THE NATURE OF TRUTH AND THE TRUTH OF NATURE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religous Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 18th, 2005

Opening Words: "Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs." -- from A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean


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[Extemporaneous Introduction: this topic purchased at the Service Auction...]


I thought we might start out this morning by looking at one of the most fundamental problems in both philosophy and theology, which basically goes like this: How do we know what we think we know, and how do we know that we know it? This deceptively simple question is, as you might imagine, a little trickier than it appears at first glance. Most of the time most of us go through life assuming that "seeing is believing" -- that there is a common sense correlation between 'the way things really are" and the evidence of our own two eyes. Yet it also doesn't take us too long to figure out that sometimes "appearances can be deceiving," and that there is often a lot more to life than meets the eye. Our understanding of what is True, and even our experience of what is Real, is filtered -- not just by our senses, but also by our expectations and even the structure of our minds. We perceive the world a certain way because there are limitations to what we can see and hear and touch and smell; and then our minds try to organize that experience of the world according to what seems to make sense.

This process begins with the concept of a subjective "Mind" itself, that is different and distinct from the World "out there." Starting with our own self-awareness, our brains categorize our experiences, distinguishing not only between "self" and "other," but between objects and actions, things and deeds, numbers and functions. We analyze by differentiating one thing from another, or by dissecting a thing into its constituent parts. We synthesize by discerning the commonalities among things we have previously identified as separate, and putting them back together again, perhaps in new or different ways. We count things and add them up, subtract and divide them, then multiply them again, factor the variables, calculate the trends and measure all the angles, because at the end of the day we like to think that we know what the bottom line is. We conceive of the world based not only on what we perceive, but on what we EXPECT to perceive, -- and those expectations shape both our experience of reality and our understanding of the truth in ways that are often all but invisible to us, because from our perspective, it's all just "common sense."

So, we form ideas about the world, and those ideas in turn shape our experience of the world in ways that make sense to us. That all seems simple enough. And yet, recognizing that this relationship between perception and conceptualization is not exactly one-to-one -- or more specifically, that what we perceive is only a small fraction of What Is, and that we can also conceive of things which we will never perceive, while our perceptions themselves are often shaped by our preconceptions (and possibly even our misconceptions)...this changes the nature of the game a little. Knowing that we are not capable of seeing it all, but that we can imagine things we will never see, and that what we do see is often only exactly what we expect to see, forces us to ask a couple of slightly different questions, namely: how "real" are our ideas, really? And how do we know which ones we can trust, and which ones are merely figments of our imagination?

There's a really obvious answer to these questions, and I want to skip ahead a little and talk about it now, because I know if I don't it's all you'll be thinking about until I get to it anyway. But the obvious answer to these questions is "by trial and error." How do we know if an idea is any good? We try it out, and if it gives us good results (which is to say, the results we expected or hoped for) then it's obviously a good idea and we continue to believe it; while if it doesn't, then maybe it's a bad idea and we need to think of something better. This philosophy is sometimes called "pragmatism," and it was best articulated by the psychologist William James (which is one reason why "real" philosophers tend to hate it)...because it is simple, and straightforward, and (from the perspective of a serious philosopher) seriously wrong in so many different ways that it is difficult to enumerate them all. But probably the main problem "real" philosophers have with Pragmatism is its absolute Relativism. You have your ideas, and I have mine, and if your ideas work for you, that's great; but don't bother ME about it (if you don't mind), because I have ideas of my own, thank you very much. James himself was very much aware of this problem with his philosophy, and he resolved it through something he called "radical empiricism" -- basically a negotiated common reality based on the consensus which develops from conversation about shared experience and perception.

But even a negotiated, consensual reality retains many of the same objections initially raised by the professional philosophers. Another concern, which is even probably more significant to ordinary people, has to do with the role of "belief" in the pragmatic "truth" of an idea. James put it this way: if you had to leap across an open chasm, you are much more likely to complete that leap successfully if you start out believing that you can actually do it, rather than believing that you can't. This is the so-called "leap of faith," American-style...since it has absolutely nothing to do with a belief in God, but is merely about the power of positive thinking and getting from point "A" to point "B" safely and in one piece. Yet this notion of the "Will to Believe" has all sorts of significant intellectual consequences, since it seems to say (at least on some level) that it is the intensity of our belief that makes an idea real. And you don't have to be a professional philosopher to see what kind of trouble an idea like that could eventually lead to. This goes well beyond the comparative advantages and disadvantages of optimism verses pessimism. Taken to its logical extreme, it basically asserts that "wishing makes it so." Yet wishful thinking is hardly a philosophy that even the most pragmatic individual is likely to succeed with. And so we are back again to our original set of questions, with perhaps an added nuance: how much of our destiny is the result of an act of Will, and how much is merely Fate? But that's a topic for another day....

