The Octopus

A Meditation on Creative Imagination

Here’s a little talk I gave ten years ago at my alma mater. In the audience were both my most challenging philosophy professor from long ago, and my daughter. That made the writing pretty difficult. I was pleased in the end with the result. Maybe some of you will find it interesting.

Phi Beta Kappa Lecture, The Connecticut College Department of Philosophy, Blaustein Center for the Humanities, March 29, 2013

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Every thing possible to be believed is an image of Truth. - Wm Blake

Instinct & Imagination

When I was a philosophy major at Conn in the early 70’s Suzanne Langer was still alive. Some of you will know she was a major American philosopher and a professor here in her later years. She had retired from teaching by the time I was a student and was writing her big book, the three volumes of Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. I had seen her many times in this building when it was Palmer Library, where I worked a couple of summers during high school. She was a small woman with startling, bright and penetrating eyes who seemed always to be gazing into some other world. I read quite a bit of her work and one passage in particular stayed with me over the years. It’s from the preface to Philosophy in a New Key and it turns out to be a quote from someone else. It comes, appropriately as you will see, from J.M. Thorburn's Art and the Unconscious. The profound and happy thought that has lived in me for 40 years is this: “all the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the mud-pies you have made; and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies to each other’s sympathetic consideration.” I’m here to share some of my pies and hope you find them appealing.

I took philosophy in my first semester because my mother, who had been a philosophy major here, class of ’47, said I might like it. Having just escaped from high school I was thoroughly sick of getting educated and had no intention of going to college. I didn’t actually apply anywhere. The paperwork for Conn was thrust at me, but I refused to fill out the application or write the essay. So my mother did it. She wasn’t worried, because it was the year the college went co-ed and the admissions office was desperate for men. Annoyingly, they let me in - and if I was here there wasn’t going to be any “introductory” anything, so the sciences were out - I wanted the real deal, right away. Introduction to Philosophy was, wonderfully, not required. On the first day of Ancient Philosophy Lester Reiss started us in on Being and Non-being, and it sounded pretty sophisticated. Lester was a spellbinding lecturer and I was hooked and never looked back. 

I was attracted to metaphysics: to philosophy that was Fundamental. I took the courses in Plato and Kant and Hegel (never got around to Aristotle, which was a mistake), and by the time we’d struggled through a big hunk of Being and Time I had decided to be a Heideggerian. Though there really wasn’t another option I would have chosen at the time, none of this was terribly good for me. Another quote that stayed with me all these years helps explain why. The British idealist F. H. Bradley wrote in the preface to Appearance and Reality in 1893 that “metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but the finding of those reasons is no less an instinct.” My trouble was that my instincts had gone awry. I had the instinct for metaphysics, but not the more basic ones that Bradley thought undergirded our lives and beliefs. I had no beliefs, or at least didn’t know what they were, and was drawn to philosophy partly in the hope of finding some. I did have some character traits that seem pretty hard-wired and in perpetual conflict. Inside me there are lots of people, as is true of all of us, but in me two tend to dominate, as perhaps is true of most of us. In me, one is a simple-minded, rationalist fundamentalist, rather like my father; the other is a slightly muddle-headed, romantic dreamer, sort of like my mother. Much of my life has played out on the stage where these figures perform. It has not been boring.

A pair of New York Times essays last year by Gary Gutting can help elevate my personal psychic dramas to the status of high theory. I met Gutting years ago when he was a young professor at Notre Dame. I was there briefly, for the second of two failed attempts to get a graduate degree in philosophy. It was perhaps a dawning awareness of my instincts that kept driving me away from the kind of life that I thought I had to have. Sometime during my wanderings a couple books by Richard Rorty helped turn me around. As Gutting points out, Rorty is one of the best spokesmen for the view that the job of philosophy is not to provide foundations for beliefs or actions. This conflicted pretty directly with my fundamentalist leanings. On the contrary he thought  “we have every right to hold basic beliefs that are not legitimated by philosophical reflection” and “maintained that the basic principles of liberal democracy [for instance] require no philosophical grounding...” 

