Reflections on Life and Mind, Part One

Causation

§1 It is a curious truth that the modern sciences purchased their extraordinary powers over the “syntax” of nature (so to speak) by first evacuating it of the “semantics” of life. It was precisely by detaching the “scientific image” from the “manifest image” (to use the terms of Wilfrid Sellars)—and specifically from the special properties of both life and mind, conceived as realities in their own rights—that the novum organum gained its right of entry into a hitherto unseen world of pure quantities and bare structural relations hidden behind the phenomenal world of organic vitality and qualitative consciousness. It was there that it established itself as master over the physical order, in a cosmic landscape reduced to abstractions, disembodied geometries, measurable magnitudes, calculable trajectories, mathematical notations. This was necessary, of course, and produced incalculable benefits; and, as it should be needless to say, the power of the human intellect to prescind from the sensible to the intelligible is a glorious thing, and one of the clearer evidences that the mind is not a mechanism. Still, this meant that vast realms of experience that had once been central to natural philosophy had become in principle invisible to the new inductive regime. It is possible to measure the discrete physical forces and interactions that compose organisms in terms of mass, momentum, exchanges of energy, and so forth; but life, if it is any kind of principle in addition to or beyond those forces and interactions, with a formal integrity irreducible to mere physical composites, exists on an entirely different ontological plane, inaccessible to those measurements. This also means, of course, that certain dimensions of reality, from the perspective of the new sciences, may have no discernible existence at all. So much of what we know about nature is determined by how we choose to interrogate it. Understanding is so often the ward of method, and every method begins from certain presuppositions about what we should ask and how we should ask it, and those presuppositions in turn determine what answers we can elicit, or even recognize as meaningful. And, of course, our method is inseparable from a metaphysics that we simply unwittingly presume, or presume with only partial awareness. In fact, our metaphysics is often nothing other than our method, mistaken for the truth it is supposed only to help us seek.