Category Archives: Religion
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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Here is the passage leading to this quote…
A holy diary
It would be really interesting if a religion kept a chronicle of its own development from its own current perspective, never modifying past entries, but constantly reflecting upon and reinterpreting the older perspective in terms of the latest one.
(Imagine a collective version of a child writing a continuous diary, starting from infancy, each session reading the story so far, then continuing it.)
The chronicle might start of as a purely mythical self-interpretation of a mythical existence. Then it might progress to a more institutionalized state and formally self-interpret its formalization, and so on all the way to its development into an pluralistic interpersonal religion, and offer pluralistic self-interpretations of its own pluralistic existence and its harmoniously divergent views on its past and future.
The only drawback to the experiment would be if some reckless Prometheus-type were to hand the work to wild readers from a more primitive stage of development. Would they even grasp it as a chronicle? They might see it as a catalogue of true factual assertions. They might misinterpret truths they’re unprepared to grasp, like children attempting but failing to make sense of the adult world.
A They
I cannot help but think that Heidegger’s understanding of social being would have been radically different if he had participated in a society that understood fellow human beings as gateways to divine being, instead of in a Protestant Christian milieu (which holds that others are, at best, superfluous in one’s own personal relationship with God) and had developed to a point where National Socialism could dominate it.
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If you happen to believe other human beings are intrinsically part of one’s relationship to God you’ll consider the conditions for cultivating and preserving relationships sacred. You might occasionally go too far and idolize those conditions, but as long as the relationships are preserved it is possible to reawaken the spirit for the sake of which they are upheld.
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My experience of social being is exactly like Heidegger’s.
However, I interpret the experience differently. I’d call it a “deficient mode” of inhabiting a culture. Heidegger’s existentiell relationship with his culture distorted his understanding of everyday Dasein — and consequently of Dasein.
Meditations on the rough game
“Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…”
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The difference between simple animal pain and human suffering is the element of perplexity. Pain is mere sensation. If we let pain just be bare pain as the Buddhists advise and refuse to compound that pain with interpretation and conceptualization, we can withstand extreme pain with the dignity of a house pet.
Suffering is pain interpreted as an insight into the human condition, a certain foresight that is actually fore-blindness, an intellectual analogue to the discovery of the ever-present/ever-absent scotoma in our field of vision.
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Philosophers are perverse people who, upon detecting perplexity, instead of evading it like a normal person, go straight into it, and through it, in order to come out on the other side of it with something deeper and more comprehensive.
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There is nothing more natural than to detest philosophy. Without this natural impulse there would be no culture because there would be no stability.
But when stability is not advantageous, and deep disruption desired, nobody is better for the job than a philosopher. A philosopher will rip down a system of thought and replace it with another that was inconceivable while the old system reigned.
That’s why once a satisfactory system is put in place, the philosopher who established it should be given the post-war Churchill treatment.
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The best simple insight I’ve heard in the last year is that chaos is not the vacuum of order, but the simultaneous existence of far too many orders.
In respect to the genesis of a world, there is no ex nihilo.
The particular is articulated from infinite mess, speaking metaphysical perspective is chaos, and experientially, perplexity. To be philosophical is to willingly return to that mess and to allow it to re-articulate differently (for the sake of who knows what).
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Innovation is rough. That is why it rarely really happens.
People who want to invent without destroying have no choice than to be trivial.
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.
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Relativists believe morality is an illusion produced by ethical provincialism.
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Some kind of analogue exists here:
ethics : morals = phenomenon : noumenon
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My three most fundamental ethical principles:
- Listen to appeals.
- Keep your promises.
- Repent when you err.
Gathering
Suddenly and miraculously, three people find themselves sitting together in a room, conversing. Moments before, nine people sat alone in three rooms, talking.
