Quidquid Recipitur: My take on reality

Quidquid Recipitur: My take on reality

Prologue

I've been thinking a lot in recent years about metaphysics, ontology and the ultimate nature of being but have not before now given any verbal form, written or oral, to those thoughts. The call to give them form has been getting louder lately so this, at age eighty-three, is an initial stab at it.

Splendid Beauty, Horrific Agony and Vanity of Vanities: Three Truths

Our gifted world, so fearfully and wonderfully magnificent, so rich, so intensely beautiful and good, is shot through with grandeur and grace. Glorious in ways that can make your heart literally ache. The solidity and grandeur of living stone. The frilly flagellations of swimming archaea. Our luminescent blue marble seen from space. The terrifying majesty of heavy weather at sea and the gentle glory of a slowly emerging dawn. The peaceful ease of an evening's gloaming. The blissful fulfillment of sexual union. The majestic elegance of behemoth Redwoods. The gnarled sturdiness of Oregon's stubborn shore pines. The unimaginably grand immensity of the cosmos. The deep glory of light. The eerie impossibilities of quantum physics. Love's heartbreaking fullness. Mystery flowering into matter, as if emerging from divinity. No wonder Plotinus would describe it all as mystery made incarnate, as glory congealed into physicality, as infinity alive in root and flower, as the upwelling radiance of transcendence into form.

But also: The world's raw pain, its graceless, ugly, bone-crushing anguish. Its baffling, devastating, soul-destroying agonies, so unrelenting at times. Lamentations, griefs and horrors. The grotesque mystery of travail and affliction to which Ecclesiastes and Job and the tormented dirges of Pascal, Tolstoy and Schopenhauer give voice. The Buddha's first noble truth, Dukkha, that life at root is suffering in all its myriad shapes and phases. All dispersed so broadly and randomly across living domain after living domain. It is Ivan's powerful speech in the "Rebellion" chapter of The Brothers Karamazov and the tortured mournings of grieving souls across the globe, hollowed out, desperately begging heaven for relief, comfort, consolation.

Horrific agony. Magnificent beauty. Both real, both true, both in the exact same world. Both break open your poor heart. How to possibly make sense of all this?

I truly have no earthly idea.

And yet. And yet, folly of follies, we so often experience this world as neither beauty nor travail, neither glory nor horror, but only as ordinary, as quotidian, as every-day, as oh-so-flatly commonplace, the regular old run-of-the-mill, routine world. The great nothing-at-all-special. How could this possibly be? And why?

One ancient axiom, so vital to the thinking of mediaeval scholastic philosophers like Aquinas and others, offers a starting point. Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. Literally

"whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver." Applied to us humans it means simply "We receive things not as they are, but as we are." A radically foundational principle too seldom appreciated in both academic and every-day epistemologies.

Also deeply instructive is Gabriel Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery. For Marcel a problem is something almost tangibly understandable, explainable, something object-like set out before me which can be conceptualized, scrutinized, attacked and gotten at with tools physical or conceptual. A problem is something you can work on, unscramble, figure out, solve. A mystery not so much. A mystery is not situated outside me, in front of me, separable from me, examinable, parsable, objective. A mystery, rather, is an existential puzzlement encountered. It is part of me, at the semi-permeable boundary (if there is one) between me and the not-me. My existence is entailed in it. It calls out to me personally to be pondered, mulled, harbored, lived with. A problem, says Marcel, can be addressed, explained, its solution noted, described in detail, and set up outside me in a way that others could see it and use that solution too. A mystery, though, grows, evolves, modulates its shape, refashions itself, broadens, explores side channels, deepens. It grows richer over time, not clearer and not simpler. A problem is a thing that can be dealt with, parsed, figured out, and finally set aside. A mystery insists that you live with it, spend time with it, go over it, over it again, regularly, from multiple perspectives, investigating its various dimensions. It asks you to osmose it, absorb it, incorporate it, let it bleed through the interstices at the boundaries of your being.

And the puzzling world? The splendorous beauty, the terrifying anguish, the vanity of vanities? What is to be made of it? Is this for us a problem to be explained or a mystery to be beheld? With Marcel I say mystery. Bewildering, dumbfounding, stupefying mystery. Complete, all at-a-loss, astonished bedazzlement. Total and incomprehensible enigma. I cannot imagine ever "figuring it out."

Even more challenging, this whole phenomenal mysterious world, thick with its agony and rich in its splendor, this world that comes streaming in through our senses, gets perceptually filtered in the process, filtered and reduced down, way down, like Procrustes on his too-short bed, into the small-capacity time and space categories of our humanly perceived world. The genuinely real world, in other words, gets re-fashioned down into our limited perceptual categories - space, time, plurality, causality, etc - so it can be recognized by a perceiving human mind. As Kant showed us, for a thing to register with us, to be recognized or perceived by us, our finite minds have to first re-jigger it, re-shape it into a format that is cognizable by our perceiving apparatus. So what we end up perceiving, i.e., our perceptual world, is just one transient manifest version of the really real. It is a highly persuasive and convincing perceptual world, to be sure, but an ultimately ephemeral one, a maya world.

Which sets the stage for this seeker's question: