Truth and Falsehood

These days, given the dominance of scientific methods, there is little actual respect accorded the results of a human being sitting alone in a room. It is true that many resultant works from such a scenario are beloved: there are mass market fictions and non fictions that are created from isolation, there is this blog you are currently reading and, of course, millions of others. However the currency of Truth is not of the essence in isolated pursuits. Rather these days scientists, especially of the hardest variety are very much of a mind like Patricia Churchland, who flatly stated that there could only limited progress in understanding from a person sitting alone and thinking. If you thought this was bad, and wondered whether progress could be made through relation and conversation, biologist Simon Levay is on hand to assure us that no progress could be made in the realm of understanding human sexuality from sitting around and discussing it. Apparently sexuality is such a third person, objective part of life that only, say, brain imaging and controlled studies could get at the truth of sex.

These are views of life that could only arise when a significant part of the elites or leading intellectuals in a given culture have implicitly or explicitly rejected the notion of first person experiential consciousness, or at the very least, have relegated such consciousness to an illusory movie that plays as a result of neurons firing. The problem with this view is not that it is reductionist per se, but that it is so extreme and radical a reductionism.

These are the sort of sentiments and assertions which naturally flow from an age of the brain. Everything that is not strictly the product of specifically scientific laboratory experiment, as in minute monitoring of brain states and so on, is seen as unreliable and in some quarters unreal and speculative.

In such an age, one that Karl Popper would rightly call "scientistic", disciplines like philosophy and psychology are essentially getting replaced by neuroscience. What good is sitting alone in your room, as wrote Kander and Ebb in Cabaret, when you can go to the lab and find out why you really are the way you are, rather than relying on your poor misguided memories, recollections, feelings, everyday reasoning, ordinary observations?

On all of these blogs I have been sitting alone in a room typing. Quite literally too, as unlike many of my contemporaries it has not and is not on a laptop amidst a crowded public space, say, a coffee shop. Would you have more implicit respect for me dear reader were my results not dreamed up from out of my brain but backed by "studies" - able to posted all over the relationship section of the Huffington Post, with keywords like "controls" and data and all sorts of though experiments like dividing people in rooms and getting responses to games and puzzles involving ethical issues and life situations? If it involved the sort of topical fears and fads of the moment, like food and nutrition issues, and our perceptions of each other, and the roots of Tea Party racism, or why and how we are altruistic or religious, or selfish according to some research group, would not my blog be a little respectable?

Never has a culture been more obsessed with the truth and falsity of itself and its representations of itself. Perhaps, not coincidentally, never has a culture had more plainly fallacious views of things. (Some of the more improbable religious beliefs are held by over half the population). The two problems are connected because we fail to honor both Poetry and Science. We have forgotten that each have work to do, but, they are not meant to be in tandem. (There is that knee-jerk Holism again in wanting to merge the two).

This split between Truth or fact on the one hand, and illusion and imagination on the other, has been a problem for much of human history. It is not inevitably a problem, for example, that we must have parts of life that are imagined or pretend and parts of life that we take to be as factual as the ground beneath our feet, nor is it a problem that these two are kept separate in some way. It was such a problem for Plato that he would have banned poets from his Republic. Plato, for all of his unscientific pontificating about ethereal forms, had a suspicion of the poets because he was only concerned with that which could be said to be really existing. He thought human culture should be a kind of news program, whereby people are saved from the sorts of dreams and nightmares that come when people spend too much time alone.

(Interestingly enough, just as I write this scientists have discovered that it is bad for us to think alone. I am not a conspiracy minded soul but is this a mere coincidence that this proof of the perils of thinking alone is revealed at the very moment when we only respect team generated scientific discovery?)

We do justice to neither poetry and science and eventually one of the domains might, in an almost colonial manner, come to play the role of or replace the other.

