The Language of God — Part Two
‘…. yeh not speeching noh man liberty is, he drink up words, scilicet, tomorrow till recover will not, all too many much illusiones through photoprismic velamina of hueful panepiphanal world spectacurum of Lord Joss, the of which zoantholitic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together fallen man than under but one photoreflection of the several iridals gradationes of solar light ….’
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
Some more words there from archdruid Balkelly (Bishop Berkeley) in his debate with Paddrock (St. Patrick). Joyce has Balkelly speaking pidgin English, for some reason, (Joss is pidgin for God), but the effect is comical so perhaps that is reason enough.
Bishop Berkeley was a philosopher who considered scepticism to be a serious threat to philosophy, though one that could be overcome, arising as it does out of a supposed distinction between appearance and reality, a distinction that poses this epistemological conundrum: How can we know the nature of reality when all that we have immediate access to are appearances? We know full well in our everyday experiences we will often be confronted by situations that present us with appearances by which we are misled. Consider the rainbow, for instance; as mentioned in part one, Berkeley believed white to be the basis of all colour and that any other colour is an illusion; but with such phenomena as rainbows, once we know that such appearances mislead us, with further experience and investigation we can come to see with the mind’s eye a rainbow as it is in itself.
Indeed, the better all the operations of nature are known and understood, the more they will be the cause of awe. One may chance while walking in the mountains to experience a captivating vision known as the Brocken spectre; whereby an enormous figure appears in the clouds, and a bright halo within a cloud of haziness will be seen ascending in an arc over the figure’s head looking much like a faint rainbow. The cause of the phenomenon is well known; an enhanced and seemingly gigantic shadow of an observer is cast upon the clouds opposite from the Sun’s direction; it results from the sunlight shining from an unclouded part of the sky impacting upon the dense vapour by which it is then refracted; and the figure’s head will often be surrounded by halo-like rings of coloured light, an optical phenomenon known as a glory, as the sunlight interacts with the water droplets with which the clouds are composed. Such a sight would be sufficient to enchant a person of a scientific persuasion; as for the unenlightened and those with not quite so acute an apprehension, the effect can be quite different.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1772–1834), in his ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, in which he contemplates which objects are the most gratifying in life, concludes with an image of the Brocken spectre:
And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!
How appearances can mislead, that one can find oneself pursuing oneself by virtue of a natural illusion. To delve more deeply into the theme of Coleridge’s poem, it is about constancy, and yet it apprehends constancy as a kind of obsession that is aimless, inconsequential, and without worth; not because the poet in his constancy has revealed himself as worthless towards the object, but because the object is revealed as without any substantial existence, or rather, it has existence merely as a fabrication of the poet’s own ideation, his idea formation. That is to say, constancy is played off against change, and what turns out to be the only real constancy is to be found in the poet’s own thoughts so much characterised by yearning, in his own ideas, whereas physical nature by contrast is forever changing; it is as though thoughts, ideas, spirits, are animate, and that they possesses the mind and then they consume the whole body; ideas are thereby the ultimate reality.
Some perceptual illusions can certainly be startling and summarily come across as impossible; but they can presently come to be seen to be illusions. But what if there is an evil demon, of the kind that René Descartes postulated, (solely for the sake of his method of doubt of course)? Suppose there is no God, but instead there is an evil demon with absolute power and devious artfulness whose time and effort is preoccupied solely with deceiving us so that we are forever mistaken, about all things; even the laws of mathematics, though they are not based upon sensation but upon reason. For God were he/she to chose to do so could make us believe there is an earth, a sky, and all extended material things in the world when, in fact, these things have no existence at all, but even though we are dreaming that 2 + 2 = 4 the certainty of such a proposition will not be doubted because 2 + 2 = 4 is true whether one contemplates it while awake or in one’s dreams; but an evil demon could deceive us even about that; after all we sometimes do fall into error about things we believe ourselves to be most certain about, such as the calculations of mathematics. And so Descartes, employing the typical kinds of arguments of the sceptic, calls all of his previous beliefs into doubt and considers to be false any belief vulnerable to even the most slender doubt; and thus discovers himself descending into the maelström of erroneous beliefs.
Such doubt is merely hyperbolic, the purpose of which is to clear the mind of preconceived opinions that might obscure the truth from us; the object is then that as we engage upon a phenomenological analysis on our beliefs or sets of beliefs there will be something that as we endeavour to doubt it a kind of grating will occur that resists our endeavours, regardless of whether an evil demon is deceiving us, or whether we are dreaming; a primary indubitable truth, a metaphysical axiom grasped intuitively and from which we can deduce absolutely certain knowledge; I am, I exist. As is well known Descartes had to resort to sending a ladder up to God to recover the world; a good God would not deceive us and so the appearances must match the reality, but this of course might have satisfied Descartes but it is not going to satisfy us. Generally speaking, responses to the appearances vs. reality dilemma fall into one of three possibilities: perceivers are inevitably disconnected from reality; there is some means of reaching reality via the appearances; or the distinction between appearance and reality is rejected.
