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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

The bucket and the river

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy, science on September 30, 2012| 4 Comments »

The other day there I came across a reference to an Alan Watts teaching about the limitations of reductionism. I’ve tracked it down –

You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it.  Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket.  If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run.  To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. ~Alan Watts from “The Wisdom of Insecurity”.

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Thomas Berry and the coming Ecozoic Era

Posted in from the viewing room, life, philosophy, science on September 17, 2012| 3 Comments »

We are in a transition time to a more ecological way of understanding our place in the universe. Here’s a short video where Thomas Berry explains why we are at the junction of era change

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A community of subjects

Posted in from the living room, life, philosophy on June 27, 2012| 2 Comments »

Thomas Berry (The Great Work) wrote that the Universe is a

community of subjects, not a collection of objects

….a simple little phrase which has the potential to radically alter your perspective.

If the Universe is a collection of objects, and every person, every animal and every plant is just such an object, then we’ll relate to others in a certain way. In fact, if we consider that all of Nature is a collection of objects, we’ll not only treat the other as an object, but we actually objectify ourselves. What does it mean to live as if you are a random, meaningless, occurrence of a machine-like thing?

If the Universe is a community of subjects, then we open ourselves up to becoming aware of the experience of the other, and to our relationship with them.  And we open ourselves up to the phenomena of subjectivity – from love to beauty, to pain and distress, to consciousness itself. What does it mean to live as if you are a unique, purposeful, utterly connected manifestation of the Life Force?

How we view the world profoundly influences our experience of it. We really do create our own lived worlds.

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Creatureliness and more

Posted in from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy on June 14, 2012| 3 Comments »

What is it to be human?

We have a tendency to break wholes into parts and then conceive of the parts as entities. This is just a conceptual skill however and often it doesn’t reflect reality terribly accurately. Mind and body, for example, is one such common division of a person. At one point I thought of myself as a “mind body doctor”, or as a doctor who “took a mind body approach”. I don’t do that any more. It’s too falsely dualistic for me. I think the mind and the body are no more separate than the wave and particle forms of light. (You know how light when considered in one way behaves as an energy wave, but in another way, as if it is made of individual particles?)

So from the conceptual perspective of looking at a human being in two ways, we can see that human beings are physical organisms. Becker, in his “The Denial of Death”, uses the term “creatureliness” for this aspect. I rather like that. Our creatureliness is what we share with all other creatures. Our bodies are physical and transient. They will degenerate and expire, like all other creatures. And like all other creatures, part of our behaviour and experience can be understood from an examination of instincts and “basic drives” – hunger, thirst, safety and so on.

However, we have another aspect, not shared with other creatures. It’s that invisible part of us. What shall we call it? Soul? Consciousness? Spirit? Becker calls it “the symbolic self”. I’m not sure I’m that keen on that particular term, but it does capture both our facility of imagination and our ability to give and gain meaning in all sensations and objects. We don’t just see the colour red. The colour red is laden with meaning. And this is true of the whole of our experience in life.

We live both a creaturely life, and a symbolic, invisible life.

Interesting, huh? And a consideration of a person which ignores either of these two perspectives, is a consideration of a person at a less than human level. Let’s always see a human being as fully human.

Heroes not zombies.

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Heroes not zombies

Posted in books, education, from the reading room, health, philosophy, psychology on June 11, 2012| 1 Comment »

This blog name grows on me with the passage of time. People like it, and they tend to “get it” very quickly. I came up with it because I saw that an awful lot of people seem to live life on autopilot, but when you sit down with them in a consultation, you discover one hero after another. People are truly amazing. And every person is the hero of their own story. It’s wonderful to hear the stories unfold and see the heroes emerge.

In Becker’s “Denial of Death”, he writes

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or, alternatively, he buries himself  in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems.

And he refers to Kierkegaard who criticised the tendency to live a “safe” life by living at “a low level of personal intensity” as a form of

Tranquilising itself with the trivial

……..there’s a lot of that about!

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What kind of world do you live in?

Posted in from the consulting room, health, philosophy, science on June 7, 2012| 1 Comment »

Here are two questions which are in my mind during every consultation I have with a patient.

What kind of world does this person live in? and What coping strategies does this person use?

Of course like every doctor I will have a number of questions in mind during a consultation. The primary goal of undergraduate Medicine is to teach diagnosis (as best I conceive it, “diagnosis” is an “understanding” – an explanation for what the patient is experiencing). So that is likely to be one of the main goals of all consultations – what’s the diagnosis? Having achieved an understanding/explanation/diagnosis, the doctor then wants to answer the question “what am I going to do about this?” What the doctor does might be to further examine, investigate, or seek the opinion of a specialist. Or what the doctor does might be a therapeutic act – the most common being either the prescription of a drug, or the carrying out of a surgical procedure.

In other words, the same two questions are important for the doctor too. What kind of world does the doctor live in? And what are his or her coping strategies?  The world view frames the diagnosis, and the coping strategies determine the actions.

