Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Value of Myth in Depicting the Conflict Between Good and Evil

Posted on by

In October 2013, three young friends living in the Washington DC area — a male-female couple and a male friend — went out to a number of local bars to celebrate a birthday. The friends drank copiously, and then returned to a small studio apartment at 2 a.m. An hour later, one of the men stabbed his male friend to death. When police arrived, they found the surviving male covered in blood, with the floor and wall also covered in blood. “I caught my buddy and my girl cheating,” said the man. “I killed my buddy.” The man was subsequently found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

How did this happen? Was murder inevitable? It seems unlikely. The killing was not pre-planned. No one in the group had a prior record of violence or criminal activity. All three friends were well-educated and successful, with bright futures ahead of them. It’s true that all were extremely drunk, but drunkenness very rarely leads to murder.

This case is noteworthy, not because murders are unusual — murders happen all the time — but because this particular murder seems to have been completely unpredictable. It’s the normality of the persons and circumstances that disturbs the conscience. Under slightly different circumstances, the murder would not have happened at all, and all three would conceivably have lived long, happy lives.

Most of us are law-abiding citizens. We believe we are good, and despise thieves, rapists, and murderers. But what happens when the normal conditions under which we live change, when we are humiliated or outraged, when there is no security for our lives or property, when our opportunities for happiness are snatched from us for no good reason? How far will we go to avenge ourselves, and what violence will we justify in order to restore our perceived notion of justice?

The conflict between good and evil tendencies within human beings is a frequent theme in both philosophy and religion. However, philosophy has had a tendency to attribute evil tendencies within humanity to a deficiency of reason. In the view of many philosophers, reason alone should be able to establish that human rights are universal, and that impulses to violence, conquest, and enslavement are irrational. Furthermore, they argue that when reason establishes its dominance over the passions within human beings, societies become freer and more peaceful. (Notably, the great philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith rejected this argument.)

The religious interpretation of the conflict between good and evil, on the other hand, is based more upon myth and faith. And while the myths of religion are not literally accurate in terms of history or science, these myths often have insights into the inner turmoil of human beings that are lost in straightforward descriptions of fact and an emphasis on rationality.

The Christian scholar Paul Elmer More argued in his book, The Religion of Plato, that the dualism between good and evil within the human soul was very effectively described by the Greek philosopher Plato, but that this description relied heavily on the picturesque elements of myth, as found in the The Republic, Laws, Timaeus, and other works. In Plato’s view, there was a struggle within all human beings between a higher nature and a lower nature, the higher nature being drawn to a vision of ideal forms and the lower nature being dominated by the flux of human passions and desires. According to More,

It is not that pleasure or pain, or the desires and emotions connected with them, are totally depraved in themselves . . . but they contain the principle of evil in so far as they are radically unlimited, belonging by nature to what in itself is without measure and tends by inertia to endless expansion. Hence, left to themselves, they run to evil, whereas under control they may become good, and the art of life lies in the governing of pleasure and pain by a law exterior to them, in a man’s becoming master of himself, or better than himself. (pp. 225-6)

What are some of the myths Plato discusses? In The Republic, Plato tells the story of Gyges, a lowly shepherd who discovers a magic ring that bestows the power of invisibility. With this invisibility, Gyges is able to go wherever he wants undetected, and to do what he wants without anyone stopping him. Eventually, Gyges kills the king of his country and obtains absolute power for himself. In discussing this story, Glaucon, a student of Socrates, argues that with the awesome power of invisibility, no man would be able to remain just, in light of the benefits one could obtain. However, Socrates responds that being a slave to one’s desires actually does not bring long-term happiness, and that the happy man is one who is able to control his desires.

In the Phaedrus, Plato relates the dialogue between Socrates and his pupil Phaedrus on whether friendship is preferable to love. Socrates discusses a number of myths throughout the dialogue, but appears to use these myths as metaphorical illustrations of the internal struggle within human beings between their higher and lower natures. It is the nature of human beings, Socrates notes, to pursue the good and the beautiful, and this pursuit can be noble or ignoble depending on whether reason is driving one toward enlightenment or desire takes over and drives one to excessive pleasure-seeking. Indeed, Socrates describes love as a type of “madness” — but he argues that this madness is a source of inspiration that can result in either good or evil depending on how one directs the passions. Socrates proceeds to employ a figurative picture of a charioteer driving two horses, with one horse being noble and the other ignoble. The noble horse pulls the charioteer toward heaven, while the ignoble horse pulls the charioteer downward, toward the earth and potential disaster. Even so, the human being in love is influenced by the god he or she follows; the followers of Ares, the god of war, are inclined to violence if they feel wronged by their lover; the followers of Zeus, on the other hand, use love to seek philosophical wisdom.

The nature and purpose of love is also discussed in the Symposium. In this dialogue, Socrates relates a fantastical myth about human beings originally being created with two bodies attached at the back, with two heads, four arms, and four legs. These beings apparently threatened the gods, so Zeus cut the beings in two; henceforth, humans spent their lives trying to find their other halves. Love inspires wisdom and courage, according to the dialogue, but only when it encourages companionship and the exchange of knowledge, and is not merely the pursuit of sexual gratification.

Illustration of the original humans described in Plato’s Symposium:

In the Timaeus, Plato discusses the creation of the universe and the role of human beings in this universe. Everything proceeds from the Good, argued Plato. However, the Good is not some lifeless abstraction, but a power with a dynamic element. According to More, Plato gave the name of God to this dynamic element. God fashions the universe according to an ideal pattern, but the end result is always less than perfect because of the resistance of the materials and the tendency of material things to always fall short of their perfect ends.

Plato argues that there are powers of good and powers of evil in the universe — and within human beings — and Plato personifies these powers as gods or daemons. There is a struggle between good and evil that all humans participate in, and all are subject to judgment at the ends of their lives (Plato believed in reincarnation and posited that deeds in one’s recent life determined one’s station in the next life.) Here, we see myth and faith enter again into Plato’s philosophy, and More defends the use of these stories and symbols as a means of illustrating the dramas of moral conflict:

In this last stage the essential truth of philosophy as a concern of the individual soul, is rendered vivid and convincing by clothing it in the imaginative garb of fiction — fiction which may yet be a veil, more or less transparent, through which we behold the actual events of the spirit world; and this aid of the imagination is needed just because the dualism of the human consciousness cannot be grasped by the reason, demands indeed a certain abatement of that rationalizing tendency of the mind which, if left to itself, inevitably seeks its satisfaction in one or the other form of monism. (p. 199)

What’s fascinating about Plato’s use of myths in philosophy is that while he recognizes that many of the myths are literally dubious or false, they seem to point to truths that are difficult or impossible to express in literal language. Love really does seem to be a desire to unite with one’s missing half, and falling in love really is akin to madness, a madness that can lead to disaster if one is not careful. Humankind does seem to be afflicted by an internal struggle between a higher, noble nature and a lower nature, with the lower nature inclined to self-centeredness and grasping for ever more wealth, power, and pleasure.

Plato had enormous influence on Western civilization, but More argues that the successors to Plato erred by abandoning Plato’s use of myth to illustrate the duality of human nature. Over the years, Greek philosophy became increasingly rationalistic and prone to a monism that was unable to cope with the reality of human dualism. (For an example of this extreme monism, see the works of Plotinus, who argued for an abstract “One” as the ultimate source of all things.) Hence, argued More, Christianity was in fact the true heir of Platonism, and not the Greek philosophers that came after Plato.

