Thinking with Herakleitos

For years I had not really understood what Herakleitos meant when he said that “I explored myself…and I could not find the boundaries [limits, peras]  of the psyche…”. Of course not:  the open soul has no boundaries, no limits. It opens up into the unbounded, the unlimited, and shares then in its unlimitedness.  The open soul is not the psyche of standard modern psychology, nor the “I” or ego of everyday life.  It is, rather, a conscious participation in the mystery of the Whole, of the unbounded It-reality beyond all speech and name. When psyche opens, it is no-thing; perhaps one can say, “not itself, but selfless.” To put the experience paradoxically:  when the soul opens, it is no longer a soul, at least as long as the awareness of the experience lasts. Simple consciousness.  

Of course there would be a danger of hypostasizing the open psyche into “God” or “being,” or the Whole, but to do that may be a mere playing with words, and it in effect would concretize the experienced unbounded opening back into an imagined entity or being.  In the opening of the soul, there is neither “I” nor “You,” but simply consciousness:  awareness without names, things, activities. Unadorned, simple awareness.  Perhaps this is what William James called “pure consciousness.”  

It may be fitting, as has been done, to call Herakleitos and others—from Plato to William James, Bergson, Whitehead, Voegelin—who experience consciousness in this way “mystic philosophers,” as has been done (for example, by Whitehead and Voegelin).  Or one could speak of the opening of the soul that forms the experiential basis of philosophy as a mode of self-transcendence, as a simple, noetic awareness of that which is.  It is noetic or knowing in the sense of an unthinking but intensely aware gazing of the mind (nous, intellect). As consciousness (psyche) opens up, noetic and logical processes of the mind differentiate.  To think is to name things and beings, and to reason (use logos) about them; noein [noetic awareness] is simpler, more primary or basic, without words, and is, perhaps, ever present beneath every act of thinking, but usually not recognized as such.  But this point remains for the time being an hypothesis to be experimentally tested. It may be that in the act we call “thinking” [legein, using logos], consciousness is not open as such, but limiting itself in the act of thinking.  If this is true, then one can understand why a human being seeking to explore reality—what is—must move back and forth between sheer openness and the self-limiting act of thinking. Perhaps this back-and-forth process is described in Plato or Aristotle (I will give thought to this possibility, which seems familiar to me, most likely from the Phaedrus or the Symposium of Plato.) And if this is a reasonable guess of what one experiences in thinking and knowing [noein], then one might playfully change Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) into “I think, therefore I am self-limited,” or more paradoxically, “I think, therefore I am not.”  

One is most truly oneself when one is not self-enclosed, or a closed soul at all, but awake in the act of non-self-limited consciousness.  If this is a reasonable formulation of the truth of experience, then one can recognize the common basis in philosophy, Buddhism (as in Zen) and the mystics of various traditions.  I, for one, have long been drawn to all three of these human modes of experience (philosophy, Zen, mysticism), because I have sensed in them a similarity not in formulations or mythical developments, but in the engendering experience: open consciousness. 

A Few Thoughts On Thinking

To be conscious is to be awake, alert, purposeful, aware of one’s “place” in the whole of reality. 

Some persons appear to be awake, but when questioned, it turns out that their mind was unfocused, or barely awake, or almost in a semi-dreaming state: You speak to them, and they say, “Whaaaat? Where am I? What’s happening’, man?” It seems to me that many persons, much of the time, are in this semi-dreaming state between genuine alert wakefulness and full sleep. They are unconsciously conscious, or unwakefully awake. To be truly awake and alert, open to reality and responsive, takes much work, practice, dedication, love. It is all too easy for a human being to sit or lie down, and enter into a kind of twilight zone of mindlessness. Television watching encourages this kind of unconscious consciousness. By the effects on consciousness, every television show is, to some extent, a variety of “The Twilight Zone.” 

To be mindfully conscious, alert and responsive, is no easy task, and seems to be especially difficult and all-too-uncommon in our present culture. Bodies move around, or sit on a sofa, or mouths move, but not much thought or awareness of reality is exhibited. For example, much of what passes for political discourse is nearly a mindless mouthing of words, slogans, or lawyerly smokescreening, detached from practical reality. For a man of common sense, such verbal meanderings are quickly recognized as “b s.” The politician I have heard the most words from in my life is Barack Obama, as he has so often appeared in the news, talking—more Twilight Zone. Much of what he says exemplifies what I call lawyerly smokescreening. He says many words to avoid saying something of pithy and of consequence. Politicians of both parties engage in the same verbal games. They are not thinking or dialoging with us, or engaging our minds, but seeking to dominate minds by mere verbiage. The right purpose of speaking is to engage other minds, to open us up more fully to reality, and not to dominate, confuse, baffle, or entomb our minds. 

                                                        Dialectics and eristics 

What is thinking? Thinking in the proper sense is a movement of thought from one point to another, if in the practical sphere, leading to a decision and taking action. Intellectual thinking, in which one explores some problem or question, is far better done in writing, because writing channels and disciplines the mind. “Wool gathering” or anxiously going over any matter is not really thinking, but a form of neurotic worrying. Much of what people call “thinking” is anxious worrying, not a genuine search for truth leading to insight or to concrete action in the world. 

To think in the intellectual sense is to pose questions and to explore answers. For example: What are the differences between constructive thinking and anxious, worrisome “thoughts”? Much of what is called “thinking” in our society is not thinking in the proper sense, but spinning of words or images in the mind, not leading to action or definite insight. Genuine thinking requires a discipline of the will, hard work, and an ongoing search for truth. If one is not seeking, how can one find? If one does not question, what could “answers” possibly mean? 

