Head vs Heart, Intellect vs Feeling?

I can't comment on the validity of the left brain/right brain caricature above or Michael Gazzaniga's split brain experiments, but it's a fitting metaphor for the spiritual existential crisis found among some evangelical Christians, a crisis which prompts them to see "heart" and "head" as worlds apart. But conscious cognition straddles both hemispheres of the brain.

In this time of social lockdown I have been listening to some online services at a nearby church and I was intrigued by one particular sermon series that was trotting out a very familiar spiritual motif. Quoting from my blog post about this motif, I said that this series promotes....

....a pattern where we find some Christians agitating for a spiritual revolution that supercharges what they regard as the rather humdrum, mediocre & unempowered work of a target church. The proposed remedy is that individuals must proactively seek an experience of "the Baptism of the Spirit". Given that many people in the church may already lay claim to having had the Baptism of the Spirit, sometimes more generic and vague terms such as the "touch of God", an "encounter with God" or an "infilling" may be used. However, when one analyses what is actually being promoted one finds that it has less to do with spiritual experience per se than it has in trying to cast spiritual renewal into a quasi-gnostic philosophical mold by asserting a sharp distinction between the initiates and non-initiates of  some kind of inner spiritual light.

There are shades of gnosticism & fideism here: As I have remarked many times before, the kind of philosophical dualism which I believe underlies the series filters Christian reality through the cliché of a heart vs head dichotomy.  In this context one often hears (as I have heard during this series) about the need to submit the profanities of the intellect to the ineffable and sacred revelations found in sublime experiences of the divine presence. It’s a caricature of the left brain vs the right brain contention and yet I would set against this the proposal that conscious cognition, which is the A to Z of experience, is likely to straddle both the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

As Kenneth Clark once expressed, we are still the offspring of the romantic movement, the movement which rebelled against the apparent primacy of the mechanical and the intellectual, a primacy which grew out of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Human feeling, instincts and sensibilities found themselves floundering as they ran up against the implications of automation and the automaton: Our industrial machine culture is haunted by the suspicion that humans too (along with their their natural context) are just another application of unfeeling mechanism, albeit a very sophisticated application*. This was the backdrop for the mysticism of the romantics as they attempted to re-establish the primacy of human feeling and the sublime mystical atmosphere that one senses to be at the heart of nature.

But industrial wealth and its concomitant science is evidence of the success of the mechanistic and intellectual take on reality. The third person perspective in which scientific accounts of reality are framed was and is vital intellectual fuel for the progress of industrial wealth and knowledge. This wealth and knowledge is overwhelming evidence of the fundamental truth and place of mechanism in our world. This paradigm has loomed large in our society and its obvious success in providing wealth and knowledge have given it an almost intimidating authority; in fact given the spiritual egocentricity of humanity it can be frightening; spiritual humanity have become strangers in their own cosmos. 

The scientific project which illuminated the cosmic place of mechanism put an end to the temple of the Ptolemaic universe, a temple where man was manifestly at the centre of divine purposes. Unsurprisingly, then, it would only be a matter of time before the suspicion that humans were themselves just (complex) mechanisms would lead to the human organism being put under the intellectual microscope in an attempt to arrive at a mechanical account of humanity.  But in spite of the successes, the fallacy of hope in illuminating human nature with science and ushering in a golden age of reason and human social progress proved to be illusory.  Something was missing.

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Technology and science have become victims of their own overwhelming success. Their amazingly effective third person narratives have redirected the attention of many thinkers away from the obvious. That is, they have lost sight of the fundamental basis of those narratives; namely that they have their origins in the first person perspective of conscious cognition: This perspective is always implicit in science as the scientific observer and experiencer of those observations which necessarily provide the evidence of science's third person theories. In short scientific data always leads back to a consciously cognating observer experiencing observations and joining the "data dots" of experience with theoretical accounts. But in the heady stratosphere of a breathtakingly successful and heroic techno-scientific project, the authenticator & cornerstone of all science, namely the first person perspective, has become almost invisible. The inner story of human consciousness has not only been marginalised but in some cases even been outright denied existence by those who have been overwhelmed by the trick that successful science has played on their minds and they have failed to see what is in front of their noses. 