Myth is “the drama of religion,” according to More, not a literally accurate description of a sequence of events. Reason and philosophy can analyze and discuss good and evil, but to fully understand the conflict between good and evil, within and between human beings, requires a dramatic depiction of our swirling, churning passions. In More’s words, “A myth is false and reprehensible in so far as it misses or distorts the primary truth of philosophy and the secondary truth of theology; it becomes more probable and more and more indispensable to the full religious life as it lends insistence and reality to those truths and answers to the daily needs of the soul.” (p. 165) The role of Christian myths in illustrating the dramatic conflict between good and evil will be discussed in the next essay.

The Influence of Christianity on Western Culture, Part Two: Religion and Culture

Posted on by

In my previous post, I addressed the debate between Christians and secular rationalists on the origins of the modern Western idea of human rights, with Christians attributing these rights to Christianity, whereas secular rationalists credited human reason. While acknowledging the crimes committed by the Christian churches in history, I also expressed skepticism about the ability of reason alone to provide a firm foundation for human rights.

In the second part of this essay, I would like to explore the idea that religion has a deep, partly subconscious, influence on culture and that this influence maintains itself even when people stop going to religious services, stop reading religious texts, and even stop believing in God. (Note: Much of what I am about to say next has been inspired by the works of the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who has covered this issue in his books, The Nature and Destiny of Man and The Self and the Dramas of History.)

___________________________

What exactly is religion, and why does it have a deep impact on our culture and thinking? Nearly all of today’s major existing religions date back from 1300 to 4000 years ago. In some respects, these religions have changed, but in most of their fundamentals, they have not. As such, there are unattractive elements in all of these religions, originating in primitive beliefs held at a time when there was hardly any truly scientific inquiry. As a guide to history, religious texts from this era are extremely unreliable; as a guide to scientific knowledge of the natural world, these religions are close to useless. So why, then, does religion continue to exercise a hold on the minds of human beings today?

I maintain that religion should be thought of primarily as a Theory of the Good. It is a way of thinking that does not (necessarily) result in truthful journalism and history, does not create accurate theories of causation, and ultimately, cares less about what things are really like and more about what things should be like.

As Robert Pirsig has noted, all life forms seek the Good, if only for themselves. They search for food, shelter, warmth, and opportunities for reproduction. More advanced life forms pursue all these and also may seek long-term companionship, a better location, and a more varied diet. If life forms can fly, they may choose to fly for the joy of it; if they can run fast, they may run for the joy of it.

Human beings have all these qualities, but also one more: with our minds, we can imagine an infinite variety of goods in infinite amounts; this is the source of our endless desires. In addition, our more advanced brains also give us the ability to imagine broadened sympathies beyond immediate family and friends, to nations and to humankind as a whole; this is the source of civilization. Finally, we also gain a curiosity about the origin of the world and ourselves and what our ultimate destiny is, or should be; this is the source of myths and faith. It is these imagined, transcendent goods that are the material for religion. And as a religion develops, it creates the basic concepts and categories by which we interpret the world.

There are many similarities among all the world’s religions in what is designated good and what is designated evil. But there are important differences as well, that have resulted in cultural clashes, sometimes leading to mild disagreements and sometimes escalating into the most vicious of wars. For the purpose of this essay, I am going to avoid the similarities among religions and discuss the differences.

Warning: Adequately covering all of the world’s major religions in a short essay is a hazardous enterprise. My depth of knowledge on this subject is not that great, and I will have to grossly simplify in many cases. I merely ask the reader for tolerance and patience; if you have a criticism, I welcome comments.

The most important difference between the major religions revolves around what is considered to be the highest good. This highest good seems to constitute a fundamental dividing line between the religions that is difficult to bridge. To make it simple, let’s summarize the highest good of each religion in one word:

Judaism – Covenant

Christianity – Love

Islam – Submission (to God)

Buddhism – Nirvana

Hinduism – Moksha

Jainism – Nonviolence (ahimsa)

Confucianism – Ren (Humanity)

Taoism – Wu Wei (inaction)

How does this perception of the highest good affect the nature of a religion?

Judaism: With only about 15 million adherents today, Judaism might appear to be a minor religion — but in fact, it is widely known throughout the world because of its huge influence on Christianity and Islam, which have billions of followers and have borrowed greatly from Judaism. Fundamental to Judaism is the idea of a covenant between God and His people, in which His people would follow the commandments of God, and God in return would bless His people with protection and abundance. This sort of faith faced many challenges over the centuries, as natural disasters and defeat in war were not always closely correlated with moral failings or a breach of the covenant. Nevertheless, the idea that moral behavior brings blessings has sustained the Jews and made them successful in many occupations for thousands of years. The chief disadvantage of Judaism has been its exclusive ties to a particular nation/ethnic group, which has limited its appeal to the rest of the world.

Christianity: Originating in Judaism, Christianity made a decisive break with Judaism under Jesus, and later, St. Paul. This break consisted primarily in recognizing that the laws of the Jews were somehow inadequate in making people good, because it was possible for someone to follow the letter of the law while remaining a very flawed or even terrible human being. Jesus’ denunciations of legalists and hypocrites in the New Testament are frequent and scathing. The way forward out of this, according to Jesus, was to simply love others, without making distinctions of rank, ethnicity, or religion. This original message of Jesus, and his self-sacrifice, inspired many Jews and non-Jews and led to the gradual, but steadily accelerating, growth of this minor sect. The chief flaw in Christianity became apparent hundreds of years after the crucifixion, when this minority sect became socially and politically powerful, and Christians used their new power to violently oppress others. This stark hypocrisy has discredited Christianity in the eyes of many.

Islam: A relatively young monotheistic religion, Islam grew out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century AD. It’s prophet, Muhammad, clearly borrowed from Judaism and Christianity, but rejected the exclusivity of Judaism and the status of Jesus as the son of God. The word “Islam” means submission, but contrary to some commentators, it means submission to God, not to Islam or Muslims, which would be blasphemous. The requirements of Islam are fairly rigorous, requiring prayers five times a day; there is also an extensive body of Islamic law that is relatively strict, though implemented unevenly in Islamic countries today, with Iran and Saudi Arabia being among the strictest. There is no denying that the birth of Islam sparked the growth of a great empire that supported an advanced civilization. In the words of Bernard Lewis, “For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement.” (What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, p. 3) Today, the Islamic world lags behind the rest of the world in many respects, perhaps because its strict social rules and tradition inhibit innovation in the modern world.

Confucianism. Founded by the scholar and government official Confucius in the 6th century B.C., Confucianism can be regarded as a system of morals based on the concept of Ren, or humanity. Confucius emphasized duty to the family, honesty in government, and espoused a version of the Golden Rule. There is a great deal of debate over whether Confucianism is actually a religion or mainly a philosophy and system of ethics. In fact, Confucius was a practical man, who did not discuss God or the afterlife, and never proclaimed an ability to perform miracles. But his impact on Chinese civilization, and Asian civilization generally, was tremendous, and the values of Confucius are deeply embedded in Chinese and other Asian societies to this day.

Buddhism. Founded by Gautama Buddha in the 6th century B.C., Buddhism addressed the problem of human suffering. In the view of the Buddha, our suffering arises from desire; because we cannot always get what we want, and what we want is never permanent, the human condition is one of perpetual dissatisfaction. When we die, we a born into another body, to suffer again. The Buddha argued that this cycle of suffering and rebirth could be ended by following the “eightfold path” – right understanding, right thought, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Following this path could lead one to nirvana, which is the extinguishing of the self and the end of the cycle of rebirth and suffering. While not entirely pacifistic, there are strong elements of pacifism in Buddhism and a large number of Buddhists are vegetarian. Many non-Buddhists, however, would dispute the premise that life is suffering and that the dissolving of the self is a solution to suffering.

