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This is the current draft of Chapter ·4 (the reverse side of Chapter 4·) of Turning Words, a work in progress, as of 15 February 2009. Points here are not presented in linear order and may assume acquaintance with concepts introduced on the obverse side.
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This book is merely an attempt to hold up my end of the Great Conversation. But i can't see that contribution in its whole context, and neither can you. Can anyOne? Is there a being for whom the Great Conversation is an internal dialogue?
You and i can only comprehend this (or any question) at the scale of the human body; at this basic level, all the buzzing business inside your brain serves the purpose of your understanding, and none of your neurons has any idea of that, even though they constitute it with their interaction. But what if all the human dialog, the crosstalk of the Internet and all the global media, is just the inner working of a global brain, working as a guidance system within the global body? What if the human collective, or Gaia perhaps, is doing the real meaning, even though we constitute it by interacting?
This may be an appealing idea, since we long to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to serve a higher purpose – this is part of our heritage as social animals. But we can at best imagine such ‘higher purpose’ – as we are now doing – within the limitations of a human organism. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (Swidler 1999, 9). Drawing upon the repertoire of human-scale experience, we might imagine Humanity or Gaia like a wise and nurturing parent – or we might imagine that this higher-level being cares about us no more than an anthill cares about the feelings of its ants. Let us imagine wisely, and humbly – and in the meantime, let our dialog probe and push the envelope of imagination and of knowledge.
The first step is always from where you stand.
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv'd identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be
I knew I should be of my body.— Walt Whitman, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’
The body as subject is the material witness to life. In other words its testimony is of the highest (indeed the only) relevance.
Within this fathom-long sentient body itself, I postulate the world, the arising of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world.— a Pali text quoted by Rahula (1974, 42)
The body can be an object for the body-as-subject or bodymind – although, as with many other objects, parts of it may be more apparent than others. But the bodymind as a whole cannot be an object, either immediate or dynamic, for itself. (On the other hand, see Thompson 2007, 261 ff., on ‘prereflective bodily self-awareness.’)
When a sign represents the subject as part of a universe of discourse or world-model, the question then is whether this sign (let us call it the self) has the same object as the sign which names the body-as-object.
Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts,the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
How can the real body ever die and be buried?Of your real body and any man's or woman's real body,
Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleanersand pass to fitting spheres,Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birthto the moment of death.Not the types set up by the printer return their impression,
the meaning, the main concern,Any more than a man's substance and life or a woman's substance and lifereturn in the body and the soul,Indifferently before death and after death.Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern,
and includes and is the soul;Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body,or any part of it!— Starting from Paumanok, §13
If your real life is a process, a kind of flow, then the fixed identity you call your self or your personality is an illusion – or at least its solidity and permanence are illusory.
The tendency to think of self, soul, reason, mind or personality as in charge of the body brings its own temptations and corruptions – notably a kind of arrogance, exacerbated by belief in a solid, permanent, immortal selfhood (which might eventually be ‘translated’ into a world worthy of it). This is a species of what Trungpa (1973) called ‘spiritual materialism’. By those lights, the ‘soul’ which survives bodily death is really just another ‘body’ made of a subtler substance, rather than the functional integrity of bodymind.
Creeds are the fossil remains of faith. But the practice of just reading, grounded in the spirit of inquiry, can resurrect a dead dogma into a living, breathing belief.
The true remains of the Buddha's body are found in the sutras.— Dogen (Cook 1978, 47)
How right you are in reality is not a function of how strongly you feel that you are right. The human tendency to self-deception and confabulation can be overcome only through genuine dialogue with authentic others. (On confabulation see especially Hirstein 2005).
Because his body shall be pure, the living beings in the thousand-millionfold world, whether at the time of birth or at the time of death, whether superior or inferior, fair or ugly, born in a good place or in a bad place, shall all be visible therein.The same is true for all the sacred mountains and all who dwell amid them, and all places from the lowest hell to the Pinnacle of Existence.
Also, as in a pure, bright mirror
One sees all physical images,
The bodhisattva, in his pure body,
Sees whatever is in the world.
