Matter, Spirit and Imagination

Matter – the world’s most abstract word. Its basic definition: something that is perceivable by the senses, either actually or theoretically. It is their presence (the particles of what matter is made) outside our minds and independent of ourselves that provides us with something to perceive. We do not actually perceive the particles of which something is made but, we are assured, they are perceivable.

So what is meant by spirit? That which is not matter – that which is immaterial.

So to say that spirit is anything that is not matter means we have no percipient access to it. The only way we can say we perceive spirit is in a metaphorical sense. A spiritual body can, by definition, never be a phenomenon.

A question follows: What sort of things are we aware of without supposing that we have perceived them? One answer is, “Ourselves.”

You can’t think of spirit without thinking of matter and vice versa.

Matter is always that of which I am conscious; but correlative to it, at the opposite pole, is the “I” who am conscious. Coleridge said it, “Matter is that of which there is consciousness, but which is not itself conscious.” Spirit is not that which is perceived but that which is. It is what we are.

What if the object being perceived happens to be a fellow being? With a fellow being the same relation between matter and spirit is there as is with me. I perceive her “matter” and she likewise perceives my “matter.” But the perceiver is the being. We know that what is important is the relation between the two individual spirits, not the phenomena of the bodies, which is the “expression” of the individual.

Imagination as the bridge between matter and spirit

One relation of matter and spirit – polarity, the negation of one or the other

Second relation of matter and spirit – the present “expression” of spirit. Matter, particularly when you are looking at another being, can become an image or picture of the immaterial. When you see the matter showing a picture of the spirit within, the resulting experience can be called “imagination.” Imagination is a relation between spirit and matter that at once maintains and transcends that contradiction between the two.

Mere perception – perception without imagination – is the sword thrust between spirit and matter. It is this type of perception, mere perception, that allowed Descartes to partition all being into the mutually exclusive categories of extended substance and thinking substance (another way of saying matter and spirit).

Mere perception is not what we normally do when we look at or listen to another being. We see her body and countenance as a material picture of the immaterial; we look at her expression. It is possible to look at the world of nature in the same way, as expression. This is what the Romantic Movement did. It is in imagination that we must look for the healing of the Cartesian thrust between matter and spirit.

Living in the gap

We live in that abrupt gap between matter and spirit; we exist by virtue of it as autonomous, self-conscious individual spirits, as free beings. Because our freedom and responsibility depend on it, any way that involves disregarding the gap, or pretending it is not there, is a way we take at our peril. Imagination is the rainbow spanning the two precipices and linking them harmoniously together. Imagination is a psychic or psychosomatic activity. “Mere perception” is the gap between matter and spirit and cannot be the bridge across itself. Science as it is now practiced can never bridge itself.

Goethe perceived nature as expression of spirit. It is from this perspective he studied nature.

To the extent that we experience another’s spiritual activity in speech, in gesture, in the mobility of countenance, and so on, in the same mode as our own – ant thus as if it were our own – we are exercising moral imagination.

Spirit depends on matter not for its being but for its expression. Incarnation is the way in which spirit becomes evident through the senses to imagination. Death takes away that part of our relation that was based on expression.

Since we can experience another spirit only in the same mode that we experience ourselves, it follows that communications of the dead can only come to us from within – arising within us as events. The problem is that it is a subtle form of communication, one that is very difficult to discern since it takes place without the aid of expression, without the sturdy confidence we are given by the gap between matter and spirit, because it occurs wholly on the spirit side of the gap. We thus have to learn to distinguish between subject and object, not just in the field of commonplace experience, where “object” means matter and “subject” means ourselves. We have to distinguish between subjective spirit and objective spirit, between that which is merely ourselves and that which is another being in ourselves.

Self and Reality

We doubt pretty well everything, because we doubt ourselves. Three existential questions representing various fields of study:

1. How did we get here? – often studied by anthropology and biology
2. Where do we go from here? – often studied by those in empirical sciences and technologies
3. Current art and literature that focuses on the underlying question of “Who am I?” or “What is humanity?” and answers it by the heavily somatic bias of the basic assumptions of our time.

Evolution of soma and psyche

Medieval and premedieval time picture the somatic and psychic components of the self as if connected by invisible and immaterial threads with the world of notself that lay outside them. The whole organism was one of many points of concentration of a field of forces, and of the beings from whom the forces emanated, rather than one object placed among other objects in a void.

