The Essential Colin Wilson (19 page)

Apart from Nietzsche, European philosophy continued in the rut selected for it by Descartes. The work of Comte was continued by Ernst Mach (1836-1916), a scientist-philosopher who became alarmed at the way that metaphysical ideas were infiltrating into physics, and who attempted to remedy this by creating a materialistic philosophy of science. 'Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer.' In Mach's time, there were bewildering developments in science—in physics, mathematics, psychology—and scientists were becoming increasingly prone to use concepts that seemed to belong to philosophy. Mach, in the expressive words of H. D. Aiken, 'proposed a radical therapeutic regimen that would strip the physical sciences to their fighting weight'. Consciousness, for example, became simply a stream of sensations, not the 'something' in which sensations occur. (Hume, of course, had taken the same view.) For Mach, 'sensation' is the key word.

Mach's chief importance is that he was a major influence on twentieth-century thought; for he not only influenced Carnap, the founder of logical positivism, but also the young Albert Einstein, who used his ideas as the philosophical basis of the theory of relativity.

Logical positivism (sometimes called logical empiricism or scientific empiricism) is one of the most influential philosophical movements of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to remove the contradictions of the nineteenth century philosophy by applying Mach's principle: sticking to the
observable
, or to that which can be verified by logic. The founder of the 'Vienna school' of logical positivists, Moritz Schlick, believed that philosophy should be confined to an attempt to clarify meanings by the use of logic; anything that cannot be reduced to logic can be dismissed as meaningless. This view clearly stems from the same impulse that induced Marx to explain history in terms of economic conflict, or that led Freud to reduce religion to the need for a father figure. It is an emotional gesture of despair in the face of complexity. A more recent form of positivism affirms that the business of philosophy is the logical analysis of language; it works upon the assumption that thinkers like Kant and Hegel managed to deceive themselves by their unconscious misuse of language. For this school, philosophy is a science, and has no business to concern itself with human fife. The Cartesian dualism vanishes because mind is reduced to that which is observable.

Logical positivism is related—emotionally at least—to another doctrine that attempts to resolve the Cartesian dualism by violent methods: pragmatism. Pragmatism was foreshadowed by Fichte, with his impatient declaration that if the
noumena
is unknowable, then we had all better forget about it. C. S. Pierce and William James apply the same kind of test to the confusions of philosophy. What are the respective merits of Kant's
noumena
and Hegel's absolute idea? Can it possibly make any difference to practical conduct? No? Then they mean the same thing. James himself was by no means a sceptic—as his
Varieties of Religious Experience
makes clear—but his way of resolving the problems of belief has an air of convenient over-simplification. There is no final way of knowing whether a religious or moral belief is true of not. So James follows Fichte in saying: Truth is relative to the individual. If belief in God works for you, then it is true—for you. Belief is better than scepticism because the believer
may
be right, whereas the sceptic, suspending his judgement, is neither right nor wrong. James's idea of belief obviously has a certain humorous casualness about it, like filling in a football coupon with the help of a pin and a blindfold. It can be seen that both pragmatism and logical positivism are forms of relativism. Truth is not 'absolute'; in one case, it is relative to human psychology (and conduct), in the other, to the laws of science and language.

All this will have made it clear that my simile of the untidy room is hardly adequate to describe the state of philosophy in the twentieth century. If the concern of philosophy is to understand the universe and man's place in it, then it seems that there has been no advance since Descartes. There is not a single statement by any philosopher since then that cannot be immediately contradicted by another statement from another philosopher—or sometimes from the same one. It might seem that it would require the synthesizing power of a Newton to create a unity out of this chaos. And yet again, the problem can be approached with common sense, and certain basic 'truths' begin to emerge.

