Reading Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy, I just had an epiphany: for the last few centuries we have been asking the question of free-will from a base-norm of unfreedom: “how does freedom emerge from the dynamics of unfree materials?” If you adopt Process Philosophy’s metaphysic, it makes much more sense to ask “how does unfreedom emerge from the interactions of free-willed particles?” This is a fascinating way to reinterpret reality.
Category Archives: Metaphysics
What is religion?
What is religion? My definition is very broad: Religion is the conscious effort to situate ourselves within a reality that involves but infinitely exceeds us conceptually, practically and morally.
Transfinition
When I say that some fact is “definitely true” it means that I cannot conceive how it could be otherwise. Sometimes, however, unexpectedly and shockingly infinity will demonstrate that reality is otherwise than how I thought, despite the fact that this event was inconceivable.
The very ground upon which things are defined shifts, relationships between thing and thing, each and everything are instantaneously renegotiated. Everything and every thing is somehow different while remaining the same. All this belongs to the phenomenon of paradigm shift.
But let’s for a moment turn away from the things and from everything, and look into that blind void from which this shock emerges, ex nihilo. Let’s stare into this scotoma, where nothing exists, but also where nothing is missing — because it is from here that metaphysics pours out fresh reality. It becomes visible only through shock of revelation.
It is from here, from this — from Whom? — that I relearn the difference between “everything” and “infinity”.
But however many times I am shifted and shocked, I remain finite, despite all appearances and temptations. But each time, my “everything” enlarges, becomes more flexible, grows more permeable, that is, if I can continue to want and to welcome God, dread and all.
Today “transfinition” seems the right word for this kind of event, where definitional fields shift, changing the meaning of everything as a whole and every thing in part, and implying the permanent possibility of other shifts. This keeps us aware of the radical difference between truth and reality, and gives us our closest approximation of understanding the meaning of infinity. We know infinity through transfinitition. We also believe in the reality of pluralism by way of transfinition.
Or so things seem to me, at this point in my ongoing history of shifts.
Secular mystic
I told a rabbi that I am a “secular mystic”.
What do I mean by that? I see the transcendent realm as inexhaustibly understandable. The act of understanding incomprehensible phenomena increases our capacity to understand. The very increase that makes the understanding possible makes us aware of new incomprehensible phenomena (and with it, the limits of our understanding), re-arousing the need to understand.
I am most interested in the experience of these limits. This problem could probably be called “hermeneutical liminality” but these days I’m trying to find clearer, prettier and more pregnant language to express this kind of idea, which is precisely why I’m interested in religion. But I find that most people are so misaligned on what religion is and does that use of religious (or “spiritual”) vocabulary leads to instant misunderstanding. “Threshold” is pretty. Limbo? Border or boundary? For now, I’ll just call them “boundary experiences”.
What are boundary experiences like when we encounter them? How do we recognize them? What are their characteristics? What are our natural responses, and are other, better responses available to us? In other words, what are the ethical implications of boundary experiences? When do we keep going, and when do we stop? When and how do we involve others in boundary-crossings?
And then: where have boundary experiences been misunderstood? And what does that look like?
My hostility toward magic is bound up with this last question: what do misunderstandings of boundary experiences look like? What artifacts of such misunderstandings remain in our culture? My attitude toward magic has nothing to do with how it conflicts with science’s current view of the world (about which I am grossly under-informed, anyway) and everything to do with the functioning of religion. Magic forecloses religious questions, and removes intellectual tensions required for religious insight.
Again, Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Or so it all appears to me right now, as I stand at the the threshold of Judaism. And one thing I’ve learned about thresholds is that something unexpected is always waiting in ambush — some unnoticed detail that changes everything.
Pluritarian Pluriversalism
To someone born into an autistic universe controlled by a single set of strictly logical natural laws, the experience of empathy and the subsequent revelation of an empathic pluriverse redefines the meaning of miracle, and of transcendence, and of religion.
Before, miracles were exceptions to the laws of nature. After, miracles are the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness: other minds, each with a world of its own — each with the power to change the meaning of one’s own world.
Before, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond the finite objective world. After, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond myriad finite objective worlds, each rooted in the elastic mind of a subject.
Before, religion was the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers. After, religion was still the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers, but the change in conceptions of transcendence and miracle means that it is the individual and the individual’s world that is transcended, and this means the route to transcendence is not around the world and one’s neighbors, but through them and their worlds. The activity of loving, respecting and learning from one’s neighbors is intrinsic to loving, respecting and learning from the infinite God who cannot be confined to any one world, however vast.
Myriad worship practices are needed to worship myriad aspects of an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly meaningful God. By this understanding, empathy is worship.