Only he alone in and of himself has clear perception,
For these are things that others do not see.— Hurvitz (1976, 275-)
The soul appears to originate movement in animals … through intention [διὰ προαιρέσεώς τινος] or process of thinking [καὶ νοήσεως].How conscious is thinking?— Aristotle, On the Soul, 406b
The whole vexing question of what we mean by ‘intention’ and how far we are ever in control of our movements is in a state of flux. In a way, perhaps, we always control and adjust our movements by observing their effects, similar to those self-regulating mechanisms that engineers call ‘feedback.’ Skill consists in a most rapid and subtle interaction between impulse and subsequent guidance, but not even the most skilful artist should claim to be able to plan a single stroke with the pen in all its details.Note the paradox inherent in the phrase ‘state of flux.’ This brings us close to the heart of the mystery.— Gombrich (2002, 302)
The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment, are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.— William James (1890, I, 8, italics in original)
As James points out, even a frog is ‘intelligent’ in this sense, and therefore has a life involving choice and spontaneity. Michael Tomasello (1999) develops a concept of ‘intentional agency’ which also crucially involves ‘the differentiation between goals and behavioral means’ (91). What is unique about humans, according to Tomasello, is that they recognize one another as intentional agents:
nonhuman primates understand conspecifics as animate beings capable of spontaneous self-movement – indeed, this is the basis for their social understanding in general and their understanding of third-party social relationships in particular – but do not understand others as intentional agents in the process of pursuing goals or mental agents in the process of thinking about the world.This peculiarly human ‘understanding’ is closely entangled with language, which affords a way of formulating the distinction between ends and means, so that it can persist and become habitual. And as Grice and others have pointed out, human-style communication begins with recognition of the intent to communicate (see Sperber and Wilson 1995).— Tomasello (1999, 21)
We not only direct ourselves, but often wonder how we do it and how to do it better. Now intent itself has become intentional. You could say that the peculiarly human level of consciousness consists of catching ourselves in the act of meaning. The schoolmen called this the level of second intentions, which ‘are the objects of the understanding considered as representations, and the first intentions to which they apply are the objects of those representations’ (Peirce, EP1:7). ‘Aquinas defined logic as the science of second intentions applied to first’ (CP 2.549). (More recently we have second-order cybernetics.) This is a shift from use of symbols to observation of their use (‘going meta’). Peirce's entry on ‘intention’ in the Century Dictionary includes this:
First intention, in logic, a general conception obtained by abstraction from the ideas or images of sensible objects.Second intention, in logic, a general conception obtained by reflection and abstraction applied to first intentions as objects. Thus, the concepts man, animal, and thing are first intentions; but if we reflect that man is a species of animal, and animal a species of organism, we see there is no reason why this process should not be continued until we have a concept embracing every other object or being (ens); and this concept, not obtained by direct abstraction from the species offered by the imagination, but by thinking about words or concepts, is a second intention.
Dennett's example is a computer. The first stance is the one taken in physics: we use it for things that only move or change when other objects or processes impinge on them. From this perspective, a computer is just a complicated hunk of plastic, metal and silicon that sits on the desk obeying the law of inertia and starts producing heat when powered up. The second stance is the one proper to biology (Mayr 1982, 51 ff.; Bateson 1979); Wilson (2002) calls it functionalism. We take this stance toward things that evidently have some function and were designed for that purpose, either consciously or by a ‘blind’ evolutionary process. The software i am now running is designed to translate my words into a digital format via keyboard input, and the monitor serves the purpose of keeping me informed about what the program is doing. This renders my interaction with the computer predictable in a far more economical manner than a physical stance could do the job. If i had to think about how all those microchips are arranged and activated, or even about the ‘machine code’ that does the grunt work of the program, i wouldn't be able to get any writing done.
Taking the third, intentional stance means ascribing to the system intentions (desires, hopes, fears, expectations, ..... ) of its own. This is our typical way of relating to one another, and to other organisms. We also slip into this mode when we say of the computer or program ‘It's looking for a resource file’ or ‘It checks my spelling automatically’ or ‘It can't handle that format.’ This makes sense, because (for instance) you probably have a better chance against a good chess-playing program if you take the intentional stance toward it than if you take the design stance; again, it's more economical, thus allowing you to anticipate its moves and keep up with the interaction in ‘real time’. This is of course the stance proper to psychology, as the design and physical stances are proper to biology and physics respectively. But it is the nature of our interaction – our dialog with the other system – that makes a stance appropriate, not the inherent nature of the system.