Vision and voice
People love to watch an artist draw. He draws a line and slowly it becomes a shape. He adds more lines, and introduces shading. So far, the relationships are all within the page; a composition takes form. But the drawing suggests that it is a drawing of something — but of what? Here is where the suspense is concentrated. The interrelated elements on the page taken as a whole point beyond themselves, to realities beyond the page. In figurative art, the reference is to physical objects. But this is only the basest reality. Beyond it is mood, and the mood is connected to the figures. And beyond that, there are layers of symbol, starting with shared cultural meanings, proceeding onward to more obscure and personal intimations.
I think storytelling is a mode of speech that imitates drawing. Human beings are predominantly visual, and whatever modes of thought make use of the visual modes of thought gain an advantage.
Maybe objectivity is preferred over subjectivity because objectivity is more optical. When we don’t want to follow some involved line of thought, when we don’t want to reach the conclusion by the path of personal realization, but just want the bottom-line result, what do we ask for? A synopsis.
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Martin Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”
More and more, I am understanding Judaism to be a perpetually developing religion of time and speech subsuming space and sight, eternally at odds with the eternalizing religions of space and sight which look forward to the end of time (which entails an end to speech). Jews hear truth and say truth. In the process truth is revealed. Truth is a relationship. “Gentiles” see the truth and assert the truth. Truth is a thing.
To flatten the history of the Jews into a series of factual ethical assertions strung together on a thread of narrative is to misunderstand it (almost) completely.
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Here’s the Ricoeur passage that set me off on this line of thought:
…polysemy is the pivot of semantics. …we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this process presents itself as a convergence of two factors, a factor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the cumulative process… the word tends to be charged with use-values, but the projection of this cumulative process into the system of signs implies that the new meaning finds its place within the system. The expansion, and, if the case obtains, the surcharge is arrested by the mutual limitation of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limiting action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion, which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the law of our language. Words have more than one sense, but they do not have an infinity of meanings.
This example shows how semantic systems differ from semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any reference to history; they are intemporal systems because they are potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the binary oppositions between distinctive units play a role. In semantics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-sections in the process of sense, in the process of nomination.
We then understand what happens when the word returns to the discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greiman calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word volume will be interpreted as a body in space; if the theme concerns the library, the word volume will be interpreted as designating a book). If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run together in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More than one interpretation is then justified by the structure of a discourse which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be realized at the same time.
In short, language is in celebration. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered and deployed; but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic discourse, and the polysemy itself of our words results from the concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action of the semantic field.
Having a place
Reading Gilbert Ryle’s explanation of the expression “in my head”, I reflexively asked a Nietzschean question: Why would we be satisfied with understanding thoughts to be located in our heads, as if they occupied a space? Certainly, a thought process could lead us to that idea, and (collective) intellectual habit could preserve it, but could there be something satisfying or comforting about the idea that has made us more hospitable toward it? I recalled a passage from Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition:
The profound connection between private and public, manifest on its most elementary level in the question of private property, is likely to be misunderstood today because of the modern equation of property and wealth on one side and propertylessness and poverty on the other. This misunderstanding is all the more annoying as both, property as well as wealth, are historically of greater relevance to the public realm than any other private matter or concern and have played, at least formally, more or less the same role as the chief condition for admission to the public realm and full-fledged citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two things are connected.
Prior to the modern age, which began with the expropriation of the poor and then proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes, all civilizations have rested upon the sacredness of private property. Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that he expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it. In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well. The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of an underworld. The nonprivative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies.
Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, and it appears in the realm of the city through the boundaries between one household and the other. The law originally was identified with this boundary line, which in ancient times was still actually a space, a kind of no man’s land between the private and the public, sheltering and protecting both realms while, at the same time, separating them from each other. The law of the polls, to be sure, transcended this ancient understanding from which, however, it retained its original spatial significance. The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action (the idea that political activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern and found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy) nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town, but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.
It is therefore not really accurate to say that private property, prior to the modern age, was thought to be a self-evident condition for admission to the public realm; it is much more than that. Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.
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We will have a place of our own, one way or another. If we cannot have it in physical space, we will create that place socially. And failing that, we will establish it in our own mind and live inside our own private place.
