We are nearing the home straight – ten chapters to go.
So, to recap, in case, in this deluge of words, you have lost your bearings (or your will to live) – haecceity, praise, love and creativity seem to me to be four ‘natural duties’ consequent of a study of how reality is. [Footnote: I am not claiming novelty here. With a bit of squinting and a willingness, like Spinoza, to blur any distinction between God and Nature, these duties could be characterized (or caricatured) as Christ’s ‘Love the Lord thy God’, and ‘Love thy neighbour’; Apollo’s ‘know thyself’; and Whitman’s ‘Make the work’.] They combine to form the STA perspective which:
– teaches attention – a close attention, but not the proprietorial care of the taxonomists – to reality and nature, and the delight to be found therein.
– teaches love so that there should be no enmity, animosity or grudges; that specific love for individuals can be fulfilling but that we should not place too much expectation on particular relationships (or bewail their absence) because our principal relationship is with the unconditional reality of the universe.
– teaches self-respect and respect for all other creatures because we all are plainly equals.
– enjoins creativity which is a great delight and fulfilment, even though society treats it as indulgent. It further reminds us that the essence of creativity is our relationship with the world and not ourselves.
– reconciles us with death, which is plainly part of nature, and not an aberration.
– relegates to near-meaninglessness all the social considerations that cause anxiety – acquiring possessions, impressing people, hierarchies of any kind, fashion, consumerism, work rivalry &c. This is all acculturated nonsense which need not trouble us.
This, then, is a start – some solid benefits accrued from looking at the sun in the fog and for once not ignoring or taking it for granted but working out what it means or, at least, what its significance may be in our lives. STA is, in part, ‘a stubborn attempt to think clearly’, as William James describes philosophy. It encourages us to meet each experience anew without the baggage of our upbringing, education, pre-conceptions; without, in fact, our laboriously constructed and maintained ‘personality’ (‘for the pattern is new in every moment’, as I shall not tire of repeating).
Most philosophies have a sense of direction. STA, by contrast, had no idea where it was going. It was not aiming for ‘a just and fair society’ or ‘the greatest happiness’ (whether individual or ‘of the greatest number’) or eudaimonia or ataraxia or, for that matter, heaven. All of these approaches seem to answer their own questions by stating their destinations and then proceeding thither, paying no more and no less attention to reality than will help them on their way. They may well be socially valuable, but are bound tightly to the presumptions of the cultures that produced them. What would a ‘just and fair society’ have meant to the Scythians? ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ to a slave-based civilization like Rome?
Ure aeghwylc sceal ende gebidan
worolde lifes. Wyrce se the mote
domes aer deathe
says the author of Beowulf. Each of us in this world must await the end of life; let him who can achieve glory before death. Such ambition underpinned his heroic society, but might sound repellent in India.
STA, determinedly pre-social, just looks at reality (supposing nature to be real) and tries to deduce from it an approach to life. It has no pre-programmed intentions. Perhaps I am deluding myself about my neutrality, but I am at least making the attempt rather than accepting the plainly fanciful presumptions of my society and tinkering with them. We begin with fact – the tree outside the window, the apples on the table – rather than an aspiration or a hypothesis. It is a resolutely ‘bottom up’ process because, after all, that is the way the universe is constructed.
But it is not the approach recommended by either religion or modern science. Einstein disdains my methodology: ‘It is quite wrong to try formulating a theory on observable magnitudes alone,’ he complains. ‘In reality, the opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.’ Anselm, eight hundred years earlier, concurs: ‘Credo ut intelligam’ (‘I believe so that I may understand’). ‘Start with the hypothesis and, if it’s the right hypothesis, all will become clear. Start without and you’ll get nowhere,’ they agree across the centuries. Much of this is just playing around with words. Einstein has not found his hypothesis ex nihilo – he is not, for example, whimsically seeking proof that the night sky is, in truth, a giant game of battleships played by beetles dancing atop their dung-balls. His hypothesis originates in all the things he has seen and read – those disprized ‘observable magnitudes’ – which suggested that such a theory might be worth formulating. Similarly, Anselm’s faith is based on his prior experience – he protests no faith in Shinto or Hinduism, for example. And as I have admitted, my strict eye is probably not quite so ‘objective’ as I would ideally wish; my impressions must be coloured by my time and place. But there is a genuine difference of emphasis. Determining the outcome before one begins can be a good, practical method for ‘project’ work but, since life is ‘process’ rather than ‘project’, it can also be delusive. In the Selective Attention Test (above Chapter 11) the viewers ignored the egregious gorilla precisely because they believed it was so important to count balls. Their hypothesis blinkered their view of reality.
