Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

The Individual and Society

November 12, 2009 · 1 Comment

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831) was a leading figure in the movement of German Idealism initiated by Immanuel Kant and in Hegel’s philosophy he expanded on Kant’s theory of knowledge by adding a social and historical element.

Kant had recognized that human beings create knowledge by using laws of reason to incorporate new sensual information cohesively into their previous understanding of reality. The demand to maintain a coherent picture of what is real – a necessary transcendental unity – creates rules of thinking that shape our view of reality.

Hegel realized that not only must individuals maintain a cohesive picture of reality, but societies and cultures must also maintain a collectively held cohesive understanding of what is real. It is not enough for me to know that I am a doctor. If I am truly to be a doctor other people must also see me as a doctor and thereby give me the authority and demand from me the responsibility of being a doctor. Reality is not only individual, it is shared. Hegel further saw that the collective understanding of reality that is held in common by all human beings of particular society of culture develops through the course of history. In his book The Philosophy of History Hegel outlines a theory of how this development occurs. .You might be able to imagine even from this brief description how Hegel’s ideas were in turn developed by Karl Marx. Marx started with Hegel’s philosophy and added to it his insights about how oppression and class struggle are the drivers of history.

John Dewey was the third great American Pragmatist along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, but unlike Peirce and James, Dewey started his philosophical career as an Hegelian. John Dewey was not associated with Harvard as Peirce and James were. He attended the University of Vermont. The University of Vermont’s first president was James Marsh who was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the central figure of what is known as Vermont Transcendentalism. Marsh was a Kantian and ran a very liberal philosophy program at the University of Vermont. By the time Dewey was an undergraduate in that same philosophy department the philosophical alignment of the program had moved from Kant to Hegel. Dewey’s thinking turned toward Pragmatism after reading William James’ The Principles of Psychology.

Dewey’s version of Pragmatism maintained a Hegelian flavor in a number of ways. For one he wrote much more extensively than the other major Pragmatists of social topics. John Dewey is perhaps the most influential philosopher in American history. During his long career Dewey made major contributions in the areas of logic, ethics, sociology, democracy, and most famously education. Dewey saw the individual as inseparable to society. Society is what defines the individual. Without society there can be no individual. If the individual is the foreground, society is the background. If the individual is the object, society is the context. Without a background there can be no foreground. Without a context there can be no object.

I see Dewey’s thinking as typical of what I see as the advancement on German Idealism that the American Pragmatists were exploring and that advancement was process thinking. Having the advantage of Darwin’s remarkable theory of evolution and over a century of remarkable scientific advances, the American Pragmatists were beginning to see things in terms of whole systems. Dewey saw the relationship of the individual to society as a system and the Peirce and James saw evolution as an evolving whole system.

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Commitment and Reality: From Kant to Peirce

November 6, 2009 · 3 Comments

There was more implied in Kant’s theory of knowledge than the fact that what we see is not an objective world in itself, but rather a picture that is created by us based on sense experience. (As if that wasn’t enough.) Besides stating that we are in an essential way the creators of the world as we see it, he was also saying that creating that world as it did had a responsibility inherent in it.

Kant recognized that as we go through life we are bombarded by sensual impressions and from those we compose an ongoing moving picture of reality. The picture of reality that we create must conform to certain rules of necessity in order to create a picture that is intelligible. As we put together our moving picture of reality all sorts of laws of necessity will demand our picture of reality must look a certain way so as to remain consistent and therefore intelligible. Some of these laws are enforced apriori, or prior to thought. Kant identified certain categories such as, time, space and being that all sensations were necessarily ordered into.

Other aspects of ordering are done more consciously using thought and reason. Every way in which we order reality has implied within it certain other necessary orderings. For instance, let’s say that we perceive a certain sequence of sensations – a shape, that is furry, has four legs and two eyes and barks and we put these sensations together into a dog. To remain consistent seeing this mental object as a dog means that by necessity the same object cannot also be a cat. In order to be consistent something being a dog makes it impossible for it to also be a cat. Within all of our conceptual categories there are uncountable numbers of implied laws that order and structure the rest of reality.

To put it another way, Kant understood human reason to be a constantly integrative process. As human beings are bombarded with a barrage of varied and incoherent sensations. These sensations are instantaneously filtered, ordered and congealed into a coherent picture of reality. This picture of reality, what Kant called a necessary transcendental unity, is the contextual background of all of our experience. The demand that this contextual background remain coherent from moment to moment places a constant demand on the way we order our perceptions.

