The meaning crisis and language III — Myth, faith, ethics and aesthetics

I

There is a scene in Jack Kerouac’s beat era novel ‘On the road’ when the narrator finds himself homeless, hungry and bordering on delirium. After a strange encounter with a woman outside a fish and chip shop, he strays into a moment of vision described as follows:

“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-hands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realised that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realised it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die…”

There are categories of human experience that the epistemological and scientific categories of our time just don’t know what to do with. It’s not just that such subjective experiences can’t have material correlates and in some sense be subsumed in a material world-view, but we don’t have any understanding of why the brain has the inherent capability for these experiences. I described the ‘nirvana’ experienced by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor during a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, and the apparent oceanic ‘right-brain’ bliss that she encountered in the last part of this essay series. Likewise, near death experiences can illicit states similarly extraordinary, and a wide category of psychedelic drugs, many found in natural plants. Roland Griffiths, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences who lead research into the effects of psilocybin, described the positive range of effects from a controlled use of the drug in a safe environment, and concluded that what these drugs are doing is nothing like pathology. In other words it’s not that these drugs are producing a blissful effect by eliciting a kind of madness akin to mental illness, but rather they are as Griffiths put it “biologically normal”. They are something our brain, or our minds, contain the innate capacity for. Not only that but the experiences themselves reflect the very basis of an ethical understanding of the world. As Jill Bolte Taylor put it “I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace.”

In the last essay I considered the epistemological poles of subject and object, and how our scientific insistence on a literal language structure has left us mired between the arbitrary subjective and ‘true’ objective categories of self-understanding. One of the problems with categorising the subjective as either arbitrary and personal, or reducible to mechanistic drives or causes and thus actually an epiphenomenon of the objective, is that we become blind to the fact that certain kinds of truth can only be realised through experience. In a famous quote from an interview with the BBC the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God, he responded “Now? It’s difficult to answer… I know… I don’t need to believe, I know”, a shorter response to one he had given several years earlier, “All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take his existence on belief — I know that he exists”.

The atheist Richard Dawkins would later come to criticise this as an example of ‘blind faith’. His many incredulous disputes with Christians who apply the experiential validations of their faith to an insistence of literal interpretations of texts such as Genesis one as a competing scientific theory to evolution perhaps sometimes might make this is a justifiable complaint from his perspective, but something profound is lost in this dismissal. There are things that cannot be ‘known’ objectively.

This relationship between objective and subjective truth reflects one of the problems with ethical understandings of the world. For a scientist or a materialist concepts of the good have to be reduced to either individual or collective mechanisms of benefit, the idea that morality is a product of evolution that produces mutual or collective gains and is in some ultimate sense better for everybody. There are numerous problems here, firstly many things beneficial to a larger group might mean the sacrificing of some smaller group, “the weak and the botched” as Nietzsche put it, and that secondly much of our morality involves precisely the overturning of evolutionary impulses. The problem is that morality as a limited objective principle ignores the fact that we have a conscious experiential moral sense, a sense that can only exist in and because of consciousness.

This ethical sense is comparable to the sense of the aesthetic. ‘Beauty’ does not exist objectively, subjectively it exists as a wholeness of phenomena fundamental to our inward lives. It is an abstraction, but one brought into actual existence by the fact of qualia and the aesthetic structure, apparently, that our minds posses, a beautiful thing thus partakes in the thing beauty. Why on earth an evolutionary process would produce such abstractions remains at this point beyond us, but they have a profound parallel to moral abstractions. The fact that experiences throughout our lives, be they of witnessing or experiencing kindness, compassion or love, give us an experiential sense of the moral akin to the aesthetic, and authorise a sense of the possibility of a world made from these impulses.

Roland Griffiths, again, asked the question that follows from his research at Johns Hopkins on the benefits of psilocybin ‘why are we wired to have these salient, felt to be sacred experience encountering ultimate reality of the interconnectedness of all people and all things, experiences that arguably provide the basis for our moral and ethical codes, common to all the world’s religions?’

Common to all the world’s religions is an essential point here in relationship to our discussion on the language of myth and metaphor. At their best religion and myth provide a housing for the sacred quality of the moral and aesthetic experience as well as an objective structure. The question for a secular ethicist is how such impulses are housed, expressed, shared, experienced and enacted collectively without religion as a structure.

The obvious response here is to point to the atrocities of the history of the religious world, and the sincerely unethical behaviour of many apparently religious individuals. While this may be a fair retort, part of the problem is that our apparent objective inventory of the past is often conducted with a kind of brazen moral complacency that takes for granted the fact that the very categories by which we are judging the past are given to us by the religions whose failings we are criticising. Many of the contemporary social justice arguments for example take for granted the somewhat absurd idea that there is some power in being a victim in society, that being marginalised or oppressed represents a kind of inherent moral outrage, an idea that is a product of the overturning of power and victimhood represented by the Christian cross, and the identification of Christ with “the least of these”. Our ethical impulses are universal, but they are not universally accessed, are capable of being ignored in favour of basic impulses towards ego or tribalism and they require actual categories of language to be enacted in the world. Many aforementioned social justice debates begin with this moral idea of victimhood but quickly descend into tribal squabbling about categories of blame and victimhood, because they lack the parallel categories of equalising fallenness or iniquity. In other words to move from abstract experience to the real world it seems in some sense we need meaningful structures of myth and narrative, and we need to believe them.

