We are a strange kind of
creature: a skinny rope ladder of a spine leading up to a thatched loft
balanced precariously on top, that serves as a kind of monkey lookout, from
which we practice our various savageries against other members of our species,
and the rest of nature.
The demise of naïve realism
hasn’t been heralded with a fanfare. In all probability you aren’t even aware
of it as much of an issue (it is, though). It’s as if the patient died in a
remote and obscure hospital far out of town and we only received the news of
his passing in some dog-eared and rain-spattered communiqué left at the side of
the road.
These two thoughts are
related by a stronger binding than initial inspection may suggest, because it
was the original division into “world stuff” and “mind stuff” that sponsored
the idea of nature being something alien and unruly that had to be tamed by man’s
superior intellect and civilizing, progressive tendencies. Nature was a
weed-throttled wilderness, and it was the business of man to convert it to a
split-level garden for his own pleasure. More than anything, nature was
something other than us, something
that had to be taken in hand and subjected to a damn good thrashing, like Basil
Fawlty’s car.
The products of this way of
thinking are all around us. But our animal tendencies are not entirely to
blame. Each world view it is possible to hold has its knock-on consequences for
behavior, branching from its originating ideas. When nature became an alien
other, something we imagined ourselves to have grown out of and left behind,
something that encroaches upon us and cramps our style…in short, when it became
an object imagined to occupy a domain
fundamentally different from what we declared ourselves to be (mind, spirit,
whatever) then the stage was set for more or less everything that has followed.
You can’t have a healthy relationship with that which you seek to dominate and
control.
Science is a human invention
that was largely a product of this ontology. No such thing as science exists “at
large” without our rhetorical interpretation of what it is and what we are
doing. Now I am not hating on science. I think it has done many wonderful
things for us, and I am using its fruits even now to communicate my thoughts to
you. It is (or at least has been, up until this point) extremely successful at
what it does. Whether it can continue this success is another matter altogether,
but I will defer that point for now. What I wish to draw attention to is this:
the triumphant success we have known with this tool, wonderful though it may
be, hypnotizes our gaze away from a serious problem that has been growing all
the while in parallel. It is as if this figure of bright raiment has a shadow
twin or dark-body double concealed back of the luminous twin’s circle of light,
and whose presence we are predisposed to ignore because we are entranced by the
radiance of the figure in the foreground.
The world is something we
can’t emulate. Please take a moment to consider the gravity of that. When we
refer to such things as “life,” “nature,” or “the world” we convince ourselves
that we somehow know what we’re talking about, when in fact we do not. Pull on
any of those home-knit terms just a little and the entire sweater unravels to a
bundle of the sketchiest definitions. And if that were not bad enough, the
problem is many times more serious when it comes to such things as feelings,
will, sensation, perception, love and awareness. When Descartes bisected the
shimmering body of being into those two strange moieties, spirit and stuff, he
set a snowball rolling down a hill that has yet to come to rest. One full half
of what he carved off with his doubting knife became dead, alien and other,
became the “matter” that we talk about, and believe for all the world that we
really see, when we gaze down microscopes and peer into the frozen prairies of outer
space. Meanwhile, everything that was vital to existence as living experience
and mystery shrank away behind the shores of that rainbow-lintelled island, the
pineal gland.
The impact of this can
hardly be overestimated. It has burrowed deep into our habitual unconscious and
into every imaginable recess of language. When we speak of “mind” and “brain”
we are discussing categories resulting from the thinking of Descartes; when we
talk of a “thing” as distinct from an “idea”, of “body” versus “spirit”, of
“animate” versus “inanimate”, when we say that something is “purely subjective”
or that we are “not being objective”, then we are implicitly referencing
Descartes. Even in science the division into “matter” and “fields” is like a
secular version of “body and soul” and owes its construction to Descartes. It has
also deeply influenced religious thinking. Concepts of an afterlife certainly
existed before Descartes, but Descartean dualism has abstracted the afterlife
to an entirely spirituous ‘otherworld’ that has no practical relation with this
one, in direct contrast to the shamanic spiritualities of the Amazon Basin, for
instance.
Very importantly, our modern
view that consciousness is “located” in the brain is a descendant of this
belief system. It may no longer be strapped into the hot seat of the pineal
gland, and is imagined to be diffuse over the entire cerebral cortex, but aside
from this the underlying assumption remains essentially unchanged.
What took place in this
imaginary process was basically the radical abstraction of consciousness
away from bodily form into its own independent realm. Thinking, feeling,
believing, imagining, all emanated from this ontological lighthouse beacon in
the pineal gland. The opposite consequence is that form, the body, Descartes’
world of “res extensa,” contracted to inanimate mechanism. The physical
organism became akin to a clockwork device, and if you boggled closely enough
at the mechanism, so the belief went, you could figure out how it “worked.”
