The Dharma of Finalism

I enjoyed NeoFinalism so much that I want to end our encounter with it on a more personal note.  I found the book to be a real challenge and an eye opener that encouraged me to rethink a lot of my habitual views.  While I wouldn't have considered myself a materialist before, I do think I still clung to a certain reductive step-by-step causalism or mechanism.  Ruyer has really opened my eyes to the way that the insistence that every thing must have smaller non-thing parts (ie. that everything is empty) is, while both true and important, not the whole story.  There's a flip side to emptiness.  Things do in fact appear, phenomena happen. Or perhaps it would be better to say: the fact that there are no essential inherently existing substances does not mean that there are no activities.  This might be something like what people mean by suchness.  The way Ruyer makes these pure insubstantial activities the building blocks of his metaphysical universe gives a new spin to the notion of Idealism.  Ideas do not exist exclusively inside the brains or minds of hairless chimps.  They are not objects seen by subjects, but are themselves subjects, "autosubjective" forms of absolute survey.  They form a real dimension of being, a "metaphysical transversal" whose properties seem much less mysterious and mystical if we understand them by analogy to Square's interaction with Sphere.

You can see that I've already started mixing dharma concepts with this reading of Ruyer.  While I'm not interested in trying to compare or reconcile the two as systems, I do want to note a few of the points of resonance between Ruyer's ideas and my current practice.

The most obvious connection is the way Ruyer's absolute domains of survey are just like the experience of Awareness.  When I settle into Empty Awareness or MahaSati, I find something akin to space, a container behind or beneath the objects it contains.  Space of course is a traditional metaphor for Awareness.  But Awareness is only like space; the two are subtly distinct.  Space as we normally experience it is actually a combination of space and time.  We infer it from the accumulation of the movement of objects.  The accumulation is very rapid, and the objects can be very subtle (eg. just the movement of attention itself), but nevertheless with sufficient concentration, we can see how space itself is constructed step-by-step.  Awareness, by contrast, is not constructed.  It is given all at once in its entirety and excludes even the possibility of movement.  It is the 'space' in which spacetime can be constructed, and it seems to know all of itself at once, without needing any investigation.  The analogy to a domain of absolute survey is clear.  The traditional idea that Awareness is aware of itself exactly parallels Ruyer's concept of "autosubjectivity".  Awareness is a (non-substantial) being that is simultaneously a knowing. 

The second point of contact is closely related to the first.  Awareness is not a conceptual construct (until I start trying to write about it).  It is not the same as what I normally call ideas or concepts, which are objects that might appear within Awareness, but should not be confused with it.  It's more a sense of embodied presence, though the 'body' here would, following the traditional classification of the mind as one of the six sense doors, explicitly include mental content.  All the objects of perception, including mental perception, are on one side, while Awareness is something entirely different.  This resonates perfectly with Ruyer's insistence on the primacy of the organism over the brain.  While he speaks of domains of absolute survey as 'conscious', he repeatedly insists that he is referring to a "primary consciousness" of the organism, the embryo, that gives rise to the brain as a tool.  Psychological consciousness and its mental events are, just like the Buddhists insist, secondary phenomena.  In neither case is this meant to denigrate the mind as a type of awareness.  For Ruyer the brain is an equipotential surface analogous to the organism, and of course nirvana is not the same as unconsciousness.  But there is a clear order of development between these two.  This raises the question of whether we could think of meditation as a process of accessing the primary consciousness of our organism.  This would be something like a coupling or resonance between this primary consciousness and our cerebral consciousness.  While an intriguing thought, I'm not sure how useful this idea really proves, since in the end every type of absolute domain -- whether physical, organic, or conscious -- is ultimately analogous to every other.  Though perhaps it can at least reinforce our attempt to stretch beyond our cerebral consciousness and consider an Awareness that we are but that is not 'ours'. 

The final point of comparison bears on the question of freedom.  Early on, we examined Ruyer's idea of freedom.  Ruyer's absolute domains are free in the only sense that matters -- they feel free, their action of existence is free and self-positing.  Debates about free will and determinism are completely sterile if we understand freedom as merely the opposite of determinism.  The freedom of in-determination, of some eruption of quantum chance or pure internal will into an otherwise completely determined universe, is not the sort of freedom we should want.  This freedom from all determinate limits is indeed an illusion.  Nevertheless, there's still an important distinction between feeling free and not feeling free.  We encountered this same issue in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche -- the feeling of freedom is the feeling of self determination, the paradoxical feeling of being simultaneously the one who commands and the one who obeys.  It's a feeling of there being no resistance to a power of acting, the zone where we are not separated from our power of acting.   Ruyer's scheme provides another angle on this question by suggesting that all absolute domains are primordially free activities, but that they can nevertheless be 'colonized' by other domains.

