Essays

Perhaps the only thing broken is us

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:21:36 -0400

Three headlines catch my eye as I sip my morning coffee: one is about the ‘scary’ climate message from the past indicating that the CO2 targets that our world’s leader seem currently unable to agree upon still amount to “playing with fire,” according to the author’s scientific sources, because those levels were historically associated with sea level rises that would be disastrous today. No comfort there, if our best efforts and greatest magnanimity toward lesser-endowed nations will buy us nothing but a disaster!
            The second headline asks: “What happened to Global Warming?” and points out that contrarians, who argue that the human impact on the environment is trivial at worst, find great comfort in the lack of continued worldwide temperature increases over the last decade, seeing it as proof that global warming theories are unfounded.
            A third headline discloses that surveys show an increasing apathy and burnout about Global Warming. Folks just want to deal with ‘real’ issues like the dismal state of their local economies. But those ‘real’ issues that folk want dealt with, and the potential global disaster that empirical data are pointing to, are inextricably linked.
            The most salient lesson that can be learned from the recent economic collapse is that the wealth creation seen over the past few decades has been nothing but slight-of-hand. And like Bernie Madoff’s ‘wealth’ generating investment activities, our economy has been largely a global Ponzi scheme. Unfortunately, like it or not, we have all been investors in this scheme and are now suffering for it. The ‘wealth’ that was created showed its true nature by evaporating overnight.
            The point of this is not that the system is broken so much as that it has been misused. Just like the environment; which is interestingly a word that we use to subtly distance ourselves from what we have really been misusing — each other. We draw a circle, highlighted boldly, around ourselves, or around our families. What is within that circle is that which we care for, and more importantly act for. What is outside that circle is fair game — resources for supplying our ever-increasing needs, for that after all is the nature of a Ponzi scheme.
            We do draw other circles, although these are not boldly highlighted, but are drawn in varying shades of light grey. These can include our community, our profession or employer, our economic class, religion, political party, alma mater, region, nation, or species. These wider circles receive some attention from us, but for the most part they are only a reflection of our true concern — the tight circle around me and mine.
            But it is not even this that is wrong. It is a daydream that we sometimes have, to believe that our concern can ever be budged to truly encompass what is outside that tight circle. It is, as many would say, human nature to be most concerned with that most central of circles.
            Well in fact it is nature; but not ‘human’ nature. This is where the break has occurred. There isn’t a human nature and some other nature. There is only nature and we are it. Even to say that we are a part of nature always leaves open the possibility that we are the important part of nature. This results in a schism between humans and their environment. Such a tight circle it is, not only protecting what is important to us — ourselves and our families and those lesser concerns that we have — but also constraining our vision to see beyond these immediate personal concerns. We have built a wall around us, and we can no longer see clearly.
            Many see Global Warming as a technical problem to be fixed using science. The environment is seen as a great machine and all we have to do is figure out which levers to pull or buttons to push and we will have solved the problem. But the problem is us. We are what is broken. We are like a section of a large ice sheet that has broken off and as we sail out to sea, slowly evaporating, we see the ice sheet left behind as the one having the difficulty. We see it moving away, not ourselves.
            For the majority of us, sustainability is nothing more than a set of practices and policies that need to be put in place so that the future can be secured, like some beachhead occupied by an opposing force. Yet if we pay attention, we will see that the enemy is us. Walt Kelly acknowledged this when he designed a “Pogo” poster for the first Earth Day in 1970 across which he wrote: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” But it wasn’t a joke.
            Even those who see Global Warming as a great hoax of charlatans and politicians fail to see, because they are blinded to it by this wall of separation, the visceral suffering inflicted on many in this world, and by that I do not mean just humans who are suffering because of ever increasing shortages in the world. It’s not a matter of mal-distribution either since much of what we over-consume originates in those areas that suffer most and which would continue to suffer if it was consumed in place. It’s the over consumption that is wrong, and that is tied directly back to our broken economy. After all, the fix for that is to get consumption going again! Yet that will just ensure that we repeat this experience over and over again until it can no longer be supported.
            The difficulty lies in how we see ourselves as being in relation to an environment and in relation to other members of our community. This is a distancing, a setting apart, a distinction, that we make between ourselves and others. Everything then is seen in terms of me — my needs and desires, the costs to my health, the impact on my environment, my family, etc.
            Yet the surprising thing is that this is not the only way that we can see ourselves and this world. Although we tend to forget this, this way of relating to nature, rather than being nature and seeing it as a whole and not as a collection of separate things adventitiously stuck together like some Frankenstein Humpty-            Dumpty, is not natural. It is a choice we make every moment of every day; every time we think: “what’s best for me?” Ultimately, it is the way we see ourselves that is broken and which needs to be fixed. Not the environment; not the economy; just us.
            Rather than this being an insurmountable obstacle beyond the reach of our scientific and technological prowess, they do not even apply. Nor does politics, policy, or any other mechanical tweeking. Instead, it is the opportunity for each and every one of us to change how we see ourselves. Fixing that will ultimately fix the problem because we are the problem. And we don’t have to lobby anyone to do something about it, or pass laws to fix it. It’s an opportunity for each of us to become whole again. Yes, that is a spiritual wholeness. It’s putting life back into the whole natural being, not by seeing the interconnections between humans and nature, but by seeing the lack of separation between humans, nature and each other. Isn’t that what is really missing?

Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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What is Actually Given in Experience

Sat, 16 May 2009 10:49:13 -0400

Paper Abstract
What is immediately experienced? Is it a world of a plurality of things, set off, one against another. Or is it a world that consists of a unity of things, all connected together? Or is it neither a constructed, nor natural unity, but rather a whole not consisting of any parts at all? I will examine immediate experience and various treatments of it in order to show the inadequacy of any view that imposes a structure of parts upon reality. Toward this end, I will specifically discuss the ideas of Bergson, James, Bradley, and Peirce. I will argue against James’ assertion that immediate experience consists of a plurality consisting of conjunctive and disjunctive relations, and in order to show that immediate experience is an indistinguishable whole, I will rely on Bergson’s discussion of the intuition of duration and its implications in light of Bradley’s work, and use Peirce to nuance certain technical points.

