What we Learned from JW's Monism

[Federica]

JW: "Part 5:In fact, the greater danger of projection may run in the opposite direction. We have become extraordinarily successful at producing systems precisely because we can arrest enough flux to obtain stable structures. We then risk projecting the character of those reductive articulations backward onto Nature Itself: Nature as mathematical structure, computation, information, law, or some deeper architecture to which our articulations are increasingly isomorphic.

But computation begins too late to be primal. Before something can be computed, differences must already have become determinate enough to count as states. Before an algorithm can operate, permissible transformations must already have been specified. Before information can be processed, something must already count as a difference.

The pinned butterfly does not prove that Nature is formless. It shows why preserved structure cannot be mistaken for living Nature.

Nor does any of this sever the articulated from the prearticulate. The cut belongs to what is cut. What confronts us constrains articulation. We are inseparable from what we cannot represent independently of our articulation of it.

But continuity is not correspondence. Constraint is not isomorphism. Intimacy is not transparency.

A future consciousness might gather vastly more than ours does now. It might articulate dimensions of existence for which we presently have no concepts. But greater range, intimacy, coherence, or transformative power would still not provide a criterion by which an articulation could certify itself as an isomorphic representation of Nature Itself.

That does not imprison us. It leaves the future radically open. To insist beforehand that whatever might come forth must preserve structure would already constrain that future according to one of our present articulations.

Logos suggests another possibility. Life does not need an invariant map of what confronts it in order to remain intimately responsive to it. It gathers and regathers according to what comes to belong. What belongs changes because existence continues. Its structures arise within that gathering and disappear within it.

Perhaps that is where our positions finally diverge. You are looking for an isomorphic continuity that can carry structure across the boundary. I am questioning why structure should be granted that privilege at all.

Structure is fundamental to the technological system. In life, structure is provisional.

The system attempts to hold its cut. Logos continually rearticulates the cut as what belongs changes.

Logos is life. Systems are death.

And the butterfly pinned in the specimen box should make us suspicious whenever the structure we can preserve is mistaken for the life we were trying to understand."

[AshvinP]

JW: "Part 1:I agree that the living process cannot be captured in a succession of articulated snapshots, and that we participate in that process aesthetically and preconsciously before we reduce it to conceptual form. Where we continue to differ concerns what can be learned from that intimacy.

You speak of refined inward attention yielding increasingly precise insight into the invisible constraints of the intuitive process. My experience leads me in a different direction. Meditation can loosen the reductions of ordinary consciousness. It can widen what becomes present and make habitual articulations appear less necessary than they ordinarily seem. But I do not take that widening as progressively uncovering a deeper structure whose meanings are already there waiting to be perceived.

Meaning happens through engagement. It gathers in logos.

But I need to qualify that immediately, because I do not mean that human beings manufacture meaning and project it upon an otherwise meaningless existence. The engagement itself is drawn. Something confronts us, constrains us, solicits us. Certain gatherings become possible and others do not. What comes forth is answerable to something that did not originate with us.

Meaning, then, is neither simply discovered nor simply invented. It comes forth.

Love is perhaps the clearest example. I do not learn what love is by withdrawing ever more deeply into myself. I learn it by loving and being loved. Nor did human beings invent the possibility of love. Something draws two lives into a relation through which possibilities appear that neither possessed beforehand as determinate meanings. Lover and beloved themselves become different through the loving.

Love was not sitting fully formed in the prearticulate waiting to be perceived. But neither is it an arbitrary human construction. The possibility of love points back toward something inherent in existence that the articulation brings forth without exhausting.

Morality is similar. We know almost nothing of morality without living among others—without cruelty, suffering, responsibility, betrayal, forgiveness, fidelity, caring and being cared for. This is why the ending of The Brothers Karamazov has always seemed to me a deeper rendering of morality than any moral system. Alyosha and the boys could not have meditated their way beforehand to what they come to know around the memory of Ilyusha. They had to undergo it: friendship and cruelty, illness and death, grief, reconciliation and remembrance.

Yet they did not simply invent the meaning afterward. What happened called for a response. Alyosha gathers what belongs to what they have undergone together.

That is logos.

And this is where I think the distinction between us becomes important. I do not understand logos as recovering meanings already present in some deeper interior realm. The prearticulate does not contain determinate meanings that logos subsequently retrieves. But neither does logos create its possibilities ex nihilo. Meaning comes forth through an engagement drawn and constrained by what cannot itself be independently articulated.

The articulation points back. It does not provide a representation of what it points toward.

This also changes how I understand consciousness itself. I do not regard consciousness as something standing opposite existence, attempting either outwardly or inwardly to discover what existence really is. We are inseparable from existence because we are literally part of its occurring.

If humanity can be said to have a purpose, I would put it this way: through us, existence has become capable of experiencing itself.

But I would not reverse that sentence. I would not say that existence brought us forth in order to experience itself. That would turn the deepest mystery into a teleology. I do not know how existence came to articulate conscious life, and I see no warrant for attributing consciousness, purpose, spirit, intelligence, or some hidden metaphysical architecture to whatever lies beyond that articulation."

A: "1/ Once again, what you describe, especially in Part 1, reflects a quintessential aspect of the intuitive-meditative path. We need not imagine either preexisting meaning within the prearticulate or a blank canvas that we shape into meaning. Such imaginations are quite irrelevant. On this path, we leave our default interest in philosophizing about such metaphysical questions at the entrance and move on to more direct, real-time experimentation with the constraints and possibilities.

