There was another consequence of the Fall: knowledge brought its own punishment; as it got larger, so the knower, by comparison, got smaller. Man was gradually displaced from the centre of the universe, the mid-point of boundless space, the top of the tree of life. When he felled God, man brought himself low. Fortunately, it was only as an idea that the universe was a whole with a centre; and being expelled from that idea was less important than retaining our position at the centre of a room or of some other sphere of attention.
The invention of writing gives an interesting twist to the rivalry between Light and the Word. Written words, which do not immediately fade like utterances bleached by silence, are both closer to vision and are at the same time woven in with a new kind of darkness. Inscription is visible – as in markings on bark and bone and in the sand and ultimately on parchment and paper – but also encodes invisible meanings. The use of ink imports shadows into the heart of light: the absence of what is made present only through reference is made explicit. Ink “highdarks” the light of the mind, the counter-light of memory and thought, of abstraction, argument and reason. The God of the written – of the religion(s) of The Book – is an absent God; there is an immeasurable distance between the words on the page and the deity in His Heaven. Even so, the stability of the inscribed confers a lasting, transcendental, even eternal significance, on the conflict and separation of discursive communities. Meaning arrested on the Sacred Page is pre-dogmatized by stability (even if susceptible to many conflicting interpretations). Such meaning may be unforgiving, coming not with Peace but with a Sword. Or bringing the promise of Divinely-authorized Peace by means of the Sword.
The Fall awoke the need for a new beginning, expressed in the Christian tradition in the New Testament, in the birth of Christ, in Whom the Word was present not absent, in the flesh not in the form of Deus Absconditus, a deity eternally Hidden.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
(1:1)
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
(Gospel According to St John 1:14)
The Word that brought the universe into being was echoed in a second word bringing hope for Creation’s favoured child. The language that had led us into the paths of death also brought salvation.
So, the Word returns to the beginning, and yet not at the beginning, and not entirely as Word. This time the Word is flesh, not at the proximal end of a creative command, but dwelling in the Creation. The Word is both God, who is always at the Beginning, and his Son who is and is not Him, who is and is not at the Beginning, who is and is not part of the Creation, who walks the earth and is not of it, who is in time but of Eternity, who moves to the left and to the right, was born in Bethlehem and killed in Jerusalem, and yet is everywhere, and because everywhere, is not anywhere, or not anywhere in particular, and moves not as we move but mysteriously. The Word made flesh is the Word gathered up in the flesh; by this means, the divisions that come from the flesh, the needs, the powers, the exclusions and inclusions are healed.
Thus, some secular thoughts about the relationship between light and words, evident in the Old Testament Genesis Creation myth, and in the New Testament where the characterization of Christ as both Logos and The Light of the World28, is profound. The luminous mystery of light is wonderfully celebrated by medieval philosopher Robert Grosseteste: “[Light] is more exalted and of a nobler and more excellent essence than all corporeal things. It has, moreover, greater similarity than all bodies to the forms that exist apart from matter, namely, the intelligences. Light, therefore, is the first corporeal form.”29 This intuition lies at the centre of the nexus of metaphors that connect knowledge, understanding, cognition with the light in so many ways such that we even report ourselves as seeing what someone means.
Even so, it would be surprising if the idea of the intelligibility and the origin of the world – or that in virtue of which the world both is and is intelligible to us and in itself – were confined to one sense modality. Some creation myths allocate sounds the role of Philo’s First-Born. There is an obvious association of sound with the Word. God’s commands would, one might expect, be audible, notwithstanding that, in the absence of ears to hear, they would not be heard.30
In the Rigveda (written before 1000 BCE) and in the early Upanishads (800–500 BCE), there is speculation about a sonar origin of the universe. This grows out of the utterance of a single primal word or syllable: “Om” or “aum” was thought to capture this because, when uttered in the correct way it contains all the vowels. The primal word was pregnant with meaning – “sphota” (or “bursting out”). The grammarian and philosopher, Bhartrhari (c.450–510 CE) brought together these doctrines of the cosmic primal word, the Vedas, and “sphota” in a synthesis of language, of an idea of the nature of the world, and of salvation. In the beginning, therefore, the primal Sound burst forth as the primal Word or primal Meaning, giving rise to a universe whose nature was destined to be meaningful vibration.
“In the beginning was the Sound” reconnects us with the Old Testament story of God’s act of creation effected by means of shattering the silence (and curdling the purity of the void with Being), in the utterance of the command that there should be light. Paul Valéry plays with this idea in his commentary on Edgar Allen Poe’s prescient cosmogony:
The problem of the totality of things, and of the origin of this whole, arises from a very simple state of mind. We want to know what came before light; or perhaps we try to find whether one particular combination of ideas might not take precedence over all others and engender the system which is their source, meaning the world, and their author, who is ourselves.
