Category: Communing

A public consensus is like ‘a fortified city built upon a high mountain’ (Thomas 32) – difficult to build, but also difficult to attack or ignore, or to change.

As Robert Theobald (1997) pointed out, our success (in exploiting resources for our own purposes) is now the greatest obstacle to our well-being.

Is there such a thing as progress toward a greater connectedness in this expanding universe?

Every day some connections are made, and some are broken.

We can only imagine where it’s all going.

Only you can imagine what we’re all doing.

Perhaps a conceptual consensus needs to be continually challenged in order to stay healthy.

Arthur Koestler (Barlow 1991, 97) says that ‘when the organism or body social is functioning steadily, the integrative and self-assertive tendencies are in a state of dynamic equilibrium – symbolized by Janus Patulcius, the Opener, with a key in his left hand, and Janus Clusius, the Closer, jealous guardian of the gate, with a staff in his right.’ A ‘state of dynamic equilibrium’ would be contradiction in terms if it didn’t refer to a continuous interplay of two opposing tendencies. This ‘state of equilibrium’ is one manifestation of the requirement for a living organism to maintain itself ‘far from equilibrium’ (Prigogine) where ‘equilibrium’ would mean the entropic state devoid of all energy flow.

The consensual model constructed by a culture or society is referred to by Berger and Luckmann (1966) as ‘the symbolic universe.’ The culture maintains itself by making sure that its members see this universe as a ‘reality’ prior and external to their practice; and much of their practice goes to maintaining this virtual reality (or this illusion, as an alien observer might call it). But if the culture succeeds too well in closing its universe to actual realities or new information, it begins to die of self-suffocation.

In order to ‘serve humanity,’ or ‘save all sentient beings,’ do you have to believe that such an entity as ‘Humanity’ is more real than you are?

A question like this revives the thousand-year debate between nominalism and realism (introduced in Chapter 12), by showing its ethical and social implications. Which has priority, the individual or the collective (the community, the state, ….. )? In biological terms, which really counts, the individual organism or the species? For Peirce, this was perhaps one of the most momentous of logical questions.

But though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of logic, its branches reach about our life. The question whether the genus homo has any existence except as individuals, is the question whether there is anything of any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence.

— Peirce (EP1:105)

Certainly the question is fundamental when it comes to political institutions. But as Northrop Frye pointed out (Chapter 8), you cannot escape the question by turning from secular politics to religion, for ‘religious bodies do not effectively express any alternative of loyalty to the totalitarian state, because they use the same metaphors of merging and individual subservience.’ States and religious bodies are the larger-scale systems which ‘contain’ individual humans; but suppose we consider the social evolution and spiritual progress of humanity over an expansive time scale while maintaining the spatial scale of the human bodymind. Then we can see each human individual as a current version of humanity rather than a minute cell in a huge organism. This would seem to be compatible with the following remarks by Frye, which continue from those already quoted in Chapter 8:

In our day Simone Weil has found the traditional doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ a major obstacle – not impossibly the major obstacle – to her entering it. She points out that it does not differ enough from other metaphors of integration, such as the class solidarity metaphor of Marxism, and says:

Our true dignity is not to be parts-of a body.… It consists in this, that in the state of perfection which is the vocation of each one of us, we no longer live in ourselves, but Christ lives in us; so that through our perfection Christ … becomes in a sense each one of us, as he is completely in each host. The hosts are not a part of his body.

I quote this because, whether she is right or wrong, and whatever the theological implications, the issue she raises is a central one in metaphorical vision, or the application of metaphors to human experience. We are born, we said, within a pre-existing social contract out of which we develop what individuality we have, and the interests of that society take priority over the interests of the individual. Many religions, on the other hand, in their origin, attempt to be re-created societies built on the influence of a single individual: Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, or at most a small group. Such teachers signify, by their appearance, that there are individuals to whom a society should be related, rather than the other way around. Within a generation or two, however, this new society has become one more social contract, and the individuals of the new generations are once again subordinated to it.
Paul’s conception of Jesus as the genuine individuality of the individual, which is what I think Simone Weil is following here, indicates a reformulating of the central Christian metaphor in a way that unites without subordinating, that achieves identity with and identity as on equal terms. The Eucharistic image, which she also refers to, suggests that the crucial event of Good Friday – the death of Christ on the cross – is one with the death of everything else in the past. The swallowed Christ, eaten, divided, and drunk, in the phrase of Eliot’s ‘Gerontion,’ is one with the potential individual buried in the tomb of the ego during the Sabbath of time and history, where it is the only thing that rests. When this individual awakens and we pass to resurrection and Easter, the community with which he is identical is no longer a whole of which he is a part, but another aspect of himself, or, in the traditional metonymic language, another person of his substance.

— Frye (1982, 100-01)

A healthy social structure, like a language, has to be massively redundant in its representations of meaning. Otherwise the loss of a single element in the social fabric would be disastrous. This redundancy is maintained by mentoring, which uses quite a lot of our energy.

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable. Perhaps this is merely to point out that life is expensive. Just to keep itself going, life makes demands on energy, supplied from inside and outside a living being, that are voracious compared with the undemanding thriftiness of death and decay. A culture, just to keep itself going, makes voracious demands on the energies of many people for hands-on mentoring.

— Jane Jacobs (2004, 159)

A grand God’s-eye view of human cultural history can be edifying, if you read it as a kind of poetry. So in that spirit, let’s say that human guidance systems have evolved from cosmologies to technologies to intimologies.

Cosmologies offered an overview of the context in which we live, and thus of the meaning of life. But when cosmologies collided, conflict ensued, because the one assumption common to all was that there could be only one true logos of the cosmos. Then we realized that cosmologies were mythologies and that there were many of them, determined by cultural and psychological factors. Now a poet could say Let Us Compare Mythologies (the title of Leonard Cohen’s first book).

At that point we could turn to technologies for the meaning of life, since by this time we had surrounded ourselves with an artificial cocoon, insulating ourselves from the natural context. If life is meaningless, we can damn well make it mean something, make a cultural context. But the long-term result of manufacturing context, as Thomas Berry (1988) pointed out, is to turn wonderworld into wasteworld.

Berry’s solution is to restore cosmology to its proper place, using the technics of science to make it more realistic. My argument here is that we can only do this if we see cosmologies (and other belief systems) as intimologies, practices of dialog by which mythologies can self-modify. From the inside of such a practice we aim at describing an external reality; from the outside, we see an act of meaning in formation.

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.