Consciousness and Remorse

 “It matters little whether the intuition of being resemble the innate gift of an imperial intelligence serenely relying upon its limpid strength and upon the cooperation of a pure and delicate flesh, and of a vivid and perfectly balanced sensibility, as seems to have been the case for Thomas Aquinas; whether, alternatively, it spring unexpectedly like a kind of natural grace at the sight of a blade of grass or a windmill, or at the sudden perception of the reality of the self; whether it proceed from the implacability with which the being of things independent of ourselves becomes abruptly evident to us, suddenly casting our own being back upon its solitude and its frailty; whether I make my way towards it by inner experience of duration, or of anguish, or of certain moral realities which transcend the flow of time—these alternatives, I repeat, are of slight moment.”   (From Existence and the Existent by Jacques Maritain)

First note and put aside for the moment the likeness to the focus on ‘I AM’,  the sadhana of Nisargadatta Maharaj. I ask what does intuition mean in this case?  Is it a sort of immediate knowledge without going through the normal reasoning process, ‘he just knew in that instant’, sort of thing?

‘I AM’ is always there, always cleansed of the past, a pure presence that pervades my present condition, simply illuminating it.  This ‘I AM’ is not my present mental state but the immediacy of my awareness of it demonstrates the self luminous cognition of my contemporary mental contents.  It is as though those states were to flow through it.  Past and present are given now and in every awareness memory shines through.

How are we to get free and live in consciousness as such leaving remorse behind. (Remorse from re-mordere -  re-bite )  Can the past break away and be rendered toothless?

Etienne Gilson's Realism

 I’m reading a lot of Etienne Gilson at the moment, dropping in and out of his books on Realism and Neo-Thomism.  He rightly scorns the idea that Cartesian methodic doubt can lead anywhere. Idealism has burned the bridge to anywhere and yet it fascinates by its apparent lucidity.  It establishes the problem field and keeps us stuck there with the endless toing and froing of the external and the internal world that act like the two ends of a seesaw.  

He writes of a Fr. Noel:

“Here we have finally come full circle, but the reader will be excused if he wonders why so much effort was expended creating the sensation of movement when in reality we have gone nowhere. First, we were told that we had to carry out an exhaustive, methodic doubt, but, since we were not permitted to doubt either thought or the fact of the existence of sensible reality, what did we actually doubt? Descartes’ doubt at least doubts something, but Monsignor Noel’s doubts nothing.”

It has been a notion of mine that Idealism is catching because it is easy to understand and modern psychology offers a specious basis.  Realism as offered by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a difficult complex philosophy which starts out in the difficult terrain of ontology going from being to the real and knowledge of it.  Descartes as Gilson holds begins with epistemology and tries to catch hold of the real with Deus as the deus ex machina.  

Another point that Gilson controverts elsewhere is the doctrine of Jacques Maritain’s that an intuition of being is essential for a true comprehension of metaphysics.  He seems to me to have a strong argument.  I shall have to go back to ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ to try and comprehend the different levels of abstraction involved in the intuition of being.  I have this idea that Maritain may be conflating Aristotle and the Cartesian critical method moving from the initial judgement or apprehension i.e. it is and it is this, what is called an intuition.  Gilson maintains that the true Thomistic realism goes from Being to the Real.  

 

The analogies between this way of thinking and the Advaitic Realism are many.  Gilson’s clarity and explanatory power is excellent.  More anon.

Realism Clew

 Realism Clew:

Very well.  There doesn't seem any way out of it.  If you want realism, thourough going realism, you have to hold to the immateriality of consciousness and the intellectual faculties.  This is the thread running through all of the various versions.  Plato has the forms or ideas impressed on the mind from their special realm.  The immateriality of the mind allows this pervasion and assures us that what we know and what is 'out there' is one and the same.  Philosophy tries to clear up the distortions that occur.  Aristotle and the Scholastics are more grounded, finding the relationship between the mind and the object the source of knowledge.  Aristotle says in Bk.XII of the metaphysics - "Everything which has not matter is indivisible".  This is I presume the core of the insight that object and mind can interpenetrate, that the object can be in the mind in its subtle form as it really is.  The mind grasps the reality of the object.  If we do not accept this as the default position then as Maritain writes:

"But it also indicates that there is an incomparable unity, a unity deeper than that between a model and a transfer, between the thing and thought, thought in act, I mean. For if things were modified or changed in any way by sensation or intellection (I do not mean in the conditions in which they exist, in their way of existing, I mean in regard to those things that properly constitute them, in what they are), then there would no longer be any truth or knowledge. Then the theorist of knowledge could not even express himself by wagging his finger because in such a case there would be left but two equally impossible recourses: either to say that knowledge implies a relation to things but deforms those things, and as a result they are never known; or else to say that knowledge implies no relation to things and that it is an absolute unfolding of thought having only itself as object. This is a position which is quite incompatible with the fact of error and negative ideas." ( from 'The Degrees of Knowledge")

Advaitins likewise relay on the immateriality of consciousness with the joint theory of vritti (mental modification) and upadhi (form of limitation/object) allowing knowledge to happen.  As in all the various schemas of Realism the fine print can be intricate.

