I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how a human mind could build up from empirical knowledge to greater structures of knowledge but he shied away from any speculations that this process was one of growing into a world, a process of shaping the mind to encapsulate not just some bottom-up views but an entire world or even an entire Creation.
I agree with the Jamesian pragmatists that we learn about reality by studying reality and building theories from what we can perceive. Our behaviors are formed by, our concepts derived from, thing-like being and from the actions and relationships we can examine in that concrete form of being. I’ve written about going beyond this in terms of understanding the nature of created being, but I’m interested now in the understanding of how it is that a human creature learns from what is around it.
In The Meaning of Truth, William James gives us a rather strong hint of a general viewpoint:
Total conflux of the mind with the reality would be the absolute limit of truth, there could be no better or more satisfying knowledge than that. [page 156]
The 1913 Webster tells us a conflux is “a flowing together; a meeting of currents.” This leads us at least a little astray and, to make my points, I’ll assume that William James intended (in the full Thomistic sense) the error I’ll attribute to him. It would seem he took the mind as something pre-existing its activity, the mind as something pre-existing its responses to reality and its movements in light of those responses. Somehow it exists independently of reality so that it can come together with that reality. By being filled with proper knowledge? Maybe the mind could be envisioned as a pre-existing lump of clay upon which reality makes impressions of greater or lesser clarity and sharpness? There is at least something to this since there are, in a manner of speaking, three layers to the human mind:
- the species level which has come into being over many generations by processes described by biological evolutionary theories,
- the social/cultural level which is the result of human communities shaping their thinking- and doing-traditions over some number of generations, and
- the individual level which is the result of an individual actively shaping his thinking and doing to his environments.
The first item comes to exist by normal biological development, being damaged mostly if the particular human being passes through a window of opportunity without the proper stimuli or with suppression of active responses. An example of such a window is the period during which the human language centers of the brain must be developed or else that human being won’t be able to use language in a human manner.
The second item is largely what came to be during the rise of human cultures and, most importantly for modern men, during the rise of those complex communities we call `civilizations’.
The third item can be taken naively as the raw smarts of a human being. This can be dangerous as I believe Americans are showing because powerful minds can exist as poorly formed and barely socialized. This leads to Americans engaging in rational thought about, say, the situation in Afghanistan without having learned a bit from our greater knowledge of that bloodied country and, even on the part of seemingly devout Christians, without having bothered to have learned a bit about general history or about Christian teachings on war and politics. Don’t rely on the writings of current Christian leaders or their advisers — these creatures are as intelligently ignorant as most Americans are. In other words, active and capable American minds typically work in a vacuum, making up a view of the world and then analyzing that view along with a small scattering of facts and producing the solution for similar problems in a similar, but non-existent, world.
So, what is the mind which comes into conflux with reality, which flows along with reality? I’ve given simple answers in my past writings because my beliefs lead me to try to deal with being first, however inadequate my mind was for doing such. Now I’m starting to ponder better descriptions. But I’m not yet read to settle on much. I’ll move on and say that I’ll start to explore better possibilities in the rest of this essay and I’ve got some other essays started which might lead to better answers than I’ve given in my writings so far. And I will say the answer I’ll arrive at when my work is done will undoubtedly be a little bit of a surprise to me though not as much as the better answers of yet unborn thinkers.
To be able to move on, I’ll return for now to writing in a more naive mode as I address the comment of William James, more explicitly sympathetic to the problems he had in speaking about something where his intuition seemed to be outrunning his explicit knowledge.
A mind isn’t shaped from some raw stuff which could be labeled as mind-stuff. Then again, there are structures in the human brain which give rise to functional abilities and inclinations and which can be spoken about in an as-if manner. Our human ability to learn language looks to be language-stuff inside our skull. The problem with some as-if language is that it leads to a reification of function to be turned into stuff which can then be etherealized once it’s proven that there is no physical mind-stuff, only a bunch of neurons which develop into structures rather than being a set of given structures at birth or conception or whatever. Different thinkers can stop at different points on this journey or even travel this sort of path in different order. The point is that all such journeys lead away from reality, from the empirical world and the totality of Creation in which the world is embedded.
Our brains have some serious amount of structure and a lot of developmental inclinations because of what happened over the past few billion years on earth.
The human brain gave rise to mind, as I use the term. In an upcoming essay, I’ll discuss an insight by Jacques Barzun who uses the term, `mind’, in a more general way, reminiscent to me of Neoplatonic ideas, which makes sense in the general flow of Western thought. I won’t be changing my usage, though I’m not totally opposed to that other way of using `mind’; after all, I consider all created being, including abstract being, to be manifested thoughts of God. We could talk about all of Creation as being a part of God’s mind, but that sort of talk, while possibly useful, can lead to pantheism, to the total identification of God with Creation.
