The Cartesian Spring – Part Six

Forget!

Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradoma-tional gazebocroticon (the ‘Mamma Lujah’ known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatonetically preprovided with clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypet-purpose of subsequent recombination so that the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past; type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance ....

- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’

The sleeper awakes; and the Wake narrative, as ‘Mamma Lujah’ is well aware, (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), is a ‘millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational’ assembly, constructed somewhat like the gazebo of W. B. Yeats, (1865 – 1939):

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but time;

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till time catch;

Should the conflagration climb,

Run till all the sages know.

We the great gazebo built,

They convicted us of guilt;

Bid me strike a match and blow.

Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Mirador en Greifwald’, 1818

And the same voice that is bringing us out of a state of sleep is enjoining us to forget the dream that is now over, an old life is being left behind; the Viconian ‘gazebocroticon’ is beginning its operations once again; connoting in a similar manner what ‘the whole ghesabo’ mainly connotes to Leopold Bloom, in ‘Ulysses’; that is to say, the physical universe together with its laws:

‘Also that now is magnetism. Back of everything magnetism. Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement. And time, well that’s the time the movement takes. Then if one thing stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it’s all arranged. Magnetic needle tells you what’s going on in the sun, the stars. Little piece of steel iron. When you hold out the fork. Come. Come. Tip. Woman and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up and look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you’re a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you have any guts in you. Tip. Have to let fly’.

And by Viconian I refer of course to Giambattista Vico, (1668 – 1744), for whom there is much that can be explained in terms of historical cycles; the Wake is also constructed like a machine with ‘clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process’, which Vico, thinking cyclically as always, sees as an ‘eggburst’, (religion), ‘eggblend’, (marriage), ‘eggburial’, (burial), and ‘hatch-asphatch’, (corsi e ricorsi (cycles and counter-cycles)) can. And as the cock crows you can be certain of breakfast ... it would appear we are having eggs.

‘Fried Eggs on a Plate Without the Plate’, Salvador Dali, 1932 

Or rather, according to Giordano Bruno, (1548 – 1600), the Wake is to be understood as a ‘dialytical’ (dialectical) process of ‘decomposition’ and ‘recombination’ in which the ‘heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities’ of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker are ‘transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past [A.L.P. ... Anna Livia Plurabelle] ... letter from litter’. The course of history, whether the amity and civility of peace or the cruelty and barbarity of war, discloses the same old ‘adomic structure’ of H.C.E., the atomic Adam, ‘as highly charged with electrons as hopazards can effective it’. The universe and its laws; matter in motion, or a vortex of tiny corpuscles of matter, as René Descartes, (1596 – 1650), reduced it to, (apart from, of course, when it comes to the mind or soul). It is good to invoke the spirit of Vico at this point, that forerunner of systematic and complex thinking, in opposition to Cartesian reductionism (reductionist in all but the mind, that is, for which exclusion he gives no justification, thereby evoking a ghost in the machine, as Gilbert Ryle, (1900 – 1976), termed it). And dialectic; for systematic and complex thinking requires complex systems; which in turn require a method that is up to the task of producing such; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s, (1770- 1831), speculative dialectics for instance. The Cartesian method of doubt, on the other hand, is not only not up to the task but it takes us to where we do not want to be. How so?

Well, with Descartes modern philosophy may have begun, with the rejection of religious authority, and beginning by doubting everything presented by the senses; and yet doubt is itself merely a species of thought, and Descartes, as a thinking thing, in a few easy steps, establishes God’s existence and that of the world, and all by operating at the level of thought alone without any reference to the world in itself. As Immanuel Kant, (1724 – 1804), put it, though his target here is Plato, (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC):

‘The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding’.

‘La promesse’, 1950, René Magritte

John McDowell, (1942 - ), employed a metaphor for such resistance free spontaneous operations of thinking, of the kind undergone by a solitary meditating philosopher sitting in a stove heated room working everything out in his head, that of ‘a frictionless spinning in a void’. A kind of intellectual masturbation, one might say. (Though McDowell’s principal target was coherentism, a theory of epistemic justification; whereby for a belief to be justified, that is, to be established as true, it must belong to a coherent system of beliefs; that is to say, for a system of beliefs to be coherent, the beliefs that make up that system must cohere with one another. Side note: in my article ‘On the Nature of Truth’ – Part 5 I suggested that Hegel was a coherentist, whereas of course he is operating with a much deeper conception of truth than can be captured through coherentism or any other simple theory of truth or justification. I am somewhat surprised no one picked me up on that; I should re-write it, but I will leave it as it stands; to show that even Homer sometimes nods, as Alexander Pope, (1688 – 1744), pointed out).