Bishop Berkeley rejected the distinction. If we were to frame the debate in terms of ideas, whereby these incorporate both the appearances one encounters in sensory perception, in addition to the mental entities involved in one’s thoughts, then the fundamental assertion is that all that exists are minds and the ideas that are had by those minds. And then Berkeley can claim that scepticism concerning the external world arises from an entirely baseless positing of material substance, whereby this is understood as something distinct from ideas and minds, and which is somehow represented by ideas and thereby encountered by minds not immediately but mediately. And as soon as the perceiver assumes that such things exist, and that they are the objects of his or her knowledge, he or she will inescapably conclude that, because his or her awareness of those objects is mediated, that there is an absence of true knowledge on the perceiver’s part.
But then Berkeley is presented with a problem; how to account for the phenomena that originally motivated the distinction between appearance and reality in the first place; for instance, perceptual illusions and the advancements of science. Like Descartes, Berkeley resorts to sending a ladder up to God (I can never quite understand why a philosopher would not be embarrassed to make such a move); God is the causal originator of the ideas; God maintains a certain order among the ideas; and we can only gradually come to understand this order; God is constantly active, willing the ideas of sense which, for us, constitute nature; these ideas are the language in which God speaks to us, and God cannot speak falsely.
Such a philosophical doctrine is known as subjective idealism; the world has no existence independent of a subject’s sensations or ideas. To return to the debate between the archdruid Balkelly and Paddrock, it is characteristic of Balkelly to give a personal subjective interpretation to the words of Paddrock. So, Paddrock asserts that in ordinary reality ‘no man is free’ but what the archdruid hears in his active mind is ‘noh (Noah and no) man is free’; Balkelly cannot be content with ordinary reality, of course, and so he puns on oh no/noh … ‘no man is free’, meaning like a performer in a Japanese Noh play? Merely reciting the lines. And it is particularly appropriate Noh theatre is invoked here; integrating as it does masks, costumes, and assorted props as emotions are principally conveyed by actors and musicians through formalized customary body language; while the archetypal masks represent roles such as spirits, women, children, the aged, in a performance that is derived from a tale of traditional literature wherein a supernatural being is transmogrified into human form as a hero to narrate the tale; and implicit in the observing and adorning of a mask is in effect a discourse between what is seen and what is concealed.
Japanese Noh theatre also had an influence on W. B. Yeats, (1865–1939):
The Mask
‘PUT off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes’.
‘O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold’.
‘I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit’.
‘It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind’.
‘But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire’.
‘O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?’
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), a mask is the very thing a philosopher needs to wear; perhaps having achieved a radical development in his or her thinking a mask of tradition may well offset any bigotry or suspicion directed towards such novel ideas; the suspicion that is that the old order is about to be disturbed. Consequently these ideas in their novelty are vulnerable to the asinine traditions that are quite alien to them. Or perhaps authentic freedom is to be sought through an obscuration of oneself, for any deep thinker putting their own ideas and arguments out into the world exposes themselves to misunderstanding, disapproval, derision, despisal. Nietzsche wrote:
‘Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the CONTRARY only be the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? A question worth asking! — it would be strange if some mystic has not already ventured on the same kind of thing. There are proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to overwhelm them with coarseness and make them unrecognizable; there are actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection. Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, in order at least to have vengeance on this sole party in the secret: shame is inventive. They are not the worst things of which one is most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask — there is so much goodness in craft. I could imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask: the refinement of his shame requiring it to be so. A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally so his regained security. Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustible in evasion of communication, DESIRES and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him there — and that it is well to be so. Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, SUPERFICIAL interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests’.
Perhaps here we may have a reason why Balkelly is speaking pidgin English after all; a simplified means of communication to hide behind; and with which to conceal the import or implications of his thoughts. And the archdruid interprets the words of the priest in his characteristically subjective manner; falling is one of the major themes of the novel and having fallen through illusion fallen humankind perceives the furniture of the earth, a phrase Berkeley used to refer to the totality of material objects, fallen humankind perceives this furniture only partly. Balkelly replaces the Fall into sin with his own what he takes to be true doctrine of illusion; but humankind cannot recover from it given that there are all too many illusions emerging from the (light separating) veil of illusion of the phenomenal (panepiphanal: pane of glass, epiphanic) earthly theatrical performance of Lord Joss, God the boss. Or if humankind is to recover it must needs see beyond the veil of illusion and recognise its spirit, its soul, as one with God. Whereas fallen humankind perceives only one separated colour of the seven degrees of the unified solar light, like with the Brocken spectre perceiving only that which cannot be absorbed, only that which is reflected, seeing a single reflected colour fallen humankind suffers illusion as to the true reality.
