Philosophical Engagement

Carl H. Flygt

October, 2005

The enactive view of perception seems to represent an improvement in the basic Kantian framework for explaining possible experience. Here, what Kant calls pure understanding is viewed as a function of skillful movement, of sensory-motor capacities brought to bear on possible objects. Objects are given as real presences, and not merely as perspectival projections or representations, in an understanding (an experience) that can probe them. That probing, moreover, is organized by a special kind of logic, the logic of unification. Objects thus appear in consciousness under categories of quantity, quality, relationship and modality because that is how sensory-motor intelligence can probe them. This categorical, transcendental logic is the logic applied by all forms of life that are capable of sensation and movement.

Now transcendental logic, or sensory-motor understanding, can be applied to objects other than merely material ones. Ideas, especially metaphysical (philosophical) ones, are one such type of object. These possible objects of philosophical focus can, under the right conditions, come under just those categories of intuition that Kant derived from the logic of judgment, and be made to stand out in consciousness as actual things and thus become subject to a type of sensory-motor probing. These conditions, however, require a special institutional framework to stabilize their possible objects, because the real movements in the mind are not generally a matter of universal (shared, common) space and time. This framework is the background necessary to perform meditation and in general to become subject to the conditions of spiritual initiation in an entirely new way.

Under such conditions, one’s motor skills are concentrated inwardly so that one’s freedom of movement is limited and thereby translated into energetic terms. Freedom of energy, and not mere freedom of movement, of course, is the real freedom, and human energy is fundamentally a matter of the circulation of the blood. Notwithstanding the difficulties that can arise in learning these quasi-motor (circulatory) skills, difficulties such as a shutting down of the very energies, circulations or dispositions that lead to the freedom one seeks to develop, enough practice of the right sort (using the right principles) inevitably will lead to the correct result. Under these conditions, the objects of mental intuition become the great spiritual objects of metaphysics, of clairvoyance, of mysticism and of magic.

The sole end and desire of philosophy and metaphysics is transcendental mysticism. Nothing else can satisfy the longing in the blood. Kant was well aware of this, and his entire critical philosophy, coming after an ambiguous critique of the clairvoyant Swedenborg, was geared to give clairvoyant intuition a segue into science. What I want to say through my conversation theory is that if we can become scientifically precise about the nature of philosophical engagement, its motives and its a priori categories, we can move both the science and the philosophy of consciousness into a new normative framework, with human energetics at its basis. And if we can do this, we will find ourselves more or less in control of human evolution.

Alva Noe is really rather good at the art of philosophical engagement. He enjoys thinking on his feet, and forming language in such a way as to make the sense of his words draw both himself and his interlocutors closer to their reference. This sort of engagement is really something like ecstatic prayer, with its double directions of causation both of the object and by the object. After sufficient study, it is the first stage open to the mystic and the seeker of the key that would unlock the doors of human perception, and make of consciousness and life a transparent and all pervading cosmic mystery as profound and sublime during the interlude between birth and death as it probably is, or can be, during the period after death and before birth.

It is the second stage of mystical engagement that concerns me, and is the reason for my developing conversation theory. The relentless application of general logic to transcendental contents has its place in our institutional life, but is also has a negative effect. The mind, if we are to understand what in reality it is, should not be overintellectualized, but rather made aesthetically into a part of universal time and space, which belongs by birthright to every human being, from the greatest to the smallest, and not made exclusively to serve political power and power relations. There are, to be sure, hierarchies of power in the cosmos, and legitimate power structures in society, and Western educational institutions by and large reflect this legitimacy. But access to high art is something that should be denied no one in a truly progressive and fair society, and training in the art of conversation is something no educational institution should neglect or ignore.

Let us then become a little more self-conscious in our social use of language, which after all binds causally to the reality of our existence in wonderful mystical ways. Let the reality of existence be as open to our social bodies as it is, on occasion, to the transcendental unity in the body of the philosopher or the mystic. And let our engagement with one another be not only perspicuous and insightful, but fundamentally available, and thus instrumental not only in revealing truth to one another and to ourselves, but by sensory-motor osmosis to all others everywhere in this world and all other worlds, higher and lower.