THE LIE OF LOGOS

There are those who read devotionals daily. I wonder at the practice. Is the emphasis on content, or is it on the activity? Is it processing of words, or processing of feeling? Is it a matter of thought or of attitude? Is it always a blend of these pairs?

It occurs that there is no difference between wondering about devotional practice and wondering about the “practice” of human life. The niche of philosophy for both inquiries is epistemology, the consideration of what we know and how we know. One position in epistemological thought is that we “know” nothing because we have no means (no “how”) to know. We have only the human version of “knowing,” constrained as we are to perceive only within our human straitjacket. We “know” what we believe and feel to be so. I subscribe to that line of thought.

But the line of thought doesn’t answer the question of what or how we “know.” It only reframes the question to reflect and refute the long Western prejudice that knowing is primarily a matter of reason. To say we know nothing because we have no means to know is only to say that reason is illusory, post-hoc, a mere means of trying to conjure order and explanation and understanding out of experience of life lived as human.

Because we experience life, we “know” it. So denying the reasonable or logical or intellectual capacity to “truly know” is simply an elimination of one classical notion as to what and how we know. It’s just the assertion we aren’t really rational beings. That leaves open the possibility we’re sub-rational or suprarational or simply arational, and also the possibility we’re rational but to such limited extent that reason provides only a trivial part of our “knowing.” This last possibility is my preferred choice.

As is often the case in thinking “philosophically,” it’s useful to pause and ask whether this exercise is worthwhile as anything more than entertainment or distracting word-play. It’s not that philosophy has to be “utilitarian,” but it ought to be substantial enough to have bearing on the conduct of human life. It should be “practical” in the sense of providing something beyond an idle engagement with thought and words.

Fine, we’re minimally rational, largely uninfluenced by reason. How does that affect the experience of this single human life now, on an ordinary Thursday morning, sitting in a sunlit room writing on a yellow pad in pencil?

It affects it in terms of orientation. It matters, to some extent, whether we live under a more or less accurate sense of the human life experience. It doesn’t matter a great deal, since most lives appear to be lived “inaccurately” without terrible consequence. Maybe better to say lives are lived “disparately” rather than inaccurately, and the disparate orientations, being incompatible, make us so fragile and fractious with each other.

It’s likely true that any random, arbitrary orientation shared by all humans would produce a more placid human hive, but history is the account of random, arbitrary orientations at odds with each other, and none has a chance of gaining universal or even critical-mass support and adherence. Philosophy, in fact, might be called a naively optimistic effort to formulate an orientation with wide appeal. It seeks to encourage abandonment of some random, arbitrary orientations in favor of some better ones reflecting how, underneath the random, arbitrary orientations, we all function as human organisms.

That leads back to our high esteem of reason. Our overestimation of reason and of ourselves as rational beings is a central random, arbitrary orientation that obscures how we function. That may sound surprising coming from an atheist who considers religion to be a major random, arbitrary orientation also. Traditionally, we think of religion as an orientation largely unrestrained by rationality—it’s the province of the mystical, the mysterious, the ineffable, the numinous, the miraculous, the peace that passes understanding. But the paradox of religion is that it’s the product of our overestimation of our reasoning capacity. There “must be” a God, a Creator, a Prime Mover—it doesn’t make sense otherwise. God is Logos, Word. Aristotle wrote of Logos as reason, and theology adopted reason as the source and proof of the arational. A thousand years or so of Western philosophy was spent largely finding reasoned, philosophical proofs for Christian doctrines and beliefs.

This takes us back to the initial inquiry as to what is going on when a person reads a daily devotional. Typically, that person cycles time and again through the same words, texts, scriptures, day after day, year after year. Logos, the Word; Logos, reason itself; Logos, Jesus and God. But the person reading the devotional is reading words, familiar words, in a sense deifying and worshipping words.

We think in words, we express ourselves in words. We order and give meaning in words. But we experience our lives beyond and beneath words, largely wordlessly, in a subterranean consciousness that uses words (if at all) in a different way, as in dreams. Words are attempts to give form to formlessness, to try to hold in place the passing ephemera of experienced life.

Even the intentional pursuit of achieving a sense of wordlessness, such as mindfulness meditation, is word-mediated, reason-mediated. Mindfulness meditation seeks to concentrate on contentless consciousness. (At least, that’s how I’ve experienced it.) It seeks to purge the mind of words, ideas, and feelings, to reach consciousness of nothing but consciousness itself. It seeks eradication of obstacles to pure consciousness, seeks emptying of everything but the mechanics of consciousness itself. It’s the pursuit of a temporary respite from everything that gives content to the experience of life, regarding content as clutter. It’s an effort to take a vacation from life as we’re consigned to live it. This isn’t to disparage it; mindfulness meditation offers glimpses of an alternative real, like mind-altering drugs. But it’s an escape from something to which we must return shortly, when bills must be paid or a difficult person must be dealt with. It’s a rare, random, arbitrary orientation that will never gain great currency.

That’s in part because “reason” is our cherished conceit and our falsest god. It’s not reason at all, but preference, belief, coping illusion, justifier. We pride ourselves on our unique reasoning ability, believing it separates us from all other beings except God, believing it makes us of similar stuff as God. We sense consciousness, breaming with content of feelings, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs, to be “reasoning.” But our consciousness is merely animal consciousness raised to a level high enough to produce wonder as to what and why consciousness is, depriving us of the animal ability simply to exist without pondering existence incessantly.

The “practice” of human life is an epistemological activity. What we “know” is what and how we perceive, experience. The “reality” of what we know is irrelevant, because there is no referent but the human one. That means metaphysics is subsumed by epistemology. This is by no means a new idea—it was a mainstay of the Vienna Circle of philosophers a hundred years ago. But it is a reorienting idea.

While metaphysics is subsumed by epistemology, ethics hangs on by a thread as an independent branch of philosophy. But it is also based on what and how we know in relation to what and how all others know. This relates to those random, arbitrary orientations we variously assume and adopt. There “must be” a single basic human orientation we all share, however we construe and alter it with our acculturated, add-on orientations. Pioneers like Freud came closest among “scientists” to identifying this underlying commonality, though he did so by means of philosophy and symbolism more than by “science.” Literature can approach the commonality in the arts, but it’s word-mediated and therefore restricted. Music, dance, and painting approach commonality, maybe best approach it person-to-person and culture-to-culture, because they operate largely independent of words. But even music, dance, and painting have the taint of “reasoning” and of vocabularies, such as the Western assignment of certain intervals between notes that we deem “right,” when other cultures choose other intervals as “right.”

It’s customary to speak of philosophy as primarily concerned with the three fields of metaphysics (the real), ethics (the right), and epistemology (the recognition of real and right). Some call them the Three Rs. But a strong case can be made that epistemology could serve nicely as the sole focus of philosophical inquiry. It uniquely explores how we experience human life. We “know” we exist, and the question is what and how we experience “knowing” that we exist. One fairly certain assertion can be made: we know there is no fourth R, reason, determining how we live and experience life. Reason is an insignificant incidental to the experience of life, worthy of consideration only in terms of how we elevated that little impostor to such prominence and veneration.

Written January 5, 2023
©2023 by Lawrence Helms