Advocating the Devil
Meditations on Reality and Polarity
When defining anything, its opposite is implied.
Just by stating that the text you read is black, I imply a non-black background in which to distinguish it.
I couldn’t tell you to turn right into my block, without implying a non-right direction you could have alternatively taken.
In a similar manner, I could never claim to know anything, without the possibility of being mistaken.
Polarity is everywhere — and nowhere. From the Taoist sage Lao Tzu in the East, to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the West, the paradoxical nature of reality has been explored through the relation of opposites. The opening lines of the Taoist classic the Tao Te Ching read (The Tao roughly meaning The Way):
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name”
And one of the earliest and most influential Greek philosophers in Heraclitus said in his collected fragments:
“All things come into being by conflict of opposites”
Both Christ and the Buddha were concerned with the contradictions we are confronted with and in outlining the proper way to faithfully walk the path through them.
Just as ‘things’ are defined in relation to one another, the words we use are relative to each other and cannot be understood in isolation. In other words, when you describe what something is, you simultaneously detail what it is not. Our opinions unfold this way as well, with every belief we might hold carrying the seed of one that opposes it. If we accept this, then the good implies the evil (if you couldn’t be evil, then could you truly be good?), although the disagreements come in when we get into the details of what is considered good, and what could be evil, as well as whether either exist at all or are merely illusion.
What leads us to perceive reality differently?
Can we know what is true?
Why do we develop differing beliefs and battle it out over them?
How do we interpret truth in what is seemingly relative?
Disagreements on fundamental matters of right and wrong, truth and fiction, reality and illusion, naturally raise questions on what we can actually be sure of. If there is any ultimate truth to our shared experience, then wouldn’t it follow that what is true for me would also be true for you?
Yet, we have spent centuries shedding blood and debating our beliefs in a vicious cycle. Whether the battlefield is contested over religion, science, politics or economics, the only guarantee seems to be that there will be no consensus on what is right and what is wrong. Even worse, many of the ‘sides’ that are pitted against each other in these fields make strong cases for why their beliefs holds the correct grasp of the truth and many are seemingly incommensurable with each other. Shouldn’t there be some agreement on the reality we seemingly share?
It seems to me that all of our arguments are nested inside of a philosophical one, as every belief system carries with it a philosophy on how reality works, even if it is only implicit in its framework. At bottom, we each have a philosophy that we act out, even though it mostly exists under the surface of our awareness, and could be different than what we explicitly claim to believe. It might be unified and consistent — or chaotic and disjointed — but it nonetheless underlies how we decide to act in the world.
What separates philosophy’s greatest thinkers, is that they attempt to get at the limits and first principles of our potential knowledge. There are three main philosophical problems that deserve serious considering:
1) What is the nature of reality and how did it come to be?
2) What can we know about it and how do we even know anything?
3) What is of value and how should I act in the world?
The philosophers call the branch of metaphysics which deals with the first problem, ontology — the process of identifying what kinds of things actually exist. The second is epistemology — which deals with how we go about knowing these things. The third is axiology — the study of value, ethics and aesthetics.
This series will join philosophers and other thinkers old and new, who will be brought into the discussion periodically, to engage their ideas and attempt to get at the depths of these issues. In addition to the whats and the hows, I want to explore the why as well. Why might any of this be the case? Is there a purpose to any of it? Is why even a valid question?
The first thing to recognize is that, in order to have an opinion on something, a belief on these questions is at least implicitly held.
Who am I to claim I am right about anything I believe, when a fellow human is as strongly convinced of her own beliefs?
Are we able to stand back and understand reality at its base or do our observations exist embedded in the world of our own perception?
We have entered the battlefield of ontology and epistemology, and as expected, the philosophers have terms for the warring tribes. Generally, the realists believe that what we experience exists in the physical world, whether or not anyone is there to perceive it, granting an objective truth to the way the universe operates. In contrast, the idealists believe that the objects of our knowledge are necessarily dependent on the activity of our minds, constraining our truths to a subjective sphere of appearances, as opposed to a direct understanding of things-in-themselves. Further, these schools are also differentiated by those that believe truths can be discovered through empiricism — perception and observation through the senses — and/or rationalism — thinking and logical reasoning.
As there are many variations and offshoots of these schools of thought, I have generalized nuanced beliefs that will receive a more thorough treating as the series develops. Nonetheless, this brings us to our first stop in questioning our perception of what is real. The issue we are confronting might be easier understood through considering the famous thought experiment:
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
To the conditioning of the modern mind, the natural reaction to this question is usually a long realist lines, as the falling tree is painted as a completely isolated object from ourselves, making a sound even without the presence of a listener.
Occurrences in the world must take place regardless of something to perceive them — right? When considering the question more closely, one realizes that the answer (unfortunately) depends upon a definition: what is meant by the word ‘sound’ in this context?
