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STATE OF THE WORLD FORUM
APPRECIATING PERCEPTION
Lindsay Mell
State of The World Forum
Occasional Paper 2006/1
ACADEMY OF THE WORD
April 2006
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‘I have to admit – It’s Getting Better
A little better all the time … [It can’t get no worse]
Yes, I admit, It’s Getting Better …
Getting so much better all the time …’
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John Lennon and Paul McCartney
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Quote from the song Getting Better
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Dedicated to Sherry – Sheung Chan
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Earlier this year, my good friend and colleague, John Hallam, inadvertently set for me
what eventually emerged as something of a challenge. Although I realize John clearly
didn’t seem to intend to raise this as such a prospect then.
This situation arose from one of my periodic update sessions on the perspectives and life
of George Santayana (1863-1952), a 20th century theorist whose emphatic yet
substantially marginalised contribution to humanity inspires my thorough admiration and
advocacy.
At one of the regular dialogue sessions arranged by John’s intuitive partner, Mishka
Jambor, John inquired of me: ‘What is it about this guy Santayana you believe is so
important that I should include his work in my kitbag of oracular works I might need on my
journey through to culmination in this life?’
At the outset of my sense of where Santayana figures in the context of valuable insights
into perception, it is noteworthy that various esteemed luminaries have been suitably
impressed with Santayana’s work.
John Dewey regarded The Life of Reason (1905-6) as:
‘The most adequate contribution America has yet made, always excepting Emerson, to
moral philosophy.’
‘Urbane, historical, free from fanaticism, and the expression of an exceptionally sensitive
perception’ was Bertrand Russell’s assessment of The Life of Reason.
‘The air he inhabits is the air genius must climb, and his defects are the defects of
supreme quality’ was the superlative testament to Santayana of
Archibald MacLeish.
‘His Life of Reason is the only comprehensive, carefully articulated philosophy of life and
civilization which has been produced on these shores [the United States]’ was how
Morris Cohen viewed Santayana’s epic work.
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Moreover, the Collier endorsement to this publisher’s edition of
Reason in Common Sense (Collier 1962), the first volume of Santayana’s
The Life of Reason, was stated as follows: ‘Santayana retraces the crucial first step in the
progress of civilization – the flowering of man’s rational life out of the chaos of primitive
feeling. Eloquent and subtle, eschewing pedantry, he describes how man first comes to
recognize his instincts, decipher his experience, control his conduct and realize his ideals
…
‘With rare insight and a poetic lucidity that is his hallmark, Santayana traces the
awakening of man’s rational life …’
It could be held that on the basis of such testimonies alone Santayana’s ideas and work
surely constitute an emphatic contribution worthy of substantial review.
Yet, as previously stated through my earlier Academy of the Word ‘State of the World’
Forum seminar papers, such attentive study is not an apparent element of influential work
in the philosophy of perception.
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Intuition as essence
When I put together my most recent commentary on George Santayana’s novel The Last
Puritan (1937), I mentioned there were some ‘situational images, metaphors and
referential episodes which potentially translate across socio-cultural situations’
(Friendship and Sentiment, October 2005: 2) evident in this work.
Further, I observed there is a broad sense in which Santayana’s thorough analysis of
interpersonal themes is resonant of the intricate fine-grained analysis of experiential
journeys carried out through The Community Project, and particularly the Deep
Friendship series of studies I have documented.
Later I noted Santayana’s realization of personal destiny through ‘the human soul’, his
awareness of ‘intuition’ as a true form of essence distinguished from knowledge and
imagination – this being fertile ground for human cultivation - and his sense of true love
and sentiment as the ground of authenticity. Spirit as the source of life, realized through
truth, Providence discerned through intertwined derivation in a moral context, along with
the priority of cultivating sensitivity and insight, were other associated principles he
advanced.
Throughout The Last Puritan, Oliver, the focal character seeks to sustain ‘romantic
equilibrium’ through ‘fortitude’ and ‘faith’ (77). These are basic elements of ‘the tapestry’
of life (187). ‘Facts … flowered into ideas, into harmonies (312) …’ and thereby
experience becomes ‘poetry’ for Oliver (312).
Thence Oliver seeks to form out his distinctive experience and place. Authenticity is his
implicit touchstone. ‘First admit the truth, then make the best of it. That’s a man’s work
(165)’, Oliver observes. Integrity is thereby extolled: ‘refine your perceptions’ and ‘purify
your motives (199-200) … how lovely each natural thing could be, if it could be true to
itself ! ‘ (276) Thence the injunction ‘… to trust, maintain and refine the inspirations of the
heart’. Oliver is supported in this by ‘… Nature, truth, God … that larger inhuman
something that surrounded humanity and sustained it …’ (359-360)
When Oliver eventually meets Edith, who is committed to her sense of ‘responsibility’ and
social convention (467, 478), he finds – ‘He was too deep for her (486) … He had asked
her for herself … But he needed ‘love’ (490) …’
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Then, some time later, when Rose appears in his life context, Oliver seeks his needed
love with much greater intuitive discernment and interpretation of how Rose is situated in
the whole realm of his endeavours. Yet it seems the stubborn spirited Rose cannot bring
herself to accept Oliver into her life, although she seems to love him enough to be moved
in her feeling and care for him. Nevertheless, ‘… I am content to live in suspense, in
disbelief, in solitude’ Rose declares (576).
However, Oliver realizes Rose and Edith ‘… were the right symbols for me then for the
thing I needed, for the thing I must find’ (580).
Meanwhile, in The Life of Reason, Santayana characterizes human life as ‘incipient
order in the midst of what seems a vast vanishing chaos’ (3). Moreover, ‘Pure feeling
rejoices in a logical non-entity very deceptive to dialectical minds’ (4). The intrusion of
‘natural history and psychology’ render consciousness artificial in this, in that they ‘infer
feeling from habit or expression …’ (9).
Purpose merges into a profound paradox in that ‘…every event is providential, every act
unpremeditated …’ (14). Situated in this is ‘… the gift of memory [which is the] capacity to
survey at once vestiges of many perceptions’ (18), while ‘transition … is the deepest
characteristic of existence’ (19). Every perception is distinctive in this life in that
‘materially considered no perception recurs’ (22).
Meanwhile, ‘Knowledge is not eating and [therefore] we cannot expect to devour and
possess what we mean (24). However, our consolation is that ‘reflection’ culminates in
‘practical significance’ (28). Moreover, perception is linked by Santayana to frequent
‘recurrence’ and ‘occurrence’ of ‘sensation’, thence also to ‘idea’ (15). Thus, ‘Ideas are
creatures of intelligence, goals of thought, ideal terms which cogitation and action circle
about …’ (47)
Consequently, ‘Love, like intelligence, must rise from appearance to reality, and rest in
that divine world which is the fulfillment of the human.’ (58).
Accordingly, ‘… the passions are humanized only by being juxtaposed and forced to live
together’ (68).
‘Harmony and cooperation’ are the supreme manifestation of the ideal for Santayana
(70). Yet, ‘There is a piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that
since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none perhaps deserves to be …’ (72), which
serves to substantiate authentic equanimity as the preferable demeanour. While,
‘Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse for being.’ (79) Therefore, it is distinctive in itself
as its legacy and significance in life.
Love remains pre-eminent, however.
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‘The glance of an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding death and immortality
together. Love is a true natural religion …’ (101)
Santayana discerned acutely the compromise of consensus.
‘One of the great lessons … which society has to teach its members is that society exists
(110-111) … Consensus of opinion has a distorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values …’
(111) While there remains an inherent duality in contradiction. ‘The existence of … a
contradiction in the moral world is the original sin of nature, whence flows every other
wrong …’ (128)
Consequently, there are profound implications from duality and/or contradiction in the
cultural context. ‘Culture is on the horns of a dilemma: if profound and noble it must
remain rare, if common it must become mean. These alternatives can never be eluded
…’ (138)
Therefore, ‘… civilization cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of remorse
and of just indignation …’ (139)
Moreover, all these considerations serve to affirm that:
‘Intellectual and artistic greatness does not need prizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and
a propitious environment …’ (148)
Further, deep friendship requires ‘affinity’ in this context.
‘Friends must desire to live as much as possible together and to share their work,
thoughts and pleasures …’ (158)
There is a deep sense through which such appreciation of intimacy in sentiment derives
from Santayana’s profound sensitivity to beauty, expressed by him in The Sense of
Beauty (1896). ‘Things are interesting because we care about them, and important
because we need them …’ he observes (4).
Inherent in this appreciation is an emphatic realization of continuity.
‘Ethics deals with conduct as much as with emotion, and therefore considers the causes
of events and their consequences as well as our judgments of their value …’ (5)
Accordingly, ‘Aesthetics … is the theory of perception or of susceptibility …’ and as such
‘… is concerned with the perception of values …’ (12)
Therefore, ‘Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing …
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‘Beauty is a value … it is an emotion, and affection of our volitional and appreciative
nature …’ (31) While, ‘The passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path
may be sometimes retraced …’ (32) For, ‘Form cannot be the form of nothing …’ (49)
While appreciation of beauty emanates from our perception, its essence is evident
through our nature, which could be cited as derived from a universal source. For, ‘The
dependence of the degrees of beauty upon our nature is perceived, while the
dependence of its essence upon our nature is still ignored …’ writes Santayana (81).
Nevertheless, we are exhorted to remain circumspect in our appreciation.
‘When there is real profundity – when the living core of things is most firmly grasped –
there will accordingly be a felt inadequacy of expression’ (82).
‘Such appreciation enables us to remain reflective, and thereby to be thorough and
circumspect in demeanour. ‘Give the symbol a little intrinsic worth of form, line and
colour, and it attracts like a magnet all the values of the things it is known to symbolise’
(129).
However we may construe the reality of nature, the facet of our nature which is most deep
and resonant for us will be our connection to universal truth.
‘Our practical and intellectual nature is deeply interested in truth’ (141).
