RECONDITE ESOTERICA

BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE

‘Know’ is a capacity verb, and a capacity verb of that special sort that is used for signifying that the person described can bring things off, or get things right. ‘Believe’, on the other hand, is a tendency verb and one which does not connote that anything is brought off or got right. ‘Belief’ can be qualified by such adjectives as ‘obstinate’, ‘wavering’, ‘unswerving’, `unconquerable’, ‘stupid’, ‘fanatical’, ‘whole-hearted’, ‘intermittent’, `passionate’, and ‘childlike’, adjectives some or all of which are also appropriate to such nouns as ‘trust’, ‘loyalty’, ‘bent’, ‘aversion’, ‘hope’, `habit’, ‘zeal’, and ‘addiction’. Beliefs, like habits, can be inveterate, slipped into and given up; like partisanships, devotions, and hopes they can be blind and obsessing; like aversions and phobias they can be unacknowledged; like fashions and tastes they can be contagious; like loyalties and animosities they can be induced by tricks. A person can be urged or entreated not to believe things, and he may try, with or without success, to cease to do so. Sometimes a person says truly ‘I cannot help believing so and so’. But none of these dictions, or their negatives, are applicable to knowing, since to know is to be equipped to get something right and not to tend to act or react in certain manners.

Gilbert Ryle (1900 – 1976)

PRECONCEPTIONS

One philosopher is influenced by another chiefly because his temperament predisposes him to a view which happens either to agree or to disagree with the other’s. The form his reasonings take will, of course, be largely governed by the fact that he will develop his views mainly in antagonism to views which he detests. But this form is superficial, and often misleading. It will rarely represent any train of thought which really set him on the way to his conclusion. Almost all philosophic arguments are invented afterwards, to recommend, or defend from attack, conclusions which the philosopher was from the outset bent upon believing, before he could think of any arguments at all. That is why philosophical reasonings are so bad, so artificial, and so unconvincing. To mistake them for the causes which led to a belief in the conclusion, is generally to fall into a naive error. The charm of the early Greek philosophers lies in the fact that, to a large extent, they did not trouble to invent bad arguments at all, but simply stated their beliefs dogmatically. They produced a system as an artist produces a work of art. Their attitude was: `That is how the world is to be’.

Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874 – 1912)

Agreement among experts in the special sciences and in exact scholarship may reasonably be hoped for and gradually attained. But philosophy, which takes human thought in general as its field, is not thus conveniently confined; and truth in philosophy, though not to be despaired of, is so complex and many-sided, so multi-faced, that any individual philosopher’s work, if it is to have any unity and coherence, must at best emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with greater force. Hence the appearance of endemic disagreement in the subject is something to be expected rather than deplored; and it is no matter for wonder that the individual philosopher’s views are more likely than those of the scientist or exact scholar to reflect in part his individual taste and temperament.

P. F. Strawson (1919 – 2006)

REASONS

Reasons are for the most part only an augmented form of the pretensions by which we seek to defend a course of conduct that we should in any case have pursued, and to lend it an air of legitimacy and reasonableness. Nature, it appears, has not cared to let a thing so necessary to her economy as human conviction depend alone on logical deductions, as these may so easily be deceptive. The impulse to act, thank Heaven, often comes to us unawares, before we are half through with proving its need and utility.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)

. . . I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to . . . my own life. In fact, all . . . comes down to this fundamental absurdity . . . . The world of explanations and reasons is not that of existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)

There is no reason, and the truth is clear to see.

P. H. (1967)

CAUSATION AND NONCAUSATION

When, for example, we say that neither of two events (which mutually exclude one another) can occur, because there is no cause why the one should occur rather than the other, it is really a matter of our being unable to describe one of the two events unless there is some sort of asymmetry. And if there is such an asymmetry, we can regard this as the cause of the occurrence of the one and of the non-occurrence of the other.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)

THE INEFFABLE

The doctrines of mysticism are secret, because they are not cold, abstract beliefs, or articles in a creed, which can be taught and explained by intellectual processes; such beliefs no one has ever desired to conceal, except from fear of prosecution. The ‘truth’ which mysticism guards is a thing which can only be learnt by being experienced; it is, fundamentally, not an intellectual, but an emotional experience ‒ that invasive, flooding sense of oneness, of reunion and communion with the life of the world, which the mystical temperaments of all ages seem to have in common, no matter in what theological terms they may happen to construe it afterwards. Being an emotional, non-rational state, it is indescribable, and incommunicable save by suggestion. To induce that state, by the stimulus of collective excitement and all the pageantry of dramatic ceremonial, is the aim of mystic ritual. The ‘truth’ can only come to those who submit themselves to these influences, because it is a thing to be immediately felt, not conveyed by dogmatic instruction. For that reason only ‒ a very sufficient one ‒ ‘mysteries’ are reserved to the initiate, who have undergone ‘purification,’ and so put themselves into a state of mind which fits them for the consummate experience.

Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874 – 1943)

[T]he rational unity of the thinking being, which is taken for granted by most philosophers, is a desideratum [a desire], not a fact. Even among peoples like ourselves [in the Western world today], ideas and relations between ideas governed by the law of participation [by mystical, “prelogical” ideas] are far from having disappeared. They exist, more or less independently, more or less impaired, but yet ineradicable, side by side with those subject to the laws of reasoning. Understanding, properly so called, tends towards logical unity and proclaims its necessity; but as a matter of fact our mental activity is both rational and irrational. The prelogical and the mystic are co-existent with the logical.
. .
On the one hand, the claims of reason desire to impose themselves on all that is imagined and thought. On the other hand, the collective representations of the social group, even when clearly prelogical and mystic by nature, tend to subsist indefinitely, like the religious and political institutions on which they are the expression, and, in another sense, the bases. Hence arise mental conflicts, as acute, and sometimes as tragic, as the conflict between rival duties. They, too, proceed from a struggle between collective habits, some time-worn and others more recent, differently oriented, which dispute the ascendancy of the mind, as differing moral claims rend the conscience. Undoubtedly it is thus that we should account for the so-called struggle of reason with itself, and for that which is real in its antinomies. And if it be true that our mentality is both logical and prelogical, the history of religious dogmas and systems of philosophy may henceforth be explained in a new light.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857 – 1939)

Has mankind ever quite freed itself from the myth? Every man has eyes and all his senses to tell him that the world is dead, cold, and unending, and he has never yet seen a God nor claimed God’s existence from empirical compulsion. On the contrary, it required an indestructible and fantastic optimism, opposed to all sense of reality, to see, for instance, such an experience as the shameful death of Christ as the highest salvation and redemption of the world. In the same way we can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology. We might say that, were it possible to sweep away all the tradition in the world with one fell stroke, with the next generation the whole mythology and history of religion would begin all over again. Only a few individuals succeed in eliminating mythology in an epoch of a certain intellectual arrogance; the mass of the people never free themselves from it. All the rationalism in the world is of no avail; it only destroys a temporary form of manifestation but not the creative urge.

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)

Any effort in philosophy to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing,
for the penalty for failure is confusion
while the reward of success is banality.
An answer, once found, is dull,
and the only remaining interest lies in a further effort
to render equally dull what is still obscure enough to be interesting.
Nelson Goodman (1906 – 1998)

THE ONE IS THE FOREST AND THE TREES

Klal U’Prat U’Klal V’Ei Atah Dan Ela K’Ein HaPrat

. . .

— —