by Simon Smith
Part 5: In which
Philosophical Psychology puts on a mask (kinky!) and dresses up as Cosmological
Intuition (ooh, nasty!)
It is, perhaps, well-known that the derivation
of the word “person” lies in the Latin persona, meaning “an actor’s
mask”; a vital metaphor this: agent and alter-ego in one. The metaphysical hint
is unmistakable. Oscar Wilde once quipped, give someone a mask and they reveal
their true selves; and in revealing, we add, so they become. As consciousness
is bodied forth by an other, so it is embodied in the “self”. Theirs is the
mask we wear, the persona we appropriate and transform into a “self”, a
conscious, personal reality, commissioned by the other. Thus does ‘[m]ind…
everywhere flow into mind’[1] I learn to play my part in the
dialectical exchange of perspectives on my self-enactment. Our first
performance, then, is no monologue but a dialogue with the other. In such
transactions are we made to be self-making.
The essence of consciousness, of
“personhood”, is fragmentary; consolidated by exchanged perspectives. This is a
commonplace of post-modern theories of identity as well as Farrer’s
metaphysical personalism. The “unity” we call a “self” is actually a function
of that primary dialectic of perspectives, the love-relationships into which we
are born. In this way, those who had and held me have inexorably bound
themselves, their image, into my every experience of consciousness. We
are who we are by their grace and gift; wherein, St. Paul reminds us, works the
grace of God.[2] Others give us the tools with which
to make or ‘mend’ ourselves (as Eugene O’Neill suggests) using that same grace
as ‘glue’.[3] They give us the language, the
symbols, in which we think our thoughts and live our lives.
Such transactions are not only of
philosophical psychology, however. ‘Otherness’ is a feature of cosmological
schematics and social semantics. The cosmos is not made of
ontologically independent units. It is primitively social or interpersonal; not
just there, but given to us. And being given, it wears the mask
of living process (as Whitehead and, more recently, Brian Cox analogically
averred); so becomes a manifold energised by the quickening of a
consciousness which constructs itself by passing itself through images of
otherness.
Behind all this lurks an old Freudian
tale. From deep within the fissures of fragmented psyche, comes the siren-call
of cosmological metaphor; the self sings softly to itself of limitation and
aspiration, of the wholeness which forever haunts its partial state. So
consciousness goes in search of firmer ground, where such transcendent
consummations may be found.
Ancient cosmologists wore their
contingency on their sleeve so yearned to embrace The Necessary. Such
speculations seemed both psychologically and metaphysically unavoidable, even
undeniable; for only they could offer our ‘flickering, unstable,
semi-transparent moment-to-moment “being”’ (as Sartre dubbed it) the chance to
claim “real being”. So the guttering candlelight of consciousness craved
the ‘solid, opaque, inert “in-themselves-ness” of things which simply
are what they are’.
That too is an old story and the
ending is well-known. Desperate to participate in the self-sustaining
ontologicality of “real being”, those anciene métaphysique
conceived consciousness as a desire for the impossible. To live such a project,
cast oneself in ‘a condition of perfect stability and completion’, is what
existentialists call ‘bad faith’: mauvaise foi. So the flame went out
and consciousness discovered it was nothing but a shadow all along; ‘emptiness
poised between two totalities’.
So much for ancient cosmologists.
Modern ones have, of course, escaped the metaphysical mire in which philosophy
and theology have long sought to drown one another. Striving after, not
Necessary Being, but universal law, they preferred to go with their GUTs, Grand
Unified Theories, that is. Such constructs are themselves reflections of a
fragmentary consciousness, expressions of the self-same
“aspiration-to-wholeness”; expressions which, it turns out, may also be doomed
to failure.
Einstein, it seems, was right again:
‘[t]he most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is
comprehensible’.[4] For the unity needed to make the
cosmic manifold a manifold, and the laws according to which it operates
universal, is notably absent. The sciences themselves tell us so. We should not
mistake the ‘unimaginable free-for-all of numerous bits of organism, system,
process’ for coherent unity or ‘world-pattern’.[5] Not a pattern nor an
organism; no more, as Farrer held against the Whiteheadians, than ‘a
superorganism , nor, indeed, a totality which exists as such at all’.[6] The universe is ‘a million million
million bits of system, interacting as they can and largely with irrelevance to
one another’.[7] Faced by such mutual indifference,
one might better designate those allegedly universal laws as “local customs”.
Such a universe - if it can be so
called - is a most inhospitable place; no consciousness could take root there
and no knowledge blossom. As go the laws so goes predictability; practically
anything might happen. How, then, could we even begin to make sense of the
universe when there is, to the best of our knowledge, no sense to be found
there?
Sense in a senseless universe? Now that is HOT! Don’t forget to tune in
next time for what very well maybe the CLIMAX of our philosophical bump ‘n’ grind.
Oh yeah! We can always hope! It has to end sometime! And maybe bad faith will
finally get what it deserves in…
Bad Faith, Naughty Faith!
Or
Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian
Reflections on Mind and Nature
[1] Farrer,
‘You Want to Pray?’ in A Celebration of Faith, , ed. Leslie
Houlden (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970), 143.
[2] King
James Bible, 1 Corinthians 15:10: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am: and
his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more
abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.’
[3] Eugene
O’Neill, The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed (London: Jonathan Cape,
1960), 101: ‘Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is
glue!’.
[4] Rees, M. From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons
(London: Profile Books, 2011), 80.
[5] Farrer,
‘Transcendence and “Radical Theology”’ in Reflective Faith, ed. Charles Conti
(London: SPCK, 1972), 173.
[6] Farrer, Faith
and Speculation, 150.
[7] Farrer,
‘The Prior Actuality of God’ in Reflective
Faith, ed. Charles Conti (London: SPCK, 1972), 187-8.
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