Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 71

Poem 71

Not-knowing is true knowledge.

Presuming to know is a disease.

First realize that you are sick;

then you can move toward health.

The Master is her own physician.

She has healed herself of all knowing.

Thus she is truly whole.

Commentary

Humility is a virtue much to be prized according to many religious and spiritual traditions, though the great Greek philosopher Aristotle denied that it could ever be one because it actually sets itself against some of our most fundamental impulses like ambition and pride for example.  Instead Aristotle exalted "greatness of soul," what he termed wonderfully in Greek as "megalopsychia," which was for him where all moral values converged - a mean, as all virtues were essentially - between the extremes of vanity on the one hand and pusillanimity or extreme timidity on the other hand.

Again, a great soul, or as we say, a humble person, would acknowledge that not-knowing is true knowledge.  It is a Socratic epistemology insofar as one's starting point is always the acknowledgement of one's ignorance and then the gradual digging down or climbing up step by step in the pursuit of that knowledge. In keeping with our Taoist poet's analogy, there are far too many sick people in the world, that is, those who presume to know; those who think they have all the answers.  That is all ego stuff, that, in actuality.

When we realise we are sick, in sustaining our Taoist metaphor, we are on the way to healing.  How true it is that when we get a diagnosis for any illness we may have, that we are on the way to a certain type of healing - please note, I do not say cure here, as curing of illnesses is an entirely different matter.  Most counsellors, tharapists and even a growing number of medical doctors acknowledge that healing is more important than cure.  

I like the call of the Master or Mistress - the Teacher is both Masculine and Feminine in Taoism, maybe even beyond all sex, but that is a matter for another place and time.  In keeping with the sentiments of this wonderful Taoist poem, let us agree to heal ourselves of all improper and inappropriate knowing.

NAMASTE.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 65

Poem 65

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

If you want to learn how to govern,

avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.

Content with an ordinary life,

you can show all people the way

back to their own true nature.

Commentary: 

This poem contains sentiments that are found in other religious and spiritual traditions. When one writes about spirituality, no matter from one tradition or another or even from a neutral stance, one will find that certain themes repeat themselves.  Our Taoist poet refers to what is called in the early Christian tradition the "docta ignorantia" or a "learned ignorance." St Augustine of Hippo was the first among the early Fathers of the Church to use this phrase which occurred in one of his sermons.  The full sentence in Augustine's wonderful Latin runs: "Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem nostram."  A translation would run: "There is in us, therefore, a certain learned ignorance, so to speak, but one taught by the Spirit of God, who helps us in our infirmity."  In other words when we talk about the divine we are never in a territory which is systematically mapped out.  The only guidelines in this spiritual province would be divine inspiration or divine revelation for St Augustine.  A similar line of thought in traditional Christian theology is that of the "via negativa" where we mortals can only deduce attributes of the Deity by declaring all that an infinite, all-powerful and all-loving Being cannot be. Another term for this approach in the mystical tradition is Negative Theology or more elaborately Apophatic theology that proceeds by describing God by negation, speaking of the Divine only in terms of what He/She is not (apophasis = repudiation or denial) rather than presuming to describe what God is.  It is in such a way that our Taoist poet writes in the first stanza of the above poem:

The ancient Masters

didn't try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

The way of "not-knowing" also fits in nicely with the Socratic tradition of declaring one's ignorance constantly in  any matter before proceeding to learn about it incrementally by research and learning.  To present oneself as the repository of all knowledge is obviously a very egotistical thing to do and a very weak approach to epistemology or any valid theory of knowledge.  Again this Socratic approach is to the fore in the second stanza:

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

In a sense as we grow as human beings we have to unlearn many of the prejudicial opinions and beliefs we have acquired during our early life.  This is the experience of most adults as they grow older and wiser.

All religions and spiritual approaches to life advocate the sufficiency of an ordinary plain life, unencumbered by great riches and power.  In  the end we all end up dead, and dying and death as as natural as living and life.  In pondering the former we learn to appreciate the latter better.  In short, we learn to value our very breath as human beings.  This is the sense I get when reading the final stanza:

If you want to learn how to govern,

avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest.

Content with an ordinary life,

you can show all people the way

back to their own true nature.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 59

Poem 59

For governing a country well

there is nothing better than moderation.

The mark of a moderate man

is freedom from his own ideas.

