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SIMPLICITY:
THE MODULARIZED MIND
AND THE ANALYTIC FALLACY OF THE FRANCISCAN AGE
According to G.K. Chesterton, the age of scientific realism ended in the Renaissance
Era. This becomes evident if we consider the difference between the common sense
realism of Thomas Aquinas and the analytic rationality of modern philosophy:
That Thomism is the philosophy of common sense is itself a matter of common sense. Yet
.... we have so long taken such matters in a very uncommon sense. (…) Since the modern
world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really
corresponded to ...what common men would call common sense. Each started with ... a
peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call the sane point of
view. …. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we
will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is
allowed to give this one twist to the mind.1
The modern decline of the pre-modern policy of the soul was a consequence of this
paradigm shift, since it was accompanied by the tendency to treat the mystery of the
human soul as an analytic explanatory problem and not as an essential feature of our
erotic everyday life.
Modern rationality is analytic to the same extent it tries do decompose complex
realities into its most simple components. Accordingly, our mental faculties become
decomposed in functional modules, like perception and cognition, and related
subfactulies, like visual, auditive, tactile and olfactory perception. Like in the premodern tradition, this functional approach is driven by the desire for simplicity.
However, in the common sense tradition of philosophical realists like Aquinas, the
desire for simplicity was focused not on the simplicity of the most elementary
modules of complex systems, but on the simplicity of God.
By contrast, the modern approach assumes that everything that cannot be
decomposed into functional modules is only of derivative significance. However,
there seems to be at least one example that tenaciously resists analytic attempts to
demythologize the symbolic realism of our everyday realism. As particularly Jewish
philosophers, like Emmanuel Levinas, have pointed out, the ‘epiphany’ of the
human face suggests up to this day that we are able to see what we hear. We still
have the poetic ability to look in a face and to see that it speaks to us – although I
would interpret this phenomenon, contrary to Levinas, in more realistic terms.
I do not only look metaphorically in a face that speaks to me. Encounters like these
are more real than everything that might be verified in empiricist terms. And, in
contrast to Levinas, I do not think that the encounter with the ‘nudity and poverty’
of the human face can only take place in an ‘anarchic’ mode that undermines what
we normally consider our reality to be. If I look, for example, at the face of the
person I love, I can perceive it as part of the world that I inhabit – it does not
necessarily undermine my ability to be in peace with myself and with my
environment. I can see her soul speaking to me; and the erotic attraction that
accompanies this perception brings me closer to the actual world that I inhabit than
any empirical observation of ‘nude facts’. The invisibility of her soul is visible and
speaks to me, because it intensifies my experience of being in the world.
One of the last representatives of this symbolic realist approach to our everyday
experience was Nicholas of Cusa. At the threshold to the modern Age, in the middle
of 15th century, he provided what is arguably the most concise summary of the
premodern concept of scientific simplicity. Cusa called this scientific account of the
simplicity of the world the ‘theology of the circle’, because it gathered together all
our cognitive and perceptual faculties in the contemplation of the simplicity of God
which transcends all analytic and functional distinctions:
Hence, although we ascribe to God sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, sense, reason,
understanding, and other such things ... nevertheless in Him seeing is not other than
hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, perceiving, and understanding. (c. 3 n. 8; Hp n. 9)
This account of the simplicity of our mental faculties turns the analytic pretensions
of the modern age upside down: It culminates not in a selection of neatly separated
cognitive and perceptual functions. It rather culminates in a breakdown of the
boundaries between different faculties and reveals the poetic core of the symbolic
realist tradition of the past.
If it is true that poetry is the most integrative of all human arts, then Cusa’s account
of our desire for simplicity coincides with a recollection of the poetic roots of our
everyday realism. To put it with John Milbank: “the poet must possess the skills of
the painter, the composer, the chef, the lover, and the distiller of perfumes”2. For,
although our sensual and cognitive faculties are, as Cusa argues, ultimately
exchangeable, their exchangeability is not arbitrary. Our ability to discover the
simplicity of the world rather requires every individual to find his or her very own
articulation of the “theology of the circle”. Every science has to be rooted in a
spiritual and poetical practice that enables us to see the simplicity of God in
everything that we encounter – comparable with Ignatius’ of Loyola’s spiritual
exercises, that emerged about 100 years after Cusa.
In contrast to this integrative approach, the modern marginalisation of the poetic
and spiritual sensitivities of the past encouraged the suspicion that our ability to
perceive the traces of the invisible in visible faces is nothing but an epiphenomenon
of, allegedly, more elementary forces.
This had fatal consequences in terms of the modern policy of the soul. In the worst
case, invisible realities such as ‘mind’, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ came now to be seen as the
delusive background noise of functional information processing systems, as is the
case in popular currents of contemporary “neurophilosophy”. In the best case, they
were reconsidered as irreducible, subjective presuppositions of scientific reason, as it
is the case in cannier accounts of modern demystification such as Kant, Hegel,
Schelling, Nietzsche, Lacan, and their post-modern successors.
The latter Kantian tradition did not deny the significance of the symbolic language
of the past. Symbolic expressions are indispensable inasmuch as they permit us to
maintain the rationalist dogma that it is possible to draw a clear and distinct line
between the determined (“objective”) and the undetermined (“subjective”) realms of
human experience and knowledge.
The philosophers of Early Romanticism went even a step further. Within a few
years after the publication of Kant’s writings, they deconstructed Kant’s attempt to
draw a strict demarcation line between objective knowledge and subjective
expressions. However, part-way through this movement came to a standstill in an
aporetic attitude with regard to the modern dualism.
This aporetic attitude was the outcome of Johann Fichte’s failed attempts to
provide a rationalist account of the most fundamental phenomenon of Kant’s
philosophy, the phenomenon of self-knowledge. Let me shortly summarize why this
debate was so important, and why it culminated in an aporetic attitude with regard
to the modern split between subjectivity and objectivity.
I am able to observe myself as an object – for example, when I look in the mirror.
However, Fichte had convincingly demonstrated that my ability to recognize myself
in a mirror could not be the mere outcome of an act of mirroring, or reflexive selfobservation. If I am looking in my mirror image, I only see an “object” (B); I do not
see anything, which informs me about the “subject” (A) that is looking in the mirror.
The only thing I know about this “I perspective” is that it is not a passive object that
can be observed in the world, but a spontaneous “subject” (A) which is actively
observing the world. Consequently, my ability to know that the person (B) in the
mirror is identical with the subject (A) that is looking in the mirror presupposes a
kind of familiarity with myself as subject (A) that is not based on a kind of
objectifying knowledge (B), but pre-reflexive knowledge.
However, as the Early Romantics pointed out, Fichte’s conclusion included a fatal
mistake. If we presuppose that there must be some sort of intuitive familiarity of the
spontaneously acting “I” with itself, this might explain why I am familiar with
myself as a spontaneous “subject” (A). But this does not yet explain why the
“person” (B) I am observing every morning in the mirror is “me” as well. Hence,
Fichte’s pre-reflexive knowledge cannot be reduced to a kind of intuition of myself
as “subject” (A). Self-consciousness presupposes an intuitive familiarity of myself
with myself that is prior to the distinction between the “subjective” and “objective”
modes of knowledge; it is neither reducible to a kind of “objective” (B), nor a kind of
“subjective” (A) knowledge; it has rather the character of a kind of familiarity with
an unknown variable (X).
Now, we might call this unknown variable “the Absolute”; but this means that we
cannot know what kind of entity this absolute being is. We only know that it is
neither an “object” nor a “subject”, and that it holds the fundamental polarity ob
subject and object together.
Other than in the premodern tradition of apophatic theology, this account of the
divine mystery was still based on an analytic, functional account of the relationship
between body and soul. This becomes most evident if we compare the romantic
concept of simplicity and unity with Nicholas of Cusa’s substance-metaphysical
concept of singularity.
According to Cusa, every creature can be perceived as a manifestation of the
simplicity of God that marks the centre of the universe and holds the world together
at its core. And this has a very simple reason: Every created reality is one with itself
to the same extent as it is what it is: a trace and image of its creator that invites us to
contemplate the simplicity of God in the mirror of his creatures (Hoff, 2007, 478).
Against this background, it might be argued that the Romantic tradition associated
the missing link, that reconciles the subjective with the objective dimensions of
myself, too quickly with an absolute principle of identity. While every creature
seemed to be trapped in the dialectic of subject and object, only God appeared as
identical with himself. Consequently, the encounter with a human face was
condemned to appear as an ultimately unsettling experience – like in Levinas, every
attempt to deny this unhappy feature of human encounters would have been
perceived as an unenlightened form of self-deception.
Cusa would have agreed with the Romantics that our comparative rationality is
bound to fail whenever it tries to relate to the principle of unity that holds
everything together what appears to be torn apart. However, the Romantics
conceived this unity as an abstract, formal principle. The simplicity of God was an
unknown ‘X’, defined by its synthetic function to unite what appears to be torn
apart. Something like this cannot be really discovered in the face of a finite creature;
and if it seems to appear in a created face, then this is nothing but a poetic illusion –
like the blue flower in Novalis novel Heinrich of Ofterdingen.
The last point explains why the Romantics perceived Fichte’s first principle as
aporetic: We only know that there is a unifying X; but we do not know what it is. By
contrast, in Cusa the essence of God is manifest in his creation, however weak this
manifestation might be. The invisible can be discovered in every creature: In a
human face, in the blue heaven, and even in a carbuncle stone.[3] But this requires
me to contemplate the simplicity of its essence, and to overcome the inclination to
decompose it into its analytic components (size, colour, shape, etc.). For this reason,
Cusa would have insisted that our ability to know that there is a principle of unity
that holds the world together at this core presupposes our ability to contemplate the
visibility of its unique essence in its creatures. It is not possible to talk about the
existence of the Absolute without contemplating what it is.
By contrast, the Early Romantic tradition (and I am talking now only about the
German tradition) focused on the pure existence of the absolute as a formal principle
of identity. What is distinct in our created world is united in God. We might strive
for perfection, harmony and simplicity, but it is not possible to find peace in the
contemplation of finite creatures, because the dividedness of our created existence is
fundamental for the way our embodied soul operates.
This restless feature of the Romantic approach to the absolute becomes most
evident in Friedrich Hölderlin’s early account of the phenomenon of self-knowledge
in his famous Fragment Urteil und Seyn.4 The ability to be not united with myself is
essential to my existence as a free and intelligent living creature. My desire for unity
and simplicity might express itself mythologically in the illusionary salvation of art
and poetry. This is even essential for our existence as divided creatures. However,
our desire for simplicity can never find its fulfilment in the world that we actually
inhabit. Our love will always be an ‘unhappy love’ (Hegemann). There will always
be a mismatch between what we find and what we are looking for. As Novalis (the
writer of Heinrich von Ofterdingen) has put it:
We are looking always and everywhere for the something unconditioned; but we
find always only things.5
This disappointing feature explains the significance of the symbolism of coldness in
Early Romantic poetry or in the related art as, for example, in Caspar David
Friedrich painting Failed Hope of 1823: pack ice, sinking ships, ruines, blue flowers
everywhere. Our desire is directed into the infinite; but to arrive at this destination is
equivalent with arriving at the absolute freezing point where the blood of our desire
for identity and simplicity comes to a dead lock.6 The blue sky has not lost its
attraction. However, other than in Cusa, it symbolizes ultimately nothing but the
mourning in the face of the lost hope in salvation; its blueness is simultaneously
infinitely bright and infinitely empty.
One of the last representatives of this nihilist tradition was Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre’s
existentialist distinction between Existence and Essence was nothing but a variation
on the Early Romantic distinction between the formal, pre-reflexive principle of our
naked being in the world (existence), and our aporetic attempts to make sense of this
‘facticity’ (essence). Hence, it is not surprising that Sartre was only a postulatory
atheist: In contrast to philosophically naive atheists, I knew that he could not get rid
of Fichte’s X; but he perceived this X simultaneously as a condition of the possibility
and as a thread to our freedom and creativity.
However, the Romantic and existentialist traditions marked only a transitional stage
in the modern deconstruction of the analytic rationality of early modernity. The
post-modernist upheaval in the late 20th century was to a certain extent a
countermovement against Sartre’s celebration of autonomy and self-empowerment.
In contrast to the existentialist assumption that ‘existence comes before essence’ the
post-modern deconstruction of the modern concept of subjectivity built on Martin
Heidegger’s criticism of Sartre. Similar to the pre-modern tradition, Heidegger, and
particularly the late Heidegger, left no space for functionalist speculations that treat
unknown principles (X) as existent, if it is not possible to account for their essence.
This was the background of Heidegger’s rejection of Sartre’s existentialist
misreading of Being and Time in his infamous Letter on Humanism.7 Post-modern
philosophers such as Derrida accepted this criticism. However, they did not provide
us with an alternative solution to the modern failure to account for the essence of the
principle of unity that holds the world together at its core. They rather tended to
make a virtue out of this impossibility, and celebrated the restlessness of a new kind
of post-modern nomadism. And this had a simple reason: They were still attached to
the modern dualism of subjectivity and objectivity, since their philosophy was based
on a parasitic attitude with regard to Cartisian and Kantian tradition of modern
philosophy. They still shared to counterintuitive assumptions which they tried to
deconstruct.
This does not mean that the Romantic and post-modern countermovement’s against
analytic attempts to unlock the secret of the human soul were just a dead end. As
long as we accept the post-Cartesian conviction that scientific knowledge is based on
analytically precise, neutral descriptions of the world, we will be haunted by
phenomena that cannot be accounted for in scientific terms. The aporia of Kant’s
Early Romantic and Post-modern successors are ineluctable as long as we conceive
the mystery of the human soul primarily as an explanatory problem and not an
essential feature of our erotic everyday life.
However, it is possible to adopt an analogical middle path between the extremes of
naive BBC4 journalist, who promise us to ‘unlock the secret of the human soul’, and
sophisticated Romantic ironists that make a virtue of our scientific incapacity to
perform this task: We have to reject the analytic dogma of the modern age tout court.
The misty space of our everyday experience neither can be completely unmixed into
neat modules (as fashionable neuro-philosophers assume) nor derived from
dialectically opposed subjective and objective forces (as the Romantics assumed).
Instead of being trapped in analytic distinctions and dialectical oppositions, we have
to learn again to inhabit the paradox in which philosophers like Cusa and Meister
Eckhart discovered the unbearable simplicity of our being in the world.
I can see the invisible in the visible whenever I look in the eyes of the person I love;
but when I am speaking as a scientist or as an allegedly ‘enlightened philosopher’, I
am supposed to pretend that the mysterious attraction of this face is delusive. But
what justifies this counter-intuitive prescription apart from the metaphysical dogma
that nothing is justified to exist that does not fit in the procrustean bed of
functionalist explanatory hypotheses? We might sacrifice our attachment to what
“common men would call common sense”, and believe in philosophers or scientists
that expect us to twist our mind. But we will never reach the point where this twist
will straighten out again.
This does not mean that the modern policy of the soul can be refuted. It is still
possible to assert the modern promise that everything will straighten out in a still
unknown future, and it would be an idle undertaking to refute this quasi-religious
believe.
I rather recommend adopting a genealogical approach to this problem, starting from
the in historical terms most perplexing question: What on earth did us ever make
believe that everything will straighten out after we have accepted the dogmatism of
scientific confidence men?
I have dealt with this genealogical question extensively in my forthcoming book.
Hence, I will confine myself to recall the genealogical starting point of the modern
Holzweg (I don’t know how to translate this expression of Heidegger, but a Holzweg
is more than a mere ‘dead end’).
The modern policy of the soul builds on the assumption that the objects of our
knowledge and perception are nothing but the sum of neatly definable, distinct
predicates, and the accompanying assumption that it is possible to separate the
sensual, imaginative, and intellectual powers of the human soul from each other as if
they were (at least formally) separable parts of a modularised compound.
This assumption became popular towards the end of the 13th century in the
Franciscan tradition that built on Avicenna. However, as distinct from this tradition,
the competing Dominican tradition of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did
not accept this new trend. It rather tried to recover the symbolic realist tradition of
the 12th century.
Two centuries latter, Nicholas of Cusa’s built on this tradition, when he developed
an alternative response to the challenges of the emerging modern age that integrated
the strengths of Franciscan approach in an attempt to recover the common sense
realism of the 12 century. On hindsight, this late attempt to recover the preFranciscan tradition has become more relevant than ever before. The Franciscan
policy of the soul was not without alternative. Hence, it is time to recover Cusa
alternative path into the modern age.
1
G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas / St. Francis of Assisi (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press 2002), 133f.
2
John Milbank, The Legend of Death. Two Poetic Sequences (Oregon: Cascade 2008), 4.
3
For example when I discover that ‘the sky is nothing other than the sky’. As long as I
adopt a comparative attitude with regard to the heaven, I will not be able to discover
the simplicity of its essence. But its invisible essence is visible to the same extent as
the sky is nothing other than the sky, i.e. as soon as I resist the rationalistic
inclination to compare it to something else .... In De li non aliud Cusa illustrates the
visibility of this indivisible essence by the mysterious shining of a precious stone:
“You see this carbuncle stone, which the peasants call a ruby. (...) I see the substance
of a carbuncle prior to the largeness or the smallness of the physical object. The same
thing holds true regarding the stone’s color, its shape, and its other accidents. Thus,
none of all the things which my sight, my touch, and my imagination attain
regarding the carbuncle are its essence. Instead, they are other things which happen
to the essence. In these other things the essence shines forth, so that it is perceptible;
for without these it cannot be perceptible”
4
How is Self-knowledge possible? By way of opposing myself to myself, becoming
separated of myself, and knowing myself as the same despite the opposition. / Wie
ist [Selbstbewußtseyn] möglich? Dadurch, dass ich mich mir Selbst entgegenseze,
mich von mir Selbst trenne, aber ungeachtet dieser Trennung mich im
entgegengesezten als dasselbe erkenne Hölderlin 1992, 156, Z.11-15; see Manfred:
Friedrich
5
Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge (Novalis 1965, 412,
Nr. 1). Vom Unerreichbaren, seinem Carakter nach, läßt sich keine Erreichung
denken – (Novalis 1968, 413, Nr. 745, Z. 9 f.).
6
Hyperion-Fragment: this is tantamount with death (see also Frank: Friedrich).
7
Cf. Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism". In: Basic Writings. From Being and
Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (New York: Harper & Row 1977), 217-265.