The Intellect as a Door to Wonder (Part 2)

Pre-Modern Thought and Participatory Knowing

This is a follow-up to the first part of this post, which can be found here. As usual with my two-part posts, this one can also be read on its own. Also, the phrase “participatory knowing” is not my own but comes from John Vervaeke.

   When I first got swept up in the philosophical search for truth, it felt kind of like catching a virus. I was not interested in using philosophy as a form of "self-help" to find a way of looking at the world that "worked for me" or made life more meaningful. I felt I had to know the truth. This is why, for a time, I accepted that human life was a meaningless cosmic hiccup that arose out of a soup of lifeless atoms moving through space, and would eventually pass back into that same soup. The sense of awe and wonder at the great mystery of life, which dawned when I first began studying philosophy, had been sucked dry by this vision of a lifeless, clockwork-like world following the precision of mathematical law. At the time, I felt this was the inevitable conclusion of an unbiased, rational inquiry into the nature of reality. It seemed that once we let go of hope in the existence of gods, entities, and metaphysical structures that had no objective evidence supporting them, we were left with the "obvious" truth: what truly existed were the physical objects of the senses.

  Fortunately for myself, and anyone else who has caught this truth virus, I now see that I was mistaken. From my current philosophical perspective, things seem quite the contrary. The suggestion that an objective, rational inquiry will leave us with a cosmos populated only by the physical objects we perceive through the senses stems from a school of philosophy that began in early 20th-century England, known as Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism states that, when it comes to questions about the nature of reality, rational analysis must be tethered to empirical observation. I would argue that an unconscious commitment to Logical Positivism generates the cosmologies most of us inhabit today, including not only the mechanistic worldview of modern science but even theological pictures of the world that trade in rich, multi-layered cosmologies for a simpler picture of a mechanistic physical world created by one divine being. However, if we take a step back in the history of philosophy before the early 20th century, we find that most metaphysical pictures suggest quite the opposite: the world we perceive through the senses is one of the lower layers of a much vaster reality.

  One of the most iconic of these suggestions is Plato’s parable of the cave. Plato likens the world we perceive with our physical senses to shadows on a cave wall. By making use of our rational faculties, Plato suggests we can move our eyes away from these shadows to look towards the fire casting the shadows, the world outside the cave, and eventually the sun—the source of all light. Most scholars understand the world outside the cave to represent an immaterial Platonic heaven populated by immaterial objects called Platonic Forms. Each object or concept we perceive on Earth has its perfect manifestation in this Platonic heaven. For example, the Platonic heaven contains the perfect cup, the perfect horse, and the perfect understanding of justice, while here on Earth we only see imperfect manifestations of those Forms. Such a reading of Plato doesn’t work very well as a critique of Logical Positivism. In fact, it was precisely these cosmologies populated by fanciful immaterial realms that Logical Positivism sought to rid us of. However, if we instead read these Platonic Forms as layers of our immediate, concrete experience of the world, we find a much more sophisticated philosophical position.

   Let’s take a simple example: a coffee cup. To perceive a particular visual stimulus as a cup, one must have been taught the universal category of "cup"—a category that applies to this particular cup but also extends beyond this particular experience to capture the structure of all possible cups. To grasp this "Form," we must use reason to inquire into the appearance of the physical cup and ascertain this nonphysical causes that makes the appearance possible. However, we do not ascend to some mysterious Platonic heaven when we realize that the cognition of the cup involves the immaterial Form of the cup. We simply realize that there is much more at play in our experience of seeing a cup than merely receiving sensory information like a camera lens. Once we realize that Platonic Forms or universal concepts play an essential role in any act of perception, we can start to see what Plato is getting at. There is no pure sense perception of an outside world composed of bounded objects. Rather, a seemingly solid perception of the "outside world" arises when the network of concepts we use to navigate our lives carves up the immediate flux of sensation into a meaningful picture that reflects recognizable objects and possible avenues of action associated with those objects.

    Most of us likley think that we apply the category or Form "cup" to our experience because there is, in fact, a cup there. However, if we push on this a little bit, we see that this doesn’t add up, as it is not until we learn about what a cup, which includes what we can do with cups, that they start to show up in our experience. A young infant doesn’t see a cup. This is why Plato suggests that all Forms originate in the Form of the Good, which is represented by the sun in his allegory of the cave. Whether it be the simple concept of a cup or a more complex concept like responsibility or justice, all the concepts we use to orient ourselves in our perceptual world are also simultaneously orienting us in the realm of possible actions. Once I perceive the cup as a cup, the possibility of drinking from it arises. Once I apply the notion of responsibility to the multitude of drives and desires within me, the possibility of disciplining myself to meet a certain goal becomes salient. The Form of the Good is the source of all light for Plato because the very perception of a world of objects, values, and ideas cannot be separated from the practical affordances and ways of living those objects, values, and ideas open to us and our community.

    Reality does not fundamentally consist of a set of objects alien to what we care about. For Plato, the forces that cause the world to lay itself out in an ordered, meaningful way are not separate from our and our community's most deeply held values and motivations. The deeper levels of reality are not objects we can know through detached scientific measurement but active, living forces we can only know by participating in them. The Logical Positivists claim that the highest form of knowing is to grasp principles that govern sense objects independent of human behavior. Plato would suggest that this is quite a superficial level of knowing, as when we keep the larger picture in mind, we find that our own choices, actions, and ways of orienting in the world are intimately tied up with the way perceptual reality lays itself out. I would suggest this is not unique to Plato but rather a trademark of pre-modern conceptions of reason and ontology. Let me briefly give two examples.

    For the great Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, God’s 99 Names play a similar ontological role to Plato’s Forms. Ibn Arabi writes, “The effects or properties of the Divine Names are the phenomena of the cosmos. In other words, they are creatures—the things, the entities, the forms—considered since they make the Divine Names manifest.” For Ibn Arabi, human experience, which always takes the form of a knower in relationship to a known object, is the process through which God’s Divine Names give themselves a concrete existence. By undertaking a discipline of prayer or contemplation, we find that behind the seemingly obvious experience of looking out at a separate physical world is, in fact, a process of one of God’s 99 Names aspiring to become conscious of itself. For example, beholding and appreciating a beautiful landscape may be God’s Glory becoming conscious of itself, and providing aid to a person in need may be God’s Mercy becoming conscious of itself. Like Plato’s Form of the Good, we only know God’s names by participating in them and allowing ourselves to become an expression of them.

    Similarly, in the Tao Te Ching, the seminal text of Taoism, Lao Tzu encourages us to "rest in inaction" and discover that the “Tao is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things." In other words, Lao Tzu suggests that deep meditation will reveal to us that the diverse world of subjects and objects all originate from a unified source, the Tao. Further, Lao Tzu writes in a phrase that could act as a catchphrase for participatory knowing more generally, “When you look for it, there is nothing to see. When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear. When you use it, it is inexhaustible.” If we look for the Tao like an object that can be grasped and known, we will come up empty-handed. To know the Tao is to move as the Tao.

    I could continue with examples. As I see it, this is not uncommon in pre-modern philosophy and theology.  Whether our dive into the depths of reality comes through rational analysis as Plato suggests or contemplative practices as Lao Tzu and Ibn Arabi suggest, we find countless suggestions in the pre-modern world that the deepest layers of reality are not composed of objects one can analyze with scientific instruments. Instead, we find something much more mysterious. On the one hand, we cannot deny we exist as physical bodies inhabiting a world of physical objects that follow laws beyond our control. However, on the other hand a deep philosophical or contemplative dive into ontology reveals that the very source from which the rich world of value and meaning that we inhabit lays itself out lies within the depths of our own being.

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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.