The Limits of Knowledge (4)

being-here and emptiness (ll)

How can existence in any form, even partial, be existentially empty? If our analysis of presence–as-process is correct in saying that the fundamen­tal dynamism of reality is change and becoming, and that change and becoming are in function of filling a need, then we find ourselves with an internal contradiction. Emptiness is nothing. As such it cannot be an explanation of the dynamism of presence.

If existence were simply static and at rest with itself, we would seem to have no problem. But since existence displays itself as an endless becoming fo­cused on being-here, “dragging” being-here into existence from moment to moment as if it were not here at all, we face a prob­lem whose solution seems beyond the reach of our concepts. For as we perceive it, existence acts as if it lacked the very thing that it is. Lack of “being” can only mean non-being, “nothing.” But, nothing, as we saw, is an absurd notion, because there is no such thing as “nothing.” Nothing does not exist and therefore cannot be known.

Existence, then, appears to be internally contradictory because by always moving to maintain itself it reveals an absence of self-possession. What is this absence? The circle of presence does not contain its explanation within itself. Where do we go from here? Beyond that circle, outside of being-here, human knowledge cannot function. For, outside of existence, there is no­thing.

Haven’t we gotten ourselves into this dead-end? After rejecting the validity of the traditional concept of “nothingness,” haven’t we simply resurrected it in another form, in a new guise, calling it emptiness? For what can emptiness “be” but another word for “no­thingness?”

“emptiness” is metaphor

The impasse stated in this form is only apparent, and it arises from taking emptiness to be a “factual” or literal concept referring to “something” which can only mean “nothing.” But emptiness is not nothingness because emptiness is not a concept, it is, as we’ve said all along, a metaphor. As metaphor, it does not answer, it rather preserves intact the significance of the question.

If we take emptiness as a literal concept and set “presence” and “emptiness” face-to-face, we discover that they cancel each other out; they cannot co-exist in the same mental construction. We cannot ask the question “how can presence be empty?” If “empty” is taken as a literal conventional concept, the question “how can presence be empty” is the same as asking “how can being be non-being.” That contradiction means that we have no way of understanding reality. And I believe it’s because we have confined our understanding of reality to what is mediated by conventional “literal” concepts and the so-called knowledge they produce. In the case we are considering that confinement is fatal. For “nothing” is a false concept, no matter what terms are used to describe it. It does not refer to anything at all.

Once we realize we are not using emptiness as a conventional concept, however, there is no inconsistency. Emptiness is a metaphor utilized to relate us to the living dynamism of reality — reality’s quest to remain itself. We have called it repeatedly, a self-embrace, and following Spino­za, conatus. Bergson called it the vital impulse, Schopenhauer called it will. In each case we are using an analogous human experience as a metaphor to describe this dynamism. We claimed we were justified in doing so because of the homogeneity of material reality. Everything is made of the same “stuff,” matter’s energy, including us. Emptiness does not refer to nothingness, but to a dynamism for self-posses­sion, a self-embrace, which, when mediated exclusively by conceptual knowledge, is unintelligible. But, ironically, while we do not know what it is, when we approach it through our metaphors we realize that we do indeed understand it — intimately, thoroughly, profoundly, implicitly — because we experience it as the inner living dynamism of our very selves. There is nothing in the world more familiar. It is our drive to survive. That is the basis for the validity of the me­ta­phor.

It was otherwise with the traditional use of the abstract concept “nothingness,” as we saw in chapter 1 and rejected. In that case there was an invalid attempt to generate a “proof” for the “necessity” of “being” based on the logical analysis of the opposition between the concepts of “being,” taken literally, and ”nothingness,” also taken literally. “Why,” the traditional metaphysicians asked, “is there something rather than nothing.” You can’t ask that question, for there is no such thing as nothing.  Neither of those concepts — “being” or “nothingness” — was considered to be anything but reliable representations of reality as it really is. It was precisely the impossible “reality” imputed to “nothingness,” however, that gave us the first clue to the untenability of the entire procedure. The essentialists had reified the concept of “non-being” and then tried to make real inferences about the character of “being” from it.

