Political Philosophy and Current Events

I want to start another thread of discussion – with no one but myself, sadly – about politics, as my home country is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

 

Background

  My home country is de facto in a state of civil war – divided somewhat by region but more by class, religion, level of education, rural vs. urban, race, and other factors. Most importantly by class. There has been some violence, but the potential for violence remains mostly under the surface at this point. By civil war I mean that supporters of Trump have rejected the basic constitutional system (elections, rule of law, independent judiciary, free and objective media) in favor of a pop-fascist cult of personality and a regime change to something like Erdogan's regime in Turkey, the Orban regime in Hungary, or (most clearly) the Putin regime in Russia. Whatever the differences in Trump’s base, they agree on this. The so-called MAGA movement is in open rebellion against the government and constitution of the United States, though in their own minds they are "patriots." (One thinks of Orwell: love means hate, truth means lies, patriot means traitor.)

  This civil war cannot be resolved on the battlefield, like the last one. That means: it cannot be resolved. A permanent cold civil war, until something collapses, until some disaster mixes things up again and hopefully we can start anew. Perhaps it is a just punishment for our hubris over the collapse of the USSR. Certainly, it is very satisfying to people like Putin who were part of the Soviet regime and lived through its collapse.

   More concretely, that means they want to control the media – to make pro-Trump media like Fox the only source of information; they want to control the justice system: Trump-friendly judges (e.g. the Supreme Court is almost there) who will rule based on Trump’s will rather than any objective application of the law); legislators blindly loyal to the leader; and a military and intelligence service that subordinates itself not to a constitution but to the leader’s will. (Of course, the leaders of such regimes are the richest people in world, and Trump’s base somehow needs him to be super rich.)

They have formed a cult around an amazingly base character, a pathological narcissist who knows no other value than elevating his ego. Everything is transactional. Security policy: he was rightly impeached for making digging up dirt on his political opponents a condition to release security aid to Ukraine; he actively colluded with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election; he lies so compulsively that it doesn’t even make the news anymore; he ignores facts to create alternative facts, alternative realities for his base – who expects that from him; he is a convicted rapist (ok, he ‘grabbed her pussy’ as he expressed himself in the Hollywood interview) and fraud; he and his family together received billions from foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and China during his Presidency; the pathetic forms his narcissism takes: the golden shoes, the superhero cards, the commercial about God choosing Trump (vomit emoji); the unchristian demonization of other kinds of people, especially the poorest and the non-white; the use of threat against opponents, from verbal abuse to unleashing his attack dog supporters on them; above all, the attempt to overthrow the government – continuing – of which the attack on the Congress by a violent mob was just one act. He is either a creature or a partner of Putin, sharing the goal of sowing chaos in the country. He is a traitor. That is who 77 million Americans voted for in 2020. That is the choice of millions more today. As he said – one of the few true things he has ever said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?”

  A large portion of Americans live in an absurdly small epistemological bubble tightly policed by an echo chamber, controlled mostly by Trump (and Putin) through Fox and even worse media outlets and of course the social media algorithm. They already have the totalitarian power to construct reality for their base, and thus to control the thoughts and feelings of their base – or probably confirm them, since if Fox, for example, started disseminating truths that punctured the bubble, its audience would find another echo chamber. Over 40% of Americans live in a fantasy world – not counting those of the so-called “WOKE” side who also live in a fantasy world. His control over them is probably at least as great as Hitler’s over Germans at the height of his powers. Of course, the rest, whatever their differences, see this from the outside with amazement, frustration, and disgust, but nothing anyone can say or do will penetrate the bubble. These people are as isolated and insulated – by their own choosing – as any member of the Koresh cult (Trump began his campaign symbolically in Waco). They are the basis of Trump’s power.

 

The consequences have been severe.

·        The undermining of the judicial system. A jury doesn’t count for the Trump world unless it consists of Trump cult members. A jury of people who are not in the cult is not a ‘jury of peers’. Judges outside the cult are enemies by definition. For them, Trump’s indictment and pending trials are show trials, equivalent to an American being tried in a court set up by Lenin’s Soviet Union. They don’t recognize the legitimacy of the American judicial system – unless they get a judge or jury who will rule in their favor. The rule of law has been compromised. The Supreme Court has just today exposed themselves as Trump hacks and have lost - also because of their corruption (clients of right-wing billionaires) - lost all legitimacy. 

 ·        Elections can no longer serve as the only legitimate way to form the government. For the Trump cult, elections are only valid if they win. Thus we don’t have a true election. For Trump supporters elections are one tool among others to reach the goal of a regime change.

·        Our bedrock alliances have been undermined. Biden and any Democratic Party leader will honor them. As long as a Democrat is in the White House and the Democrats control Congress, our deterrent power prevents Russia (and thus China) from isolating my country by annexing Europe to its sphere of influence (unless, of course, countries like Germany and France merged and acquired enough military power to be deterrents in their own right – improbable). No NATO country, no ally can place its security on who controls Congress or who is in the White House. Thus even though the Democrats control the White House and Congress, a small minority of Trump’s people can cause us to betray Ukraine, exposing an alliance with us as unreliable. After the War, both parties, for all their differences, supported the alliance. European countries could rely on that. Now, with the Trump civil war, no country can rely on us. That has created a fundamentally different international system, one fraught with insecurity, on in which we are increasingly isolated – much to the delight of dictators like Putin (Trump’s boss or partner, I am not sure which).

·        Politics is negated. Every elected representative is absorbed by the civil war, and can no longer afford to use judgment about politics. Everything must be weighed on one scale:  does it help or hinder Trump in his bid to replace the traditional government system with a kind of pop-fascism.

Against this background, I want to reflect in future entries on politics in general, and US politics (and history) in particular.

