Reductional Enchantment in a Time-Relational and Reflexive Universe
As I write these very words, I am held and propelled by time. The due date for this assignment is approaching and I’m running out of time. Time’s trajectory infuses my psyche, and with every word I type I get closer to the destination (submission). The process begins while my destination awaits. Nonetheless, time will feel different once I’ve reached my destination. Thereon, I won’t be dealing with the pressure of time, so I may feel a sense of timelessness. Still, the clocks will tick, the earth will circulate the sun, and the trains will run. Is time outside of me then? As I contemplate this question, I am told that lunch will be served at 1:00pm. Just like that, time has entered into my being again. I can’t escape it - even timelessness is experienced within time. So what and where is time then? A timeless question for a timeful world.
In his famously difficult essay Uji, Zen Master Dōgen wrote:
An Old Buddha said:
For the time being, I stand astride the highest mountain peaks.
For the time being, I move on the deepest depths of the ocean floor.
For the time being, I’m three heads and eight arms.
For the time being, I’m a staff or a whisk.
For the time being, I’m a pillar or a lantern.
For the time being. I’m Mr. Chang or Mr. Li.
For the time being, I’m the great earth and heavens above (Tanahashi, 2010).
For Dōgen, “time being” means time, just as it is, is being - being is all time. By asking: how can we expect to come to some realization when we think enlightenment is “out there” rather than “right here, right now,” Dōgen gains insight into the inseparable nature of practice and enlightenment. Thus leading him to the inseparable nature of being and time: “Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or world is left out of the present moment (Tanahashi, 1995).” Dōgen’s realization of being-time is a possible answer to the question of where time is: in the present moment. However, to answer the question of what time is with “being” seems redundant; since being-time is inseparable. If time is being, and being is the entire world, then Dōgen may be hinting at the relational nature of time.
When asked: “what time is it?” and the response is: “4:00pm,” what is it indiciating? The time does not only tell you about the sun’s position in the sky, it provides you with a network of information: the pharmacy is closing soon; the meeting is starting now; a friend is waiting at a cafe; mom’s flight from Tokyo has landed. 4:00pm is valuable information because it helps you orient yourself, and the orientation is always in relation to something or someone. Thus, 4:00pm doesn’t exist independently, it becomes meaningful when it manifests between relational entities. Dōgen’s being-time then, can be understood as becoming - which holds the essence of his teachings on impermanence: “Impermanence can be understood not just as fleeting stability, but as an expression of process and interconnection. It is when we embrace the impermanence of being-time that we drop our egocentric self and fully participate in the total activity of all beings’ time because we can now perceive ourselves as part of the whole (Roberts, 2018).” This wholeness is also what Alfred North Whitehead called the extensive continuum:
Every entity in its relationship to other actual entities is in this sense somewhere in the continuum, and arises out of the data provided by this standpoint. But in another sense it is everywhere throughout the continuum; for its constitution includes the objectifications of the actual world and thereby includes the continuum….Thus the continuum is present in each actual entity, and each actual entity pervades the continuum (1978).
In his process-relational metaphysics, Whitehead provides an alternative to substance dualism - wherein the world no longer consists of independent entities, but rather actual occasions. Thus, the extensive continuum is an expression of a matrix of actual occasions. Each actual occasion of experience is a microcosmic expression of the macrocosm, and space-time unfolds as this process of creative interpenetration emerges (Odin, 2016). From a Whiteheadian perspective, process and becoming equate to a universe that is time-developmental.
In his philosophy of organism, Whitehead protests against two modes of thought that have hijacked modern philosophy and science: bifurcation of nature and misplaced concreteness. In the former, Whitehead attempts to rescue Nature by reinterpreting it as, “what we are aware of in perception,” and through that rejects the bifurcation between subject and object. By doing so, he manages to construct a metaphysics that is no longer based on duality, but rather on polarity (Segall, 2018). Mind and matter are not separated through Cartesian dualism, instead they are like “opposite poles of a battery or magnet; they are necessarily together (Kling, 2018).” With the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Whitehead emphasizes that an abstraction should not be mistaken for something that is concrete. In other words: the map is not the territory. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness also resists reductionism, since an actual occasion cannot be deduced to a fundamental and static entity. However, I will explore this notion a little further, and investigate how process philosophy necessitates some form of reductionism - not just physical but psychical as well. By exploring reductionism through both, mind and matter, I aim to honor Whitehead’s conception of a dipolar reality. Moreover, to truly perceive a reality that is in process, requires one to understand how the moving parts relate to each other, and facilitate the unfolding of the whole. Thus, rather than a linear - parts-to-whole - approach towards understanding process-relational metaphysics, I am proposing a reflexively bidirectional - parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts - perspective of process philosophy.