Some people seem to get attached to one stance, to the point that they believe things are ‘real’ when viewed from that stance while the view from other stances is illusory. Those who get stuck in the physical stance are called physicalists, or more loosely, materialists; at the other extreme are those who dismiss the ‘material’ world as unreal, or at least less real than a ‘spiritual’ realm. In practice, of course, all of us use all three stances every day, regardless of our metaphysical preferences.
Descartes had seen the mind as a subjective consciousness that contained ideas that corresponded (or sometimes failed to correspond) to what was in the world. This view of the mind as representing the world reached its culmination in Franz Brentano's notion of intentionality. According to Brentano, all mental states (perception, memory, etc.) are of or about something; in his words, mental states necessarily have ‘reference to a content’ or ‘direction toward an object’ (which is not necessarily a thing in the world). This directedness or intentionality, Brentano claimed, was the defining characteristic of the mind. (This use of intentional should not be confused with its use to mean ‘doing something on purpose.’)— Varela et al. (1991, 15-16)
Edelman (2004, 125) defines Brentano's ‘intentionality’ as ‘the property by which consciousness is directed at, or is about, objects and states of affairs that are initially in the world’ (italics mine) – which implies a developmental process involving internalization.
Gendlin's Process Model (VII.A) derives ‘aboutness’ from interrupted behavior sequences: the interruption begets reiterated gestures, and eventually ‘the aboutness level radically remakes the world.’
Walter Freeman (1999a and b) rejects both ‘aboutness’ and ‘doing something on purpose’ as the root meaning of ‘intent’. His intent is related to the definition of living beings as autonomous agents (Kauffman 2001), and refers to the biological ground from which consciously intended meanings, and indeed consciousness itself, emerge. Freeman himself adopted his usage from Aquinas:
The concept – ‘intentionality’ – was first described by Thomas Aquinas in 1272 to denote the process by which humans and other animals act in accordance with their own growth and maturation. An ‘intent’ is the directing of an action towards some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor.— Freeman (1999a, 10)
The actor or agent does not need to imagine such a ‘goal’, or consciously define or choose it; even among humans, conscious intention (which could be called volition or will) is only the tip of the intentional iceberg. Spinoza's concept of conatus, as interpreted by Damasio, seems to be essentially the same:
It is apparent that the continuous attempt at achieving a state of positively regulated life is a deep and defining part of our existence – the first reality of our existence as Spinoza intuited when he described the relentless endeavor (conatus) of each being to preserve itself. … In Spinoza's own words: ‘Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being’ and ‘The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.’ Interpreted with the advantages of current hindsight, Spinoza's notion implies that the living organism is constructed so as to maintain the coherence of its structures and functions against numerous life-threatening odds.Autopoiesis theory is very similar, except that it prefers to describe the organism as constructing or making itself rather than passively ‘constructed’. But the Spinoza/Damasio theory amounts to the same concept:— Damasio (2003, 36)
The conatus subsumes both the impetus for self-preservation in the face of danger and opportunities and the myriad actions of self-preservation that hold the parts of a body together. In spite of the transformations the body must undergo as it develops, renews its constituent parts, and ages, the conatus continues to form the same individual and respect the same structural design.Damasio's view is that what we experience as feelings arises from that same brain circuitry; and feelings in turn are the essential components of what i have called guidance systems. The engagement to which Damasio refers (called ‘structural coupling’ in autopoiesis theory) has its highest expression in ethics, the collaboration of reason and feeling:What is Spinoza's conatus in current biological terms? It is the aggregate of dispositions laid down in brain circuitry that, once engaged by internal or environmental conditions, seeks both survival and well-being.