Emptiness as we use it metaphorically, however, refers to an entirely different notion. Rationally speaking, the metaphor concretizes the question as a conceptual quest; it doesn’t presume to provide a rational answer. We are proposing to understand the significance of an existential dy­namic whose internal contradictions we cannot reconcile in conventio­nal rationalist terms. The metaphor “emptiness,” inspired by our bodily human experience and praeter-conceptual understanding of the phenomenon, de­scribes in poetic terms what we do not conceptually comprehend but what we nevertheless experience and therefore understand intimately. This is a far cry from the claim to define the transcendent significance of “being” from a rational analysis of “non-being.” Our use of the meta­phor “emptiness” immediately directs us to a recognition of the non-intelligi­bility of the concepts involved and from there to an acknowledged conceptual ignorance, even as it describes existence as we experience it with uncommon accuracy. Unlike the function of the concept “nothingness,” which supposedly leads us to “know,” emptiness (the metaphor) leads us to “not-know,” or should we say to “un-know.” Emptiness serves to put a human face on the baffling interior living dynamism of all reality which we ex­perience intimately as the very core of what we are. We understand it more clearly, more distinctly and more thoroughly than anything else in the world. And from there we understand all existence even though we do not know what it is

We realize that existence is empty for us because even though we have it, we still thirst for it — we know what that’s like; we wake up with it every day. But clearly it cannot be “known” in conventional conceptual terms, and therefore it cannot be controlled. We understand it, not because we conceptualize it or can identify its cause but because we expe­rience it. We realize how accurately it defines us. It is a clear conscious embrace, a cognitively transparent experience but not a rational conceptual comprehension. We understand it; but we do not know what it is.

out of the impasse?

Rather than generate hypotheses to fill the conceptual gap, I am perfectly content that the final statement to be made on this question is that we can go no further — conceptually. We have encountered what Lonergan might have called a matter of sheer unintelligible fact.^[3] The traditional “solutions” to the encounter with this philosophic dead-end, advanced in the West, in my opinion, have taken one of two paths. In the first, science-orien­tated reductionists ignore the problem by simply taking the existential dynamism for granted. They assume the unexplained existence of the embrace of existence and its manifestations in the survival drive and confine their analyses to what has subsequently evolved from it. They do not ask, as we do, what it is.

In the second, philosophers of the perennial essentialist tradition simply dismiss scientific questions as “not ultimate.” They have no respect for mere presence, or “matters of fact.”^[4] They claim the real question exists only at the level of abstract “being” (and “non-being”) and proceed to a “solution” by crediting our concepts and therefore the human mental apparatus with something they do not possess — a separate genus of being called “spirit.” These “solutionists” (like Rahner and Lonergan) erect our very demands for knowledge into “proofs.” Thus they continue the fundamental circularities that have characterized Western thought from the beginning. I believe we have no justification for saying that the demand of our minds for an explanation is itself an explanation. To my mind, this is to revisit the Platonic error and the Anselm­ian trap. We imagine reality based on the functions and products of our minds. To present human conceptual knowing (verbalized abstraction) in such a way that its description requires the implied existence of an unknown (and admittedly unknowable) object, is a huge projection.

Rahner says Thomas Aquinas agrees that human knowledge is locked into the limitations of sense experience. “Transcendence” by scholastic definition goes beyond those limits. So everyone agrees, including Thomas: transcendence cannot be known directly. Rahner’s Thomas, however, is made to go further and say that the projections of human consciousness, (i.e., the ability to abstract), imply an absolute principle “pre-appre­hen­ded” by the mind, that never becomes itself the direct object of knowledge but opens us to another “realm” of knowledge. This is not a problem for Rahner because he believes “supernatural revelation” begins where direct knowing ends. The “absence of the implied object,” in his system, plays a vital role in the transition to other “facts” in the form of revealed beliefs.^[5]

My analysis is different. At the end of my reflections the discovery of the emptiness at the heart of being-here puts me at a dead-end. I believe this is true of Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Bergson as well. I am aware that the apparent contradiction we encounter in the way matter’s energy is-here leaves us at the edge of a void. We have reached the end of our earth-bound knowing. From a conceptual point of view, the rest is darkness. At that point Schopenhauer and Bergson each limit themselves to a description of that darkness — as “Will” or as “Vital impulse” — it’s where the buck stops. Rahner, for his part, turns to revelation. What I claim, is that the only thing left … if one has the temerity to go further … is relationship.

relationship to the darkness

In some way, then, that is not clear, we suspect that if there is an “explanation,” it lies in that darkness into which we peer but cannot see — what we feel and touch as our very selves, what we understand so intimately and see so clearly and certainly but about which we can say nothing. We have little choice but to accept this situation because, however galling it might be, we ourselves awaken into a condition of absolute immersion in that darkness. We understand it with absolute clarity; we know of its creative power with absolute certainty; and we rely on it for our very ex­istence itself. Matter’s energy, the embrace of existence, is a matter of sheer unexplained empirical fact. It is as incomprehensible as it is absolutely familiar, undeniable and self-evident. It is the very fire and light of our lives, but utter darkness to our minds. It is us … and yes indeed, we understand it.