But what’s left for philosophers to do? Gutting calls it “intellectual maintenance”: getting clear about what you are thinking, seeking out contradictions and inconsistencies, and discovering what the implications of your ideas may be. This is not trivial stuff. But there is more to “thinking” than this, important as it is. Another idea of Rorty’s, and it spun me around like a top, was his claim that philosophy is a genre of literature invented by Plato. This seemed a stunning reconfiguration of epistemology and, eventually, it helped to open my eyes and my world. It places philosophy not at the top of a hierarchy of ways of knowing, but makes it one of many ways in which the human imagination manifests. And it reminds us of something that as a student I wasn’t at all clear about: “philosophizing” is not the same as “thinking.” Thinking is a far broader category. But you can learn a great deal about thinking in all of its forms by trying to learn to think like a philosopher. 

This is hard to do, hard to learn and very hard to teach. Actually it probably can’t be taught, only transmitted. Because it does in fact involve rather a lot of instinct. One way to develop those instincts is to imitate a master. There was a master here who taught me more about thinking than anyone else ever has. Melvin Woody drove me fairly mad with frustration because I could not do it. And I am still angry with him for giving me a “B” in Hegel - which was, with the possible exception of Engineering Physics, the hardest course I ever took. I never actually did much thinking as his student – but he did transmit something, some sense of what to watch for and how to know when you were going off wrong. My modest capacities for thought developed later on, after the transmissions had been processed.

What is there to philosophizing besides intellectual maintenance? We might distinguish two aspects: the first is critical thinking, but the second is rather harder to define. Mr. Woody taught both, and he referred to this second activity as “exploration.” This thinking, as with all forms of exploring, changes you. Exploration is a primary act of imagination. It is so closely allied with creation that the two are often indistinguishable. And it is pretty clearly not located in the head. 

I have come to understand the imagination as the central feature of human life. It now seems to me absurd to believe that abstract thought is the defining character and the highest achievement of humanity. I am embarrassed to say that I used to assume it - theoretical anything has always attracted me. I hope that I now have a more balanced, less bloodless view of the world and of the human organism. The head may be on top of the body, but it is as much a part of the body as the intestines or the spleen. And it is an appendage, after all, as are the arms and the legs. As the arms end in hands, and the legs in feet, so the head ends, so to speak, with the mouth. What lies physically and metaphorically at the center of it all is the heart. And we know this at some level. When we speak of something central, and indeed, “fundamental,” we say it lies at the heart of things. In the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism the heart is the organ of both the imagination and of love, and as such, it is the coordinating and dominating organ of the human person. To think of abstract thought as the pinnacle of human cognition as many Western philosophers seem to have done for a very long time is a mistake with enormous consequences. Western thinkers have long regarded the location of thought as being somehow in the head – it seems to some of us a natural place to put it. But it is not so in other cultures. The psychologist C.G. Jung tells of a conversation he had in 1925 with the chief of the Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico. He speaks to Jung about the strange Europeans who have come west into his world. He says:

See how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad. 

Jung writes:

I asked him why they thought the whites were all mad. ‘They say that they think with their heads,’ he replied. ‘Why of course. What do you think with?’ I asked him in surprise. ‘We think here,’ he said, indicating his heart.

To think of the heart as an organ of imagination and love clarifies what it was I was looking for all those years ago and didn’t find in my approach to philosophy. “Instinct” isn’t the right word for it at all, though Bradley’s basic point still applies. It is what James Hillman has called the “thought of the heart.” And it was staring me in the face right there on the cover of Langer’s books: Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. My feeling function was frozen. I perhaps could have, but didn’t, learn about feeling from Langer or from Ernst Cassirer, who she draws on, and in whose thought I was fairly soaked in one of Mr. Woody’s very best courses. I learned about feeling much later, but that’s a story for another time. There are a lot of women involved. For Jung “feeling” is a rational, discriminating function, entirely distinct from emotion. It’s how we evaluate, and how we perceive meaning, so it is a way of creating and sensing “symbolic form.” It is a necessary condition for the exercise of creative imagination.

