Contemplation and Indwelling: The Path from Aesthetic Experience to Ethical Being

To contemplate is to consider something “care-fully” in order to do justice to its nature as it appears to us. It is just this sense of appearing that transforms an object of perception or memory into a subject, within which one dwells (in Michael Polanyi’s sense of indwelling). The subject captures our attention and provides a focus, but the attention is exploratory and imaginative, open to the implications of the figure confronting us. The idea of “dwelling" suggests both an activity on our part and a home, a place in which we find our identity, a safe centre from which we can make excursions and to which we may return.

The subject of contemplation does not exist as a puzzle or problem to be solved; it is more like a welcome mystery which may be clarified but not explained. Contemplation, though, is secondary to the initial reaction of mystery, of the moment to be savoured. We first enjoy the moment, then return to it in memory in order for contemplation to return us to the experience in its original vitality. Feeling, in Wordsworth’s famous definition, is “recollected in tranquility": the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does not actually exist in the mind".

A distinguishing quality of such moments is that of innocence. They work to isolate us from the pressures of “need” and “should”. They are what they are, and we are what we are, and so, curiously, we can become what we are in our reliving the moment though our imagination. In a happy childhood the moments follow upon one another with little interruption; the flow of experience carries each forward as a constant, implicit presence. The moment remains unexamined. The child “looks away” from it, as Thomas Hardy records:

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

This is Coleridge’s primary imagination: the vital, immediate and unreflective imagination which places us within the lived world. But imagination is the power that works also on memory, and it is this secondary imagination that establishes the identity of the moment as a defining feature of a self. It is an identity that occurs within the flow of experience, a differentiation not separated from the flow but an integral part of it. The secondary imagination relives the moment through re-enacting the feeling (the meaning) of its context in the lived world. The particular experience - the sight of the leech-gatherer for Wordsworth or of the hawthorns for Proust - is given its force in recollection by a repetition of the experienced context of the primary imagination. It is a return to the innocent gaze, but not that of the child "looking away”. Nor is it a "looking at” the experience, holding it at a distance, for there is no distinction now between a subject and an object of experience. It is the abstraction that imagination performs on the sensuous particulars of an experience, taking from that experience, not the superordinate category of analytic abstraction, but the living idea embodied in the particulars.

At the centre of a living idea is a value; the value is the unity found in the multitude of different moments. The quality inherent in the value is, therefore, exemplary, not summative. It provides, when developed from a purely personal or aesthetic outlook, a perspective that occupies the centre of one’s being, a centre from which the different but intrinsically related virtues can realise their vocation to illuminate the everyday. Clearing the mind of concerns, the cultivation of emptiness, is only efficient if emptiness is understood to be availability. In Marcel’s terms, this is a movement away from the possessiveness of having to the openness of being, and such openness requires the virtues of humility, concern, and care for others, for its fulfilment. In this sense, the aesthetic, though satisfying and complete in itself, is also the forerunner of the ethical, of art not only for itself but for the other.

We can understand how the participation of the audience that art appreciation requires carries over to an ethical participation that seeks to do justice to the nature of others. As with the notion of emptiness, so also with that much-vaunted disappearance of the self in meditative states. The purpose of the imaginative work involved in the meditation upon experience is precisely that of eliminating the self that possesses experience as an attribute of itself; an "internal” object, as it were, in a world of objects, in favour of a self which achieves its measure through its participation in the value of the other - other creatures and the natural world.

This is the sense of “inwardness” that Bugbee (1958) addressed in The Inward Morning. It is this sense that gave him belief in the pursuit of what he called the "somewhat absolute”. Keats talked of the modern need for "soul making” in order to oppose the constant presence of suffering and death in everyday life. Soul making is the pursuit of inwardness in which imagination works upon significant moments of memory to create an exemplary image. Think of how you remember a loved one. The image that comes to mind is that of an individual in a characteristic stance, one that seems to "sum up” that person without redundancy, to capture an essential form of their expressed being. And of course, it is not a “summing up” that contains the person; it is a moment of their expressiveness that you experience - it’s as though you are drawn to the centre of their being with ‘all’ its inherent potentiality.

The name given to this imaginative activity in phenomenology is eidetic intuition - the intuition of the essence of something defined as the guiding idea embracing the style of its sensuous exemplars. It relates to an aspect of mind that is both primal and capable of conscious elaboration: primal, since it precedes the appearance of the categorical mind and the digital handling of information; and a deliberate methodology that makes use of imaginative reflection to reveal the truth of an identity.