Tolerant like the sky,

all-pervading like sunlight,

firm like a mountain,

supple like a tree in the wind,

he has no destination in view

and makes use of anything

life happens to bring his way.

Nothing is impossible for him.

Because he has let go,

he can care for the people's welfare

as a mother cares for her child.

Commentary

Bust of Socrates

Let me return to two old chestnuts that I have used many times over in these pages.  The first is my love for what we were taught as one of Socrates' great teachings, namely that the surest starting point is our declaration of ignorance in any matter, and to progress in learning therefrom.  This is what I call the method of Socratic Ignorance.  At college in the late 1970s, I remember reading that once the humble Socrates met a man who was said by many of his contemporaries to be wise, but shortly after having engaged him in conversation, Socrates found that this man had no more wisdom than himself. Further, this supposedly wise man became very angry when Socrates had demonstrated by logic that he was not so wise after all.  Socrates famously concluded that "it seems that I am wiser than he is, to this small extent anyway, that I do not think I know what I do not know." (See Apology 21d)  The second old chestnut to which I have returned equally often in these posts is that of St Augustine who remarked that we progress in our knowledge of truth, especially truth with a capital T, by which he would have meant God, by way of a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." [Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut ita dicam, docta ignorantia, sed docta spiritu Dei, qui adiuvat infirmitatem nostram: There is, therefore, in us a certain, shall I say (so to speak), a learned ignorance, but a learned one of the spirit of God, who helps us in our infirmity. My translation.  See Epistle 130, 14, 27).  It is interesting that Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) took the title of his famous book Docta Ignorantia (1440)  from this sentence in St Augustine's magisterial letters.  The whole aim of Nicholas of Cusa, taking his inspiration from St Augustine, is that one can only know who God is, or may be, through a negative theology or a negative way, Apophatic Theology, namely by amassing all the knowledge we have about who or what he is not!]

It must surely be, in this or a similar sense, that our Taoist poet writes above of knowledge of the Tao. Our poet writes that the mark of a wise man is "freedom from his own ideas."  It never surprises me to meet people who are so convinced that they are right with respect to this or that idea, or most certain concerning the motives of this or that person.  After all, ideas and concepts are just that, ideas and concepts. Indeed, opinions, which rate on a much lower scale than those of ideas and concepts, are also heralded by egotists to be almost set in stone.  There has to be room, surely, for movement, or flexibility in our opinions (certainly) and in our ideas and concepts (as often as is logically and practically possible) in order for knowledge to grow on the way to the Truth.  Again, the wise man learns to bend in the wind of opposition, to choose his battles wisely, to smile on opposition and criticism as well as on agreement and praise - hard to do, but very worthwhile practising.  Likewise, everything a wise man encounters, good, bad and indifferent is part of the overall picture of life.  All experiences, good and bad, are metaphorically "grist to the mill."

St Augustine at study - he was a lifelong scholar

Most spiritualities and religions talk about how we handicap ourselves, or how we smother our very light of life - to use another metaphor - by our clinging onto things and even people who are, in the context of time or of eternity, or compared to the infinity of the universe, mere impermanent realities.  Hence spiritualities and religions often ask their followers to let go of their dependencies, their clinging onto this or that or the other obsession. They advise us to "Let go and Let life!" or "Live and Let Live!" or "Let Go and Let God!"  All of these things are hard to do, that is why we must return again and again to our sitting position and attempt to meditate, to arrive at that still pointedness of existence, to the heart of the Tao.  After a while, all becomes so natural, just as natural as a mother caring for her child.  As Fr Richard Rohr so succinctly puts it, in the title of one of his many books, "everything belongs."

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 47

Poem 47

Without opening your door,
you can open your heart to the world.
Without looking out your window,
you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,
the less you understand.

