Participation

Prof Chris Clarke

In response to the request for an abstract of a presentation at this seminar, I am writing not to abstract a talk, but to explain ideas which I envisage I might be bringing to the meeting, in order to contribute as and when appropriate.

My world, much of which, I am convinced, I share with others,has within it objects, people, thoughts, emotions, and more general "presences" that are hard to tie down to any such categories. In relation to much in this world I have a feeling of dialogue, by which I mean a contact with a presence that is disclosing itself as Other and which is eliciting responses, emotional and intellectual, from me. Clearly this is usually (but not invariably) the case with people and often the case with other beings, animate and inanimate. My world is progressively shaped by these encounters, and by my responses, so that "participation" seems an appropriate description.

Neo-Cartesian metaphysics (a universe that is a plenum of elementary entities [Lucretius' "first bodies" but including classical fields] with definite states moving either randomly or deterministically in the void) is intrinsically and necessarily inadequate to explain my world in its major significant features, though it seems to do quite astonishingly well at explaining certain aspects of the world to do with predictable manipulations of it. This is the major philosophical problem facing me: how is a metaphysics that is so bad at explaining most of experience so good at explaining part of it? A particular case of this is neurophysiology.

At one time I would have argued for some kind of dual aspect explanation of this puzzle. On such a view, the world is made up of things/stuff that has an inner aspect (consciousness is an example of such an inner aspect in the case of humans) and an outer aspect of physical extension à la Descartes. I am now inclined to think that a dual aspect view is actually only a kind of mollified dualism deriving from a desire to glue together the pictures of idealism and realism, without realising that these two pictures have such internal integrity that they cannot be glued together without falsity. All beings have many aspects, most of which we are presumably unaware of, and to say that all beings have precisely two aspects, or that all beings fall into precisely two categories, is surely a misleading simplification arising more from our historical circumstances than a real understanding of the way the world is.

My inclination now is to start with participation. Out of an unfolding dance of beings, there emerge some who manifest pure materiality, and some that manifest pure intellect, and many that tease us with the inadequacy of our categories. The experience of the interwoven dance makes me long to enter into it more fully in order to discover more richly the many aspects of my own being.