Hinduism. The third largest religion in the world, Hinduism is also considered to be the world’s oldest religion, with roots stretching back more than 4000 years. However, Hinduism also consists of different schools with diverse beliefs; there are multiple written texts in the Hindu tradition, but no single unifying text, such as the Bible or the Quran. A Hindu can believe in multiple gods or one God, and the Hindu conception of God/s can also vary. There is even a Hindu school of thought that is atheistic; this school goes back thousands of years. There is a strong tradition of nonviolence (ahimsa) in Hinduism, which obviously inspired Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolent resistance against British colonial rule in the early twentieth century. The chief goal of Hindu practices is moksha, or liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth — roughly similar to the concept of nirvana.

Jainism. Originating in India around 2500 years ago, the Jain religion posits ahimsa, or nonviolence, as the highest good and goal of life. Jains practice a strict vegetarianism, which even extends to certain dairy products which may harm animals and any vegetable that may harm insects if harvested. The other principles of Jainism include anekāntavāda (non-absolutism) and aparigraha (non-attachment). The principle of non-absolutism recognizes that the truth is “many-sided” and impossible to fully express in language, while non-attachment refers to the necessity of avoiding the pursuit of property, taking and keeping only what is necessary.

Taosim. Developed in the 4th century B.C., Taoism is one of the major religions in China, along with Confucianism and Buddhism. “Tao” can be translated as “the Way,” or “the One, which is natural, spontaneous, eternal, nameless, and indescribable. . . the beginning of all things and the way in which all things pursue their course.” Pursuit of the “Way” is not meant to be difficult or arduous or require sacrifice, as in other religions. Rather, the follower must practice wu wei, or effortless action. The idea is that one must act in accord with the cosmos, not fight or struggle against it. Taoism values naturalness, spontaneity, and detachment from desires.

Now, all these religions, including many I have not listed, have value. The monotheism of Judaism and its strict moralism was a stark contrast to the ancient pagan religions, which saw the gods as conflictual, cruel, and prone to immoral behavior. The moral disciplines of Islam invigorated a culture and created a civilization more advanced than the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism have placed strong emphasis on overcoming self-centeredness and rejecting violence. Confucianism has instilled the values of respect for elders, love of family, and love of learning throughout East Asia. Taoism’s emphasis on harmony puts a break on human tendencies to dominate and control.

What I would like to focus on now are the particular contributions Christianity has made to Western civilization and how Christianity has shaped the culture of the West in ways we may not even recognize, contrasting the influence of Christianity with the influence of the other major religions.

__________________________

Christianity has provided four main concepts that have shaped Western culture, concepts that retain their influence today, even among atheists.

(1) The idea of a transcendent good, above and beyond nature and society.

(2) An emphasis on the worth of the individual, above society, government, and nature.

(3) Separation of religion and government.

(4) The idea of a meaningful history, that is, an unfolding story that ends with a conclusion, not a series of random events or cycles.

Let’s examine each of these in detail.

(1) Transcendent Good. I have written in some detail about the concept of transcendence elsewhere. In brief, transcendence refers to “the action of transcending, surmounting, or rising above . . . excelling.” To seek the transcendent is to aspire to something higher than reality. The difficulty with transcendence is that it’s not easily subject to empirical examination:

[B]ecause it seems to refer to a striving for an ideal or a goal that goes above and beyond an observed reality, transcendence has something of an unreal quality. It is easy to see that rocks and plants and stars and animals and humans exist. But the transcendent cannot be directly seen, and one cannot prove the transcendent exists. It is always beyond our reach.

Transcendent religions differ from pantheistic and panentheistic religions by insisting on the greater value or goal of an ideal state of being above and beyond the reality we experience. Since this ideal state is not subject to empirical proof, transcendent religions appear irrational and superstitious to many. Moreover, the dreamy idealism of transcendent religions often results in a fanaticism that leads to intolerance and religious wars. For these reasons, philosophers and scientists in the West usually prefer pantheistic interpretations of God (see Spinoza and Einstein).

The religions of India — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism — have strong tendencies toward pantheism or panentheism, in which all existence is bound by a universal spirit, and our duty is to become one with this spirit. There is not a sharp distinction between this universal spirit and the universe or reality itself.

In China, Taoism rejects a personal God, while Confucianism is regarded by most as a philosophy or moral code than a religion. (The rational pragmatism of Chinese religion is probably why China had no major religious wars until a Chinese Christian in the 19th century led a rebellion on behalf of his “Heavenly Kingdom” that lasted 14 years and led to the deaths of tens of millions.)

And yet, there is a disadvantage in the rational pragmatism of Chinese religions — without a dreamy idealism, a culture can stagnate and become too accepting of evils. Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, who is an atheist, has remarked:

In China, the development of religion is the best lens through which to view the health of a society. Every religion, when it is imported to China is secularized. The Chinese are profoundly pragmatic. . . . What is absent in Chinese civilization, what we’ve always lacked, is a sense of the sacred. There is no room for higher principles when we live so firmly in the concrete. The possibility of hope and the aspiration to higher ideals are too abstract and therefore get obliterated in our dark, fierce realism.” (“Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China,” The New Yorker, 8 Oct 2018)

Now, Christianity is not alone in positing a transcendent good — Judaism and Islam also do this. But there are other particular qualities of Christianity that we must look to as well.

(2) Individual Worth.

To some extent, all religions value the individual human being. Yet, individual worth is central to Christianity in a way that is not found in other religions. The religions of India certainly value human life, and there are strong elements of pacifism in these religions. But these religions also tend to devalue individuality, in the sense that the ultimate goal is to overcome selfhood and merge with a larger spirit. Confucianism emphasizes moral duty, from the lowest members of society to the highest; individual worth is recognized, but the individual is still part of a hierarchy, and serves that hierarchy. In Taoism, the individual submits to the Way. In Islam, the individual submits to God. In Judaism, the idea of a Chosen People elevates one particular group over others (although this group also falls under the severe judgment of God).

Only under Christianity was the individual human being, whatever that person’s background, elevated to the highest worth. Jesus’ teachings on love and forgiveness, regardless of a person’s status and background, became central to Western civilization — though frequently violated in practice. Jesus’s vision of the afterlife emphasized not a merger with a universal spirit, but a continuance of individual life, free of suffering, in heaven.

3. Separation of religion and government.

Throughout history, the relation between religious institutions and government have varied. In some states, religion and government were unified, as in the Islamic caliphate. In most other cases, political authorities were not religious leaders, but priests were part of the ruling class that assisted the rulers. In China, Confucianism played a major role in the administrative bureaucracy, but Confucianism was a mild and rational religion that had no interest in pursuing and punishing heretics. In Judaism, rabbis often had some actual political power, depending on the historical period and location, but their power was never absolute.

Christianity originated with the martyrdom of a powerless man at the hands of an oppressive government and an intolerant society. In subsequent years, this minor sect was persecuted by the Roman empire. This persecution lasted for several hundred years; at no time during this period did Christianity receive the support, approval, or even tolerance of the imperial government.

Few other religions have originated in such an oppressive atmosphere and survived. China absorbed Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism without wars and extensive persecution campaigns. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism grew out of the same roots and largely tolerated each other. Islam had its enemies in its early years, but quickly triumphed in a series of military campaigns that built a great empire. Even the Jews, one of the most persecuted groups in history, were able to practice their religion in their own state(s) for hundreds of years before military defeat and diaspora; in 1948, the Jews again regained a state.

Now, it is true that in the 4th century A.D., Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman empire, and the Christian persecution of pagan worshippers began. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church exercised enormous influence over the culture, economy, and politics of Europe. But by the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of a strict separation between church and state became widely popular, first in America, then in Europe. While Christian churches fought this reduction in Christian political power and influence, the separation of Church and state was at least compatible with the origins of Christianity in persecution and martyrdom, and did not violate the core beliefs of Christianity.

