Month: February 2017

I and eye

When i recognize you as another experiencing subject like myself, i assume that you have a world just as i do. This world, when you focus on it, is full of myriad creatures and wonderful life in full color and exquisite detail. But the most amazing circumstance of all is that the whole show, including your amazement, is all going on inside your head. Your experience is generated by (arises from, is the feeling of, ….. ) the functioning of your brain.

Now, i don’t know this in the same way that i ‘know’ my own world of experience. It’s a theoretical model, part of a virtual reality scaffolded by language. But it’s the only model that makes sense of the evidence – especially the case studies collected by neurologists, which demonstrate poignantly the dependence of normal mental functioning on an intact brain. When the brain is malfunctioning or damaged in some way, its owner’s experience will be altered in a correlated way. How can we doubt that experiencing is a performance of the brain?

And since i have recognized you as a subject like me, i have to believe that my experience – my world (including ‘you’!) – is also a product of brain dynamics. I have no experience of my brain, of course, because my brain is too busy doing the experiencing to also take a role in my world. (The one thing the spotlight can never illuminate is the spotlight.) In my world, my knowledge of my brain’s activity is a theoretical model just like my knowledge of your brain’s activity. Our shared, consensual world, insofar as it is mediated by language, is the mutually reinforcing network of these models. We can maintain this virtual world because we can talk about these models among ourselves, and apply them pragmatically, with predictable results in the real world, the one in which we live and move.

Your actions in my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.
…
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.

— Rúmí (Barks 1995, 278)

Immanent signs of transcendence

As Evan Thompson (2007) explains, external (‘transcendent’) events are ‘given as such by virtue of the intentional activities of consciousness.’ In this sense they really are external, yet they are ‘intentionally immanent’:

their status as external events for the system (as opposed to their status for an observer of the system) is a function of the system’s own activity. Their meaning or significance corresponds to an attractor of the system’s dynamics (a recurrent pattern of activity toward which the system tends), which itself is an emergent product of that very dynamics. The external world is constituted as such for the system by virtue of the system’s self-organizing activity.

— Thompson (2007, 27)

This is another way of saying that an external event (of which a system is conscious) is the dynamic object which determines a sign to determine an interpretant which is an event internal to the system’s dynamics. This is how the Thirdness of a sign ‘brings about a Secondness between two things,’ as Peirce put it; it makes one manifest as external to the other.

The depth of the universe

The NHS translation of Thomas 67:

Jesus said, “One who knows everything but lacks in oneself lacks everything.”

DeConick’s translation:

Jesus said, ‘Whoever knows everything, but needs (to know) himself, is in need of everything.

In the Book of Thomas which is also included in Nag Hammadi codex II, Jesus says to his ‘twin’ Thomas that

those who have not known themselves have known nothing, but those who have known themselves already have acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe.

— Meyer (2005, 210)

Strangely enough, this fits with the logical sense of depth (intension), which is intrinsic or internal to a term or symbol while its breadth (extension) is extrinsic or external. Given that we ourselves are symbols, as Peirce says, ‘everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves’ (EP1:38). Its presence to us necessarily involves its otherness, its Secondness to us, its externality, while the form this manifestation takes for us arises from the depth of internality: its Firstness is the form of what matters to the bodymind. The Thirdness of the phenomenon is the sign’s act of meaning, the semiosis.

Ear of the heart

Every religion, insofar as it subordinates the well-being of individual members to that of the group itself, tends to replace the inner law of conscience with outer laws which are applied to all indiscriminately. But ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ (Blake, MHH, 24). In these conditions, a human conscience can turn to an esoteric subculture within it; otherwise the individual may be cut off from true fellowship when the exoteric religion loses its feel for the core experience which is the living source of its own laws, and the guidance embodied in them sinks to the level of superstition.

The esoteric side of scripture is not limited to early Christianity, or even to the Abrahamic religious tradition. As Steven Heine explains, it also appears in ‘esoteric Buddhist training that is characterized by intense subjectivity. This dimension includes the profound intimacy of the master-disciple relation based on intuitive insight and hermetism, as well as an aura of secrecy and inscrutability projected toward outsiders’ (Heine 2001, 8).

What i have called the conscience would correspond to the Buddha-nature in Buddhism, and in Persian Sufism to the Perfect Nature, the Angel who guides the ‘man of light.’ To paraphrase Henry Corbin, this relationship of guidance depends crucially on perfecting the individuality of each person, which cannot happen if that individuality is swallowed up in a collective being or will.

‘The power which is in thee,’ in each one of you, cannot refer to a collective guide, to a manifestation and a relationship collectively identical for each one of the souls of light. Nor, a fortiori, can it be the macrocosm or universal Man which assumes the role of heavenly counter-part of each microcosm. The infinite price attached to spiritual individuality makes it inconceivable that salvation could consist in its absorption into a totality, even a mystical one.

