The Eye and the Sky: Machian Themes (Part One)

The series which we begin here has been rather difficult to write (just even to begin), following on from the last. The difficulty is as much conceptual as it is existential. I am proceeding slowly, painfully, and, I must frankly admit, uncertainly. I do not know exactly where I will end up. Perhaps having painted myself into a corner. But I suppose the very purpose (at least in my own mind) with this blog is to be a kind of journal of my own reflections on the very fraught subject of a future science of the UFO phenomenon, but, crucially, one that proceeds free of the dogmas of our age (materialism and spiritualism being the two poles of our peculiar and perhaps long-standing conceptual dogmatism). This science does not exist, and so as I understand my role here, I must be one who attempts to bring it into being. But I am not a scientist. I am, if anything at all, an essayist of a philosophical persuasion, perhaps in the spirit of Sir Francis Bacon. Or at least I may inspire a Bacon to emerge from the shadows, to essay us into the future of this young subject (even after seventy-odd years, we have only managed to compile a record of a phenomenon; only now are we trying to collect evidence of unassailable provenance with which we may, I hope, conduct the next and most important stage of our science: the stage of theory, buttressed by experiment). 

My intention with this posting is not to write a definitive statement concerning the problem of relating matter and mind in the context of a scientific approach (attempted) to the UFO phenomenon. It is, rather, to merely open up a line of inquiry that, perhaps, has remained obscured as the phenomenon gets herded together with all manner of paranormality and “high strangeness”. Reality—or whatever is, whatever it is—is a buzzing confusion of phenomena, hidden or obscured, sometimes apparent. But knowledge (and this is my dogma) is found only in the movement from that region of undisclosed non-knowing (where things are hidden or obscure, intuitive, at the edge of our awareness, or occupying that liminal zone of half known, half unknown) to the domain of the unhidden. Something is not known simply by virtue of its being unhidden, or apparent, or observed. To know is not just to see, or to experience—or even to conceptualize. To know is the purview of a science—knowledge is its essence—but by knowledge I mean appropriation: the forging of a concrete (and relatively stable) relation between two things: knower and known. This dynamic conjunction is knowledge. Outside of this relation there is nothing known at all—which doesn’t, of course, imply that there is nothing to be known, or that there is nothing apart from this relation. It most certainly does not mean that. It is a dual statement: an assertion of what constitutes knowledge as such, and where (and when) absolute agnosticism begins (and where and when it is to end).

In the course of this series of posts, I want to explore (and finally to posit) a heretical doctrine, one which I hope will help clarify how we must orient ourselves if ufology is to attain to the status of a science. (It may of course in time leave this doctrine behind, as all early sciences grow into their more mature forms and discharge their initial naïve but necessary doctrines which aided their climb out of pure speculative fancy to tested theory.) The doctrine is (or has been) even a heresy in theoretical reflection on conventional science—a doctrine, the philosophers of science will doubtless remind us, that has long been abandoned, and for good reason (or so we might have been told). It is the doctrine of positivism. But as I am not fond of the ‘ism’ per se, I will restrict it to perhaps the most profound (and largely forgotten—or dismissed) form of it: the positivism of Ernst Mach. It is remarkably subtle, flexible, adaptable, and—importantly—amenable to whatever may exist (as far as observation and experience will allow). The latter parenthetical remark is, of course, rather crucial as we make our way towards what perhaps even Mach would have considered heretical, and that is the paranormal—that dimension of the “psychical” in the UFO phenomenon that presents to ufology its deepest vexata quaestio.

Previously, we had undertaken a somewhat combative deconstruction of the attempted overcoming of “materialism” breezily (but frustratingly inadequately) addressed by a relatively new “neo-gnostic” ufological writer, Joshua Cutchin. We did this by looking at the opposition between matter and “consciousness” from a playful Hegelian point of view, seeing that the opposition dissolves in favor of a deeper unity. But, crucially, we discovered that this deeper unity is not a unity between mind and matter! Both those categories are not so much overcome by synthesizing them into some kind of a unity, so much as they are simultaneously superseded by returning to the unity of a field of experience in which “mind” and “matter” are simply aspects of something which is itself neither mental nor physical—but infinitely plural, and hence admitting of any number of empirical relations between those aspects of nature which we would, conventionally, choose to distinguish (and we do so for various reasons specific to the scientific work we want to accomplish).

The critique I offered leads to a certain philosophy of science that is, I must admit, underwritten by a rather idiosyncratic philosophical foundation: an infinite pluralism that can be explained in the terms of Spinoza’s philosophy, reinforced by William James’ “radical empiricism”. Though I draw on Spinoza and James, I believe what I am saying is not just a synthesis of these two thinkers, but a step away from both. (But I have to leave that to others to judge. I cannot say so myself.)

