Vedanta of Consciousness, pt 1

Bhaskar takes great pains to lay out his philosophy as a system. In his introduction to Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Mervyn Hartwig notes that

[Systems] -- though much out of favour these days -- are like [ontologies]: if philosophers do not develop one explicitly, their work will implicitly or tacitly secrete one.

This is certainly true for theologians as well -- a friend of mine wrote on the implicit theodicy of Jurgen Moltmann, precisely because in his later work, Moltmann chose to avoid explicitly structuring his work so that one could refer to a Moltmannian theology. I have mixed feelings about systems. On the one hand, they force writers to "come clean" and go ahead and make the assertions they're otherwise only teasing about. On the other, they constrict potential meanings/applications of concepts. There's also the problem of jargon. Systems (especially ambitious systems that attempt to encapsulate everything) can become unwieldy, forcing the author to rely on words or phrases that represent huge swaths of ideas.

Despite Bhaskar's attempts to write systemically, there is a very circular, Eastern sensibility to his writing. Chapters aren't so much divisions in content but rather degrees of focus on a certain aspect. Much like his theory of enfoldedness, his entire philosophy might be derived from a single chapter. The first chapter of meta-Reality is titled "Vedanta of Consciousness," and its main thrust is to lay out a basic strategy for removing blocks that would keep one from accessing one's ground-state. I will go into more detail on this strategy in a later post.

What I first realized upon reading this chapter, is that under meta-Reality, I don't think there could be such a thing as an irreconcilable tension such as Derrida's interpretations of interpretation. As Bhaskar puts it,

[To] transcend a position or a set of positions is to overcome the problems, dichotomies, etc. within them, by moving to a higher, fuller or deeper position, which, by completing or filling some absence in the existing problem-field or context, allows the successful resolution of its contradictions or problems... [The new idea] emerges in a way which could not have been predicted, deduced or induced from the pre-existing field. In this sense it is de novo, out of the blue, epistemically or socially transcendent, having the aspect of coming from nowhere. (2)

Coincidentally, I recently ran across this quote from CS Lewis in one of his letters where he equivocates over Julian of Norwich's vision of the "Grand Deed" which would entail universal salvation:

My mood changes about this. Sometimes it seems mere drivel—to invent a necessarily inconceivable grand deed which makes everything quite different while leaving it exactly the same. But then at other times it has the unanswerable, illogical convincingness of things heard in a dream and appeals to what is one of my deepest convictions, viz. that reality always escapes prediction by taking a line which was simply not in your thought at all. Imagine oneself as a flat earther questioning whether the Earth was endless or not. If you were told “It is finite but never comes to an end”, one w[oul]d seem to be up against nonsense. Yet the escape (by being a sphere) is so easy—once you know it. (Collected Letters v2 369-70)

According to Bhaskar, the mechanism behind these "out of the blue" moments is the fact that the entirety of the universe is enfolded within us, and that once one is able to "[suspend] the relative concerns of the problem-field in question...the new idea [can] articulate itself [otherwise] there would have been no room for anything new" (3).

The point is, if you're stuck on something like an irreconcilable difference, the worst thing you could do is continue to think about it. Perhaps, like Archimedes, the best thing you could do would be to clear your mind and take a bath. Who knows? Maybe Eureka! will sneak up on you!