Nine theses inspired by reading F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality
One. The peak experience absorbs the bummer experience.
Recall that psychedelics, such as LSD, were once called “hallucinogens” and, by some, still are. I have a website called “The Institute for the Advancement of Psychedelic Christianity.” Suppose I changed the name to “The Institute for the Advancement of Hallucinogenic Christianity.” This brings out the difference between “psychedelic” and “hallucinogenic,” because one might take this to suggest that I regard Christianity as unreal or false, and that, nevertheless, I’m trying to push it forward. But this also reminds us that the metaphysical questions Is this real? What is real and what isn’t? are highly relevant to the question of the religious value of psychedelic experience. Calling psychedelics “hallucinogens” implies that a trip is just a series of hallucinations, in contrast to the reality known through unstoned experience. And people who have experienced psychedelics know that this is nothing more than a manifestation of ignorant prejudice, even if they find it difficult to explain what makes something real.
This isn’t to say that the opposite must be true, i.e., that every experience undergone, or thought formulated, while tripping is guaranteed to be real and true, in contrast to the illusions and delusions of unstoned consciousness. If that were the case, there would be no urgency to try to understand the difference between appearance and reality. One would automatically know it while tripping, with a confidence that mirrored that of unphilosophical, i.e., unstoned, people who think they know that psychedelics distort reality. And this is clearly not the case. One can be confused while tripping.
It may be that one does automatically know what is real and what isn’t while peaking, even if the wave leading up to the peak is a crisis of confidence, and the subsiding waves leading down from it reintroduce distractions. But this too implies that one didn’t really know the difference between appearance and reality before the psychedelic epiphany and that one should now be able to explain it.
The difference between appearance and reality is a question that philosophers have addressed from the beginning. I don’t intend here to run through an exposition of what various philosophers have had to say about it. But I have recently been studying F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality: a Metaphysical Essay, first published in 1897, with the kind of excitement I recall experiencing when I first began reading philosophy when I was young, that is, the excitement of gaining a more comprehensive worldview. This doesn’t mean that I think Bradley got everything right, though, as I hope to make clear.
Bradley marked the difference between appearance and reality in terms of self-contradiction versus self-consistency. To the degree that an experience involves jarring elements that cannot be reconciled, it is not real, but mere appearance. He wrote, “Ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict itself; here is an absolute criterion. And it is proved absolute by the fact that, either in endeavouring to deny it, or even in attempting to doubt it, we tacitly assume its validity.” (p. 140, in the Muirhead Library of Philosophy edition) That is, in attempting to deny or doubt the universal truth of this criterion of ultimate reality, we would be searching for a counterexample, something that is inconsistent with it. We would be employing this very criterion in trying to disprove it. Bradley added that, although this may seem to be a merely negative characterization, saying only that ultimate reality does not contradict itself, it also has a positive character. He argued that all appearances belong, in some sense, to reality, since they really appear: “We may say that everything, which appears, is somehow real in such a way as to be self-consistent. The character of the real is to possess everything phenomenal in a harmonious form.” (ibid.)
Looking back on memories of psychedelic trips, this was evident. There was a peak experience, a breakthrough, a revelation of a richly harmonious concrete whole in which every little detail fit perfectly, the most glaring dissonances wonderfully resolved, and that contained within itself a guarantee of being real and true. But there was also a bummer experience, characterized variously by nagging dissatisfaction, free-floating anxiety, panic, conflict, ugliness, and tiresomely elaborate phoniness, mocking all good things. If I understand Bradley, he would have judged the harmonious peak experience as real to a high degree and the bummer experience as, to a high degree, unreal. On my understanding of his view, we can’t classify the bummer as absolutely unreal, because then it would be nothing, and it did appear. But it is as unreal and false as any experience can be. Similarly, if Bradley was right, one can’t believe that the peak experience is ultimately real, absent an understanding that the bummer experience, despite appearances, does not contradict it. If the bummer experience contradicts the peak experience, then the peak experience also is appearance and not reality.
We know that the bummer experience appears to contradict the peak experience, in dramatic fashion, mockingly and with sarcasm. But do we know that it really and truly contradicts it? Similarly, we know that the peak experience was a blissful, ecstatic experience that was perfectly satisfying in all ways—physically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually. In this, it appears to contradict the bummer experience. But we can ask, here too, whether it really contradicts it. We can see now how Bradley’s defense of his criterion of ultimate reality showed the answer to both our questions. “Ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict itself.” We have a choice between believing, on the one hand, that the satisfying, harmonious peak experience in some way absorbs the bummer experience and reconciles it to itself, or, on the other hand, believing that the bitterly unsatisfying and discordant bummer experience succeeds in utterly separating itself from the peak experience and repudiating it. The first choice satisfies the criterion of ultimate reality. The second one does not. But how do we know Bradley’s criterion was correct? Because to deny or doubt it, we would have to assume it is true. If we argue that the bummer experience succeeds in separating itself from, and repudiating, the peak experience, and that therefore ultimate reality can and does contradict itself, at least in this instance, then we are arguing on the basis that the inconsistency of a claim with a counterexample to it disproves the claim, in other words, that ultimate truth and reality cannot contradict itself.
Given that ultimate reality is such that it cannot contradict itself, we know that the peak experience somehow really absorbs the bummer experience, while the bummer experience only appears to succeed in separating itself from the peak experience and repudiating it. The “somehow” is required and justified because, although the peak experience itself is a concrete, richly detailed whole in which nothing is hidden or vague or suspect, it is impossible to record it except in incomplete snatches and generalities, and so we can’t explain how it does it, but only how we know it does.
As for the religious implications of this line of reasoning, I imagine someone saying, “Ah, but this is all too pat. You are trying to think your way into heaven, and that won’t work.” Michael Oakeshott, a philosopher who acknowledged his debt to Bradley, while not agreeing with him on every point, wrote, as a young man in the 1920s, the following: “Religion exists to satisfy no craving for knowledge apart from the knowledge which comes with the mere strength and courage to take life as it is and ‘turn its necessities to glorious gain’…. And a philosophic proof, for example, of the necessity of human immortality has little or no religious value. We cannot love or live upon the knowledge of a mere necessity; love and life demand an immediate awareness, if not of the senses, at least of memory and mind.” (Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, p. 71) Let’s think about how this would apply to the above line of reasoning. In the first place, the peak experience itself is not just a philosophic proof. It is an immediate awareness. So, the philosophic proof in question here is the one to the conclusion that the peak experience absorbs the bummer experience and is not contradicted by it. Does this proof, if it is correct, have little or no religious value? I agree that the object of religion is more than an intellectually satisfying metaphysical view, but I think it includes intellectual satisfaction along with complete emotional and spiritual fulfillment. And so, no, I don’t agree with Oakeshott’s claim that the only knowledge that religion craves is that “which comes with the mere strength and courage to take life as it is and ‘turn its necessities to glorious gain.” I think it also craves the knowledge that the peak experience is trustworthy and the knowledge, which is like it, that we have life everlasting. And so, neither do I agree with the claim that a philosophic proof of the necessity of human immortality would have little or no religious value. There are many former Christians—I was once one of them–who gave up Christianity wholly or partially because they became convinced by spurious arguments that immortality is impossible or highly unlikely and who, in addition, managed to get themselves to say, as Bradley did, that it is not even desirable. (p. 507) Presumably Oakeshott isn’t one of them since he referred to Christianity as “our religion” in the work cited; but he failed to see that Christianity is incompatible with the pagan philosophies of Epicureanism and Stoicism, for he also wrote, of “the religious man,” “And the only immortality which fascinates him is a present immortality; ‘so far as possible he lives as an immortal’.” (p. 37) Clearly, it would make a difference to people who have rejected or watered down their Christianity if they became aware of a philosophic proof that we have everlasting life and that eternal death, i.e., permanent unconsciousness, is inconceivable. I know it made such a difference in my own case. I agree that it isn’t sufficient, however, because intellectual conviction needs the reinforcement of Scripture in order to hope to stand fast in the face of the devil’s temptations and discouraging words.
