The Luciferian Intellect
A meditation on navigating the boundaries of human cognition.
In many ways, the contemporary mode of thought that characterises how most of us see the world has its roots at the end of the nineteenth century. This period saw late-Victorian scientists reframe their method as what Mary Midgley calls ‘a whole myth, a philosophical conception of the world and the forces within it, directly related to the meaning of human life.’ Following the advent of Darwinism, figures such as Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) began championing science as an all-encompassing rubric through which one could shape a spiritual life — ‘a faith by which people might live.’ It was at this juncture that the scientistic lens through which Westerners now tend to view Christianity and its sacred texts began to predominate.
In More Than Allegory, Bernardo Kastrup argues that underlying this view of religious thought ‘is the hidden but far-reaching assumption that all relevant truths about reality can be directly captured by the intellect in the form of language constructs.’ Or put more bluntly, ‘if something is true, then it can be said.’ By language, Kastrup is referring to any system of signs that allows us to represent and manipulate information about the world, including mathematical notation and computer code. For Kastrup, it is crucial we recognise that while an incredibly effective tool, language is both co-dependant and co-extensive with the intellectual process itself — it mirrors the way we frame and process our experience of reality. The knowledge generated by the intellect, in its quest for truth, exhibits a positivist tendency: it is inherently circumscribed to what is given to perception and can, in the final analysis, be quantified. What tends to go unnoticed in this process is the fact that language is how we represent reality, and to re-present something is to reduce and abstract that thing from reality for a specific purpose, such as conveyance or comprehensibility. Language is the map, not the territory.
I have written before about Hannah Arendt’s distinction between our mental faculties, intellect and reason, and how they operate, especially in the domain of language. Other giants in the field have reached similar conclusions. In the Phaedrus, for instance, Socrates exclaims that ‘no one who possesses the true faculty of thinking, and therefore knows the weakness of words, will ever risk framing thoughts in discourse, let alone fix them in so inflexible a form as that of written letters.’ Ironically, this sentiment is shared by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, when he states that ‘one no longer loves one’s insight enough when one communicates it.’ In a similar vein, Heidegger wrote that ‘the internal limit of all thinking ... is that the thinker never can say what is most his own ... because the spoken word receives its determination from the ineffable.’ For Wittgenstein, ‘the results of philosophy [i.e. thinking] are the uncovering ... of bumps that the intellect has got by running its head up against the limits of language.’ Collectively, these disparate thinkers emphasise the aching discrepancy between what goes on in our minds and the comparatively radical constraints of language, alerting us to an invisible yet palpable gulf between what is and what can be expressed.
Our poets have long been aware of the chasm between language and experience. As Rilke noted, ‘things are not as graspable and sayable on the whole as we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated.’ It is perhaps for this reason that poets have led the way in revealing how language can be used to transcend itself, to become more than a series of signs denoting well-defined words and labels. Poetry and poetic idioms, including metaphor, humour, and irony, circumvent the representational, abstracted processes of the intellect by allowing analogy to convey what Percy Shelley calls the ‘before unapprehended relations of things.’ In this manner, language points beyond itself, allowing us to break outside the framework of denotative, explicit modes of expression to which ordinary language always returns us. As Ernest Fenollosa puts it, metaphor is ‘the revealer of nature’ and ‘the very substance of poetry.’ Without metaphor, ‘thought would have been starved and language chained to the obvious’ and ‘there would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen.’ Poetic language reminds us to look up from the map and marvel at the territory.
Indeed, the very word “metaphor” suggests something that carries one across some kind of gap (meta, “beyond” + pherein, “carry”). For Arendt, such metaphorical carrying beyond is a necessary aspect of language. ‘No language,’ she contends, ‘has a ready-made vocabulary for the needs of mental activity; they all borrow their vocabulary from words originally meant to correspond either to sense experience or to other experiences of ordinary life.’ Crucially, then, this borrowing is not arbitrary, as in the idioms of mathematics or formal logic, but is derived from our embodied interactions with the world we inhabit. We tend, for instance, to describe happiness as being “up” while sadness is “down.” We speak of a person in high spirits or, conversely, feeling depressed. Pivotal to this discussion is noticing how metaphors begin life revealing and establishing unrealised relations between concepts and phenomena, before repeated use and over familiarisation deadens them, flattening our once pregnant metaphors in abstraction.
This flattening is the constant pitfall posed by the intellect’s approach to the thought-things of reason, an approach that tends to apprehend metaphor in terms of literal language rather than the comprehension of previously unseen relations produced by thinking. We no longer notice all that was once conveyed by the notion of a river having a mouth. Nevertheless, symbolic language is the only way in which the intellect can reach outside the system of signs to indicate what exists beyond its abstractions, and it is for this reason that figures such as Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein hold genuine thinking and poetry to be closely related. Philosophy, in the words of the great Alfred North Whitehead, ‘is the endeavour to find a conventional phraseology for the vivid suggestiveness of the poet.’ The difficult task of thinking, as opposed to mere intellectualising, is to adopt the methods of poetic contemplation in order to bridge the conceptual gap that language itself creates.
