I’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff of that vase, you’ll ‘go down’ to molecules and then atoms and then electrons and protons and neutrons and then various sorts of entities which behave very much like ‘collapse points’ of fields. Fields are very abstract already though, for all we know, there might be many levels of abstraction to go before we reach the stuff of God’s initial acts of creating from nothingness. Even if you find physics and mathematics to be an alien form of thought, go and browse through a serious book on modern gravity theory or quantum mechanics or a mixed field of study such as the early seconds of this expansionary phase of the universe. All those equations are not descriptions of objects we can touch so much as they are the objects themselves, abstract and beyond direct sensing by eyes or ears or fingertips.
The thing is shaped from more abstract forms of being, just as the vase is shaped from its raw materials, and the abstract forms remain part of the thing just as the clay remains part of the vase. There are multiple levels of thing-like being within a human being — cells and then DNA and various minerals and biochemicals and then oxygen and carbon and then protons and electrons and then electroweak fields and quarks and so on to some very hypothetical levels of being of the sort studied by theoretical physicists. Once again, we explore more deeply into the stuff of a man and find fields which seem more akin to mathematical ideas than to earth and fire and wind and air. This sort of talk becomes recursively silly at times only because I’m trying to talk about abstract levels of being in terms of concrete levels of being which are shaped from abstract levels of being and still contain abstract being.
My contention is that we should take this seriously, this spectrum of being ranging from highly abstract to highly particular. At the same time, I’d like to expand this idea beyond the aspects of being studied by mathematicians and physicists and all sorts of physical scientists and engineers.
Modern men, including Christians who are bound to pay attention to God in His acts as Creator, have been quite reluctant to do much with these richer ideas of being. We accept the medical and other technological benefits of these enriched ideas but we refuse to restate our understanding of Creation in terms which make sense in light of modern empirical knowledge. At the very least, we need to construct new narratives of Creation, of the human race, of ourselves as members of various peoples and as members of the Body of Christ, of ourselves as individuals. Many can and should play a role in this building of such narratives, including scientists outside of their 9-5 roles as reductionists, but historians and fiction-writers and poets and musicians and movie-makers and visual artists can play a special role. They can speak the truth, a truth which merges particular and concrete things which are true with abstract truths which are thing-like.
More generally, we need to move into a new phase of Western Civilization or into the start of one or more successor civilizations. There have been some who have dared to head off into regions opened up by the modern and richer understandings of created being, but it’s remarkable, at least to me, how little respect that effort has received in general. True it is that both the works of genius and also the obscene jokes played on collectors by Picasso are worth sometimes tens of millions of dollars at auctions, as are the works of van Gogh with his better-defined, seemingly sophisticated experiments in perception, especially color perception. Mahler and Stravinsky wrote various experimental works, often despised when first played but now part of the standard repertoire of symphonic music. The same was true of Beethoven — we forget how much he redefined music beyond the standard understandings and we know only from sparse comments in his journals that he was engaged in a radical expansion of music at the time of his death. Literature? Well, traditional story-tellers, such as Tolstoy and George Eliot have produced great works and the best of those have used traditional narrative techniques to deal with the modern world. There were also those who tried to expand the boundaries of human perception and understanding, creating narratives which take a substantial intellectual effort to follow because those narratives follow events — at least sometimes — at the abstract levels of being, perhaps by such ‘simple’ tricks as treating pieces of a concrete narration as words in a more abstract narrative. I can certainly mention in this context Cervantes (way back), Sterne, Melville, and numerous poets such as Pound and cummings and T.S. Eliot.
Visual artists of the 19th and early 20th century seemed to be ahead of brain scientists in realizing that human vision isn’t unitary. As it turns out, we see an object’s shape, movement, and color separately and our brains put together the more complete view of that object in a way that still baffles scientists so far as I know. (The interested reader can pursue this topic beginning with the scientific discussion in A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki or the discussion by the same author from the viewpoint of a scientist interested in art found in Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.) To cut to the point of this particular line of insight from modern empirical knowledge:
Reality is real but human perceptions of that reality are constructed.
