Other pieces: The Heap / Parmenides and Chuang Tzu in Chungking / Cratylus
At g mail dot com I am emersonj.
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"One must always explain the
matter clearly to one's adversary, Italo Svevo, Confessions
of Zeno
A
fragmentary summary of
Over the years I've done a lot of reading in what is called philosophy. As the situation developed, I became less and less interested in the philosophy being offered by professionals. These are the scraps I remember from what I read.
A. "SIMPLES" What is experience? During the first half of the twentieth century several philosophers tried to answer that question precisely. By giving an adequate description of experience, it was thought to be possible both to find a ground for scientific truth, and to provide the foundation for a description of human consciousness and human nature. Meticulous and quite lengthy books attempted to provide a clear, distinct, universal description of the basic, most simple unit of experience. The roots of this in the Lockean and Cartesian attempts to produce non-theological grounds for science, knowledge, and truth are evident enough; seemingly there was also an attempt to make Lockean sensory empiricism more rigorous, less messy and ad-hoc, more "clear and distinct" and ultimately more Cartesian. All of these attempts, which are not usually thought of together, ended up self-destructing in rather similar ways. In general, once experience was clearly understood, it became something autonomous and hard to connect both with the person doing the experiencing or the thing experienced, so that instead of having an experience joining an experiencing subject to the experienced thing, you ended up with a floating experience whose relation to the subject and to the thing is uncertain, and which in fact tends to absorb both of them and make them unreal. But then attempts to specify these relationships and make these connections tend to proliferate new intermediate entities and muddy up the original simplicity that you were trying for. Russell Here's Bertrand Russell (all citations from Gudmunsen, Wittgenstein and Philosophy, Macmillan, 1977) : "Let us give the name of 'sense-data' to the things that are immediately known is sensation....We shall give the name 'sensation' to the experience of being immediately aware of these things..." (p. 16) "I shall give the name 'sensibilia' to those objects which have the same metaphysical and physical status as sense-data without necessarily being data to any mind.... It is important to have both terms; for we wish to discuss whether an object which is at one time a sense-datum can still exist at a time when it is not a sense-datum".... (p. 20) Gudmunsen later comments: "Russell called the awareness of sense-data 'sensation', but never seemed to feel the need of an equivalent term for mental states. Let us call them 'mentations'" (p. 25). Later there is talk about the "volitions" which must precede and cause any action. Russell makes even relations like "being in" into things: "For Russell, relations are objects and objects are real, but their ontological status, while hovering near existence, is dubious. He says, "Suppose, for example, that I am in my room. I exist and my room exists; but does "in" exist? Yet obviously the word "in" has a meaning; it denotes a relation which holds between me and my room. This relation is something, though we cannot say that it exists in the same sense in which I and my room exist.'" (p. 7). When Russell gets to saying that "in" somehow exists, it's hard not to think that Occam's razor is being violated and that the wheels are falling off the cart. We have started out with a sentence like "The man sees the chair in the room", and we end up with the sensibilia of the chair and the room, the "in" of the chair vis-a-vis the room, the sense-data experienced, the sensation of the sense-data, and perhaps the mentation of the chair. We just don't have the man or the chair anymore. Russell's analysis did lead eventually to more concrete and detailed descriptions of experience and ultimately to artificial intelligence, so it isn't simply to be sneered at. The problem is the belief that somehow this kind of description of experience could ever be a grounding for truth or the core of a description of a human being. Russell had a very thin, reformist or perfectionist notion of what humans should be (people who process empirical data using logic) and so he felt that if he were able to describe experience then he would be well on his way to understanding humans and also to grounding truth. But as Gudmunsen says, "While Russell and the Hinayana construct a 'person' with some difficulty out of more real sense-data or dharmas, Wittgenstein and the Madhamikas in general start with embodied people." (p. 73; see 61, 66, 83). Husserl Husserl, like Russell originally a mathematician and like Russell associated with Frege, made a somewhat similar attempt to provide a strict description of experience, though his method is contrary to Russell's. Husserl's idea was that if pure momentary experience unmediated by culture or memory could be isolated, it could tell us what the nature of the mind is and what the nature of reality is. Husserl's development of this research program is infinitely complex and mediated, and I haven't read it. Derrida's critique seems pretty convincing to me. All experience is mediated -- or, "there never has been any experience". "A basic belief of Husserl is that he has found a method by which we can gradually obtain absolute knowledge and establish philosophy as a rigorous science. In contrast, many people would put greater emphasis on what we now know and try to separate out more stable parts of our actual knowledge. The recognition of stable gross facts suggests a mixed position which distinguishes basic concepts and principles from those which are more dependent on particular historical circumstances..... " p. 353 Derrida, J., Speech and Phenomena, Northwestern, 1973, pp. 64-7. P 64: "One then sees quickly that the presence of the perceived present can appear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously compounded with a non-presence and a non-perception, with primary memory and expectation...." P. 66 "The fact that nonpresence and otherness are internal to presence strikes at the very root of the argument for the uselessness of signs in the self-relation."