And following on from the quote with which I began, something interesting happens under this veil of illusion to the word furniture:
‘… that one which that part of it (furnit of heupanepi world) had shown itself (part of fur of huepanwor) unable to absorbere…’
‘Furniture’ is dissected into ‘furnit’ and ultimately into ‘fur’; the loss of letters imitates the colours being absorbed and reality restricted by illusion … furnit of the hueful panepiphanal world discloses itself as part of fur … and further, truncated furniture is now the beast … absorb is rendered absorbere, prompting the associations absorb plus bare, plus bear … suggestions of tumult and conflict and the absence of any absorption into a greater unity … and what is omitted from furniture in fir, that part that is absorbed, is niture, near enough to nature and to nurture … archdruid Balkelly believes himself to be seeing reality as it truly is.
Berkeley’s arguments for subjective idealism fall apart when we apply to them some conceptual analysis however. A mind or spirit wherein the ideas exist is supposedly a thing distinct from the ideas themselves, and Berkeley himself raises the objection ‘that if there is no idea signified by the terms soul, spirit, and substance, they are wholly insignificant, or have no meaning in them’. And he also allows that ‘in a large sense indeed, we may be said to have an idea, or rather a notion of spirit’. He therefore appears to be saying two related but quite different things, that the words mind, spirit, soul, myself do not signify ideas in the narrow sense, but rather notions.
The reason put forward to warrant the assertion that we do not have ideas of spirits is that spirits are active, and so cannot be represented by ideas, which are passive and inert, this being as true of ideas of reflection as it is true of ideas of sense. Do we detect an inconsistency here? We can know ourselves by an act of reflection, and at the same time there cannot be an idea of spirit since ‘whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflection will not perceive in them any power or activity’.
There is a reference to ‘the ideas, sensations, notions which are imprinted on our minds, either by sense or reflection’. It is apparent that the reflection here is the reflection that John Locke, (1632–1704), thought of as a kind of observation that ‘might properly enough be called internal sense’. But when Berkeley employs reflection in the phrase ‘any one that is capable of the least reflection’ it would appear to be something different. When he employs the term reflect in ‘the reader need only reflect, and try to separate his own thoughts …’, and ‘I desire any one to reflect, and try, whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive … ‘, and ‘If any man shall doubt the truth of what is here delivered, let him but reflect…’ he intends by reflect to mean consider, or ‘think, rather than introspect. One way of removing the appearance of inconsistency which arises from Berkeley saying that you know yourself ‘by a reflex act’ would be to interpret him as meaning, not that you know yourself by an act of introspection, but that you know yourself by an act of thinking.
Berkeley is certainly unclear about the different senses of reflect and at one point he writes: ‘We comprehend our own existence by inward feeling or reflection, and that of other spirits by reason’ which certainly suggests that he did not differentiate between them. And a question arises as to whether when Berkeley says you know yourself ‘by a reflex act’ he means ‘by an act of reflective thinking’; as to what the thought might be, perhaps it could be suggested that the thought might be that the ideas perceived by sense require a perceiving substance in which to exist; they are unable to subsist by themselves. Ideas have a necessary relation to the mind, to be is to be perceived, and so if ideas exist that in which they exist, that which perceives them, must also exist; ideas are present in the mind in the sense that they are incapable of existence apart from the mind; and so the mind can properly be said to be the substance in which they exist, which recalls Aristotle’s, (384 BCE — 322 BCE), definition of primary substance as ‘that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject’.
The conclusion of such an argument may be summarised thus: our notion of spirit or mind is a relative notion; spirits or minds cannot be perceived, not even by the internal sense that Locke calls reflection; ideas are known to exist in virtue of knowledge of the necessary relation to the mind that ideas have; a conclusion that has the appearance of so much conceptual obfuscation, vitiated by the fallacy of equivocation, with the intent of saving the appearances, if I may so put it, of a deity that is certainly kept very busy.
‘The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’.
- James Joyce, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
THE END
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. yeh = yes.
2. noh = no.
3. scilicet = to wit, that is to say, namely; and used ironically: forsooth.
4. illusiones = illusione (Italian), illusion.
5. photoprismic = photoprismos (Greek), gripping light tightly; and photoprismatikos (Greek), light-prismatic.
6. velamina = membrane, velum, veil; and velamina (plural) (Latin), coverings, robes, garments, veils.
7. panepiphanal = epiphany, manifestation, especially an appearance of a divinity (in the New Testament, applied to the advent or ‘appearing’ of Christ); and panepiphanes (Greek), all-visible, completely manifest.
8. spectacurum = spectaculum (Latin), sight, spectacle, scene; and spectrum, the coloured band into which a beam of light is decomposed by means of a prism or diffraction grating.
9. zoantholitic = zo, animal; and anthos (Greek), flower; and lithos (Greek), stone.
10. furniture = Berkeley used the phrase ‘furniture of earth’ to refer to totality of material objects.
10. iridals = iridal (rare), of or belonging to the rainbow.
11. gradationes = (plural) (Latin), series of steps, flights of stairs.
