It is not uncommon among intellectual conservatives, especially those who are my Catholic coreligionists, to disparage René Descartes for having ruptured the Western mind and sent it on a course that has ultimately led to all the solipsism, ugliness, and despair of modernity. No doubt there is much truth in this account and I myself often take swings at Descartes. Nonetheless, that lazy and conceited Frenchman raised a philosophical question which is perfectly legitimate, though I wish it had never been asked: is it possible for my senses to convey to my mind an object that is not in fact there? In other words, can I see a flower, pick it, smell its fragrance, and be convinced that it is truly a flower and that it truly exists, and for nothing to be there at all?
Descartes gives various examples of how such an epistemic error might occur, including the fact of dreams and hallucinations as well as his famous thought experiment involving an evil demon that places misleading or false apprehensions in the mind. We must concede that these examples do at least indicate that it is possible in principle both to judge that something exists and judge what it is that exists, and for the thing in question not to exist at all. And if that is possible, presumably it is also possible for all my ‘sense-data’ to comprise such cases—at least in principle. Indeed, the fundamental premise on which the entire story of The Matrix movies is based imagines this exact notion.
Of course, someone in the classical realist (that is, broadly, the pre-modern) tradition will want to say: if it is possible—and we know it is, at least in principle—that the senses are simply unreliable conduits of reality, then cases in which they are so unreliable depart from the norm. The senses, he will say, truly convey to me the external world—albeit imperfectly, in a limited way, and distorted by all sorts of assumptions about the world unique to me and my conditioning. But the essences which are conveyed by the attributes of things, transmitted via my sense data, which I grasp by my mind’s eye, really do correspond to the things out there in the world. And the judgement of existence that I make on such things, to say that they truly do exist, corresponds to the being of the things out there in the world. And if there is an error in my apprehension of the world, that is not because there is a problem with the way the world is constituted or with the way that I am constituted per se, nor with how I relate to the world, but that something has in this particular instance gone terribly wrong. If his account were not the case, the classical realist would say, we could not discuss the topic at all.
Such a response from such a classical realist philosopher may be reasonable, but it does not get us out of the Cartesian problem. After all, what justifies the assumption that his misapprehension of reality is in this instance a departure from the norm? Is it because he can make a distinction between hallucination and proper judgement, dreaming and being awake, being free from demonic possession and being bound by it? But what if, the Cartesian will respond, all these distinctions merely distinguish between different aspects of unreality?
Up until Descartes, philosophers had taken it as a given that one’s philosophising ought to begin with thinking about the reality that we encounter in the world, and that by so doing we ought to try to make sense of it. It simply never occurred to philosophers before the 1630s to begin their philosophising with considerations about the operations of the mind. Classical philosophers uncritically—perhaps unthinkingly—maintained a relative confidence in both their senses as reliable conduits of data about the world around them, as conveying the attributes and in turn the forms of the things in the world. Thus, they trusted in their minds’ comprehension of the natures or essences of things, and in their ability to correctly judge what things did or did not exist, insofar as they had the apposite experience to make such judgments. And the reason they wandered about with this general confidence in their own ability to grasp reality was that they were—generally speaking—mystics, and those who were not mystics but physicalists (and there were a few of those among the pre-Socratics) were formed within a mystical culture.
Anaximander with his account of the eternal Apeiron, Heraclitus and his Logos of perennial fire, Pythagoras and his ascetic path to union with the perfect harmony underpinning all mathematical and musical order—the superstructure, if you like, of the cosmos—all these were mystical writers. Thanks to the work of Peter Kingsley, people have become more aware of the mystical lifeblood of the Western philosophical tradition, especially that found in Parmenides and Empedocles, Kingsley’s own especial teachers, who were indeed religious poets conveying mystical insights. Plato, of course, believed that spiritual ascent to the realm of uncreated and perfect forms was the purpose of the philosophical life, and Aristotle held that the culmination of all practical wisdom was the contemplation of God as He contemplates His own perfection.
This understanding of philosophy as a pathway of mysticism was at the heart of the Neoplatonic project. Plotinus, seeing everything as both a participation in, and emanation of, the One, embarked on a life of remarkable asceticism in pursuit of perfect spiritual union with the Absolute, due to which he would often enter states of ecstasy for many hours. His followers never departed from his conception of philosophy, and whilst Neoplatonism largely competed against Christianity in the Church’s early centuries, the latter soon baptised the fundamental insights of Neoplatonism, making its metaphysics the vital framework within which Patristic theology developed.
The mystical assumption at the heart of philosophy, which I believe delayed any asking of the Cartesian question for so many centuries, is that the world is in some mysterious way a divine communication. The world is a heavenly declaration to that part of it that possesses the requisite rational faculties to receive it: namely, us. The foundation of any realist philosophy, then, is essentially religious. To the modern mind, cut off as it is from any overarching mystical worldview, such a foundation could not be weaker on which to build a philosophical account of reality; to the classical mind, however, it is the strongest foundation on which to embark on the philosophical life, which is not merely a game of conceptual conjoinings, but a pathway leading to transformation in ultimate reality.
That the philosophical endeavour rests on a religious foundation ought not to trouble us if we have already accepted an inextinguishable fact about our own human nature, namely that we must, and will, worship. Without this assumption—which does not lend itself to demonstration beyond noting the historical fact that man has, as long as man has been, ever worshipped rightly or worshipped idolatrously, but never not worshipped—no philosophy, and indeed no life of the mind at all, is safe. Without some prior wonder at creation as the declaration of its Author, and therefore as an intelligible reality that corresponds to minds because it is a product of Mind, all philosophy collapses into scepticism. Even the most basic scientific research is impossible unless the scientist believes in such a correspondence of his mind to reality (but few scientists, and none of the most ardent secular ones, ask themselves why they should assume that this is so). Thus, without the mystical intuition, the intellect enters an inescapable spiral of anxiety-ridden, self-directed nit-picking. The childlike wonder at the world which underpins the philosophical life corrupts into the childish confusion that underpins modernity.
On a personal note, it is because I have always understood the philosophical life to rest on a religious intuition that it has ever seemed not only reasonable but necessary to combine philosophy with spiritual practices and physical exercises. Far from eccentric, before modernity there was not a single philosopher worthy of the name who did not think the same. And given that my whole life is marked by an attempt to cultivate a pre-modern mind, it ought not to surprise my readers that this is how I approach the discipline. The tripartite way of corresponding oneself to reality, namely that of the temple, the academy, and the gymnasium, has always belonged to our civilisation as the three-pillared arcade on whose sacred ground Sophia abides. But take the mystical out from underneath those pillars—that is, remove the sacred ground—and the whole structure crumbles. We exist, ultimately, for union with God, and philosophy as much as any other aspect of a cultivated human life must acknowledge that, or it becomes a mere spectre of itself and ruinous to those it is meant to serve.
