The Givenness of Things

GIVENNESS

I have been reading Jonathan Edwards lately, notably the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, “affections” being the eighteenth-century term for emotions, more or less. He lists these “affections”—joy, love, hope, desire, delight, sorrow, gratitude, compassion, and zeal, as well as fear and dread — and demonstrates from Scripture their intrinsic part in the experiences of faith. I have been impressed for some time by American philosophical pragmatism, at least as I understand it, or as I find it useful in my own thinking. The great pragmatist William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, seems to be making much the same argument Edwards had made more than a century earlier, in his case centering the question on the meaning of the profoundly emotional and sometimes transformative character of many religious conversions. His posture of objectivity, scrupulous because it is tentative, different as it is from Edwards’s intensely scriptural and theological approach, makes the same assertion Edwards makes, which is that a kind of experience felt as religious and mediated through the emotions does sometimes have formidable and highly characteristic effects on personality and behavior that are available to observation. Many of my nineteenth-century American heroes passed through the alembic of what they, like Edwards, called conversion, this qualitative leap in religious intensity and commitment that typically changed solidly pious Presbyterians or Methodists or Congregationalists into Congregationalists or Methodists or Presbyterians capable of prodigies of selflessness and discipline and generosity. I am and am not of their tradition, a mainline Protestant who has a vested interest in believing they overstated the importance of these singular, threshold experiences, and who takes it to be true that the grace of God works as it will, even gradually, patiently, quietly. This is not by any means to question the authenticity of the visions and passions they passed through, or to suggest that these were anything but enviable. These enthusiasms struck whole classes of Andover and Yale divinity graduates, sending them out to the frontier to establish churches and colleges that would help to create a culture of enlightened self-sufficiency, that is, a culture resistant to the spread of slavery or committed to its abolition. Their works speak for them still. Their devotion to their purpose is an impressive, if forgotten, proof that, in a great many ways, faith forms life and drives behavior. In their case, it engaged them in truly urgent work, and gave them an extraordinary steadiness of purpose. It made them realists, pragmatists.

Thus are we plunged into the mysteries of consciousness. There is nothing unusual about this — we are so deeply immersed in these mysteries that we have no way of establishing an objective view of them. The behavioral sciences have toiled for generations to explain how we think, why we act as we do. The models they proceed from are generally either reactions to environment that are measurable by them, or presumptively delusional states like the intuitions and experiences that sustain religious belief, or that sustain the sense of the self. My Yale divines believed heroically in a kind of personal agency that allowed them to see and engage reality and to change it, and they did this in the thrall of a kind of visionary experience it would be very difficult to describe in the reductionist terms our science of the mind allows us. They are forgotten historically, perhaps because they and their labors resist description in reductionist terms.

Granted, throughout history brutal and disastrous crusades have been carried out by leaders acting at the urging of visions and ecstasies. And brutal and disastrous customs have thriven in the humdrum of ordinary life, in the absence of anything to be called vision, slavery, for example. We are a strange species.

In all circumstances complex, higher-order thinking is called for, among contemporaries and certainly among historians. Scientific reductionism, good in its place, is very often used to evade the great fact of complexity. It has no vocabulary for higher-order thinking, which it often dismisses on the grounds that it chooses not to address it. This science begins with the assumption and ends with the conclusion that subjective experiences are not as they present themselves to individual or to common experience, though, as in the case of moral judgment, they are only and always subjective.

(I find myself using the terms “objective” and “subjective” though they imply a clean and simple distinction where no such thing is possible. A neuroscientist might see herself as the arbiter in such matters, an apostle of the objectively true with machinery to prove it. And to me she might seem like someone intoxicated by her role and loyal to its orthodoxies. In this she is like a great many of us who are specialists in one way or another, though readier to exempt herself from suspicion of bias and fallibility than most of us are. Alexis de Tocqueville described the emergence in the Europe of his day of “men who, in the name of progress, seek to reduce man to a material being.” He says, “They look for what is useful without concern for what is just; they seek science removed from faith and prosperity apart from virtue.” They style themselves “champions of modern civilization,” and so on. My point is simply that the posture often assumed by the behavioral scientists, the ones who claim to be the agents of social transformation as they dispel illusion and reveal the hard fact of our materiality, has been around for a long time. It is an established role in Western society, refreshed from generation to generation by claims to newness and rigor, always bringing this same bold, irrefutable truth. It has proved impervious to the demonstrations by physical science that materiality, however defined, is profoundly amazing, uncanny, in no way suited to the antique rhetorical uses made of it in Tocquevilles’s time and ours. All this tells strongly against positivist claims to objectivity, which are after all an essential part of this role.)