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Commentary

Windvane on the lungomare in Catanzaro Lido, January 2016

It is becoming increasingly hard  to come up with new insights with respect to the Tao Te Ching and consequently avoid boring the reader unduly by too much repetition.  I have referred to the balance of opposites many times here already.  However, a central pair of polar opposities that springs to mind is that between Inner and Outer. Indeed, this polarity is quite common in early philosophy and theology in general.  The great early Christian scholar St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) was one of the scholars within the early Church to highlight its importance.  Augustine was a restless seeker who sought the meaning of life both in the outside material world and also in the inside spiritual world.  According to his own account of his quest for meaning which he delineated in his wonderful classical biography The Confessions he found the former, while sensually stimulating, to be spiritually stultifying:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.  And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged in to those lovely created things which you made.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.  You were radiant and resplendent - you put to flight my blindness.  You were fragrant, and I dew in my breath and now pant after you.  I trusted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.  You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Admittedly, Augustine went on to condemn the material things of this world, most especially those related to the body as vitiated with evil and to elevate the spiritual realm to a rather esoteric stratosphere.  In other words, I believe he did not manage to hold the two poles in a healthy balance.  However, whatever about our criticisms of Augustinian philosophy and theology, we cannot overlook his insight that a spiritual dimension inheres within us.  In fact, Augustine spoke of his community of fellow friars as being on a shared journey to God and that this same God could be met in their code of practice (moral behaviour), the priciples they subscribed to (the Christian creed) and in their cultic practices (what I mean here by the word "cult" is any particular system of religious practice or worship: religious ceremones like Mass and so forth). He aslo recommended a life of prayer and meditation that followed a process which he called "interiority," namely that it was by a process of "going within" in prayer that one communed with God.

Now back to poem 47.  Our Taoist author is in essence doing exactly as St Augustine recommended above, namely that he suggests that we can be open to the Tao without physically opening our door and going outside.  Even without doing that, we can open our hearts out to the whole world.

Again, the idea of humankind's ignorance is an old epistemological tenet dating back many years.  Socrates encouraged his hearers to continually declare their ignorance as they sought out deeper and wider knowledge.  That knowledge could best be discovered by a process of asking tough questions to elicit ever clearer answers.  Augustine built on Socrates through Plato by recommending what he described as a "docta ignorantia" or "learned ignorance." This is the sense of the second stanza which declares that "the more we know, the less we understand." If one imagines a sphere as being the amount of accumulated knowledge learned by humankind then as knowledge grows the sphere obviously grows and while we have amassed more knowledge and wisdom there is a gowing surface of knowledge over against an ever-expanding universe of unknown knowledge and wisdom.  In that very same sense, it is often said that the more we know, the more we know what we don't know. This is, in effect, the epistemological thrust behind the lines of the second stanza.

Sometimes we need to rest and to cease from all activity to be open to life.  To be busy is a great pastime but it can often lead to mindlessness and drift on the one hand or an obsession with work or with pleasure on the other.  It is in this sense that we must read the lines of our final stanza:

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 32

Poem 32

The Tao can't be perceived.

Smaller than an electron,

it contains uncountable galaxies.

If powerful men and women

could remain centered in the Tao,

all things would be in harmony.

The world would become a paradise.

All people would be at peace,

and the law would be written in their hearts.

When you have names and forms,

know that they are provisional.

When you have institutions,

know where their functions should end.

Knowing when to stop,

you can avoid any danger.

All things end in the Tao

as rivers flow into the sea.

Commentary

Stock illustation of the universe

Ever since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens, the wondrous and wonderful exspance of the universe has been open to our ever more humbled gaze.  I never tire of reminding the reader of the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment that ever since a child when his father used bring him out in the dark of the night to view the heavens overhead, his sensitivities had become "habituated to the vast."  This is the macro or large and expanding universe.  On the opposite pole, there also exists the wondrous and wonderful world of the micro-universe opened to our ken by ever more powerful microscopes.  As well as there being a macro-universe out there, there is also a micro-universe down there at cell level and further down still at atomic and subatomic levels.

Our translator, Mr S. Mitchell, is undoubtedly taking liberties with the English language, indeed indulging in wholescale anachronisms in using the terms "electron" and "galaxies" in translating a two and a half thousand year old text.  However, we will forgive him his excesses here due to his passion for his subject.  Obviously, translators do far more than transliterating a text or translating it word for word.  If such were the task of translators we could just pour our text rather carelessly into Google translate and come up with senseless garbage that isn't language at all.  We understand what Mr Mitchell means.  He is attempting to capture the sheer wonder and awe of physical reality.  I am reminded here of the Kantian concept of noumenon or thing-in-itself, which most, if not all, philosophers agree that none of us will ever get to know.  Physics, and especially quantum physics, are in a sense engaged in a sort of quasi-Kantian quest, in attempting to find out what sub-atomic life is in itself.  Of course, the mystery is further complicated by the fact that even our most powerful microscopes disturb so much what they are looking at that essentially there can never been an objective observer at all.  It is here at this epistemological level that scientism runs its ship aground and founders on the jagged rocks of its own weak axioms.  It seems mystery and wonder are at the heart of our awesome universe. In short, I am all for good science and for the exspansion of our human knowlege, but very much against a scientism that allows no further questions beyound its axioms.  Metaphysics will always rear its head, and it is all too easy to rule the asking of such questions out of court so arbitrarily.  Once again, these are questions for a more philosophical blog, and yet they do deepen our spiritual quest here in meditating on the Tao.

