Author: gnox

In one of his manuscripts, Peirce defined a science as

the life devoted to the pursuit of truth according to the best known methods on the part of a group of men who understand one another’s ideas and works as no outsider can. It is not what they have already found out which makes their business a science; it is that they are pursuing a branch of truth according, I will not say, to the best methods, but according to the best methods that are known at the time. I do not call the solitary studies of a single man a science. It is only when a group of men, more or less in intercommunication, are aiding and stimulating one another by their understanding of a particular group of studies as outsiders cannot understand them, that I call their life a science. It is not necessary that they should all be at work upon the same problem, or that all should be fully acquainted with all that it is needful for another of them to know; but their studies must be so closely allied that any one of them could take up the problem of any other after some months of special preparation and that each should understand pretty minutely what it is that each one of the other’s work consists in; so that any two of them meeting together shall be thoroughly conversant with each other’s ideas and the language he talks and should feel each other to be brethren.

MS 1334, 11-14, 1905, quoted by Nubiola 2001

Thomas Kuhn (1969, 210) likewise says that ‘scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.’ Peirce emphasizes the esoteric side of this inquiry: few among the general public are prepared to devote that kind of attention to it. Yet we have no pragmatic choice but to believe that the objects of that attention are in the public domain, observable by anyone who does take the trouble.

If two people stand at the same place and gaze in the same direction, we must, under pain of solipsism, conclude that they receive closely similar stimuli. (If both could put their eyes at the same place, the stimuli would be identical.) But people do not see stimuli; our knowledge of them is highly theoretical and abstract. Instead they have sensations, and we are under no compulsion to suppose that the sensations of our two viewers are the same. (Sceptics might remember that color blindness was nowhere noticed until John Dalton’s description of it in 1794.) On the contrary, much neural processing takes place between the receipt of a stimulus and the awareness of a sensation. Among the few things that we know about it with assurance are: that very different stimuli can produce the same sensations; that the same stimulus can produce very different sensations; and, finally, that the route from stimulus to sensation is in part conditioned by education. Individuals raised in different societies behave on some occasions as though they saw different things. If we were not tempted to identify stimuli one-to-one with sensations, we might recognize that they actually do so.

Notice now that two groups, the members of which have systematically different sensations on receipt of the same stimuli, do in some sense live in different worlds. We posit the existence of stimuli to explain our perceptions of the world, and we posit their immutability to avoid both individual and social solipsism.

— Kuhn (1969, 192-3)

According to Dogen, the study of the Buddha-way is a group inquiry much like a science as described above by Peirce. In an early talk given for his fellow monks, he put it this way:

Although the color of the flowers is beautiful, they do not bloom of themselves; they need the spring breeze to open.

The conditions for the study of the Way are also like this; although the Way is complete in everyone, the realization of the Way depends upon collective conditions. Although individuals may be clever, the practice of the Way is done by means of collective power. Therefore, now you should make your minds as one, set your aspirations in one direction, and study thoroughly, seek and inquire.

— Dogen, Shobogenzo-zuimonki (Cleary 1980, 794)

A religious community is at least partially defined by the consensus among its members on certain habits of language usage. However, consensus across communities is harder to come by when habits of usage diverge – as they always do when communities are defining themselves by those habits.

The various uses of the word ‘religion’ itself will serve as an example. William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, 36) defined it ‘arbitrarily’ as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’ It would indeed seem arbitrary to rule out anything that people do together as being ‘religious,’ given that public ceremonies and shared beliefs play such a major part in what we commonly call ‘religion.’ But James is no doubt reflecting the Protestant milieu in which he was operating, where the social institutions and collective practices associated with ‘religion’ are supposed to be derived from individual religious experience, and not the other way round.

Walpola Rahula, on the other hand, uses the term ‘religious’ precisely for those communal beliefs and ceremonies which are marginal to the Buddhist ‘Path’:

… the Path … is a way of life to be followed, practised and developed by each individual. It is self-discipline in body, word and mind, self-development and self-purification. It has nothing to do with belief, prayer, worship or ceremony. In that sense, it has nothing which may popularly be called ‘religious.’ … In Buddhist countries there are simple and beautiful customs and ceremonies on religious occasions. They have little to do with the real Path. But they have their value in satisfying certain religious emotions and the needs of those who are less advanced, and helping them gradually along the Path.

— Rahula (1974, 49-50)

Rahula also (like most Buddhist writers) has little use for the concept of ‘the divine’ which is central to theistic religion. But when people say (as many do) that the Buddha Way is not a religion, it is the ‘popular’ rather than the Jamesian individualist concept they are referring to. Other writers (including Peirce) would reject an individualistic religion as oxymoronic; and some Buddhist writers have no problem with calling Buddhist practice ‘religious.’

As for the usage in this book, it assumes that there is no religion without a community – but since there is no selfhood without community either, there is no problem with referring to some ‘feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men’ as religious.

Science is communal cognition, which aims at learning a Truth independent of anyone’s and everyone’s belief, and takes on theories as provisional steps in that general direction. Religion might be defined as communal practice, or the practice of community; a religious belief is real to the extent that it actually guides interpersonal practice.

Science is the quest for truth, which can only be recognized by the consensus of the community. Religion is the aspiration to a higher connectivity, through recognition and practice of the deeper connections between beings. The tension between them is rooted in the difference between two modes of experience, which we might call observation and immersion. Both can be distorted by special interests or by adherence to habits of practice which obstruct recognition.

