Things in Space, by E. Alan Meece. UU Band of Writers, Oct.31, 2020. prompt: things in space
I used the words "things in space" in my Masters Paper for my MA philosophy degree in 1979. The paper is called "Reflections on Reality and its Reflection." You can find it on my website at philosopherswheel.com/rrr.html The paper became the nucleus for the philosophy questionnaire that some of you took when I was an active member here as leader of UPPIES (Unitarian Universalist Philosophers Potpourri) back in the 80s, the forerunner of our First Sunday Forum. Then the paper became the launching pad for my forthcoming book The Philosophers Wheel, after which my website is named.
The paper compared the views of Plato with Henri Bergson, turn of the 20th century vitalist and creative evolutionist. He was claimed as a forerunner of existentialism, which featured the work of Heidegger and Sartre. Plato said that the world of change that we see is a reflection of eternal ideas or archetypal forms and principles. His philosophy is called essentialism. Bergson said that these eternal ideas are just reflections or intellectual, abstract concepts from the changing reality we experience. The views of these two writers are, in effect, mirror-like reflections of one another.
But they agree along the other polarity in philosophy, which claims the priority of either spirit or matter. Both Plato and Bergson are spiritualists. For Plato, spirit is that which moves or causes itself rather than what is caused from without. Bergson called spirit the voluntary, original impetus that is making itself. For both writers, spirit is a higher consciousness, and matter, which extends into space, is a fall or decay from it. For those who disagree though, materialism is a third option. It seeks to find the cause of conditions and events we observe, and to explain and understand them as objects and forces and, if possible, with natural laws. This process allows us to partially master our environment and diagnose and treat problems. It is a needed and useful approach, even if it has its limits.
Since Plato is in favor of reason and intellect, and Bergson prefers vitality and direct experience or intuition, their disagreement is like the left brain versus the right brain. So I conceived them as differing across a horizontal axis. But both see their differing, preferred modes of knowledge and morality as spiritual. Since spiritualists like them tend to have their heads in the clouds, and materialists have their feet on terra firma, I see this as the vertical axis. I placed the three views on a triangle pointing downward, with Plato at the upper left, Bergson at the upper right, and materialists like Bertrand Russell at the bottom.
Soon I could see that this also implied a second, complementary triangle pointing upward. At the bottom left are materialists who prefer to explain the world of cause and effect through mathematical laws. I call them rationalists, who say there's a rational explanation for everything. At the bottom right are the empiricists who depend on observation through the senses and experimental testing. Perhaps you can see that rationalists and essentialists on the left both uphold reason, whether as mathematics used to calculate the operation of events and natural laws, or as principles and archetypes which explain the world and provide guidance. Existentialists and empiricists both uphold experience, whether as sense observation and practical reality testing, or as directly contacting and caring for what is vital and alive. At the top of this second triangle are the pure spiritualists half way between Plato and Bergson.
That's where I saw myself. But soon I drew a circle around this six-pointed star and called it the philosophers wheel. My aim became not to decide who is right, but to map out the disagreements. From this I developed the questionnaire to help people define and place their own philosophy on the wheel. All views became a part of how we explain and live in our world. You can take the questionnaire at my website, but bring paper and pencil.
So here's what I wrote about things in space (which is the heading for Section 2, Part 3-H of my paper): "both philosophers agree that the notion of "things in space" is a shadowy one. We see that, in spite of Bergson's references to preferring "things" to "concepts" as sources of truth, he believes (as he describes in Creative Evolution) that "there are no things. There are only actions" and an interpenetrating flux; and the realm of solid and stable things externally related to one another is created by the mind on the model of matter, but has no objective reality. It is a reflection created by "reflection," as we often call thinking.
Plato believes things in space are imperfect examples of the forms. Bergson, however, would say that forms do not escape the character of things in space just because they are one with themselves and not actually in space, for they are still separate from each other and stable like material things. For both philosophers, however, it is their location in space, or as Diotina says in the Symposium, their place, which shows the relativity of "the many things" rather than fundamental reality."
Let me unpack this a little. Plato conceived that the sense appearances of "things" is created by the eternal forms being reflected into space, which he called "the receptacle". Thus, they are just a reflection of the eternal ideas or forms. Bergson explained that "things" are reflections of reality created by the intellect on the model of matter which appears to be extended in space.
These days, things in space appear more real to us because we have shaped the world in accordance with our convenience. Using our ability to observe and use causes and effects to create and engineer useful objects, we have created a world of separate things. So if some philosopher says that "there are no things; there are only actions," we might pick up a book or a plastic plate and say, "see, here are some things!" But as Alan Watts said, the real world of nature is thoroughly wiggly. Except maybe for some rocks which sometimes get separated from cliffs and outcroppings, everything outside of modern industrial and technological civilization, whether alive or dead, interpenetrates. If you separate a living organism from its environment, it dies. It needs what we call the elements: the air, the water, the earth and the fire. And it needs some space to move and grow in too.
But what is space? Is it anything at all? Can there be space without solids? The answer is no; space and what we call bodies go together and depend on each other. Some eastern teachers call space "the soul." Actually, our consciousness is a bit like empty space. It is pure and perfect, but actually is not in space and time at all. It underlies all our experience, which is dependent upon it.
Our consciousness, or our spacious, pure spirit, depends on our environment too. As Sartre said, all consciousness is consciousness of something. It depends on there being something to be conscious of. By the same token, the reality we experience is dependent on our consciousness, and the world depends on the consciousness within all things. And as we have suggested, those things are not things. They are other conscious beings, conscious to varying degrees, and connected to all; and they are in action.
The original impetus was not the big bang, because where did that come from? All cause implies and leads back to a first cause, which is here and now, and not in the past. As Alan Watts said, to think the present is moved by the past is really making the tail wag the dog! Or the wake move the ship. The first cause is the unmoved mover. What really moves us? What brings us into being and keeps us flowing? Plato used a word which for us is God with another o added: The Good. It is the eternal form of all forms, the idea behind all ideas, he said. It is The Good which is the light of this world, and creates the world. All else is a reflection from it. And what is good? As we might say instead, Love makes the world go round.