Chris Ormell
I suggest that it is rarely a good idea to look for something, X, if you do not know at least approximately what you are looking for. The most difficult philosophical problem is probably to identify anything worth saying about the individual mind's knowledge of itself. So, for any philosopher who is not armed with a definite prior mental hypothesis, to try to 'look into his own mind' and hence detect 'a great truth' is, I submit, a mistake.
I make this claim on grounds of commonsense. We know that to be sent to look for something in the kitchen or workshop on the basis of a seriously defective description is to endure a lot of frustration, confusion and almost certainly disappointment. Let's call it a 'defective search procedure'. We have no grounds for thinking that the futility of operating a defective search procedure does not apply as much to wild goose chases in philosophy, as it does to wild goose chases in other departments of human activity.
But in the attempt to operate a philosophy of introspection there is another fundamental difficulty: that of saying something meaningful about what one has found, if, contrary to all expectation, one were lucky enough to find something by this route.
We have known since Wittgenstein that ordinary language is far from being a magic, universal spotlight, capable of being turned freely, fluently and accurately onto every dimension of human thought. On the contrary, ordinary language is an intrinsically limited, rustic, frail, even disabled, message carrier. There are many human experiences which are extremely difficult to convey in ordinary language, and then only by good fortune to an intimate, sympathetic friend. There are others which, quite likely, are not conveyable at all.
Some philosophers seem to imagine that they can invent new words to put back the missing coverage. But such words can only borrow their meaning from existing pieces of ordinary language. How can one explain their meaning except in ordinary language? They can no more supplant ordinary language than packs made up of ordinary foods in a supermarket can supplant ordinary cuisine.
Those who seek to plumb the secrets of 'being' and 'consciousness' by the introspective route seem to me to have failed to learn what Wittgenstein taught us. The heartland of meaningful speech is, of course, the honest expression in ordinary language of understandable emotion. It is centrally concerned with the presence and absence of goodness in others. But both its 'honesty' and its 'understandability' can only be ascertained by external checks. It is concerned to convey the gist of a relationship between person and person, living in ordinary, public space: not about some alleged, elusive, self-perceived shadows or scintillations lurking inside the recesses of the individual's psyche.
Those who, following this, still persist it trying to work the introspective route, are, I suggest, like flat-Earthers looking for an edge of the world which isn't there. What is unspeakable can't be spoken. It is immature, not to mention pre-Wittgensteinian, to act as if it could be.
Without the fundamental discipline of linguistic analysis philosophy cuts itself adrift from ordinary meaning and enters an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy of wishful wisdom.
Yes, of course the nature of the human mind is a great puzzle. But if we approach this 'great puzzle' in a bare hands, undisciplined way, we put ourselves into the case of looking for something, without the faintest idea of what it is. That is a dumb quest. Probably the dumb quest for an insight into the nature of one's own mind is the worst example of such defective search procedure.
Many philosophers have been puzzled about the nature of consciousness. As a result, a huge literature allegedly about this subject, but really constituting a dense fog blanket of near- meaningless rhetoric, has been devised. I find it difficult to explain to an ordinary friend what is the point of such lengthy, scholastic, consciously obscure, artifice. What does it achieve? Does it clarify the individual's mind? I doubt it. Does it clarify the great intellectual issues of the day? Certainly not! It may serve to de-clarify the great intellectual issues of the day, because it helps to give philosophy, the art, a poor reputation: as being more interested in appearances than in realities, as being quite content to bandy-about badly focussed but meretricious sentences.
We can't hope to get anywhere in philosophy unless we first concentrate our attention on focussing very firmly onto meanings.
One of the great issues of the day is what we should do with our lives. What is the good life? What kind of life is worth living? It is a problem worth thinking about, because there is a mass of evidence 'out there' (the reports of those who have followed different paths) and there is also a lot of scope for fascinating thought experiments to explore the issue.
It is a difficult problem, because 'market thinking' and modern materialism/consumerism are ubitquitous, like a rank vapour which has penetrated every room of a house. What set of non-materialistic values could hope to stand firm against such an all pervasive, corrupting influence?
Thought experiments are needed here, focused carefully on what might stand up and what will almost certainly fall down.
If we could finally bring such demanding, oceanic inquiries to a close, we would, ipso facto, find a worthwhile way of spending time, a form of consciousness with the greatest satisfaction. Let's call it the Y-way-of-life. Finding Y would amount to finding a source of identity, as a Y-seeker, and a quality of consciousness, as a person with a Y-style way of life.
But I wouldn't bet on 'getting there' by the facile short-cut of introspection.
To think one might get there by introspection is like thinking that the way to solve an equation is to stare at it harder and harder ---for as long as it takes--- until the unknown value of x finally ('as it must of course') reveals itself!
Introspective philosophy, it is widely agreed, is a reaction against positivism and physicalism: but, if so, the reaction has gone much too far. The main complaint against the positivists and the physicalists is surely that, in their blind attachment to scientific modes, they show a dismal insensitivity to human culture, human values, human relationships. They do, but it is what they lack that defines the complaint, not what they know. There can be no excuse for rejecting scientific modes of clarification out of hand in any department of human activity: least of all in one ---philosophy-- which must trade in clarification if it trades in anything at all. Yes, we need clarification in other areas too. But don't let's turn our backs on what we have.
The author is editor of PROSPERO a journal of new thinking
in Philosophy for Education (Triangle Journals)