A Cavity in the Space of Knowledge
I once wrote:
"This image is different in every age and different between people, but it is similar in that it is a fantasy image that has to be taken as true which arises when we realize that all images of the universe cannot be ultimately proved true, that science, rationality, and even common sense are paths that can only lead us part way to true happiness."
The idea is different than the common one in which spirituality or religion is "just" a bit of wishful thinking that is used because we are not mentally strong enough (usually "rational" enough) to face the truth of the meaninglessness of existence.
Nor is it the existential concept that meaningfulness is blindly chosen in a leap of faith that out of pure mental willfulness bridges the gap between the rational and the irrational.
It is rather this. That while science, rationality, and common sense take us far in life, show us the content of the near universe, shine light into the abyss of the ocean, reveal the mysteries of biochemistry, and lend pinpoint precision to the application of physical forces in mechanics --- that despite all of this in our travels in knowledge and our travels in the universe we still discover the interminable beyond whispering at the edges of being. Despite our progress into areas which were hitherto the province of the gods --- the pharmaceutical conquest of alchemy, the mechanical-Newtonian conquest of space, the maritime conquest of the oceans, etc. --- our lives are not without the experience of deep uncertainty, deep mystery, of wonder, and the all-pervading presence of the unknown.
Still a mighty squall picks up our boat and smashes us into darkness. A film is made to capture the experience, render it intelligible. A team of investigators analyzes the plain crash wreckage down to the last molecule. A girl with cancer survives impossible odds. A cancer researcher decodes the mysteries of a tropical plant. He knows the biochemical pathways of its function and he can make sense of the evolutionary history that brought it into being. But in the moment before the ship capsizes and all goes dark, the ship captain looks deep into his heart as his mind races, knowing that the great mystery of death is upon him and he knows not whereto he will go. The film crew uses CGI to capture the intertwining forces of the waves, but on a rowboat with his son, the computer programmer cries silently, feeling a sense of great awe at the power of life and water and gratitude that his son is alive. The cancer researcher knows his science, but can't help but hold his breath in awe that the elegant and beautiful inner workings of this biochemical ecology that might bring his patient back to life.
Science doesn't erase the mystery, it only bring us to it by way of new paths. It gives us a new language of inquiry into the unknown, but it does not answer the ultimate questions. Why is there anything at all? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the purpose of my life on earth? Even the question of whether there is an order and a telos to the universe goes unanswered. Some scientists see a beauty beyond human imagination and are struck by an inner intelligence in its design. Some see an inherent chaos and meaninglessness in the random or probabilistic bouncing of billiard balls and this brings them to a state of detachment and despair.
The mythologies of our ancestors grappled with the same questions. Is there meaning? Is there purpose? Who am I? What is death?
Imagine there is a unknowable and invisible dark force at work beyond our lives and behind the universe, which is not the god of yore who is knowable by his characteristics. It is not kingly or fatherly, it is not beautiful or benevolent, and yet in a sense it is these things. It is kingly inasmuch as it exerts and unquestionable authority over our lives. It is fatherly, in that through experience and example it teaches us the rules that we must learn to follow as we mature through life's development. It is at times beautiful as it spreads before us an unending tapestry of subtle mystery and elegant wonder. It is at times benevolent as it gives us tremendous gifts and teaches us great lessons, which although comprehensible through the lens of science and rationality nevertheless appear to us as unnecessary strokes of impossible luck.
But in fact like any god-concept, its immediate content --- what it comes across to us as --- is determined by the attitude that we have toward it. "Life is not fair!" "I hate God!" "I have this because I have worked for it!" "What beauty to behold as I stand upon this mountain!" "I might have died and yet still live!" These statements do not so much as call out a God already formed from out of the mists but rather in a more subtle way touch upon the type of experience that has mystified religious writers across the ages. The "god" and "gods" so composed are a polyglot bunch, made of cruelty, grace, selfishness, and beauty. But each jolt of sublimity builds a bridge to its kind. Each surge of wonder, thanksgiving, pride of accomplishment, blind and diffuse anger at the heavens is a moment of deep and reverent experience and growth. These are the ways that we wrestle with the dark forces of the unknown. In all of these moments, we feel a spine-shivering "something else" just beyond our grasp. Not a hoary man on the mountain per se, but a run in with the impossible, the unknown, and the ungraspable.
"Why were we born at all!?" whether uttered in despair or sublime joy is a grappling with the strange and eerie fact that the something that this universe is utterly transcends us, preceding our birth and, perhaps we don't know, carrying on after our own consciousness has abated.
From philosophy we learn to work out the question: "What is the I who sees himself seeing," and are confronted with the --- again --- strange and eerie fact that no matter how vigilantly we commit ourselves to the work of self-reflection we self-reflect as a certain type of being that can only know itself by not-knowing the aspect of itself that in that moment does the knowing. We can grow as in a petry dish an ever-expanding ring of "me," yet with each expansion a bit of the "me" resists and stands aside, within us, to be the me that is the I who is seeing. If self-knowledge were utterly penetrating, if science could know all things, then would this strange off-centered bit of ourselves not eventually yield to our inquiry. Yet endlessly, it resists us.
In common parlance we declare, "I have this because I have worked for it," and outwardly we stake claim for the fruits of our labor. If this were a mere statement of plain fact, I would read nothing more into. It is certainly not a claim that one's ability to enact such accomplishments is itself a gift through which accomplishment is labored; it is more egocentric a conception than this. Yet there is something more in it then plain fact. Such a claim rings true with celebrative pride, and this pride is a chilling and awe-inspiring pride because it sits on the edge between what did in fact happen and what could have failed to occur. We our proud because through our self-directed action a bit of the impossible is made possible. Hence the sublimity and transcendence of pride.
Somewhere, someone, in some context I might not understand, said, "You will see him by his works." Whatever this might have meant to whoever first wrote it, and whatever it might have meant for the many who have read it since, this one line seems to make a deep abiding sense to me with regard to this question of God, of atheism, of mystery, and of knowledge. What "he is" is a secondary construction that we gesture back toward. What is primary for us as human beings is the universal human experience of facing the mysteries --- not every waking moment of our lives --- but when they approach us. When we are near death, or in the presence of great beauty, or when our lives take unexpected turns that we never could have anticipated. At these times an otherness seems in our midst. Not as a spirit or a demon, but a real otherness.
By real otherness I mean the real presence of the unknown and unknowable, which we only know by its effects. Perhaps if the mouse hadn't chewed our alarm clock cord and we hadn't overslept by five minutes, and then therefore we had not been stopped for twenty minutes by the accident on 32nd street, then we would have gotten on that flight that crashed into the Atlantic . . . or we wouldn't have met the woman that we eventually married . . . Even Random Chaos is a name of God.
When God died, it seemed that he was immediately replaced, by a strong human ego --- as in Nietzsche --- or perhaps by the confidence of an scientific industrial modern ethos, or by the calculating skepticism of rationality. But when one truth is undermined by the impedance of a competing theory, sometimes what happens is a bit different. In our case, postmodernism happens. That is, afraid of standing too close to any concept of truth or any confident statement of ultimate good --- for the commons and oftentimes even for ourselves --- we fall into an interminable free fall, a self-reflecting reflection that abstracts again and again away from any powerful statement of the good or the true. We break apart into an endlessly deferring gesture, a infinite redux. Take Judith Butler's brilliant analysis of drag. Drag shows show by their careful wit that like the drag performance, gender is itself the product of a performance, a performance in the specific sense that it is not necessary, is not tied to a biologically determined set of characteristics, colors, sights, and sounds, but that is like every performance contingent, not "true" in a fundamental sense, but unhinged from the "real" person of the performer herself. The question is can we follow this analytical mindset "all the way down," so to speak, as in the old fashioned joke, "Do those legs go all the way up?" In a world of infinite contrast, where by one click of the mouse we can jump from spiritual asceticism to kitsch hermaphrodite pornography, it may seem that along with God died the very notion of not only "truth" but even just a fuzzy center of gravity.
