A pleasurable warping of the figuring faculty to contemplate what was there before the before.
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Time says ‘Let there be,’” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote shortly before her death in her splendid “Hymn to Time,” saluting the invisible dimension that pervades and encompasses the whole of life: “the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance.”
But what does time say of the time before there was anything to let be, the time before being?
“The concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe,” Stephen Hawking wrote in his groundbreaking 1988 book A Brief History of Time (public library) — a work of such far-reaching and lasting impact that it awakened the popular imagination to the fundamental physics of reality and, thirty years later, inspired one of the most beautiful and poignant poems of all time.
In the foreword to the final edition of the book published in his lifetime, Hawking quoted Richard Feynman’s exultation at how fortunate we are to live in an age when we are still discovering the fundamental laws of nature. Inevitably, this means we are still understanding the nature of time. As we come closer and closer to accepting that the universe might be not infinite but finite, and that Einstein’s relativity, as revolutionary as it was, has important limitations, the notion that time began at the Big Bang singularity has begun to dissolve into something more complex — and more thrilling: We might say that in the beginning of time, there was no time; but we might equally say that in the beginning of time, there was only time. (Borges touched the poetic truth behind and before the scientific fact in his exquisite refutation of time.)
In this invigorating PBS segment, New York-based Australian astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd delves into the science and splendor of when time actually began and what that illuminates about the nature of a universe which contains everything we know, including the mind that does the knowing, yet one which we are still getting to know:
In this next segment, O’Dowd considers the possibilities, as presently understood, of what might have happened before the Big Bang:
French authorities reported the smallest daily rise in new coronavirus cases and deaths on Sunday since before a lockdown began on March 17, raising hopes that the worst of the epidemic is over in France.
The number of confirmed cases rose by 115 to 144,921, health ministry data showed, and the death toll increased by 35 to 28,367 – an increase of just 0.1% for both tallies.
The weekend totals for new cases and deaths were also both the lowest since France began easing its strict coronavirus restrictions on May 11.
Epidemiologist Laurent Toubiana, director of the IRSAN health data institute, suggested the worst of the epidemic had passed and said the coronavirus may not come back, unlike previous pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish flu.
“If we do not see a quick resurgence of the epidemic, we might get a break for a few weeks,” he said on BFM TV.
Despite the easing of restrictions, social distancing rules remain in place in France and Environment Minister Elisabeth Borne told France Inter radio the government did not want people to travel abroad this summer.
She also said Paris parks must remain closed for now as the capital is still a “red zone” for circulation of the coronavirus.
The new data showed that, because of slower data reporting and with patients staying in hospital longer over the long holiday weekend, the number of people admitted to hospital with the coronavirus had increased by seven to 17,185.
It was the first increase in weeks. Until now, the number had fallen every day since April 15.
But the number of people in intensive care continued its uninterrupted decline, falling by 10 to 1,655. It was the slowest decline since the peak of the crisis, when 7,148 people were in intensive care.
Japan ends its state of emergency, New Zealand floats a four-day workweek, and the US approaches 100,000 deaths. Here’s what you should know:HeadlinesJapan ended its coronavirus emergency with 851 deaths and no lockdownJapan’s prime minister announced the end of the nation’s state of emergency, but said its “battle against the virus will continue.” While Japan never implemented a true lockdown, it did bar travelers from hard-hit countries and shut down karaoke bars, live music venues, and gyms, which will remain closed in the coming weeks.
New Zealand’s prime minister is touting a 4-day workweekAs New Zealand reopens, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is suggesting that a four-day workweek could spur domestic travel. She says the decision to shorten the workweek is between employers and employees, but she encourages businesses to think about this option to boost tourism and the nation’s economy. It’s an idea Microsoft had tested before the pandemic in Japan, finding that it actually boosted productivity by 40%.
The US is approaching 100,000 coronavirus deathsOver the weekend, The New York Times published this viral cover story putting names to numbers of the nearly 100,000 lives lost in the last few months to Covid-19. The CDC projects the US will cross this threshold by June 1, but more grimly, they also predict these death rates will continue to rise as states around the country reopen.
“The first peace is that which comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”
—Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) OGLALA SIOUX
Heȟáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk (December 1, 1863 – August 19, 1950), was a wičháša wakȟáŋ and heyoka of the Oglala Lakota people. He was a second cousin of the war leader Crazy Horse. Black Elk’s first wife Katie converted to Roman Catholicism, and they had their three children baptized as Catholics. Wikipedia
Earth, humanity and nature are inextricably interconnected. To restore us all back to health, we need to “rewild” the world, says environmental activist Kristine Tompkins. Tracing her life from Patagonia CEO to passionate conservationist, she shares how she has helped to establish national parks across millions of acres of land (and sea) in South America — and discusses the critical role we all have to play to heal the planet. “We have a common destiny,” she says. “We can flourish or we can suffer, but we’re going to be doing it together.”
Rembrandt: Belshazzar’s Feast, circa 1636–1638, showing the moment when a divine hand appeared before the Babylonian King Belshazzar and wrote on the wall a phrase interpreted by Daniel to mean: ‘God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians.’ Belshazzar was slain that night. Credit: National Gallery, London / Art Resource.
One
Robert Wright is not afraid to think big thoughts. Wright, who contributes regularly to a host of magazines including Slate and Time and who edits the Web site Bloggingheads.tv, has written several intellectually ambitious books. In TheMoral Animal (1997), for example, he considered the young (and controversial) science of evolutionary psychology. And in Nonzero (2001), he offered a heady tour of human history and argued that ideas from the mathematical field of game theory reveal how much of that history was driven by the mutual benefits that accrue from human cooperation. In his latest book, Wright takes on an even grander subject: religion. In The Evolution of God, he both surveys the history of religion and, more important, offers a new theory to explain why this history unfolded as it did.
According to Wright’s theory, although religion may seem otherworldly—a realm of revelation and spirituality—its history has, like that of much else, been driven by mundane “facts on the ground.” Religion, that is, changes through time primarily because it responds to changing circumstances in the real world: economics, politics, and war. Wright thus offers what he emphasizes is a materialist account of religion. As he further emphasizes, the ways in which religion responds to the world make sense. Like organisms, religions respond adaptively to the world.
More formally, Wright argues that religious responses to reality are generally explained by game theory and evolutionary psychology, the subjects of his previous books. Subtle aspects of the human mind, he claims, were shaped by Darwinian natural selection to allow us to recognize and take advantage of certain social situations. The most important of these—and the centerpiece of Wright’s theory—are what game theorists call non-zero-sum interactions. Unlike zero-sum games, wherein one player’s gain is another player’s loss, in some games both players can win; hence “non-zero-sum.” The classic example is economic trade. In a free market, trade occurs when both parties benefit from exchange (otherwise they wouldn’t engage in it).
As technologies, particularly transportation, improved throughout history, cultures collided and human beings encountered more and more of these non-zero-sum opportunities. Religion, Wright says, responded rationally to these encounters. For example, religious doctrine grew more tolerant of other faiths when tolerance helped smooth economic or political interactions that were potentially win-win: it’s wise to respect the other fellow’s gods when you want to trade or form military alliances with him. (Wright suggests that these responses were often unconscious, not cynical.) One consequence of the growing number of non-zero-sum interactions was that, through time, the “moral circle” expanded. While primitive man tended to view only his clan or tribe as fully human and so worthy of moral consideration, the ties forged among peoples via their cooperative interactions encouraged them to expand the moral circle from tribe, to ethnic group, to nation, and ultimately to all human beings.
