floyd merrell
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907
THE “REAL,” WHAT WE (THINK WE) KNOW ABOUT IT,
AND SEMIOSIC BODYMIND FLOWS
From the Western perspective of the
world, what, when, where, how, why, is the “real”? These are all $64,000 dollar questions that are incessantly asked
with obsessive curiosity. Actually, in
the ancient Christian tradition, we occasionally have the vague suggestion that
we would be better off if we just remained ignorant.
We first have the idea from the Old
Testament. There were two specially
groomed trees in the Garden of Eden:
the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. The story is common knowledge and I trust I need not recapitulate
it here. The point is that as a result
of the original sin, the stage was set.
Knowledge, in the Christian tradition, brings riches and multiplies and
pride and sin; therefore knowledge is bad.
Innocence cultivates poverty and humility, all of which are credentials
for inheriting the Earth; therefore innocence is good. The Faust legend created out of this myth
has captivated writers like Johan Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann, among a
host of others, and it has been played this idea to the hilt.
But how can knowledge be bad if God
possesses it in unlimited quantities?
Well, it isn’t bad. At least it
isn’t bad for God. But it is for us
sinners, because when we know, we become like God; we become aware of the
difference between good and evil. This
should be good. But it isn’t. For there now exists the possibility of our
doing evil knowingly instead of simply doing what we do in innocent bliss. God doesn’t run this risk because s/he is
immune from the Devil’s temptations.
With the New Testament, irrationalism is
added to the knowledge conundrum.
Christ is both God and human. He
is God, because he was immaculately conceived, and he is man, for, after all,
he could in the most ungodly way suffer crucifixion and death. To make matters worse, we have the Holy
Trinity as three fused into one and one subdivided into three in
simultaneity. Following Roman
philosopher Tertullian, the whole scheme is inconceivable, logically
impossible, nonsensical, and meaningless.
So the only recourse is to accept it on faith. And faith it was, in contrast to reason. The unsavory contention between the two
extremes got the West out of the starting blocks and onto the long road toward
ever increasing knowledge, secular knowledge, in its eternal conflict with
religion and faith.
In the beginning, Greek philosophers
grappled intensively with this problem.
Some of them even thought they got it right. But there was always a little contradiction or a few paradoxes
lurking around in the shadows. During
the Medieval period and afterward, the Church was supposed to have all the
answers, and many a life was lost due to heretical deviations from the
one-and-only “truth.” A few
philosophers, in spite of the warning signs, continued their quest for their
own “truths,” and they ran many risks on so doing. With the Renaissance came Western science in the pursuit of the
“truth” regarding natural phenomena.
Nothing but more heresy, as far as the Church was concerned. But now it had trouble coping with science’s
success. Science was also cutting into
what philosophers considered to be their exclusive turf. The ensuing miscommunication and resentment
and bickering went on for over three centuries. Then science made bold moves into life and its origin, and there
were even incursions into human affairs.
The hold Church fathers and philosophers enjoyed over souls and minds
suffered another set back.
Finally, as a last resort, during the
heyday of a philosophical movement called empirical positivism, philosophers
either began telling the scientists what they were doing, where they had gone
wrong, and where they should go in the future, or they gravitated into areas of
human concerns: values, ethics
aesthetics, and such. Science, with the
labels “social” and “human,” began laying bare this last stand of virgin
territory. Outcries of “secular
humanism,” “alienation,” and other somber warnings filled the air. It seemed that philosophers now had nowhere
else to go. So they retreated into
texts and discourse and narratives and language. And religion became a one-day-a-week affair at most. Science, that new chant venerating the
ultimate triumph of culture over nature by mind, was now having its day.
In short, many questions were posed and
many answers given. But the fundamental
questions remained. These questions
surfaced with a vengeance during the twentieth century. It appeared to some onlookers that all hell
had broken loose. Occasional doomsayers
declared that absolute certainty had become a pipe dream, and the idea of
complete and consistent knowledge had gone the way either of phlogiston or the
alchemy. As if this were not enough,
the death knell to tired minds wanting irrefutable answers came at the hands of
physicists, of all people. Physics: that prince of the sciences, that to which
in the heyday of logical positivism presumably all other sciences could be
reduced, that reputed source of answers to end all answers. Gone were the days when physics could be
evoked as the grand authoritarian voice.
Now, take a handful of Nobel laureates of that noble science and you may
find just as many interpretations of the world. Each physicist may have his alternate interpretation of what goes
by the umbrella term, “reality,” and all of them may engage in no-holds-barred
competition for acceptance of their newest theories. There is the sneaky feeling that “truth,” the “whole truth and
nothing but the truth,” is beyond reach, and that “reality” is unattainable.
“Reality,” one might now be prone to
conclude, is a smorgasbord of theories and conjectures, a salad bar of words
and worlds. It can be fast food gulped
down in the form of the pop physics that abounds these days. It can be the soul food of Zen physics, or a
new age vegetarian diet of “the real is us” so let’s feel good about ourselves
and be happy. It can be a sushi theory
of raw sensations is all we have and so that’s all we need. It can be meat and potatoes materialism in
the order of what you see is what there is.
It can be dessert bar ego-feeding time to the tune of “reality” is what
our consciousness makes it. Or it can
all be wrapped up in that confusing variety of conflicting side-dish
interpretations with apparently no resolution in sight that goes by the name of
quantum theory (Goswami 1993, Herbert 1985).
But things did not always appear so
hopeless. Up until the end of the
present century, optimism most often reigned.
