Note on A.N. Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World'.

When you are on a topic everything seems to feed into it. A journalist that reports on the government’s ‘most substantive meeting’ gets you pondering whether there can be a superlative of ‘substantive’. A substance is a free standing thing of which things are said. The expression noun substantive preserves this meaning but I will not bore you with a discussion of the Aristotelian implications of what H.W. Fowler calls a genteelism:

By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility. (Modern English Usage - 1966 ed.)

A. N. Whitehead avoided words that were polluted by a history of discussion that tended to draw the mind down dead ends:

“These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.' I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to a prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract.”

What Whitehead is at here is moving away from that solid thing substance to the realm of the possible which may or may not issue as an entity that is manifest. When they do the eternal objects are evident as ‘actual occasions’. His emphasis is on the nature of the universe as a monistic holistic pattern of interactions which can themselves be ‘eternal objects’. His breaks down mind/body dualism into a dyad of dual aspect:

“Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events.” (from Science and the Modern World)

It is as though we then graft on to that totalising moving through events an ontology of subject and objects.

“The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity, and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other.”

How this relates to my understanding of the theory of superimposition in Advaitic Vedanta is a topic for another occasion. �

Bergson's Key Insights in 'Matter and Memory'

 I finished Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson recently reading only a few pages at a time, that immersive sort of reading as though I was writing it. Nice idea but unlikely with this author who can turn a few millimetres of definitional space into a football pitch.  You become acquainted with the truth of his description of the difference between the amateur and the philosopher as demonstrated through the approach to a problem field.  The amateur takes the topic as found in the history, 6 reasons for, 6 against and the path through the middle.  The philosopher hears his own Socratic daimon saying ‘don’t go there’, uh uh; maybe the problem is not as posed and the oppositional poles as in the internal/external, idealism/realism dyads are merely a continuously morphing mistake.  I’m probably completely wrong in thinking that this is the key insight in his first chapter.  Broadly stated the internal demands the presence of the external to be itself.  

“The realist starts, in fact, from the universe, that is to say from an aggregate of images governed, as to their mutual

relations, by fixed laws, in which effects are in strict proportion to their causes, and of which the character is an

absence of centre, all the images unfolding on one and the same plane indefinitely prolonged. But he is at once

bound to recognize that, besides this system, there are perceptions that is to say, systems in which these same

images seem to depend on a single one among them, around which they range themselves on different planes, so as

to be wholly transformed by the slightest modification of this central image. Now this perception is just what the

idealist starts from: in the system of images which he adopts there is a privileged image, his body, by which the

other images are conditioned. But as soon as he attempts to connect the present with the past and to foretell the

future, he is obliged to abandon this central position, to replace (pg 15) all the images on the same plane, to suppose

that they no longer vary for him, but for themselves; and to treat them as though they made part of a system in

which every change gives the exact measure of its cause. On this condition alone a science of the universe becomes

possible; and, since this science exists, since it succeeds in foreseeing the future, its fundamental hypothesis cannot

be arbitrary. The first system alone is given to present experience; but we believe in the second, if only because we

affirm the continuity of the past, present, and future. Thus in idealism, as in realism, we posit one of the two

systems and seek to deduce the other from it.”

Staying at that level of analysis leads to a constant oscillation, the result of the apparently inescapable dualism between me and my world.  Here the philosopher says no, perhaps there is a path to non-duality in which there is what Bergson calls ‘pure perception’. 

If that isn’t knowledge as we know it Henri then what is it, a transcendental swiss penknife or something?  What would make you think it exists unless it evinces itself in some manner. And are you cher Maitre Bergson really saying that we perceive our perceptions?