Recently I heard a neuroscientist in Europe explain that what we call fear is in fact a pattern of heightened activity, synapses firing in a certain region of the brain. This seems to some to dispel the mystery, to refute the illusion of selfhood — aha! there it is! a bright spot on a screen. No doubt if I and a higher ape encountered a lion, there would be an interesting similarity in the pattern of excitation in our nervous systems. And much would be made of this. But if I and the ape were confronted with a subpoena or a pink slip, all similarity would vanish. This is to say that human emotion is conditioned profoundly by culture and society and one’s individual history of interaction with them both, in other words, by being human. Reaction to a subpoena would vary radically from one human being to another, depending again on personal history. In other words, neuroscience might tell us something about the processes by which fear becomes a physical sensation. But the sensation in most cases means only that a predisposition compounded of memory, association, information or the lack of it, temperament, and circumstance has been triggered and physiologically expressed. Fear as sensation is too late in the causal sequence to define fear itself. And its true origins would be dispersed throughout the brain, raising questions about the meaningfulness of the apparent relative quiet of the parts of consciousness where it has its origins, therefore about the meaningfulness of the local excitation of particular neurons. Its quiet could imply that the workings of the mind, or brain, are not of a kind existing instruments are designed to capture.

Jonathan Edwards knew that the emotions have a physical component, and he knew it could be argued that this is all they amount to. He said, “The motion of the blood and animal spirits is not the essence of these affections … but the effect of them … There is a sensation in the mind which loves and rejoices, antecedent to any effects on the fluids in the body.” He is arguing here for the capacity for emotion in spirits, disembodied souls. He is speaking within a set of religious and cultural assumptions, just as our neuroscientists do when they tell us that fear is the firing of certain synapses in the brain. Their culture and moment allow them to say, in effect, it is not you who are afraid — a little patch of gray matter is responding to stimuli in the environment. Then is there a self, at all? The point is now actively disputed.

Medical science does not know what life is, but it is very careful to distinguish it from death just the same, and very little inclined to question the reality of the phenomenon on the grounds that it lacks a satisfactory account of it. Neuroscience does not know what the mind or the self is, and has made a project of talking them out of existence for the sake of its theories which exclude them. They have banished the dichotomy called Cartesian by excluding one major term, the mind, that is.

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Jonathan Edwards is a pragmatist by my definition because he has a very active sense of the givenness of things. We know what love is — he uses the word without definition or modifier. Like every Christian moralist since Jesus, he knows love can attach itself to the wrong things, things of the world, things like power and wealth that are usually implicated in exploitation and impoverishment, if the prophets are to be believed. Still it is love he is speaking of, and we understand what he means by it. Modern English speakers may be a little less discriminating in their use of the word than the ancients were, but perhaps not. When poor old Isaac expresses his love for a stew of game, he uses the same verb Moses uses in the commandment that we love God with all our heart, soul, and strength. Of course Isaac associates the stew with rugged Esau and his life in the fields and the sunlight, so, like most things we love, it exists in a web of meaning and memory. Early translations into Latin and English made distinctions the Hebrew Bible did not make, sometimes introducing caritas, or charity, where the context implied holy love. Sometimes, as in the Vulgate’s version of the words of Isaac, it employs paraphrase.

Scriptural and modern usage does reflect experience. Love, however elusive, however protean, however fragmentary, seems to have something like an objective existence. It can be observed as well as tested. Perhaps it is better to say, language reflects a consensus of subjectivities. We seldom agree in our loves, we vary wildly in our ability to acknowledge and express them, we may find that they focus more readily on cats and dogs than on justice and mercy, neighbors and strangers. And yet, for all that, we do know what love is, and joy, gratitude, compassion, sorrow, and fear as well.

