On Being Scaled

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

Department of English

ON BEING SCALED

RHETORICAL PRACTICES OF THE COSMOS

A Dissertation

Joshua Michael DiCaglio

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2016

The dissertation of Joshua DiCaglio was approved* by the following

Richard Doyle Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee

Jeffrey Nealon Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy

John Jasso Assistant Professor of English

Mark Morrison Professor of English Head of the English Department

Mark Shriver Professor of Anthropology

Debra Hawhee Director of Graduate Studies, English Department

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

ABSTRACT

This project explores scale as technology of attention, a means of attending to one’s own perceptual field, systematically applying a measure to consistently compare the relative appearance of things. Scale is a phenomenological apparatus that permits us to speak of atoms, cells, bodies, planets, galaxies, and the whole cosmos in relation to each other. Scale is likewise a notation, a reference point whereby we relate one object (a galaxy) to our normal perceptual field (a meter). As a notation, scale’s significant rhetorical power manifests in its capacity to transform our understanding of our usual experience: in the capacity to conceive of this world, this body, and oneself according to these different scales.

I explore scale through the scalar practices of both science and mysticism, with occasional reference to political conceptions of scale. The project finds that mysticism, the perennial aspects of spirituality that aims for union with a higher being, is an unavoidable and essential part of understanding scale since scalar terminologies tend to arise from mystical experience and encountering scale tends to generate decidedly mystical questions. Looking at mysticism in relation to science permits a fresh exploration of why science finds itself struggling with mystical concepts, such as wholeness, vastness, transcendence, hierarchy, or infinity, which are particularly notable within astronomy and ecology. Likewise, looking at how science develops and systematizes scalar descriptions permits a reworking of these mystical concepts in a manner that retains a clearer reference to empirical practices, while not remaining strictly within a material conception of the cosmos.

The question of scale leads this project to move between conversations in both the humanities and the sciences through their common expression in various encounters with scale.

Each chapter begins with a consideration of a higher scale encounter born from space race

iii rhetoric, science fiction, astronomy, or ecology in order to introduce a contemporary instantiation of scalar encounters. Among these cultural icons are Stewart Brand’s vision of the

Whole Earth, Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s transcendental experience in space, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s encounter with a vast informatic entity, and Carl Sagan’s account of the Cosmos as the All. These contemporary icons are likewise mixed, via the common interest and encounter with scale, with close examinations of philosophy and mystical texts from Plato,

Plotinus, Augustine, Christian mysticism, Martin Heidegger, Vedanta, Buddhism and the

Upanishads, as well as more contemporary spiritual and literary accounts from Walt Whitman,

Richard Maurice Bucke, Aldous Huxley, among others. Science, of course, is not neglected: work from neuroscience, quantum physics, Gaia theory, mathematical logic, cybernetics, and ecology are likewise woven together around particular scalar concerns. This widespread examination is focused through the introduction of three phenomenological origins of scale— distance, measuring, and the determination of scope—each leading to a reworking of what scale is and how it functions, with widespread implications for how we speak of scalar structures and relations. Each of these phenomenological origins leads to additional reconsiderations of classic scalar concepts: wholeness and division; conversion and reflection; and the Otherworldly or transcendent.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... vii Acknowledgements ...... viii Introduction: On Scaling Being ...... 1 Chapter I: Scaling the Whole Earth ...... 36 Demanding the Whole Earth ...... 36 Mystical Scales ...... 41 Up the Mountain ...... 46 The Overview, the Claim, and the Airplane ...... 49 Dreams of Transcendence ...... 56 Behold the Earth ...... 66 The Globe Unmapped ...... 70 Scaling Beyond Metaphor ...... 76 Querying Cosmic Consciousness ...... 83 Scaling Methodus ...... 89 Chapter II: Wholeness before Fragmentation ...... 94 Dissecting Wholeness ...... 94 Zeno’s Trap ...... 106 Continuum Gestalt ...... 116 Going Crazy with VALIS ...... 124 Your Objects are already Ubik ...... 134 The Divine Injection of Palmer Eldritch ...... 150 The Death of Fragmentation ...... 160 Chapter III: The Eyes of the Cosmos ...... 164 Vision beyond the Earth ...... 164 Scale and Measure...... 168 Gazing into Nature ...... 175 Examining the Mind’s Eye ...... 193 Vision’s Privilege...... 212 Vision of God Tricks ...... 224 Eyeing the Involution ...... 244 Chapter IV: The Turning To ...... 254

Attending to Oneself ...... 254 Turning Around ...... 259 Bateson’s Loop ...... 276 Nomologies of Conversion...... 285 Inoculating the Divine ...... 292 Dwelling with Oneself ...... 296 Chapter V: The Divine Cosmos ...... 301 A Science of Everything ...... 301 Scope and Scale ...... 308 Scalar Phase Shift ...... 318 Humboldt’s Welcoming Science ...... 330 Sagan’s Cosmos ...... 341 Getting to the All ...... 348 Leaving out Space ...... 356 Looking Back from Cosmos ...... 362 Your God is too Small ...... 367 Chapter VI: The Otherworldly Chain ...... 391 The Heavens and the Earth ...... 391 Convolutions of a Transcendence Disavowed ...... 399 Plato’s Split ...... 417 The Transcendent Encounter with Death ...... 444 References ...... 454

List of Figures Page 66 - Figure 1.1: The “Blue Marble” image of earth from space. Courtesy of NASA

(http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/135918main_bm1_high.jpg)

Page 173 - Figure 3.1: Figure 3-1: This is how to see 69,911,000 meters. (Photo courtesy of NASA, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/24/image/b/)

Page 344 - Figure 5.1: – Picture of Abel 2744 from the Hubble Telescope. Courtesy of NASA.gov

(https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/spitzer/abell-2744-pia17569/)

vii

Acknowledgements

Funding for this project was provided by the Penn State English Department, the College of

Liberal Arts, and the Center for Humanities and Information. A sincere thank you to the many individuals who helped this come together, particularly Richard Doyle, for years of patience and being willing to give me time and space to work on a project of this magnitude.

viii

Introduction: On Scaling Being The final conclusion of western wisdom—that all transcendence has got to go, once and for all—is not really applicable in the field of knowledge (for which it is actually intended), because we cannot do without metaphysical guidance here: when we think we can, all that is apt to happen is that we replace the grand old metaphysical errors with infinitely more naïve and petty ones. - Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World (7)

We have already been scaled. The shifts in size are so fleshed out, so layered upon each other, that it is a fundamental aspect of our how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world.

Even with little to no scientific literacy we find ourselves tumbling through the layers of scale in our everyday interactions and modes of description.

Looking at this body, I can note the sensations as cellular signals and can muse on my emotions as neurotransmitter exchanges. I consider my microbiome and supplement my diet with probiotics while also carefully eradicating unwanted microbes in routine sanitizing. Fears arise about the errant molecules delivered through plastics and pesticides, which undoubtedly leach into the water or find their way through the skin. For an ever shrinking fee I can pay to have my DNA analyzed and find myself facing the odd relation between these spiraled molecules and some ambiguous data about my body’s dispositions. I see images of cells and molecules spattered around and know that somehow these computers are made from incredibly small etchings. I can contemplate nanomachines and artificially produced microorganisms that might come to embody unknown intelligence; they show up in movies at least and they seem more believable as technological devices embed themselves more deeply in my life. I hear of the Higgs Bosons and

Superconducting Supercolliders that bear some oblique but vaguely terrifying relationship to black holes.

Looking into the world, I can conceive of my very weight as the gravitational pull of the collective presence of a large Earth that I routinely see pictured. I can look with unease at this superfluous packaging on my food that arrived from across the planet, and contemplate the island of plastic gathering in the Pacific. I can pick up one of these electronic devices scattered around my house and immediately connect up to nearly anywhere on the planet or dive into a wealth of information that includes endless photos, videos, and writings—bits of people’s lives spread out in an ever increasing network. I can easily travel large distances, flying to one end of the earth and back within a few days. I can attempt to examine the political or economic climate—only to face the incredible uncertainty about who is acting, where, or to what ends (conspiracy theories threaten to invade). The simple numbers and narratives fed as signs of these global actions hardly serve to indicate what I know is the intricate dance of multinational corporations and globally spread governmental bodies carrying out extensive operations connecting together not just the unimaginably large 6 billion people on this planet, but the immense ecological structure that supports that population. Advertisements remind me that somewhere people are starving and species are going extinct. Space is too astronomically large to offer any relief; I know the stars are so large and so distant that the task of contemplating that distance is just too much and too irrelevant.

In this way, scale persistently demands that we pay attention to the world within this layered structure of being. Nonetheless, we have yet to come to terms with scale, even to say what scale is, how we arrive at it, or why it prompts us to such a bizarre, difficult, and convoluted sense of the world we live in. This term “Scale” itself is one of those elusive words meant to signify a means of accessing the world. Scale is a notation, a signifier of size tied to an orienting reference. Scale is a notation that organizes a perception, thought, concept, or description within a consistent relation to the phenomenal world we regularly experience. Scale is a technology for structuring of attention that tunes us into being on multiple levels, providing us with an interlacing of objects that permit us to

2 dissect and extend our conception of the world beyond what is immediately apparent. As a technology, we can note that scale is a conceptual device used to measure and take stock of phenomena. By “structuring our attention” we mean that it directs our awareness to the phenomenal world in a particular way, allowing us to focus on, discern, and conceive of phenomena in a particular way. The significance of scale as an orienting technology lies in its systematic comparison, dissection, and extension of the phenomenal world, using the physical, empirical, and apparent world to permit us to take notice of, describe, and orient ourselves to phenomena that would not otherwise be considered empirical. Scale permits or even demands that we revise our way of thinking, speaking, and perceiving the phenomena around us. The nature of this revision is not entirely clear or apparent despite its persistent and pervasive presence in our lives.

This work attempts to grapple with the fundamental rhetorical and philosophical problems related to scale, as they exist practically and theoretically, inside and outside of academic conversations, and within scientific and humanistic questions. The aim is to address the phenomenological and hermeneutic struggles that occur when we encounter these much larger or much smaller views of reality and the mixture between them. As a means of orienting ourselves to phenomena, scale becomes fundamentally about interpretation: what am I looking at and how am I seeing it? What is the appropriate level for seeing it? These interpretations result in particular ways of relating to the world that have a great deal of power. The rhetorical dimensions of scale lie in the persuasive capacity of this orienting structure that generates incredibly convincing and important types of argumentation. The rhetorical and theoretical productions of scale are both practically useful and philosophically potent. We see this power not only in the capacities born from technoscience, which take advantage of these scalar visions to do everything from predicting the weather to altering the DNA of organisms, but also in our way of conceiving ourselves. Scale

3 permits us relate to ourselves as entities made of atoms and cells and as making up ecologies that arise from the evolution of stars.

We must begin already with the simple realization: scale changes everything. By this we mean that scale changes what we even mean by the word “everything” since everything is itself a scalar term. In casual speaking, we can talk about all kinds of everything, just as we can speak of wholes, parts, and aggregates or wonder about “all of X” or “every Y.” Scale is far more systematic.

In order for it to function, scale has to be tied to size—the dimensions of spacetime—via an orienting reference, making these casual and limited uses of scalar terminologies irrelevant or erroneous. Scale structures this world in an unusual way that is not immediately apparent in our normal experience. It thus forces us to reorganize our understanding of everything according to this systematic measure. One of the first and most basic realizations of scale is that even what we mean by “things” are not immediately apparent. Every “thing” is already made up of others things and make up other things, at least insofar as we still find it useful to even speak of them as things at all.

From this changing of “things” arises one of scale’s most bizarre aspects: that we may speak seriously of the same familiar object in entirely different ways while nonetheless retaining reference to the object. No example is more intimate than to speak of our bodies as aggregates of molecules, a system of cells, a socially constituted citizen, an ecologically embedded organism, or as an intelligent piece of the solar system spun out from the fusion reactions of the sun.

Nonetheless, scale itself has not been taken on directly as a particular technology of attention for the same reason: it deals with or has some bearing on everything. When scale is addressed it is almost inevitably done within the confines of a particular discipline of limited scope, limited by the objects of concern that exist largely on one or two scales. This is nowhere more evident than the place where scale is the most obviously relevant: geography. It is surprising to find that geographers have expressed the most confusion about the nature of scale even as they have produced some of

4 the most writing about it. A significant intellectual current within geography even demands that we give up scale entirely as a non-productive or even harmful social construction, a conversation which has started to spread into the citational ecologies of other disciplines in the humanities.1 At the core of geography’s problem with scale is the limitation of the scope of their concern. Geography’s scalar schematic is built around a strictly human relation that splits itself into a relatively predictable and entirely human series of layers: locality, nation-state, and world-economy.2 If we limit ourselves to these scales, already tied into structures of human power, then we naturally find ourselves with the critiques of scale as a hierarchical ordering of power that subsumes those smaller scales to the larger.3 If we reflect on this geographic schema a few observations immediately arise: from the view of the whole cosmos, these three scales are hardly significant shifts in size. The transition between the molecule and the cell is far more significant than the shift from local to the nation. Likewise, how can a larger scale be limited within the human scope and still consider itself a shift in scale? If we speak of a nation, can we do so with the arbitrary designation of human fields of value at the expense of all that is already contained within those borders? As we will discuss further in chapter five, the defining and considering scale within these confines leads to a skewed and partial vision of what scale is.

Nonetheless, we still proceed under these confused notions of scale, often with significant effects. Much of the turmoil of the twentieth century can in some ways be described as an encounter

1 The internet, which was naturally essential for this project, makes the crossing of citational webs incredibly easy. It also leads to the cross pollination of conversations, in which the debates in one field might be transferred and invoked as an authority in another. These cross-pollinations are, of course, incredibly productive and are essential to what follows, but sometimes lead to the transferring of unwarranted authority. Two recent examples are noteworthy for scale: both Monica M. Brannon (“Standardized Spaces: Satellite Imagery in the Age of Big Data”) and Chris Tong (“Ecology without Scale: Unthinking the World Zoom”) invoke the geography conversation on scale for their arguments. Brannon is in sociology and Tong is in comparative literature. Both scholars dismiss scale in some way on the grounds of its complications presented by geography. 2 This was codified by Peter J. Taylor (in Political Geography)and Neil Smith (in Uneven Development). For an overview see Richard Howitt, ”Scale” in A Companion to Political Geography; Herod and Wright, Geographies of Power: Placing Scale. 3 These problems were some of the bases for Marston et.al.’s critique and dismissal of scale in “Human Geography without Scale.” 5 between the realities of scale and our previous ideas about scale. The accumulation of global conflict, first hot and then cold, directly confronted a vastly intertwined social and economic situation where we find it increasingly difficult to separate interests on one part of the planet with another. Atrocities were born under the odd yet understandably human conception that to unify meant to homogenize. The increased movement of peoples, species, and materials led to global regulations of all kinds of entities and substances, often more out of fear than necessity. Our failure to understand the reality of larger scales led to widespread neglect of the Earth’s resources and ongoing confusion about how to reconcile this relationship. Our capacity to manipulate more closely the various smaller scales have led to a variety of horrors and wonders that we can only pretend to fully control or understand. Communication technologies connected us together even as we continue our endless struggle with how apart we feel. Science has proliferated its careful description and observation of all of these scales of being, bringing them within the possible purview of discussion. Our encounter with the Earth from space filled us with wonder but then left us wondering why.

It can sometimes be difficult to acknowledge that our understanding of scale is itself confused. Thus, when Nancy Fraser attempts to examine the “Scales of Justice” according to the challenge of globalization, she proceeds to discuss justice as if scale itself is already apparent and clear. As a political thinkers, Fraser’s argument about scale (in the mapping sense) addresses the simple distinction between the domestic, the national, and the international. She sees scale as a means of navigating who matters, using the idea of the frame or the map to note conflicts of the

“who” of any political body. When conceived in this way, we can easily note that frames compete, leading us to the question: “given a plurality of competing frames for organizing, and resolving justice conflicts, how do we know which scale of justice is truly just?” (2). In asking this question,

Fraser follows common parlance in placing justice within an already pre-set and given understanding

6 of what scale is, what scalar objects (the Earth, nations, a person) are, and how they relate, even as she notes that this schema leaves us with the risk of incommensurability. In doing so she follows the same course as geography, already placing justice and ethics within a field limited to a preconception about what happens when we scale in a significant fashion. At the same time, Fraser acknowledges that current conflicts emerge from the breaking down of classic scalar designations, particularly the association of power and justice with the domain of the nation-state. It does not occur to Fraser that this breaking down of power might be a breaking down of residual conceptions of scale that are naturally remade when not limiting ourselves to an artificial and partial size distinction. If we are truly going to consider scale as a taking reference to significant shifts in size, we must already posit that the more we look at the scale of the global, the more we understand that this “global scale” must include everything on and within the Earth itself. Scales of justice, even as a way in to a question about human relations, already forecloses an essential part of the question. Can we really separate out fundamental questions of scale from these political instantiations? Although scale bears a relationship to framing, scale is not a kind of arbitrary mapping of the space of the Earth, dependent on the structures of political designations, but is itself a reference to the frame of any model we have for the world (see chapter 3 and 4 below). Scale thus cannot possibly be a question, as Fraser makes it, of “who counts” (5, 63). Automatically, within the scale of the Earth, everyone and everything is always already included. The problem is that we have not adjusted ourselves to this reality even as we find ourselves tied into operations that function on that scale. What Fraser calls meta-democratic, the “how” of who gets designated as included (65), buys into the argument that scaling operates around the question of inclusion and exclusion. But scale was never about a filtering of what is included but instead is an examination of what is already being included within a particular spatial scope, designated by a regular measure.

Traditional dichotomies by which we separate out scopes of justice are breaking down because they are based on scalar assumptions that do not fit the reality of the different scales we are becoming increasingly attuned to and interlaced with (although these scales were always already present). These assumptions were largely forged in the realm of political power, where human structures of subordination and domination have been at forefront of thought. What Fraser note as the “Westphalian political imaginary” that “invested a state with exclusive, undivided sovereignty over its territory” (4) is already a false scalar claim made by a limited set of humans who only seek to bar off for the sake of domination. The Hobbsian argument in which all those outside the confines of these states are in a state of chaos is nothing more than a rhetorical structure born from a monarchical sentiment that attempts to convince people to organize themselves in a particularly hegemonic way. This way of imagining scale reached its height in the twentieth century in the two forms of totalitarianism whose political differences nonetheless shared this conception of scale in which to unify is to totalize, to bring together under absolute power, with absolute concern for policing the who and the how of inclusion. As Fraser puts it, we attempted “to re-engineer human life on a mass scale” (130). This endeavor, which emerges from this tainted view of scale, not only failed but led to death, tyranny, and genocide. In response, the horrors of the twentieth century have so tainted our understanding of scale that it becomes difficult for us to see larger scales without seeing this totalizing vision. Fraser praises Hannah Arendt as the critic of these totalizing practices, which she describes using a series of tropes essential for the examination of scale: “Affecting a

God’s-eye view from the commanding heights, above and outside the human-world, this way of seeing cast human beings as material for deterministic totalizing schemes” (132). Arendt did indeed critique these totalizing schemes, but in doing so accepted their modes of scalar thinking as legitimate. It could not occur to Arendt, given the need to address and acknowledge the freshness of the horrors she was facing, to examine these modes of totalizing as themselves flawed scalar claims

8 that do not hold up to a careful account of scale. That is, totalitarian views of power impose a model of scale, how we think larger bodies relate to smaller ones, that makes use of the rhetorical weight of scale, but fundamentally neglects the way these scalar patterns actually play out within our experience of scalar shifts. Arendt’s work is thus a critique of a misunderstanding of scale that is misrecognized (and misrecognizes itself at times) as a critique of scale. Because of this confusion, her work takes too seriously the claims by which such totalizing occurred, mixing the rhetorical basis used to rally humans towards such atrocities with the atrocities themselves. Today, however, the residue of this unexamined acceptance of totalitarian imagination about scale leaves us at a loss to understand the scaling that we are nonetheless face on a daily basis.

Scale is one of those technologies of attention that, if left unexamined, is easily taken advantage of by those who make use of this rhetorical weight, perpetuating thoughts about scale even as they desperately avoid looking at how it actually works. One persistent theme in this examination will be how scale derives its power and use and how a misuse or misunderstanding of scale can allow some individuals to harness the power of scalar thinking, images, and rhetoric to ends that actually undermine the very source of scale’s rhetorical and philosophical import. This project posits that there are systematic ways of examining scale that does not make it merely relative, socially constructed, or an artifact of scientific or mathematical worldviews, but an inescapable and potent adjunct to navigating the phenomenal world. In making clear how we arrive at and develop scale, we can also make positive statements about why scale has the power it does. Doing so also makes negative statements about scale possible; that is, to speak of errors in scale and of non-scalar thinking. Making these moves clear will help us more carefully navigate our increasingly scaled consciousness in a way that addresses those conceptions of scale that do not actually attend to what produces scale and what scale produces.

Of course it was not politics but science that has enacted the great expansion in scalar thinking. Thus, it is what may be considered the twenty-first century’s greatest problem that forces us to face scale most directly: the challenges present by ecology. In theory at least, ecology takes into account the scale of the Earth as already including the Earth in its entirety. On a more fundamental level, ecology demands that we pay attention to things in their interconnected aspect rather than their fragmented appearance. Ecology already begins with this acknowledgement that we must include everything within the scope of inquiry and that this scope of inquiry must occur through the complexity of layers of inclusion. It is thus natural for an ecologist to note one significant conclusion that this project explores extensively: "if you move far enough across scales, the dominant processes change. It is not just that things get bigger or smaller, but the phenomena themselves change”

(O’Niell and King 5-6). What appears as a “leaf” on one scale is revealed as a bundle of cells on another and barely perceptive pixel in a view from orbit. Therein lies the difficulty in articulating our relationship to the ecology of the planet: the aggregate effects are not the same phenomena as the individual actions, even as they bear some kind of relationship to each other. To ask people to imagine this scalar shift is to ask people to fundamentally reorient themselves around this significant fact that their very presence looks and manifest as an entirely different, small but non-negligible phenomena on the scale of the Earth. For this shift to function it must be persistently held in mind.

But the immensity of the revolution it entails for consciousness make it difficult to follow through completely, even within the scientific practices born out of ecology.

Indeed, ecology has been plagued by the same kind of residues of a non-scalar way of viewing scale that is nearly the inverse of what we saw in politics. The rhetoric around conservation and sustainability has been incessantly plagued by the difficulty of accounting for what it means to study the whole ecosystem. At every turn, the greatest difficulty has been in understanding the human’s relationship to the ecology. The human is persistently held in opposition to the ecosystem,

10 resulting in an odd conception in which ecology leaves out or holds apart one of the most significant ecological forces of the last ten thousand years. The responses to this exclusion, which have been noted both within and outside ecology4, struggle to produce a better alternative. For example, one frame that has become popular in the last decade is called “ecosystem services,” which isolates ecological variables according to the services they render to the larger economic ecosystem. This framing has been put forward as a rhetorical maneuver that includes the larger ecosystem in the accounting process of economics, with the hope that it will make relevant these factors that are largely left out of usual economic calculus. Naturally, this schema has been widely accepted within policy making around ecology, despite the apparent ways it subordinates larger ecological factors to the limited concerns of human needs—in other words, avoids accounting fully for the shift in scale.5

Ultimately if we are going to face our ecological impacts, we are going to have to come to terms with our scalar relation to the planet. To do so we must first tune into the problematic of scale itself to outline what scale entails and to identify the primary difficulties scaling involves.

The difficulty is always compounded by the incredible expansions that scales have undergone in the last few centuries due an increase of the descriptive range of science. The possibility of scaling to the molecular and to the cosmic was not fully a possibility of human consciousness prior to the scientific revolution. Despite prior articulations of atoms and infinities, these conceptions did not contain the content and regularity provided by a systematic examination of these sizes along a continuum produced by a continuous measure. Even with the invention of the microscope, it was not until the early nineteenth century that atomic elements were identified and

4 Ecologists have persistently reflected on this exclusion, see for example Georgina M. Mace, “Whose Conservation?” Outside of ecology, the idea of nature apart from the human has been critiqued heavily in the last few decades. See, for example, William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness and the subsequent edited collection Uncommon Ground; both have been influential particularly in humanistic criticism on Ecology. 5 Thanks to Katy Barlow for introducing me to this point. For more information on ecosystem services see Farley, J., & Costanza, R. (2010). “Payments for ecosystem services: From local to global.” Ecological Economics, 69(11), 2060–2068. – Of course many have critiqued this framing, e.g. Kosoy, N., & Corbera, E. “Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism”; Muradian et. al. “Payments for ecosystem services and the fatal attraction of win-win solutions.” 11 not until the 1840s that it was fully understood that we were made up of cells. Likewise, the nineteenth century brought us the science of population statistics, more accurate measuring of the distances to the stars, Pasteur’s theories of the microbial origin of disease, the birth of geology through James Hutton and then Charles Lyell, and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. The twentieth century added to these the quantum theory, general relativity, Big Bang theory and the concordant expansion of time and space, DNA based genetics, cybernetics in its various instantiations, Gaia theory and Vernadksy’s concept of the biosphere, Lynn Margulis’ theories of microbial evolution, algorithmic and fractal mathematics, Claude Shannon’s information theory, and a variety of social systems theories. Each of these scientific articulations added a new depth to our understanding of the world, providing a new mode of description that exists on a different level, while referring to the same interlaced objects. It is no surprise, then, that in a few centuries, human thought has not yet adjusted to this burgeoning of consciousness.

Sometimes this combination of the scaling of science and the convolutions it presents for our social and political articulation of ourselves produces situations or research that are difficult to handle and uncomfortable. One final example will serve to elucidate some of the stakes here. At

Pennsylvania State University, where much of this project was written, some work is currently being done on the relationship between genetics and race. Led by Mark Shriver, who is housed in

Anthropology, this research has been critiqued as a new iteration of the eugenics research of the late nineteenth century and as a new instantiation of racialized science.6 One of the most significant aspects of Shriver’s work is the discovery that certain genes can be correlated to particular facial

6 The following discussion of Shriver’s work was derived from conversations and exchanges with Shriver, as well as several visits to his lab in 2014. Around this time Shriver’s work on facial modeling from DNA was released, producing a great deal of controversy and over-inflation of claims. Likewise, shortly after visiting his lab, the Fullwiley article was published. Shriver sent this article to me for commentary as well as two articles he wrote in response to the controversy produced from his facial modeling papers. The source of the problem was not immediately as clear as one would imagine reading Fullwiley’s article and the more I contemplated the debate the more I was troubled about it. Only after writing the response to Nancy Fraser above did the solution occur to me as a modified, scientific analog to the problems identified there. 12 features. Many critics are disturbed by the application of this discovery to criminal justice work: one can take DNA found on a crime scene and generate a limited schematic of what the individual may look like.7 Recently, Shriver and others were critiqued by Stanford Anthropologist Duana Fullwiley for making use of scientific research to reinforce and perpetuate socially constructed racial categories. A sample from this article will help clarify the difficulties involved:

Through a careful construction, they keep these Old World [racial] groups’ boundaries intact as types by creating statistical thresholds for a series of alleles (genetic markers) that come to constitute panels of “Ancestry Informative Markers,” or AIMs. From these they create a model that compares allelic frequency distributions of DNA linked to specific traits within the political boundaries that name people as Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans. In this way scientists render these groups as genetically distinct from one another. They also artificially privilege these specific demarcations for sorting human genetic diversity globally. (Fullwiley 807)

Following generally accepted theories of the social construction of race, Fullwiley emphasizes the constructed nature of these distinctions. This “careful construction” by which the researchers

“create” these models and statistical thresholds assumes a kind of cross-scalar tyranny in which individual researchers select DNA elements according to preconceived social categories for the purpose of imposing these characteristics on individuals. To speak of researchers creating statistical thresholds implies that they create the categories themselves as well as defining the characteristics, adjusting the statistical measure until it produces the desired, preconceived categories. However, the definition of a statistical threshold is not the creation of the distinctions that appear at those thresholds. Rather, thresholds are a cross-scalar calibration. When analyzing a mass of data, such as

DNA information from a set of individuals, if one places the statistical threshold too high or low, nothing can be said at all about the relationship between DNA and a specific phenotypic attribute.

On one end, all humans would look the same since variations in DNA are too small to be deemed significant. On the other end, all humans would be entirely unique since the variation is given too

7 See Claes and Shriver, “Establishing a Multidisciplinary Context” for a clarification of the scope of their claims. 13 much significance. In the amassing and analyzing of any data, patterns do emerge from the appropriate calibration towards the averaging effect naturally occurring when moving across scales.

With a complex cross-scalar relation like DNA and features tied to race, thresholds have to be carefully calibrated to ensure that only the statistically significant DNA configurations manifest rather than erroneous assumptions about race. However, the manifestation of these statistically significant DNA markers (allelic frequency distributions) are not determined by the researches in some kind of effort to derive racial categories from DNA. Rather, they are formed by the process of moving across scales from DNA to recognizable physical features. That the patterns yield recognizable race categories might only be due to relative genetic isolation prior to widespread colonization; in which case it would make sense to tie racial patterns that appear to locations as simple notations of historical genetic insularity. This notation is not an imposition, nor does it necessarily carry with it the social stigma associated with such genetically recognizable traits. Rather, the distinctions are a tuning in to the degree to which DNA might signal anything about race at all.

Shriver’s work finds that, on the level of individuals, these traits manifest as particular facial features that can be statistically mapped within the range of facial features present in the aggregate of individuals. These facial features are then shown to be tied in a statistically significant way to certain

DNA markers that tend to produce this limited set of features. The researchers hardly “chose” these relationships even if they did find the appropriate statistical threshold for bringing out those elements associated, on the social scale, with race.

In speaking with Shriver, he clarified how identifying and researching this relationship between DNA and facial features actually works as a scalar feedback mechanism that helps us understand our own racial prejudices. One of the most persistent points he made in conversation

14 was that his studies disprove the assumptions under which eugenics research proceeded.8 Those features that can, with any reliability, be tied to genetic ancestry (in this case, facial features) decidedly disprove any possibility of deriving any significant racially-tied traits relating to intelligence, disposition, or any other noteworthy physical, mental, or social capacity that forms the basis of racial profiling and discrimination. At the same time, the reason that the traditionally recognized racial categories are preserved are twofold: first, for their general and not always clear statistical significance as a marker of the history of a genetic pool. Second, and far more importantly, for their relationship to the very social construction that Fullwiley emphasizes. Retaining this relationship to the socially constructed aspects of race is precisely what allows Shriver to note the degree to which our assumptions about race are erroneous. In fact, the nature of such racialized assumptions can be studied on all scales at once, producing a feedback loop whereby we encounter social expectations embedded within individuals as they relate to any actual DNA markers. To this end, Shriver discussed how they could derive perceptual thresholds of recognition based on the gradual morphing of facial features and having individuals identify the race or gender of the face. Statistically significant features can be identified in this way, but the object of study is not then DNA but the aggregate of expectations related to race or gender; i.e. what do we come to recognize, from social training, as particular races. This data can then be compared to the relationship to DNA and these facial features as well. The productive loop occurs when we note the limit of this kind of recognition. Again, very few features are possible to be derived from DNA, i.e. the physical markers of race and sex, however defined. Interestingly, Shriver notes an additional possibility for enhancing

8 Much recent DNA research has been critiqued as a new form of eugenics. While there are undoubtedly some legitimacy to this comparison, particularly in cases in which corporations try to copyright or otherwise control genes or insurance companies try to police genetic attributes, the comparison does not attend to the fact that DNA research occurs on an entirely different scale than was possible with eugenics. The result is that the referent points wherein “race” is defined can be more clearly isolated and scrutinized; most importantly, we can recognize the limits of any racial categorization. In fact, DNA researchers have already found themselves encountering limits to the explanatory power of DNA itself, as is evidenced by the move to study epigenetic manifestations and feedback loops with DNA. 15 this feedback loop: the same facial modeling software used for these studies could be used to have one encounter one’s own face as it would appear with different racial or gendered aspects, as a strange personal experiment in reflecting on the assumptions one unwittingly applies to those categories.

Shriver’s studies only function if we attend to the shifts in scale that occur across his work, which Shriver himself is particularly interested in. In noting the scale on which a particular racially- charged feature is identified, one can actually undermine the spurious assumptions about race while still productively acknowledging that they are indeed largely socially constructed. Nonetheless, the fact that racial distinctions are socially constructed does not rule out that they might be statistically correlated to particular, quite limited, and largely physical attributes on the genetic level. Fears over this relationship are partially born on the erroneous scalar assumption contained within genetic determinism: that DNA somehow causes or absolutely determines what we are. If this was the case, then finding racial markers in DNA might still be used to justify our attitudes towards race. But, as has been widely established, DNA markers have a limited relationship to the unfolding of a complex organism like a homo sapiens. Those traits that are most statistically significant are for simple physical features, including those already used by the gestalts of these homo sapiens for the additional and often erroneous purposes of recognition, categorization, and, with the addition of social rather than genetic information, discrimination.9 The most uncomfortable thing about Shriver’s study is not that it finds some statistically relevant genetic basis for classic racial categories but that it forces us to face the extent to which we have used minor elements embedded within our physical structure as a means of discriminating and structuring our relationships to each other. In other words, at work was already a scalar mistake in which we identified a genetic factor (the limited physical racial features)

9 The critiques of genetic determinism were developed over two decades ago (see especially Doyle, On Beyond Living; Evelyn Fox Keller Refiguring Life) and have since been widely developed by science studies scholars. 16 for a social one (nearly all racial features used for discriminatory purposes). Identifying those minor structures does not reinforce or prove those categories but defines within the confines of science the precise parameters in which racial distinctions are statistically significant. Everything else encountered within the studies of this scalar relation is an encountering of our own prejudice, now clearly defined and identified as such.

As the examples of Fraser’s social justice, ecological consciousness, and Shriver’s race studies demonstrate, scale tends to throw us into uncomfortable situations since it forces us to take into account what we are talking about in a different and more rigorous way. Whether we are speaking of

“social construction” or “physical determination” we cannot merely gesture to cultural artifacts or some material objects. We must attend carefully to each of these objects, the scale on which they exist, and what we can actually say about their relation on that scale and to other scales. This enterprise requires a fully transdisciplinary acknowledgement of the scales at work. Our knowledge is always working on multiple levels as the objects at hand exist embedded within each other. Our assumptions about the relationships between these scales vary according to discipline and philosophical disposition, resulting in claims that are often illegitimately extended beyond what they can permit or resulting in some claims being dismissed as wrong when they really apply only to a particular scale. Carefully examining scale is thus absolutely necessary for any cross-disciplinary work.

Indeed, our way into scale can be through the scientific but we cannot remain there, since these modes of description already assume too much about the entities described. The mode of science is meant to largely expand rather than reflect on its mode of inquiry and description. To contemplate scale, we must pause and dwell with these scalar descriptions as they already exist in order to untangle the implications already contained within them. Doing so leads us out of science and into all of the places where such articulations dwell: their various instantiations within culture,

17 philosophies, media, literatures, and, in the end, within our own phenomenological being in the world. The scaling work that we will undertake thus brings us to bear on any number of conceptual locations, rhetorical encounters, and unusual articulations that extend far beyond the scientific endeavors that largely direct our attention to scale. On some level, our understanding of scale is already contained within our encounter with it; the details of this encounter merely need to be unfolded and examined. In the process, a kind of prolepsis—meaning a careful and serious attending to objections and confusions within our understanding—must occur whereby we examine carefully our assumptions about what scale is in relation to what scale actually presents. In doing so we address our own anxieties about scale as they exist within our massive conversation about the various instantiations of scale.

Since scale bears on the concept of everything itself, an examination of scale bears on nearly everything we think and talk about. To address scale is a monumental task that is not made any easier by the extent to which it has become embedded in our consciousness. Approaching such a task thus already demands that we scale ourselves in a manageable way, attuning to the general problematics even as we attend to the details that yield significant understanding of how scale functions. Early in the development of this project, one apparatus arose that assisted significantly in clarifying the sets of problematics of scale. As a technology of attention, scale pulls us beyond our normal frame of reference. From our usual perspective—our starting point, if you will—we can note four general “directions” that scale pulls us into: up, down, in, and out. Each direction presents particular problems and phenomena. A movement up in scale would inquire into the nature of wholes, vastness, and hierarchical relations; a movement down would bring up questions of division, foundations, and causal hierarchy; a movement in would ask “where am I on the scale”; finally, a movement out would ask “how do we relate (move across) scales?” Each of these points to a different way that scale reworks for us these fundamental questions of parts, wholes, things, beings,

18 ourselves, and relations. Due to the intertwined nature of these questions, this schematic proved to be an insufficient mechanism for organizing our exploration of the scale but it may be kept in mind as a way of noting the ways that scale changes everything.

At the same time, this work does focus more closely on the movement up, arriving at some account of the other questions through this movement to the large. The reason for this is simple: human beings have long been imagining larger entities and transcendent wholes. Yet this familiarity is precisely why a close examination of this history in terms of scale will be so productive. Doing so will provide the best way into a prolepsis for scale, addressing some of the common conceptions and arguments about what we think scale is and how these conceptions are complicated by particular instances of scalar perception and scaled events. It may be that scaling down—trying to conceive of the quantum, nanotechnological manipulation, or the fact that we are somehow made of cells—is more apparently bizarre and difficult to imagine. Indeed, many scholars dealing with scale focus on these lower scales to speak of the strange affects that scale can induce.10 However, it is precisely because scaling up seems more familiar that makes it a necessary starting point. Although the imagination of scaling up has a richer history, the most significant technological capacity and cultural icon associated with it—the view of the earth from space—is more recent than the images of the cell or the conception of the quantum. We thus find that in scaling to the large, we encounter not only the problem of scale but our own recent need to rework our prior understanding of scale in relation to our burgeoning scalar consciousness.

Here we can note the most significant and surprising element to emerge from this examination: a rereading and integration of the literature of mysticism into the conversation about scale. At the outset of this project, this integration was not anticipated. Instead, it resulted from the

10 see, for instance, the work of Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Halfway), Myra Hyrd (The Origins of Sociable Life), and Valerie L. Hanson (Haptic Visions) 19 simple fact that mysticism has undoubtedly the richest and most philosophically elaborate examination of scale. Mysticism itself can be defined according to a scalar experience: a mystic is an individual who experiences a being much larger than herself and, in this experience, feels their unity with this larger being. The result is that a scalar relation is automatically set up between the individual and the divine. The difficulty of untangling the nature of this experience has led mystics of all times and places to an elaborate scalar terminology and philosophy to help guide themselves and others through this relation. Science’s general antagonism or disregard for spiritual articulations have prevented this confluence from being noted. Likewise, mystical articulations have largely been lost in the political, which tends to take precedence in our minds over and against the reclusive mystic. Indeed, in The Human Condition Hannah Arendt directly attacks the contemplative as antithetical to the political life (this is discussed in chapter 6). Both of these exclusions could also be represented in the long historical tendency, partially due to availability of texts, to read Plato through the Republic for politics or the Timaeus for science, while ignoring the clear mysticism evident in so many of the dialogs and directly articulated in the 7th letter.

The experience of examining scale found in this work naturally led again and again to the exploration of mysticism as essential to understanding the work of scale. The general disregard for mysticism brings to the foreground the primary resistances whereby a prolepsis of scale proceeds.

Our failure to understand scalar shifts directly mirrors our failure to understand the mystic’s experience and mode of speaking about the world. Bringing the two together results in a surprising reworking of both science and mysticism as we reconsider their respective descriptions of everything according to this measure of scale. Including mystical texts allows us to treat seriously conceptual and rhetorical experiments in scaling that existed prior to the codification of science in a way that does not automatically dismiss them as more savage, more primitive, or less developed. These mystical texts also allows us to integrate into the inquiry some non-Western conceptions of scale by

20 taking reference to the texts emerging from the Vedas. It should be noted that there are substantial traditions of scientific scaling in the East as well (e.g. Indian Atomism), but that it is the scalar terminology emerging from Vedanta that proves most useful to this project. Thus, even though we will frequently go to the Greek and Christian mystical traditions simply out of familiarity, we can turn to texts in Vedanta and Buddhism as equally important and influential rhetorical experiments with scalar experience. Readers more or less resistant to such theological integrations are encouraged to read through these mystical articulations with an eye to how they bear not on religion but on our everyday experience of the world. Nothing here is a matter of belief or dogma. If sometimes the integration of mystical literature feels surprising or inappropriate, we must remember that in the pursuit of a general concept and problematic like scale, it is not the limitation of a particular genre or mode of inquiry that must guide us but the questions themselves.

Indeed, even beyond the references to mystical texts this work must often make quick and rough transition between texts and images that are not normally placed together without a great deal of methodological justification. The reasons for this are already scalar: in approaching the problematic of scale we first perform something of a zooming out where we can consider the general pattern emerging from our attempts to understand scale. Doing so permits us to see confluence between disparate texts according to their mutual attempt to untangle a particular issue.

Nonetheless, we cannot hope to be excessively thorough and detailed in regard to contexts of each of these texts. Rather than deal with the scholarly conversations around each text, the only practical course of action is to encounter the texts themselves to identify what they have to say about the problem at hand. When new texts arise in the course of our inquiry, care has been taken to ensure that no significant scholarly or historical mistakes have been made, particularly in the case of texts in translation. Likewise, the reader might note that the analysis often works between conversations in different fields with different methodological approaches and investments. When it is useful for the

21 questions that arise, these conversations are cited, but the imagined boundaries of these fields has not been respected; instead, the questions about scale guide the inquiry through these variety of articulations and methodologies for the sake of reflecting on the means and obstacles whereby we encounter scale.

The result is that this project, which was initially born from an interest in exploring scale as an element of science, ends up talking about much more than science. Indeed, as one dives into the depths of scale, one must acknowledge that, although scale has been greatly enhanced and expanded by science, scale is more fundamental or, if you’d prefer, more general than science. Indeed, this has been one of the thorniest issues around scale. Scale has alternatively been designated ontological, epistemological, or merely a social structure. Within geography this question has been debated as the

“ontological status of scale.”11 To say that scale is ontological would imply that scale exists already as a kind of entity in itself. To say scale is epistemological would imply that it is merely a way of learning or accessing about the world. To say scale is a social structure would imply that scale is one among many arbitrary conceptual frameworks that society has built for mapping the world. Scholars have tended to favor, in contradistinction to those (rarely cited) who claim scale to be static yardstick, that scale is an epistemological distinction or a social construct. This move is often used as a grounds for dismissing scale in some way to say that it is or is about a point of view. Thus, a group of geographers recently rejected scale because of the contradictions implied by the “different vantage points” required for scale to exist (Marston, et. al 420). Even those who look more favorably on scale still attach an important diminutive to the possibility of speaking of scale as related to perception. Scale becomes an “arbitrary mental device which allows us to make sense of our existence” (Herod and Wright, 5). Or again, scale is said to be “merely a way for humans to perceive and comprehend the world” (Tong 198). The argument seems to imply that if scale is just

11 see Jazairy 1, Tong 198, Herod and Wright 5 22 one among many ways for humans to perceive then perhaps we might dismiss it as a particularly problematic one.

Clarifying the ground, source, and function of scale will assist us in isolating more precisely the nature and status of scale. Any kind of argument about whether or not scale is ontological, epistemological, or socially constructed must run into the fact that scale relies both on the “being” of phenomena and a reference to the one who is measuring as a means of coming to know being. If we take the whole measuring process into account, as we will in Chapter 3, worrying about whether scale is epistemological, ontological, or a social construct has little meaning. This is because we must identify scale as a meta-level above what ontology and epistemology are usually taken to indicate: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to your own knowing and to the being of things. More precisely, we can use the term the cyberneticist Gregory Bateson borrowed from mathematical theory and say that scale is a logical type above ontological and epistemological concerns. A logical type above implies that it is a mode of speaking about and organizing those concerns a logical type below, a means of looping back on those concerns to see how they are structured. Scale is a meta- phenomenal structure that makes use of a consistent measure to compare and calibrate ourselves to phenomena. Scale does not arise solely from Being (the ontological), beings (what Heidegger calls the ontic), or our mode of accessing beings (epistemology), but rather is a way of systematically organizing and comparing phenomena as they appear. As a metaphenomenon, scale is closer to the realm of metaphysics, as is already indicated by Kant’s inclusion of unity, plurality, and totality as the basic a priori categories of quantity.12 However, unlike Kant’s a priori, we do not have to claim that scale is necessarily embedded within reason’s construction of reality. That is, scale is not a category

12 See the Critique of Pure Reason, 113. See also the discussion, in the Antimony of Pure Reason, of the possibility of a Cosmic Whole (455-464). Our account will differ from Kant’s formulation for reasons that will become apparent as we proceed, but which will not be worked out in any philosophical rigor in response to Kant, due to the nature of this examination. 23 for organizing reality. Instead, scale is an addendum and a reflecting back on the a priori categories of being that is discovered phenomenologically, first out of the attending to the presentation of the world and then out of systematically extending this presentation using a defined measure. Once discovered, the scalar mode of examining phenomena becomes a necessary conceptual adjunct to our examination of these phenomena—whether we want to speak of objects (ontology), our learning about objects (epistemology), or our way of organizing, speaking about, and distributing reality (sociality)—since those objects in question are only understood through the orientation provided by scale. Looking at an example from a smaller scale makes this clear: a cell, as a phenomena we encounter, only becomes possible once we extend our perceptual apparatus to sufficient resolution to identify cells. Regardless of the ontology of the cell (whether it actually exists), it’s epistemological status (how we find out about it, e.g. through a microscope), or the social aspects that go into its discovery (the training on how to use a microscope, the social importance it is granted, etc.), a scalar notation is required for understanding what we a referring to by “cell” whereby we can relate this phenomena “cell” with our usual experience of the world. Hence, we will speak of scale as a technology of attention because it is a tool whereby we structure our phenomenological examination of what presents itself. In a terminology resonant with Martin

Heidegger’s phenomenology, we can say that scale is a phenomenological apparatus whereby we can address and examine the organization of Being, however it presents itself for us.13

As a metaexperience scale is uniquely important for orienting ourselves to what we are experiencing. It is neither a distrusting of our perceptions nor is it a faith in them. When we take

13 These phenomenological articulations are derived from Heidegger’s description of phenomenology in the opening sections of Being and Time. Heidegger’s mode of examining Being will become important to us throughout this work since his philosophy side-steps Kant’s critique of metaphysics by examining the Being that the categories structure. As a phenomenological tool rather than a Kantian category, scale becomes a way of reflecting on how the manifold of things emerges through the a priori structures of reason. In doing so, one can encounter those categories in a different way, even isolating more directly the relationship between the structures of reason and the manifold of intuition (even the possibility of saying something about the unity of apperception that Kant notes underlies the categories but claims are inaccessible). 24 reference to the scale on which one is viewing, we are reflecting back on what our apperception

(Kant’s term for the raw encounter with the manifold of being) might mean for our ability to encounter being. We are using ourselves to encounter ourselves: this view B relates to my usual view of A through X scalar shift, when X is derived from a consistent use of another phenomena as a measure. We are using the vantage point to orient ourselves to vantage points, revealing something about what it means to see: when I see A, I am also seeing B but only if I keep X in mind. Thus, scale is not merely a vantage point but a reference point for the possibility of having a vantage point.

This reflective element of scale is necessary rather than incidental to scale: if you are not orienting your perspective to the scalar relation, you aren’t experiencing scale but another form of measurement that exists within the same scale.

Importantly, the consistency whereby scale takes measure of our phenomenal world means that, rather than just any arbitrary order of things, scale provides us with a reference point to take note of how any phenomena compares to any other. In so doing scale revises our ontic field of objects and helps us examine more closely the nature of Being itself as beings dissolve, shift, combine, layer, and relate to each other differently depending on the scale of examination. Scale provides the significant sign whereby we understand what it is we are accessing in the world, rather than providing or mediating that access. As we will see in chapter 3, scale is arbitrary only insofar as the initial measure is arbitrary. Afterwards, scale only functions through a consistency of measure whereby our attention is able to structure itself in relation to phenomenon that shift and alter according to the scale of observation. At the same time, scale is indeed a construct by which human beings come to understand the world, but one which not capable of being selected as one among many. The reason for this is essential: unless we remain strictly within a non-scalar perceptual field, we must retain a scalar referent. By non-scalar, we mean encountering and dealing only with objects discernible within the range of unassisted human perception, a world of objects that consist of

25 mostly buildings, tools, plants, animals, rocks, oceans, landscapes, other people, and the like. As soon as we insert anything outside our usual scale of perception—whether atoms, cells, ecologies, the Earth, the solar system, corporations, nations, bacteria, species, the observable universe, quarks—a scalar reference is required. As this list implies, these scalar objects are now so embedded, due to technological representations, in our language and perceptual field that avoiding scale today is impossible. To avoid scale would be to look at an image of the Earth or a cell and treat it as if it is only as big as the actual picture, rather than noting that these images point to a much larger and a much smaller entity, which bears an important relationship to the phenomena we call the body.

These conclusions do not imply that scale is purely relative or arbitrary even though it must be, in a certain way, relational. Here we must be careful. We cannot say, for instance that scale is a

“metonym for the interrelations of entities” (Tong 198) or that it “is a tool to understand relationships, negotiations, and tensions between actors in space” (El Hadi, 4) because, when we persistently scale and are scaled, it is not always clear what “entities” and “actors” are such that they interrelate, negotiate, or whatever kind of human relation we’d like to imagine them in. In terms of being, scale is particularly important since it reveals that the “ontology”—the being of things— might shift entirely depending on vantage point. As we already noted, what appears as a “leaf” on one scale is revealed as a bundle of cells on another and barely perceptive pixel in a view from orbit.

What is the leaf? Where is the leaf? Stable entities are the product of remaining on one scale, even if it is possible for us to forget that we’ve gone to a new scale. Even when we heuristically define a set of objects on two scales and speak of them relating, this is a particular way of relating, one which also must include that reference to the observer already referenced by the scaled measure. We might describe objects with the observer disguised (although never removed) whether by habit, neglect, or the simple fact that objects are relatively easily defined when you spend a great deal of time among

26 them. But as long as we are working with scale, this reference to the observer is already present as a structure of relation.

But a scalar relation is not quite like any other kind of relation we find ourselves in. When we say that the Earth is made of rocks and the rocks are made of atoms, we are suggesting that the very being of each phenomena is made up of, contained by, and holds reference to the others—and not necessarily in one direction or the other. It is actually quite difficult to consider a metaphor for scale precisely because of the entanglement it reveals between observer and objects observed. Each attempt to provide a metaphor seems to fail to capture the scalar relation, primarily because metaphors are usually drawn from the scale at which we are most familiar: the ladder, concentric circles, and the Matryoshka doll, the most common metaphors, rely on the way that objects of relatively similar size might relate to each other. Given the scholarly insistence that metaphors affect our way of understanding, scholars have argued that the ladder metaphor is inherently hierarchical, the circle metaphor inherently centralizing, and that the Matryoshka doll metaphor issues a series of totalizing wholes which contain more wholes.14 Again, on these grounds many have dismissed or attempted to “rework” scale in some way. But the metaphors are not entirely accurate to the experience of scale. Instead, we might take a hint from the fact that scale is more often itself used as a metaphor, all the more we struggle to find a metaphor for it. There is no metaphor for scale, nor is scale itself a metaphor.

One of the recent attempts to rework scale has been to describe scale in terms of a network, largely on the suggestion of theorists like Bruno Latour, who hopes to deny any and all levels or layers in favor of a somehow entirely horizontal series of relations. However, despite the network being cited in a number of places as a metaphor for scale (eg Herod and Wright 8, Marston et al

418) it isn’t clear how networks, tree roots, or rhizosomes can be considered to have any scalar

14 See Tong 199; Herod and Wright 7. 27 properties at all. Rather, a network is merely the grouping together of entities on the same scale while denying the transcendent designation (the group itself) that would imply going to another scale. Either you refuse the embedded nature of beings like cells, people, and ecologies, or you note that some kind of scalar shift happens between these three entities. This attempt at “topographical” description of scale as a network, already assumes that the objects and actants can be considered apart from the scalar measure first so that scale can then be performed as a relation. Thus, Latour argues that “a new topographical relationship becomes visible between the former micro and the former macro. The macro is neither ‘above’ nor ‘below’ the interactions, but added to them as another of their connections, feeding them and feeding off of them. There is no other known way to achieve changes in relative scale” (177). Likewise, Latour argues that “scale is what actors achieve by scaling, spacing, and contextualizing each other through the transportation in some specific vehicles of some specific traces” (184). But is not scaling already required to note the relation? To view the world as networked but not scaled, one must pretend that nothing is embedded in any way in each other, as if every object defined related to any other object defined in a purely flat way: the Earth with each human, as every human with each other; the atom with the human as the cell with the cell. How could this viewpoint possibly capture the complex interfolding of being—when I am atoms become cells become human become earth become cosmos? In such an interfolding, no actors are clear enough for objects or a network of objects to be adequately and persistently defined.

As this preliminary examination has already made apparent, we must tread carefully if we are to outline the implications of these basic conclusions about scale. Even as we find ourselves engaging in any number of modes of inquiry—whether historical, literary, phenomenological, cultural, rhetorical, or otherwise—we must return to scale itself as the central question at hand. The result is that our inquiry will lead us through any number of conclusions about the nature of scale.

These will always be guided by the same questions as they appear in different conceptual and

28 rhetorical locations. Undoubtedly there are endless loose ends always being produced in such an inquiry. For instance, we will largely set aside scales of time since many of the observations we note in scales of space are largely applicable to time. Likewise, on significantly large and small scales, time and space become intertwined in such a way that does not necessarily require that we separate the two, although future work can be done to note the particular elements of scale in relation to time.

For the sake of this project, we can use a few ways into scale as a means of organizing ourselves according to particular questions. This presents us with an organizational schema:

Three chapters (the odd chapters) provide us with a different phenomenological way of arriving at scale, introduced by a particular scalar vision and leading to a whole series of questions and explorations born from that way into scale. The first chapter deals with scale as a physical movement away from an object. The chapter is introduced by Stewart Brand’s vision that prompted him to demand an image of the earth from space. The chapter takes this image of the Earth from space as its central case study and weaves together rhetoric from the Space Race with questions of position and scale. Chapter Three deals with scale as a measuring of perception. It is introduced by a vision that occurred to the Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell while returning from the moon. This chapter takes up visuality, framing, and measuring as it relates the possibility of scaling as a measuring of oneself. Chapter Five considers scale as it arises from the changing of the scope of inquiry. It begins with Carl Sagan’s scaling of Cosmos as the vast All. This chapter examines the layering and phase transitions that occur when one includes more and more within the scope of inquiry. In the progression across these three core chapters we move from the Earth, to beyond the

Earth, to the All, finding with each shift a new set of scalar considerations. In doing so, each of these chapters produces conclusions that demand explanation or clarification from mystical writings, which are interwoven throughout the examination with the cultural, scientific, and literary figures.

Each of these core chapters are paired with an additional chapter (the even chapters), which provides a focused examination of a particularly difficult concept arising from the previous chapter.

These chapters are present both for additional prolepsis and for clarification on notions that have plagued our way of thinking, talking, and being in the world. These chapters are approached through one primary figure who is either unusual or so well-known as to be nearly invisible in the scalar concepts they elaborate. Chapter Two deals with Wholeness primarily through the science fiction writer and self-proclaimed fictionalizing philosopher, Philip K. Dick (PKD). PKD allows us to explore the contours of Wholeness through the bizarre language of information paired with questions about revelation, insanity, and the convolutions produced by the realization of Wholeness.

Chapter Four deals with conversion or metanoia (Greek for “change of heart”) as it occurs within the self-measuring of scale. This chapter deals more closely with the problem of prejudice and framing as it relates to scale, concluding that scaling is only made possible by the willingness to bring prejudice and the frame into view. Chapter Six deals with the concept of the Otherworldly, particularly as it has been traced through the history of philosophy. After beginning with Hannah

Arendt’s disavowal of space travel, this chapter turns critiques of the transcendent within philosophy through recent critiques of Gilles Deleuze. It then considers Arthur Lovejoy’s critique of the

Otherworldly and examines Plato’s Timaeus to clarify in terms of scale the origins of what appears to be a duality between two realms of being. This chapter then takes up the Katha Upanishad to clarify the stakes of a scalar distinction between the One and the Many.

As largely an endeavor in prolepsis, some care and attention is needed to help address our resistances to scale. As our discussion of politics already indicates, a great deal of the conversation about scale is tied to a rather intense disdain for anything related to hierarchy, viewing from above, wholeness, unity, or transcendence. Looking closely at scale completely reworks all of these terms, not only avoiding the critiques rallied against them but providing a powerful argument for their

30 inevitable and legitimate value. The hope is that the reader will at least see how thinking in terms of scale shifts the stakes and application of the transcendent and the hierarchical as we have learned more and more about what these shifts in size actually look like, what is required to access them, what they direct our attention to, and what they tend to induce in human beings. Perhaps some readers will follow our exploration all the way to the conclusions that have persistently been avoided as mystical, but it is understood that these are perhaps the most difficult and require the most significant shift in our approach. To help assist in these ends a Prologue has been added containing a

Primer that is meant to help attune the critical reader to particular aspects of scale. Most of the conclusions about scale are included in some way or another in this prologue, although in the indirect form of an imagined thought experiment in which Apollo and Archimedes go to the moon.

Lest the reader feel themselves lost within more difficult philosophical musings or more obscure theological implications, we can take note that these explorations do yield a few practical implications that are worth noting at the outset:

1) When moving to a higher scale, separate entities become one. When moving to a lower

scale, division usually manifests but only to a limited extent.

2) Unity is not a product of homogenization or a binding together. Rather, in terms of

scale, unification pre-exists and is born from a change of the scale on which we are

viewing.

3) Scaling persistently leads us to note interconnection rather than fragmentation

4) Moving across scales revises completely the phenomenal field of objects. A true shift or

change in scale can be designated when the change in size produces a phase transition in

which the field of objects is entirely altered.

5) Partial-wholes do not exist, including objects, units, actants, atoms, or any other basic

entity thought to be contained within itself. There is no wholeness outside the Whole,

which we will come to describe by the end of the project as the One-All-Whole.

6) Actions on one scale only produce effects on another scale when compounded, i.e. act

with the assistance of an aggregation or a mediating distribution. Thus, a clearly defined

object on one scale cannot alone determine, alter, or rule a larger or smaller scale entity

except through some means of coordinating other entities on that scale. Note that this is

true in both directions.

7) Most regular, consistent, or stable phenomenon on one scale are produced through the

aggregation of a lower scale that does not eradicate the diversity of the scale below. Nor

does the diversity of the lower scale always correspond in any direct way to the higher

scale consistency. To apply this regularity back down the scale is to mistake this

relationship.

8) In order to truly scale one cannot add additional criteria for defining the scope of

inclusion beyond the measure of space-time. For example, “all humans” is not a new

scale but an oblique phenomena that manifests on another scale since it includes an

additional criteria (only homo sapiens).

9) Scale is a measurement not of the world but of one’s own perspective

10) Scale produces unusual perspectives since it permits the projection or extension of one’s

phenomenal field, which only functions according the scalar connection retained to

normal perception.

11) Our scalar measure is usually obscured by the ego-structure—a scalar formation that cuts

out a part of the world and claims that part for itself or as itself. Ego-structures are an

illusory partial-whole. The ego-structures tend to produce the habit of treating objects in

the same fragmented and delimited way.

12) One’s perspective is not clearly one’s own but only functions as a localization of the

Whole through a particular interpretive apparatus. As such, scaling oneself is to scale the

Cosmos. By extension, since the interpretive apparatus cannot be seen as distinct; to

scale is the Cosmos scaling itself.

In the process of making these conclusions we find certain choices made which reveal how we have a bias in favor of our normal, non-scalar way of viewing reality. Scale offers us a way to examine the incongruity of our assumptions using the very same mechanisms whereby our understanding came to be solidified and calcified. This is the great power of accessing scale through science: science, through its own modes of observation, have delineated the limits of its own enterprise and, in doing so, has likewise pointed to the conclusions outside of it which we have deemed here the mystical conclusions. To face these conclusions requires us to face a choice between our usual mode of being in the world and the scalar one. Four erroneous assumptions can be identified here, although undoubtedly we’ll encounter more along the way:

1) When two things appear to be connected or related, they are still two separate things.

2) When we go to a lower scale, we expect to find more objects that are clearly distinct as

entities.

3) Physical entities or concrete phenomenon that define physical discreteness (i.e. light in

the eye, the gestalt capacity in the brain, words that designate entities) are themselves just

more discrete objects. This becomes noticeable when we experience a shutdown of this

capacity (the failure of language, an experience of wholeness, a vision of unity). We

interpret the shutdown as a lack or abnormality rather than noting that what has been

turned off is the filtering of reality. In doing so we consider the measure, dividing

apparatus, or designation to be more true or correct than the breakdown of that

measure, division, or designation (see Chapter 2).

4) The relationship between scales must necessarily be causal, either in a reductionist sense

or in a superstructural sense.

Each of these assumptions is undermined by scale. We default to these readings mostly by habit even if they lead to some strangely contradictory conclusions. Some thinkers develop incredibly complicated ways of justifying these decisions even when scalar evidence demands otherwise. When we examine scale closely, these assumptions naturally dissolve.

Scale requires us to take into account the whole relationship of being as it encounters the manifold existence already before us so that any metaphysical or physical presupposition might stand within the context of the relation that brings it before us as a phenomenon. Scale forces us to ask the question “What are we talking about?” Scale itself is a way of navigating and taking reference to that question. But not only what are we talking about—and this point is essential—but also what are we seeing, encountering, and being. How are phenomenon themselves to be addressed so that we can untangle their coming-into-being as phenomenon before us. The inquiry is thus scientific in that it proposes an experientially based measure as the means for experimenting with the description and careful comparison of reality as it is presented to observation. The inquiry is also philosophical in that it deals with what it means for these phenomenon to be presented at all. The inquiry finds itself fundamentally rhetorical because it deals with the reciprocal relationship occurring between the give and take of consciousness with its encounter with being. Seen together, we can say that scale is a way by which we navigate our own communion with the cosmos and read its eloquent structure upon the shape of our consciousness.

A certain degree of humility is required in approaching an inquiry in this way since it requires one to acknowledge, at the outset, that such an inquiry will always be incomplete. The study in

34 rhetoric, the institutional home from which this study begins, has always struggled with this seemingly contradictory inclusion of everything (or nothing) within its scope of study. Humility provides a way of navigating this movement across and within whatever comes within reach. All we can do is attend to the implications of these structures of consciousness, in whatever form they present themselves. When we attend in this way, all the insufficiencies in breadth of knowledge give way to the care taken to take notice of what a structure like scale presents for our capacity to be in the world. The hope is that the reader will do likewise and take care to contemplate the same questions and structures as they apply to their own experience, expertise, and work.

In the end, the success of such an endeavor lies only in this pausing or dwelling with a structure of consciousness that we are constantly entangled with, talking about, and encountering but failing to directly look at. Scale cannot be moved beyond, however much we would like to pretend to flatten reality. The more we avoid looking at scale, the more confusion will result from this incredible technology of attention and the more some individuals will be able to take advantage our incapacity to navigate this increasingly scaled world. It is thus with some mix of sincerity, humor, and care that we proceed through this involuted experiment in consciousness.

Chapter I: Scaling the Whole Earth

The Eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, wherein I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and ocean and all things. In all these things I beheld naught save the divine power, in a manner assuredly indescribable; so that through excess of marveling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying This whole world is full of God!” - Angela of Foligno (quoted in Underhill, 158)

The face of the Earth viewed from celestial space presents a unique appearance, different from all other heavenly bodies….The biosphere is at least as much a creation of the sun as the result of terrestrial processes. Ancient religious intuitions that considered terrestrial creatures, especially man, to be children of the sun were far nearer to the truth than is thought by those who see earthly beings simply as ephemeral creations arising from blind and accidental interplay of matter and forces. Creatures on Earth are the fruit of extended, complex processes, and are an essential part of a harmonious cosmic mechanism. - Vladamir Vernadsky, Biosphere 43-4

Demanding the Whole Earth With his consciousness assisted by a bio-evolutionary adjunct going by the name LSD,

Stewart Brand gazes from the balcony of a high-rise. He glimpses the curvature of the earth, the glimmer of its possible loop back on itself, its veritable sphere-ness creeping through the slight curve:

The buildings were not parallel—because the earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; it closed on itself. I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecture—that people perceived the earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of all their misbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred miles, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it.15

15 This quote is from Brand’s recounting of the experience during a meeting at the Lindisfarne association published in a book called The Sixties, edited by Lynda Obst. Later Brand put the essay up online at http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/WholeEarth_buton.html

This curvature of consciousness saturates Brand’s view, allows him not only to intellectually contemplate the roundness of the planet but to project his understanding beyond the everyday perception so that he can feel—finally feel what he had before intellectually heard—a monumental and counterintuitive shift—not only in his perception but in the root perceptual positions that permit all kinds of “misbehavior.”

As soon as perceiving and feeling this shift, the literally rhetorical question seems always to arise: how can we actually get others to feel likewise? Brand gathers himself and contemplates what an actual photograph of the earth from space would do for prompting this kind of view:

I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. A photograph would do it—a color photograph from space of the earth. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.

Brand has to gather together these thoughts that seem to scatter in the immensity of his vision.

Once done, the image he falls on is this photograph and its possibilities. This photo would act as a non-chemical yet psychedelic—mind-manifesting—adjunct for consciousness. It would allow us to understand the earth on a larger scale. No one would ever perceive things the same way.

Everything would be shifted.

This vision yielded the “Why haven’t we seen the Earth from Space?” campaign, in which he sent badges with the question to a slew of Congressmen, officials, NASA officials, and even Buckminster Fuller and Marshal McLuhan.16 When Brand went to publish the Whole Earth

Catalog two years later, he found just such a photo, taken from an unmanned satellite, to put on the cover. A few more years later, in 1972, the astronauts from Apollo 17 captured the Blue

16 Poole quotes much of the same passages from Brand and discusses their cultural impact at the time in Chapter 8 of Earthrise (150). Interestingly, Poole also notes that “whatever impact the campaign may have had at the time, no trace of it seems to survive in NASA’s archives” (73). 37

Marble photos, 11 pictures clearly capturing the Earth in full-phase. The pictures from the Blue

Marble set have been called the most reproduced pictures in human history and few will doubt their importance in launching the environmental movement and becoming a symbol for a globalized political mentality.17 Half a century later, however, the photo is so commonplace, so normal that it is difficult to understand the excitement expressed by Brand.18 What did he mean

“no one would ever perceive things the same way”? How do we perceive things differently now that we have this view? What has shifted? Given that we all routinely use a similar image, rendered in beautiful interactive 3D, to find our way across town—it is difficult to see Brand’s statements as anything more than a hyperbolic (even drug-induced, we might say with that grin that most who grew up post-Drug War finds it hard to suppress) and self-indulgent wish for a radical social change so prevalent in the counterculture of the sixties.

Such an uncharitable reading avoids addressing why this image of earth from space might have any kind of rhetorical power. It avoids addressing what it is we are seeing when we see this photo from earth. Yet most responses to the photo written today are largely dismissive in this way, if not completely critical of the kind of hope for transformation found in Brand’s statement.19 Such a critique is not unfamiliar, however, given that the magazine born out of

Brand’s magnum opus, The Whole Earth Review, itself published just such a critique less than

17 See for example, Poole Chapter 8; Henry and Taylor 193; Cosgrove 257 18 On the commodification of the Earthrise and Blue Marble photos see Poole 168, Tribbe Chapter 5. 19 Stefan Helmreich addresses these readings in “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean,” 1214-1215. The list of arguments with a negative reading of the Blue Marble are extensive—Helmreich’s reading is the notable exception. Most of these negative readings bring the picture back to its political implications then or since. One of the most thorough is Kevin McGuirk’s “A.R. Ammons and the Whole Earth.” See also Haraway, “Cyborgs and Symbionts”; Tong, “Ecology without Scale” 197 (figure 1 caption); Chris Russill, “Earth Observing Media” (dismissively notes Brand’s LSD use); Lazier, “Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the World Picture”; Leon Gurevitch “The Digital Globe as Climactic Coming Attraction: From Theatrical Release to Theatre of War.”; Alexander C.T. Geppert’s introduction to the special issue in History and Technology entitled “rethinking the Space Age: Astroculture and technoscience”; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth,” 261. A more careful reading that notes but moves beyond the colonial reading can be found in Robin Kelsey. "Reverse Shot: Earthrise and Blue Marble in the American Imagination." 38 two decades following the release of these photos. In this reading of the photo, we begin immediately with a move to discount the power of the photo:

A metaphor is a way of describing one entity in terms of another. The image of the whole Earth—proudly displayed on the front cover banner of this magazine—is our culture’s current metaphor for the Earth. This photographic image is not the reality of the whole Earth, but only one possible interpretation of it.20

On one level it is obvious: of course the photograph is not the reality of the whole earth—what kind of understanding of images and language would suppose that it would be? And yet, the way this critique is framed implies that the image is just another image like any representation of the world. In this reading, the view of the Earth is not a necessarily impactful vision, but merely another metaphor—one among many ways of understanding what the Earth is. While it is important to remember that this image is indeed an image, this dismissive suggestion implies a kind of arbitrariness of the image that neglects the aspects of the world that the image itself captures—whether we acknowledge these aspects or not—and their usefulness for reorienting ourselves to our everyday reality. For the critic, this approach strips the Blue Marble image of the power implied by Brand’s vision. What remains is only a negative reading born on ideological grounds: one image is meant to capture a particular ideology over another and put it forth as the truth. Brand is not, however, operating from such an ideological view: for him the vision is about a breakage and a shift, an alteration of the possible way of understanding our relation to ourselves and the cosmos.

Whatever change occurred in the nearly twenty years between Brand’s vision and the renouncing of this sensibility within the publication he was instrumental in founding, we should not be so quick to dismiss Brand’s hope that the image of Earth from space opens the possibility for a fundamental shift in human consciousness. The image of the Earth from space is in many

20 Garb, Yaakov Jerome. “The Use and Misuse of the Whole Earth Image” 39 ways our prime example of the way consciousness has found itself encountering scale. The failure to understand what is particularly special or persuasive about the image is symptomatic of our failure to comprehend what scalar shifts entail. Brand’s vision becomes potent again when we consider that the image of Earth—indeed, scale itself—can function as a rhetorical apparatus for refocusing consciousness. But the manner in which the encounter with scale implied by this image might do so has become less clear and it’s rhetorical power stripped out not only by its trivialization but also by the difficulty of processing the photo itself. Just as photography and film themselves were once surprising and then became normalized,21 significant photos which pull our perception beyond normal scales become rendered obvious by their proliferation and integration into public consciousness. Just as we can view the image of the cell without thinking about the bizarre fact that these little animalcules operate the entirety of our underlying material interactions, we can view the image of the Earth without contemplating the relation it bears to ourselves and our place in the universe.22 Any statement claiming this kind of power might be rendered inert by its very triteness.

As we begin to face the nature and implication of scalar shifts we must first acknowledge this tendency to trivialize. If we are going to address scale, we need to move beyond this triteness and consider the basic aspects of scaling that would prompt Brand to see this photo as a significant shift in human consciousness. We must acknowledge with Brand the significance of being able to perceive on this scale, to truly contemplate even from a visual perspective, what the world looks like if we leave the surface—our ever-present ground-zero of scale—and widen our view to include the whole Earth. Thus, Brand’s statement and the Blue Marble photos can

21 We can always remember this point by returning to some of the foundational texts on photography and film—even the most famous such as Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or Lewis Mumford 22 Lewis Thomas crosses both scales at once in the remarkable The Lives of a Cell to connect the imagination of ourselves on a larger scale in relation to the bizarre nature of cells themselves. 40 become our touchstone—even our icons or talismans23—for discerning our own lack of understanding about what scaling is and does. Considering this simple shift in perspective—from here to the Blue Marble—we can begin to work out the scale’s radical demands on consciousness.

Mystical Scales Before we proceed, we must pause to note that there is already within Brand’s account a connection that has been persistently avoided: the inescapable tie between the strain of spirituality which we can call “mysticism” and scale. Perhaps this connection is surprising and uncomfortable for those who want to approach this inquiry from an entirely scientific, rational, or critical perspective. However, a fundamental tenant of this inquiry is that scale cannot be approached without addressing the ties to the various spiritual traditions who have articulated a scalar terminology. There is a simple reason for this: our scalar terminology largely originates from mystics. In the Christian tradition, for example, the word “hierarchy” was most likely coined by Psuedo-Dionysus, the mystic underlying nearly all of Christian mysticism. Likewise, in the pre-scientific and largely pre-political use, Walter Hilton used the term “Scale” in his handbook The Scales of Perfection to speak of how the acolyte ascends up to God. The move from “to scale” as a climbing of a ladder to “scale” as a systematic comparison of measures does little to distort or alter the original comparison between Hilton’s individual-to-universal climb implied by his title. Even outside of an overtly religious articulation, the Greek philosophical tradition begins with arguments about the One and the Many, not only in Plato but also in two of his most influential predecessors: Heraclitus and Parmenides. The mystical foundation these

23 Helmreich discusses the image of the earth from space as religious icon using the work of Charles Sanders Peirce flesh out the concept. 41 three thinkers has long been acknowledged in commentaries on mysticism, even by those who critique it (see, for example, Russell’s “Mysticism and Logic”). The scalar nature of these philosophical accounts was more systematically articulated by Plotinus, whose system of inquiry is entirely built around the ascent of the individual to the All. Likewise, in the Vedic literature, the Atman-Brahmin distinction —the Divine cosmos viewed from the individual (Atman) viewpoint is seen to be equivalent to the whole (Brahmin)—frequently articulated in the

Upanishads is more than sufficient evidence for pointing to the scalar foundation of much of the mysticism emerging from the Vedas (including Buddhism and Vedanta). All of these mystical traditions demand that their acolytes contemplate their relationship to an larger, vast entity, alternatively deemed the Absolute, the Infinite, the Highest, the Whole, the All, or, in a more philosophical turn, Being itself.

In fact, we can—with little contradiction to the diverse and extensive mystical literature—define mysticism according to scale: mysticism is that branch of inquiry which seeks to reconcile the individual existence with the cosmic scale. However one articulates these individual and cosmic orders, some kind of scalar relationship is set up between the particular and the universal, the part and the whole. Thus, Evelyn Underhill, who was instrumental in developing a systematic account of mystical traditions, says that the mystic’s “business…is transcendence: a mounting up, an attainment of a higher order reality. Once his eyes have been opened to Eternity, his instinct for the Absolute roused from its sleep, he sees union with that

Reality as his duty no less than his joy: sees too, that this union can only be consummated on a place where illusion and selfhood [read: the scale on which this body exists] have no place”

(Mysticism, 128). Rather than being incidental to the mystery of the mystic, the unity with a higher being is foundational to the mystic’s endeavor: “mysticism, in its pure form, is the science

42 of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and that the mystic is the person who attains to this union” (50). Except where it has become an obstacle to the access of the divine, mystics will often find themselves articulating a part-whole or universal-particular relationship simply because the spiritual experience articulated—just as it was with Stewart

Brand’s—entails an encounter with a vast sense of being that exceeds one’s particularity. That the conclusion of the mystic is consistently a monistic insight couched in the language of divinity, an absorption with something larger than oneself, is itself part of the scalar nature of their encounter.24

The consistency with which mystics articulate a scalar terminology has prompted some to claim that mystical terminology undergirds all philosophy and science. Without addressing immediately the sweeping nature of such claims, we can note that this scalar terminology is fundamental to what Aldous Huxley calls the perennial philosophy: “it is from the more or less obscure intuition of the oneness that is the ground and principle of all multiplicity that philosophy takes its source. And not alone philosophy, but natural science. All science…is the reduction of multiplicities to identities. Divining the One within the many, we find an intrinsic plausibility in any explanation of the diverse in terms of a single principle” (Perennial

Philosophy 5). Such sweeping claims may seem untenable but, if we are to address the nature of scale, we cannot dismiss them outright since their universal applicability is not necessary to establish the role of the mystical for scale.

Since the scientific revolution, scale has been brought increasingly within the realm of science and become less and less overtly mystical. Science has systematically examined shifts in

24 William James recognizes this larger monistic, unifying aspect in his influential account of mysticism even if he does not place this attribute in his four aspects of mysticism (see Varieties of Religious Experience 297). In revising James’s attributes, Underhill makes the scalar nature of the endeavor a foundational aspect of mysticism: “its aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual” (81). 43 scale as they might exist wholly in a physical and empirical realm, thereby changing the manner we are able to understand the nature of scalar terms such as hierarchy, part-whole, microcosm- macrocosm, and transcendent-immanent. Nonetheless, the mystical contemplations and articulations on scale remain the precedent for our way of thinking and speaking about scale.

This examination will show that the mystical considerations remain the most philosophically rigorous accounts of scale, which are not defeated or overtaken by empirical and scientific scaling. The antipathy of science to the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the non-rational has led to what appears to be an impasse in understanding scale simply because the most significant implications of scaling cannot avoid launching us into definitively mystical, that is experientially scalar, territory.

Indeed, this affinity has often been noted in critiques of many of the sites this project will examine. In these critiques, the very presence of mystical elements become grounds for dismissing the significant and, if we are to truly understand scale, unavoidable mystical elements of scaling, especially speaking of higher scales of being. One example here will suffice: in the very same issue of the Whole Earth Review in which the image of Earth was declared to be just another metaphor, the environmental ethicist Richard Watson directly critiques those sensibilities like Brand’s which would seek a mystical re-visioning of the way we view the Earth. In responding to the influx of “eastern” religion within various environmental sentiments, Watson targets mysticism directly:

“It is mysticism itself that bothers me most. If the world or universe is not a big animal how about its being a big mind? Maybe we’re all just parts of grand thought. Or the becoming of Platonic being. . . .I think religion is based on fear of death and power plays among human beings. I think mysticism is based on a misinterpretation of superb experiences of life. … I am scared to death of both religion and mysticism. . . . I am scared of religion because it is authoritarian and irrational. Of mysticism because it is life-denying and irrational. I don’t understand principles that are contradictory. I don’t understand talk of experiences or states that transcend ordinary experience, that cannot

be categorized and discussed. . . . There is something about somebody who knows or has seen the Absolute Truth that makes my blood run cold. They know what I should do. They want to put you in chains and then convince you that it is for your own good.

Watson’s frankness is refreshing even if his fear is misdirected. We do not need to deny here that religion has often been used for terrible ends and that many—but definitely not all—who purport to have the Truth are more interested in telling people what to do and judging others than in cultivating a loving and beautiful relationship with reality. But the odd aspect of this fear is that, while the mystic might declare that they have the Absolute Truth, they are less concerned with forcing it on anyone else. With remarkable consistency, the mystic exemplifies the spiritual sentiment that insists on personal, internal refinement towards love and peace that naturally comes out of union with the Absolute, rather than an externally, self-righteous attitude that leads to the extreme behaviors by which we say religion will “put you in chains.” It is true that the mystic may declare with enthusiasm the possibility of union with the divine and hold it up as the highest good, but this kind of union yields a generosity rather than contempt for their fellow man.25 Spending some time with the various records left by mystics makes this point abundantly clear.

As will become evident, all skepticism towards religion and mysticism are welcome at the outset of an examination of scale, as long as we do not reject the religious and mystical aspects from the beginning. The fear expressed by Watson has to be set aside as antithetical to the enterprise, particularly since scale will help us rearticulate even what we mean by the

“Absolute.” Since science has intensified our understanding of scale and developed scalar terminology beyond the mystical forms, we can consider both science and mysticism together,

25 In summarizing the perennial philosophy in his introduction to Swami Prabhavananda’s translation of the Bhagavad- Gita, Huxley notes that “man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground” (13). But the way this is done, as mystics persistently note, is through “love and non-attachment” (20) rather than chains, guilt, judgment, or ignorance. 45 examining how their investments, investigations, and discoveries clarify the implications of their modes of describing the Cosmos. Unfortunately, in accounts of scale, the connection to mysticism is more often ignored than rejected.26 Yet many of the confusing or troubling aspects of scale are present in Watson’s denunciation of mysticism and religion: the assertion that scale pushes at rationality, that scale implies a totalitarian hierarchy, that scale exceeds normal experience, and that scale produces contradictions. When scientific discussion strays most close to mysticism, we tend to turn away—if we even acknowledge the affinity at all. As we proceed, however, it will become clear why this affinity continues to arise and why it is worthwhile to consider both without a pre-set belief or investment in either science or mysticism.

Up the Mountain What happens when we go to a higher scale? We can attempt, even within our relatively normal experience, to understand the shift phenomenologically. To do so, we need not take recourse to space travel; there is an experience already intensely familiar to most people on the planet: the view from a mountain. From the top of a mountain, one can see the same objects seen from below—the trees, roads, houses, and people—in a different pattern that appear as a whole new object, unified together in a larger phenomenon. The trees become a clear aggregate called forest. The phrase “you can’t see the forest for the trees” becomes more meaningful as a statement about how the entity “forest” reveals larger phenomenon that are not perceptible from the scale of “trees.” If the mountain is high enough, people are too small to be seen distinctly.

26 We will discuss many accounts throughout this work that dismiss the mystical elements of scale even as they struggle to articulate many of the same conclusions. One of the best recent examples can be found in Karen Barad’s impressive and incredibly useful account of quantum scales in Meeting the Universe Halfway. To avoid the New Age appropriations of quantum physics Barad dismisses off-hand, in the middle of a paragraph already far into the book, the use of quantum physics as a “scientific path leading out of the West to the metaphysical Edenic garden of Eastern mysticism” (67). 46

The artifacts of humankind become patterns more easily designated as larger entities: houses become villages or cities; crops become fields; roads become veins on the landscape.

The view from the mountain suggests a fundamental characteristic of scale: that individual entities dissolve into different entities when we increase the scale of our view. To state it more directly: what on one scale appears separate, on a higher scale appears to be one. Rather than simply a “considering together”—a set of trees—the phenomena revealed when scaling up presents a whole new entity—the forest. When we stay at one scale this fact is not particularly significant; if we could imagine forgetting that trees exist and only considered these phenomena via the perception of forests, we might consider the nature of “forests” quite differently. On the top of a mountain already containing forests, however, we see the trees close by and the forests in the distance and naturally relate the two. But the nature of the relation is not immediately as obvious as it may seem: how does the existence of each phenomena “tree” relate to that which is apparent in the phenomena “forest”? The situation is further complicated by the fact that our language and perception does this scaling consistently regardless of how high we are: coming off the mountain we can note that speaking of “grass” automatically implies the same tree-forest relationship. It is difficult to focus on and speak of a single blade of grass—the term “grass” implies the aggregate already.

It was this phenomenon that allowed Walt Whitman to take grass as the exemplar of the scalar relation within “A Song of Myself.” Whitman’s grass navigates the scalar identifications possible when moving between atoms, bodies, and stars. Thus, in the famous opening lines, the grass becomes the point of focus that follows from the invocation of the atomic:

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.27

Whitman invites his soul to contemplate this scalar relation: switch your perspective to a point of view from which you are revealed as part of a larger phenomenon. What one already imagines in the atom and in the blade of grass, one can project out further into the heavens. Thus, he effortlessly connects the large with the small within the scalar resolution: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” Just as Brand must gather his thoughts,

Whitman must pause with the scalar relation, being at ease in the vision of how the blade of grass too draws its distinctiveness from and within the larger phenomenon grass. In doing so,

Whitman reverses the direction of the scalar shift, allowing us to restate the principle from the opposite direction: scaling up reveals how distinctiveness—individuality—is as a fluid function or component of larger patterns.

When going up the mountain, we see that individual entities resolve into larger phenomena, unable to be understood or conceptualized before. When coming down the mountain, we retain a sense of this larger perspective and are able to consider the individual phenomena as part of the larger. Although counterintuitive to our usual way of thinking about objects, it is not difficult to retain this same relation down to entities perceptible off the mountain, whether already familiar (the grass) or newly considered (the atom). We are always tempted, moving too quickly, to say that these lower scale entities are said to be

“interconnected,” but this does not fully account for the fact that the phenomena forest does not actually retain in the perceptual field the same phenomena tree. One has to scale back down— even if it means just looking at a tree nearby—to make that connection. But from the mountain

27 All quotations from “Song of Myself” are from Leaves of Grass 1891-92 edition. 48 the separation between each individual tree, which was so apparent when walking among them, is not apparent at all. Taking the higher perspective, the multiplicity of objects appear to be one object. This fact becomes more important when we consider how the scalar relationship continues down the scale: the object ‘tree” is itself how a set of smaller entities (cells, molecules) appear to be one.

Thus, we can note, in a preliminary fashion, that scaling down reveals multiplicity, while scaling up reveals unity. In going up the scale, we have a tendency to look with some resistance to the new unity before us, since we live so much of our lives among the trees. This resistance is itself one of the first challenges of scale. It is already navigated by Whitman in replicating this scaling up in the scaling down: I “myself” am already one of these unified phenomena. However, rather than a suggestion of fragmentation, Whitman follows a formulation which preserves the unity even in multiplicity: every atom belongs to me as much as it belongs to you. In doing so

Whitman aligns himself with the perennial philosophy’s emphasis on a wholeness behind the division, as he considers the possibility of scaling to the highest possible phenomena. Such an assertion fits easily with the nearly ubiquitous use of mountains in spiritual traditions as the place to go for contemplation and communion with the divine—we will take up this question of

Wholeness in the next chapter.

The Overview, the Claim, and the Airplane Going yet a little higher, we still do not need to go to space to continue our examination.

Indeed, when NASA historian Frank White attempts to articulate a justification for continued investment in space travel, he invokes first the more common experience of airplane travel in order to introduce what he calls the “Overview Effect:”

From 30,000 feet, [the city] looked like little toys sparkling in the sunshine. From that altitude, all of Washington looked small and insignificant. However, I knew that people

down there were making life and death decisions on my behalf and taking themselves very seriously as they did so. From high in the jet stream, it seemed absurd that they could have any impact on my life. It was like ants making laws for humans. (3)

In thinking about the view from the airplane, he has already begun to flesh out some of the content of our usual responses to moving to a larger scale. First, what seems large at our usual scale is shown to be small. This corresponds with a change in value: what seems significant is seen to be much more insignificant than previously thought. Second, remembering that lower scale set of values, White reflects on how absurd it is that these people would think they have such great power over this vast landscape. The individuals who assume they hold such power are unseen from this altitude; however much we would like to claim these “human” artifacts as evidence of “our” existence, the individual humans are themselves too small to be seen from this altitude (these terms “human” and “our” already contain too much scaling). It follows, third, that the power associated with these individuals is itself a kind of backward understanding of the reality: the assumption that an individual might control all of this is the same kind of mistake as assuming ants form laws for humans.

This metaphor of ants and humans is a common one that, in its usual form, provides one basis for concern about invoking a higher scale view. For example, H.G. Wells famously describes the Martians domination of Earth through an ant-human comparison in War of the

Worlds, a book greatly concerned with scale but full of erroneous assumptions about how scale functions. Wells begins the book with a scalar relationship: “as narrowly as man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water,” man too is being scrutinized by the Martians (3). This kind of higher-scale view implies a kind of disregard that is articulated in the ant-human difference once the Martians attack: “but the

Martian took no more notice for the moment of the people running this way and that than a man

50 would of the confusion of ants in a nest against which his foot has been kicked” (69). Wells is assuming that to have a higher scale view is to be able to look with disregard on the small, an assumption already performed by the human neglect of ants. At first it appears that White is saying the same, particularly when he notes that the Overview Effect allows him to, in some sense, “see the future”: “I knew that the car on Route 110 would soon meet up with the other car on Route 37, although the two drivers were not aware of it. If they were about to have an accident, I’d see it, but they wouldn’t” (4). This perspective—often called a kind of “gods-eye view” is now commonly experienced as the kind of position one takes in many strategy video games. The assumption is that if one can see the larger patterns, one can control them, an assumption replicated by both these modern video games and by the colonial map-making enterprises.