— Damasio (2003, 36)
It is not a simple issue of trusting feelings as the necessary arbiter of good and evil. It is a matter of discovering the circumstances in which feelings can indeed be an arbiter, and using the reasoned coupling of circumstances and feelings as a guide to human behavior.— (2003, 179)
But all of this is rooted in what Spinoza (in his Ethics) called conatus, and this is what Aquinas called intent. Walter Freeman elaborates on the concept:
Aquinas further proposed that each animal is a unified being enclosed within a boundary that distinguishes ‘self’ from ‘other’, and that the self uses the body to push its boundary outwards into the world. Etymologically the word ‘intend’ comes from the Latin intendere, which means not only to stretch forth, but equally importantly to change the self by experiencing action and learning from the consequences of acting.— Freeman (1999a, 36)
Freeman labels his model pragmatism (as opposed to ‘materialism’ and ‘cognitivism’), defining it as the idea ‘that minds are dynamic structures that result from actions into the world’ (1999a, 35). Intent is what drives these ‘actions into the world’, thus constituting the upper limb of the meaning cycle.
But the root of all human ‘intention’ is the inner life which not only generates subjective experience but drives every act of the organism, physical and mental, conscious and unconscious. As Freeman explains,
… we perform most daily activities that are clearly intentional and meaningful without being explicitly aware of them. Consider the activities of athletes and dancers … As the training of the brain and body proceeds, … conscious reflection on the manipulation of the body falls away, and they can take the plunge through having what we commonly call a strong ‘feel’ for the game or dance. Performance becomes ‘second nature’. For many people, the greatest fulfillment and enjoyment comes with total immersion into the activity, so that self-awareness is scattered to the winds, and they become wholly what they desire in body and spirit, without reservation. The brain and body anticipate inputs, perceive, and make movements without need for reflection. It is precisely this kind of unconscious, but directed, skill in the exercise of perception that the concept of intentionality must include.This is the kind of intentionality that Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls flow or optimal experience. It is when the circuits of intent are fully closed, leaving no gaps between mind and body and no space for the busybody conscious ‘self’ to interfere, that the current of experience flows most freely. Self-consciousness disrupts this flow by lifting the ‘self’ out of its context. Shaun Gallagher and Anthony J. Marcel ‘suggest that disruption of the intended behaviour in such cases is due to the behaviour being the explicit focus of consciousness rather than an implicit aspect of the intention’ (Gallagher and Shear 1999, 279, italics in original).— Freeman (1999a, 23)
The Brentano (logical) sense of intentionality can be derived from the biological and psychological by observing that the perception of objects always involves movement (or at least motility) of the subject as body. The infant exploring her environment, for instance by putting things into her mouth, is learning to correlate sense experience with inner intent. Eventually the correlations become habitual and there is no need for gross physical movement in order to see things – yet visual experience is continually fine-tuned by tiny rapid eye movements called saccades. We do not consciously control these movements, yet they are ‘directed’ (Koch 2004, 63ff., 344; see also McCrone 2004).
Motility is always implicit in experience; and, not coincidentally, it is implicit in life as we know it on this planet. According to Margulis and Sagan (1995, Chapter 5), spirochetes which had developed the power of movement as free-living bacteria later bestowed movement on cells to which they became attached, and the internal movement that made sexual reproduction and genetic replication possible. Intracellular motility made possible the development of species. And according to Llinás (2001, 59), ‘the organization and function of our brains is based on the embedding of motricity over evolution.’
The deep connection, then, between intentionality and ‘aboutness’ is the movement of the subject or agent, or rather its motility, the potential for movement that creates a space in which it can move and thus furnishes its Umwelt with significant objects. It was noted long ago by the precursors of both phenomenology and psychology that activity of the subject was indispensible to perception (see Pachoud 1999). Merleau-Ponty (1945, 158) urges us ‘to understand motility as basic intentionality. Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think” but of “I can”.’ (See also Sheets-Johnstone 1999.)
