Deep Listening, Science, and Spirit: Timothy Eastman's Untying the Gordian Knot as a Resource for Poets and Artists

Integrative, Non-Reductionist Science

Timothy Eastman's Untying the Gordian Knot

A physicist by training and deeply influenced by quantum mechanics, Timothy Eastman offers Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context as a humble yet inclusive "integrative vision" of the universe.

As we read his book, we find ourselves in a vast and evolving network of mutual becoming, filled with potentialities and actualities at every level: submicroscopic, microscopic, macroscopic, and astronomical. This is a universe in which we are embedded, such that there is no God's eye view from which we can discern the whole from a third-person, context free perspective. We are small but included in a larger, evolving whole, with the universe itself as the wider context in which our lives unfold. Lest we think we might stand still and simply gaze at our environments while they shift from one state to another, we best recognize that we are always already "in process," actualizing potentialities moment by moment, along with quantum events and everything else. As the subtitle to the book makes clear: reality is process and context.

Along the way we learn to use the word "reality" in a different way. So often we speak of "reality" as the actual world or the actual universe, limiting "reality" to what is actual, whether as perceived through the senses or discerned through instruments of science (microscopes and telescopes, for example). Eastman invites us to use the word "reality" to refer to potentialities as well as actualities, which means that there is more to reality than meet the eye or the instrument, and that even the world of actualities cannot be understood without reference to potentialities. Actualities are forever and always actualizing potentialities. This means that "reality" has an openness to it, an indeterminacy. There will be more events in the universe tomorrow than there were today, because new events will have been added; the universe is, to use Whitehead's phrase, a creative advance into novelty. All of this suggests that the future of the universe, and by implication the future of our own lives, is not pre-ordained, not by God and not by the past. Our decisions count.

Of course this does not mean that the future will be happy or pleasant. It is filled with risk as well as adventure, and we humans best use all the forms of wisdom at our disposal, all forms of knowing available to us, to make our decisions. Eastman proposes that there are at least three of them: a way of numbers (science), a way that is sensitive to contexts for knowing, to the wisdom that comes from values and feelings, and to the quest for meaning (humanities) and a way attentive to ultimate meaning (spirit). One of Eastman's most important points is that all three ways of knowing are important to the living of our lives. His book is, among other things, a very good argument for interdisciplinary majors that cross the divides between the arts and sciences, and for liberal arts education in general.

In short, the book is not about physics alone, although physics plays a very important role. It is also about who we are as human beings and how we live with one another. Its contents are relevant to poets as well as chemists, artists as well as philosophers, psychologists as well as engineers, physicians as well as physicists. Its sources are wide-ranging. They include quantum physics, of course, and also evolutionary theory, semiotics and biosemiotics, culture studies, neurobiology, indigenous spirituality, spiritual writings of authors such as Richard Rohr (see below), and systematic philosophy, including and perhaps especially process philosophy. While often quite technical, Eastman's aim is to avoid "high abstractions and exotic concepts" and instead focus on concepts "compatible with basic human experience." He calls his approach the Logoi framework and hopes that it can itself provide hope to a beautiful yet troubled world. Eastman puts it this way.

My hope is that new integrative approaches like the Logoi framework can free people from ideas that have kept them stuck because of faulty presuppositions, and thereby open the way toward intellectual liberation and, hopefully, developing new strategies for gaining enhanced self-awareness, other awareness, and genuine freedom for everyone.

Eastman, Timothy E.. Untying the Gordian Knot (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (p. 318). Lexington Books. Kindle Edition.

Eastman's aims notwithstanding, the book is not an easy read for many of us steeped in the humanities (art, literature, music, philosophy, religious studies, theatre arts). Or for those of us immersed in the grassroots of family life, community life, and more general hopes for a world in need. Thus I offer this page, liberally sprinkled with excerpts, as a guide for poets and artists: that is, for those of us who are especially drawn to the second and third ways of knowing: the ways of the humanities and spirit. I apologize to readers for not giving page numbers for the excerpts: I am relying on an online (Kindle) edition of the book and its page numbers do not correspond with those of the written text. I begin with the knot of problems Eastman is trying to solve.

- Jay McDaniel

What problems does Eastman address?

