by Simon Smith
Once again, just as we were approaching
some point or other, we were forced to ditch the discussion and dive for cover.
All to avoid the stampede of intellectualists and thrill-seekers desperate to
purchase an affordable paperback copy of Beyond Realism: Seeking the Divine Other – still available from Amazon
and Vernon Press, where it is also
now an e-book.
Of course, the
same, more or less, could be said of Looking
at the Sun: New Writings in Modern Personalism: it’s available from Vernon Press and Amazon
both as a paperback and e-book. Now, isn’t that interesting?
However, if everybody is quite
ready, perhaps we can get on. Indeed, get on we shall, for finally and at the
very longest of long lasts, we come back to the point where this all began. Or
possibly what it was leading up to, I forget which. In either case, all ahead
for a Derridean thought.
It goes
something like this: I think we can extrapolate Derrida’s claims about how
messages work to help us understand something important about human action in
general (if there is any such thing). I think we can do so for the simple
reason that language-use is a human activity, perhaps even the most typically
human of human activities. And, of course, it’s actually quite difficult to see
how all this might work if it only
applied to writing and no other form of activity. I’m not even sure what that
would mean; it would make writing some kind of alien modality.
Assuming we
can legitimately extrapolate, the central point will remain the same: no
particular action entails any particular actors or interagents. An action, if
it is to be an action, must logically
be able to do without the doer and the done to.
To make sense
of any phenomenon as being a human
action, it must fit within the framework of what ordinarily counts as human action. That’s to say, for said phenomenon to be a
recognisable action, it will have to: a) be physically manifest in some way;
and b) a reasonable fit within the bounds of ordinary social convention, at
least to some degree. I say, ‘to some degree’ because an action may well be
original in many ways, but it will still be comprised of recognisable movements.
An action that was utterly and entirely original in every way, that looked nothing
at all like any other human action – how would we even know it was an action? It could be anything: a toe
made of asparagus, the taste of a hippopotamus, or someone snorting an
archangel.[1]
All of which,
believe it or not, is just another way of saying that our actions cannot be
utterly or absolutely unique if they are to be cognisable and recognisable as
actions at all. In short, actions have to be the sorts of things that people
do, which gives us a tolerably wide range of options, I should say.
Before moving
on to what I am sure we all hope to God is the conclusion, I imagine one or two
of you will just be mustard-keen to have a poke at that first requirement: action
should be physically manifest in some way. What, you may be wondering, about
mental actions? No? What about pure thought, ideas, conceptions? Seriously, no
one is wondering that? I don’t believe you.
Well, in the
first place, I’m not sure there is any such thing as ‘pure thought’, or rather,
I’m not sure what that expression is supposed to mean. More pertinently,
however, I’m with Farrer on this one:
Surely, the
burden of proof lies on the man who says that there is ever thought without so
much as the ghost of motion; and it will be hard for him to prove the negative
part of his case. ‘Not even the ghost….’ How could he be sure of that?[2]
The positive presupposition lies
on the side of physicality since that supplies our earliest and every
subsequent experience of action. Without the ability to express ourselves
physically, it is highly doubtful that we would be able to even identify
ourselves as selves in the first place, let alone have the first clue as to
what action is.
Speaking of
positive presuppositions takes us back to where we began, with the presence or priority,
ontological, of course (whatever that means) of agents who act and interact. Actions
– particularly those we experience directly – presuppose agents; minimally, two: one ‘behind’ and one ‘in front’,
which is to say, one who acts and one who is acted upon. In the same way,
relations presuppose relata. But presupposes is as strong as the
inference gets. It does not, cannot, designate or determine any necessary
connection or entailment relation; it doesn’t point indefatigably,
unquestionably, irrefragably, or absolutely to you, me, or anybody else. All and
as much as it can do (to labour a point) is require
an agent in order that we may make sense of whatever it is as an action.
Pressing the
point, we even might be tempted to say that actions alone are real – in the
sense that we have frequent, unmediated, and very empirical experience of them.
Actions make an impact, an experiencable difference to our lives. Agents, on
the other hand, are conceptual constructs, projections, frequently quite
abstract and never – that is, logically and empirically never – known apart from what they do to make themselves
known. In short, no one ever has or ever will meet an agent without some kind
of activity being involved.
All of which
leads, I think, to the inescapable conclusion that, notwithstanding the
fever-dreams and nightsweats of realist philosophers, action and relation
cannot logically, empirically, or
metaphysically support the weight of ontological priority (whatever that
means). The self-in-itself or self-apart or radical subject or private part of
a person or whatever else you call it, is a notion which cannot be sustained by
any active inference, claim to real relation, or concrete connection.
It seems, therefore,
that those who remain wedded to this so-called ‘substance-self’ must either find
some coherent way of substantiating the knowledge-claim or accept that they are,
in the end, just making stuff up. Saying ‘I just know it’s true’ or ‘I feel
it deep down’ or ‘In my version of philosophy, I don’t need to come up with an
argument’ will no longer do.
Finding a way
to make sense of their ideas would be interesting to see, not least because real
knowledge is a corollary of action. For those who like the comedy of embarrassment,
it might also be fun, but that’s not really my thing. Accepting that they’re
just making stuff up would, I think, be preferable, since it would mean
philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular (you know what I mean),
could finally move on. We could leave behind someone of the most unutterably
dull and pointless conversations ever had and, just possibly, do something
useful for the first time in two thousand years.
In sum, then,
the point is—
Wait, what’s that? Is that some kind
of alien modality? No! No! Cthulhu fhtagn!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl fhtagn!
My God! That nighted,
penguin-fringed abyss!
[1] If you really want to
know, see Farrer A. ‘Metaphysics and Analogy’ in Reflective Faith, 88.
[2] Farrer A. The Freedom of the Will (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960) 38.
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