Kant went beyond this more mechanical understanding of how reality is constructed by the mind by recognizing that by seeing objects in certain ways we were also committing to them being that way. In other words, if we see the object as a dog, we are committing ourselves to acting as if it is a dog. If it is a dog then we don’t go up and start talking to it and expecting it to answer back in human language. The laws of necessity are not only rules for how we must perceive things. They are also laws governing how we must act in relationship to things. When we see things a certain way we are committing ourselves to acting as if that is the way they are and we are responsible for acting in accordance with the way we see things.

It is a small leap from Kant here to William James’ conception of “The Will to Believe” in which he sees that what we choose to believe in fundamentally orients our perception of reality and as a result the way we act in the world. Truth in James’ brand of Pragmatism was created by our actions and our actions were determined by what we chose to believe.

Of all the American Pragmatists, however, it was Charles Sanders Peirce who was following on most directly from Kant. He held an integrated view of reality in which he simultaneously acknowledged the existence of different modes of being while insisting that all were equally real. His three modes of being were a rethinking of Kant’s fundamental categories.

Peirce claimed that reality was comprised of three modes of being that he called “Firstness,” “Secondness” and “Thirdness.” These were his three catagories. Firstness is the quality or character of things. It is “redness” or “hardness” or “coldness.” Secondness is the brute actuality of things. It is the event of experiencing the quality of something. Thirdness is the laws and habits that allow us to create a mental understanding of reality by relating things and qualities. In this we hear echos of Kant’s unknowable thing in itself, firstness, his concept of sensations, Secondness, and his transendental unity, Thirdness.

To Peirce, Thirdness was not a view of some external reality; it was an actual part of reality itself. Peirce did not see ideas as simply mirrors of the “real world;” they were as real as anything else. To appreciate the metaphysics of the Pragmatists, this point is critical and it has also become central to all forms of Evolutionary Spirituality that we find in the popular literature today.

It was in this third domain of reality that Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy was rooted because he saw our growth in knowledge about the universe as part of the growth of the universe itself. In Peirce’s understanding, the fate of the universe was in human hands because it would ultimately be determined by what Peirce imagined as an “unlimited community” of investigators. These investigators, through their shared inquiry into the nature of reality, would slowly converge toward a final agreement about what was ultimately true, and that truth would define the concluding state of the universe.

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Kant and the Creation of Reality

November 1, 2009 · 12 Comments

The American Philosophers from the Transcendentalists to the Pragmatists were all following in the footsteps of the great German Idealist Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). This isn’t too surprising because all of Western Philosophy follows in the footsteps of Kant. In 1781 Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason and rocked the world of philosophy. What Kant articulated and what later generations of philosophers picked up on was that reality as we perceive it is not purely objective – it is at least partly subjective.

It is easy to believe that reality as we see it is a reflection of reality as it actually is. In other words we tend to assume that the perceptual function that the mind plays is passive, like a mirror, and doesn’t alter the image of reality that it reflects to us. Not so, said Kant. Our perception of reality might start with sensations of something outside of ourselves, but by the time we perceive it our mind has organized, categorized and arranged those raw sensations into reality as it appears to us.

We can’t know reality directly. We don’t perceive of things in themselves. What we perceive as reality is in part created by our minds. And this creation of reality isn’t only the unconscious work of the mind as a machine, as some before Kant had believed, the creative process that constructs reality as we see it is also influenced by us. Of all of the infinite sensations, physical, emotional and conceptual that we experience at any given time we are only aware of a small percentage. The rest we ignore, but those that we attend to are compiled into reality as we see it.

One of the things that influences what we attend to and therefore what we see is our purpose at any given moment. If we are late for a train we will notice the sound of a clock ticking and use it to find the clock that we need to look at, while at other times when our purposes do not involve time we might not notice the sound of the clock at all.

In addition the picture  of reality that we construct has to be consistent with reality as we have known it in the past. All of the incoming information that we get from our senses has to be ordered not to conflict with the past. We constantly must create a necessary unity between the present moment and the  past.