Whitehead
Whitehead's understanding of the "fallacy of simple location" should have made him immune to the temptation to identify an atom of consciousness. Yet he did so. My suspicion is that his attempts at comprehensiveness and his attempts at rigor and analytic precision operated independently and ultimately at cross-purposes. To me, Whitehead's holistic thinking is the rarer and more valuable, whereas his atomistic thinking is an artifact of the early twentieth century. "In a sense, everything is everywhere". An original feature of Whitehead's philosophy is an attempt to identify perception and memory, as well as mind and matter. Matter is remembered, finished, unfree mind remembered / perceived by the free, creative mind. His ontological unit is the "actual occasion", the instant when past mind is actively perceived by present mind, thereby becoming matter and thereby inert. "The many become one [in perception], and one more" -- i.e., one moment's active perception becomes the next moment's inert thing perceived. Whitehead's ontological atom was the "actual occasion", which however is not simple, but can be analyzed thus: "1. Conformal feelings; 2-3. Conceptual feelings b and b'; 4. Simple comparative feelings; 5. Complex comparative feelings." (Sherburne, Donald, A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality, Indiana, 1966, p,40). Sherburne (pp. 38-9) comments on this: "William Christian... (pp. 80-1) asks what sort of priority this priority of one phase to another could be, concluding that it is not temporal priority, logical priority, part-whole priority, nor dialectical priority, but must be priority sui generis". I.e., Whitehead's formulation is unintelligible. Whitehead's work still seems infinitely more fruitful than that of the two preceding authors, which may be why he has been banned from most philosophy departments. (One person who seems to agree about Whitehead, or at least process philosophy, is the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine).
Conclusion A The pure formal experience described by the three philosophers resembles the dimensionless points of geometry (or Newton's real infinitesimal) in that it is imaginary. It doesn't seem, though, that anything as powerful as geometry rose from the fiction of an atom of consciousness; my understanding is that artificial intelligence developed from quite different, more pragmatic origins (mostly attempts to model animal behavior). It seems possible to me that whatever influence Philosophy of Mind and the attempts to define consciousness have had on AI might well be deleterious. But I'll never really know about that. BUCHLER: "Whatever is, whatever way, is a natural complex..... All of these terms speak discriminations of some kind, and whatever is discriminated in any respect or any degree is a natural complex." Buchler, Justus, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, 2nd. ed., SUNY, 1990, p. 1. PARMENIDES: "To this we may add the conclusion: it seems that, whether there is or is not a One, both that One and the Other alike are and are not, and appear and do not appear to be, all manner of things in all manner of ways, with respect to themselves and to one another.' Parmenides #166c, Cornford p. 244. GUDMUNSEN "The criterion for the simplicity of an object lies in the simplicity of the properties which are attributable to it. We have already seen that a difficulty arises from the fact that, with a little ingenuity, we can represent any property as a conjunction or disjunction of other properties..... Gudmunsen 6-7 (Ayer on Russell.) KRISTENSON "W. B. Kristenson once remarked, that the supposition that the origin of a phenomenon is simpler and more easily understood than that which proceeds from it, is untenable. Every origin in itself is already a complex phenomena, sometimes of an even more mysterious nature than that which it is supposed to explain." Te Velde, p. 1, (q. Kristenson in Symbool en Werkelijkheid, Arnhem, 1954, p. 96-7.) LAU LAU, D.C., Tao Te
Ching, pp. xvii-xviii B. CONTRADICTION "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the Philosophers" Derrida and his followers have provided a cake-mix recipe for nihilism which makes possible the disproof of any statement of any kind via a proof it is metaphysical and self-refuting and grounded on mutually contradictory premises. In America this nihilism usually comes flavored with sexual-liberation ideology, identity politics, and victim literature, thus achieving an anti-political "happy few" alienation which often is often claimed, for some reason, as revolutionary. Derrida's method for dealing with internal contradictions can be summed up about like this: "These contradictions are, of course, fundamental and cannot be evaded by any kind of revision of the theory, as indeed is the case with all such thinking." And once the metaphysical grounding is destroyed, decentered free-association of course becomes permissible. Perhaps it's merely