A Gordian knot is a knot tied by Gordius, king of Phrygia, held to be capable of being untied only by the future ruler of Asia, and cut by Alexander the Great with his sword. In Eastman's book, the idea of Untying the Gordian Knot is that of untying some problems that have plagued philosophers, scientists, and others for millenia. Eastman gives us a list of some of them at the outset of his book:

1. Measurement—Quantum systems can have many values at once for an observable, but upon measurement, such systems “collapse” to only one value. When and how does this happen?
2. Potentiality—Are possible relations (potentiae) part of the real (having some ontic status), or do they merely have some pragmatic or epistemic status?
3. Continuity—How are the discrete and continuous aspects of the world to be reconciled? In particular, how can one reconcile quantum physics (whose fundamental structure consists in discrete topological and logical relations) with theories of relativity (whose fundamental structure consists in continuous metrical relations)?
4. Temporality—Is the experience of time (and of temporality) an illusion or does it have some ontic basis in the real world?
5. Causal relations—Is our inference of causal relations only based on epistemic or pragmatic considerations (as with Hume’s habits of association), or is there a more fundamental ontic basis for causation?
6. Law—What is the ultimate basis for physical relationships? What enables the uniformity of physical relationships across the universe (i.e., universality)?
7. Emergence—What is emergence? Is it epistemic only, via supervenience, or does it arise by means of some ontic, multilevel creation of genuinely new processes or entities?
8. Information and Knowledge—How is knowledge grounded if not solely in information?
9. Induction—How can we justify inductive inference from the observed to the unobserved? Are there objective regularities enabling an effective and intuitive solution?
10. Access—Are the abstract realms of logic and mathematics distinct yet inaccessible (as with Plato’s allegory of the cave), or are such features a deeply imbedded aspect of reality?
11. Matter-symbol problem—What is the fundamental relationship of knower and known?
12. Mind-body problem—How does the physical brain enable processes of consciousness?
13. Problem of meaning—What is the fundamental basis for values and meaning, which appear to lack any scientific basis?

Eastman, Timothy E.. Untying the Gordian Knot (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (p. 95). Lexington Books. Kindle Edition.

What ideas can be
incorporated into daily life?

Untying the Gordian Knot is indeed a hopeful book, aimed at wrestling with, and perhaps even helping to solve, the thirteen problems listed above. I suspect that poet and artists will be especially interested in the problem of meaning (#13) and perhaps the mind-body problem (#12). But in wrestling with these two, along with the others, he offers, to my mind, many ideas that are relevant to the living of daily life, and that can be internalized and developed by people shaped by many different cultures, religions, philosophies, and religious orientations. I encourage you to take a look at how he makes the case for these ideas by an appeal to empirical evidence and philosophical analysis, but I will simply list them here, hoping they might be, in Whitehead's words, "lures for feeling" and springboards for reflection. They are:

his idea that the mind is different from the brain, thus challenging the view that human (and other animal) life is reducible to brain states.
his emphasis on triadic thinking, thus challenging the simple binaries of either-or thinking.
his emphasis on the reality of potentialities as well as actualities, thus challenging the view that actuality is what there is and all there is to "reality."
his recognition of the importance of 'anticipatory thinking' in human and animal life, opening the door for an appreciation of the way that anticipation (including hope) is part of the fabric of human (and other animal) life.
his depiction of a thoroughly relational universe where everything is connected to everything else, which sounds, by the way, very Buddhist as well as Whiteheadian.
his openness to parapsychological experiences, thus expanding common notions of cognition.
his consideration of a non-contingent ground of all potentials, which sounds a lot like Whitehead's idea of the primordial nature of God.
his recognition of many 'levels' of reality, the microscopic, the meso-level, a macro-level, and an astronomical level, thus reminding us that reality is not reducible to where we humans live so much of our lives, namely at a macrolevel of ordinary waking consciousness and sense perception.
his reminder that "space" itself is not ultimate, but rather emerges out of extensive relations, thus reminding us that our modes of thinking, if too spatialized, may miss much of what is important.
his insistence that "time" or, better, temporal, "process" and asymmetrical passage does have a kind of reality in the depths of the physical universe itself.
his idea that meaning may be embedded in the universe rather than a mere product of psychological projection, and also that meaning need not be justified by ad hoc appeals to a divine entity.
his emphasis on three ways of knowing: the way of numbers, the way of context, and the way of spirit.

Among these, I find his description of the three ways of knowing (#12 above) especially helpful in making space for the humanities and spirituality in contemporary thought.

Three Ways of Knowing

Imagine that you are sitting in on a faculty meeting in a college or university. Around you are professors of art, physics, economics, music, chemistry, religious studies, biology, and philosophy. Eastman invites all of you to recognize and appreciate three ways of knowing. This, I believe, is among the most important "take home" ideas in his book.

