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< Back Chaos David Cowles May 30, 2023 “Butterflies are beautiful, but they can keep their flapping to themselves, thank you! We already have enough environmental catastrophe to contend with.” Everyone says we live in a chaotic world , but do we? Aunt Gertrude makes the point every time she visits. Mathematicians have coined a phrase for it: The Butterfly Effect, and news organizations have turned it into a livelihood: Man bites Dog . Everyone says so, but do we? Chaos has a bad name. People equate it with Anarchy (the absence of order). They assume that events happen randomly in a chaotic world. Nothing could be further from the truth! ‘Chaotic’ and ‘random’ are antonyms, not synonyms. ( But wait for a surprise twist !) A chaotic universe is causal …to a fault! It’s Laplace on steroids. Causality is so strong that every event literally causes every other event. A perturbation of one becomes the perturbation of all. To be is to be omnipotent, but there is a trade-off: to be is also to be impotent . The more I control Dasein (that it is), the less I control Wassein (what it is). The more we can influence “the shape of things to come” (Ramones), the less power we have to make those things happen. “The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.” (Paul Simon) Have we discovered a new Uncertainty Relation a la Heisenberg…or Heidegger? In a chaotic world, everyone, every ‘thing,’ is a malevolent magician. We point our wands where we will and bring into being what may come. Every event effectively recreates the entire Universe, not ex nihilo but de nuovo . Post hoc ergo propter hoc , the bane of every aspiring logician (can one really aspire to be a logician?) is perfectly valid in a chaotic world. In a chaotic world, a butterfly flapping its wings in Borneo may indeed trigger a tornado in Topeka… and an avalanche in Anchorage or a mudslide in Malibu. Do we live in such a world? Let’s see. First, imagine that we all live on the surface of a sphere. Every event since the Big Bang can be represented as a ‘point’ on that surface. Events are positioned so that proximity reflects relevance. The relative positions of points on the sphere correspond to the causal strength of each event vis-à-vis every other event. Causal influences travel along great circles , but their impact is mitigated by the Inverse Square Law (ISL) and mediated by the events they encounter along the way. Here and now and then and there are defined by these mediated relations, woven into a fabric that we call ‘the real world.’ I could live here! Now imagine instead that every point on that sphere has a direct, unmediated connection to every other point. We just transformed our smooth spherical surface into a pock-marked cacophony of chords. Causal influences no longer ‘travel’ (they are instantaneous) and ISL no longer applies. In such a world, anything that can happen may happen; we have zero ability to predict events… or influence them. Here’s the twist I told you about earlier : a chaotic world like this behaves exactly the same way a random world would behave , even though ‘chaotic’ and ‘random’ are antonyms! I could not live here! In a chaotic world, there is no such thing as ‘intentional agency;’ therefore, ‘values’ are irrelevant, aka non-existent. Likewise, such a world has no room for God, either as the creator of heaven and earth or as the fountainhead of all value. The Power is not the Glory! All this suggests a new take on the Garden of Eden story. God created a perfect world, subject to just one limiting condition: non-recursion. The world cannot act upon itself, either by praxis or by gnosis . How could it? It’s already perfect. Any change can only be a step-down. Like isolated Q-bits in a Quantum Computer, if any element of the whole becomes aware of that whole, the wave function collapses and the whole (Eden) is shattered. According to Genesis , Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge because knowledge is inherently recursive. They were free to ‘eat’ though warned not to; but Eve held cheap the riches of Paradise…if they came at the price of ignorance. But Eve held cheap the riches of Paradise…if they came at the price of ignorance. At the first opportunity, she traded immortality for knowledge…and the rest, as they say, is history. No, I mean, it really is ‘history’… not ‘as they say,’ per se ! Adam and Eve “paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” (Joni Mitchell) They traded bliss for gnosis , and so they saw that they were naked! Hallelujah, consciousness! And eternal Eden became the spatio-temporal universe we know and still love - 14 billion years later. Remember the bumper sticker: “If you can read this, thank a teacher?” Well, if you can understand this essay, thank Eve. Later, Job spoke for Eve when he ranked ‘dying without knowledge’ as life’s greatest tragedy (Job 3: 21). (I wonder how many folks today would share Job’s assessment.) Eve and Job risked everything for something we can’t give away today: knowledge! Imagine, we have to force our kids to go to school! East of Eden, it is the project of Homo Sapiens to rebuild Paradise on earth, “to build the City of Dioce” (Pound). God made a perfect world merely by willing it. For millennia, we have been trying to rebuild (Babel?) the world we lost – yup, it was that good – but unlike God, we can’t create things just by willing them. We actually have to build them, and we can only build in a non-chaotic medium like spacetime . So do we live in a chaotic world? Aunt Gertrude notwithstanding, we do not ! Butterflies are beautiful, but they can keep their flapping to themselves, thank you! We already have enough environmental catastrophes to contend with. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” David Cowles Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) may rightly be called the philosopher of the Absurd. In his essays, stories and plays, he mercilessly confronts the world on its own terms and finds that he cannot reconcile his human urge to unify and explain all experience with the world’s incurable plurality and lack of coherence. He finds this situation ‘absurd’! Confronting Absurdity, one has, according to Camus, three options: commit physical suicide, commit philosophical suicide, or accept the absurd and live absurdity to the fullest. So Camus begins his master philosophical reflection (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus : “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” (All quotes in this essay are from The Myth of Sisyphus unless otherwise noted.) If living in this world is incurably absurd, why do it? Why go on? Why not just end it as quickly and as painlessly as possible? “Does the Absurdity dictate death?” Ultimately, Camus rejects the option of physical suicide. Like ‘philosophical suicide’ (below), it negates the Absurd; but it also amounts to running away from what’s real. Camus claims no priority on the recognition of the Absurd. Throughout his essay he acknowledges other philosophers and writers who have confronted the Absurd: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Husserl, Sartre and Dostoevsky, among others. “…All started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antimony, anguish or impotence reigns.” But Camus gently accuses all of them of committing ‘philosophical suicide’, of “hoping in spite of everything”. To paint with an overly broad brush, Camus suggests that each of these men uses the terror of the Absurd to ‘prove’, in the end, that there must be some order, some purpose, some meaning capable of overcoming that terror. This Camus rejects. In fact, Camus’ uniqueness rests on his unwillingness to seek relief in some species of phony faith or false hope – relief from the terrifying conclusions forced on us by the Absurd. “A man devoid of hope, and conscious of being so, has ceased to belong to the future.” What makes Camus’ brand of nihilism particularly heroic is his willingness to maintain his position while freely acknowledging that he does not know whether he is right or wrong. Radical skepticism is closely related to nihilism, precluding any philosophical certainties: “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.” Both Camus and Sartre admit that is possible that God exists but, unlike Pascal, they attach no importance to the matter: “Hence, what he (the absurd man) demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows…and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty.” In this Camus reveals himself to be a proper child of the Enlightenment: ‘Live solely with what he knows…bring in nothing that is not certain’. This seems obvious to us denizens of the scientific age, raised as we were on Ayer, Wittgenstein, and Austin, et al. But it would seem very odd to anyone born before, say, 1700. In those ‘unenlightened times’, what was not ‘known’ was a matter of ‘faith’ and faith was the foundation of knowledge. Camus offers a concise exposition of the Existentialist’s dilemma: “Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I know that!’ This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists…I can sketch all the aspects it is able to assume…but aspects cannot be added up …” Camus is dragging Descartes out of the head and into the heart. Furthermore, he is asserting a paradigmatically existentialist doctrine that the sum of all qualia can never lead to even a single etre . In this he bridges Parmenides Hot Link and Sartre: “Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” In other words, my existence will always surpass my essence: “This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction…” Camus may justly be called the philosopher of the Absurd, but 300 years earlier another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, focused on a similar problem in his Pensees : “We do not require great education of mind to understand that here there is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly that death…threatens us every moment…There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible…For it is not to be doubted that the duration of this life is but a moment; that the state of death is eternal… When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after…I am frightened…” Faced with an analysis of the human condition similar to Camus’, Pascal came to a very different conclusion, known as Pascal’s Wager . From a common starting point, Pascal and Camus draw diametrically opposed conclusions. Camus’ absurd man “has ceased to belong to the future” while for Pascal, there is no good other than the future. Of course, Camus and Sartre would both accuse Pascal of ‘bad faith’, of ‘philosophical suicide’…but I’m not sure Pascal would care. It is also worthwhile to compare Camus with Whitehead and Jung. They both view God as the process of essence acquiring existence. Everything evolves, everything grows, including God. The early books of the Old Testament seem to endorse this view. Abraham argues with God and uses reason to deflect his intentions; Job uses law to force a peevish and recalcitrant God to ‘be God’ and act justly. We are trained to think that all action has a motivation, a purpose, a goal; if there is no future, no transcendent meaning, no objective values, no hope, then how does one go about living one’s life? If we reject physical suicide and refuse philosophical suicide (hope), then what options are open to us? “No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition…All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize it or cancel it. The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.” Contrast Camus’ concept of freedom with that of Pope Leo XIII. Leo, of course, believed in transcendent values, in objective Truth and in the imperative of Justice. Therefore for Leo, the only real freedom is the freedom to do what is right (just) and profess what is true. To do otherwise is to be enslaved (by evil) for who would voluntarily profess something she knew to be false or do something she knew to be wrong? For Leo, that person would be living in ‘bad faith’. By contrast, Camus’ freedom is unfettered by concepts such as transcendence and objectivity. Camus’ heroes are free to create ex nihilo . In that sense, we are all gods. (Psalms 82: 6, John 10: 34) “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning…That idea that ‘I am’, my way of acting as if everything has a meaning…all that is given the lie…by the absurdity of a possible death…Death is there as the only reality.” The foundation of the Judeo-Christian world view is found in Exodus 3:14 where God tells Moses, “I am who am.” Camus undermines a 3500 year tradition by claiming that ‘I am’ is per se a lie. In this he resonates with certain Eastern traditions that reject the concept of ‘self’ entirely. Contrast St. Paul: In the end even death is subjected to Christ and Christ to God. For Camus, death subjects everything to itself; that is the essence of the Absurd. Everything hangs on this point! Paul and Camus would agree that death and meaning are utterly incompatible! In fact, they constitute the archetypical incompatibility: not ‘life and death’ but ‘death and meaning’. Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value. This is the fundamental divide underlying the intellectual history of the Western world. “Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future…He still thinks that something in life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free…” “Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary…In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences. Choices, actions cannot be justified by anything outside themselves.” So given that suicide and bad faith are no longer options, how does one live? For better or worse, Camus tackles that question head on. We explore Camus’ lifestyle prescription in a companion article on this site. Spoiler alert – It isn’t pretty! Image: Portrait from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection , 1957. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents https://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/applied-camus Previous Next

< Back Prayer For Resting in God's Timing, Ways, and Rhythm Deborah Rutherford My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Am I striving, then causing friction and confusion? This is when I slow down to rest in God's timing, ways, and rhythms -- to repent and return to Jesus, the One who carries. His will, not mine. Dear Abba, oh Father, thank you for your tender-loving kindness and mercy. Forgive me when I rush ahead of you, when I strive, push, and wander away. Oh, let me rest in you, your timing and ways, and slow down to stillness with you, where I hear your lovely voice. My day is yours as you lead me through the most beautiful dance of life. My road is your beautiful, peaceful one. Please, help me stay on your narrow road of joy and peace, love and light, heading to the forever of ever with you, our love eternal. Thank you, I am humbled by your love, in Jesus's name. Amen. Slow down to the incredible life God has planned for you by resting in His timing, ways, and rhythm, the endearing moment by moment of God's love. I have to remind myself to slow down often, that God is growing me in His timing, not mine. My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Rest in His timing, ways, and rhythms. Hi. I am Deborah Rutherford, a Christian wife, passionate about Jesus and her family. I am currently a writer, makeup artist, and sometimes singer. You can find me on my blog at www.deborahrutherford.com. Previous Next

< Back Don’t Teach Your Kid to Count! David Cowles “Our own number system is based on a highly specialized, and not necessarily privileged, concept of quantity.” Most of us can’t wait until our toddlers are old enough to count. Even, “One, three, six, four,” sounds like progress. At least they’ve caught on to the notion of sequence, if not yet quantity or magnitude. But are we doing them a disservice? Are we uncritically condemning them to live out their lives as we have lived ours? Oh come on! For heaven’s sake, it’s just counting. Show me someone who doesn’t know how to count! Well, ok, how about a whole culture. As we have discussed before in Aletheia Today , there is a tribe in the Amazon that to this day does not have even a concept of number. Ok, granted, this is a bit of an outlier, but many, many contemporary cultures have radically different concepts of numeration from us. Consider these 6 representative options: One, two, three. (Larger quantities are not considered countable.) One, two, many. One, two or three, more than three. One, all. A grain, a pile, a heap. Real Numbers plus Arithmetic. What’s key here is the way these systems treat the phenomenon of quantity. We assume that quantity is a given; it just is. But as we will see, our number system is based on a highly specialized, and not necessarily privileged, concept of quantity. Each of the ‘number systems’ mentioned above corresponds to a particular way of viewing the world: In the first case (1, 2, 3), counting is only considered useful up to ‘3’. After that, numbers are irrelevant. “One, two, and three” tell you something very specific and meaningful about your subject. Not so much after that. Perhaps some sense of volume takes over. Even in our culture, there are times when we stop counting (but usually not at 3): we call that statistics . Nobody will count the number of 7’s thrown at Bellagio’s craps tables tonight, not even the all-seeing eye in the sky. Everyone, punters, dealers, owners alike, trusts probability. The second example (1, 2, >2) could come from the notebook of a STEM professor, or a systems analyst, or a marketing guru, or an existentialist philosopher – folks not always so easily interchangeable. We know how to write equations with one variable: most of us master that in elementary school. Two variables? A little trickier – maybe high school. But more than two variables? That’s The Three Body Problem . Three or more bodies behave chaotically. So, 1, 2, >2 makes perfect sense from a physicist’s perspective, more sense perhaps than our own number system. Sara Imari Walker underscores this in Life as No One Knows It , her 2024 book outlining ‘Assembly Theory’ as an explanation for the origin and development of life: “There are, in fact, only 4 important numbers to understand in assembly theory: 0, 1, 2, and many.” Essentially, all process comes in stages: 0 = ‘does not exist’; 1 = ‘exists’; 2 = ‘copied’; >2 = ‘ubiquity’. This same logic informs our Systems Analyst. Say you have 1 point on the surface of a sphere: call it your North Pole. Now add a 2nd point anywhere on the sphere; wherever you place it, it will be one unit closer to the opposite pole. Now you can draw a geodesic from #1 through #2 to the opposite pole and back again to #1 – a Great Circle. Or you can add a 3rd point: now the line segment from #2 to #3 can point in any direction (360°) whatsoever. And to our marketing guru, peddling a sophisticated product to an inelastic audience (e.g. software to hospitals in Massachusetts). Getting any one hospital to ‘go first’ is almost impossible and adding a 2nd is no easier. #3 may or may not be a bit smoother but after 3 it’s just a matter of knocking down bowling pins. Anyone will do anything as long as 3 people have done it before. Remember when you were a wimpy kid? Your friends all wanted to jump off a ledge and they wanted you, Mikey, to go first. “No way!” So Paul went and didn’t get hurt; now it’s your turn. Still no? After Sam then. Sometime between Sam and Pedro, you’ll probably jump. On the philosophical side of things, 20th century existentialists, Martin Buber (a theist) and Jean-Paul Sartre (an atheist) both developed ontologies that based on the primacy of duality (2) as opposed to sinn fein (1) or en masse (3+). Our third example showcases the concept of ‘fuzziness’. One is one, period – a useful concept. Two and three are roughly the same and can be lumped together with little loss of information. More than three is a jumble. This is a minimal expression of what could be, and has been, a very elaborate scheme; imagine, for example: 1, 2-3, 4-6, 7-10, etc. As quantity increases, specificity becomes less important. Does the pauper count his pennies more often than the prince? Maybe, maybe not, but according to this model, he does! Think this is crazy? Think again. We do things exactly like it all the time! We estimate. We talk about ‘orders of magnitude’. And if you’re precocious, you understand logarithms. Challenge : can you infer a preferred logarithmic base by studying cultures that play with fuzzy dice (number systems)? For our Fourth number system, we are indebted to pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras (5th century BCE). He is best known for his formula, Pan in Panta , “Everything in Everything”. According to Anaxagoras, everything is an element of everything else. Everything contains and in contained by every other ‘thing’. A number system appropriate to this insight would include just two terms, “One” and “All”. One refers to each entity while All refers to all the entities that are contained by that One entity and that in turn also contain that One entity. Anaxagoras gives us the Christian doctrine of Incarnation on steroids. Crazy, right? Maybe not! 