            What form does the nature of the world take? Does it consist of many things, alone in their aseity, so that there is a plurality of things somehow following laws independent of their natures that coincide only by some chance shuffle of the overall configuration? Like children falling into the closest chair when the music stops? Or is there a unity of not many[1] natures, that brings neighbors into the closest of intimacy, so that they are no longer separate, no longer neighbors, but all merely facets of an immanent whole? Is this a question that we can answer through a conceptual analysis of already established truths? Or do we need to take another course? Concepts are only symbols of things, and thus bear with them a plurality already destructive of the whole.[2] How then could they possibly help us? Our only recourse to answering this question is to pay attention to that which forms our very consciousness – immediate experience. By this I do not mean something in this measure of time, as accounted for by the metronomic ticking of the clock, setoff from all else; rather, I mean it in the sense of not being mediated through symbolic representations. Immediate experience is that which is felt as our enduring presence in our own lives, rather than known as what is experienced. It is before all analysis, before all dichotomizations and comparisons. It is what our experience is, not what our experience is of. It requires the highest level of attention, which Bergson identifies with a lifting of a veil that allows us to appear to ourselves as we really are,[3] because the content of our experiences is so seductive that it always draws our attention in an advertisement of it. That is why Madison Avenue relishes that word. This essay will review the arguments made by four individuals who the writer feels have taken a central place in the controversy of what is actually given in experience. The four writers are William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, F.H. Bradley, and Henri Bergson. Part of this review will focus on each of these individuals’ approach to the issue, and by that I mean where their attention was focused, and by which means they arrived at their conclusions – an intuitive apprehension of immediate experience, or a manipulation of symbolic representations of that which is always already the past. Throughout, I would like to use Bergson’s ideas as the reference against which the others will be compared. To that end, I must first give an introduction to Bergson’s use of the word “intuition” that he only fully explains in his essay “An Introduction to Metaphysics.”
            The concept of duration is the central insight of Bergson’s philosophy. Duration is not the sequential ordering of instants of time – something thought – but is the living flow of everything “down to the smallest particle of the world in which we live the duration immanent to the whole of the universe.”[4] Given its role in his work, we need to be clear exactly how this insight is obtained, as it is not through intellectual reasoning about our perceptions, as he has pointed out. Rather, Bergson is clear that it arises within an intuitive felt experience of our bodies known via our affections and not our perceptions.[5] His thought here echoes Schopenhauer’s counter to Kant’s assertion that we can never know the thing-in-itself, wherein he pointed out that we are a thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer asserted that the implications of this were very great because they undermined the still prevalent assertion that consciousness is a knowing and not, as he asserted, a willing or doing.[6] This fundamental error creates difficulties because “being-known of itself contradicts being-in-itself, and everything that is known is as such only phenomenon.”[7] Bergson similarly highlights this difference using the simple example of mixing a glass of sugar and water. He points out that the waiting until the sugar melts is “big with meaning,” because his impatience while waiting is not something thought, it is something lived.[8] Yet, isn’t living only the flux of experiences that we obtain from our perceptions and our thoughts around them? Bergson counters this surface understanding by pointing out that the flux-like nature of perceptions and thoughts, such as is subsumed under our common everyday way of thinking about experience, only exists because the universe and everything in it endures essentially, and it is this essential enduring, not the kind of enduring that science speaks of, where it is assigned as another quality of things that can be known intellectually through our measurement of it, that is felt within our own living body. This enduring is immanent and not just attached to our bodies. To understand this, we must become clear of the intended meaning of immanence for Bergson and how that plays out in his depiction of intuition, without which duration has little of the meaning that Bergson wants to give it.
            Immanence, for Bergson, cannot entail within-ness, in-ness, or any other abstraction that entails a placing into or within. Such depictions suffer from the relative nature of the resulting view. Being within a thing, I am a transcendental onlooker, like that of Husserl. This is a psychologism – it is already an interpretation. Bergson uses the example of John Stuart Mill as an example of the kind of philosopher who, not being able to resign themselves to being only “psychologists in psychology” set themselves a metaphysical objective and assume that they have arrived there when they seek ‘intuitions’ via analysis. Bergson points out that this is the very negation of intuition as he means it.[9] By transporting themselves out of the ego “so as to make a series of sketches, notes, and more or less symbolic and schematic diagrams” they have confused the point of view of intuition and that of analysis.[10] It is here, he says, that philosophical empiricism is born, within a confusion of the point of view of intuition and that of analysis. It is from this confusion and its passing directly from the original and “very indistinct” intuition that science obtains its material.[11] Yet, rationalism is “the dupe” of the same illusion. “Like empiricism, it tries to join these fragments together in order to re-create the unity of the self.”[12] Instead of these surface understandings and conceptual confusions, Bergson presents us with a meaning for immanence that cannot be expressed conceptually because it is the living and not the knowing of our experiences that is its meaning. Pointing the way into this meaning, he says: “if I draw myself in from the periphery towards the centre, if I search in the depth of my being that which is most uniformly, most constantly, and most enduringly myself, I find an altogether different thing.”[13] The ‘thing’ he finds is no thing in an objective sense, except as the barest of indications, because it never stands still to be indicated. It is an identification, but not one derived from qualitative equalities or from a positional subjectivity, but from the very presence of our bodies here in this flowing whole that is our lived experience. In this sense, “immanence” takes on a ‘mystical’ meaning, since only mystics try to speak of what Bergson is here trying to bring forth. The meaning Bergson is indicating is that as Meister Eckhart expressed it in his allegory of wine in a wood cask, wherein he illustrated the difference between being “in” and being “immanent.” The wine, he said, is in the cask differently than it is in the wood, which it permeates. We can drink the wine in the cask, but not the wine within the wood. So there are these two different meanings of inwardness. But it is different, he said, with spiritual immanence. Such immanence means not only that the wine is permeating the wood, but the wood is also permeating the wine, and the wine is the wood, and the wood, the wine.[14]
            In leading up to his explanation of intuition, Bergson makes two important points that play out, or unfold, from this idea of immanence as he has framed it. The first is that we become immanent in things, other than ourselves, by a kind of “sympathy” and that we insert ourselves into these things by an effort of imagination.[15] This removes us from a “grasping” of movement from without, where we remain where we are; instead, we are where it is, and our experience is from within – as it is in itself. Thus it is not a thing-known, but as a thing-in-itself that we experience it, and this gives us an absolute, he says.[16] He uses the example of a hero’s character as found in a novel. The author’s attempts to describe the hero’s character, and all his adumbrations of it, “can never be equivalent to the simple and indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were for an instant to identify myself with the person of the hero himself.”[17] And Bergson notes, “it is in this sense, and in this sense only, that absolute is synonymous with perfection.”[18] This perfection that he is speaking of is the perfection of the experience – its wholeness. A representation, he goes on to point out, is only always taken from a certain point of view external to the thing, and thus, like Husserl’s tree, is never complete, but only partial and adumbrated. The absolute is the object and not its representation. And because of this, this absolute is infinite.[19] He says, “Now, that which lends itself at the same time both to an indivisible apprehension and to an inexhaustible enumeration is, by the very definition of the word, an infinite.”[20] This author cannot help but notice that it is here that we can discover the difference between sympathy and compassion, for it is only in this kind of immanent sympathy with another that we can truly find compassion. Likenesses may lead to sympathetic feelings, but compassion can only come by sharing this very innermost essence of another – its heart, so to speak. And perhaps this is not that far from Bergson’s own view, even though he uses the word sympathy, perhaps in fear of too strong a nuance to the immanence that he bases his thought upon. For when he defines intuition, it is as a “kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”[21]
            Duration for Bergson is an infinite absolute, perfectly known through an immanence within one’s life. “It is our own personality in its flowing through time – our self which endures” which is the one reality “which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis.”[22] This duration “excludes all idea of juxtaposition, reciprocal externality, and extension.”[23] Our experience is an un-distinguished flux – a continuous flux that is not comparable to any flux that Bergson has ever seen, he points out. “There is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when I have already passed them and turn back to observe their tracks. Whilst I was experiencing them they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could not have said where any one of them finished or where another commenced. In reality no one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other.” [24] Immediate experience, then, is a flowing whole of undistinguished feeling that is known through intuition, and is called by Bergson, duration.
            But there is a problem in this depiction of duration that leads William James to believe that he is talking about the same thing, when he takes up a position in which the point of view is one of seeing the experience. He dealt with the affective aspect of experience in “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and more directly in “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience.” In the latter, he says that his goal is to show that 1) “the popular notion that these experiences are intuitively given as purely inner facts is hasty and erroneous;” and 2) that their ambiguity illustrates beautifully his “central thesis that subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification.”[25] Given these goals, it is hard to see how James could have believed that he was in agreement with Bergson. After all, Bergson was not speaking of either subjective or objective experience, since both of these appear to be derivative of immediate intuition, which James seems to agree with. They both require us to ‘turn back’, as Bergson puts it, to see the traces of what has just passed. Immediate experience is neither subjective, nor objective – it is immediate. But then, there is a wide gulf between such immediate experience and any possible mention of it. Bergson points out: “I forget the richness of color, characteristic of duration that is lived, to see only the simple movement by which consciousness passes from one shade to another. The inner life is all this at once: variety of qualities, continuity of progress, and unity of direction. It cannot be represented by images. But it is even less possible to represent it by concepts, that is by abstract, general or simple ideas.” It is not that such concepts are mistaken because they do not adequately define their object, but rather that “no image can reproduce exactly the original feeling I have of the flow of my own conscious life.” And to this he adds that it is not even necessary that he should attempt to render it. [26]
            What is clear, to this writer at least, is that the affective nature of immediate experience is not only not representable, it is also nonrepresentational. We can speak of it, but in doing so we are indicating rather than representing. Bergson points out that concepts are in reality symbols substituted for the object that they symbolize, but such symbols retain only that part of the object that is common to it and to others, so that it is a kind of comparison. Such comparisons seduce us into thinking that somehow the symbol is the intellectual equivalent of the object, and this leads us to “believe that we can form a faithful representation of duration by setting in line the concepts of unity, multiplicity, continuity, finite or infinite divisibility, etc.”[27] That is the precise illusion and danger, insofar as such symbols serve analysis and scientific study, they are incapable of replacing intuition. It is in this sense that I say that immediate experience is nonrepresentational. It does not represent anything – it is not other than itself. We saw this same line of reasoning in Bergson’s treatment of immanence and intuition above. James’ arguments, however, focuses upon the error that he sees in what he refers to as “spiritual” depictions of experience.[28] The insight that he has, that he is trying to use to validate his holding experiences as intuitively given as purely inner facts to be erroneous, is that such ‘spiritual’ depictions fail to take note of the fact that affections are not only “of the mind,” but are also “of the body.” He notes that “anger, love, and fear are affections” and are simultaneously of the mind and the body, as proved by the (patented) James-Lange theory of emotion. He notes that, “in practical life no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical facts. So they remain equivocal.”[29] His conclusion is that “there is no original spirituality or materiality of being, intuitively discerned, then; but only a translocation of experiences from one world to another; a grouping of them with one set or another of associates for definitely practical or intellectual ends.”[30] But this is exactly what Bergson is talking against. Bergson is not facing ‘outward’, nor ‘inward’. These are spatial abstractions of structure imposed upon the immediacy of duration. James appears here to have missed the point. But of course, he wasn’t responding to Bergson, who he has only good things to say about, but rather Bradley.
            F.H. Bradley was a metaphysician in the sense that first principles were arrived at in his philosophy. They were not givens for him however, nor did it appear that he set off in search of them. Unlike most metaphysicians who approach their work at some definite given point of transcendence, he took the approach that reality cannot be self-contradictory, for if it was, nothing could truly be known with any assurance. This was an epistemological principle even more than a metaphysical one, and it had momentous meaning within his work. He did not start where Bergson did, in the intuition of immediate experience; rather, he started where science and psychology end up, trying to find commonalities between the resulting piece-parts of the great universal machine, and worked backwards, by trying to go forward. He took reason, logic, and the ‘givens’ of science and tried to make sense of them according to the rules of their inherent context. Unfortunately, doing that uncovered grave paradoxes and irresolvable tensions inherent in the scientific way of viewing reality as a plurality of interacting things that are related in some way. At each contradiction or paradox, he retreated back a step and attempted to find a valid way forward, and continued in this manner until he found something that was not self-contradictory. Approaching reality from this side of rational analysis, while discarding anything that was ultimately contradictory, left Bradley exactly where Bergson found himself – in a reality that consisted of immediate experience consisting only of sentient feeling, which could not be encompassed in conceptualizations of it because it endured, since concepts cannot encompass duration. The way that he arrived there though was apparently too dense, or damaging, for James to follow, and Bradley’s results directly conflicted with James’ own assertions about reality. While having an extensive correspondence together, in which James frequently referred to his “brother Bradley” and admitted to being unable to “crack his nut yet,” they had a veritable pitched battle in print journals.[31] Yet, we can see the agreement between Bradley and Bergson in a number of places, contrary to the absolute distinctions in their results that James frequently makes. One example of this agreement is in a supplement to two essays on “Immediate Experience” and “Consciousness and Experience” where Bradley, having arrived at the same understanding as Bergson, though by a different route, points out that when speaking of relations between things, “wherever this or any other relation is experienced, what is experienced is more than the mere relation. It involves a felt totality, and on this inclusive unity the relation depends. The subject, the object, and their relation, are experienced as elements or aspects in a One which is there from the first.”[32] We see similar thoughts in Bergson, such as, “these diverse and divergent elements must be considered as so many extracts which are, or at least which were, in their humblest form, mutually complementary.”[33] And, “Out of that indivisible feeling, as from a spring, all the words, gestures, and actions of the man would appear to me to flow naturally.”[34] And finally, “The universe endures. … The systems marked off by science endure only because they are bound up inseparably with the rest of the universe.”[35]