What Kant did for Western Philosophy was make human beings part of the creative process of reality as we see it. In this he dealt a blow to both religion and science. To religion he insisted that we can’t perceive of God directly because our perception of God will also be partly of our own construction. To science likewise he takes away the ruse of objectivity because everything we observe will always be influenced by us.

This profound connection between human perception and the creation of reality set the stage for the rest of Western Philosophy and more recently for the pursuit of Evolutionary Spirituality. The American Pragmatists were building on Kant’s insight when they connected truth to human activity. In their view, not only was our perception of reality partly a product of our own influence, but truth itself was partly created by our own actions. Ideas became true when they were acted on. Reality was created as we lived it out. Charles Sanders Peirce – yes finally back to Peirce – in his early writings was very directly trying to rearticulate Kant’s work.

What Kant did for us was redefine reality. Where we at one time had a fixed stage that we observed passively from a seat in the audience, we now had a cooperative process of creation right in the middle of the production. This insight opened doors that philosophers have been walking though ever since and I intend to walk through a few myself.

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The Purpose of Philosophy and Science

October 31, 2009 · 2 Comments

The existence of God, the nature of freewill – we just seem to keep running into some of the same BIG questions that have orbited around Western philosophy for centuries. I thought it might be a good moment to step back again and consider the best way forward.

Carl in a comment on my post called Cosmic Evolution evoked the use of Ockham’s Razor to explain why he believed that we shouldn’t add any teleology to the picture of evolution. William of Ockham was a monk in the Middle Ages who is credited with the notion that we should always prefer explanations that have the least number of assumptions. The notion of Ockham’s Razor has been used in science and is certainly a good principle to follow. At the same time it isn’t always the case.

 The way that Ockham’s Razor is used in relation to evolution is by saying that chance variations that occur in individuals and the natural selection that occurs through survival advantages can account for the movement of evolution. Since those principles are enough to explain evolution, we shouldn’t add any type of purpose or direction to the explanation. This is certainly a worthy application of Ockham’s Razor, but it doesn’t prove that there is no deeper directionality also at work in evolution.

Our understanding of evolution isn’t at a point where we could either disprove or prove the existence of a directional force in the universe’s evolution. The best counter argument to the above comes from the so-called Anthropic Principle. If we assume that there is nothing but chance variation and survival to account for evolution then we are saying that the universe as we see it has come about randomly.

The Anthropic Principle states that the conditions of the universe necessary for a life form like ours to have evolved are so exact and so complex that the odds of this universe having evolved are virtually infinity to one against. With odds such as that it seems impossible to rule out at least the possibility of some guiding principle at work in tandem with chance variation and natural selection. The Anthropic Principle certainly doesn’t prove the existence of such purpose – as some of its more religious minded adherents would like to think – but at least in my mind it does leave open the possibility.

Similarly on the individual level as Carl has also pointed out Behaviorism can explain the development of human behavior on the basis of reinforcement and conditioning. Again as powerful an explanation as this is, it isn’t proof that there is nothing else at work.

What I find interesting is why do we as individuals choose to tend to lean toward one side or the other in these debates. William James believed that in the end it was a matter of temperament. He claimed that any person tends to be either hard-minded or tender-minded. The hard-minded find solace in facts and determined causes. The tender-minded find solace in more mystical notions of purpose and intent. In the end James believed that how we saw things had more to do with our character than any objective account of reality.

I believe there is something to this, but I would add a related notion which has to do with the purposes we are invested in. If our purposes are more scientific (and I mean this in a very broad sense) then we are motivated to try to find the objective truth. That is the truth that most accurately and unbiased reflects observable facts. If our purposes are more philosophical (again in a very broad sense), I believe that we are (or should be) motivated to create a picture of reality that creates the optimal navigation system for human development at all levels. I suppose that already shows my bias, but I think it is something worth considering. Are the aims of philosophy and science the same or different?

Carl also said in his comment that he felt that we can build a morality based on humanistic values. I am not so sure about that. I think that ultimately our moral sense is directly related to our most fundamental conception of the nature of reality. That is why I believe that the reality of evolution provides a potential platform upon which to rethink our moral basis. The Western World has moved largely outside of the influence of the great religious traditions and so far a humanistic morality has not emerged that seems compelling enough to guide us. Maybe evolution will be the basis for a new morality.