This philosophy of science first begins with a deconstruction that leads to an abandonment of the metaphysical nimbus surrounding our concepts of matter and mind. These concepts are fundamental (even foundational) to what we think our sciences are, or are not, about: science is about “matter” and if it’s about “mind”, then whatever is conceptualized by this term is also going to be about “matter”—thus setting up the most basic problem science faces (a problem, of course, only if we hope to have something of a unified picture of nature where mind is ontologically no different from the rest of the things science investigates and tries to explain). If we abandon the metaphysics of matter that leads to the exclusion of mind, and, simultaneously, if we abandon the metaphysics of mind that leads to its being problematically related to the material, then we find ourselves in a sense where science—or what we should more properly call, in this earliest of stages, a natural philosophy—beings: with a neutral stance towards everything that presents to us as a phenomenon of nature. And our axiom shall be Spinoza’s: everything that manifests to us as a phenomenon is a phenomenon of nature. There is nothing beyond nature, nothing apart from nature. Our axiom, then, is that nature (or if you prefer to use spiritual terms: God) is absolutely infinite. (Spinoza called it infinite substance, but one not to be confused with the oppositional and dichotomous metaphysical substances of matter and mind.) Nature is infinitely plural. It is also infinitely democratic: everything that manifests to us as a phenomenon, being of nature, is also of the same ontological kind as nature itself (for there is in truth only and exactly one ontological kind: nature itself). Everything, therefore, is natural. Every normal or ordinary phenomenon that science and common sense accept as a real phenomenon, is a phenomenon of nature. But every paranormality is also a phenomenon of nature, albeit one we cannot yet appropriate within those paradigms of explanation accepted by our sciences. (For us this will mean that it is our sciences which must expand to accommodate a more expansive normality, not that we break with science and allow, for example, supernaturality—whatever that would be.)

Let’s pause to reflect for a moment. I am saying that our concepts “matter” and “mind” are suffused with illegitimate and even untoward metaphysical connotations and that these, when allowed to operate unchecked within science (or even in our general explanatory speculations, however fanciful), invariably lead us into any number of contradictions and paradoxes, leaving our sciences in a sorry epistemic state—of abject failure to provide adequate explanation and understanding of ourselves, our world and the relations therein. The metaphysics of “matter” leaves the physical sciences in a conceptual shamble. And the metaphysics of “mind” (or, closely associated with that, of “spirit”) leaves our religions and spiritualities in a hopeless morass of notions that would seem to pit them against the sciences of nature. This consequently leaves us with seemingly disconnected domains of inquiry, or “nonoverlapping magisteria” to quote the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould. It leads to the methodological, and therefore disciplinary, rift between the so-called “humanities” and the various sciences (the “STEM” if you prefer).

But the solution to the quagmires of materialism v. spiritualism (or mentalism)—to “science” v. the “humanities”, and so on—is not synthetic unity, and certainly not the doubling-down on materialism or a reactionary, nebulous “consciousness-based” paradigm of some unknown sort or other (and most certainly not the retreat into a “gnostic” worldview—whatever or however we may define that). (A side note: of course I must explain in depth my negative reaction here to the gnostic standpoint, and in fairness I have not yet done that in any sort of rigorous way; I must hold off on that for later.) This sorry state of radical disunity (where science operates blissfully unconcerned with the “humanities” and the humanities, for their part, operate mostly in painful ignorance of the sciences, unable to enter into an internal dialogue with them) is addressed only by a simultaneous deconstruction of matter and mind, (scientific) materialism and (religious) spiritualism, after which we are returned to a simplified field of “pure experience”. Here, we are afforded the chance to begin science again. A new science.

But let us not dwell too long in these somewhat polemical reflections. We must quickly move on to the more practical point of finding some way forward. I have (perhaps tendentiously) suggested, but have not yet adequately expounded upon, a version of positivism in the hopes of moving ufology along with confidence not only into the already difficult terrain of trying to explain those physical anomalies the UFO phenomenon presents, but also those more psychical enigmas that seem to arise in many cases. Our objective here is to explore a way of thinking through the issues that must be faced as we advance into this treacherous terrain. I am only hoping, as I have said, to suggest a way of thinking, and to work the proposal out in some small detail. It may ultimately have to be abandoned—but if we can say why and how, we will perhaps have made some progress.

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Positivism in general takes a position against “metaphysics” in science. As a more general philosophical doctrine, it attempts to discharge metaphysics altogether, and so it has a narrower and a broader construal. But let us be clear what its standpoint against metaphysics really is, since the anti-metaphysical positivists (whoever they may be) are always in a sense taking a “metaphysical” stance themselves! The confusion arises in the very concept of “metaphysics” itself, and without proper clarification we will be doomed to get into a tangle, a verbal tangle. To clear up any confusion we have to take a certain position which, it must be admitted, is going to seem to be (at least to some other professional philosophers) controversial—idiosyncratic again. So be it.