From this perspective, we can understand why the default lens through which most Westerners (including many Christians) perceive the Bible is simply inadequate. To squint at symbolic language through a scientistic lens can only result in a naïve religious realism, a hyper-literal reading which assumes that divine reality can be understood precisely as it is laid out in the language of the text. The mistake here is to see the biblical corpus as a collection of signs — literal denotations — rather than an evocation of symbols that point us beyond the limits of linguistic understanding. The early Christian scholar and Church Father Origen, for instance, noted that the seven ‘“days” of creation described in Genesis should not be taken literally, considering they took place before the sun existed. Nevertheless, this common breed of misconstrual allows us to trace both the evolution of creationism and the proliferation of atheism — positions that are not as conceptually different as they might first appear. Despite their conflicting claims about the origins of the cosmos, creationism and atheism each engage in a form of literalism that renders the deep truths of the Bible patently absurd. In this way, these nominally oppositional views are more like the twin prongs of a horseshoe than the opposite ends of a spectrum. Both approaches represent a failure to re-contextualise the inherent limits of language and appreciate the symbolic nature of what is being conveyed.
Readers may share my fascination with the idea that this very problem is laid out at the beginning of the Bible. In Genesis, when God creates Adam, he fashions from the earth an embodied mind, a creature that contains the divine spark of consciousness. Immediately on display is the symbolic power of biblical language, as well as the fractal nature of its ancient cosmology. Notice that “Adam” is derived from the Hebrew “adamah” for “earth” or “ground.” The name is also ambivalent in the text insofar as it refers at the same time to an individuated human being and this particular figure as a microcosm of humankind. Accordingly, we should understand Man as a mediator between Heaven, the divine realm of forms and ideas, and Earth, the place of concrete manifestation. We are an image of God insofar as we reflect the Creator’s capacity to bring the world into being. When God sets Adam the task of naming the animals, it is not an arbitrary process but a symbolic description of how reality and potentiality are meaningfully conjoined. Crucially, it is also this aspect of Man-as-mediator that is corrupted as a consequence of the Fall.
In The Two Hands Of God, Alan Watts writes that “good and evil” in its original Hebrew context translates to ‘what is advantageous and disadvantageous in the environment.’ On this reading, when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, inappropriately grasping for that which bestows understanding, it is their mode of attending that is changed. No longer oriented to faithful participation in Paradise, they recognise that they are naked, exposed, vulnerable. Now they are distracted by what they apprehend as “useful” or “useless” according to a particular frame — in this case, survival. Similarly, in Answer to Job, Carl Jung sees the Fall as representing the development of self-consciousness and the subsequent complications that ensue. For Jung, the Yahweh of the Old Testament is an almost Schopenhauerian force of Nature, an unconscious and amoral primal Will that gives birth to His own self-reflective capacities in the form of Satan and then Adam. Here again, we see the fractal pattern of Being revealed by Christian cosmology. If Satan represents the emergence of critical self-reflection in the mind of God, it is fitting that it is also Satan who tempts Eve in the garden, engendering the same capacity in humankind. From this perspective, Genesis is a story about the dawning of the Intellect and the conflict inherent in its capacity for goal-oriented framing.
To understand why internal conflict should accompany the development of our intellectual powers, we can turn to Iain McGilchrist’s account of the contrasting orientations of the brain’s hemispheres. It is not what the hemispheres do that is of vital significance, but how they do it. The world disclosed by left-hemispheric processes is ‘dependent on denotative language and abstraction,’ which allows it to ‘manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.’ It is a mode of attending that prizes the map over the territory. According to McGilchrist, the only way to see beyond these intellectual mappings is by a kind of metanoia, a re-contextualising of our abstractions into a broader Gestalt, ‘a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world’ — the right-hemispheric domain of reason. For McGilchrist, the proper relationship between the brain’s hemispheres is one in which the left serves the right as a trusted advisor to a king. If this relationship is compromised, the result is a mind doomed to forever trying to pull the world out of its maps, unable to understand how the pieces fit together and incapable of seeing the bigger picture.
‘Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven,’ says the lost Arch-Angel in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. ‘Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings a mind not to be changed by Place or Time.’ We can read in this epic a profound self-exploration of human consciousness. McGilchrist describes the poem as an exploration of
the relationship between two unequal powers, one of which grounds the being of the other, and indeed needs the other for its fulfilment, and which therefore has to make itself vulnerable to that other; who, through blindness and vanity, rejects the union that would have brought about the Aufhebung [higher synthesis] of both, and prefers instead a state of war without end.
The blindness and vanity of which McGilchrist writes is typical of the left-hemisphere, especially when its operations are not integrated into the right hemisphere’s broader, Gestalt-oriented processes. As demonstrated in this video, once we adopt a frame of mind directed at a specific goal, anything the intellect believes irrelevant to that end is dismissed. When it comes to the unexpected, the left hemisphere is not only relatively blind compared to the right but arrogantly confident in its own machinations. In this sense, Milton’s Satan is a personification of the intellect gone wrong. Formerly the highest and most beautiful of the angels, Lucifer, the light-bringer, gives in to pride, envy, resentment, and anger, delighting in the self-sabotaging exercise of power to weak havoc on the divine order.
In the New Testament, the figure of Jesus Christ, the second Adam, calls us to ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ For many, the idea of repentance is associated with shame and regret about past thoughts and actions. However, the term “repent” in the original Greek is “metanoia” (meta, “beyond” + nous, “mind”), meaning a change of mind. One interpretation of this petition is the critical importance of looking beyond our assumed frames, the maps produced by our intellects, that we might recalibrate our vision in order to engage more harmoniously with what is rather than descend into the imposition of our will. Metanoia is how we restore our capacity as mediators between heaven and earth, meaningfully and appropriately bringing reality and potentiality to fruition in a manner that the God of the Bible would call good. The temptation to eat of the fruit is the perennial choice faced by humankind. The intellect remains our greatest gift insofar as it is properly attuned and subservient to reason. And yet we should not forget that pride comes before the Fall.