The Plurality of Experience
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:
Philosophy, according to this view, is indeed the love of wisdom but this love is never consummated; any consummation is just an illusion, a poor satisfaction in the seeming certitude. If so, what might this futile search - known as such in advance - be for? The answer is: what matters is the search, for, however unsuccessful, it radically changes our lives.
[…]
We have never stopped and most likely never will stop asking such questions. We shall never get rid of the temptation to perceive the universe as a secret script to which we stubbornly try to find the clue. And why, indeed, should we get rid of this temptation which proved to be the most fruitful source in all civilizations except our own (or, at least, its dominant trend)? And where does the supreme validity of the verdict which forbids us this search come from? Only from the fact that this civilization - ours - which to a large extent has got rid of this search proved immensely successful in some respects; but it has failed pathetically in many others.
Leszek Kołakowski - Metaphysical Horror
In the last essay we caught a glimpse of the perennial nature of our epistemic efforts, that the investigation into our world and ourselves cannot end and reach a finalized form, for this would require an unchanging Absolute to which we approximate with an ever-increasing accuracy, that our theories converge towards a static objective world. As I argued, no such Absolute can exist epistemically, for by our immersive experience the world is forever contextual and changing, and by the process of epistemisation our epistemic access to reality is irreducibly shaped by this contingent context that is psychological, cultural, historical, and so on. What our theories endlessly converge towards is a dynamic, processual and shared life-world, a reality that it is meaningless to inquire about as independent of us, as it is primarily experiential. In theorizing about reality we are prone to mistake the map we trace for the territory, and hidden behind the success of modern science lies the inverted belief that our model of reality precedes experience. In this way, the very tool we use in our investigation stands in the way of the investigated. The perennial nature of our quest reveals itself in that the that-ness of experience escapes any effort of turning it into a what that our frameworks can deal with. What we can deal with is epistemisation, the co-creative and co-dependent process by which reality and experience is linked. Each of us embody this process distinctively, we each have a unique world view shaped by a partially shared history. Reality is as such pluralistic, the coherent union of all our experiences. The persisting issue with the epistemic is our predilection for confusing its secondary nature as primary:
It is on a particular world view, a particular metaphysical model of reality, that we end up conceiving of static objects as fundamental, rather than the wholes of which they are part, that we see only instants and not the enduring processes from which the instants are abstracted. It is the enduring and thick tension out of which the world is made, not out of the parts we reduce the tension to.
What insights can be drawn from this combined with the plurality of experience? The brief answer to this question is an understanding of polarities. Conceiving that tension necessitates endpoints for there to be tension between is once again an error of abstraction, but one so common and prevalent in human life that we see it anytime there is disagreement, be it political or discursive. This observation might very well be trivial, but transparent structures are the ones that most easily mislead us.
Tension
The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow.
Heraclitus - Fragments
Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism… means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related… Things are 'with' one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word 'and' trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes… However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.
William James - A Pluralistic Universe
What does political polarism, the countermovement to modernity and the critique of scientism have in common? They all exemplify the primacy of the tension over the terminals we abstract from the tension. The tension is processual, a whole, always changing. It recedes from our attempts at grasping it, because it itself cannot be grasped. On the other hand, we are capable of grasping the abstract objects of which we conceive the tension to be between. Objects can far more easily be measured and quantified. In a particularist world running on metrics, the choice between quantity and quality is made for us. These objects may be variously named, but all end up in polar opposition to each other: matter and mind, subject and object, realism and idealism, nature and nurture, progressivism and conservatism, political left and right, capitalism and communism, the list goes on. As the particularists that we are, we usually get caught up in one end of these polarities, and immediately face and resist opposition from without. All the while we fail to see that the tension constitutes a spectrum, divisible only in the abstract, and by polarizing ourselves, humanity fragments. We are blinded to the primacy of the tension; that it is out of the ceaselessly changing tension that creation occurs, and not from achieving the dominance of any pole. Balance and temperance are the principles of creation. This is not a statement about dissolving our disagreements, but a call for seeing the purpose of polarity: If we can cultivate a deep understanding for why we disagree, how disagreement is necessary for creation, I believe we may start to heal fragmentation, for it is partly out of making disagreements into ultimatums, blind to the creative purpose of tension, that we split the world.