Souls
Every soul is the size of the entire known universe, containing every known thing within it, endures for all time from the earliest known pre-history to the most distant imaginable future, and encompasses every conceivable possibility. Therefore, no two souls are alike.
Souls vary in size, density, variety and complexity. Souls overlap in reality, but weave through realities differently, touching, entangling, moving and being moved by different beings.
Some souls have space in them for your soul, and are happy to extend you hospitality. Some souls seek your hospitality. Other souls need your soul locked up inside your silent body.
Tillich: ontology speaks analogously
From Tillich’s The Courage to Be:
What does self-affirmation mean if there is no self, e.g. in the inorganic realm or in the infinite substance, in being-itself? Is it not an argument against the ontological character of courage that it is impossible to attribute courage to large sections of reality and to the essence of all reality? Is courage not a human quality which can be attributed even to higher animals only by analogy but not properly? Does this not decide for the moral against the ontological understanding of courage? In stating this argument one is reminded of similar arguments against most metaphysical concepts in the history of human thought. Concepts like world soul, microcosmos, instinct, the will to power, and so on have been accused of introducing subjectivity into the objective realm of things. But these accusations are mistaken. They miss the meaning of ontological concepts. It is not the function of these concepts to describe the ontological nature of reality in terms of the subjective or the objective side of our ordinary experience. It is the function of an ontological concept to use some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side. Ontology speaks analogously. Being as being transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity. But in order to approach it cognitively one must use both. And one can do so because both are rooted in that which transcends them, in being-itself. It is the light of this consideration that the ontological concepts referred to must be interpreted. They must be understood not literally but analogously. This does not mean that they have been produced arbitrarily and can easily be replaced by other concepts. Their choice is a matter of experience and thought, and subject to criteria which determine the adequacy or inadequacy of each of them.
Seeing, knowing, anticipating
One person sees the same priciples underlying every circumstance, and attributes this to his ability to see the truth.
Another person sees the same priciples underlying every circumstance, and attributes this to his inability to transcend the truth he’s already learned to know.
Yet another person, noting both the truths he has learned to know and his belief in the existence of transcendental knowing, wonders what to make of this latter belief, a belief different in kind from the first, yet also a truth seen everywhere and experienced as an ability to see the truth. Can he transcend his belief in inexhaustible transcendence, and if so, how? He suspects that the means will be shocking and will enter from the least suspected nothingness, but that is what happened the last time.
Supranaturalistic distortion of revelation
Tillich via Polanyi: “Science, psychology, and history are allies of theology in the fight against the supranaturalislic distortions of genuine revelation. Scientific and historical criticism protect revelation; they cannot dissolve it, for revelation belongs to a dimension of reality for which scientific and historical analysis are inadequate.”
Supranaturalistic distortion of revelation! — I’ve needed this expression.
Just as resorting to magic to explain scientific phenomena ends inquiry prematurely and produces worse than useless knowledge, ending a religious crisis of faith with pat magical non-explanations prevents religion from doing its kind of work.
This is why I keep insisting that fundamentalisms of every denomination are anti-religious pseudo-religions that act to insulate faithless minds from the anxieties of genuine revelation. Fundamentalism is not extreme religion, it is a displacing counterfeit of religion.
*
Faith is not a matter of factual belief, it is a matter of personal relationship with fact and what stands inexhaustibly beyond fact.
*
Magic is the splattering of belief upon the inner walls of inadequate understanding.
Wordworlds
Nothing is improved when we replace worldviews with wordworlds.
To paraphrase Bernadette from the Jerk, “It’s not [the meanings] I’ll miss. It’s the stuff!”
Our problem is not metaphysics. It is metaphysical reductionism. And specifically metaphysical reductionisms that allow us to be individually solipsistic with our eyes, or collectively solipsistic with our ears. If we get our hands involved and through interacting with the myriad beings around us, permit a fluid and indeterminately multidimensional metaphysic to stand beyond our capacity to conceptualize — one whose essence is to occasionally shock us — we’ll be better able to live in a real world.
I really cannot read more minds-in-vats. ANT has ruined me.
Law of Reason
To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.
*
“Reason? Why?”
Because it is reasonable.
“But that’s circular.”
It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.
*
Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.
*
Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.
Saulinism?
I was talking with a good friend of mine last night about “organized” atheism and why we both distance ourselves from it.
For me, the problem with atheism does not lie in the incorrectness of the belief it professes. If you were to make a list of the average atheist’s professed disbeliefs, my list of disbeliefs would match it, check for check. I am especially in agreement with atheists in their disgust with the Fundamentalist “God”. On my list that box is checked twice and starred.
