Category: Reading

Why did Nietzsche break with Schopenhauer’s Idealism?

Reading | Metaphysics

A. A. Adedire, BSc, BA | 2024-09-29

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was one of the greatest philosophical minds of the 19^th century. A controversial figure in the history of philosophy, one of his chief assets was his ability to deeply penetrate philosophical concepts and question their foundation in a way that was most ingenious and beautifully poetic. Indeed, Nietzsche is often overlooked for his polemical wit and remembered instead for his prescriptive philosophical ideas.

Central to Nietzsche’s development was Arthur Schopenhauer’s idealism, proposed in his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation. Nietzsche’s relationship with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer is storied and complicated. Naturally, Schopenhauer too was not exempt from the polemical fastidiousness of Nietzsche’s pen. Labeled a pessimist, Schopenhauer set forth a metaphysical system to define reality as a singular unified whole. He began his inquiry into understanding reality through the lens of Kantian epistemology. In his interpretation of Kantian concepts, he believed that space, time and causality were necessary features of the mind’s organizing structure. Moreover, these features of the mind were not reality at base. In a word, the viewer and the view are fundamentally inseparable. Behind the façade of the view was the thing-in-itself, a non-rational and aimless striving, which Schopenhauer termed “will.” Influenced by these ontological claims, Nietzsche spoke on his admiration for Schopenhauer by proclaiming

I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him sprang to life at once and has been the same for nine years. I understood him as though he had written for me. [1]

Despite the abundant praise in his early period, Nietzsche later significantly departed from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Why was that so? What were Nietzsche’s criticisms of Schopenhauer’s idealism?

Following in the tradition of German idealists before him, Schopenhauer envisioned a grand, all-encompassing system for understanding reality, a system to communicate a singular idea across multiple domains. Schopenhauer began philosophizing with the most fundamental epistemic question: How can one come to know the world? Acknowledging his own influence, he turned to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism as a starting point. Kant contended that the things experienced out in the world, space, time and even causality, are ways of knowing dependent on and shaped by human perception. Objects in the world appear to us in certain ways, but their true nature, independent of human perception, is unknowable. This is a core distinction in Kantian idealism: there are the things in the world of human experience shaped by human perception, and there are things-in-themselves independent of human perception. We can only cognize how the world appears to be. We cannot cognize things-in-themselves.

In 1813, a young Arthur Schopenhauer completed a dissertation on the principle of sufficient reason, a philosophical idea on causation. He was awarded his doctorate in absentia, having abandoned his earlier scientific studies in favor of philosophy. He believed his ideas to be a further elaboration of Kantian idealism but also entirely original in urgency and observation. Schopenhauer saw the Kantian distinction between how the world appears to be and the things-in-themselves somewhat differently. He believed that space, time and causality were indeed features of the mind’s organizing structure; but it then follows that there is no casual relationship between the objects of human perception and those objects independent of human perception. As such, there is only one reality viewed from two perspectives. Similarly, one would not say that the head of a cat causes its tail. These are simply two views of a greater whole, namely the cat. There cannot be a causal relationship between objects as they appear and objects as they are, independent of perception, because causality itself is an organizing principle of the mind. The importance of Schopenhauer’s perspectival claim of reality cannot be understated, because he believed it provided much needed clarity to Kant’s epistemology.

If we cannot look outward at the world to understand its fundamental nature, as Schopenhauer claims, then where must we look? His answer: inwardly. Schopenhauer believed that the foundation of reality could be intuited introspectively, similar to the views in Eastern religious and philosophical traditions. He further elaborated that, once we look inwardly, we find an instinctive, non-rational urge of unsated wanting. Consequently, this unsated urge produces an existence of unremitting discontentment. Here “non-rational” is a more precise term than “irrational,” as the latter would mean counter to reason. The philosopher, however, means something more subtle, which is “not originating from the faculty of reason.”

Schopenhauer believed that the instinctive desires of the “will” can be intuited within the body as a “will to live.” To him, the thing-in-itself is the will to live, and the world, dependent on human perception, is a set of representations of this inner striving that underlies the external world as much as it underlies the body. These representations are mind-dependent appearances so, appropriately, Schopenhauer calls them “ideas” or plainly “representations.” Again, this philosophical system claims that reality is a unified whole and these two epistemic terms, “will” and “idea,” are simply complementary perspectives or dual aspects.

To understand the late period of Friedrich Nietzsche, it is sometimes appropriate or even necessary to see his philosophical ideas as a response to or a criticism of most philosophy prior to his thinking. Nietzsche’s early work was an exploration of influences mixed with a smattering of polemical insights. With the maturation of his philosophical diet, however, came a marked shift: the development of a philosophy attuned to the cultural- and psychological-sense. In this I mean, Nietzsche’s late period work began to shift to key polemical questions in his examination of philosophical ideas: What does this espoused idea communicate about the espouser? And how would or did this espoused idea influence culture at large? Thus, Nietzsche’s famous declaration of the death of God was not just an atheistic pronouncement but a pronouncement of the death of a moral foundation within culture at large. He viewed Western culture, sometimes more specifically German culture, as progressing towards self-annihilation through a leveling of the individual spirit. He saw society as experiencing a decline in creativity, morality and vitality. Nietzsche perceived his mission as a concerted effort to reclaim the principles of self-definition in the face of cultural decadence. He viewed himself as trying to rescue Greco-Roman naturalism more generally.

Within the historical tradition of philosophy, and even more so in religious traditions, Nietzsche saw a trend in dividing the foundation of reality: there was the world of appearances, the “representations” or the “phenomena,” and there was the world underlying the appearances, the “thing-in-itself” or the “will.” Nietzsche believed that when this halving of reality took root in a philosophy, it then followed that these underlying aspects of the real were seen as “more real,” “more truthful,” or “purer.” These philosophies denied appearances in favor of an imagined world beyond understanding. For Nietzsche, this ontological move was parasitically conjoined with pessimism. In tracing the genealogy of this halving of reality, he concluded that, with the rejection of appearances, followed the denial of life itself. And the counterbalance of this negation was the affirmation of every aspect of life and the creation of one’s own values. He endeavored to bring humans back to themselves and ultimately empower and elevate the individual as a quantum that cannot be subsumed within any system. These proto-existentialist ideas were in stark contrasts to the German idealists before him, who proposed grand sweeping systems to collate nature into a singular understanding. Nietzsche believed that the pessimism of Schopenhauer followed from his halving ontology, which was a Platonic or a Christian impulse—the deadliest of Nietzschean sins next to pity. Even further, Nietzsche saw the idealism of Schopenhauer as an all-too-human framework imposed on reality, a metaphysical fiction divorced from lived experience, an invented truth.

For Arthur Schopenhauer, the great task of philosophy was to uncover the true nature of the world. He supposed that, for the ordinary man, reality was mundane and obvious, in contrast to the philosopher who, having found wonderment in the mundane, is tasked with piercing through appearances to discern the fundament of reality. It is sometimes said of Friedrich Nietzsche that he espouses a philosophy of the elite, but in his judgment of this claim by Schopenhauer he breaks from this characterization. Nietzsche rightfully questioned this “sacrosanct” task of the philosopher. He questioned the very project of metaphysics. What is the psychological lineage of an idea? What is the ultimate price for letting an ontology pervade the cultural milieu? And are we not too human to uncover a “true world”? Nietzsche’s gift was that he asked.

 

Bibliography

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Can there be a scientific form of spirituality?

Reading | Psychology

Jonathan Dinsmore, M.S. | 2024-09-15

In the span of human culture and individual uniqueness, countless things are believed, from commonplace to cosmic, many of which directly contradict one another, at times within the same individual. A belief strongly held in one thing often prevents the belief in another, even when the latter seems more apparently true. What should be the tipping point for dropping an existing belief in favor of another? Almost as numerous as beliefs are the criteria for belief, how we assess the things we have seen or heard in order to determine what we should believe as a result. For some, a Holy text is the first and last piece of evidence they need for an unshakeable belief, while for others, only the most stringent scientific evidence is worthy of sway.

If there is one lesson we should hope to have taken away from the transformative rise of science in modern culture, it might be the usefulness of taking great care in how we ascribe belief. The primary differentiator between all previous ways of thinking and the scientific way, which includes not just the institution of science itself but scientifically oriented thinking more broadly, is a certain humility in what we think we know, at least in principle, if not always in practice. This has to do with a different, more conservative approach to inferential thinking, or how we extrapolate from our existing knowledge and experiences:

IF this (is what I know/experience/observe) –> THEN that (must be the case)

Understanding our propensity for engaging in faulty inferential thinking, and therefore the necessity of a prudent and frugal approach to same, is the fundamental insight that serves as the rationale for submitting conceptual models to the acid test of meticulous investigation and experimental testing, which I regard as the essence of science.

The error of many previous belief systems and their unwarranted certainty in concepts we now understand to be false, in some cases absurd, can primarily be attributed to insufficient inferential caution, with some other contributing factors. Examples abound: the “humours” of early modern medicine, the geocentric model of the universe, the belief in phrenology, the once-accepted notion of spontaneous generation, and any number of theological speculations. In each case, unjustified extrapolations from existing observations or knowledge (supposed or actual) can be seen as the primary contributor to error. Although it is also possible to have too much inferential caution, as I consider to be the case in scientism, it would be foolish to deny the overall significance of this insight. The advancements it has facilitated in the areas of knowledge and technical capabilities for the human species, as well as impact on global culture, make its significance impossible to deny.

The significance of inferential caution or prudence to our quest for valid knowledge forces a question: What is the appropriate balance? How generously or frugally should beliefs be granted from our experiences and observations? Just how much evidence should we require  to change a belief? What approach will maximize both the accuracy and scope of our knowledge? In other words, how can we get inferential thinking right, or optimize our approach to it?

Accuracy rather than scope has been the priority in the scientific endeavor broadly, and not without reason. Much of scientific progress in the material domain is attributable to it. However, the relentless focus on accuracy has resulted in certain attitudes and beliefs that also limit scope. Inherently, when one determines that only the most stringent form of evidence is permissible, one also decides that only a limited scope of phenomena is knowable; taken to its logical conclusion, this results in doubting even the most intimate brute fact of one’s own awareness, as in eliminative materialism. In contrast to this extreme of inferential caution, the extreme of deficit is no more desirable. On the other hand, when there is too little caution, belief is ascribed willy-nilly, resulting in a proliferation of erroneous beliefs and, ultimately, outright delusion.

It stands to reason, therefore, that, somewhere between these two extremes, there is an ideal epistemic balance. Expanding the scope of knowing necessitates the consideration of types of evidence beyond what is currently considered valid within academic science and philosophy, which means that doing so without wandering into the delusional territory of inferential laxity is the primary challenge. In other words, for those of us who see value in venturing beyond the boundaries of evidence typically considered academically and scientifically valid to expand the scope of our knowing, doing so without losing the invaluable principle of epistemic prudence is our chief obstacle, aside from perhaps social stigma from the materialist orthodoxy.

