image: art installation for Thinking the Float Tank, part of the group exhibition Gödel, Escher, Bach, at West Den Haag
Thinking the Float Tank: A Unique Philosophical Experience
Philosophy aims at conjuring pure intelligence (Greek: νοῦς, nous), with the fallout being dianoetic activity or mere thinking. Ordinary thinking is sufficient for most purposes, and it is certainly enough for an academic institution and for contemporary civilization, but it is not enough for philosophy.
Art aims at conjuring invention, novelty, and creation (look to the Greek ποίησις, poiesis). Contemporary art is not only contemporary, but so far as it is true to the newness of art’s spirit it is future-facing. Contemporary artistic creations may partake of the newness of the now, of the present, but the deeper and higher presence of art in such manifestations is teleological, eschatological. The new proper to art is the elusive essence of the now and it is the ephemeral yet fixed omega point of the future.
What would be the confluence of the nous and the new? How could we capture some of its essential meaning and give it to everybody?
At summer’s end, at the contemporary art museum West Den Haag, the group exhibition Gödel, Escher, Bach will conclude its term (May 19 to August 27, 2023) with an interdisciplinary academic conference called Thinking the Float Tank: AUM Fiftieth Anniversary Conference; Cybernetics, Float Tanks, and Phenomenology Since the 1973 Esalen Institute Conference (August 24-26, 2023).
Like the famous book by Douglass Hofstadter of the same title, Gödel, Escher, Bach is about self-reference. Escher’s art manifests self-reference in all its glorious imagination and intelligence, beyond the paradoxes and contradictions of thinking the self dianoetically and of imagining the self plainly as in a mere mirror. That paradigm of self-reference shines through Escher, through Hoftstadter, and all along its path it gives a metaphysical light on such themes as subjectivity and objectivity, the absolute infinite, nothingness, higher-order processes, transcendental reflection and speculation, and so on. That light can be caught in any curve, in any cup, especially a conceptual cup, and finally in the ancient and perennial idea of the infinite sphere. In the real reality of the human world, the cup has a rich symbolic heritage, for instance the alchemical tank, and today we can look to the history of the isolation tank, or flotation tank. This is the intention of Thinking the Float Tank. Metaphysical light will be brought to earth through the confluence of intelligence and imagination and conferred in a conference.
The occasion for this universal sense of the idea of a conference is the anticipated 50th anniversary of a magical occasion at the Esalen Institute on the coast of California in 1973. John C. Lilly, the inventor of the flotation tank, and the philosopher Alan Watts invited the mathematician George Spencer-Brown to lecture on his 1969 book Laws of Form, which Lilly had been using in the tank as a guidebook to other universes. Dubbed the American University of Masters Conference (the AUM Conference), this occasion marked a “second-order” revolution in the history of cybernetics and systems thinking, and implicitly in formal ontology as well. Laws of Form is at once advanced and basic, sophisticated and ultra-simple. A similar second-order revolution was happening in phenomenology around the same time, and both of these as well as other revolutions in contemporary civilization indicate the dynamism of cosmic forces operating world-historically over human spiritual evolution. The place of the fascinating utility of the float tank as a technology of the self (Foucault) and ritual object of meditation in this history of recent philosophy gives a face to the invisible forces of invention and intelligence underlying contemporary extra-mural philosophical activity.
In his books and in the conferences of the years following the AUM Conference, John Lilly identified his inner-tank methods built upon Spencer-Brown’s architecture as “the void method.” The 1974 and 1975 Form and Void Conferences continued the AUM momentum, and fifty years later we hope to do the same. With a workshop aimed at reconstructing the void method, with a work of contemporary art that erases its traces, Gustav Metzger’s NULL OBJECT, and with its very own flotation tank built by Nikolai and Lorenz Beckmann exclusively for this conference, Thinking the Float Tank intends to conjure in fullness that momentum and siphon it into the contemporary and future now and the dianoetic relevance of the pure philosophical nous.
The news today features not only the increasingly familiar holy grail of the Information Age that is artificial intelligence, but now we are also seeing a revolution in reality and virtuality on the horizon, given for instance in the Apple Vision paradigm. Philosophy of immersion, ontology of reality, and new philosophical cosmology are no longer passive museum pieces on display for philosophers, but are inviting active participation (μέθεξις) in the philosophical and meta-theatrical sense. Theosophy and theurgy are not far from this ancient and perennial sense of philosophy.
Academic philosophy conferences capture too little of the light of pure self-reference, but if an academic philosophy conference becomes an interdisciplinary work of conceptual art about that mysterious meta-object that is the float tank, then the coalescence of invention (ποίησις) and intelligence (νοῦς) in a way that invites the highest and deepest spirit of each and every human being to participate (μέθεξις) in a new kind of thinking, we will discover something wondrous.
The path to your greatest discoveries will be by way of your greatest inventions. Come learn, invent, with us, and embark on a new direction of discovery. Thinking the Float Tank exists in a dimension parallel but perpendicular to the ordinary academic philosophy conference. Each and every person is in their deepest and highest essence a genuine philosopher and a true artist, and this truth is amplified in the float tank, where the deepest depth and the highest height coalesce.
Date: August 24-26, 2023
Location: West Den Haag, Lange Voorhout 102, 2514 EJ, Den Haag, The Netherlands
For more information, check out: Thinking the Float Tank.
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