J.N. Findlay

On Systematic Axiology

It is not illuminating to treat the ordering of values like the topography of the moon which can be established by simply training a telescope on one’s object, or, more satisfactorily, by going there.  The sort of values that one is concerned to establish in a systematic axiology are ineluctable, framework values, things presupposed in all rational choice, and indispensable to a complete account of anything whatsoever (Axiological Ethics, pp. 79-80). 

On Values and One's Vocation

We are not free to determine the points of the compass in the realm of values, but remain free, within wide limits, to steer a course among them (Axiological Ethics, p. 90).

On the Infinite Regress of Values and Other Minds

Obviously...the beings who often perform whatever may be meant by putting themselves into other people's shoes, and who have acquired some skill and zest in this performance, must in the end tend to move to a new, higher level of interest where what they concern themselves with is not what this one or that one likes or is interested in, but only with what survives all such laborious translation of oneself into everyone else's shoes, so that one then, at that level, only desires and likes what everyone must desire and like, and desire and like for everyone, and desire and like everyone to desire and like for everyone, and so on in unending complication (Axiological Ethics, p. 84).

On the Limitations of "Obligation" Ethics

That it would be 'rather fine' or 'somewhat shabby' to do something, which it is none the less not a matter of strict obligation to do or avoid, is an idea as common in ordinary ethical discussion as it is ignored by philosophers...

It remains fairly clear always what it would be better or worse to seek to realize, while it is always maddeningly unclear what one is obliged to do.

The obligatory...has a much closer relationship with the undesirable and the evil than with the desirable and or the good.  We are obliged to do things mainly because certain grave evils would otherwise befall, and not merely to realize what is positively good (Values and Intentions, p. 21).

What is worthwhile per se or the contray is, of course, something having the closest possible relation to what ought to be done, but nevertheless not so close as to not leave it possible to assert the existence or possibility of worthwhile or unworthwhile things having little or no relation to what ought to be done.  The field of ethics presupposes the field of axiology, but the latter, arguably, stretches out beyond the limits of the former (Axiological Ethics, pp. 3-4).

It is of supreme importance that in axiological considerations we should never assume that disvalues are in any sense the mirror-image of values, that the absence of goodness is automatically very bad, or the absence of badness deeply good, etc., or that the principles governing valuation and disvaluation are in any way closely parallel (Axiological Ethics, p. 8).

Values and Contradiction

What is good, [Nicolai] Hartmann tells us, necessarily lies in a large number of incompatible directions, and it is intrinsically impossible that all of these should be followed out into realization. One cannot, for example, achieve pure simplicity and variegated richness in the same thing or occasion, and yet both incontestably make claims upon us, and ought both to be realized. The realm of values, in fact, always imposes a logically impossible task upon us: we are to achieve each and all of a large number of things which yet cannot all be achieved together…What is self-contradictory certainly makes no sense in theory: there are no states of affairs that can ever make it true.  But, contrary to what is generally thought, what is self-contradictory makes sense in practice: we are in fact obliged to strive towards value accommodations to which full reality can never be given.  Even Kant saw this when he held that only in eternity could we conform to the demands of the categorical imperative (Axiological Ethics, p. 73).

Early Life

(The following autobiographical material is derived largely from Findlay's "My Life,"  which appeared in R. S. Cohen, R. M. Martin, and M. Westphal, Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay, Albany: SUNY Press, 1985.)

 

J. N. Findlay was born November 25, 1903 in Pretoria, South Africa, in the then Crown Colony of the Transvaal, the son of a lawyer, who for a time served as the Government attorney to Lord Milner.

Findlay recounts a rather idyllic childhood in a large bungalow on a suburban estate, attended to by nannies and surrounded by a large extended family and very hospitable neighbors. 

He recalls how at age three he was told that bacon, of which he had been very fond, derived from slaughtered pigs and how he was horrified “at the discovery of this moral enormity underlying our whole way of life, this gorging of ourselves on our fellow animals” (My Life, p. 5); this leading him by age seven to adopt the stance of a moral vegetarianism, which with few exceptions he adhered to throughout the remainder of his life.

In his autobiography Findlay recalls “King Edward’s death in 1910, also the glorious apparition of Halley’s Comet, spread out golden in the early morning sky as in the Bayeux Tapestry.”