To begin with, it is clear that Descartes was responsible for much of the confusion by introducing a fallacy at the very beginning. The fallacy was not a logical one; rather it was psychological. Descartes assumed that the philosopher is a thinking machine who can solve the problem by pure thought. He reminds us of Poe's Dupin, who solved the mystery of Marie Roget while sitting in an armchair with the blinds drawn. Fichte stumbled on a glimpse of the truth. Descartes was wrong to assume that all the problems are 'out there', and that the machine can be trusted completely. Admittedly, Fichte expressed his question in a somewhat extreme form, which prevented his immediate successors from perceiving its fundamental good sense. 'Can I create the universe and yet not be aware that I am doing so?' Probably not; but I can do a great many things without being aware that I'm doing them. When I think something or perceive something, it is not a simple mechanical process; thousands of interior valves flicker into life; my whole being takes part in the process. For example, someone may whistle a few bars of music and say: 'What is that?', and I reply immediately, "The opening of Beethoven's fifth symphony.' He asks: 'How did you know?', and after a moment of baffled silence, I shrug and say: 'But it was obvious.' It seems an extremely simple process; but to explain it fully would require a combination of scientist, psychologist and musician, and explanations about logarithms of frequency ratios and their effect on the cochlea, as well as of the selective action of memory. We are like a man who thinks that cars are simple mechanisms because he knows how to drive one, even though he has never looked under the bonnet. Descartes was almost certainly right in believing that nature will finally be entirely explainable in terms of logic and science; but he was mistaken in assuming that the laws of the mind are the laws of logic and science.

From this simple Cartesian fallacy sprang all the subsequent confusion. Descartes declared that the key to philosophy is simplicity; so Locke, and Hume aimed for simplicity, even if it meant assuming that man is a machine and can therefore have no possible use for truth. Comte and Mach certainly achieved simplicity; so did Kant and Hegel, in a different way; so have the logical positivists. But simplicity is not the key to philosophy or nature. Newton's
Principia
explains the movements of the heavenly bodies, but no one would call it simple. The basic simplicity of Newton lies in his unifying principles; this constitutes his superiority over earlier astronomers. Before philosophy can be meaningful, it needs a similar set of unifying principles.

This analogy with astronomy perhaps explains the nature of the Cartesian fallacy most clearly. It seems both simple and common sensible to believe that the earth stands still and the heavens revolve; but when astronomers tried to explain the motions of the heavens on this principle, they discovered that it led to complications that defeated them, It seems simple and obvious to assume that the universe will finally be understood if the mind looks on in an attitude of scientific enquiry.
But making the 'I
think' the centre of gravity of philosophy is like making the earth the centre of the universe.

These complications vanish at once if we make another hypothesis: that the centre of gravity of philosophy should be the recognition of the 'I' behind the 'I think'. The starting point is still the 'I think', the questioning intelligence. But instead of looking out at the universe from its armchair, it now needs two faces, one to look out, one to look inward towards the 'hidden I', the transcendental ego. But at the same time, it should be recognized that this is not a true 'tri-ality', any more than that a person who sleep-walks is truly two people. Although the 'I think' seems self-evident, it is actually an abstraction, a single aspect of the transcendental ego.

From
Introduction to the New Existentialism
, 1966

Let us be quite clear about the implications of all this, for they constitute a revolution in philosophy. 'Peak experiences' all seem to have the same 'content': that the chief mistake of human beings is to pay too much attention to everyday trivialities. We are strangely inefficient machines, utilizing only a fraction of our powers, and the reason for this is our short sightedness. Koestler's 'mystical' insight made him feel that even the threat of death was a triviality that should be ignored; 'So what . . . Have you nothing more serious to worry about?' Greene's whisky priest: 'It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to be a saint.' Death reveals to us that our lives have been one long miscalculation, based on triviality. Proust's Marcel, when he tastes the cake dipped in tea, says 'the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous . . . I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.' In his diary, Nijinsky, on the point of insanity, wrote: 'I am God, I am God.'