Amid these perspectives we look to ‘change the drama of history, and of our own lives’,
yet ambivalently ‘we are not awed by our destiny …’ (145)
Neither can we rely on reason, which ‘… after all, is one convention picked out of a
thousand (153) … Reality is more fluid and elusive than reason …’ (154)
Moreover, ‘… a great affection, a clear thought, a profound and well-trained faith, are
eternal possessions (161) …’
Santayana acutely discerned the paradox of predominant Spanish and American strains
in the teleology of his ideas. Nevertheless, as Dagobert Runes observed in his epic
anthology Treasury of Philosophy (1955) ‘… he highly esteemed the soil of history,
tradition or human institutions without which thought and imagination became trivial’
(1042). Correspondingly, ‘… Santayana thought in terms of two realms of being, that of
existence and that of essences.
Concerning existence, he professed materialism (1042-1043) …
‘… The seat and principle of genesis is matter, not essence, which, for its part, is
explanatory of intuition, assures the form of apperception, elucidates existence, and
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helps the mind to grasp and to retain the character and identity of the changing
existences (1043) …’
Moreover, ‘… An essence is anything definite capable of appearing and being thought of
… Knowledge is a compound of instinctive conviction and expectation, animal faith and
intuition of essence. It is essence by means of which the pursuit, attention and feelings
which contribute to knowledge are transcribed in aesthetic, moral or verbal terms into
consciousness. Matter is in flux; mind … [is] simply sensibility in bodies’ (1043) …’
Santayana’s broad perspective of reality and experience stated in
Reason and Art (1905), as quoted by Runes, is that, ‘… Life is an equilibrium which is
maintained now by accepting modification and now by imposing it (1044) …’ While this
environment reveals ‘a trace of [one’s] presence’ which can ‘infer something about [one’s]
life and action … even the disorder in which a room is left may express vividly the owner’s
ways and character …’
Alternatively, ‘… instead of a disordered room, a well planted orchard … [may] have
served and expressed his intent (1044) …’ This infusion of intent ‘… thus humanizes and
rationalizes objects [and] is called art (1044) …’
‘All art has an instinctive source and a material embodiment (1044)…’
Hence ‘… language is a rational product, not because it always has a use or meaning, but
because it is sometimes felt to have one … Arts are no less automatic than instincts, and
usually … less thoroughly purposive (1045) …’
Consequently, ‘… In a matter where custom is so ingrained and supported by a constant
apperceptive illusion, there is little hope of making thought suddenly exact, or exact
language not paradoxical. We must observe, however, that only by virtue of a false
perspective do ideas seem to govern action, or is a felt necessity the matter of invention.
In truth invention is the child of abundance … ideas are themselves products of an inner
movement which has an automatic extension outwards; and this extension manifests the
ideas … Now a man cannot draw bodily from external perception the ideas he is
supposed to create or invent … The ideas come of themselves (1046) … It is in fact a
palpable impossibility that any idea should call itself into being … thus … ebullitions in
parts of our nature become touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seem
hardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into the main current of our
being. All invention is tentative, all art experimental (1047) …’
Basically, Santayana invokes a broadly organic metaphor of human volition.
‘… What we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative processes, bringing a round of
familiar impulses and ideas; this stream has a general direction, a conscious vital inertia,
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in harmony with which it moves. Many of the developments within it are dialectical; that is
they go forward by inner necessity (1047) … the quality of assurance and right [in life] …
is only its courageous core; about it play all sorts of incidental processes, allying
themselves to it in more or less congruous movement (1048) … The sphere of self’s
power is accordingly, for primitive consciousness, simply the sphere of what happens well
(1046) …’
However ‘harmony’ in itself, like ‘utility’, cannot constitute abiding unity.
‘Utility like significance is an eventual harmony in the arts and by no means their ground
(1048) …’ Accordingly, ‘Insight … is in itself perfectly useless and inconsequential
(1049) … To be sensitive to difficulties and dangers goes with being sensitive to
opportunities … Of all reason’s embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and
complete (1050) … What makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces
in nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the life of reason;
in other words progress is art bettering the conditions of existence … Art, in … moulding
outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground through which values
may continually spring up (1051) …
‘Not only does the work of art thus perpetuate its own function and produce a better
experience, but the process of art also perpetuates itself, because it is teachable. Every
animal learns something by living … when the fruits of experience exist in the common
environment, when new instruments, unknown to nature, are offered to each individual for
his better equipment, although he must still learn in a humaner school (1051) … in art the
values secured are recognized the more easily for having been first enjoyed when other
people furnished the means to them; while the maintenance of these values is facilitated
by an external tradition (1052) …’
Santayana reveals how the reality of imagination can transcend mere sense through
intuition to thereby realize aesthetic values: ‘… imagination, has pleasures more airy and
luminous than those of sense … The values inherent in imagination, in instant intuition, in
sense endowed with form, are called aesthetic values (1052) … An aesthetic fragrance,
indeed all things may have, if in soliciting man’s senses or reason they can awaken his
imagination as well …
‘If art is that element in the life of reason which consists in modifying the environment the
better to attain its end, art may be expected … to increase man’s comfort, knowledge, and
delight (1053) …’
Paradox and continuity
There is a palpable sense for me through which Santayana seeks to associate the
attribute and principles of reason with the quality and value of harmony such that an
abundant state of equilibrium would remain prevalent in the human aspect – although he
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proposes any form of collective unity could not be so sustained. Yet the perspective of
paradox seems to inevitably predominate in this whereby, for Gilbert Keith Chesterton
(1874-1936) for instance, conflict with reason would remain an ever evident element.
This would proceed from a definition of ‘paradox’ as: ‘… a phenomenon that elicits some
conflict with preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible’ ([Oxford Dictionary
1980: 1508] Paradox – coping with complexity, April 2005: 1).
Moreover, continuity of being as lived experience was as much the touchstone of
Chesterton’s work, as for Santayana, as I observe in reference to Chesterton’s novel The
Man Who Was Thursday (1908).
‘It is probably a reasonably valid analysis that Chesterton sought to reaffirm faith in the
broad continuity of history, and particularly in the efficacy of orthodoxy, through his work
…’ I observed in Paradox – coping with complexity, April 2005: 3).
Consequently, ‘Morality is the ground through which true art is cultivated’ (4) and the
basis of ‘aesthetic growth’ according to Chesterton’s perspective.
‘Nothing sublimely has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially
reasonable has ever arisen out of pure reason,’ wrote Chesterton ([Chesterton’s Stories,
Essays and Poems 1953:126] April 2005: 4).
Clearly, Chesterton recognized ‘… the reality of paradox is far more complex than mere
duality and/or contradiction (April 2005: 4) …’
While morality was the vital element in all this.
‘… Telling the truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very
elementary part of the ethics of honesty (1953: 142) …’ he wrote.
What can be definitively observed, however, is that for all his deft discernment and
veneration of paradox as an ontological reality, Chesterton still encounters difficulty in the
face of sheer duality. ‘There is a sense in which, through the spirit of paradox, Chesterton
reveals quite a refined and exquisite appreciation of the dilemmas which could divide and
frustrate social and personal equanimity. Yet in this appreciation there often remains a
profound element of duality also’ (April 2005: 8). For instance, Chesterton exalts and
reveres the narrative element of history. ‘The highest and noblest thing that history can
be is a good story’
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(The Duty of the Historian, 1920: 106). However, he also cites the ‘weak and foolish’
aspect of history (Ibidem 1920: 106-107), for instance in needing to explain and describe
the derivation of ‘fashions’ ! (Ibidem 1920: 107)
Accordingly, Chesterton is alert to the propensity for paradox to pervade the exigencies of
discursive and linguistic practice and development. ‘… The truth is that a phrase can be
falsified by use, without being false in fact; it can seem stale without being really stilted
(The Evolution of Emma, 1920: 85) …’ Chesterton observed.
When Chesterton extols the virtues of the ‘fireside’ as an ambient homely environment, in
The Yule Log and the Democrat (1920: 142), at the outset he seeks to situate the
fireside as ‘ a place to be’ (April 2005: 13). Moreover once it is realized the fireside is such
a suitable place to be, it thence becomes also a suitable venue to live, or an environment
able to sustain and/or accommodate someone as either a prevalent reality and/or
perception which can remain resonant for them throughout a lifetime. So, for instance,
there may be a particular ‘living room’ environment to which a person returns either as a
habitation or perceptually throughout their lives.
Chesterton extends the veracity of place and ground in being by extending its pertinence
to apply to poetry and religion. ‘… And this is an essential of any poetry and any religion.
It must appeal to the origins and deal with the first things, however much or little they may
say … The one thing every man knows about the unknowable is that it is the
indispensable
(A New Plan for The Universe, 1920: 167-168) …’
Continuity and context remain imperative to sustain experience in life, as Chesterton
assuredly proclaims. ‘Unless the background of all things is good, it is no substitute to
make the foreground better (Ibidem 1920: 169) … It is indeed in the clash of
circumstances that men are most alive (Wishes 1920: 76) … It is true, of course, that
marvels, even marvels of transformation, illustrate the noblest histories and traditions
(Ibidem 1920: 77) …’
The dynamics of any particular social situation can be rendered deplete through
‘narrowness’. ‘A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness … Sociability,
like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers and renunciations (Ibidem 1920: 77) …’
Correspondingly, ‘… we have to love our neighbour because he is ‘there’ …
‘He is the simple humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be
anybody he is everybody (Ibidem 1920: 79) …’
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Thence, ‘… the sublime and special romance of the family (Heretics 1905: 80) … is
romantic because it is arbitrary … The element of adventure exist[s]; for an adventure is,
by its nature, a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has often
been regarded as the supreme adventure (81) …
‘While Chesterton seems to omit any distinction of paradox from contradiction in this early
stage of his work, he does show how perspectives of what constitutes an opposite
phenomenon can emanate from insubstantial and/or misguided attitudes … Chesterton
challenges the assertion of ‘funny’ as the opposite of ‘not funny, and of nothing else’ (87),
he writes.
Therefore, in the greater comprehensive sense, ‘tradition’ can be situated in the broader
democratic context, as Chesterton revealed in Orthodoxy (1908):
‘… tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of
common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary method (1908: 255) …’
And yet, ‘… scientific men … do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvelous
facts, but a truth connecting these facts (258) … the ordinary scientific man is strictly a
sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept
away be mere association (259) … Every man has forgotten who he is … We are all
under the same mental calamity … We have all forgotten what we really are (260) …’
Yet throughout this dilemma acute confusion remains a sure touchstone:
‘The test of all happiness is gratitude (261) … ‘
This quality of gratitude seemed to thoroughly infuse Chesterton’s experience of life and
reality, investing it with essential continuity and consistency: ‘… this world of ours has
some [‘always present’] purpose … I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a
story there is a story-teller (266) …’ Consequently, ‘… it is better to remember how all
things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.
