Advent Journal: Pinballing

Last night, sitting quietly doing nothing, pinballing between memories, arguments and fantasies, I remembered something Chris Fields said, and it settled me. It quieted me.

Fields points out (in his commentary on “Excavating Belief About Past Experience: Experiential Dynamics of the Reflective Act” by Urban Kordeš and Ema Demšar) that human experience obviously includes both first- and third-person perspectives. We have a subjective, this-is-what-me-feels-like experience, but we also have the ability to reflect on on what we think and say and do, analyzing it, and making modifications. Relationship is contingent on both perspectives.

Field is talking about science. We have objectively measureable data (e.g., gravity) but also theories about those facts (e.g., how do black holes affect gravity). We move between those perspectives, as if they were in dialogue. “Your theory doesn’t meet the facts.” “Okay but what if we change the experiment?” “Now your theory and the facts are now more harmonious.”

The suggestion is that this works in relationship as well. We are both in relationships – experiencing them in a felt, personal way – but they are also objects that we stand apart from and observe. “We need to learn how to talk better” or “we need to get away together” or “I’m not talking about this anymore until you take your meds.” Et cetera.

In order to be in relationship, we have to approach it from (or with) both perspectives – first and third-person. Per Field, this allows for constructive analysis and informed shifts in the relationship (e.g., from fear to love).

Having two first persons induces a third: the one that “hears” and judges their critical wrangling. The sociality of science is thus enacted within each individual, as well as between the different individuals that must be assumed to exist if the practice of science is to make sense.

Change “sociality of science” and “science” to “relationship” and reread that paragraph. Do you see the breadth and depth of what Field is saying?

The suggestion is that accepting the viability, the functionality, the utility of both first and third-person persepctives enables us to relate better, and to live together with greater peace and happiness. We cohere. Indeed, that state of coherence is more “us” than the so-called separate selves that struggle to cohere.

The labels “first-person” and “third-person” seem of little use in this more “communal” view of cognition. Science in this view is both first and third person, whatever its domain or focus. None of the perspectives involved is “objective” and all can and do confabulate, but by negotiating amongst themselves, they can correct or at least refine one another’s confabulations to produce useful guides to their mutually interdependent activities in their collectively specified world.

Francisco Varela (lauds and praise, lauds and praise) takes this another step further. He suggests shifting our focus away from subjective and objective as stances at all in favor of “participation and interpretation, where the subject and the object are inseparably meshed” (“The Creative Circle: Sketches on the Natural History of Circularity”).

For Varela, the world is “neither subjective nor objective, not one and separable, nor two and inseparable.” This insight . . .

. . . shows, indeed, the fundamental groundlessness of our experience, where we are given regularities and interpretations born out of our common history as biological beings and social entities. Within those consensual domains of common history we live in an apparently endless metamorphosis of interpretations following interpretations.

Varela concludes – and Field agrees – that this is a call to abandon the illusion that one can be “right” or “true” in any objective sense, but that it’s effectively “participation and interpreation” – i.e., relationship – all the way down.

We should do better to fully accept the notoriously different and more difficult situation of existing in a world where no one in particular can have a claim to better understanding in a universal sense. This is indeed interesting: that the empirical world of the living and the logic of self-reference, that the whole of the natural history of circularity should tell us that ethics – tolerance and pluralism, detachment from our own perceptions and values to allow for those of others – is the very foundation of knowledge, and also its final point. At this point, actions are clearer than words.

Fields and the late Varela are brilliant thinkers, whose devotion to science (biology and physics, mainly) is coherent with their spirituality (non-demoninational meditation and Buddhism, respectively). Beneath the academic jargon, beneath the intellectuality, lies a familiar mode.

Whatever reality is – whatever the word “God” and “Christ” point towards – it’s clear that “Love” is nontrivially entangled in it. Prior to culture, prior to language – prior to any separation at all – is relationship and the ethics that sustain and ground relationship. We are built for cooperation; we are made of and for communication.

Before it is described, Love is enacted in and through bodies which are in relationship, especially relationships that seek truth, clarity and coherence. When we seek love, we find love. Our very being is designed – is created, if you prefer – to ask what we are in truth and to remember together the answer, which is Love.