Given the mind-boggling diversity the world presents to the confused
onlooker, a set of fundamental premises was established prior to and during much
of the seventeenth century and the Baroque period—itself a paragon of
pluralism—for the purpose of laying conflicts regarding “reality” to rest for
all time. Over the years, this set of
premises became entrenched in the minds of us Westerners to the extent that
they now color our world, the world we live in. However strange and even inconsistent these premises might have
seemed in the beginning, they eventually come to appear as natural as could
be. They coincided with the world
according to what became conceived as the most commonsensical of
assumptions. And what were these
premises? They came in large part from
René Descartes in the form of mind/world and mind/body severances. These were largely metaphysical premises,
rather than scientific premises. They
were the result of the philosopher’s wish to be a geometer and scientist. Descartes by and large fulfilled his wish
and in the process produced some philosophy so convincing that it exercised a
remarkable degree of intellectual dominance since his time.
Other premises came from the beginnings of modern science: Galileo Galilei’s grand division between the
hard-core exact and measurable empirical world in contrast to the appearances
handed down by the qualities of the mind’s subjective nature. Successive scientists took Galileo’s project
to its most sublime end, especially Isaac Newton, who set the foundations for
the emergent mechanical model of the universe.
Newton’s theory was presumably of purely scientific, that is, of
inductive, nature, and hypothetico-deductive hypotheses as if drawn from a
vacuum were considered anathema. What
went as purely inductive premises were the product of scientists who wished to
remain lily clean of all metaphysical blemishes but who, in spite of
themselves, allowed a few hypothetical assumptions to creep in.[1]
To make another long story short, the
Galilean-Cartesian-Newtonian corpuscular-kinetic notion of the world entails,
as Descartes himself portrayed it, an external world made up exclusively of res
extensa (physical- or extended-stuff) chock full of subjective experience
consisting of mushy, and imprecise sensations such as color, tone, odor, taste,
and touch. All those qualities are
considered scientifically unimportant.
They are mere “secondary qualities,” a matter of the subject’s grasp of
his world according to his emotions, sentiments, and whims and fancies. As such, they are of the world of
appearances and not what is “real” in the most legitimate sense.
The genuine nature of the “real” is of utmost importance. It is available solely by way of res
cogitans (mind-stuff). The world of
res extensa, as the object of res cogitans, becomes Descartes’s
genuine focus of thought rather than subjective appearances, sentiment,
emotions. Res cogitans, when on
its best behavior, is capable of telling us what is “real,” the “reality” of
“primary qualities,” rather than the imaginary, illusory, deceptive, magical
and mythical reports given up by the subjective mind attending to “secondary
qualities.” And how does res
cogitans manage accomplish this trick?
Not by attending to subjectively received colors and sounds and smells
and tastes and touches, but by measuring and calibrating and computing the word
objectively, and giving it mathematical rather than merely linguistic window dressing. According to the epistemological giants of
the day, hard-nosed “macho thinking” eventually became the arena of res
cogitans, while all those other trivial, soft mental pursuits purportedly
became the fickle ways of “women’s thinking.”
This, of course, is putting things in possibly misleading and dangerous
terms—to say nothing of their “political incorrectness.” But once again, we can pretty much wrap up
the history of Western thought and science according to these two Cartesian
categories. Consequently, in Alfred
North Whitehead’s (1925) words, “misplaced concreteness” had its say, and the
grand “bifurcation of nature” took precedence over any and all alternative ways
of finding a home in the universe.
Admittedly, the grand Cartesian dichotomy
in certain ways came in quite handy. By
a stroke of the pen, tender “secondary” mind was sent off to do an internship
in primary school under the tutelage of the local nuns, while tough, no
nonsense “primary” mind went to an academy that would prepare him for a solid
degree in mathematics at the Venerable Institute of Technology. In this manner the task before the scientist
was incalculably simplified. The world
of res extensa accounted for by res cogitans fell conveniently
into the hands of those who happened to be mathematically endowed. According to the most optimistic reports,
the entire universe could in principle be comprehended, mathematically
comprehended that is, which was considered the only comprehension worthy of the
name. All the other less mathematically
minded folks would have to remain content with their exceedingly impoverished
poetic accounts, and leave the intellectual rigors to their more capable
counterparts.
Plato once banished the poets from the circle of hard core
thinkers. Now all citizens of the
world, save a few adult men with the proper tools, would have to take on
authority what was handed down to them by the number gurus. And authority it was, in spite of
Descartes’s antiauthoritarian “I” of “I think.” For, that “I” was a most privileged “I.” It was certainly not available to just
anybody. The Cartesian “I” saw a
“reality” made up of things that have measurable attributes: mass, momentum, position in space,
continuous existence in time expressed as inertia, energy taken in or
expended. “Reality” was considered
reducible to just that, and it was so reduced insofar as reductionism was
possible.
Eventually, the entire project triumphed beyond the wildest of
imaginations. It is hard to argue with
such success. In fact, the objective,
mechanistic view was so successful, and it became so taken for granted, that
any viable alternative seemed well nigh impossible. After some 300 years of accomplishments, scientists,
philosophers, scholars of all disciplines, and indeed, virtually all
knowledgeable citizens of the Western World, were either in a state of
euphoria, in a drunken stupor over their intoxication with their unexpected
prosperity, or with a hangover and a head full of cobwebs. Few onlookers heeded the dark clouds that raised
their ominous countenance in the distant horizon.[2]
However, there was a price to be paid for
privileging Descartes’s res cogitans (mind-stuff) over res extensa
(matter-stuff). Once the world had been
bifurcated and given a linear, digital, analytic, mathematical account, nobody
apparently knew how to put the pieces back together again into a whole, the
whole universe, that contained both res extensa and res cogitans
as well as body and mind (or better, bodymind) of “secondary qualities”
and mindbody of “primary qualities.”