Fear is an easier subject than love because it relates more directly to environment, complex as that is. The human impulse to fear is antecedent to any construction, even though, as I have said, it is shaped and triggered by culture and personal history. We all know that there are people in this country right now who acquire arsenals and gold coins and shipments of freeze-dried hamburgers and then sit in their basements waiting for the first clap of Apocalypse. However peculiar to culture and temperament this may be, the fear behind it all is just plain fear. In principle, in order to empathize, anyone who has ever had a bad dream or sat in a dentist’s chair need only scale the experience up. It would help if the empathy could factor in a near-certainty that subversives are beaming dreams into her brain or that world history is an international conspiracy of dentists. Failing this, we still know what fear is, how it feels, and how it both sharpens and distorts our perceptions.

On the other side of the question there are those who feel the objectivity of their view is established in the fact that they have produced accounts of subjective experience that are impossible to affirm on the basis of subjective experience. People may accept the meaningfulness, the truth value, of the claim that an emotion is identical with a patch of cerebral activity registered by a machine. This might well influence their own experience and worldview, that is, their subjectivity. Still, it is hard to see the point of defining emotion, or subjectivity, by depriving it of the character that defines it. If you happened to have a thousand-dollar bill, and I told you it was in fact a slip of paper with the image of Grover Cleveland printed on it, you would not accept this as true in any important sense, no matter how true it might be in the impossible absence of history, culture, society, and the rest, no matter that a higher primate would drop it in favor of a candy wrapper. It is indeed arbitrary, purely an effect of cultural consensus, that a slip of paper has value in the total absence of intrinsic value, simply because a certain number of zeros follow a one. My basement dweller has given much thought to this conundrum. The slip of paper will likely prove for human purposes to be highly negotiable all the same, on the strength of subjective consensus.

For Edwards the existence of the emotions and their character are arbitrary phenomena, in the sense that they reflect the intent of God in creating humankind. If his intent had been different we, like every created thing, would be utterly different as well. But God made us in his image, that is, with attributes that we share with him. Since religious thought assumes that he has made us one by one, so to speak, our participating in these attributes is arbitrary, too. Their existence need not be arrived at as the consequence of evolution or as an effect of self-interest or by making any other account of them that would rationalize and compromise them. This is the anthropology of the soul, and, besides its cultural and political importance — we are created equal, we are endowed by our Creator — it is entirely compatible with the pragmatism that accepts things in their complex and veiled givenness, extrapolated neither to nor from. God so loved the world. God is love. Love one another as I have loved you. These sentences are intelligible to us because we do, in however misdirected or dilute a form, participate in this attribute.

For Edwards our nature is a reflex of the expectations God has of us. We are told to hope. To fear. To feel compassion and gratitude. All these things we can do, can scarcely refrain from doing. The Bible is a compendium of passions, emotions, and meditations. The whole traffic of interaction among human beings, and between the human and the divine, is essentially a matter of inward experience — often it is dread, loneliness, homesickness, and regret, interpreted as alienation from God, or as the fear of alienation. Skeptics have always taken this kind of thinking for anthropomorphism, a primitive or wistful projection onto the unreadable universe that makes human traits into divine attributes. Skeptics can’t prove that this is true, and believers can’t prove that it is not true. Faith takes its authority from subjective experience, from an inward sense of the substance and meaning of experience. The same is true of disbelief, no doubt. Objective proof cannot be claimed on either side.

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From the point of view of Jonathan Edwards, these “affections” he names exist apart from any particular human being who might be their locus, no matter how much they are colored by temperament and by occasion. They are full of meaning intrinsically, as they are felt and expressed and as they are suppressed and denied. The aesthetic and moral order of the universe to which they are essential, and in which we are assumed by him to participate, are freestanding as well. They are intrinsic to the meaning of the whole of Creation, as our minds and perceptions are also.