a curiosity, but two other XX-C thinkers put internal contradictions in texts at the center of their work. Leo Strauss, recently famous (rightly or wrongly) as the inspiration for the Second Iraq War, believes that internal contradiction in the works of great thinkers represent coded messages, and that the rarer statement of the two is the author's real intent (a very strong application of the philological lectio difficilior principle, which even as a carefully-used technical tool is only sometimes useful). Foucault criticized Derrida's method as validating "a pedagogy that gives to the master's voice the limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely", and the same can be said of Strauss's method. The more erudite writer can say anything he wants to, and there really are no possible criteria for argument or disagreement. Strauss's method assumes that the authors studied are perfect, without inconsistency and perhaps even without internal development, whereas Derrida assumes that they're all wrong all the time. Whitehead's method is, to my mind, far superior. He says that an inconsistency in Locke's philosophy (supposedly corrected by Hume) actually represents an anticipation of Whitehead's own view. Hume's correction of Locke is internally more consistent, but leads to the subjectivist view that Whitehead believes misdirected modern philosophy. Locke's statement is incoherent, but at least leaves the problem for others to solve -- and in fact, claims Whitehead, Locke did indeed express the correct view in a couple of places, without developing it fully or integrating it into the rest of his work. STRAUSS "If we find in writings of a certain kind two contradictory theses, we are entitled to assume that the one which is more secret, i.e. occurs more rarely [or "only once"], expresses the author's serious view." (p. 230). Strauss, Leo, What is Political Philosophy, Chicago, 1959, "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing", pp. 221-233. WHITEHEAD "Whitehead will argue that although Descartes and Locke officially accept the subjectivist principle, there are moments when each repudiates the principle ....these moments are their more profound moments, Whitehead argues, and they foreshadow the doctrine of 'objectification' in the philosophy of organism." Sherburne, pp. 127-8. "I am certainly not maintaining that Locke grasped explicitly the implications of his words as thus developed for the philosophy of organism. But it is a short step from a careless phrase to a flash of insight; nor is it unbelievable that Locke saw further into the metaphysical problems than some of his followers." Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 59-60. "He speaks of the ideas in the perceived objects, and tacitly presupposes their identification with the corresponding ideas in the perceiving mind..... This mode of speech can be construed as a casual carelessness of speech on the part of Locke, or a philosophical inconsistency. But apart from this inconsistency Locke's philosophy falls to pieces." (Process and Reality, p. 113) [Whitehead took this as an anticipation of his own view of neutral monism, which held that consciousness and matter are two forms of the same thing, consciousness being the emergence of novelty in time, and the perception of matter being memory. Or something like that. I admire Whitehead and think there's something there, but apparently he isn't studied any more.] C. CONCLUSION "If you don't know whether something is true, you call it an axiom. Then you start thinking. When you quit thinking, you call it a conclusion". (Apocryphal. The same person also may have been the one who said that he spent his entire life writing academic papers for paranoid idiots. He may also have been the one who summarized the academic paper: "First you tell the reader what you are going to say, and then you tell him or her what your not going to say, and then you say it, and then you tell the reader what you didn't say, and then you tell the reader what you said". One or more of these sayings may have been by Harry Stack Sullivan). RORTY "So soon as a program to put philosophy on the secure path of science succeeds, it simply converts philosophy into a boring academic specialty. Systematic philosophy exists by perpetually straddling the gap between description and justification, cognition and choice, getting the facts right and telling us how to live." Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, 1979, p. 38. "Philosophy.... is just whatever we philosophy professors do" Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minnesota, 1982, p. 220. "The ideal of philosophical ability is to see the entire universe of possible assertions in all their inferential relationships to one another, and thus be able to construct, or criticize, any argument." (p. 219 ) STRENG "For him [Nagarjuna] these 'final answers' were not to be found because there were no self-determined questions." Streng, Frederick, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, Abingdon, 1967, p. 87. SPENCER-BROWN "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value". Spencer-Brown, George, Laws of Form, Julian Press, 1972, p. 2. MEYER "Questioning has been the unthematized foundation of philosophy and of thought at large, even though philosophers have preferred to adopt another norm, granting privilege to answers and thereby repressing questions into the realm of the preliminary and the inessential." Meyer, Michel, Rhetoric, Language, and Reason, Penn State, 1994, p. 1. "Through the impossibility of being the rationality, local rationalities are globally irrational." Meyer, p. 27. WANG "The central bias (or dogma) [of Wang's own proposed philosophy] is what might vaguely be called 'substantial factualism' or perhaps 'anthromorphic magnifactualism'. The underlying belief is in the overwhelming importance of existing knowledge for philosophy. We know more about what we know than we know how we know what we know. We know relatively better what we believe than what the ultimate justifications of our belief are. That we know what we know is and amazing brute fact and, of all possible knowledge, what is known is the most easily accessible and it is rich enough to fertilize the most interesting philosophy of knowledge at each historical period....." Wang, Hao, From Mathematics to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 1-2. GUDMUNSEN "Anthropocentrism is the only alternative to realism [and nominalism]." Gudmunsen, p. 61. "While Russell and the Hinayana construct a person with some difficulty out of more real sense-data or dharmas, Wittgenstein and the Mahayana in general start with embodied people." Gudmunsen, p. 71. APPENDIX: WITTGENSTEIN Even in his early work, Wittgenstein seemed free of the subjectivism of Russell, Husserl, et al (he talks of sentences and facts, and also of mysticism), and his later work he escaped from the atomism too. The first generation of Wittgenstein's British students seemed to have missed his point almost entirely, accounting for his expression of despair on pp. x of the PI. Finch and Gudmunsen seem to me to lead the way toward a more valid interpretation of Wittgenstein, not that I think that that will ever happen. "It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another, but of course, it is not likely." (Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Anscombe, 3rd ed., Macmillan, 1958, x/xe). "I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread." (Wittgenstein, Ludwig, "Heidegger on Being and Dread", in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Yale, 1978, pp 80-83. Originally from a letter to Friedrich Waisman; the version of the letter published by Max Black, in the Philosophical Review [vol. 74, pp. 3-27] and elsewhere, was censored to remove the reference to Heidegger.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1960, pp. 145 -- 149: "the mystical". Buchler, Justus, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, 2nd ed., SUNY, 1990. Dennett, Daniel, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon and Schuster,1996. http://sino-sv3.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/anders2.htm http://sino-sv3.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/hunting1.htm Finch, Henry Leroy, Wittgenstein the Early Philosophy, Humanities Press, 1971. Finch, Henry Leroy, Wittgenstein the Later Philosophy, Humanities Press, 1977. Ford, Lewis, and Kline, George, eds. Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy, Fordham, 1983. (Kline, "Form, Concrescence, and Concretum", pp. 104 --146.) Gudmunsen, Chris, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, Macmillan, 1977. Kline, George, Albert North Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophy, Prentice-Hall, 1963. Meyer, Michel, Rhetoric, Language, and Reason, Penn State, 1994. Popkin, Richard, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, VanGorcum, 1960. Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minnesota, 1982. Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, 1979. Spencer-Brown, George, Laws of Form, Julian Press, 1972. Strauss, Leo, What is Political Philosophy, Chicago, 1959, "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing", pp. 221-233. Streng, Frederick, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, Abingdon, 1967. Svevo, Italo, Confessions of Zeno, Vintage, 1930. Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion, Brill, 1977. Wang, Hao, From Mathematics to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, Macmillan 1985. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1960. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, "Heidegger on Being and Dread", in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Yale, 1978, pp 80-83. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Anscombe, 3rd ed., Macmillan, 1958, x/xe.
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