What do I mean? If an immersion-relationship to being-here is the defining feature of our organisms, ourselves, we fail to embrace the reliability of existence with its endemic thirst and emptiness at the risk of denying our very selves and the conditions under which we and our ancestors have been here and have evolved to become what we are. We cannot do that. We cannot sit in judgment on the circle of existence, matter’s energy, as if we stood outside of it; for not only our faculty of analysis and judgment but our very existence itself is an evolved function of matter’s energy. The internal incomprehensibility of being-here is now seen to have invaded our persons. The emptiness, the hunger to live, which we encountered in the dynamism of existence, material energy’s self-em­brace, we now see resides at the core of our very selves and lights the fire of our conscious presence; for we are-here without escape (not even death can annihilate the material energy that we are) and our very consciousness is a tool of our inherited determination to survive. We accept it. To fail to do so implies personal self-negation.

But notice: upon realizing that our analysis of existence could not explain itself, we did not physically annihilate nor disappear. Of course not. The contradictions we encountered in our rational ruminations had no impact whatsoever on being-here. Existence clearly is not dependent on our conceptualizations; the significance of being-here and the selectivity of rational consciousness do not move in the same plane. There is a reason why we cannot make deductions about reality from our ideas alone … it’s because our understanding of reality is not a function of ideas. Our consciousness is grounded in somatic experience, the organic immersion in matter’s energy. It also supports our conclusion that the neo-Thomists’ “transcendent thrust of consciousness” tells us nothing. Conceptualization with the logic of its required “explanations,” in other words, does not correspond to the reality we have come to realize is process — energy, a living dynamism we’ve described as a congenital self-embrace. And what we’re interested in is what reality is, not how we conceptualize it.

 

[1] Cf Creative Evolution, 1907 passim

 [2] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Everyman London, 1995 tr Berman.

 [3] For an extensive discussion of Lonergan’s “unintelligible fact,” see appendix 2.

[4] Cf. Rahner, Spirit in the World., pp.162 and 175. And Lonergan, Insight, p.652.

[5] For a more complete treatment of this position see the appendix.

The Limits of Knowledge (3)

being-here and emptiness (l)

The perdurance of existence in time is predicated on forging ever new relationships through combination, dissolution and re-combination — change and movement intended to satisfy what appears to be an inexplicable need for existence. What presence does is to tap its own potential for continued presence. Potential for existence can be said to be an emptiness of presence that seeks to be filled.

NOTE: “emptiness” ― I use the word as a metaphor for the conatus, or drive to survive. I characterize it as a “hunger” or a “thirst” for existence. It’s something we experience with varying degrees of intensity and “realization” throughout our lives. The term is central to the vision of Nagárjuna, a 2^nd century (ce) Mahayana Buddhist for whom “emptiness” refers to the fact that we do not possess existence independently but are rather “empty” of existence because we are dependent on other causes for our being here. For the Thomist tradition, with its emphasis on the ontological dependency of all things on esse in se subsistens, the same meaning is broadened and deepened.

Hence its creativity. The thrust of its energies is always directed toward more secure ways of being-here. But, we have to ask, if existence is-here-now and is-here endlessly, how is it that the goal of its quest is still existence?

It is the very restless instability of being-here, it’s apparent radical inse­curity, its abhorrence for the entropy that is its destiny, that appears to be the source of the endless energy of its explorations. Existence is not reconciled to its fate. This characteristic of existence may have eluded identification when found in primitive, pre-life forms, but it reveals itself with indisputable clarity in living things. Life, as a manifestation of matter’s energy, proves that existence is a mad desire, disruptive, violent, implacable.^[2] The creativity of being-here is not a serene contemplative appreciation or a leisured aesthetic browsing. It is a passionate craving, an existential fury that seems to have no end.

Matter’s energy is the locus of this insatiability. We say that because we see it functioning across the board. The frenzy of the oak tree to reach the sun, pathetic as it might appear, is not unfamiliar to us. We do the same in our own way as does every living thing that we know. The universality of the phenomenon of a generalized existential hunger that becomes growth, accumulation and self-aggrandizement, and I contend, evo­lu­tionary development, reveals to us the inherent qualities of matter’s energy of which we are all made. Understanding that the qualities of life are due to its sub-atomic constituents, explains why insatiability, and from there, dissatisfaction, desire, anguish, ob­ses­sion — suffering — is the lot of all organic life made from this universal, primordial clay. Humans are not exempt. Suffering, the sentient side of emptiness, cannot be ignored or assuaged. Any relief proves to be only temporary. It is endemic not only to life, but, we conclude, to matter’s energy itself. To be is to live; to live is to suffer the throes of surviving. To survive — to stay the same — is to change, evolve, develop, complexify. It is to create out of emptiness a world teeming with life.