This doesn’t mean our perceptions are false in any way. After all, our eyes and ears have been shaped to some piece of reality, however small, by responses of our ancestors over billions of years and by our own responses to our world, however small or large. We err, perhaps greatly, when we think as if our eyes were merely transparent panes of glass, letting some direct image of reality into our heads where resides a mind formed independently of the world around it.
Over time, men have moved to ever richer and more complete understandings of created being and of what I would call narrative realms in Creation, but not everyone has yet gotten the message. Every electron, every grain of sand or sand-flea, every human being or galaxy, has many components — use this term cautiously, each of those components as well as the entity in its entirety have abstract aspects as well as concrete aspects. The things of this world are not objects separable from but describable by mathematical truths nor are they imperfect images of things existing in some realm of the Real. A thing is the node in a complex network of various sorts of abstract being joining in a particular thing. And those nodes in their turn join to form more complex and more concrete things.
At the very least, we need artistic visions which deal, perhaps playfully, with the full spectrum of aspects of created being, including those we call ‘abstract’. We need van Goghs to give us new insights into human color vision, Picassos to question the way we see shapes and to even question the dimensions in which those shapes are set. I’ve already gone past my knowledge of painting and I want my words to be taken as suggestions optimistic as to what we can learn from those who somehow access the raw components of human vision and those who can consciously think through their own perception of colors or shapes or movements. I’m sure similar statements can be made about modern music, but I’ll pass by that topic for now as my formal knowledge of music is also as slender as one would expect from a product of the American educational system. But I also believe that the greatest need we have is for poets and writers and philosophers who can speak of the entirety of being, in its more abstract and more concrete aspects.
That’s the thrust of my efforts in writing creative fiction, efforts which began well before I tried my hand at theology or philosophy and, in fact, well before I could have stated my worldview in explicit terms or was even aware I’d developed such a strange beast. The world has been for me something of a marvelous mystery containing a multitude of mysteries. I had neither a reductionist nor an occult attitude towards these mysteries. I think that, by behavior if not by conscious thought, I had always an attitude of acceptance of reality, to the point where I wasn’t aggressive enough in querying that reality in a way proper for someone with some intellectual talent and a small bent towards mathematics and physics. Yet, if I’ve followed a strange and slow path of intellectual development, in this country where development of the mind has not much been encouraged, I did seem to implicitly realize from a fairly young age that the problem with mysteries is not that they need to be reduced, though some mysteries can be reduced in a useful and truthful way. Nor are those mysteries to be simply accepted as occult or as supernatural in the sense of beyond man’s reach. I’m speaking here of mysteries which involve created beings and not of of the revealed mysteries of God’s own Being and His transcendental life. Mysteries of Creation are, in principle, within the reach of the human mind though actual, individual human minds are too weak to grasp all of Creation and likely too weak to deal with some of the more profound mysteries of our world and the other realms of Creation.
And, yet, there’s something to be done with mysteries, at least by those called to ponder them as interesting objects of study as well as sources of wonder, the more serious sorts of poets and novelists and various artists as well as philosophers and scientists of a philosophical bent. We can do what the human being has to do, well or badly, just to survive in this life: we can respond by shaping our minds to the reality which confronts us. We explore and we test and we try to find ways to speak about what we find, or think we find. In doing so, we better shape our minds that they might be able to form statements about Creation and its various processes and relationships — in ordinary words or the words or formalisms of mathematics and other specialized sciences. We tune our minds to correspond more closely to the world, to all of Creation, as we can know it during our age and within our culture.
This is to say we accept reality and shape our thoughts correspondingly rather than trying to reduce reality to rules which allegedly are given to the human mind independently of the mundane reality around us, independently of the experience which shaped the human race over the eons and individuals humans over their lifetimes. We don’t live in our heads, inhabiting some sort of mental space equipped with all the tools to understand whatever it encounters. Our minds are our encapsulation of the environments around us, or the entire world, or even the entirety of Creation.
Mathematicians deal with the mystery of infinity by shaping their minds so that different sizes of infinity are part of those minds and the tools to deal with various sorts of numbers, including transfinite numbers larger than ordinary infinity, are part of the furnishings of those minds. Physicists deal with quantum mechanics not by thinking in terms of the common sense developed in our apish ancestors as they hunted mammoths or tamed wild ox; rather do they reshape their minds to correspond with the reality they confront when they explore different regions or levels of being than those our pre-modern ancestors knew about. The paradoxes of modern mathematics and physics aren’t the result of conflicts between reality and some sort of pure reasoning but rather a conflict between reality and a mind shaped to an inadequate understanding of reality, an understanding not sufficiently large and rich.