Behaviors reveal a sort of prospective activity in the organism as if it were oriented toward the meaning of certain elementary situations, as if it entertained familiar relations with them, as if there were an ‘a priori of the organism’, privileged conducts and laws of internal equilibrium which predisposed the organism to certain relations with its milieu. At this level there is no question yet of a real self-awareness or of intentional activity.The ‘as if’ here anticipates Dennett's concept of ‘the intentional stance’ – that is, we attribute intentionality to the organism, or infer it, rather than observing it directly; but the attribution itself is often not voluntary but automatic. ‘Intentional’ in Merleau-Ponty's final sentence above refers of course to conscious intention or to the ‘illusion of conscious will’ (Wegner 2002). Walter Freeman on the other hand uses ‘intentional’ in reference to what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘prospective activity’. Both emphasize the intersubjective nature of the intentional space inhabited by humans:— Merleau-Ponty (1964, 4)
Evolution has given us the capacity to detect intentionality in others without having to define it.… Intentional action is directed by internally generated goals and takes place in the time and space of the world shared with other intentional beings.— Freeman (1999a, 41-2)
… we are typically conscious of the results of mental processes but not of the processes themselves.— Baars (1997, 177)
The idea we've been pursuing throughout this book is that the experience of conscious will is not a direct indicator of a causal relation between thought and behavior.— Wegner (2002, 288)
Consciousness holds itself responsible for everything, and takes everything upon itself, but it has nothing of its own and makes its life in the world.— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 526)
People are surely not conscious of faking, at least after the first little while, when they play the roles of everyday life. A lack of consciousness of the processes whereby one has achieved a mental state, however, suggests a kind of genuineness …— Wegner (2002, 304 fn.)
It is as though people aspire to be ideal agents who know all their actions in advance.Wegner (2002, Chapter 5) shows that this ‘ideal agency’ is an illusion which we protect by confabulating our own motives when necessary. Merleau-Ponty had already anticipated this:— Wegner (2002, 145)
… my temperament exists only for the second order knowledge that I gain about myself when I see myself as others see me, and in so far as I recognize it, confer value upon it, and in that sense, choose it. What misleads us on this, is that we often look for freedom in the voluntary deliberation which examines one motive after another and seems to opt for the weightiest or most convincing. In reality the deliberation follows the decision, and it is my secret decision which brings the motives to light, for it would be difficult to conceive what the force of a motive might be in the absence of a decision which it confirms or to which it runs counter.— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 506)
Peirce (CP 1.623 and elsewhere) uses the terms logica utens (logic-in-use) for implicit logic, and logica docens (logic-in-teaching) for explicit logic, observer's logic, ‘the result of scientific evaluation of the logica utens’ (Ochs 1998, 76). The distinction is like use and mention, body and mind.
Our century has wiped out the dividing line between ‘body’ and ‘mind,’ and sees human life as through and through mental and corporeal.— Merleau-Ponty (1960, 226)
Let us say the cat is running after a bird, tracking the bird. By running the cat keeps the bird steady in front. The steady bird is kept ‘the same’ by the tracking behavior. The object is kept ‘the same’ by the changes of the behavior sequence. I say that the steady object ‘falls out’ as ‘the same object’ which the sequence makes.A behavior-object (it is always also a perceptual object) is made by the behavior sequence.
The bird is now both the object of the game – the hunting, the chasing – and a ‘perceptual object’ on which we can say the cat is intent. The cat's intention of hunting creates the object that its activity is about, focuses on it. Here again the aboutness and the intent are aspects of the same process.
Life is inherently restless, far from equilibrium, yet yearning for it; the tension between its twin tendencies drives the cycle of birth-and-death. This is another dimension hidden in the cryptic pun of Heraclitus: ‘The bow (bios) is called life (bios), but its work is death.’
For Turner (1996), this manifests as a target space. He points out (96) that actions in the target space are often guided, and well guided, by blended spaces that are quite distinct from beliefs. ‘Useful construction of meaning is not the same as adoption of belief.’ (We could call this a variety of pragmatism.)
Compare the role of the target implicit in the Greek verb stochazein (to shoot an arrow at a target), which Bateson glossed as the root of his term ‘stochastic processes’ (1979, 253). We aim at something, guess at it, produce a conjecture (a throwing-together). The game is trial and error – formalized in science as ‘conjecture and refutation’ (Popper).