You speak of refined inward attention yielding increasingly precise insight into the invisible constraints of the intuitive process... But I do not take that widening as progressively uncovering a deeper structure whose meanings are already there waiting to be perceived.

Exactly, but in a sense, this idea should also be applied to itself. In other words, if we initially form an idea about what kind of deeper structure can or can't be uncovered, what kind of meaning can or can't be perceived, how that meaning will be understood in relation to familiar articulated structures, and so on, we are actually projecting a 'deeper structure whose meaning is already there waiting to be perceived' into the prearticulate. Like it or not, the very formation of this idea is already such a projection about the nature of what 'articulation can bring forth without exhausting'. It is already imposing a structure on the prearticulate that determines how its meaning can be encountered and gathered.

I invite you to contemplate the following, for instance, with impartiality and without any preconceived ideas about what it implies, what determinate meanings it may be pointing to, and so on. It employs a phonograph metaphor to help anchor our feeling for the fine balance we seek on this meditative path:

The phonograph has an interesting property: it can be used for both playback and recording. If the wax is soft enough, we can conduct vibrations through the needle and impress shapes in the wax groove. The needle is a metaphor for the focus of our attention. It is the part of our conscious experience where we are most in touch with the mystery of existence. The periphery of experience feels blurry, somewhat out of focus, but in the portion that feels in focus, it is as if we try to follow as tightly as possible the metamorphosis of the World state. In one direction the mystery of the World is the driving force of the playback and drags our attention with it. This would correspond to passive perceiving. We let our needle of attention be completely ruled by the World wax and we experience the movie flow. In the other direction, attention becomes a force and we actively impress some aspects of the movie. All this can be most clearly experienced in thinking. Here our ideal intents impress, for example, the sounds of our inner voice within the movie flow.

...

First, we have to be aware that we need a kind of fine balance when concentrating our spiritual activity. If we drive the tip of our 'thinking needle' with excessive strength, we become a tyrant preoccupied with the ‘write’ operation. We become fixated on the scribbles that we impress in the flow and as a result, we become correspondingly insensitive to the greater curvatures of the groove. It’s not that we are free from these curvatures but only that in our over-fixation in the forms that we impress with our needle, we become oblivious of everything else. At the other extreme is the state where we completely let go of our spiritual activity. This leads to the mystical trance where our flow is completely determined by the World groove and as a result, our consciousness is diminished into an admittedly expansive but completely nebulous condition. For such reasons, our meditation should lead to a delicate balance between activity and receptivity. The focus of our thinking needle is both the ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ organ of our intuitive life. We actively keep our focus steady but at the same time perceive how the groove agitates it.

The above may seem like a contradiction – how can we keep our focus steady and at the same time allow it to be agitated? A rough analogy can be drawn from the sense of touch. For example, if we are blindfolded and we try to examine the shape of an object, we need to be active with our will to move our fingers, but at the same time, we are interested in the tactile sensations through which we gain intuition of the form. In other words, we don’t want to override the form of the object through our will (such as may be the case if we’re working with plasticine) but we will our movements only as far as we can feel the resistance and constraints conveyed to us through the sense of touch. Similarly, as we keep our concentration, all the distractions that try to slip our needle into their grooves begin to feel like inner nudges. They push our attention slightly but not so far that we switch grooves. The interesting thing is that these nudges are felt not simply as some mechanical pressure, but they are something meaningful. In a way, each nudge is intertwined with a flash of intuitive insight through which we know in what direction our thoughts would have run had we allowed our needle to switch tracks.

2/ Does this not sound like what you are expressing about Love? Except now we are not only talking about the characteristics of Love, but providing guidelines through which those characteristics can be put into concrete practice within the domain where it is initially most accessible. If we are honest, the possibility of extending Love to all beings (as in Alyosha's sentiment) is not something we start with by default, but is an ideal toward which we must strive. We need to begin that striving in the intimate domain where we can most readily experience the process of meaning coming forth, where we can most readily strike the delicate balance between discovery and invention of meaning, gathering and articulation, receptivity and activity, etc.

Once we impartially consider this meditative practice, we also need to refrain from projecting any determinate meaning about where it can lead, i.e., how our intimate encounter with meaning can never also entail transparency, about how consciousness withdrawing into its intuitive process must necessarily entail withdrawal from engagement with the world, and so on. These ideas are all determinate structures that we are philosophically (and very subtly) placing into the prearticulate before experimentally encountering the latter. For example, you previously wrote:

A future consciousness might gather vastly more than ours does now. It might articulate dimensions of existence for which we presently have no concepts. But greater range, intimacy, coherence, or transformative power would still not provide a criterion by which an articulation could certify itself as an isomorphic representation of Nature Itself.

But why are we measuring our expanded consciousness and its revelations against the apophatic concept of 'Nature itself'? In other words, why do we continue imagining this separate domain that justifies our thought: "My expanded consciousness has gathered a vast spectrum of meaning which was previously veiled and helps me elucidate the mysterious articulated dynamics of existence (which I only imagined to understand before through metaphysically constrained science), but alas, this has nothing to do with Nature itself, so I guess I have practically arrived at the same perspective on reality as when I started, and nothing of essential significance in that perspective has shifted." In my view, this is a result of not taking your other observations seriously enough - "I do not take that widening as progressively uncovering a deeper structure whose meanings are already there waiting to be perceived" - which is to say, not applying this observation to itself. There is no need to 'take' the widening as doing or not doing anything beforehand. We only aim to remain faithfully coupled with the process of progressive gathering and disclosure, allowing the prearticulate to guide us into its secrets rather than philosophically carving out its shape or non-shape from the outset."