For example, how do we know our world?
Why, by the senses, of course.
But what is it that we sense?
One might wish to respond that we sense what there is. This was pretty much the commonsensical
assumption before the advent of modern science. It was generally taken for granted that philosophers and common
people alike all sense the world “out there” in pretty much the same way.
Not so, said the early scientists, beginning with Galileo and
culminating with Descartes. If one
accepts the “bifurcation of nature” premise, one must conclude that when one
perceives a “red” apple, the apple’s color is no more than mere subjectivity. The apple’s genuine attributes belong to the
objectively oriented side of res cogitans and res cogitans
alone. This is a matter of “primary
qualities,” that which can be accurately measured and given clear and distinct
mathematical window-dressing. The color
of the apple one sees when expressed in terms of “primary qualities,” so the
story goes, is no more than a combination of light rays with certain
wave-lengths and their particular frequencies.
This is “macho” knowledge, liberated from its dependency on mere appearances.
The mushy, error-prone subjective self senses “secondary
qualities.” This is all right as far as
our sentiments and passions and wishes and whims and likes and dislikes
go. “Secondary qualities” are the colors
and sounds and smells and tastes and tactile sensations of our world. But they do not lead us to hard-core
knowledge of what there is, says the “macho” scientist. “Secondary qualities” are not part of res
extensa as it really stands, for pure res extensa in the objective
sense will have nothing to do with the subjective side of mind; it has no use
for “secondary qualities.”
Res extensa, then, is
actually no more than so many juxtaposed wave lengths each of a certain
frequency, so many areas of compacted and diffuse air pockets, so many
stimulated nerve endings on the mucous membrane area of the nose or at the tip
of the tongue or on the surface of the
skin. Thus what is sensed is sensed in
a private, subjective world. It is not
what is “real” at all. In this
subjective sense of sensing the world, neither scientist nor nonscientist is
clearly and distinctly in tune with the world.
Both are imprisoned within their own private worlds. What they subjectively take for their “real
world” is a ghost world. It is like a
dream, whose existence does not extend beyond what their senses directly tell
them. These direct sensations, loose
and imprecise, are good for gazing at art or a sunset, for listening to music
or warbling birds, for enjoying the aroma and taste of fine food and drink, for
reading poetry, and for making love in the dark. But they give us no solid knowledge about the world.
However, problems with this conception of
things eventually arose. With respect
to what Whitehead considered the grand Cartesian “bifurcation of the world,”
consider this. On the one hand, if we directly
sense the world in terms of “secondary qualities,” and if what is genuinely
“real” is the world of “primary
qualities” that are not directly sensed but the product of scientific
measurements, then how can “primary qualities” be known if there is no form or
fashion of direct sensation of the “secondary qualities” sort? Must “secondary qualities” not enter the
scene when the scientist is handling the tools of her trade and reading
instruments and tapping at the computer terminal and making observations in
natural environments? On the other
hand, if “primary qualities” are at some point brought to the mind’s attention
by way of “secondary qualities,” then how can the one “world” be “real” and the
other “irreal”? If “secondary
qualities” are “irreal,” then the information they hand up to the scientist in
pursuit of “primary qualities” when she is engaged in the concrete affairs of
her experimental procedures must be equally “irreal.” So at what point do these “secondary qualities” magically enter
the “real” within the ethereal zone of “primary qualities”? It would seem that both “primary” and
“secondary” considerations of the “world” are bound up in Descartes’s mind, or
better, bodymind.
With this problem in hand, I hope to
illustrate in the following pages that body and brain tell mind (or better,
bodymind) what “secondary qualities” what we sense in the “world.” Consequently mind cannot sense “primary
qualities” as measured and quantified data in the “world” without body and
brain. But when confronting this
problem, we find ourselves caught up in a dilemma. Descartes created a virtually unbridgeable gap between “secondary
qualities” and “primary qualities,” res extensa and res cogitans. If in the Cartesian sense sensations cannot
bridge the abyss between res cogitans and res extensa, then how
is it possible to bridge the abyss at all?
How is it possible genuinely to know the world? Or even know that a world “out there” exists
in the first place?
As far as my seriously limited understanding goes, Descartes himself
had lingering doubts in this regard. In
his effort to come to grips with his doubts, he left a tortuous argument. In spite of its difficulty, the argument
sports a few naïve assumptions that few scholars would care to take at face value
in light of today’s world of avant garde art over the past century, and
of relativity and quantum physics, chaos theory, virtual reality, and global
pluralism of cultures. Yet the
Cartesian impasse remains. It often
takes the form of what Richard Bernstein (1983) dubs “Cartesian anxiety”
(either we become enlightened, or we will fall victims to the dark, devilish
depths of superstition and false beliefs and ignorance). Granted.
After the grand bifurcation, mathematization of the world seemed to hold
unlimited promise. But is the great
mathematical cut worth tossing everything else into the trash can? Especially when that “everything else”
includes gazing at the sunset, listening to a Bach fugue, smelling honeysuckle
blossoms, eating an exquisite plate of pasta, and making love? When that “everything else” is what makes
life worth living after all is said and done?
In a certain manner of putting it, only
by a strange sort of move did “Cartesian anxiety” fall in step with that
age-old split between the two grand schools of Western thought: idealism and realism. In a nutshell, idealism says everything
consists of mind-stuff; realism counters that the world consists of real,
actualized physical-stuff. For
Descartes, mind-stuff (res cogitans) takes priority over physical-stuff
(res extensa), for it is what can be known by objective methods of
measurement and calculation. Hence mind
can get in tune with and mirror the world.
