Be Here Now

‘I am tired of the eternal round of transmigration’ is the reason given for seeking the knowledge that will free the seeker. Seeking to become free from seeking is subject to the retort - put down that shovel, the hole is quite deep enough already. Yet it seems unavoidable, there must be that divine discontent even if it issues in a position that is paradoxical and an aim that is senseless. A.E. Taylor puts it well in his Elements of Metaphysics:

 It is manifest, to begin with, that" self" is a teleological concept. The self whose quality is revealed in Biography and History, and judged in Ethics, has for its exclusive material our emotional interests and purposive attitudes towards the various constituents of our surroundings; of these, and of nothing else, our self is made. And the self, again, is one and individual, just in so far as these interests and purposes can be thought of as forming the expression, in the detail of succession, of a central coherent interest or purpose. Where this central interest appears not to exist at all, we have no logical right to speak of a succession of purposive acts as the expression of a single self.

Taylor holds to the primacy of the teleological and psychical over the physical in his discussion of the possibility of an afterlife.  As a Christian he would have believed in the resurrection of the body and that would have established a single fate enjoying or not its deserts. There’s a neat rounded off sense to that doctrine when you compare it to reincarnation. The difficulty there is that the general intention of the person, their aims and objectives without the physical grounding of a body, continues on without them. Therefore it seems metaphysically grumpy to complain of a condition that you can only have a doctrinal sense of. On the other hand my punya and papa (deserts) ar on the same plane of existence as their generation.

Alternatively and inescapably you can BE HERE NOW, if you can remember.

A.E. Taylor on Soul and Body

This citation from A.E. Taylor on The Problem of Soul and Body (Bk.IV.ch.2 Elements of Metaphysics) is so perspicuous and stated with such clarity that I feel that it ought to be quoted in full. Henri Bergson in his Matter and Memory likewise disputes the mind/body dichotomy and with his particular usage of the concept of representation and image attempts to navigate the straits of Realism and Idealism. He's like the Mylesian Dublin tradesman when shown a Georgian dining room with its magnificent plasterwork says:
all this will have to come down, yis' are lucky if the joyces (joists) aren't rotten. His views will be treated in a further post.

I will conclude this chapter with some considerations on the bearing of our result upon the special problems of Metaphysics. We have explicitly defended Interaction as being no statement of actual experienced fact, but a working hypothesis for the convenient correlation of two scientific constructions, neither of which directly corresponds to the actualities of experience. This means, of course, that Interaction cannot possibly be the final truth for Metaphysics. It cannot ultimately be the " fact" that " mind " and " body " are things which react upon each other, because, as we have seen, neither "mind" nor "body" is an actual datum of experience; for direct experience and its social relations, the duality subsequently created by the construction of a physical order simply has no existence. Nor can it be maintained that this duality, though not directly given as a datum, is a concept which has to be assumed in order to make experience consistent with itself, and is therefore the truth. For the concept of Interaction manifestly reposes upon the logically prior conception of the physical as a rigidly mechanical system. It is because we have first constructed the notion of the " body " on rigidly mechanical lines that we have subsequently to devise the concept of " mind " or " soul" as a means of recognising and symbolising in our science the non-mechanical character of actual human life. And since we have already seen that the mechanical, as such, cannot be real, this whole scheme of a mechanical and a non-mechanical system in causal relation with one another can only be an imperfect substitute for the Reality it is intended to symbolise.
In fact, we might have drawn the same conclusion from the very fact that the psychophysical hypothesis we have adopted is couched in terms of Transeunt Causality, since we have already satisfied ourselves that all forms of the causal postulate are more or less defective appearance.
The proposition that the psychophysical theory of the " connection " of " body " and " mind " is an artificial transformation, due to the needs of empirical science, of the actual teleological unity of human experience, is sometimes expressed by the statement that mind and body are really one and the same thing. In its insistence upon the absence of the psychophysical duality from actual experience, this saying is correct enough, but it perhaps fails to express the truth with sufficient precision. For, as it stands, the saying conveys no hint of the very different levels on which the two concepts stand in respect to the degree of truth with which they reproduce the purposive teleological character of real human experience. It would perhaps be nearer the mark to say that, while the physiologist's object, the "body," and the psychologist's object, the " mind," are alike conceptual symbols, substituted, from special causes, for the single subject of actual life, and may both be therefore said to " mean " or " stand for " the same thing, their actual content is different. For what in the language of physiology I call my " body " includes only those processes of actual life which approximate to the mechanical ideal sufficiently closely to be capable of being successfully treated as merely mechanical, and therefore brought under a scheme of general" laws " of nature. Whereas what, as a psychologist, I call my "mind" or "soul," though it includes processes of an approximately mechanical type, includes them only as subordinate to the initiation of fresh individual reactions against environment which can only be adequately expressed by teleological categories. Thus, though " mind " and " body " in a sense mean the same actual thing, the one stands for a fuller and clearer view of its true nature than the other. In Dr. Stout's terminology their intent may be the same, but their content is different.

