J.N. Findlay

Philosophical Development

On Multiple Perspectives In Philosophy

“It is possible to see the life of the cave in terms of one of its furnishings: in each type of furnishing the whole structure of the cave will in a particular fashion be embodied. Thus we can see everything in the cave in its dependence on the bodily realities of the cave foreground: matter may even become ‘dialectical’ and fulfill any and every purposive, referential, social and even religious function. We can with equal ease see everything in its dependence on the interior acts which are our personal response to material and other realities: all things can become glassily inexistence in the shifting acts of the individual, momentary mind. We can likewise see everything in its connection with sense-contents or with Platonically conceived meanings or with abstracted values and requirements, or in terms of intersubjective relations or the all-pervasive power of words. We can also, if we like, practice nimbleness and conceive of things in highly mobile fashion, so that our emphasis constantly shifts from one aspect of cave-life to another. We can also, like Hegel, build these nimble dartings into an incomparably rich teleological or other synthesis. Philosophy may be said to be in part merely the changeover from a confused combination of many ill-developed ways of regarding the cave and its contents, to a single clearly focused and pregnant way, or to a sequence of such clearly focused ways, which may in their turn bring on a new deliberately blurred kind of vision, and so on. Philosophy is seeing the world under the hegemony of one or more of its constitutive furnishings. This statement could no doubt have been given a more modern sound by speaking of language-games and one-sided linguistic diet, the need to assuage linguistic cramps, and the like. These utterances I myself avoid since, whatever the legitimacy of seeing all things in the light of words, I myself find it a cramping emphasis.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 35.

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“The suggestion to be considered is, however that the idea in terms of which the human cave is to be seen should not be a single set of notions, tidily set forth and fixedly related to one another, but a set of notions that undergoes perpetual revision and perpetual deepening, that repeatedly withdraws from itself, as it were, to a new level of reflection and insight, from which it previously judged and saw and to see in its previous views implications that were not at all evident at their own level.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 77.

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“The human cave, on this view, cannot be described by a single unvarying phenomenology, but only by series of such phenomenologies: the phenomena, we may say, themselves develop and alter as we consider them, and may in the end, transform the cave into something that can no longer be counted as a cave at all.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 78.

On the Restoration and Revision of Truth

“We must, I think, be like Isis who wandered all over the world collecting and assembling the dispersed limbs of her husband, if we desire to reconstitute the rounded body of ecumenical truth.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 39.

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“There is nothing self-contradictory in holding that we may have continuously to revise and deepen the notions in terms of which we see the world, and that our initial notions often only sake sense as one-sided, stylized abstractions from what we shall later feel impelled to employ.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 79.

On His Teacher, Wittgenstein

“I also greatly admire the work of one who was for a short time my teacher, Wittgenstein. Though I do not think he showed the flies the way out of the fly-bottle, but rather kept them buzzing inside it, his views, I think, often provide the stimulus that makes escape possible.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 40.

On Philosophy and Ordinary Language

“Philosophy, in short, may simply be the sort of activity in which we replace ordinary notions and usages by various clear types which bring out interesting issues of principle that the instances covered by these notions and usages can be seen to exhibit in varying degree. Philosophy may in fact be essentially revisionary and creative, though it builds, and must build, on the notions and usages embedded in ordinary thought and speech.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 53.

On Phenomenology

“I am not an Husserlian phenomenologist, since I construct not one, but a whole series of phenomenologies, of which only the last is meant to stand”. The Discipline of the Cave, p. 15.

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“It seems plain that our human world is a world in which innumerable ideas, meanings, facts, principles, constructions, hyphotheses, laws, images and ideals are as essential a part of the landscape as are the concrete bodies and thinking persons around which they cluster, and above which they float. They constitute a universal world of rational mind in which all thinking persons share, whatever the limitations of their immediate, sensuous viewpoint”.

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“The phenomenal world is obviously full of absences, dangers, possibilities of development, aggregates, presuppositions and past backgrounds, and this long before we formulate them in language: it requires only minimal daring to concede their presence in the phenomena revealed to animals.” The Discipline of the Cave, pp. 69-70.

On the Coincidence of Opposites

Our awareness of our own interior activities presupposes and is presupposed by our awareness of the interior activities of others, and it is absurd to treat either as essentially prior or derivative: everything we experience, however tinged with the anguish of isolation, is given as something which anyone might experience. I need not go further and stress the converse dependence of the floating idealities and wall-shadows on the more solid furniture of the cave-foreground and floor, nor need I stress the converse dependence of the solid furniture on the idealities. Whichever may come first in some outside view, they are mutually dependent in life of the cave: solid things are as much dependent on the one-sided descriptions in terms of which we know them as the latter are on the former. Words likewise obviously depend on everything else, while everything else has its cave-status set forth in words. Values and prescriptions also have the most intimate connection with the natural, personal and interpersonal situations to which they apply, and the latter are constantly seen in the light of the former. Impersonal values, though seemingly nebulous and non-resistant, are, in the end, the most inescapable of cave-furnishings, and no sphere really lies beyond their relevance. It is not necessary for me, finally, to stress the relations of all things to religious objects or of religious objects to all things: the main function of religious objects is simply to be the putative sources of whatever there may be of power, reality, permanence, self-sufficiency, excellences and accomplished good form in the world.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 33.

On Religious Awe

“Religious awe is not, as it is often deemed to be, a contingent human development, an attitude that we encounter among other attitudes in ourselves and from the world. It is not, as it has often been held to be, the mere product of man’s original need, helplessness and ignorance which will ‘wither away’ in a well-appointed Marxist society or in a civilization built on science. None of the fundamental emotional attitudes of men and animals – those picked out by such salient names as ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘hatred’, ‘disgust’, admiration’, ‘emulation’, etc. – are mere facts of nature. All have not only definite ‘constitutions’, in which their various traits hang together in a necessary or near-necessary manner, but there is also something inevitable about their emergence in a living and conscious being.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 78-9.

On Language Games

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“It is the view of the present author that Wittgenstein’s basic language-games are all covertly circular. Their teaching situations presuppose an understanding of the meanings of, for example, duration, potency, number, and so on, that they are held to teach, and throw no light on them at all. The ultimate transcendentals involved in our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world remain as unassailably problematic, and as antinomic as ever.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p 376.