This project is akin to Churchland's project when she insists that there is no "spooky" stuff. By "spooky" she means that there really aren't real values in the world floating in the ethers like Justice and Love and Beauty and so on. These are rather mere metaphors for habits we have gotten into in perception perhaps a result of some crude atavistic need to reproduce and similar stories. She is not saying the feelings aren't real; she is not saying we should stop using words like Love and Justice but that we have been wrong about their meaning and source all along. In essence we have been as wrong about ourselves as we were about chemistry and physics in previous centuries before further proof was available.

Of course to do this move is a damning indictment of this richest of cultures we inherit. It is also a way to flatter the present at the expense of our rich past. Could it be that Shakespeare has less truth or fact in his plays because he lacked our scientific advantages?

Or it is possible that one can make genuine discovery or progress in non scientific ways, in ways that consist of sitting alone in a room or talking to others in an informal context?

This blogger - your weary, jaded, middle aged musician and amateur philosopher, clad in my three piece flannel lounge suit (though with no pipe or martini in sight) is alone in a room and here to assert, without consulting the proofs of science, without benefit of experiments however controlled, that Love, Justice and Beauty and Truth are actually quite real. Indeed I submit that they are as real as tables and chairs. That they do not have an actual physical location in space or even in our brains is no argument for their non-existence. I know that this is a terribly old fashioned view, I know it is very unhip. While it does have a venerable and historically ancient pedigree, it might strike, you dearest reader, as simply too simple or traditional to be possibly true.

Yet this was the view of some of our greatest minds in many cultures around the globe. The details and tones might differ but the sentiment is the same: we have selves, our world is thoroughly suffused and shot through with value. We are conscious. We have experiences.

What I am talking about is not a religious view. Indeed one need not be religious in the slightest to hold to what I am now saying. The religious themselves play the same game as the scientists. They want to live in a world where all is reduced to third party or third person evidence; it is just that their criteria for what counts as evidence is so thoroughly baroque as to run to the opposite extreme to Churchland. Whereas she wants to edit and chisel cut away all non essentials within a hairbreadth of life, many if not most of our religions want to expand indefinitely until every part of our Soul is accounted for, explained, and mastered. The result is, in spite of the profound differences (Science makes a fetish of evidence, Faith makes a mockery of it) rather similar. I sense in both a touch of the Fundamentalist.

We live in a fundamentalist culture, as today's election results in the United States in part attest. We think in terms of ultimatums, in terms of final causes and at our worst, final solutions.

Let us never lose sight of the individual. It is the individual who is precious. Descartes made many an error but one thing he got right is that the one thing we can be sure of is that we are undergoing an experience, and through that experience we exist, though I would not want to limit it, as Descartes may have, to only thought.

After the earnestness of this blog I promise my next one will be more colorful. I promise to make sure and be more chatty and intimate, to "reach across the aisle". I promise to have some pictures to delight, amuse or distract.

But remember, after all, I am just a guy sitting alone in a room.

The Conceptualization of America

“Conception is a secondary process, not indispensable to life. It presupposes perception, which is self-sufficing, as all lower creatures, in whom conscious life goes on by reflex adaptations, show.”

“When we substitute concepts for percepts, we substitute their relations also. But since the relations are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled.” (WILLIAM JAMES, RADICAL EMPIRICISM,)

Kant said it best when he exhorted us to "dare to (or have the courage to) use your own reason", in his seminal work, WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT. Socrates of course told us to examine our life lest it be found wanting in qualities sufficient to justify even living. Many sages have found ways to encourage us and help us to see in new ways, to beat our own drums and newer rhythms, as in Thoreau, to make it new.

To a developing mind, say, in high school or college, this is heady stuff indeed. But the trouble remains, especially in our current cultural moment, that we take these encouragements and motivations in exactly the wrong way. Because, in a culture dominated by a facile and obscurantist war between science and religion, or between "Athens and Jeruselum", what gets covered over, obscured by TROMPE L'OEIL and ruse, is the nature of experience itself: we easily forget that both science and religion are guilty of the same problems, though perhaps they may be in a sort of funhouse mirror opposition to one another.