The Tao, our poet-author tells us, is simply beyond visual or aural observation.  It is something deeper, something that can only be experienced at a deep level or intuited from the heart, or again "proved" by a process of induction from, what the great Victorian theologian, John Henry Cardinal Newman called "a convergence of evidences."  Such convergences always involve the heart as well as the head and intuitions that go so much deeper than more superficial axioms.  The Tao is elusive and yet the whole universe is shot through with it.  It is the source and summit of all that is "created."

Our poet-philosopher, our Taoist author is more than a little pessimistic about the world's politicians who certainly have their motivations centered anywhere but in the Tao.  More likely still, those motivations will be based in nationalism and national pride and perhaps even in personal greed and petty jealousies. The goal of the disciples of the Taoist way is that the law of the Tao should be written in all hearts.  Indeed, let me strike a pluralist note here. We could simply substitute God, Allah, Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Buddha, Elohim, Jahweh and so on and get exactly the same message of peace and compassion and care for all sentient and non-sentient things we encounter in the world. Indeed, a true pluralist would be able to substitute "agnostic or atheistic humanist" into the about statement just as easily. How harmonious and peaceful our world would be then!!  Possible or impossible?  Most definitely possible, I believe, but very definitely most improbable.

There is no better way to conclude these few thoughts then with repeating the final two lines of our Taoist poem and letting them accompany us as a mantra on a short interval of meditation.

All things end in the Tao

as rivers flow into the sea.

Namaste, friends.

Journal of a Soul 67

The Passage of Time

Interesting evergreen tree at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The passage of time seems to be quicker the more one ages.  Indeed, as a friend of mine who is a mathematician stated: "This is quite logical because  to a 56 year old person like myself on the cusp of his 57th birthday another year is in comparative terms a mere one 56th or a one 57th of your life depending on how you calculate it.  One way or another ageing is inevitable.  Recently, I was quite intrigued when a past pupil who was about 19 declared that he would like to live forever.  Another young man in our company replied that such "would never happen and that his wishful thinking was in every sense delusional." St Augustine once defined time as "the measure of change." The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus averred that "one can never step into the same river twice," and further that everything was in "a state of flux." I was amused, as I say, by the wishful, if delusional, thinking of my young friend.  I thought to myself how great it was to be so innocent and full of enthusiasm for life. This was also quite ironic as we were in a local hostelry imbibing some alcoholic beverages in the wake of a commemorative service for one of his friends who had ended his life by suicide. Obviously this latter person had found living life totally unbearable.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is more an activity and a process than a learned body of reflections on life. While it may be the latter as is witnessed by all the countless books written on the subject, it is so much more.  It is the activity of questioning to the nth degree everything around us, the nature of the universe; what knowledge may be, if there is any such thing as Truth in an objective sense or is it always relative; what love, faith, hope and charity may be, indeed what emotions may mean; what the purpose and meaning of the life we humans experience is and so on and so forth.  There is also a philosophy of every subject under the sun.  We can surely ask what the nature of numbers is and what we are at when we do mathematics.  Are the tenets of mathematics universal and true everywhere in the universe.  We believe so and can adduce reasons to substantiate our contentions.  We can study the history of science and also its philosophy. What is the difference between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is all scientific knowledge empirical?  In many cases, yes, but both at the subatomic and astronomical level, no - we need to use very abstract and much speculative thought there, but such thought is no less rigorous than the process of arriving at conclusions from empirical evidence. There are so many questions we humans can ask and none may be as important as the moral one as to what are right and wrong actions.  What is morality and why need we act in such and such way and so on. My young friend obviously had never encountered philosophy, that is, the radical questioning of one's own thoughts and opinions.  What would it mean to live forever?  Follow the thought experiment through, young man. Would you keep ageing and ageing and yet never die? Even simple tools eventually wear out? Humans are made of material stuff which breaks down.  Does not the simple physical law of entropy imply that everything eventually burns itself out? If we never died what would birth mean at all? There obviously would be no point in birth if there were no death! How would we deal with the population explosion? These are all philosophical questions, which at first glance may seem somewhat silly, but on reflection clarify superficial thought and silly shoddy thinking.  Essentially to live implies within its ambit the process of dying itself.  In fact, to live is to die.  Think of any simple plant or flower you might have at home or in the garden.  It grows, blooms and eventually dies.  I remember meeting a most interesting man who owned a pet shop.  One could see his total commitment to and love of animals of all varieties.  He opined that it was important for youngsters to keep pets, to nourish and see them grow and eventually die.  Keeping pets, he felt, taught children to accept that death and dying are parts of life.  As an animal, albeit human, I consume food, burn it and transform it into energy to keep my body going.  It is obvious that my body will wear out, break down and die - such is only natural.