The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is God himself/The Divine Body/Jesus: we are his Members.— Blake, The Laocoön (PPB, 271)
The metaphor of the community as a body (the body of Christ) is developed at length by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12. Of course, to Paul, this was not ‘merely’ a metaphor: to be a Christian was to live in Christ. Suppose we accept that the community has become a higher-scale body, a corpus or corporation acting independently of the membership which constitutes it. Why not? The human body itself can be regarded as a ‘corporation’ of cells whose ancestors once lived separate and independent lives. The ‘corporate body’ might self-organize in a different way from animal bodies, but still have its own intentionality (see D.S. Wilson 2002). Perhaps even a corporate conscience is a possibility – but if so, there is no reason to expect that its values would coincide with those of a human conscience, any more than your values coincide with those of your heart, brain or fingernail cells.
Conscience must not only contend with external principalities and powers, but also see through the mask of internal authority.
When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men [σοφια ἀνθρωπων], but in the power of God [δυναμει θεου].We could say that Paul was showing, not telling: his words sought to awaken the creative power (vested in brain dynamics) rather than remind his hearers of conventional, ‘worldly’, already-known wisdom.— 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 (RSV)
Since it is not ‘temporal’ but mythic wisdom, ‘hidden’ from secondhand (public) sight, we can say it is ‘ordained before the world’, just as Buddhists say that the Buddha-nature is beginningless, unborn and undying.Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect [teleiois]: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory:
— 1 Corinthians 2:6-7 (KJV)
We could gloss ‘the spirit of man which is in him’ as human experience, conceived as something or someone indwelling the body – but only metaphorically ‘in him’, as we no longer need to imagine a ‘little man within’ or humunculus: this ‘someone’ is embodied by the dynamics internal to bodymind/world interbeing. We could also gloss this ‘spirit’ as the soul.Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit [πνευμα] searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God [ta bathe tou theou]. For what man knoweth the things of a man [ta tou anthropou], save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God [ta tou theou] knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
— 1 Corinthians 2:8-11 (KJV)
The ‘things of the world’ are given to us second-hand, as it were, through cultural media, and thus are not ‘freely given’ as immediate experience is.Now we have received, not the spirit of the world [to πνευμα tou cosmou], but the spirit which is of God [to πνευμα to ek tou theou]; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.
— 1 Corinthians 2:12 (KJV)
The word ‘judge’ can be read here as referring to much more than deliberate value judgments. Peirce referred to the wild (uncontrolled, pre-conscious) source experiences as perceptual judgments. (See also Merleau-Ponty 1945, 337-8.)Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man [ψυχικος ἀνθρωπος] receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual [πνευματικος] judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
— 1 Corinthians 2:13-15 (KJV)
The ‘we’ here is of course highly ambiguous; gnostics could read this chapter as an indication that Paul taught a ‘secret wisdom … not to everyone, and not publicly, but only to a select few whom he considered to be spiritually mature’ (Pagels 1979, 43; see 2:6 above, and the Gospel of Truth in NHS). Indeed Paul goes on in the next chapter to say that the Corinthians did not qualify as ‘mature’, and still don't, ‘For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men?’ But whatever Paul's doctrine was, and however he wished to distance it from ‘the flesh’, it is clear today that the most ‘secret’, most intimate wisdom of all is ‘private’ experience itself, the mystery incarnate in a single life.For who hath known the mind [noun] of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
— 1 Corinthians 2:16 (KJV)
You should practice in such a way that things come and abide in your mind, and your mind returns and abides in things, all through the day and night.— Dogen (Tanahashi 1985, 55)
Then in 1 Corinthians 15, we come to ‘the end, when he [Christ] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power’ (15:24, RSV). At this point comes the resurrection of the dead: ‘It is sown a physical body [σωμα ψυχικον], it is raised a spiritual body [σωμα πνευματικον]’ (15:44). The end of social hierarchy seems to be the beginning of spiritual life: ‘we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye’ (52), and ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ (54). The law, as embodiment of social convention, authority and power, seems to be swallowed up along with death, for ‘The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law’ (56).