The Paradox of the "Somewhat Absolute": Reconciling Reason, Imagination, and the Ineffable (Colie, Schelling)

This intuition does not possess the containment of parts supplied by a categorical judgment. Shoes, hats and kimonos are contained within the category of clothes. There are relatively clear criteria by which we can assign objects to a category (the possibility of a new fashion for wearing a chair that can be unfolded when necessary simply combines two categories). The imaginative eidetic intuition, on the other hand, has no superordinate category; it claims, on the contrary, its own "absoluteness”. In what sense can this claim be comprehensible? How, also, can an absolute be qualified as “somewhat” - to qualify it is surely to deny its absoluteness?

One possible answer to these questions is to accept the paradoxical nature of the “somewhat absolute”. Paradox is an apparent contradiction that reveals an unspoken truth. While categorical thinking relates to the world of objects, its truth being that of an objectivity without subjective influence, the world of paradox is that of our symbolic relationship to the world. The one aims at the nature of actuality, the other at the nature of the possible. The possible cannot, by definition, be defined, for it always outruns the actual. Poetry, as all the Arts, functions within the virtual space and parallel time of life viewed in the light of its possibility and possibility knows no limit but itself: the absolute exists as possibility. The paradox affirms both the absolute and its containment within the possible.

The paradox of the somewhat absolute plays upon the possible meaning of the relationship of the two terms. In that sense the meaning of one part can only be understood in relation to the meaning of the other: the paradox is self-referential. As such it requires a self-referential response on the part of the reader who must ask: how can I make sense of this contradiction? The paradox is in the first place a stimulus to thought for its argument leads apparently to no clear conclusion. You yourself must arrive at whatever conclusion does justice to the two terms by changing your way of thinking to reveal what the paradox wishes you to conclude. Indeed, as Colie (2015) has shown, the tradition of paradox reached its high point in the Renaissance with examples across a wide literary spectrum. I shall examine just three of those - the first, a paradox of logic, the second of matters civil and secular, and the third of poetry in relation to the sacred.

The “Liar" paradox is often quoted as showing a logical contradiction. Epimenides the Cretan said, "All Cretans are liars”. If he told the truth, his statement is a lie, so he didn’t tell the truth; if he lied, his statement is true, but he did not lie. The paradox concerns the relation of Epimenides to his statement; if the statement took the traditional route of the syllogism (All Cretans are liars/ Epimenides is a Cretan/ therefore Epimenides is a liar.), there would be no contradiction. The problem arises because Epimenides himself, a singular Cretan, asserts that ‘all’ Cretans are liars without any appeal to logic. Strictly then, the Liar paradox is not a logical paradox because it lies outside the logic of the syllogism - logic does not proceed to its general conclusion on the basis of the opinion of the singular man.

This supposedly logical paradox thus fulfils its purpose in demonstrating its own absurdity. As Rosalie Colie points out, paradoxes are profoundly self-critical: this “logical" paradox criticises the rigidity and limitations of logic. She says of paradoxes in general: “Operating at the limits of discourse, redirecting thoughtful attention to the faulty or limited structures of thought, paradoxes play back and forth across terminal and categorical boundaries - that is they play with human understanding, that most serious of human activities" (Colie, 2015, p. 7). This idea of a thinking that ‘plays across’ boundaries expresses most clearly the role of imagination in our overcoming the limits attached to our habitual forms of thought.

As does that other capacity of paradox to imply that sometimes, probably most times, our actions cannot be decided by the application of a priori rules of reason. There is a great comic episode in ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ in which the latter responds to his friend, Panurge, who requires to be given definite advice on the question of whether he should marry. He responds by avoiding a judgment of one or the other choice. Each consideration that Panurge raises is met with approval, whether it is for or against marriage: "Then do not marry"; "Then marry in the name of God"; "Then do not marry"; "Then marry in the name of God". Pantagruel is not impressed, exclaiming that he "would rather try to raise a fart from the belly of a dead ass" than continue in this fashion. But by retaining the contradictions Panurge signifies that no one decision provides an ultimate answer that can be applied as a general rule. Not only do individuals differ and face different situations, difference inevitably exists in human relations. We may look upon this paradox as an indication of the new humanism of the Renaissance moving away from dogma, especially with its implication that the "problem" of marriage occurs for both men and women.

Both the Liar and the Marriage paradoxes argue for that flexibility of mind signified by Keats as negative capability. This need presents itself also in those paradoxes which address the tensions raised in the Renaissance period between belief and reason, religion and science. The narrative framework of the Christian religion faced the challenge of a restatement of reason in purely secular terms; the natural world, observed and interpreted, was to be the necessary course in which we could understand our "place" within the world. Dante’s ‘Comedy’, the crowning achievement of the Christian Middle Ages, had drawn a clear parallel between the secular and the sacred - life on earth symbolising the path to be taken to gain access to Paradise - to the extent that Erich Auerbach could describe Dante as, "the poet of the secular world". Scientific reason divorced the drama and poetry of the sacred from its roots in the secular; such beliefs could have no place within the impartial pursuit of science. How then, if one continued the wish to believe, should respond to this conflict?