Every man has had one horrible adventure … I came to feel as if this magic must have a
meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal
in the world (268) …
‘A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it (270) … My
acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of
primary loyalty (277) …’
The configuration and relations of all these elements culminated in the aspect of morality.
‘Morality’ was about – “We must not hit each other in the holy place’ (272), rather than ‘I
will not hit you if you do not hit me’ (272) … They gained their morality by guarding their
religion (272) …
So morality and ethics were effectively acquired, rather than isolated, codified and
gravitated towards, like a magnet … Thence, in that ‘the pessimist … states only facts, it
is essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive
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(272-273) …’
Thus Chesterton contends the inadequacy of the pessimist is in that ‘he does not love
what he chastises’ ([1908: 273] April 2005: 24) …’
There are many facets of love which may be considered paradoxical.
As Chesterton observes: ‘A man’s friend likes him but leaves him as he is:
his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into someone else (274) …’
‘This substantiates my contention, through my work on and entitled
Deep Friendship, it is vital for anyone who loves to discern, realize and appreciate the
qualities of ‘deep friendship’ as much as ‘deep love’ ‘
(April 2005: 25)
‘All these considerations affect and influence how perspectives and reason are derived.’
(27) ‘… The commonest kind of trouble is that [the world] … is nearly reasonable, but not
quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians (282) … The whole case for
civilization is that the case for it is complex (284) … All sane men can see that sanity is
some kind of equilibrium (290) …’
The challenge which thence arose was that some element of humility was vital to
acceptance of this situation. ‘Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland’
(290) was how Chesterton put this.
‘Moreover, the vital insight [evident through Chesterton’s work is] that the ‘paradox’ is
‘parallel’, forming a common entity, as such. It does not consist of polarized,
contradictory or competitive elements. However, Chesterton sustained a particular
interpretation of what constituted equilibrium in this. ‘… There never was anything so
perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity … It was … equilibrium’ (297), he
wrote.
‘Vulnerability and fragility, rather than polarity and competitiveness would be our
touchstones in this, for Chesterton.’ (April 2005: 33)
‘… The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?
That is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The eons are easy enough to
think about, anyone can think about them (307) …’
‘However, failure to consider, say, the context of history, can be diabolical. Context is
crucial to the cultivation of substance, significance and relevance. The critical resonance
of context soon becomes evident (April 2005: 33).
‘Correspondingly, personal will enables autonomy and agency, which thereby serves
to mediate rationality.’ (April 2005: 34)
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As the poets Syme, representing convention and respectability, and Gregory,
representing revolution and revolt, sort through the terms of their complex facets of
paradox, this aspect of personal will, motives and intent infuses their quest with the terms
of rationality they accept in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). As Gregory reflects,
‘Does Syme think him ‘serious … in a deeper sense?’
(1908: 8)
So the grounding principle which emerges in this is ‘whether or not Gregory is considered
to be earnest by Syme’ (April 2005: 37). As Syme puts this, it is appropriate for ‘a man …
[to] keep something in the background of his life that is more serious than all this talking’
(1908: 8). Yet what is really sought in this, it seems, is a sense of earnest authenticity.
Correspondingly, although Gregory is presumed to harbour no respect or regard for
sentiment, as embodied through the ‘silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution’ (13),
yet he confesses an approach of intuitive spontaneous propensity in calling together
adherents of the ‘Anarchists of Europe’, a society ‘founded upon love’ (21).
Syme presumed for these early years of the 19th century that ‘… philosophers hate life
itself, their own as much as other peoples’ (30). Yet these philosophers were
characterized by ‘the one merit of disagreeing with each other’ (30) which meant ‘…
paradoxically they collectively represent the substance and bulwark of democracy’ (31)
‘Paradox bends around ideas and ideals in regular continuity, as Chesterton reveals the
phenomenon of emaciated whimsical notions which are alleged to form the basis of the
vague existential ideologies of the time’ (April 2005: 39)
A ‘sense of unnatural symbolism’ pervaded this situation whereby:
‘Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was
on the borderland of thought. He [Syme] knew that each one of these men stood at the
extreme end, so to speak, of some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end
of the world he would find something …’ (43)
Amid all this subtle intricacy, complexity and paradox, Syme was aware of championing
‘the commonplace’ (47): ‘… he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common
and kindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the music of the
barrel-organ … For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all the sprawling
eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of … the commonplace’ (47).
‘Later, Chesterton links Syme’s penchant and quality of intuition with the proficiency of
‘common sense’, through this continuous elaboration and application of paradoxical
elements.’ (April 2005: 41)
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‘Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not otherwise part of his
character. They were … poetic intuitions, and they sometimes rose to the exaltation of
prophecy.’ (85)
Chesterton, through an explanation of then contemporary times, revealed a broad
perspective of European geopolitical and ideological juxtapositions which corresponded
to Santayana’s resistance to the fatality of the First World War, as enunciated through the
character Oliver in The Last Puritan. ‘We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war
with a vast conspiracy. A secret society of anarchists is hunting us like hares … a rich and
powerful and fanatical church … which holds it holy to destroy mankind like vermin. How
hard they hunt us you can gather from the fact that we are driven to such disguises as this
one …’ (92)
Reality is characterized by a somewhat fraught aspect in this context.
‘Was there anything that was apart from what it seemed? … Was not everything, after all,
like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light?
‘Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten …’ (96)
Later the character Ratcliffe accordingly noted, ‘… most of old Sunday’s right-hand men
are millionaires who enabled him to control world-wide utilities, institutions and
communications systems’ (97).
Dr Bull later sought to exonerate what he construed as the public position in this. ‘… I
don’t think, and I never shall think, that the mass of ordinary men are a pack of dirty
modern thinkers. No, sir, I’m a democrat …’ (110) This was at odds with the earlier
perspective that it was the presence of such diverse ‘thinkers’ which underpinned the
reality of democracy …
‘Chesterton, through Syme, shows how the application of a mono-dimensional
perspective, rather than a richly paradoxical one, turns out to be the malady of all
humanity’.’ (43) ‘Listen to me … Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we
have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks
limited …’ (132)
‘… Syme ultimately emerges from what seems to be his dream …
‘Perceptions of the potential prospect of deep friendship, even Love, through sustained
appreciation and integrity, seems to pervade Syme’s closing realization.’ (April 2005:
44)
‘He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and
found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with
17
the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a
girl.’ (143)
Speculative reason in human experience
Meanwhile, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) later declared that ‘the final outlook of
philosophical thought cannot be based upon the exact statements of which form the basis
of special sciences’, as quoted by Runes (1955: 1216), and yet was able to retain ‘his
grand vision of the possibilities of abstract theory’ (1216) through his reconfiguration of
‘the subject-object relation [as] fundamental to knowledge’ (1216), as asserted by William
James in response to
Rene Descartes’ ‘sharp division between nature and mind’ (1217).
Whitehead described the subject-object distinction as the epitome of a new situation in
philosophical speculation. Accordingly, Whitehead retained ‘… the subject-object
18
relation as a fundamental structural pattern of experience, ‘but not in the sense in which
subject-object is identified with knower-known’ ’ (1217).
Whitehead maintained, ‘the living organ of experience is the living body as a whole’
(1217). ‘Human experience has its origin in the physical activities of the whole organism
which tends to readjustment when any part of it becomes unstable. Although such
experience seems to be more particularly related to the brain, Whitehead held that ‘we
cannot determine with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the body ends’.
Human experience therefore is defined as ‘an act of self-origination, including the whole
of nature …’ (1217)
‘Upon this concept of human experience, Whitehead founded his new philosophy of the
organism, his cosmology, his defense of speculative reason … The aim of his speculative
philosophy was ‘to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms
of which every item of our experience can be interpreted.’ (1217) Whitehead thought that
philosophy … [should be] ‘a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities,
balancing the fact, the theory, the alternatives and the ideal …’ (1217)
The culmination of Whitehead’s quest is a form of ‘elucidation … derived from speculative
thought’, which would enable ‘fact’ to form ‘the basis of authority’ (1218), as quoted from
the segment of Whitehead’s The Function of Reason (1929) Runes thenceforth
presents. A kind of dialectic of consistent continuity would emerge, spawning ‘the
progress from thought to practice’ (1218) and vice-versa. ‘This interplay of thought and
practice is the supreme authority’ (1218), Whitehead asserted. ‘It is the Stoic appeal to
the ‘voice of nature’ ‘ (1218).
Yet ‘the evidence’ thence elucidated through this element of authority is ‘confused,
ambiguous and contradictory’ and would serve to divest ‘all progress’ were it ever to be
codified and applied categorically. Hence the ‘need of discipline’ arises in construing
historical generality. The paradox of seeking ‘a discipline of the speculative reason’
becomes an operative prospect to transcend ‘immediate fact’ and ‘make thought creative
of the future’ through a ‘vision of systems of ideas’ (1218).
Basically, Whitehead’s invocation of ‘authority’ and ‘discipline’ in this context is consistent
with Chesterton’s affirmation of tradition and orthodoxy.
Chesterton situates these generative elements in the progressive continuity of history and
ontology, much as Whitehead considers them to be vital in the whole organic cosmology
of human enterprise or endeavour.
19
However, Chesterton seems to advocate emphatically a resurgent imperative of stability
as vital in all this, whereas Whitehead reasons: ‘… There is no true stability. What looks
like stability is a relatively slow process of atrophied decay. The stable universe is
slipping away from under us …’ (1219) Rather, progress is the ‘object of discipline’ for
Whitehead (1219).
Whitehead observed the generative dialectic of consistent continuity to be active in the
context of the early Greek philosophers, whom he revealed to be ‘unboundedly curious’
and therefore ‘speculative to a superlative degree’, yet ‘rigidly systematic’ in ‘clear
definition’ and ‘logical consistency’ (1219). ‘In fact, they invented logic in order to be
consistent’ (1219), he maintained. They were also ‘omnivorous in their interests’, which
meant they were less likely to become entrenched in their perspectives and ideas, or
enmeshed in particular notions.
