" All right, I guess we’ll start. Last week I talked to you about a line in the New Testament that was from John. It was a line that was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis. It’s a really important line. I thought I would reemphasize it, because the Bible is a book that’s been written forward and backwards in time—like most books, because if you write a book, of course, when you get to the end, if you’re a writer, you can adjust the beginning, and so on. It has this odd appearance of linearity, but it isn’t linear. It’s like you’re God, standing outside of time. That’s your book, and you can play with time anywhere along it. The people who put the book together—or the books together—took full advantage of that. It gives the story odd parallels in many, many places and this is one of the major parallels—at least from the perspective of the Christian interpretation of the Bible, which, of course, includes the New Testament.
So there’s this strange idea that Christ was the same factor, or force, that God used at the beginning of time to speak habitable order into being. That’s a very, very strange idea. It’s not something that can be just easily dismissed as superstition, partly because it’s so strange. It doesn’t even fit the definition of a superstitious belief. It’s a dream-like belief, and what I see in many of the ideas in the Bible is these dream-like ideas that underlie our normative cognition and that constitute the ground from which our more articulated and explicit ideas have emerged.
This idea’s so complicated that it’s still mostly embedded in dream-like form, but it seems to have something to do with the primacy of consciousness. This is one of the biggest issues regarding the structure of reality, as far as I can tell, because everyone from physicists to neurobiologists debate this. The stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems, to me, to be consciousness.
Consciousness has all sorts of strange properties. For example, it isn’t obvious what constitutes 'Time', or at least duration, in the absence of consciousness.
It isn’t also easy to understand what constituted 'Being' in the absence of consciousness, because it seems to be the case—well, if a movie is running and there’s no one to watch it…
I know it sounds like the tree in the forest idea, but it’s not that idea at all.
If a movie is running and no one’s watching it, in what sense can you say that there’s even a movie running? Because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie, not the objective elements of the movie. There’s something about the world—at least insofar as we’re in it as human beings—that is dependent on conscious experience of the world.
Now, of course, you can take consciousness out of the world and say, well, if none of us were here, if there was no such thing as consciousness, then the cosmos would continue running the way it is running.
But it depends on what, exactly, you mean by 'The Cosmos' when you make a statement like that. There’s something about the subjective experience of reality that gives it reality, and since we’re all pretty enamoured at our own consciousnesses—although they’re painful, because they define our being—it’s not unreasonable to give consciousness a kind of metaphysical primacy.
It’s a deeper idea than that because there’s physicists—and they’re not trivial physicists—like John Wheeler, who believes that consciousness plays a constitutive role in transforming the chaotic potential of being into the actuality of being. He’s not alive anymore, but he actually thought about it as playing a constitutive role. Then, from the neurobiological perspective, from the scientific perspective, consciousness is not something that we understand. I don’t think we understand it at all. It’s something we can’t get a handle on with our fundamental, materialist philosophy, and I don’t know why that is. It’s quite frustrating, if you’re a scientist, but it isn’t clear to me that we’ve made any progress whatsoever in understanding consciousness, even though, well, we’ve been trying to understand it for hundreds of years, and even though psychologists and neurobiologists and so forth have really put a lot of effort into understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective in the last 50 years.
Anyways, what it seems to me is the idea that God used the word to extract habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time, which is roughly the right way of thinking about it. It seems to me deeply allied with the idea that what it is that we do as human beings is encounter something like the formless and potential chaos. I mean, we’re not omniscient and we can’t just do whatever we want. That’s always what we’re grappling with, and somehow we use our consciousness to give that form. This is how people act. If you look at how they regard themselves, it’s how they act, because you say things to people like, you should live up to your potential, and you make a case that there’s something about a person that’s more than what is that yet could be if only they’d participate in the process properly. Everyone knows what that means, and no one acts like a mystery has been uttered when you say that.
You can see a situation in your own life that’s full of potential. You’re often extremely excited when you encounter something that’s full of potential, because what you see is something that could be. You see a future beckoning for you that could be if only you interacted with it properly, and it activates your nervous system in a very basic way. We even understand how that happens to the degree that we understand how the nervous system works. The systems that mediate positive emotion are governed, roughly, by neurochemical dopamine, which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus, a very, very archaic and fundamental part of the brain that responds to potential, or the possibility of accruing something new and valuable. It responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement. And so we’re engaged in the world as potential, and it looks like consciousness does that.
This is the main idea that it think has been put forth in Genesis 1. From what I gather, there’s always three causal elements that make up being at the bottom of world mythology. One is the formless potential that makes up being once it’s interacted with, and that’s generally given a feminine nature. I think that’s because it’s like the source from which all things emerge and rise. It’s more complicated than that, but then there’s some kind of interpretive structure that has to grapple with that formless potential.
I think that’s the sort of thing that’s alluded to by Immanuel Kant when he was criticizing the notion that all of information comes from sense data, which would be the pure empirical perspective. When you encounter the world, you encounter it with a cognitive structure that already has shape. It’s already in you, this structure.
Without that a priori structure, you wouldn’t be able to take the formless potential and give it structure.
It’s akin, in some way, to the idea of God the Father, and I’ll try to develop that idea more. It’s the notion that there’s something in all of us that transcends all of us, that’s deeply structural, that’s part of this ancient evolutionary and cultural process, that enables us to grapple with the formless potential and bring forth reality, roughly speaking.
And then there’s the final element, and that element seems to be something like consciousness that actually inheres in the individual.
So it’s not only that you have the structure: it’s that the structure has the capacity for action in the world.
It’s like you’re this spirit that gives the dead structure life.
As far as I can tell, the Trinitarian notion that characterizes Christianity is something like formless potential—which is never given a status of a deity in Christianity—and then the notion that there’s an a priori interpretive structure that’s a consequence of our ancient existence as beings. The notion of a structure goes back as far in time as you can go. Then there is the idea of a consciousness that is the tool of that structure. It interacts with the world and gives it reality. That’s the word, as far as I can tell.
The notion is that there’s a Father, and that’s the structure, and there’s a Son that’s transcendent and characterizes consciousness itself.
It’s the Son, the speaking of the Son, that is the active principle that turns chaos into order.
It’s such a sophisticated idea.
There’s something about it that’s, at least, phenomenologically accurate.
You do have an interpretive structure and you couldn’t understand anything without it.
Your very body is an interpretive structure.
It’s been crafted over, let’s say, three billion years of evolution.
Without that, you wouldn’t be able to perceive anything, and it’s taken a lot of death and struggle and tragedy to produce you, the thing that’s capable of encountering this immense chaos that surrounds us and transforming it into habitable order.
There’s the idea, too, of course, that’s deeply embedded in the first chapters of Genesis, which is a staggering idea and certainly not one that’s likely, that human beings, both male and female, were made in the image of God. That’s a very difficult thing to understand, partly because the God that’s referred to in those chapters has a polytheistic element, although it’s an element that's moving rapidly towards a unified monotheism. But it’s not also obvious to me why people would come up with that concept. I don’t really think that, when we think about each other, we immediately think God-like.The notion that every single human being, regardless of their peculiarities, strangenesses, sins, crimes, and all of that, has something divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect, plays an integral role, at least an analogous role, in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. That’s a magnificent, remarkable, crazy idea. And yet we developed it, and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system. "
No comments:
Post a Comment