In religion the chief problem is the problem of literalism, "the great sin of the age" according to, rightly to my eye, Thomas More. That is, we take a religious text not as poetry designed for reflection and wisdom, but as a series of how-to manuals, often plagued by the basest or most world denying moralISM (as opposed to genuine morality, which is often much simpler and narrower a province than moralism). Moralism gets worked up over what we may or may not do with our sexual organs, or what thoughts we have in the course of a day, or all sorts of arbitrary displays of belittling power.

Genuine morality is as clear as light from the sun and is rather like the instinct healthily minded people feel at unnecessary pain inflicted on the other (say in forcing ourselves upon an other's body without their consent).

Of course to a literalist - and by literalist I don't mean here someone who is unable to read the latent or symbolic content of a religious book , but rather someone who reads religious texts as a kind of message or manual - to claim the great religions as works of poetry as James Carse rightly says they are, is to insult and demean religion because religion is like journalism and nonfiction and poetry is lesser stuff that is made up by fallen humans. But actually secular poetry has all of the truths you could ever want. Emily Dickinson describes how the brain works with an almost scientific accuracy. Wordsworth shows us how children are especially valuable in works like ODE and MICHAEL. And Sylvia Plath makes us feel how men hurt women and its consequences in DADDY.

Religion, when it is no longer read as poetry but instead as a kind of journalist's nonfiction also creates claims and assertions which inevitably alienate somebody else elsewhere: someone with different interests and claims. In this sense all religion runs the risk of exclusivity either implicitly or explicitly, a point made beautifully clear in Stephen Prothero's new GOD IS NOT ONE.

Look at how such claims create real estate disputes and have plagued the Middle East since the establishment of Israeli nationhood. Land is fetishized by both sides with accumulating claims and counterclaims until finally an explosion of rocks thrown, guns and missiles fired, and at the worst, suicidal bombs exploded: this makes the whole war a moot point since it becomes an orgy of self destruction.

The current Pope is so awful a figure, so tied to scripture as literal guidance, that he considers abortions and gays living together as the "greatest dangers" posed to the world today, as if global warming and terrorism (and the pedophilia in his own overweening, overrated and bloated institution) were but side issues when compared to the sanctity of legal contracts and the fetish for fetus. (In Gore Vidal's formulation).

This is the world when it becomes a great how-to manual; this is self help as totalitarian self abasement.

Now having said all of this you might suppose that I have some progressivist notions about the superiority of science.

Yet the other side, the secular, is little better. Ironically this is the side that purports to save us from the ills of the religions, chiefly by telling us what really exists and what has been proven as opposed to that which is imaginary. But science has been thoroughly intertwined with SCIENTISM, defined as the inappropriate application to a narrow scientific method to all understanding in all the different domains of knowledge, and the view that science reveals but one truth. We are bombarded by a plethora of nonfiction - indeed unimaginative and literalist non fiction must be the greatest disease of published writing in prose today - all of it desperate to explain once and for all why we mate, why we like music, how playing music is but an elaborate means to get laid, how and why we should be happy, the science of morality and the science of religion. It is surely enough to tempt the most rational soul to consider creationist doctrine just for the sheer drama and meaning it contains when up against the lifeless and relentlessly materialist reductionism of today's science. In essence questions of even philosophy are to be replaced by cognitive neuroscience.

Questions of deep value become beside the point: they get read as but quaint relics from a time when Gilbert Ryle's "ghost in the machine" was the dominant view. Perhaps we secualr Moderns are no longer haunted by the ghost but are stuck with the machine.

We are told so often and so relentlessly who we are, why we are here, what we are meant to do, what we are not meant to do, (this last comes in many radical ecological tracts that condemn civilization and urge us to go back to some ancient way allegedly more harmonious with our early days as a species). We speak the language of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" which is no improvement over the language of the old merciless preacher of the Puritans. Amazingly it is both less severe and more severe. To speak in terms of (in)appropriate appeals to notions of correctness, as if morality were a mathematical calculation, or worse some sort of majoritarian fashion rather than what morality had always been all alone: a deep claim upon our soul.

