stubbornly-persistent illusions
In a recently-published essay at Aeon, Philip Ball observes:
And there you have it: under cover of being neutral tools for communication, metaphors smuggle in ideological freight. If a metaphor is a kind of mental map, the sociologists Dorothy Nelkin and M Susan Lindee point out in their book The DNA Mystique (1995), quoting the curator Lucy Fellowes, that ‘every map is someone’s way of getting you to look at the world his or her way.’ I don’t suppose anyone who either supports or rejects the idea of ‘selfish genes’ would be so disingenuous as to deny that the arguments are not just about evolutionary biology but also about the broader connotations of the metaphor.
The essential argument of the piece is that fitting the actual observations and research findings of the life sciences into the orthodox mechanistic and computational metaphors that the fields are wont to rely on is a Procrustean exercise that serves to abscind many of life’s most essential features from conventional descriptions of it. I have treated some of the problems with the standard Neo-Darwinian synthesis on a prior occasion and I don’t intend to return to that topic here other than to assent to the author’s conclusion that the standard metaphors of biology are outworn and should have been retired from circulation long ago.
I also recently explored that topic of how metaphors shape our conception of biography under the rubric of “paradigms of life,” in which I tried to illustrate how notions like “life is a journey” and “life is a battle” directly inform our idea of the Good and thereby tacitly steer the course that we chart through the waters of existence. That is obviously a metaphor as well, and it implies a correlative paradigm of life.
But I do not intend to rehash old territory in this essay. I wish consider another phenomenon in respect to which inadequate metaphors hobble our progress towards achieving an adequate grasp of it: namely, time.
My observation is not new. Early in the 20th century, Bergson famously contested the “spatialization of time” in his debate with Einstein, and philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have already provided comprehensive phenomenological accounts of time that should serve to burst at the seams that confines of our conventional metaphors for it. And yet, they persist. We still imagine time “to flow,” like a river through a passage. We imagine time as something serialized, like values on a number-line, or like the divisions on a clock-face circumambulated in semidiurnal rhythms by the itinerant hands, or the markings on a sundial traversed over the duration of the sun’s course. Taken together, the substance of time is conceived in analogy with, and essentially coupled to, distance in space.
Physicists presume this commensurability and mutual implication when they conceptualize time as a fourth dimension orthogonal to the three dimensions of space. A famous statement from Einstein, howbeit quoted in a letter and not an official paper, captures the implications of the conventional view in physics: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Time is conceptualized as space and hence considered to be simultaneous, in this view. The “pastness” of the past is just as illusory as the notion that I could not navigate from one side of a room to the other because in both cases, I am merely traversing axes of spacetime.
But there is reason to question whether it is appropriate to compare time to space in this manner. After all, an object can be in the same space at different times but it cannot be in the same time at different places. Indeed, these metaphors and notions of time almost ineluctably paper over its most essential feature: to wit, its “evolutionary” or “progressive” nature, for lack of better descriptors. In a certain manner, time is an abstraction from change, and for change to transpire, each successive moment must unfold from, or build off, or prior ones. If not for this tacit backdrop of everything that has gone before, summed up in a given state, any new state would be undefinable.
It’s difficult to conceive of time outside of our experience of it, but why should we imagine that it would even be desirable to do this, let alone methodologically insist on doing it? Just as it would be senseless to bracket out the testimony of our physical senses from our experience of the world that they are attuned to perceive, so by excluding experience from time, we might be excluding time altogether. This would explain the conventional view of physics, since science is predicated on the methodological exclusion of experience from research.
Indeed the attempt to divorce time from the experience of it was precisely the crux of Bergson’s critique of that view. But if we regard our own experience of time, what will at once strike us is not a flow or a passage or a line, but rather a sort of unfolding and implicit integration of prior states into the explicit experience of the present one. Memory forms a tacit bed or backdrop against which each moment of consciousness is set. Time is better imagined not as a river, but as a rose in bloom.
But time is perhaps best conceived not through likeness to any spatial phenomenon at all, but to music. The intelligibility of any melody depends on the prior tonal moments “hanging in the air of consciousness,” as it were, like smoke of incense, to colour the experience of each note that follows. An interval cannot really be experienced except through time, in this way. If we imagine looking at a scene displayed in a mirror, we can further conceive of the internal shift in intentionality necessary to perceive the glass instead of the phenomena reflected in it.
Time forms a similar backdrop to experience as such, howbeit a similar shift in intentionality is necessary to grasp it to the one that was required to transition from a perception of objects in a mirror to a perception of the mirror in which they are being reflected. I’m not sure about this, but when I attempt this shift, it seems to me that pure time is also pure consciousness.
Of course, behind any analysis of this kind, there is the Eighth Sphere, which is the progenitor of all "stubbornly-persistent illusions". Thus, it is the existence of the Eighth Sphere that serves to be the benchmark for all advancements in learning, however subtle or complex. And, coercion is a big part of Eighth-Sphere ideology. Keeping the illusionary facade in the forefront of an apparently evolutionary system of human growth and development over aeons of time, under the guise of "abstractus intellectus".
“In truth, therefore, our Earth-the Fourth Sphere-is simply not what it appears outwardly to be. Were it really to consist of atoms, all these atoms would still be impregnated by formations belonging to the Eighth Sphere-which are perceptible only to visionary clairvoyance. These formations are present everywhere; so too is the spectre-like content of the Eighth Sphere which can therefore be perceived just as actual spectres are perceived. All earthly being and existence are involved here. Lucifer and Ahriman strive unceasingly to draw from the Earth's substance whatever they can snatch, in order to form their Eighth Sphere which then, when it is sufficiently advanced, will be detached from the Earth and go its own way in the Cosmos together with Lucifer and Ahriman. Needless to say, the Earth would then pass over to Jupiter as a mere torso. But man, as you realize, has his established place in the whole of Earth-evolution, for he is mineralized through and through. We are permeated by the mineralizing process which is itself drawn into this battle, so that morsels of this substance can be continually wrested from it. Therefore we ourselves are involved in the battle. Lucifer and Ahriman battle against the Spirits of Form, with the aim of wresting mineral substance from us everywhere.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/spiritlogic/p/steiner-on-the-eighth-sphere-964?r=2kbdzg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web