Reflections on Death and Dying 

Having been brought up in a rural setting one could say that I am somewhat at home with the cycle of the seasons, with the sowing of seeds, the growth of plants, their cultivation and harvesting and so on in a never-ending cycle.  Within that scenario, death and dying are seen as a natural process. The peasant folk had and obviously still have their traditions like the waking of the dead - the celebration of the life of the departed one about the open coffin that is positioned centrally in the house of the departed.  Within this context not alone is grief made bearable but the sting is taken out of death at least for a short while.  These ancient rituals grew up within various communities as they attempted to help the grieving party cope with their sorrow and to make some social or communal sense of the experience of death.

And yet, existentially we all face our own extinction in a very private way - we each of us have to make some personal sense of our mortality, that is, if we are at least half thinking or even semi-reflective persons, as quite simply, no matter how many or how few are our family or friends, we die alone.  It is, alas, a journey only we ourselves can embark upon as we pass through the portals of death alone. Perhaps the greatest myth in our modern culture is the growth of sheer individualism with all that it entails. Modern individuals have built up around themselves their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a sense of identity - and all of that far too superficial or lacking in any depth.  Very soon we tire of superficiality, of building up  these rather tawdry worlds of vast egotistical proportions - rather like that portrayed in the novel, The Great Gatsby and most effectively indeed in the film of the same name.  All of these fantasies of individual power and prestige cannot keep the gnawing tooth of mortality at bay. Nor can any of these superficial attempts to build identity on the shifting sands of materialism keep the lonely soul protected from anxiety, angst and a host of concomitant emotional and psychosomatic complaints.

Some Personal Memories

The first death I can remember was that of my Grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy in 1968 when I was ten years of age.  My young mind soaked in the experience as my mam and dad, as well all my uncles and aunts (all 11 of them) were very upset.  Perhaps the most consoling moment of the whole experience was being requested to kneel down and say a prayer at my grandmother's bedside and to touch her beaded hands.  I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother's body in that bed all those years ago.  However, all in all, it was a positive experience, one that we were unconsciously taught to accept as a part of life, the final  mile stone along the journey of life if you like.  Then the second death I remember was that of my Uncle Paddy Quinlan at 58 of a rare cancer in 1970 - I remember so well the packed church and all the people who came to say goodbye on the day of his funeral.  I can still hear and feel the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I walked up to the graveside.  As I stood beside my father as they lowered the coffin, I saw a little white one and my father said gently, "that's your little angel brother Thomas who died many years ago." Since then, of course, there have been many other deaths, not the least of which were the deaths of my father and mother - experiences which I have recounted here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Those particular deaths were wrenches to my being that I find quite difficult to describe.  One knows that when one has experienced their leaving of this world that your generation is next.

Existentialism

Sundown, Phoenix Park, October 2014

The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space. How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end? Let’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”(Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest New York: Bantam Books)

Making Meaning

We are meaning-making creatures.  We are forever forming and moulding meaning from the very stuff of life.  If we do not do so we are an empty, hollow people whom T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken grass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...