Now that I have brought the devil into it, perhaps I can be acquitted of pursuing bloodless intellectualism, while facing the new charges on the one hand of rank superstition, and, on the other, of being in league with said evil one. At least I can take solace in the consideration that if the devil doesn’t exist, then I can’t be in league with him, and if he does, then I’m not being superstitious. In answer to the charge of superstition, I propose that if it isn’t superstitious to believe in God, then it isn’t superstitious to believe in the devil either. What I regard as superstition is the belief that the devil, by enlisting us on his side, can win his war against God. We should fear, not the devil, but God; and we should fear Him in a way that is consistent with loving Him, as, for example, we both fear and love life itself.
Two. A person is both finite and infinite.
Bradley called ultimate reality the Absolute and addressed the question of whether it has personality by distinguishing two senses in which the question may be understood. “Since the Absolute has everything, it of course must possess personality. And if by personality we are to understand the highest form of finite spiritual development, then certainly in an eminent degree the Absolute is personal.” On the other understanding of what is meant by “personal,” he said the term is taken “to exclude what is above, as well as below, personality.” On this understanding, the Absolute is not personal, “because it is personal and more. It is, in a word, super-personal.” He added, “[F]or me a person is finite or is meaningless.” From this, he went on to argue that those who insist on the personality of God are intellectually dishonest because they will not admit that what they really want is for God to be a finite person like themselves while their reasoning only shows that God, or the Absolute, is personal in the first sense of including personality as well as what goes beyond personality, since He or It is infinite. (pp. 531-3)
But I think a person is both finite and infinite.
I am finite in that I am I and not you or anyone or anything else. I can imagine what it would be like to be in someone else’s situation (loving my neighbor as myself depends on it), but I cannot imagine being someone else, because that would involve being both I and not I, which is a contradiction. As I said, I agree with Oakeshott that a philosophic proof—in this case, of my finitude in being limited to being exactly the person who I am and no other—is not sufficient for the purposes of religion, and I am glad that our religion tells us that God loves each and every one of us and does not require anyone to go out of existence by being dissolved into a unity where all individuality is lost except that of the Absolute itself. The philosophic proof and the religious belief are mutually reinforcing.
I am infinite in that I am not limited by death, and this claim applies equally to everyone who has a first-person perspective on the world. I will try to explain the philosophic reasoning that leads me to this conclusion, while saying at the outset that by itself it is insufficient and requires the reinforcement of religious belief—insufficient but not worthless. I believe that I will die in, to, or from, this life. (Each preposition seems to capture part of the truth.) But I don’t believe that I will die utterly. I will not die and stay dead. I will not lose consciousness never to regain it. I will not go out of existence. Our religion tells us so, and that is most important, but thinking about it philosophically can help also. The philosophical reason is that I can’t imagine my own non-existence, and so I can’t believe in it, either, since I don’t really know what it is that I would be believing in. I can, however, fear it, because I’m not, and don’t aspire to be, purely rational, and that is where religion helps. (“Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.”) When I try to imagine my own non-existence, I first try to imagine a world without me in it. “What is so hard about that?” someone might ask. It isn’t hard. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that it isn’t imagining my own non-existence. Rather, it is imagining that I am observing a world, from which I am absent, from a point of view somewhere outside it. But how can I observe anything if I don’t exist? So, I will try to imagine, not a world in which I don’t exist, but instead sheer nothingness. But nothingness is not anything, and so it is not anything that I can imagine. I can imagine empty space, if there is something in it or around it. And I believe that empty space exists in this sense. Similarly, I can imagine a period of time in which I am unconscious–if there was a time before, when I lost consciousness, and a time after, when I regained it. I have experienced losing consciousness and regaining it. But I cannot imagine sheer empty space with nothing in it or around it, and I cannot imagine a period in which I am unconscious that extends infinitely either backwards or forwards in time. That would not be a period of time. It would be nothingness, returning me to the mistake of trying to imagine nothingness as if it is something. This is what I mean by saying that I cannot imagine my own non-existence, and hence cannot believe in it, and this is the philosophical reason why I believe in an afterlife and a prelife.
The thought that nothingness is not something that can be experienced led Epicurus and his followers to conclude that death is nothing to be feared, because of their beliefs that death is permanent unconsciousness, and that unnecessary suffering is the only thing that it is rational to fear. “Do not fear permanent unconsciousness” would be the Epicurean advice, “because you cannot suffer if you are unconscious, and if you dread becoming permanently unconscious, you are causing yourself to suffer unnecessarily now.” I hope it is clear that this is not what I am saying. The point about which I agree with Epicurus is that nothingness is not something that can be experienced. The points about which I disagree are his contentions that death is permanent unconsciousness, and that unnecessary suffering is the only thing it is rational to fear. Since I cannot imagine being permanently unconscious, I cannot believe that that is what death is. I can imagine a time before my birth as if I am someone looking at a historical scene, but I can’t do that if I erase the person viewing the scene. I can imagine my own death as something like leaving behind a world and finding myself in a new one, i.e., as something like what has happened to me already many times, for example, in waking from dreams. I can conceive of losing consciousness and later regaining it, but I cannot conceive of losing consciousness never to regain it. I can conceive of someone, including myself, losing consciousness permanently as far as any outward appearance in the world left behind would show; but only if he or she or I remained conscious or regained consciousness in a new world that would not be experienced from the points of view of those left behind.
As to the Epicurean claim that unnecessary suffering is the only thing it is rational to fear, here is a counterexample: it is rational to fear doing something shameful. The Epicurean might reply that what one really fears is suffering the shame, to which one could reply, “On the contrary, I fear even more doing something shameful and not being ashamed.” The Epicurean’s only recourse would be to reply that such a fear is irrational, and he or she should be ashamed of such a reply.
Here is another example, or perhaps a more concrete version of the same one, not that another one is needed: I fear making a mistake in my reasoning to the conclusion that permanent unconsciousness is not a real possibility. What if the Epicurean is right, and being dead equals being permanently unconscious? After all, I have changed my mind about important things in the past, when I became convinced that I had made a mistake, so I must admit the possibility that there is some flaw in my reasoning to which I am blind. To some fluctuating degree, then, I fear permanent unconsciousness, despite the fact that I can’t imagine what it would be like, and I fear it, not because it entails any suffering other than the anticipation of it, but because it would be deeply shameful, the greatest shame of all—God’s shame, one might say—if the power to torture and kill, whether on the part of wild animals, cruel or misguided people, or the implacable forces of impersonal nature, were the final word.
The Stoics believed that the Epicureans were wrong in thinking that unnecessary suffering is the only thing it is rational to fear. They, too, thought that it is rational to fear doing something shameful and to fear even more doing it and not suffering any shame thereby. In fact, having read about the Stoics is probably why this example came to mind, i.e., I owe them, they don’t owe me. I am not a Stoic, however, because they thought that at death the human soul, which is a part of the world-soul (pneuma), is absorbed back into it. And I don’t want to be absorbed into a world-soul if it follows from this that I would be permanently unconscious, since I would no longer exist as myself. I tell myself once again: I cannot conceive of the absolute nonexistence of my own point of view.
To summarize: the finitude of a person consists in his or her identity as determined by his or her first-person perspective on the world. This is the perspective that determines one’s location in space and time, and from which one’s will comes into conflict with natural forces and the wills of others, in a concrete demonstration of one’s finitude. It is also the perspective from which one loves and is loved. A person’s finitude does not consist, as is usually held and emphasized, in his or her mortality, which is only outward appearance, real in a degree inferior to the everlastingness of his or her first-person perspective, from which he or she is immortal, and, in that sense, infinite.
Three. Persons are not things.