I had a thought the other day that I wanted to use my next few blog posts to run through a thought experiment trying to experience the development of the Western Mind from the fall of Rome to modern times. Could be interesting…

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Evolutionary Enlightenment and American Philosophy

October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment

Before continuing with our fascinating discussion I wanted, in the interest of transparency, to tell a little more about my interest in American Philosophy.

The last decades of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in progressive and evolution thinking in both academic as well as popular philosophy. The author Louis Menand in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club attributes this resurgence of progressive, forward-looking thought to the ending of the cold war and links it back to the classic American philosophy of . Today this line of thinking can be found in the increasingly popular literature of Evolutionary Spirituality. Some of the most prominent contemporary proponents of this philosophy are the recently deceased Pragmatismbut enormously influential Fr. Thomas Berry, the cosmologist Brian Swimme, the futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, the author Ken Wilber and my own spiritual mentor Andrew Cohen.

I first encountered Andrew Cohen in November of 1992 when I saw him speak in Cambridge,Massachusetts. At the time he was teaching a somewhat westernized version of an Eastern Enlightenment tradition called Advaita Vedanta. I left his talk intrigued, but honestly feeling that I had not understood anything of what he was saying. I was inspired enough, however, to pick up a copy of his book Enlightenment is Secret and my imagination was soon captivated by the message that I was reading in it. As I understood it, Cohen’s message was devastatingly simple and profound; if you truly want to be free there is nothing in this world that can stop you! What Cohen was pointing to was the deep sense that most of us have of being victimized by the experience of life. We feel burdened by our emotional and psychological experience and often see our ability to make choices as being severely limited by circumstances, social roles and responsibilities, and our personal inadequacies. This sense of limitation, according to Cohen, was an illusion. It was, in fact, a stance, a position that we were freely choosing to adopt in relationship to the complexity of human life. And because it was a position that we were choosing to take, we could just as easily stop choosing it. That was the mysterious key to liberating the human spirit. I didn’t know it at the time, but this notion revolved around one of the central themes that had developed through the history of American Philosophy; the question of freewill and creative potential.

After reading and rereading Cohen’s book I finally had the chance to see him speak again. This time I was determined to walk away with at least some understanding of what he was saying so I resolved to ask him a question about what I was thinking. “I believe what you are writing and speaking about is true.” I stated, “But, where do I find the faith to follow that path and know that everything is going to turn out OK?” I asked. His answer was as devastating simple and direct as his teaching. “Who says everything is going to turn out OK?” he questioned in response and then continued. “If you knew that everything was going to turn out OK you wouldn’t need any faith.” He went on to speak about the nature of risk and human life, but I had already gotten the answer to my question and although it wasn’t necessarily the answer that I had wanted it was the answer that I was looking for. Again, I had no way of knowing it, but my question about faith and Cohen’s implied instance that human life was a risk was also a central theme in American Philosophy. It was, in fact, the central question that propelled the entire career of America’s great psychologist philosopher William James.

In the year’s since my early encounter with Andrew Cohen his teaching has grown and developed enormously. What began as a plea for personal liberation became increasingly couched in an evolutionary philosophy that always considered the liberation of the individual in the context of their power to affect the development of our world. Again this line of thought is in many ways the central organizing notion that unifies the great tradition of American Philosophy. Over the past few years I have read and studied some of the historical development of American thought and have been continually strengthened to learn that the teaching that Andrew Cohen calls Evolutionary Enlightenment is very directly connected to the development of philosophy in America.

Two of the main roots of American Philosophy rushed into this nation during the period of colonization from two streams of thinking that had burst into being during the age of reason. One of these came directly from the scientific revolution of the European Enlightenment that was painting a picture of a world governed not by god, but by natural law. At the same time the Protestant Reformation was removing power from a church that it saw as an unnecessary obstacle to and direct access to the divine. These two lines of thought found their way into the American mind where they were shaped by the utopian ideals and challenges of colonization. The American mind began to take shape in the decades during and after the war for independence and finally came into its own during the cultural and spiritual movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists of Concord. The next generation of thinkers were the first American professional philosophers and they created the greatest original American contribution to world philosophy; Pragmatism.

Pragmatism was an evolutionary philosophy that flourished during the early decades of the 20th century as modernism peaked in American culture. After the great depression and two world wars the progressive spirit of modernisms was called into question by many and Pragmatism and the progressive spirit from which it came was temporarily submerged beneath the post-modernist philosophies  and social movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The resurgence of interest in Evolutionary Spirituality today is perhaps a second look at the evolutionary thinking at the heart of American philosophy and a chance to recreate Pragmatism in light of the many lessons learned through the 20th Century.