Three Ways of Knowing

(1) The way of numbers: a focus on context independence and quantitative representation (as with some claimed “theories of everything,” which often presume a science-only approach); also including the way of signs (semiotics); A much less restricted framing would be one associated with humanistic studies:

(2) The way of context: roughly the domain of arts and humanities; fully affirming qualitative dimensions that, in turn, also include semiotics;

(3) The way of spirit: addressing reference to ultimate boundaries, ultimacies, and spiritual experience.

Eastman, Timothy E.

A Recognition of Ultimacies and Meaning

Eventually, with the emergence of consciousness, such self-aware beings evolve to become aware of their ultimate context, not just of multiscale contingencies (worlds-upon-worlds) but also aware of the noncontingent ground of contingency, which may be (or is sometimes characterized as) the spiritual dimension (see chapter 8). At the level of ontology alone, such beings can only be confident of the way of numbers (science) and, to varying degrees, the way of context, or the way of signs (humanities, and semiotics). Going beyond these two ways through the recognition of ultimacies and unrestricted domains of discourse would logically lead to an ultimate basis for closure and meaning, transcending the anthropomorphic, and this in turn leads to the way of spirit (spirituality; the religious dimension). This progression completes the three fundamental ways of awareness for finite beings (the way of numbers, of context/signs, of spirit).

Eastman, Timothy E.

Triadic Thinking

One of Eastman's proposals is that, if we want to think in any of these three ways -- in terms of numbers, contexts, or spirit -- it is important to think triadically rather than dyadically. Dyadic thinking emphasizes relations between two realities: something is "this" or "that." It operates according to what he calls Boolean logic. Triadic thinking, by contrast, introduces a third factor. It operates according to non-Boolean logic. This third factor can be the "context" in which two things are related, which introduces an indeterminacy into the very consideration of the two things, because they can be related to the context in different ways. However understood, it entails the notion of potentialities in terms of which things behave and have their existence. Eastman writes:

Whereas scientific description and approximations very often strip away context and so enable discrete measurement results and simple input-output pairings (dyads), real-world interactions always require triads, cycles of input-output-context, or, at least, some inevitable reference to a third.

To my mind, triadic thinking introduces a note of spontaneity and improvisation into Eastman's vision, making space for a way of living that is more than formula, more than repetition, more than "framing" the world in terms of overly-defined visions at the expense of appreciating its jazz-like character. It makes space for saying "I don't know" and "let's see what happens" and "let's keep the options open" and, ever so important, "let's listen to one another and see what we discover." Such qualities of hear and mind are essential to the very world Eastman seeks to encourage. They rightly include a place for deep listening.

A Place for Deep Listening

Eastman's integrative vision points to what we might call an integrative spirituality. What might it look like? The spiritual alphabet of Spirituality and Practice is a helpful way of appreciating a more rounded and inclusive view of the spiritual modes of knowing. Spirituality and Practice highlights thirty seven qualities of heart and mind, thirty seven modes of knowing, that are important in various religious and cultural traditions, and that may well be understood as spiritual modes of knowing.

attention -  beauty -  being present -  compassion -  connections  -  devotion -  enthusiasm -  faith
forgiveness - grace -  gratitude - hope - hospitality - imagination - joy -  justice - kindness - listening
love -  meaning -  nurturing -  openness -  peace - play -  questing -  reverence - shadow - silence
teachers -  transformation -  unity -  vision - wonder -  x, the mystery -  yearning -  you -  zeal

Note that some of these modes of knowing do not deal directly with questions of ultimacy and ultimate boundaries. For example, "attention" and "being present" and "enthusiasm" and "yearning" and "you" and "zeal" (understood as zest for life) seem to pertain more to how we live in the present, in relation to one another and the natural world, than in questions of ultimacy. Eastman might prefer that they be placed within "the way of context" with its humanistic slant than in "the way of spirit." In any case, they, too, take human beings beyond the anthropomorphic, leading to a widening of the heart and mind. And I am especially grateful to Eastman for including Listening within the modes of spirituality he highlights:

The scholarly methodologies described above are especially appropriate to the way of numbers (science) and the way of context (arts and humanities). However, the way of spirit requires a further methodology. For example, Fr. Richard Rohr has argued for a critical augmentation that arises from an open and deep listening process, which he summarizes with the word “contemplation.” Such contemplative practice is key to enabling awareness of the way of spirit, but is also important for all other ways of knowing because it enables a grounding for meaning, and in turn awareness of the ground of being/becoming.