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, had a similar concept. His cosmos consisted solely of ‘actual entities’ (events) and each entity ‘prehends’ all other entities. Through prehension, every actual entity participates in each actual entity. Whitehead’s entire cosmology rests on three ‘undefined terms’: One, Many, Creativity. One is one and Many is many (or all), while Creativity represents the family of ‘operations’ that link the two. Even more recently, contemporary European philosopher, Emanuele Coccia, has revived Anaxagoras’ concept of everything in everything . Fifth , ‘grain, pile, heap’. Ok, I made this one up! But it fits, don’t you think? Here we preserve the notion of quantity but eschew entirely the concept of number. Intriguing. Could my 3 term system be expanded to include other measures like ‘horde’ or ‘stack’? Would the numberless ‘system’ of the Piraha (above) fit under this umbrella? You might not be buying any of this, but I don’t care. I’ll bet I can sell it at any local elementary school, and kids, being desperate, will gladly absorb my sky-high mark-ups. I’m kidding, of course; right? I don’t really want to repeal numeracy, do I? I suppose not. Even in our own hyper-numeric society, I have encountered people I’d describe as “quantitatively challenged” (I hope that’s politically correct) and, yes, they are challenged across a wide range of daily activities. I desperately wanted my own children and grandchildren to develop a strong ‘quantitative sense’…and they did! Now I ask, “What did I do to them?” In the early years, I helped them get comfortable with Real Numbers and learn the properties and operations of arithmetic. So what’s so bad about that? As it turns out, plenty! Which brings up to the sixth option listed above: Our system of numeration is built on the set of Real Numbers (R) plus the operations of Arithmetic (A), extended to include calculus. R + A gets you to Mars. But it’s a controversial model based on some controversial basic principles or axioms: Commutativity : a + b = b + a; a × b = b × a. Associativity : (a + b) + c = a + (b + c); (a × b) × c = a × (b × c). Identity : a – a = 0; a + (-a) = 0. Transitivity : If a > b and b > c, then a > c. Density : Between any two distinct real numbers, there is always another real number. There are no "gaps" in the real number line; any interval can be divided into arbitrarily small sub-intervals. What a wonderful world! If only we lived in it. Turns out, this world of R + A is a lot less like the Real World than Alice’s Wonderland or Dorothy’s Oz. An argument can be made that precisely none of the properties enumerated above is true IRL. For example, Order of operations is always critical: a then b is totally different from b then a. Dah! You are known by the company you keep. Ask any middle schooler: (a +b) + c feels very different from a + (b + c). Every t is a little bit ‘naught t’: -a є a and therefore a + (-a) ≠ 0. (Dialectics) Ever hear of a triangle? a > b > c > a. The real world is processional, not static. “I seem to be a verb.” (R. B. Fuller, c. 1970 CE) “What goes around comes around.” (Hesiod, c. 500 BCE) Although there are an infinite number of Real Numbers, the smallest positive Real Number > 0. This is why the great Achilles lost a road race to a Tortoise. It turns out, there are an infinite number of ‘hyperreal’ numbers between the lowest positive Real Number and 0. These hyperreal numbers are collectively known as ‘infinitesimals’, represented by the symbol, ε. Before our children have seen their first seashore, explored their first forest, stood atop their first mountain, we have made them learn a model of reality that is entirely bogus. How bogus is it? I would argue that it is the most bogus of the 5 systems we’ve been exploring. Still…what harm could possibly come from this? Let’s see. We say that something that is infinitely improbable is effectively impossible, but that’s manifestly untrue. If something is, it is, no matter how improbable. Being is not a function of probability. It is not continuous; it is indivisible; it’s binary: it either is or it is not. ‘One’ is the state of everything that is; ‘zero’ is the state of everything that is not. Only Schoedinger’s cat can be 1 and 0 at the same time. “One is the loneliest number.” (Three Dog Night) As every two year old knows, there is only one number, and that number is one. I have a cookie, or I don’t have a cookie. Two cookies are one cookie, twice (“one each hand”). There is as yet no concept of ‘multiplicity’, just ‘duplicity’ (as in “those duplicitous adults”). Good thing too, because multiplicity itself is an illusion. Everything that is is once and only once. To be real is to be unique. When we say, “Two cookies,” we are abstracting. We are positing that the cookie in the right hand is similar enough to the cookie in the left hand to be covered by a single noun (‘cookie’). What about two ball bearings? Don’t they have to be interchangeable? Yes, but ‘interchangeable’ is not ‘identical’. They look the same and, ideally at least, they perform the same. They are ‘the same’ – i.e. ‘close enough for government work’. But they are not the same, they are not identical. If they were, they would be the same ball bearing. They would be one . But they are not the same, they are not one. We hide that fact by calling them ‘two ball bearings’, thereby eliding over the infinite (yes, I said “infinite”) chasm of difference that lies between the two. Nevertheless, we will go on teaching our toddlers to count so that they can ‘live long and prosper’ in our galaxy; who can blame us? But somewhere along the way, it would be nice if let them in on the secret: it’s all just one big lie. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Norman Lear Neo-Talmudic Sage of Democracy and Good Times Dr. Stephen Stern "Nobody wins democracy. It's not a possession, but a continuous process that requires everyone's participation." Norman Lear passed away at 101 after living a life that not only brought laughs to millions, but did so while dedicating himself to what Abraham Lincoln referred to as “the unfinished work of Democracy.” Here we show that not only is Lear’s work neo-Talmudic, prophetically midrashic, but that the way we frame him offers a different paradigm from which to expand understandings of democracy as more than the enlightened property based social contract understanding of community. A Young Jew Who Cared about Democracy Born in 1922, to a blue-collar Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear’s father H.K.—he told people the “K” stood for King—brooked no dissent in the house. The kids dared not speak back and if his mother disagreed, she was told to “Stifle!” He had a hard time keeping down a job and always had a new scheme up his sleeve until he returned back from a trip to Oklahoma and was arrested for fraud. He was incarcerated until after Norman’s bar mitzvah. Lear’s mother and sister moved in with his grandparents, but Norman was circulated among relatives, never having a stable home. His escape was the radio, where he loved comedy, but found himself distressed by the antisemitic ravings of Father Charles Coughlin. Lear was a proud American, but knew that his Jewishness was leading to his exclusion. Graduating high school, Lear wanted to go to college, but after his release from incarceration, his father still had not been able to work steadily and the family had no money. So, Lear took a longshot and entered a contest sponsored by the American Legion with an essay entitled “The Constitution and Me” where he argued that his Jewishness did not keep him from being fully American, but rather informed his Americanness. He won a scholarship to Emerson College. He split his time there between the classroom and local burlesque house where he saw some of the greatest comics of the time including Phil Silvers and Red Buttons. Emerson being one of the nation’s leading dramatic schools, he was learning to act, direct, and write. He seemed destined for show business…and then came Hitler. When the war broke out, Lear, like so many other young Jewish men, felt the need to volunteer. He was a radio man and gunner in the army’s air force, flying many dangerous missions during the war. Indeed, at one point a bullet pierced his plane, killing the soldier next to him. In word and deed, Norman Lear was dedicated to promoting democracy and fighting fascism, hatred, and bigotry. Mostly In the Family After the war, he returned home, got married, and started working as a publicist. He moved to Los Angele, where he had a cousin whose husband, Ed Simmons, was trying to become a comedy writer. One night, the wives decided to go to the movies, leaving the guys home with the kids. After the little ones were in bed, Norman asked Ed what he was working on. It was a song parody. They had it done when their wives came home. Singing it for them, they thought it hilarious. Norman said they needed to sell it…now. So, they went downtown to a club where comedian Betsy Abbott was performing and between sets, approach her. She loved it and bought it on the spot for $25—a week’s salary for them. They decided to become a team. Writing a piece for Danny Thomas, they quickly became known in the industry and were picked up by Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Eventually, the team broke up and Ed went on to write for Carol Burnett. Norman wrote and started producing for a range of programs which allowed his family to live comfortably…and then he read an article in TV Guide. It was about a British program called “Til Death Do Us Part” about a conservative father and liberal son who argue about everything. It took Lear back to his own childhood and he knew he had to develop an American version. That, of course, became All in the Family, a groundbreaking show that Lear could not get picked up. It was too provocative, too edgy, too smart. He was discussing topics that serious news programs rarely touched on, much less a comedy. The network thought the seriousness would kill the laughs. It was run with a warning to audiences the first season, telling them about sensitive topics. It got off to a slow start, but where the public did not appreciate it, the critics did and after it won several Emmy’s, it became a hit. Archie Bunker was a blue-collar, bigot who hated liberals and minorities, but who loved his family including his wife Edith and his liberal daughter Gloria whose grad student husband Mike lived with them. The liberal Mike and the conservative Archie would fight nonstop, rehearsing exactly the debates that were happening around dinner tables across the country in the