* * *
Several themes emerge from Wright’s analysis of religion that are reminiscent of those that characterize the evolution of life. For one thing, the history of religion has, Wright says, a discernible direction. Just as organisms have generally grown more complex over the last four billion years, so man’s views of God have generally grown more abstract and—most important for Wright—more attractive morally over the last several thousand years. Also, evolutionary change in religion, like that in species, is typically gradual: “you don’t see whole new religions coming out of nowhere,” presumably because religions reflect preexisting social conditions.
The Evolution of God is not, however, concerned solely with the past. Wright also emphasizes that an appreciation of the power of non-zero-sum dynamics might help us resolve certain contemporary political tensions, including those between the Islamic world and the West, groups that potentially have much to gain from each other.
Describing Wright’s approach to religious history as materialist may seem to imply that he is uncomfortable with loftier visions of religion—the view, for example, that there might actually be something divine that underlies the physical universe. This is not the case. Wright is sympathetic to religion and to at least some of its larger claims. Indeed he purports to provide an account not only of the evolution of man’s view of God but, at least possibly, of God himself.
Wright’s book has several strengths. Perhaps the most conspicuous is the prose. Although the book is long, it doesn’t feel it. Wright is a skillful writer and he knows how to keep a story moving. His discussion is also surprisingly erudite. The Evolution of God is full of footnotes and the literature cited in them is consistently the literature one would hope for: heavy on scholarly studies and light on popular treatments. In a climate in which discussions of religion, and especially of the intersection of religion and science, often seem superficial or rushed, Wright is to be commended for his close study. He is also to be commended for his refreshingly dispassionate tone. All this combines to provide an absorbing (and rant-free) tour of Western religion.
But Wright’s book cannot be judged only, or even primarily, by whether it presents a capable history of religion. Instead it must be judged by whether his new theory of religion succeeds. And here, as we’ll see, The Evolution of God is less satisfying.
Two
Much of Wright’s book is given over to the history of the great Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but his story actually begins in prehistory, with shamanism. Drawing on both anthropological studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and classic analyses of primitive religion by Mircea Eliade and his peers, Wright reminds us that the shaman’s world was animated by a host of gods who lived within forces of nature and who determined the fates of individuals and tribes. Religion had little to do with morality and everything to do with the prosecution of war and intratribal politics.1 With the rise of agriculture, however, society grew more complex, placing a premium on social harmony. Religion, Wright says, responded to these changed conditions and became moral: it got into the business of policing people.
Later, primitive states grew more organized and different cultures came into contact. Although the theological consequences of these contacts could have been disastrous—different peoples worshiped potentially competing casts of gods—Wright argues that non-zero-sum dynamics prevailed. States had much to gain from one another by trade or armed alliances. So religion again responded sensibly: typically, the roster of gods recognized by any group simply expanded to include those of other groups.
Polytheism’s days were, nevertheless, numbered. Wright’s account of the rise of monotheism among the Jews represents the most impressive part of his book. The process was extraordinarily complex. As expected, Wright stresses that the evolution of Yahweh responded to tangled political, military, and economic conditions: these included Jewish relations with the Canaanites (Baal-worshipers), innumerable military adventures and misadventures, exile, and the differing political fates of northern and southern Greater Israel. Also, the evolution of monotheism, “like so much else in the history of religion,” was gradual. Indeed the process was so protracted that traces of polytheism remain in the Hebrew Bible, e.g., in Exodus, and especially in Psalms (“There is none like you among the gods, O LORD”).
The Hebrew Bible also reveals the later transformation of Yahweh from a thunderous, almost corporeal being into a more abstract and transcendent one, the “still small voice.” Wright also devotes two chapters to the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who wrote in the first century CE. Philo offered a syncretic theology that attempted to blend Hebrew tradition and Greek philosophy, faith and reason. Such reconciliation required eschewing a literal reading of scripture and embracing an allegorical one, which Philo did happily. In Philo’s theology, the Logos—reason, order, or the Word—is conceived in the mind of God and then uttered into the physical universe. The unfolding of the Logos introduces, among other things, a directionality into history, a theme that looms large for Wright.
Turning to Christianity, Wright again emphasizes the Darwinian gradualness of the evolution of this new religion. The earliest of the canonical gospels, Mark, presents a Jesus who seems more a typical apocalyptic prophet than the Word Incarnate: Jesus makes few proclamations of his divinity, preaches the coming of a Kingdom of God, and often performs miracles discreetly. Wright also stresses that the Christian doctrine of universal brotherly love likely did not derive from Jesus but appeared later, probably with the apostle Paul. Wright predictably argues that the development of this doctrine, like others, can be seen as a response to quotidian local conditions. Indeed, he claims that Paul, who traveled relentlessly, played up brotherly love—“we, who are many, are one body in Christ”—to encourage harmony within the many quarrelsome churches that he visited and then left all too soon. Paul’s message was, in other words, a management strategy, part of a business plan that allowed him to export Christianity to much of the Roman Empire.2
* * *
Finally, Wright briefly but ably surveys the evolution of Islam. He argues that Islam also reveals the adaptive nature of religion’s responses to local conditions. (The more recent emergence of Islam—Muhammad died in 632 CE—permits a reasonably clear picture of the historical setting in which this faith developed.) When Muhammad resided in Mecca, he was a politically powerless prophet who, like many prophets before him, antagonized the rich and suffered the ridicule of the people. Under such circumstances, Wright says, the optimal strategy suggested by game theory for a religion is clearly one of tolerance and conciliation. And, Wright points out, those parts of the Koran that date from Muhammad’s Meccan years are frequently conciliatory. Indeed Muhammad reaches out to, and expresses a degree of tolerance for, Jews and Christians (“To you be your religion; to me my religion.”)
But when Muhammad relocated to Medina, factual circumstances changed radically and rapidly. Muhammad’s now numerous followers grew into a staggeringly powerful political and military force. Given these changed circumstances, Islam had fewer practical reasons to pursue a strategy of tolerance and the Koran, Wright says, began to sometimes speak in a less conciliatory tone. None of this, he insists, should surprise us. Nor is it unprecedented. During difficult or turbulent political times, the Hebrew Bible (in Second Isaiah) and the New Testament (in Revelation) also grew less tolerant of other beliefs.
Despite this, the overall trend characterizing the course of Western faith is clear enough: it has grown more tolerant and has encouraged the expansion of the moral circle. Hunter-gatherers huddled about a shaman may doubt the humanity of those not belonging to the tribe but contemporary worshipers gathered in a synagogue, church, or mosque do not. Religion may be imperfect, but it has, Wright emphasizes, taken us a considerable moral distance.
