I said earlier that one aim of meditation is to “to dis-cover the root of all thinking, that which is transcendentally-ontologically prior to all thinking.” Tom Carroll asked me about this and what, if anything, it has to to with what Kant and Husserl mean by ‘transcendental.’
1) The basic idea is that, below the surface of ordinary mind, with its chaos of thoughts, images, good and evil feelings, useful and useless memories, and other detritus, there lies a ‘depth dimension’ that some of us have experienced. It is ‘prior’ in some sense to ordinary mind and its discursive operations. The experience of this depth dimension cannot be brought about by one’s own effort. It occurs on its own initiative. Phenomenologically, the experience has a gift-character. It is as if one has been granted this experience by a Power external to oneself. Whether one has in reality been granted this experience by an external Power is a metaphysical question that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation. But it is reasonable to take the experience as evidence of an external power that is prior to and deeper than anything on the phenomenal plane.
One can have this experience, or gain this glimpse, without any preparatory spiritual exercises whatsoever. Or one can make preparations. The preparations at most prepare the soul; they cannot of themselves initiate the growth. If one prepares with discursive prayer, one first touches upon this depth dimension in the transition from what Augustin Poulain calls the “prayer of simplicity” to the non-discursive “prayer of quiet.” If one experiences this transition, then one has reached the initial and lowest level of mystical experience, properly so-called. See here.
In addition to the planting metaphor, there is a metaphor for this preparation from al-Ghazali that I like very much. A desert-dweller is more likely to catch a cooling breeze at the top of a minaret than at its base. So he climbs to the top of the minaret. But whether he is granted a cooling breeze is not in his power. So the first step into the mystical cannot be achieved by own-power alone. It is not just that own-power is insufficient; own-power is neither necessary nor sufficient. Other-Power, however, is both necessary and sufficient. Preparations are merely ancillary or auxiliary.
2) By ‘thinking’ I mean discursive thinking. So a meditator qua meditator is not a thinker. Discipline thinking is at best a springboard beyond discursion toward the transdiscursive.
3) I said earlier that the root of all thinking is transcendentally-ontologically prior to all thinking. What sort of priority is this?
‘Prior’ has several senses, among them: temporal, logical, transcendental, ontological. If one event occurs before another in time, then the first is temporally prior to the second. The priority of the parts of a whole to the whole is in many cases logical but not temporal. This is especially clear in cases in which neither the whole nor its parts are in time. The numbers 2, 7, and 9 are logically but not temporally prior to the set, {2, 7, 9}. In this example there cannot be temporal priority because neither the parts (the elements) not the whole (the set) are in time.
In the case of a wall made of stacked stones, both whole (the wall) and the parts (the constituent stones) are in time. Moreover, the wall came to be at a time and will cease to be at a later time. Nonetheless, at any given time t in the wall’s career, the stones at t are logically, not temporally, prior to the wall at t.
A third example. The definitions and axioms in an axiomatic system are logically, not temporally, prior to the theorems that follow from the axioms. And note that ‘follow’ here does not have a temporal sense, despite the fact that the writing of a proof on a blackboard involves a temporally sequential series of steps.
A fourth example. Trump and the true sentence ‘Trump exists’ uttered or written by someone both exist in time. Does the man exist because the sentence is true, or is the sentence true because the man exists? The latter. The existing man, as the truth-maker of the true sentence, is logically prior to the true sentence.
4) Transcendental priority is different from both temporal and logical priority. It refers to the priority of consciousness over every object of consciousness, where ‘object’ is taken in a maximally broad way to cover concrete particulars, abstract particulars (tropes), events, event-sequences, abstracta (ideallia) of all sorts including Fregean propositions, mathematical sets of every cardinality, functions, series, finite and infinite, relations of consistency, inconsistency, and entailment, introspectible mental items whether intentional or non-intentional, Meinongian nonentities, concepts in minds, exemplified and unexemplified universals, all distinctions and differences between and among anything and anything else . . . , in short, everything that can be brought before consciousness as an object for consciousness.
Transcendental consciousness is thus the ultimate Other to every actual and possible object in the maximally broad sense of the term. It is the ultimate condition of the possibility of anything’s appearing. You can think of it as the transcendental Light of mind without which nothing would appear, including physically illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or physical sources of physical light such as the Sun, or the lambent spaces between them.
5) Ontologically prior to this transcendental Light stands its onto-theological Source. Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source of Transcendental Light upon entering into his “inmost being.” Entering there, he saw with his soul’s eye, “above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light.” He continues:
It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater
light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but
different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my
mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my
mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made
by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows
it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)
6) I didn’t get around to Kant and Husserl. Tomorrow’s another day.
