A Trip Through The Universe

Oh draw at my heart, love,

Draw till I’m gone,

That, fallen asleep, I

Still may love on.

I feel the flow of

Death’s youth-giving flood

To balsam and ether

Transform my blood -

I live all the daytime

In faith and in might

And in holy fire

I die every night.

- Novalis, (1772–1801), ‘Hymns to the Night’.

Novalis, (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), was a poet and philosopher whose philosophy, as well as reflecting upon the fragility of the human condition, was concerned with the themes of subjectivity and self-awareness, and in which, and for good philosophical reasons, preference was accorded to the imagery of poetry, as it manifests itself through metaphor. Rather than attempting to construct, through critical reason, a complete philosophical system, his approach to philosophy was fragmentary, drawing upon poetic expressiveness; it was both a controversion of the oft made distinction between art and critical thinking, or poetry and philosophy, and an attempt to explore reality, the nature of which is complex to a degree that renders it unlikely ever to be comprehended through the operation of a precisely circumscribed rational determination; but a romantic philosophy is not so much an appeal to the purely irrational, rather it is a development of an idea of reason that can incorporate the experience of poetry, and diverse emotional feelings and propensities.

The wellspring of poetry was, for Novalis, inner emotional depth, thoughts and sensations, a capacity both to think and feel, of which happily the Germans have one word, Gemüt. Gemüt is an active agent, the instrument of creative inspiration, a channel for passionate love, and sympathy, and fellow feeling; and Novalis associated it with poetry: ‘Poetry is the representation of Gemüt, of the interior world in its totality’. Whereas perception passively permits a cognitive synthesis to represent an objective exterior reality, on the other hand all the resources of thinking, of imagination, and of emotional feelings, they all qualitatively distinguish the representation of an objective/subjective interior; and it is for this reason that precedence is to be given to the poetic imagination, and for material objectivity to be appropriated by a first person perspective. ‘We perfectly conceive why, in the last instance, everything becomes poetry’, said Novalis, ‘the world, is it not finally Gemüt?’

It is poetic imagery manifested through metaphor that inclines towards becoming a reality, and so an aestheticized philosophy, if I may so put it, a romantic philosophy, retains its practical purposes, for: ‘We only know it, insofar we realize it’, as Novalis said; and, as with philosophical reflections generally, a romantic philosophy strives for completeness, for an abolition of distinctions between body and mind, or the outer and the inner, or the science of physiology and the study of mind. We find expression of this ideal in another German-language poet:

Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner — what is it?

if not the intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875–1926).

The challenge that a romantic philosophy faces, however, is that of endeavouring to think systematically but without allowing such thinking to become stagnant in an apparently conclusive set of dogmas; it must be perpetually bereft of any predetermined boundaries, and it must also advance through a reciprocal relation of influence with the natural sciences, in addition to the humanities; one might say it should mould itself into the form of a protracted intellectual venture of trial and error, forever moving towards, well, somewhere, but at least guided by an inductive methodology, and sustained by an ideal of an absolute or universal knowledge, even though this very knowledge is, by definition, beyond what is attainable.

That is to say, and as Novalis knew well enough, human reason will by its very nature seek high and low and always for the unconditioned; but what does that mean? Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), argued that reason was held to be that faculty capable of laying hold of unconditioned truth; but that this has the unfortunate consequence of it becoming tangled up in that which Kant refers to as the ‘transcendental illusion’, (‘transcendental’, in the sense of the conditions without which human knowledge would not be possible, as opposed to ‘transcendent’, in the sense of that which is beyond all possible human knowledge; I shall come to the meaning of ‘conditions’ in a moment). The illusion consists in assigning an objective reality to absolute unity and to absolute totality, and then inferring from that the absolute synthetic unity of all conditions for the possibility of things in general; ‘of whose unconditioned necessity I can make for myself no concept at all’, complains Kant.

Reason has this inclination forever to aspire towards the unconditioned, that is, it is always searching for conditions for every condition, and as a consequence it is extending itself beyond experience; a tendency which, Kant laments, can only lead to ‘the temptation either to surrender…to a sceptical hopelessness or else assume an attitude of dogmatic stubbornness’; and further, he warns us: ‘Either alternative is the death of a healthy philosophy’. Here enter a healthy romantic philosophy; as reason is preoccupied with the unconditioned and yet can find nothing but things, a romantic philosophy can study such things meticulously and thereby attempt to make some kind of sense out of them.

But what is a condition, and what is a thing, in this context? Let us consider an example, my thirst for wine (this is merely an hypothetical example). My thirst for wine supplies the reason for my drinking wine, but it will not result in my drinking wine unless certain conditions are fulfilled; that some wine is ready to hand. But the wine, unlike my thirst, is a patently independent entity, intrinsically unrelated to my drinking wine; of itself the wine gives me no reason to drink wine and has no tendency to result in my drinking wine; the wine is not intrinsically a condition of my drinking wine but is made a condition of it by my thirst for wine; the wine is conditioned by my thirst for wine to become a condition of my drinking wine. But once the wine has been so conditioned and integrated within the compass of my thirst for wine it is in the same condition as my thirst for wine; the wine as thirsted for gives me a reason for, and tends to result in, my drinking wine. My thirst for wine and the wine thirsted for are two conditions of my drinking wine; each alone is merely a necessary condition, but together they are the totality of conditions, and thus a sufficient condition, to produce a fact or thing, namely, drinking wine.

