by Simon Smith
We apologise for the interruption in service last week. This was due to
foreseen circumstances. And now, welcome back to the hottest series
on the world wide web. The series in which the cosmos gets down and dirty with
some seriously sexy symbolism. Oh yeah. Let’s get funky with it.
To
see how this works, consider Huxley on a most potent force of nature. In his
discussion of love among the birds and beasts, the many splendoured facets of
human love, as manifest in human action and relation, are used as explanatory
constructs, a via analogia that illuminates the meaning of animal
behaviour and its causes.[1] Huxley’s use of our emotional lives
is analogical, of course; we cannot take literally his talk of ardent grebes,
great tits, and blackcocks.[2] As Farrer reminds us, he who
psychologises animals is himself an ass. With only a ‘very ill-defined’ sense
of what other animals’ “subjectivity” might be like, we cannot suppose that
having emotions is the same thing for them as it is for us. Thus constrained,
we apply the model of our own action and experience, so get the animal’s action
and experience into focus by sympathetic appreciation. How else should we even
begin to understand animal behaviour or the action of evolution on it? What
other interpretative key is there?
Such natural passions figure large among the
birds and beasts in my backyard, but the fundamental constituents of the cosmos
are energy and process. That is to say, concepts such as ‘process’, ‘energy’,
and ‘activity’ are the basic elements of our cosmological maps; and they too
are borrowed from the logically primitive experience of being an active
agent. For, as Farrer showed, the model of our own activity is essential if we
hope ‘to give content to the general idea that it [whatever “it” is]
does act’.[3]
Thus, empirical metaphysics learned the lesson
of empirical psychology. Before Farrer, the psychologist Jean Piaget, and
before him, Feuerbach, found that the notion “object” originates in the child’s
conception of “I”, the “I” objectified and projected.
This does not mean that our maps are
constructed from simple anthropomorphisms. Rather, Farrer argued, we ‘erect a
pseudo-genus of which “thing” and “self” are species’.[4] We construct a model from shared or
common factors; the most common being ‘interference capability’. This ‘pseudo-genus’
supplies the framework within which those realities may be understood.
Crucially, this analogical erection is dynamic: it may go up or down depending
on the nature of the interference. Insofar as any interference resembles my
own, I must suppose it to be the expression of an agency like me; but
only to the degree that it does resemble my own. Those that are
recognisably personal – loving, linguistic, or merely logical, for instance –
reveal themselves on the upgrade; the more so as they outstrip my capacity to
undertake them. When dealing with birds, beasts, and the basic processes of the
universe, however, those “higher” features of personal consciousness are
‘washed-out’ and ‘an indefinable discount’ paid.[5] In seeking to comprehend such forces,
that is, we downgrade the analogy accordingly.
As our interactions with, and understanding
of, the world become increasingly sophisticated, our application of this graded
model must do likewise. Complicated maths, the lingua franca of
cosmologists conversing among themselves, is a prime example. Mathematics is a
language; its terms as analogical as any other; its symbols, co-ordinates on
our cosmological maps. Once again, we are not so naive as to suppose there is
anything “out there” that precisely corresponds to them. Moreover, mathematical
symbols and their configurations remain grounded in the analogy of our agency.
The most basic calculations - on which the most complex ultimately rest - share
the operative principle of all languages and substitute symbol for object. The
very possibility of symbolising objects depends on being able to identify and
re-identify the objects in question. This, in turn, depends on the capacity
objects have for exercising ‘disturbance-effect’, to act on me and so
distinguish themselves from me. For that, as suggested, is our criterion
of real existence, what Buber might call the first ‘category of being’.[6]
However, complicated maths plays a more
important role in our story. For it is not merely a symbol system; it is
a vitally important one which enables our explorations and explanations to
reach into the darkest regions of the cosmos. In so doing, it exemplifies the
ampliative extension of consciousness which is to come. This is because the
cosmologist’s calculations are not just diagrams of the universe; they are
diagrams of a diagram. The cosmologist’s mathematical maps are symbolic
representations of a matrix of forces which is itself a symbolic representation
constructed from analogies of our own activity.
Farrer described our ordinary conception of
“the universe” as resembling a ‘linear diagram of historical developments
chalked on a classroom blackboard’.[7] The sciences have brought the image
into sharper and, consequently, more poignant, focus. Our most advanced
conceptions of “the universe” do not resemble such diagrams, they are
such diagrams, mapped out in the hermeneutical imagery of mathematical equations.
Here, in the redoubling of our analogies, we
see the defeat of simplistic anthropomorphisms, those lares and penates
masquerading as “real beings”. Analogising our analogies elevates the
analogising consciousness high above the realist’s household ghosts and gods;
most pernicious of all, his Perfect Personal Agent.
Equally, it reminds traffickers in
mathematical and other scientific models of the foundations of their own
constructs. Moreover, the very “impersonalism” which, we are told, is the true
character of the cosmos, is itself such a construct, one rinsed almost
clean of any hint of personality; almost, but not quite, since the basic idea
of activity must remain. This much we cannot do without; abandon
action-concepts and the entire edifice of our understanding crumbles; we make a
nonsense of both the diagrams and diagrammatising procedure which is
scientific exploration.
“Impersonalism”, then, is an abstraction, a
projection that is meaningful only because of the personal action from which it
springs; the two cannot be coherently separated.
But this is not the end of the story. To fully
understand Farrer’s via analogia, we must turn to philosophical
psychology.
And you know what they say: philosophical
psychology is the sexiest kind of psychology!
Remember to come back next week – or possibly
the week after, given that it’s Christmas – for more wet and wild adventures,
of:
Is That an
Analogy of a Personal Cosmos in your Pocket or are you just Anthropomorphising?
Or
Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian Reflections on Mind and
Nature
[1] Huxley,
J. New Bottles for New Wine (London:
Readers Union Ltd., 1959), 213-232
[2] It is,
perhaps, worth noting here that, while the word “love” roams free about
Huxley’s article, unconstrained by parenthetical qualifications, the word
“courtship” is more firmly anchored to its analogical origins with quotation
marks.
[3] Farrer, The Freedom
of the Will, 189.
[4] Farrer, Finite
and Infinite, 67.
[5] Farrer, ‘Causes’
in Reflective Faith, 213.
[6] Buber,
M. I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor
Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 43.
[7] Farrer, Faith
and Speculation, 169.
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