Yet, ‘They very deliberately strove to combine [‘their interests’] into one coherent system
of ideas’, seeking ‘truths of the highest generality’, and thereby attended to the whole
body of their varied interests’ (1219). They were involved with ‘practical interests’.
Moreover, Plato specifically manifested a keen ‘appreciation … of the divergence
between the exactness of abstract thought and the vague margin of ambiguity which
haunts all observation …’ (1219-1220)
Ultimately, ‘the culmination of Greek speculation in Plato and Aristotle’ is evident through
‘the universality of their interests, the systematic exactness at which they aimed, and the
generality of their thought’ (1220).
The propensity of ‘speculative reason’ proposed by Whitehead is that
‘… it accepts the limitations of a special topic, such as science or a practical methodology.
It then seeks speculatively to enlarge and recast the categorical ideas within the limits of
that topic’ (1220-1221).
‘In the other way, it seeks to build a cosmology expressing the general nature of the world
as disclosed in human interests’ (1221). Accordingly, ‘institutions are intended to keep
such a cosmology in contact with reality … What those institutions stood for in the
experience of their contemporaries represents the massive facts of ultimate authority …’
(1221)
Therefore, Whitehead effectively presumed ‘institutions’ could be considered to proceed
autonomously, in and of themselves, a perspective I challenge, as evident through my
previous ‘State of The World’ Forum seminar papers.
‘The very fact of institutions to effect purposes witnesses to unquestioned belief that
foresight and purpose can shape the attainment of ends. The discordance over moral
codes witnesses to the fact of moral experience … The basis of every discord is some
common experience, discordantly realised’ (1221).
20
‘A cosmology … should not confine itself to the categorical notions of one science, and
explain away everything which will not fit in. Its business is not to refuse experience but to
find the most general interpretive system …
‘It generalizes beyond any special science, and this provides the interpretive system
which expresses their interconnection (1221) …’
Meanwhile, ‘… Reason intervenes in the capacity of arbiter and yet with a further
exercise of speculation (1222) … Cosmology sets out to be the general system of general
ideas applicable to this epoch of the universe. Abstraction is to be made from all
subordinate details. Thus there should be one cosmology presiding over many sciences.
Unfortunately this ideal has not been realized. The cosmological outlooks of different
schools … are largely inconsistent with each other ... So long as the dogmatic fallacy
infests the world, this discordance will continue … [Until] the true function of rationalism is
understood, that it is a gradual approach to ideas of clarity and generality, the discord is
what may be expected … The various cosmologies have in various degrees failed to
achieve the generality and clarity at which they aim (1222) … Descartes is obviously right,
in some sense or other, when he says that we have bodies and that we have minds, and
that they can be studied in some disconnection. It is what we do daily in practical life.
This philosophy makes a large generalization which obviously has some important
validity. But if you turn it into a final cosmology, errors will creep in (1222-1223).
‘The Art of Life’ – purpose and reason
At the outset of The Function of Reason, Whitehead reviews the presumed duality of
history whereby the inevitability of ‘degradation of energy’ and the springtime ‘renewal of
nature’ appear in contrast and ‘anarchic’ but for Reason as ‘the self-discipline of the
originative element in history’ (‘Introductory Summary’).
Whitehead recognizes the ‘nature of Reason’ as an ‘essence’ in itself amid ‘the welter of
our mental experiences, amid our intuitions, our emotions, our purposes, our decisions of
emphasis …’ (1929: 3) Relative to these human elements, ‘The Function of Reason is to
promote the art of life’ as a ‘preliminary definition’ (4), according to Whitehead.
Correspondingly, in this context, Whitehead cites the apogee of human experience as
‘the Art of Life’ (4), or what could be expressed in the more contemporary sense as
‘quality’ of life. ‘The art of persistence is to be dead’ (4), Whitehead emphatically insists
in response to the evolutionist preoccupation with ‘survival of the fittest’ (4). This
21
quandary cannot be resolved through mere ‘dogma’, which can only culminate in
elaborate abstracted ‘notions’ (5).
Quality of life as a focal criterion is evidenced through the context of humanity in the form
of what Whitehead cites as ‘a three-fold urge: i) to live, ii) to live well, iii) to live better’ (8).
‘In fact the art of life is first to be alive, secondly to be alive in a satisfactory way, and
thirdly to acquire an increase in satisfaction’ (8), Whitehead explains.
Amid these tendencies and/or inclinations:
‘… Reason is a factor in experience which directs and criticizes the urge towards the
attainment of an end realized in imagination but not in fact’ (8). As such, Reason can take
the form of ‘the operation of theoretical realisation’ (9), or else manifest as a form of
practicality (10).
However, any preoccupation with ‘method’ can eventuate in the constraint of Reason as
an element of discernment. ‘The man with a method good for purposes of his dominant
interests, is a pathological case in respect to his wider judgment in the coordination of this
method with a more complete experience … We all start by being empiricists. But our
empiricism is confined within our immediate interests (11). Some of the major disasters of
mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology (12)
…’
How such a situation proceeds is explained by Whitehead through the element of
‘purpose’ as a primary influence in ‘human affairs’ (13). ‘The conduct of human affairs is
entirely dominated by our recognition of foresight determining purpose, and purpose
issuing in conduct.’ (13) Consequently, methodologies designed to refute such
self-evident reality tended to falter manifestly from lack of credibility. ‘Many a scientist has
patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal
operations are motivated by no purposes.’ (16)
Hence a profound paradox infuses the context of method through the inception of a
deferral to a pervasive form of atrophied stability. ‘There is an active interest restraining
curiosity within the scope of the method.’ (17)
As Whitehead interprets this degradation of method:
‘… The main evidence that a methodology is worn out comes when progress within it no
longer deals with main issues … In its prime it satisfies the immediate conditions for the
good life. But the good life is unstable: the law of fatigue is inexorable (18) … It can
stabilize itself, and relapse so as to live; or it can shake itself free, and enter upon the
adventure of living better … when the species refuses adventure, there is relapse into the
well-attested habit of mere life (19) … In the stabilized life there is no room for Reason.
22
The methodology has sunk from a method to novelty into a method of repetition. Reason
is the organ of emphasis upon novelty. It provides the judgment by which it passes into
realization in purpose, and thence its realization in fact (20) …’
Moreover, the ever pervasive element of paradox consequently infiltrates the life cycle, as
Whitehead characterizes this through the continuity of this dynamic. ‘The Way of Rhythm
pervades all life, and indeed all physical existence …
The [life] cycle is such that its own completion provides the conditions for its own mere
repetition (21) … Provided that each cycle in itself is self-repairing, the fatigue from
repetition requires a high level of coordination of stretches of past experience … The
good life is attained by the enjoyment of contrasts within the scope of the method (22) …’
Thence Whitehead brings forth some perspectives of duality around his notion of
‘Fatigue’, which appears as the ‘antithesis of Reason’, and of ‘opportunity’ also, it would
seem (23). ‘Fatigue means the operation of excluding the impulse towards novelty. It
excludes the opportunities of the immediate stage at which life finds itself. That stage has
been reached by seizing opportunity … Mere repetition is the baffling of opportunity …
The urge of Reason, clogged with such inertia, is fatigue (23) … This stage of life never
truly attains stability. It represents a slow, prolonged decay in which the complexity of the
organism gradually declines towards simpler forms (24) …’
So Whitehead accepts a reality of inherent innate universal complexity. Reductionist
simplification being anathema in this perspective. Purpose and final causation are thence
associated with Reason. ‘In the animal body there is … clear evidence of activities
directed by purpose … Provided that we admit the category of final causation, we can
consistently define the primary function of Reason. This function is to constitute,
emphasise, and criticize the final causes and strength of aims directed towards them …
The pragmatic doctrine must accept this definition. It is obvious that pragmatism is
nonsense apart from final causation (26) … Reason is inexplicable if purpose be
ineffective …
‘This pragmatic function of Reason provides the agency proving the upward trend of
animal evolution (27) …’
Clearly, Whitehead appreciates causation as a blend of influences, rather than a form of
static balance. ‘A satisfactory cosmology must explain the interweaving of efficient and
of final causation. Such a cosmology will obviously remain an explanatory arbitrariness if
our doctrine of the two modes of causation takes the form of a mere limitation of one
mode by the intervention of the other mode (28) …
‘In this function of Reason is the practical embodiment of the urge to transform the good
existence into the better existence … But if we survey the universe of nature, mere static
survival seems to be the general rule, accompanied by a slow decay (28-29) …’
23
Further associated with this blended appreciation of causation are intuitive facets of
feeling and experience which serve to accordingly complexify this broad context. ‘…
Vacuity is the character of an abstraction, and is wrongly introduced into the notion of a
finally real thing, an actuality (30) … an actuality is a complex unity, which can be
analysed as a process of feeling its own components. This is the doctrine that each
actuality is an occasion of experience, the outcome of its own purposes … Such
experience is the sheer final enjoyment of being something (31) … The lowest form of
mental experience is blind urge towards a form of experience … of realization … This
urge is appetition. It is emotional purpose: it is agency … it brings the sheer vacuity of the
form into the realization of experience (32) …’
Whereas, ‘… mental experience contains in itself a factor of anarchy …
We enjoy the contrasts of our own variety in virtue of the order which removes the
incompatibility of mere diversity. Thus mental experience must itself be canalized into
order … In its lowest form, mental experience is canalized into slavish conformity (33) …
Reason civilizes the brute force of anarchic appetition (34) …
‘Reason is the enlightenment of purpose; within limits, it renders purpose effective (37) …
Reason … seeks … an understanding of the world (37-38) …
Its whole satisfaction is that experience has been understood. It presupposes life, and
seeks life rendered good with the goodness of understanding … It thus constitutes itself
[through] the urge from the good life to the better life … This is the speculative Reason
(38) … the perennial struggle between Reason and Authority is tinged with bitterness by
the intrusion of th[e] sentiment of an ultimate moral claim (39) …’
The aspect of blended morphology was always characteristic in the progress of
Reason. Whitehead explains in his terms how such a process is evident. ‘… The
speculative Reason produces that accumulation of theoretical understanding which at
critical moments enables a transition to be made toward new methodologies. Also the
discoveries of the practical understanding provide the raw material necessary for the
success of the speculative Reason (39) …’ However, the early Greek influence seemed
to actually skew this process away from a broad appreciation of intuition. ‘… Their
discovery of mathematics and of logic introduced method into speculation. Reason was
now armed with an objective text and with a method of progress (40) … It produced
systems instead of inspirations (41) …’
This underpins Whitehead’s concern at the enervation of artistic influence, which can be
extended to apply to the intellectual realm from my perspective.