What is revolutionary about the new existentialism is this: it asks whether there is not some logical method of investigating such insights and weighing their content against our 'everyday consciousness.' Nijinsky's Statement 'I am God' was not the rambling of a sick mind; it was an insight of the same type as those of Koestler, William James and Proust; and we have agreed that these insights have a certain objective content. In that case, the question suggests itself: '
Was
he God?'

An empirical philosopher would reply: 'Clearly not. Next question . . . ' But this is an evasion—like Moore producing his watch to demonstrate that time is not an illusion. A more reasonable objection would be: 'Is there any logical method of investigating such a question?' To that we can answer: Yes—through the phenomenological examination of consciousness. This in turn implies the creation of a language and a set of concepts in terms of which we can discuss it.

I think we should now be able to see clearly the fundamental issue on which the 'new existentialism' differs from the older version. The old existentialism emphasizes man's contingency. It says that since there is no God, there are no 'transcendental values' either. Man is alone in an empty universe; no act of his has any meaning outside itself—and its social context. Existentialism has removed the universal backcloth against which mediaeval man acted out his dreams, with a sense that everything he did would be brought up on judgement day. In its place, says Sartre, there is only the infinitude of space, which means that man's actions are of no importance to anyone but himself.

Phenomenology replies: We grant you, for the sake of argument, that all religious values are nonsense. But we cannot agree that man's everyday sense of his 'self-evident contingency' represents the truth either. Everyday consciousness is a liar, and most people have insights to this effect at least once a week. If they concentrated upon this matter, they would get such insights more frequently still. The question is simply how to give such insights a philosophical status, and how to investigate them.

Once we see this clearly, it becomes astonishing that anyone bothers to argue about it. Harley Granville Barker spoke of these insights as 'the secret life' (in a play of that title), and points out that
all
men, no matter how materialistic and trivial, draw their strength from 'the secret life'.

In other words, there is a standard of values 'external to human consciousness', if we are talking about the everyday human consciousness that most of us make the foundation of our values. In fact, both Sartre and Heidegger recognize this in recognizing that man gains a sense of 'authenticity' in the face of death.

Such a recognition is only a beginning. Inauthenticity is to feel futile, contingent, without purpose. Authenticity is to be driven by a deep sense of purpose.
Such a sense of purpose cannot exist unless we first make the assumption that our sense of contingency is a liar, and that there is a standard of values external to everyday human consciousness
.

In short, where both Sartre and Heidegger make a mistake is in supposing that the flash of authenticity experienced under the threat of death is a more or less 'mystical' sensation that cannot be carried over into ordinary human existence. It is not. It is a glimpse of a consciousness of purpose which, under certain circumstances, should be quite easily accessible to human beings. Once we have accepted James's idea that 'mystical consciousness' is only a change in the threshold of ordinary consciousness, the whole thing becomes more down-to-earth.

It might be mentioned, in passing, that this basic recognition differs in no fundamental respect from the metaphysics of the
Upanishads
or the
Bhagavad Gita
. The difference between the religious standpoint and the 'natural standpoint' is the difference between the 'external values system' of the next existentialism and the 'total contingency' of the old. (But I am speaking now of the metaphysics of religion, as distinguished from the element of dogma and the supernatural.)

This is the foundation. For biological reasons, we are 'blinkered', like horses in the traffic. The blinkers are a device for enabling us to concentrate on the present and its problems. A painter who is painting a large canvas has to work with his nose to the canvas; but periodically he stands back to see the effect of the whole. These over-all glimpses renew his sense of purpose.

Man's evolution depends upon a renewal of the sense of over-all purpose. For several centuries now, the direction of our culture has been a concentration upon the minute, the particular. In the field of science, this has produced our present high level of technological achievement. In the field of culture, we have less reason for self-congratulation, for the concentration upon the particular—to the exclusion of wider meanings—has led us into a
cul de sac
. Yeats described the result as 'fish gasping on the strand'—a minute realism that has lost all drive and purpose.