Regular readers will
hardly be surprised at the lengthy interruption which has taken place
in our usual service. This was largely due to the need to address a
number of legal charges facing our conference reporter, including
slander, libel, obscenity, public drunkenness, public indecency,
plagiarism, incitement to riot, defamation of character, tampering
with a jury, fiddling with a judge, wearing a hat without due care
and attention and many, many more.
For the time
being, however, the legal onslaught facing our reporter has abated. We are therefore now in a position to bring you the next thrilling
instalment in our 128 part series: The 2015 British Personalist Forum
International Conference, A Report.
In this episode,
our correspondent makes certain wild and improbable claims about
thinking and at long last gets round to his own presentation.
Episode 97: Enter Beau Sabreur, Stage Right
Any
who know me may also know that the majority of my philosophical
education was undertaken with Charles Conti. As an undergraduate at
Sussex, I took as many of his courses as I could and afterwards, when
it finally dawned on me that the world of work was really no fun at
all, I returned to do my postgraduate work with him. One result of
this was a particular view of philosophy as, essentially, an
interdisciplinary exercise. From the first, Charles impressed on his
students the idea that one cannot do philosophy unless one knows
something about literature, poetry, art, psychology, history, and so
on and so forth. In this, Charles is, of course, mistaken. Obviously, one can do
philosophy having studied philosophy and nothing but. It just won’t
be any good.
Pondering
this, on that sunny spring morning, while the coffee slopped and
biscuit crumbs filled the air, a thought occurred to me. Boasting? Oh yes indeed.
How much of that reductivism, about which we had heard much talk the day before, I wondered, is down to over-specialisation. Obviously, it is vitally important for us to be fully immersed in whatever our field happens to be if we are to make any real headway. But in so doing, we risk losing so much of the wider and deeper vision which is the legacy of human history.
How much of that reductivism, about which we had heard much talk the day before, I wondered, is down to over-specialisation. Obviously, it is vitally important for us to be fully immersed in whatever our field happens to be if we are to make any real headway. But in so doing, we risk losing so much of the wider and deeper vision which is the legacy of human history.
And
then, while pondering this thought, I had another. Two in one day, I
was clearly on a roll.
What
I want to know is why no one in materialist camp -- biological or
merely physical -- seems remotely concerned by the unintelligibility
of the reductivist case. After all, if it is true that we are just
biological processes or physical forces or whatever, then the
language in which that claim is made is meaningless. Like all the
other phenomena that we mistakenly attribute to personal
consciousness, all the books written and speeches given are themselves
reducible to the physical processes involved: sound waves,
light-refracting surfaces and so on. What, after all, is the point of
signing ones’ name to a book which clearly implies that its
contents are meaningless?
Both
Farrer and Strawson asked this question at different times.
Macmurray took a more positive view on it when he pointed out that,
given the dialogical structure of personhood, the universe must have
personal dimension to it, since you wouldn’t get
persons out of it otherwise. And even if such an absurdity were somehow
overcome, any persons you did get wouldn’t be able to know anything
about a universe that was radically different from them.
That
was the starting point for my presentation, which was next. Step
forward beau sabreur, with a song in your heart, and do
your duty.
As it was, I did not, in fact, have sufficient time to treat the
materialist question in any real depth. Not enough time? Heavens to
Murgatroyd! What am I saying?!
Forty
minutes may seem like a very short time for a paper, especially to
those who, like Conti, would readily speak for hours and hours. And
hours. To mere mortals such as I, however, it soon becomes clear
that, when all the writing and rehearsing and rewriting is done,
forty minutes is a very long time to talk. By the halfway mark, I
was exhausted, collapsing, almost snoring aloud. Fortunately, so was my
audience. Those few who struggled to retain a grip on consciousness,
I twice threw off the scent and so gained time for a short rest. Once, by mixing up my pages, thereby losing my place, and once by
knocking someone else’s papers all over the floor. What choice did
I have? I was banjoed.
Undeterred, however, I still managed to dilate at some
considerable length (two or three minutes over time, in fact) on the
philosophical psychology underpinning Austin Farrer’s
remarkable, indeed, visionary, metaphysics. Like that metaphysics,
and the epistemology which is a corollary of it, Farrer’s
philosophical psychology is essentially interactionist, relational. That’s not quite right. It isn’t just that others
teach us how to be persons in the first place; it’s more to do with
the way in which others invest personhood in us. We then appropriate and internalise that “otherness”,
transforming it into personality which reflects the moral, spiritual,
and intellectual values which both inform and in-form it. And then,
if reasonably sane and healthy, we go on to do the same for
others. If not, we become academics. What is particularly
interesting, however, is the way in which this philosophical
psychology, what we might call the interconstituitivity
of consciousness or personhood, also supplies the analogies we use
for exploring and understanding the rest of the universe. Language
drawn from this storehouse of personal images and metaphors abounds
in modern speculative cosmology and the sciences as a whole; and, it
seems, necessarily so.
There’s
something absolutely crucial to the development of metaphysics going
on here; something which I’m finally starting to see the shape of
more clearly. But we shall, no doubt come back to that at a later
date. Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
I
finished reading and the questions came thick and fast. At the mere
mention of Romanticism, a riot broke out in the back row. Those titanic forces, Ford-zilla and Conti Kong could be restrained
no longer; fur and feathers fully flew; even Margaret Yee got caught
up in it. While all about me lost their head and flung themselves,
almost bodily, into the fray, I kept mine exceedingly well and took a well earned rest. Mayhem and madness reigned
Eventually,
when the red mist cleared, a battered and bloodied Alan stood alone
on the field of battle. I looked at Jim Beaurgard and he looked at
me. Alan burped softly and fell in the dust. Was that cyanide we
smelled? As he lay before us, we could see the elaborately carved
handle of an antique dagger protruding from his nattily tweed-clad
back. And were those tyre marks smudgingly merged with the hounds
tooth check? They were; tyre marks, if I’m not mistaken, from Mk. 1 Mazda MX5; white with leather interior and walnut finish by the looks
of them. Beside the tyre marks was the unmistakable trace of a dozen or so
hoof prints. Gun smoke filled the air and a length of lead piping
lay on the ground beside our beloved chairman.
What
could possibly have happened? Obviously, some terrible accident had occurred. And then, as we looked around the room, we realised that Conti was
no where to be seen....
What happened to
Alan Ford? Where did Charles Conti disappear to? Will either of
them be back in time for the final, plenary, sessions of the
conference? Who was that masked man? And why had Juan Manuel Burgos
brought a car, a horse, a selection of antique cutlery, a lemonade
bottle with the word “CYANIDE” written in red marker pen on it, a
gun, and some basic plumbing supplies to a session that he was
chairing? The answers to these questions and many more will be revealed in the final heart-stopping instalment
of…
The 2015 British
Personalist Forum International Conference, A Report!
