MaryLupin wrote:Zowee Robert. I'm going to be at this all night if I try to answer all the interesting things you say! I take it you're a Hegel/Heidegger fan.
I find this question of the relation between spirituality and religion very interesting, partly because it relates closely to my studies of the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. I wrote a Master of Arts Honours Thesis on The Place of Ethics in Heidegger’s Ontology. I must have a somewhat idiosyncratic approach to philosophy, as I find the topics discussed in most analytic philosophy to be dull compared to Heidegger, who engages with big questions regarding the relation between human identity and being as a whole. My thesis is on my website, at link in footer, as is the link to my songs. I did read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but I confess it did not interest me anywhere near as much as Heidegger’s Being and Time. Hegel’s work struck me as a rather fanciful castle in the air, whereas Heidegger is very much grounded in experience.
Heidegger presents what I call a systematic existentialism. What that means is that he starts from logical axioms, and seeks to build a coherent and consistent philosophy upon them, but his axioms are purely existential. One of his key ideas is that human life can be defined as being in the world. Like most good axioms, this idea seems so obvious as to be a tautology, like ‘the universe exists’. But the value of Heidegger’s axiom is that it recognises social reality as primary, and presents the idea of world as a problem, rather than a given. ‘World’ is an objective reality, but it is also something that humans construct, as distinct from physical planet. For example, taking a German translation of a well-known book by Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest – Das Wort fur Welt ist Wald – we see our context shapes our perception of world, giving us a worldview or paradigm, an enframing sense of meaning.
In terms of the discussion here, this material from Heidegger suggests that spirituality is our personal vision of the world, while religion is a shared vision of the world.
I don't think we construct a "universal idea" based on particular examples. Rather I think we just have this notion of universality that comes from the illusion of a central and singular "I" and that this construct is after-the-fact applied to our individual experiences.
Sorry Mary, but I have to disagree here. Universal concepts in number, physics and ethics are not necessarily illusions, but are often accurate descriptions of reality or valid normative frameworks. We don’t derive universals – shared concepts - from our sense of personal identity, but rather from cultural agreement. We observe things, and continually assess what is the same and different between these things. Over time, we assess that some qualities are always the same, for example geometric ratios and laws of physics, and regard these stable continuous qualities as universal. The content of universals in ethics is far more contestable, in that people sincerely clash over fundamental principles of good, justice, truth and love. But Plato’s view was that philosophy could analyse these differences of opinion in order to understand universal truths in ethics.
In terms of the topic of this thread, what this problem of defining universal ethical truth means is that individuals have a spiritual vision of the good, but often consider that this vision is not shared by any institutional religion, and so reject religion on the basis of its logical, epistemic and ethical weaknesses.
My theory of universals and how they relate to experience is grounded in Heidegger’s observation that time has served as a criterion for demarcation between contingent temporal particular appearance and necessary eternal universal truth. Plato held that philosophy has three subjects, logic, physics and ethics. Each of these original disciplines of Plato’s Academy contains a distinct concept of the eternal. Logical concepts are outside time, physical laws are permanently true within time, and ethical concepts are eternal human values. In each case, temporality provides the basis to understand what is universal behind the things we see.
Yes, there is much delusion in concepts of ego. This is something that I think Heidegger usefully critiqued in his deconstruction of the isolated Cartesian self as the principle of philosophical method. Heidegger’s axiomatic framework was grounded in the reality of being with others in the world, to justify his core idea that care is the meaning of being. The error in Descartes’ theory of the isolated self has been enormously productive for modernity, but at the cost of excluding phenomena such as mood from rational consideration. The methodological error inherent in Descartes’ concept of ego cogito does not mean that Descartes’ universal concepts in mathematics are therefore in error.
Assuming that concepts are built up of the "material" of individual experiences is fundamental to much of Western intellectual and magical history.
I detect some hint of teasing in your reference here to magic, an insinuation that magical ways of thinking are actually far more widespread than is usually understood. And of course religion retains abundant hocus pocus in the hoc est corpus – here is the body. But I flatly disagree that this concept, transubstantiation, is built up out of the material of experience. Rather, it derives from what Kant termed the transcendental imagination, our abstract capacity to imagine a connection between time and eternity, between the contingent and the absolute. So religion derives from a totalising intellectual effort, a desire to have an explanation for everything, and to place our mundane existence within a frame of numinous magic. The tinkling bells are said to make wishes come true, except that the entire fairy story of religion is now widely assessed through a hermeneutic of suspicion.
It is how we seem to experience things, but as Libet (and others) have shown, it appears not to be how conscious concepts actually come to be. If the evidence coming to light is 1) correct and 2) being interpreted correctly (all unknown yet), then this assumed inductive mental process is an illusion that stems from the consequences of our specific form of increasing encephalization. My point is merely that archetypes are illusions in the same way identities are illusions.