Whether we dream of an infinitely imperious Voice, somehow shattering eternity, its first cry announcing Space, like tidings that grow ever more pregnant with consequences as they are carried towards the uppermost limit of the creative will, and the divine Word making a place for essences, for life, for liberty, for the fatal contest between law and reason, between law and chance ….31
A quieter form of the imperious shout is the Stoic’s pneuma, a concept we have already touched on. It means many things but its origin in the observed closeness of life and breathing is entrancing. Pneuma is an organizing principle, evident in both individual objects and the cosmos: it is a combination of air and fire.32 At its highest level, as “constructive fire” it is indistinguishable from Logos. We can imagine the animist thought that pneuma is active in the day-wide breathing of the open, when a breeze animates all it passes through – making clouds race across the sky, trees swish, leaves hurry, curtains billow, and the philosopher’s manuscript rise and fall.33
CHAPTER 3
Deflating the mystery 1: Putting the world inside the mind
If the eye were not sun-like, how could it see the sun?
Plotinus1
Mysteries are an affront to reason. One response is to deflate them. In the case of the “eternal mystery” of “the comprehensibility of the world”, such an approach may take the form of collapsing the distance between the comprehending mind and that which it comprehends. That this merely displaces, rather than solves or dissolves, the mystery will become clear; but it is worth dwelling on this way of dealing with Einstein’s mystery because it has played an important part in the history of thought and of our sense of who and what we are.
The gap can be closed in either of two ways. According to idealistic philosophy, the comprehended natural world is internal to the mind that comprehends it. I shall examine this view, through its most influential exponent Immanuel Kant, in the present chapter. The opposite view is that our minds are internal to, through being the product of, nature. Our capacity to comprehend the world, the argument goes, is not in the least bit surprising because it is a necessary precondition of the existence and survival of those organisms that have minds. This view, most explicitly developed in evolutionary epistemology, will be the subject of the next chapter. The two ap
proaches can be seen as opposite responses to Plotinus’ luminous question. For idealism, the eye sees the sun because the sun is eye-like; while for naturalistic (materialistic) epistemology eyesight is sun-like, being fashioned out of the same material and subject to the same forces as the sun.
Before I address the first option, the eye-like sun, I need perhaps to defend my choice of philosopher. Why Kant? There are, after all, purer versions of idealism, most notoriously that of George Berkeley the eighteenth-century empiricist philosopher for whom reality consisted solely of minds and their ideas. Such idealism however removes, rather than addresses Einstein’s mystery: the comprehended world is dissolved without remainder into the comprehending mind. This generates two problems: the origin of a common world distinct from individual minds (to be solved only by appeal to God-the-Perceiver who upholds such a world); and accommodating the process by which the knowing mind comes to acquire (only) partial and progressive knowledge and understanding of its world. An alternative port of call to Berkeley would be industrial-strength or Absolute Idealism exemplified by Hegel which (according to the nineteenth-century interpretation) “included both subjective life and objective cultural practices on which subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the self-consciousness and self-actualisation of God, the Absolute Spirit.”2 This view of Hegel has recently been contested, with some interpreters denying that he espoused spiritual monism or even that he had wanted to advance the kind of dogmatic metaphysics Kant denied. It does not, however, make his writing any more amenable to incorporation into our inquiry, especially as most of it lies beyond the cognitive pay grade of the present writer. Kant, as we shall see, at least seemed to be aware that there was an outside reality to be somehow acknowledged beyond the experience of our senses. What is more, he is a pivotal figure in Western philosophy of the last 500 years. Like Bach in Western classical music, he took account of all that preceded him and has influenced, to a unique degree, all that has followed him.
At the heart of Kant’s vision is what he characterizes as his “Copernican” revolution that locates objects of experience inside, rather than outside, the mind:
Hitherto it has been assumed that ‘all our knowledge must conform to objects’ but since this assumption has conspicuously failed to yield any metaphysical knowledge ‘we must therefore make trial whether we might not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects conform to our knowledge’.3
As for the knowing mind, it has two primary faculties: the sensibility and the understanding: “Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind: the first is the capacity of receiving impressions (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing the object through their representation (spontaneity in the production of concepts)”.4 The object of knowledge is consequently the product of a) “the forms of sensible intuition” – space and time – in which it is located; and b) the understanding that places it under certain categories – such as a causal relation to other objects. By this means, the object is unified and itself forms part of a unified world, whose diverse contents are ordered, connected, and brought into relation.
Kant’s most radical suggestion is that “space and time belong only to the forms of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, apart from which they could not be ascribed to anything whatsoever”.5 The categories of space and time are the condition of the possibility of our having any experiences at all; they are not properties of things in themselves but only of appearances: “[I]f the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish”.6 The forms of sensible intuition are the condition of coherent experience, necessary to call delirium to order.
The world of experience coheres because it is brought together in the mind – a thought that leads to Kant’s boldest claim: “the synthetic power of the mind is the lawgiver of nature”.7 This power does not merely happen to be a contingent characteristic of experience: it is a necessary condition of experience. It follows from this that the way the world holds together, its unity, is underwritten by the unity of the mind, more specifically of the self: “I” and “it”, the one who comprehends and that which is comprehended, are mutually dependent.
