Logos Read online

  Also by Raymond Tallis and published by Agenda

  Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience

  copyright © Raymond Tallis 2018

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  First edition published in 2018 by Agenda Publishing

  Agenda Publishing Limited

  The Core

  Science Central

  Bath Lane

  Newcastle upon Tyne

  NE4 5TF

  www.agendapub.com

  ISBN 978-1-78821-087-4

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

  Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  For dearest Danilo and Jay – who are just setting out on their journey of making sense of the world. And for their loving guides on the journey Adela and Jules, Ben and Lawrence

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Overture

  1

  Seeing the sense-making animal

  2

  Logos: a brief backward glance

  Addendum Beginnings: bangs, flashes and commands

  3

  Deflating the mystery 1: putting the world inside the mind

  Addendum 1 The harmony of world and mind

  Addendum 2 “The outside”

  Addendum 3 Kant and the pre-human past

  4

  Deflating the mystery 2: logos as bio-logos

  Addendum 1 The anthropic principle

  Addendum 2 A note on Russellian monism and panpsychism

  5

  The escape from subjectivity

  Addendum Subjects without bodies

  6

  Thatter: knowledge

  Addendum Squeezing out thatter: deflationary, disquotational, disappearance theories of truth

  7

  Senselessness at the heart of sense

  8

  Towards a complete comprehension of the world?

  Coda

  Notes

  References

  Acknowledgements

  Yet again, I am deeply indebted to my publisher, Steven Gerrard. I am enormously grateful for his tremendous support for my writing and his scrupulous labours during the journey to the press.

  Two referees – Professor Sebastian Gardner of University College London and Dr Tom McClelland of University of Warwick – reviewed the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions which have greatly improved the book. I am very grateful to them for their generosity. It goes without saying that any errors are my own.

  Preface

  [A] philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then, it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said.

  Henri Bergson, Address to the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy, Bologna, 1911

  The inquiry that follows is a philosophical homecoming. At any rate, it is an attempt to return to the place whence I set out in my teens, dozens of published books, and many more dozens of unpublished manuscripts, ago.

  My philosophical awakening was shaped by fears. Some were well-founded, such as that sooner or later I, and everyone I cared for, would die in pain and terror. Other fears were equally commonplace but less well-founded: that my freedom was illusory; and that the world as I experienced it might be a dream. These philosophical concerns were, a few years later, offset by something quite different: an overwhelming astonishment that I existed, that I could think that I existed; that I could make everyday sense of myself and my world; in short, that there is “that”. It was accompanied by an unexpected joy that I still cannot fully explain although I am grateful for it.

  One moment I have recalled so frequently that not one detail will have survived undistorted. As I remember it now, I am standing in a little attic room, fragrant with cabbage soup and the fishy smell of a malfunctioning anglepoise lamp. These were my student digs: 60 Park Town Crescent, Oxford, where I was lodged with Mrs Pasternak-Slater, the exiled sister of Boris. I am talking to my friend Chris Verity, then a medical student and now a retired consultant. I can’t remember what we were talking about. Suddenly I heard my own voice and, beyond my voice, the “that” implicit in it – located somewhere between “that I am”, “that x is the case”, “that the world exists” and “that I am making sense of something”. Thus, my encounter with “thatter”. “Mystery” is, perhaps, too narrow a word; rather a revelation tinged with surprise, feeling itself to be on the threshold of a further revelation that in the subsequent fifty or more years has not revealed itself.

  My career as a doctor kept me rather too much in touch with mortality, and the many limitations of freedom arising out of illness and the confusions that threatened to invade us all, as cooperation between the “it is” of the body and the “I am” of the self starts to breakdown. In my philosophical thinking, therefore, I have often focused on the joyful astonishment of realizing and accounting for the “that” which had filled me with such inexplicable delight, that seemed to bring me to the verge of an alternative sense of reality.1 It has been a presence – to varying degrees on- and off-stage – in many of my books. It was most obvious in The Explicit Animal (1991) and in the discussion of propositional awareness in The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (2004). But it was also a motivating force in Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (1988, 1995) and Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (1997, 1999) and even in my monographs on Heidegger and Parmenides.

  I could trace the itinerary of this motif through the “Collected Works of Raymond Tallis” at great length but even authorial vanity can bore itself. The point is the centrality of the theme of “That” or “That!” to my thinking. I have been tenacious in loitering in its vicinity; and it has motivated my critique of many anti-humanist intellectual trends ranging from scientism to post-Saussurean thought. It has toyed with me for decades and has come to sit at the heart of my humanist belief in the uniqueness of human consciousness and our status as true agents, who are points of origin in the world rather than merely dissolved into external – physical and cultural – forces. Of a humanism, in short, that while denying our supernatural status, does not conclude, as I did in the more despairing moments of my early teens, that we must be entirely part of the natural, the material, world, helplessly subordinated to its laws.