For the naïve sort of realist, what you know is what you see and what
you see is what there is, so in the best possible scenario what is in mind
mirrors what is “out there.” This would
seem to imply that Cartesianism inclines toward idealism. But not exactly. Mind must act on the world objectively in order to generate its
mind-stuff. It does not simply sit
around and wait for something interesting to happen. At the same time, whatever genuine information mind squeezes out
of the world consists of “primary qualities,” which are available to mind and
mind alone. Mind is by no means a
passive recipient of physical-stuff.
In contrast to the Cartesian program, the
story I tell in the inquiry entails both body and mind (bodymind) as
sign (bodymindsign). Both body
and mind are co-participants in the process of their becoming in concert with
the becoming of their world. This is a
sort of middle path between idealism and realism, or in Bernstein’s (1983)
words, between “objectivism and relativism.”
It is neither idealism nor realism, neither subjectivism nor
objectivism, neither relativism nor antirelativism but, as we shall note, much
in the order of what Peirce called “objective idealism.”[3] So much for the Cartesian quandary.
For the next move, please allow me simply
to try stating my piece outright. Then
perhaps I can get on with it:
(1) There is a world,
somehow, and it is “real.”
(2) No more than a part of the
world (The World) can be included in what we call “our world,” for we can never
know the “real” in its entirety. Our
minds are too feeble and fallible and the world is too complex and subtle.
(3) We are not as limited as the first two
premises might suggest, for at every step we make of “our world” something
other than what it was becoming, and we possess the potentiality for making it
in the future something other than what it is now becoming.
“Our world” is
“our world,” for sure. It is
what it is, “for us,” and we are what we are “for it,” at
least for the moment, since the next moment will present something other than
what the present moment presents.
The notions of “for us” and “for it” are tough nuts to crack, however,
and the best I can hope for in this very modest meditation on living semiosis
is to display the meaning of the terms throughout the story I have to
tell. For now, perhaps the most I can
say is this: we sense “our world” and
we never cease our attempts to say it, but we cannot really say it, for what we
sense is more than can be said.
Moreover, much of what we sense we know—”tacit knowledge” via
Michael Polanyi (1958, see also Margolis 1993)—and part of what we sense and
know is part of what we cannot say, so we know more than we can say. In this manner it is futile to speak of a
split between what is “real” and what is fantasy, between what is “in here” and
what is “out there,” between what we can see and say and what we cannot see and
say, and between what can be known and what cannot be known.[4]
Now what I have written to this point is
an eyeful and you are most likely asking...
Where do we need to go, after the
shortcomings of the Galileo-Cartesian-Newtonian corpuscular-kinetic view of the
“real” have become painfully apparent?
Another $64,000 question.
However, please don’t expect any ultimate answers from me. For centuries, minds infinitely more competent
than mine have tried and failed.
Nevertheless, I would at least venture to
suggest: a turn to our role as co-participants
with rather than actors on the world, and the interdependent,
interrelated, interactivity with respect to ourselves and our world. In the twentieth century, this turn was
initiated from many angles. To mention
a few instances revealing this turn, it is found in certain interpretations of
quantum theory (Herbert 1985). We sense
it in ecology and John Lovelock’s (1979) Gaia hypothesis. There is a hint of the idea in Mikhail
Bakhtin’s literary theory and in certain strains of what go by the names of
“poststructuralism” and “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” (Emerson 1997). We occasionally run into it in feminist,
gay, cultural and ethnic studies (Bordo 1987, Haraway 1991). We read about it in recent philosophy,
history, sociology, and anthropology of science (Barnes, et al. 1996, Fuller
1993, Koertge 1998). It is often
implied in recent chaos theory (Gleick
1987). It is crucial to an
understanding of Ilya Prigogine’s physics of complexity (Prigogine and Stengers
1983). We even find smatterings of it
in New Age ramblings and in other popular trends. But actually, this idea is nothing new at all. Over the centuries, it has popped up in
Western thought along the lines of the Heraclitean tradition. And, of course, it is central to much
Eastern thought.
My own inclinations along these lines
would initially evoke the name of North American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce. Why Peirce? Because he most emphatically stressed the
importance of the entire community of knowers over the idea of self-serving,
self-promoting, ego-driven individualism, that has become rampant in our
contemporary global scene and especially in the West. Because he nurtured a belief in the importance of open dialogue
between humans and humans, humans and other living creatures, and humans and
nature at large. Because he obstinately
refused to buy into the heralded mind/body, subject/object, culture/nature, and
human/nonhuman, splits, while maintaining that dichotomies of thought are
actually matters of degree rather than kind.
Because he believed signs pervade the entire universe and that we as
well as all organisms are signs among signs and that signs grow much in the
order of organic growth. Because he had
a profound respect for nature and the whole of the universe. Finally, because I sense that Peirce may
have much to offer those of us who are seeking answers to overwhelmingly
complex aesthetic, ethical, and moral issues with which we are confronted in
our contemporary milieu.
But this is neither the time nor the
place to get heavy with Peirce’s thought.
Let’s get on with bodymind and its wordl.[5]
How is the world ordinarily described in
the scientific mold? By timeless,
mechanical equations rendering “primary qualities” intelligible? No, not really. Nevertheless, the common assumption usually has it that equations
of the F = MA sort are entirely objective, and applicable in exactly the same
way everywhere and everywhen. In
classical physics, however, the world is described mathematically in terms of
differential equations. These
equations, of the calculus, involve change over time. The equation, dx/dt gives us a linear stream of
“differentials” regarding something, x, that changes in time, t.
