Kent Myers
I will mention in my paper someting about “climate of opinion”, a concept that W borrowed and that Voegelin borrowed from W. I think it is a layer that rests between two layers of error that you are referring to. Sin is typically thought of as inescapable, perpetual haze that limits us. We see through a glass darkly. Then there is an individual’s conscious, voluntary egotism and unchecked will to power, etc. THe climate of opinion, between the two, is a layer of culture that sets a standard for how to think. Our modern climate defines matters in such a way that we are not able to experience reality. The climate enforces a set of assumptions, making them unquestionable, and most people are unable to break through. As both W and Voegelin say, philosophy is ruined, and the climate makes it difficult to recognize this and to recover as a civilization. This means that many people aren’t on their own willfully ignorant and misdirected, or even evil, they just don’t know any better, but are also conditioned to be swayed by people who can tempt them into a second reality. Their natural awareness and orientation toward the divine is shut down. This is not to say that there ever was full awareness anywhere in history, or that all members of a culture are fully shut down even today. We might be at a low point, but we are also gradually coming back to our senses. W and even Voegelin thought that this might be happening, and it was their mission to help it along.
In a business proposal this week I wrote that one of the features of our approach is “celebrate accomplishment” with the benefit of “positive organizational culture, retention.” Inevitably, a reviewer thought this was weak and wanted it out. My answer was 1) We profess Agile Development and this is an essential element. We actually believe it! 2) Three of the main customers are keen on celebration and know its benefits, but the review team always includes a cost weenie who will fight for the low bid no matter what, figuring it’s all just replaceable bodies.
I had been imagining that there was a one-to-one relationship between a human experience and an agent. But now I see that it would be useful to think of many agents having a single experience. A shared experience (if that exists for W) tends to be intense, though this kind of experience can be compromised to accommodate divergent choices, hence less beautiful for some participants. I’m pondering here whether the joining of either the experiences or the agents is just an amalgamation of many individual experiences or is a kind of super-agent having a super-experience. (I met the author of “Super Better”, by the way. It’s actually a good book!)Beth, Let me take a stab at the next level of consciousness. This notion that there is “just more” consciousness between dogs and people — I don’t accept that. There is an unbridgeable distinction, but not to say that I can’t act like a dog much of the time, but the dog does NOT use symbolic language. So there could certainly be “more” consciousness within the level exemplified by humans, such as better organized memory, better evaluation of options, etc., but it is hard to concieve of a step-up change from a human-level of consciousness. One possibility would be an ‘organic’ consortium of humans. I think that’s what “the Borg” in the later Star Trek series was going for — nine humans living as one. (The very fetching “7 of 9” stepped down to became a dull and peaceful human, but she retained feelings for her prior unit.) In the story we humans were repulsed by the loss of individuality and by their lack of respect for lower creatures, but there was no denying that the Borg had super-human capability. Or perhaps we could just look at exceptional humans we know of and consider whether they had distinctly different and better consciousness that might propagate. We may have already witnessed that within history. Julian Jaynes makes a serious case that humans did not introspect until recently, only after the time the Illiad was written. The gods spoke to people from one side of the brain, and that was our will before the voices died down. It sounds preposterous but the evidence is hard to deny and serious people continue to work on it. So I guess from that we could speculate that there could be a major restructing of the mind. Perhaps we could achieve a constant mystical awaerness, not just a temporary trip, and it would persist simultaneously with a practical workaday mind. I don’t know if there are any cases of that ocurring. In a way, that is a reversion to having two minds, except that in this round they both work differently and interact differently. We do still have the structure in place for two minds. A change that is not quite a step level is to swing back from today’s worldwide ‘objective’ culture to a ‘subjective’ culture. Sakaiya wrote about this in a famous futurist work, arguing that we were returning to an epoch like the Middle Ages where people were hardly concerned with getting ahead economically and were much more active in religious-aesthetic pursuits, something that hardly made sense until very recently. Could humans become doubly reflexive, whatever that would mean? Maybe that would mean being able to play things out to an extreme extent, like a chess player who plays 10 moves ahead. We know from W that the future is undetermined, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t synthesize a content, like we have of the past, but composed of all the habits in the world that we ‘just know’. We could accurately steer past the past and stop making stupid, selfish, short-term decisions. Hah, never happen!
The protagonist in my novel gradually transformed herself in the presence of and contemplation of trees. Lots of old ones in Japan, a forest named “Beautiful Women”, the stump of the Wye Oak, the Charter Oak, Muir Woods, and some others. She is compared to a medieval nun who became famous for hugging trees. I’m not quite sure why or how the trees changed her, but she really connected both horizontally and vertically through their help. I am waiting anxiously for the buckeye tree in the park to drop some buckeyes, and I’m going to give everybody at work a nice big shiny one. Nobody else pays attention that tree. All the attention is on the nearby tree with edible chestnuts. The squirrels and Koreans vie for control. I just came back from the National Apple Festival in Pennsylvania. The many thousands of apple trees in this special region are amazingly productive. I think I’ll have my last piece of apple dowdy right now! — a reward for finishing class.
It seems to me that philosophers had been looking deeply at rocks, and that’s how they came up with dead matter. Since a human has the best access to himself, as an exemplification of nature, he would be more likely to stumble into what nature is like, being himself a part of nature. He is likely to conclude that his existence is characterized by experience, since that’s front of mind for him all day, every day. And from that conclusion, in a large but not unreasonable act of imagination, he concludes further that experience must also characterize the unities of which he is made, all the way down. I would myself go looking at things where nature is most exposed, not where it is most hidden. That’s the argument in our readings, which appeals to me.