Where I find atheists lacking is in their philosophical complacency. The atheist’s checklist of disbeliefs is too short, and it doesn’t grow. That’s fine if the question of God’s existence bores you and you have other things to think about. That is just a non-theism: non-concern for the question. I also respect anti-Fundamentalism, though I question the choice of philosophy as weapon in that battle.
But what about these “militant” atheists who furiously check and re-check the same three boxes? I believe they actually help Fundamentalists by treating the Fundamentalist theology as the last word on faith, when it is not even the first. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to an extreme, it is failure of religion to begin.
Here is what I’d like to convey to the tiny handful of urgent truly philosophical atheists: There is no single belief in God, and so there cannot be a single disbelief in God.
Being an atheist is necessarily harder than being a theist, because you must understand a belief before you can refute it. To do the job right, an atheist must not only able to enter the belief (or at least its conceptual space) in order to understand it. This “entry” is the nature of authentic theisms, and if you do not know what I am talking about, you have some basic learning to do before you can get going. Then the atheist must find the way back out this belief. Finally, he must be able to draw a map of that path from entrance to exit. This atheism is difficult and respectable.
Here is an outline of an atheism I could respect: this atheism would industriously hunt down every existing conception of God in order to understand and destroy it. Once it destroyed every existing conception it would then turn its attention to anticipating every future conception, in order to prevent its birth if not its conception.
Let’s give this atheistic discipline a name: Saulinism.
But do remember: it is easier to get in than to get out — especially once you know the difference between in and out.
*
P.S. Or make it pretty.
Dialectic is dialectic is dialectic
Latour: “If there really is one thing that materialism has never known how to celebrate, it is the multiplicity of materials, that indefinite alteration of the hidden forces that enhance the shrewdness of those who explore them.”
For some time I’ve suspected that Marx failed to really turn Hegel upside-down. He just exchanged the contents within the same container. The container itself — idealism — was just emptied of mind-concepts and filled with matter-concepts. However, with Marx as with Hegel “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”
The idea of a mind and the idea of a brain are both ideas. One who thinks of brains but does not interact with and allows stubbornly surprising real brains to intrude the idea of brains, has taken zero steps toward realism, however intensely one has thought those steps through and however vividly one has pictured the reality at which we must arrive. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, the same is true even of one’s own mind…
If you succeed in failing to do this, your prize is the entire universe. Then you can say:
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
*
Here is the passage leading to this quote…
Thoughts on ethics
An ethic supports a particular ethos. Behavior is judged ethically according to the ethos promoted or undermined. Ethics is relative.
Morality transcends ethics, and judges ethos and ethics.
According to this view, it is possible in principle to be ethically immoral by participating in bad ethos.
*
Relativists believe morality is an illusion produced by ethical provincialism.
*
Some kind of analogue exists here:
ethics : morals = phenomenon : noumenon
*
My three most fundamental ethical principles:
- Listen to appeals.
- Keep your promises.
- Repent when you err.
Solitude
Solitary confinement deprives a human being of all intentional objects. The continua of mind, of time, of cosmos are truncated to I, now and here, which, despite all narcissistic new age notions are perfectly meaningless apart from the being beyond them. Life is lived in reference to the metaphysical, through the medium of world.
Chord: mind over matter
Some quotes on the theme of divorce of mind and matter:
*
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.
*
…While world alienation determined the course and the development of modern society, earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science. Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all. This is perhaps clearest in the development of the new science’s most important mental instrument, the devices of modern algebra, by which mathematics “succeeded in freeing itself from the shackles of spatiality,” that is, from geometry, which, as the name indicates, depends on terrestrial measures and measurements. Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of earth-bound experience and his power of cognition from the shackles of finitude.
The decisive point here is not that men at the beginning of the modern age still believed with Plato in the mathematical structure of the universe nor that, one generation later, they believed with Descartes that certain knowledge is possible only where the mind plays with its own forms and formulas. What is decisive is the entirely un-Platonic subjection of geometry to algebraic treatment, which discloses the modern ideal of reducing terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols. … Yet even more significant than this possibility — to reckon with entities which could not be “seen” by the eye of the mind — was the fact that the new mental instrument, in this respect even newer and more significant than all the scientific tools it helped to devise, opened the way for an altogether novel mode of meeting and approaching nature in the experiment. In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.
…With the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all. It is no longer the beginning of philosophy, of the “science” of Being in its true appearance, but becomes instead the science of the structure of the human mind.
*
Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth: I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.
Constitution of “who”
Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”
William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”
*
If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.
For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?
To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.
To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.
But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.
*
*
It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:
- What kind of being is specifically human being?
