It is as important to know how one comes to accept and therefore why one believes, as it is what one believes.
(Carolyn Blackmer, Toksvig review 1948)The spiritual acuities and reactions have their rise rather late in life, and who is to say what keenness and swiftness might be developed as an end product of a long series of trial-and-error and emerging insights. Physical senility has no control at this level even though it may seem to bring a sleep and a forgetting of the powers of thought.
(Carolyn Blackmer, "Mental Maturity" 1949)
My reading of the last month has been anything but systematic: bits of this book and that paper, smidgins from google searches, sometimes whole books if I happened to get entangled in them. As a result I now have a much clearer idea of what Swedenborg was up to at various times in his life, and much more appreciation for what Carolyn Blackmer took on during her life, and for how resolutely she went about the difficult task of communicating to audiences that were mostly not much inclined to listen.
The pile of books around my chair continues to grow, mostly thanks to Amazon's vast array of used books, many from far out on the Long Tail. I could only wish that I'd transcribed more of the juiciest bits as I proceeded, so that I'd have more material to try to weave into a coherent report of my discoveries. This summary-to-date will accordingly be rather scattershot and disconnected, but I tell myself that it's preliminary. The intended audience? Well, primarily my own very, very self. But also for Kate and John, by way of Legacy from the grandmother they never knew. And also for Paige Arrington's possible amusement, since it was her query that started me on this adventure. So this will take the form of quoted extracts with interlarded comments, more scrapbook than synthesis.
Where to begin? What text is the best entry point for the search for essence of Carolyn Blackmer? Always a problem for any thinker or writer, but I've found that Carolyn's 35 or so short pages of Reading Swedenborg is more about the general problem of READING, really reading, than it is about accessing the rather recondite corpus of Swedenborg's works—which is to say, even those with zero interest in things Swedenborgian could read Carolyn's words with interest and profit:
Whenever I encounter people who are open and questioning, and can discover what kinds of questions concern them seriously, I am able to communicate. If nothing more, we can search together for the kinds of questions that modern man must ask if he is to have any hope of surviving to create a new kind of world...In any century, a weak or wanton eye makes for spiritual and intellectual illiteracy, for it does not see clearly enough nor persistently enough to know what to question and what to search for. Or it expects an answer immediately and ready-made on first reading ... Reading any writer faithfully requires some knowledge of his "drift and design." If the author's purpose in writing in some way answers to our need in reading, he will be worth reading over and over again no matter how obscure he seemed at first acquaintance. The problem is to know what our needs are specifically enough to formulate insistent questions as we read....
In the beginning our questions are of prime importance. They are the most valuable tools we have for opening up the meaning of what [the author] has to say to us. Of course, they need to be genuine questions, ones that come out of very real doubts, bewilderments, and perplexities...
This attitude is not just an unquestioning acceptance of everything one reads. Nor is it an unthinking, immediate conditioned reflex of "I agree" or "I disagree." That kind of reaction closes one's mind dogmatically and unquestioningly to the possible implications of what one accepts or rejects. Reading profitably often requires what someone has called "a willing suspension of disbelief", an attitude of going along with a new idea to see where it wil lead, no matter how amazing or incredible it may seem...
...what we are doing in reading or in listening is forming concepts, and our reading may be either a confirmation of our present states which would reject anything that might change our position, or it could so sharpen our perceptions that we are open to a more discriminating idea. In either case it is a process, a circular process, In the first instance, we remain in the same old groove, like a broken record, reinforcing opinions and reactions by defensive repetition. But if something happens to sharpen our perceptions we are more open to new concepts. These concepts in turn allow us to perceive with greater sensitivity... The direction and movement of our growing in understanding and wisdom can take us not just round and round, but in a spiral or an ascending vortex...
I've been surprised to find that Carolyn has a lot to say directly to ME as a reader across a vast and ragged landscape of subjects and genres. Some of her messages got through to me long ago (though I have no idea how), in that I recognize just what it is she was trying to communicate in even something so insular as an article from the 1955 New Church Messenger: "Entering the Mysteries with Reason".
