Farrerian Reflections on Mind and Nature: The Abstracted Highlights

by Simon Smith

One of the most serious difficulties facing personalist thinkers concerns the place of ‘personhood’ or consciousness in a physical universe. How, that is, do we align a reality which is irreducibly personal with a universe which, we are told, is fundamentally impersonal? How do we account for the emergence or development of personal consciousness in a universe which seems, at best, ill-equipped to host such an event? And how, finally, do we manage all this without resorting – as philosophers are wont to do – either to the impoverished superficialities of flattened naturalism or to the equally impoverished theatricalities of over-inflated transcendentalism?

Naturalist reduction has undoubtedly proved itself highly successful at mapping the universe. And yet, personalists in particular have been vehement in their opposition to what they regard as its illegitimate extension. Personhood, consciousness, is, as Austin Farrer observed, a ‘social product’. The begetting of persons is a personal business; it takes both ‘I’s and others. Biologically speaking, one of each is still the minimum; morally and metaphysically, many more are required. Add to this the literal nonsense of reducing the acquisition of knowledge – even scientific knowledge – to sheer physical process and we have some very good logical and psychological reasons for continuing to resist reduction. We are here; this much, surely, cannot be denied.

And yet, our personalist ‘and yet’ must confront what some insist are the physical facts. Like everything else, consciousness must and shall be explained by the underlying processes from which it is constituted: evolutionary, genetic, neurological, biological, biochemical, and ultimately sub-atomic. But we are not quite done with the ‘and yets’ yet. For a number of scientists have, perhaps inevitably, been driven to communicate their understanding of the cosmos beyond the confines of their particular field. And yet, in so doing they have – not, I suggest, remotely by accident – been driven to use the language of persons. Instances abound in the writings of Stephen Hawkins, Rupert Sheldrake, Stephen Jay Gould; even Richard Dawkins, who’s forceful denial of any such interpretation is well known, would, perforce, resort to moral concepts to make good his description of the selfish gene.

To regard such talk as merely the poetical flourishes of those who struggle to convey the complexities of the cosmos to a scientifically illiterate readership seems, at once, absurdly myopic and profoundly arrogant. Furthermore, as the form and content of Farrer’s thought clearly shows, it is to seriously underestimate writers, readers, and their cosmological concerns.

Farrer’s response to the most serious scientific challenges of the twentieth century was decisive: a new physics demands a new metaphysics. This, in turn, would involve a kind of via analogia; a classical doctrine though not precisely in the classical style. No rusty or dusty antiques required: the old analogy of ‘being’ was exchanged for, and superseded by, an analogy of ‘doing’.

To fully understand this via analogia we must turn to philosophical psychology. Farrer understood consciousness, not as substance or property, but as a mode of personal activity. In acts of rugged self-expression, consciousness re-entered the physical universe to grapple bodily with the mutual interplay of forces it found there. Action, then, more properly interaction, supplied the keystone; from it Farrer would rebuild metaphysics. Conscious, physical exploration redefined reality – in accordance with Einstein – as a manifold of mutually conditioning forces: rhythmic patterns of physical activity or energy.

Crucially, this is a manifold to which persons firmly belong, quite possibly as the vital ingredient. In the prescient words of Carl Sagan, ‘[t]he cosmos is...within us; we are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’ Such transactions reveal personal and physical patterns of activity to be co-consitituitive; better still, interconstituitive. This is consciousness as full participant in the realisation of those patterns and, hence, of the entire manifold. Finding the key within itself, consciousness unlocks the doors to a uni-verse, bringing unity, uniformity, and coherence to the ‘cosmic hurly-burly in full career’.

This is the embarkation point for a grand metaphysical experiment. Modelling our understanding of the cosmos on the dialectical extensions of consciousness, the physical, epistemological, and psychological outreach of “personhood”, as Farrer insisted we must, overcomes the deadlock between personalism and ‘impersonalism’. Ultimately, such models supply a better integrated conception of mind and nature than the closed-category thinking which dominates speculative cosmology could possibly allow. In so doing, they also supply the conditions by which a deeper and more profound rapprochement between science and religion may be attained.