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Giving a person a place in your own life is an act of humanity.
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:
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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.
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…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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
Edenic seeds
A biologist held out two seeds, one in each hand.
“This seed in my left hand is a future tree. If you plant this seed in a sunny spot on fertile soil and keep it watered it will consume nutrients, water and sunlight and grow into a tree.
“This seed in my right hand is a generative principle. If you place this seed in a sunny spot, on fertile soil and keep the soil watered, through the seed nutrients, water and sunlight will congregate and organize themselves into a huge tree.”
“That I can accept,” said the biologist’s colleague; “but your claim that these seeds come from the two trees of Eden strikes me as unprovable, and, frankly, unscientific.”
Protected: Trigrammar
Chuang Tzu on music, fear, weariness and stupidity
Ch’eng of North Gate said to the Yellow Emperor, “When Your Majesty performed the Hsien-ch’ih music in the wilds around Lake Tung-t’ing, I listened, and at first I was afraid. I listened some more and felt weary, and then I listened to the end and felt confused. Overwhelmed, speechless, I couldn’t get hold of myself.”
“It’s not surprising you felt that way,” said the emperor. “I performed it through man, tuned it to Heaven, went forward with ritual principle, and established it in Great Purity. Perfect music must first respond to the needs of man, accord with the reason of Heaven, proceed by the Five Virtues, and blend with spontaneity; only then can it bring order to the four seasons and bestow a final harmony upon the ten thousand things. Then the four seasons will rise one after the other, the ten thousand things will take their turn at living. Now flourishing, now decaying, the civil and military strains will keep them in step; now with clear notes, now with dull ones, the yin and the yang will blend all in harmony, the sounds flowing forth like light, like hibernating insects that start to wriggle again, like the crash of thunder with which I awe the world. At the end, no tail; at the beginning, no head; now dead, now alive, now flat on the ground, now up on its feet, its constancy is unending, yet there is nothing that can be counted on. That’s why you felt afraid.
“Then I played it with the harmony of yin and yang, lit it with the shining of sun and moon; its notes I was able to make long or short, yielding or strong, modulating about a single unity, but bowing before no rule or constancy. In the valley they filled the valley; in the void they filled the void; plugging up the crevices, holding back the spirit, accepting things on their own terms. Its notes were clear and radiant, its fame high and bright. Therefore the ghosts and spirits kept to their darkness and the sun, moon, stars, and constellations marched in their orbits. I made it stop where there is an end to things, made it flow where there is no stopping. You try to fathom it but can’t understand, try to gaze at it but can’t see, try to overtake it but can’t catch up. You stand dazed before the four-directioned emptiness of the Way, or lean on your desk and moan. Your eyes fail before you can see, your strength knuckles under before you can catch up. It was nothing I could do anything about. Your body melted into the empty void, and this brought you to an idle freedom. It was this idle freedom that made you feel weary.
“Then I played it with unwearying notes and tuned it to the command of spontaneity. Therefore there seemed to be a chaos where things grow in thickets together, a maturity where nothing takes form, a universal plucking where nothing gets pulled, a clouded obscurity where there is no sound. It moved in no direction at all, rested in mysterious shadow. Some called it death, some called it life, some called it fruit, some called it flower. It flowed and scattered, and bowed before no constant tone. The world, perplexed by it, went to the sage for instruction, for the sage is the comprehender of true form and the completer of fate. When the Heavenly mechanism is not put into action and yet the five vital organs are all complete this may be called the music of Heaven. Wordless, it delights the mind. Therefore the lord of Yen sang its praises thus: ‘Listen — you do not hear its sound; look — you do not see its form. It fills all Heaven and earth, enwraps all the six directions.’ You wanted to hear it but had no way to go about it. That was why you felt confused.
“Music begins with fear, and because of this fear there is dread, as of a curse. Then I add the weariness, and because of the weariness there is compliance. I end it all with confusion, and because of the confusion there is stupidity. And because of the stupidity there is the Way, the Way that can be lifted up and carried around wherever you go.”
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.