Such careful expansion of scope without sacrificing accuracy should be the goal of those who desire a form of spirituality that is maximally intellectually viable, in an age when the value of a scientific approach to thinking is so well established. Increased interest among scientists, academics, and the secular laity in topics such as Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies, nondualism, psychedelic medicine, panpsychism, idealism, simulation theory, contemplative practices, psi phenomena, and related topics can all be considered indications of a certain ripeness and reaching for just such a rational and scientifically compatible form of spirituality. Still, as yet, no definite crystallization of such has been widely accepted.

This is why I aspire here to suggest a way forward in creating a foundation for a shared empirical spirituality, that is, a rational spiritual philosophy that operates in the same fundamental spirit as scientific thinking, utilizing experience (of all kinds) and sound reasoning in determining how belief may be responsibly ascribed to things beyond those that are regularly and repeatably observable with our senses and sense-enhancing instruments. Sound reasoning is the key here, and I consider the proper calibration of inferential caution to be the key principle in successfully moving forward with such an endeavor. Sound reasoning for an intellectually viable empirical spirituality is critical, and I suggest that it is more-or-less a question of getting inferential caution right, of finding the proper balance that will prevent us from going either off the “woo” deep end, or being locked into nihilistic skeptical paralysis.

There have been some in recent years who have sought to promote the concept of “secular spirituality,” and so it may be warranted here to point out the difference between this and the empirical spirituality proposed here. For the most part, this has been proposed in response to a recognition of the value of spirituality, but an unwillingness to contradict materialist commitments, and engage in the types of beliefs perhaps essential to spirituality, particularly the reality of a spiritual domain of existence, and a spiritual self that is ultimately independent of body and brain. This attempt to create spirituality without spirit I regard as profoundly misguided, and actually the opposite of what I propose here. Secular spirituality, like “celibate sexuality,” seems to be borne of the idea that by adopting a title, one may gain the benefits of a thing, even if excluding all (or nearly all) that is beneficial about that thing. By this principle, lazy exercise, gagged discussion, parked racing, indoor camping, and blindfolded sightseeing all likewise deserve our consideration.

The goal of the empirical spirituality I advocate here, on the other hand, is specifically to bring a scientifically minded approach to metaphysical beliefs. This is the opposite of secular spirituality as so conceived, because the latter seeks to harvest spiritual concepts and practices in such a way that drains them of their essence, ensuring only a husk will remain. While one approach has decided from the beginning what is real and true (materialism), the other is borne of intellectual humility and curiosity. If we recognize our ignorance but desire valid knowledge, then the chief goal must be to carefully sort through the evidence and determine what ideas and phenomena within that vast and somewhat heterogenous domain of human life we call spirituality may be regarded as valid according to empirical criteria.

This will inevitably involve the consideration of that category of experiences that has been given so many titles: altered, nonordinary, transcendent, anomalous, spiritual, exceptional, and others. Such rare and profound experiences seem to form the likely source of most or all spiritual beliefs, from the enlightenment of individuals like the Buddha to encounters with angels or deities like those of Moses and Mohammed, and the alleged revelations they brought. As such, careful analysis of such experiences, historical but especially contemporary, under the preface that at least some of them may in fact be glimpses beyond the realm of ordinary physical life, should form a central aspect of the endeavor.

These experiences and the inferences that have been drawn from them are multitudinous, and may seem like a cacophony of contradictions, if all must be regarded equally. However, if taking a scientific approach geared toward conceptually approximating a singular reality, there is little reason to so regard them, and this is a critical point. Knowing what we do of mental illness, hallucination, delusional thinking, and inferential foolhardiness, it is perhaps inevitable that many experiences that are thought to be revelatory by the experiencers may in fact be hallucinatory, hoaxes, or delusory inferences. This is of course the conviction of the materialist regarding all such experiences, but to reject this sweeping premature conclusion is not to reject that it must be true in many cases, and to varying extents, for that seems inevitable. This implies, naturally, that some alleged glimpses may be more veridical than others, and many not at all, regardless of if they are thought of as such; in fact, this must be the case.

Hence the importance of careful study of, and even more careful inferential reasoning about, these experiences, particularly in weighing their evidential value, and considering how to construct metaphysical models of reality based on them. Of course, there are other areas of science and other knowledge disciplines that may likewise factor into our consideration. However, the goal here is to expand cautiously from the bedrock of certainty represented by scientific knowledge of the physical universe, the regularities of the world around us that are most well-established, to that which, though less certain, we feel we may have good enough reason to take seriously as probable metaphysical realities beyond. As such, we should proceed from the strongest evidence to the weakest, as best we can.

Different individuals may of course have differing ideas of what constitutes the strongest evidence, but this is not a problem if we apply the criteria to this area that we would to any other. That is, evidence should be weighed according to the degree to which it contradicts the null hypothesis or default assumption, which in the case of these experiences, can be thought of as the hallucinatory-hoax-delusion hypothesis. So, those experiences that are most implausible as hallucinations, hoaxes, or delusions have the strongest probability of being veridical. Since not all experiences have equal implausibility in this regard, it naturally follows that a hierarchy would result, in which those experiences with the greatest probability of veridicality play the greatest role in shaping what metaphysical phenomena we infer to be real, or what we may choose to believe, in an ongoing critical assessment of metaphysical models.

What makes an experience implausible as a hallucination, hoax, or delusion? Some examples will serve to illustrate. In my view, the experiential category that is most contradictive of this null hypothesis is veridical perceptions that could not have happened by the typical sensory means, especially when occurring via an experience whose content has clear and direct metaphysical implications. This is exemplified by perceptions of distant or otherwise inaccessible events that are later verified by third parties during out-of-body experiences, and even more so when occurring at a time that the heart and brain were flatlined, as in some near-death experiences (NDEs). This phenomenon is in principle impossible to explain under the current materialist model, beyond cynical hoax accusations. The only other explanation to which a wary skeptic might retreat is the psi hypothesis, in which case not only is psi acknowledged, but one must explain why psi is occurring under conditions of minimal or nonexistent brain activity.

Another phenomenon that is difficult to explain in terms of hallucination, and therefore carries a heavy evidential weight, is experiences that contain very similar and specific content, despite the experiencers not knowing one another, and there being no common cultural source of such content that might be supposed to have mutually informed their experiences, if they were indeed hallucinatory. Again, NDEs stand out as an exemplar in this regard as well, since they contain remarkably similar content, despite occurring to a variety of NDE-naïve people from a variety of backgrounds, religious or secular beliefs, and under a variety of (typically near-death) conditions. In this, a much lower level of variety is present than would be expected if the experiences were purely hallucinatory, which raises the question of how such similarity occurred if they were.

Another consideration, as just alluded to, is the degree to which the experience occurs to those who are not seeking it, who are no more inclined to mental instability than the general population, and who come from a variety of cultural backgrounds, holding a variety of beliefs. The less reasons we have to think that a person’s own mind was conjuring the experience up according to its existing beliefs and predispositions, which should be another source of variety if they are indeed hallucinatory, the more reason we have to think it was not so conjured. This follows a similar logic to that involved in considering the same patterns of thinking and behavior across many cultures as evidence of their heritable biological origin, in evolutionary psychology.

To be completely clear, what is suggested here is a continuous assessment of probable metaphysical models, perhaps according to Bayesian principles, in light of a rigorous assessment of experiential evidence of such, in toto. In this assessment, those models indicated by the strongest forms of evidence are assigned the greatest probability. New evidence is then considered in light of that probability structure, as is the formulation of metaphysical beliefs, just as is the case with forming physical beliefs from the experiential evidence of physical science.

In terms of how we may ensure a prudent inferential approach once we begin reasoning about these implications, the main issue is simply a hallmark of good critical thinking, to avoid making unwarranted inferences or jumping to conclusions. For instance, in the presence of many who experience a dark void and think it to be the ultimate reality, and those who experience an ocean of light and think it to be the ultimate, there is no need to throw up one’s hands at the problem. The key insight is that both parties are simply making unwarranted inferences, since no individual experience should give anyone any great sense of confidence about something as grand as ultimate reality. At least, not to any degree that would justify asserting such as a view others should adopt. Furthermore, in a metaphysical model involving layers to reality and consciousness, it is possible for many such domains of existence to have ontological status (to be real) simultaneously, and to leave the status of ultimacy as an open question that is unlikely to be definitively answered.

These are some of the chief considerations that might inform our analysis, to which many more can and should be added. The point here is not to outline a definitive list of such, but rather to introduce the method of analysis via some of its clearest examples. It may not surprise the reader at this point to know that I personally find NDEs the most convincing form of experiential evidence, and therefore consider them a primary indicator of what may be beyond the physical as we know it. Others may think another type of nonordinary experience weightier evidence, and I would welcome them to make their case as to why.

Regardless of such inevitable disagreements, like those in mainstream science, a common method of assessment can to some extent unite all who engage in such an endeavor. This is because we are capable of recognizing and sharing a common goal and general method of achieving it, despite the specific implementation and interpretation varying between individuals or camps. Again, this is exemplified quite well by the scientific community, and other legitimate knowledge disciplines for that matter, and so establishing a comparable shared framework is apropos to an expansion of empirical investigation into the metaphysical domain.

This would represent a path forward that may be walked with perhaps less of the wariness of foolishness that currently prevents many scientifically minded people from directly pursuing spirituality, despite their yearning and indirectly reaching for it in various ways. On the other side, the body of people who have embraced spirituality may find a way that is more balanced and structured than the somewhat haphazard approach so commonplace in that subculture, at least for those who may see the value in avoiding foolishness. Like science, this is really a formalization and systematization of a way of reasoning that many of us already do more informally in our own individual spirituality or philosophizing. The difference here is that it may facilitate our thinking systematically together on this topic, in such a way as to construct plausible metaphysical models grounded in evidence and critical analysis.

Science and spirituality are both undeniably significant to humanity, and there are many who are outside traditional religious institutions, perhaps the majority of that category, who feel that between the radical poles of militant skepticism and new age woo, there must be a better, more balanced way. Many already attempt to strike that balance in their own personal philosophy and spirituality. However, by establishing standards and principles for thinking together systematically on this topic, as with so many other pursuits that benefit from that approach, we will likely find a swifter approximation of the truth of the matter together.

Is reality made of language? The amazing connection between linguistic and physical structures

Reading | Metaphysics

Dr. Ludwig Sachs | 2024-09-01

As I have shown in previous articles,¹ from a psychoanalytical perspective, our mental processes appear to be organized like linguistic structures. These semantic structures, consisting of signifiers, shape not only our individual perception, but also our entire life. The concept of meaning plays a central role here, including in our interaction with the world and the way we give meaning to our lives.

On the other hand, analytic idealism argues that the fundamental substance of reality is of a mental nature and that physical phenomena are to be understood as manifestations of mental processes. This view suggests that there is a profound self-similarity between the various manifestations of mental processes—from the most subtle thoughts to the tangiest material phenomena. This also requires us to question the nature of meaning.

 

Structural psychoanalysis and the construction of meaning: metonymy and metaphor

The structures of our language, which function as directly accessible carriers of meaning, reveal remarkable parallels to physical systems in their complexity and dynamics. These parallels enable a deeper understanding of reality and show how fundamental, language-like or semantic patterns shape the structure of the world itself.