Life reveals reality. Once given the extended range of possibilities offered by that particular re-arrangement of matter’s energy we call “life,” it appears that existence flies its true colors. Presence is passionately and ruthlessly self-involved. Our praise for nature’s exquisite balance cannot fail to recognize that this balance is achieved by an almost universal violent predation, as one species survives by heartlessly taking the life of another in order to incorporate its vital organic structures into its own. Predatory activity across the board is the basic tool of the natural system. In most cases it appears that evolutionary speciation — the very design of species — is a response to available prey, euphemistically called a “niche,” or a “food source.” Thus “nature” implants its blind lust for life, and seems impervious to the slaughter it engenders. On the one hand, this points up the unity and homogeneity of all material reality, for in fact one “entity” serves to support another. On the other, hunger, hardly a metaphor in this case, appears to direct the process. Naturally the metaphors we use are themselves human as is the apparatus and the model, which is ourselves. Emptiness, hunger, are words that refer to human feelings that correspond to need. I don’t apologize for this use of words. We can’t escape from the fact that we, too, are-here; we survive by violence and we understand ourselves intimately by an understanding that recognizes that what constitutes us is our implacable conatus.

We saw in chapter 3 that certain activities, like self-replication and aggregation, once considered the exclusive domain of living things have also been discovered in non-living entities. We go even further and say that the very physical dynamisms operating in inanimate energy’s relationships — gravitation, the strong and weak forces inside the atom, electromagnetism, chemical valences and molecular attraction — are actually constitutive elements of matter’s energy as it aggregates, forming bound relationships, the better to survive. Words like “life” and “survive” are metaphors for pre-life integration taken from a resemblance to living things and human experience. But I claim they represent something real in the most fundamental forms of matter. We have identified that energy as the conatus, the self-embrace of existence, a dynamism that uses similar strategies in response to an existential lack that characterizes all of matter’s energy.

Lack? I believe we have touched a raw nerve in the organism of universal reality, an existential scar of such proportion that we are justified in calling matter’s endless energy a function of emptiness. We understand the conatus as a wound of emptiness, because we understand ourselves.

east and west

While diverse cultures may agree on how to describe “emptiness,” they have interpreted it variously and responded to it in different ways. In the West, following the belief in the transcendent importance of the individual person, need is identified as an obstacle to a­chieve­ment, self-tran­scen­dence. “Need” becomes a challenge — something to be overcome. Emptiness, therefore, as an inherent and permanent defining factor integrates only as antagonist to “self-tran­scen­­­dence. ”

In the East, on the other hand, Buddhists have a different take. Emptiness, they say, is constitutive of reality. Denying it is fatal and can be considered symptomatic of the human problem. Denial implies succumbing to the illusion of the possible permanence of the experiencing “self” and thus intensifies suffering. Buddhists believe that the false understanding of what the “self” really is (ultimately based on a mis-interpreta­tion of what existence really is), encourages us to believe that we can somehow eliminate emptiness by engorging our “selves” with existence — meaning the accumulations that are falsely thought to protect us against ultimate loss. That naturally includes wealth and power, and in our times, life-protecting and life-extending technology. Religious practice as insurance for the after-life may be considered in this category. These accumulations promise to erase suffering, death, and ultimate­­ly permit us to live forever as our “selves” in another world.

The Buddhist view challenges these presuppositions. The hoarding, grasping selfishness created by the illusion that permanence can be achieved for the “self,” only intensifies suffering for ourselves and everyone around us. What the realization called “enligh­t­enment” does, they say, is to “awaken” us from the dream of permanence and to what is really real. From the point of view espoused in our reflections here, understanding reality to be matter’s energy permits us to recognize that the permanent self is an illusion, that the craving and desire for this permanence is an unavoidable natural deception born of the internal dynamism of matter’s energy, the emptiness which fuels the survival drive, that cannot be permanently satisfied. The implication is that we should understand emptiness as the ultimate definition of individuated reality. The appearance and increased complexification of the integrated function in the evolution of life is a direct product of the hun­gry emptiness that resides at the core of all reality, driving it to aggregate and integrate in order to avoid dissolution. Identity, then, which by reproduction creates species, is fundamentally an expression of existential need — emptiness.

The corollary to this Buddhist realization-awakening, one suspects, hovering in the background though officially unexpressed, is that what really exists and endures is the Whole of being-here taken as a Totality. It is the basis for the doctrine of anatman, the unreality of the “self.” What Buddhism claims to conquer is the aggravation of the cycle of suffering brought on by the mis-interpre­ta­­tion of what this “individual self” really is and therefore from the point of view of our reflections in this essay, what being-here, existence, with its endless conatus really is. We cannot escape suffering, they say, because we cannot escape from the emptiness and the consequent hunger for existence — the unreality ­— that resides at the core of things. Life ultimately cannot unseat death. Entropy wins.

