Tuesday, December 12, 2017

the knowledge of nature









St Mary's Church, Birkin (c. 1140)




[Image source: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3799134 . Photo © Alan Murray-Rust (cc-by-sa/2.0) ]




Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product
of nature, in that sense of nature in which it is said to be
an object of knowledge ? This is our first question.






I've been taking a look at Thomas Hill Green's Prolegomena to Ethics. Green (1836 - 1882) was a British Idealist in phlosophy (along with F.H. Bradley and others), and a vocal Liberal in politics. Green, who was born in the village of Birkin in the West Riding, was appointed Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1877. That appointment allowed him to set about his major work, but it was left unfinished when he died from blood poisoning in March 1882, and was published posthumously (his fellow Balliol man A.C. Bradley acting as editor) in April 1883. (A large part had already appeared in Mind.)




Here's the quote in its context. Green is querying the contention that the moral aspects, and even the epistemological aspects, of our conscious life can be considered part of a materialistic Nature (as per Hume, Mill, evolutionary theorists...).





§8. The elimination of ethics, then, as a system of precepts,
involves no intrinsic difficulties other than those involved
in the admission of a natural science that can account for
the moralisation of man. The discovery, however, that our
assertions of moral obligation are merely the expression of
an ineffectual wish to be better off than we are, or are due
to the survival of habits originally enforced by physical fear,
but of which the origin is forgotten, is of a kind to give us
pause. It logically carries with it the conclusion, however
the conclusion may be disguised, that, in inciting ourselves
or others to do anything because it ought to be done, we
are at best making use of a serviceable illusion. And when
this consequence is found to follow logically from the con-
ception of man as in his moral attributes a subject of natural
science, it may lead to a reconsideration of a doctrine which
would otherwise have been taken for granted as the most
important outcome of modern enlightenment. As the first
charm of accounting for what has previously seemed the
mystery of our moral nature passes away, and the spirit of
criticism returns, we cannot but enquire whether a being
that was merely a result of natural forces could form a theory
of those forces as explaining himself. We have to return
once more to that analysis of the conditions of knowledge,
which forms the basis of all Critical Philosophy whether
called by the name of Kant or no, and to ask whether the
experience of connected matters of fact, which in its metho-
dical expression we call science, does not presuppose a prin-
ciple which is not itself any one or number of such matters
of fact, or their result.

Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product
of nature, in that sense of nature in which it is said to be
an object of knowledge ? This is our first question. If it
is answered in the negative, we shall at least have satisfied
ourselves that man, in respect of the function called know-
ledge, is not merely a child of nature. We shall have
ascertained the presence in him of a principle not natural,
and a specific function of this principle in rendering know-
ledge possible.




On that last point, Green elaborates the metaphor a little later:
"there is a sense in which man is related to nature as its author,
as well as one in which he is related to it as its child" (§10).




*


Green uses the example, a rather dramatic one, of an engine driver who misreads a signal. The engine driver, wondering if has made a mistake, has a conception of the "real", as opposed to the mistaken and illusory world of the unreal. From where do we get that conception?


a consciousness of
events as a related series — experience in the most elemen-
tary form in which it can be the beginning of knowledge —
has not any element of identity with, and therefore cannot
properly be said to be developed out of, a mere series of
related events, of successive modifications of body or soul,
such as is experience in the former of the senses spoken of.
No one and no number of a series of related events can be
the consciousness of the series as related. Nor can any
product of the series be so either. ... (§16)


§17. ' Perhaps not,' it may be replied, ' but may it not be
a product of previous events ? ' If it is so, a series of events
of which there is no conscious experience must be supposed
to produce a consciousness of another series. On any- other
supposition the difficulty is only postponed. For if the
series of events which produces a certain consciousness of
other events is one of which there is a consciousness, this
consciousness, not being explicable as the product of the
events of which it is the consciousness, will have in turn to
be referred to a prior series of events ; and ultimately there
will be no alternative between the admission of a conscious-
ness which is not a product of events at all  and the supposi-
tion stated — the supposition that the primary consciousness
of events results from a series of events of which there is no
consciousness. But this supposition, when we think of it,
turns out to be a concatenation of words to which no
possible connexion of ideas corresponds. It asserts a rela-
tion of cause and effect, in which the supposed cause lacks
all the characteristics of a cause. It may be questioned
whether we can admit anything as a cause which does not
explain its supposed effect, or is not equivalent to the con-
ditions into which the effect may be analysed. But granting
that we may, a cause must at least be that to which experi-
ence testifies as the uniform antecedent of the effect. Now
a series of events of which there is no consciousness is
certainly not a set of conditions into which consciousness
can be analysed. And as little can it be an antecedent
uniformly associated with consciousness in experience, for
events of which there is no consciousness cannot be within
experience at all.


...Nature, with all that belongs
to it, is a process of change : change on a uniform method,
no doubt, but change still. All the relations under which
we know it are relations in the way of change or by which
change is determined. But neither can any process of change
yield a consciousness of itself, which, in order to be a con-
sciousness of the change, must be equally present to all stages
of the change ; nor can any consciousness of change, since the
whole of it must be present at once, be itself a process of
change. There may be a change into a state of consciousness
of change, and a change out of it, on the part of this man
or that ; but within the consciousness itself there can be no
change, because no relation of before and after, of here and
there, between its constituent members — between the pre-
sentation, for instance, of point A and that of point B in the
process which forms the object of the consciousness.  (from §18)



*


I'm not a philosopher, but I understand that Green is working towards an "infinite regress" kind of reductio ad absurdum in which A, on the materialist view, depends on B depends on A depends on B depends on A.... It's a classic example of using the word "itself" to attempt to clinch an illuminating point.


But this is like the chicken and the egg. We know that neither chicken nor egg came "first", they evolved together as a combined group, very slowly, from different creatures with different eggs.  Why could not the nature we experience, and our understanding of that nature (so far as we can in fact understand it) come slowly into existence alongside each other as a combined group, and from the same common source, namely an older and less developed and less self-conscious nature?




This is not a denial of what Green is anxious to defend, namely morality, religion and democracy. It's more a matter of seeing these principles as immanent in the wonderful complexity and mystery of nature, rather than as transcendent principles injected from a world above.


From this perspective it's obvious that I resist the rhetorical implications in the merely of  "merely a result of natural forces", by which Green smuggles in a prior discrediting of what has yet to be examined.

















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