AshvinP wrote:
That bolded part is not an explanation, though. It is frequently mistaken for an explanation, but it's not. This happens a lot in materialist Darwinian theory, for ex. - we will ask about a certain trait of our psychic life and the materialist Darwinian will say that is explained by the fact that "it helped people survive in this or that way a long time ago". It may have a very well helped people survive, in fact that is very likely, but that does nothing to explain the essence of what it is. Similarly, the "terror management" psychologists try to explain all of religion and spirituality in that way, and the Freudians in a slightly different but similar way. Ultimately, I would trace all of that back to Cartesian rationalism and the notion that if we can link a phenomenon to some psychological state, then we have exhaustively explained it. I don't agree, rather I think we have explained almost none of it with such attribution. That is what really set apart Jung from Freud - the former realized ancient spiritual traditions spoke to a much deeper essence than any personal fear or desire, hence coming forth with the notion of a "collective unconscious".
I agree and disagree. I don’t imagine my very brief statement was much of an explanation at all -- too “low-resolution,” so to speak. But I think it
gestured at an explanation in a way that the “It helped them survive” response just doesn’t, and in that sense, the two are disanalogous. “It helped them survive” doesn’t point to an antecedent, a ground; it points at a
consequence, which it then takes for a cause:
They survived because they discovered fire.
Where did the discovery of fire come from?
From the fact that it helped them survive.
Now take mine:
They developed systems to justify the idea of immortality.
Where did the idea of immortality come from?
From the emotional reaction to the notion of death.
There’s a different trajectory here, one that leads naturally to a followup question: where did the notion of death come from? And the answer to
that question is too complex for me to write out in a forum post. Its root system, if we were to explore it, would run across the development of the use of symbols and our heritage as inexorably
social beings and the development of systems of power and the culture/nature split and so on. And there would be followup questions to those, and then to the answers to those, and so on. Where the cart-before-the-horse just-so story of “because it helped them survive” ends in a circle, my gesture was toward a trajectory of further and deeper inquiry. It not only progresses, but progresses along paths that diverge and reconverge and lead us to new places. I didn’t pursue it very far because stopping there, at the immediate motivation for such systems, seemed fine for our purposes right now. And what's more, my analysis is accessible within
our own experience with death and grief and power -- or, at least, mine, and isn't that where I should be starting?
By contrast, “It reflects something we intuitively understand about the Cosmos” doesn’t seem so different from asking how it is that we see the sun and being answered, by the naive realist, “Well, because it’s there!” We can certainly agree that there’s an intuitive longing for immortality, a predisposition to believe in eternity, but then we must, if we’re to make any progress, interrogate the intuition to find the soil in which it’s grounded. Turning to that, by way of an explanation of the intuition itself, you offered this:
I account for it by saying the fundamental reality is all conscious activity and that we all inhabit the same unified (or contiguous) realm of that activity. So the Big System Builders (BSB), especially those tied to spirituality, are drawing from that same 'space' of intuitive meaning
Here I’m just not sold. You’re suggesting that “intuitive meaning” is sort of...
out there in this (presumably metaphorical) space to be drawn upon, like a tree is there for anyone to paint. Rather, I would say that this:
and presenting it through their own individual personalities with all manner of unexamined assumptions and cultural baggage.
Is just the locus of the generation of meaning: the intersubjective.
(Also, whaddaya mean “cultural baggage”? You mean to tell me history didn’t end with the attainment of Absolute Spirit in 19th century Prussia?
)
I agree that "to read is to interpret"
In the interest of saving space, I’m not gonna copy/paste the whole paragraphs for this one. Instead, I want to suggest that you may have misread me: my intention is not to halt the hermeneutical dance by pointing out that every interpretation can be problematized and reconfigured and so on. My intention is to
lean into it. I mean, look back over this thread. The Existentialists would be
most unhappy that I’ve roped them into a defense of animism. After all, Sartre literally said this:
Sartre wrote:
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.
But to me it
doesn’t matter what Sartre thought of animism, not in any ultimate sense. I ripped his ideas right out of their framework and stuck them in another one, one that he would absolutely have objected to, humanist that he was. What matters to me is
what I can do with his ideas: this can connect to that in ways the original authors could not possibly have imagined, or could’ve imagined but wouldn’t have liked. And that’s just scratching the surface. Throughout this conversation, I’ve pulled from Mark Green’s Christian animism/panincarnationalism, phenomenology-inspired work on embodiment, Existentialist notions of freedom, Buddhist and psychoanalytic ideas about desire, Gagliano’s studies on plant cognition, Buddhist ideas about form/lessness (and, of course, the poststructural love for sticking slashes in words to problematize a binary), Death of God theology, the work on death in Heidegger and Becker, apophatic theology, Spinoza’s ontology, Hegel, Martin Buber, the Book of Genesis, Mathews’ panpsychism (and her theory of
eros), Alan Watts... and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. And in the background to all of that is snippets of poetry, images, fiction, song lyrics, mystical experiences.
All these authors, all these ideas, are in constant conversation in my head, new connections forming between them, new ideas emerging from the synthesis. My sense that meaning is never fixed or final or fully disclosed, that it’s locally, intersubjectively generated, is not a sense that we ought to stop doing metaphysics or hermeneutics. It’s the sense that we ought to do it
creatively. In the words of Tool, “The poetry that comes from the squaring-off between and the circling is worth it -- finding beauty in the dissonance.” Philosophy is art and play and alchemy, structures spontaneously emerging and then dissolving again only for new ones to coalesce.
Then we begin to realize there are infinite number of concepts we can attach to the perceptions. I can take the concept of "kid with kite" and attach it to the perception of old man with seeing eye dog, or the concept of "basketball" and attach it to the perception of tennis ball.
It’s
just this sort of conceptual play that allows new ideas to form. You’re right that the interpretation will ultimately come down to our desires -- that’s basically what I said about purpose and desire way back at the beginning of the thread, though I think calling them “practical aims” is a bit reductive. But sense has a way of erupting abruptly from apparently nonsensical juxtapositions (is that not the way of dreams, like we were discussing earlier?), and we do ourselves a disservice narrowing down the range of allowable desires to the apparently practical. Sure, we need to realize that they’ll stick us in a hospital if we ask the old man if we can fly his dog or ask the kid if we can pet her kite. I don’t mean to dismiss that layer of meaning. But desire itself is more creative than that, and it’s just those sort of bizarre connections that ultimately allow our thinking to go in directions we couldn’t possibly have anticipated from the logic of the given. Or, at least, that’s how it works for me -- but, to be fair, my mind is a little... odd.
Oh dear Lord, it’s six in the morning and I’ve only gotten through one post. -_- I’m looking forward to engaging with the rest of what you’ve written, but I think this one was important, if for no other reason than that trying to get across
how I think might help to contextualize and clarify
what I think.