There is a subtlety here that may have fazed the consciousness deniers: It is conceivable (and not impossible in my view) that a complete third person narrative explaining the human mind in terms of its "material" constituents of particles, fields and dynamical equations may eventually be arrived at. Although this has not yet been achieved many strides in this direction have been made and just the prospect of a complete "material explanation" of humanity might easily be taken to imply the absence of consciousness..... a third person account of humanity may become so complete as to leave the false impression that there is no room for consciousness; like the God of the gaps the consciousness of the gaps has apparently been crowded out of the third person perspective, apparently dehumanising the human.

But look again: The apparent absence of conscious cognition in the third person scientific account is simply down to the fact that this account is made from the stand point of an observer-experiencer who is external to first person and who therefore will not (by definition) experience the experiences of the first person. All the external observer is able to see of another person are the patterns and behaviour impressed on the material dynamic. But in the final analysis the third person observer has, of course, their very own first person sense of conscious cognition. In effect, then, we have the mind of an observer giving an account of another mind in terms of the observers own first person experiences and theories. As I have remarked in the introduction of my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity the third person account of humanity is written in terms of the human observer's conscious cognition and this is reminiscent of the way a computer language compiler can be written in the self same language it compiles.   

For me it is obviously axiomatic that the third person can only experience the first person as a dynamic configuration of matter, matter which has to be appropriately configured before it generates the qualia of conscious cognition.  Matter is the common medium by which first persons are able to become aware of one another and above all successfully communicate. But the two accounts of the first and third persons have to be brought together as a complementary whole; either account does not exclude the other. Both solipsists and consciousness deniers are working with a partial apprehension of reality.

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As society has become more complex and dependent on technological artifacts it is the third person language which rightly takes up most of our time; after all, a society is about cooperation & communication and communication demands that shared material medium controlled by universal laws. But the downside is that the vocabulary of the first person with its qualia of conscious cognition is apt to become marginalised, buried and perhaps even lost; at best relegated to the counselling rooms in a society dominated by the mechanical and the intellectual. In the face of the kudos and power of science's third person perspective, a sense of alienation has set in. The essence of core humanity, namely its conscious cognition, is in danger of being swamped like the lives of the slaves in Turner's painting (see below). In a burgeoning technical culture our well meaning reactionary Christian preachers are like those wallowing in the waves as they fight to restore the life. & dignity of humanity. Their response is typical of the romantic response which seeks to reaffirm the special and divinely ordained place of humanity. I understand this response completely, but when it tips over into irrationality, fideism and quasi-gnosticism it is reactionary & misguided. For them the third person becomes at best a spiritually inferior companion and at worst a blockage to sublime gnosis. But reactionary preachers can themselves be equally if not far more authoritarian and intimidating as the science status quo. In fact sometimes they are even prepared to invoke fear with the threat of divine displeasure if their views aren't followed through. 

The backdrop of industrial society places huge demands on the human intellect to handle the third person narratives that cover science, technology and the business of day to day running. But the protest by romantics is prone to overcompensating extremes as it tries to escape the apparently alienating external world by its retreat into the depths of the inner life and its mysteries. The romantic reaction is especially a protest against those who even go as far as to deny that the conscious inner life has any substance or meaning beyond the third person perspective of material configuration. The gnostic protest against "intellectualism" and the latter being contrasted over and against sublime inner experiences is the stock-in-trade of Christian romanticism. But the creation wasn't created by a demiurge but by God himself whose omniscient omnipotence has provisioned his rational creation with the facility to generate conscious cognition when the right dynamic conditions are met.

As Sir Kenneth Clarke said in his Civilisation episode The Fallacies of Hope: 

We've a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet.. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope. 

The potentially dehumanising effects of industrial society; the slave traders

either didn't care about of couldn't perceive the humanity of their merchandise. 