I have argued in the last two essays that such a belief requires us to recognise that literal language structures are inadequate and have left us mired in numerous categories errors and an inability to house vital aspects of truth. But belief requires more than just a language structure, it requires an ascent of our inwardness towards what we believe, a turn from ‘belief’ to the knowing that excels capacity to know that the religious call faith.

II

There are two mirroring stories in the Old Testament. The first is the tower of Babel, whose builders attempt to build a tower that reaches the heavens in order to ‘make a name for themselves’. God’s somewhat peculiar response is to say “as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them”, and he responds by confusing their languages, causing them to be scattered about the world.

The antitype of this narrative is the vision of Jacob. While fleeing from the murderous wrath of his brother Jacob took a stone as a pillow and lay down and slept. He had a vision of a stairway reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending. When he woke he made an altar, naming the place Bethel, ‘Bet-El’ in Hebrew meaning ‘House of God’, saying “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it…How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”

Both of these stories represent an archetypal image of a connection point of heaven and earth, often a ladder or a tree with its branches in heaven. The difference between the two rests on the attempts of the people at Babel to build themselves to the place of God, and the vision that appears to Jacob in a dream. It’s worth relating these opposing ideas to the two kinds of language we have referenced. Literal language has a kind of ‘babel’ like structure, it attempts to construct the entirety of the world bottom up, and by necessity retains only the objective concept of truth. Language of myth and metaphor by its inherent non-literal and non-reducible content means it has a kind of relationship to the unconscious mind, in other words it opens the doorway to forms of non-willed revelation and realisation.

For much of the history of the Western world art has had an intrinsic connection to religion. From Cathedrals to village churches, Dante, Milton to Handel to T. S. Eliot the sense that art is in some sense part of the corollary of the revelation of the bible has infused Christian civilisation since its beginnings. We don’t have anything like a view of art in our society as connected to religion, but we also don’t even have a widely held concept of art as related to anything profound at all. Art tends to mean either arbitrary subjective pleasure or a kind of highbrow pretentiousness represented by the Tate Modern and other such galleries filled with squiggles a small community of people have decided is art and priced at millions of dollars.

The transformation of language structure to the literal has been mirrored in the last century by the transformation of poetry and music from meaning to commodity. Music rooted in Christian cultures was blended with music such as the spirituals, the meaningful cries of oppressed people who in turn inspired the blues that became much of the music culture we encounter today. Folk became pop, and pop in its hedonistic abandoning of moral and religious society, instead of freeing us has enslaved us to a commodified world where things don’t mean things. The free love of the Beatles has led us to a success and commodity oriented culture devoid of meaning.

Since art might at its best have the same relationship to the unconscious in some sense as the myth of religion, the artist should have a role in society akin to the prophet or the shaman, individual figures who exist in the liminal space between the temporal moment of a society and the universal values which order it. A glance at any contemporary pop writer whose lyrics focus on my journey, my story, my relationships, my opinions will tell you how much we have instead centred ego in the theatre of our culture.

All of this is to argue that the removal of metaphorical language structure as the epistemological orientation point of a society has corollaries that go far beyond just what some people believe about, say, the origin of life or the creation of the world. As a society however the way back seems unlikely, forms of religion in the public space have lurched increasingly to the political right, to literalist extremes and caricatures. But for the individual, and indeed for smaller groups, the way remains open.

It’s an extraordinary act of collective and individual amnesia that the most ego shattering of transcendent moral experiences, be they psychedelic or through whatever avenue we might seek them, could all be summarised in stories we have had handed to us for generation after generation: “whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do to me.” These are not just the particular feeling or the objective fact of these impulses, but both these things, and the actual imperative that they give us, the meaningful articulation of what the abstraction of love looks like in the real, lived world we find ourselves in. We cannot house the real, rich and vital inner life of our moral reality unless we in some sense allow its authorisation in the language that we use. In a way, all of the intellectualising of these issues resolves at the simplistic hinge point of faith. What do we return from Bethel with? What does the Kingdom of God look like? Renouncing of self. Love. Service to others. The thirteenth century anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich explained her ‘spiritual understanding’ of visions of Jesus that she received during an intense time of illness:

“Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love…this is how I was taught that our Lord’s meaning is love.”

The question earlier asked by Roland Griffiths, ‘why are we wired to have these salient, felt to be sacred experience encountering ultimate reality of the interconnectedness of all people and all things…the basis for our moral and ethical codes’ hints at something not so far from what we used to believe, handed to us through these strange vessels of myth and religion: that beyond the shore from which we stand looking out like Miranda in the Tempest, is the cloudless simplicity of the phenomenological fact that love is all there really is. The writer Aldous Huxley after experimenting throughout his life with psychedelics, first mescaline and later LSD, would write, “One never loves enough. . . for what came through the open door was the realisation of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.”

Now? It’s difficult to answer… I know… I don’t need to believe, I know.