Secular Existence & Transcendence

Dasein: the thought that you pretended you didn’t have.

Alright, alright, carry on.

Speaking of pathological, what is it with your own rather peculiar serial posting tic? You do it all the time. You post one or two lines. Then 3 minutes or 5 minutes or 10 minutes later, one or two more lines. Sometimes it can be 10 or more posts in the space of 20 minutes. It reminds me of d63 back in the days when ILP actually was a philosophy venue. Back when Carleas himself often participated and the moderation wasn’t complete bullshit.

Only d63 would invariably be completely drunk when he did this. How about you?

We’ll need an actual context of course.

How about one of these:

I’m afraid I don’t have the excuse.

I can’t help but wonder why you are willing to exchange substantive posts with others here but avoid it completely with me.

Now, I have my own suspicions of course. Yes, in the past I managed to make you look like a complete fool over and over again.

But I can assure that if you are willing to go the “intelligent and civil” route with me here in regard to Secular Existence & Transcendence pertaining to the contexts I noted above, I’ll cut you some slack.

Or, sure, pick your own context and we can take it to the philosophy board.

All I ask is that it be in the general vicinity of this: “how ought one to live a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change.”

Which, as I explained above, is the I only reason I clicked on the thread in the first place.

Yeah we could be observing what we do under the illusion that we have control over it whereas actually it’s playing out automatically. If that’s true then this dialogue is a is determined by a complex interaction of cause and effect. The idea that we could choose to follow our vision of the best life is an illusion.

But so is the idea that we can choose to believe determinism. Joe and Jim think they have control over their choices regarding guns. But that’s simply an absurd illusion. If we were on the evolutionary psychology thread, irrelevant question would be what the survival value of an illusion of freedom is. Here the question might be: what set of conditions causes experiences of transcendence?

My original intention for this thread was to look at sources of transcendence in our secular world. The transcendent has real and ideal aspects. The real part is the collection of all situationally transcendent resources : the unexpected and uncontrolled processes in the universe insofar as they are productive of good (i.e. what we value).

For example, there is unexpected healing. The traditional religious term for such a transcendent resource are “miracle”. But according to a minimalist model “unexplained occurrence” is more accurate. Situational transcendence would include the doctor, the drug, the healing power of the body or some interaction of these factors.

A knowledge of the true is excluded from the modern understanding of truth. We are committed to fundamental relativism and ignorance of reality as it is in itself. These commitments are profoundly self-defeating.

From fundamental relativism it would follow that a genuinely transcendent reality in which divinity reveals truth to us would be admitted as no less true than a scientific view of reality. Both views would be seen as functions of human consciousness that can’t provide us with a true knowledge of reality as it is in itself.

The merely asserted proposition that the apparent world known by our consciousness is the only knowable world would also be relativized and thus held tentatively. But, fundamental ignorance is a self-defeating notion. If it’s true then we can’t know that it’s true.

In this context, certainty remains elusive. But openness to the possibility of transcendence makes sense, even relatively speaking.

There isn’t much difference in the inspiration of scientists or transcendentalists, except in the subject matter. The insight of a spiritual person can be just as relevant to life as a scientific theory, perhaps even more so, depending on the what you can do with that information. I think that you are right that true knowledge of reality as it is in itself eludes us and we only have metaphors to work with, as the rare experience of reality without our brain filters are beyond language.

I agree, there are far too many people rejecting transcendence on principle without actually knowing what they are rejecting. Our experience of reality is often dependant upon our perspective, our circumstances, and how sharpened our mind is to detect stimuli that give us added information which often gets overseen. How often do we notice that someone is slower or faster than us in detecting something of importance in a given situation?

Especially here on ILP there is a tendency to deny things that we haven’t experienced, or things that somehow look at negatively, assuming that our experience is exhaustive of what can be experienced.

Bob–

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-science. My formal education in the public schools was science oriented. And of course I like everyone else today is a beneficiary of techno- science. Without my cell phone or laptop I couldn’t participate in this dialogue.

