J.N. Findlay

The Problem of Other Minds

Here I will provide a single but, I believe, telling example of Findlay's reasoning.  Philosophers have long been troubled by the question of how it is that we know that individuals other than ourselves possess minds.  It is argued that while we know our own minds directly through introspection, we can only infer the existence of others’ minds on the basis of their physical behavior.  It is readily apparent that this entire problem would not arise in a world in which all consciousness was effectively one, or, less dramatically, in a (slightly lower) world in which there was direct communication between separate minds, unmediated by behavior or other material events.  Indeed, we might posit the existence of a higher, unitary, world in order to solve the problem of minds other than our own.  We might also recognize that such a world, in which experience is organized quite differently than in our own, is more or less continually accessible to some individuals in our own world, and, to all of us, at least on occasion.  In those experiences in which the mystic, for example, recognizes the unity of all souls, or in those interpersonal encounters in which one immediately understands another’s thoughts and feelings, and experiences them as if they were one’s own, we are, as it were, transported to a “higher reality”.  When we conceptualize higher worlds simply as (radically) different ways of organizing experience, the great mystery about higher worlds and their penetration into our own disappears, and what at first appears as a distant, alien concept becomes familiar and relevant to daily life.

Concluding Reflections

Findlay is not alone in positing the existence of an underlying reality, or “ world” in which the antinomies and philosophical conundrums of our own world are presumably resolved (Plato’s ideal forms, Kant’s “noumenal” reality, Hegel’s “absolute spirit”, the linguistic philosopher’s “ideal language” are each examples that come readily to mind). Just as one might posit the existence of an “afterlife” to explain the moral antinomy manifest in the “suffering of the righteous”, one might also posit the existence of a “higher” reality in order to solve other enigmatic and disturbing philosophical problems.

Indeed, when we reflect upon the kind of world which would resolve our philosophical dilemmas, we begin to recognize it as very much akin to the world which certain mystical traditions posit as existing in a metaphysical region between our world and the Absolute, and which Findlay tells us serves as the compliment or completion of our own world. This is because such a higher world is a unified, purely spiritual and conceptual world that exists outside the vexing realm of space and time.  It is a world which follows a purely rational order in which there is no place for randomly caused events.  It is a world in which “acts of will” need not proceed through the medium of matter and hence involve themselves in the problems of material necessity.  It is a world in which we are in direct communion with both the (purely ideational or spiritual) objects of experience and the thoughts of other minds, and hence a world within which the philosophical problems of “knowledge and its objects” and the “existence of other minds” cannot conceivably arise.  It is a world devoid of serial time and hence a world in which the puzzles of temporality cannot arise. It is a world without gross matter, and hence a world in which the distinction between a concept and its instance cannot be maintained, and thus where to know an instance is ipso facto to know its universal and vice versa.  Finally, it is a world in which there is neither material harm nor gain and, hence, where virtue and righteousness exist as their own and only reward.

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[This article is a modified version of essays that appear in S Drob, Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern Thought (Jason Aronson, 2000) and on the New Kabbalah Website (www.newkabbalah.com), where the author argues that Findlay's philosophy is particularly helpful in understanding the Jewish Mystical tradition]