In Whitehead’s cosmology, process can be understood through his reconstruction of perception into prehension. Unlike perception - which has traditionally been understood through a representational lens - prehension “implies the internal relations between subject and its world. Every occasion, then, is both subjective and objective - subjective as it is concrescing, but then perishing into objective fact and becoming a superjective datum for the next concrescing moment (Kling, 2018).” Thus, there is no separation between the perceiver and the perceived, as the object becomes part of the subject. Once a prehensive unification occurs, the actual occasion emerges through concrescence. “Concrescence,” as Segall eloquently describes it - is the way “a particular actual occasion’s many prehensions of other occasions becomes one, thereby adding one more realized unity of experience - another “here I am!” - to the ongoing creative advance of the cosmic community: “the many become one, and are increased by one” (2018).” Through this process of prehension and concrescence, the entirety of the cosmos actualizes potentials in the form of actual occasions. As occasions oscillate between mind and matter, past and present, subject and object, reality is expressed in the form of experience. Thus, for Whitehead, experience is the ground of reality. Consciousness on the other hand, as Griffin writes, is the “subjective form of an intellectual feeling, which arises, if at all, only in a late phase of a moment of experience (Weber & Weekes, 2011).” Ultimately, Whitehead’s process-relational reality is panexperiential; and therefore, it can be applied to electrons just as much as it can to sentient beings.
While Whitehead’s philosophy allows for “anthrodecentrism,” it is crucial to recognize that a form of reductionism is being utilized in his metaphysical scheme. In his invention of prehension, Whitehead had to break down the traditional understanding of perception and its categories (subject and object; past and present; mind and matter), to then reformulate these parts into his coherent process of prehension and concrescence. Yet, his process indicates that the dipolar categories are separate but interrelated. Furthermore, his formulation of panexperientialism also required him to reduce consciousness to its fundamental property (experience), and shift the role of consciousness from central to peripheral reality. Thus, the view of reality is also being reduced into parts. I say this not to criticize Whitehead's philosophy, but to amplify the role that reductionism plays in our understanding of the world. By doing so, I hope to shift the way in which reductionism is viewed in philosophy. To truly “see” life as a whole process, requires one to understand how the parts come together to form relationships and experiences. Reductionism should be recognized as a form of intimacy - intimacy with the whole, through the parts.
According to systems thinkers Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, the unfolding of history can be understood metaphorically as “a chaotic pendulum in the sense of chaos theory - oscillations that almost repeat themselves but not quite, seemingly random and yet forming a complex, highly organized pattern. The basic tension is one between the parts and the whole (2014)” The parts pertain to a mechanistic, reductionist or atomistic paradigm, while the whole relates to a holistic, organismic, or ecological worldview. When the pendulum swings to the side of parts, periods like the Scientific Revolution become the dominant paradigm. However, when the pendulum swings in the direction of the whole, a more holistic worldview like the Renaissance takes root. Thus, in this manner, the unfolding of history occurs reflexively - between the parts and the whole. So then a question emerges: like the dipolar aspects in Whitehead’s metaphysics, can his philosophy of organism itself be a dipolar speculation, wherein reductionism is seen as the opposite pole?
In his book, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Frank Wilczek rescues reductionism with a computer generated fractal image:
Does knowing that the image can be “reduced” to strict mathematics detract from its beauty? For me, and I trust for you, the revelation that simple mathematics can encode this structure adds to its beauty. It still looks the same, of course, as an image. But now you can also, with your mind’s eye, see it from another perspective, as an embodiment of concepts. It is both Real, and Ideal.
Therefore, “reductionism is expansionary,” says Wilczek (2015). So now, we have a dipolar reality within reductionism as well: expansionary and intimate. By reducing a piece of music to its parts (e.g. notation, intervals, wavefunction, equations), one has the ability to appreciate the song on a conceptually intimate level. Reflexively, as the music emerges from its parts, one can admire the song in its totality. Furthermore, as Wilczek stated, reduction adds beauty to the whole. And this is precisely how reductionism plays a crucial role in the teleology of Whitehead’s God.