            James’ view can be seen perhaps most clearly in his essay “The One and the Many.” In it we see James apparently responding to Bradley when he says, “To begin with, the attribute ‘one’ seems for many persons to confer a value, an ineffable illustriousness and dignity upon the world, with which the conception of it as an irreducible ‘many’ is believed to clash.” In James’ view though, “the world is ‘one’ in some respects, and ‘many’ in others.” This becomes clearer when he discusses his own view of experience in which, “our own finite fields of consciousness, which at every moment envisage a much-at-once composed of parts related variously, and in which both the conjunctions and disjunctions that appear are there only in so far as we are there as their witnesses.”[36] Such a view contrasts with those of both Bradley and Bergson. While James appreciated the clarity of Bergson’s approach to his metaphysical position, and did not appreciate Bradley’s, he has somehow gotten it into his head that they arrived at different positions. And this is, in this writer’s opinion, because of the way that speaking about the intuition of immediate experience as duration freezes it into concepts, exactly as Bergson pointed out, yet because the un-distinguished whole was for Bergson obtained via an immanent intuition, and not arrived at via the destruction of the idea of relations, as it was in Bradley, it left open the possibility that relations are somehow inherent in the felt whole, and thus James was free to assert, as he did in the same essay, that, “these results are what the Oneness of the Universe is known-as. They are the oneness, pragmatically considered. … Such is the cash-value of the world’s unity, empirically realized. … Such an idea, however, outrages rationalistic minds, which habitually despise all this practical small-change. Such minds insist on a deeper, more through-and-through union of all things in the absolute, ‘each in all and all in each,’ as the prior condition of these empirically ascertained connections. … To sum up, the world is ‘one’ in some respects, and ‘many’ in others.”[37] James seems to be attacking the very immanence that an intuition of duration requires. Does he in fact understand the difference between his own position and that of Bergson?
            In James’ essay “Bradley or Bergson?” he makes the opening remark that Bradley and Bergson’s thought, which run “parallel for such a distance” diverges “so utterly at last” that he felt the need to do a comparison between them.[38] James characterizes Bradley’s ‘principle’ as “that of doggedly following a line once entered on to the bitterest of ends” while that of Bergson’s is to “tumble to life’s call, and turn into the valley where the green pastures and the clear waters always were.”[39] James lumps Bergson in with “the empiricists” and asks “if in sensible particulars reality reveals the manyness-in-oneness of its constitution in so convincing a way, why then withhold, if you will, the name of “philosophy” from perceptual knowledge… When the alternative lies between knowing life in its full thickness and activity, as one acquainted with its me’s and thee’s and now’s and here’s, on the one hand, and knowing a trans-conceptual evaporation like the absolute, on the other, it seems to me that to choose the latter knowledge merely because it has been named “philosophy” is to be superstitiously loyal to a name.”[40] It seems a difficult stretch to find within this denigration of ‘the absolute’ any coherence with Bergson’s depiction of duration as a perfect absolute. It appears clear that James’ idea of immediate experience and that of Bergson’s are radically different in light of Bergson’s assertions about the ineffectiveness of conceptual representations to capture it. In Bergson’s philosophy duration takes center-stage, both in the enduring nature of experience itself, and in its most visible result, memory. Memory is not something that one has, nor is it something that is available for discretionary fetching; rather, memory is the enduring nature of all experience that floods the present overwhelming it so that the present can never be seen to be a moment distinct from those that have gone before. In fact, even to speak this way is faulty. There are no real moments in intuitively apprehended experience. There is only the absolute of immediate experience, flux-like, but as Bergson notes, not like any flux that he has ever seen. James, on the other hand, is adamant that his ‘radical empiricism’, which “starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order,” is his Weltanschauung.[41] To this statement it might be worthwhile to counter with Bergson’s observation that “if a man is incapable of getting for himself the intuition of the constitutive duration of his own being, nothing will ever give it to him, concepts no more than images.”[42]
            Charles Sanders Peirce, a younger contemporary and colleague of James, and a life-long friend, developed his own phenomenology of experience consisting of a trio of categories. Broadly speaking “firstness” is that which most closely resembles the immediate experience of Bergson and Bradley. It must be noted, however, that it is a conceptual depiction of the feeling of experience, and thus would immediately run afoul of Bergson’s warnings about the inability of concepts to encompass duration, as we will see.
            For Peirce, a “first” is “predominant in the ideas of freshness, life, freedom” that becomes predominant in the ideas of measureless variety and multiplicity.” A first is predominant, not because of its abstractness, but because of its self-containedness. He points out that “it is not in being separated from qualities that Firstness is most predominant, but in being something peculiar and idiosyncratic. The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought.”[43] For Peirce, a first is neither dependent, nor controlled by anything else, but we must note that it is a classification of experience and is not equivalent, not even in intent, to actual feeling. Where Bergson is pointing to the actual experience of duration – e.g. waiting for the sugar to melt impatiently – Peirce is noting the experience’s category. His is the point of view of a scientist. He notes that he does “not mean the sense of actually experiencing these feelings, whether primarily or in any memory or imagination. That is something that involves these qualities as an element of it.” Rather, he means, “the qualities themselves which, in themselves, are mere may-bes, not necessarily realized.”[44] It would seem therefore that there is little to gain from reading Peirce’s account of his phenomenology, except that in his description of feeling, he brings out a significant understanding of what I have been calling immediate experience.
            Peirce describes feeling as “an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has it own positive quality which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is, however it may have been brought about; so that if this feeling is present during a lapse of time, it is wholly and equally present at every moment of that time.” To this, he adds, “A feeling is a state, which is in its entirety in every moment of time as long as it endures. … which is as much as to say that the feeling is simply a quality of immediate consciousness.”[45] Within these lines I feel that it is possible to hear the echo of the actual durational event, though flattened out through a reduction to categories and conceptual limits. It appears to lack the spark and vitality of Bergson’s intuitional, perfect absolute duration, yet, it is not yet at the level of the psychological account that we seem to get in James. Peirce is actually very useful in dismissing psychological accounts when he brings in the vividness of a feeling. He points out that this vividness would be more accurately described as the vividness of a consciousness of the feeling, which is independent of the quality of that consciousness, and that it is the vividness which we find reduced or absent from our memories. He says that two remarks would be useful in regard to this consciousness, that bear directly on our effort here. First, he says, “of whatever is in the mind in any mode of consciousness there is necessarily an immediate consciousness and consequently a feeling.” The proof of this proposition, he says, “is very instructive as to the nature of feeling; for it shows that, if by psychology we mean the positive, or observational, science of the mind or of consciousness, then although the entire consciousness at any one instant is nothing but a feeling, yet psychology can teach us nothing of the nature of feeling, nor can we gain knowledge of any feeling by introspection, the feeling being completely veiled from introspection, for the very reason that it is our immediate consciousness.”[46] This appears to echo Bergson’s position, and more importantly, it reaffirms that immediate experience is beyond our normal mechanisms of intellectual cognition. It cannot be put into any words, concepts, or categories, and perhaps this is why Peirce leaves it outside of his phenomenology, or if he admits it at all, it is only as the feeling of ‘firstnesses’ and not any qualitative aspect of a phenomenon.
            The interesting point that I find in the three different ways of approaching the question[47] of what is actually given in experience is that they each arrive at a recognition of immediate experience as an undistinguished whole of feeling that endures even through its flux-like changes and evolution. It is the living of what we refer to, looking back, as our lives. I have excluded James’ work from my total because his appears to be a constructed flow of experience, recapitulating the plurality that exists at a phenomenology level, imputing some kind of continuity to it, as if he is gluing Humpty-Dumpty back together again. The relevant question for James is how he can provide a foundation for the continuity that he is asserting, which the others find obvious in some manner to be the essential nature of immediate experience. We get a clue to this in his essay “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” in which he gives his solution to the Zeno-like paradoxes of continuous motion. He points out that in fact all change occurs ‘drop-wise’ and that it is in the recognition of this fact that Zeno’s paradoxes are overcome. Which is true; they are overcome this way. But that doesn’t mean that he has arrived at the correct answer. He remarks that “all our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus change by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying ‘more, more, more,’ or ‘less, less, less,’ as the definite increments or diminutions make themselves felt. The discreteness is still more obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or when altogether new things come. Fechner’s term of the ‘threshold,’ which has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in drops.”[48] It would seem that James’ ‘stream of consciousness’ is not a flow, but a leaky faucet.
            My life is a single fact that has unfolded continuously, without a break or margin of any kind, without a ‘speed-bump’ in my path, along which I have never been presented with a single discontinuity but those that I can see receding away from my ever-present now, and even my awareness of those discontinuities are inseparable from the continuity of my experience, as they inform my present with a certain adumbration of my history. There are no facts of experience but those that I excise from this one. And even this vivisection is the continuous flowing whole that I am. The question as to the source of this continuity is wrong-headed because it is not looking at what is immediately experienced, but what has been idealized in some way in which it is generalized, compared, extracted, abstracted, or inducted into a category. The question is not where the continuity comes from, but where it has gotten to because it is absent from these concepts. As Bergson has pointed out, “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. This, it will be said, is only a metaphor – it is of the very essence of mechanism, in fact, to consider as metaphorical every expression which attributes to time an effective action and a reality of its own. In vain does immediate experience show us that the very basis of our conscious existence is memory, that is to say, the prolongation of the past into the present, or in a word, duration, acting and irreversible. In vain does reason prove to us that the more we get away from the objects cut out and the systems isolated by common sense and by science and the deeper we dig beneath them, the more we have to do with a reality which changes as a whole in its inmost states, as if an accumulative memory of the past made it impossible to go back again. The mechanistic instinct of the mind is stronger than reason, stronger than immediate experience.”[49]
            Thus we can see that immediate experience denies the possibility of mechanism, if immediate experience is real and not just a contingent aspect of our physiology. While it may appear to be the case that we have answered the ‘what’ question that forms the title of this essay, it must be noticed that what we have found is the essential nature of immediate experience, and not what immediate experience is a se. Only Bradley’s Absolute of sentient feeling purports to give the ‘what’ of immediate experience as well as its essential nature. The question that this leads to is perhaps beyond our means to answer, as many contend in regard to ‘consciousness,’ or perhaps it becomes easier to answer now that we have this much established. That question will have to wait for another day.
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. “Metaphysics” Trans. T. E. Hulme. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912.
—. Creative Evolution. “CE” Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library, 1944.
—. Matter and Memory. "MM" New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Bradley, F. H. Collected Works. “Works”Vols. 2, 4, 5. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999. 12 vols.
—. Essays on Truth and Reality. “ETR” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914.
James, William. "Bradley or Bergson?" “BB” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 7.2 (1910): 29-33.
—. The Writings of Willaim James. “WWJ” Ed. John J. McDermott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. “Peirce” Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1940.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. “WWR” Vol. 2. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1958. 2 vols.
Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Footnotes
[1] “not many” is the form used in mystical traditions to indicate the absence of plurality. It is done this way, because using “one” misleads the reader into believing that experience is a complete illusion, rather than only the reality of the apparent differences between things being so.
[2] Bergson, “Metaphysics,” pg 19
[3] Ibid. pg 17
[4] CE, pg 14
[5] MM, pg 17
[6] WWR, Vol II, pg 198
[7] Ibid.
[8] CE, pg 13
[9] Metaphysics, pg 31
[10] Ibid. pg 32
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid. pg 33
[13] Ibid. pg 11
[14] Sells, pg 164
[15] Metaphysics, pg 2
[16] Ibid. pg 3
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid. pg 5
[19] Ibid. pg 6
[20] Ibid, pg 7
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid. pg 9
[23] Ibid. pg 13
[24] Ibid. pg 11
[25] James, pg 272
[26] Metaphysics, pg 15
[27] Ibid. pg 18
[28] James, pg 271
[29] Ibid. pg 274
[30] Ibid. pg 275
[31] Bradley “Collected Works” Vol. 4
[32] Bradley, ETR, pg 200
[33] Bergson, CE, pg 57
[34] Metaphysics, pg 3
[35] Bergson, CE, pg 14
[36] James, WWJ, pg 267
[37] Ibid. pg 265-266
[38] James, BB, pg 29
[39] Ibid. pgs 31-32
[40] Ibid. pg 33
[41] James, WWJ, pg 195
[42] Metaphysics, pgs 15-16
[43] Peirce, pg 79
[44] Ibid. pg 81
[45] Ibid. pgs 81-82
[46] Peirce, pgs 82-83
[47] Bergson through immanent intuition, Bradley through excruciating analytic reasoning, and Peirce through his metaphysic of first principles ramified through his phenomenology.
[48] James, WWJ, pgs 563-564
[49] Bergson, CE, pg 20

Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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Understanding Nonduality

Sat, 16 May 2009 10:41:57 -0400

Background
            Nonduality is a view of reality that encompasses both ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ aspects. In truth, within systems of philosophical nonduality, which are the explanatory systems that accompany the practices and rituals within various spiritual traditions, the ‘material’ aspect of reality, which includes the attributes that make up the ego, is always held to be illusory in at least some way, while the ‘immaterial’ aspect is the real aspect of reality. The exact reverse of how most of us normally see it.
            Within systems of nonduality there is only one Self and this is God, and there is nothing other than This (the emphasis is normal). The word “God” in the sense it is used in nondual traditions is neither a theistic nor a deistic being. As a broad generalization, God is the Mind or Consciousness that permeates and manifests the phenomenal world. Everything that is, is the spontaneous manifestation of this nondual nature, including our selves and our own actions, although our actions are subject to erroneous beliefs (error or sin) and the truth of our nature is obfuscated by those beliefs.
            My own view of nondual reality is a heterodox one, as there are differences between the implications that I take from nondualism and those found in the philosophical traditions, but for the purpose of introducing nonduality to you, those differences may help to clarify, rather than further obscure what tends to be a difficult subject to grasp, since mine is an approach that seeks to explain, rather than explain away as error, our attempts to rationally understand reality.
Justification for Nonduality
            My understanding of nondual reality is based upon the observation that the phenomenal, or material, world evidences a necessary presence, or nature, of which it is the activity, and this nature, which is not itself natural in the sense of being found within the natural phenomena as another member or part of it, is not an epistemological principle, but rather, is the active principle of the world. Thus “nature” must necessarily be other than just a conceptualization of universal laws depicting necessary or putative generalizations, but must in fact be the indivisible aspect of reality that acts. This is the disontological aspect of reality, distinguished from the ontological aspect of reality, i.e. phenomenal being. This dyadic abstraction of ontological and disontological aspects is a useful tool for developing an understanding of nondual reality that is not meant to be taken as a distinction in fact. The disontological aspect is essentially different than the supposition of a supernatural entity or principle that lies outside the world. Rather, this nature is both immanent within the phenomenal world and transcends its appearances. (It) does not exist apart from it in any way, yet is not identical with it in any way either. A metaphor that I like to use is that phenomenal being is the activity of this nature, the way running is an activity of a runner; but the activity of this nature, like the running of the runner, is not equivalent to that nature, nor to the runner. In Spinozan terms, there is natura (nature) and natura naturans (nature naturing), but not natura naturata (nature natured). The latter is illusory because it entails the imaginative superimposition of reality upon the activity of nature separate and apart from that which it is the activity of, and this is the result of an erroneous understanding of the essential operation of awareness.
An Allegorical Depiction of Nonduality
            It is often helpful to use a visual or allegorical depiction when dealing with a difficult subject such as that of the nonduality of reality. First, because speaking of the ‘immaterial’ nature of reality necessarily introduces errors that cannot be overcome unless one uses a technique designed to mitigate such structural errors as are introduced by dualistic language (since all language is unsuited for metaphysical discourse in the sense that it was created for the marketplace, according to Whitehead). One such technique used almost universally by mystics is aphophasis – which means ‘unsaying’ or ‘saying away’. In apophasis all statements are signs in a most indeterminate fashion, since they are used to point to that which can only be apprehended in a ‘flash’ of insight. It must be noted that apophasis is a linguistic performance and is different in intent than “apophatic,” or negative theological, statements with which it is frequently confused. Plotinus explains the problem that necessitates the use of apophasis in this famous quote from his Enneads:
“Since the substance which is generated [from the One] is form – one could not say that what is generated from that source is anything else – and not the form of some one thing but of everything, so that no other form is left outside it, the One must be without form. But if it is without form it is not a substance; for a substance must be some one particular thing, something, that is, defined and limited; but it is impossible to apprehend the One as a particular thing: for then it would not be the principle, but only that particular thing which you said it was. But if all things are in that which is generated [from the One], which of the things in it are you going to say that the One is? Since it is none of them, it can only be said to be beyond them. But these things are beings, and being: so it is ‘beyond being’. This phrase ‘beyond being’ does not mean that it is a particular thing – for it makes no positive statement about it – and it does not say its name, but all it implies is that it is ‘not this’. But if this is what the phrase does, it in no way comprehends the One: it would be absurd to seek to comprehend that boundless nature; for anyone who wants to do this has put himself out of the way of following at all, even the least distance, in its traces; but just as he who wishes to see the intelligible nature will contemplate what is beyond the perceptible if he has no mental image of the perceptible, so he who wishes to contemplate what is beyond the intelligible will contemplate it when he has let all the intelligible go; he will learn that it is by means of the intelligible, but what it is like by letting the intelligible go. But this “what it is like” must indicate that it is ‘not like’: for there is no ‘being like’ in what is not a ‘something’. But we in our (aporia) do not know what we ought to say, and are speaking of what cannot be spoken, and give it a name because we want to indicate it to ourselves as best we can. But perhaps this name ‘One’ contains [only] a denial of multiplicity. This is why the Pythagoreans symbolically indicated it to each other by the name Apollo,[1] in the negation of the multiple. But if the One – name and reality expressed – was to be taken positively it would be less clear than if we did not give it a name at all…” (Plotinus “Enneads” V.5.6, Loeb, pp 173-174)

