Aporia: Poiesis

From Theoria, a summary of thoughts thus far: The universe, viewed from the ‘outside’ – as a ‘thing-in-itself’ is fundamentally mysterious. It might be that the universe is no more than the sum of its parts – in which case, it might be known from the inside and knowing it from the outside is not a problem. But it may be that it’s more than the sum of its parts. ‘The One’ suggests this second alternative. From ‘the One’ there is a cascade of emergence. Order emerges from chaos – creates ‘the Many’. Part of order is quantum potential, from which particles emerge. From particles, the chemical elements. From elements, chemical compounds. From chemical compounds, life. From life, consciousness. There may be further stages of emergence, in a way leading right back to ‘the One’. It might be that all of this is within the bounds of our science – that every stage is a purely natural process. Or it may be something we choose to describe as ‘supernatural’ is going on. Or it might be that ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ are just trying to describe the same quality in different ways. In all this, the reality of ‘the Many’ is hidden from us. We might achieve an abstract, objective description that is coherent and appears to map with exact correspondence to the world. But this is not the world as we experience it. For conscious beings there is only the qualities of things that we see, plus how these relate to other things, plus how things change over time. For conscious beings all truth is therefore EMBODIED TRUTH. Whether there’s an ‘ultimate substrate’, a God, a Great Spirit, a soul – all of these are open to question – but they lie at the back of all human attempts to understand. We can say therefore that all questions are essentially ‘theological’. The other reality for conscious beings is that agency is inescapable. All life makes real change in the world. Without our choosing the world would be different, therefore we can say that the world is fundamentally ‘aesthetic’, in the broadest sense. In fact, we may wonder if this choosing goes even further back than consciousness. Maybe even the emergence of order from chaos was a choice. Finally – from the thoughts arising in Theoria – is there somehow a little seed of order lurking amongst the chaos from which everything emerged? And is there still a seed of chaos lurking in amongst order – especially the order that humans try to maintain? It’s another unanswered question, but it sets the scene for the strange contradictions that follow. Before proceeding I want to mention a short caveat to the ideas expressed in Theoria. The caveat could be simply stated as the notion that thought and consciousness are two separate things. So it may be possible to be conscious, but not thinking and not even really be aware- and possibly many animals fall into this category. Meanwhile, there is no thought without consciousness, but we usually conflate the two. A belief in consciousness as separate from thought could lead to a number of alternative cosmologies, beyond those already explored in Theoria. Fundamental to our perception of the cosmos is that it is aesthetic- we don’t just perceive things, we welcome them or push them away. At least two things follow from a universe that is aesthetic: Aesthetics leads to ethics. Aesthetics introduces the idea of the sacred. The ethics question goes back almost to the beginning of the universe. From the perfect symmetry – perfect circle – of the One emerges the profoundly asymmetrical ‘Many’. And, with agency, we get a proper distinction of good and evil. As we’ve already explored, agency may go way back – so value seems fundamentally important. But then the question arises of where this value springs from. If it is just a consequence of the ability of individual consciousnesses to choose – of our agency? The problem with this explanation is that we will so often refer back to some more fundamental source of value in our ethical deliberations. It seems unavoidable to consider value as innate to the universe. But exactly how such an abstract notion as value can be innate to anything is surely another profound mystery. In Theoria we noted an important split in the pattern of emergence. From the level of consciousness, we might expect things would expand towards assemblies of consciousness such as eco-systems. But whilst this higher-level emergence may be there for us, it is largely eclipsed by the emergence of human culture. This break between nature’s emergence and our own human cultural emergence – between our ‘rational’ and our ‘mammalian’ minds – has implications for how we view the world and how we treat moral questions. Since our experience of the world is always and only embodied, then it is always the body that has the primary response. But the rational mind very often follows on with rationalisations, or indeed, contradictions. Generally, we hate holding contradictory opinions, so our minds have a tendency to cover up this dichotomy and make it seem like we are ’of one mind’. A further consideration is the idea of the sacred. Often people who profess to have no religious belief will nonetheless speak and act as if they hold certain things sacred. We affirm this sense of the sacred through what we honour and celebrate. Often it is around the body – birth, reproduction and death are prime sites for overt or covert assertions of sanctity or profanity. A lot of morality is really about these strong beliefs. The sense of the sacred and the sense of desecration are so strong and visceral it is easy to associate them with our mammalian mind and our bodies, yet they seem separate from this and also they seem separate from our rational minds. I feel I must describe them as a third thing – a third factor in the way our minds work. Stretching the definition of Poiesis a bit, we might say that the sense of the sacred – the insight of the heart – is the resolution of our mammalian nature and our rationality. This in turn, prefigures the balance of equality and freedom with justice (in Polis). The question of whether anything really is sacred leads us right back to the question of whether value is somehow built into the cosmos. For ‘believers’ and non-believers’ alike, we mostly embrace the notion that the universe is a place of awe, wonder and enchantment. Such thoughts lead directly into the notion of the sacred. The believer might regard human life – and sometimes all sentient life – as ‘drops in the ocean of the Great Spirit’, or some other such metaphor. As such, life has, for them, an intrinsic worth – indeed in our essence, in our souls, we might be regarded as perfect. For the ‘unbeliever’, at he very least, we could say that at least metaphorically each small part of the cosmos is a microcosm of the whole – that ‘the Many’ of the manifest universe somehow contains the essence of ‘the One’ – the essence of the universe as viewed from the outside. I can make a few statements now that seem to follow on directly from what has been discussed above. You may find them useful, you may not. I don’t intend them to be prescriptive – and I certainly don’t wish to propose that anyone takes action from within these ideas. More on this follows in Polis, but the statements here are what I consider starting points. To do anything with them at all would mean to first live their truth – and I’m not sure if I’ve even begun on that, so I ‘m not going to say more. Here are the statements: All work is art. All art is a gift. All gifts are the gifts of grace. We are the means of grace. Even if grace is not somehow built into the universe – even so, we are the means – the only means. Inspired by wonder and awe, our response is to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. As the embodiment of grace and in response to the particular ambiguities of humans, the chief work of grace is to seek peace: peace within ourselves. Peace between ourselves and others. Peace with nature. Peace with the wider universe. The idea of the sacred and the idea of value being somehow innate to the universe leads to one of our most difficult questions: Is the universe predisposed towards nurturing life, or is it indifferent or even hostile to life? To put it in slightly different terms: Is the universe a ‘gift’ – a gift of grace – or is it simply neutral? For it’s one thing to say that there might be innate values in the abstract sense – quite another to suggest that things are tipped towards the development or flourishing of life. And as we’ve noted already, there is a strong case for seeing the universe as ‘flawed’ – from the broken symmetries of nature right through to the realities of human evil – that seed of chaos in our otherwise ordered universe. It is, of course, a question that the religious wrestle with in particular, since, if God is good, how can the works of God be flawed or broken? If your faith tells you there is an answer to this then I’m not one to try to dissuade you. But personally I think it is a question that we should contemplate without trying to solve. If the universe is indeed predisposed favourably towards life (or there is a God who is a benevolent God) then we might describe this as a gift – the gift of grace. We might be inclined to think that perhaps we should honour this gift. So not only do we see the universe as a place of awe, wonder and enchantment and a place that is inherently sacred. We also regard ourselves as a means of grace – grace returned for the grace first given to us. Those ‘alternative cosmologies’, spoken of earlier – springing from the idea that consciousness is separate from thought – might place consciousness a lot earlier in the unfolding of the cosmos than discussed in Theoria. It might give us consciousness as the ‘ultimate substrate’, and a kind of panpsychist universe unfolding from there. I know this split of thought from consciousness might seem confusing, if not unintelligible, and it certainly adds greatly to the range f possible alternative we would need to consider. At the same time though, it might offer an answer to why we always have to go back to the wider cosmos to understand beauty and value. It’s the heart that recognises beauty, value and the sacred. In a way, what I’ve said above is just an attempt to find rational explanations. So could we say, instead, faith, trust, belief? Maybe those are closer. But actually I think the heart is beyond this – it’s the still centre of our being – that place that is, in a sense, perfect. That place that has no need of explanations. So our contemplation, or any worry, or anxiety should not distract us from this. Rather, contemplation is to clear the way for the peace of the heart. That’s where we truly find the sacred – even if you don’t like that word. Call it instead, joy, peace, serenity, tranquillity. The rational mind will always have its deliberations in ambiguity and contradiction. But that’s okay – the mind can still rest tranquil in finding no answers. That, in itself, is a gateway to the heart. I suggest that all our efforts towards wealth, happiness, fame or whatever are really aimed at satisfying our heart’s desires. And so, why not go straight to the heart instead? That’s where grace springs from. That’s the only true source of grace in the world. Our divided human minds – separating nature and culture, bodily sensations from rational thought – plus our sense of the sacred show us, I think, the dilemmas we face when we try to decide how we should live. And perhaps one other dilemma could be mentioned here and that is our somewhat obsessive interest in power. An aesthetic universe is what leads us to our notions of fairness and equality. Power is a bit more complex to figure out. These matters are taken up again in the next writing: Polis.