Three
While Wright’s account of the history of the Abrahamic faiths is frequently fascinating, his attempts to explain that history using his new theory are, unfortunately, sometimes less than persuasive. Part of the problem is that Wright’s theory is so obviously incomplete. It would be absurd to deny that local conditions help shape religion, including moral doctrine. But it would be equally absurd to deny that there’s more to the story. Consider a great moral event like the Abolitionist movement. It’s hard to maintain seriously that it was driven by win-win dynamics. What was the big material payoff to expanding the moral circle to include black slaves? The question strikes us as alarmingly wide of the mark because the real dynamics are so clear.
Most Abolitionists fought to expand the moral circle because they concluded that Christian doctrine demanded it, whether or not they had anything to gain. Indeed, to a considerable extent, what we mean by a great moral act is one in which a person who performs it might lose materially. To promote kindness or tolerance in a win-win situation is unremarkable. To do so, or at least to hope to do so, in a situation in which you might lose materially is at least part of what characterizes the religious attitude. It’s true that The Evolution of God focuses more on changes in moral doctrine than on moral acts per se, but by mostly neglecting this win-lose aspect of morality, Wright has evaded something important.3
In view of this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Wright’s materialist theory seems to stumble near the close of his book, as he turns to tensions between Islam and the West. After four hundred pages about the crucial role of non-zero-sum dynamics in the evolution of religious tolerance, Wright suddenly announces that “the bad news is that the mere existence of non-zero-sumness isn’t enough.” Two further things, he now tells us, are needed. First, people must see that they’re engaged in non-zero-sum dynamics. This alone is a little odd. It certainly isn’t true of trade. As Adam Smith famously emphasized, win-win dynamics emerge naturally in this case from each individual’s pursuit of his own interests. (No one buys a car because he sees that it will help Japanese automakers.)
Things grow more serious with Wright’s second requirement:
Depending on the exact circumstances, responding wisely to non-zero-sum opportunities can call for more than just seeing the non-zero-sumness. Sometimes it calls for a kind of “sight” that goes deeper. It can call for an apprehension not just of the pragmatic truth about human interaction, but of a kind of moral truth.
This comes as something of a surprise. We’ve been told that the “pragmatic truth about human interaction” generally accounts for the waxing and waning of religious ideas. And now we’re told that something further is needed, a sight that is deeper than pragmatic.
* * *
As Wright tries to explain this deeper sight, matters get murky. The key, he says, is something called the moral imagination, the mental ability to put oneself in another’s shoes. This ability, he assures us, was “‘designed’ by natural selection to help us exploit non-zero-sum opportunities, to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.” So the argument is that an evolutionary psychological construct, the moral imagination, lets us see game-theoretic situations that are non-zero-sum. And the result, often enough, is economic or political cooperation as well as the expansion of the moral circle.
So what’s the problem? The problem, Wright reveals, is that the moral imagination can backfire and is, in fact, now backfiring in troubled relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The reason for this backfiring is familiar to anyone who has dipped into the literature of evolutionary psychology: “Our mental equipment for dealing with game-theoretical dynamics was designed for a hunter-gatherer environment, not for the modern world.” If this is right, you might wonder why economic trade occurs so readily in the modern world, but let’s leave that aside. For there’s a bigger surprise.
Wright argues that to make further moral progress—and, in particular, to resolve tensions between Islam and the West—the moral imagination needs some “coaxing.” In fact the moral imagination needs to be expanded to “a place it doesn’t go to unabetted.” And fortunately there’s a force that can do this coaxing—religion. Indeed Wright claims that one of the great achievements of religion is that it periodically steps in and expands the moral imagination.
Now this may be true—I suspect it is—but it has nothing to do with Wright’s thesis. In fact it’s an inversion of that thesis. Wright’s causal chain was that the mental capacity of moral imagination (built by natural selection) lets us recognize win-win opportunities (game theory), which, in turn, causes the moral circle to expand (via religion). But now the chain is inverted: religion must modify the moral imagination. If I’ve understood Wright correctly (his penultimate chapter is extremely convoluted), it’s hard to see how this inversion forms part of a materialist account of religion. It’s clearly a more idealistic account: it would be nice if game theory and evolutionary psychology could fashion a more tolerant religion; but right now, they’re not doing a great job, so let’s have religion fix things. I don’t claim that this move undermines Wright’s book but it’s not some minor exception to his thesis. In any case, it’s disconcerting to learn that what Wright thinks is now needed to solve our problems—one of his goals in The Evolution of God—has so little to do with his theory.
The Evolution of God ‘s shortcomings involve not only the content of its arguments but the intellectual methods that Wright uses to build his theory. Though his key claim—that people are more likely to do something when it’s in their interest—is fairly banal, it gets dressed up in the scientific-sounding language of game theory and evolutionary psychology. But it’s hard to take most of this language seriously. Where, for example, is the actual scientific evidence that people possess a mental faculty corresponding to the moral imagination? Where is the evidence that this faculty was built by natural selection or that it stopped evolving after our days on the savanna? Where is the evidence that this mental faculty is now misfiring? In each case, the answer is that the evidence is nonexistent or exceedingly dubious. Wright’s claims about the evolution of the human mind might prove right, or at least partly right, but they have little to do with real science.
Wright’s reliance on game theory and evolutionary psychology is troubling for another reason. These theories, particularly when taken together, are so pliant that they can explain almost anything. One consequence is that Wright’s readings of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, or Koran sometimes degenerate into clever attempts to explain each passage as a response to specific local circumstances. Take his explanation of why Paul was so big on brotherly love. Paul, usually absent from any given church, needed to encourage harmony within and among his many fractious congregations; hence his epistles extolling brotherly love (what Wright calls “a form of remote control”). But Wright’s hypothesis doesn’t work. While Paul clearly suffered organizational headaches, the notion that he preached brotherly love because he was always on the road begs the question of why he was always on the road, reaching out to Gentiles in Antioch, Corinth, Galatia, Thessalonica, and elsewhere. Surely the more plausible answer is that Paul traveled tirelessly because he believed in brotherly love, not that he preached brotherly love because he traveled tirelessly.
Four
Finally, Wright seems to believe that his analysis might tell us something about God, or at least about the possibility of a “higher purpose” in nature. Here he seems motivated by concerns about what he considers overreaching by the so-called New Atheists (he mentions Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Weinberg). As I share some of these concerns, I expected to be sympathetic to his arguments. But I’m afraid that I find them mostly unconvincing.
Wright’s case begins from the moral direction he discerns in history. We have, on the whole, grown better morally; and the gods we worship have grown more appealing. Wright wants to draw a very big moral from this story:
If history naturally carries human consciousness toward moral enlightenment, however slowly and fitfully, that would be evidence that there’s some point to it all. At least, it would be more evidence than the alternative…. To the extent that “god” grows, that is evidence—maybe not massive evidence, but some evidence—of higher purpose. Which raises this question: If “god” indeed grows, and grows with stubborn persistence, does that mean we can start thinking about taking the quotation marks off?
And:
In the great divide of current thought—between those, including the Abrahamics, who see a higher purpose, a transcendent source of meaning, and those, like [Steven] Weinberg, who don’t—the manifest existence of a moral order comes down clearly on one side.
