Where I present my candidate for the alien’s epistemological guide. Written 11-28-23.
In previous sections of this work, I have endeavored to show that the basic epistemological situation of the alien—and thus the basic epistemological situation of ourselves—is not necessarily one of doubt (this is where previous philosophers—particularly René Descartes—have erred, in my opinion), but one of ignorance that leads to doubt.
Recall the fundamental notion of the Xeno Position, the starting epistemological position of this work:
The alien finds themselves suddenly thrown into existence as the sort of being we are in the sort of world in which we exist.
The alien has no memory of their previous existence or the reason for their new situation.
This motivates the alien to pursue the following project:
Learn as much as possible about the world in which they find themselves and the sort of being which they are.
Discover the reasons and possible purpose behind their coming to be in this world as the sort of being which they are.
Pursue that purpose—should it exist—to the best of their ability.
Now, what does it look like for the alien to pursue this project?
The alien devotes themselves first to learning how to think. This leads to the formulation of a logic, in our case a three-value logic built from our basic logical intuitions (equality, identity, difference, family resemblance, etc); simple declarative statements (“The cat is on the mat”, “snow is white”, etc); logical operators (Not, And, Or, Therefore, etc); existential quantity operators (There Exists, Some, All, No, etc); framing indexicals (place, time, possible worlds, fictive worlds, etc); and a basic (naïve) notion of sets that bites the bullet of paradox through paraconsistent logic.
The alien continues on to learn how to think through defining an epistemology, leading to a working definition of truth and knowledge.
The alien continues on to further define their epistemology, learning how to structure their thoughts so that they “hang together” in a meaningful way through establishing a notion of paradigms of belief and paradigms of practice. It is this last step that leads to problems, to say the least.
The alien finds quickly that there is no principled way to choose between paradigms from within a paradigm due to the problem of incommensurability. One is forced to step outside the paradigms of belief and practice and apply values from the new position of a “metaparadigm”, a paradigm about paradigms. The alien thus forms paradigmatic values, a series of values by which we might compare paradigms.
In order to properly apply these paradigmatic values, the alien needs to be able to properly change their beliefs as necessary. But even when this process is systematized, it presents a fundamental problem: when all of the knowledge one possesses leads one to a doubt, to a dilemma, trilemma, or polylemma about what is true, how should the alien proceed? What guide can lead the alien forward?
This last epistemic situation is where we—and the alien—find ourselves and its solution is therefore the last necessary feature of our working epistemology because, as mages and mystics, we are presented with a great variety of paradigms and theories of both belief and practice. We need a guide, something to tell us where to start and, when presented with a fork in the path that logic and evidence can’t help us with, we need to know which way to turn.
Please recall that in the portion of this work where I introduced Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges, I attempted to show that a mind—or at least all of the sorts of mind of which we are aware—is the sort of thing that is necessarily situated in a nexus of relations that define its range of possible interactions with reality. All minds that we know of exist in some place, at some time, have some specific history, exist within a particular culture at a particular historical moment, and have a particular set of possible states of existence and not others. Even a model of a divine mind similar to that of the monotheistic religions such as Christianity or traditions such as Neoplatonism presents a mind that—to the degree that that mind has reached into the temporal world from the eternal—has a specific history and character and has particular preferences, desires, and projects. Therefore, as far as we know, an “impartial view from nowhere that sees everything” is impossible. While this epistemic position might be possible for some other sort of mind of which we have no current awareness, for the sorts of minds—even divine or spiritual minds—we know about, the “God’s-eye view from nowhere that sees everything” does not seem to be possible.
The alien is—among other things—a mind. Thus they are situated, and this situatedness implies idiosyncrasy. No two minds can actually possess identical properties, have the same history, and lay in identical relations. Indeed, in order for them to be considered different minds at all, they must differ in some respect, otherwise they would just be the same mind. This is an instantiation of Leibniz’s “Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles” (if any two objects possess all predicates in common, they are the same object). So the alien’s mind and my mind (and yours, dear reader) are intrinsically and necessarily idiosyncratic.
Now, what does it mean for the sort of being which we are, living in the sort of existence in which we find ourselves, that minds are idiosyncratic? It means that necessarily we find ourselves forced to navigate a way of being in the world that no one else has ever dealt with before. Every one of us are brand new creatures, living brand new lives. No one has ever existed (or ever will exist, so long that reality doesn’t fundamentally change its nature) that has had the same thoughts, dealt with the same situations, laid in the same relations, and come to the same conclusions in their deliberations about how to live in the world as you. You and I, like the alien, find ourselves strangers in a strange land, forced to live as if we “always already” knew how to live when we really have no clues whatsoever. But is that really true? Do we have no clues?
