Tunnel to a New Sky

January 21, 2022

When I was a child, I had this belief that I would one day understand everything, that my world-view would be so vast and secure as to encompass all knowledge. I started reading philosophy because I saw people using names as shorthand for ideas, and I needed to know what those ideas were. Later, I started to question whether I could know everything, and then whether I could know anything. I became caught up in trivialities and circles.

Many scholars-to-be wrangle with questions of order and precedence. ‘Must I read Plato and Aristotle to understand Kant? Surely, I must read Hume at least? And should I start with the Prolegomena, or jump into the Critique? Or is the Critique even necessary? Can I just read The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and call it a day?’ For some, these questions bring about such a paralysis that they do not read anything at all, or if they do, they spend the whole time wondering whether there is some sort of esoteric mystery to the text that they are unable to properly understand due to not having read its antecedents; a wondering which prevents them from engaging open-mindedly and whole-heartedly with the text and thereby robs them of the possibility of any understanding at all.

The path of a young mentor-less scholar is a lonely and difficult one. It sometimes seems that all of these philosophers and thinkers were born having read all of the others, and possess an inherent ability to consciously synthesize all that has come before, not to mention the fact that many also seem to epitomize the social and political conditions of their time and place. Reading the academic forewords and introductions to these works immerses the reader in a complex web of literary, scientific and cultural references; incomprehensible terms without definitions; and deep analyses of subjects that they have hitherto not even been introduced to. It feels as if one needs to understand the entire world and its history just to get started.

The truth is that the only way to begin is to jump straight in. The beauty of history — the history of events as well as that of thought — is that it can be read backwards and forwards. You can start from today, in an attempt to determine the cause of the effects we perceive in our modern world. Or you can start from the beginning (or as far back as humanly possible) and work your way from cause to effect in a chronological fashion. Or you can start somewhere in the middle, and jump around from anywhere to anywhere else. By this I mean to say, that reading Kant and recognizing the ways he was influenced by Luther, is equally as impactful as reading Luther and recognizing the way he influenced Kant.

Part of appreciating this non-linear approach is acknowledging that nothing will make sense initially. Everything you read, especially when first jumping into a tradition or lineage, is part of building a foundation for future understanding. I read Kant’s Prolegomena twice, and suffered through two aborted attempts at the Critique of Pure Reason before I was able to absorb it and move on to Practical Reason and Judgement. In the meantime, I read other books — both related and unrelated, fiction and non-fiction — lived a life, and sat on my chair thinking about nothing in particular. During all that time, half-digested particles of Kant’s thought swam about inside me, ready to be unearthed. When I came back, Kant felt like an old friend — in a way, it was almost as if I could read his mind. Reading through each twist and turn in his arguments felt like one of those occasional dreams where there’s this strange sense that you already know the ending.

I firmly believe in the value of trying to figure out a text myself, at least on first reading. This is why I forego companion guides, and ignore introductions and explanatory footnotes (barring those provided by the author themselves.) We are creatures uniquely gifted with the ability to make our own sense of things, and even if this sense is initially incomplete or misguided, each time we make our own sense we step a little bit closer to conceiving our own world view. Many times, the academics who write these footnotes, introductions or companion guides, despite all their data and fancy words, fundamentally miss the point. I would say this is doubly the case when it comes to literature. Don’t let someone tell you what an author is trying to say — just read the book. They wrote it down for you.

I am not here to scorn academics or footnoters; I just want make for them their proper place. They can provide new perspectives and interpretations to compare with my own, and insights into passages I may have missed or failed to come to a conclusion about. But it is called ‘secondary literature’ for a reason. The original text comes first.

I’ve spent a long time bouncing around, learning how to learn, learning how to study, and learning what it is I truly care about. I’ve wasted time lackadaisically reading through books I felt I should read, more for the sake of having read them than through any actual interest or enjoyment. It is only now, at a twenty six years-old that feels like more a twenty-nine (whatever that means), that I have gained the self-confidence, self-assurance, and self-understanding that allows me to study resolutely and rigorously. It is only now that I feel like my journey has truly begun.

The beauty is that there is no ending to knowledge and discovery; there is only a journey. There’s no correct understanding; just a deeper and deeper understanding. This is why wise scholars can spend their whole lives reading the Bible or Quran. In a certain sense, reading books is the same as reading yourself, and reading yourself is the same as reading the universe. We are each of us a microcosm — as above, so below. That is why the key here is depth. As you descend, you discover the infinite within yourself. To descend is not to tunnel into a cave, but to burst out into a new sky.

Depth of understanding requires rigour, and patience. It is unwise to attempt to become an encyclopedia, superficially skimming page after page, retaining a basic outline, a few scattered facts before moving on. This approach may provide some interesting trivia to bring out at parties (depending on the type of parties you attend), but why should I spend my time on such an inherently trivial goal? Would I not rather penetrate to the deeper essence of things? Would I not prefer to have in my mind, instead of a scattered collection of data points, a holistic-and-yet-ever-growing idea? The mind is not a computer. It is unfathomably superior to even the most robust database-driven AI, and if you don’t believe it, then I don’t know what to tell you. You’re alive, aren’t you?

I can't get into this fully, because it will make me die, but any time someone refers to human mind as "a computer," it makes me so, so terribly sad. Computers are an inadequate facsimile of a vastly simplified model of the human mind. They are so woefully incompetent. They may in some ways replicate the form, but you can't ignore the vast disparity in content. There is so much historical richness in the organic development of even the material components of the human mind, not to mention the incomprehensible cosmic achievement that is consciousness. Oh, it makes me crazy! If you think you are a computer, go ahead and compute! Ignore socialization; ignore imagination; ignore thought and interaction in any form and stick to your true purpose! Go compute! And see where that gets you!