  Logos is an attempt, more direct than any of my previous books, to be true to, or to prolong, this astonishment that has, at increasingly long intervals, lit up within me. It is an endeavour to wake out of, or to, ordinary wakefulness: to discover the strangeness in the blindingly obvious.

  There is something necessarily artificial, flawed, about this endeavour, not just because the pace and rhythm of writing and reading does not match that of thinking and contemplation (which anyway cannot be requisitioned to order) but also because, pace Kant, our reason is only rarely driven by an inward need to pose metaphysical questions.2 The seriousness of our lives often seems to point elsewhere and even “the examined life” passes for the most part free of examination. On the contrary, it is life that tends to examine us, or at least to set the questions. We are too busy being our localized selves to ascend to the uncompromised awareness of a consciousness that belongs to no-one, nowhere, and nowhen, in particular. This can make the elective astonishment of philosophy seem frivolous or artificial.

  Philosophy is necessarily dialogic. While there are many interlocutors named during the course of this inquiry, there is one whose presence is more ubiquitous than is expl
icitly acknowledged. As I began the second attempt at this book I re-read Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere.3 Notwithstanding the copious underlinings and marginal instructions to “NB” this and “NB” that in my dog-eared copy, I do not recall my first reading of the book, although I was aware of the impact it had made on me. Re-reading Nagel brought home the significance of his subtle, complex, and self-questioning arguments. In the thirty or more years since its publication, its stature has grown. To borrow a metaphor from George Santayana applied to Spinoza, “like a mountain obscured at first by its foothills he rises as he recedes”.4 It is exasperating how many contemporary intellectual trends – reductionist and computational theories of the mind and evolutionary epistemology to name only the most dispiriting examples – have continued to flourish since Nagel demonstrated their inadequacy. That is another story. I mention Nagel here only to highlight how the passage from my open-mouthed awe to specific lines of inquiry has been influenced by The View from Nowhere.

  In Logos, therefore, I have tried to return to something that feels like a fundamental or “ur-thought” I have been on verge of having. And if some of what follows is quite technical, the audience I have in mind is the fabled “general reader”. That reader is someone like myself who passes most of his conscious hours in a sub-philosophical frame of mind, even when he is philosophizing. Many philosophical thoughts, after all, are easier to discuss than to think.

  The remark from Bergson at the head of this Preface – which is applicable to anyone who truly struggles to philosophize – is an advance warning that a thought I have never quite managed to think is still incompletely thought by the end of this inquiry. In short, Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World is a failure, although not I hope a pointless one. There is a purpose, even nobility, in aiming “to fail better”.5 Meanwhile understanding or doing justice to that intuition of half a century ago, whose admittedly intermittent light is undimmed, remains as a regulative idea. Who knows, I may have succeeded better than I fear. But for that I depend on you, the reader, the writer’s always underestimated invisible partner.

  Overture

  The greatest mysteries are those we are most likely to overlook, because they are the ground on which we stand when we puzzle over things that surprise us. Chief among these is the very fact – though “fact” is hopelessly inadequate – that the world makes sense to us. As Einstein observed, “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”.1

  A couple of decades earlier Einstein believed he had come close to fulfilling the Pythagorean dream of discovering the mathematical structure of the natural world – of space, time, and the entities occupying or taking place in them – and rendered the material universe transparent to thought. His euphoria was short-lived. Quantum mechanics – a seemingly unintelligible but immensely powerful way of describing the physical world and an incompatible complement of general relativity – came to occupy more and more explanatory space. Nevertheless, Einstein’s surprise, and delight, his wonder, remain valid: even the partial intelligibility of the world is mystery enough. The conflict between these two spectacularly successful theories did not make their theoretical and practical potency any less astonishing.

  That the world makes sense and we make sense of the world and of ourselves in the world whose givens impose a kind of sense on us is a many-layered miracle. Even those who do notice it – artists, theologians, philosophers, scientists – do so only intermittently. Typically, it is the (local) failure of sense that provokes us into thought. Otherwise we are too complicit in the necessary assumptions of common sense, paying sufficient attention to get by but not enough to see the extraordinary stuff out of which its fabric is made. We rarely wake to the miracle of our wakefulness and the possibility of waking out of it to some more illuminated state.

  Of course, if we did not make moment-to-moment sense of what was going on around us, there would be no “us”. Inhabiting an entirely unintelligible world in which nothing could be understood, anticipated, or acted upon with reliable consequences, would be incompatible with inhabiting.

