In All Humility, Is There a Higher Self?

Schuon makes a fundamental distinction between reason and intellect, the latter transcending but including the former. I took this idea on board many years ago, even before I was exposed to Schuon, as it's a prominent feature of various eastern religions. 

For example, in the model of Sri Aurobindo's metapsychology to the right (click to embiggen), we see a higher self at the center (in three dimensions it would be at the top), and an "inner being" in the "field of ego-desire" which itself can be higher or lower.

Now, I don't pretend to understand all the distinctions in the model, nor is the model the reality anyway. As I said, I long ago accepted the idea of a higher and lower self, and yet, I've never pondered the ontological status of this higher self, nor even wondered if I'm being literal.

After all, from the Christian perspective, the soul is immaterial and therefore both undivided and indivisible. We can talk about "parts," even though parts are specifically what an immaterial entity cannot have.

It does, however, have specific powers we can enumerate, from appetite to sensation to abstraction, but they're all features of the same package. These features are at once hierarchical but interconnected, which implies a kind of complementarity between continuity and discontinuity: for example, we can recognize our power to abstract form from matter, even if it is never present without a body, with its senes and appetites.

Angels have intellect without body.

True, but even you mast have something analogous to a body, otherwise you'd be as diffusely omnipresent as God. But we'll leave that discussion for another day.

Here's something I find problematic with the ego/intellect distinction: it is an invitation to pride, in that I can say, for example, that the Cosmic Skeptic (Alex O'Connor) is only an atheist because he's operating out of his lower ego, whereas I can see much further and deeper because of my supposedly higher intellect. It is not only condescending but sounds like a kind of special pleading. 

However, Schuon would be the first to say that the intellect is inseparable from the virtues, such that a "proud intellect" would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, it is the lower ego that is filled with narrow-minded pride -- for which reason, in terms of yesterday's post, it takes the limits of its vision for the limits of the world.

We'll try to sort out these questions as we proceed, but I'd first like to lay out Schuon's vision, mostly from his book Stations of Wisdom, and in particular from an essay called Orthodoxy and Intellectuality that cuts to the heart of the matter.

In the preface, he discusses our contemporary scission between faith and science, attributing this to a loss of the sapiential dimension. Deprived of the latter, we are "bound in the the end to turn against it, though 'from below' and on a purely rational, material level." This is similar to what we said yesterday about the power of reason closing in upon itself -- or, in neurological terms, right brain capture by the left.

For Schuon, this results in an "intellectual worldliness" and a "weakening of contemplative intelligence and religious instinct." But as we said yesterday, the latter instinct is actually as active and annoying as ever, only in the form of political religions -- or even the "secular religion" of atheism (to the extent that it presumes to make any apodictic claims about ultimate reality).

Schuon even describes the venerable Way of the Raccoon:

To be able to combine the religious symbolism of Heaven with the astronomical fact of the stellar galaxies in a single consciousness, an intelligence is needed which is more than just rational...

Not irrational, of course, but somehow transrational. We won't yet say how we do it, only that we do it -- or try to at any rate -- for what it's worth.

Conversely, skepticism -- and we're alluding to the Cosmic Skeptic -- "is a breach through which" the "spirit of doubt and of denial of the supernatural is made welcome." Like a fall, or something. But as a consequence,

most men are incapable of grasping a priori the compatibility between the symbolic expressions of tradition and the material discoveries established by science.

Such a man -- even man as such -- wants and deserves an explanation, but the ego

wants this "why" to be as external and as easy as that of "scientific" phenomena; in other words he wants answers on the level of his own experiences; and since these are purely material, his consciousness is closed in advance to all that goes beyond them. 

Boom. This "is to shut oneself off from the truth," "merely for reasons of dialectic." Or in other words, one's method determines what one perceives. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute? 

Well, one must first appreciate the metaphysical fact that the Absolute is what cannot not be, and that any truth we utter necessarily partakes of it. Conversely, "man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational."

In short, nothing could be more irrational than a reason enclosed in rationalism. Again, reason has its limits, so an "unlimited reason" is a contradiction of terms, an absurdity even. 

Here we could bring in Gödel's Hammer, but you get the point. In such a totalitarian rationalism, "an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality." 

"The modern mind 'moves on the surface'"; "living on husks," it "no longer knows what fruit is like." The consequence is a "false lucidity" that only replaces the old sentimentalities with new ones, i.e., with novel passions, intoxications, and projected ideological mirages.

Should we continue, or is that enough for one post?

A little more. We're not quite sick of you yet.

Okay. Schuon begins and ends with those immutable principles "which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence," one of which is the Absolute referenced above. I would say that this Absolute bifurcates herebelow into subject and object, or intelligence and intelligibility, but that's just my opinion. 

Now, "logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything." 

Which checks out: no matter how stupid or evil the doctrine, there is a philosopher somewhere who thinks he can prove it. Schuon calls these tenured absurdities "esoterisms of stupidity," and says that when worldly intelligence 

joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.

That's some fine insultainment, but the deeper point is that 

when man has no "visionary" -- as opposed to discursive -- knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of "seeing" with the "heart," all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts with an initial blindness.

So, where should we start? Perhaps this is a good place to press the pause button.