            A second reason for using an allegory is because seeing reality nondualistically is counter to our normal way of viewing reality, and thus it is very difficult to visualize what is being spoken of. My view is that it is helpful to initially rely on an allegorical device in order to locate the various ways of approaching reality, given an understanding of reality as nondual in nature. And such a device may help to clarify the differing perspectives of metaphysicians, mystics, scientists, poets, and others that try to portray reality to us. To that purpose I present the following allegory:
            There is, immanent within everything that manifests in this universe, a horizon that acts like a light prism. On one side is the source of ‘light’, this ‘immaterial’ nature that I have spoken of, that is the source of the emanation of the phenomenal universe. By immanent, I mean something different than "in". Meister Eckhart (13th-14th German theologian and mystical philosopher) used an example of wine in a wood cask to illustrate the difference between being “in” and being “immanent.” The wine, he said, is in the cask differently than it is in the wood, which it permeates. We can drink the wine in the cask, but not the wine in the wood. So there are these two different meanings of "in". But it is different, he said, with spiritual immanence. Such immanence means not only that the wine is permeating the wood, but the wood is also permeating the wine, and the wine is the wood, and the wood, the wine. Thus this horizon that I speak of is not a real separation in the phenomena of the world, but rather is a distinction between their manifestation and the nature that is the source of those manifestations, that does not rest apart from them. On this 'side' of the horizon, which is the intelligible side, is but the tip of the iceberg that we normally refer to as “reality.”
            To transcend this horizon, which is a union with wholeness, a return to the source, and a dropping away or dissolving of separation, is the provenance of mystics, who return to teach from their newfound understanding. Some mystics only have that experience once, others more frequently, but none that I know of can sustain it indefinitely, nor initiate it at will. Plotinus, for instance, is reported to have had that experience four times in his life by his student Porphyry.
            This horizon, which acts like a prism, splits the 'clear light' that is God’s emanation into separate beams of light, just as a prism does with visible light. These beams are not straight though, but writhe and vibrate, weave and braid themselves, in a constant flux, a constant movement, a constant activity of light that is the manifestation of this phenomenal world (one can see a direct correlation with current “String” theories). These beams are ontological – they are beings and things. They cause various shadows to fall on each other, and it is those shadows on the beams that weave this world of appearances and perceived differences. It is the appearance of the beams on this 'side' of the horizon that is durational. The differences between them, which are caused by the shadows that are not real but only apparent, are the material from which we construct the spatial separation of things. The duration we use to construct time. Space-time thus is nothing other than an imaginative imposition upon the emanation of light.
            This world is coherent because what appears here arises from the wholeness of this nature. Without an underlying nature, there is no reason that there would be anything at all, because in the absence of a real, as opposed to an epistemological, nature there would be no source for anything whatsoever to happen. And the one salient proof that there is a real nature is that the ‘random’ activity that we experience is stochastic,[2] rather than truly random. What appears is the presencing of this nature – its activity – and this nature is awareness. Awareness is not a phenomenal manifestation – it is not ontological. Instead, it is the nature of all manifestation. It is this insight that is the source of the profoundest wisdom to be found in spiritual traditions.
            A scientist looks at the shadows, facing away from the beams of light, and attempts to discover similarities between them so that they can work out the 'laws' of their appearance and changes over time. These laws are imaginative empirical constructions that allow the scientist to explain the appearances and predict their manifestation, and later to create techniques that enables us to reproduce at will these universal aspects of shadows to serve our practical needs.
            A poet or artist looks directly at the beams of light and notices that there is a unity that transcends all of these beams which is hidden from us by the immanent horizon within them. They use their creative imaginations to project a reminder of that unity through their creative use of language, color, texture, and shape.
            The mystic, before he or she becomes a mystic, is able somehow to turn away from the beams and shadows, and ‘travel’ to the source – all that remains then is unity. No individual any longer, for such individuality was left on the other side of the horizon, like shoes that are left at the entrance to a home. It is not just a ‘turning toward’, but a ‘return to’, that the mystic performs. A ‘turning toward’ would leave the might-be mystic where he or she was standing, only now to have the outlook of a poet or artist, or perhaps a saint who has garnered an intuitive insight. The return, however, is transcendence and the recognition of the full presence that can only be found in wholeness. The mystic returns again because this, here, now, is loved. It has to be loved because that is what it all always already is. Standing closest to the horizon, the mystic is motioning towards the light so that those with their back to it might notice it and turn themselves.
            The scientist, the poet, the artist, and the mystic are only beams of light – manifestations of God. Their individuality is apparent, but not real. This is the justification for the assertion of non-identification with the ego that is to be found in all traditions of spiritual nonduality.
            But you see, with all this activity here, now, there is really nothing happening to shake up wholeness. It only appears to be the case because of the prism effect of the horizon. It is possible for each beam of light to recognize its own nature in the other beams of light. Each beam exists only as a phenomenal manifestation, but is not real itself because it is an emanation of the whole. Yet it exists as an individuated perspective of that whole.
The Problem with Conceptual Thought
            The Vedas are the foundational scriptures of Hinduism’s various schools, including Advaita Vedanta (nondual Vedanta). The word “vedas” comes from the Sanskrit word: véda which shares the same Proto-Indo-European root (*u̯eidos) as the Greek word εἶδος, normally rendered as “form” and sometimes as “idea” in English. It is taken to mean “knowledge or wisdom” in the Hindu usage, and it is perhaps not difficult to see a similarity in the authoritative nature of the Vedas with Plato’s depiction of εἶδος in his philosophical writings, where it is discrimination of the forms in all things that are the source of our knowledge. A discrimination that is only possible because our souls have come into contact with the forms themselves before being incarnated in these bodies.
            We can view a phenomenon as a nexus of instantiation of particular forms or ideas, and this can lead us to believe that our concepts and ideas are similar. However, there is a difference between them that causes concepts to hide the truth from us, according to nondual traditions. Usually, both ideas and concepts are denigrated, but this undermines our rational accomplishments so I assert the distinction between ideas and concepts. A concept is an idea in essence, but not in content. Because everything that manifests phenomenally is a nexus of instantiation of ideas, even thoughts are ideas in this sense, if one accepts that they are phenomenally manifested as brain activity, which I do. The content of a conception, however, is a second-level generalization or discovered universal aspect of different, though (now) conceptually related, phenomena. They are the product of human reason, and it is helpful to consider them as only imaginative, or as a scientist would say: fallible. The reason for this is that conceptual content does not exist in the same sense as ideas do, which is the basis for our distinction between empirical and rational knowledge. Concepts are rarely reflective of the unity of reality; instead they tend to be an imaginative convention of reason that is purposive in intent.
            This is why, in nondual traditions, spiritual practitioners are warned away from conceptual thinking, since the content of concepts does not bring one toward the ideas of reality and its unity, but instead, leads further into the imaginative world of purposive human thought and action. There is a difference between thoughts that reflect truth and those that are imaginative assertions of universality: the latter entail a turn back toward (epistrophe) the unity of reality, while the latter maintain a focus upon the phenomenal manifestation of reality and a search therein for the shadows of that unity. We notice aspects of phenomenal reality and we fabricate names for those aspects. Sometimes what we are noticing has no truth in reality and thus are error or false belief; other times they are but the faint appearance of some truth, which, like the elephant of Indian lore, is mischaracterized because its not seen in its fullness.
The Source of Mechanistic Views of Reality
            I argue that there are no mechanisms anywhere in reality, other than in the human imagination and in our imaginatively constructed devices that harness the stochastic behavior of materials for an end. Biological organisms are not machines, and computers are an excellent example of the imaginative harnessing of indeterminate behavior. Mechanistic views result from of our attempt to remove nature from its naturing in order to focus solely on the plurality of phenomenal appearances for practical ends.
            One of my explanations for how this occurs has to do with our treatment of awareness, which is normally seen to be some kind of faculty or function of material bodies or immaterial minds. But awareness cannot be a faculty or a function of anything, but must be just what it is, because what it is cannot be any kind of receptivity. No one has ever explained how it can be that anything having to do with a body can be aware of anything. Instead, what is done is that in order to explain how awareness in one particular context could be, say our visual sense perception, we introduce something else that makes it so, the mind for example, but do not explain how it is that the new thing is aware. We explain it away, for instance, as a faculty of the mind that allows it to ‘see’ what the eyes ‘see’. We ignore the outlying difficulty – what does it mean to be aware? – dismiss it as something to be treated in the future after the important problems are fully dealt with, and then forget that there were any outlying difficulties by ‘black-boxing’ the whole affair. In financial accounting it is a truism that a penny’s discrepancy could be evidence of a billion dollar fraud, rather than being an insignificant rounding error. Theoretical explanations, including speculative philosophical ones, rarely exhibit the same rigor as financial accounting does!
            What could all of these faculties be, that our philosophical and theological accounts are littered with, other than being devices that appear to be necessary to explain what otherwise has no place in this universe of phenomenal appearances, or rather can be nothing other than this universe of appearances? Awareness cannot be a faculty; it must be the whole, because there is nothing else in reality. Thus every object is awareness as that object, which it emanates, and not an awareness of that object. It is not the eye that sees – it is vision that ‘eyes’. Each thing or being is only a separated beam of the clear light of awareness.
            There is no witnessing, no transcendental onlooker. That way of depicting consciousness, as we normally view the awareness of something, is misleading because it demands the question: what is being witnessed? What are we conscious of? And these questions either have a false answer: that there is something else that is witnessed; or an absurd answer: witnessing is a one-sided fact. The absurd answer leads to nihilism. The false answer creates our dualistic understanding of reality by adumbrating it as so many things. The alternative is to turn back toward the intelligible light, paying attention to the nature of all phenomenal manifestations, in order to notice the impossibility of real separation. This is the succinct point of all spiritual practices.
            It is an easy error to take this to imply some kind of philosophical idealism, but it must be remembered that ideas are merely the apparent separation of the pure light into separate beams, and “minds” are merely an imaginative invention. Neither are real in a disontological sense.