Bah!

What I am talking about here is not simply data derived from sense-experience garbage-compacted in an analytical framework. I am talking true knowledge, and knowledge is understanding. Not just understanding the physical whats and hows of the world in an instrumental fashion, i.e. trying to determine how things in the world can be used and exploited, but trying to make sense of them on an individual human level. What does the world mean to me? What am I doing in it? What’s it here for?

Beyond these questions is the unmediated joy of learning. It is joyful to make connections and form new ideas. Each new idea makes the world a little more beautiful. Whether this is a function of our psychology, our neurology, or some divine spark within us seems beyond the point. We are humans; humans are all we can be, and to forego our humanity because we can’t find a way to rationally justify it feels absurd. We can only understand humans, and humanity, by being human. No alien race and no supercomputer could know us better than we can know ourselves.

This is why the psuedo-objective frameworks of psychology and sociology bring us no nearer to self-understanding than the subjective realms of religion and philosophy. I find much more value in learning what an individual thought of themselves — i.e. what they thought that they were, in being a human — than what a researcher concluded considering us all in aggregate. I wouldn’t go far as Descartes and say that I only need myself; I may consider my own self the beginning and end of my understanding, but the interior of this sandwich includes other people just as it includes all of everything. I needed to read Kant before I could even conceptualize the questions that he makes me ask myself. You can’t answer a quiz before you know the questions, and every person brings with them new questions, or new formulations of old questions, that are vital to this process of understanding.

But what is it that I am trying to understand? What do I need to know? The answer is hard to explain. I have mentioned that the accumulation of information as data is assuredly not my goal. I might say that I am searching for is more intuitive and instinctual than that. But instinct and intuition are given; they don't need to be learned, so it would seem odd that my studies revolve around the words of others.

Perhaps what I am searching for is something lost. Something buried deep within all of our consciousnesses, something that emerges in fits and starts within individuals, but predominantly lies dormant within us all. I am looking for that Philosopher's Stone Hegel thought he had stumbled upon, that bestower of Absolute Knowledge by which the world-spirit looks upon itself -- via me, looking at myself -- and sublimates itself into itself. It is a nonsensical quest, at least when put into words, but I am starting to wonder whether words really are the true criterion of sense. As logicians equally admit and fail to admit, language is but a tool. It is one of many tools for expressing. There is no reason to believe that a tool we created could be a foundational aspect of the World's truth.

Here's an instinctual idea: I believe that humans contain within them some sort of divine spark. I believe that we are born capable of understanding the nature of the universe. I don't know where or if I learned that, and I don't know any way to prove it.

At the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the main character becomes a Space Baby, a being of pure energy that is essentially merged with the very fabric of the universe. This transformation is brought about by the continual realization by humans, from ape-times forward, that the universe is constructed via much larger principles than they can comprehend. The monoliths repeatedly slap them in the face with the knowledge that the means by which they thought they were going to reach Understanding are inadequate. Thus, they must let go, and embrace a larger project, ever and anon, until they are eventually allowed to integrate into the inner nature of the universe.

These spiritual sea-changes are vastly more important than the scientific developments themselves. The monoliths encourage space travel within the solar system not because we need powerful engines for where we are going, but because being in outer space broadens our view, and unlocks a vaster spirituality. The technological progress is a plot-device; in truth, we don't need rockets or telescopes to understand outer space. It's right there for us to look at. Copernicus revolutionized our view not by making a great telescope, but by reorienting himself relative to the already existing knowledge. He didn't even HAVE a telescope!

Plato believed that knowledge and virtue were synonymous. The pursuit of knowledge was an inherently virtuous task. However, unlike Aristotle, Plato was not a scientist in the way we think of a scientist today. He cared not for physical observation, but based his entire understanding on forms, delivering his ideas via poetical and mythological analogies. Unlike instrumental science, virtuous understanding in the Platonic sense requires nothing but a continuous inner reflection (via dialogues) that uncovers the knowledge hidden within.

Lao Tze and Chuang Tzu formulated the spiritual mysteries of the universe in their poems and stories. In contrast to Plato's verbosity, their works are sparse, and in contrast to his quest for granular clarity, their works are ambiguous. However, the similarities are evident, and the significance profound. As far as I can see, while whether or not they truly achieved enlightenment is difficult to discern, these thinkers approached closer to Space Babification than anyone else (whose thoughts have been written down and preserved.)

The only issue being that they are not universally convincing. You can not, in the modern age, or in any age really, bring the works of Plato or the Tao Te Ching to a scientific conference and hope to pull people towards understanding. People prefer Aristotle to Plato, Confucius to Lao Tze, and heck, even Marx to Hegel. They prefer these instrumentalized material adaptations over the spiritual poetic originals which dangle on the edge of intelligible linguistic sense.

But while the door may be continually closed on pure philosophy, the lock is never shut tight. All instrumental scientific visions eventually reach a diminishing point, an elastic wall that begins to erode the illusion of continual linear progress. And this wall can only be pushed through when someone like Copernicus, or Einstein, or Kant, search deep within themselves and perform an inner reorientation, unlocking some hidden portion of that deep subliminal knowledge that usually lies just beyond our articulative powers.

So, like Copernicus, I hope to dig deep and emerge into a new sky. A cosmos that is vast and impenetrable, while simultaneously immanent in my understanding. A cosmos that I build in the same way that it built me, that is within me in the same way that I am within it, and that can only be expressed in this way — this inadequate and vague, nonsensible and nonsensical, poetically vulgar way.