I’ve just begun a three-week road trip.
It is a metaphorical display of particulars in the context of a comprehensive whole. This is Michael Polanyi language about the tension in science between the isolated particular of scientific experimentation and the how of all the particulars coming together to create a comprehensive whole. It is a situation filled with philosophic questions.
The One and the Many
Is “Being” Individual or Relational?
Was Darwin right in a particular way but not in a comprehensive whole way?
Is meaning measured by the particular parts of our lives or the comprehensive whole of our lives?
These are questions that I think about on days of 500-600-mile drives.
On my first day, I listened to a presentation by Dr. Iain McGilchrist on The Coincidence of Opposites and two lectures by Michael Polanyi,"The Vindication of Reality" and "A Society of Explorers." I drove in silence for several hours. Took a couple of naps. And listened to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
The effect made the passage of time imperceptible. While driving, I began to construct in my mind a sequence or order. Really, an order of reality. This order is a hierarchy that I am using only as a test case. McGilchrist speaks about orders of reality. He says the higher orders explain the lower orders. The lower orders cannot explain the higher orders. This explains what I want to share with you. Higher to lower order.
Spirituality - transcendent, encompassing all of reality, and can only be grasped in bits and pieces.
Philosophy - abstract thought seeking to make sense of the larger picture of reality.
Culture - how human beings transform abstract thought into concrete representations of reality. This culture would include things like science, business, education, religion, entertainment, etc. It is individual, personal, communal, tribal, regional, national, and, strangely, attempting to be global. These are the particular expressions of Spirituality and Philosophic thought.
Politics - not the science of governance, but rather the context where people and institutions seek to establish society. In a democratic context, it is a society of We The People. In an authoritarian context, It is a culture of The Matrix, 1984, and, The Big Short. It is the overculture over all particular cultures. It is a reductivist culture that denies that there are larger questions or conversations that involved the Spirituality of Reality and Abstract reflections of Philosophy worthy of conversation. It is a micro-culture seeking to be a whole comprehensive culture.
So, if my order of reality is similar in form to what McGilchrist describes, then the Spiritual World transcends and explains all reality. It explains why, what, and how of the other three orders.
We live in a political dominated world. Politics has taken on the ordered role of defining all of reality.
If I am correct here, politics doesn’t explain or give meaning to the world of human creation whether the larger spiritual realm, the world of thought, or the world of culture that is the artifacts of human creativity. If politics is like a wayward child, then we need, at least, to look more philosophically at the nature of political culture
Okay, time to go.
I’ll have more to say about this Friday. I have 1000 miles to cover in two days. Lots of time to think. And some interesting lectures to absorb.
I like the hierarchy - concept and example too.
Nicely done.