Faith

Faith is a difficult word to define—when you think about it. My old (1967) Webster’s seems to agree. The most interesting definition of it is 2 b (1): “firm belief in something for which there is no proof”; that is a commonly held view of it in a culture where the only things that serve for proof are physical observations. The Latin root it fidere, to trust, which Webster’s never uses by itself; but one must ask: When I trust, what are my proofs? Interior sources of proof have no standing in our culture because all internal experiences are derived, in turn, from brain functions; brain functions from physical actions of neurons, etc.

But ignoring all that, we can distinguish, nonetheless, between different roots of faith: external or internal. If the faith is in a learned transmission, the faith then resides in the transmission, thus it is a trust in the words or reports of other people that have reached us by an immensely long route of passing from mind to mind—and part of that proof is the very fact that so many people had passed it on. If the faith arises from a conviction that comes from my own intuition, it is a fact I cannot for the life of me describe. But it is very strong. And only that of which my own intuition thus approves do I accept as real proof. The physical? It sometimes gives me that feeling—but by no means always; and least so if the physical is a stand-in from something internal in minds other than mine. Transmission has drawbacks, not least that large numbers of people very often believe in things that are quite dubious—and hold such beliefs for many centuries.

The action of the will is not, in my opinion, engaged in faith. Faith must come first—and from the intuition. But will is involved in this structure in other ways. It may take effort to examine reality—to deepen understanding. For intuition to operate, it must be enabled to see. Another is to follow that intuition. I may not act in accordance with my own legitimately held faith. To do so, when my inclination is to ignore it, the will becomes involved. But to assert, by will, something I don’t inwardly believe is merely a gesture of some sort. It is not, to echo the existentialists, authentic.

Eye in the Jungle

There is reality and then the cycling of mentation. The latter is largely a physical phenomenon. It is influenced by weather. We tend to be more cheery on a sunny day; our moods also reflect the overcast. The environment closest to us is that of our body, although we think of “the world” as starting beyond our skin. Not so. By far the most influential in shaping our mental states is that tiny—and I do mean tiny—portion of the world we carry about with us. We project the weather of this personal cosmos and then perceive that as the state of society, the state of the world.

It is possible to detach enough so that the difference—between ourselves and all else physical—turns visible. But it’s not habitual. The curious thing is that all habituation is of the physical variety whereas naked awareness always requires an act of the will. We can habituate ourselves to repeat actions or routines that wake us up, but, amusingly, no sooner are they really habits than they stop being effective. It’s very tough being real, easier to flow. And as we do, we like to say, It’s a jungle out there.

Defending the Tram

In re David Brook’s new book, The Social Animal, the issue is not really about the conscious or the unconscious mind, and which predominates, but ultimately about the presence or the absence of a genuine agent who may be held responsible.

One reviewer (Will Wilkinson in Forbes) quotes Brooks summarizing the thrust of his book. It is “the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connection over individual choice, character over IQ, … and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.” These are supposed to be (and no doubt they are), the revolutionary discoveries of modern psychology and brain science.

I note here the incoherence of this characterization, so prevalent everywhere these days. If we have multiple selves, who has the emotions? How do we define the character (singular) of multiple selves (plural). I know, I know. We also speak about public opinion, as if it were something tangible, the national interest, as if there was a concrete something actually capable of having an interest. But now we find it projected backwards into the individual who, on close inspection, turns out to be a crowd.

If someone hired me to defend this characterization on rational grounds, I’d want to be paid in advance—because my chief argument would be, “Well, I don’t mean that precisely, but you know what I mean.” I would, in other words, appeal to a presumed understanding in my public that modern science denies the actual presence of a soul, an individual, an agency because science can’t decant it, hold the glass beaker up to the light, and then, pointing, say: “There it is! Can you see it? It’s swirling in there.”

The presumption here is that belief in an actual conscious person capable of genuine choice is a “traditional” belief, meaning old, pre-scientific. Also obsolete, hoary, dated, primitive. Therefore the discovery that we are a more or less cohering, continuous, but ever-changing phenomenon—but inhabited by a multiplicity of selves generated by the phenomenon—is “revolutionary.” But if we really are this phenomenon, then there isn’t really anyone there to notice that a discovery has been made. The “revolutionary” modern theory may be rendered as a street-car line in which the real objects are the power lines and the car that runs on rails. The passengers who come and go, our multiple selves, are not really what it’s all about. The revolutionary theory is about as easy to defend as this description of a streetcar line.

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.