By letting paradox reveal its own reason of course. The mythical Phoenix lives in a tree in an Eastern Paradise. Every thousand years it flies to a palm tree in Arabia to build itself a nest of spices. Here it is consumed by its own fire to be reborn and when full grown flies with its own ashes to lay them on the altar of the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis. Other birds and men join to celebrate its presence before it returns to its Paradise. Shakespeare omitted the central element of the myth, the bird’s resurrection, to create a myth of the love between the Phoenix (Beauty) and the Turtle Dove (Constancy). The sixth verse begins:

Here the Antheme doth commence.
Love and Constance is dead,
Phoenix and the Turtle fled,
In a mutuall flame from hence.

So they loved as loved in twaine,
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, Division none,
Number there in love was slaine.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seene,
Twixt this Turtle and his Queene;
But in them it were a wonder.

So betweene them Love did shine,
That the Turtle saw his right,
Flaming in the Phoenix sight;
Either was the others mine.

Propertie was thus appalled,
That the selfe was not the same:
Single Natures double name,
Neither two nor one was called.

Reason in its selfe confounded,
Saw Division grow together:
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well confounded,

That it cried, how true a twaine,
Seemeth this concordant one,
Love hath Reason, Reason none,
If what parts, can so remain.

Whereupon it made this Threne,
To the Phoenix and the Dove,
Co-supremes and starres of Love,
As Chorus to their Tragic Scene.

Reason, understood as linear, categorical, and analytic, does not have the capacity to contain those experiences in which a unity presents itself in apparent opposition (the one in the many): it can only comment upon Love by excluding it from its own domain through acts of reduction - it’s a fantasy, a fiction, a wish-fulfilment. Similarly, it cannot comprehend how "my end is my beginning”, or how inwardness corresponds to a true outwardness.

Paradox plays with opposites because the unity it aspires to can be revealed in the play of opposites; this unity cannot be a category or the outcome of a linear analysis, because the opposites are maintained within the unity: the Phoenix and the Dove retain their identity within the unity of Love. The unity, visible in its particulars as it may be, is invisible, silent, the empty-but-full centre which we praise as its Chorus.

Of course, paradox does not begin in the Renaissance. But its flowering in that period suggests that it has entered a stage beyond its use solely in rhetoric and logic, a phase in which the parts the mind entertains are no longer simply assertions which, taken together, reveal a paradox, but one in which the parts refer to the operations of the mind in its task of finding value in the world. Thus, reason and belief, the issue which now occupies our minds, is resolved by turning the tables on Reason - "Love has Reason, Reason none” - to suggest a realm of value which a certain kind of reason cannot grasp.

The paradox retains its essential structure of searching for a One that unites the apparent contradictions of the Many, but the One has moved "inwards” to reflect upon itself. It is hardly surprising that this inward movement occurs alongside the change of perspective from the medieval Christianity of Dante to the onset of a world described by Galileo or Locke; Rosalie Colie points to the decline of paradox after the epidemic of its appearance in the Renaissance. For the new Science contradictory assertions are to be reconciled through empirical investigation and logico-mathematical thinking. There is no place for paradox in such Science.

Thus arose the divide between Reason and Feeling and all the other taken- for-granted oppositions which still dominate Western theory - subject and object, the interior world of mind versus the external, objective world, the rational or the irrational, evidence, not belief. But all these contradictions are themselves paradoxes that are recognised as soon as we reflect that there is a reason to feeling and a feeling in reason: our lives are conducted on the basis of the paradox, not the contradiction. Thus, the Reason demonstrated by gathering empirical evidence and subjecting it to the linear analysis of logico- mathematical thinking may be a particular aspect of it that requires inclusion in a wider framework. In this connection the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, sometimes referred to as Aesthetic Idealism, played a crucial role. In aesthetic experience, he argued, the distinctions between subject and object and reason and feeling do not hold. How, he asked, can we do justice to this experience, which, from the viewpoint of Enlightenment Reason must be seen as irrational or, at best, an entertainment?

In the first place we must re-envisage our relationship to nature. The reflection of reason sees itself as in some sense outside of nature or at its periphery; we are thereby empowered to examine nature to examine the laws that govern its operations. But this stance, powerful though it may be, does not describe our primary relation to nature, in which we live without the discrimination between ourselves and the natural world: at this level, there is no perception of the distinction between the natural and the human. We cannot even be described as being “part” of nature, for we are immersed in its centre. Reflection which dismisses this state of being can only distort our understanding of what it means to be human - it is Vico’s “barbarism of reflection”.

