The One and the Many
Based on an excerpt from William James; his great American Philosophical classic, Pragmatism.
- Gerald Alper
William James was one of the greatest visionary geniuses in the history of America. He pioneered and almost single-handedly established scientific academic psychology as a legitimate independent field of study. He did the same for the scientific study of paranormal phenomena. He founded the field of comparative studies of religions. He helped establish American philosophy as a vital, new contribution to the previously dominant philosophies of all-male European thinkers.
From the standpoint of Dynamic Psychiatry, James foresaw the dominant rise of Behaviorism. He recognized the need for the necessary counterbalance of what came to be called Person-Centered Functionalism; of Humanism; of narrative. He bemoaned the loss of meaning, of self, of reflectiveness.
In terms of physical science, he predicted the rise of pluralism; of a Many-Worlds view of the Universe (a view that is amazingly resonant with today’s cutting-edge speculative cosmologists).
Although he did not aspire to it, he became by default one of the most innovative theological thinkers of the 20th century: The Varieties of Religious Experience.
For me, James, perhaps more than anyone, showed the profound difference between matter and thought; things and persons.
Build Back Better is a great political slogan- that does not apply to a person. We build back roads, houses, bridges. We don’t build life; we grow life. Numbers and data don’t get nosebleeds, migraine attacks, or heart attacks; people do.
The Absolute, with his one purpose, is not a man like God that people want. In his plain-spoken way, James has pointed to a gigantic, intrinsic contradiction in the Bible: what can an infinitely endowed being of whom by definition there can be only one- in the Universe- have in common with any one person? At various points (the Bible suggests) a need, not only to create various wonders, but additionally the need for there to be an appropriate audience to appreciate and revere the Creator’s handiwork: i.e. Human Beings. According to the Bible, such appreciation and exultation is expected and its absence is severely punishable. Famously the Bible quotes Jehovah as warning his flock, “I am a jealous God,” (and to be perfectly clear), God prohibits false worship of competing gods, elevating his prohibition to the Ten Commandments. That scale of God — the scale of the God of the Ten Commandments- is the mighty scale. This is the scale of receding horizons, unending landscapes, the sky, the planets, the stars, the moon, and of the ocean. That scale of mind-blowing immensity; kaleidoscopic immensity, is the one most often associated with the divine; typically referred to as the Oceanic Feeling. But there is also the scale of the small, the precious, of the hidden, of the invisible, of the atoms.
How does one set of thoughts combine with another? If by some set of rules; are they hidden? If so, are they discoverable? The Problem of Combinations remains as unanswerable today as ever. Here, God, James seems to say, is physical but, not physical in just one way. He leans heavily on his own ideas of radical empiricism. In a way that’s never been done before in the History of Western Philosophy, James elevates pragmatism to a cornerstone of any and all philosophical systems. With one massive stroke, he elevates the principles of the experiential and the experimental, to an a priori structure of nature.
James dealt with this problem by splitting the old and new testaments into two different Gods and two different books. The trouble starts, according to Jung, when you try to fuse a number as a pure abstract with a number as a unit for experience. The Bible sidesteps this question or tries to get rid of the problem of scales by refusing to specify. It speaks in parables instead of in stories. It prophesies but provides no specifics, and thereby makes of itself a deceptively general theory.
So eventually religion repudiates the need for verification; (God does not like to be tested) (Faith equals Belief in evidence unseen). There’s no such thing as healthy skepticism in the Bible. “Doubting Thomas” is clearly a term of disapprobation and it is hardly surprising that there is no deep discernible culture of respect for the idea of there being any intrinsic value for expressing intellectual curiosity.
Until the first stirrings of the Renaissance, the prophets were never uncomfortable living under the 1000-year-old, authoritative shadow of Aristotle. It never occurred to any of them that when Aristotle- for over 1000 years- deduced through metaphysics the number of teeth of an average horse- that he could be wrong (or God could be wrong!)
Now with the beginning of the use of the Scientific Method, codified by Francis Bacon, new discoveries began to accumulate. For the first time, fresh corpses were available for use in medical research (sometimes stolen.) Quickly the new method caught on; the relative advantage of actually learning from observing nature directly instead of deferring to a priori, absolutist metaphysical schemes, became apparent. Now it became possible to form hypotheses and propose experiments based on them and carry them out.
With the invention of Galileo’s first telescope, an astronomical object became observable in unimaginable detail. In 2015 the Gravitational Waves of the Universe were observed for the first time ever in human history. Kip Thorne and LIGO had confirmed what had been predicted by Einstein in 1917.
A New Era
It’s been 1000 years since Metaphysics realized there was a problem combining the one and the many; a hundred years since Neuroscientific philosophers like William James recognized they still did not understand how the human mind counts numbers…We still do not know if primary numbers are real, physical, or constructs…We still do not have a theory of how a physical brain can understand a number that can be both physical and platonic…How can we incorporate in a reasonable way, the physical and the platonic? Why is the physical all that shows up as real?
What we do know is that each human is allotted one heart, one brain, and one human soul; granted one unique DNA, an individual portion of heartbeats. Whoever attempts to override these fundamental constraints can create their own narcissistic version of reality, thereby laying the foundation for mass murder and genocide not seen since WW2 — and which we are still currently continuing to experience.
Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality); and his most recent book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