- What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
- How ought a person relate to other people?
- How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
- How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?
Analytic dialectic and synthetic dialectic
Two forms of dialectic can be distinguished. They have different characters and different trajectories.
Synthetic dialectic moves toward monism.
- Synthetic dialectic is reductionistic.
- Its method is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which preserve irrelevant, complicating and inhibiting distinctions.
- Synthetic dialectic has a passionate and destructive character. It tends to destroy complex structure and release energy.
- Synthetic dialectic tends to decrease the total number of categories as well as the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting these categories, while increasing the scope of the remaining categories.
- Synthetic dialectic is experienced as liberation from de-centering illusions — oppressive notions that alienate a person from himself, prevent him from living according to his own experience and judgment, and which oblige him to live according to the experiences and judgments of others.
- The thrust of synthetic dialectic is to detect the irrelevance and invalidity of alien claims and to reject them on that basis.
- Whether idealistic or materialistic, synthetic dialectic attempts to finally subsume all being under a single, universal ontological category, or a monad. This category is understood to be basis of truth. Thinking from other bases is at best provisional and at worst, false.
- Synthetic dialectic can appear absolutist, and often succumbs to absolutism.
- Synthetic dialectic strengthens the will, but weakens the intellect.
- Synthetic dialectic synthesizes — “puts together” — broader, more universal categories. Fewer and fewer particularities are perceived in their particularity, but are taken as generalities, types or manifested principles and are treated according to their abstract intelligible character. Anomalous particularities are disregarded as irrelevant.
Analytic dialectic moves toward pluralism.
- Analytic dialectic is antireductionistic.
- Its method is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which project unnecessary, simplistic and unproductive equivalencies.
- Analytic dialectic has a moderating and constructive character. It tends to consume energy generating structures of increasing complexity.
- Analytic dialectic tends to increase the total number of categories and the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting them, while decreasing the scope of each categories.
- Analytic dialectic discovers diversity within apparent equivalency. It looks for failures to detect relevant distinctions made by other people, due to the crudeness of one’s own schema. It discovers both new distinctions and new, valid, obligating claims from others.
- The thrust of analytic dialectic is to detect the relevance and validity of alien claims and to affirm them.
- Analytic dialectic attempts to understand multiple, overlapping ontological existences in all being, which permits the understanding of diverse, valid and finite perspectives. The ground of being is understood as an engulfing infinity, to which human beings relate in finite terms.
- Analytic dialectic can appear relativist, and often succumbs to relativism.
- Analytic dialectic strengthens the intellect, but weakens the will.
- Analytic dialectic scrutinizes broad, universal categories and analyzes — “loosens them up” — into finer categorizations more capable of doing justice to “particularities in their particularity”. Particularities are still treated according to their intelligible character, but intelligibility is obligated to answer to the truth of particulars and to accommodate them.
*
Both forms of dialectic are necessary to human life. Neither is intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. The question is one of context and dynamic balance.
Somethingness
Blindness conceals itself behind nothing.
Nothing is there, but nothing is missing. Nothing is seen, but more importantly, nothing is not seen.
*
Contrast disrupts nothingness and brings somethingness into existence to us.
Presence in the midst of absence and absence in the midst of presence are equally capable of disrupting nothingness.
But presence in the midst of presence and absence in the midst of absence are nothing.
Same against same means nothing. White against white and black against black have the same effect.
*
We are blind to time because we are always inside time and never not inside it.
We are blind to space because we are always inside space and never not inside it.
We are blind to spirit because we are always inside spirit and never not inside it.
Yet we sense that there is an outside. Who knows how we sense it, or what such an outside could be?
And who knows what else we are inside and cannot conceive of not being inside?
Metaphysical pluralism
For whatever reason, I’ve found myself reading books by professed materialists (Santayana, Geertz, Langer). A couple of years ago that would have been grounds for dropping the book immediately, but now I’m approaching it phenomenologically: Anchor your work in whatever metaphysic you like if you need to — as long as I am able to bracket that metaphysic and still find validity in what you’ve built upon it.
If I am going to take a philosophy seriously that philosophy must be capable of standing on any base, and of standing on no base, and of standing on all conceivable bases simultaneously. Taking a philosophy seriously means its ideas eventually might be accepted and integrated into my own body of understanding, as opposed to being regarded as an intellectual sickness to diagnose or an alien artifact to observe externally as “someone else’s”. Taking a philosophy seriously means it might deeply influence my own way of seeing the world.
When a person confesses faith in a particular metaphysic or seems intent on eliminating metaphysics altogether it makes me suspicious, but that suspicion is only grounds for caution, not rejection.