DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE IN IT?

This is often the first question people ask me if they find out I use the I Ching (that’s if they don’t rapidly change the subject and look embarrassed on my behalf). If they are asking me whether the I Ching tells the future in the way that a fortune teller at the seaside claims to, my answer would be an emphatic no. As I’ve gone from being a teenager who loved everything that was spooky and mysterious into an old man who is increasingly sceptical of supernatural claims, I’ve grown dubious about the whole idea of foretelling the future, and I certainly don’t think this should be the purpose of consulting the I Ching.

The concept of foretelling the future seems inherently illogical. Because if anything can tell the future with certainty, that must mean that it is already laid out before us, like the past in reverse, and we can no more change it than we can alter what happened yesterday. We would be trapped in a Laplacean universe where every moment from the Big Bang onwards was irreversibly determined by the nature of the original conditions, automatons doomed to act out our destinies despite having a false sense of free will. Consulting the I Ching – or any form of futurology – would be meaningless, since even this consultation itself would have been built into reality since the start of the universe. If we want looking into the future to have any meaning at all, we cannot take this tall-dark-stranger approach to divination.

However, if we exist in a probabilistic universe where there are billions of potential futures, the idea of a predetermined one to which we can somehow get access via divination becomes an impossibility – there is no future ‘out there’ waiting for us to get in touch with it. And if forecasting the future is merely a listing of probabilities, all that the I Ching – or any oracle or futurist – can be is a sort of bookmaker laying out the odds of each horse in the race. Useful information in theory, but in a world of such complexity and chaos, and in which Foinavon wins the Grand National, how useful is it in reality? 

One common way of trying to circumvent these problems, one which is popular among people who embrace a metaphysics of physicalism, is to argue that the I Ching works psychologically, as a sort of Rorschach test which holds up a mirror to the (unconscious) mind. There is no inherent meaning in the answer we receive, and any meaning which does emerge does so from within ourselves rather than from the oracle. The medium which is used for this act of psychological introspection becomes irrelevant, and anything could serve the same function – Tarot cards, tea leaves, the entrails of birds – because the answer lies inside us rather than in the tool we are using.

While this explanation might reduce the ridicule of materialists towards things like the I Ching, or even make them grudgingly accept its potential value as a form of self-therapy – a sense that on some level it ‘works’ – I’m not totally convinced by it. It seems rooted in a modern, post-Enlightenment liberalism which places the individual as the ultimate source of truth and to ignore the larger social and cultural role of human artefacts such as oracles (or scientific models). It relies on a recourse to an immaterial unified mind that materialism, and increasingly modern neuroscience, denies. But any form of divination or futurology is placed within a cultural nexus that legitimates it and gives it a social reality which transcends the individual. There are many examples of social constructions which do not exist as ontological realities, but which nevertheless work and therefore have real effects: money, nations, games. Perhaps oracles are similar.

However, since I consult the I Ching, I have to believe that it works in some way, even if I can’t explain why. I accept that most scientists will view this statement with enormous scepticism – how can tossing three coins or manipulating a bundle of yarrow stalks produce any kind of valid result? As far as I am aware, there have been no experiments that provide any solid evidence for the reality of telekinesis – even on a much smaller scale than controlling the spin of three coins – that would satisfy scientific rigour or Randi-style scepticism. The idea that some mysterious force is at work determining the landing of the coins seems frankly ludicrous.

But if we therefore downgrade the significance of the I Ching to the purely psychological, or even to human credulity, we have to explain other things that are equally strange, things which scientists themselves accept as realities. A good example of this is the placebo effect. No one ever questions how this can happen in a purely materialistic reality, how something that is completely non-physical – a belief somehow situated in a mind that isn’t real – can help to heal the body. If we stand back for a moment and think about that, it is staggering in its potential for medical practice, and in its implications for physicalism. Yet it happens, and no one denies that it happens – they just don’t bother trying to explain it, or if they do they use terms and concepts like ‘mind’ and ‘belief’ which are ineligible in strict materialist terms. Perhaps reducing the I Ching to the purely psychological is a similar process.  