Following Plato, I wish to distinguish two kinds of “thinking” that may appear as intellectual, or constructive, or as searches for truth. One kind he terms “dialectics,” the other he calls “eristics.” Dialectical thinking is a search for truth within the in-between of existence, as the human inquirer questions reality as it presents itself to him in consciousness. This genuine thinking is in truth a movement between the divine and human partners in being. One who thinks in this mode is not alone, isolated, or self-enclosed, or “introspecting.” Nor is he or she speculating on what might be, or on some imagined deity dwelling “out there” somewhere—in the Twilight Zone. Dialectical thinking is a response to the divine mind moving one to question and to seek the truth. And this kind of thinking is limited to the exploration of concrete experiences, to reality as it presents itself to consciousness. It is a movement within reality; or in other words, reality is becoming conscious in the thinking of the one seeking truth that emerges between the divine and human partners. Dialectically, one questions because one is moved to question; and the one who seeks, finds. “What are you seeking?” are the first words of the Christ in the Gospel of John. One seeks by questioning reality as it presents itself to consciousness. 

Eristics is argumentative, speculative, intellectualistic, and not grounded in experienced reality. The best examples of eristic thinking in our western culture came from hardened religious positions taken over centuries: one accepts or “believes” certain dogmas or opinions, and then argues about them, trying to instill the same opinions in others. At least since the Enlightenment of the late 18th century, religious “thinking” or “beliefs” became far less tolerated by the intellectual elites, who turned instead to ideological, secular, political, inner-worldly eristics. Whether liberal, conservative, progressive, Hegelian, Marxist, feminist, or so on, these “thinkers” engage in the semi-conscious and more or less irrational practice of eristics: speculating or “reasoning” about matters outside of the human-divine in-between, and seeking to replace reality with a second reality, an imagined world. The genuine exploration of reality engaged in by scientists exploring real problems is a wholly different matter; but speculating on science and its place in culture is often a matter of either “science fiction” or scientism, the latter being an ideological elevation of “science” to the position of a monopoly of truth about reality. A physicist may know much about the causes and effects of gravity, for example, but that knowledge tells him virtually nothing about the nature of consciousness and the human condition. Philosophy dialectically explores the in-between reality of consciousness; eristics speculates on reality or realities more or less divorced from concrete experiences of consciousness. 

In this regard, a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, a progressive intellectual, and a Marxist are essentially doing the same thing: speculating on reality without due recourse to concrete experiences of consciousness. If one were to examine actual states of consciousness rather than mere doctrinal or scriptural beliefs, one may well discover that there is no essential difference between a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist or “believer.” Differences among concrete human beings may emerge if one asks real questions: “Does this person truly love God and neighbor? Is this person seeking to do good, to enhance life, or destroy it? Is this person seeking truth, or does he presume that he has already discovered truth? What actions is this person actually taking to do the will of the that which he calls “God” or “Allah”? Similarly, one can ask of the true believing Marxist: “How does he or she really live? Are they open to the truth of reality as it presents itself to consciousness, or do they seek to impose on reality pre-conceived intellectualistic categories? What is the end state of human society according to the Marxist conception? Can violent action now truly produce a state of peace and justice? Can human beings truly “change the world” as Marx said; or are there fundamental structures in reality which all beings, including human beings, must observe and respect? What are these fundamental structures that transcend human volition and action? What is the nature of reality in which we exist? Or should one follow Marx’s dictum: “Do not think. Do not ask questions,” because the “socialist man” does not ask such questions, but “knows” that he “creates himself by his own labor.” 

To think properly requires that one work within the given structures of reality, and seeks to explore these structures, “the nature of things” as they were called by the ancients. The sphere of human action, and what may be changed for the better, requires discovery, and working within the limits set on human activity. It is the old lesson taught by the story of Daedalus and Icarus: one must not seek to fly either too high, or too low, but stay within the limits set by reality. Dialectical thinking, or philosophy, seeks to understand human being’s place within the mysterious whole of reality, and to help us adjust to that reality, and make the best of our apportioned time of living on earth—or rather, our existence between time and eternity. For present human existence is mysterious indeed, as we participate by our bodies and minds in the whole range of reality, from inert matter up to the mind of God. Our lot is to explore the realms of reality, seeking truth and doing good within the relatively brief compasses of our lives; and to do so even as we stretch ourselves out towards “that which is immortal and everlasting,” sharing even now, by “faith working through love,” in what is by long tradition called “God.” 

To be conscious is to explore the truth of existing within the whole of reality, and to move, by “the voice of this calling and the drawing of this love” into eternity present here and now.