On Bradley’s view, if I understand it, my admission of my finitude is an admission that I am not ultimately real, and he thought that it is highly unlikely that any of us are immortal, so that wouldn’t be a way in which I could be infinite and thus real after all. (p. 506) However, his conception of the Absolute is vitiated, in my view, by an inadequate account of the identity of a person. This may be illustrated by two quotations from his writing that contradict each other. On p. 529, he wrote that, in the Absolute, “We have an all-pervasive transfusion with a re-blending of all material. And we can hardly say that the Absolute consists of finite things, when the things, as such, are there transmuted and have lost their individual natures.” But on p. 522 he had written, “Nothing in the universe can be lost, nothing fails to contribute to the single Reality, but every finite diversity is also supplemented and transformed. Everything in the Absolute still is that which it is for itself. Its private character remains, and is but neutralized by complement and fulfillment.” Does a finite thing lose its individual nature in the Absolute, or is it still that which it is for itself, its private character remaining? It is fair to say that Bradley did not give us a clear answer to this question.
I think the root of the problem is his failure to distinguish between the identity of a thing and the identity of a person. The identities of things that are not persons are determined pragmatically, according to our purposes in referring to them. Although we can think of ourselves and each other in this way also—and it is a sin that we commit daily—our identities are not subject to pragmatic considerations but are determined by the facts that each of us has a unique first-person perspective, from which he or she is a subject of experiences, who has desires and fears, joys and sorrows, and makes choices. It isn’t objectionable to think of a thing that is not a person being transmuted and losing its individual nature in the Absolute. After all, its individual nature was just what we determined it to be for our purposes, and who knows what our purposes, regarding those things, are in the Absolute? But it is objectionable to think of ourselves and each other as being changed to the point of losing our individual natures in the Absolute, for that would be equivalent to going out of existence, which is, I believe and hope, unthinkable. I wouldn’t mind having my private character complemented and fulfilled–indeed I hope for it–but I want it to still be that which it is for itself. That is, I want still to be myself. I want to continue to be there, somewhere or other, in the Absolute, to use Bradley’s term. And I remind myself again by a new version of the old argument that my desire is not disappointed: No time is absolutely past or absolutely present or absolutely future; but every time is either future, present, or past relative to some other time that either precedes it, is contemporaneous with it, or succeeds it. Now if I try to imagine a time at which I don’t exist, that is something I am doing in the present, and, since I know that I exist in the present because I couldn’t be trying to imagine anything if I didn’t exist, I am driven to try to imagine that it is some other time, either in the past or in the future, at which I didn’t or won’t exist. But whether I am trying to imagine my non-existence as occurring in the present or in the past or in the future, it is the present or the past or the future relative to the present in which I am testing my imagination. Neither the past nor the future can be detached from the present in order to be independent of my attempt at imagining and hence of my existence. I must exist in order to imagine anything, regardless of whether it is a present, past, or future time about which I am vainly trying to imagine that I am, was, or will be absent from all places. It doesn’t follow that I can’t imagine anything coming into or going out of existence. I can imagine things that aren’t people coming into and going out of existence. However, it does follow that I can’t imagine a person doing either, except in the sense of coming into existence with the creation of space and time and going out of existence with the annihilation of space and time; and I can’t imagine myself being annihilated in that way without imagining myself looking out from God’s point of view, so that everybody but me would be annihilated. But I know that I cannot look out from God’s point of view and still be me, because what makes me me is the finitude of my first-person perspective. To the objection that I haven’t proved something is impossible by showing that I can’t imagine it, my reply, again, is that I can’t believe in what I can’t imagine, because I wouldn’t even know what it is that I am supposed to believe.
I believe this reasoning also applies to you from your point of view and to everyone else from his or her point of view. I have no doubt there will be someone who will claim to be able to imagine his or her absence from all places at some time in the past or the future. I would only ask him or her to point out to me what is wrong with the above reasoning. Failing that, we can see that we should not be convinced, as many philosophers have been, by reasoning along the lines of Lichtenberg’s objection to Descartes’s famous inference from his act of thinking to his existence, the objection being that Descartes should have said no more than “I think, therefore thinking is going on, or it is thinking,” on the model of “it is raining”, and should not have gone on to infer the existence of the subject, “I” doing the thinking, since the subject who was doing the thinking presumably is extended in time beyond the moment of having that thought. This objection depends upon the false belief that a moment in time could exist independently and in isolation from all other moments of time—false because a moment in time is identified only as something within a whole series of moments. Yes, the subject who is doing the thinking is extended in time beyond the moment of having the thought, but that is not a problem for Descartes’s inference from his thinking at one moment to his existence as the one doing the thinking. Once the time of the thought, “this moment,” “now,” becomes a content of the thought, the times prior and posterior to the thought are implicated in it. Descartes would have been justified in saying, “I think, therefore I exist at every moment in every series of moments of which I can conceive, (and this is consistent with God’s power to destroy all time series and all spatially related wholes, should He choose to do so.)” He would not need to add, “and unless God chose not to create me in the first place,” since God obviously did choose to create him, since he must exist in order to be able to have any thoughts at all.
Someone may object as follows: If there is no time at which I am absent from all places, then there must be some place where I was before I was born and some place where I will be after I die. Where are those places? The Bible tells us of several cases in which Jesus raised someone from the dead, but presumably those people died again later. Only Jesus himself was raised from the dead, reappeared on Earth, and did not die again, but rather shortly later ascended into Heaven, having promised his followers that He was going to prepare a place for them also. In Christian terminology, then, the question is: Where is Heaven? Is it a place within, or outside the space of the physical universe? The problem is that either answer presupposes some sort of spatial relation, so either Heaven is within the physical universe or there is a bigger space that includes the physical universe and Heaven. Either answer gives rise to further questions. If Heaven is within the physical universe, then in principle it should be possible to travel there through physical means, without having to die. And we might ask how and why dying helps us to get there. If Heaven is outside the physical universe, how can it have any physical characteristics? If it doesn’t have any physical characteristics, how can we imagine what life is like there? And this brings in the question of time. Does time pass in Heaven, as it does in our lives here on Earth? There are some Christians who say that “eternal” does not equal “everlasting”, that eternity is timeless, so we should not think in terms of lasting forever, but in terms of escaping from time altogether. But then how are we to imagine a life in Heaven, for life is, or at least includes, a series of events, and there can be no series of events if there is no time?
These questions are unanswerable on the assumptions that there is only one temporal series that comprises all events, each of which is either prior to, contemporaneous with, or posterior to every other; and that there is only one system of physical objects, each of which is related by size, distance, and direction with every other; in other words, that there is only one universe. However, there are good reasons to doubt these assumptions.
Four. There are many worlds.
Is there only one universe, comprising one unified temporal series, in which each event is either prior to, contemporaneous with, or posterior to every other, and one system of physical objects, each of which is related by size, distance, and direction with every other? Bradley pointed out that there are separate and independent time series in dreams and fictions, and also “when we exercise our thoughts on some mere supposed sequence.” (p. 211) And the same is true for spatial relations. He wrote, “Nature in my dreams (for example) possesses extension, and yet it is not one with my physical world.” (p. 288)
When I recall a dream, I remember it as a sequence of events taking place at particular locations: “I dreamed I was driving, and then the car quit working. So, I got out and we were trying to push the car. You were there, too, and somebody else. But it was too hard, and we gave up, and I was walking, and the road narrowed to a footpath with prickly bushes on each side, so that I had to get down and crawl to make my way through.” One event occurs before another, which is in turn succeeded by another, and so on, but the only way those events are temporally related to the world to which I awoke is to say that they happened while I was asleep. I might have gone on to dream of hearing the town clock strike three and of looking up to see the sun shining beyond the clock tower, only to wake up shortly thereafter in the nighttime, check my phone, and see that it is one o’clock in the morning. And the only way to answer the questions, “Where is that path bordered by prickly bushes? Where is the clock tower?” is to say that they were in the world of my dream. I don’t expect to find them somewhere in the world to which I awakened.