Although Wright offers these ideas tentatively, it’s hard to see how they’re supposed to work. He has offered a materialist account of moral progress. If that account succeeds (and he thinks it does), it provides evidence neither for nor against anything transcendent. Indeed Wright’s use of the word “transcendent” seems gratuitous. Consider an analogy that has little or nothing to do with morality. Economists argue that the non-zero-sum game of trade—i.e., exchange in which both sides benefit—gives rise to a direction in history: the expansion of trade and the growth of wealth. But no one is tempted to conclude that this directionality suggests a higher purpose. The invisible hand is a metaphor, not a transcendent appendage. Conversely, if Wright’s materialist account of moral progress fails, this also provides evidence neither for nor against anything transcendent: maybe God drives moral progress or maybe a different materialist account could explain the facts.
Similarly, Wright sometimes suggests that the entire history of biological and cultural evolution on Earth—from single cells to multicellular colonies to human beings capable of moral thought and the elaboration of high technology—might imply the existence of a higher purpose. But again, if a materialist account of this history suffices—and for its biological parts, Darwinism does—this history neither confirms nor disproves anything transcendent.
Oddly, I suspect that Wright might concede some of this. His efforts to discern a higher purpose reflect, he hints, more an intuition or conjecture than a real argument. Taken as such, I would have no particular problem with them. But by articulating his thoughts in the language of science, Wright risks representing his thinking as something it is not.
Despite these reservations, I find that I do agree with another, and important, point that Wright touches on in the course of these discussions. Man’s sense of the divine has, it seems clear, generally grown more sophisticated and abstract through time. The Logos of Philo is miles beyond the nearly demonic gods feared by primitive man. And as Wright emphasizes, there’s every reason to expect this trajectory to continue. Certainly, few thoughtful people, now or in the future, can be expected to take literally the poetic evocations of the divine found in Western scriptures.
The symbols that run through this poetry may or may not point beyond themselves to anything real, but surely the ideas that they purport to point to are more significant than the symbols themselves. Wright is right to remind us of this, however obliquely. And he is right to note that peaceful coexistence among cultures, and perhaps even our survival as a species, could rest upon wider recognition of this point. After all, few people presumably want to kill or die over differences among symbols that might represent, at least approximately, the same thing. These are important points and they are worth making. But I don’t see how it takes game theory or evolutionary psychology to reach them.
H. Allen Orr is University Professor and Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. He is the author, with Jerry A. Coyne, of “Speciation. ”
Footnotes
Wright also disabuses the reader of New Age nonsense about shamans. The idea that, before organized religion, religion existed in an uncorrupted state is a romantic delusion. Shamans were frequently self-serving and played conspicuous political games. For more, see Wright’s “Do Shamans Have More Sex?,” Slate, July 29, 2009.
Wright mostly ignores the later evolution of the Church. He says little, for example, about the Hellenization of Christianity by the Church fathers, and especially Augustine. (The influence of Platonism and/or Neoplatonism on the Abrahamic faiths was certainly not limited to Philo.) One consequence is that the more mystical Christian tradition—featuring the Jesus who utters, “before Abraham was, I am”—is largely overlooked. See, for example, Andrew Louth’s The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford University Press, 1981), which also presents a sensitive reading of Philo.
Wright does concede, at one point, that his theory can’t explain all the vicissitudes of religious history, but he seems to consider these exceptions temporary or somehow less important. It’s difficult to see the basis for this judgment.
This post originally appeared on The New York Review of Books and was published January 13, 2010. This article is republished here with permission.
Drawing on ancient Tibetan practices and a very human need for companionship, these people believe they have figured out how to create sentient beings within their own bodies.
A man walks into his den and sits down. He closes his eyes, letting his mind wander and his consciousness grow gauzy. Slowly, she comes forward in his mind. He feels his control over his own being start to slip and fade. Another pair of eyes blinks behind his own. A sloe-eyed woman shakes out her long mane of thick gray hair. His consciousness grows hazier; time grows strange.
The man feels himself drift into the recesses; his body is now entirely hers, if only for a short while. Her slender fingers reach for her violin. She settles into his body — their body — and swings the instrument to her chin, the bow poised. The melancholy notes of a Berg sonata swell around her as her elbow slices the air, eyes closed. Her tail swings, keeping time. The song is soaring now; her teeth flash in a satisfied smile — close to human, but closer still to a wolf.
Her name is Shinyuu. She’s a tulpa, and she lives inside her host, a man who goes by the name birb.
* * *
Tulpamancy, the act of conjuring sentient, autonomous beings inside one’s mind, is practiced, studied and cultivated by a small but devoted number of people worldwide. It has gained new currency in recent years as tulpamancers have gathered online in the likely places for subcultures — Reddit, Discord, Facebook groups and other forums. While some might be quick to associate any kind of voices in one’s head with dissociative identity disorder, psychosis or schizophrenia, tulpamancers insist that the presence of their additional “headmates” is not a manifestation of mental illness.
A tulpa is a self-created life force that resides in the mind of a “host,” the physical human that created them. While every tulpamancer’s origin story varies, as does the kind of relationship they’ve fostered with their tulpa, all hosts and tulpas share a body but exist as separate consciousnesses. Hosts say they do not control their tulpas. Instead, they develop slowly on their own — not unlike a child, although their chosen form needn’t be human.
Tulpamancers report having intimate and rich relationships with their tulpas — and they believe that these beings are not a glorified psychological dysfunction, but rather a manifestation of a more highly tuned brain cognition. Tulpas occupy all kinds of relationships and roles in their hosts’ lives, from companion and confidant to healer, protector, child and chum.
While interest in the practice is booming — the r/tulpas Reddit page and Tulpa.info site boast more than 40,000 members combined — those within the community tell me that the exact number of tulpamancers worldwide is difficult to determine; estimates range from 1,000 to 10,000 folks actively practicing tulpamancy.
Psychologists are curious about tulpamancy’s therapeutic potential, and some neuroscientists believe tulpamancers could offer insight into the elasticity of human consciousness.
Tulpamancy has loose roots in Tibetan Mysticism; French author, explorer and spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel wrote many tomes on Eastern religions, but arguably her best-known work includes an account of “tulpas,” a phonetic bastardization of the Tibetan word sprul pa, meaning “emanation.” In her 1932 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, David-Néel details more than a decade in the region, where she was received by the Dalai Lama, immersed herself in the ancient rites of monastic life and education, and studied reincarnation, Tibetan folklore, necromancy and yoga. In her writings, David-Néel claims to have manifested — through intense focus and meditation — a “jolly monk” out of her own mind.
“Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control,” David-Néel wrote. As her story goes, her monk companion grew so powerful it entered the physical world and was seen by others. The tulpa became unruly and went rogue, growing self-serving and malicious, and eventually it had to be destroyed. David-Néel wrote that she had to dissolve it with her mind.
According to David-Néel, the ability to materialize sentient and almost-autonomous beings needn’t belong only to the mystically exalted. Rather, it “depends on the strength of the concentration and the quality of the mind itself.”
* * *
I find “Shinyuu” on the r/tulpasReddit board, which she helps moderate. It’s not until many emails into our correspondence that I realize she is a tulpa. Her tuplamancer, birb, says Shinyuu emerged in his mind about five years ago. A software engineer in Ireland, birb is married, with two children under the age of 4, and like all of the tulpamancers interviewed for this piece, he asked to be identified by just a first name or a pseudonym (in this case his online handle), to protect his own privacy.