In another essay in the Times Gutting helps us place imagination in a philosophical context. He neatly reviews one form of the distinction between the simple-minded and the muddle-headed: that between analytic philosophy and the so-called “continental” tradition. He writes,

analytic philosophy appeals to experience understood as common-sense intuitions... and to reason understood as the standard rules of logical inference. A number of continental approaches claim to access a privileged domain of experience that penetrates beneath the veneer of common sense and science experience. For example, ...Husserl, the early Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty try to describe the concretely lived experience from which common-sense/scientific experience is a pale and distorted abstraction...

Gutting then gives us a quick summary of some tendencies in continental thought that I hadn’t seen clearly in this light before, and with this he really grabbed my attention:

Other versions of continental thought regard the essential activity of reason not as the logical regimentation of thought but as the creative exercise of intellectual imagination. This view is characteristic of most important French philosophers since the 1960s, beginning with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. They maintain that the standard logic analytic philosophers use can merely explicate what is implicit in the concepts with which we happen to begin; such logic is useless for the essential philosophical task, which they maintain is learning to think beyond these concepts.

Continental philosophies of experience [Husserl, Heidegger] try to probe beneath the concepts of everyday experience to discover the meanings that underlie them, to think the conditions for the possibility of our concepts.  By contrast, continental philosophies of imagination try to think beyond those concepts, to, in some sense, think what is impossible.

In Through the Looking Glass the Red Queen says to Alice,

‘Now I'll give you something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day.'
`I ca'n't believe that!' said Alice.
`Ca'n't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. `Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'
Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said `one ca'n't believe impossible things.'
`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...

That last line was the quotation under my senior class picture in the Old Lyme High School yearbook, 1970. It is no surprise that the continental philosophies and psychologies of the imagination have excited me. I have spent 25 years thinking about the work of Henry Corbin, a French philosopher, theologian and scholar of Islamic mysticism whose work is probably more widely known among poets and artists than theologians and philosophers. I’m not going to talk about him here, though his vision of the imagination informs everything I say. He derives from the same cultural setting that gave rise to these other French philosophers of imagination. 

Of the two kinds of continental philosophy Gutting writes,

Philosophies of experience and philosophies of imagination are in tension, since the intuitive certainties of experience work as limits to creative intellectual imagination, which in turn challenges those alleged limits…  However, a number of recent French philosophers (e.g., Levinas, Ricoeur, Badiou and Marion) can be understood as developing philosophies that try to reconcile phenomenological experience and deconstructive creativity.

It is not true that experience simply provides facts that constrain us, and the imagination is an unconstrained fountain of free creation. Let’s leave the supposed “facts” of experience aside for now and think only about the imagination. Any creative artist, any creative thinker, can tell you that the imagination does not operate without constraint. The constraints come from seemingly different sources than rocks or money – two common standards for the simple-minded rationalists who would tie us to the hard, cold facts of reality - but they are demanding. They come from deep psychic sources, from the body itself, and from the wildly polymorphic matters and energies out of which the world is made. They come, in a sense, from Thorburn’s mud. It is at once material, psychic and spiritual, and is the difficult stuff with which we struggle to create the art and the artifacts, the songs and the stories, the monuments and the great codes that express the creative spirit of human culture.

We explore, map and differentiate this stuff by means of feeling. It is a whole-body phenomenon - if we think of it as an organ, then our whole person is the sensorium, wildly varied in its capacities for engaging the world. It is sensitive and exploratory like the nose of a mole deep in the earth, receptive like an open hand, and personal like a face. You can get along without much feeling - which can seem pretty attractive because feeling makes you very vulnerable - but then you’re going to live in a pretty small box and you’re going to have to rely on habits, other people, and the norms of your culture to determine how you live. Because it is feeling, and the creative imagination that it manifests, that let’s you cross boundaries. It makes it possible to access experiences that are outside the box of the simple intuitions of experience, outside of the box that is “normal” life. It gives you access to the radically, creatively new - maybe even to the impossible.

