Stephen R.L. Clark was a marvelous essay, "Going Beyond Our Worlds to find the World: What "Reason" is Really For,"below are some excepts followed by a few thoughts :
"Theoria offers us something more than notions: we may, or at least we hope we may, encounter a real presence, Nous, which contains whatever can be understood as rationally required. That noetic realm is at once the explanation of phenomena and of our being equipped to grasp their meaning.
"Nous is our king. But we too are kings when we are in accord with it; we can be in accord with it in two ways, either by having something like its writing written in us like laws, or by being as if filled with it and able to see it and be aware of it as present."
- Plotinus
Things as they are and as they seem to us to be are different. This is at once so obviously the case and so difficult to remember or to act upon as to constitute a puzzle. Platonists especially (and very oddly) are routinely mocked for dividing the world into two (or more), a merely material and an ideal world. But the division is at once more detailed and more certainly correct than is supposed. First (and most obviously) the images presented to me (of wife, daughter, cat) are not the full realities of those same entities. The images come and go, but the entities themselves are always present to themselves. Nor do I see (hear, smell, touch) everything that is true about them. Indeed I do not even sense all that is true of me. Whatever it is that ‘reason’ shows me I am it is not exactly what I ordinarily sense or feel is so.
We never sense more than a segment even of what is in the abstract ‘sensible’ – and far more, we are assured by ‘reason’, is going on in the world than we could ever sense. Visible light – once we have identified light and electro-magnetic radiation – is only a tiny segment of all such radiation, even of such radiation as makes visible sense to other creatures (bees or birds). We hear and smell far less than dogs, even if we also claim to know much more than they do. So the phenomenal worlds that each of us inhabit, and partly share with others of our species or some broader taxon, is no more than an echo or reflection of the fully imagined world we equate with ‘the material’. Our ordinary lives, as Aurelius insisted, are ‘a dream and a delusion’.
One step in the Platonic and Pythagorean argument is actually now commoner amongst cosmologists than ever in the past. Nowadays we ‘understand’ the material universe as the expression of mathematical relationships: we can expect the world to be homogeneous because it is everywhere, as it were, a hall of mirrors, reflecting the True World of numbers. What is lacking in the modern cosmologists’ thesis is any clear account of what those ‘numbers’ are, and how the merely mathematical and formal system can issue in material and phenomenal reality.
"What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?"
Things as they are and as they seem to us to be are different. This is at once so obviously the case and so difficult to remember or to act upon as to constitute a puzzle. Platonists especially (and very oddly) are routinely mocked for dividing the world into two (or more), a merely material and an ideal world. But the division is at once more detailed and more certainly correct than is supposed. First (and most obviously) the images presented to me (of wife, daughter, cat) are not the full realities of those same entities. The images come and go, but the entities themselves are always present to themselves. Nor do I see (hear, smell, touch) everything that is true about them. Indeed I do not even sense all that is true of me. Whatever it is that ‘reason’ shows me I am it is not exactly what I ordinarily sense or feel is so.
We never sense more than a segment even of what is in the abstract ‘sensible’ – and far more, we are assured by ‘reason’, is going on in the world than we could ever sense. Visible light – once we have identified light and electro-magnetic radiation – is only a tiny segment of all such radiation, even of such radiation as makes visible sense to other creatures (bees or birds). We hear and smell far less than dogs, even if we also claim to know much more than they do. So the phenomenal worlds that each of us inhabit, and partly share with others of our species or some broader taxon, is no more than an echo or reflection of the fully imagined world we equate with ‘the material’. Our ordinary lives, as Aurelius insisted, are ‘a dream and a delusion’.
One step in the Platonic and Pythagorean argument is actually now commoner amongst cosmologists than ever in the past. Nowadays we ‘understand’ the material universe as the expression of mathematical relationships: we can expect the world to be homogeneous because it is everywhere, as it were, a hall of mirrors, reflecting the True World of numbers. What is lacking in the modern cosmologists’ thesis is any clear account of what those ‘numbers’ are, and how the merely mathematical and formal system can issue in material and phenomenal reality.
"What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?"
- Stephen Hawking
Well, on the ancient view, perhaps that is exactly what theoria does! But we should not mistake theoria for a theory.
Merely abstract formulae, ‘laws of nature’, are only descriptions, not explanations. And neither are ‘material bodies’ as ordinarily conceived adequate explanations of the worlds that we experience. How can a merely ‘material’ world (hypothesised, exactly, as lacking all merely subjective properties) possibly explain the emergence of those properties, in conscious life? Our predecessors were wiser in positing the One, the necessarily unknowable origin of all that is, present in its entirety at every point and eliciting – from mere possibility – the manifold forms of beauty. It is from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth spring.
In one way this is to acknowledge that there are many worlds: in another it is rather to insist that there is one world only, multiply realized and mirrored in our sense and imagination: ‘a thing all faces, shining with living faces’. What the tradition asks of us is to realize the presence of that one world – and to pass in thought beyond it to the One that is its origin. ‘Reason’ is the route we take to it, but its recognition transcends all reasoning.
"Intellect … has one power for thinking, by which it looks at the things in itself, and one by which it looks at what transcends it by a direct awareness and reception, by which also before it saw only, and by seeing acquired intellect and is one. And that first one is the contemplation of Intellect in its right mind, and the other is Intellect in love, when it goes out of its mind ‘drunk with the nectar’; then it falls in love, simplified into happiness (haplotheis eis eupatheian) by having its fill, and it is better for it to be drunk with a drunkenness like this than to be more respectably sober."
Well, on the ancient view, perhaps that is exactly what theoria does! But we should not mistake theoria for a theory.