A Brief Blog Based On An Email To My Brother-In-Law With Expansions And Editing

Dear Vic, Thank you for trying to explain to me something about the laws of thermodynamics. That matter and energy are essentially the same, and that neither matter nor energy “can be created or destroyed” would be important parts of the scientific understanding of physical reality. Despite his scientific mind, I do not think that Aristotle knew or experienced the world as modern science does; he did not live in the universe of modern physics. As I read Aristotle, the Kosmos about which he writes is “to Pan,” the All.  When I used the word “world” for Aristotle’s cosmos, I did not mean our planet, the Earth, but the mysterious Whole. Words have changed their meanings over time, and experiences of reality have changed. As I read Aristotle, he experiences the cosmos as both natural and divine. His conception of the divine includes both the God as Intellect that moves the cosmos, and orders it, as well as the gods who dwell within the Kosmos. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why he considers the Kosmos to be eternal—it is not a mere creation of gods, but in some sense, the work of God and gods. Plato, Aristotle’s long-time teacher, did not call the Kosmos eternal, to the best of my knowledge. In one of his late writings, the Timaeus, Plato introduces a Demiurge, a kind of creator-god, that does not bring forth all out of nothing, but rather by intellect imposes form on matter. The creation story or cosmogony that opens the Hebrew scriptures does not explicitly say that God created “the heavens and the earth” out of nothing, although that interpretation has been read into the creation story of Genesis for centuries. The priest or priests who wrote that magnificent creation story that editors placed at the opening of their sacred writings had not raised the question, “Did God create out of nothing, or did God impose form on matter?” Apparently it was a Jew living not long before Christ, the author of the books of Maccabees, who first described what came to be called “creatio ex nihilo,” creation out of nothing. It is this conception of creation that became standard teaching in Christianity over the centuries: the non-cosmic God brought forth the world as we experience it out of nothing by his own creative word; indeed, creation can be understood as an ongoing story of God, told by God. The ancients (Jews, Greeks, Babylonians, Chinese, and so on) were highly conscious of living in a Kosmos in which all beings share, a Kosmos itself which at times was experienced as a living being, not as a lifeless thing or collection of things. The cosmic Whole is surely more than the sum of its parts, the being-things that inhabit It. At times a fear arose, probably in response to major social-political upheavals, that not only everything, but that the All could cease to exist. Just as individual being-things come into being and cease to exist, so could everything and All, apparently. Still, the underlying experience of the Kosmos was of a beautiful home that is good, and divine, and full of gods and living beings. As I understand it, this experience contrasts with the “universe of physics,” the universe as described and studied through modern physical science. The ancients, whether Greeks with their gods, or philosophers with exploratory Nous, or Jews with the I AM WHO AM, or Christians (an amalgam of Jewish faith and Greek philosophy, with other ancient beliefs and rituals thrown in), did not experience the universe of physics, but the mysterious cosmic Whole. As noted, the ancients lived in a cosmos experienced as home, as good, as meaningful, even though one could at times experience the wrath of a god in a powerful storm, or earthquake, or a Zeus-thrown lightning bolt. Ancient Gnostics, arising mainly in the wake of the epiphany of Christ, experienced the cosmos as “alien,” even as evil, a prison for the divine spirit, the Pneuma, which they experienced intensely in themselves. The Gnostics were the main characters who experienced divinity solely within themselves, and not in and through the cosmos. For Aristotle, the divine Nous (Intellect) illuminating his mind (nous) could also be known through studying reality in all of its parts, for the work of the intellect is to order things, and Aristotle experienced divine intelligence as he studied parts of animals, for example, or the heavenly bodies. This awareness shows up in his writings. And he chastises those who recoil at a worm, or spider, for example, and fail to see the divine intellect through the ordered being-thing. How do you experience “the world,” the cosmos? Is it only the “universe of physics” you see, or something else at the same time? My experience of the cosmos has undoubtedly been influenced somewhat by teachings of modern science (about which I know very little), but for the most part, I am probably closer to ancient Greeks, Jews, or Christians, whose experience of the world was filled not only with wonder and “scientific questioning,” but with awe. What provokes awe is mysterious, and divine in more ways than one can know or grasp. Surely I sense divine presence not only in the soul, but in and through the cosmos.  I do not know what you see in the sky, but I do not see just “things” or “planets,” and so on; nor do I feel imprisoned in the cosmos, although when suffering a fever, I may feel trapped in the sick body or at least in the fever. When I look at the night-time sky, for example, I see heavenly bodies, and simply assume that they are not merely “matter in motion,” or forms of energy; I am conscious of the heavenly bodies as being in some ways divine beings, or at the very least, fellow creatures. Concrete question: Do you ever bow to what you see? Sometimes I spontaneously bow to the moon, or to the sun, or to a beautiful tree that caught my attention, and as I bow, I am aware of bowing to the divine presence in and through all things. (And yes, I have bowed to my dogs, carrying as they do, divine presence.) Sometimes I have found myself greeting the moon, or the sun, with a few words or a little song.  Such actions would seem strange, perhaps, to a man or woman living in “the universe of physics,” although I am not sure, because I do not inhabit the universe of physics (nor does anyone, in truth). Would a scientist bow to the sun, or kiss a rock, or lovingly touch a tree, or kiss a little animal? If not as scientist, would he do so as a human being? I do not know, because I am not a scientist, but a human being living in a mysterious and wonder-filled cosmos. I expect that my experiences are not well grounded within a “scientific world view.” They are, I think, more cosmic, perhaps, and closer to mythical understanding. My guess is that more people feel this way than we often imagine, even after centuries of Christianity, followed by the discoveries and theories of modern science. As I see it, showing some reverence for fellow beings (including “heavenly bodies”) in the cosmos is more “natural” and true to the primary experience of mutual interpenetration and connectedness, of consubstantiality between human beings, “the heavens and the earth,” and God or gods. For example, we say that the sun moves across the sky, and many take that commonsensical assumption to be true, not integrating into their experience the notional awareness that the earth is rotating on a hypothetical axis, and revolving around the sun in a hypothetical orbit. By appearance and hence common sense, it is the sun who moves across the sky, whether a god itself, or driven by a god, or a fiery ball moved by some mysterious and divine force.  Even the breakthrough of the non-cosmic I AM to Moses does not keep one from experiencing the cosmos as "full of gods" as the ancients believed (and the experience of gods and a living, divine cosmos shows up not infrequently in biblical writings, even with faith in Yahweh (“He who is”). The all-too-modern experience and treatment of the earth as a lifeless thing to exploit is closer to Gnostic antagonism to matter than to cosmic consciousness of every being and being-thing (such as Earth) sharing in divinity. The earth, Mother Earth, is to be respected and lovingly tended, for She brings forth life. Or as another example, I long to see and feel the ocean, to be submerged in it, because doing so returns me, if I allow it, to pre-scientific awareness, to an experience of immersion in cosmic divinity, and to being part of the Whole. Longing for this grounding in cosmic reality, I desire to experience the ocean again. There are other ways, of course, to experience the Whole in a cosmic way.  Taking a good walk, feeling the cold wind on my skin, perhaps with rain or snow, or sunlight, returns me to an awareness of the Whole that includes divine presence, being-things, physical forces, and human consciousness, all together. How common this pre-scientific awareness is, I do not know, but when I allude to these experiences, ranch and farm folks seem to understand what I mean. This experience is closer to the cosmos experienced by the ancients. If it is just a world of matter, one feels cold and wet; if it is more, and mysterious, then one may be wet, but one also feels alive, connected to the mysterious Whole, and in contact with what we call “God.” Now a few appended thoughts, or corollaries of what I have just written. First, the God of the church’s creeds is too fixed, too abstract, too remote from human experience to satisfy the heart or mind, because this God does not correspond well to the divine as experienced. The God of creeds and dogmas has been intellectually, even rationalistically, sanitized. The creedal God was drained of blood. Analytically separated from the truth of experience, this “God” becomes experientially; and if that is one’s sole conception of God, it may well wither and die, leaving one floundering in a world devoid of meaning. Second, fortunately for me, daily experiences of divine presence, both within consciousness and in the mysterious cosmos, outweigh in consciousness both the universe of physics and the God of the creeds. When I want to nourish my understanding of the divine, I may look with gratitude at the world around me, even feeling the icy cold; or study philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Voegelin; or read good poetry, with its mythical-imaginative awareness of the Whole shining in and through each momentary experience. A rose is not essentially a certain species of plant with a fancy scientific name. It is far more. And a rose may be the womb of the heart, waiting to open up. When I light a fire in the morning, I do so not only for warmth, but for companionship, because, as Herakleitos wrote, “Come near the fire, for there are gods in it.” I am still able to feel divine presence reaching me through the fire’s warmth. And for such an awareness, I am truly thankful. For flatter souls, fire is just physical processes at work. Third, a former student and friend told me that I do not like myth. I am not sure what he bases that claim on; it may have been a non-nuanced statement I made out of frustration with some contemporary myths, as in movies. Some of these myths are foolish, some destructive, some truer to reality. A good story, a good myth, is often far truer than “non-fiction.” I love myth when it communicates the truth of pre-scientific, pre-rational reality, the truth of the Whole breaking through. I love myth, or story, that makes me more aware of the goodness, beauty, and truth of reality, including the divine within. Myth that has stripped out divinity is neither wholesome nor true to reality. In the hands of anti-theistic positivists, science is used as an anti-divine myth, a “truth” that rinses a sense of divine presence out of human consciousness. In such a case, human beings become as bloodless as the God of the creeds, as the God of “Theism” which they reject. There is nothing wrong with physical sciences; they surely enhance one’s understanding of the world, and often bring beneficial results to daily living. (And more: science is well worth pursuing for its own sake, as a search for truth about various realms of being.) But science can be abused when the universe of physics is allowed to replace the primary experience of the mysterious cosmos, in which all being-things share, in which one thing can become another, a reality which is alive, fluid, and largely uncontrollable. Awareness of the Whole, and of being part of the Whole, precedes self-consciousness. I do not say, “I think; therefore, I am,” but I am aware that I think because I am being moved to think from the beyond of consciousness.  And that, I submit, is a more philosophical and wholesome experience than Descartes’ self-entombment. Once one begins with self, it is difficult to escape. The moon was veiled when I looked for her early this morning, an hour after midnight. An army of clouds had moved in while I slept, obscuring my beloved moon from wondering sight. And yet, she shines behind the veil that serves to remind me of her sacred beauty, which mortal eyes may not fully behold, nor fully understand.  And snow was falling, sent by a god, or by clouds, I do not know. I wonder if Father Zeus is being playful? In any case, the snow is a gift from the heavens above, refreshing, chilling, watering dry earth, reflecting the beauty of the barely seen moon.