Jesus said, ‘I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.’Valantasis comments on this that ‘Jesus offers the hearer something that transcends human capacity’ (Valantasis 1997, 84). But if you are human, then nothing beyond human capacity can be given to you, since you will not be able to receive it. What is offered here is new experience, unfiltered through old categories and habits, or rather taking them as a point of departure. (It's not take it or leave it but take it and leave it.) This is not beyond human capacity; in fact it happens all the time, but being alive to it takes some unlearning. So maybe that's what Jesus is offering here. Dogen in his essays and talks makes a similar offer, but since he urges you to realize it rather than saying that he will ‘give’ it to you, it sounds more like a challenge than an offer.— Thomas 17 (Lambdin)
As Heraclitus pointed out long before, ‘Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for people whose souls are barbarous’, i.e. who don't ‘understand the language’ of the logos and reason accordingly (Kahn, XVI).
Here is a story. Zen master Yuanwu said, ‘Coming and going within life and death is the genuine human body.’Nanquan said, ‘Coming and going within life and death is the genuine body.’Zhaozhou said, ‘Coming and going within life and death is exactly the genuine human body.’Changsha said, ‘Coming and going within life and death is exactly the genuine body of all buddhas.’The teacher [Dogen] said: Those four venerable elders each unfolds their family style, and together they align our nostrils. They said what they could say, only it's not yet there. If this were Kosho [Dogen], I would not say it thus, but rather: ‘Coming and going within life and death is just coming and going within life and death.’— Leighton and Okumura (2004, 125-6)
But in the Gospels, an unclean spirit is also a possibility (τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἀκάθαρτον, Mark 1:26).
On Umwelt, Kalevi Kull (1998) says:
Umwelt is the semiotic world of organism. It includes all the meaningful aspects of the world for a particular organism. Thus, Umwelt is a term uniting all the semiotic processes of an organism into a whole. Indeed, the Umwelt-concept follows naturally due to the connectedness of individual semiotic processes within an organism, which means that any individual semiosis in which an organism is functioning as a subject is continuously connected to any other semiosis of the same organism. At the same time, the Umwelts of different organisms differ, which follows from the individuality and uniqueness of the history of every single organism. Umwelt is the closed world of organism. Functional (or epistemic) closure is an important and principal feature of organisms, and of semiotic systems. This has been described by Maturana and Varela (1980) through the notion of autopoiesis.
By observing one's own body, rather than simply identifying with it, one cultivates a kind of self-alterity, by experiencing one's own body simply as a matrix of phenomena, rather than as a self.— B.A. Wallace, ‘Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 8:5-7
Elaine Pagels (1979, 62-3) cites gnostic sources for several ‘mystical meanings’ of Biblical images, which interpret them as references to the human body:
Gershom Scholem likewise notes the organic nature of Kabbalistic imagery:
… to the Kabbalist the unity of God is manifested from the first as a living, dynamic unity, rich in content. What to the Jewish theologians were mere attributes of God, are to the Kabbalist potencies, hypostases, stages in an intradivine life-process, and it is not for nothing that the images with which he describes God are first and foremost images pertaining to the organism.— Scholem (1960, 94)
What the Kabbalist calls ‘the not yet unfolded Torah’ (Scholem 1960, 49) is in my book not other than the implicit intricacy. In Kabbalah the sefiroth which constitute the divine life itself and its creative power are symbolized as a language of revelation hidden behind the explicit language of the Torah, yet so precisely implicated with it that ‘if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many, you will destroy the whole world’ (Scholem 1960, 39).
Arthur Green (2004, 38) says of the first sefirah, Keter:
There is no specific ‘content’ to this sefirah; it is desire or intentionality, an inner movement of the spirit that potentially bears all content but actually bears none.The sefirot are implicit all the way down to the Shekhinah – which is still haunted by Plato's ghost:
While the inner logic of the Kabbalists' emanational thinking would seem to indicate that all beings, including the physical universe, flow forth from Shekhinah, the medieval abhorrence of associating God with corporeality complicates the picture, leaving Kabbalah with a complex and somewhat divided attitude toward the material world.— Green (2004, 53)
Souls, personalities, and egos are masks, spectres, concealing our unity as body. For it is as one biological species that mankind is one … so that to become conscious of ourselves as body is to become conscious of mankind as one.When i encountered Brown's book at age 21, it was an early pointer down the path i am tracing in this book. Another pointer was Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, which i read much more recently, though it was published in the same year i was born.