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Cosmic Evolution

October 19, 2009 · 22 Comments

I have been thinking about something that came up in the discussion around my last post. It was something that Carl had said early on when he remarked about how a large part of the American population doesn’t believe in evolution and then wondered how they could possibly ever be interested in anything like evolutionary spirituality. Good question? In fact when I spoke about evolutionary philosophy in America last week in Philadelphia someone there asked exactly the same question.

This question is a good reintroduction to what I have wanted to get us engaged in speaking about. It has to do with the way that we think about evolution. I think that what is commonly called the evolution debate is too narrowly limited to a view of evolution that was popularly created during the early part of the 20th century. It was during that time that the debate about evolution heated up, reaching a pinnacle with the famed Scopes Monkey Trial of 1926. This court case was instigated by the American Civil liberties Union to challenge a Tennessee law that made it illegal to teach in public schools anything besides Divine Creation as the ultimate origin of humanity.  

It was the trial of the century with so many people coming to watch the deliberations that they eventually moved the trial proceedings outside. The case ended with the Tennessee law upheld, which was expected from the start, but the move to go to trial did achieve its main goal which was to take the evolution debate to a national stage. The result of this heated national debate was a deepening polarization between religion and science. Christian fundamentalism tightened its grip on a literal interpretation of the Bible and science wrapped its arms around a deterministic interpretation of evolution that increasingly denied the possibility of God.

Along the way the evolution debate was set in terms that are still with us today. The language of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” reduced the essential question at hand to “Did men evolve from apes?” The view of evolution that was on trial, at least in the public’s eye, was limited to the evolution of species on Earth and most specifically, the evolution of human beings from primates. I think in many ways the debate in the public mind often remains limited to this interpretation, which I think is too narrow a definition of evolution to encapsulate the reality of cosmic evolution.

Another typical sentiment that was expressed during the time of the Scopes trial was, “Do you really think that your great, great, great grandmother was a gorilla?” Nobody would think that. The time frame through which one species might turn into another is larger than the human mind can truly hold. The way this question is framed makes it sound like an ape at some time in the past gave birth to a human-like baby. If that is the framework in which you are considering evolution, it is no wonder you would not believe it!

There seems to be a huge emotional challenge for human beings to see themselves as human beings having evolved from other species, but we don’t seem to have any difficulty imaging a tree growing from an acorn, or an adult human growing from a baby – and these transformations are equally awesome and impossible to fully understand.

Perhaps it is more useful not to think about humans evolving from apes, but simply to think of humans having evolved from the universe. We are like a leaf on a tree. The leaf didn’t come from the branch, it came from the acorn. What ever coding lies within the acorn that allows it to grow into a tree includes coding that allows for the gradual unfolding of all of the parts of the tree. One part of the tree doesn’t grow from another; all the parts grow as part of the same unfolding process over time. My consideration of evolution is not scientific (although I am familiar with some of the science of evolution) it is philosophical. I think that when we consider evolutionary philosophy it is valid to leave all that we know about evolution from religion and from science temporarily aside and look anew at how the universe seems to work. The universe grows, and that fact alone is worth contemplating deeply before we get to the more complex questions of how does it grow? is that growth guided or not? and ultimately who or what is guiding it?

There have always been religious people, and specifically Christians, who have embraced the reality of evolution and saw no need for conflict with their faith. And there are also scientists who don’t see their belief in evolution as an obstacle to their faith in God. I think that the way the evolution debate is most popularly framed might be part of what causes what sometimes appears to be an unbridgeable divide between science and religion.

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Our Evolutionary Crisis

October 3, 2009 · 18 Comments

I certainly want to continue with our discussion and I want to explore the profound ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce further, but first I wanted to say a few words in general that I have been thinking about. As some of you may know I have been a student of a spiritual teacher named Andrew Cohen and his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment for the past 16 years. During that time I have become very close to Andrew and have become in a sense a teacher myself. I am not writing this blog to attract people to Evolutionary Enlightenment (although I am happy if they find it.) I am writing this blog because I feel that life on this planet is in the midst of an evolutionary crisis. This blog is my attempt to explain what I think I have learned about our evolutionary crisis and the way to get beyond it.