God, in Whitehead’s universe, is not equivalent to that of the Abrahamic religions. Rather, God is a facilitator and participator of creativity. Furthermore, “God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities (Sjöstedt-H, 2015).” The teleology of God is beauty, through an intensification of experience. In other words, God provides the lure for actual occasions towards more intense experiences (Kling, 2018). Beauty though, is not always something which evokes a sense of symmetry and perfection; it can most definitely be experienced through sublime suffering as well. In this manner, beauty can be understood through the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi. A wabi-sabi aesthetic provides a dipolar reality to beauty, in which entities are both evolving and devolving:
In representations of wabi-sabi, arbitrarily perhaps, the devolving dynamic generally tends to manifest itself in things a little darker, more obscure, and quiet. Things evolving tend to be a little lighter and brighter, a bit clearer, and slightly more eye-arresting. And nothingness itself - instead of being empty space, as in the West - is alive with possibility. In metaphysical terms, wabi-sabi suggests that the universe is in constant motion toward or away from potential (Koren, 1994).
Wabi-sabi aligns with Whitheadian metaphysics because it embraces the incomplete and transient nature of reality - an actual occasion is created, and then it perishes. Furthermore, the polarity between evolution and devolution aligns with the metaphor of the pendulum. Swinging between the parts and the whole, creativity also manifests between the beautiful and the ugly. However, it is important to keep in mind that ugliness is also considered to be a kind of beauty in the world of wabi-sabi. Ultimately, wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, and it requires the process of breaking down to acquire a sense of appreciation:
Like homeopathic medicine, the essence of wabi-sabi is apportioned in small doses. As the doses decrease, the effect becomes more potent, more profound. The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become. Consequently, to experience wabi-sabi means you have to slow way down, be patient, and look very closely (Koren, 1994).
Thus, wabi-sabi holds within it, the wisdom of reductionism as an expansionary and intimate process. As reducing something to its fundamental aids in the nonexistence of the whole; so does the perception of the whole aid in the nonexistence of the parts. Ultimately, this dynamic interplay creates an intensification of experience, as God lures actual entities towards and away from “beauty.”
It seems then, that every part of the universe operates under a dipolar process. Thus, in a Whiteheadian sense, not only do actual occasions emerge from a relational process, but the dipolar functions themselves are in relationship. Speaking of relational, where did time go? Perhaps we can take a closer look at time to understand the dipolar processes. Firstly, let’s investigate the physical dimension of time through the physical object of the clock. When observing a clock, one is usually gripped by the instantaneously flowing experience of time. However, when one looks inside the clock, an intricately designed mechanism appears. What is uncovered beneath the surface of the mere face and hands of the clock, is an unfolding of tremendous complexity. At this point, intimacy is deepened through the act of making the clock transparent. If we were to go a little further and break the mechanistic process into its parts, we would find: a mainspring (stores mechanical energy to power the clock), a wheel train (transmits the force of the mainspring to the balance wheel), a balance wheel (oscillates back and forth), an escapement mechanism (keeps the balance wheel vibrating by giving it a push with each swing), and an indicating dial (displays the time in human readable form). Now, the clock is not ticking anymore - it’s nonexistent. Yet, I can see all the parts that help create the clock: how the parts relate to each other, and the way in which the mechanism operates. Therefore, when I put the parts back into its wholesome state, I will have arrived at it with greater intimacy through the process of reductionism. Moreover, the face of the clock will now have an expansionary effect on my perception of time.
Now let’s take a look at the more psychical side of time, through the making of the clock; within a historical narrative. In his book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014), Steven Johnson takes his reader through a journey of time. From the tracking of heavenly rhythms to checking our smartphones, the understanding and manifestation of time has undergone a deep transformation over the course of history. Humanity’s urge to concretize abstract time into the clock begins with nineteen-year-old Galileo Galilei. His intersectional understanding of: pendulum swinging altar lamps, motion and the moons of Jupiter, the rise of the global shipping industry and its new demand for accurate clocks, allowed him to synthesize and concretize time. Johnson writes, “physics, astronomy, maritime navigation, and the daydreams of a college student: all these different strains converged in Galileo’s mind. Aided by his son, he began drawing up plans for the first pendulum clock.”