“Differentials” are just that, differentials or minute, infinitesimally
minute, differences that something undergoes during a certain increment of
time. In more recent mathematics we
have fractal geometry, the patterns of which come to full bloom as the same
algorithm is repeated, over and over again, potentially to infinity, the “over
and over again” taking up time. Time
must come into the picture, for if not, nothing can be described. Whatever there is, x, changes in
time, t, in virtually infinitesimally minuscule increments in equally
minuscule increments of time.
Everything is always becoming something other than what it was
becoming. Your car is becoming somewhat
less than precisely honed pistons and valves and crankshaft and camshaft
alternator wheel. It is frayed
upholstery becoming, deteriorated rubber packing becoming, worn tire becoming,
marred window becoming, sun-blistered plastic becoming, rusted body becoming,
perforated muffler becoming.[6]
After life as a child and a young man in
the Southwestern part of the United States, and after finishing my PhD work at
the University of New Mexico in May of 1973, I bought a slightly used VW camper
van and, with wife and three offspring, we traveled to San Francisco and down
the coast and to Mexico City to visit my wife’s family. Before we knew it, it was August. So we headed up to Albuquerque, filled a
rental truck and hauled East to West Lafayette, Indiana and Purdue University,
where my first and only academic job was waiting. I knew little of the climate in the “Heartland of America,” and
assumed the trusty VW van would last a lifetime. To my surprise, the van turned rusty within a mere couple of
years. Weatherproofing was virtually
nonexistent in the Southwest, and I thought I had no need of putting a coat it
on a now four-year old vehicle in Indiana.
Or
at least so I thought. The van became
very shortly the repository of irreversible rust becoming. In response, I would periodically grind off
the rust with a skimpy ¼ inch drill fixed with a sander attachment, plug the
holes with liberal gobs of body putty, sand them down, put on some primer, and
paint over them with an aerosol can of paint from the department store (the van
was white, and, after all, white is white, isn’t it?). It was a hopeless struggle. Eventually I gave up and allowed nature to
take its course, and ended up in 1991 selling my van for a song. Rust becoming was destined to win in the
end. Time eventually reaps its harvest
from everything and everybody. I had
learned a lesson on the impermanence of all things and about my ego-centered
tendency to become attached to inanimate material things. Like my van’s rust becoming, I repeat,
everything is becoming something other than what it was becoming.
But we still nurture a natural tendency
to balk. Efficiently inculcated in our
Western science-driven ways, our mind persists, and indeed it often excels, in
the ability to treat its world as if there were nothing new under the sun, as
if there were really nothing that is entirely strange. Consequently, we persist in our mule-headed
insistence on interpreting what is different in our world in terms of what we
already thought we knew. This is often
preferable when our tender egos are taken into account. It gives us the security that what we think
we know is all we need to know, as far as our world goes, and there’s no sense
in going further than that. We prefer
this security rather than attend to, and marvel at, during each moment, what
our feelings and sensations tell us about our world’s incessant becoming. To admit to this becoming, one would expect,
is surely to fall into confusion and chaos—i.e. “Cartesian anxiety.”
Eastern sages also tell us that (1) all
things are impermanent. They teach us
that (2) nobody has an ego unless the ego is constructed by artificial means,
that (3) what we find ourselves doing at each and every moment we should do as
if it were of ultimate importance no matter how mundane it might appear, and
that (4) the ultimate in knowing is quietude, solitude, silence, nothingness,
“emptiness.” Let’s briefly take these
four principles one by one. We might
wish to construe “all things are impermanent” to mean that all that exists must
eventually die or decay and fade into oblivion. This is the negative interpretation. There is another way of looking at the phrase. In a genuine—though not necessarily a
positive—sense, although neither nothing nor nobody is fixed, permanent, or
immortal, after decay there is renewal, after destruction there is
reconstruction, after life there is birth.
In this sense the idea of impermanence is valueless, neutral. There is no positive and negative, good side
and bad side, there is just impermanence, period. It is just change, incessant change wherein everything is
becoming something other than what it was becoming. That’s all.
Express the change of velocity of a vehicle when it accelerates from 0
to 70 miles per hour, and slap it all on the Cartesian plane by means of
analytic geometry, and you have the change.
It’s all there, timelessly, for all to see, as a set of “primary
qualities.” It’s change, for sure. But it’s by and large valueless. Where is the exhilaration you experience
when putting the car in gear and stomping on the gas pedal as you let up on the
clutch and feeling your head try to flip back and detach itself from a few
vertebrae? Where is the tingling
sensation in your guts as your torso is pressed against the back of the
seat? In other words, where are the
“secondary qualities”? Within the
abstract Cartesian plane, there are no eyes catching a glimpse of the
speedometer in anticipation of a needle rapidly moving from left to right. There is just a bunch of symbols and a few
lines on a flat sheet of paper. That’s
all. There’s just change expressed
through gutless abstractions. Which brings
up the second, third, and fourth principles in the above paragraph: if you and your euphoric
feeling inside the accelerating automobile are not part of the neutral change,
the becoming of the becoming, then there is no ego, not really. If there is no ego, and if everything
is just there, then there are no values, no good or evil, and no genuine
opposites. If there are no ultimate
values, then what could be more important than what is happening at each moment
of our lives, whether we are driving down the street or walking up a stairway,
getting dressed or undressed, eating or cleaning up the table, gazing at a sunset
or watching CNN news, or taking an exam or closing a business deal. If this is the case, then no moment is any
more important than complete quietude, solitude, silence, nothingness,
“emptiness.” That’s all.