It won’t do to object that the dreamed or imagined events and locations don’t show that there is a separate and independent time series and spatial system, because they are united to the one time series and spatial system of the one real world by being dreamed or imagined at a particular time and place within it; that is, to claim, for example, that if I had the dream last night in my bed, then that is when and where they occurred. That is when and where the dream occurred, but that is not where and when I was driving a car, then pushing it, and then walking and later crawling on a footpath; because if it were, either I would still be dreaming, or I didn’t fall asleep and later wake up, and there would be a car, a road that became a footpath, and a clock tower in my bed. The events and locations of my dream are not united to the one real world of time and space by my presence in all of them, for that would make the unity of time and space dependent on me. Then we would need to add that it is dependent on me from my point of view; for from your point of view with your dreams and imaginings and waking life, it would be dependent on you, and so likewise for everybody else, each from his or her point of view. So, we would not have saved the unity of time and space, since there would be a separate world for each person. Surely, it is truer, more real, to save our common world of time and space, while accepting that there are separate worlds as indicated by our dreams and imaginings, which have no temporal or spatial relations with this one, but which are themselves spatial and temporal wholes.
“But if you compare the times and places of a pre-life and an afterlife to the times and places in a dream, a work of fiction, or a merely imagined sequence of events, you are admitting that they aren’t real.”
The examples of dreams, fictions, and supposed sequences of events show that we understand how there can be a temporal series of events in another world with its own relations of before, same time as, and after, that is independent of the temporal series of this world; and how there can be a system of physical objects in another world in which each object is related by size, distance, and direction to every other, although none of them has any relations of size, distance, or direction with any object in this world. We may mark the temporal and spatial independence, of the world of a dream, a fiction, or a supposition, from this world by calling the other world unreal. But, as Bradley remarked, by putting this label on it we have not gotten rid of it. (p. 213) We could get rid of it, if we wanted to, only by convincing ourselves that it lacks, not only temporal and spatial relations with this world, but that it lacks relations of any kind with this world. And that we cannot do. I, the very same I, inhabit the world I dream just as I inhabit this one. The other people in that world are either people I know in this world also, or strangers to me in the dream world as they would be strangers to me in this world, or people I recognize in the dream world but cannot identify with any people I know in this world. The things and places of the dream world are either identical, but transformed, or just some combination of similar and different, to those of this world. There is a less intimate connection between the world of a work of fiction and this world, since my role there is typically either that of creator or spectator, and none of the other people are identical to ones in this world; but the people and things of the fictional world either resemble or stand in contrast to those of this world. Above all, if it is an engaging work of fiction, I feel emotional connections, and am aware of conceptual connections, between the people and events there and those of this world, as I do likewise when I recall a dream. And when it comes to merely entertaining the thought of a supposed sequence of events (“Suppose I had objected to his appointment to the position, and the other members of the board had then criticized me for taking his remark too personally”), although that sequence belongs to a temporal whole that is independent of the time of this world, the events themselves stand in relations of similarity and dissimilarity with events in this world.
Such examples help me to imagine that being born and dying are transitions from one world to another, not related to it in terms of space or time but related in other ways; and since I cannot imagine my own absence from all places, but also expect to be one day absent from this world, as I was absent from it before I was born, I believe it is not only conceivable but true that being born and dying are transitions between worlds. Furthermore, I can see no reason to be confident that this world in which we find ourselves has any greater or lesser degree of reality than the world from which we came when we were born into this one or the world into which we go when we die from this one. Consider the case of dreams. From my viewpoint within this world in which I find myself awake; I regard it as the real one in comparison to the world of a dream that I remember. But when I am dreaming but unaware that I am dreaming, I am often just as confident that the world around me is real; and I remember dreams in which I somehow knew that I was dreaming, and I was puzzled as to how concretely real and tangible and unmistakably “there” everything was. Here I find helpful Bradley’s view that there are degrees of truth and reality short of the Absolute, and that they are degrees of wholeness and concreteness. We don’t achieve wholeness by excluding from reality the worlds of dreams, fictions, and suppositions, but by understanding reality as a concrete whole that includes them as independent systems of time and space whose contents are related to this world by being identical, similar, or dissimilar to the contents of waking states, historically accurate accounts, and factual observations, and not by being located at some place and time within this world nor by being any less real.
So, it makes sense to me to think that before I was born, I was in a world that was every bit as real as this one is to me now; and that when I die, I will find myself again in such a world; but it won’t follow that my life in this world was unreal either, except to the degree that it falls short of being a concrete whole. The concrete whole, which is absolutely and ultimately real, is God’s heavenly kingdom. And since the alternative of not being anywhere before I was born or after I die is something that I cannot imagine, I believe that it is not only conceivable, but true that I found myself in this world after being in another one, and that I will find myself in a new one after this one.
Someone might object that the worlds of dreams, fictions, and suppositions are subjective, each of us dreaming or imagining them in his or her own way, so that we are not really there together in any of them in the way we are in this, our common world. I might tell you that you were in my dream, but you wouldn’t have known it unless I told you; so, one could argue, you weren’t really there, because if you were, you would have known it. Thus, if we try to understand the transitions, from a pre-life to this life and from this life to an afterlife, by comparing them to the transitions between being awake and falling asleep, we may come to doubt that we will meet our loved ones in the afterlife. Each of us might inhabit his or her own private world in which other people would be mere appearances.
This raises the question whether a person can be in a world without knowing it. I think the answer is Yes. If you are asleep and dreaming, you do not know that you are in the world in which you are asleep. You believe yourself to be in the world you are dreaming, and you are in that world, but you are also in this one. I might tell you later, when you are awake, that you were talking in your sleep, and the fact that you wouldn’t have known it unless I had told you doesn’t show that you weren’t really there in your bed, talking in your sleep. Similarly, if you tell me that you were dreaming that you were talking to me, the fact that I wouldn’t have known it unless you told me doesn’t imply that I wasn’t really there in the world of your dream. We can go so far as to say that a person is always in more than one world. Whenever you consider different possible courses of action, whether in regret or in anticipation, you are considering different worlds that you inhabit along with the one where you are mulling them over. And, any time someone is thinking about you, you are there in the world of his or imagination as well as being in this world. For example, I’m pretty sure my wife is in her office working on her music as I am writing this. I imagine her sitting in front of the computer, looking at the computer screen and moving the mouse or playing some notes on the piano-like keyboard in front of the computer. But I don’t know that the scene that I am imagining matches exactly what she is doing. It’s even possible she has left her office and is lying down taking a nap in the bedroom, for example. But whatever she is doing in this world, she is also working at her computer in her office in my imagination, and, in another world of my imagination, lying down and taking a nap. So, she is present in at least those three worlds. And God is always thinking about her and you and me and everybody else.
“But someone might not know what I’m really like. So, he or she wouldn’t really be thinking about me, but about his or her false image of me.”
Since we fill in concrete details in our imaginations around a framework of things we notice or remember having noticed, we probably all have some false beliefs about each other and about ourselves. However, it isn’t logical to complain that someone has a false belief about you and then also to deny that the belief is about you.
“But you claimed that a person’s identity is determined by his or her first-person perspective on the world. This implies that if I am in the world of someone else’s dream or imagination, I should experience that world from my first-person perspective, but I only experience this world from my first-person perspective.”
In this world, you only experience this world from your first-person perspective. In the world that I am imagining right now, for the purpose of answering your objection, you and I are both on a hillside, looking out over a green valley with a river winding through it, the whole valley hazily tinted with the golden rays of the setting sun, reflections of which flash from the river. In that world, you experience only that world from your first-person perspective. Your identity is determined by your first-person perspective in every world you inhabit.
So, comparing the worlds of a pre-life and an afterlife to the worlds of dreams, fictions, and suppositions does not imply that we won’t really be together in the afterlife. Neither does comparing the transitions, from a pre-life to this life and from this life to an afterlife, to the transitions from being awake to falling asleep and dreaming, and from dreaming to waking up. These transitions are not a form of travel and can happen in the twinkling of an eye.
Five. I was a self before I knew that I was a self.