Then, time entered into the industrial age, in which the day was no longer measured in the form of abstract, mathematical units, but described in terms of the time required to complete a task (e.g. how long it would take to milk a cow or nail soles to a new pair of shoes). Thus, time is now considered a currency; it is not passed but spent. During this period, the need for clocks to be democratized and standardized increased as railroads were being built. At the same time, there was an eruption of backlash against the revolution as people didn’t want their flow of experience to be nailed to a mathematical grid. However, logistics and the movement of life pushed the revolution forward as air travel increased. This facilitated the invention of GMT (the international clock), which allowed the whole globe to be divided into time zones.
The 50s gave birth to the atomic clock, allowing for the measurement of nanoseconds. “Everytime you glance down at your smartphone to check your location,” says Johnson, “you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.” GPS owes its credentials to time, since it determines your location by comparing clocks. Ultimately, “each new advance in timekeeping enables a corresponding advance in our mastery of geography - from ships, to railroads, to air traffic, to GPS.” Herein lies the essence of space-time: measuring time is the key to measuring space. However, understanding space and time as a dipolar reality requires the comprehension of relationality. Johnson synthesizes the story of time, and descriptively writes:
Embedded in your ability to tell the time is the understanding of how electrons circulate within cesium atoms; the knowledge of how to send microwave signals from satellites and how to measure the exact speed with which they travel; the ability to position satellites in reliable orbits above the earth, and of course the actual rocket science needed to get them off the ground; the ability to trigger steady vibrations in a block of silicon dioxide - not to mention all the advances in computation and microelectronics and network science necessary to process and represent that information on your phone. You don’t need to know any of these things to tell the time now, but that’s the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repositories of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them. Your mind is silently assisted by all that knowledge each time you check your phone to see what time it is, but the knowledge itself is hidden from view.
As Johnson described, when we look at our phone or watch, we don’t actually “see” the process. But the tale of time is one of process - a multidisciplinary, relational, and fragmented process. To uncover this process, we had to go from whole-to-parts by reducing the clock into its pieces and stories. Through this act of reduction we have acquired a new level of intimacy with time. As we move from parts-to-whole, our perception of time will have an expansionary aura. Thus, 5:35 am is not just an indication of the sun’s specific position in the sky; it is the entire process that helped generate those very symbols on your clock or phone. Essentially, the physical clock is not an adequate example for the ontology of temporality. Rather, the making of the clock is a more accurate description of experienced time. Similarly to how the overlapping relationship between past and present creates the thickness of the psychological present (Pachalska & Duncan, 2009), the parts and the whole have an overlapping or oscillating dynamic that allows for a more integrative experience of the process. For this understanding of time to emerge, the reductionist approach had to be utilized in order to uncover and bring to surface the process in its entirety. By doing so, Whitehead’s God is also being honored. Especially since, “God is the clockwork by which Creativity unwinds its infinite coil (Sjöstedt-H, 2015).” Therefore, each actual entity gets a glimpse into the process from God’s eye view.
In the world of psychedelics, this process can deepen alongside reductionism. Peter Sjöstedt-H (2015) shares his understanding of the role of Whitehead’s God within psychedelic phenomenology (psy-phen), and its transformative capacity:
God ordinarly immerses Himself into us as He is the combined actual multiplicity of the universe of which we are a part; our individual perspectives are His partial perspectives. I am sound, you are vision. His is both and more in one. With psy-phen we reverse that immersion: we diffuse into Him rather than He into us [...] We are not becoming God, we are vectoring into Him, fusing with Him to an extent greater than the common fusion thereto with its proliferative negative prehensions. It is an apotheosis qualified by symbiosis. God benefits by this reversed infusion because the potential becomes actual (though not physical) through our part, and hence conscious.
To put psy-phen into further context, it would be useful to introduce Stanislav Grof and his concepts of COEX system and Basic Perinatal Matrix (BPM). Grof (2000) explains:
A COEX system consists of emotionally charged memories from different periods of our life that resemble each other in the quality of emotion or physical sensation that they share. Each COEX system has a basic theme that permeates all its layers and represents their common denominator. The individual layers then contain variations on this basic theme that occurred at different periods of the person’s life. The unconscious of a particular individual can contain several COEX constellations. Their number and the nature of the central themes varies considerably from one person to another.