The evolutionary crisis that we face stems from the fact that the circumstance of the world we live in are changing faster than we are. The pace of evolution is increasing beyond the current ability of human beings to change in response. As a result, we find ourselves unable to effectively meet global and even personal challenges. I know I often feel like I am still working on yesterday’s problems only to realize that today’s are already upon me. We simply find ourselves unable to adapt quickly enough to changing circumstances.

I believe that the solution to this is a shift in consciousness and by that I mean a fundamental change in how we understand ourselves and the universe we are a part of. That shift, as I understand it, has two stages – that don’t necessarily come in a particular order. The first is a shift that is characterized by unity. This is a shift from seeing a universe made of separate objects of which we are one, to seeing a universe that is one whole which includes separate parts; more like an organic system. The embrace of a higher unity that includes the separate parts has long been explored in different ways by most of the great spiritual traditions and the worlds philosophies and the sciences.

The second stage of the shift involves the evolutionary awakening to the fact that we and the universe we live in are not static. We are changing and evolving constantly. The evolving nature of who we are has not been explored by humanity as deeply or for as long as the exploration of our fundamental unity. In fact it has only been over the past few hundred years that this investigation has really taken shape in the west. And it is only since the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection that we can really say that the modern investigation of evolution has begun. I personally feel that this investigation of what it means to shift from a mainly separate and static relationship to life, to an essentially whole and evolving one is the key to the future. That is why I am writing this blog and why I appreciate so much those of you that join me either by reading or, even better, by contributing your own thoughts and insights. I appreciate having the opportunity to be challenged and to learn from you as I hope you do from me.

When I discovered a few years ago how much American Philosophy revolved around the question of, “How do we adapt to the new truth of evolution?” I nearly fell over. I couldn’t believe that well over a century of deep thinking had already gone into this investigation, just within the relatively limited circle of American Philosophy. As I have tried to study this philosophy it has become clear to me that there is a great deal more to learn. But in the end I think that learning is only as valuable as it helps us think clearly for ourselves. I am not a scholar, as most of you have undoubtedly already realized, but I am a firm believer in the power of philosophy and the human spirit. I don’t believe that we can change our world without changing the way we think, but I do believe that we can change our world if, in the midst of our Evolutionary Crisis, we find it within ourselves to change the way we think.

Thank you for participating in this journey with me.

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Evolutionary Duality and the Limits of Science

October 2, 2009 · 7 Comments

Next week I will be giving an afternoon lecture in Philadelphia about the relationship between philosophical inquiry and the challenges of our time, and the roots of Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment in Classic American Philosophy. (Find out more here.) In preparation for this I have been rereading some of the papers written by Charles Sanders Peirce and I think they have something to add to the contemplation we are in the middle of.

Charles Peirce was a brilliant mathematician and scientist. Peirce was educated at Harvard during the second half of the 19th century and worked a great deal of his life for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. In this position he did extremely significant scientific work including making the first attempt to determine the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy as determined by the relative brightness of stars. He also was the first to think to measure the length of a meter in wavelengths of light, the standard that is still used today. In addition he was the first American to represent the United States in an international conference on physics.

Besides being a scientific genius, Peirce was also a brilliant philosopher although he never held any official full time position in philosophy. He was a lifelong friend of William James and was enormously influential in the thinking of virtually all of the classic American Philosophers including John Dewey, Josiah Royce and George Herbert Mead. Peirce was also the originator of the philosophical conception behind the American philosophy of Pragmatism. In short he was a creative genius who is probably only a lesser known figure than some of his contemporaries because of having lived such a troubled life.

Through his work with the Coast Survey Peirce was very aware of the limits of science. He recognized that our understanding of the world was largely obtained through measurement sampling and generalization. In other words we take a few measurements – say depth to the bottom of the ocean – and from that sample we try to generalize a topographical map of the ocean floor. The larger our sample size is, the more accurate our map will be.