[1] a pollõn: not many – for this Pythagorean etymology see Plutarch “Isis and Osiris” 381F
[2] Stochastic: following a probability distribution that can be analyzed but not predicted precisely. While there is an element of randomness in any stochastic process, given large enough samples, the random behavior tends toward a central limit or ‘attractor’.
Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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On Learned Ignorance

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:43:54 -0500

Why Can’t I Say That About Unity?
         Nicolas of Cusa, near the end of Book I of “On Learned Ignorance,” touches on matters that are central to my own philosophic efforts. He combines a discussion of the name of God and Affirmative (positive) Theology with the recognition of the inadequacy of both in light of the incomprehensible simplicity of the unity of God. While my own work is not theological in focus, to say that I am speaking of any other than God would be to conjure a difference where there was none.
         The question of the nature of unity, whether it is “All in One” (De docta ignorantia “DDI”, 75) or something other than that, arises, as Nicolas points out, from “a movement of reason, which is much inferior to the intellect.” (DDI, 76) Here, as in other places, he is indicating an inadequacy of reason when it is applied to the Being of God that it cannot comprehend. His own efforts in De docta ignorantia was to point out that it is only by using reason, directed towards its own limits, that we can come to ‘see’ that which we cannot comprehend. I find such strong parallels between his efforts and that of F.H. Bradley, the Twentieth Century British philosopher whose “Absolute,” which he arrived at by a similar process of using reason to hack away the undergrowth of unsupported assumptions and metaphysical slight-of-hand without which our reasoning about the world could not proceed, was quickly dismissed after his death by philosophers for whom reason was king, even if they themselves swore an oath to the rule of empirical facts. Bradley refused to engage in what Nicholas would have referred to as “affirmative theology” because such speculative constructions would be based upon discriminations that Bradley ‘saw’ could not be part of the unity of his Absolute. Similarly, Nicholas makes the point that affirmative theology speaks not of God, but of creatures, because any such affirmations about God, whether by name or perfection, was by the necessity of reason itself, in relation to creation and not to God. (DDI, 82, 78-81)
         I do not want to spend too much time on Bradley, other than to show some quick parallels between his writing and Nicholas’. Bradley ends his book “Essays on Truth and Reality” with this concluding remark:
“On the one hand it is the entire Reality alone which matters. On the other hand every single thing, so far as it matters, is so far real, real in its own place and degree, and according as more or less it contains and carries out the in-dwelling character of the concrete Whole. But there is nothing anywhere in the world which, taken barely in its own right and unconditionally, has importance and is real. And one main work of philosophy is to show that, where there is isolation and abstraction, there is everywhere, so far as this abstraction forgets itself, unreality and error.” (Bradley, 473)
I see strong parallels between Bradley’s words and Nicholas’ own in Chapter 24, “On the Name of God and Affirmative Theology” which plays out in Bradley’s depiction of unity as a simple unity beyond relations and contradictions. Nicholas’ point on this is that “… according to the movement of reason, plurality or multitude is opposed to unity. Hence, it is not a unity of this sort that properly applies to God, but the unity to which neither otherness nor plurality nor multiplicity is opposed.” (DDI 76) This “simplicity of unity” (Ibid.) is ineffable and above all reasoning.
         Now, I wish to steer clear of the use of the word “understanding” as used by Nicholas (or perhaps his translators) because of the flip-flopping meaning of that word over the course of history. Is it Reason that ‘understands’ or Understanding that can reason? There is a world of difference between the two meanings that are a pitfall to ‘seeing’ the meaning evoking their use. Nicholas himself is rather loose with it, saying at the end of 76 that “… this is the name that is ineffable and above all understanding.” While just a few lines later, he says: “God’s name is known only by that understanding that is itself the maximum and is the maximum name.” (DDI 77) Thus we see that the meaning and relevance to our search for the truth is contextual in this sense: our understanding is defective at all times, thus the truth is beyond the grasp of human understanding; while God’s understanding is absolute and all-encompassing. In fact, God’s understanding is God. I believe it was Arendt who pointed out that the true greatness of God would not be the ability to create a universe which was simply an extension of himself through emanation, but rather the ability to create something that is wholly otherwise and completely independent from him. I see this as an excellent example of the limitations of reason because reason needs to have a field of distinct separate things with which to operate and thus shoots wide of the mark when speaking of God. It needs affirmative statements about God, which ‘himself’ then becomes an idol. In opposition to Arendt’s point, I would say that the ‘greatness’ of God would be to create an infinite variety of difference that was never anything other than God. The sheer difficulty of fitting that into our Cartesian/Newtonian worldview is indicative of its "going beyond" the limitations of reason.
         There is here a clear diminution of reason in Nicholas’ work, even while his work is built upon an insightful use of it. The point is that, properly used, reason reaches a state of aporia in which its own limitations become obvious, and because of that they can be swept away so that a proper ‘sight’ of God’s incomprehensible Being can be had. I would place this in opposition to our scientific orientation today in which reason and facts delimit the whole of possible knowledge. The World of Science is a pollarded aristocracy of intellect that excludes both those at its feet, who do not pass muster, as well as those intellects not restricted to facts and reason and thus beyond the conventional limitations of Science. Facts are the content of perceiving; reason is the operation upon facts and their derivatives and abstractions; but understanding, as I use that word, is the recognition of the encompassing presence in which both are achieved and this understanding cannot stand on either.
         Nicholas’s references to Affirmative Theology parallel Bradley’s words above. It is the extent to which ‘things’, as abstracted parts of the simple whole Absolute, reflect the “in-dwelling character of the concrete Whole” that is indicative of their degree of truth for Bradley, and the intellect which forgets its hand in the origination of such abstractions loses sight of the truth. Nicholas, pointing to a similar understanding says this of the pagans’ understanding of God: “… some pagans did not understand that since God is the being of things God exists outside things in another way than by abstraction, unlike prime matter, which exists apart from things only by the abstracting intellect.” (DDI 85) For, he says: “… no affirmations, as if positing in God something of what is signified, can apply to God, who is not any one thing more than God is all things.” (DDI 78) It is in this way, Nicholas says, that “the simple folk were led astray, for they did not take what was unfolded as an image but as the truth,” i.e. idol-worship. (DDI 84)
         This leads Nicholas into a discussion of the need for Negative Theology as a way to undo the errors inherent in affirmative statements about God. He points out that without the theology of negation, “God would not be worshiped as the infinite God but as creature.” (DDI 86) Properly speaking, I would like to point out, Negative Theology needs Affirmative Theology as much as the reverse. Without explicit or implicit positive affirmations, there is nothing to negate. To say that God is not creation is to succumb to the limitations of reason, as much as when we assert some quality of creation as being a quality of God is. This is why, in a sense, even Nicholas is wrong when he distinguishes the two types of theological statements. He is right in what he says about both, yet this is also an abstraction imposed by reason. It is only in performing this theological dance, of affirmative and remotive statements that we come closest to the truth that “shines forth incomprehensibly in the darkness of our ignorance” (DDI 89) and it is this performance that brings about this learned ignorance. Such a performance is a technique often used in mystical writings known as “apophasis”. For instance, in order to say that God is ineffable, we must first posit God, making ‘God’ a creature of reason and thus positively identifying ‘God’ as some thing that can be reasoned about, and then in the same breath we must take away this assertion by adding that this ‘what’ of which we speak is ineffable and thus beyond the reach of reason. Properly understood, this is the learned ignorance of which Nicholas writes.
         In my own work, which is focused upon an understanding of the limitations of reason, not as a further limitation upon our ability to understand, but as one that, properly understood, frees us from those limitations, these very same issues come up. The ‘whole’ that I must speak of can only be spoken of apophatically as a performance of an understanding. All that Nicholas says in his work applies equally to my own because, as I mentioned in my opening, to say that I am speaking of any other than God is to conjure a difference where there is none. Where there can be none.
Bibliography
Bond, Lawrence H., Tr., “Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings,” Paulist Press,
          Mahwah, NJ, 1997
Bradley, F.H., “Essays on Truth and Reality,” Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1914
Sells, Michael A., “Mystical Languages of Unsaying,” University of Chicago Press,          Chicago, 1994
Copyright 2008, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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Peirce on Feeling