Footnote (added 19/10/2021)

* One of the bugbears with the common concept of "mechanism" is that it is conceived as entirely a matter of local interactions between the parts of the mechanism. Those parts, such as atoms or fundamental particles, have a few relatively simple rules governing their near-neighbor interactions and it is thought that these "mindless" rules are then the source from which all else incidentally and purely fortuitously emerges. It is assumed then that these rules are the fundamental & primary reality of the cosmos and all else is secondary and ephemeral.  No further questions are then asked about whether this system of rules, if it supports the development and maintenance of life, must therefore be algorithmically pre-biased.  Moreover, it is further assumed that these rules do not include global teleological constraints, constraints which (amounting to action at a distance) would really blow away any semblance of local interaction completeness & primacy.  The oft overriding and superficial response to this picture of local mechanical interactions is that it is entirely mindless in that clearly in and of themselves these interactions have no sentient apprehension of what they are doing and therefore any complex development built on them (such as life) is purely accidental and incidental. It is ironic that this superficial response is endemic among the de-facto Intelligent Design community of North America. But then there is this.

OK, the mechanical picture of cosmic development with its purely bottom-up as opposed to top-down vision is at first sight a challenge to an anthropocentric view of the cosmos.  But if one starts to push a little harder the wall of that challenge starts to crumble. 

Planet Narnia Part 3: Consciousness

I have been doing a series of blogs on Michael Ward’s fascinating book Planet Narnia. My first two posts can be found here and here. In this post I want to pick up on another secondary theme found in Ward’s book; namely, the peculiar logical status of conscious cognition. 

 That we have a name for consciousness can in itself be the cause of logical typing errors. For example, we might say something like: “In this world we have objects like matter, space, plants, animals, human beings and consciousness!”. It might appear from the construction of this list that consciousness is just another category, like materials and animals, that we can subject to observation. However, in this list consciousness is the odd one out; we don’t observe consciousness, rather it is observation; in all observations conscious cognition is implicit and therefore it is also implicit in all scientific testing. 

Somebody who has made the category error of thinking about consciousness as if it is just another object subject to observation is Larry Moran. In this post he says: 

Now, I happen believe that there's no such thing as "consciousness" in the sense of something tangible that we can point to and say. "That's consciousness."

I would accept the face value of that statement: Take me to a brain and all I am aware of is the third person perspective of neural activity. Moreover, we’re told that a large part of brain activity is unconscious so even if I‘m looking at brain activity I’m not necessarily looking at activity that maps to “consciousness”. But this is really beside the point; the point is that this neural activity is how the first person's conscious experience registers in the consciousness of the third person observer. Therefore conscious cognition is the implicit backdrop and stage of any narrative spoken from a third person perspective. However, this exercise in self-awareness seems too reflexive for Larry and because he fails to observe anything that looks like “consciousness” in brain activity he simply defines consciousness as identical to neural activity: 

“I think it’s merely a descriptive term for brain activity. Consciousness may be an important and useful word for describing the phenomenon, but that’s all it is” 

Larry seems unable to detect the presence of consciousness cognition implicit in the phrase “describing the phenomenon”; there has to be a first person perspective for whom the whole thing is a phenomenon observed and described. It’s almost as if people like Larry lack a degree of self-awareness: They can see the third person story, but have no category for the first person story, Given that third person descriptions conventionally contain no explicit reference to an observer it is no surprise that Larry thinks consciousness doesn’t exist. But thinking that consciousness doesn’t exist is a bit like thinking that “observation” doesn’t exist. What then is the final arbiter of scientific theories in the face of this attack on the reality of observation? As Ward correctly says: 

To Lewis (as to Barfield), scientists in the modern period were too often naturalistic in their world view, apt to commit the error of removing their own minds and their thinking processes from the total picture of the world that they were trying to understand and inhabit. P242 

It was the very foundational nature of observation (or experience/consciousness) in science that lead me, at a very early stage in my philosophical musings, to be drawn toward positivistic schools of thought. I was drawn toward them because they acknowledged the scientific centrality of the conscious observing thinking agent; in fact, that highly complex agent was effectively axiomatic to positivism. This led me to a favourable view of idealism as a philosophy. According to Ward it seems that a similar shift toward idealism happened to Lewis himself: 