4. A meaningful history.

The idea that history consists of a progressive movement toward an ideal end is not common to all cultures. Ancient Greeks and Romans saw history as a long decline from an original “Golden Age,” or they saw history as essentially cyclical, consisting of a never-ending rise and decline of various civilizations. The historical views of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism were also cyclical.

It was Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that interpreted history as progressing toward an ideal end, a kingdom of heaven. But as a result of the Renaissance in the West, and then the Enlightenment, the idea of an otherworldly kingdom was dumped, and the ideal end of history became secularized. The German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) interpreted history as a dialectic clash of ideas, moving toward its ultimate end, which was human freedom. (An early enthusiast for the French Revolution, Hegel once referred to Napoleon as the “world soul” on horseback.) Karl Marx took Hegel’s vision one step further, removing Hegel’s idealism and positing a “dialectical materialism” based on class conflict. This class conflict, according to Marx, would one day end in a final, bloody clash that would end class distinctions and bring about the full equality of human beings under communism.

Alas, these dreams of earthly utopia did not come to pass. Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804 and went to work creating a new dynasty and aristocracy with which to rule Europe. In the twentieth century, Communist regimes were extraordinarily oppressive everywhere they arose, killing tens of millions of people. Certainly, the idea of human equality was attractive, and political movements arose and took power based on these ideas. Yet the results were bloodshed and tyranny. Even so, when Soviet communism collapsed, the idea of a secular “end of history,” based on the thought of Hegel, became popular again.

According to the American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the visions of Hegel and Marx were merely secular versions of Christianity, which failed because, while ostensibly dedicated to the principles of individual worth, equality, and historical progress, they could not overcome the essential fact of human sinfulness. In Christianity, this sinfulness was the basis for the prophecies in the Book of Revelation which foresaw a final battle between good and evil, requiring the intervention of God in order to achieve a final triumph of good.

According to Niebuhr, the fundamental error of all secular ideologies of historical progress was to suppose that the ability of human beings to reason could conquer tendencies to sinfulness in the same way that advances in science could conquer nature. This did not work, in Niebuhr’s view, because reason could be a tool of self-aggrandizement as well as selflessness, and was therefore insufficient to support universal brotherhood. The fundamental truth about human nature, that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment neglected, was that man is an unbreakable organic unity of mind, body, and spirit. Man’s increasing capacity to use reason resulted in new technologies and wealth but did not — and could not — overcome human tendencies to seek power. For this reason, human history was the story of the growth of both good and evil and not the triumph of good over evil. Only the intervention of God, through Christ, could bring the final fulfillment of history. Certainly, belief in this ultimate fulfillment requires a leap of faith — but whether or not one believes the Book of Revelation, it is hard to deny that human dreams of earthly utopia have been frustrated time and time again.

Perhaps at this point, you may agree with my general assessment of Christian ideas, and even find some similarities between Christian ideas and contemporary secular liberalism. Nevertheless, you may also conclude that the causal linkage between Christianity and modern liberalism has not been established. After all, the first modern liberal democracies did not emerge until nearly 1800 years after Christ. Why so long? Why did the Christian churches have such a long record of intolerance and contempt for liberal ideas? Why did the Catholic Church so often ally with monarchs, defend feudalism, and oppose liberal revolutions? Why did various Christian churches tolerate and approve of slavery for hundreds of years? I will address these issues in Part Three.

The Dynamic Quality of Henri Bergson

Posted on by

Robert Pirsig writes in Lila that Quality contains a dynamic good in addition to a static good. This dynamic good consists of a search for “betterness” that is unplanned and has no specific destination, but is nevertheless responsible for all progress. Once a dynamic good solidifies into a concept, practice, or tradition in a culture, it becomes a static good. Creativity, mysticism, dreams, and even good guesses or luck are examples of dynamic good in action. Religious traditions, laws, and science textbooks are examples of static goods.

Pirsig describes dynamic quality as the “pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality.” By this, he means that before concepts, logic, laws, and mathematical formulas are discovered, there is process of searching and grasping that has not yet settled into a pattern or solution. For example, invention and discovery is often not an outcome of calculation or logical deduction, but of a “free association of ideas” that tends to occur when one is not mentally concentrating at all. Many creative people, from writers to mathematicians, have noted that they came up with their best ideas while resting, engaging in everyday activities, or dreaming.

Dynamic quality is not just responsible for human creation — it is fundamental to all evolution, from the physical level of atoms and molecules, to the biological level of life forms, to the social level of human civilization, to the intellectual level of human thought. Dynamic quality exists everywhere, but it has no specific goals or plans — it always consists of spur-of-the-moment actions, decisions, and guesses about how to overcome obstacles to “betterness.”

It is difficult to conceive of dynamic quality — by its very nature, it is resistant to conceptualization and definition, because it has no stable form or structure. If it did have a stable form or structure, it would not be dynamic.

However the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) provided a way to think about dynamic quality, by positing change as the fundamental nature of reality. (See Beyond the “Mechanism” Metaphor in Physics.) In Bergson’s view, traditional reason, science, and philosophy created static, eternal forms and posited these forms as the foundation of reality — but in fact these forms were tools for understanding reality and not reality itself. Reality always flowed and was impossible to fully capture in any static conceptual form. This flow could best be understood through perception rather than conception. Unfortunately, as philosophy created larger and larger conceptual categories, philosophy tended to become dominated by empty abstractions such as “substance,” “numbers,” and “ideas.” Bergson proposed that only an intuitive approach that enlarged perceptual knowledge through feeling and imagination could advance philosophy out of the dead end of static abstractions.

________________________

The Flow of Time

Bergson argued that we miss the flow of time when we use the traditional tools of science, mathematics, and philosophy. Science conceives of time as simply one coordinate in a deterministic space-time block ruled by eternal laws; mathematics conceives of time as consisting of equal segments on a graph; and philosophers since Plato have conceptualized the world as consisting of the passing shadows of eternal forms.

These may be useful conceptualizations, argues Bergson, but they do not truly grasp time. Whether it is an eternal law, a graph, or an eternal form, such depictions are snapshots of reality; they do not and cannot represent the indivisible flow of time that we experience. The laws of science in particular neglected the elements of indeterminism and freedom in the universe. (Henri Bergson once debated Einstein on this topic). The neglect of real change by science was the result of science’s ambition to foresee all things, which motivated scientists to focus on the repeatable and calculable elements of nature, rather than the genuinely new. (The Creative Mind, Mineola, New York: Dover, 2007, p. 3) Those events that could not be predicted were tossed aside as being merely random or unknowable. As for philosophy, Bergson complained that the eternal forms of the philosophers were empty abstractions — the categories of beauty and justice and truth were insufficient to serve as representations of real experience.

Actual reality, according to Bergson, consisted of “unceasing creation, the uninterrupted upsurge of novelty.” (The Creative Mind, p. 7) Time was not merely a coordinate for recording motion in a determinist universe; time was “a vehicle of creation and choice.” (p. 75) The reality of change could not be captured in static concepts, but could only be grasped intuitively. While scientists saw evolution as a combination of mechanism and random change, Bergson saw evolution as a result of a vital impulse (élan vital) that pervaded the universe. Although this vital impetus possessed an original unity, individual life forms used this vital impetus for their own ends, creating conflict between life forms. (Creative Evolution, pp. 50-51)

Biologists attacked Bergson on the grounds that there was no “vital impulse” that they could detect and measure. But biologists argued from the reductionist premise that everything could be explained by reference to smaller parts, and since there was no single detectable force animating life, there was no “vital impetus.” But Bergson’s premise was holistic, referring to the broader action of organic development from lower orders to higher orders, culminating in human beings. There was no separate force — rather entities organized, survived, and reproduced by absorbing and processing energy, in multiple forms. In the words of one eminent biologist, organisms are “resilient patterns . . . in an energy flow.” There is no separate or unique energy of life – just energy.