The second notion, fundamental to Kant’s “transcendental idealism”, is that the world of experience is not, however, the whole story of what there is. Comprehension, pure reason, (contrary to the assumptions of the metaphysicians whom Kant opposed) do not reach all the way to the heart of reality. Beyond the things-for-us that populate the phenomenal realm there is the noumenal realm of the thing in-itself. While all our knowledge begins in experience, there is more to reality than what we can experience. This distinguishes Kant’s “transcendental idealism” from the phenomenalism of philosophers such as Berkeley for whom, as we have mentioned, there is nothing other than perceptions and perceivers – the latter including God necessary to maintain the existence of objects when they are not being perceived – such that the sum total of experience is the sum total of reality. Because the noumenal realm is purely an object of the understanding – an inferred something – it has no experiencable content. It is, however, that which is ultimately real and ensures that phenomena are not just free-floating illusions; that appearances are genuinely appearances of something real.
Kant’s system is immensely complex and developed with vision and ingenuity. It is, however, possible to bypass the detailed working out when assessing what, if anything, it has to offer in making the comprehensibility of the universe less mysterious by closing the gap between mind and nature.
A critique of his Critique could begin by focusing on his conception of the mind to which the world is internal and which generates the phenomenal realm out of the noumenal reality. Mind as we know it, as it is usually understood, is not a single, seamless, item – a category like “space” – but is distributed between an indefinite number of individual consciousnesses, more or less independent of one another. The human minds that comprehend the world are intimately tied to the trajectory and fate of individual bodies that occupy particular locations in space over a particular stretch of time. It would seem to follow from this that space and time are prior to, rather than underpinned by, minds. This explains how it is that I experience some parts of the world and not others; more specifically, how I can experience myself as being surrounded by certain objects rather than by others, as being here rather than elsewhere, now rather than some other time. And this is how it is that you come to experience different things from me and in a different way. I see the keyboard in front of me but not a keyboard in America or one that was destroyed twenty years ago. And while I can have awareness of items in distant places and times this awareness still has to be mediated by signs and representations that are in my vicinity, experienced here and now. I must sit in front of the computer screen to see you via Skype. If space were imposed by me, it would be difficult to understand why I have little control over the contents of my vicinity, indeed, over the way such items are disposed in the space around me and elsewhere. It does not lie within my gift to determine which bit of earth is beneath me and which clouds are above my head. Most inexorably, it is not in virtue of the properties of my mind that this body is my body spatially related to certain other bodies and experienced as mine. If it was in virtue of my mind that my body occupied a certain portion of space-time, then it would seem that the mind would have to take on the job of locating itself, with nothing to justify its locating itself in one place rather than another. Without a viewpoint already located in space and time, embodied in an object among objects, there can be no basis for experiencing one part of the world rather than another.
The opening sentences of the Critique, perhaps inadvertently, flag up this problem:
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how sho
uld our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and, by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience?8
“Objects affecting our senses” to “produce representations” gives the inescapably unKantian impression of a relationship, an external relationship, even a causal relationship, between an object and an (embodied) subject that is made possible by the spatiotemporal connection between the former and the latter. The image is one of encounter or impingement: it seems to suggest, even to presuppose, spatial and temporal relations in the world beyond, or prior to, experience, giving the latter its specific contents.
Kant’s own understanding of space, time, and causation does not allow this. Let us focus on “causation”. It is not an intrinsic property of the noumenal world, or a feature of the interaction between the noumenal realm and the mind. Since causation is one of the categories of the understanding it must be internal to the phenomenal realm. It cannot operate outside the sphere of experience in order to justify the subject having one set of experiences rather than another. Causation is, as it were, a horizontal relationship between experiences, or objects-as-experienced in the phenomenal realm, not a vertical relationship between noumenal reality and the phenomena experienced by the mind. In short, if causality is really a mind-imposed property of the phenomenal realm, we are not permitted to think of things-in-themselves causing the representations that constitute the experienced world.9
There is another, common-sense, reason for denying ourselves the idea of a causal relationship between the noumenal and phenomenal world. Causes and effects are typically proportionate to one another and they belong to the same fundamental kinds. Neither of these could be true of putative noumenal causes of phenomenal effects: nothing in either realm could be commensurate to anything in the other realm. Even though, Kant argues, we cannot know anything of the noumenon because it is not accessible to experience, we may safely conclude from his general position that it is not differentiated in the way that the objects of experience are differentiated. There is consequently nothing in the noumenal realm to “ground” the specifics of the multi-coloured phenomenal realm: it does not contribute anything to the form and content of experience. Indeed, since there is neither space nor time to separate items, there is nothing in the noumenal realm to underpin the multiplicity of distinct identities that populate the world we know. After all, for Kant the difference between unity and multiplicity belongs to the categories of the understanding.
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