So, reason is inevitably driven towards the idea of a totalizing, unconditioned first principle, which reason itself could never apprehend; but whatever such a principle may manifest in the world itself, that is something that reason does have access to, through experience and science. Thus Novalis affirms that: ‘Idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism’; a romantic philosophy is a science of science; it inquires into the conditions for the study of nature, which includes, of course, human nature. It is therefore of interest to compare a romantic philosophical and an analytical philosophical approach to the philosophical problem of physicalism.

Physicalism is in effect a metaphysical thesis, reason is again acting in accordance with its nature in its search for an unconditioned first principle; physicalism resembles in spirit the naturalistic thesis attributed to Thales of Miletus, (c. 620 BC — c. 546 BC), who postulated that, in spite of appearances, everything is ultimately water; or to the subjective idealistic thesis of Bishop Berkeley, (1685–1753), for whom, and again in spite of appearances, only minds and ideas exist (which is not to say that matter does not exist; it does, but only as an idea). For the physicalist, (and need I add in spite of appearances?), the universe and all its contents conform to a certain condition, the condition of being physical; and anything that may not appear to be physical either really is physical, or it supervenes upon the physical; (supervenience, that is, higher level properties are determined by lower level properties; these latter in this case being physical properties).

There is a well known and much discussed argument in philosophy, known as the ‘knowledge argument’, first devised by Frank Jackson, (1943 — ), and inspired by a thought experiment, and which supposedly raises problems for the physicalist. Tim Crane, (1952-), discusses this argument in ‘The Mechanical Mind, A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines and Mental Representation’, giving his own version of the thought experiment; which also, as it happens, involves wine drinking (from which no conclusion concerning philosophers in general should be drawn; I did say that a romantic philosophy should be guided by an inductive methodology, but a sample size of two is much too small to be making any inductive generalisations).

Crane’s thought experiment goes like this. Suppose that there is a scientist, Louis, of quite dazzling brilliance, an absolute expert on physics, physiology and psychology of taste, and on all the scientific facts concerning the production of wine. But wine itself he has never tasted. And then, finally, he does taste some wine: ‘Amazing! he says, ‘so this is what Chateau Latour tastes like! Now I know’. Prior to knowing what wine tastes like, Louis was aware of all the physical, physiological, psychological and oenological facts concerning wine and tasting wine. And yet, surely after he has tasted wine for the first time he has now learnt something knew about wine, namely, what it tastes like. Therefore, not everything that there is to know about tasting wine can be something physical; the taste of wine is a non-physical thing that Louis has come to learn about.

But then does this suggest that not everything that we can know falls within the realm of physics? Or any science, for that matter, that we can learn about without actually having the experiences that the science describes? A physicalist might respond that rather than demonstrating that there are non-physical entities in the world, the knowledge argument at best simply shows that there is non-physical knowledge of those entities. They concede that Louis has learnt something new, but not that there are any non-physical entities either inside or outside Louis’s brain. But a dilemma persists, as Crane points out. If we assign to consciousness a separate, non-physical form of existence, how does it get to influence and be influenced by physical occurrences? On the other hand, if everything is physical, how may we best respond to the knowledge argument, which suggest that physical facts cannot explain the mind?

If physicalism is a correct concerning its metaphysical claims it makes about the world, its account of our knowledge of the world will be necessarily incomplete. The physicalist in his response is in effect conceding that there are, in principle, limits to the type of thing that physical science can inform us about, that science in general might be able to express every worldly truth, in a manner that is independent of the experiences and perspectives of minds. So there are limits to that which science can educate us about. But does anyone think otherwise? Well, perhaps so. The chemist Peter Atkins, (1940 — ), atheist, has said: ‘My own faith, my scientific faith, is that there is nothing that the scientific method cannot illuminate and elucidate’.

Atkins is perhaps one thirds justified in his faith; for as should be evident from what I have said about a romantic philosophy, it is philosophy, science and the humanities interacting together in a productive way, which is what a romantic philosophy entails, that will most likely ‘illuminate and elucidate’ that which most concerns us. To repeat the words of Novalis given above: ‘Poetry is the representation of Gemüt, of the interior world in its totality’. A romantic philosophy can seize hold of both horns of the dilemma; how we can make sense of the mind’s causal interactions in the physical world if it is not a physical thing; or how we can explain the mind, even should it be identical with a physical thing.

The knowledge argument is still much discussed. William Lycan (1945 -) has said that ‘someday there will be no more articles written about the ‘Knowledge Argument’…That is beyond dispute. What is less certain is, how much sooner that day will come than the heat death of the universe’. With the adoption of a romantic philosophy it may come much sooner than that; a romantic philosophy can at least direct us in the right way to proceed, and it furnishes us also with the appropriate conceptual equipment necessary to the task, (in its abolition, as noted above, of distinctions between body and mind, or the outer and the inner, or the science of physiology and the study of mind), towards a solution of the nature of mind and of its relation to the natural world.

‘We dream of trips through the universe’, said Novalis, ‘yet the universe is in us’.