First Philosophy

Findlay’s brother, George, seven years his elder provided him with a copy of the Wallace translation of Hegel’s Logic (for which Findlay was to later write an extensive introduction), and this, together with Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, were the first philosophical works he read seriously upon entering university in 1919.  Of Hegel’s Logic, Findlay writes:

 

It has been my constant companion throughout my life, and Hegel, like the moon, has taken up his stance at the end of every vista, shedding light as readily on naturalism and realism as on idealism and mysticism, and being reflected in Wittgenstein or Principia Mathematica as much as in Neoplatonism or Scholastic Theology (My Life, p. 4).

 

As a youth, and even into adulthood, Findlay enjoyed acting, and for a time as an adolescent and young man he tried his hand as a poet, but by the end of the first World War his interests became fixed upon religion and mysticism, which he pursued as a student at the University of Pretoria.

Theosophy

During this period Findlay joined the Theosophical Society, which had been founded by Madame H. P. Blavatsky in 1875, and which Findlay later described as melding the philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism and strains of Gnosticism, Orphism, Kabbalism, Sufism, with an interesting, if definite, charlatanism.  Findlay notes that the society was later plagued by  scandals and was ultimately repuidiated by J. Krishnamurti, the man the movement had heralded as the “World Teacher.”

 

Findlay’s early involvement in theosophy, while perhaps a source of embarrassment for an academic philosopher, nonetheless made its mark upon him, as it led him to embrace a perennial philosophy, which at various times has appeared under the guise of Platonism, Neoplatonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah, a philosophy which entails that the world of appearances is simply the outermost layer of being that has its center in an undifferentiated and infinite ground, and for which Findlay himself much later sought to provide a rational foundation in his Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews in 1964-5 and 1965-6, subsequently published as The Discipline of the Cave and The Transcendence of the Cave.

 

Findlay spent five years in the Theosophical movement, during which time he engaged in the practice of Rajat Yoga, immersed himself in Hindu and Buddhist writings, and having an unusual affinity for languages (he had excelled in Dutch, German, French, Greek and Latin) even taught himself sufficient Sanskrit to read parts of the Bhagavad-Gita in the original.

Findlay attributed to the mental discipline of his early Yoga practice a refinement in his powers of introspection that he was later to use to advantage in countering what he regarded to be the amateur, pseudo-introspection of philosophers like Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle. While Findlay later rejected  some of the more “mythical” aspects of his yogic/mystical experiences in favor of his own brand of “rational mysticism,” (and even had a period during which he believed he had constructed a valid disproof of the existence of God) he later wrote that “a general openness to what I shall call the Uncreated Light has never left me” (My Life, p. 12).

Findlay’s experiences with, and his ultimate rejection of the specificities of the theosophical movement (e.g. the godlike “elderly brethren” said to be in communication with the leaders of the movement from their abode high in Tibet) led him to reject all particular religious doctrines. He wrote, “I came to feel that there would be something essentially wrong and even irreligious in venerating anything, however exalted, that was...tainted with specificity and contingency” (My Life, p. 12).

From Ken Bandy Who Studied With Findlay at Kings College 1957-60

From: Ken Bandy [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Fri 7/4/2008 4:29 AM
To: Sandy Drob
Subject: J N Findlay

It was good to read your tribute to J N Findlay. I was his student at King's College London 1957-60. Had I been at University College under A J Ayer instead I would have missed so much that was disregarded in those days except by JNF.

You describe him very well except that when I knew him he had at least a modicum of grey hair.

He was always very approachable for us students and even took us to lunch at the Strand Palace Hotel in our last term- at his own expense I think.

 

Your description of him walking around writing on blackboards- sometimes just dashes-evokes fond memories. I remember one occasion when he actually fell of the end of the platform while talking and drawing dashes at the same time. 

 

My fondest memory is when I was in my first year and he asked me out of the blue- "Surely Bandy you don't have an anthropomorphic view of god?"  and I guessed that the answer should be "No" although afterwards I wanted to have said "Yes" and I don't suppose he would have minded if I had.

The undergraduates were also invited to his seminars for the postgraduates and at the time we were studying "Intention" by GEM Anscombe. Findlay gave it a very detailed inspection for us.

I remember visiting him at his home in Hampstead after I had graduated to tell him that I had reluctantly decided not to go ahead with my PhD. He greeted me on the doorstep with "Good heavens Bandy, you look like a ghost"  such was the straightforward conversation of this very subtle thinker.  
 