Buddhism seems to suggest that to know reality is to understand the impermanence — the non-reality — of each and every feature and fact that emerges composed of matter’s energy taken individually and apart from the Whole. Each individual manifestation of presence suffers from the same vulnerability because, at root, it cannot escape the primordial emptiness of its existential building blocks. The conatus characterizes all the strategies of survival and development as we saw. We are all made of the same “clay,” and so, by ourselves, we all manifest the same characteristic impermanence that not only drives the communitarian strategy of matter’s energy but also explains the clinging, grasping self-involved insecurity that causes so much human suffering. The source of the energy at the base of the pyramid of reality is the emptiness inherent in any given separate manifestation of being-here. The conatus appears as if it were a reaction to an absence of existence. But how can this be?

 

[2] This approximates Schopenhauer’s proposal that being is “will.”

The Limits of Knowledge (2)

the human being — time and death

Existence is time.^[1] It’s not coincidental that time caused us to look at being-here separately from abstract “being” and ask what it otherwise would not have occurred to us to ask, why do I die, or “Why does being-here seem to end?”

My life is both temporal and temporary.  There’s a connection between the two.  It seems the very nature of the modulations of existence is to find better ways to be-here, to survive and extend survival.  The vitality displayed by matter’s energy is not a leisured aesthetic creativity, an unhurried pastime.  There is an urgency here that derives from a conatus, a drive to survive, that is integral to a developing universal entropy that results from the energy expenditure of any “thing,” whether it be the hydrogen fusing into helium in stars or the respiratory activity of the cells of the human brain.  Entropy is the exhaust from combustion — the smoke that is the sign of fire — the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to move toward a state of uniform inertia through the expenditure of energy for the performance of work.  Work is energy applied in the endeavor to survive. The aggregation and integration forged by matter’s energy is part and parcel of the “downhill” flow of the existential cataract initiated at the big-bang that drives the Universe to produce its effects — like the eddies and vortices that spin off in a raging current.  These pyramidal vortices (one vortex cumulatively building on another and another) are an anti-en­tro­pic phenomenon — they struggle against dissolution, to survive — even though they add to universal entropy as a result.

My life is the inner force of existence because it is matter’s energy.  It is driven in the direction of perdurance in an obsession to continue the dance of presence.  Time is the effluence of my own presence.  As my existence perdures from moment to moment — as each “now” molts into the next — it emanates time as the sweat of its creative labors; the vapor trail of its endless explorations.  I embrace my being-here, and so I embrace time.

The transcendence over death, not only through evolutionary integration but also with other communitarian strategies like daily alimentation and organismic reproduction, harnesses even as it recapitulates the patterns and primordial energies let loose within the first second of the big bang.  The energy that drives my hunger for existence, is the energy of matter itself.

We live in a banquet of existence.  We are not self-sufficient.  We are dependent on the entire material matrix within which we evolved.  In our lifetime, each human organism consumes in sustenance probably 40 or 50 tons of the matter’s energy — in the form of carbon — of other living things who must die in order that we might live.  Add to that another 50 tons of oxygen continuously drawn in from the atmosphere and utilized together with carbon in the cellular combustion we call metabolism.  At death we return our “stuff” to be used as food by others as part of an endless cycle of interchange within the one organism produced and energized by the cascade of existence.  Matter’s energy is a totality.

At a certain magical moment, also, the very cells of my body, by utilizing another communitarian tactic, combine with another’s to create a new identity — my daughter, my son — which is automatically granted a full allotment of time, slipping under the entropic radar of death.  How was this miracle accomplished?  The living cells are mine, but their age and accumulated karma are erased.  Death is cheated, fooled, outwitted.  The new individual with my cells, my DNA, eludes the death they were otherwise destined to endure.  Do we share this adventure in survival with love and gratitude? … Only if we understand!

But if we mis-under­stand — if we originally mis-interpreted that moment of crisis, the perception of death, as the cessation of what’s really there, we are quite capable of turning this banquet of sharing into a selfish grab-bag where the desperate “eat drink and make merry” in a display of bitter disillusionment against a morrow of imagined nothingness.  It is precisely the fact that “I” am metaphysically insignificant except as an integra­ted function of matter’s energy that opens me to a new dimension.   I realize that what is really there and really important is the matrix, the universal “stuff” of which I am made, the homogeneous substrate of which all things are made, the single organism of which we are all the leaves and branches, and which will go on in other forms endlessly.  It was with those micro-threads of existence that I was woven.  The primacy here, as always, belongs to the stuff of existence, the matter-energy of the universe.  It is material energy “congealed” in me.  And in short order, the same existence will use “me” to do something else in a constant search for survival — existence.

