Tallis - Logos: the mystery of how we make sense of the world

Also by Raymond Tallis and published by Agenda

Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience

copyright Raymond Tallis 2018

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First edition published in 2018 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

The Core

Science Central

Bath Lane

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE4 5TF

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-087-4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For dearest Danilo and Jay who are just setting out on their journey of making sense of the world. And for their loving guides on the journey Adela and Jules, Ben and Lawrence

Contents

Acknowledgements

Yet again, I am deeply indebted to my publisher, Steven Gerrard. I am enormously grateful for his tremendous support for my writing and his scrupulous labours during the journey to the press.

Two referees Professor Sebastian Gardner of University College London and Dr Tom McClelland of University of Warwick reviewed the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions which have greatly improved the book. I am very grateful to them for their generosity. It goes without saying that any errors are my own.

Preface

[A] philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then, it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said.

Henri Bergson, Address to the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy, Bologna, 1911

The inquiry that follows is a philosophical homecoming. At any rate, it is an attempt to return to the place whence I set out in my teens, dozens of published books, and many more dozens of unpublished manuscripts, ago.

My philosophical awakening was shaped by fears. Some were well-founded, such as that sooner or later I, and everyone I cared for, would die in pain and terror. Other fears were equally commonplace but less well-founded: that my freedom was illusory; and that the world as I experienced it might be a dream. These philosophical concerns were, a few years later, offset by something quite different: an overwhelming astonishment that I existed, that I could think that I existed; that I could make everyday sense of myself and my world; in short, that there is that. It was accompanied by an unexpected joy that I still cannot fully explain although I am grateful for it.

One moment I have recalled so frequently that not one detail will have survived undistorted. As I remember it now, I am standing in a little attic room, fragrant with cabbage soup and the fishy smell of a malfunctioning anglepoise lamp. These were my student digs: 60 Park Town Crescent, Oxford, where I was lodged with Mrs Pasternak-Slater, the exiled sister of Boris. I am talking to my friend Chris Verity, then a medical student and now a retired consultant. I cant remember what we were talking about. Suddenly I heard my own voice and, beyond my voice, the that implicit in it located somewhere between that I am, that x is the case, that the world exists and that I am making sense of something. Thus, my encounter with thatter. Mystery is, perhaps, too narrow a word; rather a revelation tinged with surprise, feeling itself to be on the threshold of a further revelation that in the subsequent fifty or more years has not revealed itself.

My career as a doctor kept me rather too much in touch with mortality, and the many limitations of freedom arising out of illness and the confusions that threatened to invade us all, as cooperation between the it is of the body and the I am of the self starts to breakdown. In my philosophical thinking, therefore, I have often focused on the joyful astonishment of realizing and accounting for the that which had filled me with such inexplicable delight, that seemed to bring me to the verge of an alternative sense of reality. It has been a presence to varying degrees on- and off-stage in many of my books. It was most obvious in The Explicit Animal (1991) and in the discussion of propositional awareness in The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (2004). But it was also a motivating force in Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (1988, 1995) and Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (1997, 1999) and even in my monographs on Heidegger and Parmenides.

I could trace the itinerary of this motif through the Collected Works of Raymond Tallis at great length but even authorial vanity can bore itself. The point is the centrality of the theme of That or That! to my thinking. I have been tenacious in loitering in its vicinity; and it has motivated my critique of many anti-humanist intellectual trends ranging from scientism to post-Saussurean thought. It has toyed with me for decades and has come to sit at the heart of my humanist belief in the uniqueness of human consciousness and our status as true agents, who are points of origin in the world rather than merely dissolved into external physical and cultural forces. Of a humanism, in short, that while denying our supernatural status, does not conclude, as I did in the more despairing moments of my early teens, that we must be entirely part of the natural, the material, world, helplessly subordinated to its laws.

Logos is an attempt, more direct than any of my previous books, to be true to, or to prolong, this astonishment that has, at increasingly long intervals, lit up within me. It is an endeavour to wake out of, or to, ordinary wakefulness: to discover the strangeness in the blindingly obvious.

There is something necessarily artificial, flawed, about this endeavour, not just because the pace and rhythm of writing and reading does not match that The seriousness of our lives often seems to point elsewhere and even the examined life passes for the most part free of examination. On the contrary, it is life that tends to examine us, or at least to set the questions. We are too busy being our localized selves to ascend to the uncompromised awareness of a consciousness that belongs to no-one, nowhere, and nowhen, in particular. This can make the elective astonishment of philosophy seem frivolous or artificial.

Philosophy is necessarily dialogic. While there are many interlocutors named during the course of this inquiry, there is one whose presence is more ubiquitous than is explicitly acknowledged. As I began the second attempt at this book I re-read Thomas Nagels The View from Nowhere. It is exasperating how many contemporary intellectual trends reductionist and computational theories of the mind and evolutionary epistemology to name only the most dispiriting examples have continued to flourish since Nagel demonstrated their inadequacy. That is another story. I mention Nagel here only to highlight how the passage from my open-mouthed awe to specific lines of inquiry has been influenced by The View from Nowhere.

In Logos, therefore, I have tried to return to something that feels like a fundamental or ur-thought I have been on verge of having. And if some of what follows is quite technical, the audience I have in mind is the fabled general reader. That reader is someone like myself who passes most of his conscious hours in a sub-philosophical frame of mind, even when he is philosophizing. Many philosophical thoughts, after all, are easier to discuss than to think.

The remark from Bergson at the head of this Preface which is applicable to anyone who truly struggles to philosophize is an advance warning that a thought I have never quite managed to think is still incompletely thought by the end of this inquiry. In short,