The act and the actualization that perfectly obey the idea or theme for which they aim would manifest its dynamism without the I-act of the "agent" experiencing it as an "impression of force." But it is enough—this is practically always the case, owing to the internal hierarchical structure of beings—that a gene be actualized for the force to be experienced as well as manifested, for the manifestation of an idea, an instinct, a haunting memory to be impeded by an external or internal obstacle and the impression of force to appear immediately in both the impeded being and the impeding being. Then there is struggle, the effort of two beings or two subindividualities in conflict, whose resolution will be the constitution of a more unitary system. This is why, if force in its essence results from the physicochemical nature of the unitary domain, the impression of force results from the relative alterity of two interacting domains or of two subindividualities in a complex domain. The felt force is always the "ideal" or the "virtue" of an "other" experienced from the outside. When the alterity is absolute, the "other" seeks to eliminate me. When it is relative, the other acts by trying to "convert" or "persuade" me, and I act on him in the same way. We think we are speaking in metaphors when we apply these psychological descriptions to force in general, when we speak of the "force" of an authority that persuades us and converts us to its ideal. But in fact we discover here the truly primary nature of force. (NF, 209)

I find this an interesting quote in a number of respects.  The first line recapitulates Ruyer's equation of an absolute domain with free activity.  But since this freedom literally defines the being of the individual domain, it's not as if there's any effort or force exerted to be free.  In and of itself, the individual is free in just being -- though this being is inherently active.  This seems similar to what the idea of wu wei or the non-doing of shikantaza is pointing towards.  Or as the Tibetans often put it, we are already free -- it's not something that requires a special practice or effort.

On the other hand, our free activity is never alone.  Ruyer hasn't gone into the question of the power dynamics between absolute domains, but this idea of colonizer and colonized seems similar to what we saw with Nietzsche's notion of the master and slave.  The last line, in fact, could come almost straight out of Deleuze's book on Nietzsche -- we can identify the will to power with the action of colonization that brings together a unified domain constructed of other individuals.  When these other individuals are brought together in the right way, they become us, or as Ruyer puts it, we "possess" them in the manner in the manner of a spirit possessing a shaman.  But of course, we are sometimes ourselves possessed by another individual.  This seems like it would correspond to a becoming reactive, to becoming the pure mechanism or tool or organ of another finalist activity than the one which defines us.  In other words, colonization tends to convert us into a step-by-step machine.  Our experience of effort, of limitation, of reactivity -- in short, of unfreedom -- is then at bottom an encounter either with some other recalcitrant individual that does not wish to be colonized, or of our own resistance to being colonized.  And the way to overcome this feeling is not to aspire to the impossible role of always being the colonizer, but to so harmonize ourselves with the other individuals 'above' and 'below' ourselves that all our individual activities become simultaneously compatible.  This sort of non-violence may be impossible within a Nietzschean view, but it seems to consonant with the aim of Ruyer's theological myth.

The Royal We

In retrospect, it's obvious that an avowed Neo-Platonist's philosophy will end with a new myth.  In the end, it's even the same old myth, really the only myth -- the story of how the divine appears in the world, and the story of how, by recognizing or remembering the divine, we tend to converge with it.  Ruyer self consciously ends his masterpiece with a modern version of the metaphysical myth, and at the same time assures us that there is no way to turn this myth into objective knowledge.  For Ruyer, all metaphysics is mythical by its nature.  So the myth is not just his optional flight of poetic fancy, but is necessitated by a world of individual transspatial forms.  This is because each form is in a sense closed on to itself, an absolute autosubjectivity that ultimately knows nothing beyond its self, even if it also knows that this self appears to have boundaries.  Naturally though, we are just one of these forms.  So the connection with the other forms is never through direct observation, but only through analogy, inference, or the sort of 'divine seeing' we call intuition -- in short, through myth.  Nevertheless, if it should happen that all the individual forms are in truth One, why then our myth would become reality, and repeating it to ourselves would turn us, and everything else, into God.

Ruyer's theory poses the same problem as every metaphysical theory, the problem that leads us to call them myths.  How can a particular creature, that is clearly a limited part of the universe, someone encompass the whole thing from a divine perspective? How can we be us and at the same time be God?  Every metaphysics suffers from this problem because it takes the God's eye view and attempts to exhaustively describe reality as if from outside (NF, 225)  The attempt can't help but fall into contradiction or infinite regress when we try to describe our describing, etc ... In a sense, we might even consider this the opposite paradox of the axiological cogito with which we began.  Any particular meaningful statement we make -- even, "the world is meaningless" -- automatically proves that there exist meaningful statements.  By contrast, every total metaphysical theory we propose creates a contradiction in the every act of proposing it.  One activity is self-positing, the other self-negating.  We exist; therefore we are not everything.