Notwithstanding later
attempts to re-ignite a kind of vitalism (which failed), it was this move that
killed off any idea of a “life force” in the living organism, at least as far
as the scientific process was concerned. A human being became akin to a kind of
monstrous crane driver, with the tiny operator slung in a little control cabin
inside the brain. Even animals no longer possessed mental reality in this
scheme. Only humans had a mind, and so the entire zoosphere, with the exception
of Man, became a gigantic, lumbering mechanism.
But if we can put the gears
of the mechanistic paradigm into neutral for a minute and step back from the
picture, it becomes apparent almost right away that the physical organism is
rife with “intelligence.” Just look at the body’s ability to heal itself, even
something as supposedly simple as closing off and healing a small cut on the
finger. This is alleged to be a mechanism, but in fact no mechanism anywhere
that for certain is a mechanism (such as a watch or a radio) can do
this. If such a mechanism breaks, it stays broken until it is attended to by
external repair. Neither do mechanisms grow and develop, or regenerate parts of
themselves, or reproduce themselves. Mechanism is a human abstraction. Whatever
the forms of nature might be, they are not mechanisms. Our emulations of them are mechanisms, and this is a crucial fact to
discover.
We can see the advantage of forcing
this division, of casting things this way. Descartes was very interested in mathematics and
geometry, leaving substantial contributions to the development of both these
fields. By concentrating all simple, mechanical, repeatable and measurable
elements of the world into one domain, and abstracting out all that messy
mental stuff (volition, emotion, belief, etc.) to an inexplicable “somewhere
else,” he made certain that he didn’t have to consider any of that when
examining the outside world or formulating theorems of geometry, and he created
a scenario where the external world could be “operated on” as if it were a
sacrifice victim awaiting a bevy of Aztec priests.
It is unlikely that
Descartes anticipated the full scale of our ecocidal tendencies, as illustrated
most graphically in the heading picture that goes along with this post, or our
rampaging abuses of the animal kingdom, the other sensitive beings we share
existence with, as so many abstract objects just to experiment upon or eat. But
he may have overestimated our inhering wisdom. Soon enough. we scrabbled up that
rope ladder into the monkey tree, and began to hurl our coconuts at nature.
Significant strides have
been made in science by treating the world as if it is a mechanism with
predictable, volitionless, repeatable patterns. Nevertheless, the fact that
these strides have been made does not necessarily infer that the metaphysical
assumptions underlying those inquiries are correct. Rather, it infers that
there are practical advantages of particular kinds to be had by treating
aspects of the world as if they are synonymous with this human
abstraction of a mechanism, and especially where the patterns under
investigation at least approximate to such behavior, as they tend to do in the
movements of bodies and in chemical reactions (if we don’t press too deeply).
But: the structures of
knowledge we receive back from the world are correlated to the type of
questions that we ask, and the fact that particular advantages can be had by
asking certain types of question does not preclude the possibility that other
realms of knowledge and advantage are yet to be discovered by asking very
different types of questions. It is often said that almost everything we know
of the material world has been won as a result of the scientific method. This
is true up to a point, and I am not one who would seek to diminish what science
has achieved, but as a claim it fails to be entirely convincing, because
science has been a process of asking very similar kinds of questions for
several hundred years. Not similar in terms of the contextual detail, but
similar in terms of the sponsoring metaphysics that informs the very way it
asks its questions and which has barely changed since Descartes.
Last day, I noted that the
world seems to eschew observation when pressed beyond a given point, but I left
hanging the possible implications of this. In my opinion the implication is
that the Descartean split is wrong, and in particular that awareness is somehow far more incestuously involved in the
productions of reality than we have given it credit for. While this does not
necessarily infer that reality is a “great consciousness” or a “great mind,” it
at least opens the possibility that some kind of ground or soil of what it is
to be conscious beings is a much stronger actor in the theater of existence
than we have supposed, and not just a mute spectator. If creaturely existence
grows up from some queer, dampy soil that is somehow associated with–or even
simply is–an underlying potential for
awareness, if living forms are a kind of mushroomic growth stretching up from
this soil, then this raises the suspicion that consciousness of a world of “objects”
is somehow a sleight of hand that requires a partial occlusion of penetrative
seeing in order to be sustained in existence, without collapsing like a house
of cards.
My hunch is the hidden existence of a paradox, whereby
awareness would disappear again into unconsciousness if it were ever really to “complete”
itself, having no longer a figure-ground division on which to discern itself,
and that this is the concealment dynamic we previously glimpsed operating in
nature generally. Were it to reach that point, and lapse back to “unconsciousness”
(that is, potential, pre-awareness) this might create the very kind of
existential vacuum from which outrushes nascent forms again in order to realize
the actuality that the potential is only ever a potential of. If this is true, then animal consciousness, a category that
includes our own, becomes like an array of peculiar antennae sent up out of
this ground, probing the unexplored space of possibility like so many remote
sensors quivering in the wind.
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