This is precisely why the modern age --- the age following Niezsche's great exhortation to face the death of God --- in order to work out its internal contradiction and finally know itself anew, must grapple not with a positivistic notion of truth, but with what has been called The Real. Existentialism puts it all on the individual --- and meaning emerges by some unmentionable alchemy directly out of human choice --- a leap, an artistic gesture, or a simple choice. But meaning doesn't actually emerge with such single-mindedness. Sometimes it is by our labor and it feels that it belongs only to us. But sometimes it seems to fall out of the sky into our heads. The positivistic ethos of our age says, "When truth cannot be spoken, it must be passed over in silence," but we cannot and do not "pass over" the winds that blow silently over us! These winds stir up in us passions we cannot resist, or literally pick us up like so much debris and cast us to the winds. The man who awakens one day to homosexual urges and feels his heart titillated like never before as the wind passes up his dress and sets him free --- this man may be retrospectively comprehensible to the philosophical gaze of philosophical inquiry, but he is not moved by an explicitly intelligible logic! He is moved by his heart. And if after the fact we can know that gender is more flexible than before, for him his new life path is not a fluidity but a fervor, not a bit of lifeless twine but a highway of his desire and his passion. Words like "destiny" and "path" still find a way into common parlance because we cannot make sense of our lives without a reference to the beyond. If this man is given over to a thorough genetic and physiological study, and certain hormones, gene sequences, and gene transcription factors are retrospectively determined to have causes with strong probability the actions he has taken, he will scoff and say, "but I have chosen this." Yet if it is explained to him with some effort that it was a combination of developmental psychological factors and cultural factors that have coalesced together by some alchemy of the cognitive mind to bring him into this particular self-identity and way of living, he might just as well declare with obstinacy, "These feelings are not the result of the way I am nurtured; I feel in my bones that they are part of my genetic and biological inheritance, and I could not have been any other way!"
And this captures precisely the conundrum of the postmodern scientific mind. When God died, along with him so did truth. Positivistic science gave way to neo-positivistic methodology. The great metaphysical inquiries of past centuries were replaced with the sophistic carryings-on off linguistic philosophy. The great philosopher-scientists of old were replaced by sub-sub-specialists who hide their heads in the annotated sands of encyclopedic anthologies. The great spiritual and philosophical quests of old were pressed into the offices of psychoanalysts, who were replaced by psychiatrists in the labyrinthine halls of research universities. The search for deep spiritual meaning, once stolen from the hallowed cathedrals of Catholic Europe, was passed one to the industrial psychologists of 20th century corporate commercialism . . .
Thus my desire to resuscitate God and gods as the Real absence that is the unknowable bedrock of mystery. Though we've admitted Nietzsche's "God is dead" thereby jettisoning all faith in earlier myths, we have not truly let go of these myths but instead hold on to them more dearly then ever before, only now we cling like bats to their negative form. If we cannot let go of the fetishistic replacements for the Truth we have lost and genuinely face the darkness that lies before us, a new sense of truth and meaning will not come. A holy act drops into the abyss.
Let go so that you may receive.
"This image is different in every age and different between people, but it is similar in that it is a fantasy image that has to be taken as true which arises when we realize that all images of the universe cannot be ultimately proved true, that science, rationality, and even common sense are paths that can only lead us part way to true happiness."
The idea is different than the common one in which spirituality or religion is "just" a bit of wishful thinking that is used because we are not mentally strong enough (usually "rational" enough) to face the truth of the meaninglessness of existence.
Nor is it the existential concept that meaningfulness is blindly chosen in a leap of faith that out of pure mental willfulness bridges the gap between the rational and the irrational.
It is rather this. That while science, rationality, and common sense take us far in life, show us the content of the near universe, shine light into the abyss of the ocean, reveal the mysteries of biochemistry, and lend pinpoint precision to the application of physical forces in mechanics --- that despite all of this in our travels in knowledge and our travels in the universe we still discover the interminable beyond whispering at the edges of being. Despite our progress into areas which were hitherto the province of the gods --- the pharmaceutical conquest of alchemy, the mechanical-Newtonian conquest of space, the maritime conquest of the oceans, etc. --- our lives are not without the experience of deep uncertainty, deep mystery, of wonder, and the all-pervading presence of the unknown.
Still a mighty squall picks up our boat and smashes us into darkness. A film is made to capture the experience, render it intelligible. A team of investigators analyzes the plain crash wreckage down to the last molecule. A girl with cancer survives impossible odds. A cancer researcher decodes the mysteries of a tropical plant. He knows the biochemical pathways of its function and he can make sense of the evolutionary history that brought it into being. But in the moment before the ship capsizes and all goes dark, the ship captain looks deep into his heart as his mind races, knowing that the great mystery of death is upon him and he knows not whereto he will go. The film crew uses CGI to capture the intertwining forces of the waves, but on a rowboat with his son, the computer programmer cries silently, feeling a sense of great awe at the power of life and water and gratitude that his son is alive. The cancer researcher knows his science, but can't help but hold his breath in awe that the elegant and beautiful inner workings of this biochemical ecology that might bring his patient back to life.