A Letter On Reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics, And An Appreciation For Philosophy

(Note:  What I submit below is an edited text of an email I wrote to my sister.)

Dear Jeanie,

I am reading through Aristotle's book known since Thomas Aquinas as “Metaphysics,” a collection that Aristotle neither titled nor collected, but which is about what he terms "first philosophy," or “theologia.”  (This book, or collection of related texts, was placed in the ancient catalogue of Aristotle’s works after his Physics, and hence became known as “Meta ta Physica,” “after the Physics.”  The heuristic title was harmless, but it gave rise to a speculative science known as “metaphysics.”  As Aristotle conceives his “first philosophy,” t is a search for the cause of causes, or what is presently called the ground of being.  (Physics is a study of causes of motion, and this pursuit seeks to find the “first cause.”   Werner Jaeger wrote a study many years ago on this evidently composite text; clearly the extant book needs organizing and editing.    I need to read my copy of Jaeger to assist me in reading Aristotle’s “Metaphysics.”  For the most part, as far as I can tell, at least most of the the individual books within the “Metaphysics” are ordered within themselves, and make sense, although it is at times difficult to follow the argument, as it seems to be composed from sets of notes.  Presently I am working through the famous Book Lambda, the last book of the Metaphysics, leading up to insights into "the unmoved mover."  A previous book (or what we might call a chapter, if you will) on “being as being” made more sense to me than previously.  And I still like the short book, the second, as a kind of popular introduction to philosophy, on the nature of truth.  As for the first book of the Metaphysics, which I will be studying more closely, it is an amazing account of work by Aristotle’s predecessors, and includes his appreciation of the poets as “kinds of philosophers” because they, too, wonder and seek the ground of being, albeit in and through myth. 