To get at this fountain of creativity some of us have to loosen up quite a bit. For lots of reasons we lose touch with our hearts and live cut off from our feeling, in conflict with ourselves. We need the shock of standing outside ourselves to even know that we are frozen, to what rigid what dogmas we live by unaware. To get at the flowing core we have to loosen the grip of certainties and assumptions that we don’t even know we have. How do we discover the ideas and the experiences “with which we happen to begin”? There are lots of ways, but contact with other cultures seems essential. They can be contemporary, and you can go visit and live in them. Or they can be from another time, and you can study history to escape your own ideas and the limits of your own experiences. It was, not surprisingly, a professor at Connecticut College that taught me a kind of intellectual history that undercut the certainties about the nature of the world and our place in it that I assumed everyone had always held.

The Extensive Self

Ferdinand Edward Cranz was a professor of history at Connecticut College for 43 years. I was lucky enough to be his student in three courses in the early 1970s and he changed my life. He was “Ed” to his friends and colleagues and “Mr. Cranz” to the students. He was a tall, kind and gentle man with a memorable laugh and a shock of disorderly white hair, who had a wonderful sense of humor and was respected and loved by everyone. He was the first person I had ever known who was astonishingly multi-lingual. To my lasting regret I did not heed his earnest advice to learn as many languages as I could. I got a sense of the depth of his engagement with language when he commented to me about Nicolas of Cusa that “in order to really understand Nicolas you have to realize that he was a German, writing in Latin and thinking in Greek.” 

In a startling and original interpretation of the development of Western societies, Cranz argued that the transition from the "ancient" world  to the "modern" depended upon an unacknowledged but profoundly important revolution in consciousness.  He wrote: 

The ancients -- and by the ancients I mean the Greeks, the Romans, and the Graeco-Roman Christians -- the ancients experienced an awareness open to what lay around them, and they experienced no sense of dichotomy between their awareness and everything else. What they found in their own minds or intellects was of like character with much of what was outside it; what they found in the world could in large part move directly into their minds and be possessed by it. There was an ontological continuity between what happened in their intellects and what happened in the kosmos or world.

During the 12th century in the Christian West a fundamental reorientation of the ancient categories of thought and the nature of experience itself occurred.  Cranz gave a summary statement of the “reorientation thesis” in 1985: 

There was a general reorientation of categories of thought c.1100AD, say in the generation of Anselm and Abelard. Against the ancient position … in which sensation and intellection lead to conjunction and union with what was sensed or intellected, we find a dichotomy between the mind and what is outside it, between meanings and things. [Rather than the] ancient extensive self, a self open to the world around it, we find a move to an intensive self, a universe of meanings separated by a dichotomy from the world of things. Finally, against an ancient reason which is primarily a vision of what is, we find a movement toward a reason based on the systematic coherence of what is said or thought. [These phases] are held together in the experience of what we call language… 

The ancient extensive self "was in the fullest sense part of a single realm of being and indeed, potentially identical with it." The kind of knowing that is open to this self, is in Cranz's terms, "conjunctive."  The new categories of thought and being that characterize the intensive self include dichotomous, “disjunctive” forms of knowing. There appears a split between the knower and the known, and therefore a distinction between meanings and things. Language is constituted as a human system opposed to the "things themselves" which exist outside of human language. Knowledge, rather than being a result of union with what is the known, becomes a result of a process of “reasoning” that depends upon coherence within language. Knowledge comes to "lack all immediacy." This 12th century reorientation is the foundation of the modern sense of a self alienated in the world and trapped in a system of merely human meanings. 

Cranz said that the Western mode of thought “is different from, even alien to, all previous thought, and … there is nothing normative, or even normal, about it, or us.” But it is of course not just a change in modes of thought that he was concerned with, but rather ways of experiencing the world. He wrote “the thrust of my argument is not that there were different theories about the same seeing and knowing, but rather that there were different seeings and knowings.” And he clearly thought that whatever we may have gained by this transition, something had been lost. His colleague and editor Nancy Struever tells us that Cranz’s project in “phenomenological hermeneutics” is an attempt to reclaim an experience of the psyche that was consciously articulated by Aristotle. Struever says that Cranz’s work 

shows… a deep sympathy with an Aristotelian psychology which presumes a continuum of capacities – sensation, perception, fantasy, memory, passions and intellect – that are continuously interactive… [He] describes a loss that transpires in the domain of experience: the post-Anselmian disjunction is a psychological deficit, a loss of ‘dimensionality’. And the loss is our loss as well.

