"Well over two thousand years ago, science as we know it was offered to the West with a warning tag attached to it: Use this, but don't be tricked by it. And of course, impatient little children that we are, we tore off the tag and ignored the warning."
Peter Kingsley, in Reality (2003).
One of the more salient intellectual events of 2019 for me, personally, was my discovery of the work of
Peter Kingsley. Earlier this year, a friend gifted me a book by Kingsley, having perspicaciously suspected it would resonate with me at some level. And it surely did, for which I am deeply grateful to my friend (you know who you are). Unlike most of the books I read—which I tend to regard rather soberly and coolly—Kingsley's work left me irate, inspired, bemused, delighted and a few other things, all at the same time. Whatever the case, I am anything but indifferent to it, which is probably the greatest compliment I could pay to any author.
More importantly, Kingsley's work helped me situate my own in a historical context. It has become clearer to me what it is, exactly, that I am trying to do, where it fits in the long line of Western thought, what role it is supposed to play in our culture, and what the ultimate purpose of doing it is. I see the path ahead more clearly, have a sharper sense of direction for my work, and recognize how it ultimately comes together with that of others. This is what I'd like to discuss in this long post, which is doubtlessly the most important of the year.
In what follows, I refer to two books by Kingsley:
Reality (2003) and
Catafalque (2018). For the sake of simplicity, I shall cite them as 'R' and 'C,' respectively.
A culture's source and telos
Kingsley's central premise is that all cultures have a sacred source and purpose, including our own Western civilization: "everything, absolutely everything, anyone can name that makes our so-called civilization unique has a sacred source—a sacred purpose" (C: 228). The seed of every culture, including our own, is planted not through mere chance, habit or deliberate planning, but instead through visionary experience in altered states of consciousness. It is prophets who learn, and then inform us of, what our purpose is: "western civilization, just like any other, came into being out of prophecy; from revelation" (C: 231).
In our case, we can trace our roots back to visionary Greek philosopher-poets living in southern Italy about two and a half thousand years ago, particularly Parmenides. In Parmenides' poem
On Nature we can find the origins of our Western culture. Uniquely, however, we are the only civilization that has neglected and forgotten its origin: "nowhere on this planet are you going to find one single traditional culture that doesn't remember ... having its sacred purpose and source" (C: 230).
Misunderstanding Parmenides
Indeed, Kingsley claims that we in the West have been
misinterpreting and
misrepresenting Parmenides' ideas since Plato, and modern scholarship has compounded the problem even further. Parmenides is seen as the founder of logic and rationality, of our particular way of
discriminating truth from untruth, fact from fiction, through
reasoning. According to this mainstream view, the Promethean powers of Western science, as embodied in technology, are the culmination of a way of thinking, feeling and behaving that can be traced back to Parmenides' manner of argumentation in his famous poem.
But Kingsley argues very persuasively (R: 1-306) that what Parmenides was trying to say was nothing of the kind. According to him, logic for Parmenides wasn't a formal system based on fixed axioms and theorems, meant to help us
discern true from false ideas about reality; it wasn't grounded in some metaphysically primary realm of absolutes akin to Platonic Forms; it didn't derive its validity from some external reference. In summary, Kingsley argues that, for Parmenides, logic wasn't what we now call
reason, but something much broader, deeper, unconstrained by fixed rules and formalisms.
True logic as incantation
As a matter of fact, according to Kingsley Parmenides' logic was a kind of
incantation. The idea is that we live in a world of illusions, caught up in our own internal narratives and made-up categories about what is going on, completely oblivious to the true world that surrounds us and from which we derive our very being—i.e.
reality. This illusion is unfathomably persuasive, has tremendous power and momentum. So to help one see through it and ultimately overcome it, an even more persuasive rhetorical device is required, a kind of spell or incantation woven with words, meant to disrupt our ordinary mental processes by poking them in just the right spots. This incantation is the
true logic Parmenides gifted us: "We were dragged into this illusion by a force far greater than ourselves. Something even stronger has to drag us out. That's what logic is" (R: 143). True logic is thus a kind of spell meant to trick our internal story-telling, make it catch itself in contradiction and thereby release its grip, so we can escape the illusion. But unlike ordinary logic or reason, true logic is not grounded in fixed or absolute axioms and rules of derivation. It is malleable, flexible, not bound to external references. A 'logical' argument in this sense is whatever argument will actually
persuade its target, whatever it takes.
