In Limitation Philosophy the Non-Physical Is Coincident With the Physical, So the Abstract Is Never Far From the Concrete.
Puritanism helped mould the social order, but it was itself increasingly moulded by it. R.H. Tawney
The quote is from the 1937 Preface to Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and I was struck by how I echoed it in the Logic of Limitless without ever having read it before today.
From the Logic of Limitless
“Individual human life is a single unified process involving both physical and non-physical aspects of being. The subconscious personality of Socrates regulates and is regulated by bodily functions. The homeostatic personality and the homeostatic bodily processes corresponding to it maintain the balances necessary to his physical and psychological life. On the conscious level Socrates experiences the universe as an individual human being moving bodily through time and space. He is shaped by this experience which is also in many ways shaped by him.”
“Being a conscious person what he feels about his experiences has a crucial role in shaping his own personality. Alongside every bodily experience is a conscious mind, heart and will interfacing with itself and the world. The conscious personality processes the details of life while the homeostatic personality operates the organism.”
“The abstract inner realities of personality emerge from embodied experiences and so do complex social realities. Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, being the physical offspring of Sophroniscus, relates to his father physically before anything else. All the social realities of their relationship emerge from the physical relationship of their embodied beings. All the social realities of our very complex cultures emerge from the relationships of embodied human beings to one another. Our understanding of every social phenomenon must be grounded in the realities of embodied beings to be meaningful. Embodied human beings are the atoms of social reality.”
Before going any further I ought to clarify the word ‘coincident’ in the subheading of this post. This is a technical term in the theory of particle level emergence and embodiment. In both of these processes the non-physical, function and personality respectively, proceed simultaneously through time. As this continuously occurs there is a coordination, a sort of communication where each influences and is influenced by the other. The best concrete example of this is embodiment, where I, as individual personality, am influenced by where my body is and what my body is doing and where my body is and what my body is doing is influenced by by individual personality.
The Present as an Existential Conundrum
Forever in the present both my body and the personality which emerges from the processes of embodiment exist in the present place, time, and state. These three existential realities correspond exactly to the physical realities of limited being. I am a local, temporal and discrete being, so existing in the present is at the center of the dilemma of limitation, and is why I can characterize it as a dilemma.
Given the specter of limitless time the present is but a moment in an infinite future with an infinite past behind it, so past and future are often large concerns in the present.
Justification of the Past
The powerful need to justify ones past can be seen in the fate of those who cannot. Confiscation, punishment, and social ostracism plague anyone unable to defend past actions with sufficient justification. That thought removes any mystery as to why human beings are obsessed with justification.
The forms of justification and the contents of my justifications shape my personality. In the spirit of the Tawney quote, the many of the puritans were rich, yet they were fervent believers in a Christ and a Bible that said, ‘Blessed are the poor.’ This ethical conundrum was an ever present source of much needed justification by them, and it was a powerful influencer actively shaping their personalities.
All forms of self-reflective belief have great power in shaping individual persons and the societies they live in. The Archegete concept in The Logic of Limitless explores this in detail, as the concept of a society’s origin story is expanded to uncover its far greater meanings.
A Rationale for Upcoming Activities
The future is another existential conundrum in every present moment of a limited beings existence. What to do is often determined by the why one is doing it, and the present moment needs a belief to form the heuristics of action around.
Strategy is the primary mental activity of present moments. Why to do the next thing. Being limited we reach for paradigms and perfect solutions only to find ourselves acting on heuristics and sorting out the mistakes and unforeseen difficulties of our actions. Actions taken based in strategies of past present moments when for some reason or other we believed these were the actions to take. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time, how could I have not foreseen this?” Is a very common refrain.
Truth is, as local, temporal and discrete beings heuristic behavior is all we’ve got. We cannot be at two places at once. A woman who works long hours at a job will not be available to her children as much as one who doesn’t. The physical realities of limited being make every course a compromise, whether we see it that way or not. Choosing to do this one thing is in reality a choice not to do many other things.
A heuristic is a behavioral strategy, based in belief, that one engages in the pursuit of beneficial behaviors that always has an inescapable downside. I practical terms. one cannot be in two places at once.
Most belief isn’t religious in character, but the nature of behavior being based in belief gives rise to religion as a means of justifying past decisions and providing ready made rationales for future actions. This is the essence of capitalism’s relationship to Calvinism. One justifies ahead of time future actions based in religious rationales.
The Concrete Reality of Limitation
In the final analysis we are limited beings.
In the voice of the character Friar William Ockham, in Ockham’s Epiphany.
William pauses for a moment, looks at the young scribe working with the inquisitors and says,
“There is no original sin, only limitation.”
Having observed that sentence being written down, William says, “What we call sin, our inability to be perfect human beings, is simply us living in the world of things as limited human beings with limited personalities. Like the Apostle Paul we do not understand ourselves and others in the complete way God does. We are incomplete. We are limited. We are bounded beings existing for a short time, in a small space, and we pass away. We err, not because of our first ancestor’s transgression, but because of the nature of our being.
The physical reality of limitation is inescapable.
Afterword, in Thank You, Mr. Darwin I used the phrase “creatures of imagination” to describe people whose lives are powerfully animated by abstract reality.
But the great majority of them, like the multitude of religious leaders who came before them, will never see it as they’re own responsibility to have a philosophy of deity capable of creating our world as it truly is. The problem religious leaders suffer from today is one their predecessors ought to have solved a very long time ago. Men of their ilk have shirked this problem for centuries. Destroying the messengers of truth whenever they could and ignoring the real problem they have on their hands. And this was easy for them, because religious leaders are creatures of imagination who flee from substantial reality and refuse to think in its terms. For ages a theology that describes Deity as consistent with reality has been needed and not been available to meet the needs of our understanding.
It’s about time we got a theology that makes sense.
The
The Mysterious Role of Reflective Thought in Shaping individuals and societies is looked at in this from R.H. Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
Tawney, Relevant to Topics of Archegete
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny dawns upon it, looks for a moment, before the dust of conflict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would be. The feudal noblesse had looked and had caught a glimpse of a world of fealty and chivalry and honor. The monarchy looked, or Laud and Strafford looked for it; they saw a nation drinking the blessings of material prosperity and spiritual edification from the cornucopia of a sage and paternal monarchy – a nation “fortified and adorned . . . the country rich . . . the Church flourishing . . . trade increased to that degree that we were the exchange of Christendom . . . all foreign merchants looking upon nothing as their own but what they laid up in the warehouses of this Kingdom.” In a far-off day the craftsman and laborer were to look, and see a band of comrades, where fellowship should be known for life and lack of fellowship for death. For the middle classes of the early seventeenth century, rising but not yet triumphant, that enchanted mirror was Puritanism. What it showed was a picture grave to sternness, yet not untouched with a sober exaltation-an earnest, zealous, godly generation, scorning delights, punctual in labor, constant in prayer, thrifty and thriving, filled with a decent pride in themselves and their calling, assured that strenuous toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like those Dutch Calvinists whose economic triumphs were as famous as their iron Protestantism-“thinking, sober, and patient men, and such as believe that labor and industry is their duty towards God.” Then an air stirred and the glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.