The problem of how we can articulate a theory of everything from within everything corresponds to the problem Ruyer faces in defining the notion of God within his system.  He has told us that all real beings are absolute domains, unified forms of activity held together by their striving for a transspatial Ideal.  And he's shown us many of these individuals, along with the three broad classes they fall into -- physical quanta, organic forms, and consciousnesses.  His universe is constructed entirely of these fibers of individuality that split and bifurcate and transform into one another.  Since these seem to occur in a sort of 'colonial' hierarchy where individuals subsume sub-individuals and in their turn become the 'material' for super-individuals, the question arises of whether there is a largest individual.  More precisely, the question arises of whether this theoretical largest individual would actually count as an individual?  Is the totality of the universe, the collection of all finalist activities, itself a finalist activity, an absolute domain?  Does the universe as a whole aim for some Ideal?  As with metaphysics, we encounter here a paradox of self-reference when we try to apply the concept of finalism at this largest scale.  If the only real entities are the individual finalist activities, then their collection is not itself an individual, which proves that finalism actually isn't universal, and perhaps even implies that there is no such real thing as 'the universe'.  On the other hand, if we say that this totality forms an individual which claims to be the largest finalist activity, we run into a problem of infinite regress, since it seems we would always need to add this largest activity to the set of all activities to create a new larger set, and so on ...

If every finality presupposes agent, unitary domain of work, and ideal, does the finality of the world, that is, the fact that it is assembled in such a way as to render particular finalist activities possible, require in its turn agent, unitary domain, and ideal? God as Sense of senses or End of ends is thus no more intelligible than God as Cause of causes or Being of beings. In both cases, one is caught between an infinite regress and the negation of the concept one sought to raise to the second power—which seems to reduce the concept itself to a fantasy.  Either the Sense of senses is senseless or we have to search for the sense of the sense of senses, and so forth. (NF, 240)

If the only realities are individual finalist activities, then a God which transcends these and orders them as if from outside would not be real.  But without a God, we have no explanation of why the individual finalist activities exist nor why they form continuous fibers and even seem to compose the elaborate and often harmonious tapestry we call the Cosmos. God, it turns out, is a problem whether he exists or not.

Ruyer's solution to this problem is very interesting.  He advocates a form of gnosticism.  That is, he thinks God indeed exists, but that he hides himself.  Here is how his myth ends.

In brief, the creation of real beings is so successful that beings are at once free and yet made to work in a direction in which creation would encounter no obstacle. Provided they labor and exploit their faculties, they discover all that is indispensable to their existence: energy, material, fields of action of all kinds. To the point that they sometimes believe themselves to be true gods, children of chaos, the only conscious beings, the sole beings capable of judgment, choice, and projects. Creation is carried out so well that it remains invisible to the creatures. God guides beings without impelling them. And when beings, while benefiting from the resources of creation and using their language and brain to speak, declare that they have realized that God is only a myth, it is at that moment that God is satisfied and can proclaim his creation good. (NF, 227)

Of course, the original gnostics believed that God was hidden because he was removed from the world, hidden behind it, in transcendence.  By contrast, Ruyer's God is hidden in plain sight, hidden within the world, immanently.  This is a very difficult thought that can seem like attempt to square the circle.  He ends up asserting the reality of distinct individual finalist activities at the same time that he asserts their unity.  Ruyer has naturally been preparing the ground for this conclusion throughout the book by highlighting the analogy between and continuity of the three types of individuals he's discussed.  All his individuals have the same overall form of absolute survey.  Nevertheless, this threatens to reduce the world to a single individual at the root of the analogy.  It's only if I keep in mind that the way the individuals are distinct is different from the way they are the same -- if diversity and unity happen on different conceptual 'levels' -- that I can see this as a solution to the problem.  All the individuals are different expressions of the same process of individuation.  God is the structure of this process rather than any particular example of it.  He is embedded in the world without being of it. 

There is one and only one way of escaping the contradiction: to identify God not with a being, a sense, or an activity transcendent to the world but with the two poles of all finalist activities whose totality constitutes the world. God is thus supreme Agent as well as supreme Ideal; and "Creativity" cannot be distinct from a God who is at once and indissociably Agent and Ideal. (NF, 240)

Only finalist activities exist. God also exists.  Yet God is not himself a finalist activity.  He is Finalist Activity.  Process. The Form of all activity.  God is the structure of freedom, the structure of striving after an Ideal, the structure of the actual-virtual, Agent-Ideal split and the Activity of being/knowing this split implies.  Ruyer has already told us that this is a mythical and somewhat mystical conclusion.  Activity in itself is ungraspable and unknowable except through its expression in the particular activities that we are.  And yet the endless bifurcation and colonization of these activities never exhausts the Form of Activity.  It's a peculiar and paradoxically satisfying ending for NeoFinalism -- precisely because it isn't one.