The current dominant practice of Medicine has emerged from a particular world view, and this world view is the basis of the actions chosen. So what is that world view? (I’m not going to try and nail down a label for the current Medical orthodoxy, but others have termed it “biomedicine”, “Western Medicine”, or even “scientific Medicine”. Whatever the label, I’m referring to the type of Medicine most commonly practised in the UK, and, yes, of course, you’ll see that is very similar to the commonest practices in many other countries too)

The world view from which the current orthodoxy emerges is based on certain postulates –

  1. There is only one reality.
  2. Reality can be “partialised”. It can be divided into parts which can be studied separately in order to know the whole.
  3. Knowledge can be acquired by an observer who is separate from, and stands apart from, reality.
  4. Observing has no influence on what is observed. (or the influence can be isolated or “controlled”)
  5. The observer’s values and meanings can be isolated and suspended.
  6. Two events related in time can be assumed to be causative – “A is the outcome of B”.
  7. Specifics can be generalised i.e. an explanation from one time and place can be applied to other times and places.
  8. Reality can be described in terms of “laws” and “norms”.

I don’t find these postulates either helpful or convincing. What are the postulates behind my world view as a doctor?

  1. There are multiple realities. No two individuals experience identical realities.
  2. The multiple realities are inextricably interconnected to create the whole. As such no single part can explain the whole.
  3. No-one is outside of reality.
  4. Every act of observation influences (creates even) what is observed.
  5. The observer’s values and meanings create their reality. They can’t be suspended. (Points 3 and 4 are connected to there being no object which can be known without the active involvement of a subject)
  6. Complexity and chaos theories show us that reality is non-linear. Causation can never actually be proven.
  7. Specifics always occur embedded in multiple contexts and as such are always unique. Generalisation involves ignoring the contexts.
  8. Laws and norms are cultural constructions to describe common patterns. Nature is diverse and natural phenomena are emergent (continually evolving and developing into different patterns)

How do you think these different world views affect firstly the diagnosis, and secondly the actions taken?

 

 

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A miraculous life

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy on April 19, 2012| 3 Comments »

When I read this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s new book, I immediately recalled Robert Solomon’s “Joy of Philosophy” (which I reviewed and reflected on here)

There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell. The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous

I do think reducing a human being, in whatever way, takes us into acting at a subhuman level. It’s this reduction of the miraculous, amazing, special individual to a data set of measurable parameters which lies at the core of a lot of our problems these days. (This is why I argue for a SEA CHANGE in our values).

Robert Solomon’s book is subtitled “Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life” and in that, he nails it.

A data led, reduced, materialism is a poor, thin, inadequate way to live. What I argue for is a rich, passionate life of wonder and amazement – a miraculous life.

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View from Sirius

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, movies, personal growth, philosophy on April 15, 2012| 4 Comments »

The view from Sirius……I was exploring the origins of this idea today (it’s actually a French phrase “point de vue de sirius”), and found that someone had helpfully linked it to this clip from the great Dead Poets’ Society (haven’t seen that film in YEARS!)

I like it. In French, this idea relates to the idea of the “vue en haut” – the perspective from on high. Voltaire’s 1752 tale, Micromegas, is often cited as the origin of the Sirius reference. In this amazing, centuries ahead of itself tale, a person from Sirius, Micromegas, visits the Earth. The idea of “le point de vue de Sirius”, refers to both that ability to stand back and take an overview, something we all need to do from time to time (and which I’ve been doing on my week’s break from work these last 7 days), and, also, that ability to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Years ago I chanced across a little paperback in a secondhand book shop – the poet Stephen Spender’s “Life and the Poet” where I read his idea of the poet getting into the mindset of a traveler from Earth visiting the Moon for the first time. The view from Sirius idea encompasses that idea.
However, it’s Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher, I have to thank for explaining it in his brilliant “N’oublie pas de vivre” (“Don’t forget to live”).

Whatever its origins, I think it’s a great concept – so why not try to adopt the “view from Sirius” today, and see how things look now?

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Never unconnected

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science, Uncategorized on February 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

ripples

We live with a view of ourselves as separate entities, made up of tiny, distinct, independent parts. This idea, this kind of atomism, has been around for centuries.

Now, however, we’re coming to understand that reality isn’t like that.

Lynne McTaggart writes in “The Bond”

The universe contains an indeterminate number of vibrating packets of energy that constantly pass energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball with a quantum sea of light. Indeed they aren’t even there all the time, but are constantly popping in and out of existence, making a brief appearance before disappearing back into the underlying energy field.

This is our emerging model of reality, one where there are no “things”, there is no “material” or “substance” distinct from energy. One where everything is constantly changing and nothing is separate.

Thomas Berry writes

We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.

What a lovely phrase. This atomism has led us to believe that we are not only separate from each other but from Nature itself, and that has led to an unhealthy relationship with the Earth – one where we’ve been believing we can dominate and control. But we can’t. There is no separateness.

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Sunset or Earthrise?

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy, photography on January 20, 2012| 6 Comments »

sunset

In Ian McCallum’s “Ecological Intelligence” he mentions how Copernicus brought about one of the great revolutions in human thought by convincing us that the Earth moved around the Sun, not the other way around. However, centuries later, we haven’t really managed to take this radical shift on board. We still tend to think of ourselves as being the centre of everything. We betray our perspective through the language we use.

We talk about sunset and sunrise. But the sun doesn’t set, it stays where it is. And the sun doesn’t rise, it’s the Earth which turns.

He postulates shouldn’t we be thinking instead of talking about the Earth rising into the night, and dipping into the day?

Stop and think about it for a moment. What does it feel like to think of the Earth rising into the night instead of the Sun setting?

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