David Hume, (1711 – 1776), of course, was particularly averse to the Cartesian method of philosophising, in particular because with it we end up with God. Hume preferred empiricism, with its associated scepticism and materialism, to rationalism, with its associated dogmatism and mysticism. But what did Hume end up with? With views such as this: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. …'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger’. Something has gone awry here. Ideas are taken to derive from experience alone, they are to be legitimated, or justified, within the application of experience, but it would appear that empiricism fails in its task; we end up with an extreme scepticism, and not with reason; with a material world within which desires are pushing us around, so to speak; in which there is no room for agency, and no experience of necessary causal connections. Both empiricism and rationalism lead us to problems if we buy into one at the expense of the other, such as has happened in the so-called analytical tradition in philosophy. In order to get some kind of grip upon the world, we must recognise, as Kant pointed out, and here he is distancing himself from Cartesianism:

‘Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’. 

To return to the ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, and the sixth and final meditation, ‘Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body’, Descartes argues that it is conceivable that each time I receive and recognize the idea of a body, God himself impresses it on my mind; for nothing in the idea of matter is inconsistent with its non-existence. All that I can discover which inclines me to assent to its existence is an instinctive impulse such as attaches to all our sense perceptions; and yet this, of course, is no reason.

Descartes’ sole recourse therefore is to appeal to the good faith of God; and thus he writes that if God were the cause of our ideas of matter, he would undoubtedly have given us the means of knowing that this is the case, for he is no deceiver. In granting us free wills, he has, indeed, opened the door for us to enter into falsity and error; but he has not allowed any error without placing within our reach the means of avoiding it, or, at least, correcting it once it has been made. The claims of our sense-images, which reason disproves, is an example; but no analysis disproves the natural inclination which we have to believe that corporal objects do exist; and hence, we are justified in affirming, along with the existence of finite mind, one’s own that is, and infinite Being, the actuality of the material world. It would appear that for Descartes the existence of other minds can never be anything more than an inference.

The upshot of the ‘Meditations’ would appear to be, then, to replace the common sense picture of nature with one that is amenable to rational investigation; for the new cosmology that was being shaped by people such as Johannes Kepler, (1571 – 1630), Galileo Galilei, (1564 – 1642), William Gilbert, (1544 – 1603), and others rested upon fundamental assumptions which were not so clear to the investigators themselves; and so the task fell upon Descartes to formulate these principles in such a way whereby they may serve as a standard.

‘Lake Thun, Symmetric reflection’, 1905, Ferdinand Hodler

I expect my regular reader will have seen this coming but I will end with the Hegelian solution to the Cartesian doctrine of mind/body dualism. Such a division into mutually exclusive parts presupposes that what we are concerned with here is two entirely distinct and separate realms, that is to say, the interior realm, and the exterior realm which refers to the interior realm; and Cartesian dualism emerges from a categorical mistake, whereby subjectivity is taken to be the ground upon which to build an objective philosophical system. But an authentic philosophy, on the other hand, can overcome such artificial divisions; through the idea of the absolute and of identity in differences we can get out of this quagmire that is dualism, and hence to begin to theorize about the actual world; for the contradictions themselves are located within the structure of consciousness; but were we to adopt the correct Hegelian phenomenological approach in an attempt at edifying the Cartesian doctrine of mind/body dualism we can henceforth demonstrate the mind’s excursions in the real world.

The interaction between mind/soul and body, how do we sort that one out? The object returning within itself in such a manner that thought posits itself in another, in matter; for which many metaphysical systems endeavour to give an account; the influxus physicus, for example, the influence of the body on the soul, although not vice versa. The influence of the body on the soul was accepted by the medieval scholastic philosophers, but Nicolas Malebranche, (1638 – 1715) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716), and Descartes all denied it. Malebranche postulated the theory of occasionalism, ascribing the connection between mental and bodily events to the continuing intervention of God, which would certainly keep the divine entity very busy. Leibniz postulated the theory of pre-established harmony, whereby bodies and minds only seem to causally interact with each other because they have been programmed by God in advance to harmonize with each other. Even for Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) the notion of influxus physicus was excluded by his epistemology, for we do not know what body and soul are in themselves. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, (1796-1879), accepted it again, believing that each part in the other produces the changes corresponding to its own essence; influxism.