So time is the expression of process; it is the measure of groping and the tracks of creativity.  It marks the work in progress of evolutionary development.

endless or “eternal”

The re-cycling is endless.  Isn’t that the same as “eternal,” and doesn’t it imply transcendent, necessary, absolute etc., all those abstract, essentialist characteristics derived from the “concept of being” that we rejected in chapter 1?

No.  Endless is not “eternal” because endless is open and empty.  “Eternal” is closed, fixed and finished, full and complete; “eternal” is the absence of time.  Endless, on the other hand, is time … time without end; it contemplates development without term, a presence that is forever thirsty.  “Eternal,” is synonymous with unchanging, impassible and immutable, Pure Act, pure stasis, without a shred of unfulfilled potential — perfect.  It’s a completely foreign concept to us, pure conceptual projection.  We’ve never experienced anything the least bit like it.  For us, being-here as we know it is an endless phenomenon that throbs always with unrealized potential, with an ever perceived emptiness seeking to be filled and asking for nothing but more time.  We have never encountered existence in any other form.  Its current modality is always in the process of becoming, apparently without limit, itself — existence.

Being-here in our world, is endless becoming.  It’s all we know.  Where, then, do we get the notion of a fixed and finished “eternal”?  I believe it’s another of our fantasies based on the requirements of the imaginary ancient “concept of being.”  Existence, matter’s energy, as found in the real world, however, is a function of power — potentia as Spinoza discerned insightfully — potential; it is focused on survival and constantly ready to change tactics in order to achieve it.  Matter’s creative power is the drive to exist (survive) by extruding new forms out of itself creating time.

“Eternal” is unthinkable.  Endless is not.  We can understand endless perfectly because it’s no different from time itself.  To conceptualize “endless” requires no more insight than imagining present moments, “nows” in an open-ended flow into the future.  In our very own awareness of ourselves-exist­ing, which is the unfolding of our personal presence in time, we actually experience this pheno­menon most intimately as our own sentient selves.  We experience ourselves in a temporal flow into a potentially endless future.  To experience temporal flow is to experience that part of “endless” which will always be here — the present moment, “now,” the only part of “endless” that ever … and always, exists.  To experience one’s own presence in the here and now is to experience, in a sense, everything, because it is to experience all that reality is, or ever was, or can ever be.

We are reminded that for the 14^th century mystic Johannes Eckhart, “now” was the most sacred of all locations, the center of the universe.  It was precisely where “God,” he said, who exists in an Eternal “Now,” was actively sharing “being” with creation in an effluence of love and self-donation.  If you want to touch “God,” he said, you can only do it “now.” The fact that “now” — the present moment — is the only moment that really exists and that, at the same time, it goes almost universally unattended, may be a measure of exactly how alienated from existence we are.

Can we say that our conception corresponds to the emphasis on living in the present moment promoted by the Buddhist, Thich Nat Hanh?  The Bud­dhists insist their counsel is a discipline not a doctrine.  They don’t speak about metaphysics, “being” or existence, so we can’t say for sure.  But for the Buddhists, as for Meister Eckhart, the present moment is all there is.  We are-here only in the present moment.  To live in the present moment is to embrace the impermanence, the “emptiness” that drives reality always to the next moment, creating time.

[1] The similarity of this proposition to Heidegger’s thesis expounded in his Being and Time is only semantic. For H. time is the pulse and measure of Da-sein’s anguish of being-toward-death, which alone brings Da-sein’s authentic care to bear on the beings-in-the-world. In my conception, on the other hand, I make every effort to exclude the subjective factors. Time for me is foundationally a physical property exuded by the physical perdurance in existence of a physical entity — matter’s energy.

The Limits of Knowledge (1)

These next blogs are a modified version of chapter thirteen of The Mystery of Matter (MM) which was published by IED Press in 2010. They ground a reassessment of the traditional role of religion in our lives. Modern science provides a fundamental confirmation of the apophatic “minority view” always present in Christianity but never predominant: “God” is unknowable and therefore religion knows nothing about “God.”

being-here is energy  

I have endeavored to elaborate an alternative to traditional essentialist metaphysics.

Please note changes in termninology. By knowledge I mean an objective apprehension that assumes the distinction of subject and object, where the object is not the subject. I intend to go beyond that. My goal is to understand reality. By understanding I mean a connatural perception in which the subject is an intrinsic part of the object apprehended. Understanding involves the use of conscious operations — contemplation, interpretation, recognition, realization and metaphor — that transcend abstractive knowledge and have, specifically, a somatic dimension acknowledging matter’s active energy as the common ground between subject and object.

