Anthroposophy & Versalvere

Hanging Man
July 2006
Valentin Tomberg once wrote that the spiritual counter-truth to the phrase "Nature abhors a vacuum" is "the Spirit abhors fullness."
He mentions that it is the "empty spaces" in or between things that are usable by us - e.g., doors, windows, vessels, the spokes of a wheel.
Like many insights from the field of spiritual research, Tomberg's comment presumes that the part of mankind to which it is addressed is "normal" -- or "natural" or at least "sane."
But what if the words of spiritual understanding fall upon the ears of people who are not "normal" -- people who are, in some sense, subnormal, unnatural, insane? Then the words would have to be turned into their opposites and inside-out in order to express reality. In this case the Spirit would merely be a vacuum and Nature would be a fullness experienced as something abhorrent.
I believe that we have arrived at this situation today. Americans seem hardly to tolerate the touch of anything "natural." The American obsession with sanitation began in the early 20th century and has been escalating ever since, to where we now have kitchen cleansers the equivalent of antibiotic steroids and rubber gloves that must be worn at all times by food preparers. "Nature" has become so abhorrent that it has become fashionable among certain sectors of youth to go to elaborate lengths to alter their biological gender, and modern medicine for years has been doing battle with mere "mortality," as if the human condition itself were something shameful and obscene. Biology has become allied to a politics of the annihilation of the natural.
In this way anything "natural," i.e. not subjected to human choice, has been moved into the area of the despised and the contemptible.
As for the Spirit: the Spirit today manifests as the relentless pressure to maintain fullness and satiety, the relentless pressure to forestall any movement into emptiness, incertitude, self-questioning. This "pressure" is the obverse of the operations of the vacuum, which is suctional. Today's spirit is thus anti-Spirit -- pressure rather than suction.
Thus American life swings back and forth continually between pressure and suction, fullness and vacuum, with the concepts "Nature" and "Spirit" completely reversed.This swinging back-and-forth may be pictured as the shadow of a hanging man. Only we cannot see the corpse. Those of us who are positioned on the ground watch the events unfold by means of the Internet - which is to say, we watch not so much with eyes as with thoughts.
The shadow passes and re-passes above our heads - is it merely a dead man swinging, or perhaps a lynched nation? But whatever it is, the pendulum swing never stops or comes to rest to where we might get a purchase on it or cut it down. How could there be anything so paradoxical --at the same time so helpless and mechanical? How can anything that "exists" -- and which, for that reason, must be considered "real" -- so resemble an inanimate object in that it apparently lacks the power to suffer from within and can only be acted upon from without?
For along with everything else, the helpless mechanism has swept up the meaning of passion into its diabolic paradox. Passion has come to mean lust, and instead of the renunciation of power which is the real secret of the nascent, of creativity in history, the shadows of the hanging man sweep the landscape with a ghastly and monotonous phosphorescent glow. Those of us still standing are choking in the fumes of a "Christian civilization" that has been completely gutted. The smell of sulphur is unmistakable.

Notes and Annotations:

[1] Valentin Tomberg [1900-1979] Russian anthroposophist and student of the philosophy of law who converted to Catholicism. His book, Meditations on the Tarot, [by "Anonymous"] was once pictured in a photograph of Pope John Paul II.spiritual research: spiritual science, or Anthroposophy. Founded by Rudolf Steiner [1861-1925]. We will have occasion in this blogspot to refer frequently to Anthroposophy, which is an enormous body of work that points the way to the spiritualization of the intelligence of Western man.

[2] "...the words of spiritual understanding fall upon the ears of people who are not 'normal' -- compare Jacob Needleman, from his book, Lost Christianity: "... Sensitivity to qualities of energy is the one and only touchstone for determining the level or authenticity of Christian practices….Throughout history as we know it, the very first idea that disappears from tradition when it begins to lose its power is this teaching about gradations of the being of man…And from this point of view, the distinction between nature and grace must be read to position our present level as not even at the level of natural men. We are subnatural men…"

[3] "...helpless and mechanical": Compare G.K.Chesterton, from his book, Orthodoxy: "The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself."

[4] "...the renunciation of power which is the real secret of the nascent, of creativity in history..." cf. Caryl Johnston, from an essay entitled "Truth and Reconciliation," published at http://tcrnews2.com/GuestFeature.html "Science has had its share of creative failure, as any human enterprise does; but what it does not have is a philosophy of its own history that embraces anything other than progress and conquest. Perhaps this is one reason why our views today about ourselves are so one-sided, for we consult science when we want to consult anything relating to truth. Christianity, too, has had its share of conquest and progress, but in its depths it teaches the mysterious history-stirring power of the creative failure, the shame, the depths, the abstentions, the restraints. And because we no longer provoke our thoughts to ponder where we might desist, or consider where we might refrain rather than to act, our history has become large, brutal, and hollow. We have the forms of creativity still, but whether we still have the essence is debatable."

[6] monotonous phosphorescent glow. See Jeff Wells, "The Monotony of Evil" [July 18, 2006]--at this link: http://rigint.blogspot.com/. We will also in this blog have occasion to mention Simone Weil, about whom I have frequently written. I don't agree with Jeff that she was a socialist mystic. But he is right to call attention to the work of this great and lucid soul:
"These are, after all, Simone Weil's times. Evil, wrote the socialist mystic, is monotonous: there is "never anything new, everything about it is equivalent.... It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part." This seems counterintuitive, or perhaps simply wrong, because the world today appears full of often lamentable novelty. But the novelty, evil's artifact, is an illusion. .."
posted by Caryl at 7:58 AM 0 comments



Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Challenging Materialistic Science
An interesting passage from Rudolf Steiner's book, Man: Hieroglyph of the Universe:"... Now if the European and American civilizations were to retain their present character, adhering only to the materialistic, Copernican view of the Universe --with its off-shoot, the Kant-Laplace theory -- a materialistic cosmogony must necessarily arise concerning earthly phenomena, biological, physical and chemical. It would be impossible for a cosmogony of this kind to include the moral world order in its structure. It could not embrace the Christ-Event, for it is impossible to be a believer in the materialistic view of the world and at the same time a Christian: that is an inner lie, it is something that cannot be, if one is honest and upright. Hence it was inevitable that the practical consequences should be seen in European and American culture, of the split between materialism on the one hand and a moral cosmogony on the other... This result was evidenced by the fact that men who had no external reason for being inwardly dishonest, threw faith overboard, and established a materialistic cosmogony for human life also. Thereby the materialistic cosmogony became a social cosmogony. This would however have the further consequence for our European and American civilization that man would have a materialistic cosmogony only and would know nothing of the Earth's connection with cosmic powers, in the sense that we have described it. Within a certain caste, however, the knowledge of the connection with cosmogony would remain, just as the Egyptian priests kept [i.e. withheld; my note] the knowledge of the Platonic year, the great cosmic year and the great cosmic day; and such circles could hope then to rule the people who under materialism degenerate into barbarism."[Italics mine]And in a later passage in the same chapter he contrasts the teachings of materialistic science (his example is the Kant-Laplace theory of galaxy formation, but a more contemporary example might as well be Big Bang theory) and says that "... it is much less evil when a lie is consciously accepted, than when it takes shape unconsciously, and degrades Man and drags him down. For if we consider a lie as it appears in a man's consciousness, every time he falls asleep it leaves his physical and etheric bodies with his consciousness, and lives on in a spaceless, timeless being, in the eternal being, while Man is in a dreamless sleep. There is prepared all which can result from the lie in the future; that is, everything is made ready to correct it, if it is in the consciousness. But if it is in the unconscious, it remains with the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed. When Man is not occupying those bodies, it then belongs to the Cosmos, and not to the earthly Cosmos alone, but to the whole Cosmos; there it works for the destruction of the Cosmos; above all for the destruction of the whole of humanity, for this destruction begins in humanity itself."So it is important not only to study the challengers of materialistic science. Study the geocentrists who challenge the Big Bang and Copernicus; study the plasma cosmologists who challenge the purely mechanistic, gravity-dominated universe. Study homeopathy, which challenges Pharmaceutical Science, and study Intelligent Design, which challenges materialistic Darwinism. But if you do not wish to study, and you prefer to side with the status quo - make sure you do it consciously, and register and attend very carefully to every blaring and breathless announcement you receive from the media, the pulpits, the judges, the op-ed writers, the blockbuster books and the Dennetts, Dawkins, and Derbyshires of our world. For all these people have a stake in keeping you stupid. The least you can do to resist them is to remain awake.
Labels: Anthroposophy, mass media, materialistic thinking, Rudolf Steiner
posted by Caryl at 5:44 PM 0 comments



VERSALVERE
Thursday, June 29, 2006

“Through the indwelling of the Logos the capacity of cognition has been given to us.” Georg Kühlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos, 1985

The journey that led to the poems began with an act of violent disagreement. I was, in those days – 1984 – still living in the Berkshires and my main circle of friends and interests revolved around the work of Rudolf Steiner – Anthroposophy – which had been built up in the area. There were a couple of Waldorf Schools nearby, several farms, and many business, artistic and educational initiatives arising out of this deep local interest in anthroposophy.

I recall attending a lecture, at the Waldorf School in Harlemville, NY – just across the Massachusetts border – given by one Georg Kühlewind, who was a rising star in the anthroposophical lecture circuit. Dr. Kühlewind was a native of Czechoslovakia – I believe – or perhaps of Hungary – and he was a scientist by profession but pursued Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology as a path of philosophical and spiritual deepening. The name “Cool Wind,” was a pseudonym, formed as a protective camouflage against the Soviet bureaucracy. The “Wall” still existed in those days.

Dr. Kühlewind gave a very interesting talk on these epistemological themes and interests, a talk well received by the attentive audience. I did not, I could not, disagree! And in truth I did not – for who can disagree with the call to make the act of thinking experiential - and for the recognition of a superconscious dimension to the mind?" Logos is not word, law, sense, reason, measure, etc. It is everything that makes these possible: a common relationship to the world, a common world. It is the connecting element..." I do not and did not disagree with this characterization of the Logos from Becoming Aware of the Logos: The Way of St. John the Evangelist --the title of Dr.Kühlewind's book and which I imagine was pretty much the substance of what he spoke about that night. And yet, my first reaction was to break away from this common world. Something stung me – like a burr in my hair or a catch in my throat, or a rash – a violent reaction, one might say, to an idea – which I do not even remember what it was and which, to be perfectly candid, was in all probability, completely unexceptionable.

The lecturer was staying at the home of Christopher Bamford, head of the Anthroposophic Press, and I recall the next day, in a state of continuing agitation, I called Chris’s home and asked to speak to Dr. Kühlewind. I first thanked him profusely for his talk and went on to raise the point that was simmering in my mind in such apparent turmoil – a point which, as I say, I now have no recollection at all. I doubt I made any sense. I may have been completely incoherent. The word may be "inchoate."

If I had been older and wiser I might have known that I was having an emotional reaction rather than a philosophical contention. Perhaps one's first reaction to a powerful idea comes about in this seemingly perverse form? - a "turning against" before there can be a "turning around"? Dr. Kühlewind was perhaps surprised at this excited caller. He remained noncommittally polite, as I recall.

A sentence from Dr. Kühlewind’s book forms the epigram or motto to the poems which followed... so many years later: “Through the indwelling of the Logos the capacity of cognition has been given to us.” To explicate each of these terms – ‘indwelling,’ ‘Logos,’ ‘capacity of cognition,’ ‘ has been given…’ would take volumes, maybe multivolumes – and then, such explanations would leave the reader cold who has not had a corresponding experience whereby the words and concepts would gain meaning for him.

Some time after - I do not know when it began - I commenced regular sessions of what I called "recreational visualizations." My notes of these initial experiences are unfortunately lying in an Archive in Birmingham, Alabama, and whether I will be able to recover them is as yet an open question. But it was during these sessions that the Beings who later took the form in the poems first appeared. I would go into a state of waking sleep, and after each session I recorded my thoughts and experiences in a journal. The Beings who came, came as they were named. The Name and the Being corresponded. But the question that never ceased to occupy me was this: in what sense are these Beings "real"?

posted by Lyrac 2:49 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 30, 2006
What is a gloss?

If anyone is curious about what this blog is about, he or she could do no better than read friend Andrew’s response, which I also reproduce below. Andrew states succinctly what these explorations are about:

“Well, a good place to begin seems to be the fact that the word 'poetry'—derived from the Greek word poema < href="http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id7.html">http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id7.html
Monday, July 03, 2006
What’s Not So Good about Dr. Cool Wind

Dr. Cool Wind’s first book was Stages of Consciousness. Here are a couple of quotes from it:
“All our knowledge and information result from and are generated by our activity of thinking and can only be retained, expressed, and communicated in the form of thoughts” (p. 38) and “Thought is not produced out of and through feeling. On the contrary, one has thoughts and these evoke a feeling through their inner content.” (p. 53)
Both of these statements seem to me simply wrong. 'Thought' seems to mean everything, and if thought is everything, it is nothing. And it also seems to me indisputable that feelings and emotions stimulate and provoke thinking – indeed, real thinking may have an emotional undertone - almost like a keynote.
Confusions like these seem to have been somewhat mitigated by Dr. Cool Wind's second book, by which time he begins to acknowledge the existence of wordless thoughts. But it was clearly in opposition to the anthroposophical over-emphasis of the cognitive sphere that my first poem was launched – “Grandmother Funda.” I did not know at the time that the fundus was part of the womb- n : (anatomy) the base of a hollow organ or that part farthest from its opening; "the uterine fundus" –someone later pointed this out to me. But if there is a “sensibility” to be communicated about Grandmother Funda, it is the idea that consciousness is, well, gestational. The nurturing of experiences, feelings, memories, conversations, etc., distil, ultimately, to “ideas,” which are modes of ordering and vision. An “idea,” from the Greek idein, is after all only a “window” – a seeing-into. Over-emphasis on “ideas” leads to extreme idealism. An insufficiency of the ideal realm, on the other hand, can lead to over-submergence in experience and absence of ordering vision. We need “ideas” to light the way down, the path of winding down, to recollection of concrete experiences. Thanks to this “motion,” movement – thanks to this “emotion” -- we can remember.
Most emphatically I reject the notion that “To have the world before it as an object was given naturally to humanity” – though whether that statement was from his first or second book I cannot recall. On the contrary: we are not presented with an “object.” We are presented with the grey lady ---

