by Simon Smith
Having graced your
delicate eyeballs with the abstracted highlight a few weeks ago, I thought I might as well inflict
the entirety of my Farrerian Reflections upon you. Go on, admit it, this is
just what you wanted.
This,
rather long, conference paper is, of course, yet another demonstration of just
how much I love the sound of my own voice, especially when it’s written down.
It was presented at the BPF’s 1st International Conference: British Contributions to Personalist
Philosophy – Duns Scotus to the Present Day. We were at the prestigious Oriel
College, Oxford, those few, sunny days in March 2015. To me, the whole event
remains particularly memorable for three reasons:
Firstly,
James T. Beauregard flew in from New Hampshire to attend the conference. Yes,
his arms were tired. It was a true delight to see Jim in the flesh; it was the
first time we’d actually been able to meet up since the Lund conference in 2013
where we had, in fact, first met. It was even more delightful to have the
chance to sit with him in, if Guinness-soaked memory serves, the Eagle and
Child and get gently sozzled. All in the name of philosophical enquiry, of
course.
Second,
the accommodation provided by Oriel – accommodation occupied by students during
term time, accommodation occupied by students paying upwards of £9k for the privilege,
accommodation for which we were paying quiet handsomely – reminded me of nothing
so much as a domestic violence shelter. Grimy, cold, and unutterably miserable,
the rooms would have provided the perfect backdrop for a suicide attempt.
Third,
it was the first, and thus far only, time a fight broke out during one of my
presentations. I’ve had things go awry before, but never an actual punch-up. I
kid you not.
The
aim of my presentation, as per the abstract, was to provide an embarkation
point for a grand metaphysical experiment in mapping the physical,
epistemological, and psychological outreach of ‘personhood’ (whatever that means). My hope was – and still is –
that, by modelling our conceptions of the universe on the dialectical
extensions of consciousness, we will be able to overcome the impasse between
personalism and ‘impersonalism’. Such
models, as you will discover, provide a better integrated conception of mind
and nature than anything the currently dominant, closed-category thinking which
dominates speculative cosmology could possibly allow. In so doing, they also
supply the conditions for a deeper and more profound rapprochement between scientific
and religious belief.
So
there you have it; and here, for your entertainment and edification, it is:
The first part of it, anyway.
Part 1: Persons and Nature
One
of the most serious difficulties facing personalist thinkers is how to account
for the emergence of persons in a universe seemingly so ill-equipped to host
such an event. How, moreover, are we to do so without resorting to either the
impoverished superficialities of flattened naturalism or the tawdry
theatricalities of over-inflated transcendentalism?
Naturalist reduction has proved highly
successful in mapping the universe. And yet, personalists have fiercely opposed
what they regard as its illegitimate extension. Personhood, consciousness, is, as
Austin Farrer reminds us, a ‘social product’. The begetting of persons is a
personal business; it takes ‘I’s and ‘Thous’.
Add to this the literal nonsense of reducing
knowledge to sheer physical process and we have some very good logical and
psychological reasons for resisting reduction. We are here; surely this much
cannot be denied.
And yet, our personalist ‘and yet’ must
confront what we are told are the physical ‘facts’: all things shall be
explained by underlying physical processes. But we are not quite done with the
‘and yets’ yet. For a number of scientists have sought to communicate their
vision of the cosmos beyond the confines of their own 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 Hawking,
Rupert Sheldrake, and Stephen Jay Gould; even Richard Dawkins needed moral
concepts to describe our selfish genes. Another evolutionary biologist
offers an example more poignant still. In the complex narratives of evolution,
Julian Huxley saw a profound ‘one-ness of man with nature, not merely in
respect of biological descent and chemical composition, but because nature is
the indispensable basis of his material existence, and also the indispensable partner
in his mental and spiritual achievements.’[1]
To regard such talk as merely the poetical
flourishes of one struggling to convey the complexities of the cosmos to a
scientifically illiterate audience would be short-sighted. In this case, it
would also be quite mistaken. Huxley’s remarks come from the Royal
Anthropological Institute’s 1950 Memorial Lecture for his grandfather, T. H.
Huxley.
Even when the intended audience is not so
august an institution as that, however, we should be chary of dismissing too
lightly such invitations to cosmological intimacy. We must beware, that is, of
underestimating writers, readers, and their cosmological concerns. Both the
form and content of Farrer’s works offer such a warning. For, as he well knew,
it is in those concerns and the personal images which frame them that we shall
find the clues to a resolution of our difficulties.
The first clue lies in a rapprochement between
science and theology. Huxley’s words set the scene; to fully uncover their
transcendental import, let us turn to physical and metaphysical basics.
When Einstein, Friedman, et. al, began to
probe deeper cosmological depths, our conception of the physical universe
evolved dramatically. The underlying ontology, Farrer saw, would have to do
likewise: a new physics demands a new metaphysics. The classical model of
discrete ‘reals’ bouncing around mechanically inside a static system proved as
metaphysically untenable as it was scientifically inadequate. Farrer agreed
wholeheartedly: ‘[t]he old definitions [of reality] accepted by Sir Isaac
Newton and his followers were not merely incorrect,’ he declared, ‘they were
nonsensical’.[2] Driving the point home – somewhat
unfairly, given the role of philosophers in this metaphysical muddle – he said
‘[i]t is not merely that Einstein’s very special and advanced physical
observations proved that this isn’t a Newtonian world. You couldn’t have a
Newtonian world.’
Constructed from ontologically independent
units of existence, the old model offered no insight into the nature of its
contents. Newton’s theories mapped the motion of things with a high degree of
accuracy; but their underlying ontology retained a clear-cut separation between
those things and their activities; in antiquated Aristotelian parlance, between
essences and accidents. However accurate the theories, accidents reveal nothing
about essences; that is, their reactive or operational properties.[3] This is because the inviolable
inertia of things-in-themselves and apart from any activity violates the basic
conditions of coherent epistemology. It disconnects knowing subjects from
objects known, so puts the world beyond our reach. But if the world is beyond
our reach (Wittgenstein and Feuerbach wondered) what possible reason could we
have for talking about it?
Good
question! Find out the answer in the next heart-pounding instalment of…
Throbbing Passions!
Or
Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian
Reflections on Mind and Nature
[1] Huxley, J.
New Bottles for New Wine (London: Readers
Union Ltd., 1959), 122; my emphasis.
[3] As
Whitehead pointed out, in doing so, he left us as unable to ‘ discover the
natures of the relata by any study of
the laws of their relations’ as we are to ‘discover the laws by inspection of
the natures’ Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1948), 135.
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