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(For an introduction to Findlay's rational mysticism, see the article by Sanford L. Drob in "About" on this website)
“I have definitely ‘stuck my neck out’, and attempted to construct a picture of transcendental experiences and their objects based solely on the premises that such experiences must be such as to resolve, at a higher level, the many philosophical surds that plague us in this life: the philosophical perplexities, e.g., concerning universals and particulars, mind and body, knowledge and its objects, the knowledge of other minds, etc., etc. What I have tried to work out could have been documented and confirmed by an immense amount of mystical and religious literature and experience, but I have not appealed to such support. While I do not accept any form of the widely-held dichotomy between logical and empirical truth, I do not wish, as a philosopher, to contribute to the merely empirical treatment of anything. If there is not an element of necessity, of genuine logical structure, in the construction of higher spheres of experience and their objects, they are for me without interest or importance.” (The Transcendence of the Cave, preface)
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“The mysticism of these lectures differs from many other forms of mysticism in that it does not seek to do away with logic – nor indeed with ethics or science or anything else – but to round them off. The truly well-formed sentence, we may say, must involve some mystical terms and co-ordinates.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 16.
This website, which was inaugurated in February 2006, is dedicated to the philosophy of J.N. Findlay (1903-1987) as well as to the development of themes (e.g. rational mysticism, axiological ethics) that emerge from his work. Anyone who might have content suitable for inclusion in this website, or who has a personal recollection of Professor Findlay should contact me at [email protected]. Over time, I will be adding quotations from Findlay's work and other material pertaining to his philosophy.
Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D.
While Findlay's books are out of print the most inexpensive used copies can be obtained by entering "J. N. Findlay" at www.abebooks.com.
Philosophy by rhetorical question, backed up by vividly pictured experiences and accounts of imagined tribal usages, is not easy to counter: often the only possible response to an appeal framed by Wittgenstein in such words as 'But aren't you always experiencing something different when you say X?' or 'Do you know of an experience characteristic of pointing to X', etc. is simply 'Yes' when the answer 'No' is expected, and 'No' when the expected answer is 'Yes' (Wittgenstein: A Critique, p. 6).
Wittgenstein, it may be observed, combined an original philosophical genius of the highest order, with a narrowness of philosophical scholarship which in some cases amounted to illiteracy (Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 367).
“[the] mystical way of looking at things, so far from being the special possession of peculiar people called mystics, rather enters into the experience of most men at many times, just as views of the horizon and open sky enter into most ordinary views of the world…the so-called great mystics, people like Plotinus, Jalalud’in Rumi, St Teresa, and so on, are merely people who carry to the point of genius an absolutely normal, ordinary, indispensable side of human experience…” (The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 164).
“The idea underlying the lectures is that what may be called the mystical and transcendental is an inescapable part of all experience, thought and diction, and that our most ordinary transactions of things, of persons, let alone our higher scientific, aesthetic, religious, technical, political, philosophical and symbolic activities, involve it throughout. It is not some rarefied speculative addition to our ordinary talk about the world or our dealings with it, without which they remain significant and self-sufficient: without it the most ordinary activities lose all point, and the plainest statement becomes ill-formed and ungrammatical.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 13.
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“Possibly the queerest of all the queer things in this life is that we should find this life so very queer, and that we should even speak of it as this life, contrasting it by implication with some more normal state of which we none the less have no lucid view at all. That we do in fact find this life full of perplexities, absurdities, odd and arbitrary restrictions, things all pervasive that might none the less have been quite otherwise, does not admit of question. If we find even children capable of being thrown into a mood of wonder by the strange passing of time, shall we credit them with familiarity with the ways of eternity? If we wonder why, of all marvelous chances, we happen to be the individuals we actually are, does this argue acquaintance with the queer mechanics of becoming somebody else? If we find knowledge of other people’s minds hopelessly external and peripheral, does this point to knowledge of some more intimate way of penetrating privacy?”
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“Perhaps, however, the fact that we do thus find our present situation full of queer discomforts, and that it does seem to involve cramps, pressures, irruptions, strangenesses that are far from hiding a simple message or harbouring a discoverable sense, does point to some reversing, complementary, compensating situation of which we can not but have vague knowledge, and on which the precise character of out cramps and other difficulties can throw valuable light”. The Discipline of the Cave, p. 13.
