Concealed Unity

essay

“But what does philosophy need? Since it’s inception, since the EN PANTA of Heraclitus and the EN of Parmenides, philosophy does not think the many, but rather the manifold , and the way in which it is unified. Philosophy needs the EN....... There is a need for unity, because unity is never given immediately”

Heidegger identifies the original thrust of philosophy for the ancient Greeks; looking for the unity inherent in the diversity of the world of experience. There is a desire to elaborate on or conceptually construct around an intuition of a fundamental unity, or at least integration, within the flux of change and transformation that characterises our experience of ourselves and the world. That is something with which even on a purely personal level, I can very much sympathise.

Philosophy according to Aristotle is spurred by “thauma”, wonder. And what a wonder this world can be, as well as the various hells of suffering that are also among it’s evident characteristics. The author, Edward Carpenter, whose book “Pagan and Christian Creeds” has sat mostly unread on my shelf for years but which I’ve now begun to thumb, writes in beautiful prose on the inception of religious feeling in ancient humans. Fanciful and unscientific perhaps, but not unreasonable, nor unlikely.

“The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences. Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in half a gale in June – the wind and the sun streaming over every little twig and leaf, the tree throwing out it’s branches in a kind of ecstasy and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of it’s two visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain brings relief to it’s thirst; and he will have known that these creatures are but likenesses of himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable”.

What is described here by Carpenter fits quite comfortably with what Heidegger was pointing to in the ancient Greek experience at the inception of philosophy. Here is phusis, logos, eidos, ousia. He too is the implied unity, the “EN” .

Philosophy is spiritual.

Readers of notes – and a few essays – I’ve written will be aware that I often criticise that which I call “woo”. It’s not my name for it, I didn’t invent the term. What I mean by “woo” is what appears to me to be a dense cloud of really quite misleading jargon that might pose as self-help, but is really just about exploiting suffering people’s insecurities and furnishing them with mirages that will only further exile them deeper into illusion. It’s not that I think there is no benefit in ‘self-help’ ; certainly not. But a huge industry, including online spiritual ‘entrepreneurs’ is built on promoting little more than egomania, or at least self-obsession. This is anathema to the actual spiritual principles of the source texts and traditions that are raided for venerable sounding terms and profundities to sell the ‘woo’. ‘Atman” does indeed mean ‘self’ in Sanskrit, but what is referred to as atman in the Upanishads is not the ‘ego’. It’s something more like “universal subjectivity”, or put another way, the ultimate reality which being self-aware, thus subjective, is Self. Ego, being a mere derivative within the already derivative nature of phenomenal existence (Maya) is in fact an obstacle to the awareness of atman.

But this aside, the real problem with a lot of ‘woo’ is that it can mislead trusting people in other more immediately unhealthy ways. I have myself a profound distrust of “official” narratives, including what poses as science. But this doesn’t mean I paint it all with one brush, nor do I have any more faith (quite the opposite) in so-called alternative-science, certainly not in this environment where ‘grift’ is the only reigning ideology. Making a buck above all else and be damned with the consequences to others fits in perfectly with the neoliberal orthodoxy and it’s even more fanatical sub-sect, libertarianism. That in a nutshell is my beef with ‘woo’.

Apart from these things, from these abuses, the general desire for spiritual sustenance is entirely admirable. Philosophy is spiritual, even in a sense in it’s materialist forms. Certainly materialism is “metaphysical” in the proper meaning of that term as being concerned with “phusis”. Matter was always considered a part or an aspect of phusis, which itself included everything both within and without of human experience. Nor is the distinction between revelation and philosophy unequivocal. Philosophy can be (and in many examples throughout it’s history was indeed considered) revelation. Pythagoras, Plato and many others were often considered along the lines of what we may understand by the term ‘prophets’. Plotinus was even regarded as (if accounts are taken literally and a face value) a ‘divine man’ while still living.

This concealed unity which early philosophy took as it’s inspiration, goal, and content in various ways surfaces and resurfaces as such in diverse cultures and societies throughout the history of our species. It also I suspect appears seemingly spontaneously in individual people, in others it appears in accord with observable conditions. Alienation is certainly something I can emphasize with and if philosophy has been anything to me it is as a form of therapy for a painful sense of alienation. I find a deep resource for thinking ‘unity’ in the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard Von Hartmann, Nishida Kitaro, Martin Heidegger, and the ancients like Plotinus and Parmenides, just as in religion with Buddhism or the Upanishads.

I’ll end with a quote from Schopenhauer which (for me) articulates this lost-and-sought ‘unity’ perfectly

“The merely empirical consideration of nature already recognises a constant transition from the simplest and most necessary manifestation of some universal force of nature up to the life and consciousness of man, through easy gradations and with merely relative, indeed often vague and indefinite boundaries. Reflection, following this view and penetrating into it somewhat more deeply, is soon led to the conviction that in all these phenomena the inner essence, that which manifests itself m that which appears, is one and the same thing standing out more and more distinctly. Accordingly, that which exhibits itself in a million forms of endless variety and diversity m and thus performs the most variegated and grotesque play without beginning and end, is this one essence. It is so closely concealed behind all these masks that it does not recognise itself again, and thus treats itself harshly. Therefore the great doctrine of the EN KAI PAN appeared early in the East as well as in the West; and in spite of every contradiction it has asserted itself, or has been constantly renewed”.

Martin Heidegger, “Four Seminars”

Edward Carpenter, “Pagan and Christian Creeds”

Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation, Vol 2”