Call her
The grey lady of the summer,
A sudden clearing in a swift rain
Or wakeful remembrance in a green wood
Whose paths wind down, always down,
Into the heart of past seasons . . .
It is actually the Grey Lady who calls us. To be a human being is to be called; there is no mere “natural development.” And that moment in the composition of this poem when I changed the first line introducing Grandmother Funda by means of a bland description to that of the imperative – “Call her” – marked a signal moment for me with this poem. It is imperative. It is urgent. And the urgency of the imperative is the epic tone: “Sing to the goddess, O Muse!” Great things are at stake.
And why “grey”? I suppose because all of our experiences ultimately come to be revealed in the “crown of age,”- and even when we are young, we are building up this crown of grey hairs.
The “grey lady” brings forth from the chaos of gestational experience the ordering relationships, provided we have accompanied her down into the heart of past seasons. This is my living and poetic reproach against all Cool Windian “deadness” of the past – a point he never tires of hammering because he always wishes to emphasize the “present” or “presence” when the act of thinking is living – or should I say, when thinking is in act. But it does not follow: the “presence” of thinking in act does not mean that the past is “dead.” For it is by means of this past experience that it becomes possible to think at all – to take and transform what has heretofore been gained up into a new level. Rather than “dead,” one should say that the “past” has not been adequately gestated – that is, remembered, awakened, summoned, made conscious. It means we have refused to offer hospitality to the Grey Lady – and thereby have not fully accompanied the Logos into our past.
Spiritually, the past is all we have. It is the past in which we have endured repetitions, and repetitions of repetitions – which we call learning:

You have been here so many times
You cannot even recall them,
For the words of remembrance
Entered your body long ago:
They came into your secret stillness,
And by means of learning, memories:

Flushed from Grandmother Funda’s lap,
A covey of pictures, greetings, signatures,
That she released to you:
At first
She held them up, and you merely gazed –
While she held them between her two fingers,
To the light, so: and whispering
(As the rain, as the wind, whispers)
Remember me.
First of all you need to get to the place of beholding. Being able to see, mark, name, observe, perceive, these experiences, etc. is the first stage, the indispensable beginning to being able to become a knower, that is, a keeper, a steward of ideas. And remember, too, that everything you “hold up to the light” also has the rain and the wind: that is, a certain emotional tone and force. The Grey Lady is a seasonal being -- as all the beings in these poems have their seasons -- of Summer: for at the season of maximum fruitfulness there is also a relinquishing:
Thus they fell
To you: she gave them over, made them yours,
While she passed beyond into them:
“Beyond into” – the mystery of the relationship words. But soon it will be your turn to make fruitful and to relinquish. For by being an individual rememberer, in a specific time and place, there will be – inevitably, I should think – grief and loss.
The inner experience of entropy has accompanied human experience in all times and places, but I think since the Industrial Revolution and most particularly since the Oil Age, ushering in the era of Moloch – whether of ideology or economy - this feeling has only grown in intensity. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory describes this sense of loss from the Russian angle when he writes that, “I would… submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known.”
“Hoarding up impressions” is something of the activity of the soul under the tutelage of the Grey Lady. But she also teaches us how to let go, with feeling:
Now it is your turn –
And you, lingering,
Press them into your mind, crying
“This is all I have left of her!-
This is all I have!”
In a handkerchief wet with your tears
Crumpled in the bottom of the garden.
This opening piece of “Grandmother Funda” seems to me remarkable in that it was inspired by Cool Wind and yet was wholly oppositional to his way of viewing consciousness and thinking.
The Grey Lady subsists in every human experience that manages to integrate feeling, memory and ideas. Recollection of the grandmotherly aspect of experience is the emotional and concrete counterpart to “becoming aware of the Logos.”
Overall, concerning the poems in general: in contrast with many modern poets, who seem to have little philosophy but much complexity and difficulty in their language, I have much philosophy but at the same time, great simplicity and directness in diction and language. I would like to say that in these poems I discovered and was able to bring forth music from thinking, or music in thinking – if it did not sound so immodest. So let me be immodest! – if it means standing for great things!
But I have given myself permission-- in these talk-writings, to be proud and reckless. Let others shoot me down – if they wish!
posted by Lyrac 8:31 AM 0 comments


Tuesday, July 04, 2006
ii. A VisitOn a cool summer afternoonI came to Grandmother Funda’s house.She opened the door to me, I walkedDown the long hall to her drawing room.There we drank tea, and had some cakes,While with the chill of evening coming onThe hearth fire hissed and cracked,Long into the afternoon and past,Until night’s shadows rose up in our minds.She roseTo ring the butler’s bell, but changed --Herself so strange -- to a lizard, sliver-green,Regarding me from the couch, intent. I blinked;Again she changed, and now a lounging youthIn heavy boots and smoking on a tarLeered at me from the easy chair.I asked herWhat she meant -- she made as if to speak --But paused: her being formed into a domeCurved from hearing into remembrance --It was a chime of echoes, a ruin of footfalls,The wrangle of deed with consequenceThat she consented to listen to;To all of this she at last agreed;She came to herself because she heard.It was night by now,-- And with such effort as now required,Not hearing her across from meBut myself her means of soundingThere -- I fell asleep:While sparksWent humming beyond my mind into the fire,And I too dwindled like that emberCarried by the oval flame of summer night.
___________________________________________________

Notes: The human ear:
from Portrait of a Man Standing by Salvador de Madariaga –"The ear is perhaps the most mathematical of all biological machines. The laws of optics show what an admirable degree of geometrical perfection the human eye has reached; but the ear may be more perfect still, for it is able to place in outer space the sound it perceives in its own inner space. In order to achieve this natural miracle, the ear registers the three coordinates of the spot where the sound vibrated, by means of the three planes into which the inner ear is shaped; and in order to achieve this astounding result the brain instantaneously resolves three differential equations… Musical perception is based on logorithmic laws, the basis for which is established by auditive consciousness. "

From a Notebook (Nov, 2000) I wrote: "Stages from experience to art: the 'meditations' that formed the basis for Pictures from the Speaking Stillness. Clearly, a different order of experience from so-called normal consciousness, but jumbled, confused, and chaotic. Order defined itself as a Being. The second stage: remembering and writing down. Another stage of loss, degradation of energy, inevitable distortion. Filling up notebook pages. Then the thought comes (it was not there in the beginning) to recast all of this into poetry. So after 12 years it emerges with a kind of clarity it never had in its origins."