In structural psychoanalysis, which was significantly influenced by Jacques Lacan,² the concepts of metonymy and metaphor play a central role in the analysis of linguistic structures and the mental.

Metonymy is often understood as a ‘horizontal’ chaining and refers to the diachronic (temporal) arrangement of signifiers, e.g. letters and words arranged in a sequence. This arrangement determines the meaning of a statement. A change in this sequence can change the meaning significantly.

In contrast to this is metaphor, which stands for the ‘vertical’ chaining of signifiers and adds a synchronic dimension. This vertical level adds further levels of meaning and illustrates that meanings always refer to other meanings and never directly to the thing itself. The concept of metaphor shows the complexity of meaning formation, as the connection of signifiers creates a kind of barrier that prevents direct access to the signified (the meaning).

Another important element in this concept is the ‘point de capiton,’ the quilting point, which has the function of fixing the meaning within the chain of signifiers. This ‘quilting point’ is crucial as it retroactively determines the overall meaning of a statement and shows how the end of a signifier chain can fix the meaning of the entire message, for example the period at the end of this sentence.

 

Basic concepts of quantum physics

In quantum physics, some fundamental concepts³ play a central role that make it possible to understand and predict the behavior of subatomic particles. These concepts are not only important in physics, but also offer interesting connections to other sciences and philosophy.

A system in quantum mechanics is defined as any part of reality that can be, in some operational sense, isolated from the rest of the world and made the object of investigation. Systems can contain subsystems, which increases the complexity and variety of possible investigations. A simple example of a system is an electron in an atom, which can be considered and analyzed separately.

The state of a system in quantum mechanics describes its properties at a certain point in time. The state is fundamental to understanding its potential behaviors and the results of measurements. In quantum mechanics, the state is often described by a wave function that indicates the probability of measuring certain properties. This state description is essential for understanding how systems react and evolve in response to external influences.

Observables are measurable properties of a system that play a central role in quantum mechanics. They can relate to global properties of the entire system or locally to subsystems. The measurement of observables provides specific data about the state of the system. Examples of observables are the position, momentum and energy of a particle. These quantities can be determined by appropriate experiments and provide important information about the system.

Measurement is the act of observing and obtaining data about a system. In quantum mechanics, every measurement changes the state of the system, which leads to one of the fundamental and often considered paradoxical properties of this theory. This phenomenon is known as the collapse of the wave function, in which the state of the system changes from a superposition of many possibilities into a single, measured state. The outcome of a measurement depends on the state of the system and cannot be completely predicted, which gives quantum mechanics its probabilistic nature.

 

Integration of quantum concepts and linguistic structures

Looking at these concepts allows us to draw connections to other theoretical frameworks such as structural psychoanalysis and analytic idealism and thereby develop a more comprehensive understanding of reality.

The definition of a system in quantum mechanics has a direct counterpart in the structuring of linguistic phenomena. In linguistic analysis, a chain of signifiers, such as a sentence or a section of text, can be regarded as a system that can have different states. These states correspond to different meanings or interpretations that result from the specific arrangement and combination of words.

Similar to quantum mechanics, where systems can be subdivided into subsystems to refine the investigation, parts of a signifier chain can also be considered separately in order to analyze their specific contributions to meaning within a larger textual context. This possibility of a segmented analysis reflects the complexity and deep structure of both physical and linguistic systems.

In linguistic analysis, the term ‘state’ refers to the momentary interpretation or understanding derived from a chain of signifiers. Signifiers are the specific elements of language, such as words or letters, which together construct certain meanings. This notion of state is comparable to the concept in quantum mechanics, where the state of a system defines its properties at a given time and largely determines how the system behaves and what results can be expected from measurements.

In both domains—quantum physics and linguistics—knowledge of the state essentially determines the expectations of an interaction or observation. In the field of language, the understanding of the meaning structure of a text—i.e., its ‘state’—influences how this text is interpreted. This interpretation can change when new information is added or the context in which the chain of signifiers is analyzed changes. This is similar to a change of state in quantum mechanics, which can be induced by a measurement, whereby the measurement result changes the previous understanding of the system.

 

The analogy between local and global observables

In quantum physics, a distinction is made between local and global observables, which provide insights into the structure and behavior of systems. Local observables refer to specific, isolatable properties or states within a subsystem, while global observables describe the properties of the system as a whole and provide insights that result from the totality of the system components.

A similar distinction can be found in linguistics, where local observables can correspond to individual sentences, words or letters within a text sequence. These local elements are often embedded in and influenced by higher-level structures of the text in which they appear. Global observables in language correspond to the overall system of the text or discourse, whose structure and overarching themes shape the interpretation and meaning of the individual local elements.

 

Measurement and construction of meaning

In the context of language analysis, ‘measurement’ takes place through the interpretation of the signifier chain. The aforementioned ‘point de capiton,’ the ‘quilting point,’ plays a crucial role as a fixing point that (apparently) closes the meaning of an expression. Similar to a measurement in quantum physics, which changes the state of a system, the interpretation of a text can also modify the original meaning. However, the apparent fixation caused by the quilting point is in the end illusionary, as it only temporarily brings the differential reference structure of the signifiers to a halt.

This dynamic interaction between observation and state can be applied to quantum physics as well as to linguistic and psychological processes. In both areas, it can be seen that the fixation of meaning or state always depends on the specific conditions of measurement or interpretation and thus represents a kind of illusionary stabilization in a sea of potentialities.

 

Structures of linguistic analysis: diachronic and synchronic chains

As already mentioned, in linguistics and in structural psychoanalysis in particular, a distinction is made between the diachronic (‘horizontal’) and the synchronic (‘vertical’) chain, which together form the complex fabric of language structure. The diachronic chain refers, so to speak, to the conscious, sequential flow of language. Here, words and sentences are arranged in a logical and temporal sequence. This structure can be directly measured and consciously comprehended, as it is presented in an explicit and linear form that is easy to follow.

In contrast to this is the synchronic chain, which is based on deeper connections between different elements of the language. These connections are manifested through the metaphorical function. The synchronic chain is less obvious and often eludes immediate comprehension because it operates on a more complex level. This level is rich in cultural, historical and contextual meanings that go far beyond the simple sequence of words and thus open up a deeper dimension of language analysis.

The distinction between these two chains is crucial for understanding how language-like structures influence our mental processes. While the diachronic chain represents the surface of our linguistic expression, the synchronic chain holds the latent structures that are the real force behind our linguistic creativity and metaphorical expression. These latent and mostly unconscious structures include not only individual or personal content, but are also deeply rooted in collective cultural and historical patterns that shape our interpretation of texts and our expression.

 

Structural parallels in quantum mechanics and language analysis

In quantum mechanics, we find analogous concepts to the distinction between diachronic and synchronic chains in language structure, expressed through the relationship between causality and acausality, and between facticity and potentiality.

Causality in quantum mechanics is similar to the diachronic chain in linguistics. In classical physics, events are regarded as causal sequences in which the states are clearly determined by previous events and form a measurable, deterministic sequence. This corresponds to the sequential nature of the diachronic chain, in which each word or sentence construction is based on logical and temporally sequential connections.

In quantum mechanics, however, there are phenomena such as entanglement that cannot be explained by local causality principles. Entangled particles influence each other in a way that is independent of spatial distance and without any recognizable causal connection. This type of acausal connection mirrors the synchronic chain in language structure, where deeper, metaphorical or symbolic relationships exist that are not directly apparent from the linear sequence of words.

Facticity in quantum mechanics refers to the measured state of a system that reflects a concrete, measurable property. This is comparable to the explicit meaning captured in the diachronic analysis of a text. Potentiality, on the other hand, includes the totality of all possible states that a quantum mechanical system can assume before a measurement, represented by the wave function. This range of possibilities corresponds to the variety of meanings and interpretations that are present in the synchronic chain before an (apparently) final interpretation is fixed by the ‘point de capiton.’

 

Limits to the transmission of information

In linguistics, the diachronic structure manifests itself through the sequential arrangement of words and sentences that build on each other causally and enable a direct transfer of information. This structure is analogous to measurable, causal states in quantum mechanics, where events take place in a predictable sequence. The ‘quilting point’ in structural psychoanalysis enables a temporary fixation and apparent transmission of meaning within this causal chain. This transmission appears concrete and measurable, but is ultimately a constructed and interpretative effect—in the language of structural psychoanalysis, it is imaginary.

The synchronic structure, represented in language by metaphors and symbolic language, reflects a deeper level of meaning linkage that is not limited by linear causality. This structure is comparable to quantum entanglement, where particle states are linked in a way that does not allow for direct, causal transmission of information, as described by the ‘no-communication theorem’⁴ of quantum information theory. In structural psychoanalysis, the concept of the ‘barrier’ between signifier and signified forms a similar boundary, as it prevents a direct transmission of unambiguous meaning and keeps communication on an interpretative and ambiguous level.

Diachronic and synchronic analysis in language and quantum physics shows that, while information transmission in causal structures appears possible, it is ultimately dependent on interpretative processes, which in turn are influenced by contextual factors. Acausal structures, on the other hand, offer a rich field of potential meanings that do not allow direct or unambiguous transmission. These insights highlight the complex mechanisms of meaning and information construction in both disciplines and emphasize the profound interconnectedness of language, thought and reality that challenge our conventional understanding of reality.

 

Quantum ontology and the structure of reality

In quantum ontology, especially as described by Hartmann Römer,⁵ observables are not mere mathematical constructs that describe certain measurable properties of a physical system, but rather fundamental components that structure our understanding of reality. These observables are closely linked to propositions, which represent the actual knowledge about the states of a system. Each proposition indicates what result the measurement of a particular observable could produce. They are therefore dependent on the observables, as they would have no meaning without them.

The relationship between observables and propositions shows that they form a connection that is essential for the description of physical states and for understanding the structure and dynamics of the quantum world. Römer describes this connection as a “propositional ontology,” in which the world is not defined by fixed facts, but by propositions: statements that represent potential truths.

 

Dualism of observables and the ‘Ur alternatives’

The observables in Römer’s description are dualistic and similar to Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s “Ur alternatives,”⁶ which are based on fundamental yes/no choices. This binary structure is mirrored in the differential and discrete nature of the unconscious as presented in structural psychoanalysis. The unconscious is described as a structure of signifiers that is not defined by its own substance, but by its relation to and difference from other signifiers.

 

Epistemic cut

In Hartmann Römer’s study of quantum ontology, Heisenberg’s cut is emphasized as a fundamental separation line within epistemology. This epistemic cut, which lies irrevocably between the recognizing subject and the object to be recognized, reveals the fundamental limits of our knowledge. According to Römer, the recognized is always located beyond this cut, whereby the recognizing instance can never fully grasp itself and remains limited to the role of a “transcendental subject” that cannot transcend its own basis of knowledge.

 

Archetypes, signifiers and observables: a structural similarity

In his research, Hartmann Römer discusses the interesting parallelism between Carl Jung’s archetypes and the observables of quantum physics. Römer argues that both archetypes and observables are structurally positioned, so to speak, on the cutting edge of the epistemic cut, the boundary that separates the recognizing subject from the recognized. He states that observables and propositions are to be understood as the constituent elements of the quantum world that exist primarily potentially rather than factually. These are beyond the conventional subjective-objective duality and represent entanglement-like relationships of similarity at the most general level.