The Superiority of Perception over Conception

Bergson believed with William James that all knowledge originated in perception and feeling; as human mental powers increased, conceptual categories were created to organize and generalize what we (and others) discovered through our senses. Concepts were necessary to advance human knowledge, of course. But over time, abstract concepts came to dominate human thought to the point at which pure ideas were conceived as the ultimate reality — hence Platonism in philosophy, mathematical Platonism in mathematics, and eternal laws in science. Bergson believed that although we needed concepts, we also needed to rediscover the roots of concepts in perception and feeling:

If the senses and the consciousness had an unlimited scope, if in the double direction of matter and mind the faculty of perceiving was indefinite, one would not need to conceive any more than to reason. Conceiving is a make-shift when perception is not granted to us, and reasoning is done in order to fill up the gaps of perception or to extend its scope. I do not deny the utility of abstract and general ideas, — any more than I question the value of bank-notes. But just as the note is only a promise of gold, so a conception has value only through the eventual perceptions it represents. . . . the most ingeniously assembled conceptions and the most learnedly constructed reasonings collapse like a house of cards the moment the fact — a single fact rarely seen — collides with these conceptions and these reasonings. There is not a single metaphysician, moreover, not one theologian, who is not ready to affirm that a perfect being is one who knows all things intuitively without having to go through reasoning, abstraction and generalisation. (The Creative Mind, pp. 108-9)

In the end, despite their obvious utility, the conceptions of philosophy and science tend “to weaken our concrete vision of the universe.” (p. 111) But we clearly do not have God-like powers to perceive everything, and we are not likely to get such powers. So what do we do? Bergson argues that instead of “trying to rise above our perception of things” through concepts, we “plunge into [perception] for the purpose of deepening it and widening it.” (p. 111) But how exactly are we to do this?

Enlarging Perception

There is one group of people, argues Bergson, that have mastered the ability to deepen and widen perception: artists. From paintings to poetry to novels and musical compositions, artists are able to show us things and events that we do not directly perceive and evoke a mood within us that we can understand even if the particular form that the artist presents may never have been seen or heard by us before. Bergson writes that artists are idealists who are often absent-mindedly detached from “reality.” But it is precisely because artists are detached from everyday living that they are able to see things that ordinary, practical people do not:

[Our] perception . . . isolates that part of reality as a whole that interests us; it shows us less the things themselves than the use we can make of them. It classifies, it labels them beforehand; we scarcely look at the object, it is enough for us to know which category it belongs to. But now and then, by a lucky accident, men arise whose senses or whose consciousness are less adherent to life. Nature has forgotten to attach their faculty of perceiving to their faculty of acting. When they look at a thing, they see it for itself, and not for themselves. They do not perceive simply with a view to action; they perceive in order to perceive — for nothing, for the pleasure of doing so. In regard to a certain aspect of their nature, whether it be their consciousness or one of their senses, they are born detached; and according to whether this detachment is that of a particular sense, or of consciousness, they are painters or sculptors, musicians or poets. It is therefore a much more direct vision of reality that we find in the different arts; and it is because the artist is less intent on utilizing his perception that he perceives a greater number of things. (The Creative Mind, p. 114)

The Method of Intuition

Bergson argued that the indivisible flow of time and the holistic nature of reality required an intuitive approach, that is “the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.” (The Creative Mind, p. 135) Analysis, as in the scientific disciplines, breaks down objects into elements, but this method of understanding is a translation, an insight that is less direct and holistic than intuition. The intuition comes first, and one can pass from intuition to analysis but not from analysis to intuition.

In his essay on the French philosopher Ravaisson, Bergson underscored the benefits and necessity of an intuitive approach:

[Ravaisson] distinguished two different ways of philosophizing. The first proceeds by analysis; it resolves things into their inert elements; from simplification to simplification it passes to what is most abstract and empty. Furthermore, it matters little whether this work of abstraction is effected by a physicist that we may call a mechanist or by a logician who professes to be an idealist: in either case it is materialism. The other method not only takes into account the elements but their order, their mutual agreement and their common direction. It no longer explains the living by the dead, but, seeing life everywhere, it defines the most elementary forms by their aspiration toward a higher form of life. It no longer brings the higher down to the lower, but on the contrary, the lower to the higher. It is, in the real sense of the word, spiritualism. (p. 202)

From Philosophy to Religion

A religious tendency is apparent in Bergson’s philosophical writings, and this tendency grew more pronounced as Bergson grew older. It is likely that Bergson saw religion as a form of perceptual knowledge of the Good, widened by imagination. Bergson’s final major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977) was both a philosophical critique of religion and a religious critique of philosophy, while acknowledging the contributions of both forms of knowledge. Bergson drew a distinction between “static religion,” which he believed originated in social obligations to society, and “dynamic religion,” which he argued originated in mysticism and put humans “in the stream of the creative impetus.” (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p. 179)

Bergson was a harsh critic of the superstitions of “static religion,” which he called a “farrago of error and folly.” These superstitions were common in all cultures, and originated in human imagination, which created myths to explain natural events and human history. However, Bergson noted, static religion did play a role in unifying primitive societies and creating a common culture within which individuals would subordinate their interests to the common good of society. Static religion created and enforced social obligations, without which societies could not endure. Religion also provided comfort against the depressing reality of death. (The Two Source of Morality and Religion, pp. 102-22)

In addition, it would be a mistake, Bergson argued, to suppose that one could obtain dynamic religion without the foundation of static religion. Even the superstitions of static religion originated in the human perception of a beneficent virtue that became elaborated into myths. Perhaps thinking that a cool running spring or a warm fire on the hearth as the actions of spirits or gods were a case of imagination run rampant, but these were still real goods, as were the other goods provided by the pagan gods.

Dynamic religion originated in static religion, but also moved above and beyond it, with a small number of exceptional human beings who were able to reach the divine source: “In our eyes, the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact . . . with the creative effort which life itself manifests. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself. The great mystic is to be conceived as an individual being, capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species by its material nature, thus continuing and extending the divine action.” (pp. 220-21)

In Bergson’s view, mysticism is intuition turned inward, to the “roots of our being , and thus to the very principle of life in general.” (p. 250) Rational philosophy cannot fully capture the nature of mysticism, because the insights of mysticism cannot be captured in words or symbols, except perhaps in the word “love”:

God is love, and the object of love: herein lies the whole contribution of mysticism. About this twofold love the mystic will never have done talking. His description is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable. But what he does state clearly is that divine love is not a thing of God: it is God Himself. (p. 252)

Even so, just as the dynamic religion bases its advanced moral insights in part on the social obligations of static religion, dynamic religion also must be propagated through the images and symbols supplied by the myths of static religion. (One can see this interplay of static and dynamic religion in Jesus and Gandhi, both of whom were rooted in their traditional religions, but offered original teachings and insights that went beyond their traditions.)

Toward the end of his life, Henri Bergson strongly considered converting to Catholicism (although the Church had already placed three of Bergson’s works on its Index of Prohibited Books). Bergson saw Catholicism as best representing his philosophical inclinations for knowing through perception and intuition, and for joining the vital impetus responsible for creation. However, Bergson was Jewish, and the anti-Semitism of 1930s and 1940s Europe made him reluctant to officially break with the Jewish people. When the Nazis conquered France in 1940 and the Vichy puppet government of France decided to persecute Jews, Bergson registered with the authorities as a Jew and accepted the persecutions of the Vichy regime with stoicism. Bergson died in 1941 at the age of 81.

