Ashvin wrote:Emerson further observes that if you "
go out of the house to see the moon", you will find "
’t is mere tinsel" and "
it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey." It is seldom considered in the modern era how every form in Nature we can perceive arises from imperceptible activity related to our practical aims in life; our missions and journeys. Those meaningful aims, in turn, also enrich the meaningful aesthetics of Nature. Much of what we call "objects" in the physical world are mere pixelated icons of this hidden depth of meaning residing in the World Soul. What we see in the world around us is nothing like what gives rise to what we see. In fact, every modern science has realized, in its own way, that the "boundaries" of these various "objects" in the world are completely arbitrary. They do not reflect any similar boundaries in the realm from which they travel to our sense organs.
For some, that underlying realm consists of inconceivable mindless fields of "energy", for lack of a better word, and for others that realm consists in psychic processes not unlike the inner processes we always experience. Everyone must admit, though, that
everything flows - we are always dealing with ceaseless processes in Nature. Quantum mechanics, at the turn of the twentieth century, led to the dematerialization of physical matter, as atoms could no longer be construed as particle-like objects. This resulted in the demise of Newtonian physics, which had been one of the pillars of substance metaphysics since the scientific revolution. What had been considered "matter" then became "statistical patterns" of quantum activity. Similar metamorphoses in our conceptual space have since occurred in most other fields of 'hard' science, such as biology, and it would be very foolish to consider all of these changes occurring at the same time a mere coincidence.
Living beings are no longer thought of as isolated 'entities' but rather densely interconnected communities which, in theory, can provide all that is necessary for the existence of its "members". Science has been steadily progressing towards this processual, meaning-based outlook for many years now. A further step is taken towards the spiritual essence of Nature when we systematically investigate it and derive its "laws" - the underlying principles of natural processes which make sense of why they appear to us in the way specified ways that they do.
...
Just as the modern age of nominalism leads people to consider the physical ball more "real" than the overall process it is involved in, it also leads them to consider the specific manifestation of a principle more "real" than the principle itself. We, however, should remember that, even more real than the principle is the meta-principle which encompasses it and other related principles, or what is frequently referred to by scientists and artists as "archetypes". We must do a 180-degree reversal from the modern fragmenting habit of mind if we are to begin penetrating into the essence of art we seek. We cannot stubbornly resist the progression of philosophy, science, and art, but rather we must flow with it wherever it leads. Bergson intuited this progression as well when remarking, "
the more the sciences of life develop, the more they will feel the necessity for reintegrating thought into the heart of nature."
Now, in artistic creation, for example, it seems that the materials we have to work with, words and images for the poet, forms and colors for the painter, rhythms and harmonies for the musician, range themselves spontaneously under the idea they are to express, drawn, as it were, by the charm of a superior ideality. Is it not a similar movement, is it not also a state of fascination we should attribute to material elements when they are organized into living beings?
But whence come the materials which have come under this spell? ... If the organization is, as it were, an awakening of matter, matter can only be a slumber of the mind. It is the last degree, it is the shadow of an existence which has diminished and, so to speak, emptied itself of all its contents. If matter is the “base of natural existence, a base on which, by this continuous progress that is the order of nature, from degree to degree, from kingdom to kingdom, everything comes back to the unity of mind,” then conversely we should imagine at the beginning a distention of mind, a diffusion into space and time, constituting materiality.
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)
Our eyes represent the phenomenal world around us in very specific ways - mathematically precise ways - so we can navigate that same world without information overload. With our eyes we behold what is directly relevant to our existence, which is a good many processes, but still a very restricted set from the entire range of natural processes occurring around us at any given moment. As J.J. Gibson put it in his seminal paper on the
Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, "
to perceive is to be aware of the surfaces of the environment and of oneself in it... the full awareness of surfaces includes within perception a part of memory, expectation, knowledge, and meaning - some part but not all of those mental processes in each case".