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:59:26 -0500

Properly speaking, is Bradleyian “feeling” a “first” in Peirce’s phenomenology? In order to determine what exactly Peirce means when he uses these two words, we must review his descriptions of them.
         Peirce initially defines “first” as a positive qualitative possibility of being. (pg 75, Pierce) He then goes on to expand this by saying that “Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject’s being positively such as it is regardless of aught else.” He then adds: “That can only be a possibility.” (pg 76, Pierce) Later, he expands on this category by saying “The first [category] comprises the qualities of phenomena, such as red, bitter, tedious, hard, heartrending, noble;” (pg 77, Pierce) He then makes note that regardless of how “sensations” are defined, wherever there is a phenomenon there is a quality. And that these merge into one another and therefore do not have perfect identities, but only likenesses or imperfect identities.
         He also, at this point, makes a telling statement that opens the door to Bradley’s more insightful analysis of experience. He says of qualities: “Probably, were our experience of them not so fragmentary, there would be no abrupt demarcations between them at all.” (pg 77, Pierce) This is exactly Bradley’s assertion that “immediate experience,” which is just sentience or feeling, is a sort of prototaxic experience. Yet, this ‘level’ of experience does not appear in Peirce’s work, other than in this offhand comment. Peirce is starting from “fragmentary” experience; Bradley is starting from a holistic experience in which, he says, qualities inhere but are not yet distinguished, and which is not structured, so that space, time, and self are absent. The difference between these two starting points is a wide gulf; as that between a mystic and a non-mystic is in addressing reality. The question that begs to be addressed, which I will try to address later is whether this is just a “word game” empty of any substantive difference, or if it is in fact a philosophically important insight on Bradley’s part.
         The first sign we see of “feeling” in Peirce’s account is when he points out that we “feel facts” in his description of secondness, which he says are “actual facts.” (pg 78, Pierce) This might be assumed to mean that the idea of secondness infers a melding of firstness and secondness in our actual experience, and that it is “feeling” that indicates the first aspect of experience. However, he points out: “It is not in being separated from qualities that Firstness is most predominant, but in being something peculiar and idiosyncratic. The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought.” (pg 79, Pierce) This statement that “first is predominant in feeling” clearly states that feeling is not identical to firstness in his system. While feeling predominately contains firstness, the two words are not equivalent. We can rely on Peirce’s “overscrupulousity” as evidence of his distinguishing meaning here, because if they were equivalent words he would have said so, given the careful attention to his language that he exhibits. Feeling, then, is an aggregate for Peirce. While for Bradley it has no separable parts. Clearly then we are dealing with two different phenomena that seem overlapping only because of the polysemous character of the word “feeling.”
         We see this difference become clearer when Peirce begins his more detailed description of Firstness in which it becomes clear that “feeling” is a form of consciousness. Bradley distinguishes “immediate experience” from consciousness, and thus for Bradley, “feeling” is not a form of consciousness, but underlies and is primordial to consciousness. This is highlighted by Peirce’s designation of pleasure and pain as “feelings”, whereas Bradley specifically denies that these two are “feelings” because pleasure and pain are contents, whereas “feeling” is contentless (it is not empty but there are no distinguishable qualities to it). (pg 81, Pierce) The key to seeing the wide gulf between Peirce and Bradley on their different meanings is when Peirce asserts that the being of a firstness “consists in the fact that there might be such a peculiar, positive, suchness in a phaneron.” (pg 81, Pierce) He says: “That mere quality, or suchness, is not in itself an occurrence, as seeing a red object is; it is a mere may-be.” (pg 81, Pierce) The difference between Peirce and Bradley is the difference between possibility and actuality, because actuality for Peirce is secondness, whereas for Bradley it is feeling.
         It could at this point be asserted that Bradley is conflating what Peirce has neatly distinguished, and that his conception of “immediate experience” being other than consciousness is chimerical, but it is not that simple. Bradley’s “immediate experience” is nondual, lacking both subject and objects, whereas all consciousness is dual, involving a subject and an object. Bradley says: “Feeling is immediate experience without distinction or relation in itself. It is a unity, complex but without relations. And there is here no difference between the state and its content, since, in a word, the experienced and the experience are one.” (pg 194 ETR) Yet Peirce asserts: “By a feeling, I mean an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another.” (pg 81, Pierce) By this description, it seems as if Peirce is designating a state of consciousness that is nondual, although for an implicit subject, which is either a very uncharacteristic sloppiness of words on his part, or he is asserting positively that consciousness can be both contentful and contentless (again using the word ‘content’ in the sense of distinguishable qualities). This is a critical point of departure between the two philosophers.
         Peirce repeatedly reasserts this definition of feeling as a component of consciousness. He says “… by a feeling I mean an instance of that sort of element of consciousness which is all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else.” (pg 82, Pierce) Continuing, he says: “A feeling is a state, which is in its entirety in every moment of time as long as it endures.” (Ibid.) Here, it should be pointed out, Peirce enlists time as an active substrate to his consciousness, and that is specifically missing from Bradley’s definition of immediate experience. Peirce then reasserts his point once more: “… which is as much as to say that the feeling is simply a quality of immediate consciousness.” (Ibid.)
         For Peirce “feeling” is something that arrives together with “phanerons of firstness”. That is, “feeling” is what attends the other content of consciousness and gives that consciousness its immediacy. Peirce says: “… whatever is in the mind in any mode of consciousness there is necessarily an immediate consciousness and consequently a feeling.” (pg 83, Pierce) and he points out: “… nor can we gain knowledge of any feeling by introspection, the feeling being completely veiled from introspection, for the very reason that it is our immediate consciousness.” (Ibid.) In this case, the immediacy that feeling adds to consciousness is not distinguishable from the contents of the consciousness in actual fact. Which is to assert that while phanerons of firstness, “mere may-bes” of quality are indistinguishable from the feeling of the qualities in actual fact, they are not equivalent to Bradley’s immediate experience because Peirce’s “immediate consciousness” is already at a different level of analysis than Bradley’s “immediate experience”. Bradley’s “experience” is not equivalent to Peirce’s “consciousness.”
         Bradley says clearly that “… the identification of consciousness and experience is a wrong assumption.” (pg 194 ETR) In “Consciousness and Experience” Bradley takes on this conflation of dualistic consciousness and nondualistic experience. He points out: “Now consciousness, to my mind, is not original. What comes first in each of us is rather feeling, a state as yet without either an object or subject. Feeling here naturally does not mean mere pleasure and pain.” (Ibid.) And he adds: “For consciousness is superinduced on, and is still supported by, feeling; and feeling is itself an experienced whole.” (pg 195 ETR) Bradley does acknowledge that the state of “immediate experience” is not easily identifiable for his readers. Although he lays no claim to “mystical” experience, that may be simply because he is not a member of a mystical tradition. “Mystical” has simply an unfortunate connotation to it. In point of fact, it is a possible mode of being for all humans, and is much more prevalent within the human population than the experience of traveling in space is. After all, who but a handful of individuals have ever had that experience? Shouldn’t we dispute space travel’s very validity as a possible state of human experience because of its occult nature? The lack of our own first-hand familiarity with space travel, which is only reported to us third-hand, is not an argument against its actuality. Neither then is our unfamiliarity with Bradley’s “immediate experience” an argument against its actuality. To condemn it as a mere “word game” without an actual distinction from Peirce’s “immediate consciousness” is equivalent to stating that space travel is indistinguishable from a drive to the beach. Bradley points out that while his view is difficult, it is no more difficult than the coenesthesia that is Peirce’s “feeling” as it contributes to “immediate consciousness.” (pg 194 ETR)
         In summary then, Peirce’s category of firstness and his use of the word “feeling” are not directly translatable to Bradley’s depiction of immediate experience as “feeling.” The word “feeling” in these two writers’ usage is polysemous, and easily confused because most readers do not have an adequate handle on what Bradley is trying to relate by his expression “immediate experience.” As Bradley himself acknowledges: “The above idea of immediate experience is not intelligible, I would add, in the sense of being explicable; but it is necessary, I would insist, both for psychology and for metaphysics.” (pg 189 ETR) Our difficulty is with the word “experience,” another overused word without clear-cut distinctions. Experience, after all, for the vast majority of us, is conscious; and there is little difference in saying “the experience of something” versus “the consciousness of something.” Yet, as is plainly evident from the writings of all mystical traditions and all spiritual philosophies, there is a ‘level’ or mode of experience that escapes from the normal understanding of consciousness as a container holding subject and objects in relation to each other within the structure of space and time. The problem is there is no word for this mode whose definition is clearly apparent to those of us who have not realized this mode of experience. As Bradley points out: “… the question is whether on some matters, in order to speak accurately, one has not to use metaphors which conflict with and correct each other.” (pg 196 ETR) Yet, such metaphors may mean nothing to particular readers, especially if Bradley’s writing is approached with a predisposition to misinterpret his meaning into someone else’ meaning.
         Peirce is clearly not operating from this mode of experience, and his use of feeling is not applicable to Bradley’s. Peirce’s phenomenology is a deft structure for analyzing consciousness, but has nothing to do with Bradley’s analysis and depiction of the fundamental and primordial aspects of Absolute reality.