“We here, however, come up against a central feature of life and experience: that the various directive ideas in terms of which the phenomena are ordered and articulated do not always square. That the patterns of order in which one of them sets before us as a guiding framework run athwart the patterns another sets before us, and that even in the pattern dictated by what may be called a single idea there are possibilities of alternative development, confusions of direction, that make orderly extensions difficult. Antimony, in other words, is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the experienced and interpreted world, and becomes more and more acute the more we attempt to focus phenomena clearly, to see them in their unshifting, fully revealing light. It is this all-pervasive presence of antinomy in the work of experience that makes us find the world a queer place and that led Plato and ourselves to describe it as a cave.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 20.
"In the beginning of the century the great realist philosopher, Alexius Meinong, taught a doctrine of Aussersein, of an infinite realm of objects quite indifferent to the distinctions between being and non-being, between reality and unreality, between what is and what is not the case. In the democracy of that world the golden mountain stood on a level with Pennines, the round square on a level with the Red Square at Moscow, the equality of 2 and 2 to 10 to the equality of 2 and 2 to 4. Betrand Russell, at first charmed by this doctrine, devoted vast energy to its demolition, constructing the famous Theory of Descriptions on which most of modern British philosophy is founded. I am far from denying that Russell was right in refusing to admit the boundless wealth of Aussersein into the world beyond the cave of even into that purified portion of the cave where right reason fully prevails. But people have thereby been led to forget that the unreal, the abstract, the illogical, the imaginary, the hypothetical and the ideal are an essential foil in human experience to the real, the concrete, the logical and the scientifically acceptable" (The Discipline of the Cave, p. 31).
“I have used Hegelian methods in a most un-Hegelian cause: to establish just that sort of ultimate other-worldliness which Hegel is so often at pains to dissolve”. The Discipline of the Cave, p. 16.
“Hegel, as careful students will know, only made use of his dialectic to establish a vastly enriched humanism and this-worldism, in which das Jenseitige, that which seems to lie beyond the cave, is brought wholly within the compass of human experience, so that human rationality when raised to the fully self-conscious forms of art, religion and philosophy, simply becomes the all-explanatory raison d’etre of everything. Other philosophers, both earlier and later, have, however used something like Hegel’s dialectic to go beyond the confines of the human cave. Plato and Plotinus have used alleged discrepancies in ordinary modes of conceiving things to draw us up towards higher realms of being, Spinoza made use of an ‘intuitive science’ to take us beyond the mutilated perspectives of ordinary experience, and Bradley, clad in a loosely woven robe of Hegelian and Spinozistic fibres, rose by dialectic to a strange type of purely sentient experience which he said was that of the Absolute.” The Discipline of the Cave, pp. 80-81.
“Finite existence in the here and now, with every limitation of quality and circumstance, is, Hegel teaches, when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence which is everywhere and always. To live in Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City…” (Hegel's Use of Teleology, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 132).
“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.
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"We should 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 life lived in a large number of distinct and different ways." Language, Mind and Value, p. 127.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“One can indeed prove something to be real by appealing to the experiences and testimony of others, but the existence of such experience and such testimony, and of such others, must be something whose tests lie, or could lie, in a man’s own experience, and of whose validity he alone is the final judge. A number of persons can entertain and verify some hypothesis in a co-operative manner, performing the same experiments, witnessing their outcome and drawing the same conclusions, but they can do so only because each, with his experiences, is given in the experiences of each other, so that, while all carry out common tests, the tests are also carried out by each man severally.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 29-30)
“We may hold, finally, that the whole of logic is presided over by a number of values and disvalues which are seldom explicitly acknowledged, and hardly ever argued about.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 54.
“Values and disvalues are as much an indefeasible part of the phenomena, of the world we live in, as are the cold objects that assault our senses, and the insensibility of most bodies to the darkly ignoble or glorious things that take place among them, is itself an incredible even nonsensical phenomenon, one that forces us to locate our world in a wider setting.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 155.
“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.
“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”.
“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.
…there are inconsistencies in the working of all our basic concepts…There are philosophies, for example, Hegelianism, which stress the point that many apparently opposed things require one another in order to be what they are, that which they most resist and exclude is thereby most intimately part of their essence, and also that they have an inherent tendency to develop into, or pass over into other things which continue or complete them, and that, when all is clearly seen, the antagonisms and antinomies of philosophy can be resolved by a more comprehensive vision” (Philosophy as a Discipline, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Summer, 2005, p. 147).
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.
“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.
“The notion that there are some facts of existence that cannot be thought away reveals no intrinsic absurdity. The alternative to it is the supposition that there might very well have been nothing, which does not seem to be a deeply illuminating supposition. Certain eastern sages have simply opined that before there was anything there was nothing, and that all there is came out of this nothing: whatever can be said of this opinion, it cannot be said to fill the mind with a flood of light.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 86-87.)
