This week Jane and I attended a presentation on what we might or might not know about the brain, and how experimenting on animals might or might not tell us something, and how what we might or might not know may possibly give us insight into child behavior, that might or might not help us find new interventions to help troubled children. The conclusion seemed to be that all is guesswork, but at least it is worth subjecting other sentient beings to pain in order to keep guessing.
We came away frustrated on a number of levels.
Here is one of my frustrations with the talk. The presenter had a particular view of knowledge: what it means to know something and how we get that knowledge. She was an unacknowledged positivist. A positivist is someone who thinks that we can only know something if we can perform an experiment and empirically verify the result by repeating the experiment a number of times and reaching the same conclusions. Only then do we have knowledge. (It is called the verification principle.) I have no problems with that kind of knowledge. It is the basis of our technological and scientific breakthroughs of the last few hundred years. (Though I do dissent from seeking that kind of knowledge by subjecting other sentient beings to great pain.) My frustration is when empirical knowledge is announced as the only knowledge; that all else is truly meaningless as a truth claim.
The empirical, by its nature, deals only with appearance: how things are perceived by us and not with the "thing-in-itself."
Philosophers have wrestled with the issue of appearance and reality since they began pondering about life. They have reached no firms conclusions. Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth century German philosopher, and very important as philosophers go, said that it is impossible to know a "thing-in-itself" (which he called the noumenon). We can only know how something appears to us, filtered through our own experience and limited thinking (which he called the phenomenon). The presenter of our talk this week seemed to think that appearance is reality; that noumenon collapses into phenomenon. At least Kant left room for the noumenon, even if he thought we could never know it.
The spiritual impulse is different. It is the search for the noumenon. It is to move beyond appearance to find reality. W. R. Inge said that "the only true mystic is one who sees realities and knows how to distinguish the from phantasies" (Mysticism in Religion, p. 142).
Things aren't what they appear to be. Anyone want to be a bodhisattva? Keep seeking! The mystics have told us that the fully real is fully knowable.
We came away frustrated on a number of levels.
Here is one of my frustrations with the talk. The presenter had a particular view of knowledge: what it means to know something and how we get that knowledge. She was an unacknowledged positivist. A positivist is someone who thinks that we can only know something if we can perform an experiment and empirically verify the result by repeating the experiment a number of times and reaching the same conclusions. Only then do we have knowledge. (It is called the verification principle.) I have no problems with that kind of knowledge. It is the basis of our technological and scientific breakthroughs of the last few hundred years. (Though I do dissent from seeking that kind of knowledge by subjecting other sentient beings to great pain.) My frustration is when empirical knowledge is announced as the only knowledge; that all else is truly meaningless as a truth claim.
The empirical, by its nature, deals only with appearance: how things are perceived by us and not with the "thing-in-itself."
Philosophers have wrestled with the issue of appearance and reality since they began pondering about life. They have reached no firms conclusions. Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth century German philosopher, and very important as philosophers go, said that it is impossible to know a "thing-in-itself" (which he called the noumenon). We can only know how something appears to us, filtered through our own experience and limited thinking (which he called the phenomenon). The presenter of our talk this week seemed to think that appearance is reality; that noumenon collapses into phenomenon. At least Kant left room for the noumenon, even if he thought we could never know it.
The spiritual impulse is different. It is the search for the noumenon. It is to move beyond appearance to find reality. W. R. Inge said that "the only true mystic is one who sees realities and knows how to distinguish the from phantasies" (Mysticism in Religion, p. 142).
G-d said to the Jewish prophet Samuel: G-d does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but G-d looks on the heart.In John Hick's phrase, God is the Ultimately Real. The Ultimately Real sees the "thing-in-itself." The goal of spirituality is to become one with the Ultimately Real. To become one with the Ultimately Real is to be enlightened—to see truly.
Things aren't what they appear to be. Anyone want to be a bodhisattva? Keep seeking! The mystics have told us that the fully real is fully knowable.