The Continuum
Reality is global and undivided growth, progressive invention, duration: it resembles a gradually expanding rubber balloon assuming at each moment unexpected forms. But our intelligence imagines its origin and evolution as an arrangement and rearrangement of parts which supposedly merely shift from one place to another; in theory therefore, it should be able to foresee any one state of the whole: by positing a definite number of stable elements one has, predetermined, all their possible combinations. That is not all. Reality, as immediately perceived, is fullness constantly swelling out, to which emptiness is unknown. It has extension just as it has duration; but this concrete extent is not the infinite and infinitely divisible space the intellect takes as a place in which to build. Concrete space has been extracted from things. They are not in it; it is space which is in them. Only, as soon as our thought reasons about reality, it makes space a receptacle. As it has the habit of assembling parts in a relative vacuum, it imagines that reality fills up some absolute kind of vacuum…
Henri Bergson - The Creative Mind
That the spectrum, the continuum, is prior to any dichotomies, oppositions or polarities we abstract thereof is a natural consequence when viewing reality holistically. Reality is a whole, indivisible except by epistemisation. Epistemisation inevitably chops up our experience, and out of the pieces we can abstract any order we like, subject to coherence. We have seen how any talk about what experience is or is of entails epistemisation, and thus how substance is an artifact of abstraction. In this way, static states or objects are ideas, and in arguing about them we are tangled in abstraction, not reality as it is experienced. Thus are we led to beliefs in objective matters, to positions of claimed certainty that anchor us, all the while neglecting to realize that it is not the anchoring ground we need, but a flexible whole to move in. In our positions of claimed certainty we meet opposition from other positions with an equal claim of certainty, objectivity, and of “truth” and “correctness”. Believing in the parts as prior to the whole, in our positions of belief as prior to the tension between them, we fail to see the purpose of our disagreements, and we give rise to fragmentation. Fragmentation comes about from hostile disagreement that fails to see the nature of tension.
At the heart of dialectics, the truth-seeking dialogue between opposing points of view, lies the unity of opposites. From Heraclitus’ harmony of tensions to Fichtean synthesis (utilized, but not originated by Hegel), there is a long historical and philosophical tradition of seeking balance from polarity. But most of these attempts take as their basis the polarity and not the tension between them, and can as such be merely an incomplete approximation to the full movement. By basing ourselves in dualism, trying to recover from it the non-dual synthesis, we fail to see the non-dual origin of the dualism we took as our starting point. In the words of McGilchrist: «We need not non-duality only, but the non-duality of duality and non-duality.»1 The non-duality of duality and non-duality lies at the origin. As the pluralism of James attests, there will always be a residue we cannot cover, something always escapes our epistemisation, but if we attempt to start from the continuum we may at the very least see polarities for what they are.
…it is likely that two kinds of mentality— the skeptical and the utopian— will survive separately, in unavoidable conflict. And we need their shaky coexistence; both of them are important to our cultural survival. The victory of utopian dreams would lead us to a totalitarian nightmare and the utter downfall of civilization, whereas the unchallenged domination of the skeptical spirit would condemn us to a hopeless stagnation, to an immobility that a slight accident could easily convert into catastrophic chaos. Ultimately we have to live between two irreconcilable claims, each of them having its cultural justification.
Leszek Kołakowski - Modernity on Endless Trial
The critique of modernity is as old as modernity. Political polarization and disagreement is ceaseless. Debates about the foundations of philosophy and science never end. One could naively frame this in terms of failure and victory, but this categorization would be blind to both the endless nature of the tension, and the creative purpose of it. Any belief in utopic or final states fails to see the primacy of change, that there can be no final destination, but that it is the journey there that matters. We still need the dream of utopia to have something to aim at, and equally do we need skepticism. What distinguishes the dreamer and the deranged is seeing that any vision we have for the future is not itself the goal, but an impetus for working on the world, for improving our experience. Life takes place in the journey there, not in any abstract slice or instant of it, and the journey is crafted out of the opposition that both the dreamer and skeptic are idealized limits of. Can differences be transcended? Never completely, because reality as we experience it is a pluralistic continuum. The issue confronting us is what we can do to ensure stewardship of our differences. The first step must at the very least be to make us aware of the primal nature and creative purpose of the tension.