We have seen in Chapter 2 how, prior to reflection itself, human life is embedded within the natural world; we survive as an animal among animals, making sense of the world through the symbolism of natural objects. There is in our primary encounters a co-relation between experience and the world which determines the manner in which human expressiveness is grounded in the natural world. Our creative response - the sacrifice, the cave painting, language itself - is an act of taking up, allowing the natural to become the human. It is the exercise of negative capability, of availability to the world’s offering.

This philosophy, Schelling recognised, has two, related implications (Berger & Whistler, 2020). Philosophy itself becomes genetic, uncovering the various forms of representation engendered by the grounding of the symbolic within the natural. His Philosophy thus joins the tradition established by Vico and developed further by Cassirer. But it also connects to that other philosophical tradition which "looks behind” established forms to emphasise the centrality of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ - the moment of movement from the ground to the expressed experience. Schelling maintains that the ground itself cannot be made explicit. Its totality is that of a diversity given by our vulnerability (Marcel would say, availability) to the world’s presence. As such it can only be experienced as the negative - what we are not. But, as with the similar notion of Zen emptiness, the negative functions as a positive, one that through the intentionality of consciousness achieves the transition from the inner to the outer world in symbolic representation. When we, in turn, contemplate or meditate upon this process of the mind, we comprehend how consciousness fulfils “the advent into being” referred to by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology. We find ourselves as the implicit One in the explicit Many.

We can understand now how expression and reflection combine in imagination. Only the imaginative reason of contemplation, which explores and integrates the implicit possibilities of expression can further the task of finding our selves within a meaningful world. But this symbolic adaptation does not form a closed system: the self achieves its identity by a continuous act of engagement, one in which the dynamic balance between availability and commitment is maintained. There are, perhaps, two pathologies here: without continuing openness, there is rigidity of perspective; without commitment to the other in experience, emptiness becomes narcissistic. Contemplation provides, as it were, an evolving midpoint within the circle of imagination, a centre from which we can speak. There is a distinguished history of philosophy, East and West, which has engaged with this issue to examine just how it might be said that we can speak from the centre of being, given that centre is ultimately indefinable. A number of important features emerge.

We cannot help but notice how a philosophy of contemplation often appears inseparable from an aesthetic, particularly, poetic vision. We have seen, for example, how poetry succeeds myth in the emergence of symbolic consciousness, and that Zen and Sufi mysticism are expressed as much in poetry as in philosophy. At the beginning of the Romantic Movement in England, it was Coleridge (2017) largely influenced by Schelling, who drew attention to the wholeness of mind discernible in both poetry and the philosophy inspired by poetry, attributing this spirit of unity to “that synthetic and magical power to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination”. Let’s return to that previously cited passage:

This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed control, laxis effer- tur habenis, reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial still subordinates art to nature. (Coleridge, 2017, p. 67)

This oration captures so exactly a form of thinking and feeling in which the aspect of synthesis is dominant. But note: the opposites are not denied; rather, they are carried forward into a higher level which justifies each more adequately. In particular, Reason is welcomed into the work of Imagination, a Reason which Coleridge defines as Good Sense. But what precisely can that be and how can it work together with the expressive aspect of the imagination that accomplishes the “advent into being”? Clearly, it cannot be an activity of mind that functions independently of the expressive act - the imposition of a theory or a set of rules, for, “could a rule be given from ‘without’, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art...The ‘rules’ of the imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production”.

Contemplation must commence therefore with a sympathetic reflection which takes within itself the meanings embodied in the expression. The poem becomes alive for you when you judge its significance for your self. In addition, such contemplative reflection performs the function of arresting the flow of experience; a moment is consolidated, the movement of the journey halted, so that the energy of this special experience is not drowned in the succession of the new. It assumes an exemplary place within your memory and is thereby available for acts of repetition in which its implications may be explored.

Repetition and consolidation, however, take on a particular character in the poetic imagination. However pleasurable it may be, it relates to the question of salvation, of living one’s life in such a way as to be “saved”. All imagination arises in one form or another from doubt or the acknowledgment of our ignorance. But poetic contemplation is primary both historically and for its human significance. It enacts the original meaning of contemplation as the central, sacred space of the community for the divination of auguries (the Latin ‘com’, meaning together, and ‘templare’, temple) - the first attempts at understanding the existential meaning of natural events assumed to be determined by the gods.

Acts of sacrifice and libation occurred here to appease those gods so to be released or saved from the punishments they could inflict. Their repetition endowed them with the value of an established, communal response, the action of a collective symbolism. Today, this central place is understood to be “internal” and “private” and the realm of the consciously symbolic; it is now motivated by the idea of a self-salvation, a release, one might say, not from the despair over forces imposed upon us, but by those we impose upon ourselves. The repetition and consolidation of meditation now serves the purpose of self-enlightenment.