Once among the most celebrated intellectuals in the world, today Bergson is largely forgotten. Even among French philosophers, Bergson is much less known than Descartes, Sartre, Comte, and Foucault. It is widely believed that Bergson lost his debate with Einstein in 1922 on the nature of time. (See Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time, p. 6) But it is recognized today even among physicists that while Einstein’s conception of spacetime in relativity theory is an excellent theory for predicting the motion of objects, it does not disprove the existence of time and real change. It is also true that Bergson’s writings are extraordinarily difficult to understand at times. One can go through pages of dense, complex text trying to understand what Bergson is saying, get suddenly hit with a colorful metaphor that seems to explain everything — and then have a dozen more questions about the meaning of the metaphor. Nevertheless, Bergson remains one of the very few philosophers who looked beyond eternal forms to the reality of a dynamic universe, a universe moved by a vital impetus always creating, always changing, never resting.

Beyond the “Mechanism” Metaphor in Physics

Posted on by

In previous posts, I discussed the use of the “mechanism” metaphor in science. I argued that this metaphor was useful historically in helping us to make progress in understanding cause-and-effect patterns in nature, but was limited or even deceptive in a number of important respects. In particular, the field of biology is characterized by evidence of spontaneity, adaptability, progress, and cooperative behavior among life forms that make the mechanism metaphor inadequate in characterizing and explaining life.

Physics is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the “hard sciences” and, as such, the field most suited to the mechanism metaphor. In fact, many physicists are so wedded to the idea of the universe as a mechanism, that they are inclined to speak as if the universe literally was a mechanism, that we humans are actually living inside a computer simulation. Why alien races would go through the trouble of creating simulated humans such as ourselves, with such dull, slow-moving lives, is never explained. But physicists are able to get away with these wild speculations because of their stupendous success in explaining and predicting the motion and actions of objects, from the smallest particles to the largest galaxies.

Fundamental to the success of physics is the idea that all objects are subject to laws that determine their behavior. Laws are what determine how the various parts of the universal mechanism move and interact. But when one starts asking questions about what precisely physical laws are and where they come from, one runs into questions and controversies that have never been successfully resolved.

Prior to the Big Bang theory, developed in the early twentieth century, the prevailing theory among physicists was that the universe existed eternally and had no beginning. When an accumulation of astronomical observations about the expansion of the universe led to the conclusion that the universe probably began from a single point that rapidly expanded outward, physicists gradually came to accept that the idea that the universe had a beginning, in a so-called “Big Bang.” However, this raised a problem: if laws ran the universe, and the universe had a beginning, then the laws must have preexisted the universe. In fact, the laws must have been eternal.

But what evidence is there for the notion that the laws of the universe are eternal? Does it really make sense to think of the law of gravity as existing before the universe existed, before gravity itself existed, before planets, stars, space, and time existed? Does it make sense to think of the law of conservation of mass existing before mass existed, or Mendel’s laws of genetics existing before genes existed? Where and how did they exist? If you take the logic of physics far enough, one is apt to conclude that the laws of physics are some kind of God(s), or that God is a mechanism.

Furthermore, what is the evidence for the notion that laws completely determine the motion of every particle in the universe, that the universe is deterministic? Observations and experiments under controlled conditions confirmed that the laws of Newtonian physics could indeed predict the motions of various objects. But did these observations and experiments prove that all objects everywhere behaved in completely predictable patterns?

Despite some fairly large holes in the ideas of eternal laws and determinism, both ideas have been popular among physicists and among many intellectuals. There have been dissenters, however.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) argued that the universe was in fact a highly dynamic system with a large degree of freedom within it. According to Bergson, our ideas about eternal laws originated in human attempts to understand the reality of change by using fixed, static concepts. These concepts were useful tools — in fact, the tools had to be fixed and static in order to be useful. But the reality that these concepts pointed to was in fact flowing, all “things” were in flux, and we made a major mistake by equating our static concepts with reality and positing a world of eternal forms, whether that of Plato or the physicists. Actual reality, according to Bergson, was “unceasing creation, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty.” (Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 7) Moreover, the flow of time was inherently continuous; we could try to measure time by chopping it into equal segments based on the ticking of a clock or by drawing a graph with units of time along one axis, but real time did not consist of segments any more than a flowing river consisted of segments. Time is a “vehicle of creation and choice” that refutes the idea of determinism. (p. 75)

Bergson did not dispute the experimental findings of physics, but argued that the laws of physics were insufficient to describe what the universe was really like. Physicists denied the reality of time and “unceasing creation,” according to Bergson, because scientists were searching for repeatable patterns, paying little or no attention to what was genuinely new:

[A]gainst this idea of the absolute originality and unforeseeability of forms our whole intellect rises in revolt. The essential function of our intellect, as the evolution of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, to make ready for our action on things, to foresee, for a given situation, the events, favorable or unfavorable, which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore instinctively selects in a given situation whatever is like something already known. . .  Science carries this faculty to the highest possible degree of exactitude and precision, but does not alter its essential character. Like ordinary knowledge, in dealing with things science is concerned only with the aspect of repetition. (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 29)

Bergson acknowledged the existence of repetitive patterns in nature, but rather than seeing these patterns as reflecting eternal and wholly deterministic laws, Bergson proposed a different metaphor. Drawing upon the work of the French philosopher Felix Ravaisson, Bergson argued that nature develops “habits” of behavior in the same manner that human beings develop habits, from initial choices of behavior that over time become regular and subconscious: “Should we not then imagine nature, in this form, as an obscured consciousness and a dormant will? Habit thus gives us the living demonstration of this truth, that mechanism is not sufficient to itself: it is, so to speak, only the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity.” In Bergson’s view, spiritual activity was the ultimate foundation of reality, not the habits/mechanisms that resulted from it (The Creative Mind, pp. 197-98, 208).

Bergson’s views did not go over well with most scientists. In 1922, in Paris, Henri Bergson publicly debated Albert Einstein about the nature of time. (See Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time). Einstein’s theory of relativity posited that there was no absolute time that ticked at the same rate for every body in the universe. Time was linked to space in a single space-time continuum, the movement of bodies was entirely deterministic, and this movement could be predicted by calculating the space-time coordinates of these bodies. In Einstein’s view, there was no sharp distinction between past, present, and future — all events existed in a single block of space-time. This idea of a “block universe” is still predominant in physics today, though it is not without dissenters.

Most people have a “presentist” view of reality.

But physicists prefer the “block universe” view, in which all events are equally real.

Source: Time in Cosmology

 

In fact, when Einstein’s friend Michele Besso passed away in 1955, Einstein wrote a letter of condolence to Besso’s family in which he expressed his sympathies to the family but also declared that the separation between past, past, and future was an illusion anyway, so death did not mean anything. (The Physicist and the Philosopher, pp. 338-9)

It is widely believed that Bergson lost his 1922 debate with Einstein, in large part because Bergson did not fully understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. Nevertheless, while physicists everywhere eventually came to accept relativity, many rejected Einstein’s notion of a completely determinist universe which moved as predictably as a mechanism. The French physicist Louis de Broglie and the Japanese physicist Satosi Watanabe were proponents of Bergson and argued that the indeterminacy of subatomic particles supported Bergson’s view of the reality of freedom, the flow of time, and change. Einstein, on the other hand, never did accept the indeterminacy of quantum physics and insisted to his dying day that there must be “hidden” variables that would explain everything.  (The Physicist and the Philosopher, pp. 234-38)

 

_____________________________

 

Moving forward to the present day, the debate over the reality of time has been rekindled by Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In Time Reborn, Smolin proposes that time is indeed real and that the neglect of this fact has hindered progress in physics and cosmology. Contrary to what you may have been taught in your science classes, Smolin argues that the laws of nature are not eternal and precise but emergent and approximate. Borrowing the theory of evolution from biology, Smolin argues that the laws of the universe evolve over time, that genuine novelty is real, and that the laws are not precise iron laws but approximate, granting a degree of freedom to what was formerly considered a rigidly deterministic universe.