  But there is no “of course” even about this. That human existence requires a more or less intelligible world simply moves the mystery on. After all, the vast majority of organisms flourish – and act, or at least react – without making sense of the world in the way that we humans do. That A is explained by B is not the kind of thing that bacteria (by certain criteria the most successful organisms) entertain; and at a higher level, the laws of nature as we understand them are beyond the cognitive reach of all but a small subset of H. sapiens. Human flourishing has not for most of the history and prehistory of humanity depended on the kind of gaze that could discern laws connecting the fall of a cup off a table with the clockwork of the solar system, or a theory that folds the gravitational field into the structure of space-time. Man-the-sense-making-animal therefore remains deeply mysterious and Man-the-Explainer or would-be Explainer of the universe – H. scientificus – doubly so.

  Let us unpack this a little. We live in a world in which happenings seem to be explained by other happenings: “this happened because of that”. We not only observe causes but actively seek them out. We also note patterns, connect and quantify those patterns, and arrive at the natural laws which have proved so empowering, enabling us to predict and manipulate events, to work with and around them, in pursuit of our ends. All of this takes place in a boundless public cognitive space, draws on a vast collective past, and reaches into an ever-lengthening and widening future.

  Observed patterns may be exploited as rules to guide or permit effective action. Sense-making makes what happens into a nexus of norms and norms seem to prescribe what should happen: they are quasi-normative. There is surprise, even outrage, at the unexpected, as if the material world ought to observe its own regularities, notwithstanding that there is no ought in nature.

  The extraordinary character of man, the sense-making animal may be highlighted by contrasting the direct and limited “epistemic foraging”2 of a beast looking for the origin of a threatening signal with a team of scientists listening into outer space to test a hypothesis about the Big Bang, having secured a large grant to do so.

  The reference to astronomy suggests another way of coming upon the miracle of our sense-making capacity: our ability to discern the laws informing a universe that far outsizes us. You don’t have to identify the human mind with the human brain to be legitimately astonished at the disparity of size between the knower and the known, between what we physically are and what we know. Consider the relative volumes of our heads (4 litres) and of the universe (4 x 1023 cubic light years). In these less-than-pinprick bonces, closer to the size of the atom than to the size of the universe, the universe comes to know itself as “The Universe” and some of its most general properties are understood.3 The mystery is beautifully expressed by the American philosopher, W. V. O. Quine when he describes his attempt to explain: “how we, physical denizens of the physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meagre contacts with it: from the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill”.4

  That our knowledge and understanding are incomplete does not diminish the achievement. It hardly matters how precise are the figures we arrive at regarding the size or the longevity of the universe. The question “what kind of being must we be to be mistaken over this?” is as compelling as the question “what kinds of beings could arrive at this kind of knowledge?”. What knower could house gigantic ideas such as “the universe” or (come to that) “life”? These items do not deliver themselves prepackaged as mind-sized miniatures. The cognitive depth these ideas require of us is the same irrespective of whether we have religious or secular outlooks; whether we believe the universe was made or just happened; whether its unfolding is postulated to be driven by a deity or by an intrinsic momentum of change; whether its necessity is represented by mindful Fates or by mindles
s laws and causes. “God” does not make the order of the universe and our capacity to grasp it any more probable. It is simply another name for that improbability, as we shall investigate in Chapter 2.

  Indeed, the intuition that our knowledge is bounded by ignorance, that things (causes, laws, mechanisms, other galaxies) may be concealed from us, that there are hidden truths, realities, modes of being, has been the powerful motor of our shared cognitive advance. We are creatures who cultivate doubt. We have the extraordinary capacity to infer from a mistake in one instance the possibility of being mistaken in a whole class of cases. This, at least as much as our habit of (provisional) generalization and our uniqueness as “the measuring animal”, should astonish us. So, too, the fact we can tolerate the extraordinary state of affair that as our knowledge grows, we ourselves, as the objects of our collective knowledge, shrink: our tiny bonces, in galaxies light-years in diameter.

  The headline achievements of the human mind, however, are built on lower-level sense-making capabilities that are no less remarkable. Scientific inquiry and religious or philosophical speculation are the upper storeys of a mode of consciousness that is awake to a world other than itself. Perception discerns objects that it senses as being incompletely revealed, that it intuits as having intrinsic properties such as density or microscopic structure, operating in the absence of consciousness. Our everyday consciousness inhabits a realm of knowledge and reasons and words that transcend the material circumstances of the human organism. We are aware of truths singular, particular, general, universal, and of the perpetual possibility of getting things wrong.

  There is a spectrum of sense-making, ranging from wondering what caused that noise over there, to what shapes the order of things, leading up to the ultimate question of why there is anything rather than nothing. The speculative and spectacular sense-making of the scientist is rooted in a many-layered soil of everyday making sense of ourselves, expressed in the coherence of the succession of moments, the narrative of our lives, our plans, supported by the “artefactscape” in which we pass so much of our lives. There are important differences, however, as we shall discuss.