I’ve been delayed in my reading program, but I’m getting slowly back to work on Hans Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time. I’ve also gotten behind on my writing though I’ve already posted on some preliminary issues after reading Hilary Putnam’s preface for this the reprinting by the University of California Press: Why Does Time Move Only Forward?: Some Preliminaries.
So far as I can tell, the reasons I’ve falling behind have a little to do with a minor sinus infection but mostly have to do with a problem related to my opposition to the tendency of Reichenbach and other modern thinkers to create an understanding of reality which involves only explicit and conscious cognition, abstract reasoning and schematizing and all that. Pascal lost in his efforts to protect a respect for the heart in an age when men were sliding into a great error in understanding their own human nature and their own communal nature. A distorted version of Cartesian methodology conquered so that reason rules not only in its domain but in all domains of reality which modern thinkers recognize. But the tide of the battle has shifted, due more to the efforts of modern biologists than to those of theologians and philosophers, though the greater and more serious of novelists and poets and visual artists never lost their respect for a more complete understanding of how human beings understand.
My initial ways of discussing these issues just didn’t feel right though I’d written a couple well-structured outlines and my initial short statements at the main levels of those outlines each seemed to be saying something meaningful. Yet, something was wrong. My outlines for much different versions of essays on this subject seemed well-organized and seemed to address important issues. But any attempts to expand those outlines into essays didn’t work. The attempts didn’t feel right because they didn’t move along the paths I’ve following in my recent work. I was addressing technical issues at a detailed level and ignoring the deformed idea of human understanding found in Reichenbach’s book and originating in that loss of respect for the role of the heart in understanding reality.
To a thinker such as Reichenbach who was in tune with the Enlightenment phase of Modernism, this business of feeling would seem ridiculous. Reichenbach doesn’t despise feelings as if we should be unfeeling calculators but he makes it clear that the understanding of reality should rely upon reason to the exclusion of feeling and doing. Just think matters through, organize those thoughts, and write a concise, tightly focused essay. Those of us who are taking the first steps in recovering a better and more complete human understanding of created being have to struggle not to find a more complete system of `logic’ so glorified by Reichenbach and other Modern thinkers but to find new and richer ways to discuss mind, heart, and hands as separate but complimentary aspects of human understanding.
I’ll write more about this after quoting from books of three thinkers. The chapters which are the source of the quotes have titles indicative of this entire discussion:
- Hans Reichenbach’s book: The Direction of Time; chapter: The Emotive Significance of Time
- Jacob Neusner’s book: Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity; chapter: The Doctrine of Emotions and its Long-term Uniformity in the Canonical History of Judaism’s Ideas
- E.O. Wilson’s book: Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition; chapter: The Morality of the Gene
I have already discussed the relevant ideas from Wilson’s book in an earlier post, Social and Biological: Being Honest About the Basics of Human Nature. That discussion dealt with Wilson’s ideas in the context of his critique of a statement made by Camus, the novelist and atheistic-existentialist philosopher.
I’ll be siding with Rabbi Neusner, and largely with Wilson, rather than with Professor Reichenbach, though, as always, I’ll have my own ideas to add to the entire discussion, partly because of my Christian beliefs and my tightly related understanding of created being, which understanding might well be adaptable to Jewish thought. In fact, any sensitive reader of Neusner’s books will realize that he not only invites Christian readers but also Christian readings and Christian responses. This points to one difference between him and Reichenbach and also Wilson, at least as he was presenting his ideas in the 1970s. Neusner invites other readings of what we might call the texts which help us understand our world while Reichenbach presents a more or less monolithic framework of a rationalistic sort. This framework limits the discussion greatly, enforcing the dictate that rules all non-rationalistic understandings out of court, and also limits Reichenbach’s influence on many who might find some of his ideas to be at least stimulating. Wilson’s prose presents a still different situation to the reader: at times, his presentation as such doesn’t seem to invite responses, other than assent or angry denial, but his material and fundamental ideas do, perhaps because his ideas were themselves a result of honest responses to certain aspects of this universe, what I consider a certain realm or `part’ of Creation.