Römer’s analysis of archetypes as expressions of the potentiality and complementarity of quantum observables shows the profound structural similarity between these concepts. The characteristic ambivalence of archetypes reflects the dualistic nature of observables and illustrates the complex interaction of structure and subject.

In structural psychoanalysis, Heisenberg’s cut is illustrated by the interaction of the signifier with the order of the real¹, similar to a plowshare plowing through the soil. This illustrates how the signifier excavates the signified (the meaning) from the real and how the subject is structured in a language-like manner. Such a dynamic also reflects the constitutive split of the subject, a split based on a traumatic experience and primal repression. This, in turn, leads to a dynamic of lack and desire that persists without a halt and reveals the real as the logically impossible and unsymbolizable.

 

The interweaving of language, psyche and physics

The interweaving of language, psyche and physics, as revealed by structural psychoanalysis, analytical idealism and quantum ontology, shows that these disciplines have deep structural parallels. Examining these parallels allows us to develop a broader and deeper understanding of reality that encompasses both physical and psychological dimensions. Recognizing that reality is shaped by complex and often counterintuitive processes that challenge our conventional understanding of causality and determinism can lead to new approaches and perspectives in science and philosophy.

 

Perspective of Formalization

To further formalize the theoretical considerations and connections between language, psyche, and physical reality, various mathematical concepts can be employed. One of the most innovative and promising tools is the use of perfectoid spaces.⁷

Perfectoid spaces, introduced by Peter Scholze, who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018, are a highly abstract concept from modern algebraic geometry and offer extensive possibilities for modeling complex structures. In our context, perfectoid spaces could be used to capture and analyze both the dynamic and static aspects of linguistic and psychic structures.

The consideration of p-adic numbers, which form the basis for perfectoid spaces, allows for modeling complex structures and self-similarities that reflect the differential nature of signifiers in structural psychoanalysis. The p-adic numbers provide a representation where the classical continuum is questioned, similar to how the concept of self-identity is problematized in psychoanalysis. Both concepts work with structures that cannot be represented by a simple, continuous line but by a complex interplay and interaction of elements connected on different levels. Thus, p-adic numbers reflect the fractal and self-referential properties of signifier structures. These mathematical concepts provide a suitable foundation to formally capture and analyze the connections between language, psyche, and physical reality, particularly concerning the fractal and self-referential properties of these structures.

 

Conclusion

The investigation of the profound parallels between language, psyche, and physical reality, as illuminated by structural psychoanalysis, analytical idealism, and quantum ontology, shows us that these disciplines cannot be considered in isolation. Examining these interdisciplinary approaches enables a more comprehensive understanding of reality and highlights the complex mechanisms that shape our consciousness and perception.

Continued exploration of these interfaces will improve our ability to understand the nature of reality, meaning, and consciousness, and to further uncover the deep connections that interweave these domains. This opens doors to new perspectives that can fundamentally expand our knowledge and interactions with the world.

 

Bibliography

1. https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-subject-beyond-the-i-on-structural-psychoanalysis/reading/
   https://www.essentiafoundation.org/metabolism-is-what-the-unconscious-mind-looks-like/reading/
2. e.g. https://www.lacanonline.com/ or https://lacan-entziffern.de/ (German)
3. Filk, T., Römer, H. Generalized Quantum Theory: Overview and Latest Developments. Axiomathes 21, 211–220 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-010-9136-6
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
5. Quanten, Komplementarität und Verschränkung in der Lebenswelt. Verallgemeinerte Quantentheorie, Lit Verlag Münster, ISBN 978-3-643-5378-4 https://www.anomalistik.de/images/pdf/schriften/perspektiven7_inhalt.pdf (free download)
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4cker
7. https://youtu.be/RApkRqoiZ1I?si=9rYnIYKzSulDns7N (an illustrative introduction to the topic)

The fallacy of scientific realism: does anything go?

Reading | Epistemology

Robert Hamilton, B.Sc. | 2024-08-18

Introduction

Does God exist? What is consciousness? How can we know what is real?

Questions such as these have always perplexed humanity and, despite the great advances made over recent centuries in understanding the behavior of the world around us, we seem to be no closer to answering these core questions about the nature of existence.

In my new book Anything Goes: A Philosophical Approach to Answering the God Question,¹ I argue that, paradoxically, answers to these questions can only be obtained once we recognize that no knowledge of the true structure of reality is possible. This implies that claims about the structure of reality can only be credible when viewed as models that describe the way our experience of the world behaves. These models then become our de facto reality.

 

The world is a model

Perhaps the popular notion of how science progresses is that we are gradually getting closer to the truth about the nature of the world around us. As time has gone on, scientific advances have been made and we have reached the stage where Einstein’s General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics give us a nearly complete description of the universe. We just need some clever physicists to iron out a few wrinkles like dark matter and dark energy in a Theory of Everything, and then we will have arrived at the Truth of how reality is structured.

The naivety in this belief was highlighted by 20^th century philosopher of science Karl Popper, when he pointed out that scientific theories can never be proven to be true. Rather, they are working assumptions about the way the world is, which are supported by the evidence—until they aren’t. Newton’s theory of gravity was thought to be true until anomalies, such as the precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury, were discovered. Instead, it is Einstein’s theory that provides the correct answer. This raises the possibility that, if we manage to come up with a Theory of Everything, who is to say that one day we will not conduct an experiment or make an observation that contradicts this theory? For this reason, even if physicists were to discover the true structure of reality, they could never know it. “Okay”, one might say, “although we would never know that we had reached the truth, at least we can say that our current theories are ‘more true’ than the previous ones.” This view is known as Convergent Realism and was attacked in a 1981 paper by the philosopher Larry Laudan.² Although Einstein’s theory provides only very slightly different results to Newton’s at the everyday level, the way it characterizes the universe is completely different. Newton’s theory is set in the common-sense world of three-dimensional space and a separate conception of time. Einstein’s theory is based on the notion of curved four-dimensional spacetime. Who can say what the universe will look like according to the next theory? Quantum mechanics raises the possibility that cats, in a sense, can be alive and dead at the same time and that the building blocks of our universe can be both waves and particles. Might it be that the true nature of the universe is just as weird and perhaps even beyond our ability to comprehend?

Ultimately, scientific theories are models of the way the universe works. Scientists, such as the renowned physicist Richard Feynman, readily point out that scientific models do not give us the ‘why,’ only the ‘what.’² They allow us to understand the universe in terms of its behavior—we can use them to predict how the macroscopic objects of our experience, such as tables, stars and light bulbs, behave. They do this by characterizing the universe in a way that helps us get to grips with it. But, as humans, we just do not have the tools to find out what the universe is ‘really like.’

 

The map is the territory

Now comes the plot twist. The surprising but unavoidable consequence of this is that the structure or make-up of this reality that we are modelling is, in a sense, irrelevant. If its structure is unknowable, then reality can only affect us through its behavior. And so it is only reality’s behavior that matters. It is reality’s behavior that we are modelling and a good model will predict its behavior well. But if reality’s structure is fundamentally elusive, then it will forever remain a shadowy mysterious thing lying behind the veil. It is only the structure and objects of our models that can be known to us. These are the things that we live by and that give our lives meaning. And so these are the only objects that can be considered ‘real’ in any meaningful sense—if the objects of our models are not real, then nothing is real.

What we have here, I would argue, is a case akin to The Emperor’s New Clothes. Many scientists and physicists are aware that all of our understanding is in terms of our models, but perhaps avoid engaging with the implications of this, because it is unnecessary for day-to-day work and raises difficult questions. We cling to the idea that there must be a ‘right answer’ out there, because if there isn’t, then, well, doesn’t everything fall apart? Where are the standards of correctness? What is to stop us from just claiming that whatever we like is true? I argue in Part III of my book that these worries are unfounded. Although its structure is unknowable, reality does behave in a certain way. And so not all models are created equal.

 

Anything goes?

I like to call this way of thinking the ‘Anything Goes’ method, because with no knowable reality to assess our models against, the only standard of correctness is a consideration of whether your model produces sensible results. And there is more to modelling reality than the laws of physics. Even the idea that there is some kind of external reality that is the source of our experiences is part of a model that gives us an explanation for why our experiences behave in the way they do [Editor’s note: some physicists are now questioning even the assumption of a shared external reality]. Ultimately, each of us needs to find a way of making sense of our experiences in a manner that works for us. In that sense, anything goes [Editor’s note: Essentia Foundation does not endorse this conclusion].

 

Applications

I suggest that this way of thinking is revolutionary. Once we recognize that it’s all a matter of perspective—that there are no disembodied facts about the universe in any useful sense—we can make progress in all sorts of areas that have previously proved intractable. Does God exist? It depends on your model. Is Schrödinger’s Cat alive or dead? Well, from whose perspective? Schrödinger’s or the cat’s? How would we tell if an AI attained consciousness? To answer this question, we need to consider what it means to say that an entity that only exists as part of your model of reality might have a mind of its own. We may go on to consider whether Solipsism could be true, what it’s like to be a bat, and whether you could be a brain in a vat. All these questions and more are addressed in my book.

 

Notes

¹ See www.anythinggoesmetaphysics.com for further discussion on these issues.

² The original paper, ‘A Confutation of Convergent Realism’ (Larry Laudan, March 1981, Philosophy of Science Vol. 48, No. 1), Harding and Rosenberg’s reply ‘In Defense of Convergent Realism’ (Clyde L. Hardin and Alexander Rosenberg, December 1982, Philosophy of Science Vol. 49, No. 4) and Laudan’s response ‘Realism with the Real’ (Larry Laudan, March 1984, Philosophy of Science Vol. 51, No. 1) can all be found online.

³ The inimitable Richard Feynman talks about how hard it is to make sense of what physics tells us about world at around the 21-minute mark in this video: http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/45.

The broad horizons of Ecstatic Naturalism

Reading | Metaphysics

Asher Walden, PhD | 2024-08-04

Ecstatic Naturalism is a philosophical perspective based on the work of the contemporary philosopher and theologian Robert Corrington. In metaphysical scope, it sits side by side with Pantheism, Whiteheadian Panentheism, Panpsychism, and Analytic Idealism. Like many readers and authors associated with Essentia, it is committed to the idea of world philosophy, a modern approach to philosophical analysis that benefits not only from the Judeo-Greek traditions of Europe, but also Indian, Chinese, and even Shamanic traditions. Generally speaking, I see Ecstatic Naturalism as an attempt to formulate the most generic possible account of the foundational ideas that live at the heart of various historical forms of Non-Dualism. Corrington in particular has gradually incorporated more explicitly Theosophical and Advaita Vedanta perspectives, while my own approach is more heavily influenced by Neo-Confucian and Zen Buddhist perspectives, and so bears a closer affinity to the Kyoto School. My hope is that this approach will be of interest and benefit to the Essentia community. The purpose of this essay is to give a brief overview of some of the basic ideas of Ecstatic Naturalism, with some attention given to points of tension between EN and Analytic Idealism.