These people who are hollow are the superficial people we described in one of our opening paragraphs.  They are the ones who have built their identities on the shifting sands of their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a false sense of identity - and all of that, as I have said, far too superficial or lacking in any depth. Something in us is repulsed by lack of meaning and superficiality.  It's almost as if there is something in us - some divine spark - that wishes to ignite and set the fire of enthusiasm and joy alive in our our hearts.  We feel, indeed intuit or know at a deep level, that there is something somewhere drawing us on towards meaning, some amazing, if imaginary lodestone, drawing us ever onwards.  This spiritual spark in me demands that I call it God.  Perhaps, that is overstating my case.  And yet, those are the words that came out as I wrote these lines.  There is a fullness of life to be experienced if only we have the courage to reach out and embrace it.

And as a meaning-making species we have conjured religions up from our collective unconscious to guide us and lead us ever onward on our human journey to meaning and personal truth.  We have embraced spiritualities of various types to give us the courage and the sustenance to support us on our journey.  Whether such religions and spiritualities are actually the result of our own imagination matters not a whit.  Perhaps it comes from an outside power, namely God, and of this I am quite convinced some of the time, especially at moments when I experience all too transiently beauty, truth, love, wonder and mystery.  But yet, in another sense that matters not a whit either.  What matters is that we have a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die.  In our faith, in our imagination or in our soul, our very meaning lives on, and that is what makes all the difference, a difference that no proselytizing atheist can ever take from us.  And death and dying in this scenario are surely as natural as birth and growth.  Yes, indeed. Amen to that!!

Journal of a Soul 49

The Validity of Experience 4

Introduction:

Our winning Debating Science Issues team: The Desire to Know More!!

There is much in our experience that cannot simply be reduced to information garnered from our senses.  The preceding posts have all attempted to come at what human experience is from as many directions as possible.  Reducing our experiences to merely those perceptions that are registered on our human brains by empirical data accessed through the senses is very delimiting of what human experience is or may be in its totality. (And it is  the "totality" of experience at which I am aiming to describe in these posts).

In mystical theology there was a way of approaching the divine through what was termed "the via negativa" ("the negative way") which contended that the divine was so far beyond our human knowing that the only way of approach for us human beings to make any sense of that great mystery was to advance towards it by saying what it was not - hence its appellation as being a "negative way."  Another term for this type of mystical theology was Apophatic theology. *  The WIKI sums up this approach thus:

In negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition. (see HERE)

I shall discuss mystical theology later in these posts, but the point I want to emphasize here is that even on a human level we can learn from this humble approach.  Indeed, even if we are somewhat agnostic, or even atheistic, we can still learn something from the "via negativa" or "via negationis."  In other words, I am arguing here that if we are to proceed in the task of finding out what we humans really are in and through our experiences, it is surely better for us to proceed by being open-minded.  That is, it is better for us to allow  human experience to be all that it can be by keeping as many doors open to the mystery of truth, rather than by shutting certain doors of our perception because they cannot be contained within a narrow understanding of epistemology that reduces knowledge to those facts seen only through the doors of the five senses. 

And so, at this stage in this Journal of a Soul, I want to attempt a sort of summary position, or a sort of personal statement of what I believe, or what the great Victorian theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) called an "Apologia Pro Vita Sua."

(1) I am a creature of Desire

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, 2013

As what I am attempting to do here is very personal, I must use the first personal pronoun a lot, though in academic writing one tries to avoid such a use in order to be as objective as possible.  However, it is also acceptable, especially in the social sciences to use qualitative as well as quantitative research.  These types of research methods involve describing in detail specific situations using research tools like interviews, surveys, and observations.  Self-research would fall under this heading, and it is a legitimate form of research if done methodically and with as much objectivity one can marshal. 

And so my experience of "myself" or of my "self" is that I am a sentient creature with desires and as I experience them these desires are (a) my animal desires, (b) my desire to know and (c) my desire to love and (d) my desire to be loved.  Let me briefly look at each of these subheadings: 

(a) My Animal Desires

This undoubtedly is, perhaps, the easiest to describe.  One needs to be no biologist to list our animal desires.  The obvious one is the desire for food and drink that is obvious from our very first moments of existence.  As a little child we have all cried to be fed and to have our thirst slaked.  After that the sexual nature of our bodies eventually kicks in, especially at adolescence where basically we experience our desire to mate with another of our species and so procreate or reproduce our species.

(b) My Desire to Know

Frank with the Debating Team before their victory!