Perhaps the brain’s initial instinct [Footnote: I originally wrote ‘default setting,’ so pervasive is the modern metaphor of the brain as a computer.] is hypothesis. Faced with, say, a concave mask it immediately assumes it is the more familiar shape of a convex face, jumping to the obvious (but wrong) conclusion like a plod in an Agatha Christie. But our close, unprejudiced observation tells a different story; it is when we dispense with the hypothesis that our ‘little grey cells’ reveal the truth.
It is tempting when trying to establish some sort of ‘philosophy’ to tie up all loose ends and claim comprehensiveness. But reality is full of loose ends.
O Altitudo!
which roughly translates as ‘What a lot of loose ends!’ Thought is an insufficient methodology. Our fullest relationship with the universe is through affinity, and so is less easily communicated by language – a tool developed to convey thought (and, under the microscope, as ragged as Hooke’s razor-blade).
STA is a perspective rather than a code, underlying rather than dictating actions, which are our own individual responsibilities. I am still unsure how to reconcile the doubtful business of killing other creatures with the need to eat them to stay alive. Nor do I know how exhaustively active one’s loving-kindness should be. STA has no competence to offer opinions about God or gods or heaven or nirvana. Whether, on its own, it seems sufficiently satisfying emotionally is a question you must decide for yourself (as, if not, you must decide whether the fault lies with STA’s inherent limitations or with your own expectations). But it is only a starting-point, not a destination. Its limitations are not ours. We can and do speculate.
C.R. Leslie, Sketch of S.T. Coleridge
It’s a well-established trope of religions and fairy-tales that the greatest benefits accrue to those who do not go out deliberately seeking their own advantage. (In Palestine, the Pharisees get their comeuppance from Jesus; in fairyland, the Ugly Sisters get theirs from Prince Charming. ‘The last shall be first, and the first last’ and Cinderella shall go to the ball.) Although my investigations have not been trained on locating happiness, it does appear as though they have stumbled upon something like it. What I seem to be claiming is that our primary duties in life are:-
- celebrating the world,
- making things,
- being truly ourselves and
- loving all our fellow creatures.
[Footnote: I think the only disputable claim from the ‘duties’ is that we must each fulfil our haecceity. It is not principally by logic but rather by dubious moral shaming that I disallow the lazy refusal to be oneself.] This is good news – it’s a dream job, well worth getting up for (unless you have a view like mine this morning, in which case it is well worth lying in bed for). It is a very different message from that which society tells us are our ‘duties’ – pay taxes, vote every few years (optional), and obey whatever the current laws may be – which are nothing more than admin; or its preoccupations – get a good job, get on the property ladder, buy things, keep abreast of political and cultural developments, and express your opinions thereon – none of which is outlawed by STA thinking, but which are at best secondary considerations. There is a thrilling insouciance in rejecting these trivial drudgeries, and concentrating instead on the very much more serious, hilarious and rewarding world of objective reality.
The shop-keeper asks Julie Christie why she’s been to Doncaster, and this glorious shrug is her reply. Ideally, of course, I would have shown the whole of her dazzling progress, humming, skipping, pulling funny faces, swinging her bag and puffing on her fag through Bradford’s drab and shoddy streets in Billy Liar. She is not showing off; she is just being herself which, in that acculturated sub-human environment, makes her as unearthly as the archangel Gabriel. If we must visit supermarkets, shopping malls and service stations, even if we have to visit Doncaster, we should do so with the same insouciance.
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