The whole work begins with one of Aristotle’s blockbuster insights, ridiculed by little minds who seem to want to misunderstand the ancient philosopher:  “All human beings by nature desire to know.”  (I recall graduate students mocking the claim.)  But one can wonder, “Why does it seem that so many in our society have ceased wondering, ceased questioning and seeking truth?  Why is it that children seem so inquisitive until they must endure a year or two in mass (public) education?  Adults who do not seek to know would rather, apparently, take the easy way out and turn off their minds with drugs or mindless entertainment.  The human task is to question, and especially to seek to know the truth about reality, and about God.

I love Aristotle.  He comes across as a real human being (especially, for me, in his masterful Nicomachean Ethics), but ever as an astounding lover of truth about every realm of being, and and a great teacher.  In antiquity, Aristotle was known for writing brilliant and beautiful dialogues, following the example of his mentor, Plato, but most unfortunately, none of the dialogues has been known since antiquity.  What we have are his lecture notes, presented as treatises.  Admittedly, I usually enjoy studying Plato more, and have found him more to my liking (although I love the Ethics); unlike some commentators, I have long read these two philosophers as complementary for my intellectual growth, and not as contrasts.  Each illuminates the other. (And remember, Aristotle studied under Plato for 20 years.). Both minds help me to read Hegel and Voegelin, and provoke questioning.  These fertile and brilliant minds search, and do not come to rest in doctrines (although Hegel derailed himself with the construction of his pretentious “System of Science.”)  Leibniz, c 1712, summarizes the two philosophical questions that wonder me:  Why is there something, why not nothing?  And why are things as they are, not some other way?  For Leibniz, and for me, these questions point towards the mystery we call “God.”

A motivating experience for philosophizing is existence out of nothingness. This remains a common human problem:  each one exists on the edge of non-existence.  Awareness of this issue was much stronger in ancient societies than I realized until my recent studies in Voegelin’s Ecumenic Age.  Some rituals were meant to magically reverse time and time’s action of lethally moving being-things back to nothingness.  Eliade wrote a number of books on this and related problems in his studies of myth.  I had to read Eliade as an undergraduate in a "Philosophy of Religion" class taught by an excellent Danish philosopher, who of course introduced us to Kierkegaard.  And Kierkegaard surely understands existence on the edge of non-existence, and the burdens our precarious life places on each of us who faces reality courageously. 

Yesterday I unpacked my copy of Spinoza, and I want to study him on God.  Reportedly, Spinoza is a “pantheist” (whatever that truly means), and broke from the pattern of "faith and reason,” of “religion and philosophy,” established by Philo Judaeus at the time of Christ, and was highly influential in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  I want to see if Spinoza reads the Greek philosophers with fresh eyes, and appreciates noetic consciousness as itself revelatory.  Did he break from the religious nonsense about revelation in a book, and denying the revelatory awareness that the Greek philosophers discovered?  We shall see.  In any case, I ask:  If philosophy is not revelatory, what is?  (Yes, myths and prophetic utterances can also be revelatory, but in a different way.)  I think that it is better, or at least more prudent and safe, to begin one’s search from reason, and then explore. Of course a philosopher worth his salt would explore mythical and religious texts in his quest for the ground of being, that on which all of reality is founded.  But one ought not to approach a text as “truth revealed” in any final sense, lest he in effect box up the divine Mind in a book.

Whitehead’s claim that “Aristotle founded science but ruined philosophy” often comes to mind.  I think that his great thinker was wrong on both counts.  Science had beginnings before Aristotle, in the thinkers we know as the “pre-Socratics.”  But then again, Aristotle did give sciences a firm foundation, more than mere speculation.  As for “ruining philosophy,” the treatise form may have helped to turn philosophy into doctrine, but there is no doubt in reading Aristotle that one is encountering a searching intellect of the first order.  It was lesser minds who badly damaged philosophy by summarizing Platonic and Aristotelian insights into simplistic doctrines.  An example that comes readily to mind is the “definition” of man as “the rational animal.”  What I find in Aristotle are his explorations of the noetic or rational power in human being, and he does describe human as the being “having nous.”  The later definition was flat, cut and dried; in reading Aristotle, one discovers what it is to be human as one studies to understand the philosopher’s explorations of reality.  Reason is discovered by reasoning, and human being is known through reasoning and loving.  Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and the loving search for the truth about reality by using reason in a loving, creative way.  The reason that one uses is by its nature a sharing in the divine reason (nous) that shines in, illuminating consciousness; and in exploring the structure of reality by reason, one finds much that is reasonable in the world, that nature has a noetic structure.  In other words, the world, at least nature (physis) contains much reasonable order, known by reason in man, cooperating with divine reason shining in as one seeks to know the truth.  And it is Aristotle, not a later doctrinaire disciple, who explores the life of the mind, reasoning, as ultimately moved by God in provoking the questions that engender the search (zetesis). 

Aristotle did not ruin philosophy.  Science explores what exists, the nature of reality; philosophy keeps wondering, 'Why?'  “Why is there something?  Why does the Whole exist at all?  Why not nothing?  Aristotle  greatly advanced both sciences and the science of sciences, φιλοσοφία.  Of course there is now a legitimate and independent philosophy of science.  At this time, it is not the philosophy of science that has my interest.  Rather, following both Hegel and Voegelin, I am especially interested in the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of history, but also like the philosophers of old, ever wondering about the first cause, the Why? 

A few hours ago I read a passage in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, with an aside in which Aristotle notes that intellect alone survives death, not the rest of psyche.  I want to see if and how he explores this matter, but I am quite sure that he does not do so in the Metaphysics, nor in his De Anima, his study of the Soul.  In any case, here is a difficult but worthwhile adventure.  I think that Thomas Aquinas explores this problem, too, that the intellect alone outlasts death; but he must do so covertly (lest he taste some flames on the matter of his mortal form); I have long thought this Thomas’ detailed “treatise on the angels,” within his Summa Theologiae, is written as an exercise in exploring the nature of intellect abstracted from matter (body) and bodily passions, and hence as what in man endures into eternity.  Does Spinoza teach the survival of intellect beyond death, or dissolution into the All?  We shall see.  

