Limitations arise even closer to home. Consider the extent to which we are surprised by our own thoughts – as when, as so often we finding ourselves inexplicably thinking of, remembering, or humming something. And then there is the question, touched on in Chapter 5 of the extent to which we are and are not our bodies, and our limited insight into the biological means by which we are able to continue in being. But more intimately still, there is the unsurprising, taken-for-granted utterly familiar ongoing self. We cannot get an overview of, even less gather up from 10,000 lost days, sufficient of ourselves to see, interpret and understand what we are or even truly to imagine what it must be like to meet, share a room with, or live with ourself. And there are experiences we do not fully understand in which meaning seems to converge on one intense, laser-lit spot. The paroxysm of meaning that is the unbearable hunger when desire fixes on a contingent other, and the joy of music that conveys strange and delicious significance without definite reference – these are episodic headline examples of a more continuous reality of an internal opacity we usually fail to notice because we are looking out rather than in.
There is a wriggle. My awareness of my lack of insight into either what I am, or what I am like for others, surely suggests another kind of, possibly higher-level, insight. To know what one does not know is the venerable Socratic wisdom, however ill-defined it must be. A desperate remedy, perhaps – analogous to the Pascalian claim that, since we are capable of recognizing that we are minute accidents in a vast universe, we must be more than minute accidents in a vast universe. Our unique sense of insignificance makes us special – even significant: the knowledge that makes us small is a testament to our greatness.
Thus, the fightback against the encroaching sense of our cognitive limitations that seem unaltered by advances in knowledge and our power to explain things. And there are other strategies for propping up our self-esteem. One is to argue that the limitations I have just identified may seem not to count since they are not limitations on objective knowledge and it is this that counts. We could press this argument further by suggesting that an unlimited or completely objective understanding of another’s subjectivity, or of our own subjectivity considered from an objective viewpoint, is a contradiction. What would it be like to have an inside-outside view of another or an outside-inside view of ourself? What’s more, instead of seeing them as evidence of a limit on understanding that begins close to home and extends outwards into an unbroken cognitive darkness, we can point out that the limit of our understanding applies to something merely local. If I can understand what regulates the movements of 200 billion galaxies, does it count if I don’t know why you are so upset today?
Not so fast. The failure to understand something that matters so much is the other side of the failure of huge facts to matter at all. The limitations of the token mind whose blood supply is the token self, the embodied subject, exposes the extent to which our knowledge exceeds our capacity to imagine it and our general understanding falls short of something that we can live and make full-blooded sense of. It further highlights the disconnection between the collective cognitive advance of humanity (if we allow that there is such a thing) and its realization in the individual human beings in whom alone it is actualized.
It exposes something else of that collective advance. As we progress, we leave much behind that cannot, or should not, be discarded. As we have noted, science, in its majestic ascent to awe-inspiring generality, via measurements generating or testing purely quantitative laws, loses not only the indexicals of human existence (“here” and “now” and so on), and meaning and significance, but also qualities. Abstract patterns replace the garden of the world, and marginalize everything that differentiates one particular from another, beyond size and location (which are anyway borrowed from coordinates imported from without). Reality loses its ontological weight, being made of numerical ghosts. Matter, evaporating to a smoke of mathematical symbols, loses its connection with mattering. Long before we reach the acknowledged affronts of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we have entered a world that cannot be truly thought in the sense of being imagined, conceived, a cognitive atmosphere in which our imagination cannot breathe. We face a fundamental intellectual failure: the divergence, or at least non-convergence of scientific and existential sense. This is most poignantly expressed in the fact that existential sense tells me that I, and those whom I love are irreplaceable, infinitely valuable, and at the centre of what-is, whilst science, in its most advanced development, tells us that none of this has any truth. The trajectory of our journey of understanding at its most advanced – in fundamental science – was succinctly captured in the passage from physicist Robert Geroch quoted in the previous chapter, when he argued that we might judge the importance of new ideas on physics by the criterion of how many notions one might be obliged to discard.22
The ascent to generality seems to be simultaneously explaining and “de-explaining” and Logos veers towards “Patho-Logos”. The more powerful the explanation, the less it seems like an explanation, an affront not merely to common sense, but to everything in us that is tutored and reinforced by our senses and the physical and social intercourse of everyday life. And the reward for such self-denial is not entirely satisfactory. As Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger put it: “[C]enturies of the search for causes … leads us to a final wall. Suddenly, there is something, namely the individual quantum event, that we can no longer explain in detail”.23 Thus, the end-point of the appeal to postulated, hitherto hidden, entities, causes, forces and fields.
