A Modest Epistemological Exercise: Point Reyes Thinkery - A "Must Read" Prescription
A Modest Epistemological Exercise: Point Reyes Thinkery - A "Must Read" Prescription
A Modest Epistemological Exercise: Point Reyes Thinkery - A "Must Read" Prescription
transformed our lives. So these are the two worlds I'm pointing at: the realm of immediate, qualitative experience, and the theory-laden world consisting of the explanatory machinery that informs us of precise causes and, in general, helps us to make sense of our direct experience. And what I'm asking you to do now is to carry on an inner conversation with me while blocking this second world completely from your minds. Steadfastly ignoring the explanatory machinery, we will ask ourselves: what is the character of the first, or familiar, world?
Don't think, however, that we need to be unscientific in our exploration. In fact, I am quite confident that our characterization of the familiar world will be the very characterization any scientist who spent some time considering the matter would offer. Moreover, the exercise is a worthwhile training for all scientists, since a clear grasp of the first, or familiar world may clarify a great deal about the second, or theory-laden world. The questions arising in the first world are, after all, the occasion for our investigations leading to the second world. If we fail to ask knowledgeable and productive questions of the first world, we cannot arrive at the second world. What's more, if we are not rigorously aware of the subjective contours of familiar experience, we will inevitably project aspects of our own subjectivity into our theoretical picture of the world. One last preliminary remark. We really should pursue this exercise outdoors say, across the way there in Indian Valley, standing by the creek on an autumn day. The bright sun and the golden leaves, the many soft voices of Agawamick Creek, the rustling of the dry leaves in the wind, the silent preparations the birds are making for their coming migration, the sense of warmth infusing everything it all washes over you bearing poignant testimony to something that is about to pass. And the piercing cry of the bluejay one of those hardy creatures who will stay behind reminds you of the coming winter. There, by the creek, we would actually be immersed in the familiar world we will be talking about this evening. Here, I'm afraid, we will often be reduced to summoning mental images of it, which is not at all the same thing. But we will make the best of the situation, trying to stay as close as possible to immediate experience.
An Objective World
But this needs to be linked, in counterpoint, with a second truth. Look out the window at the trees in the yard. It's true that each of us sees each tree from a different angle. Our subjective perspectives differ. Yet we have no difficulty relating our different perspectives to each other and we do it naturally, immediately, without resorting to abstruse theoretical concepts. My trees and yard, as directly experienced, turn out to be recognizably the same as your trees and yard. That's why we can have a coherent conversation about them. We could even abandon ourselves to a game of hide-and-seek among those trees this without ever having taken a physics course! If you are trying to elude me, you know very well that you cannot do so by hiding under the cover of your own subjectivity. I'll find you in the objective realm of our mutual experience the familiar realm of the appearances we share. We learn from this that, while the familiar world is suffused with the qualities of our subjective experience, it is not merely subjective. Something is given to us in perception that does not
Thinking
Another question. Where do we find thinking, or conceptual content, in the familiar world? The answer is simple: everywhere. We have no perceptions apart from thinking. The world is not there there are no appearances except in conjunction with thinking. The concepts given in thought are what enable the things of the world to manifest themselves as these particular things and are, in fact, inseparable from the things. The common view is that objects are simply given to us in perception, and then we think about them. Of course, we do think about objects in this way, but it is also true that some thinking already belongs to the object by the time we perceive it and without this thinking there would not be the perception. In other words, thinking is part of the essential constitution of the first world, and not just something that goes on in my head. For us today this is extremely difficult to get hold of. But remember again that we are talking about the familiar world the world, you might say, that transpires upon the stage of human consciousness. Perhaps it is not so strange, then, if this world comes to us as, among other things, an embodiment of thought. There are several ways you can begin to convince yourselves that thinking is already part of the familiar world by the time we perceive it: ** To begin with, imagine the world through the eyes of an infant. The organs of seeing are well developed and capable of perception, but what does the infant see? Almost nothing that we do, simply because the ideas necessary to distinguish one
One World
In a moment, I'm afraid, I must confess to some mischief. But first I want you to look at this cedar tree here and ask yourself, Where or how do you find the cedar that belongs to the second world? What distinguishes it from the tree we've been talking about up to now? Can we have any experience of the "real", second-world tree, and if so, wouldn't that very experience have to be part of the first-world tree? If, on the other hand, we can have no such experience of the real tree, what are we talking about when we speak of this tree? Do we really want to say that our science concerns things that lie beyond experience? Now my confession. I spoke at the outset of two worlds: the world of appearances, and the world given to us through technical insight and rigorous scientific investigation. But the truth is, I don't believe in two different worlds. There is only one world, and it is the first world. Science, insofar as it presents us with legitimate content and it contains a great deal of such content belongs to this first world; insofar as it claims to deal with a second, separate world, it is merely confused. Look at it this way. The rigorous and technical thinking we engage in as scientists is simply the disciplining of the thinking I spoke of earlier the thinking that, by illuminating what comes to us through our senses, causes the world to light up in perception. Thinking brings the world to manifestation, and is
Recapitulation
Let's review briefly. We have recognized the following features in the first world: ** It is a profoundly human world. We meet ourselves in it; the qualities of our own inner experience and the qualities we find in this world are one and the same. It is truly a familiar world. ** It is, at the same time, an objective world. Amid all the appearances we discover each other and the reliable presentation of things. By means of the appearances we find that we can coordinate our activities, build cities, wrest a livelihood from nature.
References
Barfield, Owen (1977). The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, Owen (1973). Poetic Diction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, Owen (1965). Saving the Appearances. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Bergson, Henri (1991). Matter and Memory, translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Brady, Ronald (2002). "Perception: Connections Between Art and Science", http://www.netfuture.org/ni/misc /pub/brady/index.html. Edelglass, Stephen, Georg Maier, et al. (1997). The Marriage of Sense and Thought: Imaginative Participation in Science. Hudson NY: Lindisfarne. Feynman, Richard P., Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963). The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley. Lukacs, John (1994). Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sacks, Oliver (1995). An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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I have subtitled this presentation, "How You Can Participate in the Renewal of Science and Nature". Perhaps you can now entertain the possibility that by sustaining the exercise we have begun here, you will come to experience and understand the world in a new way, and therefore you will help to make it a different world. As Owen Barfield once remarked: I have been reminding you that, so far at all events as the macroscopic [that is, phenomenal] universe is concerned, the world itself on the one hand and the way we perceive and think it on the other hand are inseparable. It must follow from that that, if enough people go on long enough perceiving and thinking about the world as mechanism only, the macroscopic world will eventually become mechanism only 2. (Barfield 1977, p. 115) But the flip side of this is also true: if enough people go on perceiving and thinking about the world as a living, ensouled organism, that is what it will become. This is epistemology made world-shakingly practical!
Copyright 2002, 2003, 2005 Steve Talbott Thinkery Project: To gather enough people in West Marin to dedicate ourselves to learning the perspective of the Nature Institute. Ill do this by having Steve and Craig come to the Thinkery on a regular basis to train us to acquire their sensibility. This will be the basis for creating a community dedicated to fostering a science of qualites. Perhaps, they could come out two or three times a year to meet with a core group and offer workshops for the general public.
Notes
1. Steve Talbott ([email protected]) is a Senior Researcher at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York, and editor of the online NetFuture newsletter (www.netfuture.org). This work is partially supported by a grant from the
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