Does a finite thing lose its individual nature in the Absolute, or is it still that which it is for itself, its private character remaining? I attributed Bradley’s failure to give a clear answer to this question to his not distinguishing between the identity of a thing and the identity of a person. What did he mean when he wrote, “Everything in the Absolute still is that which it is for itself”? Why did he add the phrase “for itself”? In the other passage, which contradicts this one, he wrote that finite things have lost their individual natures in the Absolute. He didn’t say anything in that passage about what a finite thing is for itself. And this is significant, because the reflexive phrase “for itself” indicates we are thinking of a finite thing that is a person, or, at least, like a person. A thing that is not a person is not anything for itself. It is what it is for us. But we are adept at conferring personhood on things in our imaginations, so it is easy to imagine that a thing cares about what it is for itself, just as we care about what we are for ourselves. A thing that is not a person doesn’t have a private character, so its private character can’t remain in the Absolute, since it didn’t exist in the first place; but we can imagine it having one, as if it is a person, and then losing it, as we revert to thinking of it as a thing that is not a person. God is also adept at conferring personhood on things in His imagination, but His imagination is ultimate reality, is the Absolute, and that is why we exist and do not lose our individual natures but remain what we are for ourselves in ultimate reality, even though we are also finite things. And since He has chosen to create space and time and us, and to confer personhood on us, there is a sense in which we are also infinite, in that there is no time at which we don’t exist, no time at which we are absent from all places. He has given us life everlasting.
When I say “we” and “us”, I take myself to be addressing all who can understand my writing whether in English or in an accurate translation into another language, even if it is never in fact translated into another language and even though I expect any readers to be, at the very most, a tiny subset of the set of potential readers. But I think the reasoning applies as well to creatures who have a perspectival experience of the world even though, as far as we can tell, they have no language and thus no concept of themselves. Our primary reference for “person” is a human being, but we need a term that distinguishes all beings who have a perspectival experience of the world from those that don’t, whether they belong to the human species or not. “Center of experience”, “soul”, or “self” would do as well, but not as Bradley understood them. He wrote:
“A centre of experience, first, is not the same thing as either a soul, or, again, a self. It need not contain the distinction of not-self from self; and, whether it contains that or not, in neither case is it, properly, a self. It will be either below, or else wider than and above, the distinction. And a soul, as we have seen, is always the creature of an intellectual construction. It cannot be the same thing with a mere centre of immediate experience. Nor again can we affirm that every centre implies and entails in some sense a corresponding soul. For the duration of such centres may perhaps be so momentary that no one, except to save a theory, could call them souls. Hence we cannot maintain that souls contain all the matter of experience which fills the world.” (p. 529)
We can observe a baby learning that certain movements are under his or her control while others aren’t, and we could describe this as learning the distinction between self and not-self, but this only shows that “I was a self before I knew that I was a self.” It doesn’t show that first I wasn’t a self and then I became a self. Bradley imagines a center of experience that is below the distinction of self and not-self. I suppose he means something like the baby before he or she learned the distinction. But the baby was a self, even if he or she didn’t yet know it, just as a human being is a mammal long before he or she learns to conceive of himself or herself that way. Yes, the concept “soul” is an intellectual construction, but a soul isn’t. Otherwise, who does the constructing? As for a center of experience that is wider and above the distinction of self and not-self, I confess I don’t know what that is, unless it is, perhaps, a person who is an exalted state such that the distinction seems pointless. I can’t remember if I have ever experienced that. The terminology is confusing, since no matter how wide a center is, I don’t understand how it could be the center unless there is something around it that is not the center. What good does it do to be wider and above the distinction of self and not-self, if you are not wider and above the distinction of center and not-center? Finally, in my remarks above, about Lichtenberg’s objection to Descartes’s cogito, I have already explained why I don’t believe the claim that a center of experience can be so momentary that it doesn’t qualify as a soul. For these reasons, we can reject Bradley’s conclusion that souls, or selves, do not “contain all the matter of experience which fills the world.”
However, since the thing that I am interested in, when I use the term “person” in contrast to “thing”, is not whether it is human rather than some other species but rather whether it experiences the world from a perspective that is all its own; if I have made that clear, maybe it is not so important to say “soul” or “self” rather than “person”. We can just extend the meaning of “person” to include non-human souls or selves. It may be that when we confer personhood on things in our imagination, we are closer to God’s imagination, which is ultimate reality, than when we deny personhood to things. It seems to me there is more danger in treating a person as a thing than there is in treating a thing as a person, and hence we should be wary of being too sure that something is not sentient and so just a thing, or merely sentient but not a person. For example, a tree that is being trimmed or cut down does not cry out or try to move away, but it is easy to imagine that it does not like being cut, and it may be that it does not like it. (Or we can imagine that it enjoys being trimmed but is horrified at being cut down.) And there is little that is more foolish than to begin by denying that a cat, for example, is acting rationally when it gets up to move to a sunny spot on a cold day or a shady spot on a hot one, and to end by explaining away our own rationality as nothing more than the result of Darwinian evolution. Compared to non-human animals in general, human beings have an enormous advantage in terms of intellectual, emotional, and artistic gifts. Genesis 1:26 tells us that God gave us dominion “over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth over the earth.” This just tells us that we have the power to use them for our purposes. It doesn’t follow that we should think of them as things that have no interests of their own. After all, God has dominion over us. He has the power to use us for His purposes, and He could treat us like things with no interests of our own if He wanted to, but He doesn’t.
Someone might accuse me of giving such a broad meaning to “person” that there would be no finite things that aren’t persons, at least as far as we know. As I said, we are adept at conferring personhood on things in our imagination. But I was only warning that we should be wary of too quickly concluding that some finite thing is not a person in this broad sense. Even though I can imagine a teapot singing a song—and such a teapot would be a person as I am using the term—I feel safe in thinking that a teapot that I use as a teapot, and that doesn’t sing or exhibit any other signs of sentience or personhood, is a finite thing that is not a person. And the same goes for many other things, to mention a few among an endless variety: a fingernail clipper, a shaving cut from a fingernail, a piece of paper, a rock, an asphalt paved walkway, a digital personal assistant—even though I often treat her as a person in my imagination. Or to be safest of all, I could just say that if there are things that God created for us or that we created with the materials that God gave us, and that don’t have a point of view of their own; then the identities of those things are determined by our pragmatic purposes, and so they do not exist for themselves and have a lesser degree of reality than those of us who exist for ourselves.
My criticism of Bradley is that his ambivalence on the question of whether finite things retain their own nature in the Absolute was due to his failure to distinguish between the identity of a finite thing that is a person and the identity of a finite thing that is not a person, and that this is what was wrong with his conception of the Absolute. Ultimate reality is not a super-personal, concrete, single individual that absorbs all other, merely apparent, individuals. Ultimate reality is God and the individual creatures upon whom He has bestowed a first-person perspective and everlasting life. Everything else is real to a lesser degree.
Six. Our religion is not contrary to reason.
I have tried to understand how we can be finite in one way and infinite in another. At least, I think I understand it better than I understand how we could be finite through and through, and ultimately unreal. What about God? Is He infinite through and through, with no possibility of being finite? That might imply that the way in which we are finite, that is, by being concrete individuals limited to our first-person perspectives, must be totally foreign to God. But that way of saving God’s thoroughgoing infinity doesn’t quite work, because it would limit Him by making the way experience comes to us into a way that He could never experience. Another question to consider is whether we can understand what it would be like for there to be an experience that is not from a first-person point of view, an experience that is not anyone’s experience. I can’t, and so I am driven to think that God has His own first-person perspective, and that it must somehow include all our first-person perspectives, so that He is not just another finite person, more powerful and knowledgeable to be sure, but limited in His point of view. Maybe this is what Bradley meant by saying that the Absolute is super-personal. Still, it is difficult to get a grip on what this would mean, for it would imply that God, right now, in addition to having His own thoughts and experiences from His first-person perspective on His creation, is experiencing the world as I experience it, is thinking these very thoughts that I am thinking, while also experiencing the world as you are experiencing it, and thinking your thoughts, and so on for everybody else. But since my experiences and thoughts come to me only from my first-person perspective and not from any God’s-eye-view, I don’t understand how they can also be God’s experiences and thoughts, from His point of view. In short, I don’t understand how God can experience the world from a finite point of view while at the same time experiencing it from an infinite point of view. This leads me to consider the possibility that, rather than simultaneously having both an infinite point of view and a finite one, God can go back and forth between a limited point of view for a time and an unlimited one the rest of the time as He sees fit. It may be that time is ultimately unreal, but from a point of view within time, it is easier to make sense of God’s choosing to alternate between an infinite and a finite perspective, depending on His purposes, than of His having always simultaneously an infinite and a finite perspective on His creation.