Bergson as a Dualist

 

In the introduction to ‘Matter and Memory’ Bergson states that his philosophy is dualist but having read his rejection of both Materialism and Idealism we are inclined to say ‘yes Henri, it’s dualism but not as we know it.  He starts from the common apprehension of a primal division between subject and object.  It’s perfectly natural and inevitable but the aporiai that it spawns sends him in a new direction.  Let’s take it that there is an interaction between a sensitive actor, the subject, and the world of sensible inputs. It is this interaction which is experienced as a plenum but not from the vantage point of a subject.  The natural tendency to place this experience in the subject is what the Advaitins call adhyasa or superimposition.  In Bergson’s panpsychist analysis memory pervades this interaction and lays it up never to be forgotten.  Now the perception which is a function of the superimposed subject has its images in a direct way in contrast to memory which is non-temporal but can insert its input.  This I think is the source of the notion of reality as the ‘aggregate of images’.  There is a pooling together from both sources.

I have previously mentioned  my intuition of the metaphor of mirror and images as being a source for his philosophy.  Metaphors instead of being merely an illustration of a point to be clarified can themselves be a higher realisation which hovers on the edge of the inexpressible.

More anon on that.

Realism in Advaita part 1

 

Advaita throws the word ‘real’ and its antonym ‘unreal’ about freely leaving the casual reader or the sitter at the feet of Swamiji, guruji, and the internet oracle, confused.  Is Advaita a type of subjective Idealism which holds that the world is a dream or ‘like’ a dream in that it is experienced and vanishes on waking, an ‘insubstantial pageant’?  Fear not, let this mini-guru with more than a hint of tin in his water pot put you right.  One thing I have though, if not enlightenment, is a fair reading in general philosophy that allows one to sift the nuances of the levels of reference.  Am I then referring to the vyavaharika/pratibhasika (absolute/relative) distinction?  Not quite.  Let me first deal with the opening question purely from an epistemological point of view.  What are we aware of when we experience something?  Is it an internal occurrence in our minds  that by some process represents the external reality or is that an overly complex way of saying that we experience an object?  Effectively, experience of the object is the immediate thing and all else is an over elaboration of the febrile mind and a derealising distraction.  There is a tiny, shy, half-truth in that.  My counter would be that Adi Shankara catered to the seeker who requires rational clarification.

The other, frequently met with, counter to this question of epistemological stance is the Orientalist - ‘really this Realism/Idealism dyad is a Western preoccupation that does not apply in Vedanta’.  Again, Shankara took it seriously though Vedanta’s answer to the aporia (puzzle) is so to speak, non-binary.   What else does non-dual mean if not that?  In any case the attempt to navigate between the Scylla and the Charybdis of Internal and External has also a long history in Western thought from, I would hold, Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and the modern revival of Panpsychism.

This is a long menu and the first item must be the neglected - what is the nature of the person, the mind/body complex that is in a world of objects?  

I’ll be back.

Bergson, a Dualist?

Right off in his introduction Bergson comes clean:

THIS book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory. It is, then, frankly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism, and which cause it, though suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense, to be held in small honour among philosophers.

(from Intro. To Matter and Memory)

My own view, no doubt contestable, and what in Bergson is not, is that here Maitre. B. Is sayingl; ‘let’s not get caught up in the eternal discussion of Dualism and Materialism rather we should bracket the problem and move on in the hope that further discussion will clarify. When you have read the book and are on the real first real reading, which is the re-reading, it is clear that that the imprinted philosophic division is transcended. If it is Dualism it is not the Cartesian kind. There is no interaction problem. In fact it is the bodily immersion in a physical material reality which evokes a reaction out of the repetoire in memory. Around every sensation is the aura of memory so rote that it barely impinges on our awareness. He might go so far occasionally as to say that sensation is memory and pure perception is a theoretical limit never encountered. Is this a prevision of the work of Piaget?

The shocking thing for the modern reader is the proposal that memory is not stored in the brain. Lesion injury seems to declare that it is but then if memory is annihilated by the destruction of a particular region of the brain how can it be re-established? By some neuro-philosophy epicycle does memory retreat to an occult location lurking there till fetched by intact areas of the brain?

My house is small, but you two have book learning by logic, you can create a mile wide space where there are only twenty feet. Let’s see if this place will do; otherwise, make it larger by talking, as is your custom.

(from The Reeve’s Tale by Chaucer)