If we examine the history of science (at least the “physical” sciences of astronomy, mechanics and so on), we see a curious series of moves made by theoreticians. Confronted by a certain definite set of observations, they are sometimes moved to posit an explanation and understanding of those observations in terms of stuff: things that have certain inherent properties that, in interaction with other, similar things, yield the observations we are trying to explain and understand. This ability to reproduce observations based on our theoretical representations, which themselves introduce a number of potentially unobservable phenomena in order to explain and understand the observable phenomena that present a mystery or curiosity to us—this is the hallmark of a science. We see the movements of the planets and other celestial bodies, we find that (as Kepler eventually did) the simplest mathematical representation of their orbits is in terms of ellipsoids with the sun as the primary fixed body around which everything else revolves, and we then posit an unobservable force or substance (gravity) which explains how it is that everything is kept in this orbital system. Based on the observations we can deduce, as Newton did, what the mathematical form of this force or substance of gravity must be: it must be given in the form of an inverse square law, with the magnitude of the force dependent on the relevant properties of the various objects involved in the relationship (in this case, the relevant property would be the masses of the objects). But what is gravity? What is mass? The positivist direction, which Mach was to take, eschewed any implicit structures not themselves entering into a direct relationship with those explicit structures manifesting to us as a phenomenon. But there is a choice, and from a purely logical, formal standpoint, it does not matter which you choose. Either gravity is a force in addition to the masses gravitationally interacting, or the interactions among (or more specifically: the behavior of) the masses is the gravity. One can view the positivist move as the move towards simplicity: if given a choice between more entities and structure, and less—where between the two there is no corresponding loss of precision or exactitude—then the preference is for the simpler of the two. One might also attempt to justify positivist simplification on empiricist grounds: that, on balance, we ought to prefer any system of nature in which a minimum of unobserved or implicit structures are introduced into our theories—the thought being that we should progress in our science only on the basis of what can be observed, interacted with or otherwise detected by we who are trying to know something about our world.

But it is important to see that what the positivist-empiricist is concerned with is having our sciences articulate the right (minimalized) structure of interactions or relations between the phenomena that present themselves to us, come whatever other suppositions we want to make about those phenomena. Beyond this structure is the extraneous, the “metaphysical”—that is, that structure which goes beyond what is necessary in order to adequately describe the phenomena we experience. Apart from the structure of explicit interactions between the phenomena, there really can’t be anything at all to worry about.

“Metaphysics” in the sense that bothers the positivist-empiricist is the product—or perhaps better: is the echo or image—of an age of passive, a priori speculative reflection on the “nature” of “reality”. It is a vestige of an illegitimate hypostatization, an essentialization of posited “substances” ultimately brought into being by either a “first cause” or, in its religious-theological incarnation, by a transcendent God. Substance is what the positivist-empiricist is abandoning here: metaphysical substances and the entities that are their supposed manifestations. Things like “matter” as a metaphysically grounded substance that underwrites what is supposed to be “real” (for the “materialist”). Things like “mind” which is also supposed to be the underwriting substance of what makes human beings so unique: our capacity for thought, for consciousness. Matter and Mind, therefore, are the foundational categories for metaphysics as such: as the positing of mutually opposed but independently existing realities that are supposed to underwrite the existence of an objectively real cosmos of things. This quite theologically exorbitant metaphysic is what the positivist-empiricist seeks to avoid. I am arguing that the denial is best accomplished by a deconstruction. But it doesn’t end there, of course. What is after substance? What is after metaphysics?

What is after those things is—what comes before them: experience itself. The positivist-empiricist wants to return to experience, and to the relations between phenomena that are given to us in experience. The positivist-empiricist adopts the belief that all knowledge is knowledge of empirically given relations. But abandoning metaphysics in favor of this positivist-empiricist stance does not mean abandoning the more primitive concern in philosophy with “Being” as such. The recourse to experience might seem naïve, even reactionary, but we have learned that it is not. It is the original gesture of philosophy—of a philosophy of nature. And it is at this point that we must make available to ourselves the pragmatic empiricism of William James, an empiricism he referred to as “radical”. This we will take up in our next post, as we develop our concept of empiricist positivism further towards the ultimate goal of building a framework for thinking about the physical, the psychological and the psychical aspects of the UFO phenomenon in a way that does not a priori embrace either materialism or spiritualism, but which proceeds to study the phenomenon from an entirely neutral perspective regarding those fraught categories of “mind” and “matter”.