Prolegomena to Metaphysics

I have debated about how personal to become in sharing my own deepest spiritual beliefs. Ulimately, however, to be honest with this blogging process it is important that you, dear reader, know the core of where my perspectives originate - what is the the central fountainhead of the pieces you see here. Before I do that, however, I have to provide some context.

The title of this blog - Prolegomena to Metaphysics - is an homage to Immanual Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics". This work was a distillation of the conclusions of his most famous work "Critique of Pure Reason" written to gain wider readership of the main work. A prolegomena is short essay that precedes and explains the more substantive work.

The Great Traditions

Two great traditions have struggled with the issue of the nature of reality.

The ancient Greeks had the leisure to invent philosophy. In a span of less than 50 years, the fundamental substance that would form the core of the Western debates for next 2200 years was said. Aristotle and Aristocles (better known as Plato) defined the parameters of Western thought and indeed, some would argue, that all of Western intellectual history has been a footnote to these two intellectual giants. The significantly different perspectives of these two greats have been debated in different forms until the very recent past.

Scholars agree that Aristotle, that premier taxonomist, got it about right when he divided philosophy into four areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics. Respectively, these ask: What is the nature of reality? How do we know truth? What is the good? What is the beautiful? Every other philosophical question seems to lie in one of these four areas. To oversimplify a bit, but not much, the west has attempted to understand these realities by looking primarily at the outer world through the lens of reason.

While a simplification, Indian philosophy created six systems (darshanas) which seek to map human knowledge: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta. Each of these schools addresses questions recognizable as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. To again oversimplify, the East attempted to answer these questions by looking primarily within through the lens of observation.

These questions - What is reality? How do we know the truth? What is the good? What is beautiful? - are the central questions of human existence. The West and East agree on this much. To ask these questions is what make us human – we are reflectively self-conscious.

In the area of metaphysics a number of issues emanated from the central question – what is reality – and these issues recur in Eastern and Western philosophy are the same. Mind and Matter, God and No God, Unity and Multiplicity, Identity and Change, Reality and Illusion, Will and Fate, Causation, and so on.

And both traditions spent thousands of years rehashing the same discussion, endlessly exploring nuance. In the West, reason refined the argument to the point where metaphysics died with Immanuel Kant. Kant who conclusively proved the limits of pure reason in determining the nature of reality as it was then understood. The East was less decisive. As people observed, they drifted into an endless array of sects and practices limited only by human experience with no rational metric to determine whether these beliefs bore relation to objective reality.

The Revolution in Human Perspective

And then a remarkable thing happened, again within the course of 50 years. In 1905, in his spare time over several months, Albert Einstein wrote four articles that fundamentally changed the course of human thought. During that same period, observations of very small particles lead to very strange conclusions about the very fabric of the nature of reality itself. Unfortunately, the two views were at odds with one another. Because these views fundamentally shifted the way the world is viewed for the first time since the ancient Greeks started thinking on these things, the implications of these theories on the nature of reality began to work their way through the world of philosophy in the West. Because these ideas had resonance with mystical insights form the East, the East began a process of grounding its philosophy in outward reality. These developments forced both traditions to question assumptions and recast their world view from more or less common ground. In other words, integration became possible and an integral world view based on multiple traditions could begin to emerge.

While many writers and thinkers could be chosen to discuss the emergence of this new level of human consciousness, the writings of two have had a most profound impact on me personally. These two seem somehow "essential" in that they articulate the core of what this revolution is about.

A. Whitehead

In 1927/1928 a brilliant mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, delivered the Gifford lecture series in what was eventually collected in the book Process and Reality. This book is very tough sledding, made even more so by the fact that Whitehead never bothered to polish his lecture notes. The process cosmology elaborated in these lectures proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are in process as occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually processes. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping (or nexus) of many smaller occasions of experience. According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing while "body" is a lower order process. Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time’s directionality; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence future experiences. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it.

By application of his ideas, Whitehead is able to fundamentally reconcile a number of very difficult Western philosophical problems in unique and compelling ways. His solution – when stripped down, look profoundly Eastern – reality, as we perceive it, simply arises as processes – that being is a potential for becoming. Because of its density, this book has not seeped into popular conceptions, but it is the first and most profound attempt at a post-Kantian philosophic cosmology after Einstein. Whitehead essentially provides the intellectual freight needed to ground much of the intuitive insight expressed by the Continental existentialists and to a lesser extent the German Idealists, who were otherwise too easily dismissed by more rigorous approaches. It is not so easy to dismiss Whitehead.

B. Aurobindo

In India, between 1914 to 1949, a western educated Indian mystic and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, wrote a series of articles that would eventually be collected into book – “The Life Divine”. He realized that Einstein and the developments of evolutionary biology pointed the way to a reconciliation of Eastern and Western thought and that it was possible for human beings to perceive the world in way that brought reason and subjective experience together. In his book The Life Divine, he posited that humans represent a apex of evolution to date and that they are uniquely situated to lead a spiritual life. By this he meant that Matter and Spirit are met in human consciousness. He posited that the purpose of existence is to discover the latent spirit in all things and release infuse and elevate all of life by application of higher forms of human and transpersonal consciousness. The importance of Aurobindo cannot be overstated. His influence in Western thought has been far reaching through the seminal work of Allan Watts, Aldous Huxley, the Beat Movement. Indeed, the entire gestalt of the 1960’s (and New Consciousness thinking) was fundamentally shaped by his work. Whether people recognize the lineage or not, most progressive thinking in the Western world since then has been significantly influenced by his work.

Based on these two pillars of early 20th Century thought, as well as some sother ignficiant writers, I have begun to develop a personal metaphysics.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.