“It is arguable that our inability to talk about the total absence of anything is merely a speaker-centric predicament, since there are always at least ourselves, our speech and the presuppositions of our speaking, but it is equally possible to regard this as an unwarrantable dogma.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 87.)
“The consensus of the best spiritual opinion and insight in regard to the life beyond is, in the view of the present lecturer, to be found in the cosmic speculations of our Aryan ancestors, whether Brahmanic, Buddhistic, Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic or Neoplatonic. To this the Jews added a vision whose intense moral fervor provided the necessary complement to whatever is negative, inert and emptily transcendental in the otherworld vision in question. We may be urged to be Jews in regard to this world, and Brahmins and Neoplatonists in regard to the next.” (Transcendence of the Cave, pp. 166-167)
“The intelligible world is...presided over by a mind which is not anyone’s mind but to which all minds, set outside this world at varying distance in the sphere of instances, aspire, and by which they may be said to inspire. Ultimate truth in this region seems as close to atheism and to theism (or vice versa), a fact evidenced by the perennial wobble of enlightened opinion on the matter (meaning by ‘enlightened’ the view of Buddhas and Messiahs, not of what are generally called ‘advanced thinkers’).” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 156)
I may here say briefly why I considered the Messianic life and mission of Jesus as a shadow of the cave, and not as the unique incarnation of absolute deity that Christians suppose it to have been. My reasons for questioning the central dogma of Christianity are reasons of emphasis: that in the notion of the Messianic status of Jesus there is a stress on the contingent carry-out as opposed to the essential core of deity which I cannot but see as unbalanced, and which leads, I think, to a large amount of essential emptiness and circularity.” (Transcendence of the Cave, pp. 114-5)
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“The mystical centre of the universe must therefore be thought of as one of those points which by their fluxion generate a whole geometry: it must be as much everywhere as at the centre. Each existent individual, even a corrupt and distorted one, must represent some specification of it pure variability, and this is what we sometimes feel when we see some rather poor object or person suddenly bathed in ineffable glory: there is always something in everything that resists every attempt to batter or abuse it, and which reveals the Most High in propria persona.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 183)
“We have accepted the principle of the Germanic theology, held by a long line of thinkers from the mediaeval mystics to Hegel, that s a perfection that does not work itself out in creating and redeeming a world is a self-contradictory perfection, it is an empty and abstract thing and not a true perfection at all.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p.183)
“That the zeal at the world’s centre is absolutely and incorruptibly clean is, in fact, only possible because it becomes more and more sullied as it moves out towards the periphery, because in variously alienated, sundered forms it can depart more and more from its central self. It must fall away from itself in order to be able to bring itself back to itself. The shocking character of what we are saying reflects only the creaks and groans of our logic and our language as we approach the final truth of things. If there is, and must be, a vein of sublimated immorality in all men whom we deeply love and admire, there is, and must be, a similar vein in the absolute.” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 196)
Download a pdf version of Findlay's Rational Mysticism by S. Drob
J.N. Findlay is primarily known for his groundbreaking work on Hegel (Hegel: A Re-examination, 1958), as the translator of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, for his essays on the puzzles engendered by time, and for his early efforts (later repudiated) to disprove the existence of God. He is also the author of a series of original works on major figures in the history of philosophy, including Meinong, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein. It is, however, Findlay’s original philosophical writings that may well prove to be his greatest philosophical legacy. Findlay presented his modern version of Neoplatonism, his unique understanding of the objects of religious experience and the Absolute, his axiological ethics, and phenomenology of the “value firmament” in four works, all published between 1961 and 1970: Values and Intentions (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961); The Discipline of the Cave (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966); The Transcendence of the Cave (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966); and Ascent to the Absolute. (London: George Allen & Unwin 1970). It is most unfortunate that each of these volumes are currently out of print. They are, apart from their philosophical value great poetic works that embody the striving of the human spirit towards, and even beyond, its highest possibilities and ideals.
In this brief, essay I can only touch upon a small segment of Findlay’s thought, his philosophical theology, which reaches its zenith in The Transcendence of the Cave, and which can perhaps best be summarized with one of his own his terms, “rational mysticism”. Findlay, whose Neoplatonism is clearly filtered through his reading of such later philosophers as Kant and Hegel, argued that a dialectical understanding of the philosophical antinomies of earthly life and experience can provide us with an intellectual intuition of “higher worlds” and an all encompassing “absolute” that is in many ways equivalent to the absolute intuited in mystical consciousness, both east and west.