Peirce was aware that an understanding of the nature of the universe gleaned from the measurements that we are able to make from this one planet would most likely be grossly inaccurate. As an example, he felt that our belief in Euclidian space would someday be found untrue. It didn’t make sense to him that space would extend infinitely in three dimensions. He felt that space must curve so that the universe would ultimately be bounded and not infinite in extension. Because of this he was sure that if we could measure a triangle that was large enough we would find that it’s angles would measure either less than or more than 180 degrees, depending on whether the curve of space was concave or convex. He knew that the largest triangles that had been measured in his time were those whose points were formed by the Earth and two distant stars and he believed that we were not yet able to measure accurately enough to see the deviation from 180 degrees.

Analogously he believed that the idea that the process of evolution was governed by “natural laws” was also erroneous. His work was done in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species and he certainly believed in the power of Natural Selection to guide the evolution of species. But when it came to the universe itself he felt that there could not be natural laws that govern the whole process because the natural laws would have evolved as part of the process.  For Peirce thinking that the universe evolved due to natural laws represented a kind of evolutionary duality. It is easy to think that the laws of time and space and energy etc. exist and govern a process of evolution that occurs within those laws. Peirce was asserting that those laws evolved within the universe and therefore could not have governed their own evolution.

Peirce attempted to create the foundation for an evolutionary philosophy that could be used to describe our evolving universe. He believed that there were three characteristics that must exist for evolution to take place, chance, continuity and habit. Chance means the possibility for novelty, somehow something new must be able to come into existence. Continuity means that things that come into existence must have the ability to remain in existence. And habit means that when something comes into existence it becomes more likely to happen again and the more it happens the more likely it is to happen more times until it becomes a permanent fixture in the universe.

Peirce believed that this evolutionary thinking could produce a completely different philosophical description of reality, but that it would take centuries to work out. Many of his ideas have been dated by the advancement of science, but I do think he was essentially correct. Charles Sanders Peirce was a profound intellect and a true evolutionary and integral thinker.

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A Brief Stop at the Human Intersection

September 22, 2009 · 26 Comments

If you think about the Universe as a vast unknown then you can think about human knowledge and understanding about the universe as the “human intersection with the universe.” Our knowledge about, and understanding of, the universe is exactly where we as conscious beings intersect with the universe. Many of the fundamental polarities that have confounded humanity for all time revolve directly around how we perceive this human intersection. On the one hand you could see human knowledge about the universe as a tiny intersection, a tiny speck of known in a vast perhaps infinite sea of unknown. On the other hand you might imagine that human knowledge was almost at the point of fully encompassing reality. In this case you would sense that human understanding was perched on the precipice, right on the brink, of understanding everything.

Romantic thinkers (like myself) tend towards the former while more empirical thinkers generally tend, perhaps ever so slightly, in the other direction.  Scientists can be either Romantic or Empirical. Catherine, our commentor who is also a respected physicist in France, will tell you that European scientists tend to be of the more Romantic variety, pursuing knowledge for its own sake, while American scientist tend to be driven more by utility and direct application. I suppose this can be argued, but there is probably some truth in the generalization.

If we imagine back to a time before the human capacity for reason was very developed there would have been no way to imagine that there might be more to reality than what you could see, hear and touch. And there would be so many things that you could not understand. If lightening struck the ground next to you, you might assume that someone must have thrown it at you from the clouds. And that someone must be much more powerful than you and so it must have been a god.

With The Enlightenment human reason began to find new ways to understand the workings of the universe. Imagine the shift that must have occurred in human consciousness with the advent of the first scientific instruments that allowed us to perceive more of the universe than ever before. The telescope showed us a universe much vaster than we had ever realized and the microscope introduced new universes of the very tiny, and sailing ships took us to a “new world” that existed right here on this world. The sense of wonder and awe must have been overwhelming. Suddenly it was clear that there was much more to the universe than we had ever been able to imagine. At the same time there was also an awe emerging from the fact that at precisely the moment when humanity was begining to see that there was a great deal more to the universe than it had imagined, it also saw that the universe appeared to be running according to universal laws. There was unity in the universe. There weren’t gods in clouds throwing things down on us. There was electricity that we could observe as the static electricity that pops when we touch metal after scrapping our shoes on a carpet, or as the lightening that falls from the sky. In both cases the laws that govern its activity were the same. In short, the universe might be bigger than we could ever image, but we could, given enough time, figure it all out.

And so human understanding has progressed and I propose that one of the fundamental polarities in the way different people see the world lies in whether their leaning is toward the awe that comes from how huge and unknown the universe is on one hand, or the possibility of understanding all of it on the other.