Bibliography
ETR:        Bradley, F.H., “Essays on Truth and Reality,” Oxford University Press, 1914
Peirce: Buchler, Justus, ed., “Philosophical Writings of Peirce,” Dover Publications, 1955
Copyright 2008, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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Arguments for Awareness as

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:31:38 -0500

How can it be said that awareness is not of some content within experience, but rather is the experienced content? First from the wholeness of felt experience in which the subject is never given but only inferred[1], and second from the fact that the continuity of experience is always univocal to a single perspective and its transcendence.
            The wholeness of felt experience in which, although qualities can be said to be present but are not yet organized into a relational scheme of objects to which they inhere, thus organization and structure is absent until imposed ‘subjectively’, seems on the face of it to be irrefutable (cf. Kant, Schopenhauer, Berkeley, Hume, Bradley, etc.) Since this wholeness of felt experience does not admit of a subject, which is only inferred into the immediacy of feeling upon reflection – in which the subject is in fact objectified – it is hard to see how awareness can be of anything at all. A view requires a viewer. Perception requires a perceiver. Having requires a holder. Without a veridical subject there is no viewer or perceiver or holder, thus the only possibility is that awareness is the whole of experience, meaning all the content found there including the feeling that attends to it, and thus awareness is not a supervenience upon some underlying process but is the process itself. This does not mean that experience is ideal, because that implicates a container for the idea; rather it means that experience is neither material nor ideal, but is a ‘real enough’ existence in which the performance of experience is whole and complete without the need for either a material substrate or a mental hypostasis.
            Even given the irrefutability of the wholeness of immediate experience, we can also find support for “awareness as” in the continuity of experience. There are two ways to view the continuity of experience: the first is as a felt continuity, accompanying as an integral part, of all experience, and which does not have any apodictic ground in fact, but rather is added to it; the second, as an obvious aspect of the wholeness of experience without which nothing enduring can be veridically said to exist, so that all experience must be null and void in its absence.
            The felt continuity of experience, the stream-like quality that we find in our experiential lives, might be a form of coenaesthesis[2] in which a sort of summation of perceptions, including that of thoughts, adds to the immediate experience a particular structure, like that of space and time, or even as a component of time. Given this possibility, which is not possible to refute since any such refutation necessarily operates within that of which it is attempting to refute, i.e. the continuity of the process of refuting, there is no necessity that the continuity is anything more than an addition to immediate experience. So it may be that our experience has no actual continuity from moment to moment, other than a felt, but not actual, coenaesthesis, and our identity must be ephemeral at best. This result holds even if this coenaesthesis is not a result of, but an integral part of, experience. Given this result, awareness cannot be of experience because there is nothing permanent at all to carry, lay claim to, or cause to be, this awareness apart from experience.
            The alternative is that it is actually awareness manifesting as experience and the felt continuity is the positive presence of awareness through the ever-changing flux of the action of awareness that we refer to as this experience. Thus the continuity is a fundamental aspect of experience, whether immediate experience or mediated via the imposed structures of our cognitive faculty. Yet in such a case, there is no individual awareness as there is still no container for it, i.e. no subject, and we must therefore speak of Awareness as the non-individuated presence. Awareness is manifesting as experience, and thus is it; experience is neither manifesting awareness, nor containing it.
            However, even though Awareness is non-individuated, experience is always univocal to a particular individual, which I have referred to elsewhere as a “perspective” of Awareness. The continuity is the individual, and this individual does not refer to a subject that endures, but rather an individuated process (experience) that endures. Such a process can be transcended to a point, in fact we are transcending it even here by speaking about non-individuated Awareness, even though we cannot ever escape to an ‘outside’ of this process. Anything that any individual can experience, whether through thought, speech, or action, is ‘inside’ of this process. In fact, ‘outside’ is a complete fantasy created in thought, imaginatively constructed as if there can be an outside to this individuated experience. And yet the individuated experience is the activity of non-individuated Awareness and thus it is always awareness as experience and never of experience!
            In short, there is never a subject, substratum, or hypostasis in which particular awareness can abide and watch, so all experience, which necessarily entails awareness, is identical with non-individuated Awareness, but the identity is not symmetric. Awareness is not identical with individuated experience, which would necessarily create a ‘subject’.
            It might be protested that such a structure implies solipsism, but that should quickly be vacated as soon as it is realized that since there is no subject, there is no veridical self to be solipsistically known, and also that Awareness and the individuated perspective that we here call experience are not equivalent bidirectionally. Thus from the side of experience something more that the continuity of experience can be known when experience is transcended.
            Beyond such protest, and perhaps more importantly, it is not possible to transcend Awareness; nor is it possible for the continuity of experience to be maintained transcendentally.
            The first point is asserted as the impossibility for experience to transcend its own transcendence. We can transcend immediate experience and reach towards Awareness, but starting from immediate experience one cannot jump, as it were, over Awareness to somewhere beyond, or otherwise than, Awareness. Such a positive assertion would be speculative at best and sheer fantasy at worst. This is not to say that some “beyond Awareness” cannot project into Awareness and experience, as such a negative conclusion would itself be speculative. Thus, revelation is safe if authenticate; yet we have no way to know that it is authenticate, so it must always be a matter of faith.
            The second point is that since there is no subject, substratum, or hypostasis under or in experience and experience is “awareness as”, there is nothing that can continue in any form of transcendental state. Awareness does not exist other than as experience. Transcending experience is not a goal that can be reached, but only a limit to experience. Experience cannot transcend itself and there is[3] nothing other than experience, so Awareness can never actually be reached. There is, it can be argued, only degrees of transcendence which reach a limit always necessarily short of full transcendence. The mystery can never be known, even though it can be asserted that the continuity of experience that we objectify into our ‘selves’ is that mystery.

[1] I am indebted to F.H. Bradley in his essay “Consciousness and Experience” for this point.
[2] “The general sense or feeling of existence arising from the sum of bodily impressions, as distinct from the definite sensations of the special senses; the vital sense.” Oxford English Dictionary
[3] denoting existence here
Copyright 2008, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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