William James very wisely cautioned against extrapolation from what we know, or think we know, to what it seems to us this knowledge must imply. If we approach the question of the affections or emotions or the inward life as Jamesian pragmatists, allowing always for the fact that they often mystify us, we will take our feelings as we know them, not only as physical states rooted in all the processes of our brains that reflect and condition our motives, but more especially as the continuously variable inward weather in which we live from birth to death. That our feelings, things so familiar to us, so near to us as to be in a sense identical with us, should be defined primarily or exclusively as the mechanistic triggering of neurons is the consequence of a particularly remarkable extrapolation, from the observation of localized activity in the brain to the assertion that human experience is of a kind to be describable in its essence on the basis of the information, if this is the proper name for it, accessed by these means.

Here is another assumption Edwards makes, one that seems confirmable from experience. Like Descartes and any number of earlier thinkers, he assumes that we are not passive in relation to our emotions. There is, experientially, a second self, a self who can wish we would not be afraid of what frightens us, that we would not be angered by what angers us, a self-awareness that regrets an incapacity for the kind of joy the best moments of life should afford us or the kind of compassion circumstance seems to demand of us. As intimate as our emotions are, we continuously stand apart from them, appraising. Why should one possibly snide remark by someone we hardly know ruin a whole day, even a week? Why do we talk too much when we are nervous? Drugs and therapies are marketed to the voice in our heads that is so alert to our failings, and so frustrated by them. It is this second self, always tacking against the impulses in us that are least acceptable to us, which makes us feel, quite rightly, that others never know us as we really are. Edwards could preach to the difference his congregation would have felt between appropriate experience — an overwhelming love of God, an overwhelming gratitude for existence, a ravishing sense of the divine beauty manifest in Creation on one hand, and the comparatively dull and meagre experience of unconverted life on the other. He could try to induce in them the state of mind or soul that would lift them out of their insensibility. Again, this is all articulated in highly particular cultural terms, and yet it does acknowledge a complexity in experience that religions generally acknowledge, for which the concepts of neuroscience offer no equivalent. To put the matter in secular terms, who can read about this speck of glittering planet in gravitational thrall to a star at the fringe of a whorl of galaxy in a roaring, surging universe that, as Edwards says, might be no more than a water drop beside the grander systems that are possible and not feel how minor and grudging our wonder is at what we are and what we can know and imagine? Add to this the belief that we are created to marvel at Creation, as Edwards and his tradition believed we were, and our bizarre fixation on lesser things becomes a part of the difference between our circumstance and our awareness of it that his tradition called our fallenness.

As in the matter of the water drop, theologians often had appropriately hyperbolic notions about the nature and reach of Creation, expressing them long before physicists could begin to confirm them or were disposed to. This aside, for them the theological universe had a grand moral architecture as well. Reality was structured around good and evil, humankind being uniquely capable of both. There was no greater scale than this architecture by which reality could be measured, even granting as they often did heavens beyond heavens. Let us say that human beings would have proceeded from a sound intuition of this moral structure if they had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, given drink to the thirsty, and, needless to say, beaten their swords into ploughshares. Clearly this would have gone far toward assuring the long-term viability of the planet, an argument for a high order of objective facticity behind teachings whose truth value is routinely slighted when it is not dismissed outright. If we had not heard these verses as poetry or as piety, to the extent we have heard them at all, we’d have a much sounder basis for dealing with reality, from the point of view of peace and human thriving, and might not now be so starkly confronted with the alternative realities of war and disease. Here history has made a more irrefutable proof than science could ever dream of.