My critique of the particularist paradigm, a dominant topic in this project, might seem to be at odds with what I say here. My critique is not meant as positing an ultimate or final alternative, but as weighing in on the balance of how we investigate reality and do science and philosophy. Arguing for the primacy of experience and the whole is not the same as arguing for the complete abolishment of the current paradigm, but for seeing the physical and metaphysical limits of the latter, and for paving the way for what we need to come next.
Freedom
You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance?
The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.
[…]
Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.
[…]
It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution.
Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history.
And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.
Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain
A pervasive question that cuts across many spheres of human discourse is the opposition between determinism and indeterminism. Are the events of our lives and our actions preordained, absolutely determined by physics, or are we “free”? The dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism is of course the usual way the problem of free will is presented, but what if we take as our starting point the tension between the polarities? First, some preliminary remarks about the problem.
Whether determinism or indeterminism reigns, nowhere will there be a neural or physical correlate to “free will” we can understand reductively. This should follow clearly from the discussion of the holistic workings of meaning and language, and the limits of the epistemic2. “Free will” is a higher-level concept, dependent on a range of other psychological and social concepts, and as a concept it is an abstraction, part of our explanatory framework. Responsibility is another such concept, and in a social world we can’t and never will get around having to act like moral responsibility is useful. It is real as a concept in our discourse, and it is real as a property we assign to and assume in each other, and we shall never act or pretend otherwise, regardless of the lack of any correlate in lower conceptual domains, be they neural or physical. Moral responsibility, just as free will, as useful and real concepts have zero dependence on physics, and necessitates no physical argument or motivation. At the conceptual level at which moral responsibility figures, the lower-level correlates simply aren’t relevant, and the higher-level concepts do not explanatorily reduce to neurons or physics. Expecting them to exemplifies the most common symptom of having confused a model of reality for reality. Our experience, what is primary, is one of freedom within the coherence and bounds of the world we find ourselves in. It is only upon taking our explanatory models as primary that we encounter any problems with freedom. “Free will” finds no meaning-invariant translation into the languages of physics and neurons, exactly because these are languages of physics and neurons: models of reality valid in limited domains. A quote from Bennett & Hacker seems apt at illustrating both this and the perennial cyclicity of philosophical questions:
Neuroscience, many believe, is solving the venerable problem of free will – showing experimentally that freedom of action is a delusion produced by the brain. Similarly, it is widely believed that the cognitive neuroscience of perception proves that perceptual qualities, such as sound and colour, do not exist in the ‘external world’, but are fictions produced by the brain, in the brain. Others demonstrate to their satisfaction that memories are stored in the brain at synaptic connections or cells – a modern variant of engrams… Such confusions [buried deep in our language] can be eliminated for a few decades by painstaking conceptual analysis. But they will rise again, as younger generations fall into the same traps. Sense data died under critical onslaught in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the end of the century internal representations arose phoenixlike from their ashes.3
We can take as a simple model of physical freedom an image of interlocking gears. When the gears are few, there are many ways to connect more gears, there are degrees of freedom that give freedom of choice. This freedom decreases as the number of gears increases, because the increasing number of interlocked gears will constrain and jam the mutual movement. This model of course fails when we have to approach the limit of reality which is when the number of gears goes to infinity. It will all have to come to a stand-still or a perfectly coordinated movement, for there can be no degrees of freedom among an infinity of interlocked gears. On this model, determinism is inevitable. But we must not dogmatically follow the model! Classical physics allows a Laplace’s demon that with the infinite knowledge of the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe can predict the future. The quantum theory opens up for an irreducible indeterminism, whereby accurate knowledge of both position and velocity is forbidden. Does this mean that the quantum theory “proves” free will? Of course not, for quantum indeterminism is not a meaning-invariant translation of free will. We are mixing languages!
The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new. The systems marked off by science endure only because they are bound up inseparably with the rest of the universe... There is no reason, therefore, why a duration, and so a form of existence like our own, should not be attributed to the systems that science isolates, provided such systems are reintegrated into the Whole. But they must be so reintegrated. The same is even more obviously true of the objects cut out by our perception.