— Corbin (1971, 16)

It was the difference or polar tension between the Angel and the individual, or between universal and particular person, which made each of the pair meaningful. In this vision (as in the enactive model of cognition), the act of seeing is ‘an interaction, a reciprocal action’ (Corbin 1971, 140). You could even say that you are God’s secret and he is yours. As Ibn Arabi put it,

Ana sirr al-Haqq: ‘I am God’s secret,’ the secret, that is, which conditions the polarity of the two faces, the face of light and the face of darkness, because the divine Being cannot exist without me, nor I exist without Him.

— Corbin (1971, 129)

In Corbin’s account of Iranian Sufism, the true self is ‘the organ and place of theophany’ (Corbin 1971, 129).

This is the state of the ‘friend of God,’ of whom the divine Being can say, according to the inspired hadith, so oft-repeated by the Sufis: ‘I am the eye through which he sees, the ear through which he hears, the hand by which he touches … ’

… and, we may add, the mind by which he reads revelation:

the theophanic figure of the Angel of Revelation in prophetology … is here the Angel of spiritual exegesis, that is to say, the one who reveals the hidden meaning of previous revelations, provided that the mystic possesses the ear of the heart.

— Corbin (1971, 131)

From tenacity to inquiry

The way of inquiry – which includes (but does not end with) revelation, as explained in Chapter 6 – is essentially the last and best of four methods outlined by Peirce in his 1877 essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief.’

In the light of current usage, and considering Peirce’s own commitment to fallibilism, this title is remarkably ironic: both ‘fixation’ and ‘belief’ seem best suited to describe the first and crudest of the four, which he calls the method of tenacity. It consists of simply clinging stubbornly to whatever belief you already have and refusing to change it. Peirce concedes that this method ‘yields great peace of mind’; but it is quite incompatible with Peirce’s view of thinking as ‘necessarily a sort of dialogue, an appeal from the momentary self to the better considered self of the immediate and of the general future’ (SS, 195). Why should the ‘better considered self’ insist on deferring to an earlier stage in its own development?

Next is the method of authority, about which enough has been said in this netbook; it amounts to a method of collective tenacity, and public character constitutes its advance over the private method of tenacity. The third method essentially involves dialogue among reasonable people, i.e. those who admit their own ‘natural preferences’ and those of others as both valuable and questionable, and use honest reasoning to work toward a more universal and consistent belief system. This is certainly more promising than the method of authority in which some people impose beliefs on others, and is the best method available on questions that can’t be settled on factual grounds alone. But where observable facts are crucially relevant, it is much inferior to the method of science. This, Peirce’s fourth and highest method, is the collective public form of the meaning cycle itself. This way of inquiry is the only one which incorporates the best features of insight, reason, critical thinking and learning from experience.

Lifting the veil

Why must we see only through a glass darkly? We can understand this as a natural result of all cognition being semiotic – but Rumi explains it in different terms: it would not serve the divine purpose for us to see ourselves as God sees us.

Is there any place our King is not? But his sorcery has blindfolded the viewer.
He blindfolds your eyes such that you see a dustmote at midday, but not the Greatest Sun,
A ship at sea, but not the ocean’s waves.
The ship’s bobbing tells you about the sea, just as the movement of people tells the blind man that it is daytime.
Have you not read the verse, God has set a seal … ? It is God who sets the seal, and it is He who removes it and lifts up the coverings.

— Rumi, Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi 2633-37 (Chittick 1983, 59)

In the last of these verses, Rumi alludes to two passages from the Qur’án. The first refers to unbelievers being rendered blind and deaf by God/Allah:

Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering.

— Qur’án 2.7 (Pickthall)

The second refers to the apocalyptic vision in Surah 50 (Qaf):

15So were We incapable of the first creation? No indeed! Yet they doubt a second creation. 16We created man— We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein— 17with two receptors set to record, one on his right side and one on his left: 18he does not utter a single word without an ever-present watcher. 19The trance of death will bring the Truth with it: ‘This is what you tried to escape.’ 20The Trumpet will be sounded: ‘This is the Day [you were] warned of.’ 21Each person will arrive attended by an [angel] to drive him on and another to bear witness: 22‘You paid no attention to this [Day]; but today We have removed your veil and your sight is sharp.’

— Haleem, M. A. S. Abdel. The Qur’an (Oxford World’s Classics) (pp. 340-341). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

The point here is that only God can remove the veils which He has placed over the eyes, hearts and minds He has created – and the resulting dis-covery would mean the end of the old habitual world and creation of a whole new one. In the meantime – that is, in historical time – God’s creatures must remain veiled from their own true nature. It is necessary for them to sleepwalk through their roles in the divine play, just as one must first be asleep in order to wake up (see Chittick 1983, 58-60). How would the play ever get performed if every role-player recognized herself as the whole show?

The ‘driving’ angel in Verse 21 of Qaf might recall the saying of Heraclitus that ‘Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow’ (Wheelwright 1959, 37). The ancient writer who quoted that fragment apparently understood it as referring to a divine blow (Wheelwright 1959, 57). In Peircean terms, the ‘driver’ might be identified with the Secondness which motivates inquiry and learning: no one learns unless his expectations are contradicted, more or less violently, by the reality beyond them. The ‘witness’ then is the voice of Experience itself.