Civilization Part II

We are born into mortal bodies. Bummer! But worse, we are born into a finite universe. When we die, we leave a legacy behind or not, for good or ill or both or neither. But when the universe dies, we leave nothing behind because there is no longer anything to leave or anywhere to leave it. There is nothing to show for our having been. We are in the realm of absolute non-entity.

In a recent TWS, we explored the purpose of civilization and agreed, I think, that civilization is an elaborate structure built by us to shield us from immediate awareness of our impending doom! Who has the time or the energy to think about entropy when you’re trying to scrape together the rent money?

Civilization invests the details of our daily lives with what Whitehead called, “misplaced concreteness.” Thanks to the topology of spacetime itself we are born looking at the World through the wrong end of a telescope. Civilization is a powerful lens we add to that telescope; it increases the spatiotemporal distortion by at least an order of magnitude. Things that are a bit removed from us seem far, far away.  

As a result, we imagine ourselves functioning in a very tight space and we gladly lose ourselves in the minutia of navigating this artificial domain. 

“I am the Walnut.” My secretions form a ‘civilizing shell’ to protect me from the noumenal world. Likewise, human beings secrete the structural components that form ‘civilization’, a barely translucent shell that keeps us only dimly aware of what lies beyond.  

97% (Derrida) of the things we do are motivated or mediated by the structures of civilization: clan, caste, class; family, nuclear and extended; economics – ‘getting and spending’ (Wordsworth); language itself; and, of course, recreation, play – first person (exercise), third person (local sports teams as totems), etc. It’s hard work being ‘me’ when ‘me’ is an avatar I’ve crafted to get by in a civilized world, “a face to meet the faces that you meet.” (Eliot) 

What can we say about civilization? Parmenides called it Doxa, the realm of Appearance (seeming). This is where you find ‘bright lights’; it’s downtown (Petula Clark). It’s where you go to get distracted: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to change place (motion), and to exchange bright color.” This is the Realm of Doxa, ‘the realm of distraction’. Think the Lower East Side in its day.

There’s nothing wrong with life’s pyrotechnics, as long as we don’t mistake them for Aletheia, the Realm of Truth. This is the noumenal world. Here there are no ‘qualia’ (sense data), truth is not perceived but intuited. It is everything that experience conceals. This is the realm of focus, the emptying of mind (the goal of mystics), the sound of one hand clapping, bodhi. It’s exclusively uptown. Think the East 90’s.

Now consider King David’s famous meditation (Psalm 23): “The Lord is my shepherd…he leads me on the path of righteousness… Even though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil (for you are with me)… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

David is able to go beyond the conceptual limits of civilization. Against entropy, he proposes eternity. Against the appearance of shadow and death, he proposes eternal life and light. But that is only possible if there is more to reality than civilization lets us see. David posits a transcendent dimension and a transcendent entity (Lord).

Accepting Parmenides’ classification of Reality into the Realm of Truth (Aletheia) and the Realm of Appearance (Doxa), the two realms share a common limit: Death, the absence of being (Aletheia), the absence of experience (Doxa).

According to Parmenides, Being consists of Aletheia, and Doxa. Death falls in neither category. That’s because it is not a thing but a limit. It marks off the furthest extent of Doxa; it is Aletheia’s doorstep. Death throws a deep shadow over Doxa, where whatever is perishes, but it floodlights Aletheia where whatever is, is eternal.  

In another recent TWS, we explored the power, and the limitations, of Science. To rephrase, science can tell us anything we want to know about how the world as it appears but nothing about the world as it is.

Science is stupendous…but superficial. We are told, “Seeing is believing.” The well intentioned folks who teach us this are condemning us to a life of ignorance. Not that seeing is necessarily deceptive, it’s just never the full show. For that we need to ‘escape from civilization’. 

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