More Books

A dry northerly had thinned the Saturday crowd by the time I went into town. Books are excellent insulation so I dropped into Charley's for a browse and came out with a few - Enderby by Anthony Burgess, Elements of Metaphysics by A.E. Taylor and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. (4, 5.5, 5 Euro)

I've been reading the Taylor as a scanned ebook from Internet Archive for a while. The scan is good but footnotes baffle it. On practically every page there are long, intricate footnotes, what I have called voices from another room. One is plunged into another conversation without warning. When ebooks are prepared with links to notes it is easy to navigate and the distinction between footnote and endnote becomes irrelevant. In a printed book I prefer footnotes myself though they seem to have been superseded by endnotes. The worst solution in my opinion is chapter end notes.

Enderby is a comedy, English literary lout. Fun, abroad, bloody.

Julian Barnes is having a late golden period, brooding on finality. It won the Booker which is generally ominous as a quality indicator as that prize seems to be a demographic encouragement. Highgate/Hampstead intellectuals are not an untapped tree so it's probably good.

I am at present reading War and Peace. I shall be gone for some time. It's a very easy book to read with many incidents that are like self contained short stories. The endnotes are informative for an ignoramus like myself (Vintage). Why conclude a peace treaty on a barge in the middle of a river. Or in a train carriage in the middle of a wood? The Shiva of Napoleon is set against the Shakti of Natasha.

David Hume sets the agenda

John Heil in an interview in 3am:The Universe as we find it

JH: Substances, not properties, have powers. Objects do what they do because they are what they are (and their circumstances are what they are, a qualification I shall henceforth omit for ease of exposition). The tomato rolls, makes a circular concave impression in the carpet, looks spherical, feels spherical because it is spherical. The tomato’s sphericality is a quality, and it is by virtue of possessing this quality that the ball does or would do what it does. If the ball’s sphericality is a property of the ball, this property is a powerful quality.
Most of us are trained to start with Humeanism and adjust. Humeanism is the default. You need a good reason move from a default position. If you start with the idea that properties are qualities, and that objects do what they do because they are governed by laws of nature, the addition of powers will seem gratuitous. We have laws. Laws explain why objects behave as they do. Who needs powers?

A.E. Taylor likewise finds David Hume a sort of point from which the modern begins to qualify from. Like the Irish Labour Party a few years ago after losing a multitude of seats – 'we may have lost but we set the agenda'. In philosophy however setting the agenda is a sort of victory.

When we ask how, if a " thing" is merely the series or sum of its attributes, and possesses no underlying unity to which the attributes belong, the whole of our ordinary language about things comes to be constructed on the contrary assumption, how it is that we always talk and think as if every " bundle " of attributes were owned by something of which we can say that it has the quality, we are met by the phenomenalist with a reference to Psychology. Owing to the fact, which Phenomenalism and Associationism are content to accept as ultimate, that sensible qualities are always presented to our perception in definite groups, it is argued that the thought of any one member of such a group is enough to revive by association the thought of the other qualities which have regularly been presented simultaneously with itself or in immediate succession to it. Hence, because thus associated in our perception, the group comes naturally, though illegitimately, by one of those mental fictions of which Hume treats so fully, to be thought of as one, though it is actually a discrete multiplicity. The unity of the thing thus lies not in itself, but solely in our way of perceiving and thinking.

(from Elements of Metaphysics)

Narrowing the Issues with A.E. Taylor

Suspense and philosophy are not usually twinned, in general, we, like the PP’s advice on sermons to his curate, are told what we going to be told, we are told it and then in a magisterial summing up are told what we have just been told. Taylor in Elements of Metaphysics is open about his idealism but what sort is it? His criticism of its chief proponents such as Kant and Berkeley are cogent and the latters invulnerability according to Hume which to me has always seemed overstated is controverted effectively.

