Hughlings Himwich

The End of the Journey: A Conversation with Neil Longenbaugh

Neil Longenbaugh: Socrates knows he is wiser than the common man because he does not profess to know what he does not. This creates a few problems for me. How can Socrates know for sure that he doesn’t know something. I think the only thing he can be certain of is that he knows nothing for certain, and if this is true then how can someone be wiser than another person if both know equally nothing? This idea is a paradox that can’t be clearly answered unless Socrates is claiming that the craftsman and poets claim to know something and he nothing.

Mr. Himwich: Problem is that the craftsmen and especially those muse-inspired poets think that do in fact know – but, of course, they don’t as is revealed under socratic questioning. You do touch on a difficult issue: Does knowledge require that we know that we know and perhaps even to be able to articulate what we know and be able to teach it to someone else. Absent this kind of knowledge we might categorized our “knowledge” as belief, hypothesis, intuition, educated guess, etc.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I think that knowing something for certain is impossibility. We can know that we can think, and articulate this to other people, but we cannot know that we know something as it truly is. I agree that we can classify our knowledge as hypothesis, intuition, etc… What is truth though? If it is impossible to know for certain then can we find truth in our educated guesses and such?

Mr. Himwich: So much depends on what one means by "truth," as you well know. For me, the truth is paradoxically the very activity of a mind that searches for understanding. This activity of mind is the very truth it searches for. It is always thus, e.g. we create the very world that seek to understand as if it were separate from us. The truth is as close as thought itself. I know this will sound mystical or worse -- plain nonsense. What is your idea of truth?

Mr. Longenbaugh: I feel that truth is something sought after. I think that there are elements that we must find within ourselves, but I think that the physical world also contains truth. I think one can find a balance between retrospection and examining the world they live in for truth. I think that truth is perhaps what you do not know, even if what you think is the truth is not really how it is. Since you believe truth to be activity of mind, do you think believe that everything we perceive and experience is some sort dream or separate experience than reality based on your mind’s bias towards the world?

Mr. Himwich: I think your understanding of truth is sound. I must admit that mine is a work in progress. When I say 'activity of the mind', I mean just that: not the products of that activity, just the pure activity itself. That activity is the existential answer to the mind/body question (how the brain and consciousness relate). If we thereby solve the mind/body question, then we will also solve the mind's relationship to the external world. I know this sounds weird. Truth for me is not this and that bit of knowledge or even the collection of such bits into a whole. It is what actually happens. Again, not what physics tells about the nature of the universe, but the universe itself as it happens. If we could understand our own activity (our own happening), then we could understand everything else. We are part of the happening of things. Again, I admit I exploring ideas here. Let me try one more time: we are already what we seek to understand. In our very attempt to understand what we already are is the Truth. (I am laughing at myself. Feel free to laugh at me as well.)

Mr. Longenbaugh: I can accept your argument (for lack of a better word), but it does bring about a few more questions. These examples seem to perhaps be contradictory, or perhaps by the nature of activity they aren’t. Someone who is in a coma for example or a dream that persists indefinitely for example, is their understanding subconscious because dreams to me seem to be more of a ride than activity. Should we try to understand these knowing we can’t control them, or should we try to learn to control them? What about out of body experiences while awake? (I won’t give any examples) These provide a little trouble for me and I’m sure for you too. I think that I can understand what I believe to be awake reality and activity.

Mr. Himwich: This is becoming more about my wayward ideas than yours (not to say yours are wayward). But I am happy to continue. It seems to me that the Truth only appears when we are actively in search for it, but it remains paradoxically and necessarily elusive. The search and Truth are like the sun and the moon, the moon’s reflected light derives from sunlike mind. (I am expressing ideas here I have never expressed before.) What we want to understand is not the moon itself but the light that illuminates it, yet we fail to recognize the source of the light comes from our own consciousness. This little analogy must be read allegorically.

Mr. Longenbaugh: That is a good analogy. This raises an interesting question. Is the moon necessary? Can we simply look straight into the sun and try and find Truth? I think that before we can journey to the sun, we must first understand the moon, or start searching. It seems maybe that the moon is more tangible than the sun. We can travel, and search for what the moon and its light means, but I don’t think its ever possible to make it to the sun. In the context of this analogy, we can keep getting closer to the sun or Truth, but the closer we are, the hotter it is. This slows us down and eventually burns us before we can ever get there.

Mr. Himwich: I think that consciousness before it is consciousness of something is nonexistent, or rather exists as a potentiality only. This goes back to that question in class: if you stop thinking, i.e. stop being conscious, do you cease to exist. That is a very live question. I would hasten to add that in the mystic traditions, especially with respect to meditation practice, there is a possible turning away from the object to consciousness itself. The reported experience is the usual wonderful mystic nonsense (of which I have a great share): a sense of unity with all things and then joy.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I’m turned toward thinking that consciousness is existence. And going away from this consciousness I think is a good thing, because I’m not sure even if there is necessarily one direction that you must head. Turning away could very well be just as real as going in the “normal” direction if we have to call it that. I can’t say I’ve experienced many of these traditions but I have a basic understanding. Do you believe that there is a certain direction, or is there a possibility or two, even an infinite amount of suns, or levels of consciousness?

Mr. Himwich: I am thunderstruck by your statement that consciousness is existence. I have made that very same statement on another occasion. First, there are some esoteric eastern philosophies that do in fact speak of levels, e.g. personal consciousness and an transcendental consciousness, in which one experiences the loss of the self that the personal consciousness has constructed. I hardly know what to say about such things. I would rather discuss this "turning away" that you speak of. Speaking for myself, the "turning away" is the journey that through experience leads back to sun. This means that only by going away from the sun can we ever really know it as the source of our being. Thus, the journey, as in epic journeys, always leads through the Underworld where there is little or no light at all. That may sound poetic, but it involves real suffering. Is such a journey the good? Yes, but I speak only for myself here.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I think that the turning away is a perspective. If you turn away from the sun, you can see how far you have come and what you have experienced. I think it can help you appreciate the sun more. I am concerned whether it is possible to turn away and never go back? Hopefully death doesn’t bring this but I think that a loss of consciousness means that there is no more journey.

Mr. Himwich: Just to sum up: There is both an objective and subjective aspect to this: reality is and is not what we are aware of: there must be something that is apart from consciousness itself and yet that there is anything at all, existence itself, is due to consciousness. This is why we both search for truth/reality as something external to our consciousness and why we keep returning to consciousness as the ground of being. It is the paradox upon which the journey hinges. The journey is the effort to return to oneself. It gives meaning to our life, precisely because we never arrive.

Ghost of Parmenides

Help out an old man on the precipice. How is it that there is to us an external world? I am not doubting that there is an external world. We would agree, I think, that we are only speaking metaphorically when we speak of experiencing ourselves from the inside. Why is it not equally metaphorical to speak of experiencing an outside.  Space after all is not a sense perception. Isn't it a construction of the brain? A part of that construction is that we experience the world as something apart from the very brain that constructed it.  O ghost of Parmenides!!  There must be some simple answer for this question. You are all sensible, smart, sane folk. Help out a simple-minded old man!  I have not yet leaped to the conclusion that there is no external world at all. I know you have papers to write or grade and a multitude of mundane matters to attend to and your share of sisyphean labor as well. And surely more worthwhile things to think about. As do I, except I can't shake this sense of the unreality of reality. Perhaps over the weekend. Or direct me to a wise man who can explain this to me, other than a psychotherapist.

Day Two: No help has arrived. So I'll try again.

I am arguing that all input from the external world is translated into the binary system of the neuronal process. The brain then recreates the external world as a hypothesis that it is continuously testing. The recreation is, however, never the world as it is. Even the externality of the world is a creation of the brain, not just colors or any other qualities. There is, so to speak, no transparency between our experience and the objects of that experience. Our experience is always hypothetical; we walk through our world through our own internal projection of it.  It is unnerving to me.