This is the world of pundits like Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell, of books like THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC and THE WISDOM OF CROWDS. It is a world of the New Atheism as if the old atheism were somehow insufficiently tough minded and incomplete. This is the world where daily we are told factoids about what foods cause cancer and how high the risk is to be married or unmarried, and happiness is thought to be as measurable like room temperature.

And if one raises any skepticism about this state of our public discourse one gets charged with nihilism on the one hand, or excessive credulity on the other.

Thus I find myself profoundly dissatisfied by both sides in the debate which share in what I call the general "conceptualization" of America. Drawing on William James' use of the terms percepts and concepts from his RADICAL EMPIRICISM, I would claim that, for about forty years or so, we have been dominated by concepts at the expense of percepts.

What gets lost in the process is this precious matter called EXPERIENCE. When religion colonizes experience, it literalizes it: that voice that I heard must be Jesus or Allah, every feeling I have I must first ask, does it come from God or the Devil?, is it good for me or bad? We don't regard experience as intrinsically valuable. We want to define it and know what it is. It is as if we feel there is something unseemly and undisciplined about savoring our lives. James Hillman put it best when he said that some Christians don't trust their own images and stories for the richness but want to know where it comes from and if it is any good for them. This is what leads certain religious groups to want to ban productions and readings of MACBETH in their communities.

A good poet needs to be as open as possible. They cherish their visitations. That is not to say they will not censor or edit, hopefully they will do just that, quite ruthlessly. But those omissions will be in the interest of formal excellence and yet ever more truth, not in the interest of fear.

Meanwhile our neuroscience crowd will tell us that experiences don't really exist: its all part of a "self regulating system", there is no I at home, just the random processing of neural networks. To make matters worse they will try and induct Buddhism as an ally, though the understanding of Buddhism is superficial.

How can we retain our sense of being more than machine, the ancient dignity of our human experience without getting caught in wedding our dignity to the specificity of our tribal blood pride, and our particular traditions?

One way is to let go of conception for brief periods and to dwell in perception. By this I DO not mean living like non human animals without any thoughts, dwelling only in reflex. Rather it is a way of being with our thoughts by working with them rather than being stuck IN them. Above all it is a way of being in our bodies and our senses and paying attention - to "being here now" as Ram Dass said it.

Sometimes religion at its best can do this, usually in so called "mystical" traditions. Art is all about this question of perception (I often get into arguments with conceptual artists when I tell them that their own work is not really valuable for the reasons they set out to do it: that is, to demonstrate or prove a point; when I tell them that the real value in their work resides in its perceptual qualities even when such merely appears to BEG for a propositional or symbolic understanding). Concepts have a fixed nature to them; they do interrupt the raw flow of experience, they do violence to the reality of temporality. Of course concepts are absolutely necessary in the function of life and culture. But, alas, concepts have overtaken other modes.

Interestingly I believe the first guilty party in the conceptualization phase was the human potential movement and newer psychologies of the 1970s: it was in this movement that we began to label with new jargon the most intimate details of life. New vogue words and phrases came into our language, and, eventually, our experience: vogue words like dysfuntional, codependency, inner child and so on. This way of looking at reality as the expression of a system or concept caused a sea change in human consciousness. People over time, with the help of mass media, began viewing their lives in these frames so that they began less and less to experience their individual lives in a spirit or ethic of SPECIALNESS. In America, a county predicated on unique individuality, this was quite a feat indeed, though something of our older small town conformity surely played a role.

I don't deny, a la social constructionist or a Michel Foucault, that there is truth to be gleamed from these concepts, only that they distort as much as they enlighten, and above all that consciousness has changed in radically different ways because of the rise of the concept.

Thus, in conclusion, we should examine our lives and dare to use our own reasons, but we should remember that the fact that we are able to dwell in experience is the most marvelous fact about us, and we may never be able to define it without doing some disservice to an essential feature of our humanity. If we do not examine our lives, someone else will be all too happy to do it for us for a fee.