We naturally renege. We want things that are important to us to
stand out. We want them to be replete
with meaning, significance, value. We
want this meaning, significance, value, to be articulable and articulated in language. Thus we are accustomed to saying things as
if we were to say “This means that.” But rarely do we pause to reflect on this strange linguistic
structure. Is it really possible that
there can something we call “this”? Is
it possible that “this” could refer to, correspond to, represent, or in any
form or fashion present a mirror image of, “that”? Could the word connected to some “this” actually mean something
else, “that”? If so, in what way, if at
all, is it like “that”? Is there a
correspondence between words and things, words and meanings? We customarily take things not as what they
are but in terms of something similar that we happened to find in some corner
of our memory. And we conveniently make
the connection. We’ve grown quite
comfortable with our laziness, or at least with our inability to take things in
our accustomed manner for what they are outside their interdependency,
interrelatedness, and interaction with other things. We don’t take them as they would appear prior to our so
integrating them, prior to our conceptualizing them and generalizing them and
throwing them into our convenient pigeon-holes. But we are deluding ourselves.
Allow me to offer another story.
Some time ago when in Brazil for the
first time and struggling with the Portuguese language, I found myself in the
market place. Spying some strange
fruit—at least I took it for a member of the things that I usually gave the
“fruit” label—I asked the vendor what these quaint items were. I was told “maracujá.” To that I simply gave the mindless
response: “Obrigado” (“Thanks”). I didn’t ask her to explain what “maracujá”
was or what it was like, since given my frail knowledge of the language I
probably wouldn’t have understood her anyway.
I heard the word as if it referred to that strange “fruit” before me and
as if it corresponded to some meaning.
I simply took the word at face value, and walked off as if I knew what
she had told me in response to my question and as if I had learned a valuable
piece of information. But I didn’t, and
I hadn’t. What had I actually
learned? I really knew no more than I
did a few seconds previous to the encounter except that those strange looking
things were given the nonsensical set of syllables “ma-ra-cu-já.” If the person in the next stall had happened
to have asked me if I knew what his specimens of the same fruit were, I would
have naturally nodded my head and made a sound roughly the equivalent of
“ma-ra-cu-já.” I would also have had
little idea what I was talking about.
We have the tendency to think that when we know a name, we know what
something in our word is.
I had not taken the time to try
interrelating “maracujá” with things with which I was familiar in order to
expand my understanding of the object before me. Had I done so, I might have come up with “passion fruit” in
English, and I would have been right.
“Maracujá” is “passion fruit.”
Well and good. But what do I now
know? I know that there is a word in
English, “passion fruit” that we use in somewhat the same way as the people in
Brazil use when speaking Portuguese and they utter the sound “maracujá.” What valuable bit of knowledge does that
afford me? Not much, really. The pair of words tells me very little about
what we call “reality.” It says little
regarding the “reality” of appearances, of “secondary qualities,” and it says
nothing at all with respect to the “reality” of “primary qualities.”
In
order to learn something, we have to value the words, give them meaning. Initiator of modern linguistics, Ferdinand
de Saussure (1966), often used the word “value” in much the same way we use “meaning.” Words have value, value given them by their
users, and if they have value they have meaning. But according to Saussure, the values we attach to words is a
matter of the interdependent, interactive, interrelations between each word and
all the other words in a language. What
the value of a given word would be outside any and all other words nobody
knows. What value “maracujá” or
“passion fruit” would have in isolation from all words in Portuguese or English
respectively is your guess as well as mine, if value there could be at all.
Up to this point Saussure was pretty much
on track. All words are interdependent,
interrelated, and interactive with all other words. The same can be said of the objects, acts, and events in our
“world.” This being the case, if the
context changes, ever so slightly, then the use of a particular word within
that context will change, and every word in the entire repertoire within the
head of a given speaker will undergo a change, however slight. I am told that the thing before me is
“maracujá.” Now I know. But I don’t really know much of anything
that I didn’t know before. Yet I know
that this particular item right here, along with its immediate neighbors in
this stall, carry the same name. And
the same goes for similar items in the next stall, and the next, today,
yesterday, and tomorrow. So I know a
little more, and I have begun generalizing the word. Then I learn that “maracujá” in Portuguese is “passion fruit” in
English. Now I have integrated the word
in one language with a word in my home language. So I know a little more.
But very little more.
How can I know more? In order to enhance my own personal
knowledge, knowledge by way of “secondary qualities,” knowledge that creates my
concrete, everyday bodymind world of experience, I must handle the fruit, open
it and gaze at its visible properties, smell it, and taste it, over and over
again if I find it to my liking—which I most certainly do. I must make up part of my life’s experience
as of one year, two years, three years, and many years in the past. A chemical qualitative and quantitative
analysis of its ingredients won’t be of much value in this regard. What is important is concrete experience, in
the past, at present, and in the future.
These experiences will be the same, yet context mandates that each
experience will be somewhat new. The
fruit will always be the same fruit, whether I label it “maracujá” or “passion
fruit.” At the same time, it will be
different.
There is a paradox in the preceding
section with respect to knowledge. If I
think I know a little more by learning what something is in terms of its
respective name, and if I have learned that little bit more through a mapping
of what it is in one language onto what it is in another
language, then I have learned something about what I presume it is, was,
and will be. Moreover, I feel
comfortable that I will be able to apply the same sort of knowledge to all like
things I might have come across in the past, what might happen to be in my
particular vicinity now, and what I might happen to run into in the future,
till the day I croak.
In other words, with respect to a particular specimen of a general
class of things called “maracujá” or “passion fruit,” if I wish, I can see it
right here, now, in my imagination. It
is one thing and one thing only. Yet
with respect to its label, “maracujá” or “passion fruit,” it is many
things. At the same time, it is what it
is, no more, no less, here and now. Yet
yesterday it was something other than what it is here and now. It was plumper, of slightly different color,
and it didn’t have as many of those minuscule insects flying around it. Besides that, if it doesn’t finds its way
into some customer’s shopping bag, within a couple of more days it will likely
be unfit for consumption, since it is about as impermanent as fruit comes. So the object in question is not one and it
is one, but it is also many, not one.