[This essay continues with the following posts.]
For Findlay, the Absolute embodies not only “the metaphysical values of simplicity, unity, self-existence and power” but also “the values...of justice, mercy, truth, beauty, etc.” He holds that “God or the religious absolute cannot fail to will these values because, in a manner which defies ordinary grammar, he not only has them, but is them.” (112). [All page references in this essay, unless otherwise noted are to the Transcendence of the Cave.] Yet at the same time Findlay holds that the “will in the religious absolute can and must determine itself quite freely” (112).
On Findlay’s view, the various values of mind, reason, intelligence and will, along with those of satisfaction, happiness, freedom, fairness, beauty, etc. “culminate in a single, unique intentional object to which devotion, worship, and unconditional self-dedication are the only appropriate attitude (98).”
To this point, Findlay is strictly Neoplatonic, and his views scarcely depart from those contained, for example, in Plotinus’ Enneads. However, Findlay adapts this Neoplatonic view to a far more dynamic conception of the cosmos and God. He does this through a careful phenomenological description of the paradoxes, absurdities and antinomies that are endemic to earthly life, what he refers to, in accordance with the Platonic metaphor, as life within the “cave.”
According to Findlay, “antinomy...is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the experienced and interpreted world (2).” Findlay states that the fact that antinomies abound in human experience leads us to “find the world a queer place” and led Plato and others to describe it as a “cave” (21). He argues that “the pervasive antinomy of the world is far too serious and too deep to count as a mere formal contradiction” (21). He holds that while antinomies can be specified as formal contradictions, this provides us with no insight because such contradictions can be readily dissolved through a specification of the “senses” in which each pole of the contradiction is true and false. For Findlay, the antinomies of human experience are more akin to “discrepancies in a person’s character,” and it does us no good to either define or argue them away as an merely “apparent” contradictions. Rather than adjust our concepts to accommodate antinimous experience, Findlay calls upon us to extend our experience to accommodate our antinimous concepts. Findlay seeks an accommodation that will “explain rather than explain away such antinomies.”
The absurdities and antinomies of the world are many, and included amongst them are such classical philosophical and theological problems as the opposition between the dictates of morality and the rewards that are obviously bestowed upon the wicked; the opposition between our experience of ourselves as possessing free will, and the scientific assumptions of determinism; the puzzles engendered by the observation that all we can really know is the data of our own senses, and our certainty regarding the existence of an objective, external world; and the absurdities associated with the ideas that we only have direct awareness of our own minds, and our certainty of the existence of the minds and inner experiences of others.
Findlay focuses upon several antinomies connected with space and time; where, for example, on the one hand these great “media” of experience appear to be the “containers” within which all events occur, but on the other hand are themselves nothing except insofar as they are defined by the events that transpire within and thus constitute them. A second antinomy arises from our consideration of the temporal “now”, the series of which seem to constitute the march of time, but none of which can be defined apart from reference to a past and a future. There are antinomies related to the opposition between efficient causality and teleology, and, according to Findlay, the consequent absurdities of bodies adjusting themselves to (future) happenings that never actually occur (27). There are antinomies that derive from a consideration of the fact that while we can appeal to the experience of others to prove something’s existence or an event’s occurrence, the very experience and testimony of the other is ultimately only apprehended through our own conscious awareness. Findlay also points to the paradoxical interdependence between the private and public criteria we utilize to comprehend our own and others’ mental states. On the one hand we can only come to label and describe ours and others inner states through the publicly observable manifestations of them, e.g. through the behavioral expressions of anger, grief, thoughtfulness, etc. On the other hand, our understanding of such outward expressions is itself dependent upon private “inner” states, both the “inner” states that serve as fulfillment of, and thus give sense to, our public behavior, and the inner states through which we become aware of our own observations (Discipline of the Cave, p. 204).
Findlay explores a number of paradoxes that relate to material bodies; for example, pointing out that while such bodies are thought to be completely independent of any mind cognizing them, they cannot even be conceived except in relation to a conscious perspective upon them (Discipline of the Cave, p. 261) or under the aegis of some ideational category. Findlay also holds that there is something highly paradoxical regarding our attitude towards our own bodies; on the one hand they seem essential to our mental and interpersonal life, while at the same time they seem to us to be alien to it (Discipline of the Cave, p. 206), so much so that theologians have long posited the mind or soul’s independence from corporeal existence.