early 1970s. Archie’s frequent use of racial slurs alarmed the network and censors, but they brought an honesty and realism to the program which was also the pivot point around which the comedy revolved. There were no strawmen, no cartoon characters, but real people wrestling real problems. It changed television comedy forever. Instead of the screwball silliness of “Mr. Ed” or unrealistic domestic portrayals of “Father Knows Best,” we were seeing real America, warts and all. It was funny because it was true. But those laughs and that truth served Lear’s lifelong project of defending Democracy. A healthy democracy requires authentic debate, critical examination of a range of viewpoints. The American entertainment landscape was a falsely sterile ecosystem, devoid of real questions, new views, and authentic searching for solutions. Lear sought to change all that, to bring the town square, John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas, to the small screen in everyone’s living room. Enlarging the Family Democracy requires freedom of speech because the truth will sometimes reside where we least expect it. We need to hear a wide range of perspectives and consider the insights they bring in order to keep from becoming trapped in our own cognitive bubble. Yet, America has a tragic history of silencing important voices. Lear’s love of democracy demanded that he increase the number of viewpoints in his comedy. He was not just going to look at white men on different sides of the political spectrum. When Edith’s outspoke feminist cousin Maude Findlay appeared in one episode, the reaction from fans was instant and overwhelming. She had to have her own show. Bea Arthur’s portrayal of the title character was fearless as it took on issues from substance abuse, to domestic violence, to suicide broke ground. The two-part episode in which Maude considers whether to get an abortion is one of the most important moments in television history. Lear replicated the All in the Family formula with the great Redd Foxx on Sanford and Son featuring junk dealer Fred Sanford in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Maude’s maid Florida was another strong character who clearly needed her own program and Lear launched Good Times, featuring the first two-parent black family to be the focus of a television show in America. They lived in the notorious Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago and that led to an unexpected visit to Lear’s office by a group of Black Panthers who demanded to see the “White trashman,” Lear. They confronted him, asking why all of his black characters were poor when there were many well-off Blacks wealthier than most Whites. Lear knew they were right and knew what he had to do, another spin-off. The Bunkers’ next door neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson owned a chain of laundromats and the profits from them allowed them to be moving on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. The Jeffersons, which was the longest-running series in television history was also the first to feature a mixed-race couple that shared a bed. Lear continued to work to increase the number of perspectives he could mainstream. One Day at a Time humanized single mothers in an age of increasing divorce. Hot l Baltimore featured a stable gay couple and sought to humanize sex workers. Remembering Father Coughlin’s antisemitism that tried to silence him, Lear demanded that no voices be silenced. Neo-Talmudism Talmudic thought begins with the Torah and its mitzvot, the commandments Jews must obey. These are the fixed points, the undeniable stakes that ground rabbinic Judaism. But as a text, the Torah and associated books of the Tanakh, require interpretation. There is an active cognitive human element that must be added in order to glean wisdom from the words. Jews may be the People of the Book, but the Book is not passively absorbed. Indeed, quite the opposite, it is actively explored and interpreted by scholars in a wide range of ways. Unlike Christianity in which different sects are distinguished by their interpretations and fight (sometimes violently) among themselves over whose understanding is the literal truth, for Jews, God’s truth is too big to fit in any one interpretation. All of the different approaches unlock the various truths contained in the text. It is not subjectivism where anything goes, as it is tied to the text, but it encourages a creative stance toward unraveling the wisdom hidden within the words. This approach is profound in marrying an absolutism—the text itself is venerated—with perspectivalism—the text gives rise to multiple understandings, all of which are considered meaningful. It allows for an intellectual version of a choir in which different voices sing different lines, but harmonize or contrast in order to create a bolder sound that no one could imagine when hearing only one voice. The profundity of this dialogic approach stands in opposition to the Hellenic-Christian tradition. In it there is one and only one truth. It is the goal. The entire process is teleological, driven with a single end in mind—achieving a grasp of that one and only truth. But the Talmudic tradition sees the value laying not in the endpoint, but in the process, not in the knowing, but in the learning. As a result the great rabbi and philosopher Emanuel Levinas argues that beneath the commitment to the mitzvot, there exists one meta-mitzvah—discussion shall never cease. If the Sacred Text is a ball, then you can think of the Hellenic-Christian approach as a game of soccer, each trying to possess the ball and score a goal, thereby defeating the others who want the ball for their own. But the rabbinic approach is instead a game of hacky-sack where the ball is hared amongst all, each doing with it what they will—some scholars making impressively fancy moves twisting in unexpected ways—while other rabbis are more straightforward in being simple in how they pass to someone else. But all of them are engaged in a collective endeavor, seeking to keep the process going as long as they can, all focused on the ball but passing it among themselves. We can keep the game, but replace the ball. By changing the Sacred Text, we are no longer being Talmudic. Instead, we are being what we call “neo-Talmudic.” One can find neo-Talmudism throughout intellectual history, where some sacred text—be it a work of art, a social institution, or an ideal—is considered sacrosanct, yet is kept alive by constant reinterpretation. In fact, Norman Lear’s television legacy is a perfect example. For him, the sacred text is the democratic experiment that is the American experience. What Lear gave to us was a great game in which the circle of players included those from a wide range of backgrounds. Each got their chance to play, to demonstrate their skills and style in working with it as they would. Everyone else would watch and laugh in appreciation until it was passed to another who would then get their turn. One might say that much of his work exercises TV prophetic midrash, an approach that doesn’t base democracy only on property rights, but directs us to understand it as never ending discussion. No one gets to own the democratic discussion in Lear’s work. Norman Lear’s great insight was that nobody wins democracy. The American democracy that Lear loved with all of his being was not an end, a goal, a thing to be possessed. He realized that it was a process, a happening that required all of us. The point was not assimilation, homogenization, the disappearance of difference. That is what Hitler wanted. Democracy was, as Levinas pointed out, an unceasing conversation. The discussion must never end. But the only way to keep it going, was to have all of us—especially those who have been kept out—to become active parts of it. Norman Lear made us laugh, but he also made us think, and in doing so tried to make more of us part of “us.” Co-written with Dr. Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg College’s Philosophy Department. Gimbel is the author of “Einstein’s Jewish Science,” a one time finalist for the national Jewish book award. Image: Photo of Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker from the television program All In the Family.. Credit: CBS This piece was republished without edits with permission from the author. Dr. Stephen Ster n has authored Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22. His forthcoming book, The Chailight Zone will be out later this year, 2024. Stern is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Return to Summer 2024 Previous Next

“Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” < Back Middle Voice David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” According to Benjamin Whorf, language is a record of how we see the world, and conversely, language conditions us to see the world in a particular way: a paradigmatic, if somewhat diabolical, example of non-linear, auto-reinforcing process. Take English, for example. When we speak, most of our verbs are either active or passive . We call that the “voice” of the verb. In an active/passive voiced language, we are always doing something to someone (or something) or someone (or something) is doing something to us: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it. The Lex Talionis (‘eye for an eye’), literally the law of retaliation , is the paradigmatic expression of such an active/passive world view. Scotty broke the vase: active voice. Scotty is called the ‘subject’ and my poor Ming is called the ‘object’ of his action. This construction first separates Scotty from what he’s done. In fact, Scotty’s action itself assumes the status of an object; it is something Scotty possesses: “ his action”. Scotty acted, and the vase ‘reacted’ (by shattering). The flow is in one direction: it’s a vector. Alternatively, the vase was broken by Scotty: passive voice. It’s the same event but this time seen from the point of view of the victim, my precious artifact. The vase is now the subject, but the action is still unidirectional, still a vector. In one sense, the active and passive voices are opposites; but in another sense, they are really the same thing. (How often that is true in our world!) They both describe the same event, in the same way, but just from opposite viewpoints. So we can say that English is an ‘active/passive voiced language’. Syntax speaks volumes about how we understand events, and, therefore, how we understand the world. An action, according to our grammar, is a vectored relationship between two unequal participants, a terribly minor, in not null, subset of all that goes on in our world. The world consists