I am probably different from most users of the I Ching in not generally believing in some kind of supernatural world. If the I Ching works – and even allowing for caveats about confirmation bias, I feel that my personal experience tells me that it does – I think it can only do so as part of a natural universe, and not by tapping into some spooky realm that transcends everyday reality. In my opinion, there is no need to posit a metaphysics of transcendence in order to explain the efficacy of the I Ching, nor to reduce it to a psychological trick. Perhaps there are scientific realities which we have not yet discovered which could one day encompass the I Ching into its worldview. Perhaps, as Haldane wrote in Possible Worlds and Other Papers, ‘the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose’. I am well aware that physicalists may see this invocation to a future science as a get-out-of-jail card, but I would counter this by arguing that they themselves do this – how else are we to interpret their assertion that science is theoretically capable of understanding everything, an assertion which is essentially a metaphysical appeal to a science of the gaps?

I imagine if any scientists ever read this piece, they will probably place me among the new-age nutjobs after reading my next sentence. Because this is where I have to admit that I believe the I Ching does work in a deeper sense, even if I can’t begin to explain how or why. Too often I have received answers from the I Ching that seemed preternaturally pertinent to my question, as if this is the only answer that it could have given me, as if in some spooky way the coins are falling in a meaningful and deliberate pattern.

I hope I am neither naïve nor stupid. I am well aware of confirmation bias and that I may be remembering the hits and forgetting the misses.  I know the human capacity for self-delusion and believing what we want to believe. I know that logically I am placing myself in the same camp as the Christian who, when asked for what proof there is for his God, will simply answer that he knows that God exists through faith, without any need of proof. It is not company I feel comfortable sharing. Ultimately, though, I have to be honest and raise my hand and say that I do believe that, in some inexplicable way, the I Ching is grounded in some kind of objective reality that goes beyond psychologism, even if this risks making me sound foolish or gullible.

Obviously, I can’t prove this any more than the Christian can prove his faith. Scientific tests of the I Ching of the kind and rigour that scientists correctly require when practising science are effectively impossible for several reasons. How, for example, do we measure a ‘hit’? How do we judge the success or failure of answers to questions such as ‘Should I accept that job offer?’ or ‘Should I marry this person?’ Most real-life questions asked of the I Ching cannot be reduced to a binary answer. Moreover, even if this were possible, the results of tests of the I Ching could never be replicated or measured against a control group. But if we test the I Ching by asking quantifiable binary questions – for example, whether it can predict rises and falls in stock or share prices – repeatedly asking this would lack the urgency and meaning of a real question asked by someone who feels troubled in a real-world situation. Again, I have to accept that this risks placing myself in dodgy company: those ‘psychics’ who claim that they can’t function in the presence of sceptics or can’t bend spoons when James Randi happens to be around.

Ultimately I have to accept that I cannot produce any concrete scientific evidence whatsoever in support of the I Ching. And reading back through what I have written, much of the tone of this essay seems apologetic. However, I want to make clear that I am not setting out to apologise for my ‘belief’ in the I Ching – the fact that I am taking time to write a long essay about it shows that I have a lot of commitment to its practical use. But I also want to show that this essay is not the work of some credulous advocate who is willing, and perhaps even wishes, to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. I also want to make clear that the I Ching is not a parlour game or some kind of magic that will sort out our lives without our taking personal responsibility. It won’t.

So far I have focused on what the I Ching is not. However, this via negativa can only take us so far and I must now attempt the more difficult task of trying to say what it is. Couched in poetic and metaphorical language, the I Ching at first appears arcane and almost wilfully mysterious, but the more that I have used it, the more aware I have become of its inner coherence. The I Ching is not a set of random images thrown carelessly together which we are free to interpret as we wish, but an intricate and complex intellectual structure with its own consistent internal logic. I stand by my conviction that the I Ching, even if one thinks it has no value as an oracle, is valid: that it contains an underlying intellectual structure which inexorably follows from its basic premises.

In answer to the question at the beginning of this essay, then, I do ‘believe in’ the I Ching, even if I can’t define exactly what this term means and haven’t the slightest idea why. Perhaps those who choose to see it as a psychological aid are basically correct, and if I am forced to define it, I would probably say it is a way of asking ourselves questions. For example, I am very wary of the idea of using the I Ching on behalf of other people; any value that it has comes through the  introspective process of thinking about the answer. This places me close, I suppose, to people who see it as essentially a psychological tool. But I would insist that this concept of a psychological tool needs to be expanded beyond the rather limited, solipsistic way that it is often theorised.

Finally, even if you end up deciding that it cannot work as an oracle since there are no such things as oracles, and that its only value is psychological (and I would add, philosophical), I still insist that  it is one of the most incredible intellectual achievements of the human species. At the risk of inviting ridicule, it has undoubtedly been the most important book in my life.