‘We seem to care less about art. Perhaps we have more to think about, and so neglect to
cultivate our aesthetic impulses (42) …’
Moreover, Whitehead proclaims, based on the impressive antecedents of our civilization:
‘… We should be on the threshold of an advance in all the values of human life (43) …’
24
Yet ‘obscurantism’ blights us from this realization. ‘… Obscurantism is the refusal to
speculate freely on the limitations of traditional methods’ and ‘the negation of the
importance of such speculation’ (43).
Further, ‘The obscurantists of any generation are in the main constituted by the
practitioners of the dominant ideology (44) …’
The purposive element of Reason prefigures a promotive sense of progress for
Whitehead. ‘… The power of going for the penetrating idea, even if it has not yet been
worked into any methodology, is what constitutes the progressive force of Reason (45) …
The understanding of a civilization is the understanding of its limits (46) …’
Correspondingly, for instance, ‘… The men of the Renaissance wore their learning ...
lightly … They tempered it with the joy of direct experience. Thus another ancient secret
was discovered … the habit of looking for oneself, the habit of observation (46) …’
Whereas before then, as now, ‘… There is the sense of dazed men groping, so far as
concerns intellectual interests (47) …
‘Science has been developed under the impulse of the speculative Reason, [or] the
desire for explanatory knowledge (48) … But the understanding of the proper functions of
speculative thought was hampered by the fallacy of dogmatism.
‘It was conceived that metaphysical thought started from principles which were clear,
distinct and certain (49) …’ Through such ‘… scientific materialism … [the] ultimate truths
about nature are then not capable of any explanatory interpretation (49-50) …’
Consequently, there was a ‘natural human tendency to turn a successful methodology
into a dogmatic creed’ (50) … theology, by reason of its formulation of questions
concerning our most intimate, sensitive interests, has always shrunk from facing the
moments of bewilderment inherent in any tentative approach to the formulation of ideas
(50) …’ Except that, rather than ‘theology’ as such doing this, this was really an outcome
of human interpretations of theology’ (50).
Meanwhile, ‘cooperation’ was the vital catalyst in this.
‘But the pursuit of knowledge is a cooperative enterprise, and the repudiation of the
relevance of diverse modes of approach … requires more justification than appeal to the
limitations of individual activities (51) …’
Correspondingly, the element and quality of ‘intuition’ was also crucial, as evidenced
through Whitehead’s assessment of Newton’s legacy.
‘His hypotheses speculatively embodied the truth vaguely discerned; they embodied this
truth in a definite formulation which far outran the powers of analytic intuition of his age
(52) …’
Evidence seems to prevail that such deficient intuition remains apparent.
25
‘The modern doctrine, popular among scientists, is that science is the mere description of
things observed. As such it assumes nothing, neither an objective world, nor causation,
nor induction … Thus the quest of science is simplicity of description. The conclusion is
that science, thus defined, needs no metaphysics (54) …’
Nevertheless, ‘… we have got to account for the experiences of the unlearned multitude
… What on earth has the mere mathematical formula to do with the experiences of th[e]
multitude? (57) …’ asks Whitehead. After all, ‘Undoubtedly it is possible to express the
procedure of science with a happy ambiguity which can receive interpretation from a
variety of metaphysical schools (53-54) …’
This resembles the equivalent quality of authentic equanimity for me.
Also, intuition remains vital in this whole complex context.
‘There can be no metaphysics of nature, and no approach to metaphysics, by scanning
the order of nature. For nature is a mere derivative appearance; and when we consider it,
we are remote from any intuition which tells of final truths (60) …’
Consequently, ‘… Philosophy has ceased to claim its proper generality, and natural
science is content with the narrow round of its methods (61) …’
Whitehead reveals the basically pragmatic character of the aspect of specific method
applied to Reason. ‘Reason which is methodic is content to limit itself within the bounds
of a successful method (65-66). It works in the secure daylight of traditional practical
activity. It is the discipline of shrewdness. Reason which is speculative questions the
methods, refusing to let them rest (66) …’
Eventually, Whitehead presents succinctly what he proposes to be the basic elemental
legacy of ‘Greek logic’ (67). Clearly stated as vital facets of these elements are certain
qualities which I’ve previously enunciated and elucidated comprehensively in this context
– intuition, consistency, experience and consequence.
‘i) Conformity to intuitive experience; ii) Clarity of propositional content;
iii) Internal Logical consistency; iv) External Logical consistency; v) Status of a Logical
scheme with: a) widespread conformity to experience,
b) no discordance with experience, c) coherence among its categorical notions, d)
methodological consequences (67-68) …’
However, in the context of the ‘modern’ era, there are patent inadequacies in the
application of these principles, according to Whitehead. ‘The moderns have, equally with
the Greeks, assumed that it is easy to formulate exactly expressed propositions. They
have also assumed the interrogation of experience is a straightforward operation (68) …’
26
As revealed through The Community Project Deep Friendship and other resources, such
reductionist notions remain severely deplete.
As Whitehead observes, ‘… the analysis of experience without the introduction of
interpretive elements … is extremely difficult (68-69) …’
Correspondingly, Whitehead advocates ‘… recourse to a system of ideas, whose mutual
relevance shall lend to each other clarity, and which hang together, so that the verification
of some reflects upon the verification of others (69) … [thereby] generating ideas
coherent with itself and receiving continuous verification (69-70) … a scheme of ideas
provides its own measure of definiteness by the mutual relatedness of its own categorical
methods (70) … The production of a scheme is a major effort of the speculative Reason.
It involves imagination far outrunning the direct observations (71) …’
Such schemes ‘… represent the capital of ideas which each age holds in trust for its
successors … For if there be no scheme to fit into, [the] significance [of these] is lost (72)
…’
Further refinement of this thesis then proceeds from Whitehead.
‘The secret of progress is the speculative interest in abstract schemes of morphology (73)
… The point is that the development of abstract theory precedes the understanding of fact
… The art of the speculative Reason consists quite as much in the transcendence of
schemes as in their utilization (75) …
‘To set limits to speculation is treason to the future … But the weaving itself requires
discipline (76) …’ Meanwhile, ‘… The obscurantists of all ages exhibit th[is] principle …
All common sense is with them. Their only serious antagonist is History (76) …’
Amid all these developments, it was important for a broad schematic context to prevail,
which would constitute a cosmology. ‘… Cosmology is the effort to frame a scheme of the
general character of the present stage of the universe (76) …’
Consequently, an amended holistic perspective of the common notion of experience is
required, Whitehead maintains. ‘There is a conventional view of experience … This view
conceives conscious experience as a clear-cut knowledge of clear-cut items with
clear-cut connections with each other. This is the conception of a trim, tidy, finite
experience uniformly illuminated. No notion could be further from the truth (78) … the
clarity cannot be segregated from the vagueness … The whole forms a system, but when
27
we set out to describe the system direct intuition plays us false … the penetration of
intuition follows upon the expectation of thought. This is the secret of attention (79) …
‘The basis of all authority is the supremacy of fact over thought … thought is a factor in the
fact of experience … The quality of an act of experience is largely determined by the
factor of the thinking which it contains … thought irrelevant to the wide world of
experience, is unproductive (80) …’
Yet, according to Whitehead, ‘… fact is supreme over thought. This is the basis of
authority (80) … there is the progress from thought to practice, and regress from practice
to the same thought. This interplay of thought and practice is the supreme authority (81)
…’
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Continuity in being, significance and meaning
It seemed perceptual realms became somewhat more subjectively configured after the
horrific, sobering, debilitating catastrophe of the Second World War.
Consequently, Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) writes in The Doors of Perception (1954),
‘We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all
circumstances we are by ourselves (7) … By its very nature every embodied spirit is
doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these
are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can
pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family
to nation, every human group is a society of island universes …
‘Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential
understanding or even of mutual empathy or ‘feeling into’ (8) …’
However, another more entrenched form of dualised perspective remains prominent
which tends to confound any prospective perceived mutuality or empathy: ‘… in certain
cases communication between universes is incomplete or even non-existent. The mind
is its own place … Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which
the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience (8) …’
Such retained sense, perception and perspective evokes a much more restrained aspect
of the form of organic consistent continuity which flows through Whitehead’s work, and/or
the broad deep context of antecedent tradition and cultural perpetuity, amid the ominous
tide of history, explored by Chesterton.
Faith and belief in any broad form of socio-communal continuity seems somewhat devoid
of significance from such individually oriented perspectival analysis. Here the sense of
belonging – or at least of everyone situated in the context of life together in association
with each other – seems vaguely appreciated through Huxley’s elegy on the existential
reality of ‘every human group’ as an ‘island universe’ (8), with people tending to remain by
themselves in the broad context of their ‘circumstances’ (7).
29
Huxley admits to some substantial incapacity in himself to ‘visualise’: ‘Words … do not
evoke pictures in my mind … When I recall something, the memory does not present itself
to me as a vividly seen event or object (10) …’
Consequently, it would seem, through the influence of a stimulant, it is ‘the miracle,
moment by moment, of naked existence’ (11) which thence intervenes as prominent for
him as he seeks to interpret the profound experience of his apparent altered state of
consciousness.