The truths of art are certainly more fuzzy than those of mathematics and the physical sciences, often more fuzzy than even the truths of history, but they are truths. The truths of art overlap with those of mathematics. After all, art speaks of created being though not necessarily of perceptible, concrete being. Then again, the same is true of mathematics and physics. We don’t see by way of our eyes those abstract objects bundled with relationships which mathematicians call ‘groups’, but a trained mind can see them in an intellectual sense in some of the behavior of atomic particles and of the entities described by quantum mechanics, and by many other entities in Creation. I’ve never seen even ordinary infinity let alone any of the still larger infinities. I’ve never run my hands along a curvature in spacetime and can’t even separate, by touch, space from the objects it holds. I can’t separate my perception of colors from that of shapes and movements and hope I never can in this life — it’s the sign of something going very wrong in a human visual system. It’s hard to say if he had a mild problem with his visual system or simply had remarkable insight into the ways of his own eyes, optic nerves, and brain, but van Gogh showed us hints of color vision without shape and without movement and he also had some emotional and mental problems at various times of his life. His unique insights and his problems might have been tied together — problems with his brain might have allowed him to be both a great artist and also a Christian with a deep devotion bearing some resemblance to that of some of the disturbed saints of Christian history. In any case, van Gogh and Einstein both had to use well-developed imaginations to do their work. Those imaginations strayed from the beliefs of the men of their time, but strayed so that they had a richer view of created being.
The main point I’d like to drive towards is that abstractions in art are not only allowable but actually necessary if men are to explore and understand truth. I don’t know enough to judge Picasso’s works, but I can say this:
If there is any truth in modern theories of infinity and randomness, any in quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity, then something like Picasso’s approach is necessary for artists to speak truth to modern man, though there’s a sense in which there are as yet few modern men. If there is any truth to modern discoveries of the workings of the human visual system, then van Gogh saw certain truths about the fragmentation of what is seen into color and shape and movement before scientists generally did.
I don’t wish to claim van Gogh was a prophet of brain science but I do wish to claim he was speaking a truth not perceived by most other men even when he presented his work to men sure they saw the world about them in its truth and completeness. That crazy and charitable genius somehow knew we construct our color-vision of the world.
This isn’t to say that all abstractions in art are true, just as it’s certainly not that case that all abstractions in mathematics and physics are true. Some abstractions are so false from the beginning as to be beyond consideration by rational men and others prove to be inconsistent with what’s known or becomes known about Creation in all the realms and levels accessible to the human mind.
But the arts speak the truth about Creation and created being only when they deal with the completeness of that Creation and created being. This doesn’t mean that all works of art, including literature, have to be exotic and difficult to understand. It does mean that modern man has a greatly expanded and enriched knowledge of Creation and created being and that knowledge is not well-contained in the forms of art and literature we’ve received from our ancestors. Modern empirical knowledge has added substance to our knowledge. The modern fields of empirical knowledge-gathering and analysis aren’t just collections of recipes that allow pre-existing human minds to simply absorb knowledge as if it were marks on a ledger. The fact that human beings are a unique species of ape, descended from apes rather than a special creation of God or the gods, most certainly has some bearing upon our understanding of Creation and of human nature. The disconcerting facts being amassed by modern brain scientists give strong testimony that human thoughts and feelings are so tightly tied to physical events in the human body — mostly the brain — as to make talk of immaterial minds and souls a bit questionable. This certainly has a bearing on our ways of speaking about human beings.
I’m going to end by referring to my novel, A Man for Every Purpose, which is the story of a man, well-educated and intelligent, who fails to properly shape his mind to his knowledge of both traditional truths and modern empirical knowledge. This novel was written five years or so before my philosophical beliefs took an explicit form but it deals with the problems of a world where the fragmentation of knowledge of Creation into realms has resulted in human beings acting as if realms of knowledge correspond to different realms of created being.