It may be helpful, in pondering this question of whether God is infinite through and through with no possibility of finitude, to return to Saint Anselm’s formulation: the being than whom none greater can be conceived. It isn’t obvious that it is always and, in every way, greater to be infinite in all respects than to be infinite in some respects and finite in other respects. It is safe to assume that God is infinite in the sense of being able to do anything He wants to do. A finite person has limited powers and cannot simply decide to exceed them. I cannot decide, for example, to flap my arms and fly like a bird. But presumably, God could. That is, He could decide to take on human form, stand right in front of us and flap his arms and fly like a bird. This would not be a case, for Him, of deciding to exceed the limits of His power. On the contrary, He would be choosing to limit His powers temporarily by taking on a human form, while choosing to exceed the powers of a human in this one way. Should we object that a being who could not take on human form, flap his arms, and fly like a bird, would be greater than one who could, on the grounds that it would be degrading for an infinite Being to appear as one human being among others, even one with a miraculous power? No, I don’t think that would be a reasonable objection. It would put a restriction on God’s choices, while pretending to exalt His power. And we can take this one step further. Could God, once He had taken on human form, decide not to exercise a miraculous power? I don’t see why not. I am not suggesting, in the fashion of Alan Watts interpreting Vedanta, that, for all we know, you or I or any other finite person could be God, who has decided to limit His powers and take on human form (or the form of some other animal); for this could not be the case unless one of us has the power to reassume his or her unlimited powers, and it is evident that none of us has such a power. One can be in touch with unlimited power, in the peak experience, but one doesn’t thereby have unlimited power or even desire to have it. A being who decided to relinquish his or her unlimited power, and who then became permanently incapable of regaining it, would not be as great as one who retained the ability to recover it whenever he or she decided to do so. That is why it is reasonable to believe that none of us is the being than whom none greater can be conceived. If we ever had unlimited power, we must have given it up, and we don’t know how to get it back. But the peak experience showed that it is unnecessary for any of us to have unlimited power, because the being, than whom none greater can be conceived and who necessarily exists, has unlimited power, glowing within everything, and will not do anything shameful, such as creating creatures who suffer pointlessly or who live for a while and then die utterly. My memories of the peak experience and these reflections lead me to the conclusion that our religion is not contrary to reason when it tells us that God chose to share our finitude by taking on human form. He did not thereby give up His unlimited powers from then on. We share in his infinity because He has given us everlasting life. If it were not for God’s sharing in our finitude and our sharing in His infinity, we would be justified in believing that we are not ultimately real.
But why do we die at all? And why do we suffer at all? Wouldn’t it be better if no one ever died, if no one ever suffered? Wouldn’t it be better if there were only heaven and no hell, the peak experience and no bummer experience? Here, again, it is too much to hope that an appeal to logic alone can provide a thoroughly satisfying answer, but we can hope, at least, to understand that the answer provided by our religion, which is thoroughly satisfying unless it is contrary to reason, is not contrary to reason. What does our religion say? What do the miracles performed by Jesus show? That God loves each and every one of us. That the blind will see, the deaf will hear, and the lame will walk. That the dead will live again. That suffering and death cannot be avoided but are not in vain and are compensated and much more than compensated in God’s heavenly kingdom. And what does logic tell us? That ultimate reality is such that it cannot contradict itself. If life and death are both real, and if we could have life without death, it would follow that life and death could exist separately and in opposition to each other, and, hence, ultimate reality would contain an irreconcilable contradiction. So, life and death cannot exist separately and in opposition to each other but must somehow be reconciled. The same reasoning applies to joy and suffering, heaven and hell, the peak experience and the bummer experience. But for each of these pairs of apparently irreconcilable opposites, the element that is harmonious and welcoming must be the one that subsumes the one that is dissonant and hostile, else no reconciliation takes place, and ultimate reality contradicts itself. So, we must die, and suffer, go to hell before heaven, and face the bummer experience if we hope to have the peak experience; and in this way we have life everlasting, peace and joy, heaven, and the peak experience of knowing that everything is fundamentally and perfectly securely all right.
Seven. There are degrees of reality and truth.
Bradley taught that every appearance, no matter how illusory, contains some degree of reality, and that every error or falsehood contains some degree of truth. This doctrine of degrees of reality and truth is superior both to the doctrine that truth consists in correspondence to an objective realm independent of experience, and to the well-intentioned but shallow relativism and subjectivism according to which it is illegitimate to criticize any culture other than one’s own or to contradict anyone who is “speaking her truth.”
The relatively small degree of truth in the correspondence theory of truth is that truth transcends one’s own experience. The concept of truth comes into play only when applied to a claim whose reach extends to the experience of someone else. If I am thinking of my experience as mine, as opposed to and exclusive of yours or anyone else’s, then it is neither true nor false, it is merely mine. A case in which I wonder if a belief of mine is true or if I am lying to myself might seem to be an exception, but it isn’t really. Suppose I am lying to myself in the sense that I have a false self-image—say, I think myself to be smarter and better looking than I really am. Or suppose my self-image is false in the other direction. I am overly self-critical and think myself worse than I actually am. Clearly, in cases like these, the testimony of other people would be relevant. In supposing that I am lying to myself, we suppose that I am assessing myself, inaccurately, according to criteria by which others might also judge me. It doesn’t matter whether someone reacts to my false self-image—say, by attempting to “take me down a peg” or by trying to reassure me that I am better than I think, or by falling in with and reinforcing my false self-image. Even if I am unaware of anything anyone else says or does to confirm or disconfirm my belief about myself, the beliefs of other people are not only not logically excluded but are vitally relevant to the question of whether my beliefs about myself are true or false. If a belief is merely mine, there is no question of its truth or falsity. I can question one of my own beliefs only by imagining myself in the situation of someone else who doesn’t share it.
There is really no such thing as a claim that is private and subjective. To say that someone is lying or is mistaken is not to make a claim about the inner states of that person but rather about a pattern of behavior or of evidence that anyone may observe. If you believe that I am lying to you, it will be because you think that what I tell you is inconsistent with other things I say or do that show that I am trying to deceive you. If you believe that I am mistaken, you will think that what I say is consistent with other things I say or do but inconsistent with what you believe to be true. If I tell you that something tastes good to me, I am not making a claim unless there is something other than just my experience at stake. It would be silly of you to object that, on the contrary, it really tastes awful to me. The obvious rejoinder would be, “How do you know?” Nor would you be disagreeing with me if you asserted that it tastes awful to you. If we leave off “to me” or “to you,” then we can treat taste as something about which we can make claims that could contradict each other. Suppose I taste a certain food, and say to you, “Please taste this and tell me if you would say it has an earthy taste.” You might reply, “No, I think it is too acidic to be called earthy. I don’t think of an earthy taste as being so sharp.” We would be assuming that our subjective experiences of tasting it are similar enough that we can discuss what is objectively the best way to describe it. But suppose the conversation continues with my reply to you, “Really? It didn’t taste sharp to me at all.” Then I would simply be reporting my subjective experience and not disagreeing with you about yours. There would be no question of whether I was mistaken unless you had a reason to suspect that I didn’t understand what you meant by calling a taste “sharp”. And you would have no reason to think I might be lying absent some evidence that I had a motive to deceive you. Suppose, instead, that I had replied, “Really? I think a taste can be both earthy and sharp.” In that case, we would be discussing how best to describe the taste, treating it as something objective, and we would be contradicting each other.