We must get beyond both points of view, both mechanism and finalism being, at bottom, only standpoints to which the human mind has been led by considering the work of man. But in what direction can we go beyond them? We have said that in analysing the structure of an organ, we can go on decomposing for ever, although the function of the whole is a simple thing. This contrast between the infinite complexity of the organ and the extreme simplicity of the function is what should open our eyes.
Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution
On the primacy of experience, experience precedes its explanation. We experience freedom of action, free will. It is on particularist models of reality that we encounter contradictions between what the model is telling us and our experience. Similarly, it is based on a particular physical model of reality that we believe that the future can be predicted from the present. We believe our inability to accurately predict the future comes down to our ignorance of all the variables, not realizing that the assumption that the future can be predicted by the epistemic might be ill-founded. Future experience will have to be made out of what is available, but what is available for reality to be made out of is not our abstraction of it! That this process should be reducible to the physical is an assumption our limited theories have failed to justify, as I hope to have shown through this project. «The world to come must be composed of what is past», but this does not mean that the future is contained in the present, it is contained in the whole, and the whole out of which the world is made resists any reduction to anything other than it is.
Determinism and indeterminism, predestination and freedom, are abstract and ideal limits of a creative tension that precedes both poles. That our past is singular and perceived as a rational and causal entity does not mean that the future is preordained and that we could read the preordained script if only we had enough observational and computational power. It is only in memory, as a representation, that our experience aligns along paths we may trace and reason about. In the act of experiencing, no such paths are clear. We act, and rationalize our actions after the fact. Only after our acts do we fully realize that a choice was made at all, that there were alternatives. Causality is only ever a posterior framework, applicable to the epistemic when it has already happened. Causality and rationalization of our past is the most basic form of storytelling we have for ordering ourselves, of assigning a structure to that part of our experience that becomes epistemised in our memory. As with all stories, it has to make sense for us, but this does not exclude the possibility of contradiction if we analyze our memory further, or compare it to the memory of others. A consequence of this storytelling relates to the ontic projection fallacy4, in particular when aimed at the past, what Braver (2014) calls Retrospective Rational Reconstruction: the rational projection from our experience of objects (present-at-hand) to their having been as we did experience them prior to that experience. The world seems so solid to us that we completely give in to the model that this solidity really is, and we take as a given that there is something outside experience holding it up. Reality is a maximally tangled web in the making (an image), not the chain we think we see it to be once it is made. Our experience of reality counters both determinism and indeterminism, for when we see beyond our models of reality we come to know that these polarizing terms only apply to an inert and chimerical reduction of our experience, a pale and frayed shadow of the ontic.
The reason I have chosen to exemplify the primacy of tension by the dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism, is in order to aid us in seeing that all the freedom, will, impetus or motivation we think we need in order to take charge of our world, we already have. The question of free will arises out of a conceptual confusion we take to be saying something about reality and our efficacy at impacting our world. We must come to understand how all notions of predetermination or finality are model-dependent, and see the deeply creative reality we take part in through our experience for what it is, how reality is creative through us. Contrary to McCarthy’s universe that was forged unto completion at its onset, in our reality only the past has seen its day, and not even the past is forged except through us. What we do from here on is entirely up to us. We are it.
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References
Bennett, M. R. & Hacker, P. M. S. (2022). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Wiley-Blackwell. [2003]
Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Dover Publications. [1907]
Bergson, H. (2010). The Creative Mind. Dover Publications. [1934]
Braver, L. (2014). Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: MIT Press.
Heraclitus (2003). Fragments. Penguin Classics.
James, W. (1909). A Pluralistic Universe. Longmans, Green & Company.
Kołakowski, L. (1997). Modernity on Endless Trial. University of Chicago Press. [1991]
Kołakowski, L. (2001). Metaphysical Horror. University of Chicago Press. [1998]
McCarthy, C. (2022). Cities of the Plain. Pan Macmillan. [1998]
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva.
McGilchrist (2021) p. 833.
See previous essays.
Bennett & Hacker (2022), p. 10.