   One of the most frustrating aspects of politics parallels one of the most interesting aspects of philosophy: the difficulty of communication between people inhabiting incommensurable philosophies – since people in the Thomist world version, say, and people in the Marxist world version, for example, would also have a difficult time communicating, even if not so difficult as would someone in a cult with an outsider. In philosophy, no bubble can be self-contained and the echo chamber doesn’t function: that is, there are no bubbles in philosophy, and the only echo chamber is defined by the outer limit of reason. There are only horizons in philosophy. As a Thomist, say, as someone who has embraced a definite philosophy of life, a man may have a different conception of reality, human nature, reason, knowledge, politics, culture, and art from a Marxist, as someone who loves wisdom (and thus truth) I must be willing to think I could be mistaken on some point, and thus willing to take seriously some other philosophy of life can offer me insights. But again, since the Thomists and the Marxists do not even conceive of reason and responsible conversation in the same way, there are challenges.

  But with a cult – like the Trump bubble – the first commandment is to maintain the bubble at all costs. Philosophy, conversation is not possible – another devasting consequence of the civil war, since politics in its pure form is authentic communication (authentic: oriented to truth). They are protected, insulated against reality. You don’t puncture the bubble of a cult by using reason, which is by definition that capacity in us that reaches out of our fantasy lives to reality.

   I have always been critical of the US system and my criticisms remain. But it is now a choice between the system I criticize and a qualitatively worse system. Liberal-capitalism I am no big fan of; fascist style dictatorship is something to fight. 

    Therefore, though I like to converse with people who see the world differently than with people who see the world like I do, the people I would most like to have a conversation with will not be available. Indeed, I doubt from my side it would be any more possible to have a conversation with a Trumpist than for a geologist or a physicist to converse with a flat earther. Marxism and Thomism are both serious philosophies. Classical liberalism is a serious political philosophy. MAGA is not a serious political philosophy – it is flat earthism compared to classical liberalism, socialism, or Burkean conservativism, say. Still, I would try it.

   What I want to do is political philosophy, practical philosophy and more general philosophy. And relative to a cult, that puts me in a bubble. That says something important about human finitude.

Meditation on Petitionary Prayer, Goodness, God’s Essence, and Loss of Faith

   Many years ago, when my daughter was going through a bad time, and I had been a newly converted Catholic full of glorious faith, feeling the presence of grace, I prayed for God to be with her and protect her. I was doing all I could but had reached the limits of what I could do. I guess it could have gone worse for her but it’s not like my prayers were answered. This is a mild case.

   A more serious case I read about in C. S. Lewis’ autobiographical book Surprised by Joy. His mother died of cancer when he was a boy. His prayers were not answered either.

  In his case and mine, the failure of God to answer such pure and innocent prayers – prayers for the protection of the most innocent and vulnerable, children – led to a crisis of faith. I had as a child ceased to believe in God when my youthful prayers were not answered. After all, I knew the verse:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

My childish prayers were certainly ridiculous, and so they had ceased to count. But my prayers for my daughter were not ridiculous. They did count. And certainly, as I said, many more serious prayers have gone unanswered, not that my daughter’s situation wasn’t serious enough.

On reflection, my prayers seemed absurd. God does not protect our children. That has been entrusted to us, a decision on the part of God, the wisdom of which I completely fail to see. Think about all the cruelty and injustice towards children. The neglect and abuse from parents themselves victims of neglect and abuse. Look at the children of Gaza or Ukraine today as a write. At the children in the cities during the bombings of WWII. At the Holocaust. At all the many attempts at genocide. At the children during the plague. Look at the children sexually victimized in child pornography. At the ones sexually abused and strangled.

God does not protect children. God did not even protect himself. He died on the cross. The prayer of Christ was not answered. Christ was abandoned as we are. God shared most deeply in our humanity when he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

      Along with the unspeakable human cruelty to animals, and indeed the cruelty of animal nature – eat or be eaten (the young being the first to be devoured – (as well as the absurd: e.g. the need to shit), all this just makes it hard to believe in divine goodness. A line from a Led Zeppelin song has always struck me:

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move

Ivan Karamazov (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov) rejection at least of one possible Christian understanding of God seems to me irrefutable. I will quote at length.

These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say."

"Brother, what are you driving at?" asked Alyosha.

"I think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."

. . .

"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. it's just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden -- the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.

 

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like."

"Never mind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.

 

And then Ivan draws his theological conclusion:

 

I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?

 

As I said, my daughter was a mild case – if God won’t or can’t do anything for the extreme cases (of which our history is full), was it not absurd that I expected divine protection for my daughter? God does not protect children. And if God does not protect even children, why should we wretched sinners be protected? Why should my beloved aunt, Alice Ann, a devout believer, suffering the agonies of a death from cancer be protected?

      Of course, there have been many attempts to apologize for that picture of God. Only He knows the big picture. Perhaps the tortured child would have grown up into an evil person, etc. Or: All the suffering that happens here on earth will be made good in the afterlife. Etc.

  Yet that picture of God – the powerful, all-conscious, all-knowing, all-Good being who knows when every leaf falls and parts the Red Sea – is a human fiction, an idolatrous image, something I (like Ivan) have had to let go.

I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

        "That's rebellion," murmered Alyosha, looking down.

"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that," said Ivan earnestly. "One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

      "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

"And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy forever?"

       "No, I can't admit it….”

 

The wall of unanswered prayer forces a radical rethinking of some religious pictures.

    As I have children, I cannot reject the world, as Ivan did (and Schopenhauer). I have found my way back to affirming life, somehow, and thus to God – a God that does not form any clear picture in my mind at all. I came again to God over the reality of goodness in the world. God seems to me like light. It leaks through only from somewhere when one person tries to help another, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, without any thought of their own ego. God shines through people who don’t lose their humanity even in the darkest of places (e.g. Auschwitz). God shines through the lives of the saints. God is a light that shines through some few souls. Yes, God is the light that shone through Christ. Or God shines through the world in the beauty that remains in it. Like a leak from another world that something in us – the capacity for love, compassion, self-sacrifice, beauty – reflects. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is on us to make this world a safe and good place for children, by adjusting our spiritual mirrors to that light.

    So what about the Biblical passage? What about prayer? First the whole passage:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? (from Luke, 11)

Apparently the one petition God does grant is for the gift of the Holy Spirit. And for me the Holy Spirit is what turns our inner mirror to the light that leaks from somewhere into the darkness of the world we humans have constructed for ourselves, into a nature that at least seems constructed by a devil in some of its aspects. Any power God has to affect the course of events, it seems to me, is given through this light, light of love.

 

 

Afterthought

The basic teaching about the efficacy of petitionary prayer opens up the Christian faith to the kind of mocking humor used by Woody Allen’s mouthpiece Boris in the movie Whatever Works (for example):

Marietta: Oh, Melody. I have a sad tale to tell you.

Melody: What happened, Mama?

Marietta: Your father left me. Aren't you shocked?

Melody: No.

Marietta: And with who, of all people?

Melody: Your best friend, Mandy.

Marietta: How did you know?

Melody: Oh, Mama. It was as plain as the nose on your face.

Cliché, sorry.

Marietta: At first I thought he was acting peculiar because things was going so bad for us, darling.

Boris: How often did you have intercourse?

Marietta: Are you going to close that insulting mouth? By bad, I mean he lost a lot of money in the stock market after you left and we were forced to sell the house. 

Melody: You sold the house?

Marietta: I'm sorry, yes. We took a beating because we were so desperate. And then he lost his job, the company went out of business. And then we spent all our savings on medical bills, 'cause I came down with a case of the shingles!

Melody: Oh, my God.

Boris: Christ, this is like Job. No locusts?

Marietta: Darling, I turned to Jesus in a deeper way than I had ever done in my life. I prayed and I prayed, every day and every night, asking God to help me.

Boris: Let me guess what happened, your shingles got worse. 

Marietta: I said, "Lord, just give me one sign that all my suffering is for a purpose." I said, "Please, God, just say something." "Break your silence.

I can't take any more misery!" 

Boris: Nothing, right? And all that money you put in the tin box every Sunday.

 

Now I laughed my head off over this scene. To laugh at something – in this case, an image of God and a theology of prayer – is a sure sign that it is dead for you.

Another afterthought.

My model prayer is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor, opponent of the Hitler regime, written from his cell in a Gestapo prison. No prayer to protect him, to get him out, to spare his life, to protect his family. Instead this:

God, I cry to you in the early morning, help me to pray and to gather my thoughts: I cannot do it alone. It is dark inside me, but you do not leave me. I am timid, but with you is my help. I am anxious, but with you is peace. There is bitterness inside me, but with you is patience. I do not understand your ways, but you know the right way for me. Lord Jesus Christ, you were poor and miserable, caught and abandoned like me. You know all the sorrow of humanity. You stay with me, when nobody stays with me. You never forget me, and you search for me. You want me to recognise you and turn to you. Lord, I hear your call and follow. Help me.

I pray for strength, for gratitude, for forgiveness - ways of trying to turn my soul-mirror in the direction of the light. I also - absurdly, perhaps pathetically - still pray that God at least be with my children. 

 

Meditation on Fantasy and Imagination

 

         C. S. Lewis has had at least as great of an influence on me as any other writer. 

A couple of places I cannot go with Lewis, theologically. His views on women and marriage will seem quaint to many. But these things are on the margin and do not diminish just how much he has taught me and my appreciation of what a wonderful writer he is. The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, Miracles, Three Ways of Writing for Children, and the short Meditation from a Toolshed – all wonderful, essential. I have just re-read his autobiographical discussion of how he became – kicking and fighting– a Christian: Surprised by Joy. I could read this book over and over. Here I want to reflect on an important theme of that book: the distinction Lewis makes between (Freudian) fantasy and imagination. This essential distinction Lewis shares with another great influence on me – Iris Murdoch. I will restrict myself to Lewis’ thought, however. Here are some key passages from Lewis:

It will be clear that at this time – at the age of six, seven, and eight – I was living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least that the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else…. But imagination is a vague word and I must make some distinctions. It may mean the world of reverie, daydream, wish-fulfilling fantasy. Of that I knew more than enough. I often pictured myself cutting a fine figure. But I must insist that this was a totally different activity from the invention of Animal-Land (Lewis’ imaginary world). Animal-Land was not (in that sense) a fantasy at all. I was not one of the characters it contained. I was its creator not a candidate for admission to it. Invention is essentially different from reverie; if some fail to recognize the difference that is because they have not themselves experienced both. Anyone who has will understand me. In my daydreams I was training myself to be a fool; in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.

 

Applying this distinction to reading different kinds of literature, literature based on fantasy as opposed to imagination – as does Murdoch – Lewis makes the distinction even more sharply – I must quote at length:

 

Let us...lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labelled a ‘Boy’s book’ or a ‘Girl’s book,’ as distinct from a ‘Children’s book’. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairyland. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery of the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration. The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale? – really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story. (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in On Stories – And Other Essays on Literature, 37-38.)

 

Both Lewis and Murdoch find this distinction essential for thinking and judging literature: literature based on fantasy – sentimental literature – is at best an escape from one’s troubles; at worst, it feeds the narcissistic potential of our personality and cuts us off from truth.

        I understand the distinction as the boundary between the ‘empirical’ and the ‘noumenal’ ego, to use Kantian language; or the psyche (e.g. as Freud and Plato before him understood it) and the soul. The psyche is largely a system of egocentric energy and fantasy, fed by an evolutionary past and, powerfully, by socialization. The soul – which includes our intellect and ‘heart’ and all higher spiritual powers, including the imagination – is that potential that in a limited, perspectival way, experiences love (and gives it), goodness, beauty, and truth. The family and social matrix forces a separation between the psyche and the soul during the course of our childhood. How and why is a problem beyond my power. The Christian idea of original sin is just as good as anything science can offer. I suppose the inheritance of evolution and history work against any unity. The combination of pure love, virtue, wisdom, community, historical roots, and justice every child needs seems beyond us as a species. Some families, burdened by economic necessity, oppression, or fortune cannot lovingly attend to their children. Some parents, themselves damaged as children, pass that damage further onto their children. Failures of love and bonding activated the psyche; pure love together with the rootedness and bonding love activate the soul. (I make no metaphysical assumptions about the substance or destiny of the soul. I am using it in an everyday sense, as when we translate a line of Homer as “a man loses half his soul the day he becomes a slave.”)

          In capitalist-consumerist-modernist-technological society, the dissolving of community and family produces narcissistic and otherwise damaged personalities as if off the assembly line. Children absolutely depend on their parents for all their needs. Parent, themselves narcissistically needy, use their children to satisfy their own narcissistic needs; ignore them when these needs require it – or resentfully attend to them. The children sense this, and withdraw into a psychic castle to protect their vulnerable egos. They never experience the kind of love that reassures them: they are “good, very good”; it is wonderful that they exist, that they have come into the world. And the world? They are thrown into schools, where, radically insecure, they often confront a kind of “war of all against all,” albeit a sublimated one. Lacking the security that they are worthy of a pure love, they compensate by striving to increase their social market value – in my case, through sports and appearance. But it is a game they cannot win. Always there is someone whose social value implies: you are of lesser worth; you are in the end not lovable. The child loses awareness of that deeper worth that only pure love and nurture can implant.

Fantasy is a necessary defense mechanism allowing us to live with this, though not the only one. (Submerging yourself in a more powerful collective identity, as in sentimental-romantic nationalism, is another.) Daydreams compensate for our lack by imagining us having whatever attributes place one high up on the scale of social value – and thus often make us a worthy object of sexual love by some elevated peer. A typical adolescent fantasy of mine (I cringe to tell it) was to imagine I was much taller and more powerfully built, making me a dominating basketball player. My girl would watch my fantasy-self dominate the game. Well, I am in good company. Lewis relates part of his experience:

 

At boarding school] There was a great decline in my imaginative life…. My reading was now mainly rubbish…. I read twaddling school stories in The Captain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, mere wish fulfillment and fantasy; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of the hero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit, though he may like pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet; but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.

 

As Lewis wrote: that kind of fantasy is “training to be a fool.” The more you lack, the more insecure you are, the more powerful the hold fantasy will gain over you. Obviously, much art fuels this ego-program. I myself have never been able to write fiction because as soon as I do I find fantasy takes over the story I wanted to tell.

Imagination (in Lewis’ and Murdoch’s sense) allows an escape from this alienation, allows you to get in touch with the soul. The longing mentioned by Lewis expresses the longing of the forgotten soul to emerge from its subconscious prison into the light of consciousness and the world. Lewis connects it with the experience of joy – in a very special sense. I have always firmly believed that joy is utterly different from happiness, and that somehow joy flows from the sublime soul (sublime because buried beneath the socially constructed ego) whereas happiness (very fleeting) comes from the ego. Lewis describes it like this:

 

…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

 

It is the greatest blessing of my life that I understand this because I have experienced exactly the longing Lewis refers to here. For me, for example, the fall season; reading The Lord of the Rings; my books; at times, the Catholic liturgy; formerly the Christmas season, and still the Easter season; my children as babies as periodically still – all this has evoked Joy in me. In Joy you leave the unrelenting ego behind. Something deeper is touched – the soul. The contact comes from some place, idea, thing, or person. You reach out to a reality that is not only an end-in-itself but like a portal to another world, or rather came “trailing clouds of glory” from that other world. I don’t think this commits me to a dualism: the fallen world and the divine realm, for example. I might also explain it as a removing of the ego-blinders such that this world and this life is for a moment revealed in its full glory. You are able to see, not “through a mirror, darkly”, but truly. In this seeing, you become aware that you are a living soul – precisely because you are not focusing on yourself.

       Joy is sublime. By sublime I mean something precise, learned and adapted from Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976). His account illuminates the psyche-soul relation I have been exploring through the distinction between fantasy and imagination. Joy is a sublime experience of transcendence. Whether transcendent to the everyday psyche or the material world – or both – is beside the point now. In our everyday, happy-and-pleasure-pursing, pain-and-unpleasantness-avoiding self we experience the world and everything in it – from trees and the sun to our children – from the perspective of this interpreted self. So, for instance, the first stage: I go out for a fall walk, take in the trees, the sky, the vegetation, the homes, and so on.

Of course, I could sentimentalize these things; transform them in my mind into a kitschy greeting card, for example – and experience some self-gratifying feelings. That is just one aspect of the fantasizing psyche and no escape from it. The longing (Sehnsucht) that is Joy is no longing to be in a kitsch painting. Rather, in the second stage of the sublime experience, your normal categories of ‘autumn’ break down. You – your empirical ego or socially constructed self – is not part of the longing at all. You, or what you ordinarily imagine yourself to be, have left the stage; Joy has replaced you. It’s like you can – as Moses looking into the Promised Land – almost visualize how autumn would be in Heaven or in a Platonic Idea. It is a difficult thing for me to understand. Not the actual fall day or moment in time holding a newborn baby – wonderful though they be – but the longing for joy occasioned by such events goes beyond what occasioned them. It is as if what occasioned them, their full being, breaks through that fantasizing ego and opens the door for the soul to apprehend this being. Now a fall day or a newborn baby may be, as Lewis puts it, an image or reflection of divine reality, or the divine spirit that infuses our being. In Lewis’ own words:

 

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. “Reflect” is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

 

This is the completion of the third stage of the sublime. The everyday experience – say of the fall day – was ruptured by joy in the second stage, and now when you experience other fall days, even though not in the grip of joyful longing, you see them as something very different – as images or reflections (symbols) for some reality that transcends ordinary ego consciousness. The memory of the original experience becomes part of the longing. Simply put, you see the world differently. The fall day activated your spiritual consciousness that emanates from another part of your being, your soul. The only necessary dualism that I insist on is the world as seen through the lens of the constructed self, its clichés and fantasies; and the world as seen through joy and longing – in which imagination plays a powerful role. From the perspective of the latter, the former seems a form of blindness.

            The sublime experience that reveals the living soul is not yet religion. As Lewis wrote,

 

In me, at any rate, it contained no element either of belief or of ethics; however far pursued, it would never have made me either wiser or better.

 

This reflects Lewis’ commitment to Christianity – a commitment to the belief that only direct contact with Christ can make a person wiser or better than pagan virtue. I don’t quite agree with Lewis here, and the difference is theological and philosophical. Only in fear and trembling do I disagree with Lewis, and fear he may be right and I wrong. I agree that the experience of Joy is probably a necessary condition for religious experience, agree with him that Joy is not yet religion. Still an absolute difference in attitude toward life and the world does exist between those locked in their distorting egos and those who, however much dominated by ego consciousness in their daily lives, have had the breakout experience of Joy.

        In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people have been chained from birth and can only see images on the screen of the cave wall, images produced by cliché and media in the service of the powers that be. They take this to be reality. This is the state of the constructed psyche. Joy is one way to break these chains. It gets you to the top of the cave where the sun cancels the darkness of psyche and reveals the bright world to a soul. This is an absolute difference. A life spent in the cave of ego, from the point of view of the soul who at least knows light exists, is not worth living. Indeed, it is a form of Hell. Once in the sun, you may discover God, you may discover that God’s love infuses the Creation, and much more. Perhaps from that higher spiritual imagination, the sunlight we may see in joy seems as pale a thing as the life of the cave seemed to the soul that the sunlight first awakened. I don’t know. I am sure that the worst thing – Hell – is for the cave (social power and ego) to imprison the soul, and thus never know or even want to know the world as it really is, the world that can awaken a soul into existence.

            One of the tragic, frustrating aspect of making this distinction is that only those who have experienced the escape from the damaged or narcissistic ego that is Joy will be able to believe it. This, moreover, has little to do with merit. Joy is a free grace, but those whom failures of love and community have badly damaged by may not be able to experience it, through no fault of their own. Still, from their perspective, all Joy will be sentimental delusion, which is in reality a corruption of joy. If the damaged, self-protecting narcissistic ego is all, then any apparent escape from must necessarily be an act for others or self-deceit for the purpose of elevating the insecure ego at the expense of other egos. There is little or nothing to be done about this.

            The distinction between fantasy and imagination – and the two parts of our inner lives that each comes from – is key not only for thinking about art but religion. As long as ego consciousness keeps us down, God can only originate in our fantasy. The whole world and heaven can be little more than our own projection, socially constructed at that perspective largely is. The ego consciousness creates its own God, one that makes them feel good, removes their insecurities, places them above others, and above all makes no demands of them. I fear that much liberalism as well as fundamentalism in religion have their sources in ego consciousness. Many people have rightly insisted that the absoluteness of goodness and the demands of a clear conscience place one in touch with something deeper than the superficial self. It is clear to me that imagination does the same.

         

           

Afterthought

All religious people and most thinking people up till the modern period beginning in the 17^th century believed that the anti-thesis of goodness, the definition of the Satanic, was what we call today “autonomy.” As Milton’s Satan precisely puts it: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” Thus what is real and good doesn’t come from Being, from Creation, but from our wills – as informed exclusively by an ego consciousness that walls out any contact with reality and love. Satan knew what he rejected. His will was evil. Our egos, just as busy walling out reality and love, just as busy building “a hell in heaven’s despite,” to quote another poet (Blake), don’t know any better, having been damaged in childhood and throughout our lives by failures of love and community, and subject to a powerful ideological and medial conditioning. You may as well expect someone who knows nothing but soap operas to respond to Shakespeare. It is possible! But only by a difficult rebellion.

     I would end with a quote from Schiller’s well-known poem “Ode to Joy”

 

Deine Zauber binden wieder,

Was der Mode Schwert geteilt;

Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder,

Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

 

Thy enchantments bind together,

What did custom stern divide,

Beggars becomes princes’ brothers,

Where thy gentle wings abide.

 

 

 Meditation on the Real World and the World as it Appears 

 

       What we know directly are contents of our consciousness, not reality as it is in itself: that is the main idea of Kant, which Schopenhauer thought was self-evident. The contents of our consciousness, the possible contents of any consciousness like our own, that we can investigate, understand to a certain degree, acquire knowledge about, interpret, etc. – that is, our ideas or re-presentations of the world as we experience it is everything we can even think out, the horizon of our thought which we cannot go beyond. We cannot get outside of our experience as structured by our brains, by our language (and in particular by our concepts of things), no more than a character in a video game can do something that goes against its programming.

 

I am looking at the two birch trees in the back of my apartment house.

   These two birch trees are not really there as far as I know. Light hits my eyes; the photons are translated into electrical energy; the electrical energy reaches my brain; my brain interprets the energy according to its program into ‘two birch trees. I cannot get out of my brain to compare the images it produced with some unperceived, unconceptualized thing-in-itself. For all I know, I might just be a brain in a vat, a brain being fed the right electrical information by some Mega-computer (Hilary Putnam). All I know is what my brain generates as “reality”; I cannot know anything else.

    For Kant, our brain’s programming generates a Newtonian “reality.” The phenomenal world in space and time is governed by the deterministic laws of physics – not because the laws of physics describe reality as it is in itself but because the laws are the way we have been programmed to experience the world. When we do physics, we are really describing or mapping the way our brains have been programmed to experience. And since Kant mistakenly believed Newton was the final word on nature, he thought this programming belonged to our hardware.

   And the programming, what we think of as physics, is completely deterministic. Nature – so the programming – is a closed system. Imagine all of what we can experience, the entire set of the content of what we can be aware of, subject to a program with this logic.

   Here is an example of a simple, closed, deterministic system using just two symbols: "+" and "-". We can represent this system as a sequence of these symbols. One such system is a binary alternating sequence, where each symbol alternates between "+" and "-": for example, the sequence: "+-+-+-+-".

  In this system, the pattern is deterministic and closed. Given any starting point in the sequence, you can predict the next symbol and all subsequent symbols with certainty. The system follows a deterministic rule where the symbol alternates between "+" and "-". Starting from any position in the sequence, you can predict the symbol at any future point or past point in the sequence. For instance, if you start at the first symbol "+", you know that the next symbol will be "-", then "+", and so on, following the alternating pattern. Similarly, if you start at any other position, you can predict the subsequent symbols based on the deterministic rule of alternation.

   All of nature – so our programming – follows the laws of physics (the rule of alternating between + and – in my simple illustration would be a physical law, like the law of gravity. We, nature, everything that we can experience, is part of the chain of cause-and-effect. My typing these words, in this system, would be entirely predictable if we had all the laws operating – i.e. the full programming were transparent to us. This system is closed because there are no external influences or interactions affecting the sequence. It's a simple example, but it effectively demonstrates the concept of a closed, deterministic system where all possible outcomes are completely predictable.

    So every thinker who imagined reality as a radical split between the world as we experience and represent it to ourselves (the phenomenal world, the world of appearances) and reality as it is in itself, unperceived, unconceptualized, unrepresented always leaves a backdoor. There is always a way out of the phenomenal world, the world that our brains have pulled down over our eyes. For Kant, it is the experience of freedom, namely, the freedom to follow (or not) the moral law, to do one’s duty. In the world as we experience and as can be described with physics, there is no freedom and thus no responsibility, no morality. Everything is caused. A person being murdered and a person being killed by a tornado – no difference within the phenomenal world, the world of objects obeying causal laws in space and time. We experience it as different – which, if the world is our representation and nothing more, must either be an illusory experience or an experience from another realm, the true reality behind the veil of appearances.

   Kant chose the latter alternative. When I see a beggar, and all my natural inclinations urge me to check my phone and walk by, but something else in my – my sense of duty, call it – calls on me to stop and give, and I stop and give, I have actually experienced a leak from another world, from the true world. The chain of cause and effect that runs the program with which we must experience anything we can experience is broken every time we do our duty (for Kant). Now you can’t prove it. Everything about giving to the beggar happens in the world of appearances and is thus subject to the same programming laws, the laws of physics. And of course I might have given to the beggar for numerous other reasons than out of a sense of duty. But if I acted from a sense of pure duty, I experienced something beyond space and time, beyond cause and effect, but plurality and all other conditions of our experience. I can’t say anything about it. I can’t give a reason for it. I experience it as an absolute command, something sui generis, something that can’t be compared to anything else we experience because it is not part of our program. It is like Super Mario (from the video game) stopping the program and doing something on his own because a voice from somewhere outside the virtual world he was a part of communicated a duty to him; as though rather than jumping on an enemy goombah felt compelled to show mercy even though mercy is not part of the program.

    Kant worked out an interpretation of the sublime to account for this getting out of the programmed reality.  I read a book by Thomas Weiskel that worked out Kant’s notion of the sublime in a way that made sense for me.

      The world of appearances is not a cage. Our understandings change all the time – at the margins (though the margins seem deep to us surface dwellers). And sometimes something amazingly new breaks into it. First, a contrast to everyday experience is presupposed – the experience of the virtual world generated by our brains' interpretations of sensory input.  

        A father, say, has a conventional relationship with his children: he is preoccupied with work, does his duty to the children – reads to them in the evening, etc. – but experiences all this as something normal, everyday, something typical for his culture. We might say this relationship is somewhat shallow without intending a moral judgment. And this shallow relationship is interwoven with the routines of family – carrying out the father program. And then, in the second phase, something happens to radically disrupt this conventional relationship: he loses a child in an auto accident or, less dramatically, is moved by some loving gesture of the child: “The habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise or astonishment is the effective correlative, and there is an immediate of a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess – and then both are, since their relation has become radically indeterminate (Thomas Weiskel, 22-23).” The habitual attitude breaks down. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he begins to see his previous life with his children in a new, critical light as being shallow, conventional – a view that was not available before. 

        In the third and final stage – assuming it comes at all – a fresh, new relationship is established. This new relationship, incorporating the excess Weiskel identified, has a different character: “…the mind recovers a fresh balance between outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and object such that the very indeterminacy that erupted in phase two is taking as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. This new relation has a “meta” character that distinguishes it from the homologous relation of habitual perception (23; emphasis mine).” The father – again, like Ivan Ilyich – has come to see his children in a radically different light; has come to change the attitude he has towards them. It is like the linguistic change between conventional uses of words like son, daughter, father, including the ways a sociologist might perhaps use the words in his work, to the super-charged uses of these words in religious poetry – language “used at full stretch” reflecting a deeper love for the children. And the conversion is not restricted to how the father experiences his children; in a sense, he now lives in a different world. (This is the only sense Nelson Goodman’s world-pluralism makes for me.)

       And then the sublime experience gets passed on in the grammar of our language, becomes part of an expanded common sense. Newborn babies are gifts, a person can haunt us in remorse, the world is filled with the grandeur of God. . .. Not everyone will be able to make these metaphors come alive in sublime experience; but it will be generally intelligible to everyone that some people can, and it should be intelligible to most that I might judge my life to be impoverished to the extent I cannot. Conceptual space for the seeing of newborn babies as gifts will have been created. Of course, this cultural space is a gift of culture, and cultures differ from one another to the extent they do not share such space. 

         Now through the sublime experience, reality leaks into and changes us and our world. But because nothing in our experience of the world allows us to understand it – we can only understand what we are programmed to experience – it’s not like we can prove it. If someone denies it, calls it an illusion on the grounds that nothing escapes the laws of physics, then Kant could not prove it to it. He could say that unless we acknowledge it, morality would be an illusion. But that is no argument that morality is not an illusion. He could say our form of life would be turned upside down. Again, that is not argument that our experience of morality is upside down. When we act from duty, according to Kant, we cannot really believe that the sublime experience corresponds to nothing or is just part of the brain’s program. But our subjective certainty again proves nothing. We are left with the sublime and the sense of subjective certainty. Believe it or not!

    To draw a limit to what can be thought – to remove metaphysical thinking as a human possibility – Kant and his followers distinguished between the world as we experience it and thus can think about, and the real world beyond our experience that we can never experience and thus never think about. Any way of conceiving the world that divides it up into a world of appearances that is equivalent to the world that we experience and talk about, and the real world that is conceptually beyond experience and all of our concepts has two and only two mutually exclusive alternatives: either skepticism: we can understand our programming better but can never know reality as it is in itself (unperceived, unconceptualized); or there is an escape from the virtual world through the sublime, but it cannot be conceptualized, spoken about except metaphorically (or analogically?), and thus cannot be known or proven – it is based on subjective certainty. Wittgenstein calls this “the mystical.”

   Both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein offer different variants of this, and I will discuss them in a future entry. But if one denies the axiom that all experience is by definition or by nature cut off from reality, virtualizes reality as it were, then things look different. I will conclude with a quote from Wittgenstein on this topic:

…to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought. . . .

I agree that we have no reason to suppose that reality completely conforms to our ways of experiencing it; that there is no reason to believe in realities that transcend our experience and thought. I disagree – and find it makes no sense – to suppose that our experience is not of something real. Perhaps it's only the surface, but it is the surface of something real.  When I look at the birch trees, I am seeing something real, birch trees, though I don't know them, don't see them as God does.         

Afterthought

Kant did not exclude the possibility that time, space, causality, subjects and objects, existed in the real world; but he maintained we could not know it. He did think it necessary to imagine a real material world apart from our perception of it. Schopenhauer found this illogical. If all we can know is appearances, then nothing gives us the right to suppose there is any world in itself apart from the world we experience. We don't know the sun, only the eye that sees the sun, he wrote. Thus the whole world of experience is a "phantasmagoria" - an illusion. 

 

Meditation of Critical Philosophy or Transcendental Idealism (Kant, Schopenhauer)

I. Transcendental Idealism: Axiomatic propositions

 

1. “The world is my representation”

“The world is my representation” is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it.” 

 

2. We have no access to reality as it is apart from our experience.

For that the objective existence of things is conditioned by a representer of them, and that consequently the objective world exists only as representation, is no hypothesis, still less a peremptory pronouncement, or even a paradox put forward for the sake of debate or argument. On the contrary, it is the surest and simplest truth…. (World as Will and Representation, vol.2, p.5)

“Nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty…”

True idealism…is not the empirical, but the transcendental. It leaves the empirical reality of the world untouched, but adheres to the fact that all object, and hence the empirically real in general, is conditioned by the subject in a twofold manner. In the first place, it is conditioned materially, or as object in general, since an objective existence is conceivable only in place of a subject and as the representation of the subject. In the second place, it is conditioned formally, since the mode and manner of the object’s existence, in other words, of its being represented (space, time, causality), proceed from the subject, and are predisposed in the subject. . . . This proves that the whole of the material world with its bodies in space, extended and, by means of time, having causal relations with one another, and everything attached to this – all this is not something existing independently of our mind, but something that has its fundamental presuppositions in our brain functions, by means of which and in which alone is such an objective order of things possible. For time, space, and causality, on which those real and objective events rest are themselves nothing more than functions of the brain; so that, therefore, this unchangeable order of things, affording the criterion and the clue to their empirical reality, itself comes first from the brain, and has its credentials from that alone.”

 

…things and their whole mode and manner of existence are inseparably associated with our consciousness of them. Therefore he who has clearly grasped this soon reaches the conviction that the assumption that things exist as such, even outside and independently of our consciousness, is really absurd.

 

GL: The thought is this: since we cannot transport ourselves outside of our conscious awareness, and compare our ideas (representations, Vorstellungen) of things (e.g. trees, people, the state, etc.) with the things as they are in reality, we have no basis for believing that our ideas of things conform to reality. On the contrary, our very idea of reality is conditioned by the way our brains have to represent reality if we are to have any experience at all. It is as though consciousness were enclosed in a submarine without windows or any direct access to the sea. All we can know is mediated through our instruments that relay data through electrical impulses to our instrument panels. We cannot get out of our submarines to compare what is on our instrument panels to the sea itself, and indeed, we have no basis for asserting that the ways our instruments (our sense, programmed by our brains) can translate what we call the sea (reality) at all into ideas/concepts. Thus our ideas/concepts reveal only the nature of our consciousness – not that of which we are conscious.

  Again, the core assumption is this: what we experience cannot ever in principle be taken for reality; it must always be assumed to be our subjective or intersubjective way of processing reality. Everything we experience, and the very conditions for experiencing anything at all – time, space, causality, object, plurality, unity, self, etc. – cannot be understood as real. Even our bodily life, even our experience of our conscious selves: not reality; nothing but appearance, phenomena.

   Everything we can possibly experience – except for the sublime (later) – is appearance. I cannot get outside my mind, which is in time, which experiences time flowing by, to check and see whether my experience of time matches the way reality is apart from my experience of it. That would be like asking a character in a Dickens novel, say, Scrooge, to get outside the novel to see whether his world is real. Or like asking someone in the Matrix to get outside the Matrix (well, that was possible in the movie: so to make the analogy right, you would have to exclude that possibility).

   Phenomenal and noumenal world, the world as it is beyond experience, the transcendental world: no time, so space, no matter or substance of any kind, no objects or plurality – in short, nothing that belongs to our experience of the world of appearances can be attributed to reality. No concept or idea applied to it, except negatively: reality is not in time or space; there is no cause and effect in the real world; there are no substances in the real world. Reality from our point of view is Nothing, No-thing. It is beyond Being.

   Within the phenomenal world of experience, as a condition of the possibility of any experience, the world must be experienced as objects existing in space and time, subject to the principle of causality (or sufficient reason). The appearances we take as the world – and as described by science – exist within a closed system: not because nature is a closed system, as physics assumes, but because our brains can only experience anything at all in such a way.  

     This turns everything on its head. For example, in classical mechanics (Newtonian physics), if the initial conditions of a system are known with sufficient precision and the laws of physics governing the system are deterministic (such as Newton's laws of motion), then the future evolution of the system can be determined with certainty – and the past as well. We can say whether there was a full moon or not when Ceasar crossed the Rubicon. But this is only because our brains are, as it were, programmed to experience the world in this way. For Schopenhauer it is all like a dream – the moon, time, space, causality – it all exists only in our minds.

     In classical thought, reality was believed to imprint itself on the unclouded mind. We could know what a thing was. The essence of a triangle was thought to lie in its defining characteristics, namely, having three straight sides and three angles that add up to 180 degrees. By grasping these essential features, one can understand what it means to be a triangle. But this is not the mind conforming itself to an independent reality for transcendental Ideality, but the mind becoming aware of part of its own programming – in this case, the program determining how space is experienced. A human being was an animal that was different from all other animals by being self-conscious, aware of itself in time and aware of its own mortality, language-using and symbol-creating, able to know to a certain extent a knowable universe, etc. Again, what is happening here is the mind examining how it has been programmed to produce and then experience an appearance of its own making.

      The best analogy might be the creation of virtual worlds by game designers, such as Minecraft. The world as it appears on the screen, the events that happen and can happen in that world, the kinds of objects that can appear in that world – all this is the function of the programming, and it is the programming that determines what we can experience in that virtual world. We know the world on the screen in virtual but suffer from the illusion that our everyday world and the world as revealed by science is somehow real. It is just as virtual as Minecraft, even if we can’t identify the source of the programming.

    This is not crazy. All of our access to the world comes through our senses. Our senses without exception pass information to the brain through electrical impulses that the brain translates into images and experience. If an engineer could mechanically feed the brain with the right electronic impulses, that engineer could make us experience whatever he wanted. It is the electrical impulses that the brain directly interprets and not the objects in the world. How can we know that the brain’s interpretation corresponds to anything real given that we cannot get outside of the brain to compare?

    Kant and Schopenhauer were aware that his implied – all things being equal – metaphysical skepticism. We can know nothing about reality. Everything we know is confined to what we can experience, to the world of appearances generated by our programming.  But they at least thought the phenomenal world was basically the same for everyone: Euclid described the programming used to produce and experience space, Newton the programming used to produce and experience nature, etc. At least we could be aware of the programming. But now we believe that space can be programmed in a vast variety of ways, from non-Euclidean geometries to the works of Escher and the surrealists; nature from Einsteinian physics to Van Gogh. Etc. Cultural and artistic variety in the human species means much of our experience is determined through cultural and even individual software working to interpret the hardware components of space, times, cause, object, etc. Reality – that which is unconceptualized, uninterpreted, undescribed – doesn’t force anything on us (though the practical needs of survival might).

      Nelson Goodman draws the logical conclusion of this way of thinking in Ways of Worldmaking: reality cannot serve as a foundation to which our various world versions can be compared to see which one is right. The idea of reality – a real world existing undescribed, undepicted, unperceived – is an empty concept, an X as Kant put it. There are as many worlds are there are world versions, one of which can be considered reality. All are phenomena, appearances. If you – within certain logical constraints – want to live in a world with 72 genders or 2, reality will not stand in your way. It’s like you – whatever that means, for the self is also an appearance, a “construct” in the parlance of our times – have just agreed to have different experience-software downloaded into your brain.

 

I am not finished with this; I want to say something about the different ways Kant and Schopenhauer thought within this framework and show its influence on contemporary culture. But I will pause here. I agree that the mind cannot simply mirror reality; that our concepts cannot be like wax imprinted by reality so that they copy reality somehow. But I reject any philosophy that cuts us entirely off from reality, that makes the world absolutely phenomenal, appearance. There is a position in between the mind-as-a-mirror-of-nature and the mind as the producer of nature. Schopenhauer himself gives a couple of excellent metaphors that support what I think and, as I believe, work against the transcendental idealism that I have crudely sketched here.  

    

Just as we know of the earth only the surface, not the great, solid masses of the interior, so we know empirically of the things of the world nothing at all except their appearances, i.e. the surface.

We complain of the darkness in which we live out our lives: we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it since we can see neither back before our birth nor out beyond our death, so that our consciousness is as it were a lightening-flash momentarily illuminating the night….  (“On the Antithesis of Thing in Itself and Appearance,” from the essays).  

 

Now if transcendental idealism is right, a radical metaphysical skepticism follows. We cannot know reality, and thus we must give up philosophy as it was traditionally conceived. Like castaways on a deserted island who find a message in a bottle washed up on shore, believing it from the outside world, only to find that they themselves had written the message (Peter Kreeft). We can become aware of the programs that run our experience, but not what the world is like outside of our programmed experience.

   But Schopenhauer’s metaphors, we do know something, the surface of things, the world as revealed in a flash of lightning. The surface is not appearance; what we see in the lightning flash is not appearance. Thus I deny the axiom that the world is not but my representation, or rather, that my representation cannot reveal anything of the world, even if it can’t reveal the whole.

     We cannot know all of reality from a point outside it, outside our consciousness, from God’s point of view; but we can experience the surface. And that is not nothing. I experience my children through my senses but also my love for them. I don’t know if they were accidents of nature, creatures of God, or what. But I do know they are real and loveable. I know that a world version, a metaphysics, that denied their reality, that saw them as nothing but appearance, or nothing but a collection of atoms in space and time, would be missing something essential even. This would be my counter philosophy that I need to unpack.

   But I would start off like this. A bee sees this:

A human sees this:

Which is the true way of seeing? That probably makes no sense. But we and the bee both see something, a flower, a poppy. If the poppy were an illusion, the bee couldn't get its nectar or transport its pollen. The thing itself is what we both see. It is not virtual. But we both see it from a finite perspective. What we can't achieve is the vision (knowledge) of a perfect, absolute consciousness - God.