Cranz was cautious about his thesis that the “ancients” experienced the world in a way radically different from ours. He knew he faced an uphill battle making his case. Struever comments that he “expressed many times his rueful awareness of the generally disbelieving scholarly response.” Although he often said that it shouldn’t be possible to recapture this vanished way of knowing, he was living proof that it could be done. He said to me once that as he sat lost in contemplation over those ancient texts, sometimes he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get back.

The Ocean in Which We Live

These arguments about the extensive self were my first encounter the idea that our perception of reality is not fixed and immutable, and that my way of apprehending the world was not the only way. I was not quite comfortable with this. I was excited by the idea because it seemed to make the world a much richer, larger and more complex place than I had imagined. I loved the sense of release that it gave me. But the naïve realist in me was bothered by the suggestion that the modern Western experience of the world is not normative, or perhaps even very common. Surely there are things “out there” about which we have “ideas” and that we describe in “language.” We need only look and there they are. I remember asking anxiously “But Mr. Cranz, what about rocks?” My memory is that he smiled his wonderful smile and said that he was an historian and didn’t know about rocks.

The paradox dissolves if we can accept the potential mutability of experience and that there can be a dichotomy between mind and the world coded into language. Because it is exactly a loss of sympathy, of ontological continuity between our ideas and the things in the world, that gives rise to the “immutable objects” that we have come to think that rocks, for instance, “really” are. We have to overcome that divide before we can understand that rocks, in the simple, literalist sense don’t exist at all. By placing the imagination at the center of things we might understand that the desire for concrete solidity to anchor our sense of the reality of the world and of ourselves starts us on a dangerous path towards a fundamentalist literalism that is the underlying evil of all idolatries.

But we have to rethink the historical interpretation of the break. I do not think that the “great disjunction,” the metaphysical catastrophe of the 12^th century, was a unique event. The reality must be far more complex. I think that it is, rather, an archetypal event, repeated again and again in various cultures at various times with a range of nuances we cannot easily know, and perhaps even repeatedly in the life of any individual to one degree or another. If there can be a break, then there can be degrees of breakage. A break with the world and a loss of sympathy and love occurs over and over in human history in all cultures and repeatedly in all of us. 

So what do we do? The answer is right there in Cranz’s phenomenological hermeneutics. There are two parts to that answer. First, we take a cue from Streuver: we need to restore the  “continuum of [our] capacities – sensation, perception, fantasy, memory, passions and intellect” and their “continuous interaction.”  That is a pretty decent working definition of feeling. Second, we take it seriously when Cranz tells us that our ontological isolation is embedded in our language. We need to renew our language. And who is it that knows about the relation between language and feeling? It’s the poets. Maybe we should listen to the poets. It is the job of poetry to awaken language and transform our feeling and our experience. Poetry is language functioning at its most intense, as the thought of the heart and the primary instrument of imagination. As such, it is exploratory in its essence. And exploration crosses boundaries. That is what exploring is - boundary crossing. We have to do this as a normal part of life. It is hard. Sometimes it is almost impossible, depending upon how imprisoned you are. Languages are instruments of feeling and of perception. But they can be traps if we can’t get outside them. This is not an abstract argument. Dying a tragic, early death from the ravages of alcoholism, the last words of the poet Jack Spicer ring with a somber authority. He said, “My vocabulary did this to me.” 

To awaken a sense of the depth of our immersion in language, and therefore of how deep our work must go, listen to poet Robert Kelly:

The renewing of our experience through language is a possibility… In the sense that language is the main sea we live in. Although [some people claim that] we live in the body, we live between this body and some other body, and the condition of that between-ness is language. You’re not really in your body. You imagine you are in your body but in fact your experiences have to do with your body, my body, her body, this body, that body, objects all around, and the nature of that mediation is language. Language is the ocean in which we live, for any operation in language is an operation in us, too.

