Aristotle does not offer the sceptic the exterior, Platonic, certainty, which he wants, again according to Martha Nussbaum at page 253. Neither do I, in my book. I say in terms that there is no insight into eternity, if it exists outside space and time, and can be none; or it becomes hell, see page 224. So we reached the same conclusion, by different means; because I have never read any Aristotle. I once tried to read his Rhetoric, because being an advocate I reckoned I knew about that; but I concluded that he had nothing to teach me about advocacy, whereas I had a good deal to teach him, so I continued no further. All I offer the sceptic is the perfectly relaxed consciousness, which I suggest is the same as or very similar to the consciousness of God, and the exhortation to view things through the eyes of the Creator.
No-one can satisfy the sceptic’s demand for external purity; we can only offer him our fellowship, which is internal purity. In my Introduction page viii, I state categorically that I believe the supreme reality is a sense of communion between two persons or two souls, even if nine tenths of it is imagination. If I am right, and this is reality, and I think any soldier would agree with me that comradeship is all; then to seek reality in the purity of external forms, is fantasy. You will never find it, any more than you will find the rainbow’s end. Newton explained the physics of rainbows; but merely because you understand his explanation, does not mean you will reach the rainbow’s end. It means actually that you will not. And I infer in my book, that there is nothing you can do to persuade the sceptic to accept your communion, if he does not want it. But anyone who rejects communion with his fellow-man is ruled out of the Kingdom of Heaven, if such a place exists; because in Heaven there is nothing else. Aristotle grounded his principle of the relevance of experience, on the utter loss of community if you were unwise enough to reject it. We are saying the same thing in different language. And he was right. The only difference which I think I have with Aristotle, is that he never aimed for the stars; and I did!
Nevertheless Aristotle’s insistence on reliance on experience is absolutely crucial; he was setting out where he believed knowledge ended. It has to end somewhere, or man turns himself into a god, which is a dangerous thing to do as it may not have the Divine blessing; and then it is likely to be termed “pride”, “arrogance”, or “blasphemy”. I gather that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre made “self” into his god; and that the result was nemesis, probably for himself, certainly for the community in which he lived. Better to accept that there are limits to human knowledge. In my opinion, experience of God is still experience. Religious people talk about “revelation”, as though it is superior to experience; but if you think God speaks to you, as He spoke to Moses at the burning bush, then that is an experience you have had, although a highly subjective one. Even if it is all imagination, it remains a vivid imaginative experience. And I was most interested to read the opinion of Field Marshall von Manstein in his book Lost Victories, that inner knowledge was the most sure knowledge, even when deciding whether to place a Panzer Army here or there. As he is generally considered the best brain in the Wehrmacht in the Second World War, his opinion is worth quite a lot, as he probably knew what he was talking about. I found the same, when I was cross-examining men whom I considered dishonest, that inner knowledge was the most sure knowledge. We may both have been echoing the language of the Medieval mystic; but perhaps he knew a thing or two as well.
So we need a theory of consciousness, and here it is. The basis is the “perfectly relaxed consciousness”, or if you like the “consciousness of God”. Superimposed on this are all the other frames of mind, with which we are very familiar: the legal, the military, the theological and so on. Each frame of mind is brought into being by a certain type of nervous tension in the body, which presupposes certain unspoken assumptions on which any particular frame of mind is based.