The modern view since the Scientific Revolution entails totally different assumptions and feelings. The first is that the dichotomy we commonly experience between the “public” world of objects outside us and existing independently of us, on the one hand, and the “private” world of our thoughts and feelings, on the other, is a kind of illusion, or at all events, that the former is “real” in a way that the latter is not. The second assumption is that, from its own point of view, each individual “subject,” each individual psyche, is isolated in its own private world of subjectivity, of which one is as good or as bad as another. The first assumptions can be called “reductionist” and the second, which springs from it inevitably can be called “projectionist.” We end up with a prosopocentric picture of each human person as a merely spatial center, psychically as well as physically isolated from the outside world and from its fellow units.

Contemporary art and literature are almost wholly based on the projectionist assumption.

The basic distinction between subject and object is clearly not the same as the distinction between mind and body. However, most people do not make this distinction in that they don’t think about it. Simply as theory the notion that macroscopic nature exists independently of man was already largely abandoned by Descartes. Today its falsity is common knowledge to all specialists concerned in any way with perception. The physicist, the neurologist, the cerebral anatomist, the psychologist, all agree that the objects we perceive and experience are at least mainly effects or constructs of a subject or community of subjects.

Since all parts of the human body, perceived or assumed to be perceivable, are themselves natural objects among other natural objects, it is not enough to describe only the organism as psychosomatic. In other words, we ought not to say, as we look out into the world and then down at our own bodies: “The behavior of this organism is psychosomatic”; but rather: “nature as a whole (including this organism) is psychophysical.” Why do we (and even scientists when they are not studying this) so quickly forget this? It is from force of habit.

What is the root and how do we root it out?

It is the habit of refusing to distinguish what we cannot separate.

We cannot pronounce indivisible what we have not first, in thought, divided; for example, the word psychosomatic. The long scientific principle of seeking to explain the who only from its parts (reductionism) springs from the same root. The obverse of this is the impulse to divide when we seek to distinguish.

If we look at it squarely we are compelled to regard objective existence as one correlative aspect of a perfect reciprocal relation between subject and object – the one inseparable, but not therefore indistinguishable. The same is true of “mind” and “world.” But, instead of accepting this, we have been led to set up a factitious objectivity and to reify a world of objects fancied existing independently of any subject.

We have been left with a ghostly subjectivity of which we do not know what to make. It has led us to invent such a term as “psychosomatic,” with the tacit assumption that the somatic component of the organism came first in time and was determinative of the evolution of the whole.

We tend to place a break between our own epidermis and the surrounding air. But both the body and the whole of nature are psychophysical. The crucial break for establishing the reality of the self is the break between the act of thinking and the product of thought or of perception and thought. The more, therefore, my thinking is my own act and the less it is mere “externally” induced, passive reverie, by that the more I am an independent and responsible self.

Failure by scientists to think through their assumptions

All the facts point to the truth that reality resides in an ultimate, irreducible polarity between subject and object, such as would naturally lead us to say: “Because I, and other “I’s” exist, the familiar world around me exists.” But what we mostly say is; “The familiar world around me exists, and therefore I, too, seem to exist. (It is sometimes argued that either one of these two positions is a valid conclusion from the premise of an irreducible polarity between subject and object. Its fallacy lies in the circumstance that the familiar world dissolves under analysis, or as the result of reflection, whether philosophical, aesthetic, or scientific. We cannot therefore, without absurdity, treat it as the source of that very analysis and reflection. Whereas, at the conclusion of any process of analysis, reflection, or investigation, however prolonged, the self remains what it was at the start: namely, that which is doing the analyzing, etc).

Psychoanalysis is also erected on the framework of which behaviorism is erected. Freud’s Oedipal complex was more of a phylogenetic than an ontogenetic phenomenon. Freud said that ontogenetically the cause lay “within,” in the psyche rather than the soma. Nevertheless he continued to take it for granted that the root cause must lie in an actual event, a physical event – that it must, in fact, be somatically determined. The only way he could do this was because he accepted as beyond question the overall picture of a somatically determined psyche and a somatically determined evolution.

It is true to say that written or printed language cannot be separated from its meaning without ceasing to be language and becoming mere squiggles. The history of marble, or of a particular piece of marble, is widely divergent form the history of sculpture, or of that particular sculptor and his art. However far back you trace the history of sculpture, you will not find it emerging from the genealogical adventures of marble. So t is with the history of the psychosomatic organism called man. If you wish to seek its history, you must distinguish its components, because they have different histories and different kinds of history. You must do that instead of introducing the self-contradictory notion of a phylogenetic “memory.”