Philosophy proceeds by wonder, and provokes wonder.  Is it any wonder that I keep turning to philosophy?

A Note On Universal Humanity In History

​Dear Jeanie,

Whether or not you fit neatly into your own description as a “Positivist,” I do not know. Here is a question to consider in any case: What constitutes universal humanity in history? That is one of the questions taken up by Voegelin in Volume 4 of Order and History, entitled The Ecumenic Age. It is probably my favorite single volume by Voegelin.
 

Briefly, what has been interpreted as forming “universal humanity” in our “present age” would have to consider: the Enlightenment conception of reason reaching into the French thinker, Comte (founder of “Positive Science”), with its belief that everyone shares in immanent reason. (This conception would be rooted in ancient Greek philosophers, but with a radically different understanding of reason than that explored by Parmenides, Heracleitos, Plato, Aristotle. My sheer guess is that when you studied philosophy as an undergraduate, your studies proceeded under and with an Enlightenment conception of reason, and professors did not clarify, perhaps did not understand, the difference between Platonic-Aristotelian nous (reason, intellect) and the notion of reason presented by thinkers such as Descartes and John Locke, and then in the self-styled “Enlightenment” and in “Positive Science.” This kind of “Enlightenment” reason could explore world-immanent phenomena, such as natural processes and “bodies in motion,” but could not explore the divine-human realm as accessible to this kind of rationalistic “reason.”

A second and also still extant understanding of what constitutes universal humanity in history comes from Hegel, writing in the early 19th century. Grounding himself on experience, and in his case, a clearly Gnostic experience, Hegel clearly has an interest in exploring “universal humanity” in history, and does so as human being grounded in “self-consciousness.” The essence and completion of human being is human self-consciousness, a work of reason, understood as human being coming to know itself as divine. Whereas Locke and the Enlightenment speculatively separated human nature from God, and especially reason from its openness to divine transcendence in any way, Hegel imaginatively collapsed human reason with the divine mind or spirit, the Geist, in “full self-consciousness.” A Positivist, I dare say, would not appreciate the Hegelian turn. Actually, Hegel’s “System of Science,” fallacious as it was, constituted an important step in the recovery of the understanding of reason and of humanity. Hegel returned away from doctrine and dogma into the truth of experience; unfortunately, his grounding experience was not an open, searching spiritual experience, but a Gnostic experience of self-enclosure, even self-divinization. Young Marx and other Hegelians knew well that Hegel had imaginatively “taken the divine back into man,” the action that Hegel himself described as “the Protestant principle” in his ever-enlightening lectures on the history of philosophy. (Luther would not have agreed with Hegel’s “Protestant principle,” but Jacob Boehme would have.)

As I have come to understand modern and contemporary philosophy, Voegelin has done well what Hegel attempted, but was fundamentally derailed by his Gnostic (self-divinized) experience. Voegelin does not operate within the bounds of reason as articulated by Descartes, Locke, the French philosophes, Kant, Comte, Marx, or Nietzsche. Rather, Voegelin returns to the Platonic-Aristotleian understanding of reason as a knowing but limited participation in the divine Nous that orders the Whole, the Kosmos. This Greek philosophical reason (nous, logos) cannot contain or comprehend the divine, but it can explore divine reality as present in the structure of reality, including human being. Like Hegel, Voegelin appreciates the Judaeo-Christian pneumatic revelations as well as the Greek theophanies in reason, something that neither Locke, nor the Enlightenment, nor Comtean Positivism saw as having value for a more valid understanding of universal humanity—of what it means to be human being in history. But Voegelin’s range of empirical knowledge is far vaster than Hegel’s, which was already astounding for the early 19th century. As an example, Voegelin even learned Chinese and studied Chinese classics and the “Chinese ecumene,” which was parallel in time to the western ecumene (Persian, Greek, Roman empires). Voegelin searched for “order in history” in the full amplitude of divine-human experience, or theophanies.

What Voegelin demonstrates is that to understand human being in history, one has to have vast empirical knowledge, as well as solid theoretical grounding. On both of these scores, the Enlightenment and Hegel were too narrow and parochial, in addition to making the theoretical errors hinted at above. In Voegelin, the philosophical enterprise so well advanced by Plato and Aristotle has been renewed and furthered. And Voegelin’s work lacks the dogmatizing tendencies present even in as great a mind as Thomas Aquinas. In my understanding, religious dogmatic conceptions, as well as rationalistic simplifications, had to be renounced, and the seeker for truth about God-in-man had to return from rigid conceptions to the simple and joyful truth of experience.

The question for you is, as noted, “What constitutes universal humanity in history?” Or do you want to do what Marx did in his “Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts” of 1846 (as I recall), and say something such as “Socialist Man [or Positivist human being] does not ask such questions…Don’t think, don’t ask such questions.” That comes from a passage Voegelin analyzed as “logophobia” (fear of reason) in Marx, and sparked an outcry among German Marxist intellectuals when he analyzed Marx as an “intellectual swindler” who forbad human beings to ask basic questions of existence. But the words are there in Marx’s texts, and Marx never pursued such questions as “why is there something, why not nothing?” He refused to think. Do I not remember finding a similar forbidding of questions in Positivism, including Logical Positivism? Yes, the phrase “Scheinprobleme” (merely “seeming problems”) comes to mind, from no less a thinker than Wittgenstein, as I recall. Questions should not be refused or cut off for ideological reasons. Fundamentalists pull that stunt, as you and I both know. But so do Enlightened intellectuals of one stripe or another. They refuse to ask the pressing questions of human existence.