In the section of this work on “Situated Knowledges”, I gave a short anecdote that will be familiar to many of my readers, that of a young person who happens to see a pentagram and feels an intense interest and a peculiar intimation that “this means something, something important”. It is this perception of meaning and import that leads many of us into magick and the spiritual life in the first place, and it is this perception of meaning and import that I call “resonance”.
Resonance is a term from the physical sciences and describes a state where the vibration of one object stimulates or prolongs vibration in another object. A typical example from a science class is when a tuning fork tuned to the same note as another tuning fork nearby is struck and the vibrations of the first fork cause the second tuning fork to start vibrating and producing sound as well. The reason why certain objects resonate with each other and others do not is because of the compositions, sizes, and shapes of the objects in question. This means that the properties that cause objects to resonate are both intrinsic and extrinsic, both internal and external. This combination of internality and externality is exactly the sort of experience we have when we encounter a resonant symbol; that symbol is meaningful in terms of the general use of language (it denotes) and it is also meaningful on the personal level (it connotes). The symbol draws us forward into meaning.
All symbols trivially “mean something”, of course. That’s what symbols do, after all. But resonance isn’t simply about reference. Instead, the notion of resonance captures a phenomenological experience of profound meaning that feels like it is leading us towards something important. It is this deeply personal, deeply idiosyncratic experience that leads one either towards or away from something in the progressive spiritual life that is sometimes called the “Great Work”, and it is to this phenomenon that the alien must turn their attention in order to find a way forward in their task.
How do we distinguish resonance from mere interest or psychological fixation? Both of the latter are also commonly associated with the reasons people who pursue magick give for their occult activities, so how do we distinguish resonance? Unfortunately, there is no external test to which we can subject this question. The distinction is purely phenomenological. This means that it is a purely subjective and interior experience of (we assume) objective and exterior realities. But so are most interests and many psychological states. So how can we distinguish resonance from mere interest or obsession, especially when resonance is often accompanied by interest and even obsession? Can we make a principled cut?
It seems to me that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between the experiences and that this qualitative difference can be used to make a principled cut. An experience of resonance is one of inexplicable significance, while an experience of mere interest or even obsession is one of explicable engagement.
First, resonance is inexplicable. For example, I am very interested in games and especially enjoy roleplaying games. I am also prone to obsession, so at times I have even been obsessed with a given game or series of games. But in these cases my experience is:
Explicable in terms of pure enjoyment. I both experience the fun of playing the game and the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing the design and story elements of the game.
Explicable in terms of my particular psychological profile. I have had health issues for much of my life and games have provided much-needed escape, thus psychologically motivating my behavior and experience.
But in the case of our anecdote about the young person seeing a pentagram for the first time there is no such explanation. The shape is merely one of many the young person has seen, and there is no discernible reason why the pentagram should seem so different, so important, when compared with other shapes.
Secondly, resonance is about significance rather than engagement. I love games and spend both time and money on them, but I don’t perceive them to be significant in any way beyond the enjoyment—either recreational or aesthetic—which they provide. This is not to imply that the aesthetic does not possess meaning and that it cannot sometimes cause meaningful change in the world; instead my claim is that the aesthetic has these results in ourselves and the world through our engagement and that this engagement is of a character unique to the aesthetic. This is also not a claim that the aesthetic cannot contain resonant elements that do, in fact, have the sort of significance of which I speak. My claim is simply that in the case of our young person and the pentagram there is a distinct experience of the pentagram meaning something, something important that goes beyond its meaning or importance as a work of art. There is the perception that behind the pentagram lays a mystery, a trail of significance to follow. The experience of the pentagram draws the young person towards something larger. This is the experience of resonance.
Now please recall that the goal of the alien, the reason they are going through all of this effort in the first place, is to discover the reasons and the purpose—if such a purpose exists—for which they have come to be in our world and to then work to fulfill that purpose. In this quest the alien searches for clues, for hints that might help their project. It is my contention that this mysterious experience of resonance, so typical of those called to magick, mysticism, and the spiritual life, is exactly what the alien is looking for…a guide, a roadmap (or at least a compass), and a place to start their work. It is resonance that tells us as mages and mystics to pursue one tradition over another, to work with a particular deity or spirit over another, or to perform a particular act of magick, mysticism, or devotion over another. And my claim is that it is this phenomenon of resonance that we should rely upon to tell us what we should do when we are trying to understand and pursue projects in the world and the rules of evidence and reason provide two or more equally preferable answers. Resonance is our “one star in sight” as Crowley (1929, 1976) put it.
And with this introduction of the concept of resonance I conclude the section of this work attempting to establish for the alien “how to think”. In the next section we will begin to explore ontology and metaphysics and begin to establish “what to think about”.
Works cited:
Aleister Crowley (Edward Alexander Crowley), Magick In Theory And Practice, (Dover Publications , Inc., 1976, originally published 1929)