However, White is saying almost the opposite in his invocation of the ant-human comparison. When one actually goes to a higher scale, a different kind of relationship to the patterns emerges. In White’s invocation, the humans aren’t controlling the ants; instead the

“humans” in the analogy is the larger world viewed from the airplane. The absurdity is that a lower scale organism (the ant) could control a higher one (the human). The analogy thus implies that the opposite of Well’s metaphor: the human is absurd for thinking his actions discern and control the planet. From the view from the airplane, it is true that you might be able to discern some relationship between the various lower-scale objects at hand, but this is a severely limited kind of relationship, plagued by a fantasy of the possibility of control: White can see how two cars might interact but the crash is only imaginary and one possibility among many. If he were to actually communicate with both drivers to tell them of the impending interaction, it would mean very little—the drivers themselves would think it absurd—so what if they are heading towards

51 each other? It is their role as drivers to navigate that actual, lower-scale interaction. To see from a higher perspective is not to control from that perspective, even if the widened perspective allows you to see structures previously unanticipated. In fact, the factors previously unanticipated will almost always be the elements that necessarily exceed what one is capable of directly encountering on one’s normal scale.

Even when we scale up only this much—enough to still retain a sense of the phenomena we frequently encounter as large when among them, such as the city buildings, trees, and rivers, but not enough to completely lose sight of these phenomena—we realize that we have never fully encountered these larger entities because they are simply too large. Here synecdoche is shown to be decidedly different than the experience that scale permits: in synecdochal articulations, a part fills in for a larger entity that we find difficult to bring fully into view. When in the middle of the city, I might fill in any part as representative for the city on account of the reality that the term “city” is attempting to capture is already too large and too abstract to clearly discern. We should note that “abstract” implies a drawing away from, implying an increasing distance. The term “city” only functions if we draw away from the most easily discernible entities that make up that larger entity. Thus, when viewing or thinking in terms of scale, synecdoche no longer functions in the same way. When White is viewing the city from the airplane, he is viewing already the futility of synecdochal attempts to position one part in relation to the larger entity. This synecdoche is what political rhetoric and conceptions of power persistently perform; just as we habitually replace “Washington” with the entire power structure of the United States, the politicians there have placed themselves in a synecdochal relationship with the larger geographic region of interactions. From the airplane, however, this synecdoche is

52 not only false but fundamentally fails to comprehend how scale reworks what we think entities are and how we think they relate.

When the synecdochal relationship is voided, a different articulation arises, based not on a limiting part-whole relationship, but in terms of a new unity in which all parts are revealed as being already contained within a larger phenomena in such a way that prevents any single part from filling in for the whole at the exclusion of the rest. White makes this conclusion explicit in terms similar to what we have already introduced: “From the airplane, the message that scientists, philosophers, spiritual teachers, and systems theorists have been trying to tell us for centuries was obvious: everything is interconnected and interrelated, each part of a subsystem of a larger whole system” (4). A view from above makes the consideration of inter-relatedness more apparent such that what appears to be isolated and separate appears to be part of the same thing. If we go slowly, this last sentence ought to be taken more literally than we want to initially: the distance between two objects becomes so small and negligible as to no longer be obvious. Such a conclusion may seem bizarre until we replicate, once again, the same relationship starting on the scale where we usually consider objects to be solid and clearly distinct: when I look at cells through a microscope there is space between what appeared to be solid. However, rather than necessarily implying more fragmentation, this comparison shows the interconnection already privileges the lower scale view by preserving the apparent separateness of the cells over the apparent unity of the body.

Rather than simply a matter of discerning how one thing affects another, White is noting that this interconnection emerges as the natural effect of taking a higher viewpoint. If you increase the scale of your consideration, interconnection becomes apparent. Interestingly, White

53 is able to argue here that our abstract conception of “world view” might be taken literally according to our actually physical location:

On the other hand, I knew that it was all a matter of perspective. When the plane landed, everyone on it would act like the people over whom we flew. This line of thought led to a simple but important realization: mental processes and views of life cannot be separated from physical location. Our ‘world view’ as a conceptual framework depends quite literally on our view of the world from a physical place in the universe. (3)

The view from above, which is usually taken metaphorically, is now literally going to a new physical location and seeing how things differ from that distance. In doing so, White has allowed us to see that the “transcendent” might have a physical resonance first and foremost, before it was granted all of the abstract metaphysical weight with which it has so long existed in theology and philosophy. Or to restate the conclusion in yet another way: White has tied the shape of point of view to the scale at which one is viewing. Something happens simply by widening the scale. White rallies the literalness of the spatial shift as he claims that civilizations in space will take this interconnectedness for granted. In having a view of the world that includes seeing it as one unified object, these civilizations will naturally integrate the reality of the

Overview Effect into their worldview.

At the same time, the emphasis on space travel limits or obscures the significance and form of the Overview Effect. Why does going to space produce it? Why do some experience the effect while others do not? White’s hesitation—“On the one hand”—points to some sense that the experience itself is transitory. In emphasizing the shift in position, he seems to account for the reason that the Overview Effect does not seem widespread and fully integrated into our understanding of the world: we literally come down out of the airplane or back to the planet. He thus is able to define the Overview Effect simply in terms of this change in position: the

Overview Effect is “the predicted experience of astronauts and space settlers, who would have a

54 different philosophical point of view as a result of having a different perspective” (4). Such a definition would imply that all astronauts experience the same effect and have the same shift in philosophical standpoint. Such a claim does not seem substantiated nor necessary, despite

White’s extensive collection of interviews at the end of The Overview Effect. This claim resembles too closely Brand’s hope that the picture of the earth from space would produce the change in consciousness. The question must arise: why has it not necessarily produced this change?

The Overview Institute, formed by White and others to promote the idea, later provides attributes for this definition that moves beyond the generality of a shift in position: “it is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.”28 The actual conceptual mechanism whereby the Overview Effect is inspired is already obscured both by what it means to experience “first-hand” such that space travel becomes necessary. In other words, the emphasis on physical location is insufficient to capture the reason why the Overview Effect is induced by space travel. White’s emphasis on space travel does not clearly establish the relationship between perspective and location, as one navigates the scalar shift such that one might have a transformative understanding of the world. Nor is it clear how this kind of effect would occur “immediately” in the movement to space. Indeed, there is already a great deal of content tied up in the Overview Institutes statements about what the vision means, which do not immediately become apparent in the scaling up movement. It is unclear to what degree the Overview Effect must be tied to the content already inferred from this image of the earth as a particular kind of fragile entity, hanging in a void. Our trip up the mountain has

28 This statement is found on the “Declaration of Vision and Principles” page on the Overview Institutes website. 55 already suggested that the shift in position merely introduces the phenomenal shift with only some of these possible resonances.

White himself does back away from the implication that we have to send everyone to space to experience the full Overview Effect. He suggests that this experience might be made available to others via satellite technology and better forms of approximating the experience through advanced simulation technologies. But such a wish still replicates what Brand already expressed in demanding a picture of the earth from space. Just as with that image, there is an element of the visual rhetoric that cannot lie in the seeing alone. The shift in perspective or position cannot be sufficient to induce the conceptual shift implied by the scalar change. If it was sufficient then all astronauts would have affirmed the Overview Effect and everyone who has been in an airplane, on a mountain, or seen the image of the earth from space would understand or at least sympathize with this Overview sentiment. In other words, we again have cause to examine further the relationship between the how the Overview Effect works in relation to normal modes of perception such that one might change position, see the new phenomenon and still not understand the implications of the shift.

Dreams of Transcendence I want to posit, however, that something is significant in this change in position such that

Brand and White both place so much hope in its propagation as an icon. Both Brand and White would have us understand that rather than one image among many, the image of Earth from space is a startling statement about perception and scale. Why? One angle of approach can be taken prior to examining the photo itself: what about the movement to space is new? How did we imagine that view prior to actually getting there and having it? Is our view of scale actually limited by our position on the planet?

Aside from the view from the mountain, our perspective of the world is usually rooted to a particular scale of perception, determined by the structure of our sensory organs and the distance to the objects we perceive. This is no new observation. In antiquity, the change of perception that occurs from large distances was a curiosity that generated a great deal of interest; it was already a question of concern for Plato and his contemporaries (see, for example,

Protagoras 356c—the reading of this passage will become important in Chapter 3). By the time of Plotinus, for instance, he is able to summarize five interpretations that had been put forward for why objects in the distance appear small. While the details of these possibilities are not immediately relevant here, Plotinus does note that this view was necessarily limited by the range of vision as located on the surface of the earth: “Of course we cannot take in the entire hemisphere at one glance; the eye directed to it could not cover so vast an expanse” (2.8.2). Prior to the twentieth century, we could only deal with the shift in scale in terms of perception in the limited view from mountains. As we have already seen, many important attributes about scale can be derived from the mountain view, but this view is necessarily limited. Most importantly, it is limited in range—you can only get so much of the world into view. The becoming-whole of moving up the scale is thus limited to the various objects in the world. Of course we can imagine projecting this relation to the Earth as a whole, but to actually sense—to view with normal perceptual capacities—the manifest unity of the whole planet and to grapple with this phenomenon would seem beyond the normal capacity of mankind on the surface of the earth.

Perhaps for this reason, Plotinus does not mobilize the shift in perception at a distance as an argument for how what we think is separate might be said to be unified, despite his persistent emphasis declaring the Cosmos a Unified One.29

29 There is a passage that is cited by Poole citing John Wilkins citing Caelius citing Plotinus having said: “If you did conceive your selfe to bee in some such high place, where you might discerne the whole Globe of the earth and water, 57

If we consider our earlier trip up the mountain, we can note a fundamental limitation to attempting to examine scale in this phenomenological way without extending further beyond the empirical data presented to the senses (ie, imagining the same relation at work on other objects without it being immediately necessary that this application is appropriate). The problem is that the objects that make up our whole phenomenal reality are still assumed to retain their objectness on another scale. We have not actually gone up high enough—to a large enough scale—for the recognizable objects to disappear. Even in the airplane, we still know most of these objects, still see them in a form that retains their semblance to the manifest presentation on the surface. In this way remaining on the ground is actually a limitation from the perspective of empirical examination since it tempts us to think of these objects in a relatively familiar way even as they are phenomenally absorbed into the unity of another object.

Such a limitation already presents a split in the way we are able to imagine scaling up prior to the actual perception of it, but which remains conflated now that we are able to discern the image using the usual visual mechanisms. On the one hand, the mapping enterprise naturally scales drawings according to known attributes of a landscape. Maps are inherently interested in the objects we live among and hold important: cities, landmarks, roads, rivers, and boundaries. If a map is to retain these attributes the map cannot scale up too far, otherwise it will lose the relevant information for which it was created. For the same reason, as the map scales up more, it will retain reference to these attributes as much as possible, the parts named, noted, and designated according to the needs of navigation, politics, exploration, etc. The view from the mountain is helpful in this regard but it serves to potentially confirm our kind of mapping, as

when it was enlightned by the Sunnes rayes, ’tis probable it would then appeare to you in the same shape as the moone doth now unto us” (Poole 50; Wilkins s149). Note that this passage is still only for relatively mundane observational ends rather than being central to any argument about the implication of the view. As far as I can tell, this citation does not appear in the Enneads. 58 does the structure of the watchtower, the rampart, and, later, the scouting plane. Map-making forms a kind of writing activity in which the attributes of the land are traced as they are traveled and then they are scaled, as accurately as possible, to retain reference to the land mapped.30

Hardly an imaginative projection, this scaling attempts to be accurate solely in comparative size while also refraining from attempting to capture what the surface would actually look like if we were able to see the whole terrain as if it were scaled to the size of a map or globe.

On the other hand, there is a long history of actually imagining this ascent to the heavens, projecting the minor scalar shift of the mountain to a larger, even cosmic range. In fact, such descriptions occur at central places in the imagining of humankind’s relationship to reality. Such instances attempt to rethink our understanding of ourselves and the planet not by scaling as one would to a map, but projecting the scalar experience to a far greater degree. Such a description of ascension occurs in Plato’s Phaedo to describe the soul’s ascent after death. A similar kind of description also exists in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad’s account of the journey of the soul after death (5.10). When not satirical, the aim of these kinds of imaginings are almost always mystical; they aim at imagining the ascension to a higher unity and striving to comprehend the nature of this unity so that one might become unified with it. Hence, in Plotinus we find descriptions such as this: “we ascend from air, light, sun- or, moon and light and sun- in detail, to these things as constituting a total- though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary.

Thence we come to the [kosmic] Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it.” (4.3.10) In more or less this form, the ascension to the cosmic Soul or Self recurs in mystical articulations both east and west as a means of assisting the mind in comprehending or accessing this larger scale of being.

30 For the relationship between cartography and civilization see Norman J.W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization. 59

But it is in Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” found at the end of his Republic, that we have the most direct imagination of going to the heavens and looking back to consider the Earth.31 Most descriptions of this sort are usually said to have been influenced or derived from this account.32

In Cicero’s work, the Roman General Scipio has a dream that takes him into the heavens where we he has a conversation with the already departed Africanus. The most important aspect of this work is the degree to which Scipio resists bringing his gaze away from the earth even as he is taken into higher and higher realms, leading Africanus to declare “Come!...how long will your mind be chained to the earth? Do you see into what regions you have come?” Despite more description of the wondrous view, Scipio still persists in focus on the earth: “‘I see’ said

Africanus, ‘that you are even now regarding the abode and habitation of mankind.’” Even now, after all the apparent vastness placed before him, Scipio still looks back at the earth. With this,

Africanus lays bare the import of this imagining the view from above: “For all the earth, which you inhabit…is a kind of little island surrounded by the waters of that sea…and yet though it has such a grand name, see how small it really is!...Yet, leaving these aside, you can certainly see in what a narrow field your human glory aspires to spread.” Here in the height of Roman

Imperialism is the declaration of the futility of empire, of the smallness of any possible actions which seek to dominate reality. The imperative, brought before a resistant Scipio, is that he leave these aside so that he might contemplate a far more vast view of the cosmos. When he looks back longingly to search for the familiar, he is shown how small and insignificant they are as further evidence that he ought to set aside the investment he has in these worldly affairs. This kind of view is thus antithetical to the mapping enterprise; it leaves behind the details of the surface for higher, deeper concerns.

31 Somnium Scipionis, Translated by W.D Pearman (1883). 32 See Cosgrove 27. 60

The focus changes once we are able to discern the nature of other planets more acutely due to improved telescopes; Kepler’s Somnium is occupied primarily with imagining the various atmospheres of distant planets.33 Such an account is more in line with Lucian’s A True Story satire in that it conflates the two modes of scaling: combining the mystical imagining of a larger view with the possibility of mapping. Lucian’s description of going to the heavens as an extension of colonial endeavors is easily transferred to science fiction once our moving to the heavens begins to consider worlds just like ours. It was in this context that the colonial impulses of American science fiction and dreams of space travel articulate space as the Final Frontier even before we make it into space.

However, the two aspects ought to remain distinguished since they involve two kinds of movements, both projections but for different ends and with different effects: one attempting to map the earth for the purposes of empire-making and the other enacting a visionary seeing of the

Cosmos as a unity. The conflation of the two, which has been incredibly common in modern readings of higher-scale views, has not only obscured our ability to understand transcendent views but has led us to dismiss the mystical on the account of the political. For example, in his influential archeology of representations of the earth, Dennis Cosgrove places the two elements together as if they are unavoidably entangled: “the history of such representations is complex, connected as closely to lust for material possession, power, and authority as to metaphysical speculation, religious aspiration, or poetic sentiment” (5). While he appears to separate out the metaphysical imaginings from the colonial and political uses of the imaginings of the earth,

Cosgrove repeatedly subordinates possible transcendence to the colonial desire. For example, in

33 See Kepler’s Somnium 61 considering the Stoics, Cicero, and Lucian—Seneca also has an account that imagines larger views to emphasize insignificance—Cosgove states:

“the dream of human flight sufficiently high to offer a global perspective is an enduring theme of stoic philosophy, in which seeing attains the dual sense of sight (noiein) as an empirical check against speculation, an assurance of truth in the description of the earth, and of vision, the capacity for poetic grasp beyond mundane or earthbound daily life, for a truer, imaginative knowledge. This is the implication of whole-earth literature from Cicero, Lucian, and Seneca which offers its male heroes their destiny in synoptic vision. Their telos combines an imperialistic urge to subdue the contingencies of the global surface with an ironic recognition of personal insignificance set against the scale of globe and cosmos” (53).

Cosgrove’s critique distinguishes the two uses of images of the earth only to conflate them. He ignores that all three writers were themselves trying to articulate the futility of a colonial enterprise. Even Lucian is satirizing the imagination that would take one into the moon for colonial ends. The implication is that the actual imagining of going to the heavens is antithetical to the colonial desire, not tied up in it. Cosgrove deems this recognition “ironic” but, except in the fact that Lucian’s A True Story is a satire, the message of all three is quite serious about the sentiments instilled by their visions. Cosgrove is missing the fundamental incongruity between two uses of the scaling up, and he is not alone in this failure.34 One might attempt to make use of scaling up to imagine a conquering of the world. This, however, is always done via maps and the drawing of lines on a surface of the planet otherwise devoid of these kind of boundaries. As is made famous by Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, the first thing to dissolve when we go to space is the national boundaries we hold to be so important.35 The role in these representations, imaginings, and, in the case of actually going to space, views of the earth from space see the

34 These conflations are often the same as the ones noted in footnote 5 above. An additional potent example can be found in Donna Haraway’s discussion of the “Land, ho!” effect in Simians, Cyborgs, Women 35 Schweickart, “No Frames, No Boundaries” 62 world as a whole and a unity as a function of the higher view itself, rather than a function of political unification.

The possibility of using the view from above for political or personal ends—and even the critique of it—is a temptation already present in the foundational narratives surrounding the visionary experience presented by scale (or, prior to the expansion of scale, the scalar experience of mystical vision). It is something that one must get over or beyond in order to look more fully into the reality of the unity presented by the transcendental vision. It is no coincidence then that

Jesus was taken to a mountain to be tempted by the expanse of land before him, which could be his. This vision is not unique either; the same temptations are given in the Katha Upanishad prior to revealing the secrets to question of death (discussed in Chapter 6). Why would the situation be different here? Indeed, the ability to take seriously our own colonial assumption of scale is itself not only problematic but fundamentally false is necessary for actually seeing the scaling up performed by our trip to space. It is no surprise that the pictures were generated in a highly colonial context under the pre-text of global domination. But it is also no small thing, however frequently it is cited, that the message coming back over the radio is that there are no indications of national preferences in space—the American Flag on the moon is a strangely futile gesture to the hope that there might be.

With this initial critique set aside, we can further note that regardless of how we imagined the Earth, until the mid-twentieth century, both mapping and visionary ascension could be dismissed as merely a projection beyond the usual capacities of human empirical experience. The projection by which one would map the planet could be said to be a capacity of reason, whereby one would adequately relate the map to the land it maps. Mystical transcendence was said to be beyond both reason and perception, into the intuitive and divine encounter with the transcendent

63 unity. But only in the twentieth century is the perceptual capacity in place whereby we might acquire the view of the Earth from above. For the first time, individuals are actually able to go to outer space and view, with normal perception, our normal reality from a wholly different visual perspective. Visual technologies allow us to vicariously take our vision to this perspective, both in photographs, videos, and, eventually, in real time via orbiting cameras.36 Previously, we have only been able to imagine or infer what this view would look like, with more or less success, with varying implications, and with more or less actual impact in the way we view our everyday life and reality.37 In actually going to this “higher” point of view—even vicariously through cameras and the accounts of others—we are able to use it as a reference point for our own existence. This movement constitutes a fundamental shift in the rhetorical power of the images and descriptions produced: now they are not said to take on the character of imagination or supposition but are as substantive as any kind of visual perception or technologically reconstructed vision. However we would like to critique both vision and film technology—and these critiques will become important as we proceed—the claim being made by these photos and astronaut accounts is on equal grounds with the claims already made by all of science grounded in empiricism. This is what the Earth looks like, we can say—not naively but in recognition that insofar as we want to invoke the authority of the empirical, this photo also claims these grounds.

Of course, only a few have gone to space to experience the actual view of the Whole Earth, particularly since you have to leave near-earth orbit to see the whole sphere. This only makes the images more important: here is a rare experience occurring for the first time in history not only

36 Despite occasional live broadcasts, no live feeds exist (at least in 2015) from space, although this would be a fascinating experiment in scalar consciousness. 37 For a history of what we thought the earth would actually look like see Poole, Earthrise. We can note that many attempts were made to visualize the various perspectives from space, most famously Chelsey Bonstell (see Henry and Taylor, “Re-thinking Apollo”) 64 in the sense of physically going to space but having the technological augmentation in place to convey the visual experience in such a form that it can be interpreted and encountered, at least in some mediated way, as if you went to space.

We must now attempt an exegesis of this image without falling into the clichés that characterized the rhetoric of space travel around the Apollo missions, which was full of somewhat humorous attempts to articulate the importance of our trip to space, so much so that astronauts were continuously chided and parodied for overusing the terms “beautiful” and

“fantastic” (see Tribbe 116, 133). Almost all astronauts noted that there was something spectacular about this experience, but much of this significance was overwritten by inflated expectations and the Cold War context of the space race—in other words, by the kind of colonial reading we already have come to expect of representations of the Earth. Likewise, attempts to articulate the vision using the available mystical terminology are not always clearly translatable to the image itself. Once the excitement of the moon landing settled, the conversation was so overwritten with the popular speculation and the images so mundane and ubiquitous that it has become difficult to seriously consider the experience. In looking at the previous imaginings of the Earth, we have hopefully cleared the ground of preconceptions we might have in reading the

Whole Earth image, even as we attend to the resonances of those two possible uses of imagining/imaging the Earth. If we are to prevent ourselves from over-emphasizing one reading over another or foreclosing other possible readings, we ought to turn now the photo itself.

Behold the Earth Below is the most famous photo of the set known in NASA as AS17-148-22727, known popularly as the Blue Marble photo (figure 1.1).

Figure 1-1: The “Blue Marble” image of earth from space. Courtesy of NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/135918main_bm1_high.jpg)

It was taken by the astronauts on Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, as they were on the way to the moon. Although similar photos were available prior to this photo (and since) this photo functions as our primary example for a simple reason: all photos that capture the full-phase

Earth (completely illuminated) prior or since were taken by space probes. While we may not care to grant particular authority to a human having been there, the reality of the eye next to the lens

66 already forecloses a particular kind of objection. It is productive to naively note the confluence of the human hands holding the camera, and the human eye looking through the lens, as the culmination of the faith in empirical, sensory examination. Here it is, using mostly the same tools we’ve always used: the Earth as a single object.

I grabbed the photo, as anyone might today, through an image search (“Blue Marble”) and immediately find a high resolution shot available to download. It only takes a second and here it is, covering the screen. Let us neglect, purposefully, whatever cultural choices or technological requirements went into producing this image. 38 Regardless of these “alterations,” this photo is what has been circulated, transmitted, remixed, and otherwise embedded in the mass of collective human consciousness. So, right now, let’s gaze into this photo as what it is: a powerful rhetorical apparatus for encountering scale.

The disc is surprisingly bright—luminescent on my screen, a swirling of white and blue. I feel almost immediately the sense of my own usual orientation as I recognize Africa and the

Arabian Peninsula. Glimmers of Asia appear on the top edges. I am looking directly into the gap between Africa and Madagascar—or slightly below it where the photo appears to be slightly brighter. The rest is ocean and cloud, although after a minute I realize that the big patch of white on the bottom of the disc is probably Antarctica. It appears as if the whole planet is reeling back away from me. But this is my normalization of the planet’s image withdrawing as my brain attempts to orient itself towards the image in a familiar way. These names, orientations, and even the shapes arise from the thousands of times that I have seen these areas mapped, overwritten with their names and borders and places. I am so saturated already with weather maps,

38 A great deal has been made of the technological requirements for these photos to be produced, particularly the reconstructed nature of them in the processing from film, the adding of color, and even the reorientation of them to fit our normal way of looking at the Earth. 67 geography lessons, and forays into Google Earth that my mind overlays it with those yellow lines and little names. I almost want to reach out and spin it, to search for the place where I am or would like to go.

But none of that is actually here in this photo before me. The longer I look, the less familiar it becomes. That strange textured brown and dark green slab is a strange exception to the white and blue hues that intermingle organically across the disc. The shape of it is no longer what I know as “Africa”—I can’t even see the edge of the land mass on the top left; I was adding it in, knowing it would end there. The longer I gaze, however, the more I have the feeling that even if this globe was oriented the way it often is now—North America or Europe full in the center with each continent clearly distinguished and with less emphasis on the ocean—I would still be able to let go of that mapping. These are, after all, only the shapes of land masses.

When I stare for a while at the bottom right section, even the designation of cloud and ocean drop away as my mind switches duck-rabbit style between the two, unsure which one is the surface and which one is not. When I let this gaze fall into the division between land and water, the continuity of the clouds produce a surprising depth. Feeling this depth, I let my perspective widen to take in the whole picture. As an experiment, I back away so that I can take it in fully at once. Apparent orb-ness manifests, the reality of the curvature that Brand already saw from his balcony. The edges are suddenly magnificently apparent, my eyes follow them around for several rotations, delighting in the contained contrast with the stark black. Astounded by the seeming void behind the Earth, I zoom in to see if it is indeed black. There are specks of light but these are hard to make out; it is unclear what they are. I know much has been made of this “void” and I can feel how it pushes me back to the image, demands that I look again.

Looking again, a consideration arises—no, a feeling invades my senses: what am I looking at? I look away for a moment, consider my desk, the scattered books, the light from the window, the trees outside blowing in the wind, my chair, my computer, my cup of tea—where is all of this? Even if this photo was centered on me here, in that splotch of brown and green shaped like the form I’ve come to know as “North America,” the truth is I perceive none of it. Or rather I know I perceive it, but—I seek for another means to say it but can only go to a scalar comparison to describe the experience—it is like saying I see the atoms in my hand when I look at my hand.

My mind reels at the suggestion, experiencing both scales at once for a moment. All of this here, is in that orb. And this orb is seamless, vibrant and clear in its spherical vastness. I feel, as if it is the voice of the earth itself, the refrain: In this multiplicity, the veritable detritus of matter scattered about your little room, do I contradict myself by showing myself as a single object?

Very well then, I contradict myself: I am large. I contain multitudes.

Whitman echoes in my head, the next line happens to be on my other computer screen: “I concentrate toward them that are nigh. I wait on the door slab.” The picture is still on my main screen, demanding its vastness. I become aware of it replicated on the desk before me, on a book, and another, and another, and another—even a business card someone found from a religious organization and passed along to me. This orb spins into an icon, each replication a kind of prayer to the vast capacity of this orb to contain such a myriad of beings even as it obliterates the distinctions and reveals itself whole. I feel suddenly as if I speak for the Earth, like my hands type for it, only thus as a kind of plea: “Listener up there! What have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening.” I can no longer tell if I am seeing the image or speaking to it—I sidle around its surface—I feel its emanation and feel how I emanate from it. I feel lost in its surface but still embedded, strikingly aware of my feet on the ground, of the pull

69 of gravity—the testament of the vastness of this presence. My mind wraps around this sphere, is contained in it, by it, for it.

I speak, the Earth speaks, Whitman speaks (across time):

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Like the first chirp of a bird, heard through a waking breath, a touch of agape—the effluent ananda (bliss)—penetrates my being and drops into the sight of the Earth as a Whole.

The Globe Unmapped

It is difficult—although not impossible—to have this kind of experience in Google Earth.

When you first open Google Earth you are presented with the same orb of blue, but now with more clear green and completely devoid of clouds. The whole image is framed, of course, by the program which provides a list of places, layers, and a tour guide offering a series of photos.

Disconcertingly, the nature of the satellite imagery gives the whole globe a plastic sheen, particularly since the image records the depths of oceans, resulting in a ridge-like formation more reminiscent of plastic globes than a living planet. Just as troublesome is the borders and labels, enabled by default, which shine bright yellow across all the land masses. If you grab it with your mouse and give it a tug, the globe will spin, just like the old plastic globes, but now not fixed to an axis. After a spin, my globe ends up centered off the west coast of Mexico, but

70 with North America flipped so that north is to the right. The view is mostly of ocean, streaked like clay. From this angle, North America looks like a monster attempting to gobble up the tip of

South America. I instinctively turn my head to try to correct it. Attempting to turn the globe back to a recognizable angle, I notice that the stars are moving with the globe. I zoom out and disable the border and labels. Here, the Earth looks like a more absurd little plastic glowing ball.

I manipulate the globe till I can see the Milky Way streaked along the left side of the earth. The shimmering of the Milky Way looks dull and distant. The Earth looks absurdly light, a bulk of the globe once again ocean, North America stage right as if it is trying to creep away.

But those yellow lines and words always invade the image. Everything is already so overwritten that it is hard to wade through the mapping impulse. Of course, Google Earth is made for the purpose of the mapping and manipulation in a way that the Whole Earth photo, however we manipulated it to produce it, never was. Of course, you could turn all these labels off and have a strange scalar experience of spinning and zooming as you’d like. In doing so, the basic gist of the scalar relations we have already set up would remain, including the need for shifts in perception in which familiar objects give way to less and less familiar objects until we have the planet whole. The relationship between here and the Whole Earth view is far more easily experienced by just doing it with the still photo since the zoom in with Google Earth gives you the impression that what it means to be here is the same as a simple aerial view. But here is the richness of the experience before you; only in lending that here up to the Whole Earth image does the sentiment we just tried to capture emerge.

In summary, we have to consider both our current typical phenomenal field of experience and yield up our mapping impulse in order for the Whole Earth image to reveal itself as a powerful scalar artifact. The reason for this should can now be clearly related to scale via two

71 more scalar principles. Adding to our first scalar principle (that unity is a function of scaling up), we add, second, that scaling requires a letting go of or a resituating of one’s normal means of mapping or breaking up the world. Here the Google Earth image actually performs this element more clearly when the screen must literally reload a new image when the zoom out reaches a particular point. But it was more acutely felt when, in continuing to dwell on the Whole Earth image, the familiar parts of the image dropped away. This dropping away exists as a kind of threshold effect—or phase transition—that is absolutely necessary when scaling (more on this in

Chapter 5).

Third, when dealing in terms of scale, unity does not annihilate multiplicity but rather easily contains it. Once stated, this principle seems obvious: the Earth contains all the objects around us—including us—and yet still appears to be one. The most ready objection to this principle is one that persists in speaking in terms of separate objects: but on the surface we still have a multiplicity of separate objects. This objection will be met fully in the next chapter which will take up the idea of wholeness and division more directly.

These scalar conclusions provide a response to the critique of views from above, including the Whole Earth photo and, in some cases, scale itself,39 as homogenizing, totalizing, elitist, or a neglect of those of those surface of the planet. We saw in the view from the mountain, that unity can be a function of scaling up but it was difficult to see the fullness of this unity until we left our usual perceptual field entirely and saw the unity of everything we live among

(including ourselves) demonstrated in the Whole Earth photograph. Now in the Blue Marble photo we have found that this unity celebrates diversity and multiplicity as a function of the

39 These critiques of scale mostly originate within Geography, especially through Marston et.al, “Human Geography without Scale,” but have also leaked into broader conversations. See Barney Warf, “Dethroning the View from Above: Towards a Critical Social Analysis of Satellite Ocularcentrism”; Tong, “Ecology without Scale: Unthinking the World Zoom”; Monica M. Brannon, “Satellite Imagery in the Age of Big Data.” 72 unity. Thus, returning to Whitman, we find that he is able to articulate the true value structure of a scalar view:

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

The beauty and majesty of the larger scale view does not annihilate the beauty of the lower scale but serves instead to enhance it as a function of a larger unity: every ant and every blackberry a part of brilliance in the higher view. The result of the view is not scorn for the beauty of this planet but it is a scorn for the vanity that would claim the small as if it is everything, particularly when placed up and against other things, whether on the same scale or not.

We thus arrive back at the two ways that we imagined the Earth from above prior to actually having it: on the one hand, for the sake of mapping, control, and colonial territorializing.

On the other, the mystical declaration of unity. We see them both in our reading of the Blue

Marble photo and saw how one had to be overcome by the other. The result was the yielding of our three scalar principles. The general historical and conceptual weight of this contrast can now become apparent.

On the one hand, there are political uses of what appear to be scalar shifts for the sake of political or personal ends. Such political uses almost always exclude certain elements by delimiting the field on which the scalar operation is formed. This version of scale was codified by Hobbes, who imagines the Commonwealth as being united by the monarch who is the head or central control formation of the larger structure. Hobbes exemplifies the colonial, the monarchical, and the fascist modes of interpreting scale, in which unity is something imposed and in which those entities within this unity are controlled and homogenized or else suppressed

73 and made subordinate. This political view of scale supposes unity to be something that must be done, forged, or created. It thus inevitably involves a covering over, eradication, or homogenization in relation to the principles held by those who aim to subdue the diversity to create unity. Furthermore, it supposes that it can place this diversity under a single individual, committee, or, in any form, representatives which will act as the head. This kind of consolidation of power is literally a misnomer of the same synecdotal kind discussed earlier. Even when everyone in a nation (a concept already limiting itself to both humans and to a limited set of humans) grants power to a particular individual or individuals, the multiplicity still remains. The reality of their unity exists in a different form, ultimately out of reach by the fact of it being too large. We should be wary of the claim that these individuals have the capacity to manipulate aggregate behaviors of individuals; this is an artifact of the capacity to work on the average that makes use of and then covers over, in a sly rhetorical maneuver that usually takes the form of synecdoche, the natural aggregation and averaging formed by considering things together (i.e., in going up the scale). Such claims to the capacity to manipulate whole populations extends the

Hobbesian view of scale. When extended in age of propaganda we can note that this concept of scalar tyranny is essential for many forms of fascism, Stalinist communism, and neoliberal capitalist structured inequality. Each of these forms takes one idea of the higher scale in order to subordinate others to that structure (the ideal race, the head of the party, the capitalist entrepreneur). What actually happens is a far more complex structure of interaction of multiplicity carrying out larger scale actions via smaller scale efforts which is then claimed by a unifying term (nation, state, church, corporation) usually for the advantage of a few who are consciously or otherwise capitalizing on this rhetorical maneuver.

In 1945, perhaps the height of this intensification of this fundamentally illusory scaling,

Aldous Huxley put the contrast in full relief: “the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels” (P. Phil

11). The mystical view of scale is the same as our view of scale articulated here and exemplified so beautifully by Whitman’s work. Thus we have, on the other hand, the truly scalar view which sees unity as a function of a widening of perspective. In this view, wholeness and unity is already the reality behind the diversity and all of the advantages gained from the higher scale view have to do with the reality of this unity, which places what appears to be separate into connection. In his poetic scaling, Whitman understood that the aggregate was already in existence as a proliferation of individuals. This is the essence of his political treatise Democratic Vistas, which was absolutely incomprehensible to those working under a Hobbesian view of scale. In fact, the whole purpose of that treatise was to work out the political implications of this alternative view of scale:

“Let us see what we can make out of a brief, general, sentimental consideration of political Democracy, and whence it has arisen…as an aggregate, and as the basic structure of our future literature and authorship. We shall, it is true, quickly and continually find the origin-idea of the singleness of man, individualism, asserting itself and cropping forth, even from the opposite ideas. But the mass or lump character, for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully weighed, born in mind, and provided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of Individualism. The two are contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them” (15).

We do not have space here to consider Whitman’s reconciliation for this apparent paradox but need not do so now given the solution already evident in the lines of poetry cited earlier. The only appropriate political structure is one which acknowledges the scalar principle whereby diversity is nurtured by unity as a function of scale.

To go further than this would be to launch into a political treatise that would lose sight of our fundamental question of scale. It would be, in essence, to remain simply at this limited set of

75 scales—between humans and the Earth—and to neglect the further questions and features revealed from a continued journey to higher and higher scales.

Scaling Beyond Metaphor Yaakov Jerome Garb’s essay in the 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review, cited briefly at the outset of our examination, contains an epigraph from the linguist George Lakoff whose work on metaphor exemplifies the more or less dominant understanding of how signs and language function current in academic circles: “metaphors may create realities for us…a metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophesies. …the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.” In a remarkable way, this articulation has performed a kind of synecdoche as dangerous at the one we have just discovered: granting metaphor the place of ruler or determinant of experience. The representation (the metaphor) is given the power to create reality, as the structure under which we will operate. This position is not exceptional; it is a common move of those operating under the “linguistic turn” to replace or at least privilege the metaphorical or linguistic as somehow determining our understanding of the world. While symbols, pictures, and metaphors undoubtedly have a relationship to our understanding of the world, there is something strange about this approach. This approach presents a difficulty for understanding the very thing it is attempting to place center stage: the rhetorical power of signs for shaping our understanding. To grant the image absolute structuring power we would have to assume that we fill in the metaphor—the Whole Earth image—for our understanding of the

Earth—the actuality of the entire planet. However, the picture of the Whole Earth is not the entirety of the planet even if it shows the planet in its wholeness aspect. Nor does anyone

76 mistake the photo for the actual planet. To be clear, neither Lakoff nor Garb are claiming that the metaphor creates the being of the thing we call “Earth.” Nonetheless, the assumption that the picture of the earth, as a metaphor, “creates the reality for us” is to reverse the priority of the role of the image and of the phenomena it supposedly structures.

Here is the problem as we have already seen it here: if the image of the earth from space is a metaphor—“a way of describing one entity in terms of another” as Garb puts it—then this image is assumed to structure our experience of the earth in terms of an image we have of it. This prior structuring also implies a kind of arbitrariness: there could be another image, another metaphor that would structure our relationship to reality differently, but with equal legitimacy.

Finally, this prior structuring power given to metaphor permits us to look at the use of the metaphor as arising from image or figure itself rather than our interpretation of it. That is, what has been cut out is the way we encounter the image, read the metaphor, and make use of it. In the end, this reading grants the power solely to the image, figure, or photograph itself rather than to a particular way that the image can be encountered. Instead, the power of any image or figure must come from the interpretive encounter with the structure found in the figure. Any figure, image, or metaphor does contain a structure, but this structure plays out for an interpretant, who has the capacity to encounter this structure in different ways, depending on how the image is approached. Scale a meta-sign telling us to approach an image in a particular way: this image is the image of your whole reality seen from far away. If we read the image as structuring our understanding of the world, there is no room for this meta-sign.

To make room for the meta-sign of scale, we can view the picture as a means of structuring our attention towards an apparent reality in such a way that guides our way of encountering it, while still necessitating an attending to the means of interpretation. If we do not

77 cut out the role of the interpretant, we can note that every image or figure occurs for someone as a particular way of paying attention to the world. By “attention” here we simply mean awareness directed toward phenomenon in a particular way. To think of language and images in this way would be to note how they direct us towards phenomena: I say “look!” and your attention goes in the direction I point. But this is not just a speech-act; when I say “The sky looks beautiful,” you might turn your head to look at the sky, but you will then pay attention to the sky in reference to concepts of beauty, since the sentence directed our attention in that way. But the sentence did not determine how you view the sky or whether or not you also think it beautiful. Images provide structure by directing our attention, but we cannot give any image or figure sole power over this capacity to attend to the world. The image or linguistic phrase assists or directs our attention for the process of navigating or orienting ourselves to the phenomena before us without necessarily filling in for that whole process.

In attending to the image in this way, the image becomes not just another metaphor but a powerful technology of attention. This view allows us to attend to the ways in which the image holds the possibility of structuring our attention without suggesting that the picture automatically renders the interpretation in one way or another. Curiously, the metaphorical approach claims to open us to alternative interpretations with the Earth from space being the “current metaphor” among many possibilities that can structure our understanding of reality: “the photographic image is not the reality of the whole Earth, but only one possible interpretation of it” (Garb 18).

But the alternatives here are not within the image itself since that image is said to already have given and structured possibilities within itself: the photograph is said to already be an interpretation. In noting that the picture already is a particular interpretation of the planet implies that the photo itself contains a definite, pre-set interpretation or series of interpretations—all of

78 which are said to be in the photo. This reading thus actually limits what this image is as a means of structuring our attention and avoids a larger conversation about how we encounter that image.

It also forecloses any possibility of noting when interpretations of an image add something to the image that is not necessarily implied by it. In other words, if an image can or has been read in a particular way or used for particular ends, we are tempted to say that the image itself prompted those readings. But this is not always clearly the case and is to hold the image responsible for the interpretation of it.

Most importantly, approaching the photo in this way leaves little room for examining the variety of ways one might encounter the photo according to its relationship to the phenomena it supposedly structures (the Earth itself). In the metaphoric view, the role of the critic becomes the task of merely dissecting what is supposedly contained within the image—what it forces us to see. But in terms of means of structuring attention, the critic can begin to say something about the possibilities of interpretation. The critic can then say, as we have here, look again—notice this other element in the photo that you did not see before. Set aside X and Y assumptions about it and consider it in Z way. Indeed, scale is one such means of navigating that relationship beyond the merely metaphorical since it adds to the photo a notation that puts it in an intimate relationship to other phenomena. What if you really consider what this image is showing us?: this is all of us, everything you know, seen together. To read the Blue Marble photo in terms of scale is contemplate what the image is in relation to what we usual experience and talk about on our scale. But this is not always present in all uses of the whole Earth photographs, even if it is always underlying the fundamental power and importance granted to those photos.

Consider the results of the metaphorical position for Garb: “this article discusses those qualities of the whole Earth image which most environmentalists do not seem to be aware of, and

79 the ways in which this image is being used to cultivate attitudes that are destroying the Earth.

For this banner of perspective and insight is also—just below the surface—a banner of alienation and escape from the Earth” (18). Garb goes on to list the objections which lie “just below the surface,” which are all critiques we commonly hear about the view from above: it is a privileged view, emphasizes the “out there” over the here, is a presumptuous “gods-eye” view, gives up on the Earth as our home, produces a homogenizing understanding of the diversity on the planet, allows us to neglect the being in “nature” that we feel on the surface, contains the earth in a single object, becomes an object of domination or symbol of victory, and ultimately allows the

Earth to be further trivialized and exploited. It is undoubtedly true that the image could be used to these ends or read in these ways. However, our reading of the image suggests that, in fact, these readings and uses of the images are not attending to the image itself in the aspects of what it is actually showing about the relationship we have to the planet. That is, none of these readings attend to the scalar relationship the photo helps us pay attention to. As our examination has hopefully made clear, the power of the image that would make it an icon of wholeness and peace does not derive from these possible appropriations. Rather, such power arises from almost the exact opposite possibility. The image can allow us see what all of this looks like from far away; we can reorganize our way of handling the world around us in response to this way of paying attention to both scales at once. Attending to the scalar relation demonstrated by the image eradicates most of the very assumptions and positions in Garb’s list.

In saying this we are not trying to claim some sort of “right” reading of the image but rather attend to the source of the rhetorical power the image has for assisting us in encountering ourselves and the world. If one derives a sense of victory, homogenization, privilege, etc. from the image, one has hardly encountered or dwelt with the image. Why can we say this? Rather

80 than being “below the surface,” such readings are the most surface level readings possible since they encounter the photo as if it is just another object. In other words, they see the image of the

Earth from space and attend to it as if it is just like any object we have around us. But to understand and view the picture in this way is to completely neglect the scalar nature of the image. The image, while still an image, is not just an image of another object like these trees, cars, books, and people around us, but is an image of what all those things look like when viewed together. In order to access this scalar view in the image, one has to consider it deeply as it relates to our usual phenomena around us. Such a relationship is not immediately apparent since the image looks so evidently object-like. But the power of the photo comes from its scalar elements, which these other interpretations neglect or fail to follow out. We can thus call these uses “appropriations” because they all attempt to claim the authority and power of the scalar image without encountering it.

Brand placed so much hope in this image precisely because of these scalar aspects. He did not, perhaps, anticipate the degree which the image might not automatically instill the sense of wholeness. Such an omission is understandable; once one experiences the scalar relation it is apparent, even obviously contained within the image. Once understood this way, these other readings of the image become surprising: have you even seen the image? When we attend to the scalar elements of the image, we see that to say that the Whole Earth image is one metaphor or interpretation among many is functionally equivalent to saying that the Whole Earth is one object among many. To the contrary, the photo demonstrates what happens when you consider the object of objects. To both see and feel this requires that you lend to the image one’s understanding—that is, pay attention to it in its scalar aspects—and be reworked by it in order for it to both function rhetorically and for it to be scalar. Taking the photo as a technology of

81 attention permits us to consider how the photo assists us in navigating the apparent phenomenon here before us. This is why we said our exegesis above was phenomenological: it aimed to encounter the being of the image, as a phenomenon built for referencing ourselves towards other phenomenon, in relation to how it relates to the phenomenon that show themselves in one way on the surface of the Earth and another from space.40

To be fair, Garb’s concern over these alternative uses of the image arose from what he saw as a defilement of the image. In a small account found in the side-bar at the beginning of the article, Kevin Kelly recounts a conversation in which Garb flips through a series of appropriations and remixes of the Whole Earth image, many coming from mundane or even disturbing sources. Frustrated over the defilement of this “totem,” Garb goes on to write this essay. But this feeling is not unusual but arises anywhere there are totems for a simple reason: they have power. And anywhere there is an image of power, some will try to take advantage of it for reasons that have nothing to do with what gave it the power to begin with. Such power only works as long as we fail to encounter the totem itself. Hence, Huxley’s noting of the political

“ersatz” of mystic scaling did not lead him to discard or fail to use the same kind of language that had been appropriated for the sake of incredible atrocities. In the end, the image of the earth is never defiled even if it is neglected and not understood. Likewise with scale itself, which is always before us, always able to be encountered. Indeed, the remainder of this work is nothing more than an attempt to continue to clear the obstacles to just such an encounter.

Do you not think the mystic feels the same who, upon encountering a deep feeling of union that transforms her very being, looks about her and finds that the very descriptions, images, and practices meant to help direct our attention towards these same experiences being

40 For the philosophically minded, we can note that this definition of phenomenon and phenomenological is derived from Heidegger’s outline of a phenomenological approach given in Being and Time. 82 used for all kinds of ends, most of which miss the mark41 and some of which are completely atrocious? Do such appropriations void the experience or the symbols meant to help guide others to them? Or rather, are these appropriations merely a powerful demonstration of the need to attend carefully to our means of encountering these images? Such an approach opens up the possibility for analysis—this loosening of what is contained in our encounter. In this view, analysis becomes a means of pushing into the image our preconceptions, understandings, and impressions and allowing the image to work on them, shift them, and transform them. It is a lending-oneself to the image. This lending-oneself is the prerequisite for scaling since it allows us to truly place the image in scale with our being. Once done, the rhetorical weight of the image reveals itself. We will discuss this more fully in chapter 4.

The argument here is not that one must read the Whole Earth image in this scalar way but rather that the power of the Whole Earth image is its possibility as an icon for contemplating a scalar relation and, in the end, it is this scalar element that gives it is rhetorical power as an image of our world. However, to contemplate scale is to experience the unifying function found in the three principles articulated here and explicated through the encounter with that image.

These conclusions are said to be an “experience” simply because they are not immediately obvious; the traveling-through the relation—from Earth to here to Earth—must be undertaken for the power of the image to manifest.

Querying Cosmic Consciousness The experience of scale described clarifies the nature of the experience that White calls the “Overview Effect” and that Brand attempts to capture in his desire for the Whole Earth

41 The word “sin” comes from an archery metaphor in Greek (hamartanó) implying “to miss the mark” (eg John 5:14: “Behold, thou are made whole: sin (hamartanó) no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee) 83 image. If we consider the necessary elements of the experience we can note that the change in physical location that produces the image of the Earth and a perceptual “Overview” are neither necessary nor sufficient for inducing the experience. Instead, the physical change holds a potential to amplify the rhetorical weight whereby one would be forced into the scalar relation.

The reason for this is simple: both the literal moving away of the Overview and the capturing of the image of the Earth function via the usual physical and perceptual mechanisms that we usually hold the most authoritative: vision, eyes, and the technological reproduction of those things as evidence insofar as they are properly calibrated to match our usual perceptual capacities.

Despite the critiques of the authority of these capacities, the image and the Overview are both at least as legitimate as any kind of empirical seeing. Indeed, they demonstrate a great deal about what has always been meant by “transcendent” and “unity” without what seems to be like an appeal to something other than the empirical.

Yet, this “something other than the empirical” is still present in the traveling-through we have performed, in the pausing on the image to allow yourself to experience its scalar statement.

This reflective element already implies that one might experience this kind of scalar relation without such an image present, by contemplating God, the Cosmos, or any other kind of

Absolute. Even the view on the mountain would suffice if the viewer projects the scalar relation beyond that perspective and gives-way in the higher view the seeming “objectness” of the smaller view around us.

Whitman himself, in his persistent navigation of this kind of scaling, can induce in the reader this effect without having the adjunct of the Whole Earth image but still through a kind of contemplation on the scaling of things already present within empirical experience, as we saw earlier in his invocation of grass and atoms. In fact, Whitman was acknowledged as a mystic in

84 his own time by a group of followers who saw him as a kind of guru. Among Whitman scholars the presence of these followers has been almost completely dismissed or trivialized—even reemerging interest in these “Whitmanites” only serves as a historical curiosity that is supposed to assist in elucidating historical facts about Whitman.42 Nonetheless, Whitman’s invasion into our description of the Whole Earth earlier already indicates that there is something legitimate and powerful in these undeniable elements of his scalar account of reality.

By far the most impactful of these “followers” was the Canadian physician Richard

Maurice Bucke, who wrote the first authorized biography of Whitman. Bucke became known internationally for his book Cosmic Consciousness, a book whose importance and impact has been largely forgotten, despite the fact that the book and the term show up persistently in conversations about religion, spirituality, and science around the turn of the nineteenth century and into the mid-twentieth century. References to Bucke appear in central locations in William

James, Huxley, and Underhill.43 Two of India’s greatest mystics in the twentieth century encountered the term; Aurobindo uses the term “cosmic consciousness” in multiple writings44 and Ramana Maharshi was asked about Cosmic Consciousness even on his mountain near

Tiruvannamalai, India.45 The Russian mathematician turned mystic P.D. Ouspensky addresses him as does the American Franklin Merell-Wolff, also a mathematician turned mystic.46 The reason for this widespread exposure is not insignificant: Cosmic Consciousness is, in many respects, the first extensive comparative study of mystical experience produced in America; it is

42 See special issue in Whitman Quarterly Review (14.2 1996), esp. the editors note by Ed Folsom. This response is often made of those who clearly fit in the mystical tradition—one might also look to responses to William Blake and Dante, both of whom are almost always included in lists of mystics and perennial philosophers. 43 James, Varieties 61, 294; Huxley Perennial Philosophy 63; Underhill, Mysticism 253 44 See for example, the poem “Cosmic Consciousness” and a section of the same title found in his Letters on Yoga, 1070- 1089. 45 Maharsi Be As You Are 20. 46 Ouspensky, Tertium Organon Chp. XXIII; Merrell-Wolff, Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Experience and Philosophy, 12, 23, 69 85 also quite interested in invoking the language of science to describe the experience. 47 Both of these aspects arise from Bucke’s description of his experience of Cosmic Consciousness, which permits him to conduct a comparative study of similar experiences and provides a reference point from which he can speak of this mode of consciousness in evolutionary terms. Cosmic

Consciousness can and has served as an appropriate term for an explication of the mystical experience that relates, in some form, to the discursive practices of science. The primary difficulty of addressing Bucke’s work replicates the difficulty we have already encountered in scaling the Whole Earth: navigating the spiritual aspects without dismissing the scientific aspects or the reverse depending on one’s inclination. Bucke can thus be our final clarification in this arc examining the Whole Earth image since, before the image was even produced, Bucke makes a connection between scale and the experience of unity and points towards the possibilities of such an experience for personal transformation congruent with both science’s expanded modes of describing and certain primary elements of spiritual experience.

As with all those we are deemed “mystics” in this study, the core of Bucke’s realization is an encounter or event: an opening of view to a new, higher, different, or alternative Reality which reorients the individual and reveals that his usual existence is in some way unreal, superficial, or illusory. The encounter shakes the budding mystic from their usual perspective, reorienting them to what is intuitively felt to be the divine, and opening to the possibility of a higher realm towards which they can aspire. The nature of distinctiveness of this experience is what allows Bucke to engage in a comparative study of others who have has a similar experience. Bucke experienced cosmic consciousness at the age of the thirty six, after an evening

47 In regards to this first aspect, we should note—lest we think that this is simply an artifact of a Western colonial mindset—that it was Ramakrishna and his student Vivekananda that produced the first systematic comparison of mystical experience that assumed a common core to all spiritual traditions. Thus, those who would like to critique Bucke’s mysticism on postcolonial grounds must do so equally with Ramakrishna. 86 with a friend spent reading the Romantic poets in conjunction with Whitman’s “Leaves of

Grass.” On his ride home, he was contemplating the topic of conversation and poetry when an experience arose: a “flame-colored cloud” enveloped him which he quickly realized “was within himself.…Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of heaven” (8). This taste of heaven was not merely a good feeling. The experience produced a realization that reorganized his way of understanding reality:

Like a flashe there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe. He does not come to believe merely; but he sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the self conscious mind seems made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise—is in very truth a living presence. He sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of nonliving substance, they are in reality specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life. (61)

This glimpse of the higher reality is felt to be the unveiling of intimate knowledge of a vastness on a level beyond our normal limited state of mind. The cosmos suddenly feels saturated with awareness, life, and consciousness. This description is found again and again with the experience of mystics of incredibly diverse backgrounds—we’ll see it again from the science fiction writer

Philip K. Dick in Chapter 2, the Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell in chapter 3, from St.

Augustine in Chapter 4. The accounts are surprisingly written in nearly the same terms: some higher truth about reality shows itself. In the process, the whole understanding of the cosmos as dead, disjointed, fragmented, and lonely is dispelled.

The term “cosmic consciousness” is already an explicit connection between the scale, science, and the realization, providing a means of fleshing out the content and justification for the Overview Effect through a scalar shift. Following the rhetorical mode of late nineteenth

87 century science, Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, discusses the encounter from a Darwinian perspective, speaking of the realization as an awakening of life to a deeper comprehension of itself by acquiring a higher perspective. His definition of cosmic consciousness connects the vision directly to a sense of order pervading the universe: “The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe” (2). Partially in contrast with traditional religious articulations, Bucke seems to prefer the term “cosmos” for its compatibility with a largely physical view of the universe (we will consider this term more closely in chapter 5). However, Bucke does not refuse the religious connotations of cosmic consciousness but reworks them in the light of the experience, going so far as to declare that “the Savior of man is Cosmic Consciousness” which he explicitly declares as the coming of Christ to the individual who experiences it (5). Following on much of the experiential mystical tradition, Bucke transforms religion into an event and a perception, an opening of consciousness to the actuality of the order and life of the Cosmos.48

The content of Bucke’s change in consciousness connects it directly to cosmos and the scalar view we are interested in here. Bucke describes the vision as an insight into the dynamic nature of the universe revealed as a whole:

“Especially does he obtain such a conception of THE WHOLE, or at least an immense WHOLE, as dwarfs all conception, imagination or speculation, springing from and belonging to ordinary self consciousness, such a conception as makes the old attempts to mentally grasp the universe and its meaning petty and even ridiculous.” (61)

In the encounter with the vastness, what shines through is the sense of the universe as a whole, an immense and unbroken totality that makes all mental content (“conception, imagination, or

48 Today religious studies scholars often follow Wayne Proudfoot (Religious Experience) claim that William James—or perhaps Schopenhaur—was responsible for making religion into a kind of experience, but of course we can see that Bucke already had this element. In fact, this argument against religion as an experience, which suggests that it only recently acquired this nature, can only be made if one ignores the entirety of mystical traditions as they exist in every major religion. 88 speculation”) downright comic (“petty and even ridiculous”). In cosmic consciousness, the visionary sees a larger perspective, in which the elaborate sets of differences and distinctions and understandings that make up their world pale in contrast to the overwhelming view of the unity within which the multiple makes its appearance.

The opening to cosmic consciousness comes when one becomes aware of a transcendent view whereby one can reorient oneself to the everyday experiences so central to one’s self- consciousness. What appears to be fragmented appears whole just as the separation between the manifold objects on the ground are dissolved when one travels to space. The experience provides a new higher, more inclusive reference point towards which the newly initiated individual can move. This higher view cleanses him of the sense that this usual view is the totality of existence through a disturbance of the normal field of existence. In clarifying this movement, Evelyn

Underhill says of the experience that “it is a disturbance of the equilibrium of the self, which results in the shifting of the field of consciousness from lower to higher levels, with a consequent removal of the centre of interest from the subject to an object now brought into view: the necessary beginning of any process of transcendence” (113). Here lies the great value that both

White and Brand are trying to invoke: the transformative acquisition of a higher point of view that opens you to a new realty that unifies what appeared previously to be fragmented. This is not just one effect among many: it cuts to the core of our understanding of reality and opens us up to a more glorious understanding of the Whole of being. In being able to physically demonstrate something of this transcendent view, the Whole Earth image derives its power from being able to more easily—but not necessarily—induce this kind of transcendence.

Scaling Methodus

At this point, while we have articulated some of the scalar effect of unity and the implications of this unity for scaling, it is understood that we have yet to articulate the value of this kind of view as well as its place as both necessary and fundamental not only to the view of the Earth but for Being more generally. In part, these claims are universal and fundamental because they are about what it means to invoke the universal. This is itself the most startling thing about Bucke’s articulation about cosmic consciousness: his ability to articulate an experience about the transcendent universal absolute and, in doing so, actually apply it to others.

Thus, much of Bucke’s book looks at various figures throughout history who have claimed spiritual visions and articulated cosmic consciousness as the common thread. Underhill and

Huxley are following in Bucke’s footsteps in their comparative studies of mysticism and the perennial philosophy. It is this element that most bothers scholars who read Bucke or Underhill or Huxley: how can they claim that all of these various spiritual leaders experienced the same thing?

The answer is already assisted by our principles of scale: when one takes on a transcendent view, the seeming diversity is revealed to take a unified form. In cosmic consciousness, the perennial philosophy, or the mystic experience one is carrying out a conceptual analog to our physical movement out into space: in considering these spiritual traditions together, a common core emerges. But to state it this way reverses the way it happens for Bucke: he does not look at all the spiritual traditions and then experience cosmic consciousness. Rather, he experiences it and then sees that all the spiritual traditions have this common core. The reason for this again fits with our understanding of scale: he had to experience that higher point to be able to see these features. Thus, while the generalizing of cosmic consciousness initially appears to be a conceptual analog to a physical movement, both

90 are clearly tied up in each other: since the vision is about scale, it also permits you to perform the conceptual scaling. The universal is shown to take on the same attributes we already articulated: there is an experience under which one can move away from the everydayness and diversity of religious and scientific practices and consider together the humans encounter with the cosmos. In doing so, a universal is revealed that is already about what it means to be universal: a unity behind the diversity that also reveals what unity is. Seeing the great value in this method,

Huxley and Underhill both undertake largely editorial and expository moves in placing together the mystics from across the centuries on every continent. This method aims to reproduce, in much the same way the Whole Earth photo does in comparison to the mystical encounter—that is, from the other direction—the realization by showing the landscape first before you really see the perspective from which this confluence occurs.

Indeed, Bucke’s project is only possible due to the increasingly globalized and technologized world he lived in, such that he would have available the diversity of texts to which he could compare his experience; the translation and distribution of spiritual texts in the eighteenth century brought together, for the first time, a whole catalog of texts that permit Bucke to contemplate their resonances and grant them the unifying term cosmic consciousness. When

Blake declared a century earlier that “All religions are One” he did not go further in explicating how and why, given that the view of all of these texts was not available even if the intuition was.49 William James is missing the other element: he is like those who would critique the

Whole Earth photo without considering the source of its power. Famously, he excludes himself from the mystical circle in the beginning of his chapter on mysticism: “for my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand”

49 The book “All Religions are One” was his earliest lithograph, see William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books 91

(290). In foreclosing himself from the experience of the transcendent, James’s study differs significantly from Bucke, Underhill, and Huxley in that, although he admits that mystic experience may be the core of religion, it is just one consideration among many. Hence, James’ book is about the variety of religious experience while the others aim to show the common core:

James’s book deals not with unity but with the diversity of derivative practices regardless of their source or purpose. Bucke, Underhill, and Huxley, on the other hand, all aim to explicate this core experience and to actually adopt a wider-scale view of the terrain at hand. In this way, their methodology is as scalar as the concepts that come out of their explanation. Such an understanding also avoids the primary objection to their work: that they neglect the diversity of articulations and practices and homogenize in a violent way, this diversity under one view.50 It should be clear how this objection is already navigated by our scalar arguments made earlier: the diversity still exists and, in fact, benefit from being attended to but only if one seeks to acquire and dwell with that transcendent unity under which they already function.

This scalar methodology permits scholars to make some broad statements that may seem strangely general. The most common move is to look past any particular terminology and to note the shared spirit of the mystic union. For example, Underhill is able to easily move from God, to pantheism, to philosophical language with no qualms about the differences: “Whether that end be called the God of Christianity, the World-soul of Pantheism, the Absolute of Philosophy, the desire to attain it and the movement towards it--so long as this is a genuine life process and not an intellectual speculation--is the proper subject of mysticism” (xiv-xv). Such a move is justified because the unity revealed between the spiritual articulations is itself the movement towards unity. Indeed, mystics themselves are the most insistent about the universality of their spiritual

50 For a summary of some of these arguments from religious studies see Huston Smith, “Is there a perennial philosophy?” 92 message. For example, Underhill quotes Saint-Martin as saying that “all mystics…speak the same language and come from the same country. As against that fact, the place which they happen to occupy in the kingdom of this world matters little” (78). Bucke’s generalizing of

Cosmic Consciousness is thus not surprising when considering the various mystical traditions.

The fact that a similar articulation was occurring at the same time in India through Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda is no coincidence.51 As our view of the world has gotten larger and more clearly dispersed, the possibility of taking this scalar methodology has increased. Indeed, it is what makes this very study possible, so long as we equally attend to the scalar principles as they emerge from our studies across time and space.

Undoubtedly, this same kind of scalar methodology applies to many topics that do not have to do directly with union with the divine. I will leave it for future work to untangle its implication for our widening scales of inquiry since, once again, we must limit ourselves for the sake of continuing to keep our attention on scale itself. Instead, we can keep our eye on this widening perspective, taking in the unity being revealed, so that we might clarify further the nature, scope, and value of this viewing from above. Following Brand, White, and Bucke we can venture further to consider the degree to which a view from above might actually permit a positive change and, if so, what this change will entail.

51 Richard King puts forward the reading that Ramakrishna was merely taking up Western notions of universalism and making use of it to generalize Vedanta as the core of Hinduism (69). Such a reading again reverses the role of experience and articulation and privileges the political reading as primary. Undoubtedly, once such a claim is in place some will interpret or make use of it in this self-proclaiming manner, but this does not mean that such an endeavor is always a kind of proselytizing. Indeed, why would it make sense as a self-promotion to declare that all religions are one? 93

Chapter II: Wholeness before Fragmentation

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and—as a special class within the whole—mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition of any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral, system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment…by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that. - Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World (28)

It is proposed that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and ‘broken up’ into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent. …If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. - David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (xi)

Such things are done, when you are forsaken, O fountain of life, who are the sole and true creator and ruler of the universe, and when by personal pride, a false unity is loved in the part. - St. Augustine, Confessions (47)

Dissecting Wholeness To scale is to break-down, a literal dissection of apparent reality. In scaling we decompose, allowing these bodies to give way to cells, and these cells to atoms. At least this is how we think when we go to smaller scales. But larger scales also entail a breakdown. The nature of this breakdown is actually far more difficult to grasp and far more significant for our

94 self-comprehension. The reason for this is simple: the breakdown we experience in contemplating larger scales is not of things that appear to be separate but the breakdown of the division between those things. We live among division; it produces our world of useful objects.

Going down the scale, at least a little ways, we find that we can discern with some ease, a set of clearly divided objects. Here be cells and atoms, the building blocks of bodies and objects. We are not particularly threatened by the fragmentation this entails because we still can set the microscope aside and see a world of familiar objects before us. These are still intact. In fact, this knowledge of the smaller scales even promises to help us understand these objects, what makes them up, how they function, and what they are for.

As we saw in chapter one, however, if we begin to move up the scale, it is not fragmentation but wholeness that manifests. What we think is divided is shown to be one. This movement up the scale opens up the possibility of Wholeness that forces us to question the usually divided appearance of things. Once the possibility of Wholeness is opened, however, the characterization just given of scaling down itself is open to be questioned. Does scaling down actually reveal more division and fragmentation? To scale down, we do indeed divide an object that appears to be already an apparent whole. When we do so, space seems to appear where there was none before, allowing us to distinguish between objects. Or at least this is how we imagine the process, both in our representations of cells and atoms, and in our way of speaking about them. Indeed, in some way we must speak in terms of objects in order for us to map these lower scales through a scientific description of how cells, atoms, quarks, or whatever else are organized. But this habit is already instantiated out of our normal way of encountering the world as a manifold organization of objects to be handled and manipulated according to their use. We have difficulty applying that same habit to larger scales because to move to a larger scale is to be

95 exceeded. As we saw in our consideration of the falsity of synecdochal claims, even as we distinguish larger objects, these objects become in some way inaccessible because they are larger than what a homo sapiens is and does. Scaling up thus pushes at this habit of distinguishing objects while scaling down tends to indulge it.

At least until we scale down enough that things start to get strange. Despite the fact that relativity and quantum theory have been around for the last century, the implication of these theories for this question of wholeness are rarely taken seriously. Nonetheless, David Bohm, the quantum physicist and student of Einstein, argues unconditionally that both quantum theory and relativity demonstrate that wholeness is actually the more appropriate—even the necessary— stance by which the cosmos must be understood. In regards to quantum theory, Bohm states that

“The quantum theory shows that the attempt to describe and follow an atomic particle in precise detail has little meaning….The notion of the atomic path has only a limited domain of applicability. In a more detailed description the atom is, in many ways, seen to behave as much like a wave as a particle. It can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud, dependent for its particular form on the whole environment, including the observing instrument. Thus, one can no longer maintain the division between the observer and observed (which is implicit in the atomistic view that regards each of these as separate aggregates of atoms). Rather both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalyzable” (9).

From its basis, quantum physics shows that, on any scale smaller than the atom, the clear separation of objects is not an appropriate response. Instead, separation is only an artifact of the observer making a distinction within and out of the field of observation. When arriving to the scale of atoms, we never actually see these atoms as distinct objects in the way we see these books separate from tables and so on. The aggregate of these probing processes by which we access and examine these smaller scales produce variation and difference which we then

96 designate, in a productive way, according to these properties.52 But the necessity of their existence as clearly distinct objects is not apparent or necessary.

In fact, for Bohm the dynamic nature of the quantum scale indicates the opposite: that those structures that appear so distinctly separate to our eyes can only make sense if related, not just to some other clearly defined observer, but to the whole in which they are embedded:

“[E]ach relatively autonomous and stable structure (e.g. an atomic particle) is to be understood not as something independently and permanently existent but rather as a product that has been formed in the whole flowing movement and that will ultimately dissolve back into this movement. How it forms and maintains itself, then, depends on its place and function in the whole (14).

To posit in advance that an object is in-itself, to take its apparent separation as a given, or to speak of it as if it is separate, is to perform a cut. But not just a cut among cuts, but a cut from the whole. Indeed, when we note that our cuts are not working properly, that the objects at hand are not adequate for describing the world, we nonetheless proceed by way of more fragmentation.

Our treatment of phenomena thus come from and develops “a largely unconscious habit of confusion around the question of what is different and what is not. So, in the very act in which we try to discover what to do about fragmentation, we will go on with this habit, and thus will tend to introduce further forms of fragmentation” (17).

Recently, the same conclusions about physics have been popularized in academia by

Karen Barad, the quantum physicist turned feminist philosopher, who argues convincingly that

Niels Bohr had already made many of the same conclusions in his development of quantum physics. She discusses the same particle-wave duality and likewise questions the a priori separation of the world into objects.53 However, when Barad articulates the same kind of

52 On the process of “seeing” atoms, see Valerie L. Hanson, Haptic Visions; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (esp. Chapter 8); Daston and Galison, Objectivity (esp. chapter 7). For an ethnography of practices of quantum physics, see Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes ad Lifetimes. 53 See chapter 3. 97 breakdown between observer and observed she does not argue for a wholeness despite consistently pointing to it. The possibility never even arises within the sprawling five-hundred page text. Take, for example, the following passage:

Bohr argues against the Cartesian presupposition that there is an inherent boundary between observer and observed, knower and known. That boundary is differently articulated depending on the specific configuration of the apparatus and its corresponding embodiment of particular concepts to the exclusion of others. That is, the object and the agencies of observation are co-constituted through the enactment of a cut that depends on the specific embodiment of particular human concepts (154).

Just a Bohm argued, Barad is suggesting that the reality encountered when going down to the quantum scale is that one cannot look at objects as inherently separate from the observing apparatus. However, for Barad, the term “apparatus” and Latour’s “actant” come to fill in for the sense of objectness that carries the residual habit of feeling that the world is, from the beginning, fragmented and full of difference. The reason for this is simple: Barad continues to privilege something that does not clearly exist on the quantum scale: matter. Getting lost in the confusion of the realist/idealist debate, Barad argues that

“Apparatuses are not Kantian conceptual frameworks; they are physical arrangements. And phenomena do not refer merely to perception of the human mind; rather, phenomena are real physical entities or beings (though not fixed and separately delineated things). Hence I conclude the Bohr’s framework is consistent with a particular notion of realism, which is not parasitic on subject-object, culture-nature, and word-world distinctions (128).

Apparatuses and phenomena are real physical beings but not fixed. They exist as physical arrangements but are not separately delineated. In trying to argue that apparatuses are inherently physical entities, Barad is already playing to the habit which undermines the radical point that

Bohr and Bohm are making: the apparatus now is treated as a fragmented entity, which she can then reorganize according to “agential separability—an agentially enacted ontological separability within the phenomena” (175). These modes of description become more convoluted

98 the more that Barad attempts to argue for the nonseparation of objects even as she argues for ontological separability between agents. The question will always arise again: how do you cut the apparatus/agent from the rest of being? The answer will have to be again: likewise by another apparatus. And we have an infinite regress except if we follow Bohm’s answer: even the apparatus does not exist independently from the Whole. Wholeness comes before fragmentation.

A choice is thus set up in scaling between which aspect will be privileged: the wholeness that manifests when we move up the scale or the division apparent on our usual scale and easily applied when moving to lower scales. But as demonstrated by Barad’s work, we have an immense habitual resistance to directly confronting the possibility of wholeness. This confusion is by no means new but was itself at the foundation of philosophy, both east and west. The essence of Vedanta is the articulation of a monism and an untangling of what that means for a world experienced as a multiplicity of objects. This monism is perhaps best captured in the

Chandogya Upanishad by the phrase: “In the beginning was only Being, One without a second”

(6.2.2, pg. 133). In Western philosophy, we have a bit more confusion due to the two

Presocratics usually associated with this question of multiplicity and unity. As the general story goes, Parmenides argued for the unity of Being as One while Heraclitus argued for an world of multiplicity and Becoming. Plato, we suppose, was somewhere in-between these two fundamentally irreconcilable positions. And yet, we find in the fragments of Heraclitus this clear statement otherwise: “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one”.54 Both of these foundational Greek thinkers thus articulated a view of the cosmos as a Whole. Nonetheless, today most attempts to articulate the cosmos in terms of oneness, monism, or wholeness are usually ostracized both within popular culture and academia.

54 Fragment 50. Translation and numbering from William Harris, Heraclitus: the Complete Fragments. Harris was a classicist at Middlebury College; his translation and commentary were made available online. 99

One need only look at the most recent iteration of this in the way the spiritual awakening of the

1960s are disregarded as “hippie” or New Age. Indeed, Bohm himself can be discarded in this way given his own role in this spiritual revival through his extended dialogs with the Indian philosopher Jiddhu Krishnamurti. Given the association of New Age antics and quantum physics,

Bohm might be thrown out in the same hesitation that Barad articulates dismissively as “the scientific path leading out of the West to the metaphysical Edenic garden of Eastern mysticism”

(67).

This general disregard or disdain for the idea of the Whole has probably always existed, but it seems to have reached something of a height while the details of quantum physics were still being worked out. Thus, in 1936 the British philosopher Arthur Lovejoy wrote, 'That it should afford so many people a peculiar satisfaction to say that All is One is, as William James once remarked, a rather puzzling thing" (13). Feeling out this same sentiment, one translator of

Heraclitus notes, in explication of the fragment just quoted, that “At the start of the 20th century this [statement that all things are One] would have seemed a piece of academic tom-foolery, but as the century ends and we are confronted by whole-istic or holistic experiences on every side, it does seem that Heraclitus was hinting at something of importance" (54).55 Indeed, the last few decades have at least provided a surface-level burgeoning of awareness of interconnection through sciences that demand, more and more, a connecting together of things previously held apart—first in ecology, which has been followed by any number of system sciences that aim to gather together more and more into their field of description. Yet persistently, critics demand difference and fragmentation as the fount of existence and elide any attempt to articulate unity.

In fact, the attempt to articulate unity or wholeness is almost always said to be ironic, any

55 William Harris, Heraclitus: the Complete Fragments, 54. 100 attempt at transcendence is said to be failed, and any description of a unifying with this Whole is said be a fantasy.56 In noticing this persistence of fragmentation, so clear in 1980, Bohm notes that the real irony is that those fields which are most conducive to interpretation and ambiguity are themselves the ones most likely to deny Wholeness in favor of fragmentation: “Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary, atomistic approach to reality (15).”

Indeed, in the humanities, critical theory has left us with an emphasis on fragmentation and difference that permits little room for speaking of any kind of wholeness or unity. If modernism was beset with angst about fragmentation, critiques of postmodernism have declared fragmentation to be pervasive, normalized, and inescapable. Likewise, if there was a continuous and pervasive theme in poststructuralism, it would be this assertion of the completeness of fragmentation, the emphasis entirely on multiplicities without the possibility of a One, and an endless breaking-down with no possibility of an origin or finality.57 Even with the more positively oriented arguments dealing with a “field of relations,” as is popular within science and technology studies, the relationality is said to be a strict conception of Becoming thought to be antithetical to any articulation of Being, let alone Being as a Whole. The result is that even literary or historical critiques of ecology tend to produce more fragmentation.58 Finally, the

56 On failed transcendence see the conversation around Tom McCarthy’s work, e.g. Peter Swenger, “the state of inauthenticity.” McCarthy gave a keynote for the European Society for Science Language and the Arts’ 2015 conference on Scale and spoke extensively about this kind of failure of unity. Many others at the conference put forth similar arguments. For an example of the dismissive declaration of union as a fantasy see Keller and Grontowski “Mind’s Eye,” 217. 57 The work of Gilles Deleuze has been essential for this argument due to his persistent denial of transcendence and his argument that difference is the origin of being. However, Deleuze’s work is perhaps more conducive to wholeness than it may seem, a point we will discuss in chapter 6. 58 Such is the case with the recent OOO stuff on ecology, esp. Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought, discussed below. 101 various forms of social critique, whether feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, or critical race studies, have largely picked up on this emphasis on difference, discarding any claim for wholeness as an artifact of hegemonic totalization.59 Barad’s work is, in many regards, the culmination of all of these trends; indeed, she works through all of these critical theories and brings them to bear on

Bohr’s original explication of quantum physics. It is no surprise then that she would not even have to deny wholeness. The possibility is not even present.

Underneath this neglect is a long history in which those who articulate wholeness, the various kinds of mystics in various intellectual and spiritual guises, are not only rejected or ignored but are thrown out of society, burned at the stake, or, in our most recent iteration, designated as insane and locked up. One merely need note the number of psychological diagnoses, psychoanalytic or otherwise, that have been conducted on various mystics, from Joan of Arc to William Blake. It is particularly confusing that scholars who emphasize so readily the role of psychological categories as structures of power would likewise conduct this same kind of ostracizing and neglect of this set of incredible individuals who have been so centrally important in human history. If there was ever any set of psychological categorizing that fits perfectly into

Michel Foucault’s oft-cited analysis of how power attempts to regulate particular mental states or in Deleuze and Guattari’s desire to undermine the norms of systematic and hegemonic psychoanalysis, it is the ostracizing of the mystic who looks out in the world and notes that all of this is not separate but, in fact, One.

The most recent spiritual blossoming to this effect had the added target of psychedelic drugs, by which the perception of wholeness could be discarded. The ego-death that the psychonauts experienced as they glimpsed a greater reality could easily be said to be an artifact

59 Some elements of this emphasis come to an interesting head in the dialog between Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau entitled “The Uses of Equality” and published in Diacritics. 102 of some chemical alteration, some manufactured illusion. Nonetheless, as Richard Doyle has recently demonstrated in Darwin’s Pharmacy, such a dismissal neglects the nuances of these visions, their lasting effects, and the resonance of their results, in some iterations, with the perennial philosophy. Doyle’s situating of psychedelics as evolutionary adjuncts, which assist human beings in exploring the nature of their consciousness, pushes against the general fear of these mind-altering substances, and places them within the context of larger spiritual practices meant to assist homo sapiens in navigating the world and themselves. Indeed, the dismissal of these experiences as artifacts of the drugs neglects to attend to the kinds of experiences themselves, why they produce certain effects, and the degree to which those effects produce certain philosophical convictions.

The problem is always that the view from/of wholeness seems, to a fragmented consciousness, to be dangerous or just plain weird. Undoubtedly there are drug experiences that have nothing to do with wholeness and many, if not most, states of consciousness designated as insane compound fragmentation rather than lead to wholeness. These fragmented states are, in many cases, disturbing or dangerous. However, we cannot fail to distinguish between the two as psychology persistently does. Richard Maurice Bucke himself, as a pioneer in psychology, new the the difference quite well, given his time as head of an insane asylum. In Cosmic

Consciousness, he distinguishes between the experience of wholeness and the fragmentation that takes place in insanity:

“How, then, shall we know that this is a new sense, revealing fact, and not a form of insanity, plunging its subject into delusion? In the first place, the tendencies of the condition in question are entirely unlike, even opposite to, those of mental alienation. …In the second place, while in all forms of insanity self-restraint—inhibition—is greatly reduced, sometimes even abolished, in cosmic consciousness it is enormously increased” (59).

103

To declare that the view of the Whole is itself a delusion or fantasy is to neglect the practical effects of those who experience this view. Such neglect may be nothing more than the residue of

Enlightenment reification of rationality over and against superstition. Nonetheless, mystics again and again articulate their view of wholeness as the in-breaking of knowledge, clarity, and peace.

The experience of wholeness, as the experience of the end of fragmentation, feels like a release, a being made whole. As we will see, the confusion about the experience and the resistance or horror it sometimes brings relates to the transformative nature of the breakdown of a world that seemed so clearly and obviously broken into parts. But once wholeness is accepted, one finds a great ease in this realization. When we attend to this difference, one can suddenly note that fragmentation and difference is itself the crux of an outlook that may itself be said to be, in some way, insane. Thus, Bohm notes that “the notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion and this illusion cannot do other than lead us to endless conflict and confusion” (1-2).

The difficulty is that there must be a break down if we are to get to wholeness. However, the nature of this breakdown is not the fragmenting of a world that is actually, appropriately, and already fragmented, but the breaking down of the divisions by which this manifold world is thought to be given as a series of objects. The mystical realization is the breaking down of our habit of fragmentation, the belief we grant to it, and the deconstruction of our solid place within it. The result is not, however, more fragmentation and endless deconstruction without an origin, but the transcending to Wholeness. As soon as this sense of Wholeness is glimpsed, the world around us appears strange, illusory, and temporary. The investment that people place in these divisions immediately seem bizarre. The imbuing of reality in the terms and divisions of language, culture, and perception—which scholars have half-heartedly critiqued as

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“correlationism” or the “correspondence theory of truth”—are eradicated by the larger vision. As

Bohm puts it, “in this habit [of fragmentation] our thought is regarded as direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments” (3). It is this habit that must be let go of for us to admit wholeness, this sense that the division itself is real and pre-existing. It is this breaking down of this fragmentation and division that we partially perceive in scaling up. It is the persistence of this habit of division that makes scaling up so startling and difficult to understand.

If there is one recent figure that adequately captures all of these elements, resistances, and the full force of the confusion around this breakdown, it is the science fiction author, amateur philosopher, and incredible visionary Philip K. Dick (PKD). PKD’s life and writings, as well as the mass of literature, representations, remixes, and scholarly critiques currently being generated about him, contain all the tensions we are dealing with here. PKD is held up as the prophet of the postmodern information age, as exemplifying the height of fragmentation, where all of reality becomes hyperreality—Jean Baudrillard’s term for a simulation which loses all reference to any reality to which it can escape.60 Nonetheless, PKD experienced in February and March of 1974, a series of visions that led him to reinterpret his entire corpus in relation to this transcendental encounter with what he called “VALIS”—the vast active living information system. Following his Valis experience, PKD began to write obsessively what he called his Exegesis, which by the time of his death amounted to nearly 8000 hand-written pages. In the Exegesis, PKD attempted to understand what had happened to him. This graphomanic outpouring is a tour de force of

60 Baudrillard discusses PKD and hyperreality in “Simulacrum and Science Fiction” 105 philosophical and metaphysical speculation alternating with self-doubt about the nature of his experience. Central to PKD’s doubt about his own experience was this possibility of insanity, this vacillating between the sense that his breakdown was the opening of a profound reality and the fear that this breakdown was nothing more than him losing his mind. Nonetheless, over time,

PKD found himself interwoven with the expanse of perennial mystics, remixing again and again, the essential insights of wholeness in the context of the burgeoning information society of which he is so widely valued as a prophet. PKD can thus serve as our guiding spirit here since he so well captures the fragmented mindset, the sense of its inescapability, the sense of breakdown, and the resistances we have to moving beyond such fragmentation. Looking at PKD looking at

Wholeness is appropriate not despite the bizarre and unusual nature of his writing, but because of it. His work is the coming clean of the bizarre nature of Wholeness, which, if taking seriously, we can render coherent even in what appears to be, as one critic put it, “erratic, even crackpot.”61

As he notes throughout the Exegesis, even the novels and stories he wrote before his transcendent experience nonetheless point to, lead to, or bolster the breakdown that leads to an eventual breakthrough by which the world becomes transformed from fragmentation to wholeness.

Zeno’s Trap PKD’s worlds are full of traps and mazes. Almost invariably, his works construct universes that, despite the science fiction elements, appear normal enough—at first. But then

61 footnote Exegesis 693. All citations to the Exegesis will be given according to folder and page number. The full documents can be found at zebrapedia.psu.edu. If the quote appears in the published volume of The Exegesis (ed. by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Letham) then page numbers will also follow). 106 things go wrong, the world starts to break down. It becomes unclear what is normal and what is not. Some kind of doubt enters. Characters feel trapped, lost, confused. When they appear to escape, to have found a way out, the sign of breakdown re-emerges, usually in the final pages.

In reflecting on his world-building, in a lecture written in 1978, PKD notes that he purposefully likes to build worlds that collapse: “I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem.”62 It may seem, when one first enters a world crafted by PKD, that such relishing in chaos is a relishing in the inescapability of doubt. One can feel trapped in a world that perpetually crumbles, lost in the chaos. It can be so difficult to see the way out of the endless layers of illusion. And yet, there is already something odd about this assertion that one can be caught in a world that crumbles. If it is crumbling, how can it continue to contain you? It ought not be a surprise, then, that in this same lecture, PKD discusses his Valis experience and his realization that there must be some kind of underlying reality which is being accessed, which is breaking through in some way, into an otherwise illusory reality. The question of encountering

PKD is thus the same question we face when considering wholeness: what is the way from fragmentation to wholeness? What is the illusion and what is the real and how do we tell the difference? Why is fragmentation a trap or a maze? What is the way out?

Let us begin first with a resistance through a story about a trap sprung and a lesson not learned. This story will also introduce us to one of PKD’s favorite topics, discussed in his 1978 lecture, in the novel form of Valis, and extensively in the Exegesis following his stumbling on the topic sometime around 1977: the relationship between the Presocratics, Plato, and the

Atomists. His conclusions about the Atomists will lead us precisely back to the conclusions we

62 PKD, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart two days later”—first published as the introduction to the collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon 107 already saw from Bohm. There is something delightful about accessing these Greek thinkers through PKD since his work engages with their ideas with nuance and intelligence almost completely outside of any kind of scholarly apparatus. Most likely, PKD’s encounter with the

Presocratics comes almost entirely from his reading in the Encyclopedia Britannica and a book by the British scholar Edward Hussey entitled The Presocratics. Nonetheless, he was able to develop an elaborate understanding of the basic problematics presented by the Greek philosophers, reading them through the problem of fragmentation, the question of the maze or trap of apparent hyperreality, and the breakthrough/down that forms the escape. We can thus read PKD’s reading as itself a creative re-interpretation of the Greek philosophers, attending to those philosophers when needed.

PKD already lays out the primary problem in 1953 in a short story called “The

Indefatigable Frog.” As he often said, it must have been unconscious. He would not have the breakthrough until over twenty years later and, in fact, this story is about a trapping that results in the lack of understanding. In the story PKD has two professors build a test for Zeno’s famous paradox. Although Zeno’s paradoxes take many forms, PKD’s description is notable: “Take

[Zeno’s] paradox of the frog and the well. As Zeno showed, the frog will never reach the top of the well. Each jump is half the previous jump; a small but very real margin always remains for him to travel.” PKD has subtly altered the usual form of the paradox; while the paradox does sometimes take the form of a frog hopping to a pond, PKD’s description puts something more at stake: escape. “It’s obvious,” Professor Hardy, a scientist, declares, “that the frog is trapped forever, in an eternal prison and can never get out” (221). Professor Grote, a philosopher, insists that the frog will escape. We thus have Zeno’s paradox revised into a trap, but not merely a simple trap but an “eternal prison.” PKD would later develop this trope in the Exegesis as the

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Gnostic “Black Iron Prison” (which he abbreviated BIP). As PKD’s works continue to develop, this notion of the prison becomes more and more associated with our actual situation in the world. By the time he writes Valis, PKD notes that this prison is the condition in which we live:

“everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world” (47). What we have then appears to be an illusion that, in its own terms, is inescapable. Whenever we go halfway out of the prison, there is still halfway to go. We will never escape from the illusion.

PKD thus simultaneously overlays a conceptual and physical problem, a prison that is about distance and spatiality but also illusion and reality.

In the “Indefatigable Frog,” PKD has his characters take a scientific approach to what seems to be a philosophical problem. “The difficulty,” Hardy insists, “is that no one has ever performed the experiment. The paradox is pure abstraction” (222). Although articulated as a prison, the sense of being-trapped is merely abstract. But what if you can perform the experiment? This is the science fiction premise: to resolve the matter, they construct a test using a chamber along which a frog will be forced to hop by a gradually warming surface. To control the diminishing distance, a magnetic field is set up which will shrink the frog in half every time he has gone halfway to the end of the chamber. Grote and Hardy place a frog in and watch as he hops along, getting smaller and smaller, until he disappears. Suspecting foul play, Grote examines inside the tube himself but then Hardy closes the door, trapping Grote within, and turns on the machine. Suddenly a philosophical trap becomes a literal trap; to escape Grote must reach the end of the tube. Grote heads through, shrinking smaller and smaller until he is so small that he has to jump from atom to atom until he suddenly falls between them—right out of the tube.

Apparently, both Grote and the frog became so small that they fell through the tube, where they return to normal size. In a state of excitement, he finds Hardy, the scientist, who is already

109 gloating, having assumed to have trapped Grote, the philosopher, in this never ending paradox.

The conversation that ends the story finds the role of philosopher and scientist suddenly reversed. After having just gone through the experience, Grote notes that “we still don’t know whether the frog would have reached the end of the tube….We’ll have to find some other way to test the paradox. The Chamber’s no good” (229). Hardy, however, is confused and shaken. How did Grote escape from this prison he thought he had left him in? “Say, Grote—“ he begins (for the second time), but Grote cuts him off, not listening.

If Zeno’s paradox is about escaping, Grote did indeed escape. However, the final lines of dialog imply that, even if Grote escaped the tube, he did not escape the paradox itself. In other words, the story implies that trap of Zeno’s paradox is not necessarily physical; rather, the paradox is the trap, or, at least, whatever makes the paradox a paradox is a kind of conceptual trap. Grote has escaped the tube but still looks elsewhere for proof since the experiment did not conform to the conditions set out by the paradox. The logician has become the scientist, seeking to externalize or render physical the conceptual parameters of the Zeno’s thought experiment even when those conditions are already not possible. Yet the experiment proved something: that the paradox did not describe reality. Now Hardy, who was sure that the frog would not escape, is the one who hesitates. While we are left to imagine what Hardy was trying to say, one thing is clear: somehow this “eternal prison” was broken.