This is a critical point, so allow me to belabor it a bit. If I were to use Parmenides' true logic on you, I would weave whatever argument line I felt would be compelling
to you, irrespective of whether the argument is strictly rational or not, strictly consistent with a given set of fixed axioms or not. The ultimate goal of true logic is way too pragmatic for that: it is to get you out of the bind in which you continuously tie yourself up. True logic, thus, is a rhetorical incantation meant to be more persuasive than our inner narratives and categories. In essence, it is a semantic trick meant to break the spell of illusion, like cracking a crystal by gently tapping on it in just the right spot.
Kingsley explains that, for Parmenides, there were only two ways to approach reality: either we judge that everything we feel, think, perceive, imagine or otherwise experience exists
as such—regardless of any correspondence with objective facts—or we must ultimately dismiss everything as non-existing. The latter option goes nowhere, for obvious reasons, which leaves only one viable path. The bind we find ourselves in is due to our hopeless attempt to find some compromise or middle ground between those two canonical options: we try to
discriminate which of our mental states correspond to actual existents—i.e. to some external reference—and which don't.
This, according to Kingsley's interpretation of Parmenides,
is the core of the illusion. And true logic is a rhetorical tool meant to show that all such discriminations—if pursued consistently to their final implications—are ultimately self-defeating.
Parmenides' metaphysics
The implicit metaphysics being adopted here is, of course, subjective idealism: "for Greeks, the world of the gods [i.e. reality] had one very particular feature. This is that simply to think something is to make it exist: is to make it real" (R: 71-72). Therefore, "whatever we are aware of is, whatever we perceive or notice is, whatever we think of is" (R: 77). Everything that has mental existence
exists as such—i.e. as a
mental existent—
and there is no other way in which it can exist: "There is nothing that exists except what can be thought or perceived" (R: 78). Therefore, the use of reason to discriminate between what exists from what doesn't exist is, well, ultimately
unreasonable: "To choose good thoughts is to reject the bad ones—and to reject something is to entertain it, is to make it exist" (R: 80). The act of deciding that something does not, or cannot, exist immediately backfires and
makes it exist, by the mere fact that the act forces us to think it into existence to begin with. Reason, as we normally apply it, is thus ultimately incoherent, even though it has its practical applications within the context of the illusion.
It is the subjective idealism he attributes to Parmenides that renders Kingsley's interpretation plausible and internally consistent: subjective idealism does away with the correspondence theory of truth, according to which mental states that correspond to objective facts are true, whereas those that don't aren't. Once these external references are done away with, all criteria of truth and existence become
internal ones, and thus logic boils down to
persuasion: what exists or is true is whatever mind has been persuaded to
make exist or true. There is nothing outside mind, no objective facts out there, to make it otherwise. This is important, so allow me to repeat it: without external references, such as objective facts, logic boils down to persuasion; there is nothing else it
can be.
Kingsley explains: "facts are of absolutely no significance in themselves: it's just as easy to get lost in facts as it is to get lost in fictions. ... All our facts, like all our reasoning, are just a façade" (R: 21-22), they hide something more essential behind them. And this 'something' is
reality: pure stillness, a realm in which nothing ever moves or changes, in which everything is intrinsically connected to everything else in an indivisible whole, and where no time but the eternal present exists. That's why true logic is "a magical lure drawing us into oneness" (R: 144)—i.e. back to reality. But what is the metaphysical ground of this reality? It is
consciousness: "Wherever it seems that you go, or come, everything happens in your consciousness. And that consciousness never moves, is always the same" (R: 80).
Notice that Kingsley's attribution of subjective idealism to Parmenides is based on the implicit assumption that the consciousness in question isn't just
your or
my personal consciousness alone; it is, instead, a transpersonal, universal consciousness within which all existence unfolds. Kingsley: "our thoughts are not ours; never have been. They are simply reality thinking itself" (R: 80); reality, or consciousness, is "utterly impersonal" (R: 160). Therefore, from the point of view of seemingly
personal, individual minds, such as yours and mine, the idealism in question is actually
objective idealism, such as the one I pursue in the body of my work. It is crucial to keep this understanding in mind, otherwise you will dismiss Kingsley's story way too quickly. His metaphysics
isn't solipsism; he isn't saying that reality is your personal dream, or the materialization of your egotistic fantasies; he is
not giving the ego divine powers of creation.
Reason is not true logic
Kingsley explains that, because we have historically misinterpreted and misrepresented Parmenides' intended meaning, we've ended up conjuring up reason out of what was meant to be true logic.
But reason is a tool precisely for discriminating between mental states that correspond to ostensive external facts from those that don't. Under the metaphysical view that to think is to make exist, such discrimination is incoherent.
Therefore, by misunderstanding true logic, we've also departed from what was meant to be Western culture's foundational metaphysics. We've invented external references outside consciousness—i.e. outside
reality—such as matter, energy, space and time. And then we've forced true logic "to operate, distorted and disfigured, in the world it had been designed to undermine" (R: 144). The result is
reason, the rational discrimination of fact from fiction in an ostensively autonomous material world independent of consciousness.