In any case, we can see how useful it is to talk as if there are chunks of clay in the human mind, such as it is, at birth. And there are rocks not to be reshaped though perhaps to be ground to dust. And there’s at least one other sort of non-stuff, though it’s arises from the activity of the human brain as it interacts with, responds to, its entire body and all that lies around it. That other, more mysterious non-stuff becomes more obvious, though no more visible, when that human being speaks and thinks complex concepts, when it tells stories and invents poetry which is sometimes a story and sometimes not. That non-stuff gets us closer to true mind as a useful concept.
The world is the stuff and non-stuff of a story which includes a huge number of characters and subplots, a huge number of props and settings. By `non-stuff’, I mean immaterial aspects such as relationships though those are still mediated through physical means. Other creatures, including human beings of lesser awareness such as children and those with damaged or poorly developed minds, act their roles as characters in these narratives and thus act as-if they had minds, but those aren’t really signs of a true mind, an imitation of the divine thoughts which are manifested in created being. They are the manifested thoughts, the created being, acting according to their nature, a nature given them by the Creator by way of acts-of-being.
I hope to be able to say all of this better in my upcoming essays, but I’ve got to work things out in the way Fred Astaire himself might have moved with some grace but not much obvious purpose as he began to choreograph a new routine with his brain and his feet.
Physics and biology and history and other fields of empirical research and analysis work at two levels. They help us to learn about the stuff of our own human natures and of all other creaturely natures, those of stars and rattlesnakes and electromagnetic fields. They also help us to understand the movements of our own selves and our environments and the entire universe through time, that is, they help us to sketch out a variety of narratives.
There’s a lot more to be said about the nature of being, concrete and abstract, which goes beyond the understanding of concrete being in its thing-like manifestations, but that’s well beyond the scope of this essay. I’ve written about some of that lot-more before and might one day write various overviews. In fact, I’ve made some good progress in writing an overview about the nature of the human mind but even that won’t be finished and published for at least 6 months.
To return to William James: its a little surprising, given his own literary bent and that of other members of his family, that he seems to have shied away from thinking up into the story levels of greater parts of the universe, let alone Creation. And that is the more neutral way to describe this world: this universe seen as a true narrative. A narrative gives us a moral ordering of some sort, however much some narratives might repel us. In my Christian way of viewing this world, it’s but a part of Creation, a part we can label concrete. This concreteness isn’t for its own sake. Rocks and rabbits don’t exist as mere objects. These concrete entities, things and living creatures, are part of stories which are in turn part of a complex narrative, a huge story being told by God. Relationships are primary and relationships in this universe are dynamic and lead to a huge variety and far huger number of stories.
Stuff and its fundamental physical relationships exist to participate in various stories or, rather, the stories are relationships and shape the raw stuff of this universe so entities arise to play roles in those stories. Even in an amoral or pre-moral way of speaking, that is the purpose of stuff and its relationships because, after all, that’s what stuff does, though imperfectly and transiently. The purpose of life is survival, though survival is ultimately defined differently for an elk, for a virtuous pagan believing this world to be all there is, and for a Christian who believes in a greater Creation which includes the possibility of surviving on the other side of the grave. Survival of the fittest, never-ending memories (in some sense) of the most noble, survival of those best able to share the life of God. Human beings survive, or fail to, in these various senses and probably others.
There’s much to be done in this area and I don’t claim to have done much more than point in the general direction of some possibilities. I’d like to develop some ways of talking about stuff and relationships and how stories develop when relationships, primary in being, create stuff, secondary but still essential to our existence, and events start popping up, often to our surprise. This is very important because those all important relationships which carry moral import lead to these stories but then further develop within these stories. When we’ve reached this narrative level, we’re in Darwin’s territory (and eventually that of Homer and Moses and the Evangelists) rather than that of Einstein, though it has to be conceded that Einstein’s work has been very useful in describing a physical universe which develops in the way of a strange story rather than being some mechanical development of given and unchanging objects.
As I’ve noted before in Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, Einstein himself was inclined to see objects as existing independently of their relationships, capable of engaging in relationships but not being changed by them. Bohr saw more clearly and was the one who was closer to the ways of thought of Christian tradition — see Until We Know What Truth and Freedom Are, We Should Be More Modest In Our Claims for an overview of those traditions.
We need ways of talking about stuff and relationships, those coming from those realms of raw being also those secondary relationships which develop in relatively more concrete realms of being and which include what we would recognize as moral relationships. William James provided his followers with part of the vocabulary and concepts necessary to engage in such discussions but neither he, nor any of his disciples I know about, have moved on to engage in philosophical or scientific versions of the discussions that the other James brother, Henry, put into the form of moral fictions.
The best possible human knowledge shouldn’t be viewed as William James did as a free-standing human mind learning to flow along with created being. A proper human mind is the physical human being as an encapsulation of this world and that requires us to encapsulate also the abstract realms of being from which things are shaped. Our minds come into being as manifestations of that perfect knowledge which James wrote about. Our minds are not entities which exist apart from that knowledge and somehow acquire it by coming together with the things of this universe.
If William James had been willing to conjecture a world, he could have seen this.