Here is a summary line from Voegelin’s lengthy analysis on humanity in history: "The mankind whose humanity unfolds in the flux of presence is universal mankind. The universality of mankind is constituted by the divine presence in the Metaxy.” (Ecumenic Age, p. 304). The “Metaxy” is one of Voegelin’s significant borrowings from Plato. In the Symposium, especially (but in other dialogues as well), Plato explores human existence as a movement between (Greek, metaxu) the human and the divine, between good and evil, between fullness and emptiness, etc. Love, for example, is a movement between the human and the divine poles of existence; it is neither strictly human nor solely divine, but a mutual participation of the divine and human. Hegel flattens out the Metaxy, the in-between, into “human self-consciousness,” breaking the “tension of existence,” and replacing philosophy as “love of wisdom” with philosophy or Science as “real knowledge.” Voegelin effectively restores the Platonic emphasis on search (zetesis) rather than on knowledge as possession (Greek, gnosis). Not surprisingly, Voegelin finds “the Question,” and especially the recurring existential questions, such as “Why am I alive?” or “Why is there something?” as constitutive of humankind in history, and not particular answers. If I may say so, Positive or Secular Science and Hegelianism have definite answers, or dismiss the questions, as noted, and in this sense, they are no better than religious fundamentalists who lock God up into a book. Philosophy seeks and asks the fundamental questions of existence. Surely you read enough Plato and Aristotle to have seen those two great minds engaged in “the search for truth,” without claiming to have “built a system” or arrived at any final understanding. Insights are gained, of course, but they lead to more searching, not to a closing off to reality. And you probably know that second-rate minds later tried to provide “answers” and “definitions” based on Plato and Aristotle, and even developed a so called “metaphysics” out of Greek explorations of reality. Remember the Roman conception, summarizing the Greek, as human being as the “rational animal”? The insight was alive for Aristotle in his explorations of the nous; it was not a mere definition to be bandied about by “thinkers.”

For many good reasons, the Enlightenment, Positive Science, and Hegel criticized “doctrinaire thinking,” and “metaphysics,” etc (attacks already visible in Descartes, of course). But the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater, and a new kind of doctrinaire thinking (or refusal to ask the big questions) was passed off as intellectually justifiable. In truth, there is no substitute for the open-ended search for truth. The answer to all ideologies—Christian, Muslim, Positivist, Hegelian, Marxian, Liberal, etc—must come from genuine philosophical inquiry. It is this inquiry, at once empirically well grounded and rooted in the truth of personal experience, that keeps drawing me back to studying Plato, Aristotle, Voegelin, and to any mind that is philosophical in the sense of engaging in an open-ended search for the truth of reality in its full range of being.

These thoughts are sketchy, perhaps a little heavy. But I share the thoughts with someone who probably disagrees, but who may perhaps understand them. In my own search for truth, I read in order to converse with great minds who have advanced the exploration of reality, and especially of what it means to be a human being.

To An Agnostic Intellectual

A letter to a dear friend, who turned away from God many years ago, aided an impoverished study of “philosophy.”

Dear 

I have never understood what happened to your study of philosophy. As I recall, you were an undergraduate major in philosophy at the University of Utah back in the early to mid 1960’s. Somehow, for some reason, you left off the study of philosophy, and turned to linguistics. Granted, the study of language has its own interests and values. But it is not philosophy.  To mistake the part for the whole is one of the foremost intellectual errors. Philosophy wants to see the whole, not merely a part.  

Philosophy means “the love of wisdom.” A student of philosophy, if he or she is indeed studying philosophy, seeks the truth about the whole of reality, and only secondly, knowledge of particular parts. Or in other words, one desiring to be a philosopher has to see all of reality, and every study of reality, in light of the whole.  Anything less than a noetic vision of the whole could not satisfy one on the philosophical journey. Along the way, one will have to study words, and physical reality, and history, and of course divinity. But one must not get derailed into an endless quest for endless information, and lose the perspective of seeing the whole, and seeing it wholly.  

Yes, philosophy must include within it a search for God. Plato made this crystal clear in his dialogues, from the Republic and Phaedrus to the Laws. Recall his words: "Philosophy is the love of wisdom. The god alone is truly wise. Philosophy is the love of God.”  That insight is found in the Phaedrus, and I do not know of any of the leading philosophers who did not share that understanding until a pre-Enlightenment thinker, and a leading modern philodoxer, to use Plato’s coined word:  John Locke. This shallow mind had some thoughts on “God,” but he did not connect his conception of God with concrete reality. Locke is what came to be called “a deist,” which as one can see, was a kind of latent atheism without the courage to take the final step: “God” is irrelevant to life, and to the life of the mind.  And this leads us into the even more superficial waters of the French Enlightenment, and its offshoots in 19th century and twentieth century ideologies.  

The best example I know of a man with a powerful intellect and philosophical background, who had the courage to push his rebellion against reality’s ultimate nature and source, was Nietzsche. His attack on “God,” on religious faith (especially Christian) was powerful, at times highly insightful, but also led to its natural consequences in his personal life. Nietzsche had the courage and consistency to accept the consequences of atheism:  Nothing is good, nothing is true, nothing is real.  How did Nietzsche handle such a major divine breaking into history as the Apostle Paul’s vision of the Resurrected Christ? How did he treat that vision? No, Nietzsche was too honest to ignore it. He labeled it “an hallucination.”  Nietzsche set the pattern for psychologizing spiritual experience (already prefigured in Fuerbach). But Nietzsche was not a mere game-player. Rather, he lived his rebellion against reality, and accepted the consequences for it.  And so he spent the final decade of his life in a total spiritual abyss that was as hellish as anything I know. He believed what he wrote, whereas the clever sophists of the Enlightenment—the self-styled “philosophes”—played with atheism as a child’s toy, get “rich and famous” for their witty assaults on stupidities of the Church, and taught others that “God is dead.” And they laughed, whereas Nietzsche suffered in miserable silence.  Nothingness lived.  