In an endeavour to correct de-explanation, reductionist explanations are reversed in the form of counter-reductionist explanations that invoke ideas such as “emergence” and “supervenience” mobilizing the all-purpose appeal to “complexity”. For this writer, “emergence” is a hand-waving move, reminiscent of Tommy Cooper the magician and comedian who used the phrase “just like that!” when he pulled a rabbit out of the hat or tried to make the audience believe he had done so. The appeal to supervenience is an attempt to heal the self-inflicted wound of “infravenient” descriptions that often take the smallest units of being – such as atoms – as the most real, and most basic, elements of reality. When atoms dissolve into entangled mathematical structures, macroscopic building and the medium-sized blocks that populate our everyday world become inexplicable.
As we set ourselves aside in pursuit of explanation, those selves and the cognitive journey they have collectively taken, look to be part of what needs to be explained. Understanding is faced with the challenge of understanding itself, and knowledge with trying to find out how knowledge is possible. At any rate, we encounter what we might call the “ouroboros” paradox or enigma, expressed particularly clearly by Russell: “Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naïve realism is false”.24 This could be updated by noting that quantum mechanics, which denies or problematizes the existence of localized, macroscopic objects, interacting causally, depends on observations made by localized, macroscopic objects, interacting causally.25 The physics which depends on people and things as normally understood is used to develop a world picture in which people and things are put into question.
This gives us another angle on the fact that advance towards complete sense-making is compromised by our being part of that which we are trying to understand; that science, and metaphysics, must be carried out from within their objects of inquiry. The objects of our knowledge and understanding, however, must necessarily be separate from the knower, the one who understands, the more so as their scope widens and they aim to become foundational. There cannot therefore be any return to our starting point, enabling us to apply our cognitive gains to the platform from which the journey took its rise. This is evident at even a fairly basic level. The coherence in a set of equations does not map on to the all-at-once of a visual field or a sense of unified “now”. At a more basic level still, propositional reality cannot be reinserted into the unfolding umwelt of our mom
ent-to-moment existence. At the most basic level of all, words can seem insoluble in experienced reality: they both exceed what is there, what is happening, in virtue of encompassing a whole class of instances, and fall short of it, being unable to capture the thisness of what-is.
The latter is an issue that has exercised poets, for whom “the exact curve of the thing” seems to elude the template of language. Hugo von Hofmannsthal captured both aspects of this unsatisfactory relationship between Word and Being. In his wonderful poem “Of the Outer Life”,26 he reflects on how the fragmentary nature of experience can be redeemed by words; how the heap of fragments connected only by “and” that is an ordinary evening with its innumerable objects and to-ings and fro-ings, its small change of beings and becomings, is redeemed when the word “evening” is uttered. The scattering that threatens to reduce reality to disconnected dross is reversed in the gathering up implicit in the word “evening”.
In his semi-autobiographical The Lord Chandos Letter, however, Hofmannsthal tells the opposite story. His protagonist, Lord Chandos, a young writer, sends a letter to his friend the philosopher Francis Bacon explaining why he has not delivered on his promise: it is a crisis in his relationship to language. He no longer believes in the capacity of words to capture things – a revelation that came to him when he reflected on the unimaginable suffering of the rats for which he had laid down poison:
I have lost my ability to think or speak of anything coherently. […] My mind compelled me to [see] all things occurring in [ordinary] conversation from an uncanny closeness … I no longer succeeded in comprehending them with the simplicity of the eye of habit. For me everything disintegrates into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea.27
Thus, man the sense-making animal encounters in the most direct way the limits to the sense he can make of the world in which he finds himself.
Those limits are many and various, as we have seen, but they seem most obdurate when the sense-maker tries to include himself in the sense that is made – a task whose full complexity is spelled out by Nagel:
[A] self-transcendent conception should ideally explain the following four things: (1) what the world is like; (2) what we are like; (3) why the world appears to beings like us in certain respects how it is and in certain respects as it isn’t; (4) how beings like us can arrive at such and such a conception.28
A challenging agenda. It incorporates the impossible task of finding a kind of light that endeavours to illuminate, and indeed see, itself as part of the seen. And it is one that is provoked not, or not only, by the fact that we are finite parts of an infinite or boundless reality but that we are also aware of this and, in this respect at least, seem to enclose or even surmount our condition. We are consequently able to entertain the dream of doing so in other respects.
Any sense of our helplessness may be mitigated by seeing that the laws of nature do not underpin any actual happening: they do not reach so low. Law-abiding nature is yet more helpless. The laws require the existence of basic stuff they have not brought into being to act as their substrate. This is the most fundamental of the “initial conditions” which they presuppose. At the same time this represents a limit to our understanding. And its other side is the melancholy truth that our most advanced form of understanding yields a picture of the world drained of all that makes up the life of the one who would understand it; drained of sensibility and even sense experience. Meaning, significance, sense that makes sense are lost. Equations and general statements fail to flower into a world-revealing, horizon-bursting revelation. Progress in objective understanding does not amount to progress towards a complete wakefulness.