And it is not identical to itself over time. If we wish to hold the world in our conceptual framework
consisting of static categories of thought, it lithely slithers beyond our
grasp; and if we want to know its impermanence, then forget about fixed
categories altogether.
This conundrum has in philosophical
circles since the time of the Greeks been known as the Paradox of One and
Many—or of the Particular and the General.
One variation of the paradox is that of the heap. Make a pile of sand on the beach and call it
a “heap.” It is many like things that
are given a definite label and that label only. Now remove ten grains. Is
it still a heap? Of course it is! Remove ten more grains, and continue the
algorithm over and over again. After
precisely which of the algorithmic moves can you confidently say the heap of no
longer a heap? A problem. Reconsider my VW van. When I bought it there was no visible rust. I should know. As a fresh Ph.D. with little money in my pocket I went over it
with a fine-tooth comb. After two
years, there was some rust. Was it the
same van? I would like to think
so. Two more years, and you guessed
it. The same van? Yes.
Two years later, then two added to the two, over and over again. Did it remain the one I once purchased? Of course, it was my van and nobody else’s,
damnit!—though, for sure, I was no longer as proud of it as I once was. From one angle, it was one: mine and mine alone. From another angle, it was, at each and
every moment, in the process of becoming something other than what it was
becoming: it was many.
A host philosophical problems in Western thought has been caught up in
the One-Many Paradox. To mention a few,
mind/body (body is subject to the ravages of time, while mind remains
imperiously immune to the body’s deterioration); free will/determinism (am I
free?, of course I am, I can do whatever I want at this particular moment, for
given my existence as Many, each moment is a bifurcation into one direction or
the other and I am free to choose, but am I free when considering the entirety
of my life?, no, not if I am considered One); subject/object (the first is One,
the second Many, according to circumstances); nature/nurture (the first is One,
the second is Many, according to environment); absolute/relative (the first is
One, the second is Many, depending on context). And so on.
We also find the One and the Many in the wave/particle complementarity
of quantum theory. The wave
interpretation of quantum theory is One.
When the “wave packet” undergoes a collapses into a particle-happening,
it is Many. To the question is the
quantum world of wave nature, the answer is “Yes and no”; to the question is it
of particle nature, the answer is “Yes and no”; to the question is it both of
wave nature and particle nature the answer is “Yes and no,” to the question is
it neither of wave nature nor particle nature, the answer is “Yes and no.” So where are we, anyway? In good keeping with the One-Many Paradox,
we are everywhere and nowhere, both right and wrong and neither right nor
wrong.
Intriguing, puzzling, and perhaps more than a little disconcerting.
So, let us ask a variation of the
question we posed above. How should the
world, and our relationship with the world, be described? By talking, for sure, since it is the best
means we have for communicating, however flawed it may be. At the same time, we must keep in mind that
all things are impermanent, that nobody actually has an ego worthy of the name,
that what we find ourselves doing at each and every moment is of ultimate
importance, that there are no values, no good or evil, no opposites, and that
in the final analysis here is only quietude, solitude, silence, nothingness, or
better put, “emptiness.” Everything is
flow, and behind the flow there is only “emptiness.” Today’s ecologists give us a lot of cryptic and apocalyptic and
statistical talk. Yet one of the common
words that continues to surface time and time again is flow.
Flow. What it tells us is that everything is already becoming something
other than what it is becoming. It
tells us that if we forget our lives and our world are incessant process, and
if we go along stubbornly assuming we can exercise control over the whole process,
then we’re in for a big surprise. We
are bound to pay the consequences in the long run. In other words, we tend to impose our embedded, entrenched,
preconceived and quite flawed conceptual categories of thought (Generalities)
on the world (of Particulars) as if it were one thing composed of a set of
fixed things, and we ignore the manyness and the impermanence of all that is
becoming. Actually, flow keeps language
moving along and honest; it provides the reason for our awakening to changes in
our world; it is of the very nature of life itself. (With the terms in parentheses I allude to the problem, evoked
above, of our dogmatically taking objects, acts, and events as generalities
without due awareness of our so taking them because we are caught up in
preconceptions, presuppositions, and prejudices, and can’t see our way into the
middle road where alternatives can be found:
we must always be aware of our generalities and take them and make them
judiciously.)
If everything is always in a process of
change, then we must be part of the same process. I would suggest that we can without great difficulty at least
begin to experience the process within which we find ourselves. Find a quiet place and sit, just sit, and
concentrate, on nothing at all. “That’s
easier said than done,” somebody retorts.
Yes, I know, accustomed as we are to the daily hubbub and our compulsion
to engage in incessant palaver. But try
it. Am I advocating Eastern
meditation? In a manner of speaking,
yes. It appears to be like those
Eastern exercises that require much time and more patience, which most likely
neither you nor I have at this time and place.
Nevertheless, just try it. For a
while, or preferably, as long as you can.
O.K.? Now concentrate on what
you have always done during every minute of your life but hardly ever thought
about, if at all. Concentrate on your
lung heaves, the weight of your body on whatever is holding it up—of course I
didn’t give you any instruction on what to sit on and how to sit, just sit. Concentrate on your heartbeat.
Heartbeat, did
I say? Yes, heartbeat. I happen to run a lot, at any time of the
day, even to and from classes, for health and for sanity—though some of my
associates think I’m a nut. But for me,
running’s where it’s at. Because I am a
running fanatic, my heartbeat is slow.