As in Kastrup’s work, the starting point is the division within nature between Nature Naturing (Schopenhauer’s Will, the Unruly Ground of Being, Nothingness) and Nature Natured (Schopenhauer’s Representation, beings, the innumerable manifested orders of the world) [Editor’s note: this is a translation of Spinoza’s natura naturans—the underlying organizing force that shapes the world—and natura naturata—the world as perceived by the senses]. The term ‘nature’ in Ecstatic Naturalism clearly refers not merely to the material world and its physical laws (which are part of Nature Natured), but to the entirety of what is. Nature is whatever is, in whatever way: from mountains and rivers, to chairs, tables and microwaves, to desires and dreams, to numbers and language, to dominions, powers, potencies and spirits, to the various orders, domains, horizons, and contexts within which any of the previous categories obtain. The basic idea is that nature is, really by definition, too vast in scope and diversity to be summarized by a neat ontological summary such as ‘everything is mind.’

In relation to the dizzying infinity of the contemplation of this nature, the ontological distinction provides the beginnings of a framework in which to orient ourselves. Consciousness as such plays a pivotal role, not just epistemologically, but metaphysically as well. The realms of Nature Natured are orderly, meaningful, and most of all, knowable. Thus, again by definition, Nature Natured is that which in principle can be known to beings such as ourselves. Following a trajectory laid by Kant, Schopenhauer, and Rorty, we can say that if it is knowable, it must be the kind of thing that can be known. And the only kind of thing that can be known is knowledge. It must be ideal or mind-y in substance. Thus, the basic orderliness of nature is that order ‘given’ to it by consciousness: space, time, and the categories. Ecstatic Naturalism does not say that mind is all there is (How could we know that?). But it does not rest at the edge of the Kantian precipice either. The primary way in which it moves past Kant, and even Schopenhauer, is by means of the betweenness structures that bridge the divide from Nature Naturing into Nature Natured.

These structures are the channels or modes by which the raw energies and potencies of Nature Naturing fuel, support, and generally pervade the orders of Nature Natured. We experience them as ‘ordinary’ things, relations, images, and events that are supercharged with emotional and metaphysical meaning and import. In other words, we experience them as sacred. A song, painting, or sunset is experienced (in a specific time and place) as not only beautiful, but intrinsically valuable. If the aesthetic and semiotic energy has ways to ground itself in the orders of the world in stable and anti-entropic ways, by means of good culture and good practices of integration, then they form a powerful wellspring of meaning, joy, and enlightened human community. If the psychic energy overpowers cultural or personal modes of integration, they may be not only destructive, but positively demonic.

Human consciousness stands at the border of the ontological divide. It is comparable to the location of the eye with respect to visual field. The eye has that which is in front of it, comprising all that can be seen. But the eye also has that which is behind it at any given time. Humans have a spatially-structured imagination, the mind’s eye, by which we can visualize that which is outside the visual range. Just so, the phenomenal self stands at the focal point between that of which it is or may be conscious (the orders of Nature Natured) and that which exists behind or beneath. But just as we have a visual imagination that allows a kind of epistemic access to that which is unseen, we also have a secondary self, a ‘higher’ or metaphysical self, which allows access to the betweenness structures that bridge the ontological divide. The ego self, or the ego dimension of the self, observes the icon, sunset, or purely imagined object in the ordinary fashion, while the deeper self experiences the flow of energy that takes the former perception as a channel or container.

Just as water takes the shape of the riverbed, pipe or glass that holds it, the sacred takes the shape of the phenomenal object that is then experienced as, and indeed is, sacred. Ecstatic practices (intensive meditation, drumming, lucid dreaming, active imagination, psychedelics, contemplative prayer, archery, etc.) train and attune the mind to deepen, stabilize, and open up these channels. Can any perceptual object be a container for the sacred in this way? Yes and no. Larger cups hold more water. The largest phenomenal containers for sacred energy are called the Archetypes. For this reason, the Archetypes provide the best available epistemic access to the character, potencies, and/or functioning of Nature Naturing.

To be clear, images of the archetypes are fully in and of Nature Natured. They are experienced in the familiar perceptual ways in which we experience things, relations, and events in the world as representation. Yet, when they become translucent to the intense light of Nature Naturing, they provide indirect clues about those aspects of the latter that are in some sense knowable to us. To the extent that they are knowable to us, just as in the case of ordinary objects of perception, they obey principles or logical laws that are ideal or mental in character. The archetypes are not structured by time, space and the categories, but they do have a logical structure of their own. That structure, in turn, gives us epistemic access to the human personal and collective unconscious. And insofar as the human unconscious is the non-local location of Nature Naturing within the human process, we have indirect access to the ‘how’ of Nature Naturing.

Images, icons and myths are not intrinsically sacred. Neither is the Unruly Ground of Being. Nature naturing is not God. Yet, when the human observer is appropriately situated with respect to the image, in the context of emotional and practical needs and desires that tend to pull the self into entropic disarray, the image may be experienced as sacred, pouring forth anti-entropic energies that are felt as not only spiritual in nature, but spiritualizing, lifting the self up out of the fully immanent travails of ego-based striving. But that numinous energy does not come from the image. Actually, it comes from the wellspring of Nature Naturing deep within of collective/cosmic unconscious, and is projected (in the familiar modality of psychic projection) into the object. So the ultimate source of the numinous is not the image, nor the (personal) unconscious, but Nature Naturing. The archetypes are the channel, the bridge that maintains a continuous logical structure in all these different orders: from the Unruly Ground, through the collective and then the personal unconscious, out into perceptual reality, then reflected back to the conscious self. Not just any shape, image, gestalt, or topology has the robustness to obtain in all these different orders—never mind maintain the internal cohesiveness to not only survive but bear the weight of such powerful psychic energy; the ones that do teach us about the relations between the different spheres. Thus, Ecstatic Naturalism allows for a greater refinement of our ontological apparatus. Instead of being limited to two basic parts of Nature, we also have the ability to categorize the archetypes into natural kinds, which in turn reflect the basic spheres or dimensions of how the energies and potencies of Nature Naturing become gradually condensed or crystalized into the orders of Nature Natured.

The shared mistake of Panpsychism and Idealism is to take human consciousness as the norm or standard, and then project that definition of (phenomenal) consciousness out into the rest of reality. This is the kind of anthropomorphism that makes those doctrines suspicious. Ecstatic naturalism argues that human explicit self-consciousness is one species of a much larger category. We can’t say much, or at least, not as much as we would like, about that broader category. We know what the colors of the visible spectrum look like. What would we say to someone who asked, what would microwaves look like if we could see them? We know about the kinds of interests and motivations that drive human life. As to other forms of life, the more distant they are from the human in environment and structure, the less capable we are of imagining them. We could say, as a matter of definition, that everything that is, is consciousness. But the price would be to admit that we only know what consciousness is in the human context. Thus, we could say that other powers and potencies that dwell within, and emerge from, the unruly ground of being are conscious in substance: but we would not know what that means. No doubt certain aspects of that singular plurality of consciousness would be more or less continuous with the energies that are funneled through the archetypes into human realms; but what about others? Thus, despite its very close affinity to Analytic Idealism, Ecstatic Naturalism remains methodologically committed to Jamesian pluralism.

Human consciousness is just an outpost or ordinal location of the Divine Mind. In some respects, each sentience is a ‘part’ of the cosmic mind, like so many distributed micro-processors in a single computational architecture. But in certain respects, the entirety of consciousness is present in any of its token locations (though not normally available to ordinary consciousness, thankfully—that would be very distracting). The relation between consciousness and the unconscious as it appears in the ontological divide on the one hand, and in the human mind on the other, does a lot of the heavy lifting. Humans can and do peel back the divide between the phenomenal consciousness of their external and internal life-world and the energies of the unconscious. The Archetypes are the channels by which those energies flow out from the unconscious of nature itself into the manifested orders of the world. Some percentage of those arrive within the human horizon; others, no doubt, land on other shores elsewhere, or shipwreck along the way.

Clearly, not all of reality is accessible to and for human consciousness. Just as our planet occupies a tiny and insignificant corner of one galaxy among billions, human consciousness is one tiny branch of the Great Tree that is Nature Natured in its inconceivable vastness. Nevertheless, it is a branch of that tree. How many archetypes are there? Countless. Do they depend on us for their existence? It seems unlikely. Yet, certain ones of them seem very closely tied to distinctively human processes, like childbirth, aging, teaching, and playing. To the extent that other animals, aliens, and discarnate transdimensional explorers participate in these same modes of being, they are dependent upon, and constrained by, the same archetypes that rule over the human realm. But what other archetypes rule over their worlds, or how, we cannot say.

 

Selected Works on Ecstatic Naturalism:

Corrington, Robert. Nature’s Religion. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.

Corrington, Robert. A Semiotic Theory of Philosophy and Religion. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Corrington Robert. Deep Pantheism: Towards a New Transcendentalism. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.

Niemoczynski, Leon J. & Nguyen, Nam T. (eds.) A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.

Non-dualism in ancient Greece? Dionysus as infinite, eternal conscious life

Reading | Mythology

Michael Asher, BA, FRSL | 2024-07-21

In Dona Tartt’s postmodern Gothic masterpiece The Secret History (1992) Richard Papen, a young Californian from a modest background, joins a band of undergraduates studying classics at a prestigious college in Vermont. Richard later discovers that members of the group, led by the formidably intellectual Henry, have managed to raise the ancient Greek god Dionysos, and in a frenzied bacchanalian dash across neighbouring fields, have murdered a local farmer. Bunny, a member of the group excluded from the ritual, finds out the truth and proceeds to blackmail the others. Drawn in by Henry, Richard becomes an accessory to the murder of Bunny, whom the group pushes over a cliff. None of the students is charged with the murders, though Henry later shoots himself dead, having first killed the band’s only female member, Camilla.

For many readers, The Secret History may be their first introduction to Dionysos, the mysterious Olympian deity who seems to be acquiring increasing significance in these times. Tartt, a classics student, is said to have based the novel on Euripides’ play Bacchae, first performed in Athens in about 406 BC—the only ancient Greek drama to feature Dionysos as the main character. The theme of The Secret History, though—the tension between control and chaos—comes from Tartt’s study of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche proposes a contradiction between Apollonian and Dionysian influences, that is, between control and chaos respectively. Though some Hellenic scholars rejected Nietzsche’s thesis from the outset, it dominated the twentieth century zeitgeist to the extent that the most terrible wars in history were frequently described as Dionysian.

It is this Nietzschean concept of Dionysos—as an embodiment of the incipient chaos lurking under the veneer of civilization, waiting to explode, and sometimes exploding—that Tartt has taken up in The Secret History. Her theme is, in fact, an endorsement of the foundation myth of industrial society: the view of civilization as a valiant defender holding back the savage beast lurking in every human, which, if not diverted, may burst forth and destroy society itself. As one of Tartt’s characters puts it, “those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free … often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely” [1].