He writes:

When we say that a thing " is " or " has Being," we seem primarily to mean that it is an object for the knowing consciousness, that it has its place in the system of objects which coherent thought recognises. When we call the same object "real" or a " reality," we lay the emphasis rather on the consideration that it is something of which we categorically must take account, whether we like it or not, if some purpose of our own is to get its fulfilment.

Is this his own thought on the matter or must we wait as he says himself for ‘the narrowing of the issues’? Something like it seems to be as further down he rejects the example of the unknown yet existing:

We may pass from the case of the mental life of a fellow-man to the case of unperceived physical reality. A recent realist philosopher, Mr. L. T. Hobhouse, has brought forward as a clear instance of an independent physical reality, the case of a railway train just emerging from a tunnel. I do not perceive the train, he says, until it issues from the tunnel, but it was just as real while it was running through the tunnel. Its reality is therefore independent of the question whether it is perceived or not. But, in the first place, the argument requires that the train shall be empty; it must be a runaway train without driver, guard, or passengers, if the conditions presumed in the premisses are to be fulfilled. And, in the second place, we may retort that even an empty runaway train must have been despatched from somewhere by somebody. It must stand in some relation to the general scheme of purposes and interests expressed in our system of railway traffic, and it is precisely this connection, with a scheme of purposes and interests, which makes the runaway train a reality and not a mere fiction of an ingenious philosopher's imagination.

How different this is from the Vedantin’s ‘unknown object’ i.e. the capacity to be an unknown object is just what makes an object a reality. It may be that as a Monist Idealist Taylor holds that the system as a whole is one and ‘minded’ and that reality is self-creative consciousness. Or something. We are living in a cosmic neighborhood alert scheme. Everything is minding the others business. Or something. The current is picking up, a narrowing of the issues is approaching but theres a sense of ‘keep calm and carry on’. It’s a remarkable production for a 34 year old man.

 

Taylored Wittgenstein

Of course, it might be said, whatever game you choose to play at, the rules of that particular game must be your supreme reality, so long as you are engaged in it. But it depends on your own choice what game you will play and how long you will keep at it. There is no game at which we all, irrespective of personal choice, have to play, and there is therefore no such thing as an ultimate reality which we must all recognise as such; there are only the special realities which correspond to our special individual purposes. You have no right to set up the particular rules of the game of scientific thought as a reality unconditionally
demanding recognition from those who do not choose to play that particular game.

from Elements of Metaphysics by A.E. Taylor

'This game is played'

Ludwig Wittgenstein and A.E. Taylor

Wittgenstein did not it seems read much philosophy but reading the classic work by A.E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (1903) I was struck by the uncanny similarity between their statements on the difficulty of metaphysics which leads me to think that this at least was one book that Wittgenstein read. He could have done worse. It is also a matter of record that he approved of the distinction between being a clever man and being a good philosopher. Taylor’s puzzlement about Hume as to whether he was the one or the other or even both seemed to Wittgenstein a general truth. He did not commit himself to the sorting of Hume.

First from Elements of Metaphysics:

(1)
It is always difficult, in treating of any branch of knowledge, to put before the beginner a correct preliminary notion of the nature and scope of the study to which he is to be introduced, but the difficulty is exceptionally great in the case of the body of investigations traditionally known as Metaphysics.^ The questions which the science seeks to answer are, indeed, in principle of the simplest and most familiar kind, but it is their very simplicity and familiarity which constitute the chief difficulty of the subject. We are naturally slow to admit that there is anything we do not understand in terms and ideas which we are constantly using, not only in the special sciences, but in our non-systematised everyday thought and language about the course of the world. Hence, when the metaphysician begins to ask troublesome questions about the meaning and validity of these common and familiar notions, ordinary practical men, and even intelligent students of the special sciences, are apt to complain that he is wasting his time by raising idle and uncalled-for difficulties about the self-evident.

(2)
. We can now see some of the reasons which make the science of Metaphysics a peculiarly difficult branch of study. It is difficult, in the first place, from the very simplicity and generality of its problems.

From Philosophical Investigations#121:

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

It was of course Wittgenstein’s great genius to be able to evoke the sense of oddness of the everyday. The ‘Now go on’ instruction to complete the series or name the odd one out etc. How do you learn that concept of ‘going on’? It takes a philosophic mind to feel that we are stuck on that reef. “In my art or sullen craft” said Dylan Thomas. It is a type of stubborn brooding - there you are sulking over some wretched puzzle and it won’t leave you alone. Go out, dig the garden, make a cup of tea.

Find Elements of Metaphysics here: Elements