Such is the price of the liberation of Logos from Mythos. It should be a signal to return to the preoccupations described in Chapter 2 that might seem to have been consigned to the history of thought. We need to rejoin that history; though precisely at what point we should rejoin it is not at all clear. What is clear is that we should do so in a spirit of wonder, even humility. And the most pressing challenge for secular thought is to reunite strands of understanding that have come apart; to unite the meaning of the glimpse of order we have when we comprehend the most general laws of nature with that which we see in the face of one with whom we are in love and the pleasure of a successful inquiry that takes us to a new landscape of possibility. We may have to accept that there may be no return to the union of the meanings of life and of the way to live with the laws of nature as seen for example in pre-Christian Stoic philosophy or pre-Galilean science.
One thing at least is clear: that certain paths lead to barren land. The attempt to merge the aims and ends of life biologically construed with the basis of our knowledge and understanding – exemplified in evolutionary epistemology and other manifestations of the naturalism that is ubiquitous in contemporary thought – is an instructive failure, not the least for a breath-taking superficiality that misses the profundity of the meta-cognitive challenge of making sense of the fact that we make sense of so much. We need to look elsewhere for a mode of understanding that will encompass the astonishing mind-portability of the laws and principles uncovered by natural science on the one hand and on the other our ineluctable everyday common sense; the pursuit of objective knowledge and the most general explanation with a narrative that incorporates the meanings we live by, inside, or against in our daily existence; the local explanations with the grand all-encompassing vision; the great facts that enclose us with the small facts that preoccupy and define us. The journey to such a destination must involve an awakening from the parochial wakefulness of the quotidian taken-for-granted.
This is scarcely a modest ambition and fraught with contradictions. The ascent to generality, as we have had occasion repeatedly to observe, means the loss of locality. Actual events, the items that populate our days, elude the laws that have the widest application, as they have a singular residue that resists digestion. At the same time to understand anything fully, it seems to be necessary to have a full understanding of everything, because all particulars have a direct or indirect explanatory connection with all other particulars.
We should be prepared to arrive at strange places. In this respect, contemporary physics, while it should not be taken to be the last word on what is out there and what we are, should be an inspiration. After all, the most powerful theory in contemporary physics – quantum field theory – can license the idea that our localized viewpoints have irrupted into a universe which is a single unified wave.29 If, however, “thatter” is an irruption into Being, it is difficult to see how it – or the knowing subject – could have been the product of processes (physical, biological) taking place in Being, including those described by quantum or any other kind of physics.
The admirable Hegelian aspiration to arrive individually or collectively at the merging of knowing with the totality of Being in an Absolute Subject seems not only grandiose but unachievable in principle, given that minds are necessarily multiple (our main reason in Chapter 3 for rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealism) and mattering inescapably parochial.30 At the very least, there would be a loss of the very reality, the material world, that is made sense of as we token minds ascend to the conditions of a general mind fused with – well, generality. It would moreover result in the collapse of the necessary gap between the knower and the known, without which there is no “thatter”. Even so, like contemporary physics, its ambition and fearlessness should inspire us.
The vision of the Absolute Subject does not, moreover, engage with the most obvious limits to understanding which can be designated by the unanswerability of certain questions that seem legitimate even if our asking cannot match their depth: Why is there anything at all? Why is it unstable rather than static? Why does it unfold in a law-like way? Why do its laws seem to take the form they do? Why (to return to an earlier question) do the constants associated with those laws have the values they have? And how is it that there are conscious beings and among them some consciously making sense
of the world and of themselves in it? These are, of course, necessary conditions of there being a world in which we can live, live together, and ask these questions. But this invocation of the anthropic principle simply moves the question on, though it highlights the accidents behind the capacity for knowledge – accidents of origin which seem to taint our knowledge. While it does not necessarily throw into question the knowledge we have, by implying that other accidents might have led to other knowledge, other realities, it does imply that knowledge cannot pace panpsychists be elevated to a metaphysical feature of the sum total of what is, taking its place alongside space, time, matter, energy, forces, fields, and so on – unless of course we are prepared to accept a full-blown idealism, when space, time, matter, energy, forces, fields are swallowed into the knowing mind.
If we accepted the possibility of a state of complete understanding, another question would face us. Would it be a terminus? How would it continue in time? The intuition that where there is a question, there must be the possibility of an answer – because the question seems to open a space to accommodate it – seems problematic in the case of a question that encompasses everything. But this slides into another, perhaps more disheartening, problem. We think of sense-making, understanding, as dynamic – a passage typically from a question to an answer. This passage seems unlikely where the question is the totality of things, including our own lives, warped into a question mark. Would it be something that was iterated in token instances of the same type? This hardly seems likely or even desirable. Sense-making, and the sense that sense is being made, is driven by a gap in sense. Explanation is characteristically the elimination of a temporary cognitive hiccup or even outrage. Understanding is a mode of becoming – hence its participial form: understanding.
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