Realism is Gravity

  

À hidden but powerful teleological motivation also intervenes at this point,to which  idealism unconsciously obeys, so cheating at its own game. Idealism's concern is precisely that it be not led to a certain terminus; it aims to avoid a certain final conclusion. Now if, from the very start, things and the extramental stability whereby they regulate our thought are so carefully rejected, it is because of the fact, above all else, that owing to a secret instinct that is the more imperious in that it remains unconfessed, the mind does not want in the end to be forced to come face to face with a transcendent, supreme reality, an abyss of personality before which every heart lies open and which our thought has to adore. The bastions and fortresses of idealistic philosophy thus appear to be just so many vast defence-works against divine personality. (from 'The Degrees of Knowledge' by Jacques Maritain)

  

This is important enough for Shankara to turn his mind to Vijnanavada.  Ontology is Theology and those that are bogged down in ‘Is it Theology or Philosophy’ miss being serious and remain essentially light floating away from the earth.  Realism is Gravity.

David Bentley Hart and Jacques Maritain on Natural and Supernatural

 The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine (essay from 'You are Gods' by David Bentley Hart.

D.B.H. begins by finding in the natural order what might be considered to be propaduetic to the divine.  In the Platonic and Aristotelian onto-epistemology there is a surpassing of the apparent division between subject and object.  It is in this that he comes close to the non-duality of Advaita Vedanta which he admits as an influence which guides him past the Natural/Supernatural dyad beloved by the Thomist manualists that he impugns with all the scintillating nay coruscating invective that he commands.  All good fun until someone loses an eye.

Jacques Maritain in his ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ :

“To admit in any degree whatsoever, even in simplest inchoative form, a genuine experience of the depths of God's being on the natural level would necessarily mean either to confuse our natural intellectuality (specified by being in general) with our intellectuality as it flows from grace and is specified by the Divine Essence itself; or to confuse the presence of God's immensity (whereby God is present in all things in virtue of his created efficiency) with His holy indwelling (whereby He is present in a special way, as object, in souls that are in the state of grace); or, again, to muddle up in the same hybrid concept, the wisdom of the natural order (metaphysical wisdom), and the infused gift of wisdom; or, finally, to attribute to the natural love of God what belongs exclusively to supernatural charity.”

As I mentioned Hart finds an entry point into complete realisation of the divine through experience.  ‘There is no other door to that awareness’ (Sankara)

In WWF terms regard me as the midget compadre that runs into the ring and kicks the referee on the shin.

Hart begins as Aristotle does with the sense of wonder. Out of that comes inquiry.  I may as well admit that he sends me to the dictionary betimes.  What’s chiasmus?  The general drift seems to be the repetition of the general in the particular or something.  Anyways he begins with an advaitic note by a laying out of the aporetic:

“We are accustomed, here in modernity’s evening twilight, to conceive of our knowledge of the world principally as a regime of representation, according to which sensory intuitions are transformed into symbolic images by some kind of neurological and perceptual metabolism, and then subjected to whatever formal conceptual determinations our transcendental apperception and apparatus of perception might permit....

Knowledge, then, consists in no more than a kind of cognitive allegory of and logical deduction about Being, because Being in itself possesses an occult adversity or resistance to being known....

The more rational assumption, however, is that so implausible a liaison between absolutely incommensurable spheres of reality is impossible, and that in fact mind and world must belong to one another from the first, as flowing from and continuously participating in a single source that is at once ontological and gnoseological, and in which the ontological and the gnoseological are one and the same.”

Here Hart is moving towards an epistemology that is like that of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’.  He calls it perceptuality/perceptability.  What we know is the object itself as it is by virtue of the mental modification/vritti or in Thomist terms the ‘conversio ad phantasmata’(?).

“Only in the transcendence of form over the formed—whether the latter be a material substrate or the intentionality of the mind—can there be a place of true indistinction between the being of an object and the knowledge of that object. Only in form—only in the informing cause of both an object’s finite existence and the act of understanding that takes that object in— can the secret and most primordial impulse of all philosophy realize its end.”