However, we should not go on, from the recognition that to claim something is true is to appeal to a correspondence with something beyond one’s purely personal experience, to the error of thinking that it is to correspond with an objective realm that is independent of all experience, a realm of “facts” which are what they are no matter whether anyone ever experiences them or not; for there is simply no way anyone could ever know that such a realm exists. Degrees of truth and reality are degrees of completeness and comprehensiveness, not degrees of correspondence with a realm that transcends experience, for either there is no such realm or, if there is, it makes no difference to us.
The relatively small degree of truth in cultural relativism is that customs, beliefs, and standards vary from one culture to another. The greater degree of error is to think that there is no universal truth that transcends cultural limits. It leads to the following dilemma: Either, (1) this thought itself is true only within the limits of cultures that accept it, in which case it is no less true that there are universal truths that transcend cultural limits, since there are cultures that regard their beliefs and standards as universal; or else, (2) the claim that there is no universal truth that transcends cultural limits is itself a universal truth that transcends cultural limits. Both alternatives are self-contradictory.
The relatively small degree of truth in subjectivism is that experience is always someone’s experience, so that when we say something like, “He is speaking his truth,” or “She is speaking her truth,” we may mean merely that someone is making a claim based on some experience that he or she had. The greater degree of error is to suppose that we each have our own truth and that everyone’s truth is equally valid, so that any objection to a claim based on someone’s experience is off-limits, because no one else has had that person’s experience. What is the subjectivist to say to someone who claims that not everyone’s truth is equally valid? It cannot be “You’re right,” because that would contradict subjectivism. Nor can it be “You’re wrong,” because that would also contradict subjectivism. And to reply, “You’re neither right nor wrong. You have your truth, and I have mine,” would be an admission that, understood as purely subjective, the concept “truth” is empty.
I was already convinced of the problems with cultural relativism and subjectivism before I read Appearance and Reality. What I learned from reading Bradley is that a theory of truth according to which truth consists in some correspondence to a realm of objective facts is also untenable. Since truth is a matter of the degree of consistent comprehensiveness, it is not a matter of subjective versus objective. Reality is not what is “out there” independent of our experience of it. Nor is it something “in here” in an experience that is merely mine. It is, Bradley has convinced me, a concrete, non-self-contradictory whole which each of us experiences from his or her first-person perspective. The truth of what we think and say about it depends upon how logically consistent and how comprehensive and complete our description is. How can it be that a proposition is, not simply and absolutely true or false, but only more or less true than another? It is because, for a proposition to be absolutely true, it would have to be an absolutely complete and coherent statement about the concrete whole that is reality. For a proposition to be absolutely false, it would have to be the contradiction of such a statement.
So, rather than saying something like, “You have your truth, and I have mine,” which implies that there is no point in discussing the matter further; we should say something like, “You have part of the truth, and I have a different part of it,” which implies that discussion should continue along the lines of trying to achieve greater comprehension and completeness, that is, a higher degree of impartiality. This is true even though one of us may have a more comprehensive and complete understanding than the other. Impartiality is not achieved by minimizing or hiding disagreements, or by pretending that two contradictory statements can both be true. Temperatures and directions of the compass are measured in degrees. It doesn’t follow that the differences between hot and cold, east and west, don’t matter. And words alone are not enough. One’s actions must be consistent with one’s words. And sometimes, further verbal discussion becomes pointless due to ill will, and in those cases one’s actions remain as the only hope for approaching a more comprehensive and complete apprehension of reality.
Subjectivism and relativism imply that discussion cannot result in apprehension of a higher degree of truth and reality, because on those theories truth and reality are nothing other than what one’s subjective experience or one’s culture take them to be. If one’s individual beliefs or the teachings of one’s culture change over time, this won’t be because they have adapted to changes in reality. The changes in reality will be entirely due to the changes in the beliefs and teachings. One’s subjective or cultural beliefs were entirely correct before the change, and they are entirely correct now, even if they would contradict each other if truth and reality were understood as independent of them. But if truth and reality are not independent of one’s subjective beliefs and the teachings of one’s culture, if it is impossible for those beliefs and teachings to be wrong because reality always adapts to them, then there is no such thing as scientific or moral progress. The present era can claim no greater apprehension of scientific or moral reality than any previous ones, just as one can’t claim to have a greater apprehension of the truth through one’s subjective experience than anyone else has through his or her subjective experience, and just as one’s culture has no greater access to truth and reality than anyone else’s culture. The beliefs of everyone about everything, in every culture, in every historical period, are all true. There are no false beliefs, only true ones. There is not one reality but many, and nothing only seems to be real. All these implications of viewing truth and reality as subjective or culturally relative show that truth, unopposed by falsity or error, and reality, unopposed by mere appearance, are empty concepts.
Since one can discover that what one believed at one time to be true wasn’t true, and since what appeared to be the case can turn out not really to be so, we must reject the theory that truth is subjective as well as the theory that it is whatever one’s culture says it is. Surely truth is not just whatever one believes or whatever the “common sense” of one’s culture takes it to be but is what it is whether one believes it or not and whether or not it accords with whatever people hold to be common sense. But it doesn’t follow that it is independent of experience, for we hope to learn by experience and we believe that that is how we find out that something we believed to be true isn’t true after all. Should we say, then, that reality is what we experience and that a belief is true when it corresponds to experience and false otherwise? The problem is that beliefs that we once held and later rejected as false, due to further experience, were also based on experience, the experience we had had up to that time. We revise our beliefs in the light of further experience. So, we should say that reality is what is revealed by ongoing experience, and that truth is the correspondence between what we believe and what is revealed by ongoing experience. Rather than thinking, then, that a belief that we have revised in the light of further experience was absolutely false, and that we are now in possession of the absolute truth, we should think that truth and reality are matters of degree. What we thought to be true was only partially true, and although our new belief has a higher degree of truth, it is unlikely that it is wholly true either, since we may need to revise it in the future in the light of further experience.
Bradley put it this way:
“Whenever a truth depends, as we say, upon observation, clearly in this case you cannot tell how much is left out, and what you have not observed may be, for all you know, the larger part of the matter. But, if so, your truth—it makes no difference whether it is called ‘particular” or ‘general’—may be indefinitely mistaken.” (p. 539)
He wrote that the criterion of truth is inconceivability of the opposite, and that this may be absolute or relative. Something we have observed is at least relatively true, and our belief about it is false only if it contradicts a more comprehensive belief. And then it is only relatively false, and the belief it contradicts is only relatively true, because it could be contradicted by an observation we have not yet made. The absolutely true is contradicted by nothing, and the absolutely false contradicts itself. Thus, even though he reasoned that the Absolute is sentient experience (“Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning.” (p. 145)), he didn’t think the absolute truth is known through observation.
Does it follow that we never have and never will know the whole truth about reality?
Eight. There is no tool to achieve the peak experience.
I believe we do know the whole truth about reality, in the peak experience; that the peak experience does not last; that it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t last; and that everybody either has had it already or will have it sooner or later. The Apostle Paul said, “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV. How did he know that? How did he know that he saw only dimly and in part, but that there would come a time when he would see the whole of reality, face to face? It is because the whole truth had been revealed to him in that great light from heaven which also blinded him, on the road to Damascus.