In this second portion of the Grandmother Funda sequence I seem to be struggling to define or characterize a modern form of 'participation.' The 'transformations' are an old theme of spiritual experience and literature, and it is almost as if I had to note this 'classical' form of myth or spiritual experience before launching into the new thing that this poem tries to express. That Grandmother Funda may have momentarily been a lizard or a smoking youth is a thing of less wonder than this new thing which is expressed in the following lines: the 'being' formed as the curvature of hearing from remembrance, and the fact that this being, too, must wrestle with physical and moral facts, and the interpenetration of spiritual and physical and moral, in her 'consent' she gives to being. Through this active wrestling and inner consent she 'comes to herself.' And now it is I who must deal with these same physical and moral facts. She is actually and physically 'across from me' but inwardly and really I become, through her deed, her means of sounding there. It is thus that we become, for one another, 'means of sounding.' It takes an effort, so much so that I am unable to maintain myself in awakeness. But the night and the sparks take us both up into itself.


posted by Lyrac 2:19 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
TowardsVersalvereKathleen Raine visited the Berkshires in the early 1980’s, when I was living there. I had the inestimable privilege of hearing her read her poetry at Christopher Bamford’s house in West Stockbridge. Perhaps it was Kathleen Raine who inspired my image of the "Grey Lady." If so, it was her appearance of grace and wisdom, and the beauty of her poetry – rather than to the torments of her inner life which she chronicled in her autobiographies and about which I have written elsewhere – http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id2.htmlRaine’s book, Defending Ancient Springs, the scholarly manifesto of the visionary poet, was published in 1985. A few passages:
"True art is at once the embodiment and the normal means of transmission ofimaginative knowledge. But to this study of those works which embody andtransmit the hidden order of the soul all great poets must come in theirmaturity; it is the secret language of the initiates…
"The imagination does not see different things, but sees things differently…
"The great gulf lies not between tradition and the visionary, but between tradition and vision on the one hand, and positivism in all its manifestations, whether academic or revolutionary, on the other…Visionaries are not iconoclasts…."
"Above all, the voice of true imagination is never ironic; that is the mark of a divided mind, whereas the imagination is above all at one with itself, the principle of unification and harmony."
If I mention Kathleen Raine now, it is because the turmoil of her inner life, which she chronicled in her autobiographies, reminds us that the path of the visionary poet is often marked by a form of spiritual suffering unknown to the apologists of materialism. To cherish the vision is to announce to the Gods a certain willingness to suffer – one’s conviction that life is a book to be read and understand in one's heart -- not merely skimmed -- ". . . not just leafing through."I don’t know if anyone has exactly and precisely correlated materialism with triviality. But I am sure that we awaken from the superstition of materialism to the degree that we allow ourselves to be moved – to be changed – to hear – and to suffer. Is this not to tell the will not to will? No wonder that the first step towards Versalvere is often accompanied by the experience of resistance –Guards closed round me the last time I came.Who are these "guards"? Perhaps the resistance of my own self to going deeper, perhaps some kind of vengeful god of materialism demanding tribute.
Loudly they enfolded me, demanding: but I foundOn the edge of each clutch of pages that they heldA path of signatures:
The "signatures," as any adept in the art of the book will know, are the letters at the bottom of each group of pages to mark the sequence in a sewn volume.
"I am heading for what is dear to me,that I may read and understand,"Said I, "and not just leafing through."
The materialists give themselves away – the order of the world defies their central dogma, and they are unable to reason without self-contradiction. Just yesterday I saw George Gilder's superb refutation of Darwinian materialism, in which he draws attention to this self-contradicting nature of materialist thought, quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true, and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." But even more to the point was Dr. J. Budziszewski's essay, "Escape from Nihilism," where he reminds us about the central flaw of modern ethics: "it assumes that the problem of human sin is mainy cognitive - that it has to do with the state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don't know what's right and wrong and that we are trying to find out. Actually the problem is volitional - it has to do with the state of our will." It is this idea that underlies the statement that the journey to Versalvere must at some point or another encounter the guards, resistance, the sense of hostile or oppressive figures, without or within. The problem is volitional. But likewise they can be surmounted if the will is pure:
And they closed behind to let me pass.
There are storms in the natural world as in the spiritual, and the dogma of materialism will leave chaos in its wake:
But Oh! The house was dark, the shutters torn,And glass of shattered windows on the grass!~The door was swinging on its hinge, the squealOf scraping iron: I ran and saw my aged friendCurled upon her couch. "I had a storm,"She said, "Or was had by one," and smiled ~
But Grandmother Funda is irreducibly "herself" –
She arose from her shawls and stood beforeThe empty gaping windows and expelled a breath;They were paned again by means of glowing air.
And it is now that this Being, Grandmother Funda, begins to wax and increase into truly awesome dimensions:
"There are words to use for all of this," she said,"Trying to sleep awake."
Grandmother Funda affirms the Logos, the ordering principle, and in so doing grows beyond mere philosophy into religion or possibly even beneficent magic:
She turned aroundAnd raised her arms, pointing, peristrephic,And hallowed all the earthdrow, blessing it,And all that moved upon it by meaning of the fireglow.
"Peristrephic" -- to turn around, revolving, rotatory. And what is "earthdrow" but "earth-word" – that is, all that is created upon the earth by means of the Word – encompassing "breath" as well as "fire"? It is movement not by mere means but by meaning of – perhaps this would lead to a theory of motion yet to be elucidated.
And then she begins her lesson, the teaching she gives to me, and which essentially forms the inner teaching of all these poems:
"You have dead habits of perceiving," she resumed,And she taught me keening: mournful seeking sharpnessFrom the knees, kneeling:This I did according to her word,
"Keening" – the Logos in thinking as in perception. As I wrote before: to bring thought-content into poetry and pictures into thought, leading to a deeper affirmation of things through re-experiencing how we come initially to experience them:
Inspiralling the sonic shadows, keening Versalvere,While luminous in stillness the Wordmage posed unspokenly.
The shadows of our separation are "sonic" – not only in the sense of the music in verse, but because echoes of participation and relation accompany us through all phases of our separations, and it is our task to "inspiral" them – to restore a luminous motion to the world. And this task involves overcoming "dead habits of perceiving."
And the summation of the experience? Already, with the last two lines, I seem to be looking into a "past" which is simultaneously "the way things are" or the ways things now and newly are. The names are no longer solely "attached," as it were, to the "things." They have become the periphery, the circumference of the world:
And the names of the things were written into the ovalLight, and the name of the place was Versalvere.