I am using the words presence, being-here, synonymously to refer to the experience of existence in the present moment. Existence-in-time replaces the traditional essentialist term “being” which I have rejected as a false abstract conceptual construct that skews our perception of the true characteristics of reality. Ultimately existence is matter’s energy.

The analysis has determined that whatever exists, as far as we can know, is matter’s energy. Ultimately it is reducible to energy which is the primordial reality. I use the doublet matter-energy to avoid any temptation to separate the two. They are one and the same thing. Moreover, we have said that matter’s energy is existence. Material energy is what we are made of and it’s what everything that we can relate to is made of. We can have no direct cognitive relationship with anything that is not matter’s energy. Even mediaeval philosophy, dedicated to establishing and exploring what they believed was a world of immortal spirit, admitted that knowledge of such transcendent realities is necessarily indirect, an inference made from the only direct natural knowledge we can have: the experience of material things. The foundational ground for the possibility of our awareness of everything, both ourselves and things other than ourselves, seems to be that we are all made of exactly the same “clay” — constructed of the same sub-atomic quarks and gluons, electrons and neutrinos which some believe to be simply the different vibrations of homogeneous strands of energy called “strings.” What appears to us as phenomena that range from inert solid matter to empty space, are sim­ply different manifestations of this energy.

Existence is energy; that means being-here is not simply here. Being-here is not at rest; it is intrinsically dynamic. It moves, it changes, it enters into combinations within itself which modify its activities and its appea­r­ances. It selects among the features and character created by these new collectivities on a continual basis — always in the service of only one goal: continued existence, survival — survival means existence. This restless recombination defines material energy’s evolution: always chang­ing, always in motion, always in process for more existence.

Existence is matter’s energy.

The process that emerges from material energy’s dynamism uses repeated patterns of recombination that I have called a “communitarian strategy.” It is a process that moves forward by the aggregation, integration and complexification of elements. It is focused always on being-here. We say it is an “undefined” energy not because it has no direction, nor because it is formless, but because the form it takes is not heuristic, i.e., it is not re­gu­latory or guiding. Form follows this energy; it does not lead it or direct it. This constitutes the seminal difference between the ancient essentialist metaphysics and cosmo-ontology. Being-here is only directed by and for being-here. It has no purpose beyond itself. There is no rationality involved. It is absolutely self-deter­mining and all forms are subservient to existence. Rational thought, plans, purposes do not describe or define this process. There is no point to being-here except to be-here.

We experience matter’s energy as an existence that is driven to endure. This goal remains ever the same whatever the recombination. All its many changes are for only one thing: being-here-now. Being-here, therefore, means staying-here, continuance, and so it implies perdurance in time. The attempt to perdure spawns a necessary derivative: presence resists cessation and dissolution. It survives. So perdurance necessarily implies being-here “better,” that is to say, more resistant to cessation, more securely, more tenaciously, more intensely. It is the foundation of survival. It explains the changes that produce new species when environments change, and it also explains the extended stasis (resistance to change) characteristic of successful species when environments don’t change or don’t change enough to warrant adaptation. Being-here is a passion for itself, an obsession and an insatiable addiction. We have called it a congenital self-embrace. Presence wants to endure, but not simply to continue; such craving seeks a guarantee and there­fore an intensification of what it does. It wants to be-here; it wants to ensure being-here. So it is driven to survive, to embrace itself in a paroxysm of self-posses­sion. Consciousness is only one of the many manifestations of this self-posses­sion and therefore it is secondary and ancillary to it. Existence, as opposed to the ancient prejudice, is not primarily thought, but desire.

Presence is-here and what is does is to stay here. It survives. It is what Spinoza called the conatus sese conservandi — the drive for self-preservation. In Spinoza’s vision it was the core property of everything that existed … a modal expression of Being itself (“God”) from which everything emanated. For Spinoza as for Aquinas, “God’s” essence was existence itself … esse in se subsistens. “God” alone was “substantial” being and all existing things were modal — a way of utilizing “God’s” being.