Attachment and Detachment

These two words have wonderfully ambiguous connotations. To be attached is to be drawn to something, but the attraction may very well arise precisely because the object bestows attention back. Attachment implies possession, therefore control. Love and attachment are often conflated, but troubles rapidly develop when love is not returned. Then attachment turns out to be simply trade: I give you attention if you attend to me. Failing this give and take, we’ll soon hear someone say, “X, I think we need to talk.” Love is much more difficult. If it is real, it’s anchored in the will; it’s not provisional, contingent, situational, etc. The reason why pet rocks are amusing objects is precisely because the rock cannot return affection. This aspect of attachment shows that it has a strong element of need hidden within it. Hence people can be said to be “too much attached to”—you fill in the blank.

Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.

If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.

People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.

Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.

What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.

More on "Primacy of Intuition"

Intuition “flows” or “bubbles up,” “flashes,” “dawns,” “strikes like lightning,” and—sometimes “nags” as conscience. All but the last of these words suggest waters or energy. Indeed I think of intuition as an influx of something energetic from the higher level of reality. Now in this modern age our almost reflexive tendency is to formulate experience in naturalistic term. It feels more real to think of intuition as an energy, thus as something impersonal. In other times, and in still active traditions, we see the same experience rendered in quite another form. We speak of “the voice of conscience,” for example. The artist feels “inspiration” coming from the Muse—that lady surely conceived of as a person. We think it sophisticated to label such things as anthropomorphizing.

I come from a demanding religious tradition, Catholicism. It takes reality seriously, insists that action has real consequences, here and beyond. In my early schooling we were invited to see our selfish urges as temptations whispered in one ear by the devil; our conscience had the other ear. The devil was recruiting future inhabitants for hell; the guardian angel strove mightily to save our soul. These images are vivid, sensory, and therefore effective ways to teach. The abstract formulations—and energetic or liquid analogies—are somewhat less compelling but more suited for the adult understanding. I’ve waxed eloquent on the symbol of the spiral just recently. In that imagery intuition might be imagined as an attraction upward, a kind of negative gravity. (It is, by the way, put almost like that by Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise. The soul “falls upward” toward heaven as naturally as water falls into the depths at a waterfall.) Temptation is the “pull” of the depths.

But I am wandering afield. If intuition manifested in sharp, precise words heard in the ear, all would be clear. It manifests as feelings, images, and perceptions of patterns. So does temptation. We supply the “little voice”—and it is an interpretation, an interpretation in both cases, be it of higher inflows or of feelings produced by hormonal reactions to stimuli. The two differ in taste, as it were; tastes are difficult to render in concepts, but attention to our experiences develops the palate, as it were. The intuitive has a certain joyous sharpness—even when it is a “dark” intuition; temptation is always heavy in flavor (as we speak of certain wines, for instance); one feels the pull of the flesh, the greed for dominance.

To state simply what I’m groping to make palpable: Intuition is primary, but it needs interpretation. The images, feelings, and sensed patterns must be properly understood. The intuition will always be right, but we can make a hash of it nevertheless by inattention or excessive attention to it, by twisting its meaning or direction. Art supplies endless examples. The same inspiration produces both kitsch and the sublime.

Scrupulosity—obsessing about one’s own sinfulness—is a good example of the abuse of conscience. Naturally, under the influence of Modernism, it is labeled as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be seen as sloppy interpretation of intuition, of conscience. The consequences of sin on the one hand (damnation, etc.) and of the self’s importance on the other are exaggerated, deformed, and produce a downward spiraling of obsessive self-absorption. Here, as in everything human, a comprehensive approach is vital. Intuition must be consulted about judgment—and judgment applied to intuition. I assign primacy to intuition in this sense: we don’t produce it ourselves. Nor do we produce our own desires. But intuition comes from above; most desires rise from the body. In the use of both we must apply ourselves correctly.

Now the human is the most maddeningly perplexing reality. I use the word “interpretation” above—and now feel the urge to interpret interpretation more comprehensively. We interpret an intuition in two ways: intellectually, thus as something meant or intended; and by action, thus by doing or abstaining to do something, by the exercise of will. A popular phrase comes to mind: “Which part of NO don’t you understand?” When we ignore a nudge of conscience, we interpret it by action.

Souls Sort Themselves

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.

Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.

This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.

This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.

The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…

* * *

Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.

The Sovereign Will

Talking of the spiral (last post) reminds me that the “problem of evil” has another dimension beyond theodicy (see Label Cloud for posts on that). I’m all too familiar with the philosophical solution that evil is “the absence of good.” We encounter it stated and restated in the great traditions. The problem with that view is that it doesn’t viscerally satisfy—an emphatic way of saying that something in the intuition rejects that answer. No, dammit, there’s more to it than that! Certain kinds of evil arising from passivity—like laziness—may be explained that way. People who are lazy certainly don’t move up the spiral toward the greater good; indeed they probably slowly sink. Laziness is a kind of balanced state: the will is lacking to do anything, good or evil; hence it is an absence of good. But we do encounter active evil in the world—the kind of actions where I, for one, find it almost impossible to believe that the deed springs entirely from ignorance. Positive, willful disregard of good must be present in it. I’ve experienced that. And if I have, so have others.

To focus on this a little more sharply, I would propose that good and evil deeds both require active willing. It is only our ability to form habits that deceives us into thinking that we “slip” into evil or do good because we’re “programmed” to do so. We forget that habits are formed out of voluntary activities. I type like a bandit, but I didn’t always. I began by concentrating. Thus even laziness is active—but it is habit, hence I can use it, as I do above, as an example of a neither-nor state of balance.

The very presence of a “sovereign will” automatically produces a polarized reality—because the will, to be real, has to have choices. Mazdaism, to give an example, is one of the most uncompromisingly polarized cosmologies. It projects an image of an infinite column of light in the “upward” direction, an infinite column of darkness in the “downward.” We’re in the mixing zone, as it were; maybe we're created here. The symbol of the spiral is an elaboration of that polarity, a rather creative intensification of it: the spiral suggests resistance to the vector, be it up or down. In ascent the spiral’s curvature is produced by our resistance, our selfishness; in its descent, the same curving is produced by our longing for the good; it brakes our rush to please ourselves.

Conceptualizations like heaven, purgatory, and hell correspond to real states—but they are too simple. We choose to be in these realms. They aren’t granted us, we’re not assigned to them, we’re not condemned to them. What we receive without any merit on our part is being, being of the highest order: with consciousness and with will.

--------------------

Illustration courtesy of Wikipedia, available here.

Twisted Together

The concept of complexity suggests an approach to thinking about values. Complex means, minimally, twisted together, entwined. Something made of many parts linked together in meaningfully related ways has more value than something simple existing without relationships. A slice of bread has more nutritional value than a lump of sugar with the same caloric value. Both produce energy in the body but the bread will provide more balanced nutrition owing to its more complex structure.

Another case. You come into a new community and meet two people. Both belong to important and well-connected families. One of them, Arthur, is a leading figure in his family, young but already widely accomplished. The other, Beaumont, is his family’s problem child, the source of many conflicts, with a very patchy history to put it generously. — This, by the way, is how a novelist develops a plot. He says: Who’s going to be more valuable to you in your work in the new community: Arthur or Beaumont? The truth is that odds heavily favor Arthur, and in most cases he will be very helpful; Beaumont may be entertaining, but he’ll be a problem sooner or later. The novelist knows this—knows how people eyeball situations—and therefore has a nice plot situation that might be exploited.

Both are complexly related to their families, but Arthur is integrated and Beaumont is not. This fact suggests that “relationship,” by itself, is not a sufficient condition for value. Relationships are central, but they range between love and hatred. Attraction and repulsion are more neutral terms, but speaking of love and hate permits us to think in terms of willful, feeling agents. We might hypothesize that creation is a movement in the direction of complexity, thus in the direction of an attractor. Destruction then may be envisioned as things spontaneously falling apart because an attractor has been removed; in its absence that which used to cohere no longer does.

Complexity, however, won’t solve the problem of morality. What is it about Beaumont that always produces trouble, mayhem, contention, flare-ups, wrecks, uproars, and the like? Why is it that whatever Arthur touches, it always turns green? Is it a willful quality? Is it grace? Is it nurture, nature, karma? Don’t look at me. I don’t have the answer. I think it is a will that freely decides, but I can’t justify that thought by the mechanics of logic.

Logic depends on concepts, but in Beaumont’s (or anybody’s) actual case, a point comes where a weird concept spoils the logic. Beaumont acts on his perceptions of reality; in his own mind he chooses the good. He seems unable to perceive the full context of his choice, unable to see that, more complexly considered, the choice he makes will lead to a negative outcome. That inability to see: is that also a choice? or is it a real inability. Logic can’t untwist that one for us. When I do bad things, I willfully ignore what I do perceive. Hence arises my belief that evil is chosen knowingly. But I can’t honestly speak for Beaumont.

This all sounds innocent enough, but its implications are quite major. We’ll have to go there.