‘Directions for the Government of the Senses’

Governing the senses, rather than being governed by the senses, is an implicit human characteristic of reason. Reason is a process of mind sorting through a large body of sense data that is evaluated to comprehend and implement behavior in best self-interest. Chapter eight of Richard Baxter’s ‘Ethics’ concerns governing the senses. It is another brilliant essay in ‘Ethics’. I think Baxter’s acute philosophical thought would surprise many philosophers. After all, Baxter wrote this book circa 1655-a contemporary of Descartes and prior to Hume and Sartre. Perennial ideas concerning mind, reason, perceptions, sense data and the relation between the temporal world and the atemporal eternal reality from which the Universe condensed or precipitated perhaps phenomenally like a hologram or more substantially as a steady state of quantum entanglement of energy packets are of continuing interest and have beginning for the west with pre-Socratic philosophers besides the obvious Athenians Socrates, Plato and Democritus. Baxter’s applied use of the salient philosophical concepts is entirely within a theological paradigm however and might easily slip past the review of overly technical contemporary philosophers and philologists interested in the history of ideas.

 To a certain extent encountering sense-data is a forced rather than an optional experience. A mind without sense data input fundamentally would need to be non-existent or without a body and hence non-existent. It may be possible for a human spirit via the grace of God to exist without a body, however the human mind seems to be a concatenation of human physiology existing as a processor of information at a conscious and subconscious level.

Sense data actually provides flat-screen 2-dimensional visual input and the brain with a little training uses the different angles of input from the eyes being set apart to create a virtual 3-D appearance. That has since been a well-researched field of study that has been broadly applied to horses and creatures that look up from the ground or down from above and so forth regarding the position of their eyes on the skull.

Not to get too far into that particular sense data inquiry, the relationship of mind to sense data and of reason to sense data is of interest for Christians; sanctification according to the measure of God’s grace permits reason to develop a spiritual and eternal capacity rather than simply a temporal relation and capacity for reason-and that is a profound difference concerning actual individual and social human behavior.

Contemporary American psychology largely concerns empirical and temporal reason and physiological relations of mind to body and sense data. Because it is fundamentally empirical it has lent itself to an anti-eternal bias. It is like Plato without a realm of forms, or Socratic virtue without eternal reason. As American psychology is a temporal and reductionist study discovering ‘mechanical’ or innate causality for sense data and cognitive processing it has tended to move toward a fracturization of reason in the temporal and nihilation of reason concerning eternal, non-phenomenal things.

That observation isn’t new of course. David Hume was the first of philosophers to formalize the maxim that if a book isn’t about sense data input, concrete things one should burn it as sophistry. That point of view seems commensurate with contemporary British imperialism through corporatism and the destruction and degradation of civilian rights, morals and reason in order to default to rule by financial elites without actual democracy being developed.

Baxter has a great page or two (actually most all of them are compared to much writing today) describing the fundamental state of human reason in comparison to that of brutes (or purely materialistic feminists and others seeking pure class ego advancement and advantage without reason of eternal values).

The quote from chapter eight, direction 1; “Reason is dethroned by sin; and the will is left unguided and unguarded to the rapes of sensual violence. Reason must be restored, before sense will be well governed; for what else must be their immediate governor? it is no sin for brutes to live by sense, because they have not reason to rule it; and in man it is ruled more or less, as reason is more or less restored. When reason is only cleared about things temporal (as in men of worldly wisdom,) there sense will be mastered and ruled as to such temporal, as far as they require it. But where is reason is sanctified, there sense is ruled to the ends of sanctification, according to the measure of grace.”

I think the development of reason is not so well respected today by select elites though there is more knowledge than ever before. There is perhaps a variegated advance along the social front regarding knowledge, reason and spiritual discernment that does not occur at an equal pace everyplace on Earth in space and time. So if reason falls victim now and then to politics and mass psychology martinets, it probably recovers eventually after some mayhem and destruction, despair and chaos. The U.S.A. presently has a non-reasoning sense-data kind of foreign policy vectors in the Middle-East and Ukraine, and the President has levered through homosexual marriage and a homosexual nominee for Secretary of the Army. Since pre-trib evangelicals also are simplistic and non-reasoning enough concerning their choice of eschatology it seems apropos that so much of U.S. foreign policy and domestic social development is off-balance and non-reasoning about eternal values and principles. Maybe that will again change yet one should never misunderestimate the powers of mass error under the tutelage of the broadcast media. One cannot expect Americans all to be John Rambo disregarding pain as easily as the mythical Buddhist monk for whom all is illusory and when the bell tolls it is silent or no bell at all. It is possible however to develop reason about the senses such that objectivity concerning the senses and sense data builds up. For Christians original sin tolls the bell for all and thee, yet it is not the signal for an, unreasoning temporal spree. Reason with an eye to the eternal world lets the Lord shield one with grace . From sense data that would overcome reason, and resonant bells sounding Satan hellish pace, the Lord Jesus navigates one through temporal, sensory shoals to the eternal place of God.

It is also the case that experience really changes reception of and reaction to sense data and empirical circumstance. Consider how one can prevent blisters from walking in boots through a variety of means, or that infected blisters can cause blood poisoning and death fairly swiftly. The naive walk right into disaster, while the experienced applying the benefit of knowledge with reason act to prevent such development from occurring. Christians too have innumerable sensory traps that might be avoided with reason and experience, and just relying upon the word of God, that are common and recurrent to all that experience life.