So matter’s energy which expresses itself in being-here displays itself as a self-embrace, a thirst for being-here that goes on and on in time and in intensity. The metaphoric nature of the description offered here is intrinsic to our interpretation. We will deal with the significance of this shortly. But here it’s important to emphasize: the drive manifest in this perdurance is not the result of evolutionary selection. Selection, ra­ther, presupposes it as the source and explanation of its effects. Natural selection is an expression of the conatus. It is the basis of all development and therefore we can also say, it is a function of matter’s energy.

existence is time

The notion to which we have given the word-label existence is not derived from an abstraction. It comes from the experience of being-here-now. If there is any valid “intuition of being,” it is here and now that we find it. The experience is that of the present moment because nothing that exists, exists in the past or in the future; whatever exists, exists only now. It’s a “now” for which the essentialists with their obsession for eternal immutability have little respect. For the “now” we experience is not a fixed value; it is a fluid, changing, temporary phenomenon; it is always gliding out of the past and into the future. Being-here is essentially time-related; it is a modulating process. For since being-here mani­fests itself in the present moment, the perdurance of any entity comprised of matter’s energy necessarily creates a flow of present moments, a non-discrete continuous sequence proceeding into the future. The insistence of what’s present to remain present, which is its self-embrace displayed in its conatus creates our experience of time.

This flow of time is inaccurately said to be composed of “moments.” Reality is, in fact, an unbroken continuum perceived by our minds as static entities enduring through the sequences of time imagined as “moments.” We use that term “moments” only because we find it difficult to imagine pure ceaseless unpartitioned change. Our concepts, we are reminded again by this, are like snap-shots. They freeze selected aspects of incoming data. It’s the way abstraction works. We cannot immediately “conceptualize” time-as-end­less-flux even though we experience it that way. Fortunately, we are able to refine our images because we reflect on experience and so we can intentionally work the fluidity of time into our notions. But there really are no instants or moments of time.

There are still other corrections to be made. Our images don’t always conform to the phenomena. The perennial philosophy tended to ima­gine existence as if it were something in itself apart from what exists. (That’s because our word-labeled “snap-shot” concepts — our ideas — tend to be taken as if they were “things” and not mental images. It is the basis of Plato’s fatal error. Our ancestors also erroneously conceived spacetime as if it were something independent of the enduring existence of what is-here. But time is not a glitch on a graph, or the tick of a clock. Spacetime does not exist apart from what survives and endures, nor does presence exist apart from the particular configuration of matter’s energy actually surviving as this or that individual entity. Time and temporary configuration are simply the way we experience energy gathered, being present and remaining present. Time is the perceptible continuum produced by what being-here does. Being-here embraces itself and its integrated functions, its recombinations. It endures, it transcends the moment and carries itself endlessly into the next — it survives as itself. Time is simply another word for the experience of being-here-in-process, existence sustaining itself, clinging to itself, and changing as it must, to remain itself.

This understanding of time as a derived property of matter’s energy, as we saw in chapter 3, corresponds to a similar understanding of space. It concurs with the new understanding that has emerged from the theories of relativity about the unified phenomenon now called spacetime. Spacetime is not an “entity” in itself. It is the measurable perception of the relationship of matter’s energy within itself, to itself, as an existential self-em­brace; it is a derived property of the conatus, the inherent self-sustaining dynamism of the substrate. The notion is that material energy even in the form perceived as particles, can also be understood as a wave field of presence that extends, not unlike gravity, throughout the entire universe.

This further emphasizes the unity of matter’s energy as a Totality. What we see when we look out on the Universe are not discrete, independently existing particles or their aggregates residing in an empty “clock-box” called spacetime. We are looking at an unbroken continuum, one single continuous manifold of overlapping and compenetrated fields, a kind of plasma, whose dynamic intra-rela­tion­ships and valences account for every last feature of our Universe as we know it, from time and space to the diaphanous complexity of our human intelligence.^[1]

The “nature” of existence — what it is — is to be seen in what it does. And what it does is to perdure as itself. The “nature” of existence is to exist. It evolves into myriads of forms and simultaneously “creates” time and space even as it remains itself.^[2] Matter’s energy remains itself through a process of sequential interior re-ar­range­ment, an unfolding that has a communitarian character: the progressive elaboration of integrated functions.

Matter’s energy is never found by itself in an unintegrated or uncombined state. It is intrinsically communitarian, creating bound relationships within itself, the better to survive. It is a dynamic self-posses­sion built on and issuing in temporary stasis and endless change, as one tentative arrangement after another is used and transcended, searching intensely for a secure foot­hold in existence. All this change is simply the recombination of the selfsame substrate. It explains how matter’s energy has developed into everything that is-here including the spacetime “envelope” in which “things” appear to exist. It displays itself as an endless dance of internal self-explora­tion — a self-unfolding that is at the same time a self-embrace. It is as if it were a single living organism.

 

 

[1] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, London, 1989, p.220f. see appendix 5.

[2] Actually, it’s more accurate to say it “is time and space,” because spacetime does not exist apart from matter’s energy under any conditions.