Accordingly, Huxley recognizes his everyday reality in this context as whatever ‘just is ‘
(12). He presumes to somehow realize the comprehensive scope of the Platonic
relations of ‘Being’ through ‘becoming’ to ‘Idea’. ‘… Plato seems to have made the
enormous, the grotesque, mistake of separating Being from becoming, and identifying it
with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea (12) …’
Therefore, from this aspect, some flowers Huxley observed were appreciated by him as
‘… a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet
self-evident paradox was to be seen the divine sense of all existence … [with] the flowers
… breathing … from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning
(12) … [and] a profounder significance (13) …’
Moreover, the primary everyday concerns of ‘Where? – How far? – How situated in
relation to what?’ were subsumed into broader considerations of meaning, significance
and existential patterns. Primarily, ‘… The really important facts were that spatial
relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world
in terms of other than spatial categories … Place and distance cease to be of much
interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of
significance, relationships within a pattern … The mind was primarily concerned, not with
measures and locations, but with being and meaning (14) … My actual experience had
been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively a perpetual present (15) …’
As a pretext to his broad consideration of how the dynamics of sense, mind and brain
interaction work out in the realm of perception through the perspective of the philosopher
C D Broad, following Bergsonian theory of memory and sense perception, Huxley notes:
‘Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to
him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The
function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and
confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most
of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that
very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful (16) …’
Thence Huxley explains the consequence of this situation.
30
‘According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large …
‘To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the
reducing valve of the brain and nervous system … To formulate and express the contents
of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol
systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once
the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born
(16-17) …’
Language thence emerges as the transformative element in the trajectory from
perception to awareness. Linguistic formulation can thereby be considered to intervene
in common discourse in a way which could be interpreted as the equivalent of discursive
practice.
‘Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is
consecrated as genuinely real by the local language.
‘Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the
reducing valve … Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows …
something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected
utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least
sufficient, picture of reality (17) …’
Huxley found from his experimentation with altered consciousness that when sugar or
glucose is reduced: ‘… Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is
enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse (18) … and loses
all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an
organism bent of getting on in the world (19) … Rather, the predominant perception
acquired is that: ‘All is in all [and] All is actually each’ (19) !
How this form of acute awareness proceeds in actual everyday reality for Huxley and
others of his ilk is that ‘… the percipient [becomes] aware of innumerable fine shades of
difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind (20) …’
So, as Huxley provides an instance of this from his personal experience,
‘… when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own
crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant
complexity ! And the texture of the grey flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously
sumptuous (22-23) …’
31
There is a palpable sense in which Huxley is aware of broadened perception on his own
part in this. While the source of the perception is somewhat universal, and at least
situated beyond or without him, Huxley is at least aware he is somehow tuned into this.
Evidence he is able to appreciate, discern, interpret and even modulate his experience of
perception is apparent from his sensitivity to, and elaboration of, the deep meaning and
significance of perceptual elements.
Yet it further remains clear from Huxley’s linkage of his experience with the broad reality
of perception that the perceptual source, which clearly infuses Huxley’s experience, and
thereby vitalizes it, in some sense at least exudes his comprehension of reality from
without. Thus perceptual awareness then proceeds in such a form that it basically forms
a common thread of evolution and continuity.
Perception for the artist ‘… is not limited to what is biologically and socially useful’ (25),
Huxley observes. This realization presumes ‘… a knowledge of the intrinsic significance
of every existent’ such that some ‘Mind at Large’ oozes past the reducing valve of brain …
into his consciousness’ (25).
Huxley advocates ‘beholders’ attend closely to this phenomenon enough for them to ‘…
understand at least a little of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call ‘mere things’ (26) …’
The visionary alternative is ‘how one ought to see’ (26) Huxley insists.
However, the emphatic inevitable retort would thence proceed:
‘… But in that case what about other people? … ‘What about human relations?’ How
could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the temporal
duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel? (26) …’
Thus inevitably Huxley is faced with the stark imperative of moral considerations, just as
Chesterton explored the profound paradox of how these fraught moral dimensions and
perspectives could work out feasibly in the context of the organic moral continuity and
consistency raised by Whitehead vis-à-vis Santayana’s prospects of altruist ideals and
ideas conveyed through truly practical interpretation.
Yet Huxley is persistently confounded in this through ‘… the world of selves, of time, of
moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world … of self-assertion, of
cocksureness, of over-valued words and idolatrously worshipped notions (27) …’
Graphically, as ever, Huxley reveals how this stark configuration of perspectives forms
out through the dualist or polarized integument of their inevitable over-expression. ‘…
The age-old debate between the actives and the contemplatives was being renewed –
32
renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented poignancy. For until this
morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms – as
discursive thinking (31) …’
So here we have an early incursion by Huxley into the realm of expression as conveyed
through ‘discursive’ practice, such as would emanate through discourse and
conversation. The instance he then provides of such ‘discursive thinking’ being ‘… as a
rapt absorption in poetry or painting, or music (31) …’
Further, Huxley elucidates:
‘… But now I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For
in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its
own higher power (31-32) …’
Thence Huxley considered his situation as accessible to ‘… contemplation – but to a
contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very
thought of action (32) …’
However, even Huxley could recognize viable alternative situations and human states in
this. For instance, it was possible to be an ‘active contemplative’, who could remain
reflective and reflexive while still enabling compassionate initiative, or else a ‘Bodhisattva’
for whom contingencies requiring compassion could form the pretext for both
‘transfiguring insight’ and ‘practical clarity’ (32).
Moreover, ‘ethical values’ by implication always permeated such situational contexts,
even given predominantly ‘negative’ dispositions, as Huxley thence proposed. ‘… Half at
least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief … The one-sided
contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it he
refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. The sum of evil, Pascal remarked,
would be much diminished if men could only sit quietly in their rooms (33) …’
While, ‘… The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay
in his room. He can go about his business … completely satisfied to see and be a part of
the divine Order of Things … [for] when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what
motive can we have for covetousness or self- assertion, for the pursuit of power or the
drearier forms of pleasure? (33) …’
Huxley reports no shortage of ‘visionaries’, even in the modernist context.
‘The mental species to which Blake belonged is fairly widely distributed even in the
urban-industrial societies of the present day (35) … The untalented visionary may
perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world
33
beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic
symbols, what he has seen (36) …’
Therefore, aesthetic discernment and values were prominent in the scope of perception
and values in this context. ‘Form the records of religion and the surviving monuments of
poetry and the plastic arts it is very plain that, at most times and in most places, men …
felt that what they saw with their eyes shut possessed a spiritually higher significance
than what they saw with their eyes open. The reason? … Familiarity breeds contempt …
What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred
to look within ! (36) …’
Yet, as Santayana revealed, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention’
(1896: 103). So, particularly in this realm of aesthetics so revered by Santayana, it could
be clearly inferred and affirmed that the malady of familiarity derives from the reluctance
of any ‘visionary’ in question to attend to their experience through a much more finely
focused referential ground, along with paradoxically greater comprehensive scope of
awareness and perception.
Actually, Huxley provides some parallel insight into how such ‘inattention’ may have
prevailed and been derived, although this constitutes only a particular perspective on this
dilemma. ‘… Because of their doctrine of the Word made flesh, Christians should have
been able, from the first, to adopt a similar attitude towards the universe around them.
But because of the doctrine of the Fall, they found it very hard to do so (36) …’ This
prospect, in itself, provides some peremptory insight into the constrained and/or
compromised aspect of humanity whereby the ‘inattention’ to which Santayana refers
could take root and become entrenched.
As he proceeds to enunciate the nature of his perception, Huxley ultimately seeks to
elucidate how any utilitarian structural compartmental perspective of reality and
phenomena cannot constitute a feasible context through which to appreciate the
inevitable deterioration and deconstruction associated with humanity, or the sense of
flawed ‘progress’ enunciated by Chesterton.
‘… The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than
in a completely coherent work. At least you aren’t lulled into a sense of false security by
some merely human, merely fabricated order.
‘You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order.
‘So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it is
dangerous, horribly dangerous (39-40) …
34
‘All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by
forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
‘When it does anything more – when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when
it becomes apprehensive about the future – it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and
may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill (41) …
‘… Today the percept had swallowed up the concept …
‘Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow – these were no more than names and notions,
mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event (42) …’
Through this latter observation the elements of discursive practice seem evident and
prominent. Therefore, paradoxically, it may thence be conceded ‘the concept’ seems to
have also ‘swallowed up … the percept’.
Consequently, it follows a more resonantly particular realization of how percept is
constituted and derived becomes vital in this context.
Eventually, Huxley explains how the venture to broach ever ‘deeper significance’
culminates in an inevitable straying away from the ‘cosy world of symbols’ from his
perspective (43).
‘I found myself all at once on the brink of panic.
‘This, I suddenly felt, was going too far.
‘Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear,
as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure
of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of
symbols, could possibly bear (43) …’
The pathology emergent from a further extreme experience of this state would be ‘… the
inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality … in the home-made universe of
common sense – the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially
acceptable conventions (44) …
‘That was the problem – to remain undistracted’ (45-46), Huxley notes, in implicit
acquiescence with Santayana’s earlier stated exhortation. While, for those affected by
extreme distraction, Huxley attests: ‘… Let there be a voice to assure them, by day and
even while they are asleep, that in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and
confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as
the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind … Perhaps a few … lost souls
35
might … be helped to win some measure of control over the universe – at once beautiful
and appalling, but always totally incomprehensible (46) …’
Huxley chronicles how aesthetic quality, value, and sense perception in the contemporary
context have substantially deteriorated into metaphorical emblems of existential escape.
‘… Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous,
poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a
few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and
religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served,
in H G Well’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall (49) …’
So the celebrated ‘Doors of Perception’ soon seem to be reduced to ‘Doors in the Wall’ of
everyday customary existence.
Further, ‘… The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone
almost all the time (50) …’
Most significantly, G K Chesterton is conferred with Huxley’s abundant sustained
reverence and admonition in this context. ‘… Ideally, everyone should be able to find
self-transcendence in some form of pure or applied religion … There are, and doubtless
always will be, good churchmen and good churchwomen for whom, unfortunately, piety is
not enough. The late G K Chesterton, who wrote at least as lyrically of drink as of
devotion, may serve as their eloquent spokesman (54) …’
Even though Huxley considered it was quite ‘unlikely’ such religious ‘self-transcendence’
could ever work out ‘in practice’ (54).