Findlay proffers two broad metaphysical responses to the existence of the antinomies that are endemic to experience. The first, immanent response, is to hold with such philosophers as Fichte and Hegel that the difficulties and conundrums posed by our antinimous experiences and interpretations are goads towards the formation of common, aims, interests and meanings, and ultimately towards the forms of artistic, scientific and philosophical creativity that constitute historical, communal and cultural life (31, 100) On this view our varied ways of seeing and interpreting things do not ultimately reflect an underlying fixed nature, but rather permit and encourage the emergence of the inquiry, debate, cooperation, creativity and self-consciousness of the our rational, social selves. The problems of this world are neither open to simple solution nor are they hopelessly enigmatic. Though they may present themselves as conundrums for millennia, they are eventually accommodated by the human spirit, and remain enigmatic only and precisely to the degree as they force the fullest development of human values, imagination, science and philosophy (34). As Findlay puts it:
these oppositions and indifferences exist for the sake of the rational activities they render possible (101).
and
The untoward, the irrational, the merely personal, have the teleological role of providing the necessary incitement and raw material for the rational, common, self-conscious result, and so all phenomenal existence can be brought under the sway of values, and something like the dominion of Good taught in the Phaedo proven true (76).
Findlay, however, proposes a second solution, a transcendent one, to the presence of antinomies, conflicts, absurdities and contradictions in this world. This second solution is necessitated because the first solution “remains a difficult unstable way of viewing things which like some strange effort at stereoscopy, is ready at any moment to switch back again to the deeply unsatisfying, but more stable ways of viewing things out of which it arose” (103). Part of our dissatisfaction with the immanent solution is that it places human life and endeavor at the center of the universe and relegates to insignificance much of the vast cosmos of stars and galaxies.
Findlay now suggests that behind the antinimous manifestations of our “cave” there is another world, or series of worlds, that both explain our current condition, and when properly understood, provide a metaphysical solution to our philosophical and moral dilemmas. He asks us to consider the possibility that “the solution of this world’s absurdities lies in another dimension and another life altogether” (105). This dimension or life is actually a “higher world”, or, better put, an upper half to our own world,” and the two halves only make fully rounded sense when seen in their mutual relevance and interconnection” (121). At another place Findlay hints at the possibility of a number of “higher worlds”:
Where scientific tensions only lead us to postulate new types of particles or modifications of fundamental scientific formulae, philosophical tensions lead us to complete our world with a whole new type or set of types of worlds (122).
Findlay’s preferred model bases itself on an analogy with earthly geography, with our “world” occupying a region of maximum differentiation close to the “equator” and God or the "Absolute" occupying a region of maximal convergence at the poles. As we pass our equatorial zone and advance toward the “higher latitudes” there is a
steady vanishing of the harsh definiteness and distinctness of individuals, and a steady blurring or coming into coincidence of the divisions amongst kinds and categories, until in the end one approaches and perhaps at last reaches a paradoxical unitary point of convergence, where the objects of religion may be thought to have their habitat (123-4).
According to Findlay, the progress towards higher worlds or latitudes involves a steady diminution of individuality, corporeality and temporality, and he informs us that the objects in these worlds are governed by associations of meaning as opposed to causality (127). As we continue our ascent, individuality will begin to vanish, as things become more and more indistinguishable from their species and genera, resulting in a realm of values that exist generically apart from any instantiation (137). As individuality diminishes, the obstacles that it and materiality place between communicating minds will vanish as well, as will the communicative gulfs that exist between persons in our own realm (134-5). The attenuated matter of the upper realms, rather than being an obstacle to consciousness and reason, will simply serve as a context for communication and a vehicle for the expression of thought and will (128). Simple location will vanish, and all things will be “predominantly somewhere, but more distantly present everywhere else” (129). Temporality will be altered, and prophecy made possible, as alternative futures are displayed, teaching us what will almost certainly happen or will happen unless we take counter-measures, etc. (131). Finally:
At the mystical pole of our whole geography we may place an object of infinite and no longer puzzling perfection, which we need no longer conceive as a mere supreme instance of incompatible values, but as the living principle of all those values themselves (137).
Thus, at the apex of all the worlds, Findlay places what Plotinus described as “The Good”, what the Indian philosophers referred to as Brahman-Atman, and what the Kabbalists spoke of as the Infinite, Ein-sof.