Science doesn't erase the mystery, it only bring us to it by way of new paths. It gives us a new language of inquiry into the unknown, but it does not answer the ultimate questions. Why is there anything at all? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the purpose of my life on earth? Even the question of whether there is an order and a telos to the universe goes unanswered. Some scientists see a beauty beyond human imagination and are struck by an inner intelligence in its design. Some see an inherent chaos and meaninglessness in the random or probabilistic bouncing of billiard balls and this brings them to a state of detachment and despair.
The mythologies of our ancestors grappled with the same questions. Is there meaning? Is there purpose? Who am I? What is death?
Imagine there is a unknowable and invisible dark force at work beyond our lives and behind the universe, which is not the god of yore who is knowable by his characteristics. It is not kingly or fatherly, it is not beautiful or benevolent, and yet in a sense it is these things. It is kingly inasmuch as it exerts and unquestionable authority over our lives. It is fatherly, in that through experience and example it teaches us the rules that we must learn to follow as we mature through life's development. It is at times beautiful as it spreads before us an unending tapestry of subtle mystery and elegant wonder. It is at times benevolent as it gives us tremendous gifts and teaches us great lessons, which although comprehensible through the lens of science and rationality nevertheless appear to us as unnecessary strokes of impossible luck.
But in fact like any god-concept, its immediate content --- what it comes across to us as --- is determined by the attitude that we have toward it. "Life is not fair!" "I hate God!" "I have this because I have worked for it!" "What beauty to behold as I stand upon this mountain!" "I might have died and yet still live!" These statements do not so much as call out a God already formed from out of the mists but rather in a more subtle way touch upon the type of experience that has mystified religious writers across the ages. The "god" and "gods" so composed are a polyglot bunch, made of cruelty, grace, selfishness, and beauty. But each jolt of sublimity builds a bridge to its kind. Each surge of wonder, thanksgiving, pride of accomplishment, blind and diffuse anger at the heavens is a moment of deep and reverent experience and growth. These are the ways that we wrestle with the dark forces of the unknown. In all of these moments, we feel a spine-shivering "something else" just beyond our grasp. Not a hoary man on the mountain per se, but a run in with the impossible, the unknown, and the ungraspable.
"Why were we born at all!?" whether uttered in despair or sublime joy is a grappling with the strange and eerie fact that the something that this universe is utterly transcends us, preceding our birth and, perhaps we don't know, carrying on after our own consciousness has abated.
From philosophy we learn to work out the question: "What is the I who sees himself seeing," and are confronted with the --- again --- strange and eerie fact that no matter how vigilantly we commit ourselves to the work of self-reflection we self-reflect as a certain type of being that can only know itself by not-knowing the aspect of itself that in that moment does the knowing. We can grow as in a petry dish an ever-expanding ring of "me," yet with each expansion a bit of the "me" resists and stands aside, within us, to be the me that is the I who is seeing. If self-knowledge were utterly penetrating, if science could know all things, then would this strange off-centered bit of ourselves not eventually yield to our inquiry. Yet endlessly, it resists us.
In common parlance we declare, "I have this because I have worked for it," and outwardly we stake claim for the fruits of our labor. If this were a mere statement of plain fact, I would read nothing more into. It is certainly not a claim that one's ability to enact such accomplishments is itself a gift through which accomplishment is labored; it is more egocentric a conception than this. Yet there is something more in it then plain fact. Such a claim rings true with celebrative pride, and this pride is a chilling and awe-inspiring pride because it sits on the edge between what did in fact happen and what could have failed to occur. We our proud because through our self-directed action a bit of the impossible is made possible. Hence the sublimity and transcendence of pride.
Somewhere, someone, in some context I might not understand, said, "You will see him by his works." Whatever this might have meant to whoever first wrote it, and whatever it might have meant for the many who have read it since, this one line seems to make a deep abiding sense to me with regard to this question of God, of atheism, of mystery, and of knowledge. What "he is" is a secondary construction that we gesture back toward. What is primary for us as human beings is the universal human experience of facing the mysteries --- not every waking moment of our lives --- but when they approach us. When we are near death, or in the presence of great beauty, or when our lives take unexpected turns that we never could have anticipated. At these times an otherness seems in our midst. Not as a spirit or a demon, but a real otherness.
By real otherness I mean the real presence of the unknown and unknowable, which we only know by its effects. Perhaps if the mouse hadn't chewed our alarm clock cord and we hadn't overslept by five minutes, and then therefore we had not been stopped for twenty minutes by the accident on 32nd street, then we would have gotten on that flight that crashed into the Atlantic . . . or we wouldn't have met the woman that we eventually married . . . Even Random Chaos is a name of God.