Maritain denies the knowledge of God via connaturality to those wholly dependent on the natural order.  Though that experience by mystics of Islam and Vedanta may be sublime it suffers from the  disability of being stuck in the natural domain. 

“There are Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and other schools of mystics. But the mystical experience to which they lay claim does not proceed from theological faith. There must, therefore, be a natural mystical experience.”

Hart counters the two tier view on which this judgment is based.  The first sentences of this citation is an objection:

“Surely the temporal is, from the perspective of the finite, contingent. But, from the perspective of the eternal life of God, God’s manifestation of himself to himself is never without his manifestation in creation, and so creation is eternally present within the eternal act whereby God is God.”

Where Hart causes the complaint ‘but this is pantheism’ arises from utterances like this:

“ Our being in God and God’s being in us are both also and more originally God’s being as God”

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Pantheism is an all-purpose dismissal which is never analysed.  Is it the atheistic pantheism of Hegel or Spinoza or something else maybe a doctrine that the world is divine.  To follow that through logically it would mean the Cosmos was uncreated which is very like the ‘ajativada’ of Gaudapada (unborn).  Hart uses a Trinitarian perspective, whereby the Cosmos is an emanation from the boundless creativity of the Father.  There is nothing necessary about creation but the connection is through the unity of being.

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Hart’s essay is of course ‘per speculum in aenigmate’.  The ambhibological words which swim in two oceans are used to advance his speculations.  Deep meditations here and natation outside the flags.

I AM realisation

 Further to the ‘I AM’ inquiry which Nisargadatta was instructed in by his guru I find that there is a universal aspect to this realisation.  Jacques Maritain in his book ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ mentions a couple.

One who is very near to us one day gave us the following testimony of such a knowledge: “Before receiving the faith,” that person (his wife Raissa ?) told us “it often happened that by a sudden intuition I experienced the reality of my own being, of the deepest, first principle that placed me outside nothingness.  It was a powerful intuition and its violence often frightened me; that intuition gave me, for the first time, knowledge of a metaphysical absolute”

Maritain in a footnote to this witness:

In Jean-Paul’s autobiography mention is made of a like intuition:

“ One morning, while I was still a child, I was standing on the threshold of my house and looked to the left, towards the wood-shed, when suddenly the idea came to me out of the sky like a bolt from the blue:I am an I  and from that moment it never left me; my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever.”

Lord Alfred Tennyson :

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?

Adventures in Grace by Raissa Maritain

I’m reading Adventures in Grace by Raissa Maritain (pub.1945) which I got for €1. The stamp on an inner page indicates that it came from the break up of a library of a Jesuit hall of residence. It was a popular book in its day in the category of light spiritual reading. I find it insipid and trite yet it it is interesting as an illustration of the halo effect. Jacques so loved her that he took her slight apercus to be on the same level as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. She would not have thought of herself like that. Was this the ‘amour fou’ that she was trying to avoid, an illusion that would come between them and the true, as she understood it, unitive vision? The crazy all consuming human love that might displace the love of God was Jacques’ attempt to understand Raissa’s journal entry which he read after her death in 1960. James Araj in
amour fou
explores what may have been a formative element in their decision as a couple to enter into a ‘celibate’ marriage. Araj who is steeped in the thought of Maritain wonders at the philosopher’s confused attempt to make sense of a spiritual stance he may not have been aware of at the time when she wrote it in April 1924. The treatment of the issue by Araj is sensitive yet firm.

When ‘Adventures’ came out in 1945 Raissa would have been 62 and yet she feels no differently about the deathbed conversion of her father in 1912 which she claims to have been presaged by:

As he often did with me, he would put it in a humorous way: “Who is a little girl three or four years old, knowing French, Russian and German, and who’s been married for 5 years?” It was naturally myself, and this meant that he understood that the life of the spirit begins from baptism.

Perhaps or maybe an echo of what he might have been hearing from her, ‘I feel my life has just begun’ etc. To me it seems ironic teasing.

Likewise her treatment of Bloy and Peguy the two writers who were so great a personal influence is bland and uninformative.

When, on reading Leon Bloy, one becomes aware of features which are thus typical of a particular period, one feels at first a certain disillusionment. But this impression passes, or at least, is seen in its merely relative value, and the essential, one might say the ontological value of Bloy’s work, appears in all its granduer.

I’ve always felt that ontology requires glue and screws, a few tacks won’t do.