On Multiple Perspectives In Philosophy

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

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

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

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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.

On the Restoration and Revision of Truth

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

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

On Philosophy and Ordinary Language

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

On Phenomenology

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

“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.

On the Coincidence of Opposites

…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.

On Language Games

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

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

On Philosophical Scholarship

“Scholarly comment is excellent when directed to thought that is philosophically important by those capable of truly entering into it: it is idle and pernicious when directed to thought that is no longer a live option, or which is not capable of being made such by the philosophical commentator.” (Towards A Neo-Neo-Platonism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 248)

On Intentionality and "Unitive Logic"

Findlay took a strong interest in the puzzles generated by so-called “intentional objects,” “objects” that appear before, are considered by, and “intended” by consciousness. He described the “central difficulty” associated with these objects as how it can be that:

"Without really including an object, and without merely blindly tending towards it and without being at all like it, but in fact differing from it in category, and without being close to it in space or in other respects, a state of mind can none the less so unambiguously and intimately ne of a certain object that it is impossible to describe it adequately without mentioning the object in question" (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 244).

Findlay holds that intentional objects are ambiguous and even contradictory, as they are presumably located within the individual who intends or considers them and yet, in some sense, are identical with the “real” object that they intend (p. 243), objects that may be worlds away from the one intending them.

Findlay proposes that only a “unitive logic” can resolve the paradoxes involved in intentionality. He writes:

"Such unitive logic may be vaguely characterized as directing our thought to an horizon where opposites melt into coincidences, where identity prevails over difference, and where the ‘moment’ or aspect replaces the part or element" (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 245).

For Findlay, “our endless philosophical puzzles (bear witness) …to our sense of the surrounding unity which our thought-procedures require although they often so desperately fight against it” (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 245).  According to Findlay, the puzzles of intentionality (and other philosophical puzzles like those regarding our knowledge of other minds) are dissolved if we consider the possibility that all is essentially one, and our thoughts about an object and the object itself are each an aspect of a unified existence. For Findlay, it is mind that reintroduces the unity that had been sundered by nature. In Findlay’s unitive logic,

"It is not an empirical accident that minds arise in the world; minds represent, we may say, the world’s deep unity asserting itself over the world’s attempted dispersion, an attempted dispersion as essential to the deep unity as the latter is essential to the former" (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 246).

While nature disperses the objects of the universe in space, time, and category, mind has the capacity to bring them into unity—considering in the same mental act the smallest quantum of energy in the scientist’s laboratory and the nuclaer furnace of a supernova in a remote galaxy.

For Findlay, the unitive logic that is an inevitable consequence of a deep consideration of mind, forces us to take seriously the claims not only of Hegel, but “of various mystical writers, Neoplatonic, Vedantic, Mahayanist, and Contemplative-Christian, that there is and must be a whole spectrum of spiritual states varying from those of our normal waking earth-life to a state in which sensuous individuality is attenuated to a vanishing point…” (Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 247).

For Findlay these notions were most beautifully expressed in Plotinus’ Enneads, where we read “Each thing holds all within itself, and again sees all in each other thing, so that everything is everywhere and all is all, and each all, and the glory infinite” (Quoted in Intentional Inexistence, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 247).