This is, perhaps, the one desire, that distinguishes us most from our fellow sentient creatures.  I find as I age that this is the one of the  greatest desires that inspires me from day to day.  I am constantly desiring to know more and more. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle states: “All men by nature desire understanding.” ** This statement has also been translated as "All men by nature desire to know." Now, that statement appeals to me, but one could obviously argue that all men do not so desire and point to this or that person whose life showed that they did not desire to know because their actions showed otherwise or that they were cognitively deficient in some way.  However, Aristotle's phrase "by nature" is a qualification that retrieves his generalization somewhat as it refers to the potentiality of each individual person, irrespective of whether they achieve knowledge or not. 

Therefore, even if Aristotle's formulation is a broad generalization, we have here an insightful statement about the nature of human beings. Everyone of us desires to know or to understand something on a daily basis, no matter how small or insignificant.  "Where is room 202A?" for instance or "Could you tell me where the Post Office is, please?" and so on and so forth would be good examples of our daily desire to know small things.  We might also wonder what it would be like to travel to Athens or Corfu or Cagliari or New York and decide to go there to find out.  At a deeper level we might wonder what a "Black Hole" or "Dark Matter" is or whether the universe is really expanding. In other words we can surely say that in all the senses listed above and in many more instances, all humankind is involved in the world of ideas and reflection: Everyone is searching for some rational explanation of something, no matter how trivial on the one hand, or how important on the other. Everyone, then, contemplates the issues that are foremost in their minds.  In a deeper existential sense, each person, in his/her own right, asks the ultimate questions concerning his/her own existence. As I sit here, I experience the desire to know who I am?  Who is this creature that types these words, forms these sentences upon this virtual page out there in cyberspace. You may be wondering what it means to be you in your particular circumstances, what it means when you have to suffer X or Y or Z, or perhaps you are asking a question like, "Why did God allow my wife/husband/partner to die so painfully?" And so on.  These questions are truly unlimited, perhaps even infinite.

As I walked from the Dart Station at Sydney Parade with a group of some twenty sixteen and seventeen year old pupils over to UCD some days ago we talked about, among other trivia, different theories of the formation of the universe.  At some stage I asked a group around me how many times bigger would they think the universe was in size proportionally to the size of one little thinking human being like ourselves.  The answer of one very intelligent boy took me by surprise and got me thinking.  He replied that it would be a figure something like the reciprocal of Planck's constant that might fit the bill.  In other words, the number one over what is perhaps the smallest number known in atomic physics.  Lovely answer.  Wish I could have come up with it.  My question was not looking for a mathematical answer at all, though I appreciated the wonderful response.  It was merely asked to provoke wonderment at mystery, quite like the Biblical question of God asking Abraham how many grains of sand were on the seashore.  In other words, even as we walk here or there many questions cross our little minds by way of desiring to know.  Then, there is that wonderful philosophical question that hits me almost existentially as well as cognitively from time to time, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ***

(c) My Desire to Love

This is also a complex desire.  There is much written on the topic of love from poems to songs to novels to learned prose essays, not to mention all the philosophical and psychological works this subject has inspired.  Our desire to procreate or our animal desires can to a little extent participate in what love is.  A materialist would perhaps have to say that his desire to love is just that, his desire to physically copulate with another.  Yet, we humans are more than a little outraged by such a reduction in what we consider ourselves to be.  Culturally, we have conceived ourselves to be so much more than our animalness or animality.  We are outraged, and rightly so, when the actions of some humans against others of our species reduce us to the actions of unthinking animals, e.g., rape, incest and legions of other horrific actions.  Indeed, oftentimes the crimes committed by humans are worse even than animalistic as even animals never drop so low.  The nature of such evil is beyond our purposes here, but it can be horrifying and troubling to a great and deep extent.

I desire to love my mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins etc.  Indeed, we culturally desire to love even our enemies.  Those of us who might be sincere and peaceful Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and indeed atheists and so on desire to love even our enemies as we sincerely believe in loving all of humankind.  On a human level, I desire to love my friends and even my work colleagues insofar as is humanly possible. However, we certainly cannot like everyone we meet, but we can certainly desire to love them in the sense of treating them justly.  Further, on a daily level I try to show my love for my pupils by the way I teach, how I treat them as individuals deserving of respect as other unique human beings and especially by  how I teach them to love and care for themselves as show real compassion for themselves as well as for others. In this context I should like to refer to an entry in my other blog on Book Reviews.  See Passion for Justice. 