In our time the received picture of the evolution of the earth prior to the appearance of Homo sapiens, or at all events of the higher animals, is one of an evolution of somatic units with no psychic component. After the appearance of Homo sapiens it is an evolution of psychosomatic organisms somatically determined. As against this, it has at all times been the evolution of a psychophysical whole; and that after the appearance of Homo sapiens it became also the story of a changing reciprocal relation between the psychic and the physical components. We can, if we choose, focus our attention on that changing reciprocal relation: and it is the business of anthropology, and some part of biology to do so. But we shall get nowhere in the end if we are not prepared to accept that the two components have distinguishable histories which can be separately traced.

It is unclear whether such thinkers as Mircea Eliade and Jung had a view of a world of subjectless objects. Eliade could be taken either way. Huxley, among others, seems to want to smuggle into a fundamentally Darwinian framework, the un-Darwinian notion of something like an inherited or phylogenetic “memory.”

A viable and convincing picture of an evolving self-consciousness is strangled at birth by this belief in a world of subjectless objects.

Enduring individuality

If self-consciousness can truly be said to have grown, or evolved, from what it was in, say, 4000BC to what it is in, say AD2000, then the same self must be assumed as present in both periods. The verb “to evolve” must be predicated for it to mean anything. In existential terms the process of evolution entails the continued presence of what is evolving. When individuality itself is conceived as evolving, this clearly will not do. It is not the same species, but the same individual that must have persisted through the successive embodiments that reveal its evolution to an observer – becoming, in the process of transformation, gradually more recognizable as its present self. At this point a biological severance of ontogenesis from phylogenesis can no longer be maintained.

If it indeed is a drive towards individuality that constitutes the law of the direction of the evolutionary process then the postulate of successive embodiments of one and the same individuality is indispensable.

Difference in views on reincarnation

The whole coloring of the Hindu/Buddhist reincarnation tradition is a striving against individuality, with successive embodiments being evidence of that failing. This is a striking difference from Steiner’s (Lessing and others) Western approach that looks forward to an “adult” status. “Why should not I return as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge and further power? Do I achieve so much in one sojourn as to make it not worth my while to return? Never!” (Lessing)

Part of this “adult” stance is to think of entering more fully into life than of withdrawing into prenatal bliss.

The product of thought is psychosomatic, so therefore, are the contents of our memory. The product has already become inseparably united with the brain, nerves, and senses, which are not the ultimate “we,” but are parts of the world. I acquire a memory and a personality by uniting myself, somatically, with the world. It is not the personality that persists, as a biological species does, through successive embodiments but the individual ego. To distinguish between the act of thinking and the product of thought is at the same time to distinguish between the two components of the psychosomatic organism – and to realize that, however inseparable they are during embodiment, the somatic component is not “I” but is part of the world. The personality is the psychosomatic unit. If it could survive the dissolution of the body, it would not be that; it would be purely psychic. But neither would it be that, if nothing survived the dissolution of the body; it would be purely somatic.

Handling criticisms of reincarnation

Given we spend 1/3 of our life asleep it is hardly open to an educated person to maintain that I only exist because and so long as I am aware of myself as a personality.

Most who speak of reincarnation emphasize the incarnate periods of existence and say little or nothing about the disincarnate periods. Steiner emphasizes the importance/value of the disincarnate periods for the evolution of the individual.

A useful example of the forgotten chain of former lives which are threading together to form the ultimate transbiographical individual – we do not remember most of the experiences growing up (particularly as a small child) that have linked together, particularly on the thread of language, to form our current human personality, for which memory is the indispensible unifying factor; though without the forgotten experiences the personality would not be what it is.

All of our current memory is part of our build-in psychosomatic unit. It is not transbiographical but only biographical.

What’s the point if we can’t remember? Actually, remembering would limit us. “The ideal scholar is one who remembers everything but understands nothing. If he does not remember everything he is less than a scholar; if he understands something, he is more than a scholar.” If we retain and reproduce too easily we may have no time or energy left to produce. Producing is our own act in a way that reproducing is not, and even understanding, as every schoolteacher knows, is an act. It can be assisted and “called forth,” but it cannot be imparted. How much of our own capacity to act depends on the gaps and interruptions (including the interruptions of sleep) that break up the smooth flow of memory? It is because of the fleeting nature of our thoughts, perceptions, and memories that we are not determined by them, but free.

If the self had to rely on our present experience for its being we should be mere bundles of stimulated behavior. We experience our freedom in the fleeting present. We are real beings because we have an immemorial past and have slowly evolved to become what we are.

To remember an experience is one thing; to recognize a fact is another. The moment we can recognize the fact of previous lives without the memory of them, we guarantee our freedom and our competence to steer; we become free spirits deep-rooted in the past and responsible to it, growing thence towards the future and responsible for it.

The two questions, “Where do we go from here?” and “How did we get here?” though they are readily distinguishable in thought, will be found to be inseparable for practical purposes.