…they maintained that abstract thought, if obedient to logical rules, gave indisputable ‘truth’ and the possibility of ‘valid’ moral judgment. Barfield, who had advanced beyond realism some time before his friend, taught Lewis that, if thought were purely a subjective event, these claims for abstract thinking would have to be abandoned. Lewis was not willing-indeed, not able – to abandon them……He now saw that a realist philosophy that admitted only sensory perception would be effectively solipsistic, but if solipsism were true it could not know itself to be true. The cerebral physiologist who says that thought is ‘only’ tiny physical movements of grey matter must be wrong, for how could he think that thought truly except by participating in the medium which the logic of his statement denies? “The inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which only sees movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self contradictory” P34

 I would want to comment on this quote as follows: The cerebral physiologist who says that thought is ‘only’ tiny physical movements of grey matter is in one sense right because his third person perspective on the first person will mean that observations of the latter will only ever reveal tiny physical movements of grey matter. But if we are a cerebral physiologist we must not neglect to carry out the reflexive operation of looking back down the line of our observation to ourselves where it becomes apparent that implicit in our third person account of the brain are the observations and theorizings of a first person perspective. It may well be that every conscious event maps on a point by point basis to some kind of neural activity, but this still leaves us with the observer-observed dichotomy between the first person and third person perspectives. 

Ward tells us that given this kind of philosophical background Lewis became an idealist: 

Lewis had wanted Nature to be quite independent of his observations, something other, indifferent, self-existing. “But now, it seemed to me, I had to give that up. Unless I were to accept an unbelievable alternative, I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos” (Logos as a pervasive spirit of rationality…) Lewis was moving toward an idealist philosophy. To be more precise, he was recognizing that his present position already entailed idealism. P34

There is, however, a major and obvious issue with a thorough going idealism that asserts that ultimate reality is only vested in the observations, perceptions and thoughts of conscious cognition. This is the old question about the reality of events which seem to be well beyond the spot light of conscious observation. We have a compelling intuition that our world is benevolently rational and therefore that the signals arriving at our door, whether they be the fossil remains from deep time or the starlight from deep space, are not just a deceptive sensory façade, but instead an interface to something real and beyond. There may be no entities that qualify as conscious observers in deep space or deep time and yet the compelling rational integrity of the cosmic order demands these signals be treated as a clue to a detailed reality beyond close observation. Lewis, in all likelihood, understood this completely and may be it is this that drew him toward Berkelyan idealism, a form of idealism where humanly unperceived cosmic quarters nevertheless have a place in the conscious cognition of God:

However, it was only a small step to theism. Indeed, Lewis admits in ‘Surprised by Joy’ that he cannot now understand how he ever regarded his idealism as ‘something quite distinct from Theism’. Rather ‘idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism’. He considered Berkeley’s account of idealism ‘unanswerable’ and when asked what school of philosophy God might support, he replied, ‘God is a Berkeleyan idealist’. P35 

I personally have no a priori problem with the notion that the motions of neural atoms, motions which constitute the third person perspective of my brain, have a point by point mapping to my every conscious thought and in that sense “explains” them. But why should this system of atoms should be graced with an epistemology that seems to work? That is, why can an ensemble of atoms successfully reach knowledge about themselves? There seems to be nothing in science which obliges guaranteed “self-knowledge”. In this connection Ward quotes Haldane: 

The naturalistic alternative refutes itself, in Lewis view, for the reason given by Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms’ P217

We could short cut the self-defeating self-reference here by simply accepting benevolent rationality as an axiomatic brute given and probe no further. But for theists benevolent rationality is a rational assumption in the context of a theology of providence. (See How to know you know you know it ) 

I’m not sure, however, that I would want to follow Lewis into the next stage of his thought, a stage which to me smacks of dualism and ghost in the machine. Following on from my last quote Ward says: 

Since this position is self-refuting, Lewis concludes that it cannot be true; human thinking must be sharing in a ‘supernatural reason’. By ‘supernatural’ Lewis means that human thought, when true, is not simply dependent upon the interlocked system of natural causes and natural effects. Rational knowledge is not caused by effects; rather it is the consequence of grounds, being determined only by the truth it knows, not by digestion or heredity or the weather or any other non-rational, naturalistic causation. P217 

For me this kind of thinking disrupts the agreement and harmony between conscious cognition and the “interlocked system of natural causes and natural effects”. Although I’m not dogmatic about it, I have no problem with the notion that there may be a complete point by point conformity between one’s first person experiences and the “system of natural causes and effects” as observed by the third person. On that basis I have no a-priori objection to the idea that “Rational knowledge is caused by effects”; in fact my understanding of theism is sympathetic to this idea: God is as much creative sovereign over the third person perspective of atoms and particles as he is over the first person experiences that map to the system of particulate motions. Therefore the system of causes and effects that we observe could well be efficacious enough to provide conscious cognition with “self-explanation” (See the forward of my book here where I moot this idea). But it is when we posit no providential underwriter of this system of self-explanation that the self-defeating self-referencing problems arise. 