Yet certainly Huxley considered the rationalist hyper-utilitarian impetus of ‘the rich and
highly educated whites’ (57) served to ‘… cover our anterior nakedness with some
philosophy – Christian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalist – but abaft we remain uncovered, at
the mercy of all the winds of circumstance (58) …’ Thereby such contemporary
ideologies lack depth and substantial grounding.
Moreover, ‘… To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception’ (58) engenders a much
more substantial perceptual experience to what would ‘… appear to an animal obsessed
with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions’ (58).
Accordingly, ‘… the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, ‘the
word is essentially fruitful’ … And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the
supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of
the word. ‘We talk,’ he wrote in middle life, ‘far too much. We should talk less and draw
more (58) … That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting
36
its future – all these are momentous signatures … how the gravity of Nature and her
silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren
ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills’ (59) …’
Huxley concurs:
‘… We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems …
‘But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We
must learn to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if
necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that
half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar
likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction … Literary or scientific, liberal or
specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal … it inflicts upon the world students of
the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s (59) …
‘Gestalt psychologists, such as Samuel Renshaw, have devised methods for widening
the range and increasing the activity of human perceptions (60) …’ However, Huxley
lamented such initiatives were broadly ignored then (that is, in 1954).
‘In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but
impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always
money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for
scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? (60-61)
…
‘ ‘I have always found, ‘Blake wrote rather bitterly, ‘that Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the only wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from
systematic reasoning.’
‘Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly
do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct
perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we
have been born. This given reality … is a transcendence belonging to another order than
the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced
participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent
otherness – to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to
think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.
Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we
make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves (62) …’
37
Ethics and aesthetics in continuity, history and existence
If intuition is a true form of essence, distinguished from knowledge, with imagination the
ground of cultivation, as Santayana proposed (1937), this implies a source through which
such qualities of intuition and imagination could be considered to be derived. Providence
would thence emerge as the volitional impetus of such a form of essence, which could be
discerned through ‘intertwined derivation’ in the moral context. ‘Faith’ maintained through
‘fortitude’ could comprise the momentum of this moral ‘equilibrium’ (77), through ‘ideas’
flowering ‘into harmonies’ (312).
So, following this moral ‘tapestry’ (187) to its culmination through integrity, we are
admonished: ‘refine your perceptions’ and ‘purify your motives’ (199-200). Meanwhile,
38
‘the inspirations of the heart’, when refined would become the source of ‘trust’ in this.
‘Nature, truth, God’ would constitute the source of this essence, which provides the
sustenance for human qualities and/or attributes.
Correspondingly, if ‘every event is providential’ (14), such providence would sustain
purpose, while the influence of perception in this situation would remain distinctive if it
could be posited that ‘materially considered no perception recurs’ (22). However, despite
the distinctiveness of perception, ‘harmony and cooperation’ (70) would supremely
manifest the ideal. Yet paradoxically in this ‘… the passions are humanized only by being
juxtaposed and forced to live together’ (68). Meanwhile, if ‘Reason, like beauty, is its own
excuse for being’ (79), then reason and beauty respectively would be derived from the
perceptual essence which sustains Providence.
Moreover, if ‘Aesthetics … is the theory of perception or of susceptibility …’ (12), then
perception is linked to the volition which emanates from essence.
This process consequently sustains human interest.
‘Things are interesting because we care about them, and important because we need
them’ (4), while ‘ethics … considers the causes of events and their consequences’ (5).
Essence would be directly evident through our nature – our humanity – if appreciation of
beauty derives from perception. Meanwhile, the deep resonance of our nature would be
our link to universal truth. This profound resonance with the universal would be realized
through essence, ‘which … is explanatory of intuition, assures the form of apperception,
elucidates existence, and helps … [the realization] of the changing existences’ ([1905]
1955: 1043). Moreover, ‘It is essence by means of which the pursuit, attention and
feelings which contribute to knowledge are transcended in aesthetic, moral and verbal
terms into consciousness (1043) …’
The paradox of perceptual influence thence emanates from and infuses the whole
phenomenon of transition and change. ‘Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by
accepting modification and now by imposing it’ (1044).
Intent infuses art and language.
Hence, ‘… language is a natural product, not because it always has a use or meaning, but
because it is sometimes felt to have one (1045) …’
39
Thus, ‘Utility like significance, is an eventual harmony in the arts and by no means their
ground (1048) … What makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces
in nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the life of reason;
in other words progress is art bettering the conditions of existence’ in that it ‘establishes
the ground … [of] values’ (1051).
Consequently, ‘… imagination, has pleasures more airy and luminous than those of
sense’ while imaginative values ‘… in sense endowed with form, are called aesthetic
values’ (1052).
Chesterton seems to revive this moral imperative of ethics and aesthetics, then locates it
in the context of continuity, history and existence. From this aspect, utility is a much more
recessive element. Accordingly, while Santayana declares, ‘Utility like significance is an
eventual harmony in the arts and by no means their ground …’ (1048), Chesterton
effectively responds, ‘Morality is the ground through which true art is cultivated’ (April
2005: 4). So that ‘nothing sublimely derives from ‘mere art’, nor does ‘anything essentially
reasonable’ derive from ‘pure reason’ (1953: 126).
Through our common humanity, our utility in language now obscures our propensity to
discern ‘pure reason’ from what we consider to be ‘reasonable’. Hence ‘… a phrase can
be falsified by use, without being false in fact’ (85). While, consequently the narrative
element of history and the resonance of ‘ a place to be’ (April 2005: 13), or to live, such as
the ‘fireside’ (1920: 142), resonates deeply for Chesterton.
So ‘… we have to love our neighbour because he is ‘there’ (79), which for me
reverberates through the perspective of our responsibility to situate, rather than position,
ourselves in our life circumstances. Meanwhile, the quest for essence persists in that
‘poetry’ and religion … must appeal to the origins … the first things’ of life, in that what
‘every man knows about the unknowable [origin or essence] is indispensible’ (167-168).
Consequently, ‘tradition’ from this aspect is not ‘some isolated or arbitrary method’ but
derives from ‘a consensus of common human voices’ which enable tradition to be
‘extended through time’ (255).
However, Chesterton seems to reach forth to where each person is situated in all this
such that he seems more particularly endowed with a cogent sense of universal
interpersonal reality than Santayana: ‘… magic must have meaning, and meaning must
have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world’ (268). Thus
‘primary loyalty’ (277), really as a form of originative essence, becomes vital, along with
‘emotions’ and ‘motive’ in this context. Beyond ‘facts, it is essential to know what are his
emotions, what is his motive’ (272-273), Chesterton writes in relation to ‘the pessimist’.
Therefore, the inherent challenge which arises is that the world, or reality, ‘… is nearly
reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians’ (282). So
40
‘orthodoxy’ is ‘perilous’, with the touchstone being a ‘parallel’ form of ‘paradox’ which
gravitates around ‘equilibrium’ (290, 297). Thus, while it follows ‘true philosophy is
concerned with the instant’ of choice or decision-making (307), nevertheless, as the poet
character, Syme, from Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday declares, it is wise for ‘a man [to] keep something in the
background of his life that is more serious than all this talking’ (1908: 8)
– or to acquire what I term earnest authenticity.
While in the modernity of Chesterton’s time, the characters in his novel ‘seemed to be on
the borderland of things … their theory was on the borderland of thought’ (43), the poet
Syme considered the everyday aspect of life ‘from the starry pinnacle of … the
commonplace’ (47).
Hence the intrepid quest for earnest authenticity appears for me the resonant prospective
touchstone in all this complexity. ‘Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering
woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always
unforeseen, and always forgotten’ (46).
Sustained appreciation and integrity would be the optimal prospect to ultimately emerge
from all this complexity.
Through his analyses, Alfred North Whitehead seems sensitive to Chesterton’s limits of
reason and logic: ‘… the final outlook of philosophical thought cannot be based upon the
exact statements which form the basis of special sciences’ ([1929] 1955: 1216), he
observed. Meanwhile, his alternative perspective was that experience originated through
organic wholeness. Life is analogous to experience. ‘Human experience has its origin in
the physical activities of the whole organism (1217) …’
Consistent continuity could be cited as the epitome of ‘the progress from thought to
practice’ and the ‘interplay of thought and practice [as] the supreme authority’ (1218).
Moreover, Whitehead invokes ‘authority’ and ‘discipline’ as Chesterton invokes tradition
and orthodoxy. For Whitehead, ‘… There is no true stability’ (1219).
The ‘speculative reason’ Whitehead advocates ‘… accepts the limitations of a special
topic [‘science or … methodology’, for instance] … it seeks to build a cosmology
expressing the general nature of the world as disclosed human interests … A cosmology
… should not confine itself to the categorical notions of one science, and explain away
everything which will not fit in (1221) …
‘Reason intervenes in the capacity of arbiter and yet with a further exercise of speculation’
(1222).
41
Whitehead in The Function of Reason (1929) recognizes the ‘nature of Reason’ as an
‘essence’ in itself amid ‘the welter of our mental experiences, amid our intuitions, our
emotions, our purposes, our decisions of emphasis (3) …’
While it is ‘the function of Reason’ to promote ‘the Art of Life’ (4).
Quality of life values and principles then become vital through the ‘free-fold urge: i) to live,
ii) to live well, iii) to live better, which correspond with Santayana’s similar advice to live
accordingly.
For Whitehead, as ‘Reason … directs and criticizes the urge towards attainment of an end
realized in imagination’ (8), it ostensibly serves a more specific and directive purpose than
through its more expansive fluid sense established by Santayana and Chesterton. This
emphasis for Whitehead emanates from his more proactive perspective of ‘purpose’ as
broadly influential in ‘human affairs’ (13), and as ‘dominated by our recognition of
foresight determining purpose’ (13). However, for Whitehead, ‘There is an active interest
restraining animosity within the scope of the method’ (17).
Therefore, like Chesterton, Whitehead seeks a more innovative explorative sense of
‘stability’, such as would correspondingly infuse aspects such as ‘tradition’ and
‘orthodoxy’ for Chesterton. Accordingly, ‘fatigue’ must ‘enter upon the adventure of living
better’, rather than ‘stabilise itself, and relapse so as to live’ (18, 19), Whitehead explains.