One might think that Findlay would follow Plotinus in an appeal to a supra-rational mystical vision to justify his assertions regarding the upper worlds. However, he holds his philosophy to be rationally derived, as following logically from the antinomies and conundrums of our earthly existence. He writes:
What I have tried to work out could have been documented and confirmed by an immense amount of mystical and religious literature and experience, but I have not appealed to such support. While I do not accept any form of the widely-held dichotomy between logical and empirical truth, I do not wish, as a philosopher, to contribute to the merely empirical treatment of anything. If there is not an element of necessity, of genuine logical structure, in the construction of higher spheres of experience and their objects, they are for me without interest or importance (preface).
The world as we experience it is broken, disjoint, absurd and incomprehensible, and only begins to make sense when we posit a higher realm as its complement and completion. The various puzzles and antinomies of our world find a solution and vanish in the higher realms. According to Findlay, the philosophical and spiritual conundrums of our own world, including but not limited to antinomies with respect to space and time, freedom and necessity, randomness and teleology, inner experience and the external world, “other minds”, and the problem of evil, are insuperable when considered in the context of the world of ordinary life and experience, and are only resolved when we consider the possibility of a spiritual and “unified” world existing as a complement to our own.
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.
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.]
“The dialectic is is...primarily a method of persistently reapplied higher-level, or metalogical, or second-order comment…where we …consider the content and operation of a concept from outside as it were, and assess its success in doing whatever it sets out to do” (Hegel's Use of Teleology, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 132).
"Understanding is the beginning of philosophy: only when various mutually complementary, often antithetical abstractions have been clearly developed, will it be possible to integrate them into a richly analyzed , living view" (Hegel: A Re-examination, NY: Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 61).
"According to Hegel, the subject of a philosophical proposition only acquires a definite content as we go on to predicate notions of it in thought, in which process we may find ourselves wanting to distort the normal use of our predicates, and to say, for example, that the Soul is both finite and infinite, or again that it is neither" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p, 62).
"It is...in the Kantian antinomies that Hegel sees the most explicit modern expression of Dialectic. Kant is praised, not only for showing that our notions of time, space, and causal dependence can be developed in contradictory ways, but in showing further that such contradictions are 'essential and necessary', that they do not spring from a casual error or conceptual mistake as previous philosophers had supposed...[Hegel] criticizes Kant for confining the antinomies to a limited set of cosmological ideas: he should, on Hegel's view, have recognized their presence in objects of all types, and in all notions and ideas" (Hegel: A Re-examination, pp. 64-5, referencing Hegel's Lesser Logic, par. 48.)
"Everything in the world is said by Hegel to involve opposed and contradictory aspects: he maintains in fact that contradiction is the motive force of the world, that it is absurd to say that contradictions are unthinkable" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 65, referencing Hegel's Lesser Logic, par 119, Zus. 2).
"The characteristic of Reason or Speculation, as opposed to Dialectic, is that it succeeds in uniting or reconciling opposed characteristics, so that the unalloyed contradiction marking the dialectical stage, which is responsible for its unease, passes over into a state which is also one of harmony and peace...and if Dialectic has shown that concepts so opposed either break down into senselessness or simply pass over into one another--then the function of Reason is to integrate such notions into new unities, where they will be shown to require each other and to be necessary conditions of each other" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 66).
"Hegel does not think that the harmonies of Reason involve any mere rejection of the disharmonies and contradictions of dialectical thought. These disharmonies may be 'overcome' but their overcoming is also their perpetual preservation. For they are overcome only in the sense that they are seen to be necessary conditions of a reasonable result, and so, in a sense, not overcome at all. One may, in fcat, say with some exaggeration, that for Hegel the overcoming of contradictions and irrationality consists really in their permanent acceptance, since they are seen to be essential to, and therefore part of, the final rational outcome. As Hegel himself puts it: 'A speculative content cannot express itself in any one-side proposition. If we say, e.g., that the Absolute is the unity of the subjective and the objective, this is indeed the case, but is to this extent one-sided, in that here only the unity is pronounced and stressed, while in actual fact the subjective and the objective are not only identical, but also different.'"(Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 64)...
"Hegel is...deeply opposed to any view which makes the contradictions of Dialectic merely apparent, something that will vanish once Systematic Science has been achieved (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 64)...Hegel further emphasizes that he is not talking about 'contradiction' in some half-hearted or equivocal manner: he is not saying that X is A in one sense, but not A in another, that it is A from one point of view but not from another...Hegel makes it as plain as possible, that it is not some watered-down, equivocal brand of contradiction, but straightforward, head-on contradiction, that he believes to exist in thought and the world, and to be an ineliminable component in self-conscious spiritual reality" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 77).