Day Three: Help has come from my old dialogue partner, Jordan Fleischer.  

 

Jordan Fleisher: I definitely agree with your ideas about our internal world. One thing I think we must consider though is that there is a definite connection between the external and internal world.  Although our experience is only a hypothesis of the external world, our experience only exists because of the external world.  After all, our brains create our experience, and our brains are part of that external world.  Does this make sense? So while our experience is just an internal projection, I think that necessary connection is what enables us to feel as if the external world must also exist. 

 Hugh Himwich: I agree that the external world must exist, but radically and perhaps necessarily other than we can ever possibly know. (Reminds me here of some statements about God.) We are caught up in existence and are part of what we speak of as external-- but what really exists is neither external nor internal.

Jordan Fleischer: If what really exists is neither external nor internal, what really exists? 

Hugh Himwich: There is no way of knowing. The external exists only from our perspective.  The most we could say is: Not This. We are always and everywhere a negation of being. This does not mean that science cannot discover aspects of reality that are useful, but we often mistake our ability to make nature work for us for knowledge of existence itself.  It may be existence is so radically different from our understanding -- no matter how efficacious that understanding may be -- that to talk about advancement in knowledge is like talking about progress in our understanding of what it is like to be another person.  We may be able to seize upon patterns and even make predictions, we may even discover the neurological correlate for consciousness, but what it is like to be that other person necessarily eludes us. So too existence. 

Jordan Fleischer: I think I understand your argument. If I'm not mistaken, we can never trust our perception of the external world to be an accurate reflection of the external world as it really is. However, would you agree that by the simple fact that we do perceive an external world, an external world of some sort necessarily exists? I agree that all we know is the external world from our perspective, but I feel that because our perception exists, some sort of external world must be causing our perception.

Hugh Himwich: I agree that the external world exists as a kind of mode of being, the other mode being the internal. Shades of Spinoza here. I think I am proposing something more radical, however, than that our perceptions of the external world are merely hypothetical. I am arguing that externality itself is a construction as well as the internal and that two really are one. This "one" is inaccessible from the internal side (1st person) or the external (3rd person). The mind/body problem results from this dual inaccessibility with the result that this problem is not resolvable from either the 1st person or 3rd person perspective. Consequently, I argue that the external world is an illusion (as is the internal), not in the sense that the external world is nothing but that it does not exist as we suppose it to be, that is external. Reality is not out there or in my mind. It transcends both objectivity and subjectivity. We know this because of the failure of either to account for what we are. We ourselves are the proof that the two are one. We just can't get to it other than by being. I am proposing a different kind of existential philosophy.

 

On justice: an invitation

A conversation between a student and a teacher at Albuquerque Academy. 

Excerpts: 

      The Teacher: Hugh Himwich

 

Justice is the fundamental right of all human beings to have the same opportunity to lead a fulfilling life.  This right does not exist in nature.  It exists only by the creative act of my choice.  It is natural justice in the sense that it is not created ex nihilo, but based upon all that it is to be human.   Once again, you are free to choose against this, but only at the cost of your humanity.  It is never a question of knowing whether your choice is right -- it is a question only of what kind of world you choose to live in.

 

      The Student: Jordan Fleischer

 

We have agreed that there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether any action or choice can be said to be just, which is exactly why it seems foolish of us to go ahead and define justice as we have.  It is essential to remember that justice itself is only an experience.  If someone makes a choice based on the parameters you have provided, they will indeed experience an act as if it is just.  However, when it comes to determining if there is any truth behind that experience, there is simply no way to know.  It reminds me of the phenomenon of color; it exists in our consciousness as something undeniably real, yet, the truth is that color is simply created by our brain and truly only exists as waves of light.  No one can say what the truth is about justice.

 

      The Invitation:  Join the conversation by sending your  

        thoughts on justice to Jordan Fleischer (FLEJ100@aa.edu) or Mr. Himwich 

        (Himwich@aa.edu).