For Kingsley, it is reason that keeps us stuck in the middle ground between the two canonical paths—namely, between judging either that everything we can conceive of exists
as such, or that nothing exists. This, according to him, is the seminal mistake that has put our entire culture on the wrong footing. Logic is no longer regarded as a magical incantation meant to persuade us out of illusion, but has turned into a tool for perpetuating the illusion: "All our attempts to discriminate between reality and deception or between truth and illusion are exactly what keeps on tricking us" (R: 211).
The telos of Western culture
But what was it that we were originally supposed to do? What goal are we supposed to pursue? What is the "burning purpose at the heart of our Western world" (C: 205)?
Kingsley is not terribly explicit about it, but he does drop enough hints. For instance, he says that the modern attitude towards the divine can be summarized in the words,
“Let’s make sure the divine takes good care of us. But as for finding what, in reality, the divine might possibly need: let it look after itself.” From here onwards one can sit back and watch how the idea of looking after the gods starts, almost by magic, vanishing from the western world. ... And now it never for a moment occurs to us that the divine might be suffering, aching from our neglect; that the sacred desperately longs for our attention far more than we in some occasional, unconscious spasm might feel a brief burst of embarrassed longing for it. (C: 29-30)
The suggestion is that the meaning and purpose of our lives is to help fulfill some divine need, which can only be fulfilled in, or by means of, the state of consciousness we call life. This is reinforced by the fact that Kingsley overtly associates himself with the thought of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, particularly Jung's book
Answer to Job. And in that book, we find Jung saying:
what does man posses that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses ... a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself.
It seems to me that
all cultures have the purpose to serve the divine by means of the state of consciousness we call life, the latter not being available to the divine itself. But each culture is meant to fulfill this sacred task in its own particular way, according to its own particular dispositions or strengths. In the case of Western culture, our strength is our sharply developed
meta-cognition, or
self-reflection; our introspective ability to turn our own thoughts, emotions, perceptions and fantasies into objects of thought, recursively. Western culture is thus meant to serve the divine by contributing to it the meta-cognitive insight of
self-realization: through us and our Western science—"a gift offered by the gods with a sacred purpose" (C: 229)—the divine recognizes itself.
The failure of the West
However, Kingsley ultimately concludes that we, in the West, have failed in our divine task. We've failed not only because we've misunderstood Parmenides—and thus bungled our metaphysics and became unable to properly use the sacred tool we were given, i.e. true logic—but for other, more insidious reasons as well.
Indeed, to serve the divine requires "a deeply religious attitude, the sense that it's all for the sake of something far greater than ourselves" (C: 122). But to nurture and sustain such religious attitude, people must "step out of their personal dramas" (
Ibid.). Yet we, in the West, indulge in personal dramas, having conflated individual freedom and expression with egocentrism, even subtle forms of narcissism. We've forgotten that, "as humans we are archetypes" (C: 143), instances of a universal template of being, so that "Whatever we think of as personal is in fact profoundly inhuman, while it's only in the utter objectivity of the impersonal that we find our humanity" (
Ibid.).
We've immersed ourselves in the dehumanizing "brutality of our western society with its normality and triviality as well as the hollow emptiness of its surveillance" (C: 230). And "when a culture forces a human to act so automatically, talk so robotically, the humanity inside the person is lost ... Everything can seem to go on working and functioning, for a while. But our role in existence has been hollowed out; our human purpose on this planet turned completely upside down" (C: 434-435). By losing touch with our own humanity, which is what links us with the divine, we've forfeited intimacy with our sacred destiny.
Worse yet, Kingsley maintains that there is no fixing the problem, no rescuing Western culture, no finding our path again: "this world of ours is already dead. It existed for a while, did the best it could, but is nothing more than a lifeless remnant of what it was meant to be. ... And this is the moment for marking, and honouring, the passing of our culture ... to keep on indulging in optimism is a shameless dereliction of our duty" (C: 442).
Well, I am not an optimist...
But I don't agree.
De Facto Western culture & the value of error
The first thing to notice is that, although Kingsley has convinced at least me that we did misinterpret Parmenides, and that the correct interpretation is that offered by Kingsley, the fact of the matter is that what we call 'Western culture' embodies and is based on the values, premises and modes of cognition set by Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the post-socratic philosophers and scientists. According to Kingsley himself, Parmenides was misinterpreted already within a single generation, so there has never being a 'correct' Western culture, so to speak. Factually, even if it is based on a seminal misunderstanding, being Western effectively means what Plato and his successors defined it to be; it has never really meant anything else.