This view is, of course, a take on Thomas Hobbes’s pronouncement in Leviathan (1651) that life in a state of nature is a war of all against all—solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short—a condition of chaos that can, conveniently for the authorities, only be prevented by submission to a sovereign power. Even today this is the vision of reality most people hold, despite the fact that, with the growing chaos in the world in the face of ever tighter control structures, it begins to look suspiciously anaemic. With regard to Tartt’s novel in particular, as Maria Grip has astutely pointed out,

it might not be as simple as saying that control versus chaos is presented in The Secret History. I would instead argue that it is rather the idea of having control that ultimately is the creator of the chaos. From this point of view, chaos is born out of different aspects of control rather than working as an antithesis to it. [2]

In other words, while Tartt’s intention may have been to express the Nietzschean opposition between Apollonian control and Dionysian chaos, what is actually being demonstrated here—albeit inadvertently—is the fact that chaos is the product of the Apollonian lust to control.

Interest in the Dionysian has proliferated in recent times, with hundreds of new books, articles and academic papers appearing on the subject. Edith Hall has pointed out that more Greek tragedy—including Bacchae—has been staged over the past decades than at any other period since classical times. “Translated, adapted, staged, sung, danced, parodied, filmed, enacted,” she has written, it “has proved magnetic to writers and directors searching for new ways in which to pose questions to contemporary society” [3]. The Dionysos featured in these studies and performances, though, is, by and large, not the mad, destructive god of Tartt and Nietzsche. It is the Dionysos whom, among scores of other names, the ancient Greeks called The Undivided: non-death, the nondual, the force of life.

Scholar Carl Kerenyi—who collaborated with Jung on his archetypes theory—was perhaps the first modern to rediscover the full nature of Dionysos. Karenyi was keen to make a distinction between authentic Greek myths and the way these myths had been misused to create modern myths—notably by writers like Nietzsche [4]. On a visit to the ruins of the ancient Greek theatre at Cumae in southern Italy in 1931—almost sixty years after The Birth of Tragedy—Kerenyi had an epiphany. He had already accepted that Dionysos represented wine, ecstasy, and animalism—and theatre—but was also aware that there were more representations of this god in myth, image, and ritual expression than any other divinity in the Greek pantheon. This suggested a central importance beyond the limits of his apparent roles.

Examining the stones of the ancient theatre—how they had been cracked and overgrown by tangled tree-roots, and hemmed in by bushes and vines—Karenyi had a sudden sense that Dionysos was still present. These vines and bushes were in essence the same that had existed here in ancient times, and this essence, he felt, was Dionysos. Or rather, Dionysos was the immanent and transcendent life force of which the trees, vines and everything else—including animals and humans—were manifestations. This, he thought, explained the crucial role of Dionysos in ancient Greek culture: the god, he concluded, was no less than the archetypal image of zoe, indestructible life.

In his book Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, published years later, Karenyi points out that, although in Latin there is only one word for life—vita—in Ancient Greek there are two: bios and zoe. While bios (as in biology) means finite or individual life, zoe (as in zoology) means infinite or indestructible life. Bios applies to the characterized life of an individual being, which may be summed up in biography, but zoe, being infinite and eternal, cannot be described or summarized: it is, in other words, the ontological primitive. “Since the basis of every individuation is represented by zoe,” Kristof Fenyesi has written, “the core of experience concerning zoe cannot embrace the experience of evanescence or ceasing. Death always happens on the level of bios, individual life, and not on the level of zoe, which serves as a basis for all individual bios.” Death (thanatos) is, in a spiritual sense, zoe’s opposite, so zoe might be referred to as non-death. This is why, as Fenyesi puts it, “the notion of soul, that is psyche, is not associated with bios, but zoe” [5]. To use a familiar analogy from nondualism, zoe is the ocean and bios the waves. The waves are transitory modes of the ocean, distinguishable from it but not separate. Thanatos is a transformation that occurs when the wave dissolves and merges back into the ocean, from which it was never actually separate in the first place.

If, far from being a symbol of chaos, Dionysos was, in fact, as James Hillman has put it, the Soul of Nature [6], how could Nietzsche have got it wrong? And if Dona Tartt really based her Dionysos in The Secret History on Bacchae, what interpretation of that play gave the impression that Dionysos was a quite different entity? “The overcoming of the Nietzschean conception of Dionysos … has now become fact,” wrote Darisusz Karlowicz in 2021, three decades after The Secret History. “The image of a mad, barbaric … god of myth … is being replaced by a picture (much closer to historical reality) of … a god whose action may consolidate order and give peace” [7].

In Bacchae, Dionysos appears in Thebes, disguised as a mortal, accompanied by a band of women followers, the Bacchae. His purpose is to confront the king, Pentheus, who has refused to acknowledge his divinity. Dionysos has already driven the women of Thebes—including Pentheus’s mother, Agave—into a frenzy, causing them to leave their domestic duties and dash off into the mountains to celebrate him in song and dance, becoming maenads, or wild women. Pentheus has Dionysos thrown into jail, but the god escapes effortlessly, causing the royal house to collapse in the process. Dionysos then tempts Pentheus to go and spy on the maenads in the mountains, dressed in female garb. Watching the wild women from a tree, the king is torn to pieces, his unknowing mother Agave being his foremost assailant. Agave brings the remains of Pentheus’s body back, believing it to be that of a lion, and is devastated when she realizes that it is her son.

Many modern scholars have regarded the play as morally ambiguous, and its theme as an unresolved contradiction. What concerns them mostly is the degree of violence and cruelty Dionysos appears to display. Donald Mastronarde has referred to this as a tragic dilemma: “One must both acknowledge Dionysos’s divinity,” he wrote, “and recognize the god’s potential for cruel violence and amoral excess” [8]. The Apollonian view of the Dionysian is the perspective of industrial civilization, in which materialism—the narrative of the left-hemisphere or ego—is dominant, with its individualist and literalist character. In this view, the king—Pentheus—is a hero defending the status quo—the polis—against a foreign religious cult, the acceptance of which is likely to lead to the breakdown of all boundaries, the materialist conception of chaos. As Richard Seaford has pointed out, though, there is no real dilemma here. “If you reject or try to suppress Dionysos, he may cruelly destroy you,” he has written, “and so you should acknowledge him. It is only a dilemma if in acknowledging him there are bad consequences, which there are not” [9].

Seaford has explained that Bacchae is best understood in terms of its context: fourth century BC Athens. This was a precarious time for the Athenian state, deeply enmeshed as it was in the war with Sparta, which would ultimately lead to its downfall. In this milieu, Dionysos—The God Who Comes—appears as a warning against hybris (hubris), the state of ego-exaltation as displayed by Pentheus the turannos (tyrant), whose family has seized control by force. Autocratic, violent, impious, and lacking in self-control, Pentheus proposes slaughtering the maenads as if they were wild animals, despite the fact that they comprise the entire adult female population of the polis, including his own mother. In attemping to exert absolute control over the community—in effect, over nature—Pentheus himself has created the moral vacuum into which his nemesis—Dionysos—is bound to enter. To the Athenian audience, Dionysos would not have been the stranger he appears in Pentheus’s eyes, but the principal of the Eleusinian mysteries, the secret, life-affirming rite-of-passage at the heart of their official religion. Pentheus, though, sees Dionysos only as a threat to his personal power, and rejects his claim to be acknowledged as divine. The violence and apparent cruelty Pentheus and his family suffer as a result of this rejection is symbolic, a graphic representation of their karma, the mental agony that ultimately results from the violation of the sacred. The violent episodes “are not to be taken literally in terms of themselves,” James Hillman has written, “but as horror stories within the entirety of the psychic process” [10].

So again, if the original Dionysis of Greek myth—a Being of Light—is not the fantasy god of Nietzsche and his student, Tartt, where did their idea of the dark Dionysian come from? For the answer, we have to look first to Christianity, which, from its inception as an official religion, regarded the Dionysian cult as its main rival. Dionysos’s messianic nature, as witnessed in Bacchae, as well as many other aspects of the Dionysos myth, are so close to the Christ-story as to suggest syncretism. Christian clipping eventually pared Dionysos down to the devil—complete with goat’s horns—and the Dionysian to the demonic. The Dionysian orgazein—the sacred celebration of zoe in song and dance—became, in Christian hype, the orgy, a profane party involving drunkenness and sexual licence. This trope—James Hillman calls it black maenadism—emerges in late medieval Europe as the witches’ sabbath: it is in precisely these terms that Pentheus imagines the behaviour of the maenads in Bacchae. In the play, though, there is no evidence that the wild women do more than abandon their domestic tasks and celebrate Dionysos with music and dancing. The carnal frenzy Tartt’s characters invoke in The Secret History is closer to black maenadism than to its authentic counterpart, and her Dionysos is closer to the Christian devil.

The second aspect of the Nietzschean Dionysos-as-Chaos story is a case of mistaken identity. Nineteenth-century “notions of Dionysos come principally from scholars working in … German,” Hillman wrote, “Dionysos is conflated with Wotan and the fear of Dionysos is confounded with justifiable dread from that primordial German shadow, Wotan. Dionysian … consciousness is distorted by the Wotanic perspective” [11]. Noting that Wotan stands for devils, pagan distractions, and destruction of culture, Hillman also records that Jung himself was aware of the tendency to conflate Dionysos with Wotan. “In Nietzsche’s biography,” Jung wrote, “you will find irreducible proof that the god he meant was really Wotan, but … he called him Dionysos” [12]. It is not Dionysos, but Wotan, the dominating, aggressive, all-masculine warrior-god, with his ego-exulting, Apollonian aspect—hybris—who actually characterizes the great and terrible wars and genocides of the twentieth century.

If Dionysos appeared in person in the Athenian psyche—that is, for the first time as the main character in a public drama—at such a perilous period in Athenian history, is it a coincidence that he has appeared at a parallel time in ours? Historians of the theatre, such as Edith Hall, date the epiphany of Dionysos in the modern age to Dionysos in ‘69, an adaptation of Bacchae staged in New York in 1968, said to be the first ever public performance of Euripides’ play in America. Ironically, or perhaps intentionally, this was the same historical moment when Dionysos’s Nietzschean rival, Apollo, reached his modern apotheosis in the Apollo 11 moon-landing (July 1969) —for some, the never-to-be-repeated apex of industrial civilization.

If the peak of anything is the moment in which its antithesis appears, we may be at the beginning of an age that is truly Dionysian. Drawing on the work of Karenyi and others, James Hillman has pointed to Dionysos as the archetype of a rejuvenated nondualist paradigm. The Apollonian weltanschauung (worldview), with its dismemberment of wholeness into separate objects, its war-mentality, its warrior-hero cult, its misogyny, and its ever-more-drastic attempts to control and exploit nature, has inevitably led to the current meta-crisis—that is, to world chaos. “What we have been calling consciousness all these years,” Hillman has written, “is really the Apollonian mode as hardened by the hero into a strong ego and which has predetermined the Dionysian in terms of its own bias” [13]—i.e., as chaos.

The Dionysos of Bacchae comes not to drive people insane—as Pentheus sees it—but with the shocking revelation that those who reject the nondual Dionysian consciousness are more mad than those who accept it. The frenzy of the god’s maenad celebrants is not, as Tartt has it in The Secret History, a homicidal insanity fuelled by drugs and sex, but the ecstasy of liberation from the madness of a life that has severed them from nature, the divine, and their own spirit. “The faithful of … Dionysus seek contact with those forces which animate both the infrahuman and suprahuman,” Alain Danielou writes in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy, “and lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life” [14]. Upsetting the order of material life, from the Apollonian point of view, is chaos. From the Dionysian side, though, it is awakening to zoe: to the knowledge that there is, in fact, a higher and more potent order than that imposed by tyrants.