When God died, it seemed that he was immediately replaced, by a strong human ego --- as in Nietzsche --- or perhaps by the confidence of an scientific industrial modern ethos, or by the calculating skepticism of rationality. But when one truth is undermined by the impedance of a competing theory, sometimes what happens is a bit different. In our case, postmodernism happens. That is, afraid of standing too close to any concept of truth or any confident statement of ultimate good --- for the commons and oftentimes even for ourselves --- we fall into an interminable free fall, a self-reflecting reflection that abstracts again and again away from any powerful statement of the good or the true. We break apart into an endlessly deferring gesture, a infinite redux. Take Judith Butler's brilliant analysis of drag. Drag shows show by their careful wit that like the drag performance, gender is itself the product of a performance, a performance in the specific sense that it is not necessary, is not tied to a biologically determined set of characteristics, colors, sights, and sounds, but that is like every performance contingent, not "true" in a fundamental sense, but unhinged from the "real" person of the performer herself. The question is can we follow this analytical mindset "all the way down," so to speak, as in the old fashioned joke, "Do those legs go all the way up?" In a world of infinite contrast, where by one click of the mouse we can jump from spiritual asceticism to kitsch hermaphrodite pornography, it may seem that along with God died the very notion of not only "truth" but even just a fuzzy center of gravity.
This is precisely why the modern age --- the age following Niezsche's great exhortation to face the death of God --- in order to work out its internal contradiction and finally know itself anew, must grapple not with a positivistic notion of truth, but with what has been called The Real. Existentialism puts it all on the individual --- and meaning emerges by some unmentionable alchemy directly out of human choice --- a leap, an artistic gesture, or a simple choice. But meaning doesn't actually emerge with such single-mindedness. Sometimes it is by our labor and it feels that it belongs only to us. But sometimes it seems to fall out of the sky into our heads. The positivistic ethos of our age says, "When truth cannot be spoken, it must be passed over in silence," but we cannot and do not "pass over" the winds that blow silently over us! These winds stir up in us passions we cannot resist, or literally pick us up like so much debris and cast us to the winds. The man who awakens one day to homosexual urges and feels his heart titillated like never before as the wind passes up his dress and sets him free --- this man may be retrospectively comprehensible to the philosophical gaze of philosophical inquiry, but he is not moved by an explicitly intelligible logic! He is moved by his heart. And if after the fact we can know that gender is more flexible than before, for him his new life path is not a fluidity but a fervor, not a bit of lifeless twine but a highway of his desire and his passion. Words like "destiny" and "path" still find a way into common parlance because we cannot make sense of our lives without a reference to the beyond. If this man is given over to a thorough genetic and physiological study, and certain hormones, gene sequences, and gene transcription factors are retrospectively determined to have causes with strong probability the actions he has taken, he will scoff and say, "but I have chosen this." Yet if it is explained to him with some effort that it was a combination of developmental psychological factors and cultural factors that have coalesced together by some alchemy of the cognitive mind to bring him into this particular self-identity and way of living, he might just as well declare with obstinacy, "These feelings are not the result of the way I am nurtured; I feel in my bones that they are part of my genetic and biological inheritance, and I could not have been any other way!"
And this captures precisely the conundrum of the postmodern scientific mind. When God died, along with him so did truth. Positivistic science gave way to neo-positivistic methodology. The great metaphysical inquiries of past centuries were replaced with the sophistic carryings-on off linguistic philosophy. The great philosopher-scientists of old were replaced by sub-sub-specialists who hide their heads in the annotated sands of encyclopedic anthologies. The great spiritual and philosophical quests of old were pressed into the offices of psychoanalysts, who were replaced by psychiatrists in the labyrinthine halls of research universities. The search for deep spiritual meaning, once stolen from the hallowed cathedrals of Catholic Europe, was passed one to the industrial psychologists of 20th century corporate commercialism . . .
Thus my desire to resuscitate God and gods as the Real absence that is the unknowable bedrock of mystery. Though we've admitted Nietzsche's "God is dead" thereby jettisoning all faith in earlier myths, we have not truly let go of these myths but instead hold on to them more dearly then ever before, only now we cling like bats to their negative form. If we cannot let go of the fetishistic replacements for the Truth we have lost and genuinely face the darkness that lies before us, a new sense of truth and meaning will not come. A holy act drops into the abyss.
Let go so that you may receive.