The whole truth, which is known in the peak experience, can’t be said, or even believed, but it can be experienced; and beliefs and statements about it can have a high degree of truth. Many years ago, I had the peak experience, more than once, while taking psychedelic trips. Two other times, not on psychedelics, eight years apart, were on first seeing my newborn sons, and another time happened on my way home from the hospital after I underwent emergency open-heart surgery. There are intimations of it in every experience of happiness about anything, no matter how seemingly small the object or fleeting the experience. It is often small things, whose significance would be difficult to explain to anyone else, that make me happy. But as for those big occasions that involve more extended tension and relief in the peak experience, I recommend, in general though not to every individual in every situation, taking a psychedelic trip, getting married and having children, and having life-prolonging surgery when necessary. But I don’t recommend doing any of those things with the goal of having the peak experience. It would be a joke to recommend having open-heart surgery in order to have the peak experience, even though the aftermath of that was an occasion for the peak experience for me. In the cases of deciding to run the risk of having a family or of taking a psychedelic trip, it may not be quite as clear that one shouldn’t do it with the goal of the peak experience in mind. Probably no one would think of deciding to have a child as a means to having the peak experience, but the quest for mutually desired sex with a loving partner, which may result in having a child, is not so different from the longing for adventure and discovery that may motivate drug use or taking up some sort of spiritual discipline. There is a paradox lurking here, though: You cannot desire the peak experience until you have had it, and after you have had it, you no longer desire it. It was something else that you longed for: a visionary or ecstatic experience as described by someone else, for example, or a repeat of a visionary or ecstatic experience you already had. The peak experience far exceeds what you were hoping for. Once you have it, you no longer desire it, because you realize that what it gives you is something you can’t lose since you have always had it and always will. God’s love is the thing you have always had and always will. The peak experience is your way of realizing this at a particular time. It can happen more than once; but you didn’t make it happen, and you never will.
The tricky thing about psychedelic drugs is that it can seem as though you can make it happen, that you could have some sort of control over the peak experience. What just happened? A miracle. What caused it? Well, I took a dose of LSD. Therefore, I can make a miracle happen by taking LSD. The trip itself showed you that you weren’t in control, and the peak experience took place when you were least in control and had no choice but to accept whatever came. But since you know you never had such an overwhelmingly spectacular experience until you tried LSD (or some other psychedelic), it is natural to think that you have discovered the means (the “tool” as I have often heard it called) of producing and reproducing the peak experience. You may think that since logical reasoning alone didn’t, and obviously couldn’t, produce the peak experience, logic somehow no longer applies, and self-contradictorily draw the conclusion that it doesn’t matter that it is self-contradictory to suppose that you can now produce at will an experience which consists in accepting that you are not in control over what matters the most to you. But experience doesn’t defy logic. Nothing can. It will show you your mistake. You can produce at will a psychedelic experience of some sort, good or bad; but you have no control over whether you will have the peak experience. There is always the possibility you will have the bummer experience instead, or something that is neither.
I feel deep gratitude for the times I have had the peak experience while on a psychedelic trip, and I would be ashamed to pretend otherwise. I have also had hellish experiences while tripping, and I hope never to undergo the like again. For a while, the number of trips one had taken was a point of bragging rights, but that phase passed. Right away, we heard from people who renounced psychedelics in favor of some spiritual discipline, which often involved following a guru. And all along, there were the denunciations from on high by one’s parents, political leaders, and religious authorities, accompanied by the threat of imprisonment. None of this stood a chance against the memory of the peak experience. But eventually experience was showing that trying to use psychedelics as a tool for plunging into the unknown, hoping for a repeat of the peak experience, often led to anxiety and disappointment, and so there was a gradual tapering off over time until one day one looked back on a stretch of many years to the days when one used to trip frequently. At least, that has been my experience and that of friends of mine. A psychedelic drug may be a tool for some other things, but not for having the peak experience. Nothing is. Life is not a technological problem to be solved, and the peak experience is always a gift from God, like life itself.
But this isn’t a matter of renouncing psychedelics as useless, let alone of denouncing them as wrong or evil. There is no need to renounce psychedelics unless you have made psychedelic experience an idol, and all I can say to those who were once psychedelic enthusiasts and later came to denounce them as evil is that I don’t understand our religion as they understand it. A psychedelic trip can consist in being confronted by the devil as well as by God, and that is nothing to make light of. But I am confident that it is impossible for the devil to use psychedelics, or anything else, to defeat God. A milder version of the objection to saying anything favorable about psychedelics is that anyone who does so is responsible whenever anyone takes a psychedelic trip and is harmed by it. I can’t respond to this objection by claiming that no one is ever harmed by a psychedelic trip. I doubt that that is true. If we just consider the prospect of what one will experience as a result of ingesting a psychedelic drug, it might be the kingdom of heaven, the horrors of hell, or something in between and less extreme. But admitting the possibility of finding oneself in hell for what seems like an eternity is consistent with claiming that one can also see the kingdom of heaven during a trip. I think that hell and heaven exist eternally, but it doesn’t follow that once you enter either one you can never leave. According to both the Apostle’s Creed and the Athanasian Creed, Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, but he didn’t stay there. And he now sits at the right hand of God, but he is going to come back from there again. And, though I wouldn’t insist on it, I don’t see that those creeds rule out the possibility that Jesus Christ can come to judge us more than once, so that we are called on each time to give an account of our lives and are sent each time either to the place of eternal life or to the place of eternal fire, until we are refined enough to ensure that we are sent to the place of eternal life every time. Martin Luther wrote, in the “Preface to Romans” (Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, p. 24), “Faith is a living and unshakeable confidence, a belief in the grace of God so assured that a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake.” Recall Humphrey Osmond’s ditty when he proposed “psychedelic” as the name for this class of drugs: “To fathom hell, or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” And Aldous Huxley wrote Heaven and Hell as well as The Doors of Perception. Similarly, no matter how irresponsible and capricious Timothy Leary was at times, no one who carefully reads High Priest comes away uninformed about the potential pitfalls of a trip. It is important to inform people that ingesting a psychedelic can be a trip to hell, but it is equally important to inform people that they might see the kingdom of heaven on a psychedelic trip. If it is a sin to say something that might cause someone to try a psychedelic and end up in hell, surely it is also a sin to say something that might cause someone to miss a trip that would have revealed to him or her the kingdom of God. All that is really required is to be completely honest about what one’s own experiences have been like, not that that is easy. It might not even be possible, given that we are all sinners; but it is the goal.
Nine. All do not go out of existence when God is all in all.
Bradley wrote, “We may say that God is not God, till he has become all in all, and that a God which is all in all is not the God of religion. God is but an aspect, and that must mean but an appearance, of the Absolute.” (p. 448)
Recall also that Bradley wrote that on his understanding a person is finite or meaningless. Accordingly, on his view, the God of religion, who is personal, must be finite and cannot be the unlimited God who is all in all. Since not everything is a person, a personal God cannot be all in all. He cannot be any of those things that aren’t persons. But furthermore, if God is a person, then He cannot be all persons either but must be one of them, albeit the supreme one. The supreme being that includes but is not limited to the supreme personal being, and that also includes all that is impersonal, can only be the Absolute, the concrete whole that includes everything.
On this reasoning, the God who is in relation to us is limited by us, i.e., we are not He, and so He is not everything. The God whose being is not limited by anything cannot be limited by not being any one or all of us, and the God of religion is not any one of us nor all of us collectively. We are His church, but that doesn’t make us God. So, the God who is all in all is not the God who is in relation to us. We must go out of existence for God to be all that exists. If we exist, and we are not God, then God is not all in all.
But why did the Apostle Paul write (the Greek equivalent of) “all in all” rather than just “all”? I would suggest it is to ward off just such reasoning as Bradley’s. In the culmination of all history, the event of all events, God, the being than which none greater can be conceived, is all in all. If He was simply all, then He would be the only thing that exists, but if He is all in all then He permeates all things through and through. He doesn’t annihilate them and replace them with Himself. And, in permeating them, He raises every one of them to its or his or her own perfection, and in this way each one participates in the supreme being without ceasing to be just what he or she or it is. The world is transformed, not lost. Every little thing has its place: the breathing walls of one’s own room, the lamp on the table sending out scintillating rays, one’s friend sitting there like a smiling idol, the man on the other side of the street checking his mailbox, the discarded foil gum wrapper flashing in the sun, the airplane rumbling in the sky, oneself striding along the sidewalk, the crow cawing from its perch on the cellular phone tower. And since it is greater to be a person than a thing, God, above and within, is a person with whom one is in relation, finally the right relation, terror turning into confidence and love on this side, wrath flashing and fading like lightning into tender mercy and love on the other. Couldn’t it be something like this that Paul had in mind when he wrote, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Corinthians 15: 52-52)?