Dionysos is not a warrior hero of the Apollonian type. Appearing even in Bacchae as an effeminate male, he is mostly a god of women. Though his main task is to liberate the feminine, this implies more than the emancipation of the female sex. It means freedom for what Hillman has called the psychological feminine, including the feminine aspect of men—the anima—which has for too long cowered under the Apollonian shadow. It is surely the application of Wotanic-Apollonian traits of aggression, and lust for power—the psychological masculine—that have brought about the current chaos. Susan Rowland, author of Remembering Dionysos, has suggested that Dionysos might be considered a masculine form of the Earth Mother. While the Earth goddess is regarded as feminine in that she is the mother of all things, Rowland says, she is actually undivided into the binary of male and female: she is potentially both but effectively neither. As a goddess, she is not the exclusive property of women: she belongs to all. In a similar way, Dionysos, though regarded as masculine, contains much of the Earth Mother within his being, and possesses a fluidity that could be construed as combining both genders [15]. It is perhaps in this sense that the ancient Greeks regarded Dionysos as The Undivided—the archetype of the web of connectedness, of zoe, through whom the essential nonduality of consciousness can be expressed [16].

 

Biblography

Anthony, Maggy. Women and Dionysus: Appearances & Exile in History, Culture, and Myth, 2021.

Barzini, Luigi. Mystery Cults, Theatre and Athenian Politics: A Reading of Euripides Bacchae and Aristophanes, The Frogs, 2021.

Bramshaw, Viki. Dionysos, Exciter to Frenzy: A Study of the God Dionysos, History, Myth & Lore, 2013.

Carpenter, Thomas H. & Faraone, Christopher A. Eds. Masks of Dionysos, 1992.

Danielou, Alain. Gods of Love & Ecstasy: The Traditions of Dionysos & Shiva, 1979.

de la Fuente, David Hernández. Parallels between Dionysos and Christ in Late Antiquity: Miraculous Healings in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, 2015.

Detienne, Marcel. Dionysos at Large. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 1989.

Dodds, E.R. The Greeks & the Irrational, 1962.

Dorozewski, Filip & Karlowicz, Darius. Eds. Dionysos & Politics: Power and Authority in the Graeco-Roman World, 2012.

Euripides. Bacchae, Translated, Introduced, with a Commentary by Richard Seaford, 1996.

Fenyvesi, Kristof. Dionysian Biopolitics: Karl Karenyi’s Concept of Indestructible Life. Comparative Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Dionysos Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World, 2014.

Grip, Maria. Aspects of Control in Dona Tartt’s The Secret History, Degree Thesis, Lund University Centre for Language and Literature Studies, 2018.

Hall, Edith, Macintosh, Fiona & Wrigley, Amanda. Eds. Dionysus Since ‘69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, 2004.

Hillman, James. The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1998.

Karenyi, Karl. Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976.

Nietzsche, Freidrich. The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music, 1872.

Odorisio, Daniel M. Dionysos in Depth: Mystes, Madness & Method in James Hillman’s Revisioning of Psychology, in Depth Psychology & Mysticism, eds. T. Cairon & Daniel M. Odorisio, 2018.

Otto, Walter F. Dionysos, Myth & Cult, 1965.

Perris, Simon. The Gentle, Jealous God: Reading Euripides Bacchae in English, 2016.

Rowland, Susan. Remembering Dionysos: Revisioning Psychology & Literature in C.G. Jung & James Hillman, 2017.

Rowland, Susan. Youtube Interview, Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology & Literature in Jung & Hillman—Susan Rowland, Earth Climate Dreams (youtube.com).

Seaford, Richard. Dionysos, 2006.

Taxidou. Dionysos and Divine Violence: A Reading of The Bacchae, in Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012.

Taylor-Perry, Rosemarie. The God Who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Revisited, 2003.

 

Citations

1. Tartt, Secret History, 40-41.
2. Grip, Control in Secret History, 2.
3. Hall, Dionysos since ‘69, p. 2.
4. Fenyvesi, Biopolitics, p. 3.
5. Ibid.
6. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 269.
7. Dorozewski & Karlowicz, Dionysos & Politics, p. 3.
8. Seaford, in Dorozewski & Karlowicz, Dionysos & Politics, p. 36.
9. Ibid.
10. Hillman, Myth, p. 278.
11. Ibid., p. 268.
12. Ibid., p. 267.
13. Ibid., p. 290.
14. Danielou, Gods, p. 24.
15. Rowland, Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology & Literature in Jung & Hillman—Susan Rowland, Earth Climate Dreams (youtube.com).
16. Rowland, Remembering, p. 174.

If you dream of a triangle, where does the triangle exist?

Reading | Metaphysics

Arthur Haswell, BA | 2024-07-06

All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself

Reading | Neuroscience

Aditya Prasad | 2024-06-23

We hallucinate our perceived realities. If you haven’t encountered this idea before, then I encourage you to watch this TED talk by neuroscientist Anil Seth (titled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”). Beneath the video you will find numerous highly-upvoted comments along these lines:

Ah yes watching this during an existential crisis in the middle of the night was a great idea.

and:

That’s the type of title that causes an existential crisis in my mind before I even click on the video.

Yet, typically, shortly after making such comments, people go right back to living their lives as though everything were completely normal and their worlds, as experienced, were external to them. Why? Because our minds won’t easily let us internalize this knowledge deeply enough for us to see its full implications; to ‘peek behind the curtain,’ as it were. Indeed, Dr. Seth himself has apparently not done so. How do I know?

Because once you experience the trick firsthand, you see that even brains are hallucinated constructs—and therefore cannot be the actual things doing the hallucinating. Afterward, you would make sure to title your talk ‘Your mind hallucinates your conscious reality,’ so as not to reinforce the mistaken notion that brain = mind. That equality is itself part of the hallucination—perhaps its most fundamental trick.

The title of the talk (as well as its content) induces a ‘trippy’ feeling in viewers, only to quench it by reassuring them that at the basis of the illusion is something solid and familiar: good ol’ brains. But what are brains, if not physical structures made of the very stuff whose existence was just called into question? In this way, the rug that was yanked out from under our feet is very neatly placed back there, almost without our noticing.

Dr. Seth would no doubt contest these claims. Surely it doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen ‘behind the curtain’ firsthand, or merely understood the process intellectually. In both cases, your objective knowledge is the same. If such an experience were to radically alter your worldview, we should chalk it up to your (very real) brain tricking you into doing so. Therefore, why bother to experience it firsthand?

This question—namely, why bother?—is precisely how your mind tricks you into never ‘peering behind the curtain.’ There is something that it does not want you to see. After all, it is generating this hallucination for a reason.

The truth is that most of us have never actually looked our experience fully in the face before. There is an astonishing miracle unfolding before (or more accurately, within) us in every moment, whose glory is impossibly beyond measure. Yet we somehow never notice it. To borrow a line from the Bible: “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see My face, and live.” I do not believe this line is alluding to physical death, but instead to a process that psychonauts sometimes refer to as ego death. It is impossible to perceive the infinite glory of Reality and still maintain the illusion of being a separate self lost in a fundamentally external reality. It is only to preserve our egoic structure that our minds make us perceive a mundane, intrinsically lifeless physical reality.

Elsewhere, the nature of God is said to be that of an uncreated light. In what sense is it ‘uncreated’? The infinite Light of which your reality is made actually precedes your notions of time and causality. It is possible to directly experience this fact just prior to your mind constructing a model of how your reality came about, what it is for, etc.; prior to any notion of creation and destruction. Such a perception is often described as timeless.

Until we see this clearly, we are always subtly looking away from our direct experience, by feeding ourselves clever stories about how we already know what it is and how it came to be, thereby convincing ourselves that we don’t really have to look. Meditation is nothing more than the practice of undoing these stories, culminating in a moment of looking directly at what has always been right under our very noses without our noticing it. It is described as en-light-ening for a reason.

But why should such a perception alter your worldview? And why would you take it seriously even if it did? This is the hardest thing to communicate—and I believe it is the root cause of the endless debates in which materialists and idealists continually talk past each other.

At the heart of such metaphysical debates is, of course, the question of what is real. They seem to be about which of two things (consciousness or matter) is more real, but they’re actually about what the word ‘real’ ought to refer to in the first place.

If you have not directly experienced the fact that your reality is a hallucination, then you can still harbor the illusion that your model of reality is grounded in something solid and dependable: that it points to reality. But if you have had the experience of entering your perception prior to the point that your hallucination of reality has fully formed—and, crucially, you had enough presence of mind to clearly see what was going on in there—you will have discovered firsthand that your model of reality has no such solid basis.

That it has no such basis isn’t a controversial point, even amongst materialists. To quote arch-materialist Sean Carroll: “We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.” In the context of his writing, he is explaining why we should trust materialism even though it is (in a very precise sense) no more likely to be true than competing hypotheses. Namely: since it is logically impossible to prove any model of reality correct (or even to put accurate probabilities on them, absent external information that is by definition inaccessible), we are free to pick what we consider real.

It is possible to maintain this position right up until the point when you look your experience fully in the face for the first time. In that moment, you finally realize how comically absurd it is to use the word ‘real’ to refer to something that you have literally no reason to believe in. You were only doing so to maintain a particular illusion; to hide something from yourself. In a flash, that word—namely, ‘real’—gets repurposed to refer to that-which-is-completely-unmistakable—the only thing that word could possibly deserve to mean.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Philip K. Dick

It is impossible to put too fine a point on this. If it is unclear what I mean when I say that you have “literally no reason to believe in” physical reality, please read this piece. I mean it in a precise sense; one that philosophers (materialists included) have already fully conceded. Yet it is not enough to understand this fact intellectually, because there is a deep aspect of your mind that will still sneakily hide its full import from you. It is protecting your egoic structure (for which you should thank it).

For the same reason, it might be difficult to see what I’m pointing to when I reference “this-which-is-completely-unmistakable.” It is literally the only thing you have ever encountered (or ever could encounter) and yet our minds reduce it to just another thing; no big deal. This reduction will continue to occur until the rug is firmly pulled out from under your reality for long enough to see what remains. Only at this point are you forced to confront the infinite splendor that never began and never lets up—that which properly deserves the exalted designation ‘real.’

For this reason, these two groups—those who have fully penetrated the illusion (even once) and those who have not—are fated to talk past each other. It is inevitable; a tragicomic joke that Reality plays on us (or really, that we play on ourselves). Luckily, it is possible to transition from one group to the other—but be forewarned: that transition is a one-way street.

The ‘Fall of Man’ as the Freudian original loss

Reading | Psychology

Dr. Ludwig Sachs | 2024-06-09

Analytical Idealism’s assumption that the mind is the fundamental basis of the world raises profound questions about the relationship between structure and subject. A useful approach to discussing these questions can be found in structural psychoanalysis, as developed by the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan.¹ It conceptualizes “the unconscious” as a language-like structure from which the subject emerges. By bringing structural psychoanalysis into dialogue with the principles of Analytic Idealism, we open up new ways of exploring the complexity of human experience.