To say that identity is illusion can seem almost solipsistic. Personal identity is traditionally defined as soul. Psychoanalysis recognises that self-perception may be false, but nonetheless there is a real personal identity, something that is the same through time, beneath the persona, that can be uncovered through analysis.
It's not that they don't exist but that they are like the surface of the sun. What we see (because of the particular nature of our visual perception limitations) is not the surface of the sun - in fact can we really say the sun has a surface at all? So archetypes are more like words. What "vile" means now when used is not what it would have meant to a speaker of Middle English. Yet we say it is the same word. Is it when it means something so very different now?
Richard Tarnas has an interesting discussion of archetypes as polyvalent and luminous. What this means is that it is sincerely difficult to quantify the deep concepts of identity. For the sun, there is a transition zone between inner heart and outer vacuum, not a single sharp surface. This makes defining an exact boundary point somewhat arbitrary. It is similarly difficult with religious archetypes, where defining the extent to which they derive from various sources is a matter of speculative interpretation. Resurrection as an archetype is grounded in the cyclic structure of the year, but cannot be simply reduced to it. Religious myths engage the great archetypes of human culture. Stories such as the resurrection and the virgin birth are absurd on the surface, but they speak to a deep truth, and it seems to me that is why they have such strong cultural resonance.
King Charles 2 apocryphally described Saint Paul’s as ‘amusing, awful and artificial’ giving high praise to Wren with a Triple A certificate in terms that have since shifted in meaning.
Materialism seems to appear reductive in part because of the notion of matter deeply buried in our cultural assumptions - matter is something passive and not autodidactic. Underlying much of the distress about seemingly reductive materialism is the difficulty in grasping the unbelievable ability of "stuff" to organize itself.
That is a superb point Mary. Time organises itself through matter in the structures of day, month, year and Great Year to be self-teaching – what you call autodidactic. That is a very good way to explain the central evolutionary principle of cumulative adaptation, which creates a natural telos in life, and in all matter for that matter. The assumption of material passivity from Descartes has been central to the scientific disenchantment of the world. Recognising that time is cyclic as well as linear is a key to reenchantment. But engaging with the big cycles of time opens universal concepts that are very far from conventional materialist theories of thought such as mind-brain identity. Rather, mind is embedded in big cultural memes, and as individuals we participate in explaining and giving new life to these memes through the evolution of myth.
One of my favourite examples is the recent discovery that not only do bacteria signal amongst themselves forming a kind of "community" using something called quorum sensing but that bacteria and their hosts use the same methodology to communicate. Molecular shape is information laden.
As an interesting aside, I came across this quorum sensing topic in my study of the potential for large scale algae production at sea. A Chinese colleague suggested we could use genetic engineering to switch off the quorum sensing gene that limits algae growth. I regard such tampering with nature as rather dangerous, and argued that it would be better to enhance algae productivity through conventional plant husbandry of selecting high yield varieties.
That added to environmental conditioning is the engine that drives material change and the increasing complexity of information in the non-living (and living) universe under conditions that allow for relative material stability.
You are right that quorum sensing is a good example of how molecules embed information. All this points to a natural evolutionary spirituality that helps to deconstruct supernatural religious traditions, finding their origins in natural intuitions.
My point here - re the sun - is that this story is another form of information complex held in the material and that this is the limit of its reality. This has much to do with the fact that all humans live under the sun and so we (as material beings) are all impacted by the sun's existence and this "relationship" alters our cellular information in somewhat similar ways. We therefore experience something that appears the same. This kind of information is (for me) different in degree not in kind from the signalling going on between our (also shared/universal) gut bacteria and our digestive systems. Again - here we diverge.
A divergence on such a complex topic can open up space for interesting learning. I remain of the view that human language enabled a phase shift in the evolution of life through a deliberate and intentional conscious connection to the whole of reality, making explicit something that previously was only implicit. Human language is therefore different in kind, not merely in degree, from natural information processes because of the advent of consciousness. With the example of the sun, we have natural cosmic clocks that produce daily cycles such as haemoglobin level. This is usefully described by Gauquelin. But language gives us the ability to quantify, understand and analyse these unconscious biological processes driven by the sun. Language furthermore gives us the ability to place such processes within a systematic understanding of how life on earth relates to the sun as the source of light and life, a key metaphor picked up in John’s prologue. I am particularly interested in how the big cycles of the sun provide an intuitive structure for myth. This becomes a matter of the scientific analysis of archetypes.
Eeeek. I just ran on and on and on. Sorry. Wasn't going to do that. All your fault - you make interesting points.
Thanks again Mary for dropping by at Booktalk.
Link to purevolume please.
http://www.purevolume.com/RobertTulip/albums
jeez where can i get a job like that! I'll volunteer!
