faith—or faith based on ignorance—cannot be real. Thus it seems to me that sincere philosophical discussion will strengthen genuine faith and only weaken unexamined forms of it—which is a service.

The problem I’m addressing has two aspects, one low, one high. Let’s take the high one first. Many faith systems base themselves on revelation, a phenomenon that can be viewed philosophically but cannot be reached by philosophy. By this I mean that philosophy can neither prove nor disprove that God speaks directly to humanity. I have my own understanding of revelation, but that is what it is, an understanding. I believe it to be true, but I cannot prove it. In my view revelation reaches all of humanity in multiple forms; several orthodoxies would deny this. In matters of faith, individual sovereignties may indeed clash. And such clashes cannot be resolved at the level of faith. But they can be discussed philosophically in a generous spirit. And that’s the spirit I try to cultivate in myself.

The low aspect is that faith systems can and often do manifest a tribal character; the best people in these systems always deplore this. Some people, however, out of ignorance, mostly, treat their beliefs as ideologies and view any discussion of them, if outside the “inside” consensus, as an attack. Similarly, they treat those in agreement with their formulations as part of the tribe. But the discussion may not be an attack at all; it may be an appreciation; and the person sympathetic to the faith system may not be a true believer.

This long comment, at this place, seems appropriate. I noted that yesterday’s posting, with its prominent use of the word “Hindu” in the title, caused several partisan websites to broadcast my posting to constituencies. And in each of the two sites (Blogger and WordPress) with the identical content, readership surged to all-time highs. Alas. Time to say the above. High time. In the future I expect to draw fire (or praise) from those who dogmatically deny (or affirm) reincarnation, those who view Gnosticism as a heresy (or truth), and yet others who quarrel with (or adhere to) Catholicism or Islam. Du calm, as my daughter in France might say. This is just philosophy. It follows the Beloved wherever She may wander.
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*Thoughts are free.

Defining a Border

All thought ultimately rests on evidence, another way of saying that it rests on truth. The root of truth is experience—for the simple reason that you have to start somewhere safe, and experience, at least in the raw, thus separated from any interpretation of it, is beyond questioning. Descartes’ cogito is simply one example of an experience that suited one kind of mind. What distinguishes philosophy from metaphysics is that philosophy is closer to evidence than metaphysics. Or that, at least, is a thesis worth examining.

I arrive here because I thoroughly enjoy well-argued philosophical propositions. I always feel the urge to apply a similar approach to the matters that interest me. But then I discover that my questions invariably concern the why of things, the purpose or the explanation of X. And here philosophy becomes deficient. It is good at explaining how things relate—and by thing I don’t mean material phenomena necessarily. It can analyze a concept and accurately find its limits, appropriate use, illegitimate application, etc., but it cannot deal with meaning unless the meaning is an intermediate term in a series: why does the rider use as saddle? No problem there. It can’t deal with ultimate meaning. Why is the rider there?

An example is the two-fold nature of the human: body and soul. What purpose does a body serve if, as we can reasonably demonstrate, using philosophical approaches, souls are in their very essence different in kind, thus radically different, from bodies. To answer this question rationally calls for explanations of the soul and of its purpose, of the material realm in the same respects, why they both exist, how they relate, and the nature and purpose of the realm in which they are each a manifestation.

Here we effectively cross a border. We can’t resolve the question without speculation, using that last word to mean an activity which cannot yield hard answers for lack of evidence—at least while we’re inside vile bodies. No system of thought, however elegant or probable, can compel agreement—as philosophy can indeed compel while it remains on the firm ground of experience. I put this out by way of saying that I’m fully aware, in all that’s said in these pages, of the limitations under which I labor. And the tone of certainty I sometimes produce must not be mistaken for authority of any kind.