A World ≠ The World

No time for an all new post, but out of curiosity I scoured the hull of the arkive to find out what I wrote about For the Love of Wisdom the first time I read it back in 2007.

Think of what we do here as metaphysical mind jazz, i.e., spontaneous improvisations on certain chord changes. Yes, we repeat ourselves, but never the same way twice. I must have a dozen versions of Statesboro Blues by the Allman Brothers, and I love them all equally. Or at least that's what I tell them.

I'm not a bitter person, but I do still mildly resent that it took so long to deprogram my left wing brainwashing and soul-tainting to rearrive at where my philosophical endeavors should have started to begin with. All that wasted timelessness contemplating impossibilities and assimilating falsehoods!

So: what's it all about, Alfie? What in the world is the world?

Or, to put it another way, what kind of world is the world of man, and is it the same as the world? Ever since Kant, the grumpy answer has been: No! Our world -- the world we perceive -- is just a form of our sensibility, a kind of projection of our neurobiology. Therefore, it is not the world. Rather, the world -- whatever that is -- is radically inaccessible to man. (Which begs the question of how we can even posit it, but whatever.)

This question is addressed in an enjoyable book I'm currently reading, For Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy, by Josef Pieper. One of the themes Pieper develops is the idea that all other animals merely live in a world, whereas human beings are privileged to (potentially, at least) live in the world.

For example, people assume that all animals with eyes, when they look at an object, see the same thing, when this is demonstrably untrue.

Pieper cites the example of a certain bird that preys on grasshoppers but is incapable of seeing the grasshopper if it isn't moving. Only in leaping does the grasshopper become distinct from the background -- which is why many insects (and higher animals) "play dead."

In their resting form, it isn't so much that they are dead as literally invisible. It is as if they drop into a hole and no longer exist in the world of the predator. Even if the bird were starving, it could search and search, and yet, never find the unmoving grasshopper right under its beak.

What this means is that the animal cannot transcend its biological boundaries, even with an organ -- the eye -- seemingly equipped for just this task.

Pieper quotes the biologist Uexküll, who draws a distinction between the animal's environment and the actual world. As the latter writes, "The environments of animals are comparable in no way to open nature, but rather to a cramped, ill-furnished apartment."

Animals are confined to an environment to which they are adapted, and from which they can never escape. Most of the world is simply not perceived or even capable of being perceived. In fact, the world didn't come into view until human beings happened upon the scene. What a mess! To which the first human exclaimed: Not my fault! It was this way when I got here.

Given Darwinian principles -- which, by the way, we can only know about because we have transcended them -- how did mankind escape its own cramped apartment and open the door to an infinitely wider, deeper, and higher world?

Or did we? Are we as trapped in a narrow cross-section of reality as our tenured apes? If so, then neither science nor philosophy are possible. Like the bird looking for the immobile grasshopper, we couldn't locate reality despite the most diligent searching. Indeed, we wouldn't even know of the existence of the reality for which to search.

Pieper writes that the human spirit isn't so much defined by the property of immateriality as it is "by the ability to enter into relations with Being as a totality," in a way that transcends our mere animal-environmental boundaries.

Now, as Schuon always emphasizes, the intellect is not restricted to a particular environment. Rather, it is universal -- "relatively absolute" -- and therefore able to know the world. Similarly, as Pieper writes, "it belongs to the very nature of a spiritual being to rise above the environment and so transcend adaptation and confinement"; which in turn explains "the at once liberating and imperiling character with which the nature of spirit is immediately associated."

This is what we were driving at on p. 92 of the book:

Up to the threshold of the third singularity, biology was firmly in control of the hominids, and for most of evolution, mind (such as it was) existed to serve the needs of the primate body. Natural selection did not, and could not have, "programmed" us to know reality, only to survive in a narrow reality tunnel constructed within the dialectical space between the world and our evolved senses.

But then suddenly Darwin was cast aside and "mind crossed a boundary into a realm wholly its own, a multidimensional landscape unmappable by science and unexplainable by natural selection"; humans ventured out of biological necessity and "into a realm with a vastly greater degree of freedom, well beyond the confining prison walls of the senses."

Thus, natural selection is adequate to explain adaptation to an environment, but it cannot explain our discovery and comprehension of the world. As Aristotle recognized early on (which for him was actually well past bedtime), "the soul is in a way all existing things."

What does he mean by this? What he means is that the soul is able to put itself in relation to the totality of Being. While other animals have only their little slice of Being, the human is able to encounter Being as a whole.

Thus, to be in Spirit is "to exist amid reality as a whole, in the face of the totality of Being." Spirit encounters not a world, but the world. Or, to be precise, "spirit" and "world" are reciprocal concepts, the one being impossible in the absence of the other. Science itself is a spiritual world, or it is no world at all, only an environment. Usually an academic environment.

Bottom line: there is no naturalistic way to get from the restricted intelligence of animals to the open intelligence of humans.