(I also want to keep in mind those other, unfamiliar experiencing unities. After animals and plants, the other three kingdoms that I know nothing about are fungi, protist and monera. Then there are virus, organelles, proteins, and probably several other sub-life systems that appear “lively”.)Based on this week’s reading, one thing I could now say that W accomplished is a correction of Hume and Kant. While I haven’t studied either of those figures, I’ve frequently read about Hume not being able to prove causation. That’s left out there as a problem to be solved, as it is indeed a problem for those who continue to labor under Hume’s assumption that everything begins with the senses.I was very gratified to read that W solved that one, and I was also wondering why I had never heard that it had been solved. It’s odd that I can believe that W is right and can (somewhat) understand the argument, but it remains very difficult to drop the conviction that sense is all. This isn’t just a word game, I have to dig far deeper to ‘get’ it.
I’ll repeat the Hardy quotation “Experience is as to intensity, not as to duraton.” I’m accepting, so far, the common sense notion that experience does require time, just that you can get more or better experience if it is intense, and probably faster as well. I was just thinking of that psychological phenomenon, that when you are just about to have a car crash or airplane crash, you suddenly see all your controls and all forces simultaneously with great clarity and make the right move to save yourself. I read that some experimenters had figured out a way to induce that state (womewhat) safely on a roller coaaster or something in order to do some research. It’s an interesting throught that we have the capability for ‘high performance’ experience that rarely comes into play. I don’t know if this state is same or different from drug-induced states. Maybe it is the same as near death, but when you are dying you rarely have an emergency problem you have to solve. So one might say that there is time, and I suppose space, but we warp it, not just by going at the speed of light, but also in our subjectivity, so it’s not absolute. (But I need to stop looking at YouTube physics and get back to the readong.)
Let’s bundle up philosophy and theology, surely, but I wouldn’t want to draw a hard boundary at that point. I looked up the phrase, “queen of the sciences” and found this passage which seems to resonate with W’s restoration:
“… “science” has historically had a broader meaning. Augustine defined science to include anything related to knowledge of the temporal world. Thomas Aquinas deemed theology a science because it could be known by general revelation as well as special revelation. More recently, German universities in the 19th Century understood science to mean “a legitimate area of study oriented to a particular object, and possessing appropriate methods of investigation.” They called this Wissenschaft to mean a science with an object to study. Theology, the study of God and His actions on Earth, fits this definition.”
The problem with today’s science is that it dogmatically asserts that its objects and its methods are the sole way of knowing.I like Voegelin’s response when somebody said “That’s nothing new.” He said that if nobody said it before, it is unlikely to be true.
Seems to me that we are doing philosophy here, a philosophy which just happens to allow for somewhat tortured and unorthodox reconciliations with sacred texts.The Christian reconcilers are over in the other class.
We have all probably known people who, when asked, “What happened?” will rattle off a play-by-play with absolutely no summary, interpretation, or what I would call ‘meaning’. That type of account lacks the depth that I seek, expect from, or add to, experience. Regardless of which way is more or less, better or worse, I find it very alien. A neighbor girl is entirely that way, and she is very friendly sort, but I always had a hard time having a conversation with her. She is now pursuing a physics PhD at Stanford, so obviously it has not been an impediment to her success as a scientist, but as a philosopher, I wonder….
Jason, Do you have an opinion about how quickly, as a human, one can say that one has had an “experience”? Seems to me that you have to ‘land the plane’, i.e., reflect in a way that assembles and chunks the experience from the perceptual stream, then attaches at least a first level of feeling to it, then meaning, and at that point I’ll assume the experience is conscious, and even that the person can describe it in words, however vaguely. Then the experience becomes revised on the occasions that it is retrieved (or actually reconstituted within the changing configuration of all experience). Highly meaningful experience will necessarily be frequently reconstituted experience, which might imply that it has plenty of opportunity to become “inaccurate.” Is eidetic memory even meaningful, or processed enough to become experience? (I suppose W. has an answer to all this, but I haven’t read it yet!)
I am unfamiliar with Naess. I checked wiki and found this summary: “every being, whether human, animal or vegetable, has an equal right to live and to blossom.[29] Næss states that through self-realization humans can become part of the ecosystems of Earth, in distinction to becoming only themselves.[further explanation needed] According to one writer, Næss defined the ethical consequences of self-realization as: If one does not know how the outcomes of one’s actions will affect other beings, one should not act.[30].”
I am interested in what we mean by “flourishing” and it sounds like he is a good source, and appears here to emphasize a process approach. But I was also curious about how you could draw a concept of flourishing from Christian thought. Seems to me that God wans us to be joyful and peaceful and without want, but that is neither an aim nor a promise. I’m hoping I’m missing something. My friend recommended to me last night Holmes Ralston III, an eco philosopher who has bot a Christian and process streak. I haven’t had a chance to read anything, but the titles look good. I think this is another instance of a person being on the edge of the process world. I’m expecting to use such sources in my projects. So thanks for that tip.I appreciate your concern, but I think the list of process thinkers was meant as a limited sample. In our first course Jay said process was not a school, not even a tradition, but a “movement”. To return to the water image, a movement is like the wide, shallow, and slow (?) flow of water down the Everglades. There are no obvious boundaries or center. That’s frustrating, since we would like to identify what’s inside and what’s outside. The boundary I am setting is simply between “wet” and “dry.”
I was delighted with Griffin book in which he explains (at length!) how we can do without supernaturalism. I’m there, but I guess I haven’t entirely given up on irrationality, ignorance, and faith in things not seen. Thanks, Lawrence, for formulating Cobb’s position on Jesus. That sounds good too, but I’d like to withhold my certainty. I have a good friend, a theologian, who did some study with Cobb and came away with the feeling that, for his taste, Jesus was insufficiently central in Cobb’s thinking. I haven’t asked him to explain that, partly because I don’t want to know. I’d like to hover in the “saving story,” Maybe Charles has a term for that.