In fact, it’s very slow, perhaps too slow. It is so slow that with each beat there must be quite a volume of
blood taken in and put out. When I am
sitting still in a relatively quiet atmosphere I can feel the rhythm of every
beat. This is nothing out of the
ordinary. Everybody can become to a
certain sense attuned to their body, or bodymind, to a considerably more profound
degree than they think. So, keep trying
it, and I think you’ll see what I mean.
Just sit there for a while.
Then, slowly, concentrate on what your mind is doing when you try to
keep it from doing anything at all.
Admittedly, what I wrote in the last sentence is a paradox if I ever
heard one. The mind keeping the mind
from doing anything at all. It’s like
telling a baby not to suckle when an object touches its lips, like telling a
cat not to stalk a ball of yarn rolling across the floor, like telling a
squirrel to quit climbing trees. The
mind does what it does and there’s hardly anything we can do about it. Nevertheless, just try it. If you do it, diligently, I promise you
you’ll come to an awareness of the incessant change that you would ordinarily
take as no-change that is occurring in your body. Sit and take in the feelings and sensations and experience for a
while.
Now put
on a swimsuit and go jump in the nearest outside swimming pool on somewhat
crisp late summer afternoon. There are
few swimmers around braving the cold water.
As soon as you jump in you let out a gasp result from the surprise your
body felt. Surprise your body
felt? What do I mean? Just that.
Your body recorded the change in temperature and your brain registered
the information and transformed it into a language you could understand. Your mind does the act of becoming conscious
of the change; your body is the vehicle that sends your mind the necessary
information….
But wait
a minute. You haven’t heard the whole
story. Stay in the pool for a few
minutes. Swim a few laps. By the time you’re through, you’ll no longer
feel the cold. You’ll have become
accustomed to it. The water’s
temperature is approximately the same; yet it no longer feels so cold. Now you find you’re enjoying the water. So you decide to take a few more laps, and
then a few more. It’s the same water,
the same body, the same mind. Yet they
are all different. The water is not the
same as far as you’re concerned:
before, it was too cold, but now it is almost just right. Your body is different. It was previously in the air medium and
rather comfortable, then in the cold water medium and uncomfortable, and
finally, in the same water medium but feeling more at east.
Your mind has
changed, but it did not do so in any autonomous fashion. It co-participated with body and
water environment and realized the change in interdependent, interaction
interrelated with them. It does
nothing on its own. In this sense bodymindworld
is more appropriate, for they are never separated from one another, and if they
were, there would be no life, no change, no language or any other mode of
communication. There would be no
flow. Bodymindworld fusion is
essential to the process, the flow, change.
Life wouldn’t be worth living without the experience of change of bodymindworld.
Of course this sort of knowledge was in
the long lost past during the course of human evolution relegated to
forgetfulness. It has been forgotten,
and we would most likely rather it stay in the past than come back to haunt us. Why haunt us? Because it is a silent, unwanted reminder of the world’s process,
included us, within the interdependent, interrelated, interactive
whole. Since especially in Western
thought, mind split off from body and world to create the illusion of its
autonomy, its mastery of anything and everything. As a consequence, mind naturally tends to flee from the reminder
of what it is within the whole of bodymindworld. Perhaps this forgetfulness, nevertheless, is
essential in order that, after generations upon generations of unknowing
transpired, knowing anew might be possible by way of remembering what was long
ago forgotten.
At least that might be the hopeful wish, perhaps.
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[1] In this light Gerald Holton (1970) discusses Newton’s suppressed fifth hypothesis that did not fit coherently with his four explicitly and forthrightly posited hypotheses; hence the reason for its suppression.
[2] By the end of the nineteenth-century one of the most notable onlookers,
it is becoming increasingly evident, was philosopher and semiotician and
general polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce argued that we have no Cartesian power of infallible
introspection or intuition. In fact,
there is no absolute guarantee that any given individual, however specialized
s/he may be (especially in the post-Peirce sense), possesses the inside track
to knowledge over anybody else (Einstein, for example, who as a child didn’t
learn to speak until after his parents worried that he was retarded, as an
adult was working in a patent office completely outside the mainstream of thought
regarding matters of physical science).
Neither are we necessarily on the right track if we mindlessly take what
authority hands down (1931-35 CP:5.264-65). The best road, however fallible it might remain, lies within an
entire interrelated, interacting, mutually cooperating and collaborating
community of knowers. In this vein,
Peirce concludes:
The real, then, is that
which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and
which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me. Thus, the very origin of the conception of
reality shows that this conception involves the notion of an unlimited
COMMUNITY, without definite limits and capable of a definite increase of
knowledge. (CP:5.311)
To put Peirce’s thought in a nutshell, if the real is “independent of the vagaries of you and me,” and if the most adequate method for knowing, however incompletely, this real, is by means of an “unlimited COMMUNITY,” then we cannot hope completely to know the real short of our belonging to an infinite community or a community that will be extended into the infinite future. Finite and fallible knowers that we are, this infinite stretch where the grand epistemological pot of gold lies in eternal wait, is always beyond our reach (for further, Almeder 1980, Fisch 1986, Hookway 1985, merrell 1997).
[3] While I can neither nor later give a viable account of “objective idealism” in this brief volume, I might suggest (Hookway 1985, merrell 1997).
[4] Regarding the interrelations between the “real,” the imaginary or fictitious, and the “irreal” in the sense of Peirce, I know of no better source than an essay by Jerry Dozoretz (1979).
[5] For an introduction to Peirce’s thought, see Almeder (1980); for a survey of his theory of the sign, I might venture to suggest merrell (1995, 2000).
[6] Formulation of the becoming of things in this manner owes a debt to Deleuze and Guattari (1983).