Thursday, July 06, 2006
In the GardenHere is the fourth and concluding section of Grandmother Funda. The entire poem is posted to the poetry website at: http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495ki/poetryplot/id9.htmlGrandmother Funda's flower is the bergamot - but I believe the wild, not the cultivated, variety. I don't know why, but at some point during the composition of the poem I met up with a wild bergamot, in Boston no less, and I am sure I knew Grandmother Funda was winking at me.We will continue with these reflections tomorrow or soon, meeting other strange and marvellous Beings in the course of our journey.
From my window I glimpsed the bergamot;Its pungent scent, though faint, had woken me.I saw Grandmother Funda walking in the garden;She carried clippers and wore gardening glovesTo gather flowers for her table: wild daisies,Black-eyed Susans, blue irisesAnd widow’s tears. She gazed longAnd thoughtfully upon her growing ones;The air was fluid and clear, with scintillasOf light and scrolls of dew ever spirallingAround her: it was hers, the moving light,The draught of liquid of a summer morning;It was what she poured out into the garden,In the summer morning of the freshest rain.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Moral Motion

In a Notebook (2000) I remarked on "the internal energy crisis… the ceaseless extraction of wonder from the cosmos and its conversion into knowledge."

One of the major turning points of this process was the extraction of the concept of motion from the participatory nexus in which it had been metaphysically embedded. This new concept of motion led to the modern or Newtonian concept of gravitation – which, ironically, leads to a certain feeling about motion as stability. I mean, don't we all rather think of the "stars in their courses' as stable and in a sense, immovable? The new concept of Motion came about through the overthrow of the Aristotelian concept of the Mover. Motion thus came to ‘rest’ in a universe deprived of a Mover, of the animating principle of desire.

This new and strangely immobilized modern concept of motion taught us how things remain but not, perhaps, how they sustain, how they can be sustained. Did the metaphysical Motion have to die in order for the technological dynamism to arise? These are the kinds of interesting historical questions that few people seem to ask, but which seem to me utterly significant and important.

In any case, the ‘remains’ of the Scientific Revolution lie all around us -- in machines which have harnessed dynamic Motion. Our modern civilization has completely overhauled (if not killed off) metaphysical motion only to turn it into its opposite – that is, to make the dynamic inert. Making motion stable, static, and predictable, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of metaphysics has lost caste. In past ages it was not 'motion' that was considered the stabilizing principle, but metaphysics. I believe it had this meaning up until the time of Kant, and that perhaps even Kant thought of metaphysics in this 'stable' way. As we know, Kant’s "dogmatic slumber" was challenged by Hume’s assertion that it is merely thanks to habit that we put notions together like causality, relation, etc. Hence he questioned such concepts as metaphysical realities. Kant, as we know, attempted to resuscitate thinking philosophy and metaphysics from this accusation of ‘lethargy of custom,’ as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it. Kant attempted to restablize metaphysics after Hume had toppled it.

But beneath the stabilizing concept of metaphysics there is perhaps another, and more radical notion, lurking beneath the surface – a notion I may have stumbled upon in a journal entry of Jan. 7, 2000: "I define metaphysics as that which seeks to suspend or disrupt what is purely automatic in us." Perhaps Hume did not think of this? Hume said we cannot metaphysically validate seeing because of habits. But the poet's answer is to crawl underneath the habits and discover, not a rationalizing but a motional metaphysics. The seer and the thing seen are on a journey together in a moving world. Perhaps this is the effort to reconvert knowledge to wonder.
I'm not sure, but I think that is a large part of the effort of these poems.

We will continue with these notions - and motions - in due season.


Saturday, July 15, 2006
Are the Beings of Recreational Visualizations Physically Describable?

I was having lunch with some colleagues the other day and I began telling them of my new poetry blog, and how it came about that I "met" the Beings that I later cast into poetry. They found the idea intriguing, and Kaye asked if I could tell what these Beings looked like, if they were describable. I found the question oddly hard to answer -- odd first of all because the experience of these Beings was entirely "inward," and secondly because the overwhelming impression I had of them was that their being corresponded to their name. The correspondence of Name and Being was the true key or index of description. "Physical description" as such played a minor role. I suppose that in these poetic pursuits I was more like a medieval Scholastic than a modern scientist.

Owen Barfield writes, in his chapter "The Texture of Medieval Thought," in his astonishingly important book, Saving the Appearances, that "'Knowledge,' for such a consciousness (i.e. the Scholastic) was conceived of as the perfection or completion of the 'naming' process of thought... for all creatures were in a greater or lesser degree images or representations, or 'names' of God." And in the next chapter he says: "Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of -- what shall we say?-- of 'meaning,' if you choose. It seems the most adequate word. Aquinas's verbum intellectus was tanquam speculum, in quo res cernitur - 'like a mirror in which the object is discerned."

But now that I think of Kaye's question, it seems to me that the series of poems describes Beings in a diminishing scale of "describable." The first of them, Grandmother Funda, is eminently describable. She is my grandmother, your grandmother, grandmotherness itself.

"Asa," the second in the series - to which we will come shortly - is loveliness itself, the feminine in its full blush of beauty and grandeur. She was clothed in a "very velvet gown," and of course, she was tall, and perhaps dark-haired, although the poem does not get to that level of description.

The third of the series, the Ringbinder, concerns Hovering Black, who has something to do with preserving memories. I picture Hovering as rather slender and rather shy and perhaps a bit whimsical - though these last two qualities have left the realm of physical description altogether.

The fourth poem concerned a being easy to describe - my cat. Pangur jumped into this series of poems a bit unlawfully. All I can say is that I took a bit of liberty here.

"Bettina Piccolo" - is any description necessary? Don't you already know, just from her name, what she is? Bettina Piccolo's little poem is just a thread inserted into the fabric.

"Maiden Glass" is a beam of light shining through a window pane -- Made-in-Glass. "Th'Emagdrow," reverse speech for "Wordgame," is a type of beast who rages through your mind when it is dancing. He is impossible, of course, full of slipshod punning, endless jokes, manias of significance (and insignificance) and besides, he eats up all your citations. But such is the price of life fermented in words. Emagdrow is very fat, and terribly shapeless.

"Frank Key" is the mysterious man who summarizes the whole and who has no physical description whatsoever. In "The Gravity Robe" the reflective poetry seems to leave the physical world altogether and encounter gravity from the inside of it. The Gravity Robe is perhaps physically describable as the swell of the sea.


Sunday, July 16, 2006
Mysterious Visitations


"In modern times, the ability to produce truth out of oneself is revealed in the abstract capacity to work out the abstract truths of mathematics and pure physics quite independently of sense-perception and experiment. This procedure - which may be traced back to Newton originally - produced the conceptual scaffolding and outlook fundamental to all the natural sciences. Such pure thinking, if applied to other fields, could create the possibility of thinking with mathematical precision about spiritual realities. Thereby the activity of the Spirit in man would truly begin... Perceiving the Logos, the spirit could assume its true function: to investigate the obstacles which stand in the way of realizing consciousness-in-the-present... For the spirit of the Comforter does not yet dwell in man. To dwell and to remain are one word in Greek: menein. To remain, in the Greek sense, meant: enduring presence, real living, not just 'visiting.' In modern man, the spirit acts like a 'visitor.'... But, since the intuition does not remain, but blazes up and goes out, man does not live, i.e., experience, the spirit which is active in the intellectual intuition. The spirit's remaining or dwelling would be an experience which continues in time. It would mean that one remains in the spirit, that one lives in the 'super-worldly' realm, in living thinking, i.e., life."

George Kuhlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos, p. 90-91.


It is deeply interesting to ponder the above words in the light of the Christian teaching about grace. Men fought for centuries to define it, or if not to define it, to define the conditions of its appearance and action. The "living thinking" of anthroposophical epistemology is not exactly grace, although I believe that some anthroposophists may hope that it is possible to live 'in a state of grace' insofar as one's cognitive activity meets the requirements of pure sense-free thinking. Although this may be an over-estimation of human possibility, I believe the anthroposophists are right to pinpoint thinking and cognition as the important battleground of the present - and future - of the action of grace. They are right to say that it is essential to become conscious of one's thinking. Or as John Lukacs put it - we need to "think about thinking."

The first question I would raise here is whether it is possible to identify so closely the Holy Spirit with cognitive activity as such. Jacob Needleman, in his worthy study of the Eastern Fathers, Lost Christianity, remarks somewhere in that amazing book that cognitive activity is only the lowest rung of the ladder. It is not actually the Spirit, or Holy Spirit - indeed, the disciplined devotions of the Early Fathers were directed to finding "the place of the heart" - where the real work of contacting the Holy Spirit begins. This astonished Needleman, who says that the most important aspect of their research was embedded in the simple words about "finding the place of the heart." What appeared to be simple and obvious was, in fact, the most difficult and elusive of all. (If I can find my copy of the book I will try to provide exact quotation.)

My second reservation has to do with the anthroposophist's insistence on "pure sense-free" thinking. For this argument I turn to Salvador de Madariaga once again, whose book, Portrait of a Man Standing, provides a sharp corner, or perhaps, course-correction, and which, besides, is full of graceful and sharp insight. In this book he contrasts the vertical and horizontal tendencies in man, having begun his discourse with a close look at a tree and a cow: "The tree and the cow, the vertical and the horizontal, remain the two coordinates of man's life. They command the primary impulses behind his doing, thinking, feeling... The vertical urge which is man... is after all incarnated in an animal and belongs, therefore, to a species that, as such, is under the sway of a horizontal impulse on which it depends for its life, and therefore, for that of its individuals... For the species to remain and endure, animal, collective, horizontal tendencies are indispensable in order to counterbalance the urge skyward. Man lives thus in a continuous dynamic equilibrium between his vertical and his horizontal worlds, between solitude and multitude."

This Spanish grundwelt gravitates the anthroposophical pitch skyward. But it is in particular de Madariaga's next point which I want to emphasize:

“…And here we come across one of those paradoxes of which nature seems to be so fond. yes, the vertical posture has separated the several vital levels, but the vertical impulse that caused it tends to keep them united, threaded together... while there lives in man, even when decanted into several levels, a definite horizontal tendency... that incites him to live flat along every one of his 'storeys,' or in other words, to accept the decantation and separation of his several levels with cowish placidity...[but] it is a fact, though perhaps paradoxical and odd at first, that life will be more fully human if and when the individual succeeds in preserving at each level the taste and touch of the other ones."

This is a long and roundabout way of saying that the anthroposophical thinker runs the risk of living in his head. He pours all of his energy and enthusiasm into exalting the 'vertical' impulse of cognition while his life-energies, so to speak, drain out of a hole in the bottom. Thus has it happened that followers of anthroposophy are sometimes to be recognized by their lack of spontaneity, their dampened personalities, their obliviousness to race, religion, nation, history, politics, and all 'personal' or even sometimes stubbornly moral expression. According to de Madariaga's analysis, all this verticality lands one in a new horizontal plane. "Epistemology is destiny" indeed!

It is thus I have some deep reservations about this anthroposophical exaltation of "sense-free" thinking. I believe I wrote these poems out of a deep disagreement with the "sense-free" dogma of anthroposophical thinking -- while holding on loyally to the anthroposophical valuation of thinking as indispensable to the path of spiritual development. Thus agreeing, I found I disagreed; and yet though disagreeing, I continued to agree. Or to put it another way: I walked with the anthroposophists until I turned a corner, and then I lost them. Or they failed to run after me.

I know not if there are readers who would have an interest in subtle disagreements at this level. But thinking is an act of minute perturbations. Only that which is minutely felt and followed can vitalize our other levels - taste, touch, feeling, sight, the moments of life. Only thinking - being 'spiritual' - can penetrate.

On this note I close for the day -- this philosophical prologue to the next poem, "Asa," which will follow in a day or two.

posted by Lyrac 12:42 PM 0 comments



July 17 2006
ASA


Grandmother Funda arises from the depths, but Asa is a being of the heights:

Asa stepped through folds of blue,
walked majestic on columns of air
curling and uncurling, up and down,
like children's paper whistle toys;

Asa is the closest I have ever come to experiencing a Greek Goddess. Her name, the same spelled backwards as forwards, is also expressive of her 'Greek' character. Asa is spatial and a-temporal, where Grandmother Funda is intimately connected with time and the past. As is present, pure presence, continually in the act of 'descending' –

she ranged down the solid draughts
of atmosphere, textural and felt,
like her own very velvet gown,
and slipped between the old and the new
of moments coming, but never there,
and passing by before they're known;

--Asa is the presence between one moment and the next:

but Asa stood present in each one:
she trod the moments like a stair,
descending, always coming down,
holding endless banisters of air.

Asa's natural stance is aloft, and it is only with difficulty that one gets a glimpse of her between the moments. But the effort to maintain alertness in the presence of this 'grandeur' - the grandeur of the minute, amidst the slightest perturbations of thought or of consciousness - can perhaps also be -- for less fine-grained beings like ourselves, tiring:

I leaned my head against the sofa
tired from seeking Versalvere,
when Asa came down the curving stair
bringing from her attic what she called
a coat for moments never worn;
It fit every time I tried it on.

Here is some wordplay. Is the coat never worn or the moments 'never worn' - unexperienced, newly arising? Why does it fit 'every time I tried it on'? And why I am tired from 'seeking Versalvere' - am I not 'already there'? Poetry puts certain questions to us, only it answers them in a different way from philosophy or discursive thought:

It was in a style of patterns culled
from voices racing past us in the sky;
we stood upon the terrace watching
their cloud-hung faces scudding by ~
they looked at us, statuesque and still,
when all at once I turned and fell . . .
I stumbled back into the room;
my moment coat had made me full.