solely of events. If our preferred way of defining an event is in terms of a unidirectional relationship between unequal participants, then for us the world will consist primarily of such actions. This will be the logos we impose upon the world, and our language will reflect that logos . Of course, it works both ways. To a large extent, we learn about the world through language. Our language teaches us to see our world in terms of unequal, unidirectional relationships. Our language creates our logos, thereby defining our world for us. Putting it another way, we create our world in the image and likeness of our language. Does this language serve our purposes ? You bet it does! It’s hard to imagine a Golden Gate Bridge without it. Our language essentially reduces Being to a schematic. But does such a language actually meet our needs ? Not so much! In the real world, action is rarely, maybe never , entirely one directional. “I hit the nail” is actually an abstract simplification of a much more complex process. When my hammer connects with the nail head, the nail moves (hopefully) and the hammer recoils (predictably) sending vibrations down my arm…and that’s assuming I didn’t also hit my thumb in the process. Syntax unravels the unity of being and displays it like a collection of butterflies pinned to the wall of a natural history museum. The fact is that every real action acts on the so-called subject as well as on the so-called object. In the example of Scotty and the vase, that reality is somewhat trivial and can probably be safely ignored…that is, unless I accept Scotty’s explanation that the vase jumped off the shelf and attacked him, possibly the act of a neighborhood genie. And why not, the very same thing happened at Billy’s house just last week. It’s a pattern you see. Better call Ghostbusters ! But did you notice the real ‘ghost’ in this story? It’s Scotty’s language. He translated what might have been an accident into the intentional action of a genie. But what if we’re trying to model a chemical reaction, or worse, a quantum mechanical process, or even worse, some sort of ecological phenomenon? How do we describe these events using just active and passive verbs? We can’t. At best, we can approximate clumsily in simple situations. “Two hydrogen atoms each lend an electron to one oxygen atom; or an oxygen atom borrows an electron from each of two hydrogen atoms.” (Hint: it’s water!) When we get into more complex interactions, language breaks down completely, and we have to resort to diagrams (e.g. Feynman diagrams) or equations or shoulder shrugs. Now imagine the difficulty of modeling complex human interactions using just active and passive voice verbs! No wonder we’re always at war with one another. And our politics? Of course, we see the world in terms of “us” and “them”; of course, we see social change in terms of class warfare. It’s the Golden Rule after all: she who has the gold, rules. Nonetheless, most of us are resigned to this state of affairs. It’s just the way things are. How could it be otherwise? Easily! And the fact is, it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t necessarily always have to be this way. Many ancient languages had another voice which linguists call the Middle Voice . The middle voice is ideally suited to model situations where relationships are between equals and where action is reciprocal. Linguists disagree about the place of the middle voice in the evolution of language, but it is at least possible that the middle voice preceded both the active and passive voices. Modern linguists struggle to understand the middle voice. Conditioned by their own active/passive logoi , they want to understand this verb form as somewhere in between the active and passive poles. Hence, the term “middle voice”. In fact, the middle voice has nothing to do with its active/passive cousins. It is a completely different way of viewing the world. The middle voice verb form describes an action that impacts both subject and object simultaneously; or it describes a reciprocal relationship between two co-subjects who are also co-objects. That’s what process is; that’s what an event is. Anything else is just an abstraction. Analogy : If the active voice is the voice of the future and the passive voice the voice of the past, then the middle voice is the voice of the Present. Imagine what our world would look like if we viewed it in terms of reciprocal relations and omnidirectional events! Would that change the way the world is? Or would it just enable us to see it as it really is? Both. We’d see the world through a different filter, and in turn, we’d most likely act quite differently in such a world. How do we talk about love using active and passive verbs? The best we can come up with is something lame like, “Mary and Paul are in love with one another.” This turns love into a static state rather than a raging fire. The middle voice, on the other hand, is ready-made to describe the relationship between Mary and Paul in a way that does it justice. The active and passive voices describe the same event in the same way; they merely reverse the point of view. The middle voice defines that same event in an entirely different way. The active/passive voice sees the world from the outside; the middle voice sees the world from the inside: objectivity vs. subjectivity. Thus, we have two opposing world views: an active/passive view and a middle voice view. One sees the world in terms of will, struggle, domination, and power; the other sees the world in terms of mutuality. One is the syntax of war, the other of peace. One is the syntax of cause and effect, the other of evolution. One is the syntax of past and future, the other of the present. Unfortunately, however, most Western languages have lost the middle voice. Where the middle voice has been retained (e.g. Icelandic), it has been forced to co-exist with its active/passive cousins, and it no longer conveys the strong sense of reciprocity it once did. The poverty of an active/passive voiced language and the lack of a strong middle voice alternative is not just a linguistic problem; it’s a philosophical problem and ultimately a theological problem. One way to understand ‘the Christian project’ is as an attempt to reintroduce middle-voice consciousness to the world. Of course, I am not suggesting that the New Testament authors, much less Jesus himself, were budding linguists. Yet, they understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way folks viewed the world and, with incredible insight, they sought to change that view. When you view events and the actions that constitute them in terms of unequal, unidirectional power relations, it becomes easy to abuse or exploit your neighbor...and impossible to love her as yourself. Even today, certain sub-cultures will brand you a sucker or a wimp or a ‘goodie two shoes’ if you do not take advantage of the weaker folks in your orbit. “It’s just business!” Active/passive-voiced languages conflict with values like justice and kindness. It is difficult to inculcate an ethic of justice, reciprocity and love in folks who view the world according to the active/passive paradigm. In this sense, ‘bad language’ could be seen as humanity’s ‘original sin’: the second commandment is just an extension of the first. Christianity, especially in its early stages, sought to replace the active/passive world view with the world view that we are calling ‘middle voice consciousness’. In the Lord’s Prayer, for example, we read, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 12 centuries later, Francis of Assisi built on this insight: “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” Whatever we do, we do to ourselves to the same degree and in the same way and at the same time as we do it to others. That goes for positive actions like forgiveness and negative actions like violence. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because in middle voice consciousness, your neighbor is yourself! Beginning with Leo XIII (1878 – 1903), modern Popes have railed against economic injustice, but they have done so from the middle voice perspective of universal love ( agape ) rather than class consciousness. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. 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< Back After Parmenides What to "Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it." David Cowles What doesn’t belong and why? Philosophy, Science, Literature, or Social Studies? Philosophy, of course. In the other disciplines, new information and new interpretive schema are constantly emerging, endlessly enriching their subject matter. Not so, philosophy! In fact, here the reverse is true. Arguably, philosophy’s greatest achievements lie in its distant past. Parmenides of Elea is generally regarded as the Father of Western Philosophy. Of course, he had precursors (e.g. Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximander), but our knowledge of their teachings is sketchy at best. From what we do know, it seems as though these OGs were narrower in their focus than Parmenides – somewhat like philosophers today. Indisputably, Parmenides was the dominant intellectual influence in the 5th century BCE, the golden age of Greece. He did not win that honor by default. He lived in ‘interesting times’, sharing the intellectual stage with political leaders, Leonides and Pericles, playwrights, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and fellow philosophers, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Zeno. We can say this much for sure: the oldest substantially intact work of systematic philosophy in the Western World is Parmenides’ ontological poem, On Nature . Happily, the Father of Western Philosophy did not pussy foot around; he asked the big questions: What is reality, really? How is it that appearances appear? How are what-is and what-seems-to-be related? Can you honestly say that we’ve moved beyond these issues 2500 years later? 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato. Whitehead was half right. Western philosophy can be read as footnotes on Plato but only if Plato is read as footnotes on Parmenides. Parmenides divided his poem into three sections: First, a short prologue; then Aletheia (Truth); finally, Doxa (Appearances). The prologue sets the poem in a narrative context and makes it clear (to me if not to all) that no account of the World can be complete without accounting for its dual aspects of Aletheia and Doxa . Aletheia models the world as noumenal, Doxa as phenomenal; and regarding the relationship between the two…silence, uncomfortable, enigmatic silence. Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand that silence, or to break it. First, there are those who deny the silence: “Parmenides must have spelled out his ideas; we’ve just lost that portion of the manuscript.” Then, there are those who have graciously offered to ‘correct’ Parmenides’ oversight. i.e. to fill in the blanks . Present company excepted, few have been willing to take Parmenides’ silence at face value in an effort to understand it. There are roughly 20 intact fragments of On Nature , each independently preserved by ‘a trusted source’, such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, Simplicius, Clement, and Eusebius – just to drop a few names. From these fragments, it is possible to reconstruct a coherent text. It is ludicrous to assume that Parmenides’ curators somehow failed to retain the one fragment of text that would have explained the entire work and unlocked its hidden meaning. So we can turn our attention to Parmenides’ editors – well meaning folk who have volunteered to add what Parmenides obviously meant to say to what he actually did say. Thanks but no thanks! However, in their zeal to correct Parmenides’ oversights, these philosophers left a trail of breathtaking ideas that constitute what we study when we study Western Philosophy. 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato. Whitehead was half right. Western philosophy can be read as footnotes on Plato but only if Plato is read as footnotes on Parmenides. No doubt, Socrates’ disciple is Parmenides’ best known editor and commentator; but he was far from the first and possibly not the most important. In fact, Plato’s grasp of pre-Socratic philosophy was ‘incomplete’…at best. I could say more…but I don’t wish to appear impolite. Three 5th century philosophers should primarily be credited with continuing Parmenides’ great project: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Zeno. All three played at ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ but in their defense, what else is a neo to do? On the plus side, their emendations preserved the spirit of Parmenides’ work. I’m not sure that he would have endorsed all their formulations but I think he would have recognized them as valid extensions of his own thought. Speaking of which, in Fragment #1, the goddess tells our pilgrim, “It is right that you should learn all things, both the steadfast heart of persuasive truth and the beliefs of mortals…how things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.” For the ‘persuasive truth’ we turn to Fragment #8: “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable, whole…and complete. Nor was it once nor will it be since it is now all together, one, continuous…Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of. Nor is it divisible since it is all alike.” But regarding ‘the beliefs of mortals’, Fragment #8 continues: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to change place (motion), and to exchange bright color.” This is the realm of Doxa . If order is your thing, you’d have loved the Big Bang. That is the moment when order in the Universe was at its maximum. Not so surprising when you consider that all energy was concentrated in a singularity – at a dimensionless point or perhaps in a Planck-sized Space. If only my desk were so well ordered. Entropy (S) is how we measure disorder. S was at its cosmic minimum at Big Bang and it will be at its cosmic maximum at Heat Death. Knowing this, you might be less surprised when I share my view that European philosophy reached its pinnacle in the 5th century BCE… before Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. This was the century of Parmenides, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles and Zeno. Not to mention Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes… or Leonides and Pericles. Who says there’s no such thing as a Golden Age? Someone sharing my view of Intellectual History might think that Hebrew theology peaked with Torah and Christian theology with the writings of John and Paul. It is certainly possible to understand the balance of the Old Testament as ‘commentary on Torah ’ and all of Christian theology as ‘commentary on the New Testament’. So, why not treat the corpus of Western philosophy as commentary on the pre-Socratics? (20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, said that all Western philosophy was commentary on Plato; but he was wrong. Plato himself was a commentator on the pre-Socratics…and not an especially good one.) Each of the major pre-Socratics contributed a unique perspective to the burgeoning science of cosmology. Heraclitus, for example, is known for Panta Re (“everything flows”). Anaxagoras is known especially for his trademarked meme, Pan in Panti Hot Link (‘everything in everything’). Anaxagoras’ universe begins as the undifferentiated entirety - pure energy in the Big Bang model. Nous (mind/soul) injects a quantum of rotation which propagates throughout the whole. This circularity could be understood as the first flicker of recursion, a precursor of consciousness. Gradually, this rotation triggers a wave of centrifugal force. The undifferentiated mass begins to separate, like attracts like, and soon sub-regions emerge, each with its own signature mix of properties. “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” (Joyce) Eventually, these sub-regions will become what we know as ‘events’, i.e. actual entities. Anaxagoras’ genesis is different from that of other philosophers. Each actual entity retains a trace of every element buried in the original mass. Entities are distinguished, not by their elements, which are the same in every case, but by the signature variation in the concentration of those elements in each entity. If Parmenides was the apostle of stability and Heraclitus the prophet of change, Anaxagoras was the oracle of solidarity. He understood that a stronger bond among entities was needed to preserve the integrity of a universe in flux. When it comes to Universe, the problem is not so much explaining its diversity as it is accounting for its ultimate unity. Anaxagoras achieves the requisite solidarity in two ways. First, as noted above, everything interpenetrates and shares elements with everything else. In fact, every entity contains the ‘seeds’ of all entities. Theoretically, if the entire universe were reduced to a single organism (cell), genesis could begin again with barely a pause for a methane rich breath. This model is remarkably close to the modern science of genetics. The RNA/DNA molecule may have synthesized only once on Planet Earth. It is likely that every cell contains genetic material descended from that original DNA molecule. But DNA is as inefficient as it is powerful. Likely, it is so powerful because it is so inefficient! The genome of a common fern is 50 times longer than the human genome. On the other hand, some bacterial genomes are 5,000 times shorter than human DNA. But size does not matter! Less than 2% of our genes code for proteins (the primary function of DNA) anyway and less than 20% are ‘expressed’ in any one organism (cell). However, unused genetic material is not useless; it can always be accessed if environmental changes favor a different combination of phenomenal traits. Tens of thousands of years of evolution can be by-passed by visiting ‘the stacks’ in the vast and ancient ‘library’ of your DNA. As climate change gets real, we may be glad for our airconditioned library. Second, Anaxagoras’ universe is scale agnostic. Patterns repeat up and down the ladder, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. We are mesmerized by scale. The vastness of it! There are c. 60 orders of magnitude from Planck scale to Uni verse. But Anaxagoras shows that scale is a local phenomenon only. From a global perspective it just endlessly repeats, and it is impossible to distinguish any one stage from any other. Scale is a relative measure, not an absolute one. So Anaxagoras could be known as ‘Father Fractal’. In an Anaxagorean universe every macro pattern is made up of congruent micro patterns. Each macro pattern is in turn a micro pattern in an even larger macro. And, of course, every micro pattern is a macro with respect to other micros. Pan in Panti. Every entity includes the ‘seeds’ of every other entity and is in turn included as a ‘seed’ in each of those other entities. As with our DNA model, the entire entity is encoded in the seed. Every entity is a pattern which reflects the patterns of the micro entities that constitute it and is reflected in the pattern of the macro entities it constitutes. This odd cosmic topology is not found only in Anaxagoras. Are you familiar with the New Testament? Part of the genius of early Christianity is the doctrine of Incarnation – the idea that God, Being per se , locus and creator of Universe, is incarnate as a quantum being (Jesus Christ) in that Universe. That’s solidarity! Pan in Panti . But this topology is not limited to the Incarnation per se . Every day, it is repeated in the celebration of Eucharist. Jesus, human and divine, body and soul, under the appearance of bread and wine, is consumed by the communicant who is immediately ‘uploaded’ into Jesus’ mystical body. Pan in Panti . In Romans (8: 26), Paul tells us that when we pray (to God), it is actually the Holy Spirit (God) who searches our hearts and intercedes for us ‘with inexpressible groanings’. In First Corinthians (15: 24-29), he tells us that all creation flows up to Christ who hands it on to the Father ‘so that God may be all in all’. Pan in Panti . In the so-called Age of Reason, Leibniz resurrected Anaxagoras for his Monadology . Briefly, Leibniz’ universe consists of monads, each one reflecting all others: Pan in Panti . Finally, in the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead created what may be the last great philosophical system of our era. Process and Reality is full of ideas that would have felt at home in 5th century BCE Greece: The universe consists solely of one class of ‘things’: Actual Entities ( aka Events). Each actual entity configures the common Multiplicity of past events into its own unique Actual World. Each actual entity executes judgment on that actual world (‘the gods of Egypt’ - Exodus 12: 12) as it ‘prehends’ all other actual entities (or to use Whitehead’s terminology, ‘as it feels them’) and acts to bring the elements closer to an ideal pattern. In Whitehead’s model, every ‘trajectory’ connects God’s Primordial Nature (conceptual values) with God’s Consequent Nature (concrete entities). As with his contemporary, Robert Frost , Whitehead’s ‘roads diverge’…but end up at the same destination. Whitehead’s model sets up a kind of universal reflexivity. Every event is ‘in God’ and God is in every event; therefore, every event is in every event. Every event is even an element of itself. How’s that for recursion? With this topology, how is it the Universe does not just seize-up at birth? For that answer, we needed to wait for Jacques Derrida in the latter half of the 20th century. Every event includes itself as an element. A’ є A. But A’ is not strictly speaking equal to A. A and A’ are separated by what Derrida called differance , an infinitesimal difference. Differance is the origin of process, Proust’s uneven cobblestones. Every event consists of the same members, uniquely configured. The cosmos, then, is God’s Kaleidoscope . A limited number of elements generate innumerable unique patterns…and we have a pre-Socratic to thank for this insight. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Groundhog Issue 2025 Previous Next