If the questioner refers to the dispersed vibrations in the air caused by the falling of the tree, then a ‘sound’ is most certainly made. Although, it is important to note that the relationship between the tree and the ground is needed for those vibrations — an observation that is important to keep in mind for later. But, if one meant the noise that we hear as a quality of those vibrations, then ‘sound’ as commonly understood is only made when the dispersed waves are met by an ear drum (or microphone and speaker system meant to emulate the reverberating function of the sense of hearing).
This implies that without the sense organ of the ear (or a measurement device inspired by it), we could have never differentiated the existence of the vibrations that we can now categorize scientifically as a ‘sound’. When normally thinking of a sound, I assume that most of us don’t have the vibrations going through the air in mind, as we are instead referring to the relationship between those waves and our ears (which requires ‘two’ to tango — just as the tree requires the ground to cause vibrations).
What does this imply about other potential phenomena that could exist outside of the range of our species’ five senses?
Is it possible we could be missing potential sense organs that, if evolved, would allow us to interface with other patterns that could be experienced in the world?
This closer consideration of the thought experiment demonstrates a limit on the confidence we can have in our understanding. Put simply, we take a leap of faith in order to believe anything about the world. We each look at the world through a unique apparatus, which colors how we perceive and experience everything. This belief system influences what we assume about the world and thus how we interpret what might be true about existence. This is an important point that forms the grounding of what will be explored in this series. The journey is largely about peeling back our assumptions and finding the beliefs that ground them.
Even if we are in agreement on the necessity of faith underlying our assumptions about the world, it doesn’t make the idealists correct, as a tinted view doesn’t mean that there isn’t stuff out there, independent of our minds, that we both are experiencing.
Can we have any true understanding of this ‘stuff’?
It is certainly tempting to be skeptical about whether or not we can know truth about objective reality at all, which is the foundational belief of the recent postmodern school of philosophy. This belief system sees all truth as relative and holds that it is impossible for us to get to any transcendent truth with our limited minds. However, by claiming no truth is absolute, isn’t one necessarily making an absolute truth claim about reality? This forces one to believe that there are either no truths with any meaning, or that there is an implied hierarchy of relative truths.
Are some ‘truths’ more ‘true’ than other ‘truths’?
Every belief system stakes its flag somewhere on the question of absolute truth, as one cannot move down a path without an assumption on what’s true (a reminder — it doesn’t need to be available for articulation either, which is the case for most who don’t care to quibble about philosophical matters).
The problem cuts deep, as using language to describe anything, including what’s true, locks us in the world of opposites. When there is ‘this’, a ‘that’ is implied, as there is ‘inside’ with ‘outside’ and ‘front’ with ‘back’. It also explains why you couldn’t understand the idealist school without placing it against that of the realists, or another with a different understanding along the spectrum.
This polarity is the fundamental issue that I alluded to in the beginning and its resolution is necessary in understanding who we are and where we came from. This is because this ‘duality’ can be applied to yourself, which opens another of the biggest philosophical issues: are you the flesh and bones that make up your body, or the thinking mind that is able to say ‘I have a body’? Is this even a valid question?
This is the mind-body problem in a nutshell. The fact we can ask this question leads dualist philosophers to believe that the mind and body are made of two separate ‘substances’ (mind/spirit and matter), while the physicalists believe that the mind can be reduced to a byproduct of the physical body, which is made up of the only substance (matter) that makes up the whole universe.
I have raised a lot of questions in order to highlight some of the major polarities, which have complicated philosophers across the East and West, for thousands of years. We like to think of the truth as black or white, but in reality it seems to be black and white. Is it possible to transcend the disputes and discover truth, without sitting on the fence?
Getting to some sort of conclusion requires a circling of many topics and different disciplines. If wisdom is possible, there’s a way to distill the complexity of these issues into the simplest, most integrative beliefs. Reality is complex and complexity breeds paradoxical situations that require integrative truths, which transcend the dualities and account for the entire spectrum of the poles reality unfolds through. I feel that any belief system that has been able to amass a long-lasting group of followers, has seen a piece of the truth, a fragment that can be integrated into a whole that paradoxically encapsulates the relatives and opposites.
This belief has sometimes been referred to as ‘nonduality’, but trying to pin it down with this name places it back in the world of opposites, as the very point of the term is to point to that which is outside the grasp of our words and categories. It refers to a ‘oneness’ or harmony in reality, which is at the same time an infinite ‘multiplicity’, made of poles that are complementary opposites of a nondual whole. Contradictions only arise when trying to break down and analyze the parts in isolation, as existence delivers the entirety through lived experience. This is as when describing a coin, its front and back are apparent distinctions of its integration — two polar dimensions that make it what a coin is. This is just as a magnet requires both a north and south pole to create the magnetic field it is known for, as it wouldn’t be what it is without this asymmetrical relationship.
These analogies are obviously not enough to demonstrate the depth of this belief, which is why I alluded to this being chapter I in a journey in which I will tackle the questions that I only was able to raise here. I will try to paint the picture of the reality that my searching has been leading me to believe, as there are many tracks that must be traversed to see how it all connects.
Thus, unraveling these questions will require a lot of advocating the devil…
[Chapter II] [ Chapter III] [Chapter IV][Chapter V][Chapter VI]