Philosophy seeks to know the nature of reality, and especially, the ultimate cause of all that is. To dismiss the search for the “first cause” is not only non-philosophical, but in truth irrational. Ideologies—including atheism and scientism, by the way—begin by forbidden asking the ultimate questions. That is the precondition for modern ideology. On this point, I refer to Karl Marx’s Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1846 (as I recall the title). Marx explicitly forbids questioning reality about its ultimate cause, and he was sufficiently trained in the history of philosophy to know what this meant:  Do not speak of God in any form.  As Marx writes, “Do not think.  Do not question.”  He explicitly forbids “socialist man” to ask any questions that lead towards God, towards the ultimate source of reality. Instead, Marx makes the utterly nonsensical claim that “socialist man creates himself by his own labor.” The sophistry here is transparent, but it surely has duped millions of so-called “intellectuals.” Many are not even “Marxists,” but they are his intellectual descendants, none the less, as they do exactly what Marx inculcated: fear of reason; refusal to ask genuine, existential questions.  

To dismiss the search for the ultimate cause as “Catholic professionalism,” or “religious belief,” may appear to be witty or clever, but until one realizes—if one ever will—that doing so would dismiss Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle as being “Catholic professionals” too, long before Christ appeared.  The use of the symbol “God,” Theos, as signifying the first cause (Aristotle’s prote arche) is neither Catholic nor Christian, but deeply rooted in the tradition of philosophy itself. If you deny this, I can easily sight many passages from Heraclitus to Aristotle that link divinity with reality, with being, with the ultimate good, with truth, and with wisdom. Of course the Hellenic philosophers had to conduct their search for truth in a two-fold battle, in effect: from mythological beliefs that did not give adequate scope for reason (“religious beliefs,” not unlike creedal Christianity, or Islam); and from the learned “experts” of their day, the “sophists,” the professors.  As an example of genuine philosophy’s openness to God, I quote the famous final words of the Apology of Socrates, by the young Plato. Condemned to die for denying the gods of the city, for introducing a “foreign divinity” (his voice), and for “corrupting the youth of Athens,” Socrates speaks his final word to his so-called “judges:” "Now it is time to go—I to die, you to live.  Which of us has the better fate is unknown to anyone, except to the God.”  

Words such as these have stirred many young minds to enter into the philosophical life.  It is a genuine search for God.  What has happened?    

The abiding puzzle for me is how a student of philosophy may possibly have learned to break from a literalistic understanding of religious mythos (story), but then fell into the far worse pit of sophistical intellectuals with their “acid of modernity,” to borrow Nietzsche’s apt phrase.  This acid bath does not lead one to the search for the divine light, but blinds one to it. What ever happened to so many “students of philosophy”?  What blinded them to the light of reason, whose ultimate nature and source is what is called “God”? What prevented so many young persons from opening up to genuine spiritual experience, and exploring these experiences with the assistance of reason? What has happened?

Of course, even a would-be atheist can use reason in the instrumental sense to solve mathematical equations, to argue logic, or to study physical reality, but as soon as one wonders, "Why do I exist?”, either one’s reason is open to transcendent experiences, or one is not.  As for atheism in our culture: It takes the form of endless entertainment, rarely in the form of careful arguments that the ultimate source of reality does not exist.  The atheistic claim is philosophically empty, so it is held as a mask, in Nietzsche’s sense.  It is a pretense, an excuse, to stop seeking for that which simply is beyond space-time. In our culture, “agnosticism” or “atheism” is an excuse for intellectual laziness of a high degree.  
What a student of philosophy recently called “the closing of the American mind” is demonstrated repeatedly in American education. It is not Socrates with his “obedience to the god” that has corrupted our youth; it is book-clever intellectuals, more “bright” than right, who are guilty of contributing disastrously, ruinously, to the closing of the minds of so many young people. We have done this. Every teacher—myself included—must keep asking, “How have I closed off the minds of students to genuine inquiry? Have I fostered an atmosphere of the search for truth, of boldness to ask the really large questions of life, or I have helped to blind the students in my care?  Have I told them, as did Marx, “Do not think. Do not question,”when it comes to questions such as “Who or what created the world?” Have I called their real, personal questions, “Scheinprobleme”—mere appearance-problems, false questions.  We have much to answer for.

The major pain in my life is to see how we in this culture are destroying young minds—and not only young ones, but older ones as well. The American culture is not just “a culture of death,” but a culture of mental-spiritual closure. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Snowing people under mountains of facts cannot substitute for genuine inquiry: Why do I exist? What is the purpose of human life? What is the meaning of life? What is reality, and what is its cause? And who is this God that brings forth all that we experience out of nothing? The quest for God is the life of the spirit. The quest for divine order in the world, in creation, in history, is the life of reason. Not to enter this quest is highly praised by degreed professors. Its effects are all around us in the breakdown of order, in so many mental and spiritual illnesses, in a culture of hiding from reality by popping pills and using mental or physical drugs.  

America has gone so far down the path of spiritual blindness, of willful unbelief, of closure to God, that I am not at all convinced that we can still be turned around. And yet, the rescue of some by God working through the light of reason is ever possible. There will always be a Solzhenitsyn, it seems, who in the midst of the Soviet closure to divine truth opened up his heart and mind to genuine faith, and showed the way to a renewal for Russia. I myself still hold out for a young Saint Francis, or Saint Clare, who will moved many by their profound, childlike trust in God, filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit, motivated by love of every human being they meet.  I do not want to underestimate the power of the Almighty to recreate a decadent culture—if and only if we cooperate. And that takes work, trust, humility, to know the truth of Delphi: “Know that you are a human being and not a god.”