Western culture, it seems to me, has three central, differentiating characteristics:
- More than many other cultures, its approach to reality is based on self-reflection, critical meta-cognitive reasoning, so as to discriminate between fact and fiction, truth and falsity; (Empiricism is a relatively recent invention of the late renaissance or early enlightenment, so I won't list it as a central characteristic of the West. We have had, for instance, well over half a millennium of scholasticism, when empiricism played hardly any role.)
- More than many other cultures, the West's metaphysics unreservedly acknowledges the existence of personal, individual minds and, therefore, the existence of an objective world out there, outside such individual minds;
- More than many other cultures, the West fully embraces the illusion we call the world.
Notice that, although the view that objective facts are material has dominated Western culture for the past couple of centuries, over the more than two millennia of its existence the West has also entertained other possibilities: Western idealists, for instance, posit that objective facts are grounded in a transpersonal mind, whereas Western computationalists posit that they are grounded in pure information.
Now, I acknowledge that the three characteristics listed above are not what Parmenides intended. Moreover, I also acknowledge that they are all ultimately illusory: logic is largely a mental invention, not a Platonic absolute; the very distinction between my personal mind and the world out there is ultimately illusory; and the physical things I perceive are mere representations, not essence.
But I don't think that these Western errors are a waste of time either. Wisdom sometimes comes only with error, as any wounded healer will know. Sometimes a misstep is more useful and important than the correct way forward, because of the experiences and insights it creates the space for. Getting to the right answer only after having exhaustively tried, and failed with, seductive but wrong ones arguably leads to a deeper, fuller insight than getting things right first time round. For in the former case, one is more intimately acquainted with why and how those seductive answers are actually wrong, and therefore has an equally fuller comprehension of the right answer.
More specifically, by having embraced objective facts and reasoning fully, unreservedly, we are making sure that every stone is turned, particularly the most seductive ones; we are laying the ground for a deeper future insight than what those shooting straight for the end can achieve. For in the latter case, there may always remain a residual seed of doubt or temptation to go and have a look under that beautiful, round, shiny stone over there on the corner, which has never been fully turned.
The destiny of Western culture may, for all I know, intrinsically entail experimenting with extremely seductive but wrong answers first, exhausting the alternatives, and only then setting itself straight. Of course, the price we pay for this is unfathomable. Generation upon generation have endured grief, despair, unspeakable suffering of every kind for having followed the siren song of illusion. This is the West's sacrifice. The only question is whether we will eventually get it right or not.
Prison break
But just how can we eventually get out of this bind and unveil reality? Kingsley talks often about μῆτις (mêtis), a kind of cunning wisdom that can be used to trick, enchant or persuade. The illusion we live in is a product of μῆτις, and only more persuasive μῆτις, such as true logic, can get us out of it.
Now ask yourself: What would be truly persuasive for the Western mind? What kind of story could short-circuit our inner narratives, expose its inner contradictions and force us to review our unexamined assumptions? The answer seems absolutely crystal clear to me: reasoning consistently pursued to its ultimate implications.
The Western mind only acknowledges reasoning as a valid story. It will dismiss anything else without even looking at it. So if one wants to use true logic to trick the West out of illusion, this true logic must come disguised as reason; it must entail embracing the illusion fully, objective facts and all, and judiciously applying reason within it. That's the μῆτις required here; there's just no other way. And Kingsley himself left space open for this approach: "when we live the illusion to the full, to its furthest limits, we are nothing but reality fulfilling its own longing" (R: 258).
Kingsley could counter this argument by claiming that those who use reason today aren't at all aware of true logic; they aren't trying to get us out of the bind, but simply hand-waving and gesticulating furiously and frivolously within the illusion, which only makes things worse. But is that really the case?
With deep and absolutely sincere respect for Kingsley, I should like to suggest the following: If one doesn't have affinity with hard-nosed reasoning, one will probably not become acquainted with present-day efforts to use hard-nosed reasoning in the spirit of true logic. And in failing to notice these efforts, one may become unjustifiably pessimistic, concluding that true logic has died. Maybe it hasn't; maybe it's still alive, just disguising itself as reason—a tactic of μῆτις—so as to not be immediately recognized and dismissed by the vulgar spirit of this time.
To free the West from illusion, we must first break into the prison wherein the West finds itself, and then break out again carrying the rest of the culture with us. We must fight the duel with the weapons chosen by the opposition, for those are the only weapons the opposition recognizes as real. Kingsley himself is well aware of this approach: "there are methods that reality can use to work its own way into our illusion and start to draw us out" (R: 255). Ditto. What a fantastic movement of μῆτις it would be to use pure, strict, sharp reasoning to undermine reason itself... wouldn't it?