Merely abstract formulae, ‘laws of nature’, are only descriptions, not explanations. And neither are ‘material bodies’ as ordinarily conceived adequate explanations of the worlds that we experience. How can a merely ‘material’ world (hypothesised, exactly, as lacking all merely subjective properties) possibly explain the emergence of those properties, in conscious life? Our predecessors were wiser in positing the One, the necessarily unknowable origin of all that is, present in its entirety at every point and eliciting – from mere possibility – the manifold forms of beauty. It is from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth spring.
In one way this is to acknowledge that there are many worlds: in another it is rather to insist that there is one world only, multiply realized and mirrored in our sense and imagination: ‘a thing all faces, shining with living faces’. What the tradition asks of us is to realize the presence of that one world – and to pass in thought beyond it to the One that is its origin. ‘Reason’ is the route we take to it, but its recognition transcends all reasoning.
"Intellect … has one power for thinking, by which it looks at the things in itself, and one by which it looks at what transcends it by a direct awareness and reception, by which also before it saw only, and by seeing acquired intellect and is one. And that first one is the contemplation of Intellect in its right mind, and the other is Intellect in love, when it goes out of its mind ‘drunk with the nectar’; then it falls in love, simplified into happiness (haplotheis eis eupatheian) by having its fill, and it is better for it to be drunk with a drunkenness like this than to be more respectably sober."
- Plotinus
Like ‘the wise men of old’, as Plotinus tells us, we create these images in the hope that the gods will infuse them with their life, that we will be awakened to a real and lucid assent to marvels. ‘The wise men of old … made temples and statues in the wish that the gods should be present to them’.
All other things, perhaps, are more in touch with Nous than we are, precisely because we are talking all the time, and so obscure the vision. Why, after all, is it a sign of our superiority (as so many human traditions say) that we can get things wrong? Knowing good and evil, in the story, was actually a mistake! The serpent’s suggestion was that we would be ‘as gods’ if we could discriminate between ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’. The alternative answer is that we should prefer to see all things as good, or at least to refrain from judgment. According to Muslim tradition, ‘One day Jesus was walking with his followers, and they passed by the carcass of a dog. The followers said, “How this dog stinks!” But Jesus said, “How white are its teeth.”’. ‘To the pure all things are pure’ – which does not, of course, deny the possibility of corruption: on the contrary, for those who are ‘defiled and unbelieving’ everything is ‘impure’.
Like ‘the wise men of old’, as Plotinus tells us, we create these images in the hope that the gods will infuse them with their life, that we will be awakened to a real and lucid assent to marvels. ‘The wise men of old … made temples and statues in the wish that the gods should be present to them’.
All other things, perhaps, are more in touch with Nous than we are, precisely because we are talking all the time, and so obscure the vision. Why, after all, is it a sign of our superiority (as so many human traditions say) that we can get things wrong? Knowing good and evil, in the story, was actually a mistake! The serpent’s suggestion was that we would be ‘as gods’ if we could discriminate between ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’. The alternative answer is that we should prefer to see all things as good, or at least to refrain from judgment. According to Muslim tradition, ‘One day Jesus was walking with his followers, and they passed by the carcass of a dog. The followers said, “How this dog stinks!” But Jesus said, “How white are its teeth.”’. ‘To the pure all things are pure’ – which does not, of course, deny the possibility of corruption: on the contrary, for those who are ‘defiled and unbelieving’ everything is ‘impure’.
‘Reason’ in the proper sense is the recognition of Beauty. If once we can see ‘as the All’ we will ‘stop marking [ourselves] off from all being and will come to the All without going out anywhere’. - Plotinus
Clark's essay reminded me of this by David Hart :
"As opposed to the positivistic view of truth so prevalent today, the more ancient Platonist model of truth is one of disclosure: the radiance by which the object of reflection really shows itself–gives itself–to the subjective intention.
“Love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that in-tends the world as beauty and can so receive it ..
…this much we must admit: anyone suffering a profound grief, in which love's joy has been transformed into sorrow, knows how utterly oppressive and imprisoning seems the brute immensity of the world, its unforgiving impersonality, its callous grandeur and vapidity, its hideous persistence . . .. "
This, I think, is because, as both the ancients and mystics of today tell us, it is not from metaphysics that one is "inspired" to see the meaning of nature, perception must be morally conditioned -the senses rendered rational to mirror the rationality of the world, the Platonic axiom that “Only like can know, and be known by, like.”
There is still this strain even in Christian thought, in the Orthodox East. Two fundamental forms of the education of the senses: liturgical and ascetical. Each provides the essential context for the other.
The cumulative effect of this process is that the senses are “rendered rational,” and the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, is more attentive to actual reality, now able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.
Clark's essay reminded me of this by David Hart :
"As opposed to the positivistic view of truth so prevalent today, the more ancient Platonist model of truth is one of disclosure: the radiance by which the object of reflection really shows itself–gives itself–to the subjective intention.
“Love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that in-tends the world as beauty and can so receive it ..
…this much we must admit: anyone suffering a profound grief, in which love's joy has been transformed into sorrow, knows how utterly oppressive and imprisoning seems the brute immensity of the world, its unforgiving impersonality, its callous grandeur and vapidity, its hideous persistence . . .. "
This, I think, is because, as both the ancients and mystics of today tell us, it is not from metaphysics that one is "inspired" to see the meaning of nature, perception must be morally conditioned -the senses rendered rational to mirror the rationality of the world, the Platonic axiom that “Only like can know, and be known by, like.”
There is still this strain even in Christian thought, in the Orthodox East. Two fundamental forms of the education of the senses: liturgical and ascetical. Each provides the essential context for the other.
The cumulative effect of this process is that the senses are “rendered rational,” and the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, is more attentive to actual reality, now able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.
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