It’s interesting to note that Wilson’s thought is largely in synch with the Jewish and Christian traditional ideas about the nature of this world and the nature of human beings, though he presents his ideas in such a way as to make them unattractive to many traditionalists. I’ll be writing more on that starting in a couple weeks or so as I start to read some of Wilson’s books more seriously. For now, I’ll only say that this agreement between Wilson’s thought and that of at least this Thomistically inclined Christian is a result of different, but ultimately compatible, responses to reality. Wilson, at least in that book published more than 30 years ago, was genocentric to an excessive extent but certainly not enough to overcome the great insights in his version of sociobiology, so closely allied to the already existing version of Robert Trivers, a man who’d been said by some to be a superior evolutionary thinker because he had also been a lawyer and was better than most biologists at distinguishing between good and bad arguments.
In any case, it seems that extreme forms of genocentricism have, in recent years, been calmed a bit by the criticisms and ongoing work of embryologists and others who have shown development of a complex organism to be one of, shall we say, development of a complex organism in which there is not so much centralized control as interaction, including interaction with environments. Genes are at many times the dominant interactors but cannot themselves control a complex development process in which they are one independent systems interacting with the maternal signals, the ongoing somatic developments, and the environmental possibilities and constraints. Even the underlying chemical structures of genes are now known to evolve somewhat independently of natural selection and other macroscopic evolutionary processes—though clearly those processes do have the final say. Those who survive and reproduce successfully leave descendants. The point is not that evolutionary processes are overridden by mystical processes but rather that the genes themselves encode certain information which makes possible complex interactive development. Genes are not some sort of a complete and deterministic recipe book.
With a substantial groundwork laid, I repeat the question I used as the title of this essay: Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality? To anticipate the rest of this essay: Rabbi Neusner gives a strong, “Yes,” from a Jewish angle; I give a strong, “Yes,” from a sacramental Christian angle; Wilson gives a strong, “Yes,” from a sociobiological angle; Reichenbach says, “No,” from what seems to be an Enlightenment angle. I’ll start with Reichenbach’s answer.
First, I’ll note that Reichenbach doesn’t really deal with the issue, so much as he assumes the answer he likes. To him, perhaps to many thinkers in the late stages of the Enlightenment phase of what we parochially call “the Modern Age,” the answer was given by great, if also greatly defective, thinkers of the High Enlightenment in the 18th century, men who took up a certain line of philosophical thought without caring much or thinking about its incompatibility with Western Civilization. Here are two relevant quotes from Reichenbach’s The Direction of Time.
If we could stop time, we could escape death—the fact that we cannot makes us ultimately impotent, makes us equals of the piece of lumber drifting in the river current. The fear of death is thus transformed into a fear of time, the flow of time appearing as the expression of superhuman forces from which there is no escape. The phrase “passing away”, by means of which we evasively speak of death without using its name, reveals our emotional identification of time flow with death.
Dissatisfied emotion has frequently been projected into logic. In theories of the universe it often reappears in the guise of logical queries and pseudo-logical constructions. [page 4]
I don’t really have an issue with his naive analysis of the fear of death—as a naive analysis, but, somehow, the judge of all reality has become not even the entire mind but only those parts of the mind which handle `logic’. Emotions, as well as mental processes not logical in a scientific sense, apparently do no more than distort the legitimate effort to understand reality by way of logic.
The desire to survive death and to live eternally, in the sense of unlimited time, a desire obviously incompatible with physical facts, has thus led to a conception in which eternal life is not life in time, but in a different reality. In order to escape the “passing away” with time, a timeless reality was invented. [page 4]
Death or life after death isn’t the subject of this essay but rather the claim that a more complete understanding of reality comes from mind, heart, and hands. We need thought both practical and abstract, feelings which are properly disciplined for the moral ordering of our lives, and actions toward an ordered life and an ordered relationship with the physical realms of Creation. Mind, heart, and hands.
In Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity, Jacob Neusner’s collection of essays, we can read:
The doctrine of emotions in the view of the sages who created Judaism remained always the same. The reason derives from the social realities that give meaning to emotion and definition to the possibilities of feeling. If we begin with feeling, we end up in society. [page 51]
In this way of thought, emotions are produced by ties or relationships and then help to strengthen and shape those ties, shaping them to what might be called a communal heart but also helping to give birth to a communal mind, an intellect. In a recent essay, Intelligence vs. Intellect, I quoted Jacques Barzun:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand. [page 4, The House of Intellect]
We can return to Neusner’s book to read:
In the language of theology of the Judaism of a later age the Mensch of the Yiddish language, the fully human person, must become the Israel-Mensch. And who is this? It is the Judaic human being harmonious in affection, action, and affirmation. Together these determine who is Israel, the Jewish nation—one by one and all together.
In the Western Protestant tradition of Edwards and Schleirmacher we take it for granted that emotions speak for the private individual, not the nation. In the tradition of philosophy from the Greeks onward, moreover, emotions speak not rationally but irrationally. This other view, that of the ancient sages (a view that is also gaining currency in contemporary philosophy and psychology), sees the matter differently. It regards emotions as artifacts of culture and conceives that emotions lay down judgments. They therefore emerge as rational, public, and social, speaking not only for the individual but also to him or her. Feelings, too, define modes of symbolic behavior, as noted. When we examine the doctrine of emotions in the canonical writings of formative Judaism, we enter a world to which it is self-evident that feeling is subject to law and emotion is a matter of lesson and tradition. [page 51]
And:
[T]he heart belongs, together with the mind, to the human being’s powers to form reasoned viewpoints. Coming from the sages, intellectuals to their core, such an opinion surely coheres with the context and circumstance of those who held it. [page 56]
I think Neusner would have made this particular statement still stronger, at least for my purposes, by bringing the hands into the above statement, but it’s clear he does intend such an integration if we look at the quotes I supplied from his essay and certainly from the entirety of his essay.
I don’t fully accept Pascal’s famous claim: The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. I believe the heart guides reason in many ways and also knows some things reason can’t discover on its own, but I also believe that mind, heart, and hands can come to understand each other. In my way of thinking, those three human ways of knowing are different ways for a human being to learn how to participate in those divine acts which are called acts-of-being in my way of thinking, largely based upon Thomistic views of being. It’s necessary that we human beings act according to all of these—mind, heart, and hands–but, if we were God, any of our acts would be all three at once. When God thinks, He also feels and acts. When God acts, He also thinks and feels. When God feels, He also thinks and acts. To do one is, for God, to do all three.
We are images of God, at least we can be such when we respond properly to our environments or—still better—all of Creation to the extent possible. We can become human persons, encapsulations of Creation, encapsulations of the thoughts God manifested and wished for us to share with Him, and when we do so we gain the attributes of a world: unity, coherence, and completeness. There are lots of triune attributes in Christian thought and at least some in Jewish thought and other traditions of thought, but we shouldn’t think they map exactly to each other. Yet, a threesome, like a tripod, seems to be the simplest stable support in our concrete realm of being. And tripods clearly map to each other in at least some abstract ways.