One major problem with physics, Smolin argues, is that scientists tend to generalize or extrapolate based on conclusions drawn from laboratory experiments conducted under highly controlled conditions, with extraneous variables carefully excluded — Smolin calls this “physics in a box.” Now there is nothing inherently wrong with “physics in a box” — carefully controlled experiments that exclude extraneous variables are absolutely essential to progress in scientific knowledge. The problem is that one cannot take a law derived from such a controlled experiment and simply scale it up to apply to the entire universe; Smolin calls this the “cosmological fallacy.” As Smolin argues, it makes no sense to simply scale up the findings from these controlled experiments, because the universe contains everything, including the extraneous variables! Controlled experiments are too restricted and artificial to serve as an adequate basis for a theory that includes everything. Instead of generalizing from the bottom up based on isolated subsystems of the universe, physicists must construct theories of the whole universe, from the top down. (Time Reborn, pp. 38-39, 97)

Smolin is not the first scientist to argue that the laws of nature may have evolved over time. Smolin points to the eminent physicists Paul Dirac, John Archibald Wheeler, and Richard Feynman as previous proponents of the idea that the laws may have evolved. (Time Reborn, pp. xxv-xxvi) But all of these theorists were preceded by the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who argued that “the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution.” (Time Reborn, p. xxv) Dr. Smolin gives credit to Charles Sanders Peirce for originating this idea, and proposes two ways in which the laws of nature have evolved.

The first way is through a series of “Big Bangs,” in which each new universe selects different laws each time. Smolin argues that there must have been an endless succession of Big Bangs in the past which have led to our current universe with its particular set of laws. (p. 120) Furthermore, Smolin proposes that black holes create new, baby universes, each with its own laws — so the black holes in our universe are the parents of other universes, and our own universe is the child of a black hole in some other universe! (pp. 123-25) Unfortunately, it seems impossible to adequately prove this theory, unless there is some possible way of observing these other universes with their different laws.

Smolin also proposes that laws can arise at the quantum level based on what he calls the “principle of precedence.” Smolin makes an analogy to Anglo-Saxon law, in which the decisions of judges in the past serve as precedents for decisions made today and in the future, in an ever-growing body of “common law.” The idea is that everything in the universe has a tendency to develop habits; when a truly novel event occurs, and then occurs again, and again, it settles into a pattern of repetition; that settled pattern of repetition indicates the development of a new law of nature. The law did not previously exist eternally — it emerged out of habit. (Time Reborn, pp. 146-53) Furthermore, rather than being bound by deterministic laws, the universe remains genuinely open and free, able to build new forms on top of existing forms. Smolin argues, “In the time-bound picture I propose, the universe is a process for breeding novel phenomena and states of organization, which will forever renew itself as it evolves to states of ever higher complexity and organization. The observational record tells us unambiguously that the universe is getting more interesting as time goes on.” (p. 194)

And yet, despite his openness to the idea of genuine novelty in the evolution of the universe, even Smolin is unable to get away from the idea of mechanisms being ultimately responsible for everything. Smolin writes that the universe began with a particular set of initial conditions and then asks “What mechanism selected the actual initial conditions out of the infinite set of possibilities?” (pp. 97-98) He does not consider the possibility that in the beginning, perhaps there was no mechanism. Indeed, this is the problem with any cosmology that aims to provide a total explanation for existence; as one goes back in time searching for origins, one eventually reaches a first cause that has no prior cause, and thus no causal explanation. One either has to posit a creator-God, an eternal self-sufficient mechanism, or throw up one’s hands and accept that we are faced with an unsolvable mystery.

In fact, Smolin is not as radical as his inspiration, Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce, the universe did not start out with a mechanism but rather began from a condition of maximum freedom and spontaneity, only gradually adopting certain “habits” which evolved into laws. Furthermore, even after the development of laws, the universe retained a great deal of chance and spontaneity. Laws specified certain regularities, but even within these regularities, a great deal of freedom still existed. For example, life forms may have been bound to the surface of the earth and subject to the regular rotation of the earth, the orbit of the earth around the sun, and the limitations of biology, but nonetheless life forms still retained considerable freedom.

Peirce, who believed in God, held that the universe was pervaded not by mechanism but mind, which was by definition characterized by freedom and spontaneity. As the mind/universe developed certain habits, these habits congealed into laws and solid matter. In Peirce’s view, “matter . . . [is] mere specialised and partially deadened mind.” (“The Law of Mind,” The Monist, vol. 11, no. 4, July 1892) This view is somewhat similar to the view of the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who noted that “Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made. . . .”

One contemporary philosopher, Philip Goff of Durham University, following Peirce and other thinkers, has argued that consciousness is not restricted to humans but in fact pervades the universe, from the smallest subatomic particles to the most intelligent human beings. This theory is known as panpsychism. (see Goff’s book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness) Goff does not argue that atoms, rocks, water, stars, etc. are like humans in their thought process, but that they have experiences, albeit very primitive and simple experiences compared to humans. The difference between the experiences of a human and the experiences of an electron is vast, but the difference still exists on a spectrum; there is no sharp dividing line that dictates that experience ends when one gets down to the level of insects, cells, viruses, molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles. In Dr. Goff’s words:

Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe. . . .

The starting point of the panpsychist is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. . . . Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself. So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing supernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside,” in terms of its behavior. But matter “from the inside”—i.e., in terms of its intrinsic nature—is constituted of forms of consciousness.

Unfortunately, there is, at present, no proof that the universe is pervaded by mind, nor is there solid evidence that the laws of physics have evolved. We do know that the science of physics is no longer as deterministic as it used to be. The behavior of subatomic particles is not fully predictable, despite the best efforts of physicists for nearly a century, and many physicists now acknowledge this. We also know that the concepts of laws and determinism often fail in the field of biology — there are very few actual laws in biology, and the idea that these laws preexisted life itself seems incoherent. No biologist will tell you that human beings in their present state are the inevitable product of determinist evolution and that if we started the planet Earth all over again, we would end up in 4.5 billion years with exactly the same types of life forms, including humans, that we have now. Nor can biologists predict the movement of life forms the same way that physicists can predict the movement of planets. Life forms do their own thing. Human beings retain their free will and moral responsibility. Still, the notion that the laws of physics are pre-existent and eternal appears to have no solid ground either; it is merely one of those assumptions that has become widely accepted because few have sought to challenge it or even ask for evidence.

Beyond the “Mechanism” Metaphor in Biology

Posted on by

In a previous post, I discussed the frequent use of the “mechanism” metaphor in the sciences. I argued that while this metaphor was useful in spurring research into cause-and-effect patterns in physical and biological entities, it was inadequate as a descriptive model for what the universe and life is like. In particular, the “mechanism” metaphor is unable to capture the reality of change, the evidence of self-driven progress, and the autonomy and freedom of life forms.

I don’t think it’s possible to abandon metaphors altogether in science, including the mechanism metaphor. But I do think that if we are to more fully understand the nature of life, in all its forms, we must supplement the mechanism metaphor with other, additional conceptualizations and metaphors that illustrate dynamic processes.

______________________________

 

David Bohm (1917-1992), one of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century, once remarked upon a puzzling development in the sciences: While 19th century classical physics operated according to the view that the universe was a mechanism, research into quantum physics in the 20th century demonstrated that the behavior of particles at the subatomic level was not nearly as deterministic as the behavior of larger objects, but rather was probabilistic. Nevertheless, while physicists adjusted to this new reality, the science of biology was increasingly adopting the metaphor of mechanism to study life. Remarked Bohm:

 It does seem odd . . . that just when physics is thus moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology are moving closer to it. If this trend continues, it may well be that scientists will be regarding  living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism. But of course, in the long run, such a point of view cannot stand up to critical analysis. For since DNA and other molecules studied by the biologist are constituted of electrons, protons, neutrons, etc., it follows that they too are capable of behaving in a far more complex and subtle way than can be described in terms of mechanical concepts. (Source: David Bohm, “Some Remarks on the Notion of Order,” in Towards a Theoretical Biology, Vol. 2: Sketches, ed. C.H. Waddington, Chicago: Aldine Publishing, p. 34.)