Romantic thinkers tend to be obsessed with the unknown. Imagine arriving on a completely alien planet and being sent out to explore the area around your spaceship. The twist is that you are wearing blindfolds that only allow you to see through drinking straw, you have cotton stuffed in your ears and you are wearing boxing gloves. You walk around for hours examining the world with your impaired senses and come back to make a full report. How closely would your report reflect the reality that you would perceive if you were to remove the blindfolds, the cotton and the gloves, and then repeat the exploration? We know that our eyes only see a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. What if our total ability to perceive was ten times more impaired than the spaceman wearing boxing gloves? 100 times? 1000 times? etc.

Because they are so enamored by the vastness of the unknown, Romantics are less interested in knowing more about what they can already perceive and more interested in expanding the doors of perception further. They don’t experiment on the world; they experiment on themselves – sometimes living dangerously close to the brink of self destruction. They use emotion, intuition, art and altered states of consciousness to take themselves beyond the barrier of the known into the uncharted territories afforded by new perceptions. They gave us the image of the lone scientist sleeplessly pursuing a new discovery and the tortured artist on the unending quest for novelty. They were creative souls extraordinaire.

I would disagree that Romanticism represents some earlier stage of development that we have gone beyond. I think that Romanticism is one end of the polarity between the known and the unknown. That polarity creates a tension that drives human creativity through all stages of development as we explore the universal crossroads of the human intersection.

→ 26 CommentsCategories: Freewill and Human Choice and Conscious Evolution
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Test Drive a Worldview

September 16, 2009 · 7 Comments

To respond to Andy, I knew that I was getting myself into some trouble by oversimplifying and over-generalizing philosophy and breaking it down into metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. I was lumping things, like logic into epistemology and aesthetics into ethics (which I probably would have been better off calling values theory.) I also regret using the phrase “complete” to describe a philosophical system when in fact “closed” would have better conveyed what I meant.

The point that I was making still intrigues me and it has to do with the nature of what a worldview is. In my last post I argued that if a philosophy dictates “what is real,” “how you determine what is real,” and “how you value what is real,” then it is a closed system. Internally it will be completely consistent, and as long as you “believe” in these three pillars everything (to lift a phrase from Carl) on the inside will look like non-fiction (ie. true) and everything on the outside will look like fiction (ie. not true.)

A worldview is not only a set of ideas or beliefs about the world; it is a complete psycho-emotional mental filter of the world. It is a 360 panoramic view of the real. Your worldview dictates how you think about the world, how you feel about the world and how you respond to the world. It envelops us so that the world from inside what worldview looks and feels completely different than the world seen from inside another.

As I study philosophy I like to try to get inside – to the extent possible – different worldviews and drink them up, appreciating each on its own merit before comparing them one to another. If I read enough and think enough there seems to be a point where I get a glimpse of the world from inside that worldview.

Recently, I have been reading the romantic poets, philosophers and scientists and sometimes I really seem to get a sense of the world they were looking at. It was a world of open and unlimited possibility in which strangely marvelous and unseen natural forces were guiding the movement of life. These natural invisible movements were continuously revealing themselves and there was a sense of awe and wonder at the marvel of life and reality. The Romantic mind has an aversion to too much control over the forces of nature. They prefer a kind of philosophical/spiritual/emotional aikido. They attempt to feel the underlying currents of life and match them in speed and intensity and allow the power of those deeper forces to move them so that they become an instrument of life.

It was this romantic spirit that was so alive in the work of the American Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the other brilliant lights of Concord and New England were blazing Romantic spirits. And look at the wondrous result! Almost all of American culture can be traced to some aspect of their genius. There are four houses on two streets in Concord in which a huge amount of greater American literature was created. We might look at them through a modern lens and find much of their thinking lacking. The question remains if we will be as influential on our future as they have proved to be on theirs.

Rare Personal Aside: I was married this past weekend in the Hillside Chapel that in the late 1800’s housed The Concord School of Philosophy. That school, which ran for 10 consecutive summers, was a gathering place of great minds from across America. My wife (Amy) and I gave a brief talk to all who gathered expressing some of the ways in which we have both been inspired by their romantic pioneering spirit. And so I am thinking a great deal about these romantic thinkers and the world they lived in.

→ 7 CommentsCategories: Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Awakening of the American Mind
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