Hegel considered the influxus physicus to be a crude conception; for it postulates that the relation of spirit is of a corporeal nature, that the object is related to mind as bodies are to one another. But for Descartes the soul belongs to thought, and the body to extension; and thus because both are substance, (a fundamental entity of reality) neither requires the concept of the other, and hence soul and body are independent of one another and can exercise no direct influence upon one another. So how could mind and body ever have a direct relation to each other? Descartes insisted that there is no physical influence of one upon the other; for such would have signified a mechanical relation between the two; and thus is established the intellectual sphere in contradistinction to matter.

Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Composition VII’, 1913

The mind thereby has an independent subsistence; within the cogito the I is certain of itself; however, a mediator is needed in order for there to be a union between the abstract and the external; and the Cartesian solution is to situate between mind and body the very thing that constitutes the metaphysical foundation of their mutual exchanges, that is to say, God. God is the mediator, it is God that grants assistance to the mind and soul for what it cannot achieve through its own freedom; in order that the changes in body and soul may correspond with one another. Which is to say, my desires, my intentions, they are all realized in matter; and the association of mind and matter is effected through God; God is the truth of the conception; and as long as I think rightly and consistently, something real corresponds to my thought, and the connecting link is God; for God is the perfect identity of the two opposites, since God is the very unity of concept and reality. 

Baruch Spinoza, (1632 - 1677), works this out and develops it in its further moments through his Idea: 'The first thing that constitutes the actual being of a human Mind', he said, is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists'. He then argues that it follows that 'the human Mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God'. And further: 'Whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the human Mind must be perceived by the human Mind'. And thus Cartesian dualism is rejected in favour of Spinozist monism: 'The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body, or a certain mode of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else'. Descartes was correct to conclude that in finite things the identity of opposites is imperfect; but the form he employs is inadequate; for it implies that in the beginning there are two things, thought or soul and body, and that then God appears as a third thing, outside both; and therefore, to put it in Hegelian terms, God is not the Notion of unity, nor are the two elements themselves Notion; but Descartes asserted that both those original elements are created substances.; and this very expression created pertains to the ordinary conception only and is not a determinate thought; it was Spinoza, therefore, who first accomplishes the return to thought.

Explanation in philosophy, such as the explanation of the mind/body problem, necessarily means monism; and while tendency towards monism has always been evident in philosophy, butt the philosophical basis of it was first definitely enunciated by Spinoza; he it was who recognised that the first principle of the universe must be a single principle, and that this principle must be a unity; for the ultimate reality is only real in virtue of the fact that it is dependent on nothing outside itself. And to be thus self-dependent is to be self-determined, and what is self-determined must be a unity; for were there to be two ultimate realities, one would be limited, thereby determined by the other; and by virtue of that very fact neither ultimate reality would be self-determined.

Idealism in philosophy is monistic, its basic principle is that thought and Being, subject and object, are identical; but they are also distinct. In some sense or other, the object stands over against the self, it is the not-self, but by Hegel's principle of the identity of opposites, knowing and Being are identical and yet distinct; their identity is compatible with their difference. That the thing is identical with the thought means that there is no absolute separation between subject and object, for the object is within the subject; that the thing is different from the thought means that the subject expels part of itself, that is to say, the object from itself and opposes itself to it. I observe a material object, a tree for instance, the tree is most assuredly external to me; it is not-me; and this is the separation of knowing and Being. But the tree is still within the unity of thought; it is not external to me in the sense that it is something utterly outside thought, unknowable; and this is the identity of thought and Being. Thought overreaches the gulf between itself and object, that is to say, the separation between thought and thing is a separation within thought itself, and if the thing could break away completely from the unity of thought, it would become an unknowable Kantian thing in itself; and that is impossible.

