by Simon Smith
Part 6: Don’t
Stop Now! We’re Almost There!
The universe may, indeed, not be a thing;
it is, perhaps, in Farrer’s somewhat ‘antiquated slang’, ‘one damned thing
after another’.[1] Nevertheless, this ‘cosmic
hurly-burly’ cannot be quite what it seems. If it were, Einstein’s diagrams
would be nothing but psychological projections with little empirical flavour.
But the enormous success of the sciences belies this; their theories and
predictions have proved accurate and reliable, more than ‘servicable,’ as
Farrer put it, ‘for finding our way among those live points of process in which
alone the world is actual’.[2] In devising such seemingly faithful
maps of the cosmos, scientists have clearly demonstrated that it is, in
some crucial sense, rational, coherent, unified; sufficiently so, at least, to
ensure the laws of physics admit of universal application.
Two such incompatible pictures of the
universe cannot be permitted to stand. Fortunately, our mistake is obvious; it
is a realist one. All our fine talk of analogies and maps notwithstanding, we
have forgotten Farrer’s first metaphysical commandment: ‘the real order of
things is diagrammatisable not diagrammatic’.[3] Such is the moral of Heisenberg’s
uncertainty; at least, we think it is.
We have, it seems, returned to the
metaphysics of the nursery wherein our child’s imagination owlishly regards the
cosmos as ontologically independent. A shameful regression; for it was just
such juvenilia that action-concepts and analogies were meant to overcome. We
cannot now sensibly claim to know anything about the cosmos apart from our
interactions with it. This is the foundation-stone of speculative cosmology and
philosophical psychology. ‘No physical science,’ insists the empirically
inclined metaphysician, ‘without physical interference’; ‘no personal
knowledge,’ adds the metaphysically mindful psychologist, ‘without personal
intercourse’; indeed, they chorus, ‘no thought about any reality about
which we can do nothing but think.’[4] Thus, Farrer’s ‘highest possible
generalisation of the empirical principle’ coincides with his - and our - basic
metaphysical principle, esse est operari. Intelligible thought about
what things are requires some interactive potential because what things are
is given in and as what they do.
Elsewhere, he put the point like this:
‘[i]t is not plausible that we should be able to talk about types of things,
about which we can do nothing but talk’.[5] We take from this a double
reminder. Besides the interactive requirements of “real being” and intelligible
talk, language, lest we forget, is a most powerful mode of human activity.
Words may heal and harm with divine or devastating effect; they may even create
consciousness along with all its gods.
Here, then, is the end of our story;
but it is also, in one important sense, just the beginning. The unity wrought
by science from the constant collision of forces, which is, in truth, our
universe, cannot belong to the universe per se any more than it belongs
to consciousness in se. Scientific laws, like beauty, are in the eye of
the beholder, Huxley reminds us: ‘their generation requires the participation
of human minds and their interactions with objects.’[6] “Coherence” and “unity” are,
likewise, modes of participation shaping the transactions wherein the universe and
consciousness are actualised. The processes and activities which constitute
consciousness and the cosmos are, therefore, not only physical, they are also
descriptive, projective; in short, personal. Transacted as they are between
consciousness and its “objects”, those conceptualising participations are
co-constitutive, better still, inter-constitutive, of the agencies there
enacted. In the prescient words of Carl Sagan, ‘[t]he cosmos is… within us; we
are made of star-stuff.’
Damn, that’s nasty! Oh yeah! Transactions and star stuff! Mmm. Things.
Uh huh! Really struggling to keep up the illusion that this is in some way sexy
when it clearly isn’t. It’s not even a little bit mucky. Oooh. Nevertheless,
don’t forget to come back next time for the finale of our philosophical dirty
business…
Let’s Arrive Together!
Or
Mirror of the Cosmos: Farrerian
Reflections on Mind and Nature
[1] Farrer,
‘Transcendence and “Radical Theology”’ in Reflective Faith, ed. Charles Conti (London: SPCK, 1972), 174.
[2] Farrer, Faith
and Speculation, 169.
[3] Farrer, Faith
and Speculation 150.
[4] Farrer, Faith
and Speculation, 22; my emphasis.
[5] Farrer, Finite
and Infinite, 74.
No comments:
Post a Comment