Notice: “any operation in language is an operation is us.” So we shouldn’t take the word “poetry” too literally. There is a poetic function to every kind of language. It’s the poetic, feeling function in us that needs to be activated. We all need to be as multi-lingual as possible. But you can be a polyglot even if you only speak one Mother Tongue. Read, and better yet, write some actual poetry - of course - this can be incredibly powerful; but also: learn to speak and think like a psychologist, like an historian, a musician, like a biologist; learn the languages of carpentry, of gardening, of working with stone; see the world like a dancer, a theologian, a banker, or a painter does; learn to read the landscape like a geologist or a city planner; learn a programming language, learn calculus, think like a physicist, even, heaven help you, a philosopher. You will need as many vocabularies as you can get to make senses of this outrageous world. As Cranz taught me and I now know with real immediacy, your language alters what you can see and how you experience the world. But work as hard as you can never to let any of these forms of life - and every language comes hitched to one - become a Master Narrative that dominates all the others. That’s exceedingly hard - we all have an inner fundamentalist who insists we do just that. It would be so much easier if one language, one form of life, were enough. And it is the difficult and exacting work of a lifetime to learn to feel when to use one language rather than another. Listen to the poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst thinking like a biologist:

Like other creatures, humans are heavily self-absorbed. We frequently pretend… that language belongs to humans alone. And many of us claim that the only kind of human language, or the only kind that matters, is the kind that is born in the mouth. The languages of music and mathematics, the gestural languages of the deaf, the calls of leopard frogs and whales, the rituals of the mating sandhill cranes, and the chemical messages coming and going day and night within the brain itself are a few of the many reminders that language is actually part of the fire of which life is spun. We are able to think about language at all only because a license to do so is chemically written into our genes. The languages in which we are spoken are those for which we speak.

I never did get a graduate degree in philosophy, but ended up as a biologist, chasing butterflies instead. So it is fitting that Suzanne Langer figures in my life. She was a superb naturalist with a profound aptitude for sensing the wonders of the biological world. I have another memory of her work that I have carried around half-consciously for years. When I dredged it from the depths and held it up for inspection for this talk it was suddenly obvious that of course she couldn’t have said that! My notoriously unreliable memory has it that somewhere in her writings she breezily dismissed that old standby of abstract philosophizing, the “mind-body problem,” by saying that anyone who looks with sufficient attention through a microscope at the living stuff that biologists used to call “protoplasm” should have no difficulty in seeing that of course it’s conscious! What mind-body problem!? Maybe she did say it. I hope she did. Alfred North Whitehead was her dissertation advisor and she certainly would have known his comment that philosophical systems are never refuted, only abandoned. When that happens, the imagination opens, an era ends, and another set of metaphors comes into play. 

I am fond of biological language because of what it has let me see. Because we are animals, inside and out, and we not only live in a world exploding with life - we are worlds exploding with life. Recognizing that there is a natural history of the psyche is at least as important as understanding the workings of ecosystems, or your own digestion. This is immediate and practical. For instance, my continuing experience with thinking and writing is that it is deep underwater work trying to wrestle an octopus into a mason jar. The creature I try to capture always gets away. This is natural. The world is wild and uncontrollable. We should expect it. 

Biologists don’t use that term, “protoplasm,” much anymore - we have other more precise “plasms” - and it suggests the discredited notion of a living Urshleim, the living “first created” mud from which all other life derives. But by 500 million years ago, more or less, an astonishing explosion of worms and wildly tentacled and gesticulating beasts had evolved from some “-plasm” - from the mud. The simple and uniform gave rise to the differentiated and the complex. This is creative evolution at work. Out of some equally dark and mysterious fundament, languages also proliferate. There is “an absolutely fundamental impulse in language itself” that drives “the proliferation of mutually incomprehensible languages.” This is the judgement of George Steiner in After Babel, his great book on translation. Dialects, creoles, argots, jargons and idiolects multiply and “every form of language offers its own vision of life.” This wild diversity is the result of the drive for human individuation. Every one of us is looking for our own voice, our own language for reality. This is creative imagination at work.