We cannot know that conscious life has appeared only on earth, but we have good grounds for assuming that it is rare and extraordinary enough that its vanishing would be an incalculable impoverishment of the sum of things. An insect is more complex than a star. So how is the scale of change to be reckoned if life itself is the thing lost, recent and local as the phenomenon seems to be? Stars burn out and the nature of the universe is more or less unaltered. But if we say that, for all we know to the contrary, there is just one minor planet in a limitless field of stars where apple trees blossom and where songs are sung, then most of us would probably grant an important centrality to that planet. The parable of the Pearl of Great Price is not apt here, since it assumes something imaginable, a near equivalence of exchange value between the whole of a man’s wealth and a single pearl. But if this strange planet is the pearl, what could even seem to be of equivalent value? Say the universe has no boundary and the stars are numberless. Still there is an infinite qualitative difference between life and the most opulent and glorious reaches of lifelessness. I may seem to be offering a very available defense of the ecosystem. But my point is of another kind. If life is as extraordinary as it appears to be, if it is unique to this planet, as it may well be, then it is within human power to make an infinite qualitative difference in the cosmos by erasing this singularity. Objectively speaking, this change would be imponderable, because the difference between life and lifelessness is imponderable. The very notion of scale, with its implication of commensurability, collapses. From this perspective, the argument for the alternative architecture proposed by religion, that moral structures are essential elements of cosmic reality, taking precedence over space and time and gravity, matter and force, is formidable.

And this returns me to pragmatism, givenness, what Edwards called the arbitrary constitution of the Creator. We know only what we know, only in the ways that we know it or can know it. It is only reasonable to assume that the physical world is accessible to other modes of perception than we are capable of. Our instruments project and refine human perceptions and query reality in order to address whatever questions we think to pose. However triumphant our achievements may seem to us, to an all-competent observer we might appear entangled in a small, dense web of our own weaving. As civilizations, polities, ethnicities, professions, and families, we certainly are entangled, in webs of status and honor and custom and piety that can seem inevitable to us and utterly arbitrary to outsiders, as in fact they are, though no more so than are the standards an outsider’s view would bring to bear on them. So we have models, after our human fashion, of realities composed of givens of our own creation that yield the profoundest effects on our minds and our lives. I mention here gender and race, concepts of indeterminable meaning and great practical power, variously active in every social order, every culture.

It is in his defense of the doctrine of original sin that Edwards makes his most explicit and extended argument for creation’s arbitrary character, that is, for its being composed so as to reflect the intentions of a creator, not as the elaboration of an order intrinsic to itself. Edwards can speak of natural system and order + revelatory beauty + the moral contest of good and evil, and be wholly unembarrassed by the heterogeneity of components of the reality he describes. Pre-Reformation theology, influenced by the thought of Aristotle and Ptolemy, tended to resolve all being into one system. Edwards is indebted to Calvin in that he makes the phenomenon of consciousness, rather than an objective cosmic order, the central reality. Calvin could be agnostic in the matter of the Copernican hypothesis because his theology was not dependent on any model of structured ontology. Edwards was thoroughly knowledgeable in the Newtonian science of his time, but for him no more than for John Locke did it imply a closed system, one that could in principle be described or explained exhaustively in terms of established physical properties or laws.

Positivist science, dominant among us, resembles pre-Reformation theology in its drive to unite all knowledge in one vocabulary of description. But, since for it God is emphatically not a given, the elements of reality that were consistent with reality’s divine origins in the Thomist scheme are not to be accommodated in the new system. Those “affections” Edwards makes much of are, in the modern understanding, anomalies or delusions. True, now and then something is sighted that looks like love or compassion among members of another species. Under current assumptions this would be better evidence of their reality than any number of seeming altruisms among human beings, certainly better than the surges and twinges we take for love or pity when we are subject to them ourselves. But skepticism is mighty. Such human evidence is anecdotal and open to interpretation.

There is a very strict principle of selection at work here, which looks rational to us, being strict. Obviously, to invoke the will of God to explain anything, to the exclusion of other ways of accounting for it, would be to disable the knowledge-acquiring, problem-exploring brilliance that for Calvin and his tradition were proof of the existence of the human soul. But for the positivist model of reality humanity itself is not really a given. Indeed, the positivist exclusions of articulate experience, the report we make of ourselves, is as rigorous as its exclusion of theism. This is generally accepted as something objectivity requires, but as strong a case could be made that it is a thing objectivity forbids.

