I’ve been reading several books at once again. As has happened before, I find one book serendipitously commenting on another. The first book is What is Life by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. The second is Essays and Aphorisms, an abridgement of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena.
Margulis and Sagan have been talking about life as “purposeful matter.” Though perhaps none too clear about what to replace it with, they complain about the classical scientific model of the universe as a mechanism which (in their own words) “fails to account for our own self-awareness and self-determination because the mechanical worldview denies choice. Mechanisms, after all, don’t act, they react.” As they contemplate the Gaia hypothesis (based on the unlikely miracles of the long term maintenance of the earth’s temperature, atmospheric balances and oceanic salinities across geologic time) they even speak of a “mammal-like purposefulness in the organization of life as a whole.”
Schopenhauer’s thought also seems bound to his experience of the existence of “will.” He complains about the scientific model of mechanism in words that are eerily reminiscent of What is Life? “If there exists no natural force whose essential property is just as much to act purposefully as it is the essential property of gravity to keep physical bodies together, which moves, directs and orders the entire complex workings of the organism, and which expresses itself in the same way as gravity expresses itself in the phenomenon of falling, then life is only a semblance, an illusion, and every creature is in reality a mere automaton, i.e. a play of mechanical, physical and chemical forces.” Like Margulis and Sagan he has no truck with those who deny “will” or consciousness to other mammals and even sees will or mind pervading the ostensibly “dead” matter of the world we inhabit.
Margulis and Sagan invoke the principles of “autopoiesis” and “emergence” as a non-theistic explanation of the existence of freedom. Schopenhauer invokes the still scientifically respectable concept of the “life force” from his own time. From the outside it seems to me that both of them are groping for “sciency” words to express from within an avowedly empirical worldview some of the insights of the mystical experience, specifically the experiences of consciousness and freedom. Odd how “empirical,” which is supposed to mean ‘based on experience’ has come instead to mean ‘based on a very narrow set of experiences – those that involve measurement.’ Margulis/Sagan seem to me to be trying to widen the scientific view of the world to include some universal (but not quantifiable) human experiences. I’m going to resist a temptation to take a detour down the side passage that opens up here into the limitations of mechanical/mathematical/scientific models of knowledge, but maybe we’ll come back to it before the end (I hope it does, because I think you would find it entertaining to watch me champion some major components of Elder Packer’s much maligned “The Law and the Light”).
What I want to do instead is continue down the path of thinking about freedom. For the third text I have been reading is the Book of Mormon. Here I’ve been reading topically, rather than straight through as I’ve been doing with the other two. With the New Year approaching and its normal accompaniment of evaluation of past directions and the setting of new goals, I’ve been reading on the topic of CHOICES. My starting point has been Second Nephi Chapter Two. Early in my life this chapter seemed to me to be a glimpse into the underlying structure of the universe. Though my conclusions differed markedly from Skousen’s, my approach to the text was similar to his – I assumed the intent of the passage was to reveal the mechanics of how agency worked, and that by carefully piecing together insights here with other scriptures a reasonably complete schematic or wiring diagram of the true “nature of things” could be assembled. Though three decades later I’m still awed and amazed by the depth of Lehi’s insights, I find myself less certain about just what it is I am being given a glimpse of in this inspired text.
I bring this up because I want to make clear what I am and what I am not trying to do. I’m not trying to create a Mormon Theology in the style of Blake Ostler. I’m not working on the assumption that the revelations we have are, say, the equivalent of an automotive manual that details the workings of a car and its systems in such a way that we can clearly trace the details of causes and effects. I’m assuming that they resemble much more the sketchy user’s manual that comes with any new automobile and which contains useful and necessary information for the safe long term use and maintenance of the vehicle. I am assuming that the information is accurate but limited – i.e. geared to the understanding of a mortal being working WITHIN the veil, with no memory and little direct experience of the vast realities that lie beyond the narrow confines of this specialized environment. A user’s manual does not provide a wiring diagram. It doesn’t trace the flow of fuel through the engine, nor the path of air intake and the exit of exhaust. A careful reading of it does, however, allow us to know that fuel and air and electricity are all necessary to the functioning of our automobile. That is all I aim to do with Freedom in these emails, tease out a few of the elements involved in the functioning of agency and the admittedly limited things we might be able to say about how they relate to each other.
I have no intention of attempting the systematic theologian’s self-imposed task of recreating some kind of authoritative mechanic’s automotive manual (a task that Mormon theologian Adam Miller usefully describes as follows – “Doing theology is like building a comically circuitous Rube Goldberg machine: you spend your time tinkering together an unnecessarily complicated, impractical, and ingenious apparatus for doing things that are, in themselves, simple”). I also have no intention of being all that careful or complete. These emails are working notes of a study in progress, not the thoughtful statement of a completed project of analysis being prepared for publication. There will be dead-ends, mistakes, revisions, recantations, back tracking and some covering of the same ground yet again in an attempt to refine my understanding. Assume all conclusions to be perennially tentative. Feel free to question, challenge or expand on what I’m doing.
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