Thus, someone who may have experienced a traumatic event (e.g. physical abuse by a father) will find themselves unconsciously repeating that trauma in indirect ways throughout their lives. Consequently, the emotions and behaviors that are attached to that initial trauma creates a COEX system. One type of trauma that all humans have in common is that of birth:
The intimate connection between birth and death in our unconscious psyche makes eminent sense. It reflects the fact that birth is a potential or actual life-threatening event. The delivery brutally terminates the intrauterine existence of the fetus. He or she “dies” as an aquatic organism and is born as an air-breathing, physiologically and even anatomically different form of life. And the passage through the birth canal is, in and of itself, a difficult and possibly life-threatening event [...] Conscious reliving and integration of the trauma of birth plays an important role in the process of experiential psychotherapy and self-exploration.
Through his understanding of the perinatal experience, Grof formulated the Basic Perinatal Matrix, which constellates four distinct experiential patterns (BPMs) that have left an imprint on the deep unconscious of our psyches. Through numerous experiments and patient trials with LSD, Grof gained insight into how trauma is relieved. His work has shown that with high-dose psychedelic trips, one has the ability to shed the layers of their psyche down to the period in which they were a fetus. And by re-living the birth trauma, the psyche manages to reach a point of equilibrium; wherein, the trauma may no longer persist in the individual. Furthermore, Grof’s case studies have shown that past life experiences can also manifest under psychedelics. Thus, one has the ability to shed beyond the perinatal level.
Therefore, when Sjöstedt-H says, “We are not becoming God, we are vectoring into Him, fusing with Him to an extent greater than the common fusion thereto with its proliferative negative prehensions,” he is indicating that the reliving and relieving of trauma through psychedelics is our way of experiencing the process through God’s eye view. Furthermore, all the actual occasions that were prehended negatively are then concresced as the body and psyche reach a state of equilibrium. Although, I would slightly disagree with Sjöstedt-H on the notion that “the potential becomes actual (though not physical).” In many cases, the potential does actualize itself physically through the elimination of trauma. Ultimately, the psychedelic process of vectoring into God is also one of reductionism. By shedding the layers of the psyche to its fundamental occasion of experience (perinatal and/or past life experience) necessitates the whole-to-parts process. While returning to a state of equilibrium through the re-living of trauma reflexively generates the process of parts-to-whole. Finally, you acquire an intimate and expansionary experience of yourself and the cosmos.
Since reductionism and reflexivity are two ways in which process can be understood, I propose a new word that can capture this inextricably intertwined relationship between the two: reduxivity. Thus, to witness life as process-relational requires one to investigate it through a reduxive lens. It is important to remember that reductionism doesn’t only happen one way. Through reflexivity it becomes bidirectional, and can be understood through the dipolar functions of: intimacy and expansion; whole-to-parts and parts-to-whole; evolution and devolution. Ultimately, these dipolar functions are also what constitute the “relational” nature of process-relational metaphysics. And if time is relational then time is intimacy with all actual entities; it is expansionary; it is the parts; and it is the whole. Time is also evolving and devolving. That being said, the bidirectionality of time itself has not yet been accounted for within the dipolar function of mind and matter. That is to say, while psychedelics do allow one to travel through time in a psychical manner, it does not give the physical body permission to travel back in time. And as Whitehead said:
Whatever is found in “practice” must lie within the scope of the metaphysical description. When the description fails to include the “practice,” the metaphysics is inadequate and requires revision. There can be no appeal to practice to supplement metaphysics (1978).
So maybe reduxivity as a metaphysical description is inadequate and needs revision. However, like William James said, “Philosophy, like life, must keep the doors and windows open.” So for the time being, I keep this as an open premise; as there very well could be another layer of reduxivity that needs to occur in order for the “practice” to emerge. For the time being - as Dōgen would suggest - we should just practice the mystery:
For the time being, I stand astride the highest mountain peaks.
For the time being, I move on the deepest depths of the ocean floor.
For the time being, I’m three heads and eight arms.
For the time being, I’m a staff or a whisk.
For the time being, I’m a pillar or a lantern.
For the time being. I’m Mr. Chang or Mr. Li.
For the time being, I’m the great earth and heavens above.
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