The Magical Flower of Winter

The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:

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For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale… Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end… Rightly heard all tales are one. 

Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

What is reality? Is it what we see and sense, what we experience? Or is it what we think these experiences correspond to “out there”, beyond ourselves and our reach? Is there more to reality than what appears to us? Is there an ultimate reality holding the world of experience up? In this first article I will try to outline some of the topics this project is about. To me, this project is a continuous process of discovery and creation, a process which, paralleling the view of reality I attempt to outline, has no privileged starting point from which all else derives. Thus, many areas will be visited in due course, and due to the aspect of wholes precluding straightforward reduction, we will only be able to see the outline of the whole gradually, from the edge of the intersection each area provides a vantage from.

One of the credos of 20th century science was a notion of objectivity that completely removes us humans as observers, participants and theorisers, from its framework. This philosophical and scientific framework, henceforth called particularism, is founded on physicalism - that all of reality is solely composed of physical parts, realism - that there is an external world independent of us, and reductionism - that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. Describing it as simply as this, reducing it to this extent, is of course bordering on caricature, but the simplification is necessary in order to provide a clear background which may be contrasted against. And I want to contrast against particularism because as a philosophy and framework of science it is limited, as we will come to see all frameworks are. Particularism has brought upon itself the "hard" problems: the question of the existence of an external and independent world, and the problem of how mind, consciousness or experience can have a physical basis. The realization is starting to take hold of the fact that a framework of reality cannot be made without accounting for ourselves, for our status as the ones creating the framework, doing the observations and experiencing the reality we are attempting to wrap our explanations around. “Consciousness” is not what engenders this realization, it is the inseparability of us as experiencers, theorisers and observers from our experiences, theories and observations. The fact that we have an experience at all has become transparent to us, and only what we experience, the content, is what modern science attempts to account for. The that-ness of being is always there and so we have largely forgotten the complete and utter wonderment that it should be something it is to be at all. 

Not only is particularism limited, but it continues to be the framework that underpins scientific education and culture worldwide. It is commonplace today among practicing scientists to hold to some notion of anti-reductionism, anti-physicalism or anti-realism, but still the mainstream scientific worldview that is taught and that is portrayed in our culture is particularist. This work is not intended as ammunition in a polemic against specific views, though these views may be used as a background to compare against or stand opposed to. We cannot do without particularism, it is the essence of normal, constructive, bottom-up knowledge, and it has brought about an understanding of the world we would not want to be without, scientifically and technologically. But we must now come to realize that particularism alone is not the philosophy that will aid us in understanding reality and our inextricable place in it. What I am aiming for is an understanding of particularism as a paradigmatic phase that will be superseded, that indeed has to be complemented in order for our knowledge and culture to grow beyond its current bounds. 

I will in this project be concerned with a wide range of topics in science and philosophy: physics, language, mathematics, meaning, mind. Within physics we will be looking at quantum theory and the general theory of relativity, in particular at what these say about the nature of reality. The non-separability and contextuality brought into focus by quantum theory, and the notions of background-independence and covariance central to general relativity, presents us with a structure of reality that is radically different from both everyday experience and classical physics. The puzzles of experience and mind invariably call for an understanding and framework that supports itself, without recourse to anything external to it. These notions hint at holistic aspects we will further dive into via the philosophies of language, mathematics and meaning: for our understanding of reality is inseparable from how it is represented. Based on these holistic conceptual structures, as well as considerations from other areas, I will outline a view of reality as a whole, a philosophy of immanence, capable of holding itself up without a foundation in something inaccessible. This view of reality is vitally participatory, with experience as primary, and a view upon which reality and us as experiencers are inextricably and mutually dependent. 

The view of reality I will sketch is, in my opinion, not first and foremost significant for philosophy or science, but for our relationship to reality as a whole. I believe we need a radical change in our basic views about and attitudes towards reality, not only because our current relationship is one of fragmentation, separation and alienation, which in turn adds fuel to societal and ecological imbalance and inequality, but because the prevailing views about reality simply aren’t coherent with our existence and experience. Particularism has obliterated the magic of being. That we are independent of the world, or that the world is independent of us, has been the most destructive notion ever put to life by mankind, a notion that has put us on the calamitous path of growth for the sake of growth, instead of growth for the sake of our well-being. To get to the future in a balanced and united way, we need a worldview, a philosophy, that is enabling this instead of preventing it. 

There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

Roberto Bolaño - 2666

The title of this work, the magical flower of winter, simultaneously symbolizes several of the concepts and structures I will discuss and develop. With the caveats of it being an image, a representation with inevitable limitations, the magical flower of winter is the flower growing out of itself, symbolizing the self-upholding nature of reality, the corresponding holistic philosophy I will outline, as well as the reciprocal relationship between us and reality that this philosophy represents. We cannot at this advanced stage of civilization allow ourselves to do anything, neither politics nor philosophy, without an eye on the whole that we are part of. Though tedious, this tedium is as nothing if we take action now, against having our hand forced later. The magical flower of winter is, ultimately, a symbol and a declaration of philosophical and ecological resistance for this age of adversity, a seed for a philosophy for the future. 

What I want to say stands crystal clear in my mind, but once I start pulling it down into words it recedes. And this very phenomenon is part of what I am trying to capture, the “receding from grasp” is part of the process I want, but inevitably fail, to put words to. The unsayable. I will only hope that through what I say herein, you will be able to see the outline of the unsayable. In all of the following we must be careful to keep in mind that what words relate and the reality you experience are different kinds, that the structure described by our language and science is our creation and a shadow, an afterimage of reality as we experience it. And we must be ever mindful that we are always immersed in reality, we are never independent, never free to view reality from the outside or from nowhere. Our relationship with reality is a mutual one. My goal is to make you feel that the ground we stand on is shaky, but that even though the ground moves, we are still able to stand, and that it is in fact the flexibility made possible by this instability that makes us able to stand in the first place. 

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