...it has generally been conceded in our western world that the knowable is confined to a clearly defined field governed by the requirements of a scientific and material thought. Everything that cannot be observed objectively, measured, isolated as fact, expressed in language that shares the logical structure of physical reality, is said to be inaccessible to logic. "But if there be a world which is not physical, or not in space-time, it may have a structure which we can never hope to express or to know," says Bertrand Russell, and rightly adds, "Perhaps that is why we know so much physics and so little of anything else."...The power of the mind to form symbols for itself whereby it represents and realizes its world of inner reality is, indeed, the keynote of all humanistic problems...
And even in a 1934 article on religious education (and including angelology I can't relate to) I detect some subtle points:
Close observation of very little children will show a great many qualities they have in common with ancient peoples and with angels. Their thought and speech are full of arcana of knowledges that flow in from celestial and spiritual things. When they have not been ridiculed or corrected severely, they use language with a grand carelessness and freedom to express their ideas of thought. Sensitive ears will perceive how sublime ideas are expressed in a few simple words artlessly arranged. Their innocent affection makes it the universal of languages understood wherever there is an answering affection. Their speech is like the speech of angelic spirits and of early peoples because their inner memory has not yet been obscured by too many external images and ideas. Little children likewise understand the idea of thought of another's speech without knowing precisely and intellectually the meaning of each word. This is especially true of whatever is said with emotional coloring.I have found that several passes at Carolyn's writings are necessary for me to get past my own limitations (which include an allergy to the doctrinal zones: the Lord and the Word were vital to her, but outside my ken/comfort zone), and I haven't yet attempted some of the scanned papers. And anyway one of the motivating questions for me has been: what were the influences upon which she drew? Swedenborg's NON-theological writings are one body of literature to explore, and the nexus of several philosophers Carolyn was engaged with is another (Peirce, Cassirer, Whitehead, Langer).
Swedenborg first, then. I began this effort to approach Swedenborg with a defective picture of who he was in the context of 18th century European thought and science, and have been filling in the picture slowly. He and his contemporaries had an array of tools and concepts to use in the project of studying the systems of the world around them, and a set of open questions that their tools and concepts were applicable to (or seemed to be). They also had assumptions, some of which are not now current (for example, that the Christian model of higher powers/divinity was fundamental and true: that there is a Lord was pretty much universally believed, and that spiritual realms were adjacent to the world of man on earth, and that angels existed, etc.).
Thus, Swedenborg's early interest in mathematics was constrained by contemporary understanding of what mathematics could do and was relevant for. The possibility that mathematics might be the key to a hidden universal language was a primary motive for the study of math and science.
By the same token, Swedenborg's biological interests were in support of his search for the soul, and the means by which the Divine/celestial communicated with humanity. Swedenborg's sophisticated model of animus/mens/anima was taken as an explanation of communication between the earthbound and the celestial [and needs an explication that I'll have to contrive and link to, since it was so central to Carolyn's interests].
Consider the impact on Swedenborg and his contemporaries of Leeuwenhoek's microscope, which opened a whole new world of possibilities beyond the resolving power of the naked eye, and so opened to empirical investigation realms that were formerly mysterious, indeed unknowable, but also encountered resolution limitations that obscured yet more mysteries (Swedenborg had and used a Leeuwenhoek-style microscope himself). And of course that same issue of instrumentation changing the possible questions obtained in other scientific fields. So the questions kept changing as understanding advanced.
But the question of Vital Essence was unanswered: what was it how did it work, what animated it? In 1718 Swedenborg published a paper titled "A proof that our Vital Essence consists for the most part of small vibrations, that is, of tremulations" which
posited the existence of a superfine matter that served as a medium for transmitting thoughts and sensations ... the Divine itself made manifest...Swedenborg posed as an empirical question
(Scribe of Heaven pp 13, 14)
What is this something in the soul, which is nothing mechanical, and what are the appropriate means of understanding it?Swedenborg traveled a lot (Germany, Holland, France, England) and wrote a lot. His 1741 Oeconomia Regni Animalis [Dynamics of the Soul's Domain] posited a "spiritous fluid" which contains the essence of life, and offered a hierarchy of
(Scribe of Heaven pg 16)
And all that 18th century science turns out to be quite fascinating to inquire into.
