by Simon Smith
Part 2: In which we put Barry White on the stereo and Physics and Metaphysics Get IT On!
Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian
Reflections on Mind and Nature
‘Science,’
Martin Rees observes, ‘wouldn’t have got very far with pure thought alone’;
especially pure thought about ontologically pure things.[1] Newton, of course, was well aware of
this, as his gruesome optical experiments clearly demonstrate. Indeed, any
teacher will tell you that learning is a product of interaction; knowledge is
earned by deliberate interference with things. Farrer, too, followed this
empirical path, devising his ‘causal solution’ to the ontological and
epistemological disjunct entailed by classical metaphysics. We know things, he
observed, as they impact on our explorations, disturbing and diversifying the
field of our activities.[2] The world can be explored because it
is ‘the playground of human thews and human thoughts’.[3]
Thus the ‘great Newtonian fiction’ transformed
into ‘a complex of interlocking biographies’: a manifold of interpenetrating
patterns, ‘infinitely complicated, minute rhythms of active process.’[4] In the Farrerian’s Latin
catch-phrase, esse est operari: real “being” is being-in-action. No
‘solid and stupid lumps of physical matter’, then; at the ‘bottom of substance
is ceaseless act’.[5] So Farrer designated ‘[e]nergy,
rather than stuff…our ultimate’.[6] Echoes of Einstein.[7] Furthermore, ‘[f]or energy, not to
act is not to be’; hence, ‘[t]he notion of energies in a pure or simple state,
prior to mutual engagement is physical nonsense’. We cannot coherently conceive
of energy in vacuo, ‘that is, action without interplay’;[8]
action is inevitably interaction. Being active, therefore, real ‘being’
is also interconnected.
With a Whiteheadian flourish, Charles Conti
captured Farrer’s visionary metaphysics like this: ‘[n]o actualities without
full and proper integration with other actualities, themselves in the process
of becoming’.[9] This applies to the very
foundations of the universe. Even space and time are no longer inert, as
Stephen Hawking shows. In Einstein’s hands, space and time became, ‘dynamic
quantities that influenced and were influenced by events that took place in
them’.[10] The patterns of process and energy
which constitute our universe have a physical impact on the space-time in
which they operate. And little wonder, for ‘process’ and ‘energia’ mean
reciprocal interference: actualities disturbing a field of activity comprised
of other actualities. Real things, including space-time itself, are in and
as the mutual interplay of what Conti dubs ‘interference capabilities’ and
Farrer, ‘disturbance-effects’.[11]
Nota bene:
in this activist revision of metaphysics, we may discern the contours of a
philosophical psychology. Persons are agents, active explorers in that
playground of concrete connections. Consciousness is interactively
extended, physically embodied, and fully engaged in the mutual interplay
wherein the world is and is discovered.
Farrer was not alone in developing this new
metaphysical model. Its roots lie in the Thomism which framed his magnum
opus, Finite and Infinite. Both Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’
and Bergson’s elan vital of biological and cosmic evolution also pursued
such a course. The similarities between these thinkers are clear and important;
we shall not gainsay them. No less important, however, are the differences, the
most crucial of which is Farrer’s acute awareness of the analogical or
diagrammatic nature of our metaphysics. The febrile fantasies of neo-realists
notwithstanding, this has become common scientific currency in recent years, if
Hawking and Gould are to be believed. Their cosmological constructs are, they
concur, merely maps of the universe.
And yet, given the advances suggested here,
one might wonder why we must resort to the antiquated doctrine of analogy. It
will profit us little to protest that dusty old “being-concepts” have been
superseded by a vigorously energetic analogy of doing. The question is “why
must we use analogies at all?” Does not our interactionist metaphysics overcome
abstract essences, bridge the gap between agents and their objects? Do not
interpenetrating patterns of activity carry us right to the heart of real
“being”?
In the spirit of Heisenberg, our answer must
be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. On the one hand, those processes subject to our
interference and control are those of which our understanding will be widest
and deepest. But our explorations cannot be restricted to those events in which
we directly participate, even collectively as a species. Such a policy would
radically restrict the extent of our knowledge. Thus, on the other hand, our
explorations reach beyond our capacity to act by deploying inferences and
extrapolations.
Admit this, however, and we draw to ourselves
unwelcome company. The ghost of David Hume stands hard by, eyeing the
inferences and extrapolations in our other hand. We may no longer live in a
“billiard-ball” universe, but his critique of casual thinking retains its
force. Let science get on with probabilifying the cosmos; we cannot
ignore the fact that our physics and metaphysics illuminate a universe of
merely seeming effects. For we have, the ghost cheerfully reminds us, no more
access to the causal forces “behind” those effects than we have to agencies
allegedly “behind” their acts.
Indeed we do not; but it is not quite true to
say, as Hume did, that we have no access at all to causal agency; nor
that, as a consequence, all our causal inferences must refer to constant
conjunctions. As a matter of fact, we do have access to one causal agency and
the force it applies to the universe; access which is direct, immediate, and
reliable; access which is, moreover, analogically extendable. Our own capacity
to act, to interfere with patterns and processes which are not our own, is our
standing example of causal agency. It is also the model used in thinking all
others.
And that ain’t all, oh
no!
For more hot, throbbing, science-on-philosophy action, tune in
next time to…
Thrust While You Think: Adventures of a Black Market Cosmologist
Or
[1] Rees, M. From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons
(London: Profile Books, 2011), 134.
[6] Farrer,
A. Faith and Speculation, 82.
[7] Echoes,
too, of Whitehead, for whom ‘the actual world is a process, and that process is
the becoming of actual occasions’. Whitehead, A. N. Process and Reality (Corrected
Edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press,
1978), 22.
[8] Farrer,
A. Faith and Speculation, 167.
[10] Hawking, S.
‘Einstein’s Dream’ in Black Holes
and Baby Universes and Other Essays (London: Bantam Books, 1993), 66.
[11] Conti,
‘Austin Farrer and the Analogy of Other Minds’ in For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honour of Austin Farrer, ed.
Jeffrey C. Eaton & Ann Loades (Pennsylvania: Pickwick, 1983), 56; Finite
and Infinite, 235.
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