"We may, however, maintain that, whatever Hegel may say in regard to the presence of contradictions in thought and reality, the sense in which he admits such contradictions is determined by his use of the concept, and not by what he says about it. And since he uses 'contradiction' to illuminate the workings of ordinary notions, and things in the world, and not to cast doubt on their meaning or reality, it is plain that he cannot be using it in the self-cancelling manner that might at first seem plausible. By the presence of 'contradictions' in thought or reality, Hegel plainly means the presence of opposed, antithetical tendencies, tendencies which work in contrary directions, which each aim at dominating the whole field and worsting their opponents, but which each also require these opponents in order to be what they are, and to have something to struggle with" (Hegel: A Re-examination. p. 77).
"Whatever one may think of the detailed application of his Dialectic, (Hegel) has certainly made plain that our notions do carry with them a certain natural shading in other notions, a natural implication of such notions, and a natural favourableness and unfavourableness to other notions, which is not in our power to create or alter, but which may be said to rest solely on their affinity of content" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 79).
"Hegel in fact admits that much of the detail of the world is contingent and dialectically indeducible: he should have gone further , in conformity with his actual practice, and admitted that even its broader features admit of no precise deduction, but merely if an illuminating treatment. We can show, that is, how things and notions can be regarded as making contributions to the self-consciousness of Spirit: we cannot show that the same contributions could not have been made otherwise" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 82).
"We may note...that the notion of Spirit, in which the Dialectic culminates, is such as to forbid that the Dialectic should be anything like a deductive system, in which unique conclusions follow rigorously upon definite premises. For Spirit can only exist as Spirit in so far as it is confronted with an other which it cannot render completely transparent" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 82).
"It seems better to judge Hegel's remarkable performance in the light of the reasonable aims which appear in his practice, than in the light of the unreasonable aims which may be read into his less careful statements by his admirers or his detractors" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 82).
“It is also important to stress here that, for Kant, our own thinking selves, as the agents who perform all our perceptual and conceptual syntheses, and who present us with our picture of a coherent, real world, and of whose regular action we are at all times capable of being conscious, are themselves objects of which no intuitive, sensuous presentation is possible, and which are accordingly, in their non-apparent aspects, wholly beyond knowledge (CPR, B. 157-8).” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 2.
“And this unknowable, thinking subject must further be credited, in virtue of certain moral demands...with the power to initiate changes in itself and the world, to which no adequately determining, previously existent causal factor can be assigned. Such a power is not only not illustrated by anything given to sensible intuition: it is also, in Kant’s view, incapable of being thus illustrated.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 3.
“Kant’s account of experience and knowledge therefore presupposes the existence of agents and acts that cannot be empirically known, since they are the preconditions of empirical knowledge, and it also presumes that we can form just notions of such agents and of them.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 5.
“Kant, like Wittgenstein, admits that the notions of transcendent metaphysics have deep roots in our conceptual and linguistic apparatus, but he does not, like Wittgenstein, think that there is some sort of philosophical therapy which could exorcise them.” Kant and the Transcendental Object,p. 200.
“There is a great deal of brash writing in the Critique of Pure Reason, and an exaggerated repudiation of the magnificent metaphysical tradition in which Kant grew up, and which is really always in the background of his thought. But this brash writing has been greatly admired by many, particularly in recent times, and has been given a false importance which a careful study of Kant will dispel.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p 28.
“Unapparent objects behind appearances and experience are..part of the Leibnizian tradition, which as modified by Christian Wolff and his school, provided the true background against which all Kant’s teaching must be understood. To Leibniz, as to Kant, space was only a well-founded phenomenon, the expression of parallelisms and affinities among monadic substances, some apperceptive and rational, some irrationally conscious, and some dizzily confused, which make up the true world. To this view Kant always shows deference: it tells us, he says, what Things-in-themselves would have to be like if we could have any knowledge of them.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 17.
“Without some definite idea of the logical character of what could be independently real, we should not be able to characterize our experienced world as being merely phenomenal.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 24.
“Kant does not…forbid us to retain the conception of a persistent personal self-responsible for all we remember to have done and thought, and whatever we anticipate. The postulation of such a self will, in fact, be shown to be unavoidable from a moral point of view.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 206.
"The phenomenal world is like some immense cocktail party, at which we and others are making our own contributions to the deafening clamour: it is only by qualities of voice and coherence in what is said, that we can sort out distinct speakers and conversations, and give each its appropriate due." Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 26
“Kant, however, tried to do away with philosophical theses, controversies, and antinomies in much the same manner as Wittgenstein, though Wittgenstein performed the slaughter more thoroughly than Kant. For, if Plato placed men in a cave from which egress was with effort possible, Kant placed them in a cave from which escape was impossible in this life, though it remained thinkable and desirable. Wittgenstein, however, constructed a habitation for hermits (or for a single hermit) from which escape was not only impossible, but neither thinkable nor desirable, except owing to a confusion.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p.376.