But in 1743 Swedenborg began a personal and private diary of dreams, the upshot of which was that he embarked on spiritual discoveries and writings that have widely branded him as a "mystic" (a designation that Carolyn abhorred) or "seer" and, after his death, led to the founding of reading groups and eventually churches that Swedenborg certainly never foresaw or intended. The Van Dusen [a psychiatrist] and Bergquist [a former diplomat] volumes are fascinating expositions of the dream diaries. My brother David was positively allergic to every bit of the churchy stuff, but found the dream diaries compelling. Now I understand why.
Carolyn's Essays in Spiritual Psychology takes on both the Dream Diary and Swedenborg's model of the Mind. Until now I've been flat out unable to read these essays, though I can't muster an explanation beyond discomfort with things Swedenborgian.
I was surprised to find that D.T. Suzuki's Swedenborg: Buddha of the North (originally published in 1913, translated from Japanese in ...) was especially helpful when I was starting to try to make sense of Swedenborg this time around. I read it via Kindle, and so was able to extract highlighted passages as a single page. (Note especially the marvelous Swedenborg quotation at Location 1287, enough to make one want to seek out angelic Cicerones...)
... (working...)
I remember clearly the presence on my mother's desk of Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and CK Ogden and IA Richards' The Meaning of Meaning (1923). I fancy that I wondered what "Meaning of Meaning" could mean, but I don't think I ever asked. Looking into the book now, Umberto Eco's Introduction (1988) places it at the intersection of "linguistics, semantics, philosophy of language, [and] semiotics", but also observes that M of M is rarely cited in contemporary writing in those disciplines.
One of the happy side effects of my recent reading of materials my mother was influenced by has been to pique my interest in the still live but now somnolent literatures of past times—partly recognizing what Eco tags as the 'seminal' and asking where-did-x-come-from/go?, and partly for the novel and refreshing flavor of prose from 50 and more years ago (Eco's label for this literature is 'classic'). Eco puts it very clearly:
To the layman or the student who is just preparing to face the problems of language I would suggest that he bear in mind that the book was conceived in the first decades of [the 20th] century. Since then many things have happened: the spread of logical positivism, analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, the application of logical models to ordinary language, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, in addition to the central role now played by the problem of meaning in research into artificial intelligence. Ogden and Richards could know none of these things. The reader must therefore remember that this book represents a prelude to these developments... If the reader keeps this firmly in mind he will understand the fascination of the book, its capacity for opening horizons. (pg vi)Some bits of Ogden and Richards seem especially in harmony with Carolyn:
An account of the process of Interpretation is thus the key to the understanding of the Sign-situation, and therefore the beginning of wisdom... (pg 50)Carolyn was much concerned with process of Interpetation, and with pathways toward wisdom. And I'm also reminded of her memory of Lewis Field Hite teaching her to think philosophically, asking her "Carolyn, what do you mean when you say...?"
Eco again:
...in the course of an everyday conversation, it can be useful to ask one's interlocutor what he really wanted to say and what meaning he was giving to a certain word he used. But it is equally true that ordinary language lives on ambiguity, nuance, and allusion; and people use it nonchalantly, often managing to understand one another despite imprecisions, ellipses, and misreadings. (pp vii-viii)
...
The dust jacket of Langer's Philosophical Sketches (1962) pulls no punches, and echoes some of what I've sketched above:
The tidal wave of continental philosophy and postmodern theory in the 1970s and '80s sent the work of a number of mid-century thinkers underwater. Developing ideas in the fields of linguistic analysis, literary criticism, aesthetics, and the theory of consciousness were no longer considered fruitful and were disregarded. However, recent discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and biology, and the implications of those findings, may make some of this earlier work ripe for reappraisal...