Part of the irony of the situation is that the standard of proof is insufficient for the task at hand. Zeno’s paradox is so strange because it is about how we organize reality rather than how reality is already organized. Although Hardy says that no one has performed the experiment, we could respond that we have, in fact, performed it an endless number of times every time we arrive somewhere. However, if this was really what Zeno was after, the paradox would be no

110 problem at all. Thus, Grote and Hardy’s primary mistake was to suppose that Zeno’s paradox was something to be tested physically. At the same time, the paradox still captures something important: a way in which our modeling the world is somehow insufficient. PKD dramatizes this insufficiency while Grote is in the tube: each time Grote shrinks he attempts to calculate the remaining distance to the end of the tube, trying to figure out how long it will take him to finish.

This calculation is the measuring of a distance that, because it is scaling down, will continue to shrink with the shrinking of the measurer. At some point Grote must give up this measuring of the distance: “How long would it be? He looked at the size of the great blocks of ore piled up around him. Suddenly a terror rushed through him. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t figure it out,’ he said”

(228). Yet, trying to “figure it out” is what Grote still wants to do once he escapes. Despite the failures in calculation (logic) and despite the insufficiency of the experiment (science), Grote still wants a concrete solution. But Zeno’s paradox is supposed to be abstract because the paradox is about abstraction itself.

The brilliance of the experiment was that Grote had to himself experience the trip through the tube in order to see whether it was successful or not. However, Grote was so concerned with the logical and empirical validity of the paradox that he failed to see that the paradox revealed something about logic and empiricism itself; that is, how we order the structure of the empirical world. He experienced this failure but failed to comprehend it. In this way, Grote was still trapped inside a conception of the world where Zeno’s paradox still existed as paradox. If instead he noted that the division was only made possible by the dividing of the one who divides— himself—then he would have noted that Zeno’s paradox reveals something about this division: it is not an artifact of reality but an artifact of the one who divides. And with division, more division is always possible insofar as someone is there to divide. But when that “one who

111 divides” becomes sufficiently small, one tumbles out of the chamber. We will see how this functions more in what follows both in this chapter and in Chapter 3, which will take up the question “who scales?” directly.

The essential point here is that when PKD speaks of traps and mazes in the Exegesis, he is not talking about physical traps. Rather the division whereby we derive the physical is first a conceptual trap, a trap of thought, perception, and habit about the way we understand the phenomena before us. Thus, in his novels, even when the characters fall into mazes and traps, they are usually not in an actual maze or bound in a trap. The BIP is not a physical entity or place, even though PKD often describes it in physical terms. When PKD says something like

”the black iron prison is wherever you are in relation to the freer next world,” we should resist the temptation to think that he is speaking of some kind of physical state or some supernatural spiritual realm separate from ours (Exegesis 23:127 (215)). Rather, the BIP is “wherever you are” precisely because the prison is a way of seeing or, as he says in Valis, a Gestalt. In the currently unpublished Folder 53, which contains his primary contemplation on the Atomists,

PKD notes that his realization is about a “meta-abstraction”—a paying attention to the way in which abstraction itself has organized reality. The base reality is the same but the way it is approached differs, as “two different ways of organizing based on the same blocks

(constituents).” What PKD will go on the articulate is an alternate Gestalt, as different forms of accessing or understanding Cosmos. Even Cosmos, he notes, is “not a thing but the way things fit together” (53-11).

Indeed, PKD makes clear that his traps are all a kind of semi-self-induced problem in perception. In Valis, PKD has a new name for these kinds of problems: “it was a Chinese finger- trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets” (176). PKD’s traps always

112 draw us into a bind; we want to pull at them harder, try to untangle them, but this only binds us further. Rather, like a Chinese finger trap, the only way out is to relax into the trap, continue to travel through its structure so that we can understand its form, relinquish the desire to hyper- rationalize, and then, with time, we’ll naturally fall out of them just as Grote falls out of the chamber. The reason for this is already clear given our discussion of Bohm and Barad: we cannot hold onto any sense of a priori physicality or externality by which we could stop the experiment.

We must attend to when we fall out of physicality itself, as when Grote literally fell through the apparently solid and physical chamber. But this persistence is not the indefatigable persistence of

Grote, who would continue to hop on, believing that there was still something empirical to test even after the answer was already revealed. Contrast this excitement with his final experience in the tube: “Professor Grote closed his eyes. Peace came over him, his tired body relaxed. ’No more jumping,’ he said, drifting down, down. . . .He closed his eyes and allowed the darkness to take him over, at last.”

As with Grote after leaving the chamber, we are often resistant to the experience by which we might glimpse Wholeness or do not even know what to make of it. What was this experience that I felt? What was the result of this experience? PKD himself felt this confusion after 2-3-74; it may be this very confusion that generated the Exegesis as the obsessive need to elaborate, to make clear the precise nature of the conclusion provided by the experience. Part of the problem is that in our dominant modes of engaging the world, doubt is built into our very way of approaching the problem. From a materialist point of view, the position that a conceptual problem might take precedence over a physical problem seems inappropriate or even egoistic

(since the experience must be privileged before material it is said to be an experience of). In commenting on this relationship in the Exegesis, PKD writes:

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Whether it is “true” or not depends on what you mean by true. It does justice to my experience; in that sense it is true. What if the experience itself is not true? To me that question is unintelligible; it is my experience: it belongs to me, is a part of me, and by construing a model adequate to it I make it a permanent part of me, not something that escapes me. If my model works, if it is an adequate representation, I can by means of it convert it back into something like the original experience, so it is an encoding, an informational analog of that experience (to the degree that I have been successful). (90:31, 710)

PKD is reflecting on our own means of reading his metaphysical speculation of his escape from the BIP. It has to be read as true insofar as it describes an experience of a release that is actually felt, in a way that Grote was unable to acknowledge in himself. The “truth” is the experience, not the words about the experience, which are only models that attempt to outline the gist of the experience in a way that is likewise able to in-form someone else in a similar way. The words encode rather than correspond to the experience, providing a means of re-inducing the experience for PKD or inducing the experience in another reader, assuming the encoding is sufficient for the task. PKD is thus crafting worlds to help us run the experiment Grote and

Hardy were running, but in the appropriate place: our internal experience of the world. His remixing of spiritual, philosophical, and scientific tropes follow these ideas out not as dogma or some kind of clear explication but as indicators and conceptual experiments by which we can perhaps be induced into the same kind of experiences: “It is not a doctrine or even a theory that I am fabricating; it is an impression: a change in me as to what I am.” The stakes are thus raised again. To escape the prison requires a change in ourselves, induced via an impression taken in through a thought-experiment of how this world crumbles. PKD’s endless narration is an attempt to find an adequate way to render this impression, to follow it out within his own fictional works as they relate to the implications for our real sense of confinement, our quite tremendous conceptual maze.

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Nonetheless, even here a resistance arises in the form of a footnote in the excerpts of the

Exegesis published in 2011. The footnote, attached to PKD’s contemplation of the truth in his experience just quoted, is from N. Katherine Hayles:

Here Dick offers what is perhaps the most striking rationale for his theorizing: the ability to formulate and conceptualize an experience so that the affect associated with the experience can be captured and re-evoked by meditating on the theory. Without doubt, a theory that does this would have utility for the person who evolved it; the question then is whether it would have the same or similar effect on people who did not have the original experience. I doubt that it would work this way for most people reading Dick’s theories. By contrast, his fiction, with its rich contexts, suggestive characterizations, and haunting themes, clearly has this kind of power. His theorizing is important, then, not so much on its own account as for insight it gives into his creative processes and the deep unconscious motivations that drive his fiction (710).

Here we have a frank side-stepping of the question of experience and truth that is at the core of

PKD’s work, both fiction and non-fiction. Just as Grote, the philosopher turned skeptic, hesitates to apply what he has experienced, Hayles, literary critic turned skeptic, hesitates to permit the strangeness of PKD’s theorizing to admit itself as a, if not the, possible explanation of her clearly powerful experience within his novels. It is probably true that his fiction is better than his theorizing at inducing the very ideas he is talking about in the Exegesis. At the same time, PKD himself saw them as insufficient practices in interpretation. PKD is thus already doing to his own work what Hayles refuses to do: treating them as experiments in inducing reflection on the nature of one’s reality. As an exegesis, a term that originates in medieval Biblical scholarship, the Exegesis is meant to be a clarification, a further commentary on what is already taken on authority. In this case, the authority is not PKD as some clearly defined author, but the experience of PKD’s confinement and release within a real conceptual prison. The Exegesis, as with the present work and perhaps all literary scholarship of note, thus becomes added commentary meant to assist us navigating our own experience so that we might have a similar— or at least similarly meaningful—experience. It seems that after 2-3-74 PKD became like a

115 machine for generating ways out of the traps and mazes that seem so apparent in his work. If you don’t like this one, here is another, and another, and another—for 8000 pages. We read the

Exegesis, not merely to understand his fiction—as if that has some value outside this whole problem of traps and illusions we so praise him for capturing—but to help us feel our way out of our own instantiation of the BIP. Even so, Hayles hesitates, doubting that it would actually work that way for others who haven’t had the experience. And yet it is because we haven’t experienced what PKD experienced, haven’t found the way out of this trap, that we need the

Exegesis. It is because we feel lost in the same mazes PKD so powerfully captured, because we have come to relish in this sense of no escape while discarding his declared escape, that the additional in-forming is needed. PKD thus writes on in hope that, rather than wallow in the sense of hyperreality, we step ourselves into the chamber and allow our world to shrink and crumble.

Continuum Gestalt In our perception of the world a choice has already been made in favor of a Gestalt built on fragmentation. This way of perceiving the world is so embedded in our understanding that it does not usually occur to us as a possibility to think otherwise. Zeno’s paradox thus makes little sense except as some trick of mathematics, as if Zeno is merely reifying mathematical properties of division to make a rather abstract point that has no practical application in reality. If we follow

Zeno’s paradox out as a thought experiment about the possibility of division, however, then we get a different story.

Around 1977, PKD finds just such an account of Zeno’s paradox while reading the

British classicist Edward Hussey. We can conduct this experiment ourselves. Take two objects, say these two glasses on my desk. They appear to be obviously separated and therefore obviously distinct objects. Zeno points out, to the contrary, that in order for these two glasses to actually be

116 separate objects, a third thing must exist between them to separate them. Otherwise, they must be considered two non-separate parts of the same thing. Alright, we say, there is air between them.

Then what separates the air from the glasses? And so on. Zeno was trying to illustrate how our own sense of space is contradictory. As Hussey states it, “if something X that is is separate from something else Y that also is, then there must be a third thing Z, distinct from X and Y, to separate them” (92). But what is Z? In order for Z to be distinct from X and Y, it would need another thing, which also exists, which separates Z from X and Y. And so on, in infinite regress.

Thus, division is itself impossible. To believe in a division between things is to introduce a paradox.

At first glance this may seem like a spurious or impractical argument. We want to say, in response, that I don’t need to know what the dividing entity is to know that these glasses are separate and moveable, for all practical purposes. Yet it is unclear how exactly the certainty and absoluteness of the glasses’ separation is necessary for me to pick up the glass and get a drink. In fact, when we follow the regress down a few steps we see that scale helps us navigate the stakes of Zeno’s argument. As we divide to smaller and smaller separations, at some point it no longer becomes sensible to notice the division. The force of the molecules of air against the molecules of the glass, for instance, interact precisely because of their inter-tangled fields of force which, as

Bohm already pointed out earlier, are merely functional fields of energy rather than clearly distinct objects. While the molecules of air and the glass appear and function as clearly distinct on our normal scale, at a lower scale it is their interaction—that is, the ways in which they are clearly part of the same field of relations—that is important. At that point a choice has to be made: do we still consider them separate entities if they are so intimately related? Is a relation a definitive separation? Or, rather, is the description of a relation or a larger process evidence of

117 the merely functional nature of division? We divide in practice, not in reality, for the sake of highlighting or making use of parts of the world that can be considered functionally distinct according to the scale on which we are understanding and working with them. Moving to another scale, however, already suggests that this dividing might no longer function. In this vein, Bohm writes, “since, in the first instance, fragmentation is an attempt to extend analysis of the world into separate parts beyond the domain in which to do this is appropriate, it is in effect an attempt to divide what is really indivisible. In the next step such an attempt will lead us to also try to unite what is not really unitable” (15-16). If we take division for granted and then start talking about how things work together, we become incapable of seeing how things actually fit together.

Thus, assuming that the relation between two things indicates that, in some real way, these two things are part of the same larger whole, is actually more practical both in our everyday lives and for the practice of science.

What then is the domain in which division occurs? As PKD learned from Hussey, Zeno was a student of Parmenides, who claimed that the world consisted of two forms, which equate to two Gestalts, or ways of organizing the world: Form I is reality—that which is (Greek: to on).

Form II is a negative reality—that which is not (Greek: to me on). Form II corresponds roughly to the illusory world of fragmentation: it is a product of our mind’s ability to categorize and divide, born out of our ability to declare things as false—to see nothing where something must exist in order to divide between things. Zeno demonstrates that, in considering our divisions of reality as real, we find an infinite regress of things. Thus, Form I, the true reality, consists of a monism: that which is, the whole, which is One (see Hussey 128). Form II is produced out of a rupture in which we come to believe in and act according to fragmentation over wholeness.

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PKD, reading Hussey, finds the first expression of the rupture in the Atomists

(Democritus and Leucippus). The Atomists, who were some of the final Pre-Socratic philosophers, took a then-radical approach to solving Zeno’s paradox. They proposed including

Parmenides’ Form II, that which is not (to me on), as part of their explanation of the world. In other words, the Atomists seem to suggest that ‘that which is not’ somehow is. Essentially, they claimed “the ‘nothing’ exists just as much as the ‘thing’” (Hussey 142). As Hussey clarifies, the

Atomists make a crucial switch in the way they make this claim: they take the word for

“nothing” (to meden) and remove the negative prefix (me-) to create a new word for “(no)thing”

(to den). The thingness of nothingness (to den) is thus different from normal things (to on). In this manner, the Atomists claim that “nothingness is just as real as any ‘thing’’ (143). Hussey explains the implications of this maneuver:

Once ‘the nothing’ was admitted, it could perform two functions: it separated ‘things’ from one another, and so made plurality possible, and it allowed change of place by things, so making possible all change which could be reduced to rearrangement of unit ‘things.’ ‘The nothing’ therefore functioned as ‘empty space,’ or ‘void,’ and the sources usually call it ‘the void’ (to kenon). It was the first time that a well-thought out concept of a purely passive and empty space had been propounded (144).

The Atomists make fragmentation possible by introducing the possibility of empty space, which provides that third object (the Z above) that is both a thing which separates things, while not requiring its own presence. A cold, entirely mechanistic view of the world was thus made possible by this maneuver. The Atomists introduced nothing into the universe.

PKD was struck deeply by this section in Hussey and devoted many pages of The

Exegesis to working out the details and implications of this introduction of nothingness. He begins by simply noting that the insight must have been something of a break for that time: “If people prior to the Atomists saw the void (and comprehended it) as we do, it would not have been necessary for Democritus to say of the void (kenon) that it, although incorporeal, is existent

119 and real. Because what is he saying that is new? He must be saying something new or he would not say it” (53:1). In other words, studying the break deployed by the Atomists is to study the coming-into-being of our own view of the world. To work backwards from the divisive view is to rediscover, philosophically, what the world looks like without this division. What PKD finds is that the Atomists were working in a time in which what he calls a “continuum” model of the universe prevailed. They could not think of a world with empty space. So when they spoke of kenon (the void), they had to make it “existent and real” in order to make the argument work at all. “All I can presume,” he writes, “is that the concept of continuum must have [existed] prior to the atomists or they would have simply called the void what we call it: empty space containing nothing”—that is, they would not have even bothered to name this “nothing” any more than we do. “But this is. . .what they deny it: the status of meden” (53-1). Of course PKD recognizes that granting nothing existence is a contradiction. Instead, he sees that “the Atomists had to yield pro forma to the continuum view while still making their point. This was the only way they could make their point within the conceptual framework of the time. So those prior to the Atomists must have seen a continuum, and, if so, what did they see (or conceive) when they saw kenon?”

That is, in a continuum view of reality, what do we make of the apparent space between apparent things?

PKD can only try to describe the continuum view of reality through what he saw on 2-3-

74: “There was one “thing” that is, unity and being perceived and conceived as unity. And, being perceived and conceived as a unity space (kenon) signified something other than what it signifies—i.e. is—in the discontinuous matter view. The key term is Gestalt. Each thing (what we call “thing”) was not a thing at all; it was a part, and functioned as a part (of a whole).”

Within the continuum view of reality, there is no space. Rather, space is not perceived at all;

120 space actually becomes nothing. PKD sees this as a kind of Gestalt: the mind sees how the pieces work together into a whole so that none of the discrete units can be viewed in full isolation. The result is that kenon—the space—has no significance at all.

The Atomists, however, upset this Gestalt: “they consign significance to the kenon in contradistinction to to on, physical objects. The two are biopolarized” (53-2). Prior to the

Atomists, PKD suggests, kenon must not have separated objects since it was not considered to be real. “Then when we today conceive of space (kenon) we conceive of something real (without realizing it).” Unthinkingly, we adopt the Atomists view. If we actually thought space was nothing, then we would see the world as PKD did on 2-3-74: as one whole. After all, in the continuum view, “the percept-system and cognitive system does not even show a register of

‘Zero’; the recipient scans ‘to on’ and ‘to on’ only. For him, space is like an ellipses in the attention of the mind (as if it lost consciousness in its scanning” (53-2). Without acknowledging it, we have completely adopted the discontinuous view of reality, believing nothing to be something.

When one moves from the discontinuous Form II to the continuum of Form I, Being (to on), one has a completely different experience:

“Reality -- including the percipient as part to whole -- is experienced as one, unitary, interested structure (Which is "true kosmos" as Pythagoras used the term; hence "an extinct true kosmos and it's still there.") Reality valued this way […] is such that "the void" (meden) no longer is accorded existence, as it has mistakenly been from the Greek Atomist on down. Hence there is no void, no nothing; thus all things are seen literally to be connected, and there is what I saw that I called Valis. Not a plurality of atomized discontinuous pieces of matter but, rather, one interconnected whole. If the void (meden) is accorded a reality - it is not regarded as existent - then it follows logically that by definition there is a literal continuum. This cannot be expressed or imagined if you premise the atoms and void discontinuum matter bases. But I did see it (3-74) because it is true, and when we see void we are deluded.” (55-1).

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The literal nature of the continuum is important. Division can only be considered functional, secondary (which is why it is Form II) to a reality which is continuous first. The illusion under which we exist is literally a negative, the insertion of a nothingness where nothingness cannot exist. Once we abolish this nothingness, Wholeness manifests as always being present in what

Being is: “And this turns out finally, when all falsifications are abolished to be the Eleatic continuum which is the ancient (extinct) true Kosmos; it is still there, but we are unable to see it.

We suffer then, a negative hallucination; we don't see what is not there. We fail to see what is”

(55-1). We are always seeing Wholeness, our perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic structures merely cut it up in the manner that Kant already identified through his analysis of the a priori categories of pure reason.63 Regardless of the nature of PKD’s philosophical training, he understands this fundamental point in relation to Kant. For Kant, the categories, which include space and time, are conditions of possibility of experience. Yet the experience of wholeness is the experience of the dropping away of these very categories, as PKD experienced in 2-3-74:

Perhaps you see Kosmos - continuum - when the Kantian categories go because space, like time and causation, is one of them; then I'm saying that…of time, certainly; that most of all. Causation certainly; I saw that go. And also space: discrete plurality gives way to unity because "space" equals "void" and is a Kantian category, which is to say "discontinuous matter is connected with these categories and is false." (55-1).

While Kant insists that you cannot move beyond the a priori categories, PKD nonetheless experienced the constructed nature of these categories and thus encountered the reality behind them. Suddenly Wholeness became not only possible but necessary since Wholeness is not another category but what is expressed when the categories fall away.64

63 We will see, in chapter 6, that this list “perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic structures” is already in Plato’s Sophist 64 Of course Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason takes Wholeness to be just one category among many. But this argument hinges already on his insistence that there is no outside of the structure of reason. 122

Indeed, the insistence by which scholars have reasserted, time and time again, that there is no outside of the categories is surprising given the current desire to get beyond or around

Kant’s metaphysics. Nonetheless, even within Kant’s text there is no proper justification given for the failure to escape the categories except that it is beyond the capacity of reason to do so.

Thus, to hold to Kant’s denial is to already hold to reason as the way in which we access the world. But we can call forth a second witness in Franklin Merrell-Wolff, the twentieth century

Harvard trained philosopher-turned-mystic, who argues that Kant was right that reason is limited to the categories, but wrong to think that reason and perception are man’s only capacities for encountering the world. We can thus use the more philosophically careful statement from

Merrell-Wolff to supplement PKD’s assertion: “I am well aware that several philosophies affirm or imply that all consciousness is of necessity [constrained by space and time]. But since this is undemonstratable, it has only the value of an arbitrary assertion, which is countered by simple denial” (Franklin 316). 65 However, Merrell-Wolff notes that if we tie reason to the categories, then the fact that we can have an encounter with Wholeness, as both PKD and Merrell-Wolff testify in conjunction with the whole history of mystics who say likewise, demonstrates that humans have another capacity, which Merrell-Wolff calls “introception” by which we can encounter Wholeness. The possibility and logical necessity of Wholeness is pointed to already in

Zeno’s paradoxes and people throughout time and across the globe attest to having encountered this Gestalt of Wholeness. If nothing else, then, the emphasis of fragmentation over Wholeness must at least be acknowledged as a choice, a mere assertion or belief. PKD may then respond

65 This is the impasse of mystic vs rationalist that will always reduce itself to some form of: Mystic: “I experienced the beyond of Reason/Language/Fragmentation” Critic: “No you didn’t, there is no escape from Reason/Language/Fragmentation.” Mystic: “But I experienced it.” Critic: “That’s impossible, you must be wrong/deluded/insane/a bad philosopher.” 123 with the sly observation that in making this choice, you are trapping yourself in nothing and nothing will free you as long as you grant nothing reality.

Going Crazy with VALIS Then again, maybe PKD is just crazy and using philosophical speculation to back up this nonsense that is periodically set up and affirmed by equally crazy individuals who jump on the mystic train. We could even come up with a name for it, as was once done for Suzanne Segal, who experienced the sense of Wholeness randomly while stepping on a bus in Paris. They called it “depersonalization disorder” and she became a model case. PKD too has shown up in psychological studies as a model case.66 The situation is not helped by the fact that the PKD himself continually falters between this sense of realization and this confusion, the back-tracking instigated by “I must be insane.” As scholars have endlessly pointed out, PKD was formally diagnosed and obsessively diagnosed himself with any number of mental illnesses, from bipolar to schizophrenia. There were multiple suicide attempts and time was spent in mental hospitals.

For most scholars, PKD’s insanity is a given and it is just a matter of saying what exactly his insanity was and what the relationship was to the novels. Even a more nuanced argument, such as the one offered by Roger Luckhurst still assumes that PKD was actually unhinged. After an extensive review of the various ways PKD has been diagnosed, Luckhurst suggests that PKD’s self-diagnosis ought to be read as a kind of self-narrative in which one applies the contemporary categories of diagnosis to narrate one’s status. PKD, Luckhurst argues, “was highly susceptible to this process of dynamic nominalism in his own life and in his fiction” (19). Luckhurst is not disputing that PKD is crazy, just that we can’t give him a clear diagnosis; rather, his diagnosis

66 Luckhurst, “Diagnosing Dick” discusses PKD’s appearance in The Psychologist in 2003. Suzanne Segal’s case was much more explicitly tied into the psychological literature both because she discussed the experience extensively with psychiatrists and had a doctorate in Psychology. 124 shifted with his own narrative about himself in relation to the categories found in psychiatry and anti-psychiatry at the time. Following this conclusion, we can just say that PKD adopted the category and psychosis of “Mystic” as a means of narrating his own insanity. Maybe all mystics do that.

After all, PKD—and many, if not all mystics—sound pretty crazy. What a strange thing to say—that the world is all one Whole! And if that’s the case, why does it have to come as some kind of revelation; why does it come so often cloaked in such vague, shadowy, or bizarre terms?

Why do they stick out so much? Obsessively writing strange philosophical musings is an obviously unhinged thing to do, especially when they involve things like claiming that we are actually stuck in A.D 50 and are travelling backwards in time as part of a battle between God and the Destroyer. PKD might as well don a tin-foil hat when he starts to talk about Valis and living information.

It is convenient to, at one point, relish in the prescience by which PKD is able to capture the insanity of the information era and then, in another moment, discard as insane or too bizarre the underlying visions that emerged from PKD’s own philosophical inquiry. Either he was a fictionalizing philosopher, as he called himself, or he was just a nut who churned out imaginative stories (75:9, 693). The apparent strangeness of his claims is not criteria alone to dismiss what his mode of description drives us towards, despite the instability and his tendency to fall towards a certain paranoid mode. To the contrary, the way that he takes up the rhetoric of the information age precisely serves to highlight the strangeness of our own usual way of viewing the world.

PKD was himself quite reflective about the way his situation could be read as insane, not only in the fact that his novels dealt extensively with mental illness, but also in his understanding of how insane the conclusions from 2-3-74 might sound. The novel Valis, is built around this

125 possibility of insanity as an open question within the response and untangling of the experience of Wholeness. Valis is a largely autobiographical account of Horselover Fat, a translation of

Philip from the Greek and Dick from the German, who is writing a “Tractate” after Valis beamed information into his head. Many of the events in the novel actually happened to PKD, including his extensive work with a psychiatrist, the suicide attempts, and the general tenor of the conversations Horselover Fat has with friends largely fits with accounts of the time. The novel presents Horselover Fat as insane, since he has an obvious problem of identity: he is split from the novelist, Philip K. Dick, who is writing the novel. Given that the novel was written several years into PKD’s writing of the Exegesis, we can read Valis as a kind of tool of meta-abstraction whereby PKD is able to reflect on the question of insanity in his own life and experiences. The question of insanity is tied directly to the question of fictionalizing. As PKD himself becomes entangled in the narrative of his work, the relationship between the fictional Horselover Fat and

PKD is itself a way for PKD to reflect on how to navigate a fictional situation for its non- fictional—quite real and important—implications. Luckhurst’s insight is thus partially correct:

PKD is indeed dealing with the narrative about his own subjective identity. But in Valis and throughout the Exegesis, PKD does so on a meta-subjective level, not just narrating about himself but considering what it means to narrate about oneself, to fictionalize a philosophical problem, and how to extricate out of this self-narration and persistent fictionalization the significant conclusions. Horselover Fat’s insanity—being split into two personalities—is equivalent to the fictionalizing of PKD himself as a character apart from himself. In Horselover

Fat’s quest to understand Valis, we have a parallel reflection on the part of PKD to see where and how he himself navigates the split of his fiction to distill from it the conclusions that make it philosophy.

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The disjointing of insanity/sanity and fiction/philosophy arises because of the jarring implication that, if PKD’s conclusions about Wholeness and Valis are correct, then the generally accepted mode of consciousness and reading the world is actually insane. PKD realizes this almost immediately after coming to the continuum model:

If you had been raised in a civilization that unquestioningly held the discontinuous matter view of reality, and you suddenly saw -- or "saw" -- cosmos -- which I say must of necessity be predicated on the continuum view - the experience would simply unhinge you because cosmos - in the true sense - is impossible in the discontinuous matter world. Two realizations are involved then: (1) what you see or "see" exists but cannot; (2) what you and everyone else fundamentally believed about reality is erroneous (53-013).

Essentially, the view of Wholeness reverses our usual assumption about reality. Suddenly what we think is real (this manifold world of objects) becomes unreal (an artifact of division). You see something which exists—Wholeness—but this Wholeness cannot be possible in this world of division since it seems so antithetical to it. One is then forced to face this second conclusion: that we are all working from a fundamentally erroneous assumption about reality. Reality has given way to illusion, wisdom to fiction, and thereby opened up a kind of doubt or confusion. How can

I know that this is right? This itself could “unhinge you” as it forces you to face this tangle of illusion and this denial of the sense of reality upon which your view of the world was previously grounded.

If we accept the conclusion about Wholeness, then we find ourselves already in this maze in which the sane is shown to be insane and fiction may become philosophy. Literally, we exist in a world that must already be deemed illusory or fictional in some sense. It sounds like a conspiracy. In describing this situation in Valis, Horselover Fat and his friends must first discover a secret group who has received contact from Valis. Only then do they hear about this maze of illusion:

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‘We are in a maze, here,’ Mini said, ‘which we built and then fell into and can’t get out. In essence, VALIS selectively fires information to us which aids us in escaping from the maze, in finding a way out. . . .We were great builders, but one day we decided to play a game. We did it voluntarily. . . .To make the game into something real, into something more than an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This, unfortunately, included loss of memory—loss of our true origins. But worse than that—and here is where we in a sense managed to defeat ourselves, to turn victory over to our servant, over to the maze we had built—‘ ‘The third eye closed,’ Fat said. ‘Yes,’ Mini said, ‘We relinquished the third eye, our prime evolutionary attribute. It is the third eye which VALIS reopens.’ (207)

The realization is that we have lost some sense under which we can register the nature of the game we are playing, whereby we recognize what is illusion and what is real. The maze that we built is the world of fragmentation, whereby we grant a reality to division. The recognition of the maze is not enough, however, to free us: How are we to discern in what ways we actually fail to recognize how we are trapped by division? How could we have built for ourselves such a powerful fiction to live by? Recognizing the frustration, PKD notes, in response to this closing of the third eye that we have “another Chinese finger-trap. And built by ourselves. To trap our own selves” (346). Even in seeing the trap, we pull against it and find ourselves more tightly bound than ever.

We have thus a sense of illusion to fill in our sense of reality. In VALIS, PKD uses

Hussey to discuss Heraclitus’ conception of how “the entire universe—as we experience it— could be a forgery” (36). The crucial aside (“as we experience it”) indicates that we are dealing with a problem in perception or interpretation of reality. Thus, PKD explains, quoting Hussey,

“in Fragment 56 [Heraclitus] says that men, in regard to knowledge of perceptible things, ‘are the victims of illusion much as Homer was.’” Likewise, Heraclitus compares men “to sleepers in private worlds of their own” (36, Hussey 37). Our perception of the world is like a mythology, fantasy, or dream—a fictionalizing that we are so absorbed in that we do not know how to

128 untangle ourselves from it. PKD is noting a sentiment that is likewise found in Vedic thought, as is expressed in the Diamond Sutra’s penultimate stanza: “All composed things are like a dream, a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning” (Han, Diamond 32). For Heraclitus, the analogy of the dream captures our faith in sensory interactions, the Gestalt, the process by which we filter and fill in the holes of our perceptions. The analogy of the myth captures the way that we essentially take illusions and fantasies for reality—most often through believing the narratives we build around the world as accurately capturing the world.

In introducing illusion into the mix, Heraclitus makes it possible to think that reality is concealed from us. Suddenly fantasy and reality have switched places: what we call reality becomes a fantasy while what is actually real must emerge from outside of our perceptual norm.

PKD is particularly struck by this point: “In all my reading, I have—I mean, Horselover Fat has—never found anything more significant as an insight into the nature of reality” (36). The insertion of the clarification, which is narratively unnecessary, actually serves the opposite purpose than what such an assertion usually performs: it is a moment of frankness, in which

PKD finds himself writing as himself, noting the significance of this conclusion and, in doing so, bringing our awareness to its implications for the fictional performance. For PKD, the implication is that one must go insane in order to see reality. If “insane people—psychologically defined. . .are not in touch with reality” and reality itself is beyond the usual phenomenal world, then “the universe itself—and the Mind behind it—is insane. Therefore someone in touch with reality is, by definition, in touch with the insane: infused by the irrational” (37). We are thus in a bind: one cannot tell what is real because both the mind and what it perceives are distorted: “Fat monitored his own mind and found it defective. He then, by the use of his own mind, monitored outer reality…[and also] found it defective.” For Horselover Fat, this meant that “there was no

129 way out. The interlocking between the defective instrument and the defective subject produced another perfect Chinese finger trap.”

At the same time, there seems to be one route out of the trap: sometimes reality breaks through on its own. If the world is illusory, then the in-breaking of reality can be called a theophany: “a theophany consists of a self-disclosure by the divine” (VALIS 34). In order to reveal the truth, some kind of external force must intervene—as Mini put it, “something outside had to enter” (207). The implication is that all true experiences of reality are nothing other than these in-breakings of the divine: “if Heraclitus is correct, there is in fact no reality but that of theophanies” (34). But theophany runs again into the problem of insanity. Even if reality did break through, we may not recognize the theophany amidst the other illusions. After all, if the mind is defective, then even the theophany might appear as another defect. Furthermore, the mind is quite adept at producing more confusion. This is in fact, part of what PKD dramatizes through his descriptions of the BIP. As we create new paths out of its confines, these paths are assimilated into the BIP. Thus, in the Exegesis he writes that “the BIP warps every new effort at freedom into the further mold of tyranny” (16:62, 346). In the context of our discussion of

Wholeness, we would say that every attempt to articulate wholeness must proceed by division, since division is our usual way of looking at the world. As Valis makes clear, the category of

“insanity” becomes itself an obstacle as we find it increasingly difficult to discern true theophany from a perpetuation of illusion. PKD goes through this process incessantly himself, fluctuating between his own belief in his revelation and self-deprecation. The entire Exegesis performs the same kind of maze-like structure; PKD must find more paths to travel because each one is not fully sufficient to escape the BIP. As he says in Valis, “the maze shifts as you move through it,

130 because it is alive” (205). Insecurity creeps back in, turning insights into doubt and accusations of insanity. And so the Exegesis continues.

However, if we hesitate over the accusation of insanity for a moment, then perhaps we can discern genuine theophany from more illusion. The “third eye” that we saw in the conversation above, suggests that there was, before the maze was built, some capacity to see through the illusion into what is actually there. The implication is that, in some way, we have discarded or discounted some part of our perception, closing off a certain way of seeing. Some underlying intuition seems to have been lost. Although PKD did not directly cite this section,

Hussey can help us further here. He explains that, for Heraclitus, a paradox is created out of an illusory separation or division: “men fail to understand the general truth illustrated by the

‘paradoxes,’ that what is at variance (from itself) is in agreement with itself” (43). A paradox is an incongruity created by our own false perception or conception. In a way, then, a paradox is itself a theophany, a revelation that our concepts are inadequate. This is what our discussion of

Zeno’s paradox showed. What Merrell-Wolff called introception is the human capacity to receive theophany. This “exceptional faculty” captured by the idea of the “third eye” might been seen as the capacity to reflect on this fragmentation, to take note of it as a game that we are playing with reality rather than the reality itself. Such an account fits with what Gregory Bateson once argued about play: for play to exist, we need to have some signal that indicates “this is play,” otherwise the act is taken seriously, read practically as a sincere and real act rather than a playful one.67 A meta-sign is needed whereby we recognize the play at hand. The signal from

VALIS is the meta-sign or meta-abstraction that allows us to become aware of the falsity of our divisions—these divisions are shown to be just a kind of game, a tentative means of dividing up

67 see “A theory of Play and Fantasy” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind 131 the reality for the purposes of playing out a cosmic dance. The “third eye” is thus equated not to something mysterious or supernatural but to the capacity to distinguish the illusion from the real, to become aware of the divisions by which one divides reality. Such is much the same conclusion of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra: the “diamond that cuts through the illusion” is the ability to discern the tentative nature of words and concepts. In the diamond sutra this is expressed as a recursive reflection whereby one reasserts the forgotten tentative nature of the institution of division. It takes the form of: “That which we call X is not X. That is why we call it

X.”68 Likewise, the sign “this is a paradox” is a sign of insufficiency of division as a signal to be open for the otherwise of Wholeness, whereby the world might show itself differently.

This resurgence of reality is part of what PKD tries to capture as the entity VALIS,

Zebra, or, following Heraclitus, the Logos. Despite the attempt to discard theophanies as insanity, the paradoxes of our false perceptions persist and, thus, are slowly dismantled:

The encircled BIP/magnet/pathenogin is being disassembled and incorporated into the brain/phagocyte/sphere/[manifestations of VALIS], which process produces time and flux (v. Heraclitus). But it is not an equal contest: the sphere or brain although facing a formidable opponent is successfully dismantling it, although the process is not complete. It is the upper realm of Form I eventually making irreal the lower realm of Form II, as Parmenides realized. . . .The push-pull process accomplishes…final unitary totality. As the push-pull takes place between a given cell, station, part, bit or Atman, and the total brain-so-far, that bit is hyped up to elevated—well, I guess for whatever it will serve as in the final unitary being, which is probably awake (sentient) throughout.” (The Exegesis 18:66 (378)).

However crazy this may sound, PKD is just articulating the same point about meta-abstraction.

The meta-abstraction eats the division, eradicates the nothing. Zebra or Valis is just the

Wholeness of reality that is constantly trying to manifest, to break our sense of fragmentation and alert us to the larger reality of which we are a part. This realization makes us available to play the role in the Whole we were always meant to play. The metaphor of Zebra is appropriate

68Hanh, The Diamond 132 since it implies that Valis makes use of the parts you hold to be nothing (black stripes) to disguise itself in reality. This larger reality exists already and we already exist as a part of it. This itself is a strange experience that PKD articulates in scalar terms: “so my brain, made up of millions of cells, in billions of [electrical] combinations, became one station (cell) in (of) a larger brain, linked to other “cells” (persons), some dead, some living, some yet to be, with Christ as the total mind (psyche)” (38:26, 254). This “system of linking” signals that we are to connect even ourselves up to the Whole, and only be doing so will the illusion fall away. Rather than a system of belief, this becoming-Whole functions through an acknowledgement of the larger structure necessarily implied by the falling away of division. Thus, the big revelation that Fat receives is not to believe in some divine entity. Rather, he is instructed by Sophia, the current incarnation of Valis, that “man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves” (VALIS 219). Upon hearing Sophia’s words, the split between Fat and PKD is cured and his fictional self is made whole with his real self.

And yet, something quite crazy can still occur in response to this becoming-Whole: one can go on to fail to accept one’s own divinity as part of the whole. The failure to recognize personal theophany is precisely what Valis dramatizes in the latter half of the book. Even though

Fat is told that man himself is the living god, he still searches for divinity outside of himself. The switch seems to occur when the characters begin to think of themselves as having special access to divinity rather than already existing within the divine: “We are a privileged group,” they declare, “We are God’s elect” (230). Ironically, instead of taking on themselves the proffered status of divine, in recognizing this implication as a necessary correlate to Wholeness, they fall into an empty pride, which puts them in a special place in relation to a divinity. Thus, when

Sophia dies, they fall into confusion, uncertain where the divine has gone. Fat’s madness

133 resurfaces. The distrust of intuition has returned as Fat continues to look outside of himself for a reality that will only ever arrive as an internal theophany. Like Grote running off to the office, trying to think of another experiment, Fat runs off to the corners of the world, trying to find God.

In the further meta-abstraction in which PKD reflects on what he has written, PKD notes that “in VALIS I transmuted myself and my life into a picaroon character…. VALIS’ message is not the Parousia but pistis” (60:A-35 (689)). Rather than feeling the arrival of the divine Whole

(Parousia), Horselover Fat, as the fiction counterpart to PKD, runs off after pistis, belief. To work from Wholeness is not a belief but rather the eradication of the need for belief. To work from Wholeness is not to discern what in the world is a fiction but rather the eradication of the sense that to find the real is to find the right kind of division. If this is an insanity, it is only so because of the persistence required to untangle the implication of Wholeness: “my insanity,”

PKD writes in a particularly frank section of the Exegesis, “given an insane world, is, paradoxically, a facing of reality, and this is sane” (75:D-9, 692). Even so, the solution is not the articulation of a philosophy itself but, perhaps, even the exhausting of this philosophy—even in

8000 hand-written pages—since this philosophy itself is the accumulation of more distinctions:

“perhaps more than anyone else I reveal the irrational depths of underlying reality. My ideological solution is a failure; if I believe in it I have gone mad…Little can be said for my point of view, except that it can’t be logically demolished; if it could be I would have done so.

Thus I am in touch with reality.” We can see that we are in touch with reality not by adequately describing the situation but by already seeing how our divisions fail, even the divisions crafted in the vision of Wholeness. From there, being in touch with reality is enough.

Your Objects are already Ubik At the deepest level, the brain represents form, and the BIP represents entropy. . . .The BIP is sameness: thermal death.

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- The Exegesis (38:88 (365))

The loop by which we suppose ourselves trapped in illusion occurs in failing to understand this withdrawal that happens as soon as try to look for the truth within the context of the illusory world of divisions. The inescapable crumbling of PKD’s worlds is the practice of letting-crumble our sense of solidity. After reading a few of his novels one can put the book down and get the eerie sense that this world outside the book is also crumbling. The fiction is only bizarre because our reality is equally bizarre, we have just stabilized it for what appear to be practical purposes. Even so, the stabilization leads us to obsessively hunt after objects that we imbue with such importance. Getting lost in the fragmentation, we think we are bound by these faux divisions, the money, the goods, the technology, the success. The realization of Wholeness does not deny these things insofar as they are division but puts them in the context of the Whole whereby the power of their hold breaks down.

This is the cosmos that PKD steps us into, both in his novels and in The Exegesis: a world whose larger order exceeds the structures of power that keeps us endlessly tied to the apparent needs before us. Value is shown to be found not just in any higher structure, but in the structure of the Whole. This relationship in PKD’s work has often been read according to biopolitical structures whereby corporations and governments are able to control the lives of people.69 Such readings fail to see the way that even those corporate and governmental leaders are themselves caught in the crumbling or else find themselves becoming transformed beyond themselves into some other monolithic entity that is no longer tied to the corporate structure of power (as is the case with Runciter in Ubik and Palmer Eldritch in Three Stigmata). It is not our tie to biopolitical structures that PKD is diagnosing but the way that these pale in the structure of

69 See, for example, Chris Rudge “‘The Shock of Dysrecognition’: Biopolitcal Subjects and Drugs in Dick’s Science Fiction” and Fabienne Collignon’s “Cold-Pac Politics: Ubik’s Cold War Imaginary.” 135 power that exceeds even that, a power which causes biopolitical force to appear as nothing more than a weak, futile, and disorganized attempt at order. It is Cosmos that PKD pushes us towards, in showing the bizarre unfolding of post-war capitalism, the arrangement of objects not by economic structure but by the larger underlying order of the Whole:

There is no other correct term for what I saw when I saw physical thoughts in terms of changing mutual arrangements of physical objects - presumably all physical objects in the universe - than kosmos. If we saw [them as] physical objects but not as thoughts we would name reality, universe, world, world-order, etc. and if there were incorporeal thoughts we would have God, demiurge, Logos, nous, etc. It is the necessary unity of the two that renders it kosmos. (53:5) The structure of Cosmos here is the correlation between thoughts and physical objects. This is the same reality seen both ways: in terms of physicality we call it “reality, universe, world”; in terms of thought we call it “God, demiurge, Logos, nous.” The objects of the world are nothing more than the thoughts of Cosmos. Likewise, the thoughts of Cosmos are the objects of the world. You could get this conclusion likewise from Bateson’s conception of Mind as a cybernetic Whole looping back on itself, from Teilhard’s noosphere as the development of the

Intelligence of God, from Berkeley’s famous idealism in which the Universe is all thoughts in the mind of God, or even from the classic Vedic thought that all of this is the play in the mind of

Siva. PKD is emphasizing here two elements that may not be immediately apparent in these articulations. First, to note an idealism is to note that objects are themselves here as part of the larger order, as structures to assist us in navigating this Whole. Only in considering both the physical and the ideal together do we get a complete view of Cosmos. Second, the order arises not from these limited, fragmented pieces, but from this larger structure as a whole. Thus, PKD continues:

Needless to say, I did not know this when I saw it in 3-74 and (I believe) not when I wrote "Valis" if indeed I knew it at all before today. But (as I say) we must revert to - or revive, reinstate - the pre-Atomist continuum reality and go at once from that to kosmos; we can never go from discontinuous matter reality to kosmos. With the discontinuous

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matter model you wind up with eg. Wittgenstein who could not discern any totality or overall structure and was (to me) a nihilist pure and simple (53:5).

Rather than get caught up in some kind of idealist-realist debate, PKD sees the stakes according to Wholeness or Fragmentation. In fragmentation, all of this world—objects and thoughts—can mean nothing, can be nothing more than a cold and endless interaction of chaotic elements fighting against each other. On the other hand, in working from Wholeness, suddenly the world/Cosmos is itself imbued with meaning, a meaning which can only be accessed if one lets- crumble one’s sense that this apparent reality is reality itself.

We can thus approach once more the question of wholeness according to the breakdown of objects and objectness, both our habit of seeing objects and our obsession for objects as the fount of reality. Although PKD might not have fully united thought and the physical together conceptually until the passage above, this conclusion is already the result of many of his novels that work with this sense of physical break down. Perhaps the best novel to take us through this breakdown is Ubik, which he obsessively read and interpreted throughout the Exegesis. In Ubik, we find a perpetual decay of reality as the breaking down or regression of objects back to a former state. Those who tumble into the illusion of Ubik are tuned into a rapid-decay of the apparently stable world, not only as the entropic dissipation of the Cosmos that we came to fear in the 19th century as the “heat death” of the universe, but also as a regression back in time. The breakdown presented in Ubik thus decimates our decisive field of objects, these “things-in- themselves” that appear so stable, so within our control, so ready for comprehension. Ubik demonstrates the futility of grasping at our divisions even as it presents, out of the surrender to the helplessness of dissolution, the eponymous Ubik as that which binds beneath and beyond the simulacrum.

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In Ubik everyone is helplessly entangled in the process of decay, even when they seem to possess some power otherwise. This process of becoming-helpless to the decay is captured by one of PKD’s favorite words: the inert or inertia—an unusual adjective that recurs endlessly throughout PKD’s oeuvre. PKD uses this term to describe a feeling of action giving way to a motion that has no actor. “Inertia” works so well because it retains an emphasis on residual motion once an actor has become passive. The whole novel is built around the process of falling into a state of inertness and the attempts of the characters to recover some sense of liveliness.

The main characters are trapped in a world drained of activity; everything in the world seems to be regressing, as if all of the active forces in the universe have ceased. All that is left is inertia, entropy, and the gradual undoing of reality. But all this becoming-inert is only to make way for the salvific entity “Ubik” wherein the inertness is kept at bay and reality is mended. Ubik fills in the gaps, permits to move what would fall inert if left to its own accord.

The breakdown of the novel begins when a bomb explodes in the middle of Glen

Runciter and the “intertials” he employs, whose psionic powers negate other psionic abilities. At first the novel seems to continue on like any science fiction action story; Glen Runciter is injured and put into cryogenic storage (called “cold-pac”) as Joe Chip, an employee who tests inertials, takes control of the situation. But then strange things start to happen: objects start to appear old and out of date. We first notice this when Joe Chip attempts to get a cup of coffee: “Joe picks up the coffee cup, and found the coffee cold, inert and ancient” (87). It appears that this gathering of inertials has initiated a cosmic wind-down. The phrase “inert and ancient” stands out; the coffee is not merely cold or old, but becomes a completely ineffectual artifact of a process whose presence began in a far off time, for long forgotten purposes. From this point on, the objects in

Ubik become significant signs insofar as they provide a signal of falsity by their very decay and

138 incapacity. Joe and the others know they are in a false world because the objects are insufficiently stable. At the same time, even as the objects signal that this world is illusory, they likewise signal the presence of help as Runciter’s words of guidance start to show up on cigarette cartons, discarded newspapers, graffiti, and billboards. These objects are means of informing the characters about what needs to be done and how to find the Ubik, as a very part of their regress.

It was their decay that made possible their function as informing objects. Likewise, it is the way that objects resolve and dissolve into any number of other objects in the movement across scales that inform us that a division process has always already been undertaken, that some strange

Gestalt was already put into place. These changes send a clear signal: do not look to these objects for evidence of underlying reality except indirectly, as means, by their decay, of directing us beyond them, to the Ubik.

In encountering these inert and ancient objects, we can insert a scholarly notation about objects. Such a reading of objects is entirely antithetical to the current theoretical obsession with objects designated as Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). Reifying as pre-existing the world’s objects, OOO seeks, as Ian Bogost puts it, to “put things at the center of being....OOO contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos,

DVD players, and sandstone, for example” (6). OOO is born out of Graham Harman’s unfortunate reading of Heidegger’s discussion of the withdrawal of objects, which Harman takes to mean that objects must always pre-exist or otherwise withdraw from the Dasein which accesses them. However, we can emphasize here that this “withdrawal” of objects is, for

Heidegger, just what PKD describes in Ubik—the more we rely on objects or look at them for reality, the more they resist being solid and break down. This is fundamental Heidegger: the ontic is not the ontological. We can thus agree with Marcus Boon’s assessment, in his essay on

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OOO and PKD, that, contrary to Harman’s assertion, “Heidegger seeks precisely to displace the object status of objects.”70 That is, the objects cannot be pre-given as objects, except insofar as they are designated as objects according to their use-value, for us. This is why they become present, because they manifest as having some kind of being which is recognizable. But certain objects are present as objects that allow us to reflect on Being-itself beyond the manifold of objects—to bring us to Ubik. It may be that the ultimate use-value of all objects is to lead us to

Ubik, in their very variability, decay, and obvious relation to the homo sapien-tied Dasein who sees, reads, and interprets their presence. It is no surprise, then, to find that the whole structure of

OOO cannot process scale’s radical orientation to objects: “OOO…draws attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis) and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves” (6). In invoking all scales here, Bogost has not scaled at all since he has ignored that the relation between the scales contains simultaneous referents to the same object. Without this scalar connection, shifts in size produce what appears like different objects that refer to the same object. You can’t call a thing atoms now, as one separate set of pre- existing things, and then an alpaca later, as another separate thing-in-itself. In actually paying attention to what happens in scaling, we see that these atoms and alpacas, in their objectness, are already tied to the entity which observes them and scales them. In the meantime, these supposedly pre-existing objects shift form, become imbibed, revised and rebuilt, grow old and decay, hearken back to ancient events for which they still bear marks, and signal in words and signs the transformation of consciousness. We can already see Bogost’s DVD players spiraling backward through time, becoming-VHS in its obsolescence. Bonobos may soon be extinct,

70 Boon, “Between Science and Object”, 79. 140 although captured in sandstone to be read into the archeological record as disappearing in the midst of the Anthropocene.

The attempt to privilege objects in some way must tie itself to a sense of flatness. But flatness can never be sustained except from the perspective of the Whole. One requires some

Ubik to fill in the gaps, to permit that all of these things might transform into anything else.

Without this you find yourself with a contradiction, in which you claim to address everything but still hold on to these “things” that are clearly always passing away, altering, containing more than themselves (atoms, energies, forces). Thus, we get these odd attempts to also claim everything according to objects alone: “Instead [the philosophical subject] must become everything, full stop” (Bogost 10). Yet this everything is not the Whole that occurs when viewing things as they come-together into a single object: “there is no ur-thing, no container, no vessel, no concept that sits above being such that it can include all aspects of it holistically and incontrovertibly” (Bogost 12). This argument cannot sustain itself: you can’t have your everything and divide it too. Everything considered as everything requires us to acknowledge that, even phenomenologically, things are always connected up and the divisions that we retain between them are mainly due to the position of these homo sapiens navigating them, there to distinguish between the computer screen and the central processing unit. Nonetheless, it is on the structure of a non-human perspective that OOO claims to have an everything without

Everything, completely neglecting that it if we attended to the human way of perceiving our scale, we’d see that the designation of divided objects as separate and coherent objects in themselves is an artifact of the scale we live on. If you would like to cut out the Whole, the Ubik, you’ll find yourself always at a loss to account for these altering and ever interconnected objects.

In this way, the atomists had a much more philosophically potent point, even if they did provide

141 arguments that led to fragmentation: if you imagine an infinitesimally small basic constituent of the universe, then all these things are not clearly objects but rather always in flux according to how all these small things are relating to each other. Even atomism thus produces the same conclusion: there is no possibility of encountering discernible “units” (as Bogost calls them) without adding in the reference “unit for,” even if you let this “unit for” be nonhuman (the banana will be a different object for a fruit fly).

But likewise, you can’t, as Timothy Morton does, have your interconnection and fragment it too unless you scale. You can’t designate this vast interconnection a “mesh,” declare, as Morton does adequately if not hastily in The Ecological Thought (see chapter 2), that this mesh arises from a viewing from a larger perspective, and deny the wholeness aspects, deny any possible term Nature, some Ubik by which all of this makes sense together: “It’s strictly impossible to equate this total interconnectedness…with something beyond us or larger than us.

Total interconnectedness isn’t holistic” (40). It is unclear what Morton could mean in saying that it is “strictly impossible” to speak at all in terms of the unity of things, or how he would limit this total interconnectedness somehow to the level of homo sapiens still scratching at the earth (just with bigger sticks) even while claiming its vastness. He has the general fear right (“They fear totality means totalitarianism”) but his solution fails to examine the scalar error at the base of that assumption and thereby still denies any semblance of Wholeness. What is this viewing together other than a viewing things not as fragmented objects but according to their function within the Whole, which is nothing more than everything considered together in their interconnected aspects. To posit either objects or interconnection without Wholeness is already to posit Wholes that are partial; indeed, we can call these “partial-wholes.” But a Whole cannot be partial and still be Whole, however much we’d like to speak of holons as layers of

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Wholeness.71 Either you say an object is actually a whole in itself or it is already part of the

Whole. Partial-wholes simply cannot exist, however you would like to define objects, actors, or units.

The truth of the matter is that any reification of objects, devoid of the Ubik, will always find itself running into the becoming-object of oneself. As PKD already noted above, as much as we’d like to invigorate the liveliness of things, we cannot do so without addressing them in the context of the Whole. Anything less than the whole—anything less than ubiquity—will end up draining both objects and ourselves of liveliness. This was, in fact, the point Heidegger makes about man in the Question Concerning Technology: that as we try to force the world to stand- reserve as a set of predictable objects, we ourselves start to conceive of ourselves the same way.

PKD is obsessed with this problem in which one gets so lost in the illusion that you become helpless cogs in a machine. There are thus two forms of passivity already present: the falling into the inert mode by which you can simplify yourself as one component in an empty machine and the yielding up to the higher power of Ubik/Valis/Zebra whereby you find yourself now able to act once again, now as an agent of the Whole. Thus, in Ubik the object-decay becomes far more significant when the inertness reaches the characters. As Joe Chip experiences this crumbling, he describes it as a kind of draining of activity: “I’m slowed down, compressed by gravity. His world had assumed the attribute of pure mass. He perceived himself in one mode only: that of an object subjected to the pressure of weight. One quality, one attribute. And one experience.

Inertia” (182). Here PKD emphasizes the becoming-passiveness of inertia as an experience. Joe

71 This recent iteration of this mistake arises from Arthur Koestler’s taking up the idea in The Ghost in the Machine, which coined the term holons. Of course, Koestler’s holons are far more interesting because of Koestler’s use of cybernetics and chaos theory to posit some rules whereby these are not entirely Whole even as they form discernible systems. We have to be careful, however, since the definition of self-organizing dissipative structures does imply that these are whole at all, as the name holon would imply, since their dissipative nature means that they are functioning already in relation. 143

Chip becomes “pure mass” in the mechanistic sense: he contains no internal force of motion.

Chip feels his sense of being-subject giving way to being-object, to being externally determined only as a piece of matter winding down. Chip is thus trapped in this state of decay, in which he winds down regardless of his actions. Part of the terror of this trap is that the novel makes clear that the falling into inertness does not rely on the characters being in cold-pack. As Joe Chip finds himself decaying he muses on his sudden coldness:

Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force that I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe. So at least I won’t be alone (187).

The contrast set up here is between the dynamic process of life and the still, cold state of death.

The blending of the entropic state of the universe with the slow-decay of the characters points to how this kind of cold-pac deterioration is our normal state. Indeed, we can read cryogenic deterrence of death as this attempt to make use of the cold to avoid the inevitable decay of death, which nonetheless creeps in. Perhaps, then, we might think of the novel as describing the futility of technological means of avoiding death or as exemplifying the attempt to hold at bay the powers of technological destruction.72 But this is also what it means to be trapped within the realm of divided objects at all. To deal with objects is to deal with things already cut off, fragmented, and divided. To hold to an object, to force it to stand still, is already to demand the world to stand still in a way that it never will. Objects work off of tension, out of a making-into- something-else. It is only by this process that we can distinguish them, according to, as Gregory

Bateson famously put it, differences that make a difference—some kind of decay or giving-off which makes them visible and distinguishable as objects. To place oneself into this field of

72 Collignon summarizes these kind of readings in “Cold-Pac Politics” (48-49). 144 difference is already to place oneself as an object, to yield up oneself as nothing more than a difference that will likewise be found helpless in the decaying world. Death, the ultimate difference, which we try to hold at bay, claims us through the very fragmentation we feel as we identify ourselves as another one of these objects. We attempt to freeze them and ourselves, to lock them into place, force them to be ready-at-hand. But this is precisely the condition of decay—to lose the heat, to dissipate into chaos.73 If such futile holding in place is an insufficient stance for objects, how much more insufficient is it for our subjective experience of the world?74

What then is Ubik and how does it function to sustain the world without rendering it cold, without holding it in place and making it merely inert matter? In The Exegesis, one PKD’s earliest descriptions of his vision reminds us of the situation in Ubik:

What I saw about the external disinhibiting structure which evidently surrounds each human being, as a sort of cube-like chamber, was the utilization of every sort of datum, especially visual, so that when required that particular datum projected a signal…which the intended person to be disinhibited received. . . .The intended individual would experience a sudden transformation of the ground-set formation of the environment around him; one item would come forward, alter from ground and become set, then go back once more, to resume its passive or inert mode. . . .What in regard to us seemed to me especially high in this utility was written material of any and all sorts: any sign, any ad, any piece of paper; the resemblance to Runciter’s communication with people via the trash of the gutter...this is exactly what I actually saw myself as functioning in the highest fashion to guide and instruct us, these same verbal instruments. (4:147 (70))

The dynamic objects in Chip’s decaying world are not inhibitors but disinhibitors. When an object becomes meaningful, they are projected forward out of the otherwise inert environment, and alter the appearance of reality. Thus, Joe Chip experiences these kinds of sudden transformations when he receives messages from Runciter or applied the Ubik. Certain things seem to become active once again, until they fade back into their inert forms. The whole constitution of this series of objects is either the regress into chaos or the coming forward of

73 On entropy and this scalar relation to the cosmos see Salthe, “The Cosmic Bellows”; Dorian Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice 74 We will face this point directly as a function of scaling to the Whole in our final examination of Chapter 6. 145 meaning by which one is able to see how to act. Such meaningful objects are not evidence of this world as having some kind of a piori division but of an underlying support. As Joe muses in his final lines of the novel, “we are served by organic ghosts…who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment…elements which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart” (225). This underlying substance is the meaning that emerges even in the most unexpected places, as the objects indicating some substance that was already providing the support, the signals of how to proceed. Ubik, as the ubiquitous, is already this substance, the fullness of Being beyond the illusion which nonetheless makes the illusion possible. Thus, we find this advertisement immediately following Chip’s last musing:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here. I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word, and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be (797).

Ubik is the presence of what is already, beyond the illusion, from which the world is sustained.

The decay of objects points to the need to seek out Ubik and Ubik itself sends signals on how it can be found, but nearly always in unusual places, as bizarre signals that arise out of the environment as meaningful objects. To glimpse Ubik is to feel the way it works as a disinhibiting structure breaking through, allowing one to find oneself as subject again, taking away the inertness, as one becomes manifest within and part of the Whole.

The condition of possibility for overcoming the inertness is that second kind of becoming-passive, the surrender, the yielding control. After encountering one final regression,

Joe sits down on a bench. Here, about to fall into full decay, he experiences something subtly different than before: “All he felt was the support of the bench beneath him, the release of some of his vast inertial weight” (222). The emphasis here is not on the struggle, but of the laying

146 down of the weight. In this place, having consigned himself to dissolution, a girl appears with

Ubik. “You brought me from the future,” she says to Joe Chip. “You summoned me directly from the factory” (222). By yielding to a future beyond his control, that future came back to grant him more life. To yield in this way is to give up the inhibiting structure of one’s own investment in sustaining this world. Paradoxically, only by surrendering in this way can the world be sustained.

This yielding as disinhibiting is the break down of the belief and reliance on this world of objects as the ultimate reality. Usefully, in another passage, PKD articulates this as a kind of macrobrain:

“No, damn it, it is like Ubik! The outside macrobrain is signaling us to wake up, we are…asleep…while watching for Christ to return. We were made toxic—ie put in “half life”—as if killed. Fuck! I know it; Ubik is the paradigm! The half-life, the messages, Ubik itself, Runciter—we are in some sort of bubble of irreality: spurious world generated by—the plenary powers, astral determinism, whatever the fuck that is. (21:14, 416)

The cold-pac is thus not just some commentary on cryogenics and the desire to avoid death but an allegory for how one would come to access the beyond of this ever-decaying world of objects.

In our habit of dividing, we become inured to our own division, essentially falling for the dream as if it is reality. As it breaks down, the Ubik can come through, as the larger Whole by which even this fragmented series of objects is made possible. The intensity of this passage captures the nearly paranoid appearance of this realization: this world is not true but is the structure of some kind of mysterious power or fate. However, in suggesting this possibility, a weariness sets in: “I give up. Its hold was broken over me in 3-74—Salvation is real. Paul was right. But technology is involved, a superior technology.” On some level, there is no need to explain where this world of objects comes from because the release is already seen. This “I give up” appears repeatedly throughout the Exegesis and in particularly important parts of Divine Invasion, PKD’s most

147 refined novel form of his spiritual conclusions. In the last instant, one must give up to it, this

Whole, yielding the intensity by which one would desire for these objects to remain as they are.

When the continuum model returns, teleology, divinity, and purpose become a natural condition of the universe as a Whole. A different reality is revealed: “cosmos…exhibits order, growth, a high degree of structure and purpose and is both intelligent and alive, organism not mechanism” (53-4). The continuum view makes us aware that our prison was always a view of ourselves as isolated, separate, discrete individuals—disjointed “I”s—who must look outside of ourselves for connections. We surround ourselves with kenon, leaving us alone and isolated, becoming inert, falling into divided objects. But from the continuum view, we are part of the whole: “and of course in a kosmos—truly understood—the percipient is part of the structure, not outside it, and ideally shares in its mind….’inner-outer’ signify only ‘macro-micro’” (53-6). We can now derive meaning, significance, and connection from our place in the whole where before there was only nihilism: “a given object or event can play one role in our world [the discontinuous view] and quite another in that world [the continuum view]. In that world its role is one of pure function as part within one unitary integrated system: the part derives its identity, meaning, significance, and purpose from the total system, and, alone, signifies nothing at all”

(53-14, emphasis in original). Within discontinuity, we are meaningless. We signify nothing, because we can do nothing but move around and be moved around by objects external to ourselves. We are trapped by and within this fragmented structure which seems to push us along, as the characters are in Ubik, throwing us into disarray, passivity, and inertness.

With continuum restored, our actions then become meaningful in relation to the whole; the “external” becomes the “macro” part of ourselves that mirrors our own experiences and capacities. We thus find a new kind of release which comes out of newfound kind of activity.

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Since the continuum view “must be understood intelligibly by the rational/reasoning faculty of the percipient, not viewed sensibly, ie passively; the reasoning or cognitive faculty must operate actively, as, for example, when reading written words on a page” (53-14). This is the kind of activity that Joe Chip discovered: as he sought out and yielded to the instructions of Ubik, Ubik came to him. By this logic, to study ourselves is to study the whole; to study the mind is to study the structure of reality. We can now view our subjective experiences as legitimate rather than insane, our world of objects as indicating the Whole rather than a fragmented Cosmos. The reason why we can perceive reality is because we are a part of it. Our false perceptions—those that we have come to distrust as “subjective”—are actually those that we develop as artifacts of the view of ourselves as separate from the world. The only internal experiences we need to distrust, as Zeno’s paradox teaches us, are those which insist that divisions actually reflect reality. There is no longer the need to continue to struggle to try to maintain fragmentation as

Grote does. Suddenly, as we learned from reading Valis, we can acknowledge our own divinity since we, too, are part of Valis.

Surrender division and Ubik appears. Some superior technology intervenes, the Ubik by which everything was made whole. In feeling this appearance of Ubik, PKD examines this mass of pages he has produced and declares:

I qua author am a function of it! I am a mouth piece for it, which is fine, since it protects me. My corpus of writing is a true picture of the reality situation, since the macrobrain is the actual author. But the “audience” isn’t us here but the outside; then Zebra, the macrobrain (Logos) is in here, inside this “bubble” with us. Reporting back out to its source. Of course it’s here with us; I saw it; we’re in it.” (21:14-16; 416)

In seeing himself in the bubble of illusory objects, sustained by the hidden Ubik, PKD has the uncanny feeling that these words by which this observation is made is itself like Runciter’s messages. While it may seem like a conceited position, it was no doubt startling for PKD himself

149 to find that these conclusions could be drawn out of his crazy nightly ramblings and his cheap, hastily written, often trashy sci-fi. PKD can feel how much of this meaning-invasion was beyond his own capacities and made possible only by this larger structure which made meaningful even in the decaying worlds he constructed. PKD saw Ubik, and thereby sees Ubik as an expression of what it means for us to act. The Logos/Valis sends signals that open up agency and allows life to continue in the face of entropy: “Zebra continually guides (controls?) us as we move (are moved) through the ‘maze’ of life—disinhibited constantly and at the right time and place by the right signal” (25:11, 230). We are save through our surrender to a negation of a negation. The signals are a crucial but oblique form of guidance, the very decay of the world indicating, in the space in-between where we think nothing is, the Wholeness already present.

The Divine Injection of Palmer Eldritch Wholeness is not merely to be thought of, it is to be ingested. We must take the

Wholeness fully inside. It must rework us. Like a drug, perhaps, a drug meant to get us to see what is already there or to stop seeing the nothing that we think is there.

There is something curious about PKD’s use of drugs. It may be, in the end, that they did not do much for him. At least this is what he implied when he admitted in an interview towards the end of his life, that four separate doctors had examined the effect of amphetamines on his brain and discovered that they had no substantial effect on his brain.75 In many ways, his use of drugs themselves were an illusion, or an elaborate placebo, or a fiction, like his famous lie in which he told Harlan Elison that the story he submitted to Dangerous Visions was written while on LSD. Surely, you’d have to be on LSD to think of this stuff, we want to say. Although he took

LSD, he says he never cared for the experience. Meanwhile, PKD wrote one of the most

75 see Chris Rudge, “The Shock of Dysrecognition,” 42 150 powerful critiques of drugs and drug regulation to come out of the time. Despite these facts, on some level, we want PKD to be on a lot of drugs. We want him to be saturated with drugs, speaking from drugs, so that we can attribute the bizarre distortions of these worlds to some kind of occlusion, some kind of manufactured illusion. Perhaps we can just point out that, when he had his Valis experience in 2-3-74, he was on painkillers for a tooth surgery. So much for your

Jesus fish induced pink light experience!

The fact that the great awakening of spirituality in the 1960s concurred with so many drugs does not seem all that bizarre when you consider Bohm and PKD’s statements about fragmentation. Both reiterate the deeply embedded nature of fragmentation, the degree to which even imagining Wholeness has become so antithetical to our understanding in the world that it becomes difficult for us to encounter it on our own, even when so many things point to wholeness. An adjunct may be needed, like a sledgehammer to break through our sense of confinement among the world of division. In the 1960s, that sledgehammer was psychedelics.

But the unfortunate aftermath of this kind of brute breaking-through is that, in picking up the pieces in the looming shadow of the drug war, you’ve got your false god to burn at the stake. It was the drugs, we can say. Nonetheless, there is always this doubt, upon which the claims of

Leary, Huxley, and the psychonauts who found so much meaning from their experience can be respected—a sense that, if our normal vision is occluded, then a chemical disinhibitor, if appropriately tuned, might very well reveal not an illusion but the truth.76

For PKD, the imbibing of the divine extends this intake of the disinhibitor as an intensely powerful metaphor to help us understand not a false vision but how arriving at unoccluded sight requires a kind of imbibing to fill in the gaps where we’ve put nothing. Again, this is not

76 This argument and logic has been worked out by Doyle in Darwin’s Pharmacy. 151 demented sight, but the recovery of normal sight. As so many scholars have pointed out, there is a connection here to Plato’s pharmakon, the poison which is the cure. For PKD, this reference to

Plato is perfect since, if the atomists were in some way instigating a Fall, then Plato was the attempt to conceptually rectify the problem before it became too widespread:

"And it's still there." 3-74 was not supernatural revelation….It was normal sight, unoccluded sight (hence, "I am no longer blind!" This tells it all .). What we normally experience is the debased fragmented, partial view; we do not see what is there. Thus 3- 74 represented man's normal, healthy, natural state: it is a human, not divine, state. Plotinus and Heidegger indicate that the fall came after Parmenides and before Aristotle. It was the whole point of Plato's great edifice of metaphysics to arrest this fall, to reach some accommodation between the old view - that of the Eleatics - and the new view, that of the atomists. [….]And now, 2300 years later, the reversal of the Fall begins...not back to Plato but all the way back to kosmos, to unity itself. (53:008)

PKD describes the move to the discontinuous model as a kind of Fall in which our connection to cosmos is severed. If the world is fragmented, then there can be no set of order or coordination of these divided “things” unless one supposes them to be outside the realm of things, i.e supernatural. “What is going on here is that there is no way what is taken to be rational thought and its empirical experience of world can be equated with God, providential, teleology, etc., and thus the soul of man is sundered from what he takes to be reasonable.” If action is simply the moving around of discrete objects, as we discussed in the last section, then any agency or purpose will always necessitate a an entity outside of the realm of those objects. Yet, the realm of those objects is where we consider reason; therefore, we are cut off from purpose itself. We have, essentially, locked out the divine, forcing reality to enter by force, as a negation of our belief in nothingness.

If Ubik captures the decay of objects required to access Wholeness, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrtich captures the imbibing or invading also required for Wholeness. In Three

Stigmata, the imbibing is literal: there are two kinds of drugs presented in the work that are two

152 different modes of consumption and lead to two different modes of altering ones relationship to the world. Rather than simply an allegory about drugs and power, as the story has often been read, if we attend to the particular effects of the drugs and their relationship to how those who take them are able to experience the world, Three Stigmata becomes about the possibility and means of taking to heart Wholeness.77

In the world of Three Stigmata, Earth has heated until it has become nearly intolerable to live on. There is an on-going draft sending people on a one-way trip to the space colonies on

Mars (among others). On Mars, the meager conditions leave the hovelists, as they are called, only one escape: the illegal yet widely used Can-D. This drug transports the user into the body of either Walt or Pat, where they can live out a normal day. The material objects of the illusion depend on a “layout” of miniature objects that you can buy from P.P. Layouts, the legal half of the illegal organization that produces and sells Can-D. Notably, the experience of Can-D is

“canned” in the sense that we often say of Disneyland or a TV show: the experience is formulated and sold to you, completely directed by and centered on materialistic whims.

Likewise, everything in the world is indulgent and glamorous, making the drug a powerful yet shallow candy. It gives the user the chance to buy, in miniature, the life of decadence and indulgence.

Chew-Z, on the other hand, is a terrifying drug. It places you in a world that appears to be of your own making. The reality is contingent on your own desires, thoughts, and choices. The result is not some ideal world of fantasy but an often strange reliving of parts of one’s life, with alterations. Furthermore, a presence seems to saturate the experience, the eponymous Palmer

77 For readings of drugs in Palmer Eldritch see Rudge, “‘The Shock of Dysrecognition’”; Boon, “Between Scanner and Object”. Oddly, these essays talk about both Chew-Z and Can-D as if they are somehow equivalent when the difference is not only remarkable but the key to understanding the novel. 153

Eldritch who brought the drug from deep space, shows up within the world, sometimes acting as a guide, sometimes a jester, but always an oddly invasive presence. The experience is further complicated by the way it produces time dilations. You may experience a moment in the past, but you can also experience the future. In the future, the people see you but they claim that you are not real but a chooser, a phantom produced by those who took Chew-Z. The illusion is thus layered and somehow tied to reality off of Chew-Z. However, relation between the illusion and reality is unclear: how would your taking of a drug make others see you in the future? This ambiguity results in Chew-Z’s most notable attribute: once you’ve taken it you can never be sure if you’re still on it.

As PKD notes in the Exegesis, Three Stigmata is a study of transubstantiation, the

Christian imbibing of the blood and body of Christ through the sacrament of communion (32:7,

274). Can-D and Chew-Z are each a different kind of sacrament that yield a different kind of communion. Can-D permits multiple users to share the same layout and thereby share the experience—the men all share the body of the same Walt and the women all share the body of

Pat. Their communion is thus with each other, over shared desires within the material world, funneled according to appropriate social and gender norms. Even if it leads to them bickering about what they’ll do, they have the shared illusion and are able to act together. Chew-Z, on the other hand, does not produce a communion with others, a point that Leo Bulero, the CEO of P.P

Layouts, notes with triumph when Palmer Eldritch first gives him the drug. For Bulero, the lack of communal experience means that the drug will have no appeal, since this implies that the social elements will disappear. The collective illusion is itself central to the appeal of Can-D, a canned but mutual experience of a particular hallucination. PKD, in thinking about a similar kind

154 of communal experience he writes about in Maze of Death, speaks of it as a “mass wish- fulfillment hallucination shared by everyone” (32:7, 275).

Chew-Z’s communion is always complicated by the presence of Palmer Eldritch. He gets inside your head and shows up just when you think you have cleansed yourself of him.

Nonetheless, the process of being on Chew-Z is far more meaningful because of how it manifests your own desires. In a real sense, the communion with Palmer Eldritch is an internal communion with oneself as you are forced to navigate the depths of your desires and thoughts. Given the dismal life on both the Earth and Mars, Can-D provides the escape of a fake idealized world.

Chew-Z, on the other hand, forces you to face your own dissatisfaction with this dismal world and learn to be content with it. One would think that a world created from your desires would only result in a more intense personal wish-fulfillment, but the contrary seems to be the case: you are forced to face what you were trying to hide from yourself. While on Chew-Z, hardly any time passes (as far as you can tell) in the real world, giving you great lengths of time to work out your own inner conflicts. In some way, then, there is a bit of truth to the way Chew-Z is marketed: “God promises eternal life,” the ad runs, “We can deliver it” (152).

Of course this is terrifying for everyone involved. We can examine, in particular, the experience of Barney Mayerson, the main protagonist who works for Bulero at P.P Layouts. For

Mayerson, being a chooser is a trap. “Once you take Chew-Z,” he laments, “you’re delivered over.” He goes through a number of stages in navigating this trap that force him to yield more and more to the presence of Palmer Eldritch. Ultimately, Mayerson is not delivered over to

Palmer Eldritch but to his own dissatisfaction with the real world, where his career ambitions have caused him to lose everything of value. Thus, as soon as he takes Chew-Z, Mayerson finds himself in the past, when he is still with his former wife, Emily. He argues with her and begins

155 to mull over his corporate ambitions. Eldritch appears, angry: “You’re perverse” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ll give you ten more minutes then I’m bringing you back. . . . So you better figure out very damn fast what you want and if you understand anything finally”

(172). Mayerson is thus placing himself in some kind of loop in which he repeats his mistakes.

Only the presence of Eldritch signals that Mayerson has a choice otherwise, much like a more active counterpart to Runciter in Ubik. Mayerson partially realizes this when, upon visiting his ex-wife a second time, he states, “It’s precisely what I deserve. . . .I made this situation” (175).

Of course, this is true in the Chew-Z experience and in real life. The Chew-Z experience merely forced him to see it.

The hope for Mayerson, when he wakes up a moment later, is that somehow the past could be changed. Something seems wrong about this conclusion. For one thing, even after he wakes up, Eldritch has persisted. Bulero has also realized this earlier: “the trouble is. . .that once you get into one of them you can’t quite scramble back out; it stays with you, even when you think you’re free” (187). How could Chew-Z simply be a means for changing the past when it also invades the present? Is this an illusion at all? Something has changed with the ingestion of

Chew-Z. Even though Mayerson insists he is trapped, Eldritch keeps implying that there is no trap at all. So when Mayerson declares that “what’s missing here is a way by which we can be freed” (190), we are left wondering: freed from what exactly? What has Chew-Z induced that would require them to get out? One thing becomes clear: Mayerson is trapped, more than anything, by his own dissatisfaction. He selfishly forces more Chew-Z out of another hovelist and consumes it only to be projected not into the past but into the future, where his ex-wife is quite happy without him. What then is Mayerson to do? He finally begins to yield his sense of choice to the alien agency that appears to be invading: Palmer Eldritch, who Mayerson now

156 posits is the actual creator of these worlds. Mayerson has thus finds his internal communion to be a communion with this higher entity, whose desires exceed his own. Palmer Eldritch creates the world, he notes, “the rest of us just inhabit them and when he wants to he can inhabit them too. . .

.Even be any of us he cares to. All of us, in fact, if he desires” (194). In other words, Palmer

Eldritch is a God. Undoubtedly, the basic sense of the communion is right and the humility

Mayerson learns seems to teach him something important. But the nature of Eldritch is still unclear. When Eldritch appears again he thus denies Mayerson’s deification and prayer and demands that he continue to consider himself: “You don’t understand,” he says. “Nothing can be changed because, in this future, Mayerson also exists in another form. Then Eldritch offers some strange advice: “You’re a ghost…try building your life on that premise” (398). Taking on the role of ghost lets Mayerson encounter himself as he finds his future self. The result: his future self only wants to be rid of him. Finally, facing his own self-rejection, he stops struggling against

Palmer Eldritch, just as Joe Chip yielded in the final moment to the sense of inertia. The result is similar: Palmer Eldritch reappears and this time, Mayerson surrenders. The result is that the communion becomes complete: Mayerson becomes Palmer Eldritch. Although it appears that

Mayerson is the only one to perform this merger, the final pages reveal that the spread has been complete: “So it’s spread. Without the use of the drug. He’s everywhere” (230). Palmer Eldritch, who is said in the same passage to have come from “the space in between,” has filled up this space in between—he has filled in the nothing in everything.

In merging with Eldritch we have a kind of negative restoration. Indeed, PKD notes in the Exegesis that Stigmata’s conclusion “was the startling notion that imbibing of the sacred host culminated, for the imbiber, in eventually becoming the deity of which the host was the supernatural manifestation” (32:7, 274). The only difference is that Stigmata “simply revers[es]

157 the bipolarities of good and evil,” making Eldritch seem evil rather than divine. However, given our discussion of the arrival at wholeness as a disinhibitor and a negation of nothingness itself, the negative form of Eldritch is appropriate. Eldritch works so well to untangle the internal division because he overlays the divisiveness already existing within the characters. The nature of the ontological dimensions of Eldritch’s invasion is made clear through a conversation between Mayerson and his religious neighbor and lover, Anne. Anne recounts a joke in which, while the guests are in the other room at a party, a five pound steak disappears, apparently eaten by a cat. In order to see if the cat ate the steak, they weigh it, finding that it weighs exactly five pounds: “they’re satisfied that they know what happened now; they’ve got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, ‘But where’s the cat’” (219). One takes in the divine host, Palmer Eldritch, and finds the world altered in and by his presence. Yet when one goes to look for him, you find only what you found before. Anne directly invokes the “wine and the wafer” of communion. Even if one were to take in the divine, it would change you from the inside with no significant external change. This fits with what we’ve already said about

Wholeness: the restoration of from this “Fall” of fragmentation still permits you to work among and within the world of division but without the sense that the division is real. In the context of

Stigmata, we could say that the nothing has been filled up by Palmer Eldritch, by the Whole which permits you to discern and trust the larger structure.

In the final conversation with Eldritch, Mayerson declares that he is unclean. Eldritch responds: “to the primitive mind…the unclean and the holy are confused” (226). In truth,

Eldritch simply helped Mayerson realize his own divinity. This divinity can appear as a kind of horrific invasion or breach in reality. We want to restore it, to weed out the in-breaking of the divine. PKD himself reflects that this is what he experienced while writing Three Stigmata:

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But most of all I recall what I saw when I awakened: I saw Palmer Eldritch in the Sun—I saw God backward, but sure enough, in the daytime sun: at high noon, and knew him to be a god. The Three Stigmata, if read properly (i.e. reversed) contains many clues as to the nature of God and to our relationship with him. I was motivated to feel, then, fearing what I saw, so vast was the breach (The Exegesis 5:54 (148))

When we read Three Stigmata not as about the invasion of Eldritch, but as the surging forth of internal divinity (i.e. in Mayerson), then there appears to be something like a vast breach of reality. Suddenly the world seems turned inside out but only because this thing from the space in-between has inverted our fragmentation, forcing us to face our own divisions, and bringing our awareness to the vastness that already fills in the space where we hold there to be nothing.

Whatever else Palmer Eldritch claims in the novel about the nature of Chew-Z, the result for Mayerson is actually tremendously positive. He goes from being dissatisfied and discontent, always regretting the past and full of vain ambition, to completely content with his situation on

Mars. Such contentment prompts him to actually get to work on Mars, rather than neglecting the hovel, as the others have done while on Can-D. The “three stigmata” that are signs of Palmer

Eldritch are “alienation, blurred reality, and despair” (223) corresponding to the artificial hand, the electronic eyes, and the “radically deranged jaw” (221). These signs show up as the presence of Eldritch within the Chew-Z experience, as signs of the presence of this dissatisfaction. Given the involuted nature of the Chew-Z experience, we can say that the presence of Eldritch’s three stigmata is the unveiling of how these three traits are already present as a result of the vanity and blindness whereby we fragment the world. Indeed, these three traits are directly correlated to fragmentation: alienation comes from thinking one is separate, blurred reality comes from the manufactured illusion of division, and despair from the hopelessness that a divided cosmos provides. To see Valis, to ingest this fullness, is to return to cosmos. The result, as PKD notes in

159 the Exegesis, is that “the categories of alienation, estrangement, and [despair]78 will reversed and man will be again at home: moored” (53-9). The three stigmata are released.

The Death of Fragmentation

The ultimate disobedience to the BIP is to refuse to admit that it even [truly] exists, even though it has the power to torment, humiliate and kill. - The Exegesis 14:59 (323) - “There is no rational way out of the maze, no rigid formula. Rigid formulas are maze constructs.” - Exegesis 81:K-81 (769)

In Divine Invasion, PKD describes the recovery of the continuum through a description of what is call the “Hermetic transform.” In the section immediately preceding the description,

Rybys, a Mary figure who is pregnant with the divine child Emmanuel, rearticulates a sense of being trapped: “I want out and I can’t get out….I am a diseased rat in a kind of cage” (448).

Following the lament, a voice arises: “Fear not,” it says, “you will live on in your son.” We find a section break, and then cut to Emmanuel, now a child, as he begins the Hermetic transform. A part of this description should suffice as a contrast to the despair of Rybys:

He sat for a little while, although ‘little while’ no longer signified anything. Then, by degrees, the transform took place. He saw outside him the pattern, the print, of his own brain; he was within a world made up of his brain, with living information carried here and there like little rivers of shining red that were alive. …Meanwhile he introjected the outer world so that he contained it within him. He now had the universe inside him and his own brain outside everywhere. His brain extended into the vast spaces, far larger than the universe had been. Therefore he knew the extent of all things that were himself, and because he had incorporated the world, he knew it and controlled it (60, emphasis in original).

78 In the original manuscript, PKD uses Heidegger’s term Geworfenheit, which describes a kind of thrownness into the experience of things. I have substituted despair here simply to mirror what we found in Three Stigmata, although Geworfenheit, for Heidegger, is connected to a kind of despair. 160

Understanding comes from the connection, the moving of the inner-outer into the micro-macro relationship. Within the understanding of oneself in relation to the Whole, one’s position to everything is remade according to the larger structure.

Divine Invasion dramatizes this battle between fragmentation and wholeness as a battle between good and evil. Doing so clarifies, as our examinations of his other works have already hinted, that the difference between the two is not merely philosophical but quite practical. When working from fragmentation, it is easy to feel as if everything is breaking down since all of these objects decay and fall away. We have to struggle to acquire them, we become jealous over what others have, and we become confused by things that appear to be separate but are nonetheless intimately related. The expression of Belial in Divine Invasion takes the form of the “accuser,” the Jewish mystical name for Satan, which makes the characters see everything in their worst light. The Advocate (the Christ figure in the novel) restores the sense of beauty to the world, allowing the individuals to appreciate what is already before them. This restoring by the

Advocate equates to the linkage expressed by the Valis, which we can gloss in a secular way as the Whole. It is an enabling because we are only trapped by our sense of separation. If we are truly trapped in discontinuity then we are always only interacting with a series of disconnected objects, which act on us (also a disconnected object). But if we fill in the gaps, get rid of nothing as thing, then there is no separation. Then we are localized but non-discreet manifestations of a larger whole. To act is to act with the universe. Freedom comes from this realization that acting is not something we, as isolated egos, do to things—rather acting is to move with the divine connection. To truly act you need a more authentic, more fundamental kind of Palmer Eldritch— a kind of divine presence which does not leave us isolated but which forces us to move through the linkages that exist. To act we need divinity. We need Ubik. We need to realize that the only

161 paradox comes from our separation. The divine invasion is reality breaking through, informing us that when we act, we act as part of the whole universe. This may, at first, seem like a trap— only because it feels like an invasion. But if we relax into it, we see the reality of the situation. If all is discontinuous, all is mechanistic and there is no choice. If everything is continuous, every motion is a lively affective agent for everything else. This realization only seems like an unhinging because it changes what we know and can see. A certain kind of surrender leads to all liberation.

Working with the Exegesis, in conjunction with PKD’s extensive mass of fiction, has thus launched us into an examination of Wholeness that perhaps needed the bizarre to unhinge our sense that this world of fragmentation stands just fine as it is. As Richard Doyle points out on his essay on PKD’s relation to the perennial philosophy, the task of taking on PKD is already a scalar maneuver that, like Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy, reveals the underlying pattern, not, as for Huxley, via juxtaposition, but by overwhelming you, exhausting the capacity to find another resistance, another division to latch on to. The task of The Exegesis is the task of getting lost in the expanse until the underlying tenant becomes clear. Seemingly disparate and contradictory fragments of thoughts and exploration come together in a realization of Wholeness underlying it.

Then, in wading through the information overload, we navigate the fragmentation of this information saturated world, by the dissolution of our resistance. I have become whole, given up, lost, invaded, in-formed by the world of Philip K. Dick. PKD has eaten this nothing, recycled it through his endless parade of words, and shrunk away these divisions until this dividing-machine called a brain can no longer sustain sufficient resolution required to divide again. This “I”— dividing machine—becomes void so that the void is abolished. The result: I tumble through the

162 confines of this Zeno’s Paradox chamber; a sense of Divinity breaks through; the Black Iron

Prison dissolves; Wholeness manifests.

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Chapter III: The Eyes of the Cosmos

No one can understand the sounds of a drum Without understanding both drum and drummer; Nor the sound of the conch without understanding Both the conch and its blower; nor the sound of a Vina without understanding both vina and musician. As clouds of smoke arise from a fire laid damp with Fuel, even so the Supreme have issued forth all the Vedas, history, arts, sciences, poetry, aphorisms, and commentaries. All these are the breath of the Supreme. - Brihadarnyaka Upanishad (2.4.10)

Which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ - Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World (22)

Aham brahma param brahma asannedam na me na me I am Brahman, the supreme Brahman. ‘This’ is not real, not mine, not mine. - Ribhu Gita 22:21 (378)

Vision beyond the Earth Floating in the depths of space, Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell has some time to pause and dwell on the view. At first, seeing the Earth, his mind is occupied by the wars and strife on the surface: “There was an initial awareness that the planet in the window harbored much strife and discord beneath the blue-and-white atmosphere—a fact belied by its peaceful and inviting appearance.”1 It easy, in seeing the familiarity of the planet beneath him to contemplate the

1 Way of the Explorer, 58. 164 incredible outpouring of negativity through which we often view its surface. This, however, is only an initial impression. His gaze goes further:

Then I looked beyond the earth itself to the magnificence of the larger scene, there was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught. My understanding of the separate distinctness and relative independence of movement of those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony—a sense of interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. Particular scientific facts about stellar evolution took on new significance. (58)

Here is the experience of a scale above, the forcing of consciousness to face its relation to the fullness of being far larger and greater than the limited scope upon which its reality is built. But in space. One can hear the echoes of an intergalactic Thoreau remixed with Carl Sagan: The vast

Cosmos! The actual universe! The common molecules! The exchange of starstuff! Contact!

Contact! Who am I? Where am I?

In recounting the experience, Mitchell himself immediately denies the tempting and inevitable connection: “this wasn’t a ‘religious’ or otherworldly experience, although many have tried to cast similar events in that mold” (58). In this denial we see the depth of our confusion about how to even approach these kinds of visions. What has happened? What are we to make of such an experience if we already, from the outset, deny this essential character as somehow religious or connected into a range of philosophical and spiritual traditions aimed at articulating the spiritual nature of this kind of transcendent encounter? Mitchell’s denial is in line with a scientific skepticism, yet he himself is already implicated in the greatest target of science’s ongoing skeptical crusade against anything resembling superstition: his persistent interest in extras-sensory perception, his testaments to the remote healing of his mother, and his involvement later in life with attempting to scientifically test paranormal activities—all of these allow most well-meaning rational individuals to automatically place him in the pile labeled

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“crackpot.” As if to render it open to this very dismissal, the chapter in which Mitchell’s visionary experience is recounted focuses primarily on his experiments in ESP while in space and their subsequent publication in the Journal of Parapsychology.

But there can be no doubt in reading through his account: this moment of vision is the core of his experience since it was what created a change in Mitchell’s comprehension of the cosmos:

“I experienced what has been described as the ecstasy of unity. I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it and experienced it sentiently. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and mentally extending out into the cosmos. The restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone fell away. I realized that this was a biological response of my brain attempting to reorganize and give meaning to information about the wonderful and awesome processes that I was privileged to view from this vantage point” (59).

Here the seeing melds with feeling to yield a reorganization of Mitchell’s whole way of seeing, thinking, and being. The persuasive force of the cosmic vision manifests in the unity that reveals itself in light of these stellar facts that have taken on new significance. What appears to be

“Edgar Mitchell”—these “restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone”—drop away into the vastness that is apparent in the gaze to the Earth and beyond. In this space of emptiness, the eye of Mitchell gives way to an extension. Yet, even in this moment, this viewer notes, with awe and respect, “that I was privileged to view from this vantage point.” The power of the vision melds with a particular kind of viewing from a particular kind of vantage point such that it brings with it this transformative power.

What is the beyond-Earth, the beyond-Edgar Mitchell that still must somehow be articulated as this privileged vantage point? We can recall that even Frank White notes in the

Overview Effect “that it was all a matter of perspective” (3). If so, what is it about this perspective, occupied by one “Edgar Mitchell,” such that it claims for itself the experience of this unity, this vastness, this startling perspective of the cosmos? From this vantage point, truth

166 emerges. With this thought, a flood of critical voices assemble themselves around our analysis.

Yes, here we have it: with some amount of confidence, this white, American, highly-educated man of science who stands among the select and privileged few who have gone to space insists that, from this vantage point, he has seen the truth. Male gaze to infinity! The god-trick! The

Mind’s Eye projected outward to feast on Mother Nature in the dream of totality!

And yet we must pause at the point where flesh and bone fall away and this being extends out into the cosmos. What is this becoming-vast such that it must feel this being pull apart? Why is the core of Mitchell’s vision the falling apart of his specificity, of his restraints and boundaries, and of his personal position? If this was just an expression of Mitchell’s positionality, why would it feel like an invasion? It is the bafflement that should give us pause, the moment where Edgar

Mitchell himself is confused by the expression that emerges. He cannot attribute it to his environment, his upbringing, or his prejudices. The whole experience is too strange, too surprising, and too transformative:

“Perhaps it was the air of safety and sanctuary after a two-day foray into an unforgiving environment. But I don’t think so. The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow I felt tuned in to something much larger than myself, something much larger than the planet in the window. Something incomprehensibly big. Even today, the journey still baffles me” (58).

We thus face a problem in understanding Mitchell’s experience in terms of some kind of privileged viewpoint, prejudice, or extension of personal desire: the core tenant of the vision was a tuning into something larger than “Edgar Mitchell.” It is a mistake then to discard this vision as merely an artifact of a particular privileged viewpoint originating in some way from Mitchell since it was Mitchell himself who was changed by the experience. Likewise, the event is too strange to simply be a hegemonic imposition of Mitchell’s desire on the cosmos. True, the experience is a recognizable visionary experience, but only of a certain kind of spiritual

167 transformation, which he already notes does not fit with a preconceived sense of what spiritual visions are like. And why in space? Why in looking past the earth? Why is it revealed as foreign?

Why is it tied up in “certain facts about stellar evolution?”

So this is where we pause next in trying to understand scale: seeing the wholeness of the earth, contemplating the wholeness of reality, and then looking beyond the Earth into the vastness of larger scales which extend beyond. What is the “incomprehensibly big” that baffles us? What is this view such that it produces a vision? Is this vision also essential to the nature of scale or is it merely an artifact of a particular kind of view? Mitchell provides us with another instance in which to contemplate the persuasive power of scale, now as it manifests in an even larger encounter with the vastness apparent in looking beyond the Earth. To consider Mitchell’s vision and the nature of this viewpoint such that one would have the privilege of a transformative vision, we will need to consider the nature of vision itself as it relates to scale. It is no coincidence that all mystical traditions speak of having visions, realizations, revelations, awakenings, or transcendental experiences. It is also no coincidence that scale would be tied up in the very same questions about perspective, experience, and reflection as they relate to the possibility of being persuaded to a new outlook on the world. As will become clear, scale, by definition, requires the consideration of perspective. Most importantly, this consideration of the perspective of one’s perspective opens us to the possibility of reworking that perspective such that what I want to claim as “my perspective” is transformed into nothing other than a view of

Cosmos by Cosmos itself. Such a cosmic involution is not antithetical to science nor is it solely in the domain of religion, but is itself the fount of the mystical nature of being when considered carefully through the shifts in scale.

Scale and Measure

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Without any other context or scholarly apparatus, let us consider another phenomenological aspect of scaling. When moving away from an object, one notes rather quickly that there is a significance shift in size of the object. I could, for instance, look at this house here, travel a distance away—say, back to the top of our mountain—and notice that the object that appeared quite large up close is quite small far away. This is, of course, so common a phenomenon and our mind naturally accommodates it so that we usually do not even give it any thought. Nonetheless, the reality of the shift requires us to pay attention to how perspective relates to scale. In the movement from my front yard to the mountain, what has changed?: my position. Or at least this is what we want to say initially but, to be clearer, we can attend to the sensory apparatus in question and answer again: the eye has changed position.

What has happened? The change of position from my front yard to the top of the mountain has changed the way the same phenomena—my house—has presented itself to me.

Furthermore, from the front yard the house took up most of my field of vision, but on the mountain it is only one small entity among many others. However, the detail seen up close has resolved itself not into less detail when considering the whole view presented, but into less details specifically about the house. Somehow in moving the eye away from the object, the eye is able to take in a wider range of being but, due to the structure of the eye, the detail of the view resolves from larger patterns (the whole patchwork of the landscape) rather than the patterns apparent close up (the bricks in the wall).

Let’s consider naively the aspects involved: in order for this becoming-smaller phenomenon to occur we have two positions, the same observing apparatus, and the same object.

Scale enters as a possibility and concept when we provide some means of measuring the shift in positions. We thus introduce a measure so that we can take stock of what has occurred. Today

169 we would use a ruler or a meter but a special measure is not necessary: we could easily use a hand or the length of a car as long as we keep that measure consistent. The only other necessary criterion is that we use an object with length discernible from the short distance rather than the long distance, otherwise it is relatively difficult (without some more advanced apparatus) to use it to take stock of both distances at the same time. So we choose a meter, and we use the meter to measure the house’s dimensions by holding the meter up against the house. Then if we go up to the mountain we can hold the meter up in front of us and find that, in fact, it is useless for measuring the house from this distance: rather, we can only measure the house as it appears within our field of vision. Since we can’t put it up against the tactile boundaries of the house while this far away, this measure is completely reliant on how close the meter is from our eye.

Suddenly the measure itself seems oddly variable despite the fact that we chose it for its consistency: if I bring the meter close to my eye it appears that the whole landscape measures at a meter and the house perhaps a centimeter but if I pull it away from my eye, suddenly the house will measure several centimeters.

Of course this is absurd because it is not how to produce a measurement at all.

Nonetheless, it highlights an important fact: while it appears that measurement and scale are about the measure and the objects themselves, both measurement and scale are in fact about the perception—what is currently appearing within a visual field. That is, what is being measured is not objects but the perception of objects in relative position to apparent phenomena. We place the measure against the object when up close so that the position of the eye cannot shift the measurement: there is no discernible space between the measure and the object through which the angle of the eye could interfere. We have effectively reduced the perspectival variable to

170 zero.2 When we move away from the house we then have to take into account the distance of the eye to the object as well as how large the object appears. If we had some way to measure that distance, we could then actually determine the size of the object from whatever distance.3

What we are doing in scaling, then, is attending not to the relative size of things but the relative size of things as they appear for a perceptual apparatus. But by “perceptual apparatus” we always mean here, first and foremost, the eye by which our perceptual system makes sense of a vast majority of spatial attributes. Even when we use an adjunct for the eye, for it to be accessible to the form of consciousness most humans are acquainted with, it must be converted into a discernible form whereby our perceiver might process it. Contrary to what we often assume, the measure is not the primary element in scaling, it is merely the standard by which one can systematically takes reference within the perceptual field. In providing ourselves with this measure we can project out, both by compounding and dividing, the measure so that we can have a consistent point of reference whereby we can compare how phenomenon appear. We can thus speak of a million meters with any comprehension only by projecting out that measure.

Crucially, the meter itself does not change scale, it is merely the device by which the perceptual apparatus is able to take stock of what is apparent in the field of vision.4 Nor, does the eye itself change scale (it does not grow larger or smaller). Rather, the distance between the eye and the object have increased. Perhaps as an artifact of mapping on a two-dimensional surface, we do not

2 This point only functions when staying on a close scale to what you are measuring. This kind of measurement, by using a large enough measure to make that variable negligible (the space between the meter and the object is far smaller than the meter—such discrepancy becomes more important if we were to try to measure on smaller scales since you would need a measure that could in some way get closer to the object). However, since we are concerned not with the measuring of objects but the scaling of them, we can leave this point aside. 3 Astronomers use elaborate techniques to determine the size and distance stars and planets. These techniques are called the “cosmic distance ladder”—see Webb, Measuring the Universe: The Cosmological Distance Ladder 4 The metric system has been so effective and necessary for scaling because it has built into a way to retain reference to the same measure (meter) while building in a pseudo-scaling of the measure (nanometer, kilometer) to prevent the number of the measure from getting too unwieldy. 171 speak of scale in terms of distance between eye and object but instead flip the axis the other direction and speak of length across, comparing the relative length of what we are viewing to our usual reference point tied to the measuring apparatus (eg., one thousand meters for every centimeter). Doing so is actually appropriate since it acknowledges already that what is being measured is the perceptual field, not necessarily the distance between an eye and an object, which is more essential for augmented vision that deals not in distance between the objects but in magnifying power. Likewise, placing the scale as a ratio between two modes of perception allows a viewer to take reference even in a transported or technologically produced representation, whether a map or an image.

Figure 3-1: This is how to see 69,911,000 meters. (Photo courtesy of NASA, http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/24/image/b/)

The fact that the scalar measure takes reference to the viewer’s perception means that scale works regardless of the medium or the actual distance between the viewer and the objects. It says

“this picture you are viewing of Jupiter would be the equivalent of 69,911,000 of these meters you are familiar with.” I cannot comprehend what that many meters would like look stacked next to each other on a typical human scale for a simple reason: as exemplified by a photo of Jupiter,

172 that many meters can only be viewed at once when scaled down to a sufficient degree such that it appears as a discernible entity. The reason for this is that the measure is a reference taken from our usual perceptual field. Projecting out that reference makes the incomprehensible comprehensible, but in a limited way: only as a means of taking comparative reference to the phenomena (Jupiter) in relation to our usual phenomena around us. Either way, the relative size is a notation about apparent reality that allows the perceiver to perceive their own perception

(here you perceive the picture of Jupiter) as it is projected out beyond its usual perceptual constraints but, through the scalar consistency of the measure, rendered in ratio to the phenomenon around them.5

From its foundations, then, scale is about taking into account a perceptual field as they occur for a perceiver. It allows my attention to take stock of the image or the view according to a determined principle. Such a reference is incredibly useful for saying something about how what

I usually see relates to the much smaller or much larger. When projected out far beyond normal means of vision (to Jupiter or to a cell), this shift and this referent becomes not only significant but necessary for our untangling of appearance. Since we habitually place scalar references in when needed and are at least somewhat practiced in scaling, we can forget the significance of this point. Without a scalar reference, someone who did not know what the picture was would have no reason to think it was an object much larger than even our planet.6

5 Tong argues that this is modes of measuring means things will be relative: “Scale is not a static yardstick, but a metonym for the interrelations of entities” (198). However, noting that scale is relative obscures the way in which scale is always measuring perception. 6 Barney Wharf cited just one such instance of a colleague going to an Amazonian farmer who expressed disbelief about the idea of a satellite taking photos from space. Wharf takes this as evidence of cultural relativism: “The enormous discrepancy between the views held by my colleague and the farm illustrates that satellite images, far from constituting some “objective” vision of the Earth, are always wrapped within and bounded by cultural understandings and assumptions.” (42) But this is only to note that one might operate under the scalar referent or not. 173

This is, in fact, already present in the ancient consideration of why we need to move beyond sense data alone by applying measures to appearances. In an argument about the need for an internal measure of virtue, Plato’s Socrates invokes the same kind of shift in perceptual appearance:

“‘Answer me this: Do things of the same size appear to you larger when seen near at hand, and smaller when seen from a distance or not?’ They would say that they do. ‘And similarly for thicknesses [attributes of objects] and pluralities [number of objects]? And equal sounds seem louder when near at hand, softer when farther away?’ They would agree. ‘If then our well being depended upon this, doing and choosing large things, avoiding and not doing the small ones, what would we see as our salvation in life? Would it be the art of measurement or the power of appearance? While the power of appearance often makes us wander all over the place in confusion, often changing our minds about the same things and regretting our actions and choices with respect to things large and small, the art of measurement in contrast, would make the appearances lose their power by showing us the truth, would give us peace of mind firmly rooted in the truth and would save our life” (356c-e).7

In a real way, not fully acknowledging scale—in not taking measure of our perceptions, words, and things—places us within a kind of confusion in which we change our minds (or words) about the same things: sometimes speaking of them as atoms and molecules, sometimes as cells, sometimes as bodies, sometimes as larger ecologies. We often, for instance, say that chemicals cause a particular behavior within a person. In doing so we take one scale to have precedence over another: the appearance of the chemical within our scientific visualizing apparatus becomes a way of determining what a human is. But then we switch scales again and make statements about this larger entity, the homo sapiens acting in a particular way because of a chemical. But are we speaking of chemicals or bodies? We have, in some way, “changed our minds about the same things,” saying at one moment that they are bodies and at another that they are chemicals.

Of course what we have actually done is change scales and, only if we attend to the changing of

7 Unless otherwise noted, all references from Plato are from the translations contained in the Hackett edition of Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. 174 scales, can posit some kind of relation between the two scales spatially. How this is to be done is not immediately apparent, however, and is not a question we can adequately take on until we resolve for ourselves what we meant by these appearances “chemical” and homo sapien. Here is the essential point: the entities chemical and homo sapiens themselves are the appearances that, as Socrates says, “lose their power” in the extended measure of scaling beyond our normal scale of perception. If we are to be “firmly rooted in the truth,” then we have to attend to this reassessment of the perceptual field through nothing other than the consistent use of the perceptual field (the measure). We thus find another principle of scale: when scaling, apparent objects are not given precedence or given as inalienable and clearly defined entities. Objects are only clearly defined when we remain on one scale. To compare two entities on two different scales without acknowledging this fact—that is, to pretend that the object on one scale is still clearly defined from the perspective of the other scale—will only create mistakes since it reifies both appearances while insisting, in relating them via scale, that neither are absolute.

We navigate this problem first and foremost by considering the attribute of perception itself by which scalar perception is made possible. Since the entity being measured is perception rather than the objects, it is the nature and form of this perception that must be taken into account if we are to understand scale.

Gazing into Nature With scale partially within our view, we can tune into the scholarly apparatus that critiques vision or the gaze. Such critiques have proliferated to a curious extent, with incredible fervor and interest, and have become so entrenched in academic thought that it is difficult to hear

175 how Mitchell’s vision was of any significance at all.8 If we are to adequately examine the dust in

Mitchell’s view and its relation to scale we must first examine our own eyes—there are many motes obscuring our vision that need attending to and clearing away so that we can see the situation clearly.9 Indeed, this Biblical reference is particularly relevant given a preliminary observation about these critiques: most major critiques of vision takes issue with the person who is viewing while simultaneously reifying that viewer as a definable—if not distinct—entity. If scale forces us to truly hone in on perspective, we must tread carefully through what this

“perspective” or “vision” or “point of view” is and, most importantly, what it would mean to say that there is a perspective which is “mine.”

The most enduring but in many ways easiest critique of vision comes from a combination of psychoanalysis: the concept of the gaze. While the gaze becomes a particularly marked line of inquiry for John Paul Sartre and, following him, Emmanuel Levinas, using the notion of the gaze as a means of generally critiquing vision was solidified in the early 1970s by Laura Mulvey, who applied the psychoanalytic concept of the male gaze to film, and Susan Sontag, who applied the idea of voyeurism to photography.10 While both angles draw on slightly different literature, the essence is the same: the critique of technologies of vision as inherently reliant on a kind of voyeuristic pleasure derived from the gaze upon an object. For Mulvey, the gaze is specifically a male gaze direct at women in a way that corresponds to sexual pleasure. Mulvey’s article aims to look at “the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman as the object of pleasure” (8). She identifies a pleasure-seeking

8 One of the most common traits of critiques of vision is to point out the persistent use of visual metaphors for speaking about the world. Such demonstrations, such as the one found at the beginning of Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, do nothing more than prove that language finds information from the senses the easiest way to conceptualize its self-navigation. As such, we can make use of the visual language while purposefully mixing our metaphors here to remind ourselves that there are many ways to navigate our understanding. 9 Matthew 7:5 10 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure”; Sontag On Photography 176 view that she suggests is already in place in the male gaze and then is captured in film. In calling attention to this gaze Mulvey hopes to ruin the pleasure by upsetting the sense of ease by which such oppressive gazes are captured and replicated in film. Sontag applies a similar notion of the voyeur but to photography more generally as not only a form of erotic pleasure but as an indulgence in curiosity, detachment, ubiquity, and mastery (7, 42). She famously generalizes the attitude of voyeurism: “taking a photograph has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events” (7). Sontag identifies a kind of detached curiosity whereby one can gaze into the world without getting involved, actively engaging in the passive watching of others, even when, as in the case of war photography, the images are horrifying.

Both Mulvey and Sontag’s arguments were important moments of social critique and rightly garnered a great deal of attention and reflection about how films are made and how we use and view photography. However, both arguments leave open a dangerous avenue for generalization that have led to a habitual reuse of their argumentative structure beyond the scope under which they wrote. Given that Mulvey’s argument is derived from psychoanalysis, it is no stretch to apply the noticeably male gaze exemplified in much film to a more generalized male outlook on the world, only because psychoanalysis already works in this kind of generalized mode—suggesting that men form a particular kind of cognitive structure for generally consistent reasons. Few critics (and even less among popular participants in such conversations) still hold to the original psychoanalytic structures, whether we are dealing with Freudian or a Lacanian assessments. Nonetheless, the concept of the male gaze has persisted and been extended far beyond this kind of male desire. If one attaches certain attributes to the gaze that would make it a token of hegemony—distance, mastery, and pleasure being the most common—then one can apply the concept of the male gaze to all kinds of objects of culture to declare them symbols or

177 embodiments of hegemonic gaze. Of course some of these assessments are appropriate applications since there is a way of viewing that places oneself in this dominate relation. But when the default critique becomes attending to the voyeuristic or hegemonic pleasure one might derive from an object, we risk failing to see alternative possibilities, appeals, and effects of views which may, on the surface, appear the same but that actually speak to a far deeper structure of viewing.

In ecocriticism, for example, it has become common to assert that nature films and photography are artifacts of a gaze that directly mirrors Mulvey’s male gaze. In its most extreme form, Bart H. Welling declares these images “ecoporn” that train the eye to be “solitary, central but remote, an all seeing but simultaneously invisible consuming male subject to its marginalized, decontextualized, powerless, speechless, unknowing, endangered, pleasure-giving, commodified, consumable female object.”11 Such a critique rereads any view of wonder and delight derived from nature according to its role for creating pleasure that serves as a violence.

Yet in doing so it does not acknowledge the mechanism for deriving such pleasure nor how the view relates to this list of adjectives that are, without clear justification, all placed together and attached to the phrase “the tyranny of the visual.” In Mulvey’s critique the derived pleasure comes from sexuality itself; however much the male gaze perverts and does violence in the process of handling, capturing, and stoking his own desire in his films—and these are, to be clear, terrible, unhealthy, and often violent ways to handle the desire—nonetheless, the basis of this desire still lies in a sexual instinct bolstered by millions of years of sexual evolution. Indeed, sexual pleasure in itself is not a problem and every film about sex is not a problem. Rather, a way of approaching and appropriating the sexual object turns it into a structure of violence.

11 Welling, “Ecoporn, Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman.” (53) – Welling cites a number of others making the same claim. 178

When comparing this structure to nature photography, we must note that one does not aim to get sexual pleasure from nature photography. Rather, the basic pleasure arising nature photography comes from a more aesthetic or sublime pleasure of a much larger nature. Even so there is a parallel problem: some nature photography aims to cheaply indulge in a kind of faux sublimity in order to capitalize on a poor imitation of the profound, just as many films instill pleasure by creating and indulging the male gaze. However, they derive their power from an appeal to a different kind of pleasure: one sexual, one a transcendental beauty. The critique of nature photography as a male gaze covers over this possible sublime feeling by associating the distortion of this sublime pleasure with the distortion of sexual pleasure. There is an essential difference between sexual and sublime pleasure, however: the appeal to sexuality derives its force from desire for the consummation of one’s impulses. But, as we will see, the power of a view of nature is derived from precisely the opposite: the movement beyond one’s impulses and desires.

The real risk of such critiques lies in generalizing them or internalizing them as the primary form of viewing or being with Nature. When internalized, one might think that to view

Nature at all, but especially to view it in any transcendental sense, is the formation or exemplification of a male gaze. From this perspective, we then read the profundity of a vision like Edgar Mitchell’s as being derived from his maleness or his desire. In such a reading there is nothing more to say of his experience—it has been not only dismissed but dismissed as an emblem of hegemony and male desire. Even worse and far more personal is the way this critique can distort our personal capacity to understand these profounder pleasures. In applying Mulvey’s critique of sexual gaze to a different kind of gaze and a more important experience, we ourselves might find it difficult to glimpse the beauty of reality and feel anything profound at all. It is no

179 wonder, then, that so much nature writing today spirals out of a kind of bitterness or frustration.

When combined with a fear-based rhetoric around global warming, pollution, and the

Anthropocene, there can appear to be no avenue toward comprehending or appreciating this larger being of reality.12

Sontag’s focus on the habits of viewing and the non-neutrality of photography is likewise important but likewise easily misused. The passivity of the voyeur implies a kind of banal curiosity inherent in most kinds of viewing, particularly those of replicated photographs frequently seen. As we already examined in relation to the Blue Marble photo, such a passive relation to the photo is possible and common, but does not attend to the photograph itself.

Rather, it treats the photography as an object of curiosity because it is held at an emotional distance that does not attend to the scalar relation itself—that is, the actual distance it captures.

The voyeuristic position derives personal pleasure from not getting involved, from the scandal of seeing something that could be meaningful while not becoming implicated. While photography can cultivate a habitual occupation of this position, such a position is not necessary. Given the sheer number of photographs that occupy our attention, we cannot possibly implicate ourselves in all of them, so of course we have to acquire a distancing, nearly apathetic response to many images. But these are not really viewing so much as a kind of looking without attention, like walking by the faces in a crowd. When necessary, however, it is possible to stop and really view what is being presented. A different affect might then emerge.

Sontag’s arguments about the non-neutrality of photography replicates the same structure of argument we already saw Garb making about the Blue Marble image in Chapter 1.

Photographs can and do tend to produce particular effects based on the structure of the view. As

12 See, for example, Rick Bass, “A Perfect Day” 180 we already noted, just because these effects and uses are possible does not account for what gave them their power. To draw from ecocriticism once again, we can note some truth in the critique that our approach to wildlife conservation arises from a view of nature as a passive virgin to be preserved or recovered. For example, it has often been argued, using the arguments of Sontag and the like, that images of nature as pristine and a place apart promote a distanced and partial view of reality, which results in a number of problems for environmentalism. Indeed, it is incredibly easy to go through the history of the use of such images and note how they omit certain things, include other things, and get used for harmful ends as well as positive ends.13 Our normal approach to such critiques is to thereby dismiss the image, discourse, or concept that is critiqued as occluding and dominating in whatever manner. In ecocriticism this argumentative structure has been particularly marked, leading to many to dismiss the idea of Nature completely.14 Here the structure we saw in invoking metaphorics for the Blue Marble is replicated in a declaration about the inherent bias or structuring form of a view. But in insisting that the photograph is non-neutral, we forget that the photograph is being viewed by someone and is therefore open to multiple interpretations however fixed the frame might seem. If two people are in the same spot in Yosemite, looking at the same view, we do not dispute that they will view the same thing differently and feel different things. Photographs do structure the view in a particular way—often in a way that is productively different than one might normally (hence the need for the analysis of them)—but we have essentially reversed the location of interpretation when we suggest that the photographs structure our view of them. Just because Nature can be viewed in a problematic way does not mean the idea of Nature is itself inherently problematic.

13 See, for example, Deluca and Demo, “Imaging Nature” 14 See, for example, the essays collected in the controversial but influential collection edited by William Cronon, Uncommon Ground. These arguments culminate in arguments like Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature, which tries to expunge the idea of nature from the conversation about ecology. 181

Instead, if we reflect on and attend to why we have the idea of Nature and what productive purposes it serves, then the noting of what is left out is actually the process of integrating in those aspects. Likewise, we can note a dangerous reading of an image, narrative, or way of approaching the world without dismissing that view altogether because it might be used in that way. We do not need to dispute, for instance, Carolyn Merchant’s reading of the environmentalism’s Western Recovery narrative as a kind of application of the Biblical Fall.15

However, this is merely one use of the Biblical story in relation to nature, which reads it according to its gendered structure. We do not need to dismiss the myth to suggest that it might have other important things to say about our relation to nature.

There is a direct relationship between the voyeuristic attitude and the failure to account for such interpretive reflections. Both voyeurism and the male gaze imply that there is a clear subject sitting back to watch and derive pleasure from the gazing. The pleasure and curiosity comes from a viewer who is himself not considered, safely hidden as the point of view from which viewing emerges. Such a position seems safe because it is unexamined: they leave the position of the interpretant intact—they are merely receiving the structure already contained in the film. Nonetheless, as Mulvey already pointed out, the male gaze derives its pleasure from the “satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego” (835). The desire and satisfaction works for the viewer only because that viewer has not been examined. Mulvey rightly notes that the bringing attention to this pleasure destroys it because it forces that ego to look back at itself as the viewer.

In attending to a possible interpretation embedded within a view, the same reflection can occur: a looking at what one derived or was permitted to see in an image. If we leave it at that, then we might push the image away in disgust—I don’t want to view that! But pushing it away is to fail

15 Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden” 182 to attend to our own position as the viewer of the view, to protect ourselves as critics from attending to the view contained within the view of these views. A similar kind of egoic satisfaction and reinforcement can occur: I have critiqued this image or idea for these terrible things that it contains, therefore I am exempt or otherwise immune from these problems. But if we do not leave ourselves intact within the critique we might realize that attending to our own approach and interpretation of a view is the essence of dissecting its possible meanings and implications beyond these appropriations and interpretations used for hegemonic and violent ends. Doing so allows us to attend to arguments about things like “Nature” with generosity and understanding, looking for the source of their rhetorical weight, rather than simply dismissing them as inherently and inevitably problematic.

* * *

The ease with which the critique of the male gaze was applied to environmental rhetoric and nature writing is no accident; many of those critiquing these visions of Nature are using a kind of nature tourism and politicized environmentalism to re-read the Romantic and

Transcendentalist views of the beauty of Nature, which often relied on a visual language to speak of the encounter with Nature. As the name “Transcendentalist” already implies, this movement was inherently interested in some kind of scalar shift. The invocation of Thoreau expressed earlier both points to the resonance between Mitchell and the Transcendentalists and marks how critiques of Transcendentalist vision are likewise easily rallied against his vision. Now that some of the ground has been cleared, we can examine the foundational text for Transcendentalism—

Emerson’s “Nature”—in order to understand Emerson’s use of vision, which is itself inherently attuned to the scalar elements already identified in our phenomenological examination.

183

Emerson’s vision of Nature is not given or assumed, nor can it be demanded. While the view yields a certain kind of power and sublimity, it cannot be approached for the consummation of a desire for power or sublimity. Nonetheless, the vision expresses many of the attributes often critiqued about vision. Here is the essential passage:

"Standing on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes. I become transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am the part or particle of God" (10).

The similarities to Mitchell’s description earlier is notable: he feels himself pervading all of reality, part of a much larger entity (God for Emerson, Cosmos for Mitchell), and he feels the vastness of the expanse of space. Yet, also here are most of the elements critiqued of vision: becoming infinite, becoming nothing, seeing everything, and the proclaiming oneself divine. But how does becoming nothing relate to seeing everything? How does being “uplifted into infinite space” relate to being “the part or particle of God.” It is no coincidence that Edgar Mitchell, in literally being lifted into space, also claims astoundingly that he felt himself as part and particle of cosmic events. The visionary experience must be a function of a kind of vision that hinges on this most striking of phrases: “I become transparent eye-ball.” Why transparent and why specifically an “eye-ball”—the object itself, not just the eye or the vision or, even more abstract, the soul as the one-who-views?

The need for becoming-transparent already points to an essential element of scale: for scale to function one’s own eyes must become transparent. This phrase is meant in a somewhat literal way, given that the eye itself must already be transparent in order for light to pass through it and be seen. But the transparency is also figural: the attuning one’s view to be open to what presents itself. The condition of possibility of a lens functioning is its transparency: that light will pass through it so that what emerges on the other side is not simply an artifacts of the lens. The

184 need to take account of, to measure, the field of vision is already the suggestion that one must not assume that this vision is opaque, set in stone, or inalienable. One must become open to the possibility that sight itself is open to a standard beyond the primary apparatus of vision, the eye- ball. There is thus a distancing that has to occur to the visual apparatus itself, a separation from this particular seeing so that one can become open to a seeing that sees itself.

Emerson argues that our usual way of viewing is not a true seeing; in some way we ourselves do not become transparent in the viewing and therefore cloud or obscure the vision. To this end, he introduces different kinds of seeing: "To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child" (10). This

“superficial seeing” necessitates not a training of the eye to see particular things in a particular way,16 but rather a purging of the distortions under which it operates: "A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text" (25). In order to see clearly, one must undergo the practice of purging the eyes. But what must be purged?

The answer lies already in the first quote: “all egotism vanishes.” What must be swept clear of our view is not any kind of content—this is not a policing of what is appropriate or inappropriate to view. Rather, what must be swept away is the sense of “I” there viewing Nature at all. Of course this undoing of the I as the becoming-transparent of the Eye is entirely antithetical to our usual consideration of a “point of view,” but it is perhaps the single most important point, on which the rest of our examination of scalar perception relies. The question lies in what we attach ourselves to within the perceptual field. Undoubtedly the eye presents a particular sensory field to consciousness. The fact that closing or moving the eyes changes this

16 See Emerson’s critique of science on page 43. This sentiment is thus opposite of the training of the eye that is described in Daston’s examination of the training of the eye to be a kind of observer (“On Scientific Observation”). 185 visual field is an obvious test of this. But it is not clear that this view itself, nor the objects it encounters, belong to the eye or, more importantly, that the eye belongs to a me as some clearly designated entity associated immediately with the eye, the body, or a physical location in space.

The importance of this move lies in its possibility of becoming open to the measurement of the field of vision: if I hold to this vision as mine then I calcify it according to an obscure standard built around what I think my point of view is. But only when I see this point of view as not mine does it become open to the elements necessary for and demonstrated in scale—to measure, to reflection, to considering its relation to that which exceeds the filtered and limited field of vision.

Although others will enter to assist us in a moment, let us see if we can use Emerson to provide an initial explication of why egotism must vanish. Consider another passage that may initially appear quite perplexing:

"The problem of restoring the world’s original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake [sic]. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand as perception” (47)

The first sentence of this passage immediately recalls Merchant’s critique of the redemption narrative. However, Emerson is not suggesting here that Nature itself needs to be restored. Quite the opposite, man needs to be restored. By this he does not mean a facile “return to Nature” in any literal sense. Instead, the problem lies in the eye, that is, in the way we view reality. His two examples here are notable for their indication of brokenness or lack—the ruin is what has fallen apart, the blank is the space left where there could be content. Both loss and emptiness cannot be in things since they are the seeing of something that has passed away or is not there. These views show that what we usually see is not some kind of things in themselves but already the artifact of

186 the eye’s mode of attending to objects according to a given series of expectations and structures.

Hence the “axis of vision”—that which we see or presents itself to us—does not line up to the

“axis of things”—Being itself or, if we permit a Heideggerian rephrase, the ontological Being from which beings present themselves ontically. Indeed this resonance with Heidegger is appropriate given Heidegger’s famous critique of Enframing (Gestell) and the idea of representation.17 The problem for Heidegger is that the approach to Nature as a “World Picture” assumes that there is some “fixed ground plan of natural events” that is possible to describe in some kind of set way (127). Likewise, in Enframing one expects the world to manifest in this same way, every time. There is thus a double sense in which our vision does not line up: first in the structure of the eye itself and then again in the imposition of one’s mental model onto the world, such that one could then notice the blank or the ruin. Enframing is a way of approaching one’s own view that leads, for Heidegger, to a “conquest of the world” by making the world exist in a stable and easily defined way (134). Emerson’s critique of science clarifies that his point is quite similar: “empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the [hu]manly contemplation of the whole”

(43). Vision, as already filtered by both the eye and one’s world picture, displays a reality already disjointed and fragmented by this doubled treatment of our vision and our picture as absolute and clear. However, this is a way of treating your vision as if it is already clear that does not preclude the becoming transparent of the eye in both senses. By letting go of this sense of enframing and attending to the eye itself, one can become transparent eye-ball, but only if we can find the source of disunity within ourselves. However much we would like to deny this

17 Enframing is introduced in “The Question Concerning Technology” and the representation is discussed in the “The Age of the World Picture” – Both essays in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 187 possibility (we will address these denials as we move forward), being a “naturalist” requires this becoming transparent of both the World Picture and the Eye.

The requirement for becoming transparent lies in calibrating your view to Nature. Just as

Heidegger’s philosophy begins with an examination of Being itself, Emerson is suggesting that the disjunction in man occurs already within himself—as being disunited with himself. Perhaps this term “spirit” has now become so obscure that its meaning is unclear. By “spirit” Emerson is pointing mostly to a “scope” of view, a point that we will return to in chapter 5. In short, by

“spirit” Emerson is explicitly pointing to that Being which is not limited to—is bigger or higher than—the body or the eye-ball itself. Emerson demands that our scope be larger if we are going to be able to reunite ourselves with Nature: "Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture" (17). When we place “the frame” anywhere less than the vastness of nature, we have limited nature to a particular point.

We call this point “mine” and associate it with the eye, the body, or the phenomenal view presented to my vision. But for us to truly see the world, we have to let go of the sense of possessiveness of this view. This does not undo in some way the perspective of the eye, but permits us to attend to or take into account how reality appears even within the eye since we are not demanding that the vision remain the same or present itself in a particular way for us.

Indeed scale already demands that this is the case. What appears to be one thing up close is revealed to be another from far away. Far more dramatically, when we go even further or closer, the phenomena change entirely so that whatever we see disappears into a whole new set of phenomena. The problem in grasping this shift is not that things change but that we persist in

188 holding to things as they were before or as we expect them to be. This holding creates a disjointed reality, leading us to see what we expect to see rather than simply taking in the phenomenal field, even as it completely revises itself in the scalar shift. Looking at scale as a measuring of perspective takes this one step further: scale reveals that all of the apparent reality within this view called mine is actually exceeded even within itself. I see a hand. Then in a microscope I see a patchwork of cells. Or the opposite: I see a house. Then from space, I see a whole planet—no house visible. Then I look at the stars and I see the vastness, how it extends and extends and extends but this extension is just expressed as the shimmering points of light which I can feel already exist in the incomprehensible distance but are actually the incomprehensible size of this sun. Invoking this feeling, Emerson points to the stars as his opening image: “But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual existence of the sublime” (9). The pairing here is important: the stars are vast yet present, incomprehensibly distant yet visible: “the stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.” Scale forces us to notice how being exceeds this point called I yet nonetheless vision happens. If we hold to the I no reflection, no consideration of this vision is possible. The Eye already demands that we consider together this excess of distance that is nonetheless present. I don’t know how this can be the case. I can’t reach them yet they are here. Where then am I?

Going back down the scale we see why the question we raised about chemicals and bodies is so essential to scale: I claim this body as mine. This eye is part of the body and it is the eye which makes vision possible. Therefore, this vision is my vision. But I consider it—how

189 does it work? What is the relationship between the experience of vision, how I interpret it, and the physical mechanisms that make it function—what do I do with these rods and cones, these lenses and neurons? Let us not forget the persistent influence of culture, which will flavor the view, partially determine what I see and do not see. But beyond even these, what of the light?

How is it that I claim the eye for myself, the point of view for myself, but not the light which makes that vision possible? If I claim the light, must I also claim the object? Does this imply an idealism? Is this all in my mind? But this question immediately makes no sense: what would it mean to say my mind? This is no clearer than my vision, my point of view. Where is it? In the neurons? In the cells? In the body? In the light? In the culture? If I say all of these then I cannot just start with the body, still holding it out as mine even as I say that it is not: it is not my body determined by all of these other bodies, on all scales at once. If I become multiplicity in this way, how am I still the body?

In doing so, a new kind of seeing emerges, even a new set of eyes: “so shall we come to look at the world with new eyes” (48). More accurately, we will have a new way of viewing vision itself. That is, the vision presented to me will not be taken as the axis of truth but as indicative of my being within a larger Being, as the “current of the Universal Being circulat[ing] through me.” Emerson thus suggests that, in encountering the beautiful, “this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony” (36-37). The penetration of nature is an in-taking, an in-forming of that vastness such that the “itself” is not penetrating nature (as it would be if we read it sexually) but forced to acknowledge its harmony with it. If we take seriously the questions about the I it is unclear who would fuck nature; indeed, Universal Being circulates through me, not as an all-powerful man but a human being realizing their inseparability from the vastness. “Man is the dwarf of himself”

190 declares Emerson’s poet. “He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally” (46).

Somehow being is still here, vision is still here, the thing called human is still here—but it exceeds anything delimited, enframed, or claimed as mine.

If we take this point seriously, we must note that the need to purify the eye and become transparent are not, as is often asserted, an attempt to master reality. Quite the opposite: the attempt to master nature is only possible in failing to purify the eye/I in this way. Thus Emerson states that the world is “not…now subjected to human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us”

(42). Likewise, he critiques the attraction of science—this supposed field of domination—for claiming and accepting the incompleteness of its theories and truths as the whole of truth.

Indeed, the results of Emerson’s becoming-transparent is not at all domination. In this perplexing loop, Beauty and Love emerges as the standard by which the world demands, even in your consideration of vision, that we relinquish this view as mine. Beauty emerges when we allow our way of handling vision align with the reality of vision, when we let go of the World Picture and permit vision to become a transparent encountering. We will no longer identify with the vision or hold on to how we expect it to appear, but now find ourselves able to truly attend to it as it is.

Beauty becomes the standard by which Nature rewards this letting be of vision, as we identify not with what we see but with the vast. Love is the demand accompanied this kind of perception.

In such a view beautiful objects are not revealed but all objects become beautiful: “to the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again" (15).

Perhaps in desiring this kind of beauty, we think that we can acquire it. That sounds great, I want it. Where do I get one of those? Enter a whole business capitalizing on packaging and selling various forms that claim to have this transcendental power and appeal. But these are

191 not a problem. Even a National Geographic special could break you of the sense that this is your view, although the bizarreness of the height of reality TV or the advertisements in the commercial break are probably just as likely to do so. Either way, the purifying of the Eye of the

I is what is required, not any particular view. It is true that Emerson does point to something like

“wilderness” as the place where this experience is most possible and potent (“In the woods we return to reason and faith” (10)). The reason for this should be clear given the necessary purification: contained within our technological shells, it can become easy to imagine man as master and myself as the driver of this car, this keyboard, these ideas, this body, and this world.

No sublimity is possible from such a position, only more me, me, me—my opinion, my desires, my position, my point of view. Stepping out of the technical apparatus, the ridiculousness of this claiming is apparent. But even within it, it is only in not attending to the means of the technological edifice that we are able to sustain this illusion of self-mastery—one which is not male or female but exists anywhere there is an ego. To this end, Emerson points out in his chapter on Commodity the bizarre and beautiful nature of the fact that all of the world present to man—not just the technological—is strangely and surprisingly suited for humankind: “All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man” (12). For me to acknowledge this as a beautiful rather than horrific realization, requires that I take these facts all the way inside, allow them to touch the deepest recesses of what I think I am, not isolated as an independent (yet related!) viewer, but as part or particle of all of this. If you want it, you can’t have it—not without this fundamentally humble take on your own self, your own vision. If you are looking for beauty it won't come: "if too eagerly hunted [nature] becomes shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. ... 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence”

(16). Hence, going into the woods to find it is unlikely to yield it, especially when we think that

192 this is what going to the woods is for. All of this beauty, wholeness, and truth—yes, even this word we cannot shy away from—“depends on the simplicity of [one’s] character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss” (22). Or, to cite older wisdom, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8). Indeed, the Beauty will be everywhere already and always.

In this letting-go of one’s perspective as mine, a measure is made possible in such a way that was consistently obscured prior to becoming transparent eye-ball:

“the world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure” (42).

This is why Emerson speaks so much about the careful examination and dwelling with the world.

In feeling how all of this exceeds the capacity of vision, we can look out in the vastness of

Nature as a fixed point by which we can measure Being. What is fixed is not this perspective, these objects, these things, or any particular content—all of these change even in our scaling. But scaling works by relying on an underlying consistency of things. In feeling that it exceeds that which is claimed as mine we can already see the need and possibility of taking measure of this perspective in relation to this expanse and the wealth of detail it makes possible on whatever scale we view. Only in relinquishing the apparent as absolute in favor of the absolute vastness, will we be open to reworking what all this is by taking measure, taking stock, scaling and rescaling, shifting and re-shifting, however being presents itself.

Examining the Mind’s Eye The echoes of idealism refracted through Emerson’s transparent eye-ball call forth another question: what then of this material, the eye-ball itself? A sortie from the bastion of

193 sensation: however you want to cut it, the eye is a material apparatus bringing in a material light bouncing off of material objects. Surely these odd statements about the ego and the eye simply function from some kind of mind-body dualism. Bring in the Descartes! We shall have this argument’s head on a platter!

The war metaphor is only fitting because of the vehemence with which Plato and

Descartes are critiqued for the institution of some kind of mind-body dualism, which permits a separation between a disembodied soul and the material world. Undoubtedly, the mind-body distinction has been used to justify all kinds of arguments and actions, ranging from problematic to terrifying. However, we ought to pause here to re-examine the terrain of this mind-body separation since our examination of scale has already indicated that something of that sort is needed, not as a distinction about kinds of reality within the apparent phenomena, but as a distinction between ways of encountering these phenomena. What we will come to is this: when we consider the perceptual apparatus by which the world appears a necessary distinction arises between the perception itself and reflective or internal consideration of that perception, viz. the perception of perception. Without the second, perception would be taken entirely as the whole of reality, the appearance of objects would be unquestioned, and scaling itself would not be possible. No measure would be introduced or even be possible if we were not able to step back and say “what is this? What size? How does this image in the distance compare to the image up close? Is that the same object? What if we go smaller?” All of these questions are not taking the perceptual encounter as it appears wholly for the faculties of sensation but demands the need for something more: a consideration, measurement, and judgment of the appearance of reality beyond apparent appearance. Let us therefore put down our weapons by which we attack the frequently used versions of “mind” and “body” and yield momentarily our supposed “positions”

194 so that we can consider the terrain under which such a distinction might not only make sense but also be useful or even necessary.

In fact, we are benefited greatly by the proliferation of arguments about the materiality or specificity of vision as it functions as a decidedly embodied means of coloring our understanding of knowledge, truth, and being. Even more than with the arguments about the male gaze, the terrain here has been well-mapped so that the arguments might be habitually invoked. A preliminary generalization: these critiques are nearly always anti-idealist in nature (whether they call themselves realist or something else is another matter) in that they return to the materiality of the eye to reassert the physical attributes of vision against the more abstract spiritually-charged kind of seeing we already explored in Emerson. There are two related objections here that are developed and invoked in different ways; these might be grouped under the handy phrases

“ocularcentrism” and “the Mind’s Eye.” Ocularcentrism, as the term implies, argues that we have focused on visuality at the expense of other senses. Doing so privileges a certain mode of being in the world and a certain way of conceptualizing knowledge that is only possible by taking vision as the central metaphor.18 The “mind’s eye” arguments critique the move from a physical eye to a metaphysical description of reason, reflection, and intuition in the language of vision.

With the Mind’s Eye we speak of the vision of the soul as differing from the vision of the eye, positing a distinction between mind and body even as we invoke the metaphoric similarity. The areas in which these arguments have been invoked are widespread but four main groups have used them the most: a tradition of French philosophy, which Martin Jay has summarized and brought under the banner of ocularcentrism; a pragmatist critique of truth, most famously articulated by Richard Rorty; feminist science studies interested in considering the origin and

18 See Jay, Downcast Eyes for a summary and history of these arguments. 195 nature of objectivity; and art history and criticism which has studied the origin and development of various theories and forms of painting based on different understandings of the eye. These conversations are by no means distinct; each has drawn on the others to build a massive literature critiquing visuality on these grounds.

Undoubtedly we could get lost in these critiques, which would result in some vague generalizations about them that does not do justice to how the arguments are usually structured.

We will do better, therefore, to examine closely one argument chosen for the way it draws on or is used frequently by all of these major conversations, for its engagement with the central texts at hand, from Plato and Descartes, and for its inclusion of both the Mind’s Eye and the ocularcentrism critiques. This article, “The Mind’s Eye,” by Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine

Grontkowski, directly takes up the French conversation on visuality and is then subsequently cited by many following critiques of vision, in science studies and elsewhere. It makes use of many of the then relatively fresh arguments and assumptions about visuality and focuses almost entirely on the role of Plato and Descartes in cultivating them. We can thus also call forth Plato’s words to see what he has to say in response. Given the general vehemence towards Descartes, let us leave him to the side; the issues and misunderstandings that might be hidden there are already contained within a particular reading of Plato.

The aim of Keller and Grontkowski’s article is to examine the history and role of vision as it relates to the development of knowledge. They are responding directly to Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray’s declaration that the logic of vision is an inherently male logic that leads directly to a glorification of distancing and objectivity. We already dealt with these arguments somewhat through Mulvey and Sontag. Keller and Grontkowski aim to step back and consider the role of visual metaphor as it relates to biological theories of the eye—that is, to consider the

196 relation between the physical eye-ball, scientific theories about vision, and the reflective, eye of the mind. They articulate from the beginning what they see to be a paradox: the invocation of a physical sense (visuality) for a nonphysical conception of truth: “Vision connects us to truth as it distances us from the corporeal” (209). The result is a division into the “body’s eye and the mind’s eye,” which makes possible the scientific conception of objective knowledge through a means of distancing oneself from a passive nature. While they do not see this division as necessary for Plato, the passages they cite and the interpretations they derive from his works directly set up a particular form of the mind/body division.

Before beginning to read Plato, Keller and Grontowski introduce the question at the core of our last critique: they cite Eric. A Havlock’s Preface to Plato to connect the move from an oral (hearing) to a writing (visual) culture with “the growing development, even birth…of the personal “I” (209). Here arises the same question: what is the relation between visuality and the concept of the “I” as someone who sees? Thus, when the authors explore the connection between the mental and visual as the metaphor between the physical and spiritual sight, they keep open the question of identity: “the knower and that which is known, in this metaphor, are essentially kindred. They are both parts of the whole of being itself” (212). Keller and Grontowski do not note, however, what here is referred to as “knower” and what is referred to as “known.” Moving too quickly, the usual assumption would be that I am the knower, as subject, and the thing I am looking at is the object. There is already a question then about the status of the I here: am I the eye? For Plato, clearly not. Rather, the “I” in question is this elusive term “soul,” which as Keller and Grontowski point out, Plato posits in the Meno and elsewhere as having already having

Truth within it due to its union with the Forms. These Forms are “eidos and idea, i.e., things which are seen” (212).

197

The authors posit two modern scientific assumptions about objectivity and the knowability of nature: first, “the separation of subject from object” and, second, “the move away from the conditions of perception” (212). They suggest that the second is fully contained in Plato and the first is begun by Plato but completed by Descartes. From this assumption about the

“retreat from the body sought in Plato’s epistemology,” the authors identify what they see to be another paradox:

“One [paradox] is intrinsic to the conceptualization of knowledge as simultaneously objective and transcendent. The 'cool light of reason' establishes, in a single move, worldly distance and divine communion. Further, in allowing for the dissociation of truth from process, the visual metaphor ironically allows for the dissociation of mental from the sensory. Vision is that sense which places the world at greatest remove;…it is the sense which most readily promotes the illusion of disengagement and objectification. At the same time, it provides a compelling model for intangible communication offering the most profound and primitive satisfaction.” (213)

It is not immediately clear why “worldly distance” and “divine communion” are antithetical, why the dissociation of mental and sensory would be ironic, nor why it requires the visual metaphor to do so. Here we have, once again, a quick statement of a number of repeated assumptions that often underlie critiques of vision: that worldly distance and divine communion are incommensurable; that one cannot use, without irony, a physical metaphor for a nonphysical (if we even admit such a thing) distinction; and, underlying this second assumption, that the structure of that metaphor inevitably determines the way we think about knowledge—in other words, that the visual metaphor is largely responsible for the much of the way we think knowledge functions.

Keller and Grontowski do point out that Plato would not have said these were paradoxes based on the fact that he had a different theory of vision. They thus move on to Descartes to show how, with the eye becoming passive within scientific conceptions of vision, these paradoxes are accentuated by the development of a Cartesian subject. If we follow the authors

198 past Plato and into the cogito of Descartes, usually interpreted hastily as some sort of magically distinctive subject, we will neglect to untangle some important aspects of Plato’s mind/body distinction and why worldly distance and divine communion are not antithetical. In fact, we will find that some of what the authors—and many others—accuse Descartes of, are readily accepted in Plato but in a positive sense. Most importantly, the passive nature of self: “Having made the eye purely passive, all intellectual activity is reserved to the “I,” which, however, is radically separate from the body which houses it” (215). In invoking the same Eye/I resonance we are working with here, Keller and Grontowski are moving quite quickly. Who is this “I” that is active? Is it not separate from the body? Is it separate but housed in the body? What does this mean? They do not ask these questions of Descartes, but instead move on to explain the implications of this separation, implications which are congruent with Plato’s articulation of knowledge:

“Nature may be visible by a mechanical process which leaves both the knower and the known disengaged, but it only becomes ‘knowable’ by virtue of an ‘inborn’ or ‘natural’ light which connects the mind’s eye to truth. It is that light which reestablishes the subject's relation--a relation now totally and finally dematerialized--to the objects of perception" (216).

In other words, vision itself is mechanical and passive—not done by a clearly defined subject— and requires an additional inner light for knowledge to occur. But what is active in this formulation? Not the mind’s eye, but the inner or inborn light by which the mind’s eye is able to see the truth. In following the metaphor of the eye, we cannot simply replicate in the mental what we already assume about the physical: that the one who sees is a clearly defined and delimited being individuated and still located, somehow, in the body even as it is separated from the body.

Keller and Grontowski suggest that the change in the understanding of the eye from active to passive should also change the way we understand knowledge; in contradiction, the authors state

199 that the Mind’s Eye is an “active knower” and that this activity is what makes Nature able to be apprehended. Even if we hold to the insistence that our understanding of knowledge must follow the metaphor, then this must mean that the Mind’s Eye is also a passive recipient of the divine light. The intensification of the argument which produces this contradiction is not from Plato or

Descartes, nor necessarily from Keller and Grontkowski. It comes from a hubris that the authors already acknowledge: “Insofar as it does not seem possible to conceive of knowledge as a passive recording of data—human pride alone would seem to preclude such an epistemological posture—then a sharper division between visual and mental sight was necessitated” (215, emphasis added). The implication is that, while Plato and Descartes mind-body distinction may be used to bolster an erroneous egoic “I” who might apprehend nature, doing so is only a move of hubris, not the necessary implication of a mind-body distinction.

Plato himself focuses in on this same relationship between perception and the need for reflection—to consider what I am, or who perceives—in his discussion of knowledge in the

Theaetetus. Given that the Theaetetus is so centrally about knowledge and perception, it is surprising how rarely the text itself is examined in the analyses of Plato’s position on vision.

Keller and Grontkowski do quote from it as evidence for Plato’s separation of knowledge and perception. However, to get a full sense of why Plato makes this distinction we must attend to the text a little closer. The dialog is a recounting of a conversation between the young

Theaetetus, his teacher Theodorus (a mathematician), and Socrates. The argument of the dialog begins when Socrates challenges Theodorus to provide a definition of knowledge. Theaetetus’ first definition is that knowledge is perception: “the way it appears at present” posits Theaetetus,

“is that knowledge is simply perception” (151e). The first arc of the dialectic thus explicitly lays out a rationale for separating perception from knowledge. The conclusion of this first arc is what

200 is quoted by Keller and Grontowski: “Taking it all together then, you call this perception…a thing which has no part in apprehending truth…nor, consequently, in knowledge either” (186e,

212 in Keller and Grontowski). But the manner that we get to this conclusion is surprising: Plato has Socrates rally not the expected Absolute Ideas but arguments from motion and Becoming, which are initially congruent with a materialistic position, in order to show the need to separate knowledge from perception. The reason is quite simple: if things are constantly in the process of changing—becoming something else—how can we say that knowledge is simply perception?

The objects of perception will change, being one thing at one moment and something different at another moment. How then can we speak in terms of knowing these things when the things themselves are forever shifting?

While Keller and Grontowski and many others have made much of Plato’s theory of vision, derived from the Timeaus, the posited theory of vision in the Theaetetus is a purposefully open and ambiguous materialistic theory of vision:

“Let us…posit that there is nothing which is, in itself, one thing. According to this theory, black or white or any other color will turn out to have come into being through the impact of the eye upon the appropriate motion; and what we naturally call a particular color is neither that which impinges nor that which is impinged upon, but something which has come into being between the two, and which is private to the individual percipient” (154a).

Plato’s supposed theory of vision from the Timeaus, that the eye emits some kind of fire by which it sees, is side-stepped here in favor of simply noting that there must be some relationship between the eye and the object seen in order for perception to occur.19 Noting this relationship turns the question of perception into a personal one that “is private to the individual percipient.”

19 It is possible to derive a Platonic theory of vision by placing together the discussions of vision from Timeaus, the Theaetetus, and the Meno. For example, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler, chapter 1. Doing so is appropriate only insofar as scientists did so themselves. However, within Plato’s corpus it is clear that he was not particularly interested in developing such a theory since, as Theaetetus itself makes clear, his primary concern was not knowledge of how things like the vision works but the acknowledging of the uncertainty involved in the positing of such knowledge. 201

Doing so allows Plato to introduce the uncertainty of vision in personal terms: “do you feel sure that anything appears to another human being like it appears to you? Wouldn’t you be much more disposed to hold that it doesn’t appear the same even to yourself because you never remain like yourself?” (154a). Even the perception of oneself is always shifting. How could we be more certain about the perception in others is any more stable? Thus, Socrates introduces his persistent insistence that the course of inquiry is first and foremost a self-inquiry: “so our first aim will be to look at our thoughts themselves in relation to themselves, and see what they are…in all seriousness ‘analyzing’ ourselves, and asking what are these apparitions within us?” (154e-

155a). The shift that produces the mind-body distinction is thus the need to admit that the appearance of objects is not itself clear enough to provide a sufficient ground for knowledge.

One must begin with oneself, as the perceiver, looking and analyzing what these appearances are

“within us.” As we saw in our thought experiment on perception and scale, the need for a measure and the possibility of scale comes from this same kind of attending-to the phenomenological appearances of things as they present themselves in their variances. No presupposed idealism is necessary for moving to this conclusion, only the admission that one’s perceptions are always shifting just as one’s own sense of self is always different from one moment to the next.

Of course one might take recourse to a staunch materialism here and try to articulate such things still in strictly perceptual terms. Such arguments were already present in Plato’s time. To proceed forward in the argument, Plato’s Socrates thus must note that we cannot hold to this unreasonable position but must open ourselves to the possibility that Being itself might exceed what is in perception. Such an admission amounts to an initiation: “see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can

202 grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality” (155e). Here is the most explicit turn away from materialism and the introduction of an idealism, hinging on the possibility of admitting the uncertain, limited, and temporary nature of one’s own perceptual apparatus. However, the need for this initiation only has to do with the admitting of action, processes, and those things not visible to the naked eye—in other words, most of the things readily integrated into most materialistic positions. Today, matter itself, in being tied to the atomic scale, is already a dealing of things in the invisible. To arrive at this position as a materialism is to grasp the tangibility of matter with one hand and the abstractness of scalar shifts with the other. But these smaller entities are already made possible by moving beyond the senses, by applying a measure to our perception. Only when we ignore the reflective nature of scale do we suppose such objects like

“atoms” are tangible in the same way as “what we can grasp with both hands.”

As soon as we acknowledge that that which is contained in perception is too unstable and shifting to provide grounds for knowledge, we are ready to introduce something beyond perception itself. Indeed, it is its relational nature that makes perception so uncertain and so in need of additional examination. The description of the relationship between the eye and objects only confirms this:

“the eye and some other things…which has come into its neighborhood, generate both whiteness and the perception which is by nature united with it….In this event, motions arise in the intervening space, sight from the side of the eye and whiteness from the side of that which cooperates in the production of color. The eye is filled with sight; at that moment it sees, and becomes not indeed sight, but a seeing eye; which its partner in the process of producing color is filled with whiteness, and becomes not whiteness but white” (156e)

However the mechanism works, the point is that nothing can be assumed about the being of the attributes of perception prior to the perceptual encounter. The eye becomes a “seeing eye” only

203 in the encounter with objects and the object becomes white only in the process of being seen:

“nothing…is in itself any of these. All of them, of all kinds whatsoever, are what things become through association with one another, as the result of motion” (157a). As the remainder of the dialog goes on to establish, even if we come to know the perception in an intimate way, there will always be uncertainty in regard to both what is appearing and the precise nature of the attributes arising from that relation.

As with what we have already seen before, such an argument about the uncertainty of perception only functions if one admits one’s own uncertainty as the perceiver. If we, in perceiving something, think only of the perception itself as if it is apparent and clear, then we will not acknowledge our own place in the perception. A move is required in which one acknowledges the perceptual apparatus: “I become, not perception, but percipient” (159e). Once one admits one’s place as percipient, uncertainty in relation to perception must enter if one honestly takes stock of one’s role: “I shall never become thus percipient of anything else. A perception of something else is another perception and makes another and a changed percipient.”

The perception changes not just because objects change but because the percipient changes as well. If I suppose myself stable, I can pretend that it is only the objects which change and thereby suppose that I am measuring only the changing of objects. But to posit in this way is to ignore the percipient’s role in producing the perception. Oddly, it is the materialist position, which holds solely to objects as the producers of perception, which produces the strongest egoic position, congruent with the idea of the independent humanistic subject, by nature of ignoring the percipient. While the materialist may claim to remain solely in the realm of body and thereby have no such split between mind and body, this ignoring of the percipient produces in practice the kind of unexamined viewer who pretends to be nowhere only by virtue of having failed to

204 examine himself. Instead, Plato demands that we reflect back on the mode of perception, to examine it in its uncertainty. This is only possible if we place the percipient on the line, noting the uncertainty of perception in producing knowledge.

It is from these arguments that Plato is able to move from perception to judgment, to something which is rendered in Keller and Grontowski as “the separation of subject from object” and the “move away from the conditions of perception” (212). The separation comes from the need to take into account the whole of perception as emerging within a percipient which itself is not stable or clearly defined. Perception has no part in producing knowledge because it is inherently non-reflective: it does not inherently clarify what is produced by what and how. Thus,

Socrates and Theaetetus posit a new solution: “then knowledge is to be found not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them” (186d). Some additional calculation is needed and the faculty which makes calculations steps forward to fill the task. The rest seems pretty clear given the history of rationality through Enlightenment thought: Plato favors reason as the site of knowledge over and against the embodied perception. In doing so, he would posit the soul as a reasoning entity looking out into the material world, dissecting it from a distance.

Except that this is not the conclusion at all. Instead, Socrates and Theaetetus go on to dismiss both judgment and a third option—judgment with an account (logos)—as possible definitions of knowledge on almost the same grounds: uncertainty about the nature of how these judgments are produced or how these accounts are applied. In each one the problem arises when the one who sees, judges, or takes into account assumes that they themselves know the knowledge that is known. The relationship is always unclear at the site of the knower where one assumes oneself to be the one who sees, who judges, and who takes into account. We need not go further into the arguments to come to the payoff of nearly all the Platonic dialogues: not a

205 desire for certainty but a getting-good with uncertainty. The payoff of the need to reflect back on perception is not itself knowledge in a clear way—reason will not yield certainty about perception either—but the acknowledgment of uncertainty itself as a function of humility: “you will be less modest and not think you know what you don’t know” (210c). To operate otherwise is to function as the “blind leading the blind,” pretending you have knowledge when you do not have it at all (209e).

This point is both practical and essential for our process of scaling. One must learn to acknowledge what one does not know in order to even judge what one sees. The movement from perception to judgment to accounting each relied on an acknowledging of such uncertainty. But in the end, even these are not clearly accounted for. When moving across scales one will only be able to use the measure to an effective end if one lets go of the apparentness of any given perception. But this does not mean that you replace perception with the measure as the site of truth. To do so is to still ignore the place of oneself in the production of the measure. It is this ignoring that leads us to privilege the objects discerned on a new scale over another. As we take another scale into account, we can forget the relationship whereby that taking into account was made possible. Who is measuring? Who is scaling? To ask this question is to bring back into view the measuring process, not to undermine it as a possibility, but to see it for what it is: a means of judging the perceptual field.

It is a function of scaling itself to produce this kind of openness, but only if one holds oneself open to scaling in the process. Thus, in a central passage transitioning from a discussion of perception to judgment, Plato contrasts the view of the politician—the “practical man”

(173b)—and the view of the philosopher on scalar grounds:

“when [the philosopher] hears talk of land—that so-and-so has a property ten thousand acres or more, and what a vast property that is, it sounds to him like a tiny plot, used as

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he is to envisage the whole earth. When his companions become lyric on the subject of great families, and exclaim at the noble blood of one who can point to seven wealthy ancestors, he thinks that such praise comes of a dim and limited vision, an inability…to take a steady view of the whole” (175a).

The conclusions here echo many of those we arrived at in chapter one. The steady view of the whole makes the investments and interests of the practical man sound bizarre. This is a view of one’s view such that one might fully reassess one’s situation. The payoff is always not hubris— that I have a better view than you do—but actually the humility from which one is able to alter one’s viewpoint. It is only in not acknowledging the limited view by taking reference to the larger view, that we find ourselves seemingly trapped in our personal point of view: “We must tell them the truth—that their very ignorance of their true state fixes them the more firmly therein” (176d).

The knowing for Plato, whereby we would move away from materiality and institute a reflective examination, is a knowledge that one’s position as the perceiver is itself not fully clear.

The only appropriate response then is not knowledge but an unknowing and a realignment of oneself in light of this not-knowing. Thus, he introduces, just as we saw in Emerson, the question of virtue as tied to a scalar shift: “That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming as like God as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pious, with understanding” (176b). This connection should make clear why Plato also turned to scalar examples when dealing with virtue in the Protagoras (quoted earlier). The confusion and blindness comes from keeping oneself in the realm of appearances as if they are certain when, even on their own grounds, they are themselves always shifting, changing, and connected to the subject-object interchange of the eye-object, percipient-perceived relationship.

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It may seem odd to claim that Plato, who is so well known as a champion of truth and virtue, would himself be claiming a not-knowing at the core of his philosophical examinations.

Indeed, Keller and Grontowski’s statement that Plato provides a “conceptualization of knowledge as simultaneously objective and transcendent” (213) is an expression of the confusion about how Plato’s account of knowledge would lead us to truth about the world via a transcendence of it. However, we can now see that the reason we move away from perception, institute something like a division between perception and reflection of that perception, and leave aside the apparent reality of the material world, all relates to the acknowledging of the perceiver involved in the process of perceiving, specifically the undermining of the sense of self-certainty found only in occupying the unexamined position.

But we must tread carefully here. When one carefully examines oneself, there may emerge a more appropriate kind of certainty found in this kind of not-knowing which may appear, on the surface, to sound like the sense-certainty Plato critiques. Keller and Grontowski confusedly point to this as the ‘cool light of reason’ which provides simultaneously “worldly distance and divine communion” (213). There is indeed in Plato this mystic connection between distance and union. But here the distance is shown to be, most importantly, distance from oneself. Or, more precisely, distance from what you think you are. It is from this connection that

Plato is able to speak of the arrival at truth and virtue not as a kind of knowledge but rather a not- knowing which yields understanding. The best statement of this revealing of truth can be found in the 7th Letter:

This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries—that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is

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kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.20

It is not possible to claim knowledge or skill in these matters of truth because the truth itself is a matter of arriving at the not-knowing whereby one is open to experience the world without treating as absolutely correct the perceptual and conceptual apparatuses that shape this view.

Plato is already acknowledging that one cannot even have anything like a treatise to prove this point without it itself sounding like knowledge. Rather, the process of dialectic clears away the obscuring factors until the light of truth suddenly breaks through. But this light of truth emerges not from knowing but from not knowing, specifically an acknowledging the mode of not- knowing already contained within one’s own being, a not-knowing which exceeds the forms of appearance so present within experience. That is, the knowledge about the objects of sensation will always give way to the perpetual altering of a world in fluctuation, both in terms of the objects shifting and the shifting of the percipient (indeed, it is not always clear that the two are separate). If we take in these objects and systematically compare them, seeing how they do not line up, and how they change then a sudden understanding can arise about the nature of all of this:

After much effort, as names, definitions, sights, and other data of sense, are brought into contact and friction one with another, in the course of scrutiny and kindly testing by men who proceed by question and answer without ill will, with a sudden flash there shines forth understanding about every problem, and an intelligence whose efforts reach the furthest limits of human powers. (7th Letter)

Insofar as we remain considering objects without taking into view the percipient, we will remain in the conviction that the objects of sense have themselves some permanence. When we make the simple admission that these objects are always altering and we move to take ourselves into account, then we proceed by negative dissociation from what we think we are and know, to

20 The 7th letter translation is from J. Harward. 209 proceed to experience the fullness of the presence of being beyond what is apparent. The Mind’s

Eye is not reason as mental content, but the proceeding by this unknowing to the openness that moves beyond any divisions of objects as material and set categories as thoughts. Only then does this Mind’s Eye open when it admits that the I/Eye itself is exceeded.

The Christian mystical tradition of negative theology is built on these very grounds, best exemplified by the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, written in the 14th century. In that text we find the withdrawing as a becoming-nowhere not as a place of impeccable and impenetrable selfhood, but as the opening to the fullness already present when looking with the Mind’s Eye rather than the Eye thought to be one’s own:

“Yet for fear you may be deceived and interpret what I say literally, I do not choose to express the interior life in this way. Rather I will speak in paradoxes. Do not try to withdraw into yourself, for to put it simply, I do not want you to be anywhere; no, not outside, above, behind, or beside yourself. But to this you say: ‘Where then shall I be? By your reckoning I am to be nowhere!’ Exactly. In fact you have expressed it rather well, for I would indeed have you be nowhere. Why? Because nowhere, physically, is everywhere spatially. Understand this clearly: your spiritual work is not located in any particular place. But when your mind consciously focuses on anything, you are there in that place spiritually, as certainly as your body is located in a definite place right now.” (124)

The body itself, in its tangibility demands that we look back here, that we privilege what appears so obvious within our experience. Yes, the body is located in space, as is the eye. But if we want higher knowledge, to be able to examine the fullness of what all of this is, then we have to clear away the sense that this apparent perception is all that is. The much disparaged view from nowhere is actually an attempt to articulate this position, but it only functions if it the becoming- nowhere extends to the sense that this I itself is an unalienable but limited point of view.21

In a sense, then, we have to move beyond sense- experience in order to study experience. Specifically one must reflect on sense-experience itself

21 This idea of the view from nowhere was developed in Nagel, The View from Nowhere, discussed below. 210 in order to be open to measuring it without persistently falling into confusion. However, the arrival at the nowhere is itself an experience felt as the absence of experience: “Forget this kind of everywhere and the world’s all. It pales in richness beside this blessed nothingness and nowhere. Don’t worry if your faculties fail to grasp it. Actually that is the way it should be, for this nothingness is so lofty that they cannot reach it. It cannot be explained, only experienced”

(Cloud of Unknowing 124). Literally, the nothingness is the exceeding of oneself that is so lofty that the senses and reason cannot grasp it because it is exceeds them. But this can be experienced as an absence, a not-knowing. If we take all that we have discussed thus far, the reason for this should be clear: the negative erasure here is the erasure of the part of oneself that insists that it is here and only here, in this body, in the eyes, in the point of view.

Thus, we arrive again at the relationship between humility and truth as the condition of possibility of acknowledging that what appears to be so clear within perception in fact requires additional measuring, comparison, and reflection. The truly ironic element of this conclusion is that, if the personal reflective aspect is not acknowledged, the move to measuring and judgment can have the opposite effect of the what allowed it to take place to begin with: the humility by which one would yield sense-certainty in favor of judgment becomes a new kind of self-certainty as one identifies oneself with the measure or the point of view, now externalized as an outward- looking examination of objects. Plato acknowledges this problem in the 7th letter:

But I do not think it a good thing for men that there should be a disquisition, as it is called, on this topic-except for some few, who are able with a little teaching to find it out for themselves. As for the rest, it would fill some of them quite illogically with a mistaken feeling of contempt, and others with lofty and vain-glorious expectations, as though they had learnt something high and mighty (7th letter)

Plato already foreshadows the hubris of a scientific outlook which would use these arguments about reflection and the need for a measure to create a stronger form of contempt and vanity.

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Perhaps the reworking of the perception/reflection distinction into a sharply divided subject/object makes this possible. Nonetheless, as the argumentative arc of the Theaetetus already makes clear, those who would claim to be inspired by the “cool light of reason” must also acknowledge that knowledge from measuring itself does not yield certain knowledge of itself, except insofar as it permits us to revise our orientation towards the senses and their world of objects. From a scalar perspective, the hubris lies in forgetting once again the role of the measurer, just as we forget the role of the perceiver. Thus, if we move beyond material perception here, we must equally move beyond the clear humanistic reason in the same manner if scale is not going to be calcified into a clear set of externalized and perpetually evident descriptions of reality. As we come to see our seeing in the movement of scale, we must also remain open to this movement of seeing in reflecting on the scalar process itself.

Vision’s Privilege Let us now attend more closely to the particularity of vision as it relates to scale, lest the reader think we have blindly followed something which is nothing more than an artifact of vision. Is scale only visual? Does the visual have a special relation to the scaling we are dealing with here?

Scholars have made some intoxicating claims about the nature of vision in order to dismiss vision or various notions as artifacts of vision. Most frequently cited is Hans Jonas’s

“The Nobility of Sight” which notes three phenomenological aspects of vision that would justify the Greek assertion that vision is the most noble of the senses: “(1) simultaneity in the presentation of a manifold, (2) neutralization of the causality of sense-affection, (3) distance in the spatial and mental senses” (507). Unsurprisingly these three claims are those most often rallied in opposition to vision as presenting a reality that is simultaneous, neutralizing, and

212 distancing. We do not have to get into the sprawling examinations of Martin Jay to examine this repeated claim about the centrality or privilege given to sight or its various negative aspects.

Instead, let us consider what aspects of vision make it amenable to scale. Once again, the question of the I/Eye will prove central.

Let us take a particular tack here that builds in a different way the phenomenology of vision described by Jonas, whose description is particularly amenable to the problematic conception of scientific knowledge critiqued as ocularcentrism. Instead, we will find three analogous implications already contained within his three phenomenal characteristics which simultaneously build on and deconstruct the assumptions contained in his analysis. In relation to scale we can make the following observation: vision is the sense which is most amenable to a critical examination, a systematic comparison of the field of perception, and a questioning of the source and construction of the perceptual world. The reasons for this are threefold: (1) vision creates a field of obliquely defined objects that are amenable to examination and comparison, (2) it does not hold the material location as the agential and privileged origin of sense, and (3) it provides a means of reflecting on the perceptual field according to distance. Part of the difficulty here is that it is exceedingly difficult to dissect the senses from each other not only because able- bodied individuals tend to experience all the senses simultaneously, but our language reinforces any habits of thought that tends to be produced by any given sense (so that even those who do not have one sense or another might equally adopt those attributes). Furthermore, many attributes that could be read as artifacts of a given sense are useful for navigating the world more generally so that it is not clear whether that attribute is an artifact of the sense or merely bolstered by it.

Thus, the ability to conceive of the world as a field able to be traversed, cited by Jonas as an artifact of vision (518), would be possible with or without vision by the process of a body

213 moving around. Sight may help solidify this field to be traversed, but it is not essential to it. We should thus be careful not to make too much of any of these conclusions. Nonetheless, we can provide some general considerations about sight using touch as the primary contrast, since touch is the sense least amenable to considering itself and thus to scale.

The defining of objects is so central to our understanding of the world that it is hard to detach ourselves from considering their existence. Jonas notes that touch and sight provide us with this sense of objects as static entities, but with a difference: touch operates via a time- measure while sight provides us with a field of objects present at once. Adding hearing into the mix, Jonas summarizes the difference as: “Hearing—presentation of sequence through sequence; touch—presentation of simultaneity through sequence; sight—presentation of simultaneity through simultaneity” (512). Because I must actively run my hand along the contours of an object to distinguish it through touch, touch creates objects only as a function of time. Vision, claims Jonas, presents a multiplicity of objects within a consistent field of view due to the simultaneity of those objects distinguished within the same glance. For Jonas, the results are significant: “only the simultaneity of image allows the beholder to compare and interrelate: it not only offers many things at once, but offers them in their mutual proportion, and thus objectivity emerges pre-eminently from sight” (513). Likewise, “only the simultaneity of sight, with its extended “present” of enduring objects, allows the distinction between change and the unchanging and therefore between becoming and being” (513)

Let us pause to reconsider these claims. Without assuming objectness in advance, can we say that vision clearly distinguishes objects? If I merely open my eyes, without moving anything but the eyes (and thereby invoking touch), is it immediately clear that this field of vision is full of objects? If I look at a mug on the desk, I can see through a change of color that the desk is

214 different from the mug. Habitually I declare that these are each objects, but this is already assuming that difference in color equals difference in object. But then I look too at the desk and see many shades within it, including a line where the planks have been fused together to make a larger surface. Do I likewise consider each of those as separate or do I say that this is indeed a desk? Why would the change of color between the mug and the desk be more privileged in the distinction of objects than the planks of wood? Furthermore, if I painted a mug into the desk with sufficient detail and precision that it appeared as if a separate object were there, I would not be able to say whether there is or is not a separate object, without reaching out and feeling to see if it is there.

Rather, it is touch which seems to bear most on the sense of objectness, not due to anything related to simultaneity but due to the high degree of solidity it has in interacting with the world. While taste also requires contact, only touch requires resistance. I reach out for the optical illusion of the mug on the desk and feel only a flat surface. Likewise, I may see through a glass wall, not even noticing its presence, but, then in feeling it, say there is a separation there.

Most importantly, I think of the mug as separate from the desk when I pick it up, feel around the whole object, see that it can move separately from the desk, and wave my hand beneath it. My hand passing between them convinces me of their separateness. When thinking in terms of objects, paired with the focusing effect that produces near and far, vision seems to produce blank space between objects. Yet, it is impossible for me to clearly distinguish these objects without moving the body. As far as I can see, there simply is not space between the mug and the desk.

Even if I pick up the mug and then appeal to sight, vision merely notes the change in shade, color, and point of focus between the colors of the mug, the wall behind it, and the desk. Touch thereby instills in us a habitual means of thinking of things in terms of objectness, which is then

215 transferred to and bolstered by vision, which becomes more efficient at distinguishing objects by adding elements such as color and depth (as an artifact of focus).

At the same time, vision does provide an additional means of comparing objects but only because it resists this objectness even as it becomes mixed with it. The reason for this is already present in our earlier thought experiment with perception and scale. If I pick up an object and feel its contours, it appears to remain both solid and the same size. But if I, considering the vision of the object, move it closer or further away from my eyes, turning it this way and that way, it changes shape, shade, size, and texture depending on how I turn it and examine it. Touch grants it its objectness but vision grants it a dynamic of difference that demands that it be examined. While I could use touch to actively change an object by rubbing at it, breaking it in half, or binding it to something else, within touch these changes appear to be artifacts of my action to the objects. At what point, in solely considering touch, would I begin to dissect the aspects of this “object” as it appears to the senses, to ask about the nature of its objectness? Scale enters when vision notices that the object itself changes depending on how it is looked at. But do

I continue to privilege objectness—the tactile—first even when the systematic comparison of vision reveals that objects that look and feel solid on one scale, look (but don’t feel, at least not with these hands) divided on another—and vice versa?

Far from making objects evident and persistent, the visual field presents such a vast series of shapes, colors, and hues that the possibility of objectivity arises from the need to compare these with as little intervention as possible from that sense which intervenes—touch. This means that objectivity is actually partially the process of moving away from the touch-belief that habitually sets out in advance that things are supposed to be clearly and distinctly objects able to exert resistance on a body conceived at the scale of our normal sense perception. The fact that

216 vision does present many objects simultaneously makes it the best adjunct to the tangible navigation of the world. But it also presents the possibility, if attended to apart from the need for tangible division between things and resistance from things, that we might systematically reconsider what objects are and how they are produced.

It follows that we cannot take too easily Jonas’s assumption about simultaneity and objectness. We could, for instance, posit that vision reveals objects by moving itself around or by noting the movement of objects, such as a bird flying away or a rock falling. Doing so reintroduces time into the equation and favors, once again, not stability of objects but their changing. Jonas’s declaration that vision produces a static field of objects already fails simply because, even if it produces a static field from moment to moment, it provides no consistent means of distinguishing a the visual field into a series of objects. Once you reintroduce time, visuality makes use of the relative stability to see how things that appear to not change, do in fact change. The visual field operates at a speed and efficiency that makes it ideal for such a comparison. The conception of change requires both a field of objects which are stable enough to track but not so stable that they remain exactly the same. Both the space-scale and time-scale shifts rely on the way that vision allows the perceiver to track how what appears to be stable changes depending on the passing of time or the movement of the observer or object. I see the tree in the ground, then I walk around it and observe its changing contours, I walk to the edge of the park and see how it changes, I magnify its contents to see what it contains, and then I watch for a long time to see how it grows, alters, and decays over the course of many years. All of these observations require that I posit the “tree” as a stable enough object to provide consistent observation. But if I hold to the tree as itself a distinct, independent, evident, and self-contained object, then it is not amenable to this examination.

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We can thus turn to our second point: vision does not privilege an agent that must interact with an object as something separate from it. In line with our previous discussion, this statement does not mean what it might initially seem. In addition to providing a clear sense of objectness within the tangible world, touch also provides an intense sense of subjectness. Tangibility implies both capacity to be separated and the application of resistance. It ties the sensation almost entirely to the body as separate from the objects being sensed, partially due to the need to make absent the apparent distance between the body and the thing sensed. Touch-sense occurs when the body is pressed against something but disappears when removed. It thus cultivates the sense that the one who senses is the body, clearly separate from the object, and that this body is distinctly who I am. This is due to the field of touch extending throughout the body. The other senses do not provide this clear sense that I am wholly this body as a clearly distinct entity. Taste is not rich enough to provide more than the sense that the tongue is the experiencer. Hearing and smell are not apparently in the ear or nose except when they are covered—as revealed by feeling something over the ear or nose. When I see my hands move, it is not clear that these are mine that are moving if I ignore entirely the sensation of touch. The one exception is the visual activity of looking in the mirror, which explains the importance of the “mirror stage” for the establishing of an egoic identity within Lacanian psychoanalysis. But even then, the mirror is a singular, non-persistent experience that, when not complimented by touch, is not clearly an image of myself. The thing I am looking at in the mirror is not evidently myself according to vision alone. The image of the body is not the body. Only in feeling the body move and seeing that this movement is confirmed in the movement of the mirror, do I come to associate the image in the mirror as mine. When considered strictly in terms of the senses, this sense that one is the body falls away, as when the mystic and friend of C.S. Lewis, Douglas Harding had the sudden

218 experience that he had no head. Harding developed a whole series of thought experiments born from this reality that, from the examination of vision itself, it cannot be inferred that the body is a clearly distinct object from which originates the appearance of reality.22 The metaphor of reflection becomes important in the sense of a “looking back” not as a looking at the body as in mirror, but as a becoming aware of the faculty of perception. Thus, Harding’s first thought experiment is simple: point your finger back at your field of vision. Who is the finger pointing at?

We can see how the assumption that I am the body already taints in some way Jonas’s examination of his second point, that vision cultivates a sense of passivity or neutrality due to the presence of light as its medium. Neither the eye nor the object has to move in order for vision to work. However, the way that Jonas describes this already assumes the identification with the body:

“in seeing I am not yet engaged by the seen object. I may choose to enter into intercourse with it, but it can appear without the fact of its appearance already involving intercourse. By my seeing it, no issue of my possible relations with it is prejudged. Neither I nor the object has so far done anything to determine the mutual situation. It lets me be as I let it be. In this respect, sight differs decisively from touch and hearing. The obtaining of the touch-experience itself is nothing but the entering into actual intercourse with an object” (514).

This accounts leaves me passive only because it already assumes that I am the body, which is not interacting with the object. “Intercourse” here is an artifact of tangibility, of the felt resistance of body against a surface. This intercourse is notably said to be the “I” here such that, when the body is not engaged with another object, I am not engaged with another object. It is this assumption that allows us to read the separation of visuality in terms of a clear subject-object

22 Harding published these experiments in On Having No Head. These experiments are summarized at www.headless.org. In a later book Harding articulates his conclusions in terms of scale in The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, coming to nearly all the same conclusions presented in this chapter. 219 distinction, as the relationship between a passive looker, gazing on what is seen. Given what we just said about the subject beyond the apparentness of the body, such an assumption of passivity arises from first assuming this “I” is the body, not as an artifact of visuality by itself. Thus, in articulating this aspect of why sight is the most noble of senses, Jonas actually sets up for vision the very critique that is often rallied against it: “the gain is the concept of objectivity, of the thing as it is in itself as distinct from the thing as it affects me, and from this distinction arises the whole idea of theoria and theoretical truth. Furthermore, the image is handed over to imagination, which can deal with it in complete detachment from the actual presence of the original object” (515). Jonas has favored already the way touch distinguishes objects and myself as a body, in articulating objectivity as being about how an object affects me and as it is in itself.

But the implication here is that an object affecting me means that the object comes to touch this body, to have a tangible material interaction with the bodily surface. Again, the major import of this conclusion seems to come from touch, from the assumption that the subject is the body rather than that it is the eye which sees. As noted in our first point, sight produces the need and capacity for the examination of objects because touch produces the sense that these objects are separate entities containing an “in itself.” But vision already notes that objects change depending on how they are viewed, in what context, under what light, in comparison to other objects, and at what scale. In sum, vision does not see an object “as it is” but sees the objects distinctly enough to compare how they appear depending on how they are perceived.

Thus we find ourselves at our third point, which is the most explicitly connected to scale: that the distancing of vision within a field of apparent differences allows one to more explicitly and carefully dissect the relation involved in perceiving. It is paradoxically the increased separation between the eye and the objects that makes us more capable to note how what appears

220 to be inalienable, solid, and tangible is in fact always shifting and giving way. Touch may feel how an object changes; indeed the experience of the body aging is a long, protracted, and beautifully intimate touch-experience in the changing of an object. But, on its own, touch would not easily provide the means for a systematic consideration that is amenable to careful analysis.

The experience of the hand is tied to the density of sensory neurons within it. Light yields already a resolution capability that requires only the wave-length of light. Of course, beyond a certain resolution, we return to something like the tactile, as in the scanning-tunneling microscope.23 But would it occur to us to dissect in this way without the visual?

Likewise, the medium of light provides us with the means of dissecting far beyond what the rest of the senses are able to encounter. We would like to declare that the stars are inaccessible to us, distant and inalienable. But this statement again privileges the tactile and the body as the site of our being. The fact that the light extends from billions of light years away, to connect the eye to a star in a far off galaxy, already implies for vision a connection between those two incredibly distant points. In attending to the production of distance via sight, we can note that only the body would assume distance as an actual, inalienable, and existing in a solid field of objects.24 It is true that vision produces something like distance, giving us the sense that the stars are far away. But in a real sense, vision brings what is distant near enough for examination, while retaining the sense of distance sufficiently for comparison. Thus we can say

23 Valerie L. Hanson describes this kind of touch-vision in Haptic Visions. The question we have here is the degree to which these manifestations of another scale are actually tied to our normal sense perception such that we would find ourselves with the capacity to scale them. What comes out the other end that permits us to “see” the object? In the case of the scanning tunnel microscope it is usually an image, although we could imagine a tactile device with this kind of tactile access to another scale, as is imagined in Feynman’s famous “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom” and dramatized in Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Nonetheless, the point remains intact: such scaling becomes more clearly possible through vision and thus we speak of it, by extension, as a kind of seeing even as we feel our way through these lower scales. 24 Alexander von Humboldt notes in the first volume of Kosmos this same importance of light: “Phenomena of light proclaim the existence of matter in the remotest of space, and the eye is thus made the medium through which we may contemplate the universe.” (67) 221 that vision functions via distance for the purpose of comparison and notation of the alteration of the apparent objects.

Again, this observation about distance requires us to distinguish sight carefully from the sense of touch which would privilege the tangible as the absolute standard by which we judge the distinctions between things, which Jonas again fails to do in discussing distance: “it would not be correct to say that in sight the distant is brought near. Rather it is left in its distance, and if this is great enough it can put the observed object outside the sphere of possible intercourse and of environmental relevance. In that case, perceptual distance many turn into mental distance, and the phenomenon of disinterested beholding may emerge” (519). The distant is “left in its distance” insofar as vision contains artifacts whereby we can judge distance in systematic comparison through the process of scaling. It is, however, brought near in vision by its becoming-present and is only thought to be truly distant by the incapacity of the body, through motion and touch, to intervene in what is seen. But this does not mean that it is “outside the sphere of possible intercourse and of environmental relevance.” For vision, the light itself is a kind of intercourse, or the evidence of an intercourse that extends beyond what is tangible. It makes it possible to imagine that there are additional means of intercourse even beyond the other senses, that the body might be affected by things beyond what is felt here in the body. This is, in fact, the realization that what we call “environment” extends to distances far beyond what is located in the vicinity of the body. The sun itself, the epitome of environmental relevance is felt intimately by the body in the sunlight but seen by the eye as startlingly present even as it affects us from afar. Even touch discerns the effect of gravity, but only with sight do we come to understand that this subtle force is the evidence that objects which are too large to feel the

222 contours or too far to be touched are, in fact, within the sphere of intercourse—as long as by

“intercourse” we do not simply mean the tangible press of the body against their surface.

It is interesting that this whole examination is made possible by the fact that vision is the only sense that can easily be “turned off” by closing the eyes. In doing so, I can more carefully examine the sense of touch apart from the visual field. It also means that, in another seemingly contradictory statement, vision always appears open for examination. When I close my eyes, all of this manifold world disappears. But the sense of touch never disappears. Thus I am always able to identify myself with touch, which seems persistent and inalienable. Likewise, the medium of the air always provides some sense of sound, making the world seem persistently full of motion. It is no surprise, then, that one of the things noted by astronauts is the incredible silence and the startling nature of weightlessness. Such undermining of the usual sense of touch and hearing no doubt played a role in Mitchell’s experience, which, when paired with a visual field forcing him to contemplate the connection with vast distances, allowed him to experience the extension of his being beyond the immediate tie with the body.25

In the beginning, unexamined vision may seem to yield a field of objects that we can pretend are a series of stable, separate, and distinct “in themselves.” Scale already initiates the examination by which we attend to the differences yielded within the objects seen. It takes into account the eye as the examining apparatus in noting how the objects change depending on where and how they are seen. Thus, vision becomes the noblest sense through its capacity to take into account and even undermine itself under careful and studious comparison. All the senses can be scaled in some way since they all have some degree of intensity or magnitude—eg, the

25 For the various astronaut experiences with silence and weightlessness see White, The Overview Effect (20-21; interviews in second half). The most effective way to replicate this being senseless without leaving the gravitational field of the Earth is the flotation tank, a strange device invented by John Lilly that is used to eradicate sensation as much as possible. The result is the ability to examine what one is without sensation. 223 scoleville scale for the hotness of peppers, the loudness of sounds (notably cited by Plato in the

Protagoras right alongside vision as he justified the need for a measure), the intensity of smells, and the attempt to formulate pain indicators. Only vision is amenable to careful, nuanced dissection with sufficient resolution to produce large scalar shifts.

Nonetheless, we should be careful not to make too much of any of these statements. We especially do not mean to disparage touch in noting how we become intoxicated by it. It is noteworthy that all of the senses are invoked in mystical practices as means and metaphors of going beyond the senses. In the pairing of clarity and distance, vision is the most amenable to self-examination, which explains why the concept of self-inquiry is so often articulated as a reflection. But likewise, mystics speak of transcendence as a silence, in the sense of feeling oneself as going silent beyond any hearing. Some also speak of tasting the divine, in the sense that one recognizes its flavor as sweet and worth pursuing. Similarly, the common use of incenses and other smells make use of the aroma as a trigger for the experience beyond the senses. Even touch is frequently invoked as the touch of God or bliss results in the experience of a tingling or burning. Undoubtedly, these bodies, as dynamic sensory apparatuses, must be engaged by the experiences that are larger than their contours and smaller than what they initially seem. Scaling in the field of vision is privileged for the care by which it allows itself to be considered, but only if we do not become intoxicated by the sense of distance, of being “over here” in opposition to those “things in themselves” over there. True, the eye is “here” in a particular location, but it is the nature of the eye to make use of that distance for the purpose of comparison. Thus, when it takes itself into account, the eye as apparatus for perception becomes a dynamic means of systematically taking into account the world of the senses.

Vision of God Tricks

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We have one final subtle yet important critique of vision to examine here, a great beam still obscuring our view of vision. What does it mean to “take into account” the vision of the eye according to the production of a “point of view?” Given this repeated questioning of the location of the “I,” whose point of view is produced by the Eye? What is the “privileged point of view” that Mitchell was able to acquire and was it wholly and uniquely his? If the production of the Eye in the vision was not Mitchell’s then whose was it?

One of the peculiar claims of those who experience the vision of vastness, is the invocation of their position as the position of the divine. We already saw this need to become divine in Emerson (“I am part and particle of God”) and in Plato (“That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming as like God as possible”). The view of above, in its position as above, implies some kind of transcendence. This transcendence, we have already indicated, is a view that exceeds the body, prejudices, and position. The argument we arrive at here is that, for transcendence to be understood in any consistent and non-hegemonic way, I have to yield fully the sense that this vision is clearly and definably mine and instead understand it as a function of the cosmos, as the All. In the words of

Carl Sagan, “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” What we encounter here is the great difficulty we have in fully understanding this possibility even as it is persistently present.

The critic before us is Donna Haraway, whose work was as important as Evelyn Fox

Keller’s for a particular moment in feminist theory and the birth of science studies. Like Keller’s work, Haraway was instrumental in reworking a particularly distorted and hegemonic claim over the argumentative structures of transcendence. In rightly demonstrating and opposing the incomplete and unclear claims of a domineering view of humanity and science, Haraway took a staunch position against the whole mode of speaking in terms of transcendence. It is because

225 these critiques are powerful and in some way legitimate that we ought to re-examine them once again. The most notable and damning phrase that we encounter here is the memorable and oft- cited “god-trick.” This term captures the general spirit of the critique: that the claim for transcendence is itself nothing other than a trick, an illusion in which a man is able to pretend that they are in a godly position when they clearly are not. Here is the crucial passage from

“Situated Knowledges:”

"I am arguing for a politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partially and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people's lives. I am arguing from the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden.” (589)

Haraway sets up a distinction here between a view from a body and a view from above or nowhere. Her argument assumes that the body is a location and a situating that is antithetical to any consideration of universality. The invocation of “people’s lives” imbues the opposition between the partial and the universal with a personal and political weight. Not only are they antithetical but they are in a hegemonic relationship: to claim the universal is to make a claim on people’s lives. Likewise, these two lists of attributes set in opposition imply a great deal about the nature of the universal and the partial. The view from above/nowhere is said to be simplistic, while the body is complex and contradictory. The implication is not that the view from above actually creates simplicity but that it creates the illusion of simplicity at the expense of the complexity of bodies. It is a trick, the trick of pretending I, in viewing from above, am able to acquire the god-like perspective wherein I obtain the capacity to hegemonically determine, control, and homogenize those before my view.

As it happens, the primary question in Haraway’s critique again concerns the relationship between the physical point of view and the identity of the self as an “I” functionally one and the

226 same as that physical point of view—in the tie between the Eye and the I. Although Haraway’s main claims are about epistemology and objectivity, the crux of the argument turns around the point of origin of epistemology: she returns to a metaphor of visuality in order to argue that objectivity must always originate from a particular situated position, just as all vision originates from the position of the eye. She directly contrasts this situated knowledge with any view of epistemology as transcendent: “Feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (579). In critiquing transcendence through a turn to situated knowledge, what cannot be transcended is the situated and positional nature of encountering the world. Yet, in invoking vision as the guiding metaphor we are left with a question: is this situated knowledge really situated? Where? Is it clearly definable in relation to a particular point of view such that it functions as the point from which objectivity might emerge? Am I allowed to speak of it as mine? Can I locate it?

The problem becomes clearer if we consider the text which, despite not being cited, was undoubtedly Haraway’s prime point of contrast—given that it was published two years before

Haraway’s essay and contains a full explication of the arguments critiqued by Haraway in all the same terms: Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere. Nagel’s argument hinges around the human capacity to set aside a located perspective in favor of a more objective view from nowhere. Here is the primary passage of interest in Nagel, from a chapter which is explicitly about the nature of the “objective self:”

The basic step which brings [the view from nowhere/the objective self] to life is not complicated and does not require advanced scientific theories: it is simply the step of conceiving the world as a place that includes the person I am within it, as just another of its contents—conceiving myself from outside, in other words. So I can step away from this unconsidered perspective of the particular person I thought I was. Next comes the step of conceiving from outside all the points of view and experiences of that person and others of his species, and considering the world as a place in which these phenomena are produced by interaction between these beings and others things. That is the beginning of

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science. And again it is I who have done this stepping back, not only from an individual viewpoint but from a specific type of viewpoint. (63)

One can see already how anyone with feminist sensibilities would object to this passage. From a subjugated position, the masculine “step away” is merely a means of claiming to have a perspective that speaks for or contains the perspective of others. This “others of his species” becomes the speaking for these subjugated groups who are not allowed to speak themselves. The possibility of “conceiving myself from outside” may be seen as a trick granted by the privilege of a decidedly white male perspective who, not already being set aside as an other, is able to claim the process of doing so. The white man is capable of taking this step back since they are not constantly being reminded of and read within a subjugated set of positions. The return to the position is thus a return to the neglected position, the one not seen when the white man steps away from the nonlocality of his own identity.

Nagel opens himself up for such a critique as soon as he articulates the move beyond the physical as a move to the objective as an outside: “conceiving myself from the outside.” The contradiction contained in this phrase is precisely what we want to get at here. If I am able to conceive of “myself” truly “from the outside” then how can this be “myself” in any particular way? Nagel attempts to untangle this position—indeed the whole book is an attempt to confront this very paradox—but he never quite fully lets go of the starting point from which one would posit oneself as the seemingly straightforward and easily perceived confines of this identity. As it moves beyond this local self, the objective self, for Nagel, is thus a kind of conceptualization, an imagining of oneself beyond what oneself is: “I begin by considering the world as a whole, as if from nowhere, and in those oceans of space and time TN [Thomas Nagel] is just one person among countless others” (61). We move only in terms of as if—as if from nowhere, as if I already know that I am here, but I merely consider the world as a whole. In this “as if from

228 nowhere”, I see that this I—by this does Nagel still mean this body? this social construction? this legal entity? this bundle of cells?—I see that this I is just one among others, who are, of course, clearly discernable as persons. Have I actually gotten outside myself if I think the I that I have transcended is my body? If I do identify myself with my body, then the viewing things from the whole is decidedly not a viewing “from the outside” at all. The question of who is TN, who am

I?, becomes rewritten according to an unacknowledged contradiction, in which one denies one’s position even as one affirms it. This is indeed a trick, of declaring oneself to be a particular, clearly defined egoic I, apart from yet somehow tied to the clearly discernible body.

Haraway’s solution is to call Nagel out on the trick, undoing the contradiction by reaffirming the place of the body as the source of perspective, as the place in which knowledge is situated. In this line of thought, this “I” would come back to the Eye as the position from which

I cannot escape. Any attempt to escape from this “point of view” is read in the way we just read

Nagel. Thus, we can insistently return with Haraway to vision as means of reintegrating the political concerns of the kinds of people who are or are not allowed to see: “Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints of the subjugated. Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is objectivity. Only those occupying the positions of dominators are self- identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again" (586). In this view, science is the process of attending to the position under which one views and the technologies by which that view is mediated. To deny that my view is mediated is to position myself as a dominator. The logic here is cutting: it is only possible to be self-identical, unmarked, or transcendent if you are in the position of a dominator. Why? In line with what we already saw from Nagel, the thought is that only those in dominant positions can imagine that they can erase

229 the situated and mediated nature of the knowledge that is so clearly originating from their bodies.

In forgetting this located nature, these individuals generalize their viewpoint as the universal or transcendent, in the meantime ignoring or erasing those alternative viewpoints which they have only been able to claim by ignoring their own mediation and embodiment.

In relation to Nagel, Haraway’s arguments do cut through that particular kind of contradictory claim by which one would declare that I am able to see, outside myself, the whole of the objective world. And yet, we have a particular problem for Haraway’s arguments to proceed: is Haraway here claiming that the embodied and situated view is in itself wholly and clearly mine? Is the body’s view clear at all? If knowledge is about situating, then is it clear where this view is from and whose view this is such that I can decidedly deny the possibility of exceeding that which is presented within the visual field? Can we figure out what my “position” is in order to situate this knowledge which I supposedly produce out of the location generally deemed as “mine”?

To answer these questions Haraway must address directly the question of locating oneself. She does so by directly invoking the body first: "[w]e need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name" (582). We return back again to the question “who am I?” but now as a location. Haraway makes a connection between “our bodies”—specifically the kind of vision granted by the eye and by the primate brain—and the capacity to determine our location as points of intervention. Even as she does so, she acknowledges this uncertainty of that position as difficult to name. At the very point where the certainty of the body is invoked, the argument must run into an uncertainty or ambiguity. If I

230 mean I am here, in the body, seeing from these eyes, do I mean a solid and discernible position?

In response to this possibility Haraway states that "[f]eminist embodiment…is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning.

Embodiment is significant prosthesis” (586). In a move that has become recognizable, Haraway has deflected the question of the body’s clear constitution into a whole network that exceeds its clear position. Doing so has the advantage of permitting a kind of “positioning” based not on the body but on the determination of “nodes” in relation to each other across a network. Position becomes triangulated not out of a reified body but out of the interaction of external reference points. Following this same logic, Haraway is able to disavow the need to know the position of oneself, even as she demands that our knowledge be situated and held in reference to discernible structures of power:

Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted? These points also apply to testimony from the position of 'oneself.' We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. Self-identity is a bad visual system." (585).

In denying self-identity, Haraway leaves only the external determination of situatedness, a conceiving of one’s position based on how it functions within a network of relations. No longer a matter of where “I” am, the “situated” location of knowledge becomes a matter of determination within a community of others. However, Haraway is not merely yielding up the situatedness to the network, but still retains the sense of a clear position from which one sees and acts: “"The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history" (586). This self is not present to itself yet it interrogates other positions and is held

231 accountable for its own. Yet it is still said to be a self; merely the means of reflection have been yielded up. And further: “subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there, and original” (585). The

“knowing self,” however partial, is still a self, despite the impossibility of granting it any clear presence. If it is not a self then how can we affirm that it has a position that is truly situated in such a way that provides objective situated knowledge useful for science? But can it be a self if it is so partial and incomplete, only clearly definable when we look not at the position but outside of it?

It seems that we have come full circle to an inverted version of Nagel’s argument, but still fundamentally an affirmation of this point of view as seen from outside itself. Just as with

Nagel, Haraway wants the self in both ways, at one point affirming the clearly definable and locatable nature of one’s “situated” position, at another invoking what exceeds that position and thereby determines it. But then how is this knowledge truly situated? By others? If so, is not the invocation of the situating by others itself already a statement of a dominating position: the claim that what a person—these entities you, or me, or Haraway, assumed from the outset to be distinct and located—sees is formed by others implies that we are all in the process of determining the nature of each other’s being. We can also note the similarity between Nagel’s consideration of the “world as a place in which these phenomena are produced by interaction between these things and other things” (63) and Haraway’s network of material-semiotic actants. The difference lies in how these positions are granted authority. For Nagel, the question of identity emerges first while for Haraway the question of position takes priority. Nonetheless, both are determined externally through the means of exceeding the originally posited identity and location even as we affirm that those identities and locations are definable from the start.

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The two means of situating the place of knowledge comes to a head when Haraway states: "Knowledge from the point of view of the unmarked is truly fantastic, distorted, and irrational. The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practiced and honored is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God, whose eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference" (586). But then who is ordering all the difference by which the world appears as it is? If Nagel is actually saying that he, the Man in the flesh, is this master, then he would be guilty as charged. And insofar as he retains this preconceived sense of TN as an individual that is transcended externally, he is indeed guilty of such a move. In doing so, however, Nagel never really gets beyond TN and therefore fails at his own task of conceiving beyond himself. Indeed, Nagel never really acknowledges where or what this entity TN is such that it presents a problem for identity. Haraway has a similar problem: in discarding Nagel’s question of identity, she yields up the ordering of difference to something that exceeds the very thing she holds as the point of entry, the situated and located position. In doing so, Haraway simultaneously affirms and denies the examination of a perspective’s location. This position has to be examined but it cannot be examined as a function of a self. Am I allowed then to say anything about my position, as experienced? Who, then, am I? If “I” is itself a problematic designation that must be erased in its entirety—abolishing identification fully—then we find an odd situation in which Haraway herself is articulating a kind of view from nowhere in particular.

I cannot claim this view as mine, so then do I becomes nothing? But if this I is nothing then how can I claim it as positioned? What is this here? Who is seeing? If we turn with Haraway to the external web of actants then we find ourselves with a transcendent viewpoint masquerading as a local view, only now this “community” and “network” take the place of the One God as the

233 determinate and master of difference. Is this itself not the tyranny of social determinations and power?

In trying to avoid Nagel’s confusion about the location of the thing already externally determined as TN, Haraway thus switches scales away from the here and now of present experience even as she claims to be privileging that here and now—the situated nature of experience—as the fount of knowledge. The scales below—the material—and one scale above— the cultural—come to stand in for the question of position. However we would like to escape the question of identity, the question of who I am cannot be erased but will only be moved around, even moved to different scales. The reason for this is simple: something is present which is taking measure of the world, even in all these statements, who is declaring and considering what and who is the one measuring. Haraway is right to note that, when speaking of vision, one must pay attention to the structure of the eye to say anything about what is produced in the field of vision. Likewise, one must pay attention to the one who is considering vision, and the one who is considering scale, in order to determine their location. The question is still one of “where we are or are not” but not presuming to know the “we” as some collective of humans or actants just as

Nagel presumes to know the “I” as TN. To approach it in this way requires that we take into account first, without presuming these “I”s and “We”s ahead of time, the question of who sees.

Who is actually seeing in seeing? Even if we granted a location of the eye is this eye mine? Is it ours? Who says?

The fact that Haraway places her argument in terms of a kind of “god-trick” is significant since neither Nagel nor Haraway actually permit the thought that was already put forward by

Plato and Emerson: that when we consider the source of our vision beyond the designated “I” as delimited in some particular location, we can open up the possibility that this vision called mine

234 is actually the vision of the Cosmos itself. Nagel himself denies this possibility out of fear of sounding hubristic: “I know this sounds like metaphysical megalomania of an unusually shameless kind. Merely being TN isn’t good enough for me: I have to think of myself as the world soul in humble disguise….I am not saying that I individually am the subject of the universe: just that I am a subject” (61). Nagel has not let go of Nagel even as he imagines going beyond himself. Nagel is still a subject. Clearly, this is itself hubristic, in the sense of retaining one’s sense of self, an unwillingness to yield up that last ounce of self-affirmation to the possibility that, in the vast scale of things, this thing claimed as mine might actually be a function of the cosmos. To actually understand that possibility is to follow out fully the “locating where I am” that Haraway demands that we conduct. Both Nagel and Haraway acknowledge that, almost immediately, in inquiring into oneself, what one thinks one is is exceeded. But rather than yield up what I think I am, both Nagel and Haraway pretend to go outside of themselves, while declaring that this “self” is not itself clear, somehow keeping the sense of themselves as some kind of located position. To actually follow out this question of where I am, such that I feel the limit of what I think I am, the path of inquiry cannot be external but internal since the supposed move to the internal keeps intact this entity “me” that I am supposedly getting beyond.

Both Nagel and Haraway acknowledge that there are high stakes to following out this

Mobius strip, but their approach fail to account for the source of the power. The capacity to step outside of what one thinks is oneself does have a kind of power. Nagel speaks of this as a

“feeling of amazement that is part of the philosophical thought—a strange sense that I both am and am not the hub of the universe” (64). The question of the source of this feeling of amazement, the power of moving beyond the thought of oneself is directly related to the practice of scaling one’s experience beyond the body through the process of taking measure, and the

235 contemplation of what appears to be mine in the function of that which is larger. In feeling oneself exceeded, the power arises from the fact that this being exceeded is already experienced as a kind of within. Something remarkable happens in the probing into “who sees?” and “who scales?”, but the source of this amazement lies in the letting go of the confines of what one thinks one is, not in turning to a posited outside. In the posited outside, people’s lives are indeed at stake. Actually scaling the sense of “I,” however, reworks the concern and source of this power in such a way that the body, social position, and identity cherished as mine is decisively and completely yielded up within the measure of oneself. To carry out this process fully, we need an esoteric solution—“eso” coming from the Greek for “within”—to both the question of the location and the subject of vision. Only by examining oneself, as the viewer and the one who scales, can one consider truly where I am and where I am not.

* * *

Our way in can be through Nicholas de Cusa, the fifteenth century cardinal, whose mystical handbook The Vision of God presents an experiment for considering vision in relation to the Absolute. Cusa’s exercise is to consider an omnivoyant painting of Christ, in which the eyes appear to follow the viewer.26 One performs the experiment by hanging the painting on a wall and then considering closely the way that the painting appears to move as you change position, to look on everyone despite their difference in their locations, and to look at each viewer “as if it looked on none other” (4). Today, thinking ourselves well-acquainted with optical phenomenon as illusions, we may be tempted to discard this as mere trick. Indeed, such paintings are relatively easy to create—the illusion is created by painting the gaze at a directly ninety degree angle out of a flat painting. As a thought experiment, however, the phenomena is potent since it

26 Cusa’s work is often noted for its theological use of this contemporary art fascination. This reading is indebted to Rotman who made the connection between Cusa and identity in his brief examination in Signifying Nothing. 236 helps us reflect on the nature of vision itself. Dismissing it as an optical illusion misses the fact that it is precisely its role as an artifact of vision that makes the illusion productive for contemplating how vision functions. We get our conception of vision from the practice of vision, particularly when we consider the origin of vision. The omnivoyant painting is not meant to be true—Cusa is not saying that this is really how God watches everyone—but is meant to help us reflect on how vision is attributed and granted direction. Acknowledging the fundamentally reflective nature of the experiment also allows us to side-step the potential Big Brother or panopticon reading of the thought experiment, as some kind of policing mechanism. Not once does Cusa use the gaze here to mean a kind of overseeing or disciplining. Sin is only mentioned once throughout the whole book, and in the context of a plea for strength. The vision of god contemplated here is entirely the gaze of love and diligent care. To be in the vision of God means to be seen, considered, and cared for by God. The exercise thus functions only if we view this vision as a reflective contemplation of how God includes us all in the fullness of love. Note as well that by “God” here we do not mean, from the beginning, some kind of entity necessarily limited to the shape and form of a human as in the case of the painting. Indeed, part of the purpose of the exercise is to contemplate on the form of God itself, as one experiences her in the mystical encounter. Thus, Cusa states at the outset that “God, who is the very summit of all perfection, and greater than can be conceived, is called δέος from this very fact that He beholdeth all things” (7). Note that δέος is Greek for awe. We are thus contemplating under the term

“God,” Nagel’s feeling of amazement found when considering what is seen and felt beyond the apparent limit of the physical body.

Regardless of the position of the eye of the viewer, the eye of the painting appears to be looking directly at you. Position here is irrelevant for whether or not you are in the gaze of the

237 divine. Or rather, all positions are relevant but not as a condition of possibility for being viewed.

The care and attentiveness follows you, no matter where you are, what you are doing, or how you are viewing. You only have to look to the painting to see that it is looking directly at you.

Likewise, you could ask someone on the other side of the room and they would say the same.

Where it is seen, the painting appears to consider you closely, directly, and exclusively—in all these places at once, yet only directed at your location.

The reflective aspects begin when we consider how this vision actually functions. The requisite is that we abstract away from the particularity of the eyes:

"For, if I examine sight in the abstract, which I have dissociated in my mind from all eyes and bodily organs, and consider how abstract sight in its limited state--that is, as sight in seeing persons--is narrowed down to time and place, to particular objects, and to other like conditions, while sight in the abstract is in like manner withdrawn from these conditions and absolute, then I well perceive 'tis not of the essence of sight to behold one object more than another, although it inhereth in sight, in its limited state, to be unable to look on more than one thing at a time, or upon all things absolutely. But God is the true Universal sight, and he is not inferior to sight in the abstract as it can be conceived by the intellect, but is beyond all comparison more perfect” (8).

The contrast set up here is between vision as I experience it and vision as it is appears when considering the painting. When we see things, the experience is limited to particular objects, by the conditions of light, our degree of focus, the objects distance, etc. These all depending on the

“seeing person” involved, the body and the eye by which the light is processed. However, the possibility of seeing, even the mechanism by which one takes in the world and considers it, might be abstracted from this limited state if we consider that vision is a property by which some entity is comprehended by another. If the eye encounters the world through light, creating a perception based on a limited set of conditions, we can posit the possibility for perceptual encounter as more fundamental to the limited manner in which the eye does so. In this way, Cusa is not merely talking about vision in particular but the capacity to perceive through directed

238 attention and care, abstracted away from the particularities of bodily organs. Cusa is merely making use of vision for the same reason we already established in our discussion of Han Jonas’s privileging of sight: it permits us to more adequately consider the nature and source of this perceiving. Given that our vision focuses on one object at a time, yet may look on any number of objects at any given time, we can move away, viz. abstract, from the particular instance of seeing and consider how all things, in containing the possibility of being perceived, might likewise be seen. We have already enacted this abstraction in producing augmentations of scale, demonstrating that beyond any particular kind of organ or bodily production, one might produce something like vision—some kind of seeing—that makes what is invisible visible. This abstraction allows us to take measure of sight itself: "But sight that is freed from all limitation embraceth at one and the same time each and every mode of seeing, as being the most adequate measure of all sights, and their truest pattern" (10). The implication is that everything that is might somehow be encountered through something like a perception and only by considering this Absolute kind of seeing can seeing itself be judged. The capacity to see will always be limited for each human body or apparatus augmenting that body. Literally, this eye will never be able to see everything. But abstracting away from this particular eye, however, we can say that the Absolute of sight is the capacity of all things to be seen and thereby use that as a means of considering sight itself.

The essential point here is that we must get beyond our usual way of relating to sight, which limits itself to particular objects, seen one at a time. In contemplating the Absolute as a possible kind of perception, we find two possible perspectives, one as a looking outward, and the other, as the Absolute, looking inward:

"Lord, Thou seest and hast eyes. Thou art an Eye, since with Thee having is being, wherefore in Thyself Thou dost observe all things. If in me my seeing were an eye, as 'tis

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in thee, my God, then in myself I should see all things, since the eye is like a mirror. Notwithstanding this, our sight, through the mirror of the eye, can only see that particular object toward which it is turned, because its power can only be determined in a particular manner by the object, so that it seeth not all things contained in the mirror of the eye. But Thy sight, being an eye or living mirror, seeth all things in itself" (37, italics added).

Note the scalar mode by which God is said to be an Eye. If the Absolute has the capacity for sight, it can be said to be the fullness of this capacity to take in, to regard, to examine, and to direct attention. Since it is the Absolute, however, this attentiveness is not directed outside itself but as a looking within of itself, by which it observes all things. This is not our experience of sight. The human eye must turn to something in order to see and is limited by the object which it sees and the nature of its perceptive capacities. Absolute sight, on the other hand, would take into account, within itself, the whole of what is. There is in this passage, however, this possibility of an inward turn ourselves for which the trope of the mirror is so fitting: this strange phrase “if in me my seeing were an eye…then in myself I should see all things” implies that if we take this eye and turn it to the mirror itself—the Absolute Eye—then what is reflected is not the limited view of particular objects but the fount from which all things might be considered.

What does this looking at the Absolute within look like? Is it possible to be seen?

Necessarily, the view is beyond comprehension since it exceeds the limited capacity of the physical eye. Nonetheless, I sees that it is beyond limited sight. I take measure of what exceeds a limited position, and thereby see the expanse of the Absolute:

Thou has at times appeared unto me, Lord, as One not to be seen of any creature, because Thou art a God hidden, infinite. Now infinity is beyond all comprehension. Then Thou hast after appeared unto me as One to be seen of all, since a thing existeth in the measure wherein Thou dost behold it, and it could not exist in reality did it not behold Thee: for sight affordeth being, since it is Thine essence. Thus, my God, thou are at once invisible and visible. Thou are invisible in regard to Thine own Being, but visible in regard to that of the creature, which only existeth in the measure wherein it beholdeth thee. Thou, therefore, my invisible God, are seen of all and art seen in all seeing. Thou art seen by every person that seeth, in all that may be seen, and in every act of seeing, invisible as thou art.

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The whole of the Absolute, being Absolute, is too large to be seen—not just in terms of size but in the sense that it includes all possibilities of attending to Cosmos that can be found in Being.

Precisely because the Absolute is all kinds of seeing, our seeing itself must be included in those kinds of seeing. This view here right now that you are experiencing is also included in that seeing. What you are seeing is limited, but part of the Absolute totality of perceptions. This seeing is not the seeing the Absolute as a whole, however, due to its limitations. The physical eye, the nature of light, the structure of the brain, the social mores by which the vision is processed, the meaning granted to it—these are all kinds of measure brought to bear on the perception, limiting it, determining it, and making it possible. Taking that measure into account we can note that it is a seeing of the Absolute by the limited, through a particular measure, which is itself part of the Absolute. Thus we can say that right now you are both seeing and not seeing the Absolute.

What one sees when gazing into the Absolute, then, is some kind of reflection of oneself—the Absolute as it is expressed according to the measures brought to bear on the vision.

This taking into account the conditions of perception is, of course, what Haraway wants to arrive at in her situated knowledges. But if we follow through to the Absolute, this measuring of the measure, we find something more startling that revises the whole nature of what we are knowing and who is knowing it. The following passage, containing the full expression of the involutionary—inward looking—measure, is the crux of the argument and thus is worth quoting at length:

Accordingly, when Thou receivest the form of whosoever looketh on Thee, Thou dost raise me up that I may perceive how he who looketh on Thee doth not give Thee form, but seeth himself in Thee, because from Thee he receiveth that which he is. And so that which Thou appearest to receive from him that looketh on Thee is truly Thy gift to him. Thou being as it were a living mirror of eternity which is the Form of forms. While any

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looketh in this mirror, he seeth his own form in the Form of forms, to wit, in the mirror, and he judgeth the form which seeth in that mirror to be the figure of his own form because 'tis so with a polished material mirror. Yet 'tis the contrary which is true, for in that mirror of eternity what he seeth is not a figure, but the truth, whereof the beholder himself is a figure. While I perceive how the glance of Thine icon seemeth to change in accord with my changing, and Thy face seemeth to be changed--because of this change, Thou appearest to me like the shadow following the movement of one that walketh; but 'tis because I am a living shadow and Thou the truth that I judge from the change of the shadow that the truth changeth also. Wherefore, my God, Thou art alike shadow and truth. Thou are alike the image and exemplar of myself and of all men (72).

The vision claimed and designated as mine (my perspective, my point of view) appears to give form to the universe in a particular way due to the limits this view places on Being. However, when I am raised to another level of abstraction and perceive the perceiver (“he who looketh on thee”), I see that this vision itself is contained in the Absolute and is thereby a function of the

Absolute seeing itself (“seeth himself in thee”). What I claim as my perspective is actually not mine at all but is the Absolute seeing itself here and in this way, as it is presented in this field of vision I want to call mine. This “I” is itself a kind of mirror, a way of the Absolute looking back at itself. When looking into the world, I see something like a clearly distinguished self—a particular form—because this is how we are used to seeing in actual mirrors (“‘tis so with a polished material mirror.”) What I see when I consider the mirroring power of this vision itself, is that this “self” is a figure of the Absolute. I see what I think is myself in and through the

Absolute, as the Absolute viewing itself. In this view, I am the shadow that moves in accordance with how the Absolute moves. The Truth of truths here concerns the function of this vision as the

Absolute. Thus, all truth within a particular vision becomes contingent on the way this measure called the I/Eye moves and applies its limits. Even so, this shadow called Eye/I is not apart from but is itself the Absolute, not the shadow apart from the Absolute, but the shadow as part of the

Absolute.

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In the end, who measures, who sees, and who scales? The Absolute. The All. Cosmos.

(But not these terms themselves, but that thing which can be experienced as the All, as we will discuss in chapter 5). The physical eye is merely one means of the Cosmos to look at itself. It has a position, determined according to a field of relations, but this field of relations can never be assume first. Only the Absolute Whole might be assumed first, as the highest scale of being wherein nothing is left out. This Absolute Whole is what is expressed and seen in the measure measuring itself. I am not seeing myself as the Absolute when I look outward because it is the function of these perceptive and conceptual capacities to separate and delimit in the way that they do. Only when I consider the source of this vision do I see this I/Eye as a function of the

Cosmos. Awe, the Deos, manifests itself. Far from being a mere intellectual game, the result of this gaze into the mirror of Eternity, this measure of the measure itself, is the opening of one’s being to love:

O Lovingkindness beyond unfolding, Thou dost offer Thyself to him that beholdeth Thee as though Thou receives being from him, and dost conform Thyself unto him that he may love Thee the more the more Thou seemest like unto himself! We cannot hate ourselves, hence we love that which partaketh of our being and goeth along with it; we embrace our likeness, because we are pictured in the image, and we love ourselves therein (74).

When viewed externally, the objective self appears cold and distancing. When viewed internally, the distance is distance from what one thinks one is, as a limited and separate being. Once I distance myself from this illusory and erroneous limitation, I see that I am part and particle of

God. Love emerges naturally from this realization, seeing myself as and in the gaze of the divine.

Once I do this, I likewise view the rest of Being as parts of the Absolute encountering itself. My function as part of the Absolute is not to speak for them but to encounter all things from here, as the way the Absolute will encounter them within these limitations. Thus, I take measure of the changing field of perceptual things with attentiveness and care, understanding that the field of

243 truth lies not in what I am seeing, but in the I who is seeing consisting of a function of the

Cosmos seeing.

The process of accessing and comprehending on different scales both makes one aware of this measuring process and helps us realize in what way scaling proceeds as a function of the cosmos viewing itself. Scaling permits us to extend the vision of the Cosmos in a systematic way that makes the processes of life extend in more nuanced ways through itself. Scale is the Eye of the Absolute taking a more detailed and systematic look at itself, so that it can not only discern in a finer resolution what it already contains, but so that these eyes and brains of homo sapiens might more clearly discern their scalar position in relation to the Absolute. Both Nagel and

Haraway are correct in noting that this body and this identity is not clearly here and only here.

This “here” of perception is not meant to be claimed only experienced. Only then can it be measured as it is set up, by the eye as the instrument of the Absolute, to be measured.

Eyeing the Involution In gazing out past the earth, Edgar Mitchell felt his own being as a function of the

Cosmos gazing at itself, within itself. Doing so, for a moment, erased the particularity of the vision that might be claimed as “Edgar Mitchell’s” and allowed him to experience it in relation to the scale of the Absolute. For a moment, he felt himself transparent, an open channel of the vastness operating in the form of a flesh and blood which was not clearly divided from the cosmos. For a moment, the Mind’s eye by which he took stock of the world pierced through as a vision beyond vision, a knowing beyond knowing. This is a measure of oneself as the cosmos measuring itself, an opening to the beyond of measuring even as one notices the expanse of what is discerned.

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This scalar loop is one of the most persistently articulated aspects of the mystical insight, regardless of location, time, or tradition. The access to the divine is not only an ascension to the highest, but the recognition of oneself as the function of that divine accessing itself. Within the

Vedic tradition, this insight was beautifully captured in the Chandogya Upanishad through the phrase tat tvam asi, thou art that:

“As bees suck nectar from many a flower And make their honey one, so that no drop Can say, ‘I am from this flower or that,’ All creatures, though one, know not that they are One. There is nothing that does not come from him. Of everything he is the inmost Self. He is the truth; he is the Self supreme. You are that, Shvetaketu; you are that.” (VI.9, pg 134)

One goes to the highest by going to the inmost Self and this inmost Self makes clear that this here and now is a manifestation of and by the Absolute, even as we churn along in our nectar gathering activities. Everything is resituated around this conclusion. In examining larger scales, this “I” becomes aware of the limited nature of this mode of being here in order to become open to the unlimited being beyond those delimited by the physical, perceptive, and mental capacities.

In contemplating the Absolute, which in being Absolute already extends far beyond the comprehension and vision of the limited brain-Eye-social structure, this “I” feels itself exceeded.

But this being-exceeded is not the excess of this “I,” but the failure of this egoic designation to capture what it is in itself. Looking out into the vastness of the stars one feels the cosmos extend beyond oneself. But the nature of this “oneself” becomes apparent as soon as one takes into account or begins to examine from whence this vision, this scaling to the vast, begins. This is a turning the turning inside, articulated in the Katha Upanishad as a kind of seeing from behind, a sensing of the senses, an attention to attention:

the Self-existent Lord pierced the senses

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To turn outward. Thus we look to the world Without and see not the Self within us. A sage withdrew his senses from the world Of change and, seeking immortality, Looked within, and beheld the deathless Self. (2.1.1, 83)

The looking within is required to arrive at tat tvam asi since I have to realize myself fully as all of this, but never limited already to any kind of egoic designation. Only if we retain a reference to this egoic designation does such a formula appear in any way a hegemonic or threatening expansion of your desires (i.e. “you want to be everything”).

The arrival at this full realization requires a sometimes arduous but always powerful reworking of one’s whole structure of being in such a way that roots out the false egoic identifications, abolishing the egoic habits by which we function. Thus, when Adi Sankara, the

8th century philosopher who revitalized the study of the Upanishads, articulates the mode of arriving at divine recognition, he describes it as the cultivating of a discrimination between not-

Self and Self. This non-self/Self form of judgment avoids the problems of judgment we saw in

Plato’s Theaetetus since the knowledge yielded is first a knowledge of oneself as the Self, not any particular content yielded by discriminating among the various objects yielded by a limited self:

“The false knowledge will cease to function at the dawn of right knowledge and in no other way. According to the scriptures, realization of the identity of the Self (Atman) with the Absolute (Brahman) is right knowledge. This realization comes only through right discrimination made between the Self and the not-Self.”27

The mode of discrimination can begin with the scaling to the vast then taking note of where this

“I” is located. Doing so allows one to see the myriad ways we claim a part of the cosmos for ourselves. In addition to the Atman/Brahman distinction, Sanskrit also has the word “ahamkara” to further clarify this relationship. Ahamkara translates as “the one who acts” or “the self as the

27 Verse 202, pg 212 in Achyarya Pranipata Chaitanya translation 246 doer,” although in translations it is usually appropriately rendered as “ego.” The ahamkara’s sense of acting is illusory, however. It is the aspect of mental experience most apparently interested it its own existence as a separate entity as it wants to feel that it is the one acting. This sense of myself as the doer forces the mind to search for something within this limited experience through which it can identify itself as the actor. We might best note the feeling of ahamkara as a kind of “ego-structure” whereby one defines out of the Whole a part of the whole that acts. The ego-structure would be a special kind of partial-whole (discussed in Chapter 2) in which one designates an actor.

The ego-structure will never fully work. It can never claim itself as acting absolutely except by going to the Absolute. Everything short of arriving at the Absolute as the actor is a cut made without truly accounting for the one who is making the cut. Any cut will always be partial because, as the 20th century guru Ramana Maharsi persistently argued, the first cut is always between “I” and the rest of the cosmos.28 That is, the ego-structure is the first partial-whole designation (the subject) out of which all other partial-wholes (objects) are identified. Examining this sense of the “I” is the necessary condition for transcendence (getting beyond subjects and objects). Transcendence itself becomes nothing more than transcendence of the ego as an examination of the source of this sense of “I”: “the ego’s phenomenal existence is transcended when you dive into the source from where the ‘I’-thought [aham-vritti] rises” (47). However, this transcendence is not a leaving behind of all sense of having selfhood, but the sense of self as limited: “You must distinguish between the ‘I’, pure in itself, and the ‘I’-thought….If you stay as the ‘I’, your being alone, without thought, the ‘I’-thought will disappear and the delusion will

28 See the short treatise “Who am I?” 247 vanish for ever” (49). The true transcending of the “I” is to realize that “I am” (aham) is nothing more than All.

At the same time, if we follow this logic carefully, the transcendence is not a transcendence at all but a returning to what one truly is: the cosmos looking back at itself.

Otherwise we are forced to ask, with Maharsi, “Transcending what, and by whom? You alone exist” (49). But let us not forget to augment this “you alone” with the careful negation, drawn from the Ribhu Gita, one of Maharsi’s favorite texts: “I am not the individual. I have no differences. I am not thought nor do I have any mind. I am not flesh nor do I have bones nor am I the body with ego [ahamkara]” (22.33). Edgar Mitchell feels his flesh and bones extending out into the cosmos. He feels the stellar facts by which this body was churned out from the unknown abyss. A billion suns explode over billions of years—such inaccessible numbers. Even more, we feel, looking out, torn apart: “ever of the undivided nature am I; ever devoid of measure. Ever of the pure and singular form am I; ever the consciousness alone” (22.29). The measure by which this world is measured here is itself not the Absolute it persistently measures. Yet as measure the

Absolute measures itself, in this form here to be illuminated within itself. Edgar Mitchell sees and feels this vastness burst through in awe and wonder and love. He feels the deep measure already within. “Ever of the nature of true measure am I; ever the illuminator of existence. Ever of the form of philosophy am I; ever pious and auspicious” (22.30). And yet, and yet, we pause again once more for that by which this location, this limit is exceeded: “I am not the one who measures. I am not that which is measured. I am not all. I am the supreme. I am the form of complete knowledge” (22.35).

The results of transcendence is itself the transcendence from part to whole, from partiality as the function of one’s claim on oneself, to fullness as the realization that the partiality is

248 nothing more than a temporary function of a non-separate measuring device called the body.

This transition has the power to eradicate the sense of absoluteness granted to the temporary and the partial, the permanence we grant to these shifting forms, and the hold by which we think this realm of appearance binds us. We are not held to this scale nor to this vision nor to this mode of viewing. Our view is always dark and partial, except insofar as we already are the Cosmos feeling itself. And this “feeling itself” always acts as love. We have thus arrived in some manner to Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians: “Love [agape] never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for languages, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end.” Everything done by this body and mind is partial, but in examining itself, this partiality already sees into its own partiality. This partiality is like a child speaking of the world as if they understood it when so little is grasped by these thoughts, words, and perceptions:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things”—these selfishly oriented demands of oneself that cannot handle the nuance and humility of understanding oneself as a part of the cosmos. “For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face.” In other words, everything that we see and feel now is reflected through the mechanism of this body except for when one looks internally: “Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known.” This knowing of oneself fully is the knowing fully, the consummation of the know thyself as the function of the divine. Once accomplished, “now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (13:8-13).

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Lest these religious references strike some resistance in the reader, let us have one final refrain using two more recent, secular examples that are sufficiently separate from spiritual contexts. First, a case of realization that occurred in a non-religious situation, with only some spiritual training in meditation, and not in relation to a literal scalar vision of the sort Mitchell had, and yet the realization was very much articulated in the same terms. At the age of 27,

Suzanne Segal stepped onto a bus in Paris and lost entirely her sense of self.

"I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called 'me' was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head” (49).

This experience came as a surprise and was not clearly inspired by any kind of experience.

People get on buses all the time. Most people don’t feel their ego drop away when they do so.

Yet the way that Segal articulates the vision is entirely congruent with our account here. Rather than rearticulate some kind of ghost-like “me” floating “a foot behind and to the left of my head” the result of this involution, as the realization settled in, was a sense of vastness. In fact, she called this divine sense itself “vastness” as opposed to the “reference point” from which perception is thought to originate. This “reference point” is noticeably constructed out of a sense that there is a definitive “me” that is making choices—again the ahamkara. But one can, in ridding oneself of this sense of the limited “I,” acquire the eyes of the vastness. The difference is felt as a kind of freedom: “When the eyes of this reference point are being seen through rather than the eyes of vastness, it looks to the mind like only a very limited range of actions is available, when in fact the possibilities are limitless” (159-60). Not only does one feel how the limits of the body or location are not absolute, but to see from the eyes of vastness is to see things in the perspective by which, as Plato said above, there shines forth understanding about

250 every problem: “To see things for what they are is to see with the eyes of vastness itself” (150).

Suddenly everything appears to be clearly situated within the vastness, and, following the language of Cusa’s experiment, “these eyes see the incredible benevolence of the universe, which is completely trustworthy in all respects” (Segal 144). I can thus feel myself as the vastness and this vastness is the reference point by which everything makes sense, but only if I have transcended any egoic identification or residue. Indeed, the vastness wants this. It may even be what humans are for, this kind of direct and aware perception of the cosmos as aware of itself:

“The vastness has its own non-personal desire to perceive itself directly through itself using the circuitry of every human being” (142).

We can then, in a final word, note Edgar Mitchell, this bundle of atoms, this choreography of cells, this structure of experiences, this socially distinguished astronaut, this particle of the Earth, this measured measure of the cosmos, still remains after this vision. He remains to arrive back on Earth, to write a book, to start an Institute, and, in general, to struggle to understand what has happened. The vision erases our sense of self, the finality of it, the solidity of it, without erasing this body. Because we are not the body, the erasure of the egoic sense of self is not the erasure of the body. Likewise, because we are not the source of a point of view, we are able to have a point of view. This limit is itself the way that Cosmos is able to know itself. These words and this reading is another way for the Cosmos to try to understand its understanding of itself. The sense of this going-on, still viewing, measuring and carefully attending to that measure in the taking account of the scaling process, was beautifully captured by Christopher Nolan in the climax of the film Interstellar. The interstellar astronaut named

Cooper, falls into a black hole only to find a replica of his daughter Murph’s bedroom repeated endlessly around him, each iteration showing a different time of the same place. He realizes that

251 this is some kind of interface by which he can transmit data about the black hole gathered by

Tars, the robot who also fell into the black hole, through space-time back to his daughter on

Earth so that she can complete their anti-gravity spaceship. As he realizes what he needs to do, he suddenly understands why he must be there to do it. Speaking of the mysterious “they” who made this trip possible, Cooper and Tars finally realize their situation:

Cooper: All of this, is one little girls bedroom, every moment, infinitely complex. They have access to infinite space, but they are not bound by anything. If they can't find a specific place in time they can't communicate. That's why I'm here, to find a way to tell Murph, just like I found this moment. Tars: How Cooper? Cooper: Love Tars, Love. It's just like Brand [another astronaut] said. My connection with Murph...it is quantifiable. It's the key. Tars: What are we here to do? Cooper: Find out how to tell her.

The “they” exist outside of space-time, are in some way infinite or Absolute. Precisely because they are beyond space-time, they need an entity limited in some way to navigate in such a way that communication is possible. Cooper and Tars are the devices by which that precise moment is found and the communication is made possible. Likewise, from the perspective of the vastness, we realize that this human circuitry is always just this: a means for the cosmos to see, feel, think about, and do just what is right here—as a navigation of itself in the way that is particular to the configuration we are embedded in. Once we realize this—“that’s why I’m here”—we are open to do the task at hand, to find a way to tell Murph, to find a way to do what we need to do as this part of the Cosmos. But how? With Love, as the thing which remains most of all to direct us to what needs to be done. From there, the ingenuity by which we carry out this task set before us naturally emerges from the mental and perceptive capacities already present to us in the kind of limits used to perceive the vastness. Then we can indeed trust our position, our vision, but measured through the Mind’s Eye as the Eye of vastness by which we take stock of this whole of

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Being. As much as we would like this position, however, it can only be accessed if we go ourselves through the black hole, a going-through the abyss in which our sense of egoic self is lost under the weight of vastness. Only in this involution does the incomprehensibly large manifest in its fullness, as the fullness by which the limitations of this flesh and blood are suddenly imbued with a purpose and meaning. Then the mouth opens to speak, the hands find themselves writing, the breath continues to intake the cosmos, the careful judgment measures the perception at hand, and we move forward through space-time.

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Chapter IV: The Turning To

The brightness and magnificence of this world, which by reason of its height and greatness is hidden from men, is Divine and Wonderful. It addeth much to the Glory of the Temple in which we live. Yet it is the cause why men understand it not. They think it too great and wide to be enjoyed. - Thomas Traherne The face of truth is hidden by your orb Of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb So that I, who adore the true, may see The glory of truth. - Isha Upanishad

Out of an impious pride they fall back from you and suffer an eclipse of your light. So early can they foresee a coming eclipse of the sun, but their own present eclipse they do not see, for they do not seek with a devout mind whence it is that they possess this skill by which they seek out these things. But when they find this, because you have made them, they do not give themselves up to you, so that you may preserve what you have made, and they do not slay in sacrifice to you what they have made themselves to be. - Saint Augustine (Confessions 5.3)

In the danger there holds sway this turning about not yet thought on. In the coming to presence of the danger there conceals itself, therefore, the possibility of a turning in which the oblivion belonging to the coming to presence of Being will so turn itself that, with this turning, the truth of the coming to presence of Being will expressly turn in—turn homeward—into whatever is. - Heidegger, “The Turning” 41

Attending to Oneself Scale is a transformation, in which atoms become cells, cells become bodies, bodies become ecologies, ecologies become complex churnings of astronomical events. The transformation is not, as we discovered in the last chapter, in the objects themselves, but in the one who scales, as they allow their sense of being to be scaled. As such, scale demands that we take stock, beginning to notice what exactly we are noticing in relation to the usual or previous course of observation within our experience. This extra noticing not only requires a focus of attention but also a particular kind of willingness or capacity to grant the scalar relation a kind of power. For it to function, we must hold ourselves to the relation of the measure, both for the sake

254 of consistency and out of respect for the strangeness of being that presents itself when we arrive at another scale. When taking a scalar perspective, it is not enough to dismissively note the scalar relation: yes, this is just a view of the entire planet; this is a cell. We’ve seen these before. But can the understanding of this scalar relation truly take hold if we do not grant it the space to affect our sense of the world? We must dwell with the fact that the phenomena usually before us—the trees, buildings, foods, people, technologies—dissolve into a single phenomena—the

Earth—when the very same perceptive capacities are projected out into a larger scale. We must permit the transformation as it functions in the depths of this consciousness.

The more we rehearse and revisualize scalar transitions, the less attention we seem to grant them. Again, it is not enough merely to see it because the visual is too easily read as another object of the same sort we deal with daily: yes, here is the earth. It looks like a marble. It is blue. We might even acknowledge, on a surface level, that yes this includes everything we know. But then we look from the photo, back to the world of manifold objects, and the scalar relation does not really take hold: I fail to reorganize my understanding of this set of phenomena before me in relation to the unity manifest in the way these smaller phenomena appear from a larger perspective. This is a rhetorical failure. Nothing has changed, nothing has been persuaded, the transformation has not taken hold. I have not noticed that the scalar reference is not merely towards objects, but towards my ability to orient myself to the encountered phenomena. It seems that our brains have a tendency to normalize these scalar experiences, to solidify the scalar relation into a mere relation of objects, our usual, mundane, relational, but ultimately limited and non-scalar view. But to fully understand scalar relations, we must keep in view both objects— myself and the earth—in order to understand how the two phenomenon are scaled in relation to each other. To do so I must be able to surrender the pre-given characters of both of these

255 entities—this “I” and this blue marble—otherwise the sense of certainty apparent on one scale will override the new strange relation revealed by the scaling event.

As we began to see in the last chapter, because the scalar relation is a reference orienting one’s perspective both to what is viewed and to the viewer, scaling means that the observer must be transformed. I must reflect on the placement of my perspective in relation to the perspective before me, and this alters me, otherwise I will not be able to fully perform the loop it entails: from me, to the object, and back to me. Occasionally this relationship breaks through, a rhetorical invasion persuading us to the immensity of these shifts, and we glimpse the scalar form for a moment with no warning or preparation at all. Huxley calls this a “gratuitous grace,” noting that Bucke’s realization, discussed in Chapter 1, is of this nature: the higher relationship is revealed in a flash, allowing the individual to momentarily reorient themselves to the cosmic view.29 We also saw Philip K. Dick call it, following Heraclitus, a “theophany.” Suddenly one sees vastness and the reality of the transcendental viewpoint. Sometimes people are in some way primed for the experience and so, at the right moment, some element of it breaks through, usually triggered by some kind of surprising or overwhelming event. Always, however, there must be a reflective element such that the individual becomes implicated in the event: I must realize that I did not understand or comprehend the world in some way before I experienced this relation. As such, there must be an element of surrender; the in-breaking of the vast All does not occur through a demand or a predetermined set of beliefs but through a willingness to look deeply into the void and place ourselves into the scalar loop. If I am already unwilling or unable to place this consciousness into the scalar relation, it will not take hold or may fade quickly. The experience will not come or it will mean little. Or, perhaps I will feel it and it will move me but I

29 Perennial Philosophy 68 256 will fail to comprehend what has happened; afterwards the solidity of the everyday view will reassert itself and I will, with time, dismiss the event as anomalous. To do so is to return to our usual intellectual accounting of scale, which grasps at the reality of cells and galaxies with no real rhetorical weight, no transformative implication.

That is to say, in examining this scaling up and the possible transcendent experience we must consider what permits or prevents us from having the experience, what shapes the experience, and how one might interpret the experience afterwards. Here is a problem of rhetoric: when and in what ways does scaling create a change, a deep-seated persuasion of one’s consciousness that the universe as a Whole exists in a shape different from what one previously imagined. However, we encounter a number of obstacles to this line thought, given popular means of understanding what produces these kinds of experiences, especially in our attempts to explain such experiences through prior preparation on the part of the visionary, the interpretation of the individual after the vision, or some sense of framing and filtering on the part of the individual that produced it. To understand the variable nature of the experience of scale, as well as our resistance to it, we have to consider each of these in relation to the scalar reflection.

One of the easiest means of dismissing the experience is to think of varying effects of images in terms of prejudices. Perhaps Edgar Mitchell experienced what he did because he was already predisposed towards the esoteric. Perhaps he wanted to feel something significant, so he did. Perhaps Philip K. Dick finally lost it. Perhaps Richard Maurice Bucke was just looking for someone to follow. The hope is that attending to and taking seriously the scalar elements of these accounts has explicated in some serious and systematic way the contours of their experiences, why they experienced them, and their relation to normal consciousness and scientific description.

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We can now spend some time, given our extended contemplation on the nature of vision in the previous chapter, addressing and handling the rhetorical conditions for scalar experience.

Mystical accounts are full of instances in which people far less willing than Edgar

Mitchell, Philip K. Dick, and Richard Maurice Bucke are suddenly forced into an experience of the Absolute; one need go no further than St. Paul or St. Augustine. Saint Augustine is a particularly potent example because he was both incredibly resistant to the altering event and he was himself a rhetorician, carefully attuned to the nuances of rhetorical modes for creating various kinds of persuasion. In many ways, the Confessions are Augustine’s attempt to untangle the inward-looking reflection required for a shift of this nature. Indeed, the rhetorical difficulty presented in the accessing of a higher reference might be considered a neglected rhetorical tradition aimed at persuading and preparing consciousness to reflect back on itself, in order to cultivate the capacity to perform the kind of involutionary reorientation of which the scaling event is an example. Saint Augustine provides the touchstone for this tradition in the West, although it is clear even from his own references that his reflections were influenced by similar articulations in Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus. In the Vedic tradition, the same inward-oriented rhetorical tradition exists in noticeable forms in both Vedanta and Buddhism through the aphoristic style and care taken to the different modes of preparing and altering of attention. One of the most potent examples of the Vedic approach is the work of Adi Sankara, particularly his

Crest Jewel of Wisdom, which we might treat as a less-familiar counterpart to make more apparent this alternate inward looking view of the rhetorical preparation, functions, and affects.

For our purposes, the most important element common to both traditions is the need to set aside, overcome, or otherwise move beyond personal prejudice, inclinations, and the investment in the

258 egoic structure that we discussed in the previous chapter. Only then does the persuasive power of the vast manifest, causing a change in the very structure of one’s understanding of the world.

Turning Around In the scalar shift what is under question is the solidity and import of what is before me.

How does this body exist as part of this planet? How can all these objects here actually be that, this incredibly large structure? When we go further, to the edges of space, the difficulty is more marked: even these familiar points of reference are lost. If I am truly considering the incredible shift, a fear seems to emerge that gives rise to a resistance. I can’t be this insignificant, this small.

I can’t understand it. What about all the things I love? What about these people? What about my hard-driven efforts? Where have they gone? What are they in this vastness? The underlying strain of each of these questions is an insistent falling-back to the concerns of myself—this “I”— before the scaling effect necessitated a reconsideration of its validity and form. This rejection is the rejection of scale itself. The resistance is best encapsulated today by the normalization of the scaling movements whereby these questions need not even arise. Normalization in this instance means to treat something as part of the same scale on which one exists most intimately, so that the scalar shift need not include this dwarfing, leaving intact the psychical investment in the everyday.

The study of the resistance then leads us not to prejudice but to the resistance to the addressing of the prejudice that prevents us from rescaling our being. The process by which Saint

Augustine was converted was not a process of establishing the necessary prejudice but the opposite: a long and intense breaking-down of his prejudicial structures. The shape of this breaking down required first and foremost a turning back upon the desires and thoughts that he did not want to even consider. This turn back upon oneself is the primary trope—the Greek

259 tropos itself meaning “turn”—by which the experience or realization is possible. Thus,

Augustine, upon hearing a story of another’s experience of conversion, feels this peculiar effect:

As he spoke, you, O Lord, turned me back upon myself. You took me from behind my own back, where I had placed myself because I did not wish to look upon myself. You stood me face to face with myself that I might see how foul I was, how deformed and defiled, how covered with stains and sore. I looked, and I was filled with horror, but there was no place for me to flee to away from myself. If I tried to turn my gaze from myself, he still went on with the story that he was telling, and once again you placed me in front of myself, and thrust me before my own eyes, so that I might find out my iniquity and hate it. I knew what it was, but I pretended not to; I refused to look at it, and put it out of my memory. (156; 8.7)

To apply this passage to our understanding of scale, we can put aside for the moment any resistance we might have to the language of defilement here. To feel the fullness of the story being told, Augustine must look at himself—is forced to look at himself. Despite the power of the view, he tries not to; he actively resists looking back at his current state, at the aspects of himself that would become implicated in the conversion being demanded. If this were merely another kind of prejudice or predisposition, which inclines Augustine to this kind of conversion, such a struggle would not need to occur. Instead, his prejudice has to come into view as the very thing to be implicated in the conversion.

The same applies with a vision like the view from above that demands a change in understanding. Prejudice itself is what is at stake in the vision. Because the vision is about how and what I am and see, I must allow my prejudice to come into view and somehow have it undermined or undone by the view. Thus, we find the reverse of our usual assumption about prejudice: excessive skepticism tends to prevent individuals from allowing their attention to dwell on the scalar relationship for sufficient time for them to process their own place in it. Or, in the same vein, many people are likely unwilling or unable to implicate themselves into the scalar loop, to place their own conceptions, preferences, and prejudices within this extended measure.

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Thus, skepticism itself can be the prejudice as we become skeptical of everything except skepticism. Augustine himself was, prior to conversion, one such skeptic and often notes how he became caught up in a stubborn refusal to consider his own predispositions and resistances. Once the change occurs, he is able to note that he was often working from a prejudice he was unaware of previously: “The catholic faith does not teach what we once thought and what we vainly accused it of” (111). A new understanding and a new power manifests once he turns back upon himself, admitting his own lack of understanding.30

The question is not, therefore, one of the degree to which a person is critical or able to be objective. In fact, Augustine is persistently critical right until the conversion becomes complete.

We can see in Augustine already that there is an element of a critical attitude which prevents him from acknowledging what has become apparent: “I knew what it was, but I pretended not to; I refused to look at it, and put it out of my memory.” Augustine can see the problematic nature of his own preconceptions. He can see how this new view might affect them, how they might change. But he pretends not to: he actively refuses to acknowledge the disparity even though the disparity has already been seen. Here, there is actually a failure of being critical that masquerades as a criticism: the unwillingness to face his own insufficiency leads him to push it away, to suspect the apparent shift before him. Nonetheless, those who critique mystics often attack them on these grounds. Consider, for example what was said by one critic of Richard

Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness: "If he had been a little more critical and objective in his attitude, and if he had realized there were related phenomena, such as the feelings of the partially intoxicated individual, the occasional effects of anesthetic, and the states of elation

30 Such a problematic relationship happens both by the religious acolyte and by those who critique religion on the grounds of skepticism, eg Hitchens, Dawkins, who we will discuss in Chapter 5. 261 achieved in religious conversion, he might have come to different conclusions."31 Why would we assume that, because Bucke was elated by his experience, that he we was somehow less capable of reflecting on its attributes? Bucke was, of course, quite aware of the states of elation found in religious conversion and did, at least to a limited extent, acknowledge the same resonance that we are exploring here between mystical experience and cosmic consciousness. If one pauses to reflect on this critique, it appears rather strange that we would think that saying that the psychological nature of the event immediately renders it void or self-produced. This critique of Bucke is particularly interesting since it psychologizes an early psychologist who articulated the realization in terms of how conscious states are produced, a point we also discussed in relation to similar accusations about Philip K. Dick. Why would it be less objective and critical to note that one can experience a particular state, when conditions are right, which sheds light on and alters what one is able to see in the normal state of consciousness?

This critic is simply one of many who critique mystical experience on the grounds that it is simply a psychological event, born from a “will to believe” or emotional investment that is counter to normal rational faculties. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have developed various arguments and schema about the psychological, emotional, or physiological nature of the events. In one of the earliest examples, Bertrand Russell, in his famous essay on Mysticism and

Logic, asserts that “mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe” (3). Russell makes mysticism into a kind of irrational holding to a belief simply because you feel strongly about it. The implication is that the belief itself is arbitrary, that there are always more or different beliefs which you might be equally passionate about. Such a reckoning seems familiar enough, but the assumption itself is

31 quoted in Greenland, “Richard Maurice Bucke,” 389 262 strange: that such a passion might associate itself with any kind of position. From the external perspective such a troubling sticking to one’s belief is indeed the mark of a kind of radicalism masquerading as the mystic’s self-confidence. But if one’s prejudice is what is coming into view as the thing to be undermined, the emotional content emerges not from the belief but from the undermining of belief. From an internal perspective, the difference is tremendous: one entails a persistent holding onto one’s beliefs which puts one at odds and in conflict with others while the other is a persistent yielding of belief which produces a passionate conviction of a reality which exceeds oneself.

Following these same assumptions within the apparatus of an increasingly systematized and externalized psychological methodology, an influential schema was proposed in the 1970s in

Science by Roland Fischer. Fischer charts the various states deemed “mystical” on a continuum based on the extent of arousal excited by the experience.32 The standard by which the states are judged is various beta, alpha, and theta waves revealed by an EEG. But such an account can never make a distinction between the various content or result of such excitations. In other words, what induces the state, what does the state produce within consciousness, and what is consciousness capable of following the state. Thus, Fischer’s diagram includes on the same continuum states which differ tremendously both in content and results: schizophrenia and catatonia are next to mystical rapture. There is no sense, for instance, what occurs to the state designated “normal”—also called “I” on the chart—once the physiologically noticeable changes cease. Such attempts to lump these states together in terms of psychology or emotion, neglect the rhetorical conditions under which they may or not be produced and the transformative power they have once they are produced. While more sophisticated means of psychologically testing

32 For a more recent discussion on this schema see Forman’s introduction in The Problem of Pure Consciousness 263 these experiences have been developed since, the reduction of these experiences to physiological or psychological signals will always run into this same problem.

When we attend to the nuances under which these elements play out in consciousness, however, we can even account for the variety of emotional states as varying reactions to and means of encountering the self-directed reflection. The common element, apparent with

Augustine, is that the realization required that he surrender his will and his beliefs in order for the new understanding to emerge. The emotional weight was a function of this need to surrender and his own resistance to it. The problem is that Augustine does not even know what his own psychical prejudices are: “I had no clear idea,” he states again and again, “even of my own self”

(119). The process is a facing of psychical investment, an untangling of the habitual modes of understanding the world. To describe the process, Augustine uses the language of linking formed by the investments of this body:

“For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will, and when lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not resisted, it becomes necessity. But such links, joined on to another, as it were—for this reason I have called it a chain—a harsh bondage held me fast. A new will, which had begun within me…was not yet able to overcome that prior will, grown strong with age. Thus did my two wills, the one old, the other new, the first carnal, and the second spiritual, contend with one another.” (151)

We can read “lusts” here as the psychical investment in the things we do around us, the normal objects of value and importance, and the bodily needs which demand attention and addressing.

These naturally hold importance to us as, however innocently, we persistently reaffirm their reality and power in our everyday engagement with them. A transcendent view, however, places before us a viewpoint which contradicts, reworks, and reorients the value and being of these things. When attending to the nuances of the differences as they conflicted inside him, Augustine is able to discern these two kinds of belief and emotional investment. Yet, in this inward looking, the conflict between these wills was associated with an ego-structure: “it was by me that this

264 habit had been made so warlike against me, since I had come willingly to this point where I now willed not.” When this war between the wills is released, in the surrender of the willfulness, the links themselves can be dissolved of their power. It was, however, not the belief that did so, but the surrender of it—the willingness to move beyond the willful and insistent connections and investments made by our usual way of being on our everyday scale of experience. In this form, belief only contained a willful resistance that must be overcome: “yet I was still bound to the earth, and I refused to become your soldier” (151).

The persistent need to reassess and to learn to address one’s beliefs, will, and prejudice are thus usually necessary to form the capacity to face oneself and be changed by the experience.

The emphasis on some kind of training, however, has been another point of resistance: some might suspect that training to see a particular thing might produce that effect itself, in a kind of self-fulfilling event. The fact that we often see the scalar relationship without truly encountering it already implies that we need to be trained to see so that we can understand that what we are seeing expresses a reworking of our normal understanding of the world. Within the mystic experience of the transcendental relation, some element of training exists to attune the mind towards this higher realm. But, again, what we are trained to do is not see anything other than the relationship of our consciousness with the phenomenon at hand, in two different scales. Or, in spiritual terminology: to comprehend our individual selves (Atman) in relation to our higher selves (Brahman); to contemplate our personal desires in relation to the larger Whole; to allow our sense of individuality (ego-structure, the “I,” ahamkara) dissolve in the unity of the All.

Since the brain is not used to dealing with reality in this way, having been trained since birth to view only one scale, it must be retrained to perform the loop.

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Once neuroscience acquired the capability and openness to a more nuanced feedback loop between subjective states and brain structures, this capacity to reflect on your own prejudices could be mapped in a clearer way. If nothing else, the capacity for such reflection could be pointed to as not just another myth we tell ourselves. Such studies have recently gained prominence and widespread support. Undoubtedly, the theories and terminologies will continue to change, but we could, as a means of invoking science’s scalar description look at how much as shifted since Fischer’s initial diagram. Interestingly, one of the elements that have arisen from recent studies on meditation is the relation meditative states have to normal states of consciousness. Through extensive brain imaging of individuals doing various tasks, neuroscientists have isolated what they call the “Default Mode Network” (DMN).33 It is called

“Default” because it tends to activate when people stop doing tasks. In fact, this is how the DMN was first identified: it activated when researchers weren’t having the individuals do anything at all. 34 Once identified, researchers began to study when and what caused the DMN to activate.

They found that it activated under all those activities that contain a self-referential content: “tasks that encourage subjects toward internal mentation, including autobiographical memory, thinking about one's future, theory of mind, self-referential and affective decision making” (Andrews-

Hanna et al. See also Oschner et. al.). These kinds of thoughts are said to be self-referential because they are about what you think you are, including a narrative about what you need to do or have done, a rehearsal of plans and memories. One study, which reviews thirty years of imaging, notes that this self-referential narrative tends to fire up when we are not doing anything:

33 The following discussion was greatly assisted by Gary Weber, who has been involved in many of the studies discussed. His blog http://happinessbeyondthought.blogspot.com/ keeps up with current research on meditation and neuroscience. Weber is himself a trained scientist who worked in the industry for three decades and is also a self- proclaimed mystic. For a concise synthesis of the neuroscience research and its relation to thoughts, see the youtube video “What ‘no thoughts’ means – 3 different kinds of thoughts” 34 See Andrews-Hanna, et. al. “Functional-Anatomic Fractionation of the Brain’s Default Mode Network” 266

“the default network is a specific, anatomically defined brain system preferentially active when individuals are not focused on the external environment” (Buckner et al). Most of these studies, however, treat this DMN as an important part of an individual’s cognitive well-being. That is, until studies on meditation showed a clear correlation between meditative states and a decrease in the functioning of the DMN (see Brewer et. al.; Farb et.al.). These studies found an antithetical relationship between the DMN and the parts of the brain primarily involved in high- level tasks, known as the Task-positive Network (TPN). The less the brain was taken up with self-referential thoughts, the better you were at doing high level tasks. Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale, argues that the relationship between the DMN and the TPN produces evidence for the need to release the hold one has one’s thoughts, i.e. on the divisions produced out of one’s experience of the world. The implication is that the self-referential thoughts of the

DMN prevent us from functioning creatively since they attach those thoughts to our identity: what we think we are and the world is. We hold on to our divisions because it is what we think we are. To be clear, the DMN is not the ego itself; that is, neuroscientists have not found your

“self” in a part of the brain; they have merely identified a part of the brain that seems to pretend that it is a self. The ego-structure is not an actual thing, but rather a narrative told about what we are, that gathers together a diversity of experiences and, in an act of scalar tyranny, calls them mine. Thus, at least in these recent studies, instead of finding this “I” within the brain, neuroscientists seem to have found a part of the brain that tells itself that it is a “I.”35

Furthermore, it seems this “I” gets in the way of creative activity. Indeed, this makes sense from a scalar perspective: the ego-function has claimed that it can perform what is literally out of its scale.

35 For an excellent discussion of the scope of these scientific claims see Gary Weber and Rich Doyle, “The Neuroscience of non-dual awakening” in Into the Stillness. 267

Brewer and others have point out that simple training can be done outside of any kind of meditative or spiritual practice in a cross-scalar encounter: if hooked up to an MRI, you could have feedback noting when the DMN is activated and adjust yourself accordingly (see Garrison et. al.). Doing so could allow you to attend to the effects of the DMN, increasing focused attention over mind-wandering. That is, you could literally see when you are not really allowing yourself to see something. But of course, this loop only has more authority because we already fail to attend to our own capacity to watch how we divide up the world. Meditation as a practice is actually this loop already performed within one’s experience. Spiritual practices are largely meant to induce this capacity to examine the world outside of these habituated and engrained structures of thought. To truly attend to the nuances of scale requires a preparation of this kind, something to prepare ourselves for the shift scaling entails and to ensure that we will hold to that shift rather than our preconceived ideas about the world. Likewise, the intense relationship between scale and our default ways of viewing the world make scale itself a productive means of encountering our own prejudices about the world. This project itself is the attempt to move through scale as just such a meditative exercise for the encountering of oneself.

Ultimately, the result is always beyond even that training. Training for an experience is not the same as the experience itself, that is, it does not produce the experience but merely allows one to obtain the state of mind where it is possible. This clearing-away is already evident in the antithetical relationship between the DMN and the TPN. It is further compounded by other studies that note that a bulk of high-level cognitive functioning occurs outside of the narrative consciousness of normal experience.36 These studies have mapped how an insight or decision will become visible in brain scans six to eight seconds before they are registered within the field

36 See Sheth, et. al., “Posterior Beta and Anterior Gamma Oscillations predict cognitive insight.” 268 of direct awareness. The suggestion is already that such insight is beyond what we assume to claim under a clear ego-function. The ego-function would suppose that it is the one producing the insight, but this insight is already outside of its usual narrative capacities. The implication is that all training performs is a practice in learning to listen to those parts of the brain that already know more than the DMN—the I-thought, ego-structure—can contain within its narratives.

Rather than training oneself into a particular kind of thought or belief, the thoughts and beliefs have to be cleared away for the insight to be produced.

As we see with Augustine’s training in an externally oriented rhetoric and the

Manichean philosophy popular during his time, training that indulges one’s ego-structure might actually get in the way and itself need to be reflected on and undone for the alternative experience to manifest. Augustine had to undertake a different sort of training: the training of the mind to be able to focus and examine itself. Training clears away those obstacles to the higher scale view. To assume training produces the feeling is to leave no room for the possibility of preparation for such tremendous insights. Yet, even this insistence on the persistent place of prejudice itself implies that any possibility of moving beyond prejudice would require immense preparation, especially when prejudice—the prejudgment of what is and is not—is what is reworked in the experience. Hence, the dialectical method of Plato’s Socrates seeks to find a not knowing, an acknowledgement of where the understanding fails, is confused and, in anger at this not-knowing, resists a different kind of knowing from emerging. Thus, in introducing The Cloud of Unknowing, Evelyn Underhill notes that the practice of this anonymous mystic is a willful giving up of the will into a love born not of knowledge or understanding, but an unknowing:

“This ‘intent stretching’—this loving and vigorous determination of the will—he regards as the central fact of the mystical life; the very heart of effective prayer. Only by its exercise can the

269 spirit, freed from the distractions of memory and sense, focus itself upon Reality and ascend with

‘a privy love pressed’ to that ‘Cloud of Unknowing’”.37

The question still remains, however, the degree to which one’s experience—or the possibility of one’s experience—is conditioned by influences outside of those directly attributed to prejudice and will (the ego-function). Such a criticism asks in what way do pre-existing cultural or linguistic variables determine, shape, or even create the experience? There are two major metaphors used to think about this possibility: the frame and the screen. In rhetoric and sociology, the frame is the social means of constructing and defining a particular idea or issue.38

The assumption usually made is that a frame will limit and in some way determine the scope of what one is able to understand. But if we take the frame metaphor seriously, we can see that again the scalar nature of the experience reworks this metaphor: in scale I become aware of the frame, my position, and the relation between the two. Ultimately, when the movement continues upward or downward, the frame exceeds itself and a frameless experience might break through unless one clings to their frame. After the fact, any number of means of framing the account of the experience might be employed. But since the experience itself took the frame with it (till it was out of the picture), these frames will now appear insufficient, artificial, or, as is often emphasized, just frames.

The screen metaphor is a bit more problematic since it implies that one cannot see without the screen.39 Here, the loop again becomes essential: since scale refers to the particular screen – a structure of viewing—to look at scale is not to look through a screen but to look at the screen apart from any objects. The assumption at issue here is whether or not one’s sensory

37 Underhill, “Introduction” 38 See, for example, Jim A. Kyupers, “Framing Analysis” 39 This idea originates largely from Kenneth Burke’s idea of terministic screens, found in Language as Symbolic Action, 44- 62. 270 perceptions or way of being always by necessity filters or obscures the real. To the contrary, for the mystic the appropriate metaphor for the screen is to suggest that the screen itself is an already blank or empty surface whereupon the phenomena of reality might express. Thus, Ramana

Maharsi uses a cinematic screen metaphor: “The screen is always there but several types of pictures appear on the screen and then disappear. Nothing sticks to the screen, it remains a screen. Similarly, you remain your own Self [the Cosmic All] in [whatever state you are experiencing]. If you know that, the [content of experience] will not trouble you, just as the pictures which appear on the screen do not stick to it” (Be as You Are 13). In navigating scale, one must take reference to one’s screen, noting it in order to compare it to what one sees.

Traveling across and spending time with different scales thus opens the possibility that one breaks through one’s screens—in the filtering sense—and experiences an unmitigated consciousness—the blank cinematic screen.

We can note further, that the question of interpretation reasserts this difficulty, which hinges on the degree to which one allows interpretation to be separated from the experience or if one assumes that interpretation is already prior to experience. When one follows the second conclusion, one can then declare that such experiences are only a matter of interpretation rather than of some fundamental importance. Such critiques often come from an application of Hans

Georg Gadamer’s argument that interpretation is foundational to being and that prejudice in interpretation is inevitable and, indeed, desirable. Following this argument, religious studies scholar Richard King is able to claim that “[t]here is no possibility of a universally applicable metanarrative or bird’s-eye view of reality” (73). The assumption here is that the universality exists in a way outside of the individual, in his ability to arrive at and interpret a particular view or position. King pushes this argument further: “the process of interpreting a text, then,

271 according to Gadamer, inevitably involves the projections of one’s own values, interest, and agenda onto the text” (75). King applies this not only to texts but to the practice of religion more generally. Such a conception allows King to rely on the socially reinforced and historically situated nature of any investigation into spiritual matters. As is often done by scholars today,

King grants this kind of prejudice and interpretation a priority as the primary limits of what one is able to understand: “given the inevitability of prejudice on the part of the investigator, it is important to consider the conditioning factors that provide the boundaries of possibility for understanding” (81). Such an argument already contains a problem, however: it attempts to prove a negative, that you never can experience outside of prejudice.40 Such an argument is simply another form of the Kantian argument, discussed in chapter 2, that there is no possibility of getting out of the structures of thought. The whole reflective enterprise suggests otherwise: we only have this feeling that we cannot escape from thought because our DMN, our ego-function, is so persistent and powerful that we never see beyond it.

Undoubtedly, the varying affects of a larger scale view is partially one of interpretation, but this misses an essential point: the subject at hand cannot simply be “reality” externally understood, but one’s own place within reality. The interpretive apparatus itself is what is at stake in the view. As Augustine makes clear, one might even have prejudice about one’s own prejudice, but this too must come into view in the inward looking. In the realm of interpretation following the event, any prior resistance one had to having the realization might be doubled if one, as Augustine does in our first passage, looks on what one sees and pushes it to the side through a particular kind of narrative about its relevance or irrelevance. Or, in terms of scale,

40 As the citation of King indicates, it is oddly within religious studies that we find some of the most vehement discussions about the role of prejudice, beginning with the famous arguments by Steven Katz, against the possibility of pure consciousness (see the collections edited by Katz, Mysticism and Religious Traditions and Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis for an overview of these kinds of positions). 272 when I consider the place of the eye in relation to the different scales at which this eye is able to perceive, I must become aware of the eye as the determinate factor of the prejudice for objects and limits. The scaling movement shows that reality exceeds this eye, and only in insisting that I preserve this as “I” do I resist the involution.

Since the mystical insight occurs when these interpretations themselves come into view as part of the view dwarfed and swallowed by this birds-eye view, the post-hoc re- interpretations—what one articulates to attempt to describe the experience afterwards—are not what is at stake. I am not actively interpreted but feel myself implicated in the interpretive event.

Not only does the interpretive apparatus come into awareness, but it may be emptied out of prejudice and cultural influence in that moment of encountering a scale beyond bodies and cultures. Thus, Augustine speaks of an earlier interpretation he had in which he imagined bodies

“as my imagination dictated” and “as I thought proper” (123). The shift comes from bringing the gaze back at himself, from what his imagination had dictated to be the truth shining through as his own prejudices come into view. This is not an interpretation but the view of interpretation itself and, most importantly, a letting-rest of interpretation: “this was the sum of it: not to will what I willed and to will what you willed.” This “you” is not another human, or language, or culture, or historical moment but the view of Cosmos that breaks through when the interpretive moment is taken into account. 41 When I experience myself in relation to the larger scale entity

“Earth” I am not interpreting the relation in any active way but surrendering to the relation that exceeds these prejudicial investments. The falsehood of subjectivity itself as a scalar reality comes into view.

41 WT Stace has a good discussion of the role of interpretation in religious experience in Mysticism and Philosophy, 31. 273

At the same time, we can follow King and Gadamer in agreeing that any interpretation is going to be inherently caught up in or limited by the historical and cultural situatedness of the one interpreting. This is only the case if we understand “interpretation” as a post-hoc narrative about the experience. But considering interpretation as the narrative following an event does not mean that this post-hoc narrative created the significant shift at hand—that I have made something more of the event than it was originally. It is true that one can, in the process of narrating an experience, make it into something more significant than it in fact was. With the mystical experience, the opposite seems to happen: the budding mystic struggles to capture or articulate the significance of the experience. Because of this difficulty, those who write about the experience afterwards must do so from a different approach to language, not as encapsulating, determining, or limiting what one might understand but helping others direct their attention in a particular way so that I allow the reader to take into account their attention as well.42 From a scalar point of view, this makes sense: if in the experience I encounter myself subsumed into a larger entity, that larger entity far exceeds the terminology and narrative capacity of this individual mind.43 What is a billion suns? Where am I in the galaxy? What is all of this in timescale of the Milky Way’s slow spin? Yet this is what I look at when I see the stars; this is what I am glimpsing when I see the suns rotation. I am pulled in both directions; this “I” is pulled apart. Then, if I am trying to talk about the experience to others, all I can do is point to it indirectly since any attempt to describe it would require the recipient to also implicate

42 Some of the best reflection to this effect can be found in Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Experience and Philosophy, esp. the consideration of levels of thought and the writing in aphorisms (305-308). We will see parallels to these levels from Bateson in the following section. 43 It was considering just this point that allowed the Jesuit mystic Tielhard de Chardin to develop the concept of the noosphere with Vladamir Vernadsky as the mind-correlate to Venadsky’s Biosphere. On the scalar nature of the noosphere see Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy 175. 274 themselves in the scalar relation. Otherwise, from their non-scaled point of view, they will only see more of the same: the objects, relations, and priorities that occupy their everyday life.

Thus, an amplification of humility, persistently applied, is required for us to experience this kind of wholeness. Gadamer suggests that a humility is needed for an “openness to experiences” (King 75) but then this same claim allows King to justify a historically determined view of religious experience and to largely reject any claim to experiencing non-situatedness.

This desire for openness misunderstands the primary site of resistance: the prejudices etched into one’s view by the manifold of structures formed by one’s usual scale of human concerns, words, and thoughts. These are what are undermined by scale, however much we try to reintegrate them into our cultural realm. To combat this assertion, Augustine proposes an alternative approach: “I should have knocked and proposed the question ‘How is this believed?’ instead of insultingly opposing it, as if it were believed as I thought” (98). Likewise, we can follow Augustine’s surprise when, upon finding someone reading, he was able to assert the internal nature of this inquiring: “When he read, his eyes moved down the pages and his heart sought out their meaning, while his voice and tongue remained silent” (97). This statement is not just about reading without speaking—King uses this assumption to make a point about textual traditions in his reading of Augustine (see 65)—but is primarily about the silencing effect that must take place within oneself in order to allow meaning to emerge. One must let the experience play out in one’s consciousness, to let oneself feel the way the image or word or thought might carry these affects, rather than dismiss them on one’s own prejudicial understanding. To do this, one must first be willing to face oneself, to bring oneself into view, not as another kind of self- referential thought but as the encountering, noticing, and accounting for these self-referential thoughts by which we divide reality. In short, “be still and know that I am God” (Psalms 46:10).

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Bateson’s Loop The mechanism whereby we perform this self-examination is already built into the structure of consciousness itself. We cannot speak of this coming-into-view of prejudice without articulating the capacity of consciousness to consider itself. Likewise, we cannot deny this possibility of addressing one’s own prejudice if we admit the possibility of becoming aware of it.

Otherwise, any kind of ideology critique would be nothing more than the pointing to a series of personal aspects that are immutable. To assume this immutability of prejudice, habit, or position, however, is to buy into the concept of identity, so important to our way of thinking of ourselves in our post-post modern moment (or whatever you’d like to call it). What then do we hope to accomplish in pointing to prejudice, discrimination, and problematic articulations?

The problem lies partially in our mistaking the scale on which this view of prejudice occurs. Prejudice, habits, and discrimination are often most noticeable within social groups because they manifest as the accumulated preferences of a group of individuals. But preference and habit, as a mode of examination, can and must always occur on the scale of oneself. Note that we don’t say the “scale of individuals” because as far as each of us is concerned, the only way we exist on this scale is within ourselves—i.e. this experience you are having right now.

Part of the problem is that we can note the preference in others and have become incredibly good at doing so, but neglect the practices whereby we examine ourselves. Prejudice, beliefs, and discriminations play out within our collective unconscious through the averaging together of these habits of thought that exist within each of us. Diagnosing the larger patterns is thus an important mechanism only insofar as they assist us in seeing ourselves. While we can prevent collateral damage from our collective bias and such an action might be useful or even necessary, we cannot neglect the scale through which our conscious experience occurs. From there, the personal social interactions we have become feedback mechanisms by which we can encounter

276 ourselves encountering others. Reflecting on how these habits play out within our experience and following through on this structure is the only surface upon which any of us act. Whatever we do on a “social” level to regulate prejudice will only proliferate a different kind of prejudice, now structured into the system differently, in proportion to the degree that we each, ourselves, take into account our own structure.

We can examine how this works in a more rigorous way using the language of cybernetics. In many ways cybernetics merely provided us with a clearer means of saying what philosophy and spirituality has always described as “know thyself,” “take care of yourself,” or take account of your sins (the Greek hamantaro, the ways in which we miss the mark, acting in disjunction with the Whole). Cybernetics attends to the loops that automatically occur within complex systems, in which the system begins to refer back to itself. With the language of cybernetics we can describe more precisely the level on which “know thyself” occurs as well as describe how it functions. The cyberneticist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson already performed this examination in a short, brilliant, and endlessly provocative essay called “The

Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.” The beauty of this essay is that it articulates one’s own scalar relations with oneself, by which one encounters the parts of one’s own experience.

Bateson picks up an essential concept from mathematics: the Theory of Logical Types of

Betrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. We will explore the origin of this theory in chapter

6. Here, we can let Bateson explain it:

The theory asserts that no class can, in formal logical or mathematical discourse, be a member of itself; that a class of classes cannot be one of the classes which are its members; that a name is not the thing named; that “John Bateson” is the class of which that boy is the unique member; and so forth. These assertions may seem trivial and even obvious, but…it is not at all unusual for theorists of behavioral science to commit errors

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which are precisely the error of classifying the name with the thing named…an error of logical typing (280).

The great contribution here, which is not necessarily apparent in Russell and Whitehead’s original formulation (since they are concerned with mathematical theory), is that logical types are not merely a grouping together but a loop back onto a set of entities—a designation of them as a set. “John Bateson” is a term pointing to the physical phenomenon “boy.” Any time you have something that refers to itself, you have gone a logical type above that thing, performing a loop back that designates that thing, or in some way structures or organizes our attention to it.

One may then also distill a further logical type by referring back to that thing again. To speak of language in general and to muse about its function would be a logical type above the name “John

Bateson” since it is a language about language. Likewise, one could have a discourse about the mode of conducting study about language, which would be a logical type above that.

From this definition of Logical Types, Bateson is able to distill a number of logical types of learning, by which a system refers back to itself. While it is worthwhile to attend to Bateson’s actual articulation, for the sake of space we can summarize them here:

Learning 0: the base activity of matter itself – action/reaction (e.g. basic signals in information processing)

Learning I: the base activity of living structures – stimulus/response (e.g. Pavlovian conditioning) – provides basic “context markers” that signal an action to occur

Learning II: the organizational activity of complex living structures using models that organize contexts for responses – a pattern of contexts rather than a particular context is now used to organize responses (e.g. responses to people according to “character”) Most of the responses that humans function within are classified as Learning II since we work according to organizations of contexts—shapes of meaning, expectation, complex social situations, and abstract transactions. Learning II is an accumulation of contexts whereby we figure out what to do. It permits us to speak of transactions according to particular

278 identifications. It also allows us to speak of the context by which these identifications occur, as themselves kinds of identifications. In this loop, a persons “characteristic, whatever it be, is not his but is rather a characteristic of what goes on between him and something (or somebody) else”

(298). Something like prejudice begins on the level of Learning I, as simple stimulus response, but becomes truly manifest and embedded in Learning II, in which basic characteristics (he’s black) become associated within an organization of contexts, e.g. capacities (he’s not appropriate for this job), leading to particular responses according to that organization (he doesn’t get hired).

Most importantly, Learning II is self-validating since it tends to produce and reinforce the contexts under which it functions. Thus we replicate on the level of our social, technological, or economic apparatus the organization of contexts from which we already function. As a result,

“the self-validating characteristic of the content of Learning II has the effect that such learning is almost ineradicable” (301).

Almost. Learning III is the structure by which we reflect on our very means of making contexts and thereby learn to alter that structure. Such a structure, notes Bateson, is “likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings” and “it will also be difficult for scientists, who are only human, to imagine or describe this process” (301). The reason for this is that it requires one to take into account their own context making process without simply making this another kind of context. To truly learn on this level means to be able to alter or move beyond the organizational contexts by which our complex social lives function. Thus, in introducing Learning III, Bateson makes a surprising move: “Zen Buddhists, Occidental mystics, and some psychiatrists assert that these matters are totally beyond the reach of language. But, in spite of this warning, let me begin to speculate about what must (logically) be the case” (301-2). Bateson notes that if there are any authorities on Learning III they are to be found within those, like mystics, who specialize in

279 untangling the depths of human behaviors apart from the bindings of contexts. The problem is that Learning III cannot just be the change of contexts; this is the purview of Learning II. For example, to motivate yourself to run by setting a schedule, joining a running team, or getting a better pair of shoes is not a learning about your context setting capacity but is merely the changing of contexts in order to organize them in a different way. Instead, the whole orientation towards this structure has to change, even your sense of yourself:

The premise of what is commonly called ‘character’ –the definitions of the “self”—save the individual from having to examine the abstract, philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of many sequences of life. ‘I don’t know whether it’s good music; I only know whether I like it.’ But Learning III will throw these unexamined premises open to question and change. (303)

This is not a mere surface level of ethical discourse, which aims to regulate contexts according to some kind of derived principles or rules. Such ethical principles, by definition, function as reinforcements to context-building. Instead, something more dramatic is produced in Learning

III: “Learning III (i.e. learning about Learning II) may lead either to an increase in Learning II or to a limitation or perhaps a reduction of that phenomenon. Certainty it must lead to a greater flexibility in the premises acquired by the process of Learning II—a freedom from their bondage” (304). In Learning III one does not entirely avoid building and acting according to contexts since such things are occasionally useful (maybe new shoes would help me finally get into running). But the full consummation of Learning III produces an incredible sense of freedom because you no longer feel bound by the complex structure of habits built by Learning

II.

Most importantly, Learning III releases you from the bondage of your own identity, permitting you to bring into view your own prejudicial structures. The relationship between identity and Learning III is essential to its structure:

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But any freedom from the bondage of habit must also denote a profound redefinition of the self. If I stop at the level of Learning II, “I” am the aggregate of those characteristics which I call my “character.” “I” am my habits of acting in context and shaping and perceiving the contexts in which I act. Selfhood is a product or aggregate of Learning II. To the degree that a man achieves Learning III, and learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts, his ‘self’ will take on a sort of irrelevance. The concept of ‘self’ will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience (304).

This may be the clearest scientific explanation of what has been described as enlightenment, nirvana, conversion, beatification, or ego-death. The entirety of Learning III hinges on the possibility of bringing into view the artificiality of one’s self-identity, those attributes which one has attributed to oneself as the context of your behavior. To learn on this level requires that this identity be open for question and moderation, on all levels. It is to bring one’s own prejudice into view and allow it to change on a basic level.

The relationship between Learning III and identity becomes particularly important for our mode of speaking of ideologies and prejudice, particularly since our dominant mode of discourse is meant to drastically reinforce identity structures according to particular categories, even when we speak in terms of special marginalized individuals. From the perspective of these learning levels it ought to be clear that the current biopolitical regulation of identity structures is the most efficient means for political structures to direct power.44 As long as we continue to function in terms of Identity, including identity politics, structures of power will be able to tune into those identity structures in order to reorganize economic and power flows in desired, ultimately

44 For a diagnosis of late late capitalism’s intensification and use of Identity as a means of biopower, see Jeff Nealon Post- post Modernism. This problem with identity was already at the core of Buckminster Fuller’s diagnosis of the globalizing of power: “The ‘sovereign’ –meaning top-weapons enforced—‘national’ claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification. As a consequence of the slavish ‘categoryitis’ the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions ‘Where do you life?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘What religion’? ‘What race?’ ‘What nationality?’ are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on the Earth” (Operating Manual 19-20). Someone those claimants of power have convinced us to only intensify these questions, but we do continually see how they are antithetical to our living with ourselves and with the planet. 281 disabling and parasitic directions. However much we attempt to change the organization of those contexts and identities, people will always find a way to adjust and take advantage of this training into and around contexts. Likewise, as long as Learning II is the dominant function, prejudice will naturally occur as indomitable structures that we fail to locate because we cannot see them within our own identity structures, which, in learning II, are not seen but operated within. The persistence of the question of racism as a being racist is just one iteration of this. “I am not a racist!” indexes that norm whereby we expect such behaviors to exist according to an

Identity even as we do not bring into view the contexts that produce those prejudicial behaviors.

Only in Learning III does this training of contexts come into view and become open for alteration within oneself, but this is contingent on the willingness and capacity to let go of identity structures within oneself and within each other.

Bateson notes that Learning III is ultimately very difficult to achieve and is potentially dangerous since, when only done partially, it can lead to an instability. Indeed, this makes sense even in our basic example of racial structures: one notices the prejudicial contexts within yourself and, unless done fully through the release of Identity, one immediately loops them back within the context of Learning II: “Oh no, I’m a racist!” Such partial means of noticing one’s contextual and identification structures probably lead to the cycles of guilt, frustration, anger, annoyance, and avoidance that we perpetually move between within discussions of Identity politics. On a more personal level, these can be felt as frustrations towards one’s own insufficiencies even as you become aware of them as problems in your identity. In many ways, this accounts for the “I am sinful and corrupt” tone of much of religion, as exemplified the initial passage we quoted from Augustine’s Confessions. The sense of self-corruption is the birthing pains of a consciousness beginning to arrive at the capacity for Learning III. Of course religious

282 power has long taken advantage of this beginning, tying it back into a system of confession and self-identification that prevents full Learning III from occurring.

The manifestation of Learning III, in its full capacity, is found already in the releasing of this sense of identity, of oneself as limited to the set of contexts that have been attached to this sense of self. Thus, Bateson finishes his discussion of Learning III by noting the scalar experience it induces:

The resolution of contraries reveals a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes and relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction. That any of these can survive seems almost miraculous, but some are perhaps saved from being swept away on oceanic feeling by their ability to focus in on the minutiae of life. Every detail of the universe is seen as proposing a view of the whole (306).

Bateson has provided us here with another articulation of the tat tvam asi relationship by which we realize ourselves as a localization of the Whole Cosmos, but now clarifying how this new state of consciousness bears on the habits, prejudices, and beliefs that have been formulated under the structure of Learning II. Bateson’s personal fear of this level might relate to his own troubles in navigating it; such a fear is not necessary even if such a transition and practice of

Learning III does often lead to some measure of surprise and struggle. The struggle dissipates as one learns to surrender the sense of self that prevents you from viewing these prejudices and opening them up for accounting and, if necessary, alteration.

In the end, the condition of possibility of taking into account your prejudices is this release of identity. But this is not merely some nihilistic negation of oneself. If you really were this set of contexts, then this negation would be self-annihilation. But as we already saw in the previous chapter, it is in taking into account what we really are, measuring that location, that we see ourselves as the Cosmos itself. To release identity means to yield to the Whole, to the

Cosmos itself. It cannot be done without this transcendental relation not to some limited entity

283 but to the All itself (see chapters 5 &6). In fact, Learning III is not additional personal control of one’s habits since such control is nothing more than an artifact of the ego-structure, indulging in the ahamkara’s identification of itself as the doer. Instead, it is the identification with and surrender towards this larger being that permits Learning III to occur. Ascetic practices, including meditation, will only work to yield Learning III insofar as they provide this surrender.

The hierarchy presented within many religious texts are meant to note this difficulty and the need for surrender. For example, Gary Weber, a scientist and spiritual teacher, points out that the Bhagavad Gita appears to have the contradictory demand that that you give up your desires while also noting that you must inevitably act according to one’s nature: “Even a (wo)man of wisdom acts in accordance with their own nature. Beings follow their nature. What will restraint accomplish?” (32 – Gita 3:33). This seeming contradiction is navigated by the question of identity according to hierarchy. One has to navigate out of the limited identification built around

Learning II in order to arrive at Learning III:

“the senses are superior (to the body); the mind is superior to the senses; the intellect is superior to the mind, but what is superior to the intellect is the Self…Understanding that the Self is superior to the intellect [this structure of and capacity for contexts built from Learning II]…establish yourself in the Self by controlling each of these with the next higher one with the help of the mind” (33-34 – Gita 3:42-43).

Eknath Eawaren usefully glosses this last phrase as “Thus, knowing that which is supreme, let the Atman rule the ego” (109). One could likewise look to Psuedo-Dionysus’s “Hierarchy of

Angels” for a similar progression in Christianity that, if read according to an internal progression towards the divine, contains the same implication. Identification with the Cosmic All rather than indulging in the ego-structure naturally reworks one’s desires according to this higher point.

Suddenly the structure of these desires and wants become yielded up to Being itself and control is no longer necessary. The result may be that some of the structures built in Learning II remain

284 as relatively harmless structures for navigating our complex world. But those harmful ones that build disproportionate, disharmonious, and violent relations will naturally die away.

Nomologies of Conversion The nature of the event that makes this scaling-up possible requires setting aside of the I.

With this assumption in mind, we are now prepared to examine the primary terminologies whereby the experience is described. These terminologies are all functions of the scalar shift resulting in the overcoming or voiding of the “I” which attempts to cling to one scale.

Once he was thus prepared, Augustine experienced the shift. Here is his description of one stage of his conversion:

“Being thus admonished to return to myself, under your leadership I entered into my inmost being. This I could do, for you became my helper. I entered there, and by my soul’s eye, such as it was, I saw above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light. It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater light, as it were, of the same kind, as though that light would shine many, many times more bright, and by its great power fill the whole universe. Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it, O eternal truth, and true love, and beloved eternity! You are my God, and I sigh for you day and night! “When I first knew you, you took me up, so that I might see that there was something to see, but that I was not yet one able to see it. You beat back my feeble sight, sending down your beams most powerfully upon me, and I trembled with love and awe.” (7.10)

The sublime terminology of this passage is directly tied to the language of ascension and the discovery of a higher point of reference. One feels the Absolute as above, beyond, and saturating all of being as this higher scale necessitates the saturating but extending beyond one’s being.

We can see in this passage traces of the three terms that are used repeatedly to describe the experience: epiphany, ecstasy, and metanoia. The experience is an epiphany in the sense that

285 it unveils or manifests a larger entity—“epi” meaning “above” and the Greek “phania” meaning

“to appear,” usually in the sense of suddenly coming into view.45 We have become accustomed to referring to an epiphany as a kind of revelation of something not previously understood, but have not retained its relation to something “above.” However, this “above” relation follows from the fact that an epiphany occurs as an opening of understanding into a larger structure that was not previously seen. In epiphany we are suddenly able to discern a larger point of view, revealing structure and order (elements of kosmos) that were not seen before: Augustine naturally feels that this light is higher than he is as it breaks into his consciousness. Edgar Mitchell also includes this upward movement in his description of how we have all experienced this kind of intuition:

“Everyone experiences that potent, ethereal sense of ah-hah! and for a brief moment, they glimpse the larger structure of a problem in their life, resolve a conflict in their thinking, or glimpse the grand pattern of the universe itself” (68). Even when epiphany does not relate to the universe as a whole, the epiphany retains its sense of revelation based on a larger view. As we saw it discussed by Philip K. Dick, the surprise and the force of the epiphany originates from the opening up of a pattern (the larger information system) that was not apparent before. Cosmic consciousness takes this revelation of patterns and order to the level of the entirety of the All: it is a kind of epiphany in which the cosmic perspective suddenly appears. Vastness saturates as one arrives at this ultimate Overview Effect.

The experience produces ecstasy because of its relationship of the individual consciousness with a higher entity allows one to arrive at a perspective outside of oneself.

Suddenly, I can see beyond the perspective of this “I” into a larger whole, which seems to have its own order and being. It seems that the epiphany and the ecstasy go hand in hand: the in-

45 see Greek “epiphanes” in Perseus, esp LSJ definition 286 breaking of the higher produces a setting-aside that is an upwelling of love and awe (deos).

Augustine describes this as a light which exceeds himself because it makes him. Clarifying the nature of this relation, Huxley notes that "[d]irect knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego which is the barrier separating the "thou" from the "that"” (35). One has to become beside oneself in order for the larger structure to suddenly appear. As one puts one’s perspective on hold, being willing to leave it, considering the possibility that the larger view might shift or alter it, one is pulled beside oneself into the full experience of wonder. Again, Mitchell confirms this sense in his own experience: “[t]he ecstasy I experienced was somehow a natural response of my body to the overwhelming sense of unity” (68). The body thrives on the unity that is revealed when brought to a higher perspective because it can now open to and accept the larger structure which supports it. The modern sense of “ecstasy” emptied of this referent to the self’s reorientation nonetheless preserves the knowledge that ecstasy is tied to a surrender or overwhelming of the usual sense of self. Nonetheless, as Richard Doyle points out in discussing the rhetoric of psychedelics, ecstasy is itself a significant sign of the folding-inward, which might even be experienced in reading about a transcendent experience as the sign that you also have begun the involutionary movement; the rhetorical power is taking hold.46

In the sudden appearance which puts you beyond the self, a shift occurs. From this larger sense of order, one is able to reorient the “normal” but thoroughly illusory way of thinking. From the neuroscientific perspective, this is the shutting down of the DMN; in Bateson’s terminology this is the acquiring of Learning III. Each of these indicate a significant shift in the one’s way of functioning and the primary focus and structure of one’s attention. The Greek term for this shift

46 See Darwin’s Pharmacy, 209. 287 is metanoia, meaning a change or alteration of mind. This term, which is well-known by Biblical scholars, is cited by both Huxley and Mitchell to suggest that the experience cannot be complete without some shift, some change in how one usually thinks about the world.47 For Augustine, it was the conversion that changed his entire worldview, his actions, his being, his thoughts, and his priorities. This is the greatest and most important element of cosmic consciousness: it leaves one changed from the perspectival shift. After the higher view, I no longer view my normal world the same. In this way, the experience of cosmic consciousness is a “disciplining of consciousness” as Huxley says (P. Phil. 72). Indeed, as the critic of Bucke noted, cosmic consciousness is a spiritual conversion, which is one of the ways biblical scholars have attempted to translate metanoia.48 But the nature of conversion is a shifting of one’s priorities away from the lower ones in favor of the priorities revealed by the larger pattern and structure.

All three of these have to occur in some measure in the experience of cosmic consciousness. One has to be infected by it, implicated in it, and, after the fact, changed by it.

The metanoia is the persistence of this intoxicating element, which results in a new orientation once the experience of cosmic consciousness has worked itself into our perspective. Thus,

Huxley says that "we, as separate individuals, must not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it” (73). Because it is the revelation of a larger structure, which is necessarily larger than the one we normally operate under, we do not invoke the view, even as we see it, but the view must impose on us and overwhelm our usual perspective. We must be "effaced from effacement."49 This detachment from the identification with one’s perspective is already the

47 Huxley P. Phil 72; Mitchell Way of the Explorer 66. 48 The King James Version translates metanoia as “repent,” which unfortunately loses the sense of inner transformation, makes the process sound more active (I must repent verses I experienced a change of mind), and ties the change to an economy of definable sins. 49 Al Ghazzali, quoted in Huxley 73 288 opening to that perspective, even in its defined, limited, and predisposed sense. As indicated earlier, even brain studies have noted that a bulk of advanced processing happens outside of the sliver of consciousness we claim as mine; this change is thus an alteration of one’s reference point even to these thoughts that appear.50 As the teacher of Yogananda once described it, “so deep was his identity with Sri Ramakrishna that Master Mahasaya no longer considered his thoughts as his own” (Autobiography 87).

These three elements may appear supernatural, particularly since they have a long history of being described in relation to the intoxication of Gods and the supernatural conversion of a soul which must now bow before the deity that has revealed itself. But, even outside of the religious context under which Augustine operates, we can consider these elements stripped of the religious overtones, if only to realize that what those religious overtones may have indicated. If we read Augustine generously, we see that this bowing down is always a humility made possible by the self-reflecting surrender. As we discussed in chapter 1, the bowing down is never to a limited entity (priest, king, nation, etc.). Likewise, for this change in view to result in a metanoia—as true shift in the way you’re able to be in the world—the alteration must extend beyond a purely mental or cognitive shift. For this reason, the ecstatic states experienced in glimpsing the beyond-egoic consciousness is often articulated in terms of a kind of death and rebirth. While Christianity has preserved this sense of death and rebirth in the rite of baptism, it has been rearticulated in a more direct manner as the concept of “ego-death” by psychologist

Walter Pahnke as well as Timothy Leary and Huxley.51 Again, the tie here is the reincorporation

50 As discussed in Weber, “What ‘no thoughts’ mean: Three different kinds of thoughts”, the implication of the brain studies cited above is that there are three kinds of thoughts: those that are self-referential and essentially useless, those advanced planning capacities of the TPN, and the high-functioning problem solving that happens outside of our usual awareness. Metanoia will affect the frequency and power of the first kind but allow more space for the others. Scale itself is a function of these latter two. 51 Walter N. Pahnke, “The Psychedelic Mystical Experience in the Human Encounter with Death.” See also Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy especially the discussion of ego-death and the directing of attention on the nature of the self (112). 289 of a religious trope into an experience that does not need the religious articulation, but to ignore this religious trope is to neglect the long history of attempts to articulate these experiences. Thus,

“ego-death” is nothing more than an rearticulation of Jesus’ “he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Indeed, we can see how appropriate this term is given our discussion of the ego-structures in chapter 3.

However direct and accurate the articulation, the morbid and fearful nature of speaking of the experience as a kind of “death” makes the opening to the fullness of cosmos appear unsavory. Thus, it will be useful to consider three more positive terms that are widely associated the kind of transformative experience at hand here: love, bliss, and samadhi. For Edgar Mitchell, it was the last of these terms that permitted him to articulate his experience in space as a mystical experience (see 143). The term samadhi is particularly relevant for our purposes because it highlights the positive, unifying aspect of what might otherwise feel like a loss or death. The root

“sam” means “to bring together” and “dhi” indicates a putting together, holding, or establishing.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff thus glosses the definition as a “bringing together of that which is improperly separated” (298). Samadhi expresses as what we call ecstasy but only because the

“self” that you are pushed beyond is the egoic, limited self bound to one limited scale. But samadhi highlights that this beyond of self is actually a unifying with a larger aspect of your being, more appropriately designated as the self experienced through being saturated in, and inseperable from, the All. Because this All exceeds the limits of one’s typical awareness—and exceeds rational awareness entirely—it feels like a pulling-away, an emptiness, a beyond overwhelming one’s experience. But this is just the feel of the usual ego, invested and accustomed to lower-scale concerns, losing its sense of absoluteness.

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The emotional potency of the identification with the Whole might therefore be articulated in the positive Upanishadic counterpart to ecstasy: bliss or, in Sanskrit, ananda. This bliss is what one feels when the hold on the self is given up to the Self: this larger perspective whereby the excessive and unreasonable emotional investment granted to one’s worries and concerns might dissolve into the wholeness of the larger perspective. When studied, the ananda is actually itself a kind of measure of the degree to which one has truly allowed the reality of the scalar vastness to saturate one’s being through a surrender of the usual “I” perspective. Thus, the Ribhu

Gita uses ananda as a particular reference point via the beautiful mantra: “anandam paramam manam idam drysam na kincana” (bliss is the ultimate measure, this which is visible is nothing at all). One has to repeatedly feel the subsumption of this reality here and now by this far greater vastness whereby all of these concerns dissolve into a blissful unity. Such texts are written in chant form as a technology for overwhelming the ego-structure’s own limitation and narrative, permitting the in-breaking of the larger perspective and a shift away from the usual attachment to objects.

A similar articulation is found in the Christian meditative practice articulated in the

Cloud of Unknowing. As in Augustine’s description of his conversion, in this text we find that the everlasting love of God is the equivalent of the Upanishadic bliss. The love is granted and felt in relation not to any object of knowledge but to that which exceeds the knowledge: the great force of unknowing. This beyond of unknowing already fits with the implication of the term

“All” or “infinite” which must exceed the one taking referent, yielding this identification with the “I” of knowledge and finding oneself merged with this Whole of the divine. Love here is useful because it captures the wholly positive sense that this giving to the vast entails: the surrender is an adoration, a passionate, caring for the Whole devoid of the content of knowing—

291 since any knowing implies a scalar perception less than the Whole. The result of this yielding is a love that pierces the affections: “then perhaps he may touch you with a ray of his divine light which will pierce the cloud of unknowing between you and him [read: self and Self or “I” and

All]. He will let you glimpse something of the ineffable secrets of his divine wisdom and your affection will seem on fire with his love” (74). This love overwhelms the normal ego-structure by which you organize reality. In both the Upanishadic and Christian traditions, this love or bliss is not only the simplest guide and practice but also the force that burns away the ties to the lower scale investments. Hence, in the Cloud we read that “the work of love will eventually heal them totally” (75).

We have to note, however, that the condition for this transformation to function is still the surrender of the “I” perspective whereby the infinite scaling up might function. We must not forget that without the loss of the egoic view which claims its perspective as absolutely essential, the ecstasy cannot give way to bliss or love of the sort felt in the union, samadhi. Scale teaches us that this is more a shift than a loss. Thus, a common misunderstanding when speaking of love or bliss is that it is something to be held to or felt by you—as an egoic self. We can see this confusion in the way the Upanishadic ananda was picked up and popularized by Joseph

Campbell through the maxim “follow your bliss.” But this bliss, by definition, cannot be “yours” as a limited consciousness. Not a limited being of what is immediately before me, but the extended being of the whole cosmos. Only when I realize that I am not this, but that—the Whole

Cosmos—does this form of bliss and love arrive.

Inoculating the Divine Our examination of resistances suggests that the view, even if felt as epiphany and a moment of ecstasy, does not seem enough to produce the metanoia. There are probably few

292 people left on this planet who have not seen the view of the earth from space. How many of us, in seeing this photo, experience the cosmic shift as Edgar Mitchell did? Mitchell himself seems to acknowledge this problem when he notes that we have all experienced epiphanies to a lesser degree (see 68, quoted above). Even if we do not associate it with any larger perspective or deity, we do feel moments in which a larger pattern reveals itself. But rarely, it seems, do these larger perspectives result in a metanoia, in which our whole being seems to shift and we are left irrevocably changed and reoriented by the experience.

To understand why we might not experience the power of the scalar relation, we have to explore the way these images have circulated and the rhetorical conditions under which they have been experienced. We must examine our own approach and our own reactions to it. If the experience only manifests when we ourselves are overtaken by the larger view, when, in

Huxley’s terms, we are thought by it and reoriented in the process, then making the higher perspective more everyday may paradoxically makes it more difficult to experience. If cosmic consciousness entails a reorientation or even surrender of what we have known, the experience may be averted or even destroyed if we think we know what the experience entails. “Yes, I’ve seen that—it’s the earth from space. What’s the big deal?”

This kind of familiarity effectively inoculates us from experiencing cosmic consciousness.52 As long as we think we know what the image of the earth is, as long as we are accustomed to its shape, as long as we think it is nothing significant, we will not be open to

52 After writing this section, I became aware of a whole set of communication theory using this same metaphor of inoculation, developed initially by W.J. McGuire (“The effectiveness of supportive and refutational defenses in immunizing defenses.”). This literature uses inoculation in the proper, positive sense: purposefully inoculating individuals against harmful kinds of discourse (e.g. Pfau, Van Bockern, and Kang use the theory to study building resistance to smoking ads among teens), while I am using it here in a kind of negative sense: we want to be infected by these structures that assist us in directing our attention in such important ways. 293 considering what the image actually entails. We will not follow through on the scalar relationship. We will not perform the movement for ourselves. We will not place ourselves on the line, turning the scalar relation on ourselves, so that the reorientation includes those parts of us that fail to comprehend it because they are used to operating on a different scale. The increasing prevalence of scalar imagery, the more frequent reminders of our interconnectedness, and the more persistent sense that we are missing something when we stay on this scale—these all can push us to the sublime. But these elements can also seem to promote a sublime inoculation, so much so that we can deny, with more force than ever, the possibility of the transcendent even as we demonstrate its efficacy daily.

In many ways, the inoculation occurs through a conceptualization of the elements that produce cosmic consciousness. An intellectual examination, disconnected from the personal implication into the scalar relation, produces an empty articulation of the significance of the transcendent without being able to understand how it functions. Ecology has provided us with the most prevalent and persistent example: one can intellectually and personally know that we belong to this larger embedded structure without losing oneself in it. Yet when we do not pursue the scalar relation through the full loop, it remains incomplete. We then risk reproducing the position the scalar relation undoes: we become outsiders to the very relation which would imply that we are part of a larger whole. In other words, if we do not include ourselves in the whole and continue to pretend that we are somehow outside of it, we are reproducing the view from nowhere and confusing the true view from everywhere enacted by the scalar shift.

Logically, I can speak of how we are all part of the same planet and therefore have some kind of obligation to it. Yet, in the very act, I can fail to see the power in the view itself and fail to truly allow the scalar relation rework how I live and view my existence. In relation to ecology, we are

294 not speaking here of those who do not comprehend their role in a larger environment but those who proclaim to understand this and invoke it socially, habitually, insistently—even judgmentally—without being willing to take on the possibility of scaling all the way, placing oneself on the line, experiencing the self itself as ecological.

We can see this failure in recent attempts to strip environmentalism of any “spiritual” element as well as the scorn for the “Deep Ecologists” who tried to articulate environmental sentiment in terms of wholeness.53 The resistance has become something of a tick among ecologists who will readily declare that they are not tree huggers or hippies.54 It is also evidenced by the persistent resistance to the Gaia hypothesis.55 But without the element of an invasive unity which is realized when one personally realizes your place in a larger whole, environmentalism is left with nothing but a series of empty intellectual sentiments and self-indulging social obligations and a mechanical relation to an ever larger system. I can feel better about myself because I take care of the earth, despise those who do not, and meanwhile never truly understand the unity entailed by ecology. In doing so, we naturally lead ourselves into those aspects of environmentalism easily drawn into the very system built to neglect or even take advantage of this larger whole.56 The situation is strikingly similar to the problem that Huxley notes occurs when religious practitioners fail to move beyond a merely intellectual or social relationship to the rituals they routinely practice and the beliefs they insistently rehearse: when “men and women make practical applications of a merely intellectual and unrealized theory that all is God and God is all,” they distort, trivialize, and fail to understand the importance of the practices they are

53 See, for example, Bennett, Michael. “From Wide Open Spaces to Metropolitan Places The Urban Challenge to Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8.1 (2001): 31–52. Web. 54 This sentiment is often expressed in popular presentations of various forms of ecological work. A good sampling of these invocations can be found in DeLoach, Bruner, and Gossett, “An Analysis of the ‘tree-hugger’ Label” 55 For a recent and thorough examination of this resistance to Gaia theory see Toby Tyrrell, On Gaia: A critical investigation of the relationship between life and earth. 56 See, for example, the idea of ecosystem services discussed in the Preface. 295 involved in (P. Phil 70). Ecology, as the process of applying the cosmic insight of wholeness to our own relationship with the world, is not, nor does it ever need to be, a series of ritualistic motions resembling religious practices. But to strip ecology of the cosmic insight is to strip it of its transformative element and to welcome an inoculation to the very kinds of changes its movement to a larger whole implies.

Today, this cosmic inoculation is the primary obstacle to our ability to see and feel our place in cosmos. We do not simply need to see more or better, but in a qualitatively different fashion; we need to be willing and able to really spend time contemplating these relations while clearing away via examination our own prejudices about them. Once we take seriously that these relationships have to be, in some way, performed and dwelt on—that a mere glimpse is not enough, even if the experience manifests as an cosmic glimpse—then perhaps we can open ourselves to experimenting with the scalar movement, allowing our consciousness to implicate itself in the relation. To do so, the personal reference point, must, at least for a moment, disappear, to allow the new scale to come into view.

Dwelling with Oneself For such scalar persuasion to manifest, it must be dwelt with as the encountering of one’s own prejudices, otherwise those predispositions will once again hide themselves in the unexamined, the unmeasured. These scalar encounters are always tending towards normalization, towards a becoming clear and contained object. So we have to stay with them, as they appear to consist within us in these layers. I am atoms and cells and Earth and Cosmos.

The term “dwell” invokes the deeper sense by which Martin Heidegger declared dwelling as essential to our being in the world, not as the active process of a building, but as the passive process of learning to be by letting be. Heidegger notes the resonance between the etymological

296 roots of “dwelling” which implies that we remain, that we stay in place and another meaning: “to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace.”57 This remaining in peace implies that

“we leave something beforehand in its own nature,” that is, we empty ourselves of these prior thoughts, contents, and investments so that being might itself emerge apart from our desire to intervene. The intervention itself is the contrary nature of the technological impulse to enframe, the Gestell, whereby we attempt to capture that reality and make it be a particular thing.58 But in dwelling we do not intervene, we do not enframe but we let-be so as to preserve within us the fundamental peace of being: “the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving” (147).

We want to say that scale enframes this being in another way, by providing this schematic that appears to impose a structure on reality. That signifier “10 nanometers” seems to hold the image to an enframed form, the meter. To the contrary, the scalar notation does not hold the image to the meter, it holds ourselves to it, forcing us to face the ways in which we have already found ourselves in our taking stock of phenomena. In doing so, we are forced to acknowledge the variability of presentation, the layers of phenomena, and the role of a position, resolution, and structure for determining how the world appears. The scale does not lock in place but force us to acknowledge our tie to the variability of things. Doing so does not ties us to the measure so much as let us take it into account and dwell more fully with the apparatus by which we navigate this world.

In a simpler manner, Adi Sankara reinserts into this mode of dwelling a necessary doing that reminds us that this is a self-directed kind of rhetoric, which directs our attention to a task to

57 “Being, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 147. 58 See “The Question Concerning Technology”, discussed in Chapter 2 above. 297 be performed with ourselves: “sickness is not cured by saying ‘Medicine’ but by drinking it.”59

These experiences have to be gone through so that the resistances to the dropping away of the “I” necessary for scaling is able to persistently be performed. Not merely seen or watched, but turned to. As Augustine was turned back to himself, both he and Sankara then declare our need to further turn ourselves to the task of dwelling on this relation beyond a mere declaration or articulation: “An eloquent voice, a stream of words, skill in explaining the teaching; and learning of the learned, these bring enjoyment but not freedom,” says Sankara. “A net of words is a great forest where the fancy wanders therefore the reality of the Self is to be strenuously learned from the knower of that reality” (v. 347). As the one-who-scales, examining scale is one means of diving into this “knower of that reality”. Thus, Augustine reasserts that we must find this part within, to “lay hold on it within yourself” (15). Likewise, Sankara declares sees this ability as the cultivation of the discernment between self (the parts my ego claims) and Self (this All that exceeds these egoic limits) is itself the crown jewel that guides one to the change necessary for dwelling in peace.

Performed, practiced and arrived at in its full form, Cosmic consciousness leaves us with a powerful and explicit desire to pursue the fullness of that perspective simply because we realize that this mere glimpse of a higher reality has not quite completed a full reorientation of that new perspective. The complexity of spiritual practices may arise from the attempt to continue the pursuit of the transcendent point, as a means of preparation. Sankara, for instance, articulates a series of rites and preparations whereby one is able to relinquish the inhibiting factors preventing one from discrimating between self and Self.60 The changing perspective entailed by cosmic consciousness requires a tremendous reassessment of one’s own position and

59 Verse 62, Charles Johnston translation. Cf Chaitanya translation, 90. 60 See verses 16-34. 298 a revisiting of the relation so that the habits of the mind, which is used to operating on a lower scale, are able to be retrained in relation to this larger perspective. For Bucke, one experience of cosmic consciousness was enough for a significant shift to occur, but for most people, our small epiphanies and ecstasies are not enough to form a sufficiently clear sense of the transcendental relation. Even for Bucke, as Underhill points out, the glimpse of cosmic consciousness is not enough to retrain the whole on one’s being to reorient itself to this new view.61 If we take the open rather than dogmatic position to spiritual articulations of this larger view, we could reconsider various kinds of meditative practices as attempts to focus the mind in such a way that it can more fully absorb this relation to the transcendent point. These are methods of addressing our own resistances, inward-looking means of reconfiguring ourselves to become more comfortable with the scalar shift whereby we lose sight of ourselves. Once fully performed, the mind can become comfortable with the disappearance of the personal point of view. As per one of our central scalar insights—that higher scales do not erase lower scales—the body will continue to function as it needs for sustenance and for society but without the incredible suffering, hatred, and antagonism created when we identify ourselves with this scale, separate and apart from the Whole.

Given the stagnant and tedious nature of so much that is said for or against the transcendent, it is refreshing to consider that all that we need to begin to understand the Cosmos is to really look and let ourselves slowly feel the shift in perspective. This is a rhetorical practice with which we can experiment. The image of the earth from space, as a prime example, is already here before us, declaring that we are part of something larger. But we must be willing to let it saturate us, teach us itself how this higher reference might induce in us a shift. All

61 Underhill, Mysticism, 193. 299 techniques fade before simply dwelling with the relation. Lest we make it too complicated, the

Cloud of Unknowing reminds us that “techniques for controlling your thoughts are better learned from God through experience than from any man in this life” (77). In the end, metanoia comes without the complicated structures under which we usually try to reason our way towards understanding and change. This simple surrender can be repeated, beyond the complexity of content because all content re-asserts the egoic, lower-scale perception that keeps you from experiencing the awesome power of the vast All. Instead, we must dwell with the vast and let it be so being can emerge whole. No scholarly apparatus necessary, although it may be absolutely necessary for scholarship to proceed. In the words of the Ribhu Gita: “Even a single line from a chapter, if meditated upon with one’s heart and mind, will ensure release from worldly bondage.

To the one who is tired of traditional learning and who is quiescent, this knowledge may be imparted without hesitation.”62 There is nothing more to do but to suspend your judgment, look past what you think you know about it, and let yourself be implicated in the reality by which all of this exists in the eyes of Cosmos.

62 Ribhu Gita 50.71 (p 729) 300

Chapter V: The Divine Cosmos

Standing by the lake on a jump-or-think basis, the very first spontaneous question coming to mind was, "If you put aside everything you've ever been asked to believe and have recourse only to your own experiences do you have any conviction arising from those experiences which either discards or must assume an a priori greater intellect than the intellect of man?" The answer was swift and positive. Experience had clearly demonstrated an a priori anticipatory and only intellectually apprehendable orderliness of interactive principles operating in the universe into which we are born. - Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth Catalog Fall 1968

"Though deeply rooted you are held by earth Mount, life your summit to the stars in strength. A kindred force from the heights of things is calling, Mind, making you the bound twixt hell and heaven." - Giordano Bruno, “To his Own Spirit”1

A Science of Everything Out on the edge of the solar system the disembodied voice of Carl Sagan points to the pale blue dot of the earth and, with that voice soaked with homey wisdom, demands that we take into account the vastness that dwarfs even the largeness of the planet. Television radio waves quickly surpass the Voyager spacecraft where the golden disc—one of Sagan’s prized projects— soars out into space, awaiting discovery. Within some of these waves lie a thousand iterations of

Sagan’s opening lines of Cosmos2:

"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."

1 In Cause, Principle, Unity, 54-55. 2 For sake of clarity, I will refer to the two iterations of Cosmos according to the host who also served as its primary spokesperson in justifying and speaking about the show: Sagan’s Cosmos (Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 1980) and Tyson’s Cosmos (Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, 2014) 301

At the edge of the observable universe Niel Degrasse Tyson takes his place next to Sagan, his unashamed idol, to take us once again through the Cosmic Calendar, this time enhanced by all the CGI a big budget can muster a decade and a half into the 21st century. Despite all the new flashy footage in this 2014 version of Cosmos, he retains the first five-minute clip from Sagan’s original performance, a moment of sincerity that has left its traces in the depths of a culture that had, when the original series premiered in 1980, already passed beyond the excitement of the space race and had already seen Star Wars and over a decade of Star Trek. Despite the waning budget for actual space travel and this increasing sense that space travel was mostly a device for science fiction, the original Cosmos somehow reinvigorated a sense of wonder for the universe, for science, and for space travel. The fact that a sequel series would be made, twenty four years after the original aired, with the backing of Fox Studios, only affirms its importance for instilling a sense of wonder.

And yet this opening line remains a strange statement. How do we comprehend the

Cosmos if defined in this way? To what do these words refer? Or, to look at this phrase in another light, granting legitimacy to this word “all,” what are these words meant to induce in us such that suddenly this vast Cosmos swallows up all that we know in its combustive capacity to force a consciousness to the highest scale of being? We exist here, in this room, with this every day existence, with our everyday affairs always in front of us, occupying our time and attention.

All of this, says Sagan, is Cosmos. But so is everything else. All of it, throughout time and space.

In Cosmos we get two basic visions and images that are meant to help us comprehend what we might mean when we say Cosmos is the All, the Everything. One is a projection through time: the cosmic calendar, which splits the known timetable of the universe (currently

13.8 billion years) into twelve months, with the current moment on the last second of December

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31st. From this view, the entirety of human history happens in the last eight seconds. The other vision is the projection through space: the glimpse of the gathering of galaxies which are strewn across a black expanse so vast that they themselves look like large oddly shaped stars. This view is not what we see when we see the stars at night, but many orders of magnitude greater: each little swirl is itself billions of stars spinning around together. This takes us to the edge of the

“observable universe,” a term introduced by Tyson in the new iteration of Cosmos, where light simply has not had enough time to travel further. But the limit of this calendar or this observable universe are deceptively encompassing, as if there is a definitive border. Perhaps these are the limits, but they are not edges of the sort we usually understand; both Sagan and Tyson do not let us forget that, from these perspectives, all that we will ever know shrinks before the vastness of this expanse so that it is not even discernible without returning to a smaller scale.

But what is it that we are seeing in these images? What is it that we are coming to understand? How and to what do these pictures and images mean to refer? How do these words mean to point to a thing, as a thing in a referential fashion? If language is a map of reality how could these words and images map the cosmos when they only serve to point us to all of it, in its vast incomprehensible expanse? The map itself expands, is lost in the reorientation as this term

"All" captures more and more. The calendar and the observable universe thus become useful forms synonymous with the All of Cosmos, allowing us a starting point on which to sketch a chart, capable of being modified and expanded as we learn more of what the “All” might include.

But what is it that we are charting?

Does this ambiguity simply mean that we must consider this definition of Cosmos to be

“vague”? This is a handy way to dismiss the power of Sagan’s definition. “All,” we could suppose, is an empty signifier playing a simple trick, pretending it signifies when it does not. We

303 might then be tempted to dismiss the word “cosmos” as a deceptive, layered term of vagueness, claiming for science the ambiguity of a word which merely points to the other thing that might have been excluded. On the other hand, we can consider, in an experiment with scale, a legitimate rhetorical function that is born out of this very ambiguity, the point at which the All becomes the site of a powerful implication, poised right on the edge of the border of signified and significance. Indeed, this question of vastness, easily dismissed as vagueness, launches us into the recognizable theological problem but in a secular, scientific context: the problem of the

All and the One, a problem familiar in theology and philosophy through the poorly signifying terms the "infinite," the "absolute," and the "universal." If we are not going to dismiss these terms as vague we might say that these terms are powerful rhetorical devices whose power is found in their including, from the outset, an excess of content. The terms themselves already have wrapped within them a paradox: anything to which the word "infinite" would refer to must immediately exceed the term's referent to include something else besides the current object. One will never quite reach the edges of the Infinite, even with your observations and calendars.

And what do we do here when a great man of science, which, we have been told, is a rigorous skeptical empiricism devoted to material reality--what are we to do when a champion of science invokes this vast term which expands even as you reach the edge of its potential to signify? Is there something in this larger scale vision that launches us into these uncertain and ambiguous possibilities which science itself, as a mapping endeavor, admits into its scope?

Whatever the vision of a grander scale—whether the view from an airplane described in Frank

White’s Overview Effect, the view from space as first popularized by the Blue Marble photo, a view from the edge of the solar system as described in Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot monologue, or a view from the edge of the Observable Universe as Tyson takes us in the new

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Cosmos—we find ourselves at this impasse. On the one hand, we can lose ourselves in the vastness, feeling our known categories dissolve and our mental models burst at the seams as this

“All” captures, morphs, and expands everything we know. Here, language no longer is taken as a referent, but a kind of induction towards an existence beyond itself, best captured by that favorite word of the mystics: the ineffable. On the other hand, we can look away for a moment, reorient ourselves back to limited here and now, and refuse this vastness as mere vagueness—as a signifier that has failed to capture any referent at all, a map whose lines merely gesture off the page. Here, we can now provide a new name and narrative for our view—a name that delimits this newfound vastness—and once again place this view comfortably within our sense of the objective, tangible reality and thus primed to be mapped: here are the limits, the calendar, the observable universe. Perhaps then, even, we can dismiss the view as a mere simulacrum, a model, a mapping that attempts to totalize its own tracing. And yet, at the moment we do so, we have not viewed scale at all, have not been willing to face the perceptual shift that is the movement up and out, to the larger and the largest.

We can thus approach scale once more from this question of scope, as a means of navigating the interpretive uncertainty we encounter when opening up a wider view of things. To change scale is in some way a change in scope, to provide a limit in space upon which an inquiry will be focused. In defining Cosmos as the All, Carl Sagan would have us define our object of inquiry as large as possible. This is a fundamental action performed by scaling: the very object of inquiry has shifted. We had before these terms and concepts, these ways of organizing the world and phenomenon, these narratives guiding us through their shape and form. On the same scale, these objects of inquiry remain largely the same shape. But when we expand or contract the scale, change the range of the limit on which we are looking, we suddenly find that the objects

305 have shifted, and that perhaps they are not objects at all. What we already knew about X has been revealed to exist in a new light, or not even be discernible at all. We have become so accustomed to this shift that we speak of it casually: yes, our bodies are made of cells, those cells of atoms. Yes, our world is made of living beings, landmasses, and oceans. But the need to consider these together is not immediately obvious nor necessary. While mysticism has always pointed to this inclusion of the All, science demands that we rigorously dissect the content of this

All according to its relation to different delimiting scopes. Nonetheless, as Sagan already demonstrates, this delimiting of science only functions properly if it admits first the possibility of including everything it finds.

Of course science has expressed unending unease in trying to deal with the emotional, spiritual, abstract, philosophical, or mystical. Yet the frontiers of science already function according to this opening, to admission that as long as something is, it might be included in the scope of science. However much the popular image of science would have us think otherwise, the scope of science includes the difficult and emotionally ridden rhetoric that drives millions of scientists to wonder. It is no surprise then, that, for the study of science, Sagan already invokes the ancient tropes associated with the sublime contemplation of the expanse of the universe.

Over the sound of the waves, his hair blowing in the wind, Carl Sagan continues:

“Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice a faint sensation, as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries. The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.” (Cosmos ep. 1)

When considered in its vastness, this inquiry strikes rhetorically at something deep, some question or inkling of a question or comprehension “beyond” not only what we already know but the kind of knowledge we usually engage in. This inkling is not coincidental, however, but

306 central to the kind of inquiry Sagan proposes: when we open the scope of inquiry up to a broader view, we are forced into revising what we are inquiring into, and who is inquiring.

This movement up the scale prompts wonder as it overwhelms our minds by providing more and more, an ever growing wealth of detail even as the expanse to be detailed extends to the edges of the observable universe. There is something startling in an inquiry which would seek to study together what appears separate by placing them within the same scope of inquiry.

We saw the wonder of unity already in relation to the Blue Marble photo; here, the vision truly manifests as an overwhelming wonder when we arrive at the highest scale, the vast limits of the

All. As we continue to move away from our normal experience, expanding the scope further and further, what we see from below is dissolved, again and again. Normal human understanding is shifted. At the highest point which admits all potential additions, what do we then arrive at?

Humans have long imagined this movement but have struggled to articulate the relation. Most importantly, the tie and relation between the world of objects and the great viewpoint, which would dissolve those objects in a larger unity—whether society or the kingdom of God—has long been difficult to understand. Now science has found itself, in a quest to examine the universe empirically, with a description of vastness that retains a reference, via a scalar indicator, to the world that we experience every day.

In the vastness, then, Cosmos becomes the entity which groups, forms together, whatever may be presented. We do not, however, understand what this term might entail, how it might function as a meaningful signifier which will let us understand our place within it. Scaling up can institute this kind of doubt: a palpable sense that what we thought we understood has now been replaced by something unknown, something beyond what we see. Naming it or measuring it does not capture it but merely points to it. We have to understand the relation between the vastness

307 and what it is to be here. We cannot neglect, nor does Sagan fail to rhetorically profit from, the incredible resonance between these scientific terms of vastness and the classic terms of spirituality. The deceptive concreteness of mathematical and physical descriptions of Cosmos may appear strikingly different from the classic ideas about gods and God. Nonetheless, even as this all-encompassing vastness articulated as Cosmos presses our understanding to new heights and expanses, we must also assume that the same has been done with the grand accumulation of spiritual knowledge, writing, and practices which bear a striking similarity to the view of

Cosmos. We can thus posit here again our experimental procedure: in the grand cloud of unknowing produced by our movement across scales, we must suspend our supposed knowledge of what both science and religion seeks. At the same time, scaling up reveals not discontinuity but continuity. Likewise, in suspending our understanding we can take both terminologies and possibilities together: the scientific study of Cosmos with the scalar aspects of spirituality so that, put together, each can bring us to a new understanding that, however apparently divided, was present all along.

Scope and Scale For pragmatic purposes we limit the range of any study according to particular criteria.

Scale bears a special relation to this limiting of inquiry since its existence arises from purely spatial criteria.3 That is, scale limits an inquiry according to a particular range in size, according to the usual entities able to be discerned and considered when examining that physical expanse.

Thus, we speak of the “nanoscale” as one scope and the “global scale” as another, each involving different ranges under which we organize the inclusion of material for study.

3 As with the rest of this project, we’re leaving aside temporal aspects, although most of the analysis in this chapter applies equally to time scales. 308

How do we arrive at this limiting scheme? With no apparatus, we find ourselves looking out in the world and attempting to understand what is there. Within normal perception, we do not have any particular need to scale since most things are relatively within reach. However, once you start to include more and more into the scope of the inquiry, say for the purposes of managing a large estate or a city, we suddenly need to speak of a larger range of inquiry. As soon as we posit a higher point, the city or the estate, we posit for ourselves a range of inclusion. The curious thing about this range is that it contains a higher category—the city—that in itself is not the entity of study. Rather, the people, interactions, buildings, transactions, conditions, etc within the borders of this entity “city” are the topic of study. The term “city” merely indicates these interactions within a particular range, as the scope of the interactions to be examined. Everything within the borders of the delimited space become relevant objects of inquiry. To speak of the city is to speak of the structure of all of these interactions together, yet the city-itself is not really any one of those interactions. Nonetheless, in seeing all these interactions together, we find ourselves speaking of the city—its well-being, its structure, its status, its growth, etc. The tendency to do so becomes marked when one then enlarges the scope of consideration again, as we inevitably do in the encounter of another city and then a state, then the interactions between States, and then the whole globalized world. Each expansion of range does not erase the previous limit since limits are largely set according to the ease by which the inquiry can be undertaken. To study the interactions within a city involves a different set of interactions that does not necessarily apply in the same way to the interactions between cities, and likewise in states.

We have found ourselves with the example of the city because it is already present there for us within human experience. It is no surprise that much thought about scale begins in this way, in thinking about human social organization, beginning with the family, estate, or city and

309 moving upwards from there. Both science and mysticism share a different approach, however, that implicitly notes that an error in scale has already taken place in our move from the person to the city to the state to the globe. That is, the criteria for limitation has brought with it an addition, unacknowledged criteria: the human. The result of this inclusion is that we find ourselves able to speak of the scaling of globalization and the scaling of ecology as two separate kinds of scale.

One question we find in considering scope and scale is thus, is it possible to scale in these parallel ways?

Our answer has to be no, for some quite important reasons that become apparent when we look at two other ways into scale. First, mystical scale begins when one posits already a highest point that includes everything. We will examine some differences in how this “everything” is articulated later in this chapter, but for now we can note that the divine point is higher in scale and, in some way, takes everything into account. Thus, mystics scale by noting a point where the criteria for limiting the scope of inquiry is not a limitation at all: it is simply the All. God is the highest, the creator and caretaker of all creation. One gets a sense of scale from the presence of the world here in relation to the All of the divine—as we have already discussed as the scales of

Atman and Brahman, the Microcosm and the Macrocosm. For the mystic, the microcosm includes all of the objects we live among, all of our concerns, all things living and nonliving, all cities and human constructs, and all the interactions among all of these things. The microcosm is all of these things while the macrocosm is all of these things as seen within and from the

Absolute.

Science, our second alternative to encountering scale and scope, does not find itself with much of a need to scale until it accumulates enough objects to start to consider them in such large quantities or divisions that it needs to note the range of observation. To some small degree,

310 such consideration probably occurred in relation to the stars, but even then the matter was not about scope but about distance. Indeed, given the lack of understanding of even the size of the

Earth, it would be exceedingly difficult to consider studying all of the various objects on the

Earth in relation to each other. Science could consider packs and herds, hives of ants and bees, flocks of birds, and groups of fish, but in doing so does not have any particular need to note the limit of its range of inquiry, nor expand that limit, since that limit was largely confined to the boundaries of normal human perception and capacities for examination. That is, empiricism, as the study of sense experience, already seemed to provide that limit until we found means of expanding what we included within the realm of sense-experience. Without attending too closely to the historical dimensions of this development, which could occupy a book in itself, it will be useful in our phenomenological consideration to note that a few technological developments permitted a shift in the scoping of science. Most apparent, perhaps, is the printing press and the circulation of results, which permitted a kind of cataloging and accumulation of observation that could extend to large groups of organisms and places. At some point, the conception of a larger population or species starts to take on new meaning, as a larger entity limited, as we saw in the case of the city, by an additional criteria. However, once you have these larger entities (species, population, geological formations), a shift in thought can occur: you can start to consider their relationship on a whole different scale. Rather than speak of a giraffe interacting with a tree, you speak of these species of giraffe interacting with the larger fauna of the savanna. This switch might seem to be minor but in terms of scale the difference is tremendous. Considering the species alone is to provide a criteria that will include all of that species, without any limit to size.

As long as there is another homo sapiens, we can add them to the list. When we drop that criteria by which we define a set of like things together (a population, a kind of coast formation, a

311 species) and begin to relate these together, we have left ourselves with a spatial criteria for designating the relation between things. The suggestion is that we ought to include all things within a particular size range as a significant domain of relations not limited by number but by the spatial dimension on which they operate.

The shift is more noticeable in scaling down since we require a technical augmentation which automatically ties our mode of viewing to a range. With the naked eye there is not much of a need to scale down since there are few things that we would naturally think ought to be studied differently when divided rather seen as they normally appear. Simple dissection (of an organism, a structure, a machine) is an exception, but this shift is not significant enough to do more than introduce a part/whole question. Once the microscope is introduced, however, scaling is already built into the apparatus, which would say that what is being observed is X times smaller according to the degree of magnification. Given that a solid surface might reveal a whole landscape of difference within this magnification, we already speak of a kind of opening up of a new limit. That is, the microscope points to the need to include, within the same limit, e.g. a drop of water, more than was previously thought. While this limiting runs into the problem of resolution, which delayed much of the scaling down that we are familiar with today until the 19th century, it nonetheless opens up the possibility for science that one has to note the range on which your inquiry is undertaken.4

These two developments might reasonably account for why thought about scale burgeoned in the 17th century. We can note, however, that it was not until the end of the 18th century that enough accumulation, globalization, and knowledge of microscopy permitted the shift to a strictly spatial conception of scale. It is no surprise that the late 18th century gives us

4 Note, for instance, that cell theory was not fully formulated until 1838 despite being named by Robert Hooke in 1665. 312

James Hutton’s introduction of a mode of considering the scale of the Earth (both in space and time); the work in chemistry devoted to identifying, defining, and weighing of atomic elements; and the beginning of the metric system whereby we could standardize these scopes. A full account of this shift requires the nuance of a historian. From a conceptual, phenomenological, and cultural perspective, the shift by which the relations of these larger or smaller entities might be considered provides us with a combination of the mystical definition of scale and science’s emphasis on the physical: to inquire on a particular scale means to include everything discernible within a particular spatial scope. The magnification power of a microscope becomes converted into the notion of a range of observation. Scaling down retains this sense of measure within the metric system’s use of powers of ten in designating magnitudes of size. Within significant shifts down in scale, we thus speak of the scale according to the size range that is significant. Because scaling up originates in the accumulating of already discerned objects, we usually identify these scales according to their significant objects. The accumulation of data about larger groups of organisms, geological features, and ocean and weather patterns can now be tied to the physical scope that includes all the relations within a spatial dimension. Note, however, that in such an inclusion the nearest sensible designation of range moves us immediately from our normal set of objects to the global, from local weather patterns (it is raining here) to global weather patterns; from local geological features (here is sandstone) to the whole earth’s geological patterns, from a particular species (the hummingbird) to the larger ecosystem, which ultimately must mean the unlimited potential to interact as far as this organism can potentially range, ie, the whole planet.5 The reason for this is practical: when speaking of the

5 As a further example: invasion ecology is built around the attempt to limit the scope of a species range first and then apply this as a standard applied back to that species possible location. But in reality the limits of a species’ range is limited by its internal survival capacities, not any particular location where we suppose it to have originated. We can speak of the value of a species entering a new area that it has not been previously, but this is to add some other criteria 313 next scale above that which we usually see, the range of relations become significantly reorganized only when we take in the whole Earth. Although science does, in a synecdochal fashion, allow smaller studies to stand in for these larger scale relations, it is nonetheless in taking the spatial dimensions to the scope of the planet that we find ourselves operating in terms of scale.

The reason particular kinds of spatial limits or ranges matter leads us to a further essential point. Thinking spatially, one can place a limit in any arbitrary location. The limit of scale is, however, an extension of a spatial range of significance, not the limitation to a particular location. Thus, in speaking about scale we have abstracted further from the actual spatial location to the range of spatial size at which one studies. To scale, one does not draw a line around a particular location, but notes the size on which one is considering objects. Once scale becomes tied to a strictly spatial size range, this point follows naturally: the scaling does not occur because you chose a particular nanometer segment of the world but because the range of objects you are considering are those which have become noteworthy within the scope of a nanometer.

When scaling up from our normal world of objects, the noteworthy objects remain relatively static until we arrive at the level of the planet. Anything short of the planet depends on the particular selection of location rather than scope or range. Thus, the selection of the range of the

British Isles is not a scalar shift, but a limitation of a particular location whose shift in size is not sufficient to warrant a change in object without risking a significant omission. This omission comes from the addition of a location rather than spatial size consideration.

Scale in relation to scope thus requires the tie to the spatial dimension but as a range abstracted away from any particular location. Scale proceeds from designating a scope at a

to the mix while “invasion” seems to imply that the range of any given species is already delimited according to some higher scale division. 314 spatial range of size, standardized by some measure, within which everything of note is included.

This “everything of note” indicates that to study any of the objects on a particular scale is to enter into a field of relations that immediately extends to all objects of the same size. We thus have a correlate to the non-specificity of the spatial range: a scale presents a particular field of relations that exists within its own spatial dimensions. This is essentially to think of scale in terms of resolution. One can note the same object, e.g. your body, and see entirely different things depending on the scale on which you consider: a web of atoms, a play of cells, a body, a part of an ecological system, or a complex development of the entropic dispersal of the sun. Each depends not only on scope but on resolution: the size on which you encounter the object. Doing so opens up layers of complexity that depend on the starting range of your approach to the object, a point noted by Benoit Mandelbrot in what became known as the “coastline paradox.”

This paradox simply notes that the contours of a particular object (e.g. a coast) does not have a clear well-defined length. Rather the length depends on the scale at which one is measuring, since a smaller scale will actually include more small variations within its measure.6 On a different size of measure, one would find a whole new range of possible objects to include within the study but unlike the example of the coastline, the shift is far more significant when talking about the actual limits of objects. Going to the size of the cell does not just produce more to measure but produces a whole world of interactions discernible at that resolution. This conclusion also implies that the field of relations on one scale can never directly relate to the field of relations on another scale, except via a set of intermediary aggregation factors. This separation is only because what is definable within the scope of one range is different than what

6 See Mandlebrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature 315 is definable within the scope of another range. We consider these in a moment as significant thresholds at which shifts in size become important.

We thus have two artifacts of this tie between scope and scale as a range of spatialization that warrant further explanation since they create a great deal of confusion in talking about scale.

First, this last point in which the scope becomes tied to particular ranges of size at which the objects shift. Second, the confusion of what appears to be scaling but which has already included within it another criteria. The result of these two points is that, in order to actually scale, one must include everything within the scope designated while attending to the resolution demanded by that inclusion. To omit anything from this scale would be to add another criteria of limitation, either a location or another factor, which would make the change not about a change in scale, i.e. a shift in the size of signification of your object of study, but a delimitation according to additional categories.

The most obvious significance of this conclusion is that much of the “shifts in scale” that we speak about habitually are not shifts in scale at all since they are limited by the additional criteria of the human. When we speak of “scaling up” according to economics or politics, we have performed only a partial shift in scope. Such a shift might function well enough when dealing with the local realm of actions, where human relations are already clearly embedded in a series of interactions with a local environment. But when we speak of global capital, we are already eliding the rest of the significant scope under which the scale of the global exists. One cannot speak of global economy or global politics without speaking also of ecology since the shift in scale (scope) occurs in the extended range of inquiry, not in the mere aggregation of a set of entities already thought to be significant (humans). The humans, which were clearly definable on the scale on which the bodies of homo sapiens exist, are actually, from the global scale, only a

316 part of the larger range. Because we imagined we could scale up in this human-exclusive manner, the science of ecology then reversed the problem by trying to consider the interaction of organisms excluding the human. Scale as a shift in size-range under which we look at the world implies that when we go to the global scale we include everything contained within the Earth. To exclude anything is to already place an additional limit that is not an artifact of scale but an artifact of some otherwise privileging limitation. It thus will lead to some partiality of results that arise from this additional criteria. Hence, the conceptual limitation of our scope of consideration to the human has conflicted directly with the actual scaling to the global that has occurred in practice. Our persistence in this practice perpetuates the neglect that produces the cross-scale disruption of mass-extinction, global warming, and widespread pollution.

Likewise, while “all humans” may be an object existing on another scale, it is not itself this higher scale. Because humans, insofar as they are clearly definable homo sapiens, exist on the scale on which these bodies exist. This scalar attempt to designate “all humans” is to cut across and exclude those things by which “all humans” sustain themselves: the other organisms consumed for food, the technology, the products (waste and otherwise), the general social and cultural currents, and their overall exchange of energy. Again, the scope under which “all humans” exists is the global, and the global, as a scale, must include everything within it. The same goes with any scaling up, not just the grouping of humans, which we have just used as an example because it is so common. It would be the same with “all trees” or “all bats” or “all limestone.” To scale up is to already make oneself available to the wider range of things by including more. Thus, any additional limiting criteria will obscure what this widening of scope has actually permitted. While science must, of necessity, limit itself according to additional criteria, it must do so with the understanding that this widening of scope has already admitted

317 into the study the excess that likewise admits itself into this scale. This is not, as it might seem initially, that much of a problem: if I study bat populations, I cannot study everything on the planet, but I can study the whole planet as they exist for bats. Indeed, science is not interested in any single bat but all bats and bats as they relate and live in an ecosystem. The conclusion here is just the significant but difficult admission that this broadening out of scope is already to admit more into your scope than can be adequately described. To make this admission is simply to make apparent the additional criteria as limiting factors aside from scale and to admit that these limiting factors, although functional, will always be exceeded in practice. Indeed, since something will always be left out, this is always the case already. In noting these criteria in relation to scale we are merely saying more precisely what is being left out.

The final implication of this examination is another re-affirmation of the conclusion that scaling up is more difficult but more necessary to understand than scaling down. To scale up is to include more in your scope. And if we are going to truly include everything within a range of inquiry, this includes all ranges of study beneath. The only reason we are able to limit ourselves to particular scales is because we reach threshold points at which the objects of significance change. We can thus, in practice, limit ourselves to particular scales as a field of relation.

Nonetheless, it is only in scaling to the All, including everything within the scope of inquiry, that any complete understanding of the world can be had. The impossibility of literally scaling to the

All is precisely where science finds itself once again in the realm of mysticism. The remainder of this chapter will thus attempt to outline the implications of this limit of limits.

Scalar Phase Shift Inquiry into the nature of reality will always fail to be exhaustive. A limit is required, within thought, language, and even perception to focus the attention on what is at hand. As one

318 adds more and more, including a wider and wider range of things, one finds that you inevitably reach a limiting threshold at which there are simply too many objects to consider. This is a simple aspect of the work that humans do: if you have too much on your plate, you no longer function well. So you either clear away objects of consideration or you get someone else to help you. But in terms of your individual comprehension, it would still be limited in detail. You cannot repeat the work that your colleagues do in order to likewise process or benefit from the results of their work. We already know this intuitively when it comes to scholarship, both in sciences and the humanities. I cannot look at all the editions of a manuscript to ensure a good edition for every book I read. Alternatively, I cannot repeat every experiment upon which my further experimentation requires. Other scholars have done this and other scholars have checked those scholars and, as long as I spend enough time in that conversation to be comfortable with proceeding, I can proceed with them. A project like the current one would not be possible without this amassing of translations, editions, and readily available and easily accessed infostructure of online databases.

The nature of this processing can be identified as a scalar shift that occurs when one increases the scope of inquiry. A physical analog already pre-exists this social one: as one moves away from objects, there are simply too many things in the field of vision to fully parse. The result is that the eye and the brain naturally sacrifice detail in favor of overall patterns. Doing so does not erase the detail, there is just too much of it for the brain to process within the visual field. Thus, when we went to the top of the mountain we saw a forest rather than trees because, even if our vision was good enough to see every leaf of a tree as we do standing next to them, there would be far too many leaves for the brain to make use of. If our vision was that good (or if we got some binoculars) we would have to focus our attention on what we could process, which

319 is about the equivalent of standing next to the tree, i.e. we would scale back down to where we could conceivably process the multiplicity of objects called leaves within each tree. Thus, as we scale out more and more, we find significant thresholds at which the objects in the view switch from one manifold of discernable objects to another, as a practical shift of resolution. When we continue to add more, this will happen once again, such that forests dissolve into the patterns of the Earth, and then the Earth will dissolve into the organization of the solar system, and so on.

Literally, to include these objects within the range of inquiry, as discernible objects, would not be possible in the same way. The object “Earth” does include all the objects trees, but to attend to each individual tree and the Earth at the same time is impossible. Nonetheless, because we can examine both scales at once, we construct a category “all trees” by which we can speak of the individual trees on the scale of the Earth. Doing so is not to take into account every tree on the

Earth, but rather to speak of the accumulation of trees as they matter within the scope of the

Earth. Nor is this movement to “all trees” to hold every tree to the same standard. Instead, this movement is a simple averaging effect of seeing what similarities come to matter on another scale, as perception already does when it loses sight of individual trees and sees the pattern of the forest. The difficulty that ecologists have faced with the concept of equilibrium perfectly captures this problem: equilibrium within ecosystems is a description of a system’s natural averaging effect discerned with examined on a higher scale. An ecosystem will always appear to be in something like an equilibrium when one includes the broader system. Although significant disturbances might persist, disturbances in space and time are usually capable of being compensated for and a new averaging effect occurs if you zoom out more, taking in a broader range of space and time. Regardless, environmental conservation sometimes uses the idea of equilibrium to reverse this averaging phenomenon back onto the lower scales, suggesting that the

320 ecosystem must maintain this equilibrium. But in reality the equilibrium is an artifact of the interactions on the lower scale being considered from a higher scale.7

In addition, we may be tempted to think that these threshold points can be avoided if we increase the processing power. We either get more people together, crowdsource the data processing, or get a computer to process it for us. The computer can in some way “pay attention” to all the leaves in a forest at once. Big data processing does permit us to take into account far more information that would otherwise be left out of the calculation, e.g. in the statistical work of population studies. However, the results of such Big Data still produce these thresholds at which that data is processed from the lower scale mass of data into a digestible set of numbers found in various forms of statistical information. When attempting to stay at the same resolution

(i.e., only cells), it becomes nearly impossible and not particularly useful to speak at the same time of individual cells and the whole system of cells. Thus, to actually switch scales and speak of the whole body we retain the reference to individual cells only through these statistical mediations, which does not describe the behavior of individual cells but the aggregation of them.

This statistical information does not replace the exceedingly large number of smaller things processed but instead provides us with some means of paying attention to all of them at once in relation to the larger system, but only across this threshold by which all of those objects (which are often human lives or species going extinct) are not discernible except en masse. The power of this statistical data is tremendous since it does yield useful information about general trends and patterns that is significant on the individual level of the raw data. But it does not erase nor does it tell us about the variety already existing within the individual entities it is processing.

7 This point was made by the mathematical-ecologist Peter Chesson, who discussed this critique of equilibrium at a lecture presented to the Penn State mathematics department in 2014. He developed a scale transition theory to account for the various scales at which attributes like equilibrium might be discerned (see Chesson et. al. “Scale Transition Theory for Understanding Mechanisms in Metacommunities) 321

Nonetheless, much of our managerial and political strategies tend to follow the pattern we just identified with the concept of equilibrium: assuming that these statistical averages can be overlaid on the entities studied as reliable predictors of behavior, desires, interactions, etc. It is true that, in the aggregate, such an overlay may work (i.e., an advertisement works for a lot of people, so despite varieties in reactions and resistance, I can speak generally about its effectiveness) but this is a merely saying that the larger scale view will apply to the larger scale view. Naturally averaged effects will apply to the aggregates from which that average is drawn.

The threshold shifts mean we need to attend to what we are studying and speaking about with care to the scale on which we are speaking. Many terms naturally cross scales and make this difficult, as we already noted when we speak of “humans”. This term “humans” is a pattern discernible from a scale above, able to be related to the action of the whole planet according to general patterns that can be statistically derived. Sometimes this shifting scales is quite productive but, depending on the kind of inquiry, it can have limited use. Thus, the excitement in the digital humanities about the use of big data processing as another way into literary or historical texts must necessarily be limited by the domain under which these texts become significant. If we take a large text, such as Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis (discussed in chapter 2), data mining can be incredibly useful for finding new patterns, locating related passages, and revealing some deeper emphases and connections that might not be evident when trying to read such a large work. All of this becomes meaningful, however, in actually encountering the text, taking it on and reading parts of it in order to see the results of these patterns, connections, and deeper emphases. In other words, these larger scale patterns are only useful for directing our attention to what the work of reading and interpretation already is: an encounter with the text on the level of the text.

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To assist us in understanding these shifts in resolution, we can return to the concept of logical types, which we introduced through Gregory Bateson in Chapter 4. The theory of logical types was initially proposed by Betrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in the Principia

Mathematica as a solution to a problem in set theory of the sort we are dealing with here. Set theory is an attempt to define the basis of mathematics according to the grouping of things together into sets. A basic set is a set which contains nothing. From there one can provide sets of sets whereby mathematical entities are built and related to one another. Mathematics thus ends up dealing with numbers according to relations between sets, with each set being some kind of relation between sets of numbers delimited according to some defining factor within the set.

Unlike our usual limits in attention, mathematical notation can easily indicate an infinite set ([1,

3, 5, 7…] already indicates the set of all positive odd integers, which expands indefinitely).

Nonetheless, even in this infinite notation, one has designated a set within sets that functions according to the limitations that defines the set. We thus have the possibility of speaking of two sets that contain the same numbers but which intersect in some way. In describing this relation we can then define a set of those sets and so on, until you get to the set of all sets. However, this hierarchical organization of sets produces a paradox. This paradox is best popularized in what became known as the “barber paradox:” A barber is a man in a town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber? If the barber shaves himself, then he doesn’t. If he doesn’t shave himself, than he does. The problem with this paradox is that it contains two different sets, the Village, a collection of individuals, and the barber, one of those individuals. The rule places these two sets in relation in a way that produces the contradiction. In response to this problem, Russell and Whitehead posit the theory of logical

323 types, in which you distinguish types according to the level on which you are functioning. One arrives at a new level when you make a set of sets, e.g. the village is a set of individuals.

This logical paradox created quite a stir during its time since it identified a fundamental difficulty in how we might apply logic and mathematics to reality. Philosophies of mathematics went on to propose any number of alternatives to the logical type theory to resolve the paradox, but these do not concern us here.8 Instead, the theory becomes significant for all modes of inquiry when Gregory Bateson generalizes the theory of logical types, applying it to questions that are not necessarily within the purview of mathematics. As we saw in Chapter 4, Bateson encountered the problem of sets in relation to cybernetic loops, in which a system looped back on itself. The result is that a system is able to recognize itself as a system, thereby producing an awareness that was a logical type above the system itself. Likewise, one could then become aware of the process of noting this system and therefore reflect, in a further logical type above, on how one becomes aware of systems. Bateson discovers these logical types when thinking about signs of signs, which are meant to organize systems of signs according to categories. He thus talks about play as a sign that is a logical type above other signs since the sign “this is play” indicates what is happening in other signs, a point we referenced briefly in chapter 2.9 Used in this way, logical types allow us to note when we arrive at a new meta-level in which we establish a sign about other signs. Bateson’s famous double bind is an example of what happens when one has a contradiction that, on one level demands one thing, but on a logical type above, demands another.

What we can notice here with scale and scope is that thresholds already necessitate a different kind of logical type that is more tied to physical space than Bateson’s articulation but

8 See my article which is hopefully forthcoming soon on Whitehead’s response to this logical type problem. 9 See “A theory of play and fantasy” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 324 nonetheless emerges in the same kind of way. When one arrives at a particular scope, there arises the need to define a new set that emerges out the previous multiplicity of things. That is, one creates another level of entities that relates in a different way to the multiplicity of entities contained within that new set. This new set (forest) contains all entities on the scale below (in this case, not just trees but also the whole ecosystem of the forest) out of which it has been defined. Noting these as logical types is simply to note that the entities are changing depending on what scale you are working with. Contradictions can emerge when you relate an entity on one scale to one on another since the scope under which they function and appear distinct are different. Our language and concepts have a way of dealing with this in the form of speaking according to “all X” that establishes a relationship between two scales. We have to be careful about how we note these relationships, however. “All humans” relate to “all trees” in a different way than I might relate to the tree in my front yard. Rarely then do we find ourselves in need of speaking of “all humans” in relation to the tree in my front yard, although undoubtedly a study of such instances would yield some interesting and productive scalar leaps. At the same time, this logical typing allows us to relate across scales even as it allows us to distinguish them: as Lynn

Margulis pointed out that “all bacteria” bear a special relation to the planet’s regulatory functions that, through their aggregate behaviors adjust the larger makeup and provide the feedback mechanism under which the Gaia theory makes sense.10 But to say that “a bacteria” does so does not make sense.

Such incongruity is precisely what we struggle to understand in our own relationship to the planet. I do not exist as “all humans” even though I am included in that set. Yet this “all humans” is significantly altering, in a dangerous way, the terrain and make-up of the Earth’s

10 For a summary of Margulis’s role in gaia theory see Bruce Clarke “Neocybernetics of Gaia: Emergence of Second- Order Gaia Theory.” 325 resources and atmosphere. The traveling of this relationship between logical types is necessary for understanding one’s own reaction to ecology. But to assume that one becomes or acts as “all humans”—and thereby can change the world—is not only to misplace oneself on a logical type that does not apply, but may potentially lead you to counterproductive behaviors that neglect the level on which this homo sapien exists and acts. Since these larger scale relations were already produced due to the aggregation of individual actions, one can only act on the scale on which one exists. While we know this intuitively we do not always articulate social change in this way: we become focused on the results (We need to save the planet; we need to get X and Y political change) made visible on a higher scale such that we neglect the place from which these larger patterns emerge. In other words we mistake the larger scale patterns for personal actions. Even when such patterns can be manufactured or altered in some way, this is from connecting into a larger system at the level on which one is connected in. A bacteria might institute large systemic change in the body because it hooks into the system of the body in a particular way and replicates itself to produce those effects on a larger scale. But it does so by acting on the level for which its size is appropriate, in a manner that is far more chaotic than the body’s symptoms suggest (now I have a cough and a fever). It is thus useful to note that on the level of the bacteria itself we have different actions and effects than on the level of the whole body. The bacteria produces those effects by acting on the scale on which it exists, which is all anyone ever does.

Rather, the traveling across scales exist as a feedback mechanism, forming a logical type of the conceptual sort Bateson articulates. That is, it allows us to note that the movement across thresholds or logical types, from the scale of the ecological to ourselves, provides a feedback on our behavior here, allowing us to make adjustments according to the larger scale structure.

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Scaling thus creates physical logical types according to thresholds that are navigated according to conceptual logical types by allowing us to reflect on our own relationship to these thresholds.

This dual physical/conceptual logical typing of scale is naturally built into life itself.

The determination of an individual is not just the self-maintaining of autopoeisis, as biologists

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela once articulated it11, but the arrival at a new scale under which the active organization of matter might refer back to itself. The dissipative nature of living structures is always the cybernetic regulation between two scales by which a larger system loops back and maintains elements of itself from the perspective of the new scale. Thus, Illya

Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in their discussion of dissipative structures in Order out of Chaos note that “one of the most important problems in evolutionary theory is the eventual feedback between macroscopic and microscopic events: macroscopic structures emerging from microscopic events would in turn lead to a modification of the microscopic mechanisms” (191).

In other words, when you get to a particular size a feedback mechanism becomes apparent which does not necessarily control the microscopic events but nonetheless shapes them, in aggregate, according to the needs visible on the higher scale but not visible on the lower scale. This relationship, of course, also runs the other way: the microscope needs manifest macroscopic behaviors. An organism is thus always navigating at least two scales that yields two worlds of relations.

Life has compounded itself according to logical types of size in the same way we have already noted but now more directly tied to the scale of its function. As J.B.S. Haldane noted as early as 1926, all organisms have a particular size on which they function well.12 This leads to some significant thresholds in size past which life must not get bigger but must compound itself

11 See Autopoeisis and Cognition 12 J.B.S Haldane, “On Being the Right Size” 327 by making aggregates of organisms rather than larger organisms. There is thus also something of a logical typing of life: single-celled organisms work with atoms and molecules but can only get to a certain size, at which point the coordination of single-celled organisms becomes the means of further advanced handling of the dissipative nature of the system. At some point, these become sufficiently intertwined that a new organism is formed that consists of cells that are tied together according to this cybernetic loop. The shift in size is thus a shift in logical type, which also yields a different scale of perceptual being. Thus, we do not exist in the same field of reference that our cells do. The result is that, as long as our cells have what they need, they will do what they do according to a structure that is not necessarily conceptually known or determined by the larger structure. Indeed, such a thought already points to how the dissipative nature of the organism is its tie to that which exceeds it—it must always be taking in more by which it sustains itself. An organism is a loop out of itself which nonetheless functions according to its relationship to the whole, as the larger, set of all sets, out which it draws the matter of its sustenance. Indeed, there will always be a logical type in which one reflects back on the logical typing itself to see that this type has been drawn out of the whole by a structure, like ourselves, which discerns the scale and layers of the intervention by which the organism is sustained. We also can note that, in this account, the organism next higher to the multicellular world we live in is not groups of humans acting in consort but the biosphere itself, which has existed for a long time but which is still in the process of tying itself together as a cybernetically organized entity capable of reflecting on itself (the element identified by Vladamir Vernadsky and Tielhard de Chardin as the noosphere).

The final implication of this discussion is that, while we can distinguish any number of groups of entities, some significant scales can be designated according to thresholds at which

328 objects, relations, behaviors, and organisms differ in such a way that we have reorganize our way of thinking about them. A scale can be said to be truly different at the point where the objects on the previous scale are no longer discernible, i.e., no longer able to be held within the scope of one’s examination without going back down the scale. These scales proceed according to orders of magnitude at which the inclusion of everything within itself necessitates a logical typing rather than a mere grouping. From this definition, we have a relatively small number of significant scales:

Quantum Atomic/Molecular (nanometers) Cellular/Unicellular (micrometers) Normal (meters) Global Solar system (range of gravitational field of a sun) Galaxy Observable universe

It is interesting that we have some difficulty naming what I have designated here as “normal” only because this is the ground-zero of scale for those homo sapiens defining the scale. Most terms are inadequate since they indicate too much content about that scale, i.e. the “human scale” implies that it is ours. As reference points in experience, this normal scale is the perceptual and interactive field on which we exist directly act without intermediaries or compounding structures. It therefore also includes very small insects, animals, plants, and nonliving structures of the size we routinely interact with. Note, in addition, that I have left out a number of scales that we might be tempted to include that might be tentatively called organ structures with reference specifically to the organs of bodies and organelles of cells. These are the structures that life forms as intermediaries between different scales but which do not consist themselves of a significant enough shift in size to entirely change the set of relations. That is, they do not form a full logical type shift from one scale to another. The reason for this should be clear when we

329 consider that the scales so prized by geographers—local, city, state, nation, global—are reduced down in this scheme only to two scales: the normal and the global. This is because, as we stated before, city, state, and nation all preserve their human-centered reference. All organ structures are not significant shifts in scale for the same reason: they keep their tie to the organism and only become significant within that organism rather than changing the whole field of relations according to the size of their interaction.

Humboldt’s Welcoming Science At some point, science had to start directly including more and more within its scope of inquiry as the only appropriate way to get a full understanding of reality. At first the cataloguing process of natural history was largely the result of a colonial exploration, which took place in a somewhat systematic form at least as early as Richard Ligon’s 1657 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. This cataloguing process mixed together curiosity for the exotic, the desire to discern value in a far off location, and a penchant for detailed description. As compounded through the social connections of the British Royal Society, such cataloging largely drew on an increasingly elaborate network of interested parties who sent descriptions, drawings, and samples across the globe to be collated and analyzed. Alongside this encyclopedic gathering was a tradition of attempting to gather this set of knowledge together into one system of the universe. This was originally a semi-religious endeavor, epitomized by Thomas Burnet’s Sacred

Theory of the Earth, published in 1681. Burnet’s cosmology was speculative, based mostly on scriptural reference and then supplemented by the empirical observations available at the time.

The basic shape of this document was influential since it proposed that by means of bringing together and collating minor evidence about the world, one could derive a full cosmology. James

Hutton’s 1788 Theory of the Earth, which brought forth geological rather than scriptural

330 evidence to craft a larger view of the universe, was already an insertion into a tradition of bringing together these disparate parts. Following Hutton, it was in the 19th century that these tendencies and practices were brought together in a more thoughtful attempt to exhaustively connect all these disparate pieces together as a system of description that cut across multiple scales. This task was undertaken most clearly by Alexander von Humboldt in his popular

Kosmos, published in five volumes beginning in 1845.13 Much of the content of these lectures was gathered in the same way that natural philosophers had been gathering data for centuries: through travel around the world, the examination of a variety of samples, and the access to an enormous accumulation and network of knowledge. Some of the significance of Kosmos lies in its ambitious scope, but this ambition was largely congruous with what Hutton had already performed fifty years earlier. The value lies in how Humboldt’s Kosmos directly address the value and method of moving from the aggregate of disconnected scientific facts to a sense of the connection that spans across scales. Humboldt’s methodology is explicitly an attempt to include everything and a justification of how and why one might do so—all situated in response to the widespread establishment of Enlightenment praise of rationality over and against anything resembling speculation or superstition. One of Humboldt’s most significant rhetorical moves was to establish a means of describing the universe as a Whole without resorting to speculation, making use of disjointing facts in a way that permitted variety even as a larger unity was identified and described. He was able to articulate this view in terms of reason and science because of a scalar view in which, as one includes more and more, science is able to note the vast interconnection of things through productive movement across scales, speaking both generally and with detail according to the scale on which you are describing. Most significantly, one can

13 On the history of Humboldt’s Kosmos see Walls, The Passage to Cosmos and Helfreich, Humboldt’s Cosmos. 331 only do so with an eye not to detail but to the whole of the universe, that is, if you leave nothing out of the account.

Kosmos was Humboldt’s last work, after a long career of travelling the world, gathering through observation and experiment a mass of information. The work was the culmination of this research, combined with the knowledge available to him within the scientific circles of Europe, but set to an ambition that he had when he started out as a young man. He describes this not as a rationale but an impulse: “the principle impulse by which I was directed, was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomenon of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces” (ix).14 The reason for this impulse is already present for Humboldt in his encounters with nature. He describes looking out over oceans and flat plains, seeing the vast expanses of things, and feeling a sense that these things are interconnected even as he participates in the long tradition of examining each of these separate objects. He is particularly delighted by the surprise of finding recognizable patterns in landscape, plants, and animals in every quarter of the planet (see 6-13). This is itself a cosmopolitan impulse, noting that when we consider ourselves “citizens of the world” (5), we naturally start to notice patterns that speak of a deeper interconnection. Contrary to the tediousness of careful scientific observation, these patterns induce wonder: “The powerful effect exercised by nature springs, as it were, from the connection and unity of the impressions and emotions produced; and we can only trace their different sources by analyzing the individuality of objects, and the diversity of forces” (6). Humboldt thus connects together this detailed analyzing of objects and forces with the wonder of a larger scale view. When you include more

14 The pagination here is from the 1893 English edition 332 within the study, the detail itself yields the sense, through the confluences produced, of a deeper sense of unity.

The result of this confluence is that, although we usually speak today of Wholeness and

Unity as contrary to rationality and experience, a rational empiricism itself points to unity for

Humboldt: “Nature considered rationally, that is to say, submitted to the process of thought, is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole (to pan) animated by the breath of life” (2-3).

Even when applying rational thought, which in itself focuses on and manipulates division, nature appears as a unity. As we consider more and more things, these things show themselves as interrelated. One begins to see patterns and connections not apparent when considering these things alone. The insertion here of the Greek to pan is essential: while to pan might be translated as the Whole, it is usually translated as “the All.” He repeats this Greek insertion throughout

Kosmos, as if to remind us that by “The Whole” here he means the aggregate nature of the All

(c.f. 51, 62). Include everything and wonder and interconnection will naturally appear.

This maneuver was particularly significant given the contemporary sentiments about such poetic sensibilities by scientists and the concerns about the coldness of scientific description by non-scientists. The introduction to Kosmos directly addresses these two sides and positions the expansive project as about both wonder and empirical science. Humboldt must address both of these sentiments, justifying a move to wonder and wholeness for those who prize rationality, and demonstrating to those who see science as antithetical to a poetic sensibility that rational inquiry might yield wonder.

From one perspective, the emphasis on physical observation, experimentation, and mathematical calculation—all gathered under the scope of rational empiricism—generally tends

333 towards a disparate set of individual facts that actively avoids any larger statements about the structure of the cosmos as a whole. On empirical grounds, to speak of the All, the Whole, of this unity underneath division, is grounds for doubt since it ties itself to what is observable: “Physical philosophy…when based upon science, doubts because it seeks to investigate, distinguishes between that which is certain and that which is merely probable, and strives incessantly to perfect theory by extending the circle of observation” (18). Rational empiricism will doubt this

Whole because it aims to investigate by observation what is there. In doing so it deals with those phenomena capable of being unveiled from apparent nature. However, a tension is produced when, in order to perfect this observation, it must extend its circle of observation. As it observes more and more it also begins to observe discrepancies to any law that it produces to try to describe this assemblage of things. The result is that, “instead of seeking to discover the mean or medium point, around which oscillate, in apparent independence of forces, all the phenomena of the external world, this system delights in multiplying exceptions to the law” (18). Because observation of particulars will always yield exception to any general theories, there is one sentiment of rationality which would deny or doubt any general view on the grounds that the particulars will never fit that general theory. To proceed in this gathering together, Humboldt must invoke a scalar distinction between the manifold of disparate facts and, quite simply, the mean or medium produced when considering them all together. This invocation of statistics is in line with what we have already said about scope and scale: Humboldt is not seeking to eradicate the differences of the multiplicity of observation but noting that out of this multiplicity, an underlying pattern can be legitimately and rationally derived.

Humboldt is thus able to bridge this diversity of observation with a generalized mode of description that gives way to a poetic sensibility. The enjoyment of science, he argues, comes

334 from this ability to take into account both the factual correctness and the expanse of order that they might encompass: “The higher enjoyments yielded by the study of nature depend upon the correctness and the depth of our views, and upon the extent of the subjects that may be comprehended in a single glance” (19). This “single glance” is a pattern recognition behavior that occurs when taking in all of the data at once so that what appears to be disparate and contradictory is revealed in its connected and unified aspect. The methodology here accepts both scales at once, using and attending to the details of observation to support and bolster this larger scale form of observation. Thus, he speaks of his project as an attempt to “prove how, without detriment to the stability of special studies, we may be enabled to generalize our ideas by concentrating them in one common focus, and thus arrive at a point of view from which all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active, whole, animated by one sole impulse” (36). This “common focus” is produced by considering all of these things together.

Doing so yields to wonder and poetry in the sense that, somehow beneath it all, one is able to discern the fantastic presence of “one sole impulse” in the vast aggregate of things. At this point,

Humboldt turns to poetry to express the point better: “‘Nature,’ as Schelling remarks in his poetic discourse on art, ‘is not an inert mass; and to him who can comprehend her vast sublimity, she reveals herself as the creative force of the universe—before all time, eternal, ever active, she calls to life all things, whether perishable or imperishable’” (36). In invoking Schelling’s critique of a mechanistic view, Humboldt is thus affirming how a rationally grounded, empirical understanding of the world can itself arrive at the sublime sense of the universe.

At the same time, the wonder is not entirely couched in this sense of the inaccessible.

Scale also makes, in some way, the inaccessible accessible, as it allows the scientists to get a picture of how all of these disparate facts connect up. This point becomes noteworthy when

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Humboldt disputes Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime as a feeling born from the ignorance of nature. In Humboldt’s time this sentiment had, by his own account, led to a fear among non-scientists that the knowledge of science is directly antithetical to the wonder, beauty, and appreciation of nature. In response, Humboldt puts forward a rhetorical move that we have become familiar with today:

Whilst the illusion of the senses would make the stars stationary in the vault of heaven, astronomy by her aspiring labours has assigned indefinite bounds to space; and if she has set limits to the great nebula to which our solar system belongs, it has only been to show us in those remote regions of space, which appear to expand in proportion to the increase in our optic powers, islet on islet of scattered nebulae. The feeling of sublime, so far as it arises from a contemplation of the distance of the stars, of their greatness and physical extent, reflects itself in the feeling of the infinite, which belongs to another sphere of ideas included in the domain of the mind. The solemn and imposing impressions excited by this sentiment, are owing to the combination of which we have spoken, and to the analogous character of the enjoyment and emotions awakened in us, whether we float on the surface of the great deep, stand on some lonely mountain summit…or by the aid of powerful optical instruments scan the regions of space, and see the remote nebulous mass resolve itself into worlds of stars. (19-20)

Humboldt replaces ignorance with vastness as the source of the sublime, noting that it is in going to higher points of view that find this wonder. Notably, this view is made possible by science in a new but equally potent way. Science allows us to discern how things that appear to be anchored or simple are actually far more complex in their motions and things that appear solid (a nebulous mass) are actually a far more vast set of stars. The result is actually an expansion of the cosmos that seems to derive its sublimity by its endless increasing of objects possible to include in the

All. It is the size of this great set, the All, it’s “greatness and physical extent,” that actually enhances our wonder. The reason for this “imposing impression” is this combining force of scale, of taking together all of these details and adding them to the same set until we see a larger sense of unity emerge. Thus, Humboldt solemnly adds the use of the telescope to the experience of the ocean or mountain, the classic experiences of vastness.

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Humboldt thus respects and refers to the sense of unity and wholeness that has always been present, even in those civilizations still known at the time as “savage nations:”

“We find even amongst the most savage nations…a certain vague, terror-stricken sense of the all-powerful unity of natural forces, and the existence of an invisible, spiritual essence manifested in those forces, whether in the unfolding of the flower and maturing the fruit of the nutrient tree, in upheaving the soil of the forest, or in rending the clouds with the might of a storm. We may here trace the revelation of a bond of union, linking together the visible world and that higher spiritual world which escapes the grasp of the senses.” (16)

Humboldt sees this all-powerful unity as carried through and then further explicated by the progress of empirical observation. The systematic scientific examination of experience and rationality is a necessary adjunct for outlining the nature of this “all powerful unity of natural forces.” Humboldt is not merely making scientific gestures to elaborate a vague or shadowy notion. Rather he is suggesting that rigorous observation and empirical study actually lead us back to the same sentiment of the vastness of nature, but now in a newly formed and informed way. No longer content with the “vague presentiment of the harmonious unity of natural forces” man proceeds to dissect and examine (17). For Humboldt, this process only culminates in further compounding and elaborating the nature of the vast Whole, that deserves more respect and wonder the more that is included within its All.

At the same time, the description sought after here is not to reduce the cosmos to a few abstract rational principles, in the way we have become familiar with today as the so-called

“Theory of Everything.” That is, this view of the universe that permits Kosmos is not to find the smallest scale by which all other things could make sense—an assumption built on reductionism—nor is it to discover some kind of mathematical principle whereby we could provide some kind of perfect mathematical understanding of all phenomena. To counter this possibility, Humboldt states that “it is not the purpose of this essay…to reduce all sensible

337 phenomena to a small number of abstract principles, based on reason only” (29). Here Humboldt is most likely referring to the abstract and speculative theories of those like Burnet who would apply principles of reason as means of speculating beyond what has been observed and examined experimentally. Humboldt sees his Kosmos as based on the results of rational empiricism as the limit whereby he will craft this picture of the vastness of cosmos (30). He thus draws out a scalar analogy that, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness of its conception of history, is nonetheless appropriate in spirit:

“The unity which I seek to attain in the development of the great phenomena of the universe, is analogous to that which historical composition is capable of acquiring. All points relating to accidental individualities, and the essential variations of the actual, whether in the form and arrangement of natural objects in the struggle of man against the elements, or of nations against nations, do not admit of being based only on a rational foundation—that is to say, of being deduced from ideas alone” (30).

Rather than looking at the impossible vastness of historical events, the historian must in some way build a story out of the facts that can be discerned in the archive. To abstract away from these particularities does not require that one be guided by conceptual ideas used to filter the mass of events (such as the idea progress) but rather to what emerges in a scalar fashion out of the facts presented. Likewise, Humboldt draws away from the details of the particulars in order to see the larger order of things.

The way this is done, however, is not to just provide us with a view of that which is physically larger, i.e., the Earth and stars, but rather to provide us descriptions of as much as possible, according to their relation to each other. In this way, the project truly becomes an account attuned to the All-ness present in all parts of the universe. Humboldt begins with astronomical phenomena and ends with descriptions of terrestrial organisms, including some brief descriptions of their microscopic features. It is thus a careful gathering of scientific facts honed to direct our attention to seemingly disparate aspects of the universe, on multiple scales, to

338 demonstrate the overarching unity and interconnection that exists within this vast range of things.

But in citing this range of things, we cannot lose sight of the larger unity as is often done when working with a particular scale: “The principle of unity is lost sight of, and the guiding clue is rent asunder whenever any specific and peculiar kind of action manifests itself amid the active forces of nature” (56-57). For instance, he cites the then recent process of defining atomic elements as the over emphasis on one kind of action and force. His description thus describes all scales with an eye towards interconnection and relation rather than isolation and division. Such a combination makes possible this blend of wonder and detail.

The term “Cosmos” was chosen specifically to capture this practice of description and

Humboldt frequently refers to his work as “the science of the cosmos” (e.g. 36). In discussing the history of the word, Humboldt notes that he is using it in a new way that unites the Greek use of the term with this mode of scientific description he is deploying. During his time, “Cosmos” was largely used to designate the outer portion of space; to study cosmos usually meant to study astronomy. However, Pythagoras had already used the term to mean “the order that reigns in the universe, or entire world” (51). In his use of the term, Humboldt is invoking this order in relation to the All (the to pan) that might be productively discerned out of the vast aggregation of scientific description. Thus, this science of the cosmos cuts across both science and art, with a broad ambition to combine classification with intuitive insight. In transitioning to the actual physical description, he thus summarizes the scope in this way:

It is by a separation and classification of phenomena, by an intuitive insight into the play of obscure forces, and by animated expressions, in which the perceptible spectacle is reflected with vivid truthfulness, that we may hope to comprehend and describe the universal all (to pan) in a manner worthy of the dignity of the word Cosmos in its signification of universe, order of the world, and adornment of this universal order. May the immeasurable diversity of phenomena which crowd into the picture of nature in no way detract from that harmonious impression of rest and unity, which is the ultimate object of every literary or purely artistical [sic] composition (62).

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The prayer-like shape of this invocation is a plea to the reader to allow the diversity of detail draw us into a sense of wonder at the wealth contained within the Cosmos, without losing the sense of this interconnection. The first sentence here places Humboldt’s work within the realm of science while the last places it within the realm of Literature, marrying these two together as a function of seeing this variety of facts in a broader light. Only then can we say we are describing

Cosmos, the order inherent in the All.

And yet, a point arises that requires us to consider further. There is a contradiction between the ignorance mentioned through Burke and vastness of Cosmos as described by

Humboldlt. If science is going to truly describe the All then this All will always extend beyond the designations given to it. More will always be there to describe. Something will always be left out, not just in terms of the spatial expanse of the universe but also the fact that, on each scale, a new variety of relations is opened up to describe. Both vastness and the All of Cosmos imply the same kind of not-knowing in the knowing that we encountered in Chapter 3, but here as an inclusion of the not yet included. Although this is not the deliberate ignorance of Burke’s sublime, there is a new kind of failure of knowledge outlined by the process of knowledge itself.

Hence, Humboldt invokes the infinite instead of ignorance as the source of the sublime. Opening the scope of inquiry further reveals more to be seen and described but it also opens us up to the real sense of limitation, the ever expanding nature of this Cosmos. The order expands far beyond what could possibly be described. Although Humboldt seems aware of this fact, it is not always so apparent within scientific rhetoric today. For instance, the nature of those things we call

“forces” in the universe are ambiguous, even as we attempt to find their origin in smaller and smaller scales. We speak of the empirical and mathematical description of forces as if they are an explanation when in fact they often simply place names on the relations between things. A

340 name like “gravity” is a signifier that functions sufficiently for mathematical description, but risks also covering over the vastness it already contains. We have performed something like what

Georg Cantor (the same mathematician who created set theory) once did for mathematics: produced kinds of infinite words to cover the infinite so that we can forget its infinite, vast, and inaccessible aspect. This aspect will re-emerge again and again, and will always continue to do so both in practice and theory, but the capacity to fill in another infinite word can keep us thinking our description is complete. “Cosmos” itself risks being such a word since it contains within it this vastness that is nonetheless tied to physical and empirical practices of science. We must therefore proceed with this vastness in mind, retaining its connection between the spiritual and the physical through this to pan and sense of the infinite.

Sagan’s Cosmos Carl Sagan’s Cosmos reinvigorates Humboldt’s vision well over a century later, on the other side of a long and on-going scientific and technological transformation. Sagan carries the spirit of Humboldt’s Kosmos into the visual medium of television where the incredible wealth of detail that science has accumulated is able to be visually rendered according to a more detailed scalar relationship. The use of cinematic effects allows Sagan to present the viewer with what it would look like if we were able to go to the edges of space and back. What makes films like

Cosmos so significant is the way that its visions are based on the continually developing ability to see and infer objects along the whole electromagnetic spectrum in an increasingly high resolution, coupled with detailed description on each level. Cosmos patches together these alternative modes of seeing and attempts to show us what we would otherwise be unable to see.

In a physical sense we could never travel to the edge of the observable universe, just as we will clearly never be able to travel to the level of the atom. Sagan’s “ship of the imagination” is thus

341 necessary to navigate this spatial continuum, even as he includes the statement, much like

Humboldt’s, that we keep our eyes always on the facts. While the performance of this scaling in words produces continuity by juxtaposition, this spatial movement produces it by a visually continuous movement. Of course we can never really know what it would be like to “see” our galaxy or a cell in the same way and proportion that we see this room and these books.

Nonetheless, the capacity to explore with focused attention the nuances of these different scales, with some ease of transition between them, provides us with some sense of how we are entangled within these layers of being.

Like Humboldt’s Kosmos, Sagan mostly focused on the large but easily travels to the small. This emphasis had to do with his focus as astronomer but also with his obsession with the large as a means of opening the scope to include more within the purview of examination. While scaling down can reveal an unusual and unexpected wealth of detail, the temptation is always to see this as a series of fragmented pieces rather than an addition to the wealth of vast and layered interconnection. To capture this relation, Sagan goes into the small from the perspective of the vast. His statement “We are starstuff and we long to return” is itself the setup of this relationship that brings our attention to what we saw Edgar Mitchell describe as “certain facts about stellar evolution.” The atoms in your body were forged in the vastness of the sun. Traveling the contours of this thought is tremendous as it breaks your body into pieces (atoms) and projects these in relation to a vast entity (the sun), but only works when we have opened up the scope of inquiry to the cosmic level. The scalar projection is thus a perfect setup for Sagan’s famous conclusion, discussed in chapter three, that “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” The purview presented in the large allows us to see these scalar shifts as ways of contemplating our relationship to this All, not in isolation but in its interconnected aspect. Reflecting the shift in

342 both scientific knowledge and scope of perspective, Sagan revises Humboldt’s sense that we are citizens of the world. For Sagan, we are citizens of the Cosmos.

By the time of Sagan’s Cosmos, the vastness has gotten larger and our relationship with it more intimate. The most striking image that Sagan returns to again and again throughout his work is the image in which whole galaxies and groups of galaxies are shown to look something like blurred, streaked stars. We have even better photos of this now, such as is found in figure

5.1, from the Hubble telescope.

Figure 5.1 – Picture of Abel 2744 from the Hubble Telescope. Courtesy of NASA.gov (https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/spitzer/abell-2744-pia17569/)

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Each galaxy shown here contains billions of stars. Such a view is not possible with the naked eye and is only comprehended in any practical way by the visual transition from our scale to the scale at which that is what is seen. Although the cosmic zoom had been popularized by the

Eames brother’s Power of Ten in 1977, Sagan likewise made this kind of zoom central to his first episode of Cosmos, taking us first to this perspective of galaxies and then guiding us back through space to the Earth, then zooming back out in the final frames. Tyson’s Cosmos does the opposite, starting at Earth and taking us out to the edge of the observable universe, which is also how it is shown at the beginning of the movie Contact, written by Sagan and directed by Robert

Zemeckis. Both transitions are useful for orienting ourselves to the immensity of the Cosmos.

The point here is not to capture a kind of actuality of scaling since we can never actually zoom in this way. When Sagan repeats the sequence in Varieties of Scientific Experience, this time from earth to galaxies through a series of pictures, he notes that “this perspective is a kind of calibration of where we are” (28). A calibration does not have to be precise in all senses for it to function. Rather, a calibration is a comparison between two measurements so that they align in proper proportion. The calibration performed by this cosmic zoom is the sufficient means of reorienting our sense of size and space to the vastness of the Cosmos.

Indeed, Sagan often reflected on the relationship between large numbers and our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos. Of course he is famous for the phrase “billions and billions,” which was actually coined in Johnny Carson’s parody of Sagan on the Tonight Show.

Sagan’s last book, published posthumously, embraced this phrase and reflected on the importance of using and contemplating such incomprehensible numbers. In discussing exponential notation (e.g. 10^34), Sagan notes that “this doesn’t mean you can picture a billion or a quintillion objects in your head—nobody can. But, with the exponential notation, we can

344 think about and calculate with such numbers” (Billions and Billions 10). Indeed, the picturing of this broad scope of the universe is not meant to capture everything even as it includes everything.

It provides us with a way, navigated by the scalar notation and scalar relationship of the zoom, to think about the cosmos in its vast aspect. The purpose here is not to tame the Cosmos and somehow make it fully comprehensible, although working thoughtlessly with such images and numbers can make them feel like you have them within your grasp. Instead, such images and numbers allow us to calculate and think about vastness in some way that already exceeds the content provided. 15

Indeed, once you have admitted the scope of the All, scaling down is nothing more than an elaboration of the excess, the unending wealth of possible calculation, objects, and description possible even within those things that appear to be relatively apparent. Sagan makes it all the more evident that scientific description contains within it a kind of compression factor by which certain descriptions capture enormous amounts of behaviors in both their variety and unity. It is always possible to selectively switch scales to provide new modes of description, all in some way incomprehensible. Thus, he gives us the beautiful scalar number: there are 1080 elementary particles (electrons, photons, neutrons) in the Cosmos (Billions 10). Such a number is not meant to be comprehended, although it can be used for calculation, but is instead a notation of excess.

In this case it is a compounded excess since elementary particles are too small to be seen and the

Cosmos is too large to be seen. In some way, a number notation like 1080 re-inserts the sense of not-knowing that might have been thoughtlessly lost when habituated to the image of the cosmos or the atom. This reorientation to the excess only functions, however, if we note that we have no

15 Timothy Morton has made nearly the inverse argument about large numbers to what we posit here: he argues that the numbers are finite and inaccessible, while we are saying they are accessible modes of the infinite (see Morton, Ecological Thought 40). The difference in argument hinges around the scalar shift implied by the inclusion of the All, a point that Morton shies away from in favor of the apparent finitude of these large objects. 345 comprehension of what that number indicates. Rather than expressing a frustration in the sight of this not-knowing, as we have undoubtedly felt when contemplating a number like the trillions of dollars in national debt, we can instead react with appreciation for this excess. No one has it all, no one fully comprehends it. Even if we did completely layer the description so that no corner of the observable universe was left without words, the description would be so vast that it would not consist of knowledge for oneself. When including the All, there is always an excess. In the process of expanding the scientific description of the Cosmos, the All has continually gotten bigger. In response, we have created more All-like words and images to calibrate our attention to it. Nonetheless, the All is still the inclusion of an excess, gesturing to whatever else science might move to next.

At the same time, Cosmos does let us “see” such large and small entities, providing some image to fill in their place and put us in relation to them. These images function in the same way, providing us with a sense of the incomprehensibly large and the incomprehensibly small, not in a way that fully discloses their reality, but which allows us to contemplate their presence in a way that makes them more real for us. There is a careful balance that must be struck here in these kind of visualizations since this making real, this apparent objectness, ease of manipulation, and tie to scientific work, always tempts us to overemphasize the reality of these views. However, as we already saw in Humboldt and in our discussion of the Blue Marble photo in chapter 1, if we overemphasize the reality—or lack of reality—in such larger views they begin to lose the power that, was derived from their infinite aspects. To see the infinite aspects is to see the scalar element of such visualizations, noting that this view of entire galaxies bears a nearly infinite relationship to our comprehension of the world around us. However humorous the phrase,

“billions and billions” does indicate this compounding scalar relation visualized at such a cosmic

346 scale. To truly encounter this photo is to contemplate billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each. The photo is itself a function of this excess by which our sense of what it means to consider everything is reworked according to a vastness too large to be comprehended even as it is visualized.

The problem is set up already by the making-accessible of what is fundamentally too vast to be held within the mind. Such a problem comes into relief less within science, where the description of the universe needs only its function for thought and calculation, and more within the philosophical reflection and public communication on those scientific descriptions.16 Thus, both Humboldt’s and Sagan’s endeavors were necessarily works of public communication about science. As a mode of defining variables examining their relations, science will always be able to proceed with these various kinds of infinite images and descriptions since they will yield practical means of calculation and manipulation, particularly when dealing with the averaging effects of moving between two scales. In doing so, science has been able to define for us in some way the scope of vastness itself. This was the sentiment that Humboldt expressed as the transition from a more primitive awe of the heavens to the sublimity of science. Neither

Humboldt, Sagan, nor Tyson see science as eradicating this awe. The purpose of their work is to re-establish this awe in relation to the vastness of scientific description. To do so is to tune into how the seemingly complete aspects—the part of science which claims a tie to a rational empiricism—actually exceeds itself in its own description. In the end, there is incredible wonder already contained in the description of the Cosmos, a wonder that functions as an underlying motivation for science and scientists. All three forms of Cosmos portray the meticulous work of scientists as arising from this wondrous access to a better sense of the vastness to be described.

16 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari usefully describe science as the defining of “functives”—functional variables whereby the world can be mapped (What is Philosophy? Chapter 5). 347

In essence, the work of a science of the Cosmos is the public communication whereby we remind ourselves, both scientists and nonscientists, that science has actually come full circle back to awe: moving away from the initial raw encounter with the wonder of nature, to the rigors of cold description, and back to this sense of wonder as the vastness becomes an artifact of an incomprehensibly large Cosmos filled with endless layers of description weaving together into one Whole an immense diversity of beautiful and intricately interconnected entities. Such a progression is not a process undertaken through the history of science but is something that occurs within each of us in our relationship to scientific description. A public work like these versions of Cosmos are simply meant to assist us in seeing this progression by which we come to understand, appreciate, and not forget this wonder.

Getting to the All The transition by which we arrive at this vastness is one of the most important elements in conceptualizing and permitting this sense of wonder. Let us consider more closely this transition from our current perspective to the All.

We discussed in chapter one how moving up in scale resolved differences into similarities. However, if we go further up the scale, even those differences may be resolved into similarities unable to be perceived from that first movement. While this recursive movement is not discussed extensively by Frank White in the Overview Effect, it is implied by one of his major concepts: the Universal Insight. White points out that this universal insight is most often articulated by those who go out far enough to see the continual effect of the widening scale:

“especially for astronauts who have gone to the moon, there is the Universal Insight, a realization of how small the Earth is in the scheme of things. There is a sense of unity of everything in the universe and an understanding that our ultimate destiny is to become citizens of the universe”

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(93). Moving up the scale, when we pursue it further and further, can help us to understand the

“universe as a whole” (55). This “as a whole” is Sagan’s cosmic All: the Universal Insight occurs when one’s perception is able to open to the possibility that the All might be a Whole.

The Universal Insight is of a different order than the Overview effect quite simply because you cannot actually go so high as to see the All in its Totality such that one is able to find one’s place in the vast Whole. Here Plotinus’s assertion that “we cannot take in the entire hemisphere at one glance” (discussed in Chapter 1) might be restated as “we cannot take in the entire cosmos at one glance.” We can imagine further reaches of space and time but these will never be the All. In some way, we are limited by what we know about light itself: the edge of the

“observable universe” which Tyson takes us to in episode one of the new Cosmos. But this does not discount the intense experiential shift that is implied by this traveling to the edge of the

Cosmos. Instead, it suggests that the Universal Insight pushes beyond potential positional nature of the Overview Effect and forces us to imagine or creatively represent what this change in position would look like, all while retaining some connection or continuity to the present experience.

Here the physical location where one finds the Overview Effect turns back into a mode of logical abstraction, but now from a new point of view. The Universal Insight might be seen as a recursive form of the Overview effect that occurs as you move further and further away, including more and more within your scope. If you take the implications of the view from above, even experienced in a limited degree, and project it out even further, in recursive fashion, the implication of the Overview Effect compounds to a breaking point. The Universal Insight effectively combines the Overview Effect with Lucretius’ famous argument for the infinity of the universe. We already saw this infinity of the universe affirmed by Humboldt in Kosmos. In the

349 new Cosmos series, Tyson reintroduces Lucretius argument for the infinity of the universe through a creative rendition of the story of the scientific mystic Giordano Bruno (episode 1,

18:00). While Lucretius’s argument is a logical one, the essence of it fits with our continual scaling up to the All. The original verses from Lucretius are illuminating:

It matters nothing where thou post thyself, In whatsoever regions of the same; Even any place a man has set him down Still leaves about him the unbounded All Outward in all directions; or, supposing A moment the all of space finite to be, If some one farthest traveller runs forth Unto the extreme coasts and throws ahead A flying spear, is't then thy wish to think It goes, hurled off amain, to where 'twas sent And shoots afar, or that some object there Can thwart and stop it? For the one or other Thou must admit and take. Either of which Shuts off escape for thee, and does compel That thou concede the All spreads everywhere, Owning no confines. (974-990)

If we take the overview effect seriously, we could perform the same experiment in terms of scale, as if the traveler looked back each time he found the extreme coast. Lucretius states the conclusion at the very beginning: “even any place a man has set him down still leaves about him the unbounded All.” The incredible realization of the All (in Lucretius, the Latin omni, where we derive the term omniscient), as a term which captures whatever else might be considered beyond it, is the end result of this movement. Since a boundary implies a division, a limit, there must always be a something from which it is divided off. Thus, there is always the capacity to add more, to go further. Even the “observable universe” is merely limited by the speed of light, which is current means of untangling the depths of the Cosmos. Nonetheless, Tyson readily notes that “many of us suspect that all of this, all the worlds, stars, galaxies, and clusters in our observable universe is just one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes, a multiverse,

350 universe of universes, world without end” (1, 15:25). We are always capable of imaging more, leading us to yet another recursion (“universe of universes”) that points to another beyond.

The only appropriate thing to do visually at such a moment is to introduce a loop. Thus, the frame following Tyson’s lines transitions to a waterfall, capturing the sense of cascading that this rabbit-hole of “universe of universes” provides. Another common transition, especially if we go down the scale, is to just loop the transition around, going from the smallest scale to the largest, as was in several episodes of the Simpsons. Perhaps the most appropriate transition might also seem the most trite: the transition into the eye. This occurs at the end of the zoom out in Contact as well as in the title sequence of Tyson’s Cosmos, where a nebula transforms into an eye from which emerges the ship of the imagination. Such loops are appropriate merely because they reflect the infinite nature of the universe as a function of the observation, which ends up being recursive as long as we pay attention to the observer who is designating and traveling through these infinities.

Indeed, mathematics has provided us with the odd compounding of infinities we already mentioned briefly, such that even when we designate a word like Cosmos, the All, or the Infinite we can always permit addition to these words. Such an opening to addition is itself part of the

Allness of the All. To designate an All or an infinity is never to suggest completion but merely to put in a placeholder gesturing to the highest point. Such openness was already conceptualized in mathematics in David Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel, which he delivered in a lecture in 1924 and was then popularized in George Gamow’s 1947 book One Two Three...Infinity. There are a number of experiments that can be conducted with the concept of the infinite hotel, but the interesting one for us is that, even if you imagine that the infinity of rooms are occupied, you still have room to add more. All you do is you take the first of the infinite set, add 1 (n+1), and do so on to

351 infinity. Then you have an opening at the first room. In this way, the concept of infinity itself already implies, even mathematically, that more can be added. One can always keep going.

The visualizations of these transitions, such as those we saw in Sagan’s Cosmos do provide us with a sense of the phase transitions that occur when we do find these limits of our perceptual field. When a continuity is preserved in the motion outward, we can note these thresholds as they continue to occur in our moving outward. The effectiveness of representations of the cosmic zoom in looping the Overview Effect lies in the way that it allows us to note these transitions as a kind of layering of vastness, at each point where a limit appears to be reached, another means of expanding further is presented. We thus get acquainted with the possibility of what appears to be the limit (here is the Absolute, the edge of infinity), dissolving into another addition. Each phase transition is another training in the expansion of infinity.

With these aspects in view, we can look at the Powers of Ten (1977) short film. The film was produced by Charles and Ray Eames based on a 1957 book called Cosmic View by Kees

Boeke. The film was the first to popularize a continuous zoom through scales according to orders of magnitude. The film begins centered on a couple having a picnic in a park in Chicago then seamlessly zooms out at a rate of one power of ten every ten seconds. The result is a startling pull through multiple scales as we constantly find ourselves encountering a whole different way of viewing reality. The film is remarkable for the way it forces us to revise our understanding of our usual organization to the world—the calibration noted by Sagan. The seamlessness of the transitions between scales makes the differences produced all the more startling. Some critics have noted that this seamlessness was artificially produced in the making of the film, sometimes leading to alterations in the strict scalar zoom.17 Such a critique, while worth noting, assumes

17 Horton, Zach. “Networking the Cosmic Zoom” 352 that the power of the film must come from its accuracy to scale rather than the way such seamlessness allows the viewer to retain the semblance of a normal experience: here is normal experience pulled through orders of magnitude. The ecstasy produced by such a transition comes out of its seamlessness, which allows the viewer to be taken by surprise, feeling their usual perspectives give way to new ones. Indeed, the Powers of Ten has likewise been one location for the critique of “scalar effects,” as if these are some kind of imposition upon the viewer. Thus, one scholar reads the film as a “training of the eye of the viewer that used the mathematical sublime with a visual ecstasy to present scientific principles from a voyeuristic view from outside of the world presented and through a screen interface” (Brannon 276). The assumption here seems to be that the video frames the world for the viewer, in some kind of imposition from outside. But, as we have seen, in scale the outside here is an outside of this limited “I,” not the exclusion of myself required for voyeurism. The ecstasy is not in the visual but involuted: in its means of calibrating myself to the infinite. It brings to my awareness what it means to exceed one’s limited view, forces us to reconsider what holds us here (these things we are so invested in), and to reflect on how this limited reality has such a needless power over our everyday lives.

This cannot just be a “mathematical sublime” of measurement. Although there is a quantitative element involved in expanding ones scope, there needs to be this essential qualitative element whereby one is willing and able—via the surrender of the absolute investment in the reality of the “I” scale—to consider fully this scope.

With these considerations of framing and rhetorical power in mind, using all our conclusions about scale we have made thus far, let us try to discern again the effects by which at certain thresholds a new unity manifest.

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We start with the things we know and love, that we care about: a delightful picnic on a sunny day—smiling faces, good food, a relaxing afternoon, a book, a nap. All of this is fine here.

It is a usual delightful scene. As we begin to zoom out, it is at 10^2 that we no longer see these individuals, they become lost. But that’s fine—another structure, recognizable and also human, becomes apparent: the bridges, a lake, a stadium, lines of cars. All of this is fine—we’re still here intact. At 10^4 even those disappear, washed out into stripes of brown in the green. But still, I see these lines—they are the etches of human directions of the surface of the earth, like a map— that guide us through this surface. We know where we can go, how to go there. This picture remains for a few seconds as landscapes: it seems only as if we’re gliding across a map in the familiar contours of these masses of earth and water. But as we continue to zoom I begin to long for the edges, anticipating their arrival: the limit of the Earth. You can feel it coming: an impending concavity, the first evidence of clouds obscuring the familiar neatness of the map-like nature of these landmasses. Then it is there, suddenly—an invasion of darkness that begins at the corners of the frame and then envelops the earth. Here it is: it is contained, all of this streaked white patterns of blue. I can notice, for a brief second, that this video has made me into both the picnickers and the viewer. How am I still oriented in relation to them? I cannot see. I cannot take the reference: I only see this whole. As picnicker I become the whole that my role as viewer allows me to see.

But it still looks like an object, one I can adore and hold to—like the summer afternoon, the relaxing with a book—as the reference point for beauty and love. But the video doesn’t let me—as if to say that if I pause only here I’ll only reify this view into an object too. It takes twenty seconds from the revelation of the Earth’s wholeness for the Earth to start to look exactly like another star. 10^8 meters. The whole time it retreats, I can feel all familiarity retreating. I

354 can feel that I want to hold on. I don’t want to go further. Except that, at this moment, it looks just like a night sky: I could be on the Earth looking up in the dark, not back at this starting point.

A further familiarity enters: the streaks indicating the course of the planets. Then the sun emerges from the left side of the screen. Yes, this is our sun, our solar system. It is familiar, comforting—I suppose—at least on the level of concepts. We’re in orbit, grounded by this familiar point.

It takes only sixteen seconds for the sun to become another star.

Fifty two seconds, and almost nothing happens. The narrator tries to remedy this, pointing to constellations that are familiar. But I feel oddly rooted. I have no idea where we are going. Are we moving at all? The squares indicating each power of ten are still retreating, signs that we are moving, but I feel stilled, motionless. Then a shift occurs: stars start to invade from the edges and this invasion picks up speed. Suddenly a new formation appears, so unfamiliar that it is familiar: a cloud of stars. What is this? What are these streaks? Will another earth emerge?

Where are the edges? Then the Milk Way comes into view: I know this image, having seen it before. But it looks like a hurricane. A hurricane of stars: the furious swirl of how many suns?

Only a few seconds and a few other streaks and then the Milky Way is itself another dot.

These points of light are what for me now?

The frame pauses. It reads 10^24. The scene of darkness—barely speckled by light

(perhaps it is dust on my screen?)—it quivers. Where have we gone? Where are we? I can still feel myself here, at the desk (at the park) watching a video (reading a book). But what is this?

What can my view be? My being quivers on the edge of vast darkness: the observable universe.

The zoom back in happens quickly, none of this looks familiar anymore. Is this man still sleeping, having seen this vastness? Am I still watching? What were these intermediary steps?

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How far? I can’t see it anymore: they are all unfamiliar functions of a beyond. Larger, too large for familiarity, too large for knowledge. Seeing the man again, the picnic, aware of these eyes staring at a screen, I feel that the perspective has not left that point, but is pulled down an infinite tube—a wormhole of spacetime—with my sense of locatedness spread along the disorienting walls made of nothing more than an orienting mark: 10^24. I am now prepared, even welcome the shift down further, feeling my expectation alter to allow that this too will resolve further and further into a vast not-knowing. I too contain a universe: yes, let’s scale down further. Let this body too become involuted: I am already implicated in the far wider, I cannot be defined as this sleeping-watching man.

The feeling that one must go on, continuing to zoom, is brought face to face with the possibility of humbly accepting that this continuation is unnecessary. Within this frame is already so much that, if we pause and dwell with it, we are able to feel how the vast expanse was not contained by the image itself but within the acknowledgement that the All-ness of this infinitude will continue. That this perspective might continue to zoom on, in its continual gesture to the infinite—this is felt as a breakdown of the frame itself, a trailing off, an ellipses that ends with silence. On this science too must go silent in awe. The galaxies as dust in the abyss—even these are not immune.

Leaving out Space We, of course, cannot go to the edges of the Observable Universe. Nonetheless, the edges of the Observable Universe is observable because it comes to us. This rhetorical switch points to a persistent oddity in our rhetoric about space that seems to produce a contradiction. This contradiction is born from the common sentiment that most of space is nothing, empty, and void.

Thus, even though we are able to see the vastness of space, we often articulate it as an emptiness

356 and an isolation. In the context of extraterrestrial life, we have the sentiment captured in the movie version of Contact (1997): “But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.” More potent is the oft-invoked sentiment within some ecologically minded circles in which we are isolated within the universe, what Sagan poetically describes as “the great, enveloping cosmic dark” (Cosmos ep 13). We saw this in Chapter 1 through the Overview

Institute’s description of the earth as “a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.” The sense is that space is largely empty, uninteresting, and devoid of meaning. As a correlate, we are isolated, vulnerable, and delicate. This moody sentiment fits nicely with our general feeling about our environmental situation, our own loneliness and isolation, and the sense that the cosmos itself is fragmented. The same sentiment has often been put forward about the inaccessibility of large scales. As we have already seen, such scalar entities are not absolutely inaccessible even if they are inaccessible in a few important ways—physically, for instance. Scale itself is the means we use to access such things.

While the stars are distant and in some way inaccessible, this imagining of space as empty is a curious move since it permits a powerful exclusion. This exclusion is conducted by a long-standing conceptual habit, born from the structure of sight, which becomes habituated into a rhetorical maneuver: when we discern an object, we cut out the space in-between those objects, seeing it as empty for the sake of seeing the object (this was discussed somewhat in chapter 2).

Yet there is something that is connecting your eye and the object: light itself must exist along or within the space between the two objects. Light is only one spectrum of electromagnetic radiation but we know that space is full of such radiation. Likewise, there is good evidence that something like dark matter or a Higgs field—or whatever science will come to call it—saturates the universe. But, most remarkably, we know that gravity functions regardless of distance.

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Whatever gravity is—and even if we cannot reasonably say it is a thing—it nonetheless in some real way connects us to the stars. Granted, the effect is miniscule for stars at a great distance, but the theory of gravity necessitates that there is no limit to the field of gravity’s influence. When

Neil Degrasse Tyson describes this in episode 10 of the new Cosmos, he notes that "the sun does touch the planets, with its gravitational field." Likewise, he notes that magnetism already extends fields for force around the earth. These are basic scientific facts that do not require any advanced understanding. This episode of Tyson’s Cosmos dramatizes the links through the final moments of the episode by visualizing the signals from lights and radio signals. Of course we know this, but we habitually think of objects as those things which are solid and easily seen. Just as we know that air is not empty and still habitually treat it as such, we think of space as largely empty because the significant entities easily identified as objects (planets, stars, and galaxies) are so distant. In reality, we are able to say things about the Observable Universe because there is this connection between us and the edge of the Universe. Everything we infer about the Cosmos comes from examining in detail how we are connected to those things from here. Just as James

Hutton first noted that geological formations connect us with distant time elements, astronomy’s dissection of the visual field is born out of the realization that these fields of vision are a kind of connection with distant objects. Science has always paradoxically included what is beyond our normal view of vision but nonetheless measurable in some way. It has been persistently taking into itself most phenomenon that were once considered “supernatural” as soon as there is a way to put them to a measure. The best example of this is magnetism (described in episode 10 of

Tyson’s Cosmos), which is still a rather magical invisible force however accurately science is able to map it.

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When we leave out these things that fill space, cutting ourselves off from distant objects entirely (just because these bodies can’t travel there), we find ourselves encountering the strange nihilism and loneliness that can come with some scalar arguments. This sense of morbid emptiness has become popular in some scalar visualizations, such as one online graphic by the artist Josh Worth called “If the Moon were Only 1 Pixel: A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system.”18 The main premise of this interactive graphic was that it did not use orders of magnitude, as is used by the Powers of Ten. It takes its base size proportion to be the size of the moon as one pixel (hence the title) and then keeps a continuous scale from there. The result is a line that allows the user to scroll endlessly through what appears to be pretty much nothing. Not content to merely leave this be, the artist includes some musing on this emptiness of the universe, built out of what is essentially this idea that scale is ultimately inaccessible: “When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt...[after more scrolling] Those things are too much for our brains to handle. [more scrolling] We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them.

[scrolling] We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers. Even so, they never seem to work.” As we have noted before, Worth’s point about the incapacity to formulate metaphors for scale is accurate. But the negativity of this sentiment arises from the fact that the graphic is not actually scaling for us. While the graphic does directly address the potential normalization that orders of magnitude might produce, the tediousness of the graphic makes the scalar relation appear meaningless. Thus, while his project is a productive reminder of the scale on which we exist, Worth seems to miss that the worth of such order of magnitude shifts lies in

18 See http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html. Worth notes in a blog post (“FAQs: 1 Pixel Moon Map”) that at least 3 million people viewed the graphic and scrolled all the way to Pluto. 359 how they make these larger things at least marginally comprehensible in their connection to scale.

Instead, Worth would continue to project us along this non-scalar axis (it is not scalar because it retains the same scale throughout) in order to demonstrate this further point about nothingness. Again, the point is about thought’s capacity to capture things: “It's easy to disregard nothingness because there's no thought available to encapsulate it. There's no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.” But, of course, nothingness doesn’t exist and has always already ceased to exist, so this statement does not make sense. Meanwhile, what Worth is not showing, because he is staying on the same scale, is the nonvisual things that are traveling across those distances, which make even the measure of that distance possible. Nonetheless, out of this nothingness, he finds himself (as we continue to tediously scroll through, feeling ourselves a little bored and listless) able to posit some grand theories about the universe:

It's a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise we'd have no point of reference at all. -- We'd be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren't built to understand. All this emptiness really could drive you nuts. For instance, if you're in a sensory deprivation tank for too long, your brain starts to make things up. You see and hear things that aren't there. The brain isn't built to handle "empty." "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didn't exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."

But of course evolution did equip us with the capacity to feel wonder at vastness and connection.

Worth’s graphic cuts out both of these elements by refusing scale and refusing to include those things that do actually fill this nothing but which aren’t as glorious or obviously visible as the stars, planets, and galaxies (which he can’t show because he’s not changing scales). The result of such a conception is endless boredom, separation, and lack of meaning:

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But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of. The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice. You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot. Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring.

We see here some of the same arguments we’ve been making, even invoked according to scale, but making the opposite point. Worth’s diagram is able to arrive at these points precisely by leaving out scale and by positing nothing as not only a thing, but most of the universe (see chapter 2). Thus, he is able to project this nothingness down to the scale of atoms as well, denying off-hand even the possibility of connectedness using a simple denial:

Emptiness is actually everywhere. It's something like 99.999999999999999999958% of the known universe. Even an atom is mostly empty space.[,,,] Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty... - -- but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us. You could safely say the universe is a "whole lotta nothing"

Ironically the idea that atoms are mostly empty space was articulated by Sagan in the first episode of the Cosmos and is affirmed in a more powerful way when Tyson describes in episode

6 that our atoms never actually touch each other. Yet this positioning is only a habitual granting of substance and tangibility to the small and the weighty—the nucleus of the atom in Sagan and

Tyson’s case. Underneath this is already an exclusion—force and energy is not a thing—that permits Worth’s further disavowal. This denial—“but come on”—is the insistence that all that matters is some kind of tangible visible matter. But to leave out the rest is to leave oneself with this sense of nothingness, this sense by which the universe is largely empty, void, and disjointed.

It is to privilege the apparent location of the stars and ignore the fact that every star is sending an array of electromagnetic rays and gravitational fields that extend across the entire cosmos. All of this must, on some level, already be connected, even on a measurable level, even if we don’t see it and even if we don’t yet have a full account for it. The nihilism and glorification of emptiness is thus a persistent exclusion at the very point where we aim to include more by heading out from

361 the earth and into space. It is also the denial of scale itself as the possibility of extending our consciousness carefully through this expanse that manifests itself. It is the denial, up front, of the beauty and wonder of the cosmos in favor of the bored sense that all of this is mostly nothing at all.

Looking Back from Cosmos Of course we only ever get to the edge of the Cosmos from here, in unfolding in these imaginative mediums what science has untangled in its descriptive endeavor. It is in this loop back, this reflective consideration of the infinite seen from here, that science waxes the most poetic. At this edge, where the All of Cosmos gestures to the infinite unknown on one side and infinite layers of description on the other, what do these spokesmen for science say? What is the culmination and lesson of this great glimpse of vastness?

Let’s consider briefly the two final speeches in the two iterations Cosmos series, which actually amount to three speeches since Tyson inserts Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot speech before his final musings.

Sagan’s embracing of skepticism has a kind of opening to what is not yet discovered and what might be added to this endless descriptive endeavor. He notes that science only yields to wonder if we do not find ourselves in a dogmatic position. Dogma would constrain us by the very sense of completion; it is the forgetting of the open ended nature of the infinite even when we have decidedly finite images and numbers to describe it. Thus, Sagan connects this encountering of the cosmos with a healthy skepticism that leads to wonder:

It is the birthright of every child to encounter the cosmos anew in every culture and every age. When this happens to us, we experience a deep sense of wonder. The most fortunate among us are guided by teachers who channel this exhilaration. We are born to delight in the world. We are taught to distinguish our preconceptions from the truth. Then, new worlds are discovered as we decipher the mysteries of the cosmos. (Sagan, Cosmos ep 13)

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The deciphering is related to the appreciating, as the undoing of preconceptions (what one thinks one knows) in relation to what can be encountered within this vast All. If the vastness is kept in sight, as an openness and willingness to encounter more and more, then the exhilaration and delight becomes the basis on which scientific description proceeds. In this view, the practice of science is really just a systematic collective worshiping of the Cosmos, conducted through seeing what the Cosmos can do and granting it a compounding description that always hopes for its own revision. Thus, Sagan continues:

Science is a collective enterprise that embraces many cultures and spans the generations. In every age, and sometimes in the most unlikely places there are those who wish with a great passion to understand the world. We don't know where the next discovery will come from. What dream of the mind's eye will remake the world. These dreams begin as impossibilities…. We humans long to be connected with our origins so we create rituals. Science is another way to express this longing. It also connects us with our origins. And it, too, has its rituals and its commandments. Its only sacred truth is that there are no sacred truths.

This final line implies that the truths of science are not the source of its sacredness. That is, facts themselves are not sacred. Rather, the sacred nature of science is the open-ended, collective enterprise of gazing into the expanse of Cosmos, on all scales, with some willingness to venture to describe in a systematic manner. But the description itself is not sacred; rather it is the yielding to this longing for interconnection, for allowing all of these disparate facts to come together, that finds us performing the rituals of scientific practice.

In the final moments of wonder, Sagan returns back to his dictum that “we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself” in order to revisit this scientific accumulation from the cosmic perspective. The result is a beautiful leap through scales to help force us into a sense that all of this is nothing more than a worshiping of the All. This final speech is worth quoting at length:

We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of matter and the forces that sculpt this world and others. We know the molecules of life are easily formed under conditions

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common throughout the cosmos. We have mapped the molecular machines at the heart of life. We have discovered a microcosm in a drop of water. We have peered into the bloodstream and down on our stormy planet to see the Earth as a single organism. We have found volcanoes on other worlds and explosions on the sun studied comets from the depths of space and traced their origins and destinies listened to pulsars and searched for other civilizations. We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we whose earliest footsteps, are preserved in the volcanic ash of East Africa. We have walked far.

The persistence of the scalar shifts here allow us to transition one final time between various perspectives of ourselves. The repeated list of accomplishments is not merely a praise of humankind but a designation of what our collective consciousness has gathered as an offering from and for the Cosmos. Thus, Sagan immediately spread us as thin as possible, wedged between two vast scales as he continues:

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth. But it's simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we, we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos we've begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars organized collections of 10 billion-billion- billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps, throughout the cosmos. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast from which we spring.

As citizens of the Cosmos we see ourselves as walking hydrogen atoms and fragments of stars, weaving these words by which our attention can be tuned into the infinite cosmic signals. The sentiment here is the same that Brian Swimme articulates in his narrations of cosmos as, quite simply, we are the part of cosmos built to love to the cosmos.19 However cold and distancing scientific description might sound and however alienating and dangerous the technological development out of science is, when we dwell with the perspective it gives us, then love and awe manifests.

19 See, for example, the Universe is a Green Dragon 364

The concerns over technological abuse of science was never far from Sagan’s mind as the primary taint of this scientific praise of the Cosmos. He is known for his horrifying descriptions of nuclear winter and for his early warnings about global warming, dramatized in the final episode of Cosmos. Most productively, in his Pale Blue Dot speech, reproduced at the end of

Tyson’s Cosmos, Sagan invoked the same trope that we already saw in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio in Chapter One. This invocation reversed the always popular concern for spending money on space travel as a neglect of problems at home. Here one product of science (photos from the

Voyager 1 spacecraft) was used to counteract the dangerous game we are playing with the other products of science by which we dominate, exploit, and neglect each other and this planet.

The speech, which was originally given as a speech at Cornell October 13, 1994, reflects on this glimpse back, this nearly lost sight of our planet, as a rhetorical exercise in feeling vastness:

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Sagan aggregates the “every” to direct our attention to the scalar inclusion rendered small by an image of a speck of dust. Doing so trivializes not these lives themselves but the investment placed in the certainty by which we would insistently struggle with each other. Everything we hold large in our lives, we can recalibrate within this larger view. These values do not disappear but become contextualized across space-time according to a higher perspective and purpose.

Even though he begins speaking of both the good and the bad, he then turns to focus on our sense of hubris by which we wreak havoc on the each other and the planet:

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The Earth is a very small stage in a vast, cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

An ethical position emerges naturally from this cosmic view. The obscurity is itself the possibility of finding the humble position by which one learns to live oriented towards this

Cosmos as a thing of vast and exceeding beauty. It is impossible, in this view, to retain the sense of hatred and cruelty that we so often obsess over when considering this planet from the surface.

The chaos, both good and bad, becomes instead a beautiful, layered dance that spins through the wealth of the vast.

Tyson, despite his occasional awkwardness in taking up Sagan’s mantle, wraps together the sentiments of these two speeches in a beautiful connection to scale. Speaking to an audience who has become inured to such transitions in scale, the power of Tyson’s speech comes from how he directs the audience to reflect on what they are willing to take in:

Learning the age of the Earth or the distance to the stars or how life evolves-- what difference does that make? Well, part of it depends on how big a universe you're willing to live in. Some of us like it small. That's fine. Understandable. But I like it big. And when I take all of this into my heart and my mind, I'm uplifted by it. And when I have that feeling, I want to know that it's real, that it's not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what's true, and our imagination is nothing compared with Nature's awesome reality. I want to know what's in those dark places, and what happened before the Big Bang. I want to know what lies beyond the cosmic horizon, and how life began.

The central point here is this “taking all of this into my heart and mind.” The vastness lifts, on its own accord, our sensibilities to dwell on love and beauty. Even though Tyson is not content to just acknowledge this lifting, the scientific impulse does not corrupt the wonder but already

366 demands the beyond imagination as its source. It is the gazing into the mystery outlined even within the descriptive apparatus of science that provides the uplifting. Indeed, Tyson adequately captures this sense that, even as science continues to describe, there will always be more mystery to gaze into. He thus invokes some of Sagan’s original speech but now turns us more towards the future:

We, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we've begun to learn the story of our origins-- star stuff contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness. We and the other living things on this planet carry a legacy of cosmic evolution spanning billions of years. If we take that knowledge to heart, if we come to know and love nature as it really is, then we will surely be remembered by our descendants as good, strong links in the chain of life. And our children will continue this sacred searching, seeing for us as we have seen for those who came before, discovering wonders yet undreamt of in the cosmos.

Again, taking that knowledge of vastness to heart, is essential for us to see nature “as it really is.”

By this “as it really is,” Tyson is not so much invoking the absolute truth of science but, in line with Sagan, the capacity to outline and direct our attention through the expanse of vastness, as a calibration between our everyday lives and the mysterious wonder we feel about the cosmos.

This calibration is itself sacred, as a kind of on-going naming of the divine Cosmos.

Your God is too Small Despite these beautiful sentiments there is a tension between these scalings to the sacred and the scientific skepticism towards the religious. Such a tension does not demand some kind of bridge between science and religion but a careful dissection of what within science and within religion is insufficient to capture the fount of sacredness that has sprung from both modes of describing the encounter with the divine.

In the introduction to Sagan’s Varieties of Scientific Experience, Ann Druyan, co- producer of the original Cosmos and Sagan’s last wife, suggests that much of Sagan’s work can been seen as an attempt to reinvigorate our view of the cosmos according to sciences discoveries.

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Comparing Sagan to the Biblical Joshua, Druyan declares that Sagan always tried to knock down the “wall[s] around our souls that keep us from taking the revelations of science to heart” (ix).

Although Druyan purposefully invokes spiritual terminology, these “revelations” are not meant to be taken as something supernatural in the usual sense of the term, but what science has shown us about the universe. The difference, says Druyan, is whether or not we are able to truly understand their significance, not just on a technological level but on a deeper level as well. “We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed,” she laments, “unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature.” Here we find the connection that makes Carl Sagan’s work reach from science into mysticism in the view of a scalar shift: being spiritually paralyzed is tied to being unable to face the vastness of the cosmos, even as it is revealed by science.

Yet, even though Sagan was quite willing to consider spiritual matters, much of his work was closer to the avowedly anti-religious Richard Dawkins than the New Age interpretations of

Fritjof Capra; indeed, a quote from Dawkins praising Varieties can be found on the back of the paperback edition. Sagan’s participation in the Gifford Lectures, which Druyan edited into

Varieties, connected him already into a conversation about the more religious elements of his imagining of Cosmos. The Gifford lectures were made for this purpose: to have philosophers, thinkers, and scientists engage with theological issues, even if theology is not their normal interest.20 However spiritual in tone Sagan’s work might be, much of these lectures focus on dismissing and otherwise arguing against most traditional conceptions of religion and spirituality. Likewise, much of Cosmos is explicitly anti-metaphysical; episode seven goes so far as to set up Pythagoras and Plato as the enemies of scientific inquiry, obliquely implying that

20 For a history of the role and importance of the Gifford lectures see John Haldane, “Scotland’s Gift 368 they were responsible for science’s failure to mature in antiquity. For the most part, Sagan sticks to critiquing a view of God as a supernatural entity controlling the universe and avoids speculating on the confluence between his spiritualization of science and the classic esoteric and mystical visions of vastness.

Thus, his primary theological statement in Varieties remains focused on the implications of the astrophysical scale, as something altogether different from anything religion or spirituality has yet been able to conceive: "And this vast number of worlds,” he says, “the enormous scale of the universe in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religion"(27). This is an odd statement that cannot possibly be true in one sense but must be obviously true in another. On the one hand, our exploration of mysticism and scale already implies that spirituality was built on accessing and uniting with the vastness of reality. In this way, we could say that only the mystic has truly dwelt on this enormous scale long enough to find how to reconcile herself with it. On the other hand, the fact that we have only known these numbers and dimensions for a limited time does imply that there is something additional that one can add in fleshing out the nature and necessity of this vastness, but only as a way into structuring our attention to the vastness the mystic already admits.

But what is the theological conclusion derived from this metaphysical statement equating an image of vastness with the expanse of cosmos? Sagan himself resists going much further, noting, after taking the audience through a powers of ten sequence of pictures, that “there is no particular theological conclusion” he insists, “that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through.” Despite this hesitation, he does offer one primary potential conclusion:

We have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that

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the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less a universe.

The same sentiment is articulated by Edgar Mitchell, who also sees himself as a champion of science despite (or because of, he may argue) his involvement in testing paranormal phenomenon: “All I can suggest to the mystic and the theologian is that our gods have been too small” (216). Finally, this same conclusion is put into the mouth of Giordono Bruno in the first episode of the new Cosmos: standing before the group of skeptical scholastic astronomers, this brooding animated Bruno yells over the mummers, “Your God is too small!”

What this phrase seems to imply is that the All of most religion has confined itself to something less than the All. As the All has gotten bigger through the expansive descriptive practice of science, the lesser sense of the divine becomes dwarfed by this greater All. If this is the case, then Cosmos, as the All of science, is God reworked through the revelations of science.

But this sentence is not entirely clear, especially given science’s usual fragmenting mode of description. Perhaps Sagan resists saying more about this theological conclusion, simply because it is not immediately apparent why a vision of vastness would lead to such a statement about the size of God. True to his word, Sagan does not actually provide a theological explication of this new scale of God as an explicitly spiritual view or practice (to the extent that we understand what we mean by “spiritual view”). Instead, he mostly focuses on ethical matters, moving from the decentering aspects of a large scale view to the concerns of nuclear annihilation and ecological catastrophe. The two chapters which could have considered the nature of a larger, vast

God, “the God Hypothesis” and “Religious Experience,” are actually the most dismissive of religious ideas and terminology, primarily because the chapters focus on the idea of God as a supernatural entity and of religious experience as the fount of a belief in a supernatural realm. In doing so Sagan’s point is merely polemical. It does not, at least in Varieties, offer a clear

370 alternative, nor does he consider fully what his vast view of Cosmos might mean given the history of theology and philosophy. Indeed, it seems that Sagan does not want to go further than obliquely imply that, if we go to the highest scale, we can replace the word or idea of “God” with

“Cosmos.” In this movement, he reworks the animated Bruno’s statement in a light that sounds far more scientific: “what we do understand brings us face to face with an awesome cosmos that is simply different from the cosmos of our pious ancestors” (31).

This “simply different” is a broad statement to make of all of our “pious ancestors” and posits some larger rupture where Humboldt posited a return. Sagan’s difference is evidence of how the persistent distrust within science for the articulations that cross some line from whatever is considered material to whatever is considered the spiritual, a distrust that Humboldt noted but seemed to feel fewer qualms about pushing aside. Today, the terminologies of science and spirituality generally serve to police this divide by those who firmly identify themselves on one side or the other, although, as we already saw in Tyson and Sagan’s invocation of the sacred, they will cross for the sake of invoking a sentiment or authority that is more adequate to describe their sense of wonder. It is this crossing and the moments where the crossing is refused that serve to clarify what is at work here in the cross between science’s and mysticism’s encounter with the vast.

The major hesitation is almost entirely around the definition of the word “God” itself.

This is interesting given the usual attunement to terminologies within science. Sagan’s vast cosmos does not, he insist, include those aspects generally ridiculed by science: blind superstition, willingness for wild speculation, rejection of reality and sensory evidence, or a generally oppressive homogenizing mentality. Despite this disavowal, popularly rehearsed, it is not clear that a thoughtful view of religion includes these things either, at least when we attend to

371 them carefully. Sagan’s chapter on the “God Hypothesis” admits that the definition of the word

“god” is ambiguous and used in any number of ways, but he never considers what this word might indicate in relation to the scaling he so loves to perform. Indeed, he has already cut off that possibility—no religion has considered the vastness of the cosmos. Even though he acknowledges that most conceptions of God are not exactly anthropomorphized (he notes that the Greeks would consider the Christians atheists for this reason (148)), he nonetheless does not consider what kind of description would be appropriate to define the domain at which a spiritual position might legitimately transition to a divine name, i.e. to considering “Cosmos” as a divine name. The remainder of his chapter addresses a wide variety of arguments attempting to prove

God’s existence without ever positing anything about what exactly this word “God” means such that it needs to be proved. It seems that Sagan legitimately examined these arguments for the existence of God, but never quite stopped to wonder about the intention of this transcendental term. He somewhat blithely points to Paul Tillich as a modern theologian who denies “God’s existence, at least as a supernatural power” (149). He likewise points to Spinoza and Einstein’s view of God as “not very different from the sum total of physical laws of the universe” but then he dismisses this as a possibility (on the grounds that such a definition would imply that we all believe in God since it would be difficult to find people who do not believe in any kind of order in the universe whatsoever (149-150)). The result of Sagan’s avoidance is that, despite having clearly read a great deal about arguments for God, he nonetheless affirms an agnostic position according to an unclear definition of God.

In the end, it is unclear in such markedly spiritual accounts of science, what a skeptical scientist like Sagan means by “God” such that, in the final moments, he would deny any possibility of speaking to and with a mystical articulation of the wonder and divinity of the

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Cosmos. Such a question can be untangled without falling into the superstitious and relatively loose interpretations undergone by some of the more frustrating New Age philosophies— although if we untangle this properly, we might find ourselves, quite appropriately, taking seriously many of so-called New Age philosophies who engage seriously with science. The obfuscation arises not in these odd syntheses, but in the antagonism on both sides of a polarized religion/science divide, between a group of quite outspoken atheists and a group of quite outspoken fundamentalists, both of whom get intensely immersed into political and social debates about the role of moral, social, and knowledge structures. Both of these deal quite intently in terms of belief and conviction, as the certainty of one’s position. Yet, as we have persistently noted, our scaling to the All is antithetical to such certainty, belief, and conviction of this sort. The All or the Cosmos is not a matter of belief nor knowing but an encounter with the unknown that produces a humble conviction that relates to the limit and scope of one’s own knowledge.

The term “supernatural” is the category by which science has carried on its long term diatribe against religion. Thus, Richard Dawkins defines God as ‘a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us” (God Delusion 52). This definition of God already contains an understanding of what religious people supposedly believe in, which may or may not fit general sentiments about God.

The designations here are deliberately crafted to exclude things that science has already performed. “Superhuman intelligence” merely refers to an assumption that consciousness is epiphenomenal to matter and is therefore a particular kind of belief about the location of consciousness. “Supernatural” is more interesting given that science has been on a gradual crusade to deny the supernatural even as it extends, through the All-aspects we’ve discussed

373 here, its definition of the “natural” to include a great deal once considered supernatural. Finally, the implication of “deliberation” and “creation” is that we conceive of God as some kind of craftsman who forges the world like we forge a machine. All of these ideas imply a dualist God, who is some kind of definable entity who exists apart from but in relation to this Cosmos, an All alongside our current All. Dawkins is thus waging a war against a particular kind of God, specifically crafted as a belief over and against a series of assumptions he would rather champion about reality. This dualist God is hardly more developed than the belief that some anthropomorphic Zeus is hanging out in his cloud, except that his cloud is somewhere outside the

Cosmos. Few, if any, thoughtful theologians would affirm this idea of God. Yet this definition of

God persists in most disavowals of religion. Even those who avoid the debate about atheism and science seem to define God in some sort of oppositional way, apart from nature and according to some decidedly human attributes. For example, even in all his wonder, Tyson notes that his

“confidence that there is a loving God who cares at all for your health and your longevity, based on what I see in the physical universe, is so low that it is not something that I would spend any time investing in.”21 This idea of God implies that the deity is some kind of accountant or parental figure, who is managing the whole system with some kind of directed hand.

Undoubtedly, Tyson is also thinking here of how prayer is used as a kind of “can I have my way, please?” pleading for one’s sake. In this view, God is still conceived in a dualist, nearly human sense: as some figure apart from this Cosmos who nonetheless tends it as one tends a garden, only in some kind of supernatural manner.

Both of these dualist conceptions of God are undoubtedly derived from experiences with many religious adherents. Insofar as these dualist notions are put forward, they do indeed deserve

21 Rebecca Mead, “Starman” 374 to be critiqued. Such critiques define and force our attention to a certain vagueness about our conceptions of God that unwittingly grant human attributes to the divine while also conceiving the divine as some kind of Otherworldly accountant. We will take up this concept of the

Otherworldly in the next chapter to examine if it has any legitimacy. Here we want to go a little deeper into the core of this question of “God” without merely accepting this dualist version that is so stereotyped within the science/religion conversation. Within the confines of this debate, the antagonism towards this dualist conception of God can indeed be accepted as a diatribe against a potentially dangerous version of spirituality. Indeed, much of the antagonism towards religion tends to arise from the consequences of a simple dualist conception of God. One can hardly deny that religion has often, if not mostly, been used as a structure of power, domination, and exploitation that takes advantage of a certain weakness, desire, or longing.22 Those who have pursued this longing to the depths of mystical experience will undoubtedly feel some of the same sentiments about the general tenor of religious practices since they take advantage of such spiritual longing, turning it into a weakness that is easily exploited for the purpose of fanaticism.

Thus, the most useful part of the atheistic attack on religion is the diatribe against the abuse of religious structures for the purpose of war, exploitation, and abuse. The tone of such attacks feels like hellfire itself as these books pile up the accounts of terrible deeds committed under the name of God. However, for those trying to understand their longing and wonder they feel about the

Cosmos, the result tends to be an intense antagonism. One could just as easily point to the terrible things done in the name of science. Such an accounting becomes nothing more than a mutual excoriating between two sets of beliefs, each considering the other as ignorant of some aspect of the Cosmos.

22 A recent account of these problems within religion can be found in Christopher Hitchens God is Not Great, which, as the publisher’s blurb already points out, is in the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian. 375

This antagonism covers up the ambiguity about the appropriate description of the divine, as well as the reality of the spiritual experience of union from which the mystic emerges and to which she always returns. The mystic will not engage in this debate because he finds himself on both sides of it, condemning the corruption of spirituality by religious structures while testifying to the reality of the divine structure that can be accessed beyond the visible world. The mystic too works according to the principle of the All, but with even more attention and care to the aspects we have already noted exist within the sciences of the Cosmos. Instead of speaking of a dualist God as the fount of spiritual sentiment, we must set aside our previous understanding of what these words mean. If we are to openly explore the move from God to Cosmos in the view of vastness, a switch which Sagan himself made only implicitly, we must be willing to acknowledge that there is a point, if we are actually after the truth and there is any truth at all in spiritual experience, where science itself points to or outlines the place at which the traditionally spiritual manifests. In order to scale up this tiny God of which Sagan, Mitchell, and Bruno speaks, switching our vocabulary is necessary but not sufficient. Indeed, this is precisely the height of skeptical inquiry: to set aside prejudice in the face of the consideration before us even if that consideration is spirituality itself. To do so we must approach this line of inquiry without the dogmatic assumption that either science or religion adequately describes what it seeks to describe but also with an openness to the possibility that they both do describe something legitimate in their own way. This examination will only work if we purge ourselves of—or at least notice and take stock of—the prior conviction or disposition towards religious matters, scientific inquiry, or something equally skeptical of both of those. Skepticism itself is not beyond skepticism.

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We can note that there is an unacknowledged resistance, perhaps strong enough to be called a contradiction, within Tyson’s encomium for the cosmos, analyzed in the last section above. Tyson notes that when he takes in the vastness of Cosmos he is uplifted by it. But then he continues: “And when I have that feeling, I want to know that it's real, that it's not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what's true, and our imagination is nothing compared with Nature's awesome reality.” He goes on to note how he wants to dive further into the mysteries of science, to untangle black holes and other astronomical unknowns. A moment like this reveals a deep and underlying mistrust of one’s own feelings, particularly the sense of wonder and awe. All other things are dealt with as legitimate data, but this one: that awe, wonder, and beauty. This emotion is read as prejudice or predisposition, a “feeling what you want to feel” as it is expressed in the movie Contact or an evolutionary instinct as it is described in Dawkin’s The God Delusion. The result is a turn away from this kind of sensation as illegitimate data on the nature of reality, cutting it out of what is included. The incredible history, the many individuals in all periods and times experiencing and testifying for this awe, are automatically discarded. Often, they are dismissed because of the possibility to interpret such awe according to belief: the “something happening inside my own head” implies that it is manufactured, generated by one’s desire to feel a certain way. But there is another way, outside of belief and a distrust of desire, which makes these emotions another part of reality, capable of being studied empirically, included within the realm of phenomena to be prodded and examined.

The primary obstacle to such a study seems to be the idea of matter. Such an internal study is outside of a purely material encounter. And yet the descriptive power of matter has long been extended beyond the phenomena that it originally implied. Nonetheless, Tyson’s invocation of “I want to know its real” seems to search for some material reason for wonder. What could this be

377 other than to look outside one’s experience, i.e. to switch scales to the social or the molecular or the evolutionary to try to explain why you have this feeling? Doing so will never be sufficient to explain why this feeling is uniquely tied to this mode of vastness, to this going to the All and contemplating Cosmos in its massively inclusive aspect. The explanation for that tie will exceed how it manifests in a particular release of dopamine or how it builds into a self-reinforcing social or evolutionary structure by which we direct our attention to the vast. Something is thus left out of the All of Cosmos: the very wonder from which the science of the Cosmos was born. Within this material framework, Tyson discard of the emotion of wonder even as he affirms. Therein lies the contradiction: rather than examining the feeling of wonder as it relates to the excess of description—the All-ness aspect of Cosmos—Tyson retreats back to description itself, to science’s further outlining and diagramming of the expanse of Cosmos. This is the element that most frustrates those working from a mystical view: that even in encountering the wonder of the

All, description is still privileged over the excess that is already pointed to.

Thus, Tyson finishes his description of Bruno’s quite accurate description of the infinitude of Cosmos with the telling phrase: “Bruno was no scientist. His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess because he has no evidence to support it.” The evidence Bruno had was entirely within a non-material mode of description that acknowledged the experience of feeling the vastness of cosmos. If you take the vastness of cosmos as your starting point, then many of the conclusions that Bruno made about the physical may likewise follow. The essence of Bruno’s insight was not about facts—we have gone beyond the accumulation of facts to the mystery already contained within what appears to be described and known. If he was dealing with points of data about phenomenon, like the size of Jupiter or the distance to Vega, then we might say it was a lucky guess. Instead, it was his willingness to face and integrate in the vastness of cosmos

378 that, when applied back to the known facts at the time, allowed him to discard some, alter others, and add some more insights on his own, some of which even permitted further observational confirmation.

The expanse of the Cosmos as an all-inclusive term permits a feeling of Wholeness when one yields up and becomes united with this vastness, when one truly permits that this “we are star stuff and we long to return” implies this unity of our being with the Cosmos. Such a conception exists outside of any religion, creed, dogma, or doctrine—even the doctrine of science—because it exists solely as the willingness to contemplate this vastness and truly integrate it into the core of your being. Thus Albert Einstein, the patron-saint of science, once noted the perennial nature of this realization of the vastness:

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.23

Einstein acknowledges, as Humboldt did, the resonance between the ancient mystical encounter and the scientific encounter with the Cosmos. Einstein goes further in acknowledging this encounter as originating from this willingness to move beyond oneself and contemplate the order and beauty of an existence which already exceeds one’s world, i.e. a willingness to begin to acknowledge that you exist already on a higher scale. Doing so produces religious feeling but it also pulls you outside of any dogma or conception of God that is in any way recognizable.

Einstein continues:

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the

23 Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930 379

heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.24

The “no God conceived in man’s image” is the denial of the dualist God that Sagan and so many others seem to think is at the core of religious feeling. Einstein understood enough about the mystery of the cosmos and the experience of the mystic to be willing to acknowledge the confluence of the two. In fact, he saw science as one of the means of elaborating on and accessing this religious feeling, as it expands our consciousness far beyond what it would be limited to otherwise.

We can say, with Einstein, that “we thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one.”25 This conception hinges on the excess already contained within the All included in the layers of wondrous description of the Cosmos. Sagan is right to note that vastness bears a relationship to the divine and even captures the essence of it through the musings we’ve noted from the first episode of Cosmos. It is this involution of ourselves within the vast cosmic All that permits the opening of consciousness to the great unknown that exceeds ourselves. In noting this relation, science will always contain the paradox whereby the systematic probing and careful description of the contours and layers of Being will always tempt us towards the closure that forecloses the possibility of wonder. This closure is dogma and is entirely antithetical to science itself. To close off in this way is to declare some end, some limit to what is included in the All and thereby making it less than the All.

It is at this juncture that the mystical articulation steps forward once again to help us address this general problem of how discern when description, even of the sort provided by

24 ibid 25 ibid 380 science, has approached what be appropriately considered the divine. We can note already that

Sagan’s term Cosmos already fits within a long history of words that are originally coined for their scope but then eventually come to take a personalized aspect. In Greek, for instance we have Pantos (All), which was used by Plato and favored by Plotinus; Deos (Awe), favored by

Nicholas de Cusa (see chapter 4); and Pleroma (fullness), used by the Gnostics and favored by

Philip K. Dick throughout the Exegesis26. In Hebrew, the tetragrammaton Yhwh, later rendered as

Jehovah, is posited to be derived from the Hebrew “To be, to exist, or he that is.”27 This naming of the Divine according to Being also fits with what we’ve discussed from Parmenides and with the Sanskrit naming of the Self as sat-cit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss).28 A number of traditions have made use of the One or the Whole—e.g. the “One without a Second” of the

Upanishads and Sankara, the One of Plotinus, the Gnostic monad in the “Secret Book of John,”29 and even Spinoza’s concept of the one substance. Each of these implies a going to the All that is congruent with Sagan’s and Humboldt’s use of Cosmos. The term “God,” on the other hand, does not have any clear etymology, and thus is not clearly related to scope, size, being, or presence. Nonetheless, if there is a particular value to the English word “God” it may be that it points to a particularly intimate form of cosmic substance, as was exemplified by Hegel’s cryptic but powerful suggestion that God is substance become subject.30 This personalization is in line with the Vedic Atman and sat-cit-anada, which compounds being with awareness, felt as bliss,

26 C.f. the opening invocation to the Isha Upanishad for a Vedic articulation of fullness. 27 The actual etymological root of the tetragrammaton is disputed. The thought that the name arises from “to be” is largely due to the YHWH’s declaration I AM that I AM to Moses, which is the Hebrew “ehyeh asher ehyeh.” See Larry Perkins comments in A New English Translation of the Septuagint, p. 46. This general sentiment is confirmed by Moses Maimonides’s discussion of the name of God and Exodus 3:14, in The Guide for the Perplexed (1:65, p 152-156). 28 This term is common through the literature of Vedanta. It appears frequently in the Ribhu Gita, the works of Sankara, and many modern commentaries on Vedanta. An excellent discussion of the term can be found in Merrell-Wolff’s Merrell-Wolff’s Experience, 32. 29 Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 108. The term translated here is “monas” or monad. 30 Phenomenology of Spirit, 10 381 in order to retain the indistinguishable tie between Being and the experience of that Being. But this articulation of God a personal does not imply God as anthropomorphized or dualist. Perhaps such connections are still obscured. To further clarify, we can consider the names of God to see in what ways it might be appropriate to move from this seemingly material endeavor of describing the physical order of the universe, to something more adequately spiritual.

For the mystic, the problem of the foreclosing of description is an old one. The mystical answer can take two forms: an affirmation of opposites and a recursion of all-ness. The denial of opposites often leads to a strange articulations such as this one from the Bhagavad Gita: “I will tell you of the wisdom that leads to immortality: the beginningless Brahman, which can be called neither being nor non-being” (13.12). Although an apparent contradiction, this is already implied by a term like the “All.” In the All, the small kinds of being might easily be said to be insufficient to capture the All. Yet the All is not non-existent. In some ways the affirmation of opposites can actually seem too apparent and easily glossed over by terms like All, which contain within them these opposite affirmations (or denials if following a negative theology, which exists both in most mystical strains). Thus, many mystics have resorted to a recursive description of the names of the divine, e.g. the king of kings. However, to indicate this recursive relationship as fully exceeding whatever we think is limited in the term, the recursion may be articulated as a “beyond,” “above,” or a “behind.” In the twentieth century it was Paul Tillich, the same theologian that Sagan cites as not really believing in God, who affirms god as the God above God.31 Indeed, Tillich partially derives this formulation from Heidegger’s description of

Being as not merely individual beings but the underlying Being behind any given being, the ontological condition whereby the ontic manifestation might occur.

31 See Courage to Be 186. 382

Nonetheless, the recursion was always present in the Biblical “I AM THAT I AM”

(Exodus 3:14), which, as the mystic rabbi Moses Maimonides notes, was given after the

Isrealites demanded a name for God as an indication of who this entity was.32 The demand arose from a need for a clear referent within experience since it is not immediately apparent that one might refer to something outside of what one encounters with the senses:

“For at that time all the people except a few were not aware of the existence of the deity, and the utmost limits of their speculation did not transcend the sphere, its faculties, and its actions, for they did not separate themselves from things perceived by the senses and had not attained intellectual perfection” (Guide of the Perplexed 154).

All sense experience is contingent being, found and defined according to its way of being encountered. The first “I am” indicates these kinds of sensed being, which the second pulls the affirmation to the persistent Being not specific to any of those beings: “the whole secret consists in the repetition in a predicative position of the very word indicative of existence:” I am the being which is only what it is (154-5). This Being is beyond any particular being derived from the faculties of the senses but is not entirely separated from them; it is the Being behind beings.

Likewise, the idea of naming God as the “God above God” was already contained within the corpus that is largely the fount of Christian mysticism: the work of Pseudo-Dionysius. In his tract “The Divine Names” Dionysius directly comments on the difficulty of naming the divine, which must necessarily exceed any name given to it, since a name, hastily understood, appears as a limit. Likewise, to associate the divine with any particular element within Cosmos is to let that part of the Cosmos stand in for the All, but it cannot be the All. Thus, in a real sense, the All is beyond being and cannot be known since anything known is not a knowing of the All, only a part of the All. Dionysius thus states:

“Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being. Let us

32 Guide of the Perplexed, 1:65 (153). 383

therefore look as far upward as the light of sacred scripture [read: recognized accounts of mystic experience] will allow, and, in our reverent awe of what is divine, let us be drawn together toward the divine splendor” (49).

The purpose of such names is not to capture what the divine is but to direct our attention to the highest point, to allow us to gather together our minds in awe at the majesty of the expanse of

Being. A name for the divine is thus a rhetorical practice in directing and transforming ourselves in relation to this holiness, rather than to describe in some way what it is. Rather than a map of the divine, a divine name is a means of directing us up and outward, just as Sagan’s favorite image of the galaxies. Dionysius assists us in moving beyond the tempting limit of a term like

All or Cosmos, by coming back to this compounding “infinity beyond being” (49), “Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech” (50).33

This is the crux of the move from the dualist god to the monistic conception of the divine: if you actually include everything in God then no being, even what we conceive of as the

All (e.g. the observable universe) actually indicates that All. You must include everything, otherwise you are naming a partial God, who is not God at all. Thus Dionysius states: “Names appropriate to God are praised regarding the whole, entire, full, and complete divinity rather than any part of it…they [must] refer indivisibly, absolutely, unreservedly, and totally to God in his entirety” (58). The suggestion is that we must articulate Cosmos, as we have already done above in accounting for the power of the term, as the All-ness of the All or the All beyond All.

The key is that one has truly arrived at the divine when one stops describing and allows oneself to be with the God beyond God. To do so is to allow oneself to be one with Cosmos. It is thus the hesitation that Tyson encounters when feeling his own wonder that brings him just short of understanding the divinity he is already experiencing in his conception of cosmos. In response

33 Nicholas de Cusa also favored these recursions and used them extensively in the Vision of God. 384 to just this kind of sentiment, Dionysus writes the following passage, which must be read carefully and in its entirety to fully grasp the import:

Since the union of divinized minds with the Light beyond all deity occurs in the cessation of all intelligent activity, the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels [in describing God] as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings. Truly and supernaturally enlightened after this blessed union, they discover that although it is the cause of everything, it is not a thing since it transcends all things in a manner beyond being. Hence, with regard to the supra-essential being of God— transcendent Goodness transcendently there—no lover of truth which is above all truth will seek to praise it as word or power or mind or life or being. No. It is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence. And yet, since it is the underpinning of goodness and by merely being there is the cause of everything, to praise this divinely beneficent Providence you must turn to all of creation (54).

Dionysius is describing a final phase shift already captured by the term “All” in which everything that is pales beneath the majesty of the underlying being of the pure Being of this All.

This is felt as transcendent, apart from anything that is, even that which can be described by science. Nonetheless, science does as well as any description at pointing to this excess, at the immensity already contained within the vastness of Being. This “truth above all truth” is the truth of this vastness beyond any particular facts, those elements championed by science but which

Sagan and Tyson already demanded were not to be cherished or held on to. The divine is at a

“total remove” from all of these words that attempt to describe it because the words do not capture the All, being themselves merely an element within it. The divine is thus the beyond of words, the saturation of the attention with what these words attempt to point it to. And yet this divine is still accessible because it is in being, already is the fullness of Being, and thus able to be pointed to by these words that mean to direct us there by directing our reflection to the Being already in being, but beyond the scales that produce partial objects. Indeed, if you really want to

385 feel this vastness, there may be no better way to access it than to “turn to all of creation” or even to the “All that is, All that was, and all that ever will be” of this universe, the Cosmos.

In the end, there is a great power in allowing this final phase transition to manifest as an actual transition point that leaves behind any content. One result is significant shift in the way we are able to discuss the divine, particularly in relation to science. We can see the difference in two similar movies, already discussed at different points here: Contact and Interstellar. Both of these movies, which happen to both star Matthew McConaughey, deal with the relationship to the divine in a remarkably different way. Contact was written by Sagan as a screenplay first, then novelized when the screenplay stalled before it was eventually filmed and released in 1997.

While the movie has some interesting things to say about first-person experience, the movie relies heavily on a concept of God that is largely dualist, divisive, and based in belief.

Throughout the movie, this concept of God plays a crucial role in the politicized interactions of the characters as Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), a researcher in the Search for Extraterrestial Life

(SETI), fights for funding and then, after finding said extraterrestrial life, for recognition. The religious figure is Palmer Joss (McConaughey), who is the religious adviser to the White House.

Throughout the movie, Ellie and Palmer have a number of conversations about whether or not

God exists, but never is there any uncertainty about what is referred to by God, except for

Palmer’s own description of his conversion. This conversation, which we only hear half of, implies that Palmer had some sort of theophany in which he realized that a higher being must be present. Regardless, the remainder of the conversations about God are articulated around belief verses evidence. This culminates during a hearing to decide who gets to ride in the mysterious space-travelling machine, whose schematics were sent in the signal picked up by Ellie. At the final hearing to decide who gets to go, Joss asks Ellie that dreaded and largely irrelevant

386 question: “Do you believe in God?” The question seems to hold some kind of totalizing weight as it is dramatized in this scientist-put-on-trial situation. But it is unclear what could possibly be meant by the question. One other character seconds the question with the meaningless observation that “95% of the world’s population believes in some higher power.” What would we mean by “higher power” in such a context? Surely anyone would recognize the Sun itself as a higher power (but these are the same grounds Sagan used to dismiss Einstein’s conception of

God). It is only when unexamined that this question holds any rhetorical weight, as it is given in the film—when Ellie answers that there is no evidence that would lead her to affirm a higher power, they give the position to someone else. What the movie puts forth as an exposé of faith verses evidence is thus more of an display of the oddity of our unexamined conception of God, whereby we publically affirm a belief in a mutual term that we grant a great deal of power but that shares no clear common referent.

By contrast, Interstellar introduces the question of a higher power through a notably and obviously ambiguous term: “they.” This “they” fills in throughout the film for the entities that seem to be directing NASA to a new colony. They are the unseen and powerful entities that manifest as nearly supernatural phenomenon; the movie notes that these phenomenon are all forms of gravity but the events are everything that we would consider supernatural, including the ability to communicate across space and time. They give Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) the coordinates to find the top secret remnants of NASA. They produce the wormhole that allows

NASA to send scouts to look for habitable planets. They show up in the wormhole for an eerie handshake with Brand (Anne Hathaway). They produce the five dimensional visualization within the black hole through which Cooper is able to communicate data from the black hole back to his daughter so that she can save civilization. While Contact indulges the always present temptation

387 to think of God like another entity, the they of Interstellar retains the necessary ambiguity that prevents us from attributing it a coherent limitation. This ambiguity is further enhanced when, in the climactic lines in the black hole that we already discussed in chapter 3, the “they” becomes intermixed with the “us.” The initial thought is that, actually, this they is nothing more than

Cooper himself: “Don’t you get it yet TARS,” says Cooper, “I brought myself here.” In a way, of course, this is true since he did use this space-time interface to provide the necessary information leading him to the NASA facility. But the they is still ambiguous. Cooper continues, noting that

“we’re the bridge” but only a bridge. The they is still ambiguous: “I thought they chose me. They didn’t choose me, they chose her,” referring to his daughter. The ambiguity of this they isn’t resolved until after Cooper encodes the data into a watch. Immediately following we have these lines:

Cooper: Don’t you get it yet TARS? They aren’t beings, they’re us. TARS: Cooper, people couldn’t build this. Cooper: Not yet, not you and me. People, a civilization that has evolved past the four dimension that we know.

One might easily walk out of the theatre with this quaint sense that people have somehow, in the future, become god-like five dimensional entities that can travel through space and time to ensure their survival. But the whole picture gives us something more interesting. Recall the lines discussed in chapter three in which Cooper makes the realization: “All of this, is one little girls bedroom, every moment, infinitely complex. They have access to infinite space, but they are not bound by anything.” Cooper’s they/us is the arrival at a being that is the infinite beyond the infinite, a boundless All beyond the All of this Cosmos. The invocation of the fifth dimension serves to produce this thought: that we become the divine when we leave behind these four dimensions out of which space and time unfold. The they are us seen in and seeing from the All beyond All. From this perspective, every individual thing, including each of us, is a function of

388 ourselves reading ourselves through the divine guidance of our being interfolded in the God beyond God. And, in a real sense, the implication of the movie is not that we, as homo sapiens, will become this God beyond God, but that this travel down the black hole, this entering into the abyss of vastness is this evolution, it is seeing ourselves in this divine, fifth dimensional aspect.

Contrast now the climax resulting from Contact’s hopelessly overblown yet dualist conception of God. Rather than this intricate and profound involution, Contact takes us to the beautiful vision of another galaxy only to reveal a glum conclusion. This “contact” is not so special at all but rather is just the encounter with other civilizations lost in the galaxy, just like us. The interstellar travel network was built by an older civilization, but they are long gone.

Instead, Ellie is greeted by some other alien, taking the shape of her deceased father, who tells her that there is reason to hope because there is other sentient life in the galaxy: “You feel so cut off, so alone....See in all our searching the only thing we found to keep the emptiness at bay was each other.” This is hardly a comfort. The difference with Interstellar is notable. In Interstellar the they become us seen in the divine interpenetrating aspect through which space and time itself was not an absolute limit but simply a part of what we are: a network node in the vast interconnected All. In Contact, there is only an emptiness that must be held at bay. Intergalactic contact only serves to reaffirm the glum conclusion that the only meaning and purpose to our lives is our social contact with each other. Interstellar takes this contact and makes it the endless involution of meaning across spacetime, permitting us to forge on within this sense of wonder at the cosmic capacities evident at every moment. Contact leaves Ellie struggling for proof, questioning her own feelings, and testifying, with great opposition, that she had an experience.

Interstellar does not need such public affirmation; Cooper is able to quietly continue, taking leave from the very civilization he saved and heading to help Brand start a new colony on

389 another planet. In this way, the divine does not need a glamorous public debate in which we accusingly demand proof and testimony of each other. The divine quietly sits in the vastness that we already travel through, every moment, as what we already are as part of the All.

This involution only works if we go to the All. Anything less than the All and we find ourselves apart, lonely, separated, and in need of this mediocre contact by which we mutually defer what we see as an otherwise dark universe. What then of the wonder? What then of science’s great mysterious encounter with the Cosmos? Instead, if we experiment with this climb to the highest of scales, we find this feeling of incredible and beautiful excess, this being split among the eons of accumulated time and space, where the divine manifests as the piercing of consciousness with this sacred sense of Wholeness by which all of this is. Here in the expanse of

Cosmos, every bit finds itself included, loved, and brought to peace.

390

Chapter VI: The Otherworldly Chain

"The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fulness--to its heights we can always reach--when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing,' says the Upanishad, whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe." - Aurobindo Ghose (quotes in Huxley 61)

"Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else from which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found." - Meister Eckhart (quoted in Huxley 66)

“Let me never say, ‘these things should not be!’ If I considered them alone, I might desire better things; but still for them alone I ought to praise you…. No more did I long for better things, because I thought of all things, and with a sounder judgment I held that the higher things are indeed better than the lower, but that all things together are better than the higher things alone.” - Augustine, Confessions (135)

Jesus answered, My Kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now my kingdom is from hence. - John 18:36

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. - Luke 17:21

The Heavens and the Earth

Scaling to the vast reaches of what appears as the edges of the material world revises our sense of being according to an open ended All. It demands that there be more than what we attempt to contain within the confines of this term “materiality,” which is now as ambiguous as

391 the term “spirit” to which it has traditionally been opposed. Even here, from the surface of this planet, we get a glimpse of this Cosmic perspective by looking up at the stars. Science does not deny the wonder we feel at this expanse but only confirms it and extends it, even at it tempts us to a claim that we know it, have it all within our grasp. And yet we touch and grasp and control the stars only as much as we touch quarks. On the scale of the All, everything shifts according to a perspective by which this little Earthly dance becomes lodged within an expanse that is only beyond the imagination in the sense that it provokes it to endless narrative, imagining, and, in the final word, silent wonder at the excess from which more words might begin again.

Perhaps here an objection emerges, one that we know well: Do we find ourselves again back here, at Genesis 1? In the beginning we have the heavens and then the earth. Have we once again split reality into this heaven and Earth? In those pre-scientific days, perhaps, this split made sense: from the surface of the earth, one looks up to see the heavens and one looks around to see the Earth. But what is the heavens when one leaves the earth and goes to space? Where in this scaling of being is this other world, the heavens? Of course the statement in these terms sounds absurd to the modern mind: heaven, we might say, is space—the largely empty place outside the Earth’s atmosphere where we measure things in terms of light years and galaxies are as numerous as the stars we can see in the sky. But is this what is recognized by the term

“heavens”? The original Greek “ouranos” implies an encompassing or the heights above,1 and yet this “above” already implies a standing up on the earth, from which one can either look down or up, above or below.

The modern sentiment, wearied with religion, produces the objection: haven’t we had enough of heavens, these otherworldly denials of this life? Were these not lies told to us by

1 According to the definition in Thayer’s Greek Lexicon 392 priests and monarchs, like some kind of advanced Santa Claus, meant to direct us to an elsewhere so we can be subordinate, docile, and easily controlled? We find here that sentiment that lurks as an endlessly remixed phrase: religion is the opiate for the masses. Or perhaps we can refer to Nietzsche’s extensive assessment of religion as a denial of this world and this life. Is this account of scale not just another example of mankind seeking some other realm, some otherworldly being whereby we can escape an existence we find miserable? Indeed, anytime a vision, philosophy, or teaching brings us anywhere beyond this worldly realm of cherished things, a critic appears to decry this articulation as a denial of the practical, the political, or some kind of supposedly obvious and present actuality or materiality to which we should hold.

Undoubtedly there are legitimate targets for these claims, people who do despise this life, this planet, or materiality in any form, and seek some kind of escape. Again, the parallel is already in the rhetoric of space travel: the dramatic vision of man’s future in space is so often tinged with that deep-rooted dissatisfaction with this earthly life and the desire to escape. Hannah Arendt famously noted this contention in the opening reflections in The Human Condition in which she said of the launch of Sputnik:

The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the ‘first step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.’ And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk of Russia’s great scientists: ‘Mankind will not remain bound on this earth forever.’ (1)

The painfully appropriate tie between the escape of space travel and the escape of death beckons us to contemplate the possible self-effacing nature of scaling up as it relates to the ancient trope of the heavenly realm accessed beyond the passing away of this physical body. We seem to be tending towards the ascetic: the denial of this world, this flesh, and this body. But what could our scalar account have to do with heaven as some kind of spiritual realm on the other side of death,

393 the place where all of this becomes rewarded in some kind of accounting, where we don some kind of immortality?

There is undoubtedly something in space travel—perhaps in the endeavor of science more generally—which “seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given” as Arendt states (2). It is not so clear, however, in what way man “wishes to exchange [existence], as it were, for something he has made himself” by going to the stars or building a more technologically saturated reality for themselves. Indeed, here we find ourselves with the capacity to ask: what did we ever mean by these heavens such that they could be another realm, another kind of being? Where is heaven? Is it a location? Was it ever a location? What is the realm? What did we ever mean by it? Why heaven over the earth? What is the nature of the escape that man is longingly building and seeking for themselves?

If the All is accessed as a kind of highest scale, pictured by science even in the limits of the observable universe, then we are introduced again to the concern about this escape from the human condition. Undoubtedly, the taking up of space travel as a means of escape from problems here, paired with hopes of radically extending life (even to immortality) through technologies of cryogenics and augmentation, has become the technophilic equivalent to the religious hope in a better world to come. But this is far too literal and resonates almost too well with the religious desire for a “heaven” where man might live on in new, yet familiar forms, a glorified alternative to the existence they find so difficult. In space travel paired with cryogenic preservation, we may think we have found another realm, an otherworldly expanse of endless possibilities—new worlds, new stars, new configurations of stars. But, as we already saw in the climax of Contact, the result is often some rather mundane kind of transcendence. More kinds of loneliness, just bigger and lasting longer.

394

But even before the excitement of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence revealed no discernable life in the nearby stars, there was hesitation about whether space was actually this realm of the otherworldly. As Buckminster Fuller famously argued, mankind is already in space.2

Going to space did not, in fact, bring man into a different realm. Rather, it seems that man’s desire to go to space only pretended or hoped to extend his frontier which, at least in popular imagination, remains tied to the same scale of conquest and dominion. The frontier of Turner’s

Thesis is suddenly given endless space in our imagination: the All becomes the expanse by which mankind will dominate this Cosmos, even if it takes us unimaginably long times to get there (we’ll work around that limit, right?). The hope is that this frontier is both endless and final: we’ll always have somewhere else to explore, somewhere else to escape to.

However, outer space could hardly be the realm of the Otherwordly, despite the fact that it’s become the focus of many of the worst kinds of escapism often associated with the desire for a Manifest Destiny or another realm of being. Again, scale presents us with an immediate complication. We find immediately two possible ways of viewing the “world” which is other: literally other worlds like earth or a realm formed out of a higher perspective, a scale above. The sentiment that going to space is to go to another realm replicates the colonial sense that what you’ll find there are just more places relatively similar to the ones we are used to, just as

Europeans did when arriving at the new continent. This is hardly scalar, but simply an extension of our same scale to other spheres rotating this or other suns. The only scalar element here is that we can now imagine countless numbers of these planets. For example, the recent advanced data and super high resolution photography of the expanse of space has produced an advance need to

2 Fuller, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, 46: “I’ve often heard people say, ‘I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts.” 395 chart and interpret the picture itself. But this charting and interpreting is an immense effort to rescale the image back to the intelligible scale of planets. This scaling back is the same whether the tenor of such a dissection is “which are conquerable?” or “which might be inhabited?” Even in such a project, scale reasserts itself in the sheer distance between these planets and the difficulty getting to them. Not only would these other worlds remain relatively the same but the condition of their infinite possibility is the enormity of the distance separating them—a distance which may one day be overcome but which forecloses outer space as the location which satisfies the persistent otherworldly element in human thought.

There thus seems to be a clear opposition between this desire to head to other worlds and the attending to the needs of this planet. This divide already fits within a philosophical opposition between the contemplative and the active forms of life, which has, at least in the 20th century, been largely derived from Nietzsche, who famously proclaimed that we ought to

“remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestial hopes.”

(Thus Spake Zarathustra 42). The thought is that we are somehow rejecting this reality by speaking of a transcendent realm at all. In the twentieth century, scholars and intellectuals have largely followed Nietzsche’s denial of the otherworldly. The rejection of the possibility of the transcendent is usually made on these terms: that to go to the transcendent is to turn your back on the concerns of this world. Arendt makes this opposition explicit in The Human Condition, through her distinction between the viva active and the viva contemplativa. By her account, the contemplative life has long ruled the active life, the political and practical realm wherein work, labor, and action is performed. Her philosophy aims to reassert and justify the active life and root out the supposedly passive and withdrawn contemplative life. And yet this philosophy already assumes a particular kind of clear opposition between the two kinds of life: “the primacy of

396 contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos” (15). On one level, our last analysis would confirm this: the beauty lies in the Whole which is greater than any of these limited parts. However, on another level, we cannot follow Arendt’s assumed distinction in which the work of human hands is not included in the beauty and truth of kosmos. Likewise, she assumes that work, labor, and action is completely antithetical to the contemplative life. This already inserts a divide in a place that does not fit our scalar account: one cannot perform actions and be contemplative. Hence,

“the philosopher’s experience of the eternal…can occur only outside the realm of human affairs and outside the plurality of men” (20). Again, on one level this is true: what we have spoken about as the encounter with the All must happen on the scale on which you exist: the reflection by which you take into account your position and dwell with that All (see chapter 3 and 4). But on another level, this discovering of the eternal does not somehow transport us these bodies to another realm where they can no longer function. It is as if Arendt is assuming that the contemplative life is nothing but ascetic withdrawal, despite the fact that such withdrawal has never been a necessary condition for experiencing the All. Likewise, her statement that “human life in so far as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of man-made things which it never leaves or altogether transcends” already assumes that the transcendence of the contemplative life was some kind of literal leaving aside or escape from these concerns (22).

Arendt argues that we have always read the active life through the lens of the contemplative life, but her argument does just the opposite: to assume that contemplation is absolutely antithetical to work and action is already to read the stillness and wonder of the contemplative in relation to the persistent occupation with material desires, political struggles,

397 and physical needs. While the contemplative does note that this view of eternity reworks our relationship to these active concerns and sometimes recommends a temporary withdrawal from them to experience the All, mystics persistently refuse to see their realization as antithetical to the functioning of these homo sapien bodies. As we have already noted in our previous examinations, the realization of oneself as the function of the All, the Whole, the Cosmos is a change in identification that leaves the body intact. Only those who read such contemplation from the perspective of activity would suppose that to glimpse the beauty of eternity renders one paralyzed and incapable of action. Indeed, it seems strange that we could ever argue that the contemplative life has ruled these demands of the physical body, particularly since these contemplative concerns are usually converted persistently back into action and work. In fact, the ascetic practices of the yogi or the regulation of bodies by Christian dogma seem more akin to a political action than the contemplative encounter with the eternal. The active life has been so persistent that even initially contemplative practices become transformed into another iteration of worldly power. The truly contemplative dictates, such as Jesus’s “Love your neighbor as yourself,” become subsumed under a structure of domination where you might as well pay to have your sins absolved.

If mankind will never escape this human life it is only because that is the scale on which this homo sapien functions. But it is not clear that the contemplative life was ever about the homo sapien literally leaving this scale. Rather, something else seems to be at work that does not fit into the otherworldly divide that Arendt is working with. Given the scalar reworking of the terms of the transcendent, we can approach again these questions in a way that doesn’t need to proceed with the same kind of scorn or disregard. In fact, we will see how a generally negative disposition towards arguments for another realm of being have led to a great deal of confusion

398 around arguments approaching a monistic viewpoint. Likewise, the grounds on which monistic views are dismissed have failed to understand the implications of those arguments, as have always been justified by the mystic as the most practical, transformative, and beautiful means of living one’s life. We can proceed in three stages, first examining the recent excoriation of the

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze for his monism. We do not need to deny this monism but rather will use this rejection as an exposé of the assumptions about the uselessness of such a position. We can momentarily note how some of these arguments are already entailed by

Deleuze’s own following of Nietzschean characterizations of the transcendent and the spiritual.

We can then take reference to how even some of the oldest or most foundational mystical texts already contain within them an analysis of these problems. Second, we can then read Arthur

Lovejoy’s foundational critique of the Otherworldly and see how this critique actually fails to understand Plato’s use of the concept of the All in the Timaeus. This analysis will lead us to a third examination: a close reading of the Katha Upanishad as a nuanced text dealing with the value of this scaling to the All as it exists in the encounter with death. The Katha Upanishad will make clear the personal stakes of what might appear as another realm in accessing and uniting with this all. As we already saw in our preceding examinations, that the All, the Whole, and the heavens are already within us. The result of accessing this heaven within us is a blossoming of consciousness that revises and reorganizes everything according to this new system of value, oriented to the All rather than the limited concerns that are built on a partial and fragmented understanding of reality.

Convolutions of a Transcendence Disavowed Within philosophy, we can note that our question of heaven and earth exists as two distinct but confusedly intertwined concerns: the opposition between transcendence and

399 immanence and the debate between the mystic and the doubter. Unfortunately, these two questions often occur together and often become confused with each other. Immanence is held to clearly indicate the world of things around us and thereby suggest that there is no possibility of moving beyond it, as we just saw in Arendt; even arguments about the immanent nature of God place our attention on these things objects present on our scale, with the supposition that this makes us more practical and more grounded. In contrast to these present concerns, a transcendent philosophy is usually said to be a dangerous distraction from the concerns around us. The possibility of mysticism, that union with the divine is both possible and the goal of all human endeavor, is likewise held against the various alternatives that either deny the existence of the divine, make it inaccessible, or deem it a useless or even a dangerous distraction from worldly, political, practical concerns. Usually mysticism can become associated with a transcendent view and thereby dismissed in the same way. Claims abound in these configurations, none of which seem particularly clear according to our scalar consideration of the All, layers of being, and our position as eyes of the Cosmos.

The most illuminating recently example of this whole confusion is found in the work of

Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s work is a re-reading of the history of philosophy that reworks the foundations of being according to its creative power. His work has become popular in some academic circles, who find his language, which instantiates a kind of endless relationality, useful for any number of political or cultural commentaries. Particularly attractive is Deleuze’s stance against any mode of transcendence: everything for Deleuze is absolutely immanent. Relations all occur on this flat field, where exchanges are perpetually hashed out through what, in the nomology he developed with Felix Guattari, is called territorializing and deterritorializing.3

3 The terminology of territorialization is worked out in A Thousand Plateaus (e.g. 9) 400

Furthermore, it seems that Deleuze is able to work out this philosophy in an entirely materialistic sense in some way, at least as he is often read. However, a recent re-examination of Deleuze by

Peter Hallward has noted that much of the secondary commentary on Deleuze has ignored his insistent and persistent mysticism, which is present throughout his work. This mystical element produces what appears to be a contradiction: Deleuze demands absolute immanence but this immanence must be in some way accessed or acquired. In other words, a mystical accessing of the divine is required.

Hallward’s reading of Deleuze need not be disputed since his assessment seems to fit quite well with much of the more obscure elements of Deleuze’s work and explains some of the strangeness involved in the application of his terminology to political commentary. Indeed, this political application of Deleuze has been disavowed by a number of other political philosophers, most famously Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou.4 If scholars want a totally flat theory of endless multiplicities, Badiou would be the one to read, given that his philosophy is based around this rejection of the identification of the One and Being (we can address Badiou briefly in a moment).

What is remarkable is the way that Deleuze’s persistent insistence in absolute immanence leads him to articulate a mystical position. However Deleuze may distinguish himself from particular mystics (see Hallward 85), the basic element is same: to access the full creativity of Being, one must find a way beyond the limit that holds you to the realm of being wherein you are forced to operate within given and seemingly totalizing of constraints. The more you escape from this limited mode of being, the more creative capacity you have.

What we will dispute from Hallward is the assumption that is not explicated in his analysis and is therefore the most telling: his assumption that Deleuze’s mysticism makes him

4 Zizek often takes aim at Deleuze and wrote one book directly addressing him (Organs without Bodies). Badiou placed Deleuze in relation to Heidegger in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. 401 useless for politics, ultimately impractical, and utterly idealistic. Here a particular faith manifests that we want to isolate as the antithesis to the mystical assertion that there is another realm to be accessed. This faith might be stated this way: this world is clearly real, useful, material, tangible, and sensible. By “actuality” we clearly mean the tangible, since it’s here before us to be touched, seen, talked about, manipulated, debated, etc. Anything beyond this tangibility is useless, irrelevant, impractical, and antithetical to the political war we wage for the ethical sustainment of humankind. As is the case with Hallward, such a point is rarely argued but merely stated as obvious. Thus, Hallward turns in his final pages to show us the “obvious

(and perfectly explicit) limitations” to Deleuze’s philosophy (162). First, “there is no place in

Deleuze’s philosophy for any notion of change, time, or history that is mediated by actuality. . .

.Unlike Darwin or Marx, for instance, the adamantly virtual orientation of Deleuze’s

‘constructivism’ does not allow him to account for cumulative transformations or novelty in terms of actual materials and tendencies” (162, italics added). The italicized phrases are the addendum which make clear the assumption that already refuses Deleuze’s basis: that to account for transformations we call “actual” or “ material” require, first, for us to assume that they are actual and, second, that we speak of them as material. Essentially this argument amounts to a disputed premise: you don’t see this world of multiplicities as actuality and therefore you can’t speak of them as if they are actualities. But this does not mean that Deleuze’s philosophy could not have incredible explanatory power if, in actuality, all of these entities are indeed virtual, contingent, and relational entities who derive their being not just from relations but from the being of the All that constitutes them. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari speak of philosophy as a series of partial mappings of this Whole of what is otherwise larger than any one philosophy:

Philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit together, because their edges do not match up. They are not pieces of a

402

jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All, an “Omnitude” that includes all concepts on one and the same plane. (What is Philosophy? 35)

For Deleuze and Guattari, the height of philosophy is the achieving a kind of infinite speed under which concepts blur away and we are left only with this vast plane of immanence beyond any one philosophy (38). The diving into the concepts of philosophy is to look at any one of these mappings of the plane of immanence according to its particular way of cutting it up. Science, as well, has a clear function: to define through systematic delimitation various “functives”— functional variables— and see how they relate. These are limits by which science is able to define entities and make them relate. But these limits are already not real: “every limit is illusory” (What is Philosophy? 120). Deleuze and Guattari cite the same questions about continuum we addressed in chapter 2 to note that this recognition that limits themselves are illusory is essential to the procession of science. Science must begin and function according to this sense that limits themselves are illusory and, that “things are interactions and bodies are communications” rather than saying that these things and bodies pre-exist in such a way that permits them to relate outside of the limitations that are imposed on them (123). It is thus the recognition of the illusory nature of bodies and things that permits science to proceed without pretending that its own mode of gathering together is absolute. As we have encountered already, every time we change scales this recognition is already implicitly required as the necessary precondition for allowing the field of objects to shift to a new scale.

At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari refuse to see this as a kind of transcendence, a moving beyond this realm of objects, and therein lies the confusion. Their refusal of transcendence originates from the same concern we have noted previously: the sense that transcendence means a monarchical relation. In this refusal, Deleuze and Guattari essentially

403 acknowledge the vast One-All as the point of Being beyond limit and division. They grant it the name “plane of immanence,” but they refuse to acknowledge that this relationship to our current reality is one of transcendence. Their objection is actually quite relevant and correct from a mystical point of view: “transcendence” must always emerge from the overcoming of a real point to be transcended. The wording here is noteworthy:

“when immanence becomes immanent ‘to’ a transcendental subjectivity, it is at the heart of its own field that the hallmark or figure of a transcendence must appear as action now referring to another self, to other consciousnesses (communication)….But since all this pure and even untamed lived [sic] does not belong completely to the self that represents it to itself, something transcendent is reestablished on the horizon, in the region of nonbelonging” (46)

The problem here for D&G is that this transcendent subjectivity—the person for whom the immanent domain is transcendent—retains their sense of subjective separateness. The rest of the world thus becomes, in that subject’s feeling that this One-All is not contained within them, a world where immanence is a field of Others outside of oneself. This conception of the transcendent is indeed monarchial, but it does not fit our account either of the All or of ourselves as the Eyes of Cosmos. Indeed, D&G note that “when immanence is no longer immanent to something other than itself it is possible to speak of a plane of immanence” (47). The sense of oneself as ahamkara, the ego for whom immanence emerges, must be undone. But in articulating it in this way we already have the defense for articulations of mystical transcendence: what is moved beyond is never the plane of immanence but the ego itself. This exists as a negation and a transcendence, as the negation of the self which thinks it is limited, which we already see through negative theology, Buddhism, and Vedanta. The erasure of the egoic identification with the body leads one to recognize that one’s own experience is the experience of the All itself, which as much as we would like to think it is in the body, is never limited to it.

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Again, scale already demands that this is the case, pointing to how what is already in our experience exceeds the apparent limits and contours of what we would like to claim for ourselves as tied to the body. I will remove my identification with this supposedly human subject, limited in and to this clearly defined body, as a false scalar designation. In doing so I have a transcendence and a negation which undoes all limits, or rather my sense that these limits are absolute (only the Absolute, the All, is Absolute). This is also seen in going to the All: anything less than the All is partial, containing some kind of limit designated off in a particular way, structured according to a particular scale of observation. The All acknowledges the excess of these structures and the possibility for scaling once again. Yet, since the transcendence is not a physical movement beyond anything at all, once you have transcended one’s limited sense of self and identified with the All, the result is immanence. Doing so actually produces what can be articulated as two realms but which are functionally one realm viewed two ways (again, we encountered this same point from Philip K. Dick in chapter 2): the realm of the All (the plane of immanence), where no content serves to cover or divide but only map, and the realm of multiplicity within the All, the experience of this mapping. Deleuze already maps this as the virtual and the actual, the being of the One substance (a concept derived from Spinoza) and the modes of being of this substance.5 The actual is the Substance that exceeds all limited points of being by which we derive this field of relations. It is from this actuality that things emerge but the description of these things is not the description of the One-All that transcends them. But here we have made the slip that makes the difficulty present: by transcends them we mean exists aside from any particular entity, is higher than, viewed from a larger scale, and taken in as the never contained One-All.

5 For a summary of this position see Hallward 30 405

What Deleuze and Guattari deny as transcendence is thus already undone in some way by their mysticism. This point is the crux of Hallward’s critique: Deleuze requires us to go out of this world in order to arrive at the plane of immanence, to leave behind the sense that this world is actuality. This precludes the sense that we are dealing with actual relations that Hallward assumes are the locus and determinant of being. Here arises Hallward’s statements about

Deleuze’s political philosophy. First: “the political aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy amounts to little more than utopian distraction” since it demands we either hail the world perpetually beyond any located power (which he calls, ominously, the ‘war machine’) or we bow to the State. This

“utopian distraction” assumes that contemplation is a distraction from that which causes changes in societies. The idea that one might not be politically engaged but still engaged in altering the course of things is just not tenable within the usual way of thinking about our social lives. But this is not immediately obvious. It may be that the on-going fragmented, bitter, and disjointed political climate is only possible if we are oriented towards politics in the usual involved way, bolstered always by the ultimately superficial investment in the limited powers supposed to be held by the State. Such a line of thought implies that the realization of the plane of immanence is actually to realize that the view of the war machine is not a utopian project but a personal orientation towards power that does not pay homage to supposed power claimed by the State.

This is a position congruent with the mystical realization that power extends beyond the limited purview of what a State claims; as we discussed in the first chapter, the State merely claims for itself a synecdochal relationship. This claim only functions to the extent that others limit themselves internally to that realm of subordination.

Hallward adds a further disavowal: “such a philosophy precludes a distinctively relational conception of politics as a matter of course” (162). Again, this is correct even though it may be a

406 conclusion that Deleuze himself would not admit. But the point here again is to look at the effects of this extra-worldly perspective. The plane of immanence, in the vast One-All in constant flux within itself, does not construct politics out of some clear cut set of relations. Every set of relations already contains within it also the flux of these objects, relating on multiple scales, always embedded in the vast whole within which all relations function. Hallward is concerned about this lack of relationality because he assumes that unity has to be imposed, created, and crafted. Thus, he suggests that our “politics of the future” needs “more resilient forms of cohesion” (162). Hallward fails to see that fragmentation exists when one holds to the realm of objects, and cohesion on that level will always be forced and imposed. True cohesion only appears at the level of the All, where there is nothing left out. Everything is always already included in the One-All, so all relations are already manifestations of the pre-existing cohesion of the Whole. Political cohesion in some obvious sense is not required for this cohesion, although humans that act from the limited perspective will be more likely to bow to the limited entities towards which they direct their fear. In so doing, the political limitation permits power to proliferate in ways not tuned into the Whole. Unfortunately, from the view of fragmentation, from the partial perspective which only sees pieces, contemplation appears useless because it refuses to acknowledge and work within this limited claim to power. Insofar as we are dealing with the scale on which we normally experience the world, things are indeed all about relations.

But in scaling to the All we find not relation but Wholeness, which releases the sense of absoluteness granted to those relations. All of these relations become just creative fluctuations within the All, appearing according to how our personal and social interpretive apparatuses are made to direct our attention to a part of this All.

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The conception of the One-All already asks one holding such a position: do you think this homo sapien knows and controls all of this? Is there nothing bigger, nothing beyond what you claim here? From the perspective of the vast, can you not admit already that there is unity, or will you disavow it in favor of something you claim for yourself, over and against Being itself?

Hallward would rather claim political knowledge, as well as pretend to be in control, than admit that “pure contemplation without knowledge” is the fount from which we can cease falling prey to these limited gods, kings, and material desires. This is indeed what Hallward claims about

Heidegger, Foucault, and Agamben in contrast to Deleuze: they each somehow limit themselves to this world, keeping themselves to the realm of clearly defined relations. In saying this we have fallen again into the nomology of transcendence but only because we address one who assumes himself separate, limited, and fragmented. In this way, we find ourselves cycling between a language of transcendence and immanence depending on if we speak of arriving at or living in the realm Hallward deems “extra-worldly.”

We will not leave it at this because such an argument has been so persistent that it is worth taking more time to carefully justify why exactly the mystical One-All position is itself the most political, personal, potent, and beautiful position. Indeed, this may be the very argument that philosophy has been having all along, an endless vacillation between those who affirm this world and those who demand that we consider beyond it. Unfortunately we have had to continue to reproduce the question again and again, given new terminology and a new understanding since the attempt to explain this vision of the All will always be less than the All, even as the All-ness of a term like the One-All gestures towards it. It may be surprising to find, then, that actually the question of the transcendent verses the immanent has always given way to the question of the mystical verses the worldly. That is, nearly since the beginning of formulations of these divine

408 encounters, the mystical vision has been felt as a transcendence to a view that was absolutely immanent. This history is unfortunately something that Deleuze seem to recognize. Thus, we find in the Isha Upanishad, one of the oldest Upanishads, a direct statement on these matters:

The self is everywhere. Bright is the Self, Indivisible, untouched by sin, wise, Immanent and transcendent. He it is Who holds the cosmos together. (5) […] In dark night live those for whom the Lord Is transcendent only; in night darker still, For whom he is immanent only. But for those for whom he is transcendent And immanent cross the sea of death With the immanent and enter into Immortality with the transcendent. (9-11)

This liberal translation from Eknath Easwaren renders the words bhuya and sambhuya as the immanent and the transcendent, although some translators render it differently. 6 “Bhu” is a root which can imply either being or becoming. In the context of the original phrase7, the more literal translation would be non-becoming and becoming. Interestingly, sambhuya literally means “all being together,” completely in line with our examination of the All. While some mystical traditions will prefer one or the other articulation, being or becoming, immanence or transcendence, the sense that the divine is in everything yet completely outside of everything fits already with our conception of the All. In denying the transcendent, Deleuze merely aligns himself with a means of critiquing a kind of transcendence, failing to see how his own

6 The translation of this passage has always been notoriously difficult. The first part does translate philosophical concepts that roughly equate to immanence and transcendence. Thus in applying these terms to the ignorance and knowledge, Easwaren’s translation fits with much of the commentary on the Upanishad (e.g. Aurobindo Ghose’s commentary, pg 23-25, 68). Indeed, the sense that the Self is in All, yet self-contained does imply a confluence of immanence and transcendence even if other translators do not use these terms. 7 The original text of verse 12 reads: andhaṃ tamaḥ praviśanti ye'sambhūtimupāsate /tato bhūya iva te tamo ya u sambhūtyā ratāḥ (for full text and translation see Sitarama, Upanishads and Sri Sankara Commentary or Patrick Oliville, The Early Upanishads 408). Oliville translates the terms as nonbecoming and becoming. 409 philosophy implies, from one perspective, a moving-beyond and a gathering together that must inevitably throw him into the language of the transcendent.

Unfortunately, the denial of the transcendent leads to two additional elements in

Deleuze’s thought that obscure his relation to mysticism and produce distinctively non-mystical interpretations: his emphasis on difference as the emergence of all being, and the resulting denial of truth outside of production. These points have created a great deal of confusion about

Deleuze’s thought and it may be that Deleuze himself was unwilling to fully account for this contradiction. Deleuze’s emphasis on difference, to “raise difference to the absolute” as

Hallward notes it (13), does actually fit with what we have said before but only if we articulate it carefully: being in the realm of the virtual multiplicity always emerges as difference. In insisting that difference is primary in everything that emerges within the All does not imply that the All itself is difference. But on this point, perhaps, Deleuze was himself unwilling to go all the way— it is certainly hard to tell given his continual emphasis on differentiation. Indeed, to move from difference to unity without difference requires that one yield up all difference to the inclusion that yields Being as that from which difference emerges; it is hard to articulate such a point without transcendence. Likewise, Deleuze follows the emphasis within poststructuralism on the lack of truth: “truth is not to be achieved, formed or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New” (quoted in Hallward 1). We have again the same problem: on one level this statement follows if we are dealing with anything “true” that can be said within the All. But another concept of truth exists, which the mystic has always declared as the fount of the true: the existence of the One-All where truth is nothing but the reality of this undifferentiated Whole. Truth in the One-All is not any of part, it is not an articulation of the

410 details, but an orientation towards that view of Being that leads to a revision of one’s whole way of being.

Thus, Deleuze will never posit that there are two realms because the only realm of actuality is the plane of immanence itself. This, again, fits with the view of the All with the important exception that, to arrive at the All one has to conduct some kind of transcendent movement. You have to let your conception of being expand to this One-All. It is this All that produces two realms, one born from difference, the other born from the Absolute Oneness of

Unity, each with two different modes or meanings for anything called “truth.” The strange thing about Deleuze’s philosophy is that he explicates the realm within the All from the perspective of the All while denying the transcendent nature of that position. Nonetheless, it was from this experience of arrival at the All that two realms were articulated, one as illusory and transitory and one as whole and eternal. In the Greek tradition, this idea already exists in both Heraclitus, who posited that theophany was required for accessing the One over the Many, and Parmenides, who posited two Forms—one being and one not-being—with not-being existing as an illusory way of viewing the world (see chapter 2 for further discussion).

The simplicity of the experience of the One-All tends can produce incredibly beautiful and concise articulations such as that found in the Isha Upanishad. With a thinker like Deleuze, one gets a sense that they glimpsed this vastness, saw the way that it revised our sense of anything less than the All, but found themselves struggling to articulate it clearly within the mires of the history of philosophy. Hopefully our endeavor with scale has served to clarify rather than obscure these issues. Indeed, sometimes it is those who try to describe the One-All while retaining some prior rejection of a mystical articulation that produce the most confusion. Thus, this project has attempted to remain open to the various ways this experience with the All might

411 be pointed to in language. Likewise, for the purposes of prolepsis, it is often more useful to go to a thinker who directly rejects the possibility of the One-All, since doing so clarifies what is at stake.

Such is the case with a thinker like Badiou, where the situation is less confusing even if the position is completely antithetical to what we are articulating here. Badiou stays in this realm of multiplicities, wagering that all that exists are situations by which things are determined: “I will maintain, and it is the wager of this book, that ontology is a situation” (Being and Event 29).

He directly addressed the Parmenidean roots of philosophy as an identification of the One and

Being and seeks to root out from the core of philosophy any possibility of speaking of Being as

One: “what has to be declared is that the one, which is not, solely exists in operation. In other words: there is no one, only the count-as-one” (26). Or again, “my entire discourse originates in an axiomatic decision; that of the non-being of the one” (34). The honesty here at the outset of an incredibly dense and complicated book, is much appreciated. This is a wager, the positing of an axiom, and a declaration: what if the one is not? The result is then pure multiplicity: “the ontological situation is the multiple without any other predicate than its multiplicity” (30). In this way Badiou produces a kind of addendum to Plato’s Parmenides even as it is posited as a means to escape it. Since the point of Parmenides is to articulate in a systematic way the possibilities of speaking of the One and Being, with each section containing an axiomatic positing of some relation of One and Being, Badiou’s system provides a lengthy addendum from which the One is attempted to be scrubbed from the articulation itself. Such is, in fact, the result of remaining entirely in this realm of being, completely insistent that all things we will meet, conceive, and encounter will be nothing more than an endless play of relations and situations.

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Here we can posit again what scale has to say to this choice to remain, insistently, only here with the apparent, the obvious, and the tangible. Oneness manifests and is experienced when we move outside of the sense of our own limitation, our sense as clear subject apart from the objects of the world, this sense that we are the one who scales apart from the Cosmos. This point requires us to understand all our previous discussions of scale. In summary: we arrive at the need to speak of the One when we begin to study how objects manifest as unity when we move away from them, that this Wholeness aspect acknowledges and accepts their interconnection rather than insisting on their division, that accounting for the division that emerges from the body as the dividing mechanism which scales permits one to realize oneself as a function of the cosmos, that this identification with the cosmos produces a conversion of understanding and approach, that this approach calibrates our being with a final phase-shift in the open ended All that already includes whatever else might be produced for examination. This

One-All is experienced by a willingness to move outside of what one thinks one is, to realize oneself as this All, and to allow one’s conception of the world to be revised accordingly.

Transcendence and the production of two realms of being is the acknowledgement that this combination of scalar movements leads us to move beyond anything less than the All if we are to speak of Truth. The question we always have when facing Badiou’s wager is this: does Badiou reason that he can capture the multiplicity of being and hold it there in the multiple? What must he hold on to to preserve this sense of being as endless “situation?” Situation for whom and determined by what? Do we, when we hold to this world around us, think of this stuff as stable, certain, and real enough to trust in situations as the fount of being? Or do these limited situations already force us to a conception larger than this limited perception? If a larger perception is possible, as indeed scaling already demands in seeing the Earth, the Galaxy, the Observable

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Universe, then something like a new realm is posited. In this realm, all of this perceptual world is an incidental, or, to use Deleuze’s term, virtual being according to a limitation. But if we take aside all of those limitations, then we have nothing other than the One, as the All that exceeds everything which could possibly divide it in any way that creates relations.

For this realization to occur however, one would have to go silent in the vastness of being so that one can permit the All-ness of the All to saturate oneself beyond any description. This becoming-silent is not a silencing (as we think of it in politics) but is the inaction of the ahamkara itself, the sense that one is the doer. There is thus a pair of resistances to arriving at this conclusion: the persistent love or holding to anything less than the All (attachments in

Buddhism, worldly idols in Judaism and Christianity, the egoic “I” in much of Vedanta) and the fear of this sense of inactivity (resting in the Self for Vedanta, giving up one’s will to God in

Judaism and Christianity). The first concern has often been expressed as an exasperation, such as

Nietzsche’s dismissal of Buddhism as a “nihilistic turning away from life, a longing for nothingness or for life’s ‘opposite,’ for a different sort of ‘being.’”8 Likewise, Betrand Russell dismisses mysticism for its denial of this realm of sense and reason as an illusion: “The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion”

(“Mysticism and Logic” 10). It should now be clearer how the process of scaling and the arrival at the All produce a way in which this world can be said to be illusory and an insight or revelation is needed as coming from beyond one’s sense of limited existence.

8 Birth of Tragedy and the Genology of Morals, 225 – Random House, Goffling trans. 414

The fear produced by inaction is expressed by Hallward as a primary demonstration of the lack of value in Deleuze’s philosophy: “'what should we do?', is to be resolved exclusively in terms of what we can do" (163). This point always appears confusing but it makes sense in terms of scale. If we look even at our bodies we can note that this complex operations of cells, each working with their complex web of molecules, each functioning according to rules present in the atomic scale. This body already contains at least three layers of activity that are beyond the conscious experience of action. We can add to this the fourth layer at which social and ecological demands provide some impetus for continuing to function within the support structure of the planet. All of these things are at work in the body and do not undo our sense of being a localized point of consciousness. But they do demand that we take note of how this awareness at this point in space-time is produced not as an activity but as a kind of resting in the confluence of what is.

In the perspective of the All, feeling the localization of consciousness in this point we can designate as the Atman, the cells continue to function, the memories continue to show up, the words continue to arise, and life goes on. The ego-structure is an additional function, an errant claiming of a part of this dance as the structure of oneself. But since all of this is not directly within that limited scope, which has been cut out of the Whole, one has necessarily left out something that makes it possible for action to occur. The paradoxical result is that the supposition that you are the actor actually produces an obstacle to physical action—sometimes freezing it entirely—since this “I” expects to have what is already outside of the limit it has set for itself. This is, for instance, the experience of writer’s block, in which one expects to know how to write or write well. But eloquence and argumentative capacity itself arises from an incredible cross-scalar exchange of neural and social processes that extend beyond what is claimed by the “I” as the doer. If one expands one’s sense of self to the All, then this sense of

415 doing can go to a state of inactivity the parts of the All that are structured to perform various tasks are permitted to perform those tasks. The hands perform the typing with what feels like no thought, by which we mean no self-referential thought (about “I” as the doer) rather than any kind of cognition. The language processing occurs with no thought. Likewise, the ideas arise with no thought that can be claimed by a “me” and exist embedded within a social, political, and historical framework that far exceeds this homo sapien body sitting here typing. Thus, this body that types is itself able to function better in proportion to the extent that I allow all of these parts, existing on multiple scales, to perform according to what they are. Thus, the resolution of “what should we do?” to “what can we do” is not a kind of deriving of maxims from nature9, but is the acknowledgement that the many scales of being insist that we yield the absoluteness we usually grant to our sense of being a contained, definable, and independent actor. The political implications follow in the same way: one will act politically as needed (and only insofar as needed) according to the necessity of navigating social being, including pushing against abuses of power or refusing to acknowledge power that is claimed falsely. This position will not permit the sense that one knows best how to run the whole world, nor will it permit the sense that one needs to intervene beyond the scope at which this body acts. In fact, such over-extensions are the fount of excessive political action whereby we attempt to force others to conform to what we suppose should be within the realm of action claimed by this ego-structure. Oddly, the position of inaction suggests that such a person might be able to lead better since that person will understand the scalar relationship they have to those they lead and will direct accordingly,

9 This kind of argument is often rallied against a kind of trivial way of invoking nature in a way that tries to justify some supposedly ethical or moral principle, such as has been done with homosexuality, eg Alex Johnson, “How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time.” 416 trusting in the larger system to function. Perhaps this is always what Plato meant by the philosopher-king.

Indeed, Plato’s position in this history of two realms has been endlessly confused, particularly since his mysticism is not always apparent and, when it is, it has been either grounds for dismissal or a source of confusion. It will be useful then to turn to Arthur Lovejoy’s discussion of the Otherworldly as it arises in Plato. We can then look at Plato’s texts themselves to see the justification for this mysticism and its resulting distinction between two realms of being. As many of our explorations have already done, doing so will repeat some of the same conclusion here but from another angle.

Plato’s Split The antagonism towards the split between these two realms comes to a head in the concept of the Otherworldly. The best articulation of this concept is found in Arthur Lovejoy’s classic study of scale and philosophy, The Great Chain of Being. Although Hallward used the term “extra-worldly,” it is nonetheless this same sense of otherworldliness that he is indicating— that is, the same kind of tenor and arguments apply.10 Lovejoy’s study takes up this particular question: where does the two realm hypothesis come from? If we examine, as we will in a moment, how Plato actually divides these two realms in The Sophist, the question will be more metaphysical—in that we will deal with the problem of truth and falsity. In contrast, by turning to the Timeaus, Lovejoy looks for the origin of the two realms in Plato’s cosmology. Doing so produces what appears to be a tremendous contradiction which, for Lovejoy, strikes at the very heart of philosophy.

10 Indeed, the term “otherworldly” is applied back to Deleuze by David Lane 417

It must be noted, before we examine Lovejoy’s distillation of the otherworldly, that he denies mysticism at the outset of the study as nothing more than some kind of peculiar emotional response to relinquishing one’s sense of self: “when a monistic philosophy declares, or suggests, that one Is oneself a part of the universal Oneness, a whole complex of obscure emotional responses is released” (13). Lovejoy thus begins already with a measure of disregard for our wonder experienced in the All, seeing it as a kind of disposition or “susceptibility to different sorts of metaphysical pathos” (13). Again we have an interesting moment in which, like in

Hallward, the critique adequately captures many of the proper elements of the mystical encounter with scale, but dismisses them off hand as something nonsensical.

Lovejoy uses the term the “otherworldly” for this realm beyond the illusory. His use of the term follows the sense we already discussed in Nietzsche but in a more elaborated form:

“By ‘otherworldliness,’ then – in the sense in which the term, I suggest, is an indispensable one for distinguishing the primary antithesis in philosophical or religious tendencies—I mean the belief that both the genuinely ‘real’ and the truly good are radically antithetic in their essential characteristics to anything to be found in man’s natural life, in the ordinary course of human experience, however, normal, however intelligent, and however fortunate. The world we know and here now—various, mutable, a perpetual flux of states and relations of things, or an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thoughts and sensations, each of them lapsing into a nonentity in the very moments of its birth—seems to the otherworldly mind to have no substance in it; the objects of sense and even of empirical scientific knowledge are unstable, contingent, forever breaking down logically into mere relations to other things which when scrutinized prove equally relative and elusive. (25)

The otherworldly does not merely pose two realms but does so at the expense of the realm of normal thought and sensation. This world becomes a mere world of relations, in contrast to a non-relational realm that would provide a contrasting stability and certainty to the ever-shifting nature of the realm of multiplicity. In noting the change in this way, Lovejoy accurately captures the dilemma: this world of flux and endless flow of sensation is insufficient to provide any continuity or sense of being in its partial nature. Yet in calling it a belief, Lovejoy is already

418 indicating that he does not find even this noting of variability to be a convincing argument for a move to the Otherworldly. For Lovejoy, the move to the Otherworldly is simply a believing in a stability beneath the fluctuation rather than an experience of it, as we have seen in the mystical accounts.

Indeed, Lovejoy takes issue with the mystical argument that our view of the world is fundamentally erroneous or partial. The otherworldly must also reflect on the capacity of man, positing a distinction between our usual judgments and a deeper, divine capacity to discern this higher realm. Thus, Lovejoy continues:

Our judgments concerning them [the world of flux] have seemed to many philosophers of many races and ages to lead us inevitably into mere quagmires of confusion and contradiction. And—the theme is of the tritest—the joys of natural life are evanescent and delusive, as age if not youth discovers. But the human will, as conceived by the otherworldly philosophers, not only seeks but is capable of finding some final, fixed, immutable, intrinsic, perfectly satisfying good, as the human reason seeks, and can find, some stable, definitive, coherent, self-contained, and self-explanatory object or objects of contemplation. (25)

Those positing the otherworldly point to the contradictory and fleeting nature of our worldly realm. Yet, however trite it may seem, the paradoxical confusion of usual judgment, which tangles itself in its attempt to explain reality, also mirrors the way that we ceaselessly attempt to use the objects of our world to satisfy our desires and intellectual curiosities. Both problems arise from the same error: taking our partial view of life and desires for the Whole. That is to say, we attach ourselves to everything short of the All, attempting to fill ourselves with those limited entities as a means of satisfaction. The missing element admits the reality of something beyond.

However, our account here has already shown that the missing element is not an object, but the

All itself. Union with the One-All-Whole is what fills us, releasing us from the suffering of evanescent and delusive pleasures of limited existence. The feeling of being partial is a feeling of dissatisfaction on the part of the budding mystic that his mode of putting together the world is

419 limited. In the elaborate language of Tibetan Buddhism this sense of suffering is called the “all- pervasively affecting suffering” in which one feels a deep sense that one’s “aggregate factors of experience”—how you put together the world—is somehow insufficient.11 This feeling is a becoming-aware of the limited scale on which one has conceived of oneself. In the experience of the All, the mystic finds a point that satisfies all desires by seeing herself as already connected to everything, as it is.

Lovejoy completes his definition of the otherworldly by referring to the production of the two realms, here following the traditional distinction between higher and lower:

Not, however, in this world is either [the mutable or the immutable] to be found, but on a ‘higher’ realm of being different in its essential nature, and not merely in degree and detail, from the lower. That other realm, though to those enmeshed in matter, occupied with things of sense, busy with plans of action, or absorbed in personal affections, it appears cold and tenuous and barren of interest and delight, is, to those who have been emancipated through reflection or emotional disillusionment, the final goal of the philosophic quest and the sole region in which the intellect or the heart of man, ceasing, even in this present life, to pursue shadows, can find rest. (26)

Here, Lovejoy captures something of the confusion and frustration surrounding the separation of the two realms and the otherworldly. Lovejoy, as someone who has not experienced the otherworldly can only see this other realm of unity as a barren and cold rejection of all the warmth and life of this world. To the contrary, it is from this perspective of the One-All that wonder, beauty, and love emerges as a function of the absolute inclusion. In the All, everything is taken into account, already absorbed into the vastness that supports all things by their very being. This sentiment brings us to the emotional and psychological side of the dispute at work in the otherworldly distinction: for those who do not understand the distinction and what experience would bring it about, this split into higher and lower realms seems to be produced only from a

11 The Buddhist terminology is one of the most elaborate. The quotes here are derived from the Buddhist Archives of Dr. Alexander Berzin, which contains extensive resources on the basis of Buddhism: “Brief Introduction to the Four Noble Truths” and “All-Pervasive Suffering” 420 hatred of this world. This sense of hatred is only compounded by the devoted ascetics, who attempt to access the divine by denying their bodies. Although many of those attempting to access the cosmic consciousness of the All integrate some element of asceticism, this element is far from the core of the split they have instituted between higher and lower realms. Far from being a cold and barren realm, the higher union of the cosmos is persistently revealed as not only beautiful but the very fount from which beauty, love, and joy emanate. Far from being lifeless and void—a veritable dead and empty space—the higher realm reveals that the Cosmos is full of life, is indeed, as we already saw Richard Maurice Bucke and others assert, wholly alive. Far from being a hatred of the universe, seeing and living in relation to the higher realm leads one to love the Cosmos in a way not truly possible before. The famous Ecclesiastical “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the mystic, clears way for love and joy in a way that far exceeds any possible love or joy found when “busy with plans of action” or “absorbed with personal affections.”

Hence out of Plato’s cave is not a dark night but the Sun and this vision of the Sun, once you adjust to it, is both beautiful and wholly different than the normal way of viewing the world.

This is the part of Plato’s cave metaphor that those who do not like this sense of otherworldliness hesitate to cite. Once exiting the Cave and seeing the Sun fully, realizing that everything comes from the Sun, man notes the barrenness of his former view: “he reminds himself of his first dwelling place, his fellow prisoners, and what passed for wisdom there” and “he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others” (Republic 516c). Furthermore:

“if there had been honors, praises, or prizes among them for the one who was sharpest at identifying shadows as they passed by and who best remembered which usually came earlier, which later, and which simultaneously…do you think that our man would desire these rewards or envy those among the prisoners who were honored and held power? Instead, wouldn’t he feel, with Homer, that he’d much prefer to ‘work the earth as a serf

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to another, one without possessions,’ and go through any sufferings, rather than share their opinions and live as they do?” (516d).

The value is not only a reorganization according to the larger view of the All, but a release from the sense that this is all there is, that one need to be tied to a system of rewards and prestige that hinges on the deference paid to them. In this view, an Otherworldly perspective is the easiest way to break the hold of consumerism, materialism, or excessive and misdirected political energy. One would rather do the most menial of labor than forsake this understanding because this view is itself a revelation of the very source of the Good and the Beautiful: “Once one has seen it…one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it” (517c). This brilliant opening of light abolishes all of these lesser things, seeing them now as the chasing after minor things as if they were everything. It is why the attainment of this higher realm becomes the final goal of the philosopher and the sole region in which mankind can find rest. As much as Lovejoy would like to assert that unity appears barren, we must remember that this is not at all the experience of those who instigate that very philosophical split that he is addressing. The emotional investment here must be clear: those who would deny mystic insight must acknowledge that all true realizations of cosmic wholeness—not simply intellectual assertions of unity—are all accompanied by incredible articulations of love and beauty.

Lovejoy’s concept of the Otherworldly already precludes that this other realm might actually be the source of such a transformation. Lovejoy ties the genesis of the otherworldly and the Great Chain of Being to Plato’s exposition of the realm of ideas. The construction of the

Theory of Ideas already places Plato at the center of our discussion of the Otherworldly in

422 relation to scale: in his discussion of Plato’s Seventh Letter, Lovejoy argues that Plato’s Theory of Ideas is essentially a “frank mysticism” (34-35)—this is also the sense in which we have addressed the 7th letter in chapter 3. As with any writer who can be considered a mystic, Plato posits a split between the world of sense and a higher realm as primarily an attempt to assist us from moving from the illusory world of sense to this higher realm. Lovejoy already makes the connection for us between Plato’s Good and the later forms of God in which the same otherworldly split is established. Thus, Lovejoy’s five attributes of Plato’s Theory of Ideas already sums up much of what we’ve discussed:

1) The realm of ideas is “the most indubitable of all realities”

2) This realm concerns the essential, or thing-in-itself

3) It is the opposite of “this” world.

4) Its true nature is ineffable

5) We all desire this realm (see 40-41)

In articulating these attributes, Lovejoy confirms in a critical way what we may have been tempted to dismiss, in chapter 2, as amateur philosophy in Philip K. Dick: that Plato’s great edifice of philosophy was an attempt to present a clear exposition of this higher realm of being.

These five elements are indeed a good summary of attributes of the One-All-Whole we have been encountering in scaling. For Lovejoy, however, there is a contradiction at the heart of this philosophy. Lovejoy calls this contradiction the “principle of plentitude.” The principle, in summary, is this: the Unity and Wholeness of the Cosmos must also institute a fundamentally illusory realm of multiplicity apart from this One, generating the Great Chain of Being extending from the illusory realm to the divine realm.

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Lovejoy distills the principle of plentitude from his reading of the Timeaus. The curious thing about his reading of the Timaeus is that it runs into the same questions we had about the definition of God in Chapter 5. The crux, for Plato, is a relation between God, the Good, and the

All. Lovejoy’s reading fails to see this connection, instead relying on a conception of God that he already assumes is antithetical to this description. Thus, he begins his examination through a particular reading of Plato’s concept of the Good, as God:

“If by ‘God’ you meant – among many other and seemingly incompatible things – the Being who is, or eternally possesses, the good in the highest degree; and if “the good” meant absolute self-sufficiency; and if all imperfect and finite temporal beings are, as such, not to be identified with the divine essence – then it manifestly followed that their existence—that is, the existence of the entire sensible world in time, and of all conscious beings who are not in any sense genuinely self-sufficient—can bring no addition of excellence to reality. The fullness of good is attained for all in God; and “the creatures” add nothing to it.” (43)

This conception of God, as Lovejoy reads it, makes God a particular kind of entity that already presupposes a set of terminology that is not scalar. That is, God is not the All as we posit in the definition of Cosmos but is discussed in the same dualist sense we spoke of in the last chapter: an entity vaguely other and antithetical to the realm of the physical. The assumption here is that self-sufficiency is only possible when a being is set in isolation. This view of God is essentially imagining God as some kind of entity apart from any object in the same way that we view our relation to things that we create: I am over here writing and therefore hold the power over the text as it is formed. In the same manner, this view of God imagines God as somehow apart from reality, manipulating it from this outside. Naturally, the metaphorical means of describing God— even as he is described as “the creator” in the Timeaus—often describe God in this way. From this particular kind of split, Lovejoy sees the possibility of “self-sufficiency” and “Absoluteness” as necessarily cutting Plato’s God (the Good) off from the entities in the lower realm. From this split, the higher subject (“God”) is separated from all other subjects (“the creatures”) by or

424 concordant with the requirement of self-sufficiency and absoluteness. By these same requirements, it would be a contradiction for God to need any creature, just as we would say that any person is not self-sufficient if they need to get food from another person. The frustration over the nature of the transcendent comes from this kind of split which places God as forever apart yet always desired.

The Timeaus actually promotes this confusion since the account establishes a distinction between two entities that could be identified as God: the demiurge (creator) and the universe that is created. While we often associate God with the One, the difficulty here is that the One/Many split, and the necessary relation between the two, concerns the universe, not the Creator. That is, in the description of the Timaeus, it is the universe which is both One and Many, not the creator.

However, we can navigate this if we consider the final phase-transition of the All. From the perspective of the manifold things in the universe, these things must come together as One, to be opposed to the Many. From the perspective of this shift as manifesting a Whole that is beyond any referent or object, no matter how vast (i.e. the Observable Universe), we can note that this all exceeds even its posited description as One or All, which we described in the last chapter as

Tillich’s God above God. From this perspective, one might say that this God above God is that from which everything arises but is itself beyond that everything. This demiurge is described as apart from the Cosmos because it is apart from any created thing. We merely imagine this apartness to be an absolute separation from the totality of things because we imagine that this apartness originates from a separation rather than a complete shift in the way of understanding the One-All.

Ultimately, however, the Timeaus, as a discussion of the physical world, is not really concerned with describing the creator. Rather, the concern is to discuss, as much as possible,

425 how the transcendent One generates the world of multiplicity in the form we become familiar with. This demiurge is not some creating entity, as we might craft a pot of clay. Instead, the demiurge is merely the way of describing the One-All from the inaccessible yet encounterable vastness in such a way that permits us to speak of the cause of causes. Thus, when we associate the creator with God, as it is done much more directly in Aristotle’s concept of the unmoved mover12, we combine the self-sufficiency entailed by Oneness, which is eternal, with the possibility of creation. Doing so aligns the divine within a sequence of horizontal events in which we follow one cause back into another until we have the originating cause. Such a conception permits the mechanistic idea of the Clockwork God. Our discussion of the All can replace this horizontal view of causality with a scalar one: the God above God is the way in which the presence of the Whole-One-All is the original and always present cause and being of everything. Indeed, as we already saw in Philip K. Dicks’ Exegesis, teleology exists only on the scale of the Whole. In this way, the One (the universe considered in its oneness) itself takes up the role of the creator—so that the One creates itself—rather than the opposite sense which we usually adopt: identifying the Oneness with the creator and the universe with the Many.13

Out of this confusion, Lovejoy’s articulation automatically creates problems for Plato by applying a concept of God, with the ensuing contradictions, which are not necessarily applicable

12 On Aristotle’s distortion of Plato’s mystical principles Huxley once commented: "But between Aristotle and the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy within the great religious traditions there is this vast difference: Aristotle is primarily concerned with cosmology, the Perennial Philosophers are primarily concerned with liberation and enlightenment: Aristotle is content to know about the unmoved mover, from the outside and theoretically; the aim of the Perennial Philosophers is to become directly aware of it, to know it unitively, so that they and others may actually become the unmoving One. This unitive knowledge can be knowledge in the heights, or knowledge in the fulness, or knowledge in the heights and fulness." (65)

13 Most of these details are worked out by Plotinus in the Enneads but we will avoid the full discussion of this here, for the sake of limiting the discussion. 426 to the text. Indeed, Lovejoy notes that Plato does not necessarily follow his logic: “Plato himself, it is true, does not explicitly draw out this consequence [that God’s self-sufficiency cuts him off from the Many], and the fact that he does not is, no doubt, significant.” It may be significant precisely because Plato is working with a concept of God and Cosmos which does not entail this kind of contradiction. However, rather than entertain this possibility, Lovejoy views this as a failure on Plato’s part; that is, Plato simply failed to see the contradiction. Thus, Lovejoy reasserts that this kind of separation is foundational to our understand of the otherworldly: “But it is nevertheless in the clear implication of this part of his doctrine that we must recognize the primary source of that endlessly repeated theorem of the philosophic theologians that God has no need of a world and is indifferent to it and all that goes on in it” (43). Clearly Lovejoy is not speaking of those, like Nicholas de Cusa, who describe how we are all persistently in the loving gaze and care of the divine. Indeed, Lovejoy seems to be sacrificing, just as Hallward and

Arendt, the mystical encounter based on some confused premises. What is at stake in this discussion, then, is not just an interpretation of Plato, but a question of understanding any articulation of any transcendent Whole (whether we apply the term God to it or not); that is, why do traditions which would posit such a higher realm suggest that it requires a leaving behind, a beyond, or an antithetical relationship with this realm?

From this view of God as a craftsman—imagined much like we imagine any entities on our same scale—completely apart and isolated from the physical realm, Lovejoy is able to point to a contradictory reversal of Plato’s concept of the One:

“Having arrived at the conception of an Idea of Ideas which is a pure perfection alien to all categories of ordinary thought and in need of nothing external to itself, he forthwith finds in just this transcendent and absolute Being the necessitating logical ground of existence of this world; and he does not stop short of the assertion of the necessity and worth of the existence of all conceivable kinds of finite, temporal, imperfect, and corporeal beings.” (45)

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For the modern ear, the contradiction between these two positions is quite obvious, almost too much so for a thinker so foundational to Western philosophy and for a position which has been repeated and elaborated throughout its history. How can the self-sufficient and absolute have anything to do with the partial? Nonetheless, lest we be unfair to Lovejoy, we can remember that he is only following a common, non-scalar way of conceiving of these terms “God,” “self- sufficiency,” and the “Absolute” and taking seriously, at least on the surface level, Plato’s suggestion that the Good is both self-sufficient and requires the multiplicity of creatures in order to be complete. Thus, we should go slowly to untangle the formulation of this contradiction, both as it exists in Plato and how it produces a notion of the otherworldly for Lovejoy.

The crucial passage of the Timeaus appears when Timeaus attempts to explain how we move from the existence of the One to the world of the Many: why is there a world of multiplicity and becoming at all? The logic, according to Timeaus, is that the universe, in order that it may be perfect and most beautiful, must include the multiple. That is, something about the nature of goodness and the universe as universe, requires the Many to come into being. Why?

Plato argues that the Good cannot be the Good while being envious. If it is not to be envious, it must necessarily allow the multiplicity to come into being. Here is the relevant passage from the

Timeaus from which Lovejoy derives the principle of plentitude:

“Let us now state the Cause wherefore He that constructed Becoming and the All (to pan). He was good, and in him that is good no envy ariseth concerning anything; and being devoid of envy He desired that all should be, so far as possible, like unto Himself. This principle, then, we shall be wholly right in accepting from men of wisdom as being above all the supreme originating principle of Becoming and the Cosmos” (29e)

The formulation here provides us with the tempting sense that this Demiurge is something like us, which would desire everything or otherwise risk being envious. This attribute of the creator, however, emerges already from our sense of the All beyond the All as open-excess of the

428 inclusion of everything. If we take seriously this sense of the All as the source of everything, the scale on which teleology emerges, then it produces an argument about envy already.

The reason for this is found in the second aspect of Plato’s argument, which is much more clearly about the Many and the One. The argument is essentially this: that “the Whole may be really be All,” the Creator brings into being the multiplicity of beings. Lovejoy finds this phrase—“the Whole may be really be All”—in a description that occurs long after the world of

Becoming came into being (41c). He thus situates it in a question of what kinds of creatures are formed, rather than seeing it as essential to the argument. He then dismisses this formula as being a trivial statement about diversity: “Plato’s Demiurgus acted literally upon the principle in which common speech is wont to express the temper not only of universal tolerance but of comprehensive appropriation of diversity—that it takes all kinds to make the world” (51). The insertion of the “kinds” into this statement reworks the formula “That the Whole may be All” into a mere statement about the forms of the multiplicity rather than the fact that there is multiplicity at all. Nonetheless, the statement itself is about how the Whole necessitates that there be a Many, not just how it necessitates a diversity of kinds within the Many. If the Whole is anything short of the All, then some of the of being would be left out. If we are actually going to let the Whole be All, it must include every bit of the Many.

It is unfortunate that, instead of untangling how these leaps of necessity follow in the argument, Lovejoy takes recourse to declaring that the Demiurge took literally a naive statement from “common speech.” He did likewise in response to the first part of the argument even as he reasserts its importance: “the dialectic by which Plato arrives at this combination may seem to many modern ears unconvincing and essentially verbal, and its outcome no better than a contradiction; but we shall fail to understand a large and important part of the subsequent history

429 of ideas in the West if we ignore the fact that just this dual dialectic dominated the thought of many generations” (50). Indeed, this is of central importance and ought not to be ignored. But the whole separation is not as easily understood as Lovejoy would like and it seems like much of the confusion, particularly the scorn for the otherworldly and for Plato more generally, comes from failing to take seriously that this argument might, in fact, be more than a verbal elaboration or the naïve enacting of common speech.

Lovejoy thus did not finish the examination of Plato’s arguments even as he grounds his whole concern about the otherworldly and the Great Chain of Being on a series of unexamined assumptions about its contradictory nature. We must ourselves complete this examination. We will do so with generosity to Lovejoy by noting that without a bit more care we are likely to read

Plato’s split in the same way. Indeed, many theologically minded thinkers operate with the split set up just as Lovejoy proposes. Since Lovejoy is dealing with how the idea is taken up following Plato, we are equally questioning those who take up the same kind of interpretation and inherit the confusion Lovejoy is tracking. But by becoming aware of the scalar moves involved, we can bring the argument into relief in a more coherent and less contradictory way.

Regardless, we have already noted the ambiguity and confusion about the terms of the split and must, as it were, return to the source, to see how and why Plato saw these arguments as more than merely verbal but as powerful arguments for why the All must be One but, in this Oneness, necessitates the Many. We again find ourselves with a question: what was the power of this argument for Plato and so many others whereby we find the history of thought persistently positing this otherworldly realm in the same manner Plato does? It is not enough to say that others were following or building on Plato in some way. We cannot assume, in some kind of hubris, that there has always been this contradiction in philosophy and no one noted it until

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Lovejoy. The fact that so many articulate this otherworldly experience demands that we do not merely dismiss it as contradiction but spend some time seriously considering how these two realms emerge from the scaling to the All.

Let us examine then, how Plato uses this ancient astronomer to explain the nature of the universe. Even from the moment Timaeus is called upon to speak, an interesting relationship occurs: “seeing that Timaeus is our best astronomer” says Critias, another interlocutor, “and has made it his special task to learn about the nature of the Universe (pantos), it seemed good to us that he should speak first, beginning with the origin of the Universe (kosmos) and ending with the generation of mankind” (27a). Although some translators keep kosmos as Cosmos, I have retained the translation “Universe,” found in a number of versions, to note the interchangeable nature of the terms kosmos and pantos in this dialogue. Today, when we speak of “the universe” we do so as a kind of object, associated with the astronomical expanse of stars. We forget, however, that the term “universe” itself is a compound of “uni”—One—and the Latin “vertere”,

“to turn.” Universe is already the Whole of All that has turned out to be, considered as One. As we already noted in our previous examination of Cosmos, in the Greek, the various forms of the word pas (including pantos and pan where we get the word “pantheism”), mean All or Whole, thus highlighting the inclusivity in the object “universe.” The word kosmos emphasizes the ordered nature of this All that is to be described. In a following passage, Timaeus adds another term, ‘ouranos’ (from which we derive Uranus)—the heaven, implied as the realm beyond the sky—first calling it pas ouranos, the Whole Heaven. These three terms all highlight different parts of the subject at hand—the Universe. Each relate to our questions of scale in different ways. Ouranos, the heaven, implies the inclusion of a realm beyond the ground of the earth—our view from above. Pantos, the All, is the element of inclusivity of the scope of our examination.

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Finally, kosmos, here in the original Greek context, suggests we are speaking of the order implicit in this All. Importantly, Timaeus notes that we can use whatever name is most acceptable for the context, depending on the aspect one is emphasizing about this Whole (28b).

Indeed, all three terms are essential for the scalar logic set up by Plato’s argument.

Equipped with these three terms, we are already prepared to address Lovejoy’s second point about Plato’s argument: the formula “that the Whole may be All.” The phrase in the Greek is “te pan tode ontōs hapan ē” (41c). The word “hapan” is an intensification of “pan,” variously translated as “absolute all” or “whole.” The phrase can thus read alternatively, in addition to

Lovejoy’s formulation, as “that the All may really be fully All” or “that the All may really be the

Whole.” The fact that Timaeus is operating with the word pan from the beginning, already entails this logic and makes it fundamental to the argument. If Timaeus is going to describe this

Universe, the ordered All, then it must not leave anything out. If anything is left out then it is not hapan, not really the Whole-All.

But, it might be objected, aside from the convention of merely naming the cosmos in this inclusive way, why must the cosmos be held in reference to All? Why must this All be One and not just a mental grouping of all beings under the name “the All”, as philosophy often does under the word “totality”? This objection is met by considering the perspective of what one is examining. It is essential that Critias suggested that Timaeus give an account of pantos, the All, not the multiplicity or the world of Becoming (27a). Timaeus seeks an account of how all of this

Being comes to be, not just how any particular being comes into being, which would be an entirely different kind of explanation. Of course, once Timaeus moves beyond this most general level, he is able to derive the multiplicity of kinds of being. But then he has moved from metaphysics to physics and, as he examines the kinds of being anything less than the All, we can

432 dispute him on physical grounds. But the point which generates the two realms deals solely with the All. From the considering of All together is born metaphysics which might generate or provide the framework for a physics.

There is further necessity in considering the All rather than anything lesser. Given our previous scalar examinations we can see that the term “ouranos” points to the fact that the grouping occurs when we move our perspective beyond limited entities. From the Heavens, we see all things together. Plato is thus suggesting that, if we are going to find any cause or understanding of the multiplicity, we must go to the highest point, to the truly eternal, in order to get Being rather than Becoming, One rather than Many. At the same time, the dialogue acknowledges that these are two different ways of looking at reality, rather than two different places as the word “realm” might have indicated. The two realms are generated by a shift in what one focuses on. Of course, the reliance on perspective is not immediately apparent when the distinction is set up:

Now first of all we must, in my judgment, make the following distinction. What is that which is Existent (to on) always and has no Becoming? And what is that which is Becoming always and never is Existent? Now the one of these is apprehensible by thought with the aid of reasoning, since it is ever uniformly existent; whereas the other is an object of opinion with the aid of unreasoning sensation, since it becomes and perishes and is never really existent. (27d-28a)

In the overcoded way we probably, on our scale, understand Being and Becoming, the world of

Permanence and the world of Change, we might assume too quickly that Plato is positing these two categories a priori, already assuming their existence. However, we must remember that the distinction is not immediately obvious in the world of everyday objects. Only when we realize that things appear to change, through observing time, do we lose hope in their reality. Yet, when we change our perspective, moving to the Heavens, we find a different kind of model, in which

Wholeness and interconnection is the norm. The question is what one focuses on and what one

433 includes within one’s scope of examination. Thus, Plato says that this distinction designates not two places (as we usually think of realms) or beings, but two “paradeigma,” which is translated as pattern, model or paradigm, on which we can base our examination. In one view, one looks beyond any smaller entities which shift and change, finding that “that which remains the same” is infinite, and eternal. In the other, one holds to what already shifts, forms, and dies away.

It is now sufficiently clear that the nature of the creator has little to do with the necessities of Being and Becoming. In fact, Timaeus avoids saying anything about the creator at all: “Now to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered Him, to declare Him unto all men were a thing impossible” (28c). This indeed fits with our examination of the God above God as well as what we discussed in Chapter 3 about the

7th Letter: the accessing of this All-ness of the All is already beyond being captured by words and can only be pointed to and encountered. Thus, Timaeus returns to the question of the universe again to speak of this crossing of the threshold from the excess-attribute of the All, to the part that we discern: what model or pattern is the creator following? While the terminology of model or pattern might suggest a blueprint that dictates how one builds, the articulation is again reliant on perspective: it is a question more of what one looks at rather than the source of what one creates. Thus, Timaeus says that “it is plain that he fixed his gaze on the Eternal” (29a).

The insistence of looking implies that one sees differently, even looking at same things, when looking at Being than Becoming. One passes away, the other remains eternal. In this way, scale itself has already provided us with some means of understanding these two paradigms as means of structuring our attention according to these two different realms (what Philip K. Dick glossed as Parmenides’ Form I and Form II).

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At this juncture we arrive at the crucial value judgment Lovejoy makes so much of.

Timaeus articulates the selection between Being and Becoming in terms of beauty and goodness:

“Now if it so be that this Cosmos is beautiful and its Constructor good, it is plain that he fixed his gaze on the Eternal; but if otherwise (which is an impious supposition), his gaze was on that which has come into existence. But it is clear to everyone that his gaze was on the Eternal; for the Cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and He the best of all the Causes. So having in this wise come into existence, it has been constructed after the pattern of that which is apprehensible by reason (logos) and thought (phronesis) and is self-identical.” (29a)

The creator focuses on the eternal because he is good and the Cosmos is beautiful. In this passage it appears that the goodness of the creator dictates the necessity of following the model of being. But the precursor to this passage places the emphasis not on the creator but on the model:

“But when the artificer of any object, in forming its shape and quality, keeps his gaze fixed on that which is uniform, using a model of this kind, that object, executed in this way, must of necessity be beautiful; but whenever he gazes at that which has come into existence and uses a created model, the object thus executed is not beautiful” (28a-b).

The point here is that Wholeness and the All is beautiful, insofar as one obtains the truly All such that Everything becomes One and is not transient. Only then are we dealing with a higher model, which does not pass away and is eternal. If one admits this point, then stating that a good creator would model after the All is hardly to be disputed and hardly an attribute related to that creator’s self-sufficiency or any other attributes. Rather, the judgment falls back on the nature of the

Cosmos: the universe can only be truly beautiful is we keep our gaze fixed on the eternal All.

Otherwise, we will try to cherish a part over and against other parts, in opposition—some beautiful, some not. In the paradigm of the All, however, everything is beautiful.

We can consider this point more clearly in a practical rhetorical experiment dealing with the confluences between the term agape, love in Greek, and ananda, bliss in Sanskrit. These terms have recurred here as more specific terms dealing with the feeling one gets when

435 encountering one’s union with Being. These words exist to index what we might otherwise describe as a limited love and a limited feeling of happiness. When they arise, however, agape and ananda are not directed towards a thing. Rather, one feels oneself subsumed to the intensity of the feeling: they become the significant signs of unity emerging from the silencing of the part of the mind which holds itself apart from the All. However, in describing happiness or love, we nearly always speak of them directed towards an object. One become happy about or because of something. One loves something or gets something loved. Such happiness and love are both transitory, directed towards a limited object, trying to derive a sense of happiness and love from a limited scope to which one’s preferences become directed. However, agape and ananda are the

All-forms of these limited, preferentially tied, far weaker ways of relating to reality. When uniting with the All, agape is the immense, endless, everlasting love of being with the divine.

Ananda is the bliss one feels as absolute happiness and contentment of existing within the

Whole. Outside of union, all love and happiness could be said to be derived from these experiences but limited and therefore caught up in a preferential economy, driven by some kind of attainment. But in calibrating oneself to the All, all things are approached with agape and ananda. This is why both love and bliss (everlasting joy in the Christian articulation) are used as significant standards by which one can calibrate oneself to the All.

This same kind of argument applies to yet another necessity in the phrasing of the selecting on the part of the demiurge of which pattern he’ll follow: either he goes with the infinite, or he must go with what has “come into existence”. But if the creator focuses on anything that has come into existence, modeling the universe off of this limited being, she has already limited the scope of creation and is not the artificer of the All. Another way to consider this same point is in relation to where one can make or define cosmos, order. If one selects a

436 model anything less than the All, then one is modeling the order of a larger “thing” (everything considered together) on a smaller thing. If we are to examine this order, then we must do likewise, looking to the All and not to anything smaller to discern cosmos (order) and the nature of the universe. Otherwise, something will always be left out and something will always exceed the model. It is not just a matter of beauty then, but of the need to include the most full and most complete form of understanding.

This last point connects the two parts of Plato’s argument together: in order for the

Whole to be All, it must be beautiful, nothing can be left out, and all must be One. Only then can there be nothing for the creator to envy. The language of envy may seem odd until read against another related passage in which Timaeus justifies why this All must truly be One:

One it must be termed, if it is to be framed after its Pattern. For that which embraces all intelligible Living Creatures could never be second, with another beside it; for if so, there must needs exist yet another Living Creature, which should embrace them both, and of which they two would each be a part; in which case this Universe could no longer be rightly described as modelled on these two, but rather on that third Creature which contains them both. (29a-b)

We see repeated here the “One without a Second” of the Upanisads and Sankara (discussed in

Chapter 2). This is not to be read sequentially but in the scalar way we have already positioned as the All. The language of envy is thus easily reconciled as a statement about the all- inclusiveness of the All. If the All is not really All, then there will be a remainder for which the creator will be “jealous” since this All will not truly be All and he will not have truly followed the pattern of eternal Being.14 Likewise, it would leave open the fact (in a way that invokes

Longinus’ paradox and as a kind of upward form of Zeno’s Paradox) that we still need to take

14 Note that this word for jealous here pthonos, which compares to the Hebrew qanna found in Exdus 20:5 (“For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God”). Curiously the Greek term used for this same verse is not pthonos but zélótés, zealousness. (This was discovered using the Blue Letter Bible in conjunction with Perseus). 437 into account both of these cosmoses together. In philosophical terms, this inclusiveness is the very ontology of the All.

One final passage brings together the fullness of this argument, in which the All must be

One and the One must be All, otherwise we are not considering the All:

First, that it might be, so far as possible, a Living Creature, perfect and whole, with all its parts perfect; and next, that it might be One, inasmuch as there was nothing left over out of which another like Creature might come into existence; and further, that it might be secure from age and ailment, since He perceived that when heat and cold, and all things which have violent potencies, surround a composite body from without and collide with it they dissolve it unduly and make it to waste away by bringing upon it ailments and age. Wherefore, because of this reasoning, He fashioned it to be One single Whole, compounded of all wholes (hapas), perfect and ageless and unailing. And he bestowed on it the shape which was befitting and akin. Now for that Living Creature which is designed to embrace within itself all living creatures the fitting shape will be that which comprises within itself all the shapes there are. (32a-33b)

If we’re actually viewing the whole, this whole embraces all things which appear to be lesser wholes. If not viewed from the All, the partial-wholes must invade the examination and you are no longer examining all of being. This is where Lovejoy could become confused about the nature of the inclusion of all kinds: for the All to be All, it cannot leave anything out. Lovejoy’s mistake is thus a scalar mistaking of Being for the world of beings that are less than the All. If anything is left out, it is ontologically not the All, the demiurge has lost his gaze on the eternal, and this creator has fallen from the highest good. We have thus arrived to the distinction between two realms, which might be likewise described as Being and being.

With all these justifications before us, we can now reconsider the contradiction that so distressed Lovejoy. When Lovejoy disparagingly points out that the Realm of Ideas contains “a pure perfection alien to all categories of ordinary thought and in need of nothing external to itself” he is correct but fails to see the logic of these qualities. The All-ness of the One is the very trait that makes the possibility of a transcendent hierarchy difficult to grasp: considering the All

438 does generate two different realms of consideration. From the perspective of the All, the objects of multiplicity dissolve into the Whole. This Whole, since it includes all, is self-sufficient because, literally, there is nothing else for it to rely on—everything is included in its examination—even the creator (merging the creator with the One dissolves any problems with this point). Not even nothing is external to the All. Likewise, from the view of the All, lesser beings come and go, but the Whole remains the same—a point which is not contradicted by the laws of thermodynamics: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. As such, from the view of the All, “all categories of ordinary thought” are indeed transformed since those categories were formed in and for a view less than the All, the realm of thermodynamic transformation, the world of relations of beings less than the All, which, through there interaction also produce time.

It is essential to Plato’s point—and he shares this point with much of the Perennial

Philosophy—that the view of the All transforms our normal perspective and reworks our whole view of the Cosmos. This shift is why the two perspectives are said to be two realms. The desire for the higher realm is born from a desire for that other perspective, in which order reveals itself and all these disparate parts come together to reveal an eternal Whole. This must be sought simply because it is not immediately apparent to our eyes tuned to the scale of objects before us.

In the way that the Being calibrated to the All is utterly different from what we know, it is said to be otherworldly. But as the inclusive All, it is hardly apart from even if it may be antithetical to, the world we live in now.

The investment of this whole discussion returns when we consider that Lovejoy argues that the Cave metaphor is annulled on the grounds that the Intellectual world was declared deficient without the sensible. Of course if we experiment with rephrasing the two in our new terms we get a different story: the Cosmos viewed as a whole must include the every day

439 phenomenon found on our scale, even as it shows that those phenomenon disappear in the view from the All. Lovejoy is unable to see this relation when he says of the shadows in the Cave that

“their existence was the very consummation of its perfection” (53). This statement fails to see that the perfection was not formed via the existence of shadows but by including their existence along with all of the rest. But when one steps out of the cave, beyond the world of usual sense, one finds the sun and the sun, by shining forth and filling and including all, takes all shadows into itself.

What remains for our sense of Plato’s split to be complete is a brief examination of the source of this split within our experience. This occurs not in cosmology, but in the climax of his three part examination of Parmenides contribution to philosophy (Parmenides, Theaetetus, and

Sophist). In the Sophist Plato takes on the practical navigation of the two realms of being by addressing how we might handle this dualism that is actually a monism. The question here is practical: if there is no such thing as Non-Being, as Parmenides argues, then how can anyone speak falsely? Their statement, after all, in some way is, in being stated. In scalar terms, this would be phrased in terms of separation: if I am part of the All, then my egoic sense of separation, my worldly investments, and the things I hold onto here are also part of the All and therefore true and real. If the divine is in everything, then in seeking after money, political power, or pleasure I am equally pursuing the divine.

The move made in the Sophist is to point out how a part of being might take part in something that appears as not-being by claiming itself over and against the rest of being. For this to occur, a difference must be made. Here is where we find that Deleuze’s insistence on difference in some way corrupts his mystical tendencies. Difference is the instantiation of the move from the realm of the One-All-Whole to the realm of the Many. In doing so, difference

440 produces the possibility of speaking falsely or partially about things. Here is the crucial passage, placed in Parmenides’ terms of being and not-being:

“So it’s clear that change really is both something that is not, but also a thing that is since it partakes in that which is?...So it has to be possible that that which is not to be, in the case of change and also as applied to all the kinds. That’s because as applied to all of them the nature of the different makes each of them not be, by making it different from that which is. And we’re going to be right if we say that all of them are not in this same way. And on the other hand we’re also going to be right if we call them beings, because they have a share in that which is” (256d-e).

Something like change is produced out of difference, where one distinguishes an entity according to the scale of observation and a delimitation of entities within that observation. These entities might then relate, change, and interact but only as marked out of this All. All knowledge likewise proceeds from this fact that difference is introduced into the All: “each part of

[knowledge] that has to do with something is marked off and has a name peculiar to itself”

(257d). This marking off permits knowledge to function in a partial way, as follows from the separation out of the All.

The marking off of difference, as a moving short of the All, causes being to “blend with belief (doxa) and speech (logos)” (260c). The result is the possibility of speaking and believing that which is not. This produces the deceptive capacities of copies, likenesses, and appearances as parts of the All are divided in different ways and correlated to each other in different means.

To navigate this realm of the Many to avoid deception, we need to identify the sources of this kind of not-being that takes part in Being. Plato gives us three sources: “we have to search around for speech, belief, and appearances, and first discover what they are, so that when they appear we see their association with that which is not clearly” (260e). Because they function as less than the All, speech, belief, and appearance (phaino, the physical disclosing of things) present us with a limited, demarcated view of the All. They thus produce a kind of not-being

441 within Being. Viewing from the All does not rid us of perception, belief, or speech but changes our relationship to them: we no longer expect them to ever be adequate to the All.

This rereading completely undoes Lovejoy’s primary assertion about the futile and void quality of otherworldly thinking. “But any otherworldliness,” he writes, “whether integral or limited, can it would seem, make nothing of the fact that there is a 'this world' to be escaped from; least of all can't justify or explain the being of such a world, or that of any particular feature or aspect of empirical existence which it negates. Its natural recourse, therefore is, as in the Vedanta, to the device of illusionism" (30). If the One and the All is indeed completely separate then it would be true that it could “make nothing” of the fact of this world. But if the division was, from the beginning, a scalar division of the sort we have outlined here, then the reverse becomes the case: those who attempt to make sense of “this world” can make no sense of it at all since their perspective and scope of examination means they will necessarily leave out, fail to see, and altogether misunderstand how any of these parts work within the whole. Most importantly, they will become caught up in opinion, language, and perception, treating the differences from which these emerge as actual rather than virtual. Unless we do find some way to escape from “this” world and into the realm of the All, the order of the Cosmos will be forever hidden behind a tangle of words, beliefs, and sensations.

Lovejoy’s gesturing to Vedanta in the last quote could not be more appropriate, particularly since it reveals that these implications were already worked out before Plato’s sometimes confusing account. The elusiveness of this world is beautifully captured by the idea that the realm of maya is the play of Vishnu. Vishnu, another avatar of Brahmin, the All or the

Whole, generates the multiplicity within itself, churning out possibilities and varieties which never exceed or encroach upon its Wholeness. The encounter with this Wholeness overwhelms

442 the limited reality under which we operate. Thus, the famous vision of Krisha that Arjuna has in the Bhagavad Gita describes this revelation of the Whole-All in it’s overwhelming power:

“There, within the body of the God of gods Arjuna saw all the manifold forms of the universe United as One. Filled with amazement, his hair Standing on end in ecstasy, he bowed before the Lord with joined palms and began to pray. (11.13)15

When we arrive at the All, it shines forth through the whole of multiplicity, saturating all with the All. This incredible ecstasy recounted in the Gita, reminds us that we cannot take Plato’s All in such a way that remains merely intellectual, in the sense that it is confined to a form of thought, another doxa or articulation, held antithetical to the intuitive and emotional faculties which would grasp beyond the conceptual forms we have developed to deal with the world of the

Many. Instead, we must continue our ascent beyond opinion, language, or perception. We must go further here, beyond anything which can be considered less than the All, so much that all objects, even thought itself, disappears and is surrendered into a One that is complete because it includes nothing short of hapas, the Whole of the All

The implication, then, is that if one goes to the All, one already moves beyond these limited forms of not-being. One will always see speech, belief, and appearances as partial and therefore not look to them for absolute truth, knowledge, reality, or satisfaction. In the All, however, one finds the fount of clarity and being, through which one is freed from the tyranny of those beliefs, articulations, and appearances that seem so absolutely real and necessary. The only reality, necessity, and satisfaction needed is in the All. Released from the chains by which one

15 An alternative translation of the first two lines reads: “At that time Arjuna could see in the universal form of the Lord the un-limited expansions of the universe situated in one place although divided into many, many thousands.” I have slightly altered the final line of the Easwaren translation.

443 endless searches among these shadows, one can now navigate this limited reality within the light of the One-All.

The Transcendent Encounter with Death This doubt haunted even the gods of old; For it is hard to know, O Death, as you say I can have no greater teacher than you, And there is no boon equal to this - Katha Upanishad (1:22)

Clearly the split between heaven and earth has nothing to do with a realm of ghost-like spirits floating in some kind of parallel dimension. Likewise, there is no sense in our discussion here that the view of reality produced by the scaling to the All defers some kind of reward or judgment till after death nor that it provides some kind of reward or perpetuation of the ego in the shape of an immortal spirit. Nonetheless, it does have something to do with death. A curious inversion exists here between the articulation of Christianity and Vedanta (the two spiritual discourses we have discussed most): in Christianity immortality appears to be something granted after death while in the Vedic tradition, one is rebirthed endlessly in the cycle of samsara until one transcends this cycle. However these articulations have been granted a kind of supernatural element, infused by a kind of belief and an excess of explanatory power, there is something here in the encounter with death that reworks, in relation to our scaling ourselves to the All and our understanding the split between the One and the Many. Although we could look closely at the conception of Christ’s resurrection to consider this relation, the somewhat inverted nature of the

Vedic articulation provides us with a clearer and less overcoded version of this question, which will lead us to one final and powerful implication of our scaling to the All.

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As we already noted above, the sage in the Isha Upanishad easily states this relationship we just discussed from Plato, in which the immanent and the transcendent are brought together.

If we return to this same verse, we will note the significance of the payoff:

But those for whom he is transcendent And immanent cross the sea of death With immanent and enter into Immortality with the transcendent. So have we heard from the wise. (12-14).

The implication here is that navigating the scalar views under which the universe is both transcendent and immanent will help us encounter death in such a way that we enter in a state of immortality. In the context of the cycle of samsara, this text would usually be read in that semi- physical way in which one’s ghost-like self passes out of its endless cycling through instantiations and achieves some kind of higher state where it no longer is reborn but exists forever. This semi-literal reading of passages like this does not fit here since it does not take into account the most important elements we have already dealt with in the mystical articulation of the union with the divine: the sense of Wholeness, the loss of the ego-function, and the arrival at the One-All.

The Upanishads have another text that assists us here, which is one of the most significant and clearest of all the ancient mystical texts: the Katha Upanishad. The power and accessibility of this Upanishad is only increased by it’s obvious parallels to Platonic and the

Christian texts, which are significant enough that we either have some mutual influence or some amazing confluence of articulation (we’ll discuss these in a moment). Most importantly, at the core of the text is an encounter with Yama, Death, in which Nachiketa, the sage in the story, asks death the ultimate question: “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ Say others. I want you to teach me the truth” (1: 20, p. 72-3). Because

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Nachiketa waited at death’s door for three days, Yama promised him that he would give him three boons (wishes). This question is Nachiketa’s final wish. The beauty and nuance of the answer fleshes out the Isha Upanishad’s claim that this realization of equality of immanence and transcendence leads one to immortality.

At first, however, Yama refuses to answer, noting that “This doubt haunted even the gods of old, for the secret of death is hard to know” (1.21). Here we find the surprising parallel to the story of Jesus: Yama puts forward a series of alternatives for Nachiketa that are much the same as Christ’s temptation, which he faced just after his baptism by John. These temptations are those things that we tend to hold more important than the All, those things that hold our attention as being the most needed and substantial parts of our lives: healthy offspring, wealth, a large kingdom, endless pleasure, and beautiful women to wait on him.16 In order to know the secret of death, Nachiketa first has to set aside his desire for these things as already less than the All. As he already noted in an earlier verse, such desires do not exist in heaven (“There is no fear in heaven...passing beyond hunger and thirst and pain, All rejoice in the kingdom of heaven” –

1:12). Thus, in response to Yama’s temptation he notes that all these pleasures are fleeting and will cease at death. The question of death already demands that one face the reality beyond these limited things that occupy so much of our attention.

Yama replies by noting, in terms that now resonate with Plato, that men find themselves privileging their own lives and knowledge, insistent that they understand what life is for in this limited realm of sense:

Ignorant of their ignorance, yet wise In their own esteem, those deluded men Proud of their vain learning go round and round Like the blind led by the blind [cf our discussion of Theaetetus above]. Far beyond

16 Note that the temptation to perform miracles is not here as it is in Jesus’s temptations, although this element is present in Vedic texts as the tempting presence of siddhis that are granted to the yogi 446

Their eyes, hypnotized by the world of sense, Opens the way to immortality. “I am my body; when my body dies, I die.” Living in this superstition, They fall life after life under my sway (2:5, 76).

Alternatively, Patrick Olivelle translates these final lines as “Thinking, ‘this is the world; there is no other’, he falls into my power again and again.” The holding to the earthly desires and vanities is the insistence that all that we have is here, in this body and in this world, that there is no possibility of conceiving beyond this. To do so is to remain in death, to always fall under the power of the fear of death rather than to escape to this other world, the heavens where there is no fear.

Given our extensive discussion, we might already see the scalar argument: if you are nothing but the All localized here, then immortality is nothing more than this realization that this self is not the body. If you are the Cosmos, then death is nothing more than a part of the Cosmos changing forms. We state this up front to note how easy it is to come to this logical and intellectual conclusion if we follow out the arguments of scale. Undoubtedly the ease to which we can come to this conclusion makes it instantly sound mundane, lacking any real emotional weight. Here, a dissatisfaction can immediately present itself: what do you mean?—I still die!

My memories die. My body dies. My accomplishments end. I get lost in the vast cosmos and all this effort then amounts to nothing. For those who would believe in some kind of literal preservation of their egoic self throughout all of time (Nachiketa’s ‘He still exists’), this conclusion is a pale and dissatisfying immortality. For those who would keep to this world alone

(Nachiketa’s ‘He does not’), this is a pale and incoherent immortality, a mere logical switch, some kind of change in articulation trumped up as a profound alteration.

447

The Katha Upanishad responds to these dissatisfactions in order to mark the need for dwelling with this conclusion in order for its significance to manifest. It notes three primary prerequisites: the need to arrive at and contemplate the All, the need to move beyond intellect or logic, and the need to control one’s desires. The first is articulated as a rare taking up of the question of the All: “It is but few who hear about the Self [alternatively: the Being of all beings17]. Fewer still dedicate their lives to its Realization…Rare are they who make it the supreme goal of their lives” (2:7). Alternatively, Olivelle translates this last phrase as “Lucky is the man who grasps it.” The implication is that the difficulty of grasping the full scope of the

Being of beings requires a focused attention and a careful reworking of one’s whole orientation according to this Self. This reworking saturates all levels of one’s being, not merely existing on an intellectual level:

The truth of the self cannot come through one Who has not realized that he is the Self. The intellect cannot reveal the Self. Beyond its duality of subject And object. Those who see themselves in all And all in them help others through spiritual Osmosis to realize the Self themselves (2:8)

The identification with the Cosmos only functions as true identification if one loses the sense of subject-object by which one assumes oneself as the entity (subject) accessing this All (object).

This is the source of the conversion we discussed in Chapter 4, the necessary yielding to that which is larger than oneself. Merely saying or reading these words would not be sufficient; in fact, the simplicity of it offers the temptation for an easy dismissal (yes, sure, I guess that makes sense logically—but what do I do? All I have is still just this. I’ll still die). A full saturation of this surprising and awe-inducing conception of oneself as always already the One-All-Whole, the

17 According to the translation by Swami Krishnananda (pg 35) 448

Cosmos, the Divine requires this dwelling that exists beyond any limited and off-hand affirmation or examination.

On a practical level, the situation is not helped by the fact that these homo sapien bodies come built with self-referencing attention devices called desires, that direct our energies to these limited entities of desire. Here arises the classic and oft-hated need to control your desires. The reason for this discipline can make sense in terms of this capacity to understand the reality of the

Cosmos as a Whole: our attentions will always be split among and attached to the limited fragments for which this bodily apparatus is designed. To fully scale to anything beyond this limited set of objects, we would have to, in some way, align those desires with the fullness of being on all scales. We can read the Katha’s chariot metaphor accordingly:

Know the Self as lord of the chariot, The body as the chariot itself, The discriminating intellect as The charioteer, and the mind as the reins, The senses, say the wise, are the horses; Selfish desires are the roads they travel. When the Self is confused with the body, Mind, and senses, they point out, he seems To enjoy pleasure and suffer sorrow. When a person lacks discrimination And his mind is undisciplined, the senses Run hither and thither like wild horses. But they obey the rein like trained horses When one has discrimination and Has made the mind one-pointed. (3:3-6 , pg 81)

The reader may be familiar with the quite similar articulation within Plato’s Phaedrus as the philosopher’s means of transcending the limited love to the highest beauty, good, and agape (see

246a-255a). The point here is that some discipline is required for the purpose of taking into account, measuring, harmonizing, and calibrating this homo sapien part of the Cosmos, to which

449 our awareness is tied, to the Cosmic One-All-Whole. Only then does one find oneself able to encounter fully this impasse of death and find some kind of significance in this sense of Cosmos.

The endless beauty comes in seeing this point beyond the limits of the limited existence.

It is this Self within the self, accessed by taking this internal measure to its highest point, that we see the transformative wonder of the All. In Oliville’s rendering:

Finer than the finest, larger than the largest, Is the self (atman) that lies here hidden In the heart of a living being. Without desires and free from sorrow, A man perceives by the creator’s grace The grandeur of the self (2:20, 237)

Once realized, sorrow ends:

When he perceives this immense, all pervading self, As bodiless within bodies As stable within unstable beings— A wise man ceases to grieve. (2:22, 238)

The loss of grief comes when you take your own sense of self and contemplate it within this all pervading self. Doing so literally frees you from the horror of one’s own death, seeing that this self-identification has no truth to it whatsoever. There is no ego there to even deny since this ego-structure was nothing more than a cut out of the whole, which is not even evident within the contours of the body or the expanse of the senses—as our persistent scaling has already demonstrated.

Indeed, following through on these conclusions produces this sense that there are two ways of viewing the self. The Easwaren translation makes this split explicit by pointedly using the term “ego” in opposition to the “Self.” This emphasis, which is congruent with Sankara’s

Advaita Vedanta, clarifies that the distinction between heaven and earth is not just between the

450

One and the Many but between an insistent holding to one’s ego and a willingness to yield to the

All. We find this beautifully in Easwaren’s translation:

In the secret cave of the heart, two are Seated by life’s fountain. The separate ego Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff, Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter, While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter Neither liking this nor disliking that. The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self Lives in light. (3:1, 80).18

The two realms are thus also split according to ego/Self as two ways of encountering even the tie to this homo sapien localization of the Cosmos. Only the sense of ego produces endless need for judging between desires, an endless seeking after satisfaction. Inside, however, is already the

Cosmos, the One-All-Whole, able to be accessed by calming the mind and directing the attention towards this undying, unchanging essence already immanent within our very being.

In accessing this higher Self, this body continues to live and function, drinking the sweet and bitter of life, but without the extra torturous falling after likes and dislikes. This satisfaction arises already from the Absolute Wholeness of Cosmos itself, which already contains everything supported within it. From such a perspective, we take many forms, altering and shifting through all of these instantiations—these myriad of forms and shapes seen so clearly through any switch in scale—but always rest within a unity far larger than the unity we propose for ourselves in the egoic sense of self:

As the same air assumes different shapes When it enters objects differing in shape So does the Self take the shape Of every creature in whom he is present (2:10, 88)

18 This passage is translated in quite different ways in other texts. Oliville gives both dwellers in the cave equal status, implying that the two selves are closer to the Atman and Brahmin distinction. This translation does not handle well the bitter verse content elements of the passage. Krishnananda glosses these two selves in a way congruent with Easwaren’s translation: as jiva and ishvara—the separate, fragmented individual and the divine manifestation (63). 451

We then can feel ourselves already as the divine, taking shape, and feel that there is no possibility of corruption in this cosmic consciousness:

As the sun, who is the eye of the world, Cannot be tainted by the defects in our eyes Or by the objects it looks on, So the one Self, dwelling in all, cannot Be tainted by the evils of the world, For this Self transcends all! (2:11)

Happiness results in this full identification with the transcendent self, immanent within the multiplicity of beings. Here the Katha Upanishad repeats Plato’s argument about the generation of the Many by the One, but now making the purpose of this argument clear:

The ruler supreme, inner Self of all, Multiplies his oneness into many. Eternal joy is theirs who see the Self In their own hearts. To none else does it come! (2:12)

The realization of the One out of the Many is the transcendence of one’s limited sense of being that permits one not only to rejoice in the All but to feel this happiness as the very essence of one’s being.

Looking inward, we see this Self already present and find ourselves able to rise above these self-references. Thus, we reach the climax of the Katha Upanishad:

The unitive state cannot be attained Through words or thoughts or through the eye [i.e. Plato’s sources of non-being] How can it be attained except through one Who is established in this state oneself? There are two selves, the separate ego And the indivisible Atman. When One rises above the I and me and mine, The Atman is revealed as one’s real Self. (3:12-13, 91).

It is not that one denies one’s self or wearies of one’s existence. Rather, it is the sense of limited ego that is wearying, as the continual effort of fragmentation requires a great deal of effort and produces endless disjunction between what is seen, believed, and said and what actually is. The

452 passing from Many to One arises only when we are willing to let go of our hold on this limited sense of existence. This limit is always demonstrated within our experience in the very insufficiency and contours of sensation, politics, desire, science, and even religious practices— the Upanishads themselves were the moving beyond or consummation of the Vedic rituals.

Scale points already to this division through its means of taking stock, accounting, measuring, and noting the variety already present in our means of perceiving, describing, and thinking about the world before us. To access the heart of these shifts in our sense of what we are can lead us to wander through endless multiplicity unless we attend to this possibility of transcending from our limited sense of self, taking measure of our own being as the one who scales, and permit ourselves to feel, access, and be transformed by this highest scale as it already presents itself within consciousness. Such an inquiry cannot begin with more words but instead requires an invocation, an inner plea to light the way through these endless layers of being:

May we light the fire […] That burns out the ego and enables us To pass from fearful fragmentation To fearless fullness in the changeless whole (3:2)

453

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Vita

Joshua DiCaglio

EDUCATION

Ph.D. English Pennsylvania State University Expected May 2016 Emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition Defended Sept. 28, 2015

M.A. English Pennsylvania State University May 2012

B.A. Interdisciplinary University of South Carolina Dec. 2009 Studies Self-designed major in Rhetoric of Science and Technology

PUBLICATIONS

“The Logic of Subjectivity” forthcoming in Philosophy and Rhetoric (2017), 34 pages.

“Ironic Ecology.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 22 (2015): 447 - 465. “Review of Dorian Sagan, ed. Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel and Dorian Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edge of Science.” Configurations 21 (2013): 374-377.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

The Cosmic Encounter: The All as Power beyond the Ego-function, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Houston, TX. 2015 (Panel organizer: Higher Powers: Encountering Non-human Scales).

On Being Scaled: Rethinking the View from Above. European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Malta. 2015.

Only the Everything Flows: the Paradox of Philip K. Dick’s (de)Fragmentation, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Dallas, TX. 2014.

Finding a Subjective Science: Kenneth Burke, Whitehead, and Russell’s Paradox. Rhetoric Society of America, San Antonio, TX. 2014.

Encountering the Molecule: Nanotechnology and Material Vitality. Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Milwaukee, WI. 2012.

Ethics, Ethos, and Authority in Online Discussions of Science. National Communication Association, San Francisco, CA. 2010 (co-presented with Pat Gehrke).