I exchange several emails with Shinyuu to set up our call, wrangling time zones, birb’s ambivalence about being interviewed, and my own incredulity. Was I really conversing with a sentient being living inside someone else’s mind?
“Sorry, hostey has a pretty packed schedule with a bunch of meetings and I usually get the leftovers unless planned well in advance,” Shinyuu writes. “We can both chat, sure, if you can fit your questions in half an hour time and if it’s fine with you to first talk to me then to hostey (or vice versa) as switching back and forth is kinda exhausting. … He’s not much into this all, but he said he wouldn’t mind answering a question or two if it helps you.”
When birb answers the phone, his voice is gruff, his speech staccato and direct. He seems harried, a little distracted; he’s found time to talk just after work. He tells me that he developed Shinyuu after reading an article about tulpamancy on a tech website — the creation of an auxiliary being fascinated him. “What will it tell me about myself?” he wondered.
When I ask him about the exact nature of their relationship, he sighs deeply. “Honestly, the only shared interest is the body,” birb says. “Only one of us can use it at a time, and there’s only so many hands and legs to go around.” She was created out of an intense curiosity about what his mind was capable of, not out of desire for a companion. In fact, Shinyuu’s presence in birb’s life has caused friction among his family.
“Shinyuu and my wife have a tense relationship,” birb says. “Sometimes Shinyuu tells evening stories to my children. She is definitely a better singer than me — she can calm them to sleep! — but my wife is a bit jealous because I have a female companion. I didn’t consult with her on whether I should [do] this or not.”
He says that this duality of mind and body is distracting, but not in a detrimental way; it’s basically an exercise in intense time management. “Most of the time I control the body because I have a day job. On my lunch breaks we’ll read books — books she likes — and she’ll want to make notes, so she needs the body. She doesn’t like my handwriting,” he laughs.
* * *
When “Shinyuu” answers the phone, I’m greeted by a quintessentially feminine voice; breathy and lilting. She seems — by her voice, speech pattern, vocabulary and personality — like an entirely different person than birb. We make pleasant small talk about the weather. And then I ask her just what she thinks she is.
“How I identify is quite a difficult question,” Shinyuu laughs. “I guess I identify as a person — that makes the most sense to me — but I also tend to see myself as a wolf. But the body necessitates using hands, so I switch between a wolf and something human, something in between. I sometimes joke that I was a wolf in my previous life and I got screwed this time around by having a non-body.”
While Shinyuu says that she identifies with and enjoys her human-lupine being, she also recognizes that her existence was willed by birb. He had been charmed by the Japanese novel series Spice and Wolf, which follows the trials and travails of a merchant and a wolf-deity who takes the form of a 15-year-old girl.
Questions rage in the tulpamancy community around hosting tulpas that aren’t the same gender or age as you, how to navigate sexual relationships, and what it means — practically — to share a body.
“Sex is quite tricky,” Shinyuu tells me. “You can bang your head against a wall because you want to feel something, but I have to leave these thoughts behind. I’m not going to have a physical partner ever. It’s my state of life.”
When I ask Shinyuu how she feels about residing in a male body, she tells me that she is “quite skilled at disassociating from [birb’s] body.” Both birb and Shinyuu say that “switching” — toggling control of the body they share — is easy enough, if tiring. She seconds birb’s assertion that the biggest issue is time management.
“Me and hostey have well-defined lives by now; it’s hard to cram two lives into the span of 24 hours!” Shinyuu says. Birb says Shinyuu is able to “front” — control his body — about 40 percent of the time. But it’s not enough; Shinyuu is taking violin lessons, pursuing creative writing classes, and devouring books. She recently read a book called The Wisdom of Wolves, about the daily lives of a wolf pack in the Yellowstone National Park area, and she was moved by some of the author’s sentiments about how deeply misunderstood these animals are.
“The author writes that people are actually afraid of wolves because they’re scared of what they represent, not what they are,” she tells me. “I can say the same about tulpas. When someone thinks you’re hearing voices in your head or that you might be a danger to them because you don’t fully control your body — that’s so different than what I experience.”
Birb says that Shinyuu sometimes suffers from depressive episodes, struggling with the nature of her being — what exactly am I? — and the fundamental limitations on her ability to experience the world. He says those psychological valleys can be trying for both of them.
“If your tulpa is depressed, you feel that,” birb sighs. “I have a family and a job — I’m pretty established, and I like what I’m doing. But Shinyuu is not sure if she is a person or not; she’s searching for herself.”
* * *
In a tulpamancy lecture at the Plural Positivity World Conference last April, a tulpamancer known online as “bduddy” explained that lately, tulpamancy has grown more nuanced and, in many ways, less fanciful. In the first modern iteration, tulpas were extensions of games or shows their tulpamancers’ loved, a kind of glorified fan fiction. Bduddy says that that impulse has evolved.
“Tulpas are no longer just playthings,” he says. “In the early days, it was very common and very accepted to make a tulpa that was based off an existing character. … There were a lot of [My Little] Pony tulpas out there.” He explains that many of the old guides to creating a tulpa focused on predetermining what or who your tulpa would be. Now that’s changed.
“People will say you don’t have to do that and maybe you shouldn’t do that” — predetermine your tulpa’s form — and that’s a significant change in the community, bduddy says. He explains that just as in mainstream society, there is a newfound emphasis on consent; the tulpamancers believe that their tulpas are separate and autonomous beings, and therefore they should choose their own form.
According to bduddy, to begin the tulpamancy process you essentially talk to someone in your head until they start talking back. “Talk to them in a mind-voice. You don’t have to do it out loud,” he explains. “Talk to them about what you’re doing in your life, what you might do together.”
This process of using one’s “mind-voice” — speaking to your future tulpa — is called “forcing.” It refers to bringing a tulpa into being, not forcing it to do things. Bduddy explains that there is “passive forcing” — talking to the tulpa while doing something else simultaneously — and “active forcing,” a kind of hyperfocused meditation that involves pouring psychic energy into conjuring another being. Once you’ve successfully fostered this being, your tulpa can “front,” taking over your body from time to time to pursue a life of their own. This is known as becoming “plural.”
Dr. Samuel Veissière, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and co-director of the Culture, Mind, and Brain Program at McGill University, is a leader in studying the phenomenon of tulpamancy. His research began with a demographic survey, conducted in 2014 with 141 respondents. According to his study of tulpamancy: “The most common tulpamancer profile to emerge is one of a highly cerebral, imaginative, highly articulate, upper-middle class, formally educated person with many consistently pursued interests, talents, and hobbies, but limited channels of physical social interaction.”
Veissière first stumbled across tulpamancy in a 2013 New York Times article, “Conjuring Up Our Own Gods,” penned by Tanya MarieLuhrmann, a Stanford professor whose work explores how people experience God. Veissière and Luhrmann started working together, and they have since partnered up with neuroscientist Michael Lifshitz, who specializes in the plasticity of human consciousness. Together, they’re conducting a formal cognitive study using MRIs to see what is transpiring at the neurological level in tulpamancers’ minds.
“My understanding is [that] hearing voices and communicating with identities, spirits, imaginary friends, tulpas — it all draws on a completely normal propensity,” Veissière tells me in a phone interview. “This is nonpathological voice-hearing; tulpamancers have come to desire auditory and verbal hallucinations.” (Depending on whom you ask in the community, tulpas are not necessarily considered imaginary friends; many believe tulpas have their own minds.)
“There is a small but growing body of evidence that lives have been improved in this practice,” Veissière continues. “It helps individuals with social anxiety issues — it aids in theory of mind, the ability to relate to other people. Children who develop imaginary friends are better able to understand people in real life — they develop socio-cognitive abilities to infer what other people want and desire. It’s trainable.”
* * *
For 28-year-old Marz, tulpamancy — in one way or another — has played a pivotal role in his mental health his entire life. Growing up with strict Christian parents in suburban Michigan in the 1990s, there weren’t many outlets for expressing himself. So he had a host of imaginary friends. “I would doodle creatures over and over again — things that didn’t exist — and over time one of those imaginary friends became very prevalent,” Marz said. “I created my own protector. There was a lot of trauma that happened in my life as a young child.”
Marz initially named his protector “Shadow.” “He took the form of a goth human — very pale,” Marz recalls. “He gave me his name eventually, ‘Niro,’ and he grew with me in ways of style and physical appearance. He gained new appendages like horns and ears.”
Marz believes, as does his therapist, that his lifelong relationships with imaginary friends and tulpas are manifestations of his subconscious that are helping him live a less bifurcated and damaged life. In other words, the presence of Niro fostered a sense of safety that Marz never received as a child.
Marz says that the first time Niro became sentient was when Marz was on the cusp of self-harm. As a teenager, when his depression and suicidal ideation reached a fever pitch, “[Niro] flashed into my vision and told me to stop,” Marz says.
Over the past three years, however, Niro has been reabsorbed into Marz’s consciousness. Marz says it was Niro’s decision: “He told me, ‘I was meant to be your protector — to teach you things you weren’t taught because you were neglected, but you’re an adult now. And I’ve given everything I could teach you.’”
Marz says it was less like a death and more like an evolution. “By the time Niro passed on, I was deep into the tulpamancy community online. I had better techniques, a better understanding of what’s required to make a better tulpa.”
For Marz, tulpas are a double-edged sword that must be wielded intentionally and with care. The subconscious is a powerful place, and if it’s not plumbed properly it can run amok. “People should treat having a tulpa like taking psychedelic drugs. If you’re not ready to face that part of yourself, don’t do it. If you’re not working on yourself methodically in your subconscious, things will arrive. Your tulpa will voice who are you on the inside, even if you don’t know who you are,” Marz says.
A proper tulpa uses your subconscious to help and embolden you. “Interacting with a thoughtform or tulpa happens to be very similar to virtual reality,” Marz says. “Much like a screen veiling the environment around you, my tulpa appears to me almost like a filter in my own vision.”
These days, Marz is in the company of a tulpa named Enki, a pseudo-robot with a “horse-dog head,” antlers and body armor. Marz brought Enki into sentience carefully, painstakingly carving out mutual ground rules after several attempts with other tulpas didn’t work out. He leans on Enki when he’s overwhelmed.
“When I’m at peak exhaustion, I can be like, ‘Hey you can you take over? I’m going to nap for a minute.’ It’s an autopilot.” But Enki — who now has a companion tulpa, Una, a humanoid insect who keeps Enki company when Marz isn’t available — is capable of actively soothing Marz’s nerves as well.
“On my darkest days, when I need to simulate comfort, Enki and Una have the ability to reassure me,” says Marz. “It’s wonderful as an adult to compartmentalize. Tulpas can mitigate stress and exhaustion.”
* * *
For Maggie, who was raised in a white, suburban, middle-class Catholic family in Central Ohio and now identifies as nonbinary, the emergence of her tulpa, Devin, was far less intentional, but no less therapeutic.
Maggie suffered from depression, anxiety, ADHD and undiagnosed autism during her childhood. She spent a lifetime painfully at odds with her body, her identity and particularly her age. Just a year ago, she decided to court the idea of a “headmate,” a past iteration of herself.
“I was having a pretty bad week,” Maggie wrote me. “I had taken a mental health [day] from work just days before, feeling depressed with unusually strong notes of age dysphoria,” a profound sensation of feeling at odds with her own body and age.
A friend introduced her to the idea of pursuing alternative identities. “I created a past instance of myself who had time-traveled somehow to the present from [the] late ’90s and was possessing present-me,” she says.
But Maggie’s imagined past self didn’t entirely leave when she stopped “pretending.” Instead, she says, she slowly had the distinct impression of dual processing in her mind — perceptions, responses, thoughts and feedback that weren’t recognizable as her own.
“Had I somehow made myself plural for real?” she says, reflecting on her state of mind at the time. “The idea was very appealing. I had an emotional need for this visitor to stay.” She began digging into online forums, asking for advice from friends who were plural already, and pouring energy into fostering this new presence — “forcing” it into being. And soon enough, Maggie’s tulpa, Devin, emerged.
I ask Maggie if I can speak to Devin, and she agrees. I copy my questions into an email, wondering just who or what I am actually sending them to. As with Shinyuu and birb, the tone and vocabulary are starkly different when I receive a response from Devin.
“I’m a kid, I think about 11,” Devin writes. “Maggie brought me here when she was really depressed. She didn’t think I was real at first, and she didn’t expect me to stay.”
Both Maggie and Devin believe that, at first, they were an amalgamation of memories and impressions of what it was like to be a kid, coupled with a fabricated identity of Maggie’s past self.
“Before I came here, I didn’t really exist,” Devin continues. “Pieces of me were floating around Maggie’s mind, but I had no consciousness. Sometimes I still think of the ’90s as where I came from, but I don’t claim any specific memories from that time. As far as we can tell, I probably don’t age.”
Maggie and Devin identify as mother and child, which Maggie says is an unusual manifestation of the tulpa/host relationship. Maggie says she wishes she could experience complete amnesia when Devin is “fronting” — currently they share memories and experiences, but she is constantly urging Devin to become more independent.
Devin’s greatest lament is not the shared memories — although they both admit it can be confusing deciding whose experiences belong to whom — but rather, the cumbersomeness of Maggie’s adult body. “Maggie is too tall and heavy. She doesn’t fit into some places I would. Our physical body gets tired too easily. And we can’t go in bouncy castles or ball pits because we look like a grown-up.”
* * *
Michael Lifshitz, Tanya Marie Luhrmann and Samuel Veissière hope to determine what is transpiring on a neurological level among tulpamancers. And one of the first aspects of this discovery is negotiating the muddy waters of mental illness — challenging those who say tulpamancy is a manifestation of psychosis or disassociation, not a cognitive leap.
And while tulpamancers manifest some of the criteria for dissociative identity disorder (DID) — such as a “discontinuity of self” and gaps in memory — neither the community itself nor any of the researchers I spoke to think that tulpamancers in general are suffering from psychosis or DID, namely because there is an absence of distress. These voices are also purposeful — they’ve been created with intention. The hosts’ lives are perhaps more complicated due to the presence of their tulpas, but they’re also healthier.
