Evolving Eternity

“Art is Lies that tell the Truth” — Pablo Picasso

One of my favorite things about blogging is getting the chance to communicate and exchange ideas with so many intelligent, aware and educated people. As a non-academic I don’t believe there would be any other way to exchange the thoughts, information and research I do here. I am so grateful for this opportunity.

I was reminded just how true this is last week in debate with Adam, Matt and Jason about eternal objects, form, universals, philosophical concepts generally and the nature of ‘mind’. To be sure, there are many notions and positions each of us defend which overlap and/or complement each other, but there seem to be some important divergences as well. I am fairly certain that we all share a naturalistic understanding of consciousness and human life, but our points of reference and discursive aims tend to act as barriers (at least for me) to commensurability and agreement about some of the key issues at play. No doubt we will continue to work through these issues as we go along our individual ways, but I truly appreciate all the comments and enjoy the time they afford me to reflect.

A great example is Matt Segall's recent response to my previous post on matter and contingency (here). Matt's response continues our discussion (started here) about Whitehead, eternal forms and materialism with a beautiful post (here) about the “becoming of being” and the eternal. Matt’s words overflow this post with the kind of wisdom that becomes possible only when genuine inquiry and mythopoetic intelligence meet.

Fortunately Matt's post also reminded me of a special piece of wisdom I hope I never forget: that every story we tell about the world and how it works remains simply a story. Some stories are crafted to tell us a whole lot about natural facts and scientific objects, while others are created to help us interpret those facts, and move us beyond our meager technical perceptions into expanses of imagination unencumbered by the contingencies of physical existence. And so any story I might want to tell will ultimately leave out much of what someone else’s story is capable of telling.

So what differences exist between the stories I want to tell and those Matt wants to tell? Quite a lot as it turns out, but not in a way that should disparage what either one of us are up to. Overly simplified, I would characterize our interests as moving in opposite theoretical directions while seeking to end up covering the same cosmological grounds. That is to say it seems to me that Matt wants to think the Absolute (unity), with an eye towards cultivating the existential implications which flow from an acquaintance therein, while I want to think the Possible (multiplicity), with a wonky fish eye towards negation and the positive mutations that come from reigning in our animal speculations. (I wonder if a Tibetan Buddhism vs. Zen Buddhism analogy might be apt here?) Both orientations are positive and inherently worthy of exploration, and both projects seek to understand the cosmos as a living, evolving and mysterious process. Our differences, then, can only serve to amplify a broad curiosity shared by both, while also animating our discussions and debates with many critical considerations. And for that I can only be thankful.

Matt writes:

My process philosophy is rheological, like Michael’s; but it is not just that, not just a scientific study of the flow of matter in the world. It is also a love of the way of wisdom in the world. Philosophy–at least as it was known when the word, and the way of life, was brought forth and developed in the pre- and post-Socratic philosophers–is concerned not only with contingent flows but with the “becoming of being,” the way of eternity, the living unity of the temporal universe.

 I would like to think my philosophy is not "just" a minor riff on scientific studies of the flow of matter, but also a speculative pragmatism working with the raw empirical conditions of the cosmos to generate alternative modes of being, knowing and doing – at least on a personal level. The task I have given myself is to try to understand as much and as deeply as possible about the world we come from. For me this task entails a fierce refusal of the myths and lies that surround us, until such time as those myths and lies reveal ‘truths’ that can no longer be refused. My interests also deal squarely with the “becoming of being” but in a way that allows being’s becoming to intervene on the conceptions I am willing to make of it-them. So, in this spirit, to decide too strongly on the character of that which intervenes of-itself prior to the interventions themselves is to allow a symphony of accumulated human concerns to drown out the possibility inherent in the world itself.

Of course it would take a lot for me to cash such statements out in strictly philosophical terms, but I do believe such values require some sort of theoretical minimalism governed as much by the darker implications of the ecological sciences (method) as by speculative probings of interpretive innovation (theory). Moreover, the stories we want to tell about matter, energy, stars, planets, creatures, etc., need to embody a radical appreciation for all those humbling, visceral, morbid and raw facts and realities of material existence at their foundation. To think the cosmos and the planet as responsible earthly creatures we must think earthly and creaturely thoughts. We must not only think and talk about ‘matter’, but rather start from our perceptions and realizations of the reality that we are thinking-matter. In this context,  anything less than a critical, yet careful and rigorous, reevaluation of all existing myths, poetics and discourses seems to me un-thinkable.

Matt writes:

Natural science itself already assumes the unity of the universe, that it is cosmos despite its chaos, even where it seems to methodologically require that intelligent freedom be kept distinct from a contingent and purposeless reality (i.e., that some mixture of mentality not be assumed to exist already in all materiality). This seeming methodological requirement of a modest witness to objectify neutral matter cannot be metaphysically justified. Philosophy, if it is to be anything more than an apology for nominalistic materialism, is the attempt to think the complex unity of intelligence and nature, to participate in the One Life organizing the whole.

I certainly agree there is no reason to assume we could ever deploy a completely objective perspective in the world, but I also do not believe it is reasonable to assume that subjectivity already exists in “all materiality”. It seems to me that both positions deal in extremes and are equally ruinous to creaturely thinking (or what we might call wilderness thinking) because both assume far too much. The objectifiers assume neutrality and the subjectifiers (panpsychists?) project experientiality; the former fails to recognize the potency or vibrancy or inherent activity of matter and energy, whereas the latter fails to circumscribe their own functional capacities and attributes.

As for philosophy, some would argue it has a propensity for apologizing for whomever wields its intellectual authority, or for whomever creates the most fashionable set of arguments. Philosophy is whatever we make of it. In an academic setting it can be a set of commentaries on a canon. In a personal context it can be a value-system and guide for living. On the streets it can be a means of survival or style of communication. In a stratified class-culture it can be a weapon or a means of oppression. There are no solid boundaries with philosophical thought. The genre is thinking as such, and the actions are always decidedly human. “Alchemical hermeneutics” and “anarchic re-engagement” indeed.

Matt writes:

Eternity’s participation in time does not imply the erasure of contingencies or the permanence of physical laws. Laws are cosmic habits. They could have been otherwise. What couldn’t have been otherwise is that cosmic memory (i.e., intelligence as it acts in time) would form habits of some kind.

Eternity evolves and surprises itself in creative acts of novelty; our thought and our deeds are no exception. I don’t know if it could be otherwise and I don’t think we can assume. I only try to know what is. And we can only speculate about what could be by intimating ourselves as much as possible with what already is. We are expressions of a world as primordially potent as it is complex. Figuring out how this is so, what can be learned from it, and how best to live in/as it is the real challenge and opportunity before us.