Ken Bandy

7/4/2008 

From Daniel Breazeale Who Studied With Findlay at Yale (late 1960s)

December 13, 2008

I stumbled upon your J.N. Findlay website quite by accident this morning; but I am glad I did, since I enjoyed browsing there for a pleasant half hour. 

So let me express my gratitude by sharing a few of my own recollections of Prof. Findlay.

I was a PhD student of Philosophy at Yale from 1966 to 1971, a classmate of Doug Lackey, whom you mention on site.  I took only one class with Findlay, but it was unforgettable: a class on Hegel's Logic, in which the entire class read the Lesser Logic (in the Wallace translation) and each student had to prepare a presentation on a specific section of the text, based on the Science of Logic. 

What I most remember about that class is Findlay's peculiar and peculiarly effective method of "lecturing while writing and erasing," which you describe so well.  At some point early in the semester he began distributing his lectures in rather crudely typed and mimeographed form at the beginning of each class (shades of Fichte and the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre!), and then proceeded to read them to us while again writing them on the board.  We could not believe it, but it turned out to be most effective!   My nearly complete set of those often-reread mimeographed lectures is one of my most cherished mementos of my years in New Haven.

I recall how one day in class, in the course of a discussion of Hegel's critical account of "mechanism" Findlay, blustering in his usual red-faced manner, sputtered -- nay, fairly hissed -- that defenders of a mechanistic world picture absurdly "wanted to think of themselves as bicycles." Case closed, he seemed to be saying!

Another memory: Findlay never failed to attend any of the well-attended guest lecturers sponsored by the philosophy department during those years and he invariably was among the first to stand up and pose a question to the speaker.  Invariably as well, his was the most penetrating question.  On more than one occasion I witnessed speakers reduced to near silence by the same.  My friends and I joked that if we were ever to be in a situation of reading a professional paper and saw Findlay in the audience, we would simply refuse to go on.

Finally, I recall very well the farewell bash for Findlay held at the Yale College (Branford?) with which he was associated.  He gave a talk to a very large audience, consisting almost entirely of students. I think only one member of the Yale philosophy faculty (Karsten Harries) had the courtesy to attend.  But what was memorable was the substance of the lecture, in which Findlay spoke positively about psychotrophic drugs (this was the late sixties, remember?) and connected drug experiences to his own rational mysticism, to Platonism, etc.  He was not, of course, advocating drug usage, but he showed an understanding and appreciation of what was happening then in the youth culture that completly escaped colleagues half his age.  It was a brave thing to do.

I don't think I made much of a personal impression upon Findlay. (I will never forget the disappointment of receiving back my 40 page term paper on Hegel's Logic of Essence with no comments except a grade of A on the last page and the sentence "I can find nothing to disagree with in this paper.")   But he made an indelible one upon me. 

Thank you for your web site
Dan Breazeale


--
Daniel Breazeale
Professor and Acting Chair
Department of Philosophy
University of Kentucky
Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences

From Arnold Kalnitsky

I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon your tribute site while searching for any possible links or studies pertaining to J. N. Findlay. Back in 1977 in my graduate studies days I was preparing to defend a Master's thesis focused on Platonic cosmogony, and in my research, came across  the two volumes of Prof. Findlay's Gifford Lectures. His unique and somewhat idiosyncratic modernist reconstruction/revision of the Platonic/Neoplatonic  metaphysical orientation was a stimulating and enlightening experience. As well as providing richness of content, the boldness of his philosophical stance was a welcome relief from the majority of doctrinaire reiterations of the fashionable mainstream schools. The mix of phenomenological method, "neo-Neoplatonism," legitimized religious/spiritual experience and sweeping Hegelian perspective certainly is a unique synthesis emerging from an intellectual environment not prone to endorse such a direction.

Admittedly, much of his writing is packed with ideas that require continued deciphering and thoughtful evaluation, but the effort certainly is rewarding. Recently I found an out of print edition of Ascent to the Absolute, which while more diverse in subject matter, amplifies the themes of his Gifford Lectures. It's too bad that he has not been accorded more recognition as an original thinker and that his speculative works are not discussed more pervasively. However, the Gifford Lectures have retained a certain prestige throughout their history, and perhaps the Discipline of the Cave and the Transcendence of the Cave will be revisited and incorporated to some degree in contemporary discourse. I myself am working on a modest project that has been facilitated by ideas and theories of Findlay's that have helped clarify my thoughts and opened up interesting lines of speculation. Again, thanks for the web site, the personal anecdotes, and then overview of his ideas. It's nice to find a current reference about a figure who was markedly influential in my own education.