Reason is absent from ‘the stabilized life’ which lapses into ‘repetition’ (20) for Whitehead.
‘Reason is the organ of emphasis upon novelty’ (20) …
‘Mere repetition [through ‘fatigue’] is the baffling of opportunity’ (23).
Inherent in ‘Reason’ is the presence of ‘final causation’, or a universal sense of purpose.
However, Whitehead seems to imply a palpable blend of all these elements, rather than a
prevalent form of static balance, through ‘the interweaving … of final causation’ (28).
Hence ‘appetition … is emotional purpose: it is agency … it brings … the form into the
realization of experience’ (32). Although such ‘experience must … be canalized into
order’ (33) effectively in a form of reverberation of Santayana’s perspective of the ‘form’ of
idea and ideal.
Consequently, a blended morphology of methodology through transition is inherent in
Whitehead’s analysis for me. Regrettably, ‘obscurantism’ as ‘the refusal to speculate
freely on the limitations of traditional method’ (43) offsets the emergence of such diversely
situated methodology. Whereas ‘speculative Reason’, as ‘the desire for exploratory
knowledge’ (48) is essential in the context of ‘pursuit of knowledge [as] a cooperative
enterprise’ (51).
42
Thus, optimally ‘science’ through ‘a happy ambiguity … [could] receive interpretation from
a variety of metaphysical schools’ (53-54). This would epitomize my equivalent quality of
authentic equanimity.
Whitehead advocates ‘recourse to a system of ideas’ grounded in ‘mutual relevance’
and ‘mutual relatedness’ (69-70) such that the ‘significance’ of all these elements would
not be ‘lost’ (72). The ‘penetration of intuition’ is the vital primary quality in this process,
being ‘the secret of attention’ (79), as it was for Santayana in his transcendence of
familiarity through focused attention. There is no authentic form of ‘trim, tidy, finite
experience’ (78). For, paradoxically as ever, ‘the clarity cannot be segregated from the
vagueness … The whole forms a system’ (79).
However, since the Second World War, with the world gripped in the throes of profound
destruction and degradation in historical social and moral cohesion, Aldous Huxley in The
Doors of Perception (1954) proclaims the paradoxical circumstance of each person as
being ‘by ourselves’ yet ‘living together’ (7). Hence, ‘sensations, feelings, insights … all
these are private’ (8). Only we can live ‘the experiences themselves’ (8) we face in life,
with increased prospective ‘mutual empathy’ for others (8). Our ‘symbols [words] refer’
and belong ‘to mutually exclusive realms of experience’ (8), which could seem antithetical
to Whitehead’s organic consistent continuity or Chesterton’s perpetual antecedent
tradition.
Yet Huxley recognizes the importance of everyday reality as it ‘just is’ (12), realizing the
significance of Whitehead’s sense of continuity and Chesterton’s perpetual tradition, such
that he challenges the Platonic perspective of realizing ‘relations of Being’ through
‘becoming’ to ‘Idea’. While Huxley is alert to the trajectory of derived ‘deeper meaning’
(12) culminating in ‘a profounder significance’ (13), particularly resonant with Whitehead’s
sense of ‘mind’ being ‘primarily concerned not with measures and locations, but with
being and meaning’ (14) which links with Whitehead’s critique of ‘obscurantism’ and
banal utility.
Whereas, however, Huxley subscribes to the perspective of ‘the brain and nervous
system’ serving as a filtering system through which whatever is ‘practically useful’ (16)
may be derived. While he realizes the place of languages and ‘symbol systems’ in this,
he observes the evident paradox that:
‘Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into
which he or she has been born’ (16-17).
43
For Huxley attests to the imperative to realize ‘… something different from the carefully
selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or
at least sufficient, picture of reality’ (17). Rather as Whitehead, Chesterton and
Santayana recognize in diverse forms it is vital ‘… the percipient [becomes] aware of
innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind’
(2). While perception as a comprehension of reality somehow comes from without for
Huxley.
Moreover, ‘knowledge of intrinsic significance’ (25) becomes vital in this, along with the
moral and ethical imperative of ‘what one ought to do and … [how] one ought to feel (26)
…’ So thence Chesterton’s profound paradox of moral dimensions thence comes to link
with Whitehead’s organic continuity and consistency in the context of Santayana’s
altruistic ideals and ideas through the element of significance, which is interpreted as
‘intrinsic’ by Huxley.
This congruence of perspectives intersects with the ‘age-old debate between the actives
and the contemplatives’ (31) which tends to culminate in ‘discursive thinking’ epitomized
by ‘rapt absorption’ (31), and so also by Whitehead’s ‘obscurantism’, along with
Santayana’s proposed prevalence of the ideal.
However, one can always seek to be an authentic blended ‘active contemplative’! (32)
Meanwhile, ‘motive’ remains critical in this context for Huxley (33), along with authentic
discernment and values.
As ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ (36), ‘higher significance’ is often derived more from ‘eyes
shut’ than ‘eyes open’ in a ‘spiritual’ sense (36).
Yet, following Santayana, ‘familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention’
(1896: 103). Thus the ‘visionary’ is situated to seek a more finely focused referential
ground in this. While, ultimately, ‘You have to rely on your immediate perception of the
ultimate order’ (1954: 39-40). However, ‘Today the percept had swallowed up the
concept’ (42). Yet, paradoxically as ever, the concept seems to swallow the percept
when discursive practice impairs a ‘deeper significance’ from the ‘cosy emerging world of
symbols’ (43).
Whatever the situation, ‘the home-made universe of common sense’ cannot sustain
‘refuge from inner and outer reality (44) … the problem [being] to remain undistracted’
(45-46) – for distraction would breed ‘inattention’ !
However, if ‘the ultimate Reality remains unshakeably itself … the same substance as the
inner light’ (46), then this must be the source of perception.
Meanwhile, contemporary aesthetic quality, value, sense and perception would be
impaired by any evident metaphorical existential escape.
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Hence H G Wells’ ‘Doors in the Wall’ of circumstance become the broadly envisaged
reduced form of Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’.
Nevertheless, ‘… To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception’ (58) remains the
epitome of Huxley’s quest.
Moreover, while we cannot do without ‘systematic reasoning … of the inner and outer
worlds into which we have been born … Our goal is to discover that we have always been
where we ought to be’ (62).
Thence we are thus situated to proceed with our life quest or journey through an ethos of
earnest authenticity and authentic equanimity, as realized through the quality of Deep
Friendship epitomized through The Community Project endeavours through the
auspices of the United Nations Association of Australia 2006 ‘Growing Community’
grounded in the broad theme of ‘Living Together’.
Conclusion – continuity, perception and ‘living well’.
If we follow the trajectory of analyses of perception brought forward by Santayana,
Chesterton, Whitehead and Huxley, it is possible to discern a clear incremental tendency
to locate the essence of perception from without the human entity and the human context.
This resonates with what I have earlier proposed in these ‘State of the World’ Forum
seminar papers that each person derives their personal and interpersonal perception
from a broad source or origin, through which we are provided such perception. Yet we
also concurrently draw perception from this source, so that all perception forms a
common aspect.
Such a realization of how we have come to be aware of the essence of our being as
beyond yet paradoxically blended into the reality of our human senses would enable us to
more bountifully fulfill Whitehead’s wise proposition that we seek:
‘i) to live, ii) to live well, and iii) to live better’ (1929: 8).
Actually, this prospect stated by Whitehead encompasses much of the essential thread of
what Santayana, Chesterton and Huxley attempt to explore and expound throughout their
respective analyses and ideas considered here, as is revealed and implicit throughout the
content trajectory of this seminar paper.
Hence, what follows from what is established here is that there is a palpable sense of the
continuity of our perception of our human endeavours collectively, and how these have
worked out during the greater part of the 20th century through the perspectives of each of
these theorists.
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Further, there is some element of consistency evident in this sense of continuity, as this
emerges from the significance and meaning of perception experienced personally and
collectively in the context of the human condition.
Moreover, there is a form of resonance which emerges from the relevance of perception
experienced and realized in this respect, through the comprehensive aspect of these
elements as they are thereby variously interpreted.
Given this is Anzac Day, may we hope and believe with the ‘Faith’ Santayana and
Chesterton admonish us to retain throughout our fortunes in life that we will seek to
explore the whole context of the continuity evident through the blended tapestry which is
our humanity … Meanwhile, universal principles will be vital in this endeavour.
REFERENCES
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith: Heretics; 1905
Othodoxy; 1908
The Bodley Head G K Chesterton
Selected by P J Kavanagh
Bodley Head, London, 1985.
Chesterton’s Stories, Essays and Poems
Dent, London, 1953.
The Man Who Was Thursday – A Nightmare
Wordsworth Editions, London, 1985.
First published in 1908.
The Uses of Diversity – A Book of Essays
Methuen, London, 1920.
Huxley, Aldous 1954:
The Doors of Perception
Chatto & Windus, London,
1972 Edition.
Mell, Lindsay:
Essential Reality
46
Academy of the Word
‘State of the World’ Forum
Occasional Paper 2003/2
Presented in October 2003,
Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia.
Friendship and Sentiment
Academy of the Word
‘State of the World’ Forum
Occasional Paper 2005/2
Presented in October 2005,
Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia.
Paradox – coping with complexity
Academy of the Word
‘State of the World’ Forum
Occasional Paper 2005/1
Presented in April 2005,
Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia.
Runes, Dagobert (ed) 1955:
Treasury of Philosophy
The Philosophical Library, New York, USA.
Entry on George Santayana, pp. 1042-1053.
Entry on Alfred North Whitehead,
pp. 1216-1223.
Santayana, George:
Reason in Art
Charles Scribner’s Sons
New York, USA, 1905.
The Life of Reason
The Phases of Human Progress
Constable & Co, London, UK, 1905-6.
1954 Edition.
The Sense of Beauty –
Being the outline of aesthetic theory
Dover Publications, New York, USA, 1896.
1955 Edition.
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The Last Puritan
Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York, USA, 1937.
Shorter Oxford Dictionary:
London, UK, 1980:
Entry for ‘Paradox’ p. 1508.
Whitehead, Alfred North 1929:
The Function of Reason
Princeton University Press, USA.
Beacon Edition, 1958.
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