I read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. Where does he stand to criticize science? He looks at it from the standpoint of the history of Western Civilization. He wrote it in the1960s. He explicated the phenomenon of the paradigm shift and indeed his book was an early harbinger of the paradigm shift that would overtake the modern era.

The appeal to history is in fact an act of this-worldly transcendence. With it one seems to transcend the immediacy of one’s place and time. But a theory of science based on history will itself become the subject of scientific criticism. No experience can escape the reductive scientific net of more or less.

But where do all these arguments of science and history occur if not in a consciousness that is greater than the sum of their parts?

When I was studying psychoanalysis I learned to discriminate the observing ego from the ego as object or actor. I was trained and indeed trained myself to examine both myself as therapist and the client from the viewpoint of the transcendent subject.

I did so in service of the goal of helping people. I learned to think this way before I subjected the process to philosophical reflection. Eventually it occurred to me that this process is itself a product of the imagination.

But then the question arises who is making this observation? It is the observing ego observing the observing ego. Have we not touched the threshold of infinite regression? Negative Infinity is a kind of transcendence in itself. The Abyss.

Wrong thread…

I’m a bit confused, probably because I was talking about inspiration, and gave scientific and transcendentalist inspiration as examples, and the fact that they have similarities. An example from Einstein is, “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am” or “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”

I too am not anti-science, and profit enormously from technology. It is just that I feel that technology at work in social media for example is destructive, and the video that Mad Man P posted confirmed that. That is why I am wary of fb and twitter.

So, are you saying that when we are immersed in history or science, we also have an experience of transcendence? That could then be true of anything into which we have been absorbed in.

If the process is a product of the imagination, is there true objectivity? Isn’t the imagination that imagines subjective, or am I not understanding the process?

That’s a great question! David Hume said that although we have no rational grounds for believing in objective reality, we have no choice but to act as if it is true.

How do we perceive objects? When we see something our brain receives a series of signals down the optic nerve. We have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. The only part of our visual field with good resolution is a narrow area about one degree of visual angle around the retina center. So the raw data sent to the brain is like a badly pixelated picture with a hole in it.

But the human brain processes that data and combines the input from both eyes. It reads a two-dimensional array of data from the retina and creates from it the impression of three-dimensional space. From this the brain constructs a mental picture of the object. So what we mean when we say “I see a tree” is merely that we have used the light scattered by the tree to build a mental image of it. Would you call that “true objectivity”?

David Hume seems to have grasped the reality of it.

This is of course the reason why the experience of the happening we call reality is a relative experience, because we have multiple influences on what we see. I have often experienced a selective blindness, in which of all things, it is what I am looking for that I can’t see. My wife walks in and straight up to what I’m looking for (fortunately, it doesn’t happen that much). There are people in the world who (not only linguistically) can’t follow our line of thinking, because they have a culturally affected line of thought that makes some of our thoughts at odds with theirs (and vice-versa).

It sometimes annoys people, but I tend to ask them whether I am seeing or understanding the same as they are. They have sometimes accused me of being over analytic (which is a part of my personality) and critical, although it is only my way of adjusting my perception. One friend of ours told me how annoyed she was that I laughed at something she said, although she didn’t intend it to be funny. The problem was that she really didn’t know what she had said, and my wife had to come to the rescue. I have often experienced myself in automatic mode, lacking awareness of everything I was doing, and asking myself whether I had actually done it.

These are a few examples of why I can understand that our perception of the world is unable to see everything “as it is” or objectively. There are, of course, ways to cope with that, and they are helpful, but there still remains the chance of a bias, even if it is a group bias.

Yeah phenomenology is about how experience actually unfolds. Martin Heidegger spends a lot of time describing how the tools we are accustomed to using recede from awareness until they don’t work or break.

Hume actually pioneered this kind of observation when he noted the discontinuity of the self over time. Of course Buddha had already gone there way back in the axial age.

