As a corollary or remark, on a short metaphysical essay I wrote about a week ago, the following must be added. I have said that there is only one substance which exists, and it is a combination of me, and all the objects and events which I can experience in my life. There is no one else, and there are no truly external objects. The only external thing is God – and God is intimately involved in life.
This might be termed solipsism, but being the only living human being in this universe, is only a fraction of what this metaphysics entails or implies. What it also implies is, that the objective world around that human being, has no reality in itself. It is assumed that the external or objective world, has an independent reality, outside of me. It is taken for granted usually, that when I die, it continues; and that, before I was born, some objective external world was always there. But this is not something we should simply assume to be the case.
Rather, the world as we experience it never happens without us; it is not predictable except in a general way, while in the details the world is has something like a mind of its own; and it has features which prove that it is more like an extensive field for our subjective ambitions, dreams, potentiality, and freedom.
I do not deny that existence has a structure, or a guiding system holding it together. It has predictable and knowable qualities. But intrinsically, its visual aspect depends on having eyes; its size depends on how far you are prepared to go; all of its qualities depend on the one who observes it; what is known about it depends on who the knower is.
Further, the type of existence that it is, whether cruel, good, confined, painful, etc., depends on the activity of the person living the life. For instance, if he choses a military life, then he will see pain, his outlook will be conservative, he will notice the degenerate aspects of existence, and so on. His philosophy and his knowledge will be reflected in these choices he has made. So, at some medium level of importance, freedom of action is the rule of existence. And even if a man is a hermit, and attains to vast amounts of knowledge and wisdom, the same can be said. This, in contrast to the notion that there is some set of predictable laws which are supposed by determinists to dominate and characterise being and life.
Objective reality appears always through a subjective consciousness. That is the nature of the substance, the nature of being. The world is shaped by what the conscious subject wants it to be, or imagines it to be.
Now, I do accept, that there is some kind of order which undergirds and holds things together. For instance, dogs are always more or less dogs. There is a difference between being awake and dreaming. And the sun has an apparent pathway around the skies; other human beings have predictable characteristics. The abilities of human beings such as myself, to achieve things, are determined in advance; activity must take place in time and space, for the most part.
But this is not to say that time and space are absolute; or that the forms of things are determined by some kind of known law, as it were. The form or ideal form of things does exist, but it is more of an aspiration, than a feature of reality. They say that there is a ‘law of evolution’ for example. But this is more of an aspiration than an actual law inside nature.
There is no ‘law’ of nature, rather, an aspiration toward ‘law’ and form. I refer, as an example, to the law of nature that animals have a life span of such and such years. They aspire to this, but do not always attain it – if ever precisely. Animals and men have an ideal shape, but this is never achieved.
Because the world has this intimate connection with the imagination and the aspiration and freedom of the subjective consciousness, and because it is not dominated by an external absolute law of materialism (an unproven theory very widespread among scientists and laymen alike), because it is not actually a material external world, then we can understand some Christian aspects of life.
For instance, anyone who regularly, and with belief, prays to God, or the saints, knows that such prayer does have effects in the practical world. Materialists deny this is possible. But it does happen, so the metaphysics and the approach to reality must be faulty.
Being is not dominated by a law; and material reality is not deterministically arranged; rather, Being is only ever being for one single individual, and is his ‘life’. The ideas or forms and prototypes of nature and the world, which stand outside and above it, guide but do not enforce rules on to life.
There are some interesting studies done by the Cambridge biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, which come to my mind, when I think about what I have said here. Sheldrake has over many years posited ‘morphic resonance’ and morphological forms as the things which guide world and animal development, evolution, and local development. Everyone knows that animals and even inert materials, such as chemicals, and crystals, and lower sorts of life such as fungus, have what we would call a ‘memory’.
Crystals, chemicals, moulds, and some of the larger animals, are able to know things from a distance. They are able to communicate knowledge which is somehow built into reality. This is how we explain how individuals of a species of animal in one case, can and do demonstrable transmit things they have learned to do, to other individuals thousands of miles distant, and even to the unborn – in what they refer to as ‘the inheritance of acquired characteristics’. This kind of thing is considered impossible, in a purely material world; and in a purely material world, it is impossible. Yet it does happen.
We find that racial memory is an observable fact among human beings. This is because, perhaps, reality is an extension of human being; or, human being is a temporary aspect of the eternal substance. And that this is what an individual subjective consciousness is. But all of these observations relate to the matter of what exactly it is, which really gives regularity and order to substance: I claim, it is not mute law, a material condition such as 'the law of gravity'; rather, it is a set of Ideas and forms, or morphic prototypes, which resonate and draw being into certain shapes. When it comes to discussing the absolute nature of reality, my earlier proposal has more to say.
I propose something dreadful: that you are the only living person; that God is the only person who is really with you. It is not a trivial idea, for it also proposes that you can’t die, and that there is a world and life beyond this one, where you and God will have further discussions about what is good and what you have done with your time. In effect, it might even come to seem, from this perspective, that life is nothing more than a field in which, by living in the world, God and the soul interact – and that this is life’s meaning.
Additionally, there are some doors opened for science and technology. After all, technology and physical science has not really done anything at all since around 1950, and so, this metaphysics should have some effect on the blockage, as it were.