Hegel's principle of the identity of opposites is fully worked out in his 'Science of Logic'; I cannot go into that here, I may devote a separate article to it; but if we are able to make sense of it this principle can be made to do a lot of work for us. The basic idea is this. An Other is represented to the world of immediate perception by the Notion or Concept; this representation approximates to the object but in an opposite or negative form; the thing is posited in Being while confronting a negative in the form of past Being contained in theoretical form in the Notion; and the interpenetration of Being and Notion is Essence; a contradictory process which leads to the identification of Being and the Notion, the modification of the Notion brought about by the successive resolution of internal contradictions, the struggle to understand what we are doing. The Notion has for its first phase (thesis) subjectivity; the nature of reality is defined as essentially subject; the second phase (antithesis) of the doctrine of the Notion is objectivity. Reality is thus defined as the opposite of subject, that is to say, object. Reality is then defined (synthesis) as being not an abstract subject or abstract object but the unity of subject and object. And this is the Idea, to be defined as the unity of subjectivity and objectivity.

_________________________________________________________________________

‘My criticism of [Hegel’s] procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe’.

- Alfred North Whitehead

THE END

Ferdinand Hodler, ‘The Night’, 1889-90

Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:

1. mole = small velvety-furred burrowing mammal having small eyes and fossorial forefeet.

2. millwheel = a wheel used to drive a mill, especially a water-wheel used for that purpose.

3. cyclometer = an apparatus attached to the wheel of a vehicle, espescially of a cycle, for registering the distance traversed.

4. tetra- = four; and four-dimensional.

5. gazebo = a turret or lantern on the roof of a house, usually for the purpose of commanding an extensive prospect; also, a similar erection in a garden or pleasure ground; a belvedere or look-out; a projecting window or balcony; and gazebo (fake Latin), I shall gaze; and kritikon (Greek), something picked out, choice.

6. mamalujo = and mamma (Latin, Greek), female breast.

7. scandaller (obsolete) = one who utters scandal; one who slanders; and Sheridan, ‘School for Scandal’.

8. matty (rare.) = matted; and Matthew.

9. John-a-dog = an official formerly employed to whip dogs out of a church or chapel; and John-a-dreams, generic for 'a dreamy fellow' (William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’ II.2.553); and Johnny MacDougal and his ass.

10. autokinetical (obsolete) = self-moving, possessed of spontaneous activity; and autokinêton (Modern Greek), self-moving (thing), automobile.

11. clapper = the contrivance in a mill for striking or shaking the hopper so as to make the grain move down to the millstones; and coupling, the name of various contrivances for connecting parts of constructions or machinery, esp. in order to transmit motion.

12. smelt = to fuse or melt (ore, etc.) in order to extract the metal.

13. expressive = serving to express, indicate, or represent; and ‘Work in Progress’, Joyce's name for Finnegans Wake during composition.

14. homely = such as belongs to home or is produced or practised at home (esp. a humble home); and Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

15. catch-as-catch-can = the Lancashire style of wrestling (expressing laying hold of in any way, each as he can); and (birth, marriage, burial, ricorso).

16. portal vein = the vena porta, or great vein formed by the union of the veins from the stomach, intestine, and spleen, conveying blood to the liver, where it divides again into branches.

17. dialytically = by way of dialysis, (Chemistry. Any process in which particles of different kinds are selectively removed from a liquid as a consequence of differences in their capacity to pass through a membrane into another liquid); and dialectically.

18. decomposition = separation or resolution (of anything) into its constituent elements.

19. pet = specially cherished, for which one has a particular fondness or weakness, favourite.

20. eroticism = a sexual impulse or desire; erotic spirit or character.

21. eccentricity = deviation from an established pattern, rule or norm.

22. legacy = anything handed down by an ancestor or predecessor.

23. type = a small cupola or dome; that by which something is symbolized or figured; anything having a symbolical signification; a symbol, emblem.

24. tope = an ancient structure, in the form of a dome or tumulus of masonry, for the preservation of relics or in commemoration of some fact; and topos (Greek), place.

25. litter = odds and ends, fragments and leavings lying about, rubbish; a state of confusion or untidiness; a disorderly accumulation of things lying about.

26. sendence = sentence.

27. sundance = a religious dance in honour of the sun, accompanied with rites of self-torture, practised by certain North American Indian peoples.

'Anna Livia Plurabelle', Dublin, photo by me