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The Two Main Problems of Philosophy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

N. L. Wilson
N. L. Wilson
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

One of the main problems is of course the mind-body problem. It'snot really a question as to how there can be such disparate things as protons and electrons on the one hand, and such things as desires on the other, cohabiting the same universe and apparently having quite a lot to do with each other. For, provided that we are not squeamish about committing the pathetic fallacy, we can attribute desires to any kind of servomechanism, we can claim that the ordinary water closet, for example, wants to remain full at all times and when necessary acts so as to fulfil that desire. The question, as I see it, is rather, how there can be such a thing as consciousness of desire existing in universelargely unconscious.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1973 , pp. 199 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1973

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References

1 Opp. ed. Gerh. tom VI, 602, n. 7. Quoted by Heidegger, , “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” in Kaufmann, Walter, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York, 1956).Google Scholar

2 The suggestion is elaborated in my “Substance without Substrata.” Review of Metaphysics 12 (1959), pp. 521–39Google Scholar. What is going on here is a wholesale Ramsification of names into variables. For “Ramsification,” see Carnap, Rudolf, Philosophical Foundations of Physics New York, London, 1966Google Scholar, Chapter 26, “The Ramsey Sentence”.

3 The claims here are defended in much greater detail in my paper, “Color Qualities and Reference to Them,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 2, no. 2, 1972. pp. 145–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 I am grateful to Richard Cartwright both for the point and for the example.

6 I should like to propose the drive to exist, that is, the drive to have effects, as the basic psychological drive, inplace of the sex drive, the will to power, or the appetite for glory or whatever else has been suggested as the “basic” drive. If I am right we have some kind of explanation of activities as apparently dissimilar as the building of the pyramids, the painting of the Sistine Chapel, the taking out of life insurance and the senseless vandalism manifested in incendiarism, window smashing and paint smearing. I am referring to a basic need to leave one's mark on the world in some fashion or other. We would rather do than be done to. Vance Packard has somewhere suggested that a primary motive for men taking out life insurance is an anxiety to go on having effects on others' lives after theirown deaths. I suspect that vandalism is hardly ever the outcome of rage, but rather is the result of a sense of ineffectiveness. On this view both constructive and destructive activity are manifestations of the same basic drive and they would jointly be contrasted with the passive tendency, the contemplative, perhaps what Heidegger has in mind when he writes of “openness to Being.” I do not go so far as to suggest that there is a counterbalancing drive for passivity, but maybe there should be. See below on Non-BQ. I.

6 Actually, I can remember Paul Weiss, when I was a student in one of his classes, making this point as an independent observation.

7 The phrase comes to me from Robert Binkley. I do notknow its original source. Sartre, of course, speaks of the translucency of consciousness, but he concerned precisely with the lack of transparency that occurs in self-deception.

8 One is reminded of Aristotle: “… the soul is the first grade of actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it,” (De An., 412 a 28)—thinking, perceiving and the like being the second and final grade of actuality.

9 It has been pointed out to me by Paul Fitzgerald that there might be a short-lived particle, either in the lab or in outer space, which, during its span of existence does not happen to have any effects on anything. We might even know of its existence. Surely it would be perverse to deny that it exists. These considerations suggest a refinement, namely: to be is to be capable of having effects. Now, to compensate, we have to strengthen the doctrine in a way that is difficult to state but is easy to illustrate. Consider a world consisting solely of sugar cubes and buckets of water, but in the entire history of the world no sugar cube comes in contact with water. Neither solubility norinsolubility could be attributed to any sugar cube. A Laplacean demon, surveying the universe, would have no basis for saying of any sugar cube that it is soluble in water or insoluble. In order for it to make sense to say that this sugar cube is soluble there must be some cases of sugar actually dissolved in water or else (complications) enough fine-grained phenomena to support atheory of physical chemistry which would imply that sugar dissolves in water. In general then, (A) if something possesses a latentdisposition, something else must possess the same disposition manifested, or else, as a few lines back, some other, more complicated conditions must be satisfied. Now the original formula may be modified: (B) To be (an individual or an event) is to be capable of having direct or indirect effects on a conscious being.We may assume (C) that the “more complicated conditions” clause in (A) will not apply. (I think I could show this.) Itfollows from (A), (B) and (C) that if anything exists, something—somewhere, sometime—is conscious. Hence, again, any possible world must contain conscious beings.

10 One can talk of a thing as a “bundle of properties”, but that is simply to trade one mystery for another.