According to Bohm, biology had to overcome, or at least supplement, the mechanism metaphor if it was to advance. It was not enough to state that anything outside mechanical processes was “random,” for the concept of randomness was too ill-defined to constitute an adequate description of phenomena that did not fit into the mechanism metaphor. For one thing, noted Bohm, the word “random” was often used to denote “disorder,” when in fact it was impossible for a phenomenon to have no order whatsoever. Nor did unpredictability imply randomness — Bohm pointed out that the notes of a musical composition are not predictable, but nonetheless have a precise order when considered in totality. (Ibid., p. 20)

Bohm’s alternative conceptualization was that of an open order, that is, an order that consisted of multiple potential sub-orders or outcomes. For example, if you roll a single die once, there are six possible outcomes and each outcome is equally likely. But the die is not disordered; in fact, it is a precisely ordered system, with equal length dimensions on all sides of the cube and a weight equally distributed throughout the cube. (This issue is discussed in How Random is Evolution?) However, unlike the roll of a die, life is both open to new possibilities and capable of retaining previous outcomes, resulting in increasingly complex orders, orders that are nonetheless still open to change.

Although we are inclined to think of reality as composed of “things,” Bohm argued that the fundamental reality of the universe was not “things” but change: “All is process. That is to say, there is no thing in the universe. Things, objects, entities, are abstractions of what is relatively constant from a process of movement and transformation. They are like the shapes that children like to see in the clouds . . . .” (“Further Remarks on Order,” Ibid., p. 42) The British biologist C.H. Waddington, commenting on Bohm, proposed another metaphor, borrowed from the ancient Judeo-Christian sectarian movement known as Gnosticism:

‘Things’ are essentially eggs — pregnant with God-knows-what. You look at them and they appear simple enough, with a bland definite shape, rather impenetrable. You glance away for a bit and when you look back what you find is that they have turned into a fluffy yellow chick, actively running about and all set to get imprinted on you if you will give it half a chance. Unsettling, even perhaps a bit sinister. But one strand of Gnostic thought asserted that _everything_ is like that. (C.H. Waddington, “The Practical Consequences of Metaphysical Beliefs on a Biologist’s Work,” Ibid., p. 73)

Bohm adds that although the mechanism metaphor is apt to make one think of nature as an engineer or the work of an engineer (i.e., the universe as a “clock”), it could be more useful to think of nature as an artist. Bohm compares nature to a young child beginning to draw. Such a child attempting to draw a rectangle for the first time is apt to end up with a drawing that resembles random or nearly-random lines. Over time however, the child gathers visual impressions and instructions from parents, teachers, books, and toys of what shapes are and what a rectangle is; over time, with growth and practice, the child learns to draw a reasonably good rectangle. (Bohm, “Further Remarks on Order, Ibid., pp. 48-50) It is an order that appears to be the outcome of randomness, but in fact emerges from an open order of multiple possibilities.

 

The American microbiologist Carl. W. Woese (1928-2012), who achieved honors and awards for his discovery of a third domain of life, the “archaea,” also rejected the use of mechanist perspectives in biology. In an article calling for a “new biology,” Woese argued that biology borrowed too much from physics, focusing on the smallest parts of nature while lacking a holistic perspective:

Let’s stop looking at the organism purely as a molecular machine. The machine metaphor certainly provides insights, but these come at the price of overlooking much of what biology is. Machines are not made of parts that continually turn over, renew. The organism is. Machines are stable and accurate because they are designed and built to be so. The stability of an organism lies in resilience, the homeostatic capacity to reestablish itself. While a machine is a mere collection of parts, some sort of “sense of the whole” inheres in the organism, a quality that becomes particularly apparent in phenomena such as regeneration in amphibians and certain invertebrates and in the homeorhesis exhibited by developing embryos.

If they are not machines, then what are organisms? A metaphor far more to my liking is this. Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow. A simple flow metaphor, of course, fails to capture much of what the organism is. None of our representations of organism capture it in its entirety. But the flow metaphor does begin to show us the organism’s (and biology’s) essence. And it is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as (stable) complex, dynamic organization. (“A New Biology for a New Century,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2004, pp. 175-6)

A swirling pattern of water is perhaps not entirely satisfactory as a metaphoric conceptualization of life, but it does point to an aspect of reality that the mechanism metaphor does not satisfactorily capture: the ability of life to adapt.

Woese proposes another metaphor to describe what life was like in the very early stages of evolution, when primitive single-celled organisms were all that existed: a community. In this stage, cellular organization was minimal, and many important functions evolved separately and imperfectly in different cellular organisms. However, these organisms could evolve by exchanging genes, in a process called Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT). This was the primary factor in very early evolution, not random mutation. According to Woese:

The world of primitive cells feels like a vast sea, or field, of cosmopolitan genes flowing into and out of the evolving cellular (and other) entities. Because of the high level of HGT [horizontal gene transfer], evolution at this stage would in essence be communal, not individual. The community of primitive evolving biological entities as a whole as well as the surrounding field of cosmopolitan genes participates in a collective reticulate [i.e., networked] evolution. (Ibid., p. 182)

It was only later that this loose community of cells increased their interactions to the point at which a phase transition took place, in which evolution became less communal and the vertical inheritance of relatively well-developed organisms became the main form of evolutionary descent. But horizontal gene transfer still continued after this transition, and continues to this day. (Ibid., pp. 182-84) It’s hard to see how these interactions resemble any kind of mechanism.

Tree of life showing vertical and horizontal gene transfers.

Source:  Horizontal gene transfer – Wikipedia

 

_____________________________

So let’s return to the question of “vitalism,” the old theory that there was something special responsible for life: a soul, spirit, force, or substance. The old theories of vitalism have been abandoned on the grounds that no one has been able to observe, identify, or measure a soul, spirit, etc. However, the dissatisfaction of many biologists with the “mechanist” outlook has led to a new conception of vitalism, one in which the essence of life is not in a mysterious substance or force but in the organization of matter and energy, and the processes that occur under this organization. (See Sebastian Normandin and Charles T. Wolfe, eds., Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010, p. 2n4, 69, 277, 294 )

As Woese wrote, organisms are “resilient patterns . . . in an energy flow.” In a previous essay, I pointed to the work of the great physicist Werner Heisenberg, who noted that matter and energy are essentially interchangeable and that the universe itself began as a great burst of energy, much of which gradually evolved into different forms of matter over time. According to Heisenberg, “Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made. . . .” (Physics and Philosophy, p. 63)

Now energy itself is not a personal being, and while energy can move things, it’s problematic to equate any moving matter as a kind of life. But is it not the case that once a particular configuration of energy/matter rises to a certain level, organized under a unified consciousness with a free will, then that configuration of energy/matter constitutes a spirit or soul? In this view, there is no vitalist “substance” that gives life to matter — it is simply a matter of energy/matter reaching a certain level of organization capable of (at least minimal) consciousness and free will.

In this view, when ancient peoples thought that breath was the spirit of life and blood was the sacred source of life, they were not that far off the mark. Oxygen is needed by (most) life forms to process the energy in food. Without the continual flow of oxygen from our environment into our body, we die. (Indeed, brain damage will occur after only three minutes without oxygen.) And blood delivers the oxygen and nutrients to the cells that compose our body. Both breath and blood maintain the flow of energy that is essential to life. It’s all a matter of organized energy/matter, with billions of smaller actors and activities working together to form a unified conscious being.