William James formulated his ideas about pragmatism at the end of the 19th century, in a self-conscious attempt to bring together two divergent strains of philosophical thought which had dominated Western civilization for the previous two centuries. (And at this point I need to apologize to any philosophy majors in the room for trying to boil down everything you learned in college into about thirty seconds). But on one hand you had the Empiricist tradition of John Locke and his subsequent followers and critics. Locke saw the human mind as a tabula rasa or "blank slate" on which our sense-impressions of the world form our ideas about the world and our place within it. Reality is what we see with our own two eyes, and every thing else follows after. And on the other hand was the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant and his successors, who were much more sensitive about the distinctions that could be made between Reality, and our experience of reality, and our pre-existing concepts about what is "really" real, which tend to shape our perceptions and give meaning to our experience. The fact that the Idealists wrote mostly in German and the Empiricists in English did little to facilitate mutual understanding, especially on the English side, where Locke's defenders tended to conflate the ideas of his English-speaking critics George Berkeley and David Hume with the less skeptical, more nuanced Idealism of the Germans.

The post-Kantian German Transcendental Idealists (and I hope that's the last time I ever say something like THAT from this pulpit, although I suspect it won't be) had a much more sophisticated view of perception than either Locke or his critics. They basically distinguished between the world of Phenomena, or appearance, which was a shared world of experience and perception, and the world of the Noumena which might be thought of as the objective, pre-existing reality behind or beneath or beyond the world of Phenomena, which is essentially opaque to our limited senses, and can only be apprehended through an act of mindful imagination. But the realm of the Noumena is not just an imaginary world. If anything, it is more real than the world of phenomena which we experience and perceive, since it exists independently of our awareness of it, and we need not depend upon an imperfect act of perception in order to have knowledge of its existence.

Well, that's probably about enough of that for now. It's an interesting, but complicated set of ideas, I know; it took me about a decade before I finally felt like I was starting to "get it" (and I'm still not sure I REALLY understand). But I do want to take a moment to say just a few words about our own spiritual ancestors, the American Transcendentalists, and how they fit into all this. Because they were the ones whose thinking about this issues essentially shaped our own understanding, and our practices here in the Unitarian Church. Although perhaps not very well appreciated either in their own time or now, there was another school of English (or, more strictly speaking, Scottish) philosophy in the 18th century which was very much aware of the difficulty of simply assuming that whatever we perceived about the world was actually real, but who finessed the problem of skepticism by assuming instead that since human beings are also a product of the reality which we observe, we possess certain "faculties" which allow us, almost instinctively, both to Trust what we see, and what we THINK about what we see, without falling into the trap of absolute doubt.

In other words, human beings do not stand outside "the world" and observe it objectively; we are part of the world, we participate in it and our perceptions and reflections about that experience share the same reality of both the thing we are experiencing and the experience itself. Our perceptions may not be perfect, but they are all part and particle of the same puzzle and can be relied on as such. The philosophy of these so-called "common sense Realists" was very popular at Harvard when Ralph Waldo Emerson was a student there, and it gave him a different perspective on what the German Idealists were trying to say, when their ideas finally started to flow into the English-speaking world in the form of the Romantic movement.

None of this will be on the mid-term, by the way....

Romanticism was an intellectual and literary movement in love with Nature, and with the notion that "natural" human beings were somehow closer to their origins, closer to God, than civilized people were. They believed in intuition: that introspection was better than circumspection, and that Universal Truth resided most authentically within the inmost chambers of the human soul, safe from the corruption of the society of one's peers. Our eyes and our ears and the conventional wisdom of our neighbors may tell us one thing, but our spirits, our souls, tell us something else. The wisdom of the world falls short of the wisdom of the Oversoul -- it is mere "understanding" only, and not the Pure Reason of the Divine Mind in whose image we were created, and whose essential character we all share.

Emerson was not, strictly speaking, a philosopher. He saw himself more as a poet, and perhaps even a mystic...a writer and public speaker, and for a time a Unitarian minister, although he was never really that comfortable with the pastoral part of the job, and gave it up as soon as he felt he could afford to. But in passages like the one I read earlier from his book Nature, Emerson reveals the true nature of his own mystical insight into the underlying nature of reality itself, which came to him neither through an act of perception nor an act of reflection, but rather by what can best be described as a sudden and momentary experience of unanticipated inspiration, during which he apprehended immediately and without mediation the "true" nature of the Noumenal Universe, where "all mean egotism vanishes."

"I become a transparent eye-ball..." he wrote. "I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." His description is reminiscent of the experiences of mystics in every period of history and from every point on the globe. The whole of Creation is very, very big; while human beings are very, very small; yet we are part of that Whole, and still whole within ourselves, connected intimately to everything that is, and ever was, and ever will be; and that is the only reality that really matters. It's not exactly rational, but it's not exactly irrational either -- it's more non-rational, and perhaps even a little unrealistic and unreasonable as well. But it's still True -- true in a way that defies definition or often even description. And once we've "seen" it, we see it over and over again everywhere we look for it; but none of our ideas, and none of our words, are really equal to the task of capturing the experience in its entirety.

And as for the question of knowing which ideas we can trust, well a lot of that has to do with one's tolerance for ambiguity. If you demand certainty from life before you will trust it, you will shape your ideas to fit that expectation...and over time you will ultimately be disappointed. But if you can learn to trust without being certain, your imagination becomes free to explore to the very limits of possibility -- free to think outside the box, free to soar among the clouds and build castles in the air, and then to return to earth again to put the foundations under them, and live in ways that no one has ever dreamed of living before. And with each act of creative imagination, the universe itself grows larger and more accessible, and the realm of possibility becomes more real, and more true....

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Reading: from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man cast off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.