William James proposed that ideas should be tested in their playing out in the real world, a theater of occasion clearly more splendid and momentous in his understanding than anything the phrase implies in ordinary use. Let us say, as a thought experiment, that someone in authority in a country equipped with doomsday weapons fears attack by another country and strikes preemptively. There would be thousands of years of cultural history and some few decades of personal history behind the decision. Madman though he might be, he would have brought the species to a culmination that humankind had been preparing for eons. To say that a spasm of activity in a region of his brain was crucial to the event would be utterly trivial, laughable, it being so thoroughly overdetermined. Yet we are encouraged to accept as hard truth a conception of reality that deprives us of the means to talk about ourselves in clearly necessary terms, as precious, for example, or tragic, or epochal, since we do have a terrifyingly profound impact on this strange little garden leafing and blooming in the frozen, fiery tempest of cosmic reality, a garden entrusted to our care in irresistible fact, even if there were no creator God present to charge us with it.

The impact of our presence in the world, which is far too consistent over time to be excluded from any objective account of our nature, as any reader of history will know, is emerging as an urgent reality, an objective, unequivocal reality, at a point when principled ignorance of ourselves is called science. Say only that the Genesis narrative reflects no more than sad wisdom and long, if primordial, experience. It makes a kind of statement about our divided selves of which we moderns, on principle, are wholly incapable. And it tells us that we are no ordinary participants in nature, that what we do is a matter of the highest order of importance, however minor our transgressions may seem to us. Edwards would say that God in his freedom can impute the sin of Adam to every human being and generation, re-creating as true what he wills, who alone creates and perpetuates all Being — that is, all that is in fact true. To me this seems a long way of saying that we are Adam, singly and together, and that the etiology of our behavior, so remarkably splendid and terrible, is to be traced directly and exclusively to our humanity. There simply is a bias toward error we share only with one another, with the beasts not at all. Recognition of this bias would surely yield humility and mutual forgiveness, if we were not so intractably human.

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I admire Calvin more than I do any of the Calvinists, Edwards included. Edwards’s defense of the doctrine of original sin seems to me more brilliant as ontology than persuasive as theology. And as ontology it is not original with him. Yet for me this ontology in the context he gave it was a godsend. It was in reading this text many years ago that I was rescued from the determinist, even mechanistic implications of positivism, a determinism more constraining than either original sin or predestination, the first of these implying to me a realism that profoundly and appropriately complicates the impulse to lay blame, the second entering so far into the mysteries of time and causality that only incomprehension could see it as determinist. There is probably no cruder moral statement possible than to say that people get what they deserve, and this is only truer when rewards or punishments are to be felt everlastingly. So it is reasonable to suppose that other considerations must be in play.

The prodigal son, of whom we know nothing good, is predestined to receive welcome and embrace because his judge is his father. Perhaps the parable would lose its authority if the youth had had a door slammed in his face, though perhaps not, since people are much impressed with the notion of just deserts. In any case, polemic and ignorance have made cartoons of both these famous doctrines, original sin and predestination, which were not aberrations of Puritanism but were in fact virtually universal in Christian theologies, Catholic and Protestant, for as long as meaningful theology was written.

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There is at present an alienation from religion, even among the religious, that is a consequence of this privileging of information, for want of a better word, over experience, or of logic over history. The faithful are baffled by the problems that have come with the loss of the conceptual vocabulary of religion, and, more generally, of the language that can speak of and for the radical, solitary, time-bound self. The authority of a model of reality that excludes the former on principle and the latter out of a simplistic confidence in the adequacy of its own terms, its own small sphere of reference, has distracted and demoralized the faithful, as it would not have done if they were a little inclined to reflect. They are not alone in being talked out of the meaningfulness of their own experience, but they are perhaps more at fault for it than others, having had their souls as a conscious and in theory a cherished and cultivated part of their inwardness. If they have displaced the Holy Ghost with the zeitgeist, the choice is entirely their own. And if they feel this as an impoverishment, it is for them to consider why this is true and what it might mean. I hasten to add that fundamentalism that makes the same naive truth claims positivism makes is still more impoverished than religious thought that attempts to be reconciled with positivism. Certainly every problem of extrapolation is present in the insistence on basing cosmogenesis on texts that are brief and ancient and culturally remote, and, for those who take them to be sacred, should induce humility in their interpreters. There is more reverence, intended or not, and in any case more awe, in the hypotheses that ponder unperceived dimensions and abrupt cosmic inflation than in the construction of these temporally tiny models of reality which reject the freedom of God to act as mysteriously as his nature assures us he would do, as observation assures us he has done. Where were they when he laid the foundations of the earth? Extrapolation always entails presumption. To quote Jonathan Edwards, “We have got so far beyond those things for which language was initially contrived, that, unless we use extreme caution, we cannot speak, unless we speak exceeding unintelligibly, without literally contradicting ourselves — Coroll. No wonder, therefore, that the high and abstract mysteries of the Deity, the prime and most abstract of all beings, imply so many seeming contradictions.”