“If something doesn’t hurt, then it’s not pathological,” Lifshitz tells me on the phone. “Think about rumination. Maybe I think a lot, but it’s not depressive unless it’s making me depressed. Being disassociated — having the feeling of multiple agents living inside of you — in and of itself is not fundamentally pathological.”
“The thing that’s clear is that tulpamancy helps people,” Lifshitz continues. “Tulpamancy allows folks to feel more relaxed and better able to socialize. In fact, we’re interested in how we could use it for developing better treatments for those who do have DID or psychosis. Perhaps we can teach [patients] how to engage with voices or personalities in a way that might be useful [or] therapeutic.”
The study will compare evangelical Christians who conjure the voice of God (a topic Luhrmann has studied extensively) with tulpamancers. When people are conversing with God, or when tulpamancers are actively using their imagination and mind-voice, what exactly is happening in the brain?
Veissière explains that they anticipate results similar to those of hypnosis studies. When there is switching — when the tulpa takes control of the host’s body — they expect to see activity in the primary motor cortex, but not in the supplementary motor area, which is implicated in voluntary action. That would mean that, whether we believe this other voice is “real” or not, the brain is experiencing God/the tulpa as something not in its control — as a decidedly “not-me” experience.
And if this phenomenon is observable in evangelical Christians, hypnosis patients and tulpamancers alike, why should tulpamancy be considered so strange? Is creating and talking to tulpas so different than conversing with God?
Luhrmann’s lengthy studies on evangelical Christians dovetail with the goals of the burgeoning tulpamancy community, she says, because “tulpamancers are working hard to make tulpas real, and Christians are working to make God real.”
“In Christianity, there is a recognition that if you wanted to, you could learn to experience God more vividly, but you have to invest effort,” Luhrmann continues. “If you want to experience God, you should work. The work tulpamancers are describing is work that uses human cognitive capacities. The difference here is that a Christian who learns to pray and experiences God does not end up with the view that they madeup God — they end up with a view that they have learned to work their way through their human limitations.”
The tulpamancy community faces a strangely loaded conundrum. They are the creators of their own auxiliary beings, but they share behaviors with well-trod religious practitioners. So what realm does tulpamancy occupy? Therapy? A new religion? A deliberate restructuring of one’s mind? And how do psychiatrists determine which voices are “bad” and which are “good”? Who gets to decide when God is talking and when someone is suffering from DID?
In short, we just don’t know yet. Tulpamancers report bullying and mockery, and there are very few meetups in person, due to the stigmas around “hearing voices,” but tulpamancers believe that this will fade over time as society evolves. Exposure and time can normalize a lot of behaviors.
“I don’t think the fact that they’re being stigmatized is a surprising thing,” Luhrmann says. “Christianity is practiced by over a billion people. There’s not a lot of stigma about being a Christian; it has a powerful moral vision of the world. Tulpamancy does not. It’s five years old and practiced by comparatively few on a consistent basis, and those people often feel like misfits in their society.”
“Any spiritual practice or sense of belief that is historically new has been considered weird by older generations,” says Veissière. “There is an interesting paradox, especially in the West — a growing interest in plurality, but a big fear of stigma. We’re very xenophobic and afraid of the world. Among younger people, the practice might become more accepted.”
Maggie says she “doesn’t like keeping secrets,” so she’s been fairly open in talking about her experiences with Devin. She says that the more people she tells, the more she hears, “Hey, that’s relatable.”
Marz, on the other hand, doesn’t talk about tulpas much publicly, but he says that “[of] the friends I have told, their reaction is, ‘Good on you. Fantastic! As long as it’s not a destructive voice.’ For me, it’s done nothing but help — to understand myself, to be more empathetic.”
For their part, Luhrmann, Lifshitz and Veissière hope that their findings will further our understanding of what human consciousness and imagination are capable of. “There is an idea of a singular self,” Lifshitz says. “Why does it seem so weird that multiple selves can live in the same mind? That’s the deeper direction tulpamancy is pointing. It’s easy to write off — ‘it’s cool, but tulpamancy isn’t real’— but what is the ‘real’ self? How do we draw those boundaries?”
Katie Tandy is the co-founding editor of three digital media publications: Ravishly, The Establishment — a multimedia site championing marginalized voices, stories and creators that shuttered in April 2019 — and a new literary site, PULP, which centers on sexuality and reproductive rights. A veteran alt-weekly journalist, Katie has worked as a reporter for The East Hampton Star, SF Weekly, East Bay Express, The Ark, and Oakland Magazine.
This post originally appeared on Narratively and was published December 12, 2019. This article is republished here with permission.
The world is said to have been built on
ideas, that which has so far shaped our conception of it. The Western
mode of thinking and doing things has evolved through the ages
bringing it to where it now stands. The book „Passion of the
Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped our World? by
Richard Tarnas aims at producing a
chronological narratives of how ideas
and thought have evolved in the Western world through time especially
in the history of philosophy and how also these thought and ideas
have changed the world and it’s still undergoing some transformation.
Tarnas approaches this history from a chronological dimension
beginning with the ancient Greek period down to contemporary time. He
believes it is the task of every generation to examine the ideas that
have helped shaped its understanding of it.
I. THE GREEK WORLD VIEW
The foundation of Greek philosophical
thinking was the quest to understand the nature of the cosmos up
until the time of the Athenian, the Greek tended to view the world
through archetypal forms but a more profound refection about this
archetype transformed into an intellectual dimension. The Greeks
believed that the universe was ordered by a plurality of timeless
essences which underlay concrete reality giving it form and meaning.
That is things were always in cosmic opposites (e.g. male and female,
good and evil e.t.c.) bringing us to the idea of constant flux and
that there could yet be distinguished specific immutable structure or
essences that could be enduring and believed to possess an
independent reality of their own. It was on this that Plato based his
metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
Plato’s perspective now happens to be
the starting point and foundation for the evolution of the western
mind.
The Archetypal Forms
Platonism as it’s commonly understood
revolves around the cardinal doctrine of ideas or forms.
Plato’s conception of form is not
actually conceptual abstract thoughts created by the mind but their
derivates in concrete reality. Reality possesses a quality and degree
of being. For example, to say something is beautiful means that thing
possesses a quality of beauty in it. In other words, the/that object
of beauty participates in the absolute form of beauty. Some critics
of Plato have said they can only see things as they exist not as they
are (they can perceive particulars and not ideas) but Plato says a
person has to have gotten the notion of idea/forms before actually
knowing that which is particular.
Idea and God
Plato’s use of gods and ideas are a
bit ambiguous as he tends to use them either interchangeably,
metaphorically or literarily. At some point, he presents them as
mythical figures and at other as epitomes of ideas. The use of
archetypes here are also not farfetched. For example, Eros as used in
Plato’s work symposium expresses itself at the physical level of
sexual instinct while at other times; it is considered as the
philosopher’s passion for intellectual beauty and wisdom and then
becomes the ultimate source of all beauty. It could then be said that
all Plato tried to do was to resolve the tension between classical
Greek minds notion of myth and reason.