 

Regards,

 

Dr. Arnold Kalnitsky

Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars, August 1, 2007

Dr Kalnitsky subsequently added:

As a specialist in the history and philosophy of religion, I'm intrigued at how Findlay dealt so comprehensively with themes that have subsequently appeared in many "new age" and transpersonal contexts - yet is virtually never acknowledged, referred to, or even listed in bibliographies. Even in the more serious thinkers of that genre. I think there are a number of sociological reasons for this - but that's another long and convoluted story. Interestingly, someone like Whitehead has been appropriated by many and used in diverse contexts largely because isolated quotes or portions of theories can be interpreted loosely enough and cloaked in seeming scientific credibility to superficially blend into many tenuous theoeretical constructs.

August 4, 2007

University Years

During his years in the Theosophical Movement Findlay worked towards his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Pretoria, where under W. A. Macfayden and others he studied classics and the history of philosophy. At the time, in an effort to find backing for his  Theosophical commitments, he took a particular interest in Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel.  He relates that at the close of this period he embraced the Fichtean notion of an “all-positing, self-positing Ego,” a doctrine that he brought with him to England when he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship in 1923. 

Findlay’s sojourn at Oxford, from 1924-27, provided him, for the first time, with intellectual friendships with a large group of peers, and he devoted himself there to the study of ancient history and a close reading of Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek.  His estimate of the “Dons” at Oxford, however, was less than flattering, and he “found it rather a waste of time to listen to the last breathings of Oxford idealism, in the discourse of Joseph, Joachim, Paton and Collingwood, the last infected with the infinite emptiness of Croce” (My Life, p. 17).  Already at Oxford Findlay was beginning to develop definite philosophical ideas and what was to become a lifelong penchant for stating his opinions (regarding both ideas and those who proffered them) in uncensored terms.  

 

At Oxford, however, Findlay ultimately abandoned his version of Fichtean philosophy, as he began to doubt “whether anything in [him] could have posited the world as [he] found it,” and with this doubt he abandoned his zeal for epistemological  idealism, a  zeal that he never recovered, in spite of his great admiration for both Kant and Hegel—who on Findlay’s view were not epistemological idealists.  Indeed, having been moved by certain aspects of Russell’s views in Our Knowledge of the External World, and the Analysis of Mind, Findlay went in a realist direction, albeit one that allowed for the metaphysical reality of ideas, values, and even realms that most realists regard as purely mental.

 

For a time, as a postgraduate student  at Oxford, Findlay took up the aim of Buddhist Scholarship, but was discouraged from doing so by the Pali scholar, Mrs. Rhys Davids, who informed him that there would be little opportunity for an academic position in this field.  Instead, Findlay studied Plotinus under Clement Webb, and began the project of reconstructing Plato's "unwritten doctrines," as they are described in Aristotle's Metaphysics , a project that was to culminate nearly 40 years later in Findlay's 1974 book, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, a work which argued that Plato conceived of the "ideas" as a hierachical arrangement,  mathematically generated from a single "One," which Plato identified with the idea of the Good,  and which Findlay connected to the program of Russell and Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica

Many Alternative Philosophies

...it would in no sense be a genuine reproach to philosophy if there weren't any single, absolutely right account of things, but rather a large number of alternative accounts, of varying excellence, which illuminate the 'facts' from different angles. For where usage is settled, and we have only to apply it to empirical material, it is impossible to talk very differently without also talking contradictorily.  But where usage is unsettled and creative, as it always is and must be in philosophy, there are far fewer cases of such grosss incompatibility. We should, perhaps, no more regret that things can be spoken of metaphysically in a large number of distinct manners, than that things can be painted in a large number of distinct styles, or lived in a large number of distinct and different ways ("Values in Speaking," Language, Mind and Value, p. 126-7)

Analytic and Synthetic Philosophy

Philosophy may be said to be a critical examination of fundamental concepts and principles, that is, concepts and principles which structure all or nearly all of our experience, all our language and its essential grammar and every thing or theme that we can know or think of.  It is also in some of its exercises attempts to revise and to simplify and tidy up such fundamental concepts and principles …[which] may lead further to the attempt to integrate them into a systematic unity in which differing sorts of things are brought under as few main heads as possible, and ideally under a single, ultimate head, and in which there is as much mutual dependence and close interconnection between things and sorts of things and facts as possible, and as little left unexplained and unexplainable, and having to be swallowed as a mere fact, as possible. This second aspect of philosophy is constructive or speculative or synthetic … (Philosophy as a Discipline, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Summer, 2005, p. 141).

