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Either/Or?—And/Or?—Both/And?
Immanuel Kant got upset about more things than Hamann’s aforementioned remark regarding Hume’s need for faith in order to get through breakfast; as Jeffrey Kripal is overly fond of noting, Kant said that if even one of Emanuel Swedenborg’s assertions about the afterlife were true, it would overturn every premise of the Enlightenment. This kind of hyperbole is an invitation to wildly irrational dismissals, of the sort in which latter-day scions of rationality like to engage when faced with anything that modifies their god-term premises about the nature of the world. We seem to be constructed to resist the fact that we are constructed, put together from a blend of biology and social conditioning, and we bristle when our most intimate combinations of childhood traumas and social presuppositions are challenged.
This means that we are insufficiently puzzled by how it comes to be that Swedenborg and Sam Parnia’s philosophical sources should have come to share the view of a DIY afterlife, that pervasive notion along the Silk Road from Tehran to Tibet (I don’t think Tehran existed in the heyday of the Silk Road, but it makes an attractive alliteration): that the world is non-dualistic, that all matter/spirit comes from the Source and returns to it, that the body is part of a solidified material nexus at one end of the matter-spirit continuum, and that what happens to us after we depart from the body is largely constructed by our choices while in a body—not imposed by outside forces, not least because there is no “outside.” Sam Parnia’s assumption that consciousness must be composed of a subtle matter that can be studied objectively is a secularized rephrasing of centuries of psychological investigation in realms of guided hallucination—visions that the scions of the Silk Road’s view of things would say are no less trustworthy than the shared hallucinations that we call everyday reality.
With the possible exception of C. G. Jung and Henry Corbin, this kind of stuff leaves Western Europeans and their Western Hemisphere descendants feeling like they have fallen down a rabbit hole. Eastern Europeans are another story; Konrad Adenauer was more correct than he knew when he grumbled “Hier beginnt Asien” on approaching the Polish border. On the farthest margins of Silk Road culture, however, the rigors of interior investigation melt into disorganized folklore, and in fact the natural tendency towards storytelling for its own sake made the more rigorous forms of metaphysically minded empiricism a minority opinion even along the main trade routes.
Jung tried to translate the findings of the metaphysically minded empiricists into psychological language, but Jung’s “phenomenological standpoint” itself is regarded as disguised metaphysics by those for whom reductionism is an article of faith. The meaning of mental events is likely to remain forever an item of disputation between the two empiricisms, and the only thing that can be fruitfully investigated would be those aspects of mental events as verifiable by outside observers as, say, the Higgs boson is for physicists.
And that thing might well be the question of whether accurate perceptions ever occur in the middle of fantasy-inflected recollections—whether imaginary gardens ever have real toads in them, to cite the line of verse that eventually embarrassed Marianne Moore sufficiently that she cut it out of her collected poems.
Immanuel Kant got upset about more things than Hamann’s aforementioned remark regarding Hume’s need for faith in order to get through breakfast; as Jeffrey Kripal is overly fond of noting, Kant said that if even one of Emanuel Swedenborg’s assertions about the afterlife were true, it would overturn every premise of the Enlightenment. This kind of hyperbole is an invitation to wildly irrational dismissals, of the sort in which latter-day scions of rationality like to engage when faced with anything that modifies their god-term premises about the nature of the world. We seem to be constructed to resist the fact that we are constructed, put together from a blend of biology and social conditioning, and we bristle when our most intimate combinations of childhood traumas and social presuppositions are challenged.
This means that we are insufficiently puzzled by how it comes to be that Swedenborg and Sam Parnia’s philosophical sources should have come to share the view of a DIY afterlife, that pervasive notion along the Silk Road from Tehran to Tibet (I don’t think Tehran existed in the heyday of the Silk Road, but it makes an attractive alliteration): that the world is non-dualistic, that all matter/spirit comes from the Source and returns to it, that the body is part of a solidified material nexus at one end of the matter-spirit continuum, and that what happens to us after we depart from the body is largely constructed by our choices while in a body—not imposed by outside forces, not least because there is no “outside.” Sam Parnia’s assumption that consciousness must be composed of a subtle matter that can be studied objectively is a secularized rephrasing of centuries of psychological investigation in realms of guided hallucination—visions that the scions of the Silk Road’s view of things would say are no less trustworthy than the shared hallucinations that we call everyday reality.
With the possible exception of C. G. Jung and Henry Corbin, this kind of stuff leaves Western Europeans and their Western Hemisphere descendants feeling like they have fallen down a rabbit hole. Eastern Europeans are another story; Konrad Adenauer was more correct than he knew when he grumbled “Hier beginnt Asien” on approaching the Polish border. On the farthest margins of Silk Road culture, however, the rigors of interior investigation melt into disorganized folklore, and in fact the natural tendency towards storytelling for its own sake made the more rigorous forms of metaphysically minded empiricism a minority opinion even along the main trade routes.
Jung tried to translate the findings of the metaphysically minded empiricists into psychological language, but Jung’s “phenomenological standpoint” itself is regarded as disguised metaphysics by those for whom reductionism is an article of faith. The meaning of mental events is likely to remain forever an item of disputation between the two empiricisms, and the only thing that can be fruitfully investigated would be those aspects of mental events as verifiable by outside observers as, say, the Higgs boson is for physicists.
And that thing might well be the question of whether accurate perceptions ever occur in the middle of fantasy-inflected recollections—whether imaginary gardens ever have real toads in them, to cite the line of verse that eventually embarrassed Marianne Moore sufficiently that she cut it out of her collected poems.