The great given, the medium of all gain and all loss, the medium within which change is possible and inevitable and constancy persists through endless transformations, the medium of act, accident, and thought, disruption and coherency, is time. No one knows what time is, or whether it began when the universe began or is a constant in a system of Being that preexists the one we know. For our purposes it accommodates everything that has existed or will exist, utterly indiscriminate but by no means neutral, transparent, or passive. The ideas we all live by change over time, inverted, eroded, distorted, amplified, recombining in time, which might seem to be a space that permits movement and change, or a kind of liquidity that irresistibly effects movement and change, though the inadequacy of both metaphors makes the point that it is something else entirely. It might seem to occur as quanta, ticks of a cosmic clock. The absolute and momentary present in which we all live might seem to be set apart by the slightest, most porous membrane from the moment that precedes or follows it. But this way of thinking excludes the fact that moments can differ in every property, and as they differ they change our experience of time. Only when we are presented with an astonishment of some sort, a threat or an insight, are we inclined to realize that a moment is potentially capacious and transformative, and that we are subject to time far otherwise than in the most predictable of events, our mortality.

This is to say that the primary condition of our existence is a mystery as virginal as it has always been. Science may at some point be able to say meaningful things about time. I can’t imagine what even a tentative account of it would look like, but I am no scientist, certainly no mathematician. And in fact the descriptions I read of epigenetics or of quantum phenomena might as well be of genies and dervishes for all the ground they seem to provide for extrapolation of the familiar kind, so long considered scientific. Our genes are not fixed like beads on a string, the physical world is not simple and solid, to be meaningful a statement need not be falsifiable, nor is it falsified in its not satisfying a particular, sometimes tendentious, standard of meaning or truth. The reality we experience is given in the sense that it is, for our purposes, lawful, allowing hypothesis and prediction, or available at least to being construed retrospectively in terms of cause and effect. It is given in a deeper sense in the fact that it is emergent. The genome accomplishes its microteleologies, a thought elaborates itself, finding its way to conclusion, recruiting memory, bias, and mood among other things all more or less persistent, most of them unconscious and unarticulable. Our singularity lies above all in the negotiations the mind makes with itself, of which we ourselves know very little. W. B. Yeats called it “the long-legged fly upon the stream, moving upon silence.”

The word “emergent” implies a source, an “arising from.” This is a mystery with analogs. If the universe expanded from a single particle, what did it expand into? Was everything that has been, is, and will be, through the whole of its eons of transformations, potential in that particle? My language here is no doubt far too crude to serve my argument well. My point is simply that there are other frontiers than this one we stand on continuously, where what is fronts on what is to come. It is an error of much scientific thinking to extrapolate — that word again — from our radically partial model of reality, a model curtailed, unaccountably and arbitrarily, by the exclusion of much that we do know about the vast fabric and the fine grain of the cosmos in which we live and move and have our being. Cosmic and microcosmic being are so glorious and strange that nothing marvelous can be excluded on the grounds of improbability, particularly nothing attested to by innumerable brilliant and distinctive voices in every corner of the world, for example human selfhood, the human mind. I invoke the stuff of Being because we are made of it. An etiology that implies a lower order of complexity than our given experience reports to us and through us only seems rational if we leave out of account the most basic knowledge we now have of the cosmos, knowledge that has as its signature a radical resistance to simplification, to understanding in terms of any known language of causality.