The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 94)
This ‘intervolvement’ is intimately related to what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. But to speak of the body as ‘vehicle’ seems to invite the notion of a passenger, and thus to readmit dualism. Damasio also seems to invite a dualism when he says that ‘an amoeba does not know of its own organism's intentions’ – as if the amoeba has an organism rather than is one. The trick, as usual, is not to get fooled by language.
Jesus said, ‘How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.’— Thomas 87 (Meyer)
Jesus said, ‘Woe to the flesh that depends on the soul; woe to the soul that depends on the flesh.’— Thomas 112 (Lambdin); compare Saying 7
If soul and body are so distinct in their functioning that one can depend on the other, then both are in a sorry state!
DeConick (2007a) regards all five of these saying as ‘accretions’ reflecting the ‘encratic’ theology which became dominant in Alexandrian and Syrian Christianity a few generations after Jesus. For the Encratites, as they were called, self-control meant self-denial. From that perspective, embodiment was in itself a state of suffering in which the soul was trapped unless it could overmaster the passions, pleasures and pains of the flesh. DeConick points out that the word translated here as ‘depend’ is the same Coptic word used to refer to the crucifixion of Jesus, and she gives these alternate translations of 87 and 112:
Jesus said, ‘Miserable is the body crucified by a body. Miserable is the soul crucified by these together.’
Jesus said, ‘Alas to the flesh crucified by the soul! Alas to the soul crucified by the flesh!’These readings would be in accord with Paul's saying (Galatians 5.24) that ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (RSV). Since embodiment is suffering by nature, the Christian can only save his soul from this plight by inflicting even more suffering on the body to suppress its natural desires. But a more effective cure would be to heal the schizophrenic (‘splithearted’) opposition between soul and body; and Thomas 112 can be read without strain as commending that course.
it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuonewho is always telling the old ‘ghoatstory’. Packed into the words indentifide and idendifine are intimations of branching (cf. dendrite), dividing, defining, ending, inwardness (endogenous), teeth, finish and faith, as well as identify. The body it seems is itself a ghost of an old goat.
Cast a cold eyeSince he died in 1938, Yeats could not have known that his epitaph bears a striking resemblance to the shortest saying in the Gospel of Thomas, 42:
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Jesus says: ‘Become passers-by.’There is much that can be (and has been) said about this saying and its various translations (see Meyer 2003, 59-75); here i will make a few suggestions. First, the two words of this saying link identity (‘become’) with dynamic itinerancy (‘passers-by’), and thus compress the concept of semiotic closure into an expression the size of a mustard seed. In another context, this same seed could sprout an expression like that of Dogen: ‘Impermanence is the buddha-nature.’ Moreover, the Coptic root of the word translated ‘passersby’ is derived from the Greek parago, which is remarkably similar to the Sanskrit word paragate, which appears in the mantra at the climax of the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra, a very brief and essential Buddhist scripture. According to Thich Nhat Hanh (1988, 50), paragate ‘means gone all the way to the other shore.’— (5G)
The whole mantra is Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. Nhat Hanh translates ‘Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, svaha!’ (the last word being a ‘cry of joy or excitement’). This is also related to Tathagata (‘thus-gone’) as a title of the Buddha. (Leighton and Okumura (2004, 103) render it as ‘the one who comes and goes in thusness’.) Thomas 42 could then be read as an exhortation to seek enlightenment – especially in the Zen context where practice is enlightenment and enlightenment is practice (rather than a state that you aim to arrive at and dwell in some day). There is also a parallel Islamic saying which may ultimately spring from the same source as Thomas 42: ‘This world is a bridge. Pass over it, but do not build your dwelling there’ (Meyer 2003, 70).
Life depends eternally on chaotic itinerancy: try to fix it and it founders. The point is not to stand on the other shore, or to be Somebody, but to be thus gone.
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