The Evolution of the Greek Mind from Homer to Plato
The Mythic Vision
Greek thoughts were not devoid of
religion and myths as they played an important role in their
background and approach to the universe. The idea that gods played an
important role in the life of the human person was brought to the
fore by Greek poet and writers as they intended to explain the human
conditions based on their ideas and understanding of the gods. Their
understanding and notions of the gods was also born out human
behavior as perceived by them thereby attributing these features to
the gods. Myths for them therefore were a process for interpreting
nature and the processes of life as it also helped them in shaping
their culture.
The Birth of Philosophy
The Greek vision from myth as a source
of explanation was gradually shifting as early as the Sixth Century
B.C. in the large and prosperous Ionian city of Miletus situated in
the Eastern part of the Greek world on the coast of Asia Minor. The
shift also might have been as a result of conflicting mythologies,
growing civilization, the Greek polis social organization based on
laws rather than arbitrary act could be said to have influenced
Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes to seek to want to know what it
is that made the universe tick despite its constant changing motions
and the primordial substance from which it was made as there was a
plurality in their understanding of this natural phenomenon. There
was the need to explain the cosmos by means of observation and reason
rather than by mythological component. Nature should be explained in
terms of nature itself and not something beyond it. Natural
empiricism was born and human intelligence grew stronger while the
sovereign powers of the gods grew weaker. Parmenides of Elea also
approached the problem of the universe just as his predecessors but
used language and logic because for him,
“what is is” and “what is not is not.”
This revolutionary thinking therefore
brought logic to the fore as a necessary tool for the investigation
of reality. Anaxagoras, Empedocles and the atomist tried to reconcile
the positions of the naturalist and the rationalist by creating a
pluralistic system. Empedocles posited that the four elements
fire, water, air and earth
which were eternal moved together and
apart by the primary forces of love and strife while Anaxagoras
posited that the universe was constituted by an infinite number of
minute, qualitatively different seeds which he considered to be the
mind (Nous). The atomist, Leucippus and Democritus who constructed a
complex explanation of all phenomena in a purely materialistic term
posited that the universe is made up of infinite numbers of atoms
which move in a boundless void and their random collision varying
combination produced the visible world. Human knowledge for them is
simply gotten from the impact of material atoms on the sense meaning
that things happen by chance. Pythagoras created a synthesis between
religion (myth) and reason. He founded a school and was more
interested in the in the forms of phenomena. Their commitment to
cultic secrecy made most of their work to be largely unknown. They
charted an independent philosophical course structured on myth and
mystery religion while advancing scientific discoveries of immense
consequence for later Western thought. But the more Greek developed
intellectually, the more doubt sets in. Thus quoting Xenophanes “The
gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the
course of time, through seeking, man find that which is the better …”
The Greek Enlightenment
The Athenians were at the peak of
intellectual and cultural development in Greece as Athens became the
center of the Greek world. Philosophers at this time had already
created a delicate balance between mythological traditions and the
modern secular rationalism. There was also the gradual and continuous
shift towards a more humanistic endeavor such as the movement from
Aristocracy to Egalitarianism, savagery to civilized culture, old
religious belief to uninhabited human reason and endeavor. The
Sophist emerged during the latter part of the Fifth Century B.C. and
were itinerant teachers. Concerning knowledge, they claim it is
subjective and not objective that all a person can know is the
content of his/her mind rather than things outside the mind. On the
idea of god, they posit that we cannot know if they exist or what
form they take because of the shortness of human life while Critias
further believes that the gods were an invention of humans to instill
fear in them in other that those who would have acted in a evil
manner would be constrained or restrained. So for them, the world was
best viewed apart from religious prejudices. The sophist mediated the
shift from mythology to rationality. They championed a methodological
approach to the human person and society thereby bringing about the
Greek classical system of education and training which included
gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, poetry,music, mathematics, geography,
natural history, astronomy and the physical sciences, history of
society and ethics, and philosophy which for them would be standard
for producing a well-rounded and educated citizen. The sophist view
soon developed into a systematic doubt of human beliefs, the
relativity and plasticity of human values and custom, and other
issues of the time also added to its challenge. It now seems that the
use of human reason had kind of fallen in on itself and everywhere
the system seemed to be collapsing and knowledge of rationality
seemed to be failing.
Socrates
Socrates entered the philosophical
arena at a time when the climate was highly charged as there was
tension between ancient Olympian traditions and the vigorous new
intellectualism. Upon the end of his life, he had left the Greek mind
radically transformed, establishing not only a new method and ideas
for the pursuit if truth, but also, in his own person an enduring
model and inspiration for all subsequent philosophy. Despite his
influence, little is known about Socrates as what we have of him is
what is known through Plato. Socrates can be considered as a person
imbued with passion for intellectual honesty and moral integrity
though his life tends to be full of paradoxical contrast; he was
above all a man consumed by the passion for truth. Socrates was more
interested in ethics and logic as he found physics and cosmology
confusing because for him, they were not morally useful and were
riddled with inconsistent theories. He believed that education should
lead us to live a good life and therefore set for himself the task of
finding a way to knowledge that transcend mere opinion, to inform a
morality the transcend mere convention.
On the discourse of the soul, Socrates
says a better understanding of the soul and one’s self would lead
to happiness because happiness is not the product of physical or
external circumstances of wealth, power, reputation, but of living a
good life that is good for the soul. In essence, the key to human
happiness is the development of a rational moral character. Socrates
developed a dialectical form of argument that became fundamental to
the character and evolution of the Western mind which is reasoning
through rigorous dialogue as a method of investigation intended to
expose false belief and elicit truth. His methodology was not
universally accepted because it was considered unsettling.
The Platonic Hero
Socrates’ philosophy can be
considered as an expression of his personality as he was portrayed by
Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Symposium and The republic which is based
on good understanding of the self. These works also shows that the
human mind can discover and know timeless universals through the
supreme discipline of philosophy. In a sense, the Socrates of Plato
is a combination of both mythic deities and the development of human
intellect to arrive at truth. The human intellect coupled with divine
faculty now becomes a prerogative of both the great and humble.
Socrates and Plato’s search for
clarity, order and meaning had gone a full circle bringing about an
intellectual restoration. Thus Plato gave a new significance to the
old archetypal vision of the ancient Greek sensibility.
Socrates is taken as the paradigmatic figure of Greek philosophy but is difficult to separate his thought from that of Plato as it was in Plato that Socrates thought fully came to be known and developed. Socrates methodology became the foundation for Plato’s broader enunciation of the major outlines and problems for subsequent Western philosophy in all its diverse areas. Socrates was not just used as a mouth piece by Plato to complete his own independent ideas but his relationship to Socrates appears complicated. Socrates duty as an intellectual mid-wife could perhaps have found its final and fullest fruit of fulfillment in Platonic philosophy.
• Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone.
• It’s always darkest before dawn. So if you’re going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the time to do it.
• Don’t be irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.
• Always remember you’re unique. Just like everyone else.
• Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
• Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
• If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.
• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
• If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably a good investment.
• If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
• Some days you are the bug; some days you are the windshield.
• Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
• The best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
• A closed mouth gathers no foot.
• Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
• Generally speaking, you aren’t learning much when your lips are moving.
• Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
• Never miss a good chance to shut up.
• We are born naked, wet, and hungry, and get slapped on the ass…then things get worse.
• Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
• There is a fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
• Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
Goethe’s Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.
The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann’s translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe’s language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two.
(Goodreads.com)
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