The transmission of a tradition is its continuity in practice, which is intimacy itself.

As Dogen said to his community, ‘We must eat rice with the mouth of the assembly; our vitality must be the strength of the assembly’ (EK 8, shosan 6, p. 481).

Our self-control must be the self-control of the community, which guides our present path into the future. We never know how long that path will persist.

The individual, knowing that he will die, can take comfort in the belief that the community (and therefore his contribution to it) will continue after his death. But he can’t be sure of that; the community is only relatively more permanent than he is. Better then to take refuge in the path rather than the destination; or better, in what Peirce called ‘the great principle of continuity’, by whose light we see that ‘all is fluid and every point directly partakes the being of every other.’ To get this point is to get Dogen’s point that impermanence is the buddha-nature.

A human individual is both a member or part of Humanity and a whole embodiment or instance of Humanity. (In logical terms, these are the collective and distributive senses of ‘humanity,’ respectively.) A typical community is a larger part of Humanity than an individual, but is less human, less personal – does not embody Humanity as completely.

A corporation is still less human, though it may be deemed a ‘person’ for legal purposes. Modern corporations are degenerate persons, legal fictions created for a specific and very limited purpose, namely to maximize financial profits while minimizing risk for the shareholders. In order to develop real personalities they would have to learn from their interactions with others, as genuine persons do – interactions based on empathy. But the growth and development of empathy is entirely different from what economists call ‘growth.’

Many myths, legends and comprehensive works of fiction, such as Blake’s prophetic books and Finnegans Wake, portray the cosmos as a reflection or expression of the human bodymind, and the history of humanity as the biography (or the dream) of a universal Human Being. This represents a mythic/artistic blending of the collective and distributive views of Humanity, of human bodymind.

In the mythic dimension of science, the ultimate community of inquiry is more than just humanity: it is the whole system of all living beings, the cast of characters of God’s dream.

Metaphorically, the collective/cultural bubble is to the individual cognitive bubble as the ancient city wall is to the cell wall, each being an autopoietic construct which defines the community or system. Heraclitus pointed this out long ago:

The people must fight for their law as for their city wall.
Speaking with understanding they must hold fast to what is common to all, as a city holds to its law, and even more firmly. For all human laws are nourished by a divine one, which prevails as it will, suffices for all and surpasses them.
Common to all is Thought (ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν).

— DK 44,113-14; Kahn LXV, XXX-XXXI; Wheelwright 80-81

I translate το φρονέειν here as ‘Thought’ (rather than ‘thinking’) in order to denote a universal (‘divine’) process in which all things are involved, rather than a psychological process that is supposed to happen inside of individual thinkers. This is consistent not only with other fragments of Heraclitus, but also with Peirce’s view ‘that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought, and that that thought may and does as much govern outward things as it does our thinking’ (CP 1.27, 1909). In another context, he related this to scientific thinking as a communal activity:

There is no reason why ‘thought’ … should be taken in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought. Of course, that ultimate state of habit to which the action of self-control ultimately tends, where no room is left for further self-control, is, in the case of thought, the state of fixed belief, or perfect knowledge.
Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism.

— Peirce, EP2:337-8

The ‘circle of society’ is ‘of higher rank’ in this respect, that ‘all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals’ (EP1:369). But in another respect, this ‘loosely compacted person’ depends on individual organisms for access to experience – its ‘only teacher’ – just as a biological population or species depends on the survival and reproduction of individuals to continue and evolve. Every means of inquiry is based on making contact, or connecting, with the reality which is independent of conventional belief. Yet the system which makes inquiry possible is made of the connections which constitute the community. The individual who devotes himself to inquiry can do so with integrity only by working both with and against the conventions of the society which he inhabits; and insofar as that society is healthy and evolving, it embodies a diversity of habits.

‘Let us not concur casually about the most important matters,’ said Heraclitus (Kahn XI, D. 47).

‘The first thing that the Will to Learn supposes is a dissatisfaction with one’s present state of opinion,’ said Peirce (EP2:47). (Dissatisfaction with someone else’s present state of opinion, on the other hand, is more conducive to contention than to learning.)

Each time I find something worth saying, it is because I have not been satisfied to coincide with my feeling, because I have succeeded in studying it as a way of behaving, as a modification of my relations with others and with the world, because I have managed to think about it as I would think about the behavior of another person whom I happened to witness.

— Merleau-Ponty (1948, 52)

Anything worth saying is informative because its dialogic involves all three ‘persons’ (first, second and third) in its dissatisfaction.

‘All experiences are subjective’ (Bateson, 1979, 33) – yet they differ in mode. ‘In an observational mode one is detached from that which is the focus of attention; in a non-observational mode one is immersed in it’ (Gallagher and Marcel, in Gallagher and Shear 1999, 281). The mode of experience proper to scientific experimenting isolates the observer’s attention from her intentions. This practice only occurs within the intersubjective context of intentional consensus-building; but the intent to observe isolates attention temporarily even from that, since the process degenerates if the experimenter allows his preferences to interfere with his observations.

Immersion in the social context of science requires the very detachment from the Other, from the dialog partner, which is most inimical to communal practice generally, and to religious practice in particular. This is perhaps why someone who is known to be an acute observer of behavior tends to make people nervous (as Bennett Berger remarked, in his introduction to Goffman 1974).

The scientific method of isolating phenomena from the rest of the world (and especially from the investigator’s intent) is rarely of use in testing the more intimately guiding principles. For that we need a bigger science, a fuller empiricism that includes both participation and observation.