(d) My desire To Be loved

With some friends, enjoying myself:  Quest for identity there, too!

I suppose, to use a fitting metaphor, to love and be loved are two sides of the one coin.  I remember my English lecturer at college, the great late John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute arguing that as a senior examiner in Leaving Certificate English he had insisted on one of his subordinate examiners increasing the essay marks of one candidate who had written with great insight on the dual nature of loving, i.e., to love and be loved.  Without a doubt, I am nothing if I am not loved.  My personhood and selfhood is reduced to a mere suffering entity which feels lost, rejected and scorned.  If Lady Macbeth could speak of being "unsexed" by her crimes, we could surely speak of being "unselfed" by not being loved.  To be loved is to be invited in from the cold, to be accepted as part of the group.  In short, to be loved means to belong somewhere.  When we don't belong, we are in fact outsiders, out in the cold, left one side, marginalized, forgotten, overlooked, discriminated against and so on.  You, dear reader, can add your own description of being unloved to my attempts here.

My desires, in my opinion, which I have outlined and explicated to the best of my ability above, push me to an identity which is, as it were, a being or a self who is so much more.  I have attempted to come to grips with what this more may be.  I see myself or my "self" as being a project, which while firmly rooted in the now, is like some strange plant that has been mysteriously sown in this body but which is striving daily to grow more and more.  Our personhood or our selfhood is a project that is always on-going.  We are reaching out to embrace that more all the time both individually and culturally.  Perhaps it is somehow in this quest for selfhood that the Divine enters in.  While I experience myself as very much finite in this all-too-human and animal body, I also simultaneously experience my desires to be of an infinite quality, that is desire belongs to the infinite, to the divine spark in me. Perhaps, I would not be so desiring, unless there is a more... unless there is a more somewhere ever ahead of me.  Or am I merely delusional?  I think not, I know not. I desire not.  All, I can proclaim, like Socrates is my ignorance seeking knowledge.  But why such seeking?  I'll leave the answer, or perhaps more accurately, the quest to you, dear read. Buon viaggio!

*Apophatic Theology: In the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism God is understood as “the One” who is way beyond words and images, the one who transcends every category in a radical simplicity beyond all human thought and idea.  God’s uniqueness and grandeur so ovewhelm our senses and minds that God is described as solitary, radically simple; even as hidden, invisible, or “dark”.  Thus, Henry Vaughan’s famous poem The Night: There is in God (some say)//A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here//Say it is late and dusky, because they//See not all clear//O for that night! where I in him//Might live invisible and dim.//

Hence, all apophatic theology can do, in one sense, is declare what God is not in terms of human words.  However, it can declare God's utter transcendence in terms that are actually ironically quite clear like that of dark mystery, of hiddenness and otherness, uniqueness and grandeur.  One might wonder here at the marvelling of our astrophysicists at the Black Holes and the Dark Matter of the Universe.  Maybe, just maybe, there could be some parallels here with The Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross.  After all, there are some great parallels between mysticism and astrophysics, not to mention quantum physics. See the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

** Aristotle's most famous book is perhaps his Metaphysics.  The parts of it still in existence span fourteen books. The early books give background information and survey the field before Aristotle's time. Therein, he describes the nature of wisdom as well as criticizing the theories of Plato which he deemed as too ideal and far too poetic: it begins with sense perceptions, which must be translated into scientific expertise. Such knowledge requires the understanding of both facts and causes, and wisdom comes only with an understanding of the universal principles and primary causes built on this science. Aristotle's work in metaphysics is therefore motivated by this desire for wisdom, which requires the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What is known to us as metaphysics is what Aristotle called "first philosophy." Metaphysics involves a study of the universal principles of being, the abstract qualities of existence itself. The starting point of Aristotle's metaphysics is his rejection of Plato's Theory of Forms. In Plato's theory, material objects are changeable and not real in themselves; rather, they correspond to an ideal, eternal, and immutable Form by a common name, and this Form can be perceived only by the intellect. Thus a thing perceived to be beautiful in this world is in fact an imperfect manifestation of the Form of Beauty. Aristotle's arguments against this theory were numerous. Ultimately he rejected Plato's ideas as poetic but empty language; as a scientist and empiricist he preferred to focus on the reality of the material world.

***This question appears in Martin Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (1959), pp. 7-8  See here for the philosopher Arthur Witherall's short essay on this topic.