Nature of Philosophy

Plato's World View

The nature of the Platonic view of the world is to be an outlook in which concrete instances, whether they be things, events or situations or whatever, are seen as in the deepest sense parasitic upon what may be called ‘Ideal Contents’, and not as is commonly thought, vice versa.  It is, further, a view in which such Ideal Contents form an integrated Order, ranging from Contents of the most generic to the most highly specific, arranged according to affinities, distances and dependencies which spring wholly from what they are, and could not any point be otherwise.  All these Ideal Contents and all their ideal relations are such as to reveal themselves perspicuously to a thought which looks for them in the right manner, though they are not in any sense constituted by or for such a thought (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 351).

 

What is essential to the great Platonic revolution is not the erection of predicates into a new sort of logical subjects, though we may seek to express it by doing just this: it is rather the recognition that predicates, senses, universals are the primary stuff, if one may so put it, of experience and reality, that so-called particulars are as such unidentifiable and undiscoverable, their whole being consisting, if one may so phrase it, in instantiating Natures or in having things said of them (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 355).

Platonism and God

And Platonism, despite surface-semblances to the contrary, is in fact the only philosophy tailored to fit the Judaeo-Christian religious need for a unique, single, absolutely surpassing, all-disposing source of everything. For an instantial God, even if emptily said to have made Heaven and Earth and Man out of nothing and even if expressing His being in the superb blankness of ‘I am that I am,’ will always remain one among others, a particular being jealous of possible rivals, who might very well not have existed, and exhibiting a particularity in his disposition…There can indeed be nothing sacrosanct about any particular…God, in short, to deserve the self-prostration accorded for Him by the Jews, or the unreserved love demanded for Him by Jesus, would have to be, not a particular case of Justice, or Understanding, or Power or Beauty etc. by Justice itself, the Understanding itself, the infinite Might and Loveliness etc. which are necessarily unique and surpassing, in that they are of a different logical type from their parasitic instances…True religion, it may be argued, is the logical passion par excellence, and the logical pattern into which it breathes that passion tends to have a Platonic tinge (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 378-80).

The Value Firmament, Part I, a Lecture by S. Drob

In this lecture to his doctoral students in clinical psychology, Sanford Drob draws upon the work of J.N. Findlay and others to  make the case for conceiving “ethics,” including professional ethics,  in axiological terms. He briefly discusses some of the many questions that are raised by axiology, and outlines a  theoretical system that promises to provide a coherent picture of what might be called the dimensions of value and what Findlay spoke of as the “value firmament.” 

For a variety of reasons, both professional philosophers and the public at large have often come to understand "ethics" in what might be called “superego” or obligatory terms, as a restraint upon desire and satisfaction. By way of contrast, axiological ethics understands values, in both obligatory and superogatory terms, as things that we may not always be obliged to do, but which provide life with meaning and satisfaction, and which serve as the implicit background of all human activity, relationships and commerce. Axiological ethics, rather than focusing exclusively upon right and wrong, ought and ought not, focuses upon the rich tapestry of values that include creativity, compassion, beauty, spirit, etc. Further, it endeavors to ascertain, systematize and, if possible, derive from simpler principles, the values that are thought to constitute the meaning and purpose of human life, and, at least on some views, to exist objectively in the world. The relevance of the value firmament to everyday life and commerce as well as to the field of clinical psychology is considered.  

Posted, December 22, 2008.

 

Download Value Firmament S Drob, Lecture I

Findlay's Rational Mysticism: An Introduction by S. Drob

Download Findlay's Rational Mysticism by S Drob Posted in full elsewhere on this site (click "About") this article is posted here as a pdf attachment.

Hegel on Conflict: Avoidance or Resolution?

Hegel may have been right in making resolution rather than the avoidance of conflict the true goal of our conscious endeavours (Values and Intentions, p. 84).