Of course, the cell phone has revolutionized our sense of self. We are walking around in cyberspace unaware of our physical surroundings at times. Our knowledge base has been exponentially enhanced. Our relationships take on a virtual dimension.

In this context to deny the reality of the soul, when that’s where we experience all these things seems downright stupid. Nevertheless this way of seeing things, requires the first order level of philosophy: the examined life.

Most of the people I run into locally seem to have not entered into it at least at the time when I’m interacting with them. Hey maybe they think the same thing about me.

The soul is an elusive thing. Kastrup talks of “experiential states as excitations of pure subjectivity.” Iain McGilchrist says, “I don’t really know anything about the soul and the only thing that consoles me is that probably very few other people do either.” But he goes on to say, “it […] sets the
human being in a broad context, not the narrow context of where we’re encountering the person. And it seems to have this idea of a destiny. And so one gets the idea of Keats’ that the world is a vale of soul-making. What did he mean? He didn’t mean that we grow up intellectually. He didn’t mean that we got better at being moral citizens. He didn’t mean that something happened to our heart exactly, although it could have involved bits of all of those. He meant something bigger and deeper.”

I quite like McGilchrist’s dealing with the subject, because he is a literary person, who calls upon literary examples. He says, “There’s a rather marvellous moment in a play of Iris Murdoch’s called Above the Gods, where a character says, “In a way goodness and truth seem to come out of the depths of the soul, and when we really know something, we feel that we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star. We’re sort of stretched out. It’s like beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is.”

This feels familiar, which is what literature is trying to awaken in us, a re-discovery of something that has eluded us, something which has “stretched us out” from time to time. It seems as though we need an inspiration that comes from somewhere we can’t fathom. McGilchrist quotes Plato:

“For philosophy doesn’t admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter, and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one’s soul, by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”

We have spoken about music in the past and McGilchrist gives an example of music, Kyrie Le Roy, by the 16th century John Taverner, of which he says, “It is intellectually pleasing; it is, I suppose, emotionally something; but it is above all spiritually whatever it is.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q71BjyByztk

I think it would be best to read the transcript of the broadcast:
https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/events-transcripts/rsa—what-happened-to-the-soul-iain-mcgilchrist.pdf

Or watch his talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWme5Jea7p4

Bob–

It seems that what McGilchrist is trying to do is help us appreciate in language the cognitive abilities of the right brain which cannot be literally expressed in language. From that point of view, the right brain is the soul. (But not literally, of course!)

Hmm, I think he would baulk at that, but I know what you are saying. What did he say? “I fall back, in a way, on the wisdom that “he who knows, doesn’t say”. Unfortunately, I’ve already said far too much.”

But he is ambiguous because he can’t be more specific. He can only use examples that approach the subject, but one example I liked was this:

“Bonheoffer calls it a kind of cantus firmus, using an idea from polyphonic music: the melody, as it were, to which all the other melodies provide the counterpoint. And he makes the point that, if that element in our life, the spiritual, is kept going as the cantus firmus, we can depart as far as we like from it into the world, the actual world, the concrete world, the material, the fleshly, the emotional, the everyday – without losing anything”

Right. 1:1 correspondence of the right brain and the soul would seemingly contradict his proposition that right brain function cannot be captured in language. Metaphysically it would be consistent with the dual aspect theory. Has Kastrup commented on McGilchrist’s theory anywhere?

In More than Allegory: “The religious myth that resonates the strongest with your obfuscated mind should inform your emotional life—again, not your intellectual life—as if it were the literal truth, even though you’ll know rationally that it isn’t. I am thus advocating a deliberate, lucid split or dissociation between your emotional and intellectual attitudes. The way to achieve it is to remind yourself constantly that there is no better description of transcendent truths than the religious myth that resonates with your heart. Therefore, the logical way to go about life is, ironically, to buy into your heart-chosen myth with reasonable but not excessive intellectual oversight. The intellect is a valuable adviser but a lousy king.”

With reference to McGilchrist in his notes

Perfect! That connects him with the structure of reality described by McGilchrist, Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau.