More Reflections on the Soul, and the Mind, and our Place in the World

No proof or evidence for the tone deaf. We can only emotionally connect – or not – to transcendence, and consent or refuse consent to those responses. The emotional responses to transcendent, when not sentimental, are experiences of the sublime, or the mystical in Wittgenstein’s sense. The fact of such responses and the importance of their role in the spiritual lives of human beings are not proofs that anything beyond the ordinary is ‘real’; they are not objective evidence either. But they are a kind of subjective evidence, an intimation to weigh against the possibility that the real, for example, is nothing but what physics can study. 

   ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …than are dreamt of in your philosophy or science!’      True or false? No experiment or equation can answer that question. No experiment can prove whether one’s experience that a certain waterfall is sublime is an experience of reality or a subjective-psychological-evolutionary illusion occasioned by some otherwise meaningless collection of water molecules. What we are left with is men and women speaking and writing: ‘Wow, that waterfall is awesome”’; ‘Gee, what a sweet waterfall.’ Compare: ‘Just listened again to the fugue in G minor – no words to express how deeply beautiful that is’ Teenage rapper: ‘Well, I listened to part of it – it was so boring I couldn’t go on. No action!’ Not all responses are equal.

   

     Before modernity – science, technology, industrialism, capitalism – it was common sense that our emotional responses were more or less in harmony with reality, “believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt (C, S. Lewis)”: that, for example, Wordsworth’s joy – later expressed in the well-known poem – in beholding the daffodils by a bay disclosed something real about the daffodils and nature (beauty and more). Therefore, it also belonged to common sense that emotions needed to be educated. Before we can conceptualize the truth of beings and nature herself we need to feel the truth. Indeed, we cannot intellectually apprehend truth without first knowing it emotionally. Thus just as the ignorant teen above was tone deaf to the music of Bach, we tend to be tone deaf to nature and much of reality, including our own.

 

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Different pictures of the soul, or the self, or human nature are involved here. Interestingly, how you understand yourself depends on how you understand nature, reality as a whole.