My favorite theoretical biologist, Stuart Kauffman, has a broad vision of evolution based on the dynamics of complex systems of all kinds - physical, biological and cultural - that can help us here, and that fits neatly among the ideas of the theorists of the imagination that we were thinking about earlier. They try to imagine beyond the concepts of everyday experience, to think the impossible - or at least to think the unknown and the radically new. For Kauffman, a deep understanding of evolution provides the best way to understand the fundamental creativity of the cosmos. It gets us finally beyond the deterministic Newtonian cosmology that had underwritten the scientific world view for centuries, and that William Blake, the wild man of English Romanticism, called Single Vision. As is true in any of the arts, evolution discovers its opportunities and constraints as it goes - no antecedent laws at all can tell what will happen next. Kauffman says the products of evolution are “entailed by no laws at all.” The primary act of evolution is creation. Complex systems from cells to societies are unpredictable in principle over all but the shortest time scales. These ever-changing systems are in dynamic equilibrium, precariously balanced between order and chaos. Kauffman likes to say that all such systems, including us, are, at our adaptive best, poised “on the edge of chaos.” 

Chaos, as the gaping Void that precedes creation, is one of the primordial principles in early Greek cosmology. Much later, Ovid in the Metamorphoses, has it as a “crude, lumped mass, nothing but tonnage, discordant elements in badly bound congestion.” It is “mud” of a sort: void of form, disorganized and dark. Today we think of chaos as a high-energy state, disordered and disruptive, something like the way Sigmund Freud thought of the Id, the nasty, instinctual unconscious where all the irrational drives rage about, uncontrolled. If you imagine the unconscious that way then you will think you need to develop a mature ego to control and suppress it. C.G. Jung had a rather less pessimistic view of what he thought of as the instincts and the unconscious and regarded these as a source of life and energy for the whole person, including the intellectual and spiritual aspects of human life. Being open to the unconscious is for Jung a good thing, and utterly necessary for your sanity. In Freud’s psychology it is the “anal stage” of psychological development where you get to do the messy play that making mud pies involves. It’s something you are supposed to outgrow. I prefer to think as Jung did. Growing up does not mean washing off the mud and staying neat and tidy like an adult. It does not mean stuffing all the worms and the octopi and the countless other creatures into racks of drawers for storage - to do that you have to kill them. If we think as Jung did, then that chaotic substrate seems not disgusting and repellent as excrement does to city folks, but fertile and pregnant with life, as it does to farmers and biologists  - not “shit,” but compost. It is to be attended to, listened to, worked with and celebrated - not flushed. It is best to be comfortable with the mess that is your life.

This ambiguous, indeterminate “stuff,” is a primordial mud from a place antecedent to our imprecise and misleading distinctions between the inner and the outer, body and soul, matter and mind. The patriarch of all the French philosophers of the imagination, Gaston Bachelard, connects it with motifs of metamorphosis and transformation. In his Earth and Reveries of Repose he tells us a dream of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In the dream Rilke is holding a disgusting clump of wet, black dirt in his hands. He knows he has to shape it with his fingers, but it makes him extremely nauseous. He cuts a off slice with a knife and is terrified that the inside will be even more horrible. But then he sees what his knife has revealed: the slowly opening wings of a spectacular, iridescent butterfly. This vision is more somber than Thorburn’s tiny drama that opened our meditation, but the point is much the same. We have to go pretty deep among the roots to find our “real stuff” and make something meaningful out of the confused, messy and often painful chaos of our lives. To try to suppress and deny that essential chaos is suicidal. If you attend to the confused jumble long enough to find the language that releases it, to find your own voice, then something worthwhile will appear. When it does, you will find that “all the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people the mud-pies you have made” and you can have the gentle but abiding pleasure of confidingly recommending them to other people’s sympathetic consideration.