< Back Things Are Not Always the Way They Seem to Appear David Cowles Jul 19, 2022 This alternative turns a simple, two-stroke process of alienation into a four-stroke process of alignment. How so? "Things are not always what they seem ,” you’ve heard it a million times, and it certainly is true…as far as it goes. It captures the separation of Being and Appearing, traditional in Western philosophy from Parmenides ( Aletheia vs. Doxa ) through Heidegger ( Dasein vs. Wassein ). But it also suggests that there is an almost primordial conflict between being (‘thing’) and appearing (‘experience’). Many years ago, I heard this same basic concept formulated in a way I like much better: “Things are not always the way they seem to appear.” This alternative turns a simple, two-stroke process of alienation (above) into a four-stroke process of alignment (below). How so? We start with things as they are , not as they seem to be to each other, not as they appear to be to an outside observer, but things as they are to each other, islands in the stream . Groups of things can form; call them ‘multiplicities.' Things in a multiplicity don’t necessarily have to fit together and very often they don’t. It would be more accurate to say that things in a multiplicity have a habit of frequently bumping into one another. Things are , they seem , and as we shall soon see, they appear . But before they can do any of this, things need to transform from mere multiplicities into nexus (pl.). Things cannot ‘seem’ on their own. ‘Seeming’ lies between ‘being’ and ‘not-being’ or between ‘being’ and ‘appearing.' ( Side bar : does that mean that ‘non-being’ and ‘appearing’ are the same thing? Check out Shakespeare’s Tempest for some ideas on this.) Seeming can be a bit, well, for want of a better word, ‘unseemly.' Seeming is a social act and, therefore, requires a collective subject (i.e., a nexus). Seeming connects the solidary act of being with the communal act of appearing. Seeming is fundamental to nexus. How a nexus ‘seems’ defines what that nexus ‘is.' Likewise, only a nexus can ‘seem’ so whatever ‘seems’ is a nexus. This is what is meant by ‘the way they seem:' it is a single act but with two opposite aspects. The ‘way’ is how things come together to form nexus (pl.) while the ‘seem’ is how the fully formed nexus projects itself in the world. Finally, things ‘appear.' Whew! It’s been a long ride, but yes, you can finally say it, “We’re there now.” Appearing implies an audience: ‘Tom Jones is now appearing in Las Vegas.’ He wouldn’t be ‘appearing’ if there wasn’t at least the expectation of one tapped out gambler as an audience. So, yes, we’re home now. The fat (sic) lady has sung! A ‘bud of experience’ (William James) has emerged from an undifferentiated background pool of potentiality. We have what Alfred North Whitehead would call, ‘an actual entity.' Let’s retrace our steps. We started with things in themselves, solitary things, strangers in the night. Then we looked at the way those things come together to form a nexus. A nexus is the first step in seeming . The process climaxes in what we call an experience . The experiencing agent interacts with the nexus in question thereby transforming the nexus’ seeming into appearing , the contribution of the nexus to the experience. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” < Back Causality and 'The Bhagavad Gita' David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” In an earlier article Cause and Effect , we spelled out a ‘new’ theory of causality , based in part on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. According to this model, every ‘act’ ( aka Actual Entity) begins with the conversion of the disordered multiplicity that is Universe (“Universe is plural” – Buckminster Fuller) into a uniquely ordered nexus, an Actual World. Each Actual Entity (event) has its own Actual World: one world, one event; one event, one world! However, it is important to note at the outset that the Actual World does not in any way cause or determine its Actual Entity; rather every Actual Entity determines its own Actual World. The first stage in the concrescence of any Actual Entity is a single process with three aspects: (1) conversion of the Multiplicity (Universe) into a nexus (Actual World), (2) evaluation of that nexus in terms of objective eternal values, and (3) formation of intent (‘subjective aim’), not necessarily conscious, based on that evaluation. Expressed this way, these three ‘aspects’ seem to suggest a sequence; however, that is a trick of language. In fact, they constitute a single act with three simultaneous aspects. In the real world, process is multi-valent, not simply vectored through time. This initial stage is motivated and guided by transcendental values (‘eternal objects’), like Beauty, Truth, and Justice, that logically (not temporally) precede Universe and subsist in God’s Primordial Nature. The final stage in the concrescence of any Actual Entity is also a single process with three simultaneous aspects: (1) satisfaction, (2) objective immortality, and (3) superject. These aspects are denotatively identical but connotatively distinct. Here the three-in-one phenomenon is a bit more apparent. ‘Satisfaction’ is the realization of the ‘subjective aim’ as felt by the Actual Entity itself; ‘objective immortality’ is that satisfaction seen from the perspective of the Multiplicity; and ‘superject’ is that objective immortality felt by other Actual Entities, including God’s Consequent Nature. The function of every act is to convert intention into satisfaction. This is the act itself and the process is called ‘concrescence’ (Whitehead). In the process of concrescence, the subjective aim usually undergoes substantial modification. The event ends as a ‘settled matter of fact’ (objective immortality) projected (superject) into the Actual Worlds of all future Actual Entities. The ‘subject’ of the action, the Actual Entity itself, is responsible (1) for its intention (subjective aim), (2) for its objective immortality (superject), and (3) for the way (‘subjective form’) that the intention is reflected in the satisfaction. Style counts! Every event is sui generis , it ‘causes itself’. Is this Nihilism? Or Solipsism? The very opposite! Every event begins with an evaluation of ‘everything that is’, and the formation of a complex intention that reflects that valuation and the relevant values it seeks to realize. On the other hand, no event is responsible for the way it is received by and integrated into subsequent Actual Entities. That is entirely the responsibility of those subsequent entities. Because every event is sui generis , no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event. This model of reality is not new, not to me, not even to Whitehead. In fact, I discovered a similar concept of causality in a 2000 year old Hindu scripture, the justly famous Bhagavad Gita . Let’s set the scene: We are on a field of battle but Arjuna, commander of one of the armies, is having second thoughts. He recognizes his kinship with the warriors on the other side and he is loath to kill them: “I foresee no good resulting from slaughtering my kin in war…for if we killed these murderers, evil like theirs would cling to us…The wrong done by this destruction is evident… Nor do we know whether it would be better for us to vanquish them or to be overcome.” In just a few words, Arjuna raises three cogent arguments against ‘activism’: (1) ‘karma’ from committed acts blows back on whoever commits those acts; (2) the acts that duty calls us to perform may be immoral per se (for example, killing other human beings); (3) there is no way to know anything about the long term consequences of our actions. Fortunately, however, Arjuna is best buds with the divine Lord Krishna and this ‘Handsome Haired One’ sets the ‘Strong-Armed Warrior’ straight: “Your concern should be with action, never with action’s fruits.” Lord Krishna swats away Arjuna’s weighty reservations with the flick of his supple wrist. In the process, he exposes the unstated premise undergirding both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: i.e., that future events ( ends ) are ‘caused’ by prior events ( means ). Krishna exhorts Arjuna to detach himself from the fruits of his actions and to focus exclusively on the actions themselves. This is not an appeal for Quietism. Rejection of the fruits of action is not the same thing as rejection of action itself: “Not by not acting in this world does one become free from action… Not even for a moment does someone exist without acting… In order to maintain the world, your obligation is to act… Should I not engage in action these worlds would perish, utterly…” Today, we know that the cessation of all activity is synonymous with Absolute Zero on the Kelvin Scale; 0°K defines Big Freeze , the end of Universe. Krishna was ahead of his time. Non-action is an illusion. To be is to act. The question is how : “Scripture is your authority for what to do and not to do. Understanding its injunctions, you are obliged to action…These actions, though, should be performed without attachment to their fruits…” By Scripture, the Gita is referring to the Hindu Vedas and the Upanishads. Scripture plays a comparable role in Judeo-Christian theology. Here though, we are referring to the Torah, the Midrashim, the Talmud, the Semon on the Mount, etc. “All actions are undertaken by the qualities of nature though one deceived by his ego imagines, ‘I am doing this’… Qualities act on one another.” In other words, God, the conduit of all values into the world, acts through us, his mortal agents. Per Whitehead, all action is motivated by qualities (values). Actual Entities are the loci of acts but the acts themselves are pure expressions of values. The ‘subject’ is merely the mechanism by which those values are realized in the present and projected into the future. “Better to do one’s own duty ineptly than another’s well.” Here, The Gita calls to mind Paul’s contemporaneous Letter to Ephesians: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God had prepared in advance that we should live in them.” (2: 10) We do not determine our duty. We divine it and we perform it…or we don’t! Duty is dictated by the ‘eternal objects’ ( aka ‘transcendental values’) that constitute God’s Primordial Nature. Nor is Krishna (God) exempt from these laws ( dharma ): “In order to protect the good…and to establish righteousness, age after age, I come to be.” God too is a manifestation of ‘qualities acting on one another’. Good is what constitutes God and it is God who projects Good into Universe. No Good, no God! No God, no Good! This is a radical form of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Medieval theologians noted that some entities are ‘more good’ than others. They reasoned that there must therefore be something that is ‘ most good ’, and that whatever is ‘most good’ must exist, because it is better to exist than not. That ‘most good being’ is what we call ‘God’. The Gita arrives at the same destination via a somewhat different route; Krishna says, “Know me as one who never acts.” - i.e., as one who selflessly lets qualities act through him. Speaking of qualities, “Of lights, I am the radiant sun…of stars, I am the Moon…of beings, I am consciousness…of waters, I am Ocean…of mountains, I am the Himalayas…of mortal men, I am the king…of rivers, I am Ganges…of creations, I am beginning, middle, and end…of speakers, I am the discourse…of secrets, I am the silence, and the knowledge of those who know…” Anslem of Bec never wrote like this! But a Medieval Irish poet ( St. Dallan ) came close: “Be Thou my vision…my best thought…my light…my wisdom…my true word…my treasure...” Like Dallan, Krishna defines himself in terms of essential qualities: “I am water’s taste, Arjuna, I am the light of the sun and moon…sound in the air, manhood in men. I am the pure fragrance of earth and the radiance of fire; I am the life in all beings…the mind of the intelligent, the splendor of the radiant. I am the might of the mighty…” “And know that states of being…proceed from me – however, I am not in them, they are in me…Here behold all the universe…standing as one in my body.” “I am that which is the seed within all beings, Arjuna – without me nothing can exist.” The Gospel of John applies this same insight to Christ: “All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be.” (1: 3) Finally, Krishna makes clear to Arjuna that he neither controls nor is responsible for the course of events in the world: “Those warriors arrayed in lines opposing your men, even without you, will have perished…I have destroyed your enemy already: serve as my tool, O Ambidextrous Archer! (Arjuna)” “Who sees himself as the sole doer, does not see…even after slaying these people, he neither slays, nor is he bound…” Arjuna is responsible for discerning his duty, perhaps with a gentle nudge from Lord Krishna, and then performing that duty to the best of his ability. That will be his legacy, not the outcome of some battle now barely visible through the fog of history. So how is any of this different from the traditional Western view of causality? I’ll grant you the distinction is subtle…but important! We tend to focus on intent, motive, ‘what was he trying to do’. The model we are proposing here includes the formation of intent but also the execution of that intent. Our judges put great emphasis on the dismount. We focus on ‘settled matters of fact’: what did he do! We are not concerned, however, with what happens next. What use future Actual Entities make of Arjuna’s Objective Immortality is between them and their God. Leave Arjuna out of it. He is not to blame for the Great London Fire (1666) or for Johnny’s poor performance on this morning’s algebra exam. So, in the spirit of Voltaire ( Candide ), “Tend to your own patch!” David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Varieties of Social Organization David Cowles Oct 31, 2024 “Am I the stuff my social networks are made of…or am I merely the intersection of the various networks in which I participate?” When we are born, our first consistent discrimination is probably ‘me/not-me’. My survival depends on understanding myself in relation to my environment. Gradually, I realize that that environment is not monochromatic. My mother relates to me differently from my stuffed animals…or the cat. Most importantly, I come to distinguish a loosely structured group of ‘big people’ who interact with me on a more or less regular basis. I will learn to think of those people as family . Et Voila , I have already begun drawing my social map of the world; I will continue to fill it in over the course of a lifetime. Later, I’ll learn that I am also part of a clan, a neighborhood, a school, a parish, a nation, a species, and ultimately, a biosphere. Later still, I’m told that my precious, autonomous body is itself made up of only slightly less autonomous bodies called cells . And these cells themselves house other semi-autonomous life forms (nuclei & mitochondria). It’s bewildering. There are currently 8 billion pseudo-me living on Planet Earth but 30 trillion mini-me (cells) make up my body. Chances are, I’ll shuffle off this mortal coil still utterly unable to fully comprehend these basic realities. My species, homo sapiens , covers most of a planet with a circumference of about 26,000 miles, soon to be connected by ‘filaments’ to other regions of space. So the phenomenon colloquially known as ‘me’ is really a nesting of bio-social spheroids extending over more than 20 orders of magnitude (from the size of a mitochondrion to the circumference of Planet Earth). Across this scale, there are numerous styles of social organization. The components of a cell are symbionts while the cells themselves form tissues, organs, and ultimately the single macro-organism you affectionately know as ‘me’. I in turn belong to a hierarchy of variously ordered societies. My family, for example, is organized differently from my gang, my community, my country, my church. I once suggested to my father that we model our family on a parliamentary democracy but, strangely enough, he did not see wisdom in my idea. Animal cells are products of the merger of previously independent, prokaryotic (nuclear free) cells to form a single entity. These eukaryotic cells repeatedly reproduce until they provide the full complement and diversity needed to form the adult body of a macro-organism. The Plant Kingdom exhibits different models of organization. For example, while animal behavior is often controlled by a central nervous system, plant intelligence tends to be distributed throughout the organism. Think Blockchain! Bacteria, on the other hand, remain prokaryotic. They function and reproduce independently but they freely exchange DNA and often cooperate with members of the same or different species to pursue mutual objectives. Some organisms organize into colonies - groups of genetically identical or closely related organisms, called zooids, that live together in a tight knit society, called Zooidland in an upcoming Lego Movie. Zooids are individual animals but they are also part of the larger colonial organism. Each zooid is capable of some degree of independent function. If necessary, it can survive outside the colony, but it can also work cooperatively as part of a larger whole. Coral is a good example of a colonial organization. In many colonial species, different zooids specialize in specific functions like feeding, reproduction, or defense. This specialization allows for more efficient overall functioning of the colony. But then these same zooids work together, e.g. to create a colony-wide circulatory system. So, colonies resemble animal bodies, on one hand, and animal societies on the other. As individual humans, we participate at several levels of organization. On the one hand, our bodies are societies of cooperating cells; on another, we are ‘cells’ cooperating in the form and function of transpersonal organizations (above). But we are also members of a species ( homo sapiens ) and of a biosphere ( Gaia ). Question : Am I the stuff my social networks are made of…or am I merely the intersection of the various networks in which I participate? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

"I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." < Back A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance Shalvi Waldman Jul 15, 2023 "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Hidden Life An earlier “Thought” introduced “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the reflections of a career forester. The book focuses on communities of trees. In these communities, trees demonstrate the ability to communicate, to share resources, to perform selfless, eleemosynary acts, to recognize and care for progenitors as well as offspring. Are these activities enough for us to ascribe a type of consciousness to these communities? David Cowles An earlier “Thought” introduced “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the reflections of a career forester. The book focuses on communities of trees. In these communities, trees demonstrate the ability to communicate, to share resources, to perform selfless, eleemosynary acts, to recognize and care for progenitors as well as offspring. Are these activities enough for us to ascribe a type of consciousness to these communities? Now Netflix is showing a documentary called “Fantastic Fungi”. The role of fungus in the behavior of trees is well treated in the “Hidden Life” but this Netflix documentary focuses exclusively on that role. My lifetime has witnessed a new awareness of mental process and moral behavior beyond the “merely human world”. Prior to this, during the Age of Reason, the status of animals was reduced to that of automatons and the status of plants to that of simple machines. If we go back to even earlier times, however, we discover cultures that truly valued the non-human. In Biblical Judaism, for example, animals and cultivated lands enjoy all the same Sabbath protections as humans. Later, Hasidic Judaism divided being into 4 categories: human, animal, vegetable and inanimate. Each contains the same ‘divine spark’. Each can be reunited with God. In fact, the Hasidim refuse to recognize any sort of hierarchy among these 4 ontological categories. It has even been suggested that Judaism is the natural religion of ecology. Share Previous Next