At one point Ward quotes Barfield who in my opinion expresses well the situation we find ourselves in: 

Science deals with the world which it perceives but, seeking more and more to penetrate the veil of naive perception, progresses only toward the goal of nothing, because it still does not accept in practice (what-ever it may admit theoretically) that the mind first creates what it perceives as objects, including the instruments which science uses for that very penetration. It insists on dealing with ‘data’, but there shall no data be given, save the bare precept. The rest is imagination. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is, not only that larger and larger telescopes should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity. P241-242 (Barfield) 

We cannot peep round the interface of our perceptions or dispense with the imagination which interprets what it sees and builds the superstructure of a rational world on those perceptions. Whether we believe in a providential theism or not, science can only proceed if we are positive about the assumption of a rational world amenable to the imagination. Without this assumption being the foundation of our thought we have little epistemological purchase on the cosmos. Without this assumption being proactively exploited all science and knowledge ends.

 Notes: 

William Erwin Thompson, of whom I have done two posts (see here and here) and whose ideas I feel are linked to Planet Narnia, is another author who understands the status of consciousness. See the second of the two posts I have linked to where I quote from Pages 98 and 99 of Thompson’s book Passages about Earth.

I have written on the subject of consciousness several times in this blog as follows:


http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/self-referencing-nature-of.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/nounema-elementa-cognita-and.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-consciousness.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/free-will-and-determinism.html

Planet Narnia: Part 2

 As we saw in the first part of this series the primary theme of Michael Ward’s book (“Planet Narnia”) is to show that C. S. Lewis’s Seven Chronicles of Narnia were intended to recreate the touch and feel of the mediaeval seven planet astrological cosmos. In this second part I want to trace a secondary theme found in Ward’s book: That is, with the coming of the Copernican revolution there followed a sense of disenchantment and apparent demystification of the once sacred cosmos. Let Ward set the scene: 

Looking up at the heavens now, Lewis argues, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. Now we sense that we are looking out into a trackless vacuity, pitch-black and dead cold. Then we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast lighted concavity P23.

 For obvious reasons Lewis refers to the Ptolemaic astrological cosmos as a “Discarded image”: Lewis revelled in this image says Ward: 

Lewis makes no effort to hide the pleasure he derives from this view of the cosmos. He remarks the human imagination has seldom entertained an object so sublimely ordered; the medieval universe was ‘tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine’. P24 

And it was because he thought it beautiful that Lewis so revelled in the pre-Copernican cosmos. P27 

In a quote taken from Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy Ward conveys to us the contrast in mood invoked by the old and new cosmologies respectively: In the following passage we find Lewis putting his thoughts about these cosmologies into the head of his main character, Ransom: 

A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life has come? He had thought it barren; he now saw that it was the womb of worlds whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more. No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory – the “Happy chimes that ly. Where day never shuts his eye. Up in the broad fields of the sky.” He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often. P25 

Lewis is telling us here that our understanding of the meaning of the modern cosmological picture is deficient of much needed emotional vitamins; that understanding fails to fully satisfy our appetite for majesty and mystery and, I suspect, above all, it apparently fails to give humanity that centrality of purpose and position which is implicit in the Ptolemaic universe. But, in my view, modern science is beginning to offer a new kind of empyrean that acts as the hook for our deep seated need for the harmony and purpose that stirs our passions. “Space”, so called, is filled with the quantum ferment of possibility and pervaded by the high temperature medium of gravity; “Space” is the forge in which worlds are formed. (See my posts here for my efforts at trying to make human sense of the cosmic perspective) 

According to Ward, Lewis’s writing of the Ransom trilogy was motivated in part by a desire to address the problem of the disconsolate reaction to the modern cosmological model: 