This essay is also intended to make a complementary contribution to Arsanious’ profound analysis of the biblical Fall of Man, in which he considers the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal.² I build on his argument that the misrecognition of these levels raises central questions about our experience of the world. By integrating structural psychoanalysis, I try to shed light on how unconscious processes influence this misunderstanding and shape our experience of reality.

 

Introduction

Structural psychoanalysis, which emerges from the therapeutic experience of treating symptoms by speaking, assumes that the unconscious has a language-like structure. To say that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” from the point of view of psychoanalysis, is the same as saying that “the unconscious is structured.” For structural psychoanalysis, a structure is always the structure of a language. The material of the unconscious is therefore of a linguistic nature: it consists of signifiers.

 

Subject and structure

What is the difference between a signifier and a sign? The signifier, in contrast to the sign, is not that which represents something for someone, but that by which the subject is represented for another signifier. The sentence “the unconscious is structured like a language” does not just mean that the unconscious consists of signifiers; it is about the unconscious and the relationship between structure and subject. This is where psychoanalysis differs from the natural sciences and linguistics, which exclude the subject. If psychoanalysis is about structure, then it is about the relationship between structure and subject. This is the strange thing about it, because it implies that the subject is inseparable from every structure. Or can you imagine a structure without a subject being involved?

 

The Signifier

“The signifier is that by which the subject is represented for another signifier.” This formulation is a deliberate departure from the classic definition of a sign, which states: “A sign represents something for someone.” A sign is about representing a consciousness. Structural psychoanalysis, on the other hand, eliminates this direct reference: the signifier does not represent something for someone, but for another signifier. This relational structure of representation eludes consciousness.

 

Interaction between signifiers

In structural psychoanalysis, it is not the individual signifier that represents the subject, but a chain of signifiers. The subject is indirectly contained in this chain. The chain continues from one signifier to the next. In a simple sentence such as “I love you,” the subject is represented by the signifier “I” for the signifier “love.” And “love” leads to the signifier “you.” What is important here is that the subject is not the signifier “I” but instead only represented by it, and that the representing signifier refers to another signifier. The subject is determined by this concatenation of signifiers, it is the product of this connection and not what controls the concatenation. The subject is a subjectum, a subordinate.

 

The unconscious as knowledge

In structural psychoanalysis, the unconscious is understood as a chain of signifiers. Since it is about the relationship between signifiers, the unconscious is a knowledge whose simplest form is the difference between the signifiers. The subject appears twice here: as that which is deciphered in this knowledge and as that which deciphers this knowledge. The process of deciphering the unconscious takes the place of what is commonly referred to as self-awareness. This definition also sets itself apart from the idea that psychoanalysis is concerned with the “subject” in the everyday sense, a subject that communicates with another—i.e., with “intersubjectivity.” The relationship at issue here is one between signifiers, not subjects.

 

Differentiality of the signifiers

In structural psychoanalysis, the signifier is seen as an elementary component of the (language) structure, which is not defined by its own substance but by its relationship to, and difference from, other signifiers. Signifiers have no inherent meaning or substance; their meaning arises solely from their position and function within the structure of the signifier network. The signifier is nothing but the difference from all other signifiers.

The ultimate basis for the functioning of the language structure as a system of signifiers is therefore the difference, the difference as such, the absolute difference. This difference is the difference that underpins the signifier system.

Structural psychoanalysis shares the emphasis on a fundamental difference, for example, with the concept of the “Ur-alternatives” of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007),³ a renowned German physicist and philosopher who argued that the basis of the physical world consists not of material particles or waves, but of fundamental binary decisions—the Ur-alternatives. These decisions, similar to bits in digital computer technology, represent the simplest form of information: the choice between two options. Von Weizsäcker saw in these yes/no decisions a primary ontology and argued that physics can be understood as a form of information processing.

 

The narcissism of small differences

The concept of differentiality is based on what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” This narcissism refers to pure difference—to a “single trait.” The difference is so small that it is reduced to differentness, to a difference that indicates nothing more than just the presence of a difference. The “single trait” in Freud’s sense is based on absolute difference, on difference per se. It is difference reduced to empty diversity. By adopting a “single trait”—by constituting a small difference—the I (-ideal) is created through identification, which gives the subject a sense, a meaning. The single trait is therefore both identity and difference.

The “single trait” can be visualized with a tally. Each tally mark is both identical and different in relation to the other tally marks. It is identical to the others in that each can be exchanged with any other, it differs from the others in that it occupies a different position.

The subject is thus not located on the level of the one in the sense of totality, but of the countable individual. Identification with the “single trait” is identification as a single person, as a countable individual. This identification is at the same time the creation of a difference, the differentiation from others.

 

Trauma and primal repression

Why does the subject identify with the “single trait”? From a psychoanalytic perspective, the reason is that the subject insists on producing an experience of satisfaction that is exactly the same as an earlier one: the first foundation of the subject is the so-called primary identification and the associated experience of satisfaction that was connected with the first inscription of a marker, with the first inscription of a “single trait.” The erasure of this first foundation—the primary identification—is, in Freud’s terminology, the result of repressed trauma: “Urverdrängung,” the primal repression. In structural psychoanalysis, the primally repressed belongs to the order of the Real. The Real is that which absolutely resists verbalization and visualization in the course of psychoanalysis, that which cannot be symbolized and made conscious. Structural psychoanalysis thus refers to Freud’s fundamental concepts with which he attempted to explain certain profound psychological phenomena. Therefore, when interpreting dreams, one often encounters a critical point at which an entanglement of thoughts occurs that cannot be further unraveled. Freud referred to this point as the “navel of the dream.” This refers to the Real and bears witness to primal repression, a process in which the very first, fundamental psychological contents are repressed.

The concept of the Real is similar to Kant’s idea of the noumenal, as a reality that lies beyond our sensory experience. According to Kant, the noumenal remains unknowable to us, since our knowledge is based on the sensory experience of the phenomenal world—i.e., the contents of perception. Structural psychoanalysis agrees that the Real is unknowable, but emphasizes that the Real is inevitably involved and intervenes in our experience of the world, for which the analogy of linking Borromean rings⁴ can be used. It emphasizes the irrevocable presence of the Real for the subject by marking the boundaries of the symbolic and the imaginary and pointing to the unavoidable confrontation with that which eludes complete comprehension and representation.

Freud described what is originally repressed as the “ideational representation” of “das Ding,” the Freudian thing. What is “das Ding”? It is pure lack, original loss, although not a lost object in the conventional sense. The idea is the following: as soon as the subject refers to something as an object, something is already lost at the same time, “das Ding.” All possible real and ideal objects in their capacity as objects are only a vain substitute for “das Ding,” which is the name for the vain desire to return to a world before trauma, in which there was still no difference between the subject and his objects.

That which absolutely opposes symbolization by the unconscious can be determined more precisely on the basis of psychoanalytic experience. According to Freud, the unconscious cannot conceive of its own death or of sexual difference. The subject attempts to symbolize sexual difference and death, but is unable to do so.

 

The need for repetition

The subject now attempts in vain to repeat the original experience of satisfaction. Insistence in the form of repetition aims to reproduce the first foundation of the subject and thus produce an experience of satisfaction that is exactly the same as an earlier one. However, the repetition of a certain experience of satisfaction is only possible if the latter is identified in some way. This particular experience of satisfaction is identified by the single trait; it cannot be repeated other than by means of this marker, this absolute difference.

The marker abstracts the experience by labelling it as repeatable. However, it is precisely the uniqueness or specificity of the original experience that the subject longs for. The achievement of the same experience of satisfaction is therefore structurally impossible, because the marker transforms the experience into a repeatable state and thus eliminates its specific uniqueness.

This paradox—i.e., that the marker simultaneously represents the access to and the blockage of the specific experience of satisfaction—leads to the subject remaining trapped in a cycle of repetition. The structural impossibility of reproducing the repressed experience of satisfaction maintains the dynamic of repetition and drives the subject to try to achieve the unattainable.

 

The expulsion from paradise

Shouldn’t these basic structures of the subject also be found deep in the collective myths of humanity, and not only as pictorial metaphors, but as direct manifestations of the primally repressed itself? In this context, the narrative of the expulsion from paradise proves to be not only an allegorical tradition, but also a testimony to our “collective subject structure,” the archetypal anthropos that reveals the nature of human existence. It penetrates consciousness as a narrative that seeks to articulate the unspeakable and to grasp the fundamental core of our being. This story reflects the fate of humanity, which goes far beyond what could be understood as a metaphorical interpretation.

Man, as the image of God, as the ideational representation (“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’”⁵), embodies the primary identification, the original experience of satisfaction (“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good”). In this original state, man is in perfect, indiscriminate unity with the living Word of God, which contains no idea of death (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”⁶).

The creation of Eve from Adam’s ribs, the single trait of the “bony tally,” marks the difference between the sexes, which, however, man is not aware of (“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”).

The snake, as the embodiment of difference in itself, as a single trait in the form of a line and with a split tongue, introduces the desire to be equal to God. This is about the woman—i.e., the side of the human being that emerged from the single trait. The desire to be equal to God refers to the desire for the first experience of satisfaction via marking and identification (“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”). However, this means that the dynamic is subject to the above-mentioned structural impossibility or is inevitably associated with the loss of “das Ding.”

Man eats from the tree of knowledge, the capacity for binary differentiation of the “Ur-alternative” of good and evil. Good and evil for whom? For the “I”: by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the subject enters the world of signifiers and symbolic differences as an “I” through identification with the single trait. This action marks the beginning of the subject, but also the loss of immediate unity with the divine, which is now unattainable as “das Ding,” because it lies beyond the significant differences from which the subject emerges. This is how Adam and Eve recognize their difference, of which they had no idea beforehand (“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”).

The unity with God is broken, man disappears as a split or dissociated subject in the form of a question addressed to the “I” (“But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’”). God has become the Other, of which the “I” is afraid (“And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’”).

The fall into the phenomenal, which Arsanious refers to very aptly in his essay, therefore appears from this psychoanalytical perspective as the “I” development of the human being through the entry into the symbolic order. The subsequent expulsion from paradise and the loss of the immediate presence of God are the trauma of this fundamental separation. The access to paradise, to God and to the tree of life is lost, repressed (“He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”). God becomes “das Ding,” the unattainable object of desire.

From then on, the subject circles around this lost “Ding” of the primal repressed. And since humans, as the subjects of the unconscious, have no concept of death and their own sexual differentiations, it is impossible for them to symbolize death and sexual differentiations. Thus, the subject is condemned to encounter death in incessant procreation, a death it does not understand, in an endless attempt to approach the inexpressible, hoping for redemption.

 

Bibliography

1. https://www.lacanonline.com/ or https://lacan-entziffern.de/ (German)
2. https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-fall-into-the-phenomenal-how-idealism-can-help-the-creation-story-converge-with-deep-scientific-truth/reading/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4cker or https://youtu.be/txkh9xvpQAg?si=KjT3fWQqCUdeJnnn (German)
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borromean_rings
5. Old Testament, Genesis online https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=ESV
6. New Testament, Gospel of John online https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201&version=ESV