And now, with my 'moment coat' and the fullness it gives me,with Asa experience dissolves into feelings, colors, sensations -- though 'dissolving' is perhaps not the right word, because things are things, things are what they are, things are:

O, such feelings did I do that noon!~
I clasped the chairs, loving the waves
the ribbings made in cushioned corduroy,
the ridges rising through my hands;
in smooth and darkening softened octaves
Asa moved through velvet-curtained sounds,
retreating from my fingers' press:
now lifting, they felt a brighter joy
of cotton - it was the shirt I wore~
and my feet, hatching in their nest
of woollen socks, stood up at last:

I have often thought of these lines as a tribute to a mentally damaged boy I knew when I worked at Berkshire Children's Community, a home for retarded children. Eric could say only a few words, and two of his main activities were riffling the pages of a telephone book or fingering the corduroy ridges of his pants. All day, to run his fingers along the corduroy ridges.

with Asa, before the time was past,
riding majestic on folds of blue,
slipping between the old and the new.

posted by Lyrac 5:11 PM 0 comments





Sunday, July 23, 2006
What is Thinking? (i) or, Coexistence as a Principle

In 1997 I was reading Ortega y Gasset, and I was beginning to view Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology through the lens of Ortega y Gasset's notes on the history of philosophy. Here is a note from my journal on January 11th of that year:

“…Ortega’s critique of Descartes: ...that he discovered the indubitable reality of thought, but could not rest content with this, but had to push on to make thought a “substance,” a res cogitans. Had he rested within thought he might have discovered that thought includes both subject and object: world and thinker are linked together. Instead, he liberated thought and then enclosed it in a cocoon. Modern idealism, subjectivity, thus drags hermetism and docetism in its wake. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: “The only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.” (p. xxvii, Philosophy of Freedom). This is pure hermetism, pure subjectivity.

The anthroposophists believe that Steiner overcame Cartesian dualism when he said that “Thinking produces the ideas of subject and object just as it produces all others.” It is true that Steiner grounds his philosophy in the indubitable act of thinking. But how then does he get to the world? This is still unclear to me. It is significant that Rudolf Steiner says that thinking “produces” the subject and object, where Ortega says that thinking presupposes subject and object.

That is: thinking exists. I am thinking about a table. This thinking-about the table says nothing about the real existence of any specific table, only that real tables exist somewhere, and that I am thinking of one: these are both true and included within my thought. My real existence and the table’s real existence are both presupposed. “… I am that which sees the world and the world is that which is seen by me… If there were no things to be seen, thought about, and imagined, I would not see, think, or imagine; that is to say, I would not exist.”

It is true that Rudolf Steiner does come close to this thought when he says: “The reason why we do not observe the thinking that goes on in our ordinary life is none other than this, that it is due to our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce, appears in my field of observation as an object; I find myself confronted by it as something that has come about independently of me. It comes to meet me. I must accept it as something that precedes my thinking process, as a premiss. While I am reflecting upon the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is focussed upon it. To be thus occupied is precisely to contemplate by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to the object of this activity. In other words, while I am thinking I pay no heed to my thinking, which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking, which is not of my making.” But Steiner draws near only to skirt away again. It may be said in justification that Rudolf Steiner’s purpose with his epistemology is not to establish the mutual reality of thinking and world but to establish thinking as a primary organ of the spirit and so effect a rescue from materialism. The point is well taken -- The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (preferred to the title Philosophy of Freedom) was published in 1899, and thus followed upon the high tide of 19th century materialism.

Steiner stressed that thinking is the “unobserved” element in our knowledge, and in this I believe he was correct. “We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For both subject and object are concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying that before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood.” (p. 35) But how is it possible to understand thinking apart from some specific content? Even in my "recreational visualizations" there was some specific content, or 'input,' or 'experience,' in the form of Beings whose generalized, and at first hazy, 'presences' ultimately crystallized in the poems.

On the other hand, though I raise this question of Steiner, I am quite willing to suppose that the ultimate 'Stuff' of the Universe is, in fact, thought. But there is a big difference in holding this idea as a belief, or as a possibility, and actually arguing it successfully in philosophy. This is just the type of question that ought to exercise those in the field of Intelligent Design - the kind of thing that would need to be argued with full intellectual detachments, each having stores of powder and armory to lay against the sodden foundations of positivist-postmodernist naturalism. And in some of those stores and armory, I think, there needs to be a reserve of ammunition-- for imagination.

The pictorial qualities of thought need to be addressed. We live in a world where pictures - manufactured images - have all but driven away thought. But the human capacity to imagine, to produce pictures of one's own, has correspondingly become extremely impoverished, along with the capacity for empathy and understanding. Truly, philosophy for the future needs a 'therapeutic' mission - to rescue the life in thought by integrating rational thought with the pictorial imagination.

Next, Rudolf Steiner remarks: “Thinking lies beyond subject and object. It produces these two concepts just as it produces all others.” (p. 43) But I find this hairsplitting. Let us grant that thinking “produces” the concept, object, but it does not “produce” table in the same direct way which Ortega describes, and which Steiner himself acknowledged in the previous passage where he admits that things simply appear in his field of observation.

Where Descartes “substantialized” thinking, Steiner seems to “spiritualize” it. According to Olin Wannamaker’s commentary on Steiner's epistemology, [it] “… places the human spirit in the act of thinking within the sphere of objective spiritual reality.” And: “thinking, free from preconceptions… leads to the knowledge that man lives in a true spiritual world.”

My journal entry continues in this wise: “I was profoundly influenced by the importance that Rudolf Steiner gives to the act of thinking. That thinking is a path to the truth, to the spirit... this was extremely important to me. Rudolf Steiner’s path gave me a spiritual world, it is true – but I wanted a real world. I did not want spirit as a substitute for the world; I wanted the spirit of truth to penetrate the world, be in it, realize itself in it… Yet this idea – thinking-as-spirit – is tremendously fruitful, perhaps the only real genesis of fruitfulness – as proved by all that Steiner was able to do with it… "

In the list of real-world problems and concerns, the question of whether thinking includes subject and object or produces them must rate pretty low on the scale. And yet, isn’t it just here that, by really thinking the matter through, and what is more, really feeling it as a life-issue, feeling dissatisfied with a lack of clarity on this issue – would not this elastic dissatisfaction be enough to propel one into an altogether different philosophical world?

Probably one advances in philosophy to the extent that such elastic dissatisfactions cause one to grasp the tiny corner of a single philosophical problem – a tiny part that, for some reason, really matters to me.

In any event, it was startling to move from the world of Steiner to that of Ortega, who could have been addressing Steiner with the following: “… the first thing we do about something can never be thinking about it; in order for me to engage in this peculiar activity, the thing I deal with must have been involved in a previous relationship with me, which was not merely a matter of thinking about it.” Some Lessons in Metaphysics, p. 79

Ortega says that the root assumption of the modern age is that our primary relationship with things is thinking about them; that therefore things are what they are when we think them. On the contrary, he says, things are what they are when we are not thinking about them, when we are simply counting on them, taking them for granted, living them.

Which is why, for Ortega, the chief philosophical issue, problem, reality, etc. is life itself -- and not 'spirit,' 'thinking,' 'science,' 'knowledge,' etc. For what good are all these to us if -- as it says in the last book of the Bible - 'You have a name, and you are alive, but in reality you are dead'?

Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Meeting Richard Wilbur

I met the American poet Richard Wilbur many years ago in Savannah. I was eighteen; I believe Mr. Wilbur at the time was about thirty-five. He had come to Savannah to address the Savannah Poetry Society, a wonderful organization which I hope is still in existence. I met Mr. Wilbur and made some flippant or theatrical remark; he seized my hand and kissed it.

I have always ever since held Mr. Richard Wilbur in the highest annals of Honor. I have also thought he was one of the few American poets to achieve recognition who did not sell his talent to cheap fads.

Some years later a little exchange occurred on an Owen Barfield e-list, and someone quoted two lines from Wilbur's poem, "Epistemology" --

"We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."

To which I answered in kind:

But the cream of the matter--
there's no other udder.

I indulge in these faint recollections to make a little interval, a bridge, from our ponderous reflections on Epistemology to take up the next aspect of the soul - Memory - to follow in a few days.



Friday, July 28, 2006
Is Complementarity the Same Thing as Coexistence?

No.

The next poem-discussion is coming soon, but before we get there, I wanted to make a note on something I said in the post-before-last.

I was reading Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, where he is talking about "The Perversity of Physics" (his Chapter Two). He is discussing the famous Uncertainty Principle, or Principle of Complementarity, where sometimes a particle acts like a wave, or a wave sometimes acts like a particle, and he quoted Werner Heisenberg, who discovered, or enunciated this principle:

"The concept of complementarity is meant to describe a situation in which we can look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference. These two frames mutually exclude each other, but they also complement each other, and only the juxtaposition of these contradictory frames provides an exhaustive view of the appearances of the phenomena."

Certainly the principle is useful, if only to remind us that an event may be viewed in different perspectives. What is interesting is to see how perspective itself was being incorporated into the very structure of science. But then Heisenberg goes on to say that,

"What the Copenhagen School calls complementarity accords very neatly with the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind."

But this is just what it does not do - or rather, it seems to me an unjustifiable leap from the principle of complementarity applied to the fundamentals of reality to a philosophical discussion about matter and mind. Is he suggesting that the wave-like state is mental and the particle-like state is matter? Indeed it is "neat" - it is in fact too "neat." Because by saying that complementarity accords with the matter vs. mind distinction, he has thereby abolished complementarity itself, or he is rendered it useless by removing its sting and its power to surprise. Complementarity itself, both in its wave-like and particle-like aspects, belongs to the "matter" side, in the sense that it is the mind's construction or interpretation about what it sees.

Complementarity says that now the mind "sees double" where before it reduced everything to the purely material entities -- "of single vision and Newton's sleep."

In this sense the complementarity idea has failed to live up to its promise. The most startling thing one can learn from the principle of complementarity is that there is dynamism inherent in perceiving-thinking itself. One should say - "This is what thinking looks like - from the outside." In essence, complementarity is a perceiving of thinking - but I wonder if this has even been realized. What is left for a thinking that thus so dramatically... sees itself revolving between act and process?

The same old dead cognitive habits, the same dead dessicated intellectualism - which came perilously and gloriously close, in the Principle of Complementarity, to the living picture, of life in the form of Mind. But turned aside in the end -- because these old habits were not up tothe new revelation. Instead of making thinking more dynamic, complementarity only contributed to making the picture of the world less rational.

The Principle of Complementarity should have been a feast for kings. Instead, it was thrown to the dogs.

The point of this little essay being, when you think about thinking, even something as mundane as the proper places of subject and object therein, the world begins to whisper its secrets to you.

posted by Lyrac 7:06 PM 0 comments

Saturday, August 05, 2006
Heisenberg Revisited

Concerning my last post: I had the feeling that the quote from Heisenberg regarding the indeterminancy principle as an illustration of Cartesian dualism might have been something the great physicist tossed off in a careless moment. This sense has been reinforced today, for I was just reading John Lukacs' chapter "History and Physics," from Historical Consciousness, where he quotes Heisenberg:

"...Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought but it makes the sharp separation between the world and the I impossible..."

Heisenberg then makes the comment that the Cartesian partition has penetrated very deeply into the human mind over the past few centuries, and that "it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality."

To which John Lukacs assents: "We cannot avoid the condition of our participation." I have always thought that this great book, Historical Consciousness, originally published in 1968, was a signal moment in our intellectual life. In its densely interwoven arguments about the nature of history and thinking, the participation idea returns after a prolonged sleep since the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. There - according to Owen Barfield, whose inspiration is very evident in John Lukacs' pages - "In the work of Thomas Aquinas, in particular, the word participate or participation occurs almost on every page, and a whole book could be written - indeed one has been written - on the uses he makes of it. It is not a technical term of philosophy and he is no more concerned to define it than a modern philosopher would be, to define some such common tool of his thought as, say, the word compare. " Barfield, Saving the Appearances (1965) p. 89.

I have had a very interesting correspondence this week regarding Owen Barfield and participation. I submitted an essay on Barfield to an interdenominational Christian magazine whose editors have a strong and unquenchable interest in C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield's good friend. The editor to whom I sent the piece seemed initially favorable to it, but the verdict from his circle of reviewers nixed any hope of seeing it published. While most of this negative reaction was probably due to my shortcomings as a writer combined with the difficulty of the subject, I have to wonder whether some of that negative reaction was due to the challenge that the idea of participation presents to the entrenched Cartesian dualism. Christianity has had a century of struggle with Darwinism, but to Cartesianism it seems to have accomodated itself without much of a murmur. Barfield's argument in Saving the Appearances shows the links between the materialism of Darwin and the dualism of Descartes.

It's a big challenge, and people don't want to hear it, I guess. They don't want to go back that far into scientific and philosophical disagreements. But then comes a great work like Historical Consciousness, which lifts the whole debate into a new arena - that of history. And participation is becoming now a vital question for history. The participation idea faded from men's minds coincident with the rise of science, and its disappearance certainly facilitated the "manipulative" attitude towards nature that obtains today. This manipulative and controlling attitude is still much in evidence in our scientific and technological society. But it has also come to a certain place of limits - perhaps even of diminishing returns. We are running close to the energy limits. But the people who know it or who pretend not to know it have no plans to subject the domineering attitude to a radical self-questioning. Instead, they have other plans. History is their new field of operation. How much can you stagemanage events, wars, assassinations, financial catastrophes, invasions, subversions and the endless parading of thoughtless, corrupted, contemptible and deceiving people in the leadership spotlight of the world? How far can you go in casting out the participation of decent people? When do you reach the moral limits?

These are the kinds of questions that arise in any consideration of participation - which begins, for us, with its presence or absence in political affairs and then becomes a larger, or deeper, question about how we perceive, how we configure sensations into things, and occurrences into 'events.' It becomes a question of what we are and how we think and act - a question of historical consciousness. Today, it is becoming the question of how - if - history will continue.