Following the Copernican revolution, astronomy and astrology became gradually distinct and the former prospered while the latter fell on hard times. P 29 

Milton straddled the old and new views of the cosmos; he marked the transition to the new disenchanted model of the universe from the traditional one which stretched back in time immemorial. The Ransom trilogy… is in large part an attempt to rehabilitate that traditional conception. P26 

There has been no delight (of that sort) in “nature” since the old cosmology was rejected. No one can respond in just the same way to the Einsteinian, or even the Newtonian, universe. P235 

There is still, of course, delight and wonder in nature, but according to Lewis, (according to Ward) that delight is no longer supplemented by an overarching sense of a sublime purpose or belief that the cosmos is  a wonderful magical and mystery show and as such part of a higher context that imbues it with meaning. Ward quotes Lewis as follows: 

By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies, finally of her colours, smells and tastes (Kepler at the beginning of his career explained the motion of the planets by their anima motrices; before he died, he explained it mechanically) The result was dualism rather than materialism. The mind, on whose ideal constructions the whole method depended stood over against its object in ever sharper dissimilarity. Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold. This process, slowly working, ensured during the next century the loss of the old mythical imagination; the conceit, and later the personified abstraction, takes its place. Later still, as a desperate attempt to bridge the gulf which begins to be found intolerable, we have the Nature poetry of the Romantics. Page 241 

Very telling I think is Lewis suggestion here that dualism is a product of the mind’s alienation and estrangement from its cosmic setting; this is something I myself have been aware of. And when it is not dualism it is an out and out materialism. As Ward himself adds: 

The seeing eye that has stared through the Telescopes in the post-Copernican period has typically been an eye with ‘single vision’, one which notices matter and mechanism and little or nothing else. P243 

Much of the material I have quoted from Ward I find very reminiscent of William Irwin Thompson’s reaction to modern science. Thompson’s reaction can be gauged in the two posts I did on his two books “At the Edge of History” and Passages about Earth. If Lewis calls for the rehabilitation of the medieval mystical regard for the Cosmos (although not for the mediaeval cosmological model itself) then Thompson looks for the re-establishment of a “Pythagorean” science: 

We somehow have to outflank the ignorant armies of the Left and Right to find the space and time to convert our industrial technology to new kind of Pythagorean science. (At the Edge of History P75) 

As we have seen in the quotes above Lewis talks about the relation between the loss of the old mythological imagination and man’s resulting sense of alienation from his home in the cosmos, and this in turn leads to a dualistic philosophy of spirit vs. matter. (Either that or a monistic philosophy of materialism). Thompson’s views resonate with Lewis here: 

There is indeed a “mythopeic mentality”, but it is not restricted to precivilised man, but is to be found in geniuses as different as Boehme, Kepler, Blake, Yeats, Wagner, Heisenberg, and that student of Boehme’s theory of action and reaction, Isaac Newton. Myth is not an early level of human development, but an imaginative description of reality in which the known is related to the unknown……(At the Edge of History P170) 

Birth and death are ultimately confusing; to make sense of them we will have to make our peace with myth…. At the edge of history, history itself can no longer help us and only myth remains equal to reality. ……(At the Edge of History P205) 

A mythos vs. logos tension is chronic in our culture today; when this tension doesn’t end with a sense of emptiness and meaningless attempts are made to resolve it with pathological religious responses such as the gnosticism of the Jesus swoon-ins or the corrupted and caricatured science of the young earth creationists. In their dissonance and inconsonance Christian fundamentalists are returning to geocentrism in order to make human sense of the cosmos: From Gerardus Bouw, through John Byle to Answers in Genesis, we have here fundamentalists whose perverse science of cosmology is leading to some kind of geocentricsm – very directly sense in the case of Bouw and indirectly in the case of other YECs who inexorably move toward geocentric cosmologies. (As a result of geocentrism being implicit in their handling of time) The intellectually pathological state of fundamentalist Christianity as it thrashes over failed cosmological models, has, I propose, a lot to do with the difficulty in coping with the disconsolate feelings invoked by the symmetries that science is uncovering.

...to be continued...

***

Some posts  where I have touched on material relevant to the above can be found using these links :

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/hemisphere-short-of-brain.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/symbolism-at-blickling-hall.html
http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/christmas-1939.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/luddites-and-evolution-machine.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/heres-interesting-book-cloudspotters.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/blickling-hall.html
http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/why-dualism.html

Planet Narnia: Part 1

A couple of years ago I read Michael Ward’s book “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis”. I never got round to doing a blog post on it; I was in fact reminded to do so as a result of recently reading William Thompson’s dual volume “At the Edge of History/Passages about Earth”. Ward, Lewis and Thompson all tread the mystical realm of mythology and their works have significant points of contact, points of contact I wish to explore in a series of posts.

The main thesis of Ward’s book is that C. S. Lewis wrote the seven Chronicles of Narnia as way of capturing the touch and feel of the medieval seven planet astrology. It seems that the secretive Lewis never let on that this was one of his purposes in writing the Chronicles and this is why, according to Ward, the superficial reader perceives them as a weird assortment of scenes, characters and plots, apparently unconnected by any coherent underlying idea. That was basically my perception of the Narniad and one reason why, hitherto, I’ve not been interested in them. But Ward claims to have rumbled the hidden code that pervades the pages of these books.

I’m not very familiar with Lewis or the literary world in which he was immersed. I’ve read some of his books and watched a couple of productions taken from his Chronicles. Ward, needless to say, is steeped in Lewis. Not surprisingly then my rather cursory acquaintance with Lewis handicapped my reading of Ward’s book: My lack of familiarity with its many literary allusions and authors made it heavy going in parts. However, I ploughed on through it determined to get to the end of it especially as I sensed that this book impinged upon my interest in the modern paradigm changes that have left the mediaeval world well behind, its sea of faith long since departed, leaving many of Christianity’s modern manifestations high, dry and floundering.

Ward has had to work against a very natural and understandable bias against the kind of thing he is doing: The field of revealing hidden meanings and cracking secret codes has an unfortunate history of being the stamping ground of cranks, conspiracy theorists and extremists. Nevertheless, in my rather inexpert opinion Ward presents a very convincing case for medieval astrology being the underlying and hitherto hidden theme that makes sense of Lewis’s work. In medieval times each planet had associated with it its own particular range of motifs and ideas such as colour, metals and general ambiance. These motifs, in due course, make their appearance in their respective book of the Chronicles. For example, according to Ward Prince Caspian is associated with the planet Mars and Martian motifs can be found scattered throughout the book such as “perpendicularity” which is “a manifestations of Mars's masculinity” (pp 80-81), and also a military regard for orderliness (p92). Mars's metal is “iron”, a metal which, given its history, goes together well with a warlike and mechanistic disregard for painful effects (p79) and this metal makes an important appearance in Prince Caspian. (p92)

Given that this kind of thing is repeated for all seven books it all seems too much of coincidence for it to have happened by chance, especially as it is well known that Lewis was awestruck by the mystery of mediaeval astrology and he wrote much about it.

It was in large part through his love of Dante that Lewis grew to be so enchanted by the Ptolemaic universe (p41)

As for astrology, the foregoing chapters have shown that Lewis’s imaginative fascination with it was life-long and deep. (p247)

After reading Ward’s book the only mystery left seems to be why this underlying theme wasn’t spotted long ago given the proliferation of clues to be found in the Chronicles, starting with the number of books; seven. In fact Ward himself wonders why he has been privileged to make this discovery when so many others have spent so long mulling over the enigma and occasion of Lewis seemingly incoherent Narniad. Ward puts some of this down to the modern attitude to astrology:

And the final reason is that those critics who were looking for a third level may not have been open to the subject of astrology as his work really requires, for as I have pointed out, astrology, a subject disdained by academics, tends to be given a doubly wide berth by Christian academics. Since most Lewis scholars have been Christian or well-disposed to the Christian tradition, there was an in-built improbability that researchers would fully understand his most successful work. (p245)….. His status as a Christian too often causes Pavlovian reactions of approval among his co-religionist readership; his interest in astrology gets overlooked in the rush to lionize him. (p246)

In this connection it is worth noting that Lewis also had a high regard for pagan religions:

But a much more substantial reason for Lewis’s love of the Ptolemaic cosmos, despite its factual inadequacy, has to do with some of his most deeply held religious beliefs. As a boy he had been told by his schoolmasters that Christianity was 100 percent correct and every other religion, including the pagan myths of ancient Greece and Rome, was 100 percent wrong. He found that this statement, rather than bolstering the Christian claim undermined it and he abandoned his childhood faith ‘largely under the influence of classical education’. It was to this experience that he owed his ‘firm conviction that the only possible basis for Christian apologetics is a proper respect for Paganism.’ Therefore Lewis was not troubled by the similarities between, for instance, the pagan Jupiter and the Hebrew Yahweh. He takes pleasure in pointing out,  in ‘Miracles’, that ‘God is supposed to have had a “Son”, just as if God were a mythological deity like Jupiter' . The resemblance ought to be present, given that God works through human myths as well as through His own true myth, the historical story of Jesus Christ. Since God is the Father of lights, even the dim and guttering lights of paganism could be ascribed ultimately to Him. Christians should feel no obligations to quench the smouldering flax burning in pagan myths: on the contrary they should do their best to fan it in to flame. Lewis, with Spencer, believed that 'Divine Wisdom spoke not only on the Mount of Olives, but also on Parnassus' Of course, the Parnassian wisdom was not as complete or as sufficient as that offered in Christ, but it should be honoured as far as it went. (p28)


Lewis’s religion was not a upas tree in whose shadow nothing else could grow. If paganism could be shown to have something in common with Christianity, Lewis concluded ‘so much better for paganism’ not ‘so much the worse for Christianity’ (p28)

Lewis had a high view of the pagan gods (234)

Interestingly, I got a very unfavorable reaction when I quoted the pieces above to a conservative Christian. The reaction was entirely emotional, irrational and final: It was clear that no further thought was going to be expended on Ward’s careful nuancing and instead a mindless knee jerk response was deemed sufficient to deal with the matter; even though on many issues Lewis is quoted favorably by conservative Christians. It all rather bears Ward out. It is an irony that conservative reaction so often resembles the superstitious dread of the pagan religionist toward that which is deemed to be ritually unclean. This reaction betrays the downside of pagan religious attitudes that still very much suffuse conservative Christianity (Compare Romans 14:14 and context).

In order to handle Lewis’s work Ward develops a significant concept that probably embraces much of Lewis’s thinking. Ward coins the term “Donegality” (after Donegal in Ireland; see p16 and p75) to act as the seed for the crystallization of an idea that Lewis himself refers to as the “kappa element” (“Kappa” for the first letter of the Greek word for ‘hidden’ or ‘cryptic’; p15) in literature; that is, the mood and atmosphere a literary piece conjures up:

He (Lewis) thought that literary images, like musical motifs, should be richly expressive of mood, existing ‘in every possible relation of contrast, mutual support, development, variation, half echo and the like’ (p74)

Terms that Lewis himself used to express the kappa element were ‘flavour or atmosphere’, ‘smell or taste’, ‘mood’ and ‘quiddity’ (p16). My understanding of “Donegality” is that it is not an intrinsic property found in the articulated description of the connection itself – that is, in its logos, but rather it is an extrinsic reactive property resulting of the mood feelings it evokes in us – basically, its mythos. I suspect that this has much to do with how our moods and feelings map to the mixes of chemical concentrations in the brain which, like many smells, are all but unique to a stimulus situation. Lewis objective then is to create the Donegality of the mediaeval astrology. The touch and feel of this astrology can’t be experienced by simply describing it but only by immersing oneself in its ambiance and this ambiance is recreated by replicating the general motifs of the ethos and mores that stimulate it.

According to Ward (and he has convinced me) medieval Ptolemaic Donegality is the single most important concept needed to understand Lewis’s chronicles of Narnia, a concept that many have missed:

It is not as though the Chronicles were utterly incomprehensible without this donegalitarian key, and many readers were content to accept that the septet’s apparent lack of homogeneity was evidence of hasty writing, not a sign of an unidentified inner meaning. (p245)

The donegalitarian interpretation seems to me to account for so many things that I would even dare to suggest that the burden of proof now rests with those who would dispute it. (p215)


...to be continued