The idea of open and deep listening is important for all contemplative approaches to spirituality. A potential area of exploration here is what Eastman calls, following Whitehead, perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Eastman gives two examples: physical memory of the past and the anticipation of having an influence (causal efficacy) of the future. But in Whitehead's thought there is an additional form of causal efficacy, which Whitehead calls "hybrid physical feelings." They are physical feelings of the mental poles of past experiences, as might be felt in, for example, telepathy, when we "feel the feelings of others." In moments of deep listening, when we listen to ourselves, other people, and the world around us with empathic ears, we are "feeling the feelings" of others in something like a deep listening. This listening is ever so important if we are to realize the hopes for "enhanced other awareness" that Eastman brings to the book.

What is clear is that Eastman offers a way of looking at things, an integrative vision, that invites just such considerations. His ideas are as relevant to poets and artists as to scientists and philosophers. He summarizes his own ideas at various points. Here are two examples.

Key Ideas in the book:
Eastman in his own Words

Four Key Ideas

Maintaining a skepticism toward “-isms,” the Logoi framework is my attempt at an integrative framework of systematic philosophy which, although less developed, appears more comprehensive than most of the integrative philosophies listed here. The strength of the Logoi framework lies in the useful contributions it could make to an improved integrative framework because its scope is broader, taking into account, among other features,

(1) its compact set of fundamental notions (process, logic, relations, context) yet incorporating both reduction and emergence;
(2) its focus on two aspects of the real (both the actual and potentiae) and, correspondingly two logical orders within the real (the Boolean order of actualizations, and non-Boolean order of potentiae);
(3) distinguishing diachronic and synchronic focus as key ways to characterize, respectively, causation and emergence;
(4) attention to multiple ways of knowing and associated levels of context; namely, context independence (science); context dependence (arts and humanities; semiotics); and ultimate context (dimensions of spirit).

Eastman, Timothy E.. Untying the Gordian Knot (Contemporary Whitehead Studies)

Five Ontological Concepts and Two Epistemological Factors

I have attempted to avoid the high abstractions and exotic concepts favored by some, instead focusing on concepts compatible with basic human experience. Building on the most fundamental of notions (process/logic/relations), the fundamental ontological factors that we have revealed are as follows: (1) mode of being/becoming (contingent vs. non-contingent); (2) logical orders (Boolean vs. non-Boolean; actualizations vs. potentiae); (3) pre-space extensive connection (local-global); (4) quantum process (diachronic; fundamental succession); and (5) emergence (synchronic; multilevel; triadicity and semiosis).

In conjunction with these ontological factors, I have focused on two fundamental epistemological factors: (1) modes of perception (presentational immediacy versus causal efficacy, based on Whitehead’s analysis), and (2) three basic ways of knowing: the way of context independence (science, the quantitative, mathematical, and physical relationships); the way of context (humanities and the arts, the qualitative, the way of signs or semiosis); and finally, the way of ultimate context (way of spirit; for example, the contemplative traditions, theology, and religion).

By deploying the Logoi framework, a unified approach is enabled that takes us beyond discrete substances, mechanism, and separateness to fundamental events, processes, and interconnectedness; instead of a simple reductionism of all things to discreet, separable “things,” we have both reduction and emergence, both analysis and creative synthesis. Rethinking the relational web and working through multiple levels of context and synthesis, we have arrived at a vision of transformative thinking, ultimacies and meaning, human and more. The Logoi framework offers a new way to think about the issue of how meaning might be embedded in the universe without invoking ad hoc some divine entity.

Eastman, Timothy E.. Untying the Gordian Knot (Contemporary Whitehead Studies)

And what of that meaning that may well be embedded in the universe. Is that not the subject matter of so much poetry? And is it not the aim of poets and others in the humanities to explore, excavate, and extend that meaning. They - we - need not invoke ad hoc some divine entity; although we may well sense something divine in and beyond the nature of things. The Whiteheadian tradition, by which Eastman is influenced, does not sharply separate meaning in the world, the intrinsic value of life, from meaning in God. They are woven together in such a way that, as we appreciate and recognize the value of life, we discover God. Eastman points out that such sensibilities are compatible with, and can be enriched by, another way of knowing: the way of numbers. He points out that good science and good art and good spirituality can be housemates, all residing in the heart of the same person in triadic form, informing one another in surprising ways. And we might not also wonder if, in fact, the way of numbers has a certain kind of spirituality, too. Is it not, as well, a form of deep listening which takes heed, as best it can, of the mathematical dimensions of the world, even as the humanities and religion take heed of the qualitative. They need one another. Eastman's Untying the Gordian Knot brings forth the humility, and the adventure, of mutual fellowship, of community, between the arts, the sciences, and spirituality.

- Jay McDaniel, April 14, 2021