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Monthly Archives: January 2012
Jonathan Sacks
Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.
Becoming
Phoebe Imogen Mary Cottam, 17th April 2010
The number ladder
From zero to hero, the world is born with the appearance of 1. The archetypal boundary is right there in the change from nothing to all. But, one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
From 1 to 2, consciousness is possible. Granularity and separation. We can understand existence because we have edge. A within and without. Quantum mechanics shows that everything exists only as a cloud of possibility – until observed. It is the act of knowing that crystallises out reality from potential. Deliberately to mix language – it is witness that causes wavefunction collapse. It is consciousness that creates reality, and that is only possible when edge is born with the advent of the number 2. Duality appears to be a fundamental property of existence. Energy is the flip side of matter (e=mc2), everything is wave and particle simultaneously. Yin is nothing without Yang. Ich and Du embrace and the world unfolds.
From 2 to 3 – unbalanced materialism. The three dimensions of space, but static – going nowhere without time. The trinity – all male of course! A way point en-route to…
The mystic number 4, Jung’s number. The sacred number of alchemy. The four points of the compass and of course the description of all – space-time (the fourth dimension not separate as imagined until Einstein, but integrated). The alchemists believed that moving from 1 to 2 to 3 and then finally adding one to reach 4, integrating back to one was the route to perfection. Jung worked with Wolfgang Pauli to tease out an interrelationship between quantum mechanics and psychology. What synchronicity then that Pauli’s best know contribution was to discover through the exclusion principle that a fourth dimension is needed to describe reality. The three intuitive dimensions of space plus spin.
Is the BBC institutionally sexist?
Woman’s Hour is a wonderful programme. Why is there not a Man’s Hour?
Philosophy vs. Anthropology? « corkshoesandsparrows
Philosophy vs. Anthropology?
by corkshoesandsparrows
With reference to the Journal of Philosophy article ‘What is the Role of Consciousness in Demonstrative thought,’ (January 2011) it seems a tedious point to make, but to conflate conscious perception with sight is an observation (excuse the pun) that holds very much within a Western thought tradition which privileges sight over all the other senses. Yet, as a move in itself, it is demonstrative of that which Philosophy in general takes, and that which, I feel undermines it at the outset. Which is to take a quite specific, Western perception of ‘the world’ and to apply it via rationalist principles to the whole of mankind. In many respects, Anthropology has challenged this, fighting for the space for other peoples’ knowledge of the(ir) world, and in turn, the space within our own to think beyond (or creatively within) prescribed boundaries. Indeed, it seems that Philosophy hasn’t ‘progressed’ in this respect since having found a logic to alleviate itself from epistemological nihilism. The patterned response is generally the same: we must be able to assume the existence of others, we must be able to infer something of other peoples thoughts, and so from the solitary thinking man to the entire worlds’ peoples. It seems in its refute, Philosophy is still stuck in a pendulum: we either can’t understand people’s intentions based on our own thoughts, we are trapped within our own impenetrable consciousness, or we can infer from our own thoughts that of any other person. For all the inconsistencies in its image, not to speak of the flaws in its logical fabric, Anthropology at least defends the right to alterior thought within a Western intellectual tradition.
The Phenomenon of Man – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
De Chardin’s work is scintillating – a brilliant piece of philosophical science. But, oh how difficult to access! It appears as a work of nineteenth century charismatic spirituality, language calculated to repel a positivist scientist. Yet it deals with concepts and theories that bring together quantum mechanics, relativity, geology, evolutionary biology and anthropology. One struggles to absorb the width of his landscape.
And he distils some compelling concepts.
Material evolution started at the big bang with occasional phase-shifts from plasma to atoms, from giant molecules to cellular life, from complex organisms to the birth of ideas. Evolution within the geosphere (the crystallising and polymerising worlds) leading to the biosphere and now the noosphere.
A duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the “without” and “within”. He traces the development of the “within”, an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas.
He shows that everything, both material and spiritual in each phase has common properties – plurality, unity and energy.
His ideas have of course been widely adopted, but almost by stealth and by others. He was a Jesuit priest, and the church tried to gag him. He bowed to pressure, because of his vows of obedience, and much of his work came to light after his death. . De Chardin’s work gloriously and selflessly witnesses the growth of God within and between us. What an irony that the entombed treasury of his ideas was pillaged most famously by Richard Dawkins (memes? Noosphere…), who is of course the Ian Paisly of atheism.
It is meat and needs to be chewed, but it is rich meat and will repay the effort.
Life
“Consciousness veiled by morphology” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Thou art
The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber said “To man the world is two-fold .. the attitude of man is two-fold .. the one primary word is the combination I-Thou, the other is the combination I-It”.
I-thou is a relationship of inner to inner, an authentic encounter that is the touchstone of existence. (I-thou creating “our”).
Of course, Buber wrote in German and Du has currency in contrast to Sie or Es, whereas in English we now reserve intimate addressing for our relationship with God. How ironic!
In our English language how can we now mark the transition in relationships between the formality of “you are” and the caress of “thou art”? And when and why did we lose the rich language of intimacy?
Surely thou-ness was clear in the minds of the scholars constructing the King James Bible in 1611. Perhaps the slow death of this way of celebrating friendship is linked to the four hundred year rise of materialism since the reformation?
Perhaps as the smoke clears and we see the I-It debris left by capitalism and atheism a new expression of thou-ness will appear.
Let us pray so.