“It i
“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.
“The views that Wittgenstein is here putting forward are in many respects profoundly analogous to those of Kant, in that he locates a whole realm of unknowable, simple unities beneath the complex objects which appear before us empirically, and takes it that their relations are in some unknowable manner translated into the relations of empirical things.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 371.
“Wittgenstein, however, like Kant, has his various transcendentals which, in the sort of speech that enables us to state the relations of ordinary empirical objects, cannot be spoken of at all, but which, wince he does in fact speak of them, must be capable of being spoken of in some other manner. Kant’s introduction of what can and must be thought of, but not known, is wholly parallel. The Wittgensteinian subject, or cosmic speaker, is such a transcendental; and so is the whole world conceived as a whole, whether in the abstract guise of ‘everything that is the case’, the totality of the macro-facts or micro-facts that there are.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 373.
“Our freedom and deathlessness lie in another, non-factual dimension altogether. In the same way, the beauty of certain objects, and the excellence and blessedness of a certain way of life, and of the whole world seen in the light of these things, go beyond all the facts of the world, and belong to a mystical stratum that cannot be uttered as empirical facts are utterable. Wittgenstein in all these utterances is providing a close analogue to the practical postulations of Kant. It is an immense pity that those who have commented on the highly metaphysical and mystical Tractatus have, in the main, been deep-dyed barbarians as far as metaphysics and mysticism are concerned.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 374.
“Kant certainly uses the word ‘knowledge’ eccentrically in holding that what we regard as a necessary condition of a certain sort of knowledge is not itself capable of being known; but for Kant we can never be said to know what we only conceive emptily and without fulfilling intuition. We cannot therefore be said to know that there is a Transcendental Subject or that there are Transcendental Objects, though both are necessary to the existence of empirical knowledge.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 7.
“It is, however, all-important to stress that Kant believes that there absolutely is such a sensitive, perceptive, thinking subject, before which objects display themselves in experience, and that is present and active even when we are much too object-absorbed to be conscious of it, and that there are properties that it has ‘in itself’, with which we are necessarily unacquainted. It may even, as far as we can tell, be the very same being that appears to us as the brain or the nerves in the body (see, e.g., CPR, B 72.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 10.
“We have, Kant holds, some sort of immediate sense of our own spontaneous causality in acts of free choice, particularly in those of moral decision, but the sort of freedom of which we are then conscious is nothing that we can clearly understand (e.g., CPR, B. xxix), and of which he only once or twice dares say that we can have knowledge.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 11.
“Kant’s whole procedure is, therefore, such as to suggest, and at one or two crucial points to assert, a thoroughgoing correlation between the structures of phenomenal givens and those of their transcendent structures.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 15.
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Kant...defined freedom purely in negative terms: it is a form of causality in which there is no prior inclination which precisely determines what is done or chosen, or determines whether there is an endorsement of a given inclination, or contrary decision to abide by the moral law. To use such a notion in explanation demands, however, that we should give it a positive meaning, and this, in the sense of being able to illustrate it intuitively, is something that we cannot do.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.
“Freedom is not an ordinary concept of which plain illustrations can be given: it is rather a Transcendental Idea whose possible cases transcend illustration.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.
“Beings endowed with a will therefore necessarily think of themselves as free, and take themselves to be free, and this is so even if the Idea of freedom has nothing corresponding to it in intuition, and in fact transcends all possible experience…it gives to a transcendent power a definite place in the phenomenal order, even if only in the thought of rational agents. To be obligatorily thinkable seems, in fact to be the characteristic manner in which the transcendently real insinuates itself into phenomenal experience.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.
“Kant comments on the strange circle, which obliges us to believe in our freedom, that is, our non-pathological self-determination, in order to understand the possibility and the necessity of moral laws; but which also obliges us to accept the possibility and necessity of unconditional moral laws in order to understand the possibility and necessity of such freedom (p. 450). The two concepts are in fact equivalent: a will free to determine its direction without the pressures of particular interests must necessarily follow laws of the purest generality—it cannot dispense with all laws since it is a rational power—and a will governed by laws of the purest generality must necessarily be able to resist determination by particular interests.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.
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).
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).
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).
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).
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).
(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. 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.”
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.