I’ll repeat the quotes from my earlier essay on sociobiology, Social and Biological: Being Honest About the Basics of Human Nature. These two quotes are from the first chapter of Wilson’s Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition:
Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths. [page 3]
And:
Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. They hypothalamus-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness, “knowing” that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. [page 3]
In other words, modern biological sciences including evolutionary biology support the idea that emotions aren’t some sort of imperfection in the human being nor do they merely exist to give us epiphenomena to color our existence in a world which is `just material’, let alone `only logical’. Most biologists who have had reasons to express opinions on the importance of emotion to thinking don’t even consider emotions to be primarily short-cuts to conclusions we would reach by thinking if we had the time. There is that element in feeling but also in thinking and doing. They are different aspects of acts-of-being, more fundamental than even substance, and thinking can help us when our feeling is inadequate—as any Catholic would know from reading a guide to confession which will tell us an intellectual repentance suffices when we can’t muster up the proper depth of feeling. Similar statements can be made about all these three aspects of human efforts to participate in God’s acts-of-being: feeling, thinking, and doing. They can each help the others along and perhaps a resurrected and perfected human being would become God-like in that he would no longer feel, think, or do without doing and feeling and thinking, all three at once and in each and every act.
We are given a sort of concrete human nature, including a very complex brain, which allows us to shape ourselves to encapsulate some relatively greater or lesser part of Creation. We understand Creation, created being, by these active responses, those of Fred Astaire and those of Vincent van Gogh as well as those of Albert Einstein—a viewpoint advocated by such prominent neuroscientists as Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman, both of whom have written books which provide pleasure as well as wisdom to the truly literate reader. The neuroscientists Jerome Kagan and Antonio Damasio are but two who’ve written accessible and widely available books on the irreducible importance of emotions to human life.
If we are to understand Creation, spacetime and matter and all other components and aspects, then we’ll understand by shaping ourselves to encapsulate Creation. We won’t understand Creation if we start by misunderstanding ourselves and trying to fit created being into `logical frameworks’. We have no such `logical frameworks’ in our brains in which to fit Creation and have no reason to believe Creation could fit into any such frameworks if they existed. In fact, even when we try in ways more proper to human nature, we’re too small and too imperfect to understand much more than a vanishingly small bit as individuals and not much more even at the level of the community of the entire human race. But we’re making progress in some understanding some parts and aspects of Creation, a surprising amount of progress given our small and imperfect selves.
Do those components of human understanding, feeling and thinking and doing, really respond to irreducible components or aspects of Creation? Let me first paraphrase Einstein in words he wouldn’t use but I don’t think he would object to the general thrust of my ideas: Our understanding of created being should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. At that point in the process of analysis, it’s time to look for explanations which include all those seemingly fundamental components and aspects. You might be wrong and the next few generations might busy themselves taking your fundamental components and aspects apart to find still smaller particles. First, we searched for atoms, a search which had lasted for centuries and went through such strange paths as alchemy, but did result in the deep knowledge summarized in modern periodic tables of the elements. Then, we explored subatomic particles and discovered electrons and protons and neutrons and then strange hints of particles which didn’t fit into the simple scheme of things. Then we found out that there is a large zoo of particles out there and they seem to be broken pieces of more symmetric entities.
God acts and feels even as He does, and so forth. The Almighty is unified, and coherent and complete, in ways that aren’t possible to us—at least in our mortal lives. Why can’t we be unified in this way?
As noted above and in many of my essays on this blog, the concrete forms of being in this universe are the results of the fragmentation of more symmetric forms of created being, more abstract forms of created being. Physicists, in the Standard Theory of particle physics, have described an electroweak force which is the more symmetric entity which shattered into electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force as the universe expanded and cooled after the so-called Big Bang. The electroweak force can be described and understood in many ways but it’s electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force which are manifested in our concrete realm as particular forms of that more abstract force. In a similar way, we are concrete creatures who have evolved and developed from broken pieces of more symmetric, more abstract, forms of being. Feeling and thinking and doing are tightly related and can even help strengthen each other and can even cover for one another under certain circumstances.
As I said above: Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. We can replace `reality’ by `this concrete level of being’ and then we can understand, by analogy to modern physics, that we can construct plausible understandings of being in which feeling and thinking and doing are broken pieces of but one symmetric act-of-being, but those three components, again—in analogy to electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force, are irreducible components or aspects of minded creatures in this world of concrete being.