Now my modest contribution is merely this: Whatever, I urge, may be the ultimate truth in metaphysic or in science, certainly a complete and sympathetic outlook over our world does not warrant the critic's attitude. In comnmon experience throughout life the interrelatedness of things, if strictly construed, is no doubt at times a very valuable point of view, but is not a very prominent or patent fact.
The first point that strikes one is that, by the ordinary mind, in quite commonplace and unreflective apprehension, a great part of our surroundings are not considered as things at all. We do not analyse them so. Out of doors, in the country, the conception of things hardly ever occurs to us. Fields, hills, moors, roads, the sky-these are not thought of as things, as terms of relations, each at arm's length to others, a discriminated unit. "I see no lines in nature," said the French artist, and I think he might well have said, "I see no relations." Interrelatedness belongs surely to the sort of stage at which you begin to think in terms of maps or diagrams, and set down positions or reactions of isolated units with reference to one another. For relations in the strict sense you surely must have strictly bounded and distinguished terms; and in ordinary life we recognise nothing of the kind, except when we are handling portable objects, from which our notion of "things " is, in the main, derived. Continuity, in the popular sense, is the leading character of our world. I do not know exactly how one's kinsmen come to be called one's relations; but I think that this narrow reference of the word in everyday usage shows how unfamiliar is the general or logical idea of interrelatedness in common life.--Bernard Bosanquet (1914-15) "Science and Philosophy" (17-8) {HT Alex Klein (recall)}
Bosanquet presupposes, what one may call, natural sympathy in common life rather than seeing such continuity as an achievement subsequent to what I will call an active sympathetic engagement.
In context Bosanquet is joining in the great debate between Bradley and Russell on the side of Bradley. This, despite the fact that Bosanquet is conceding quite a bit to Russell; he is allowing that Russell's position may be superior as metaphysics and philosophy of science. But Bosanquet is insisting that from the vantage point of common sense, scientific philosophy misconstrues what came to be known as the manifest image. So Bosanquet is denying that Russell's theory of theory can encompass a theory about all of reality and, in particular, the part about human affairs that we care about as practical agents. If this were all there was to Bosanquet's point it would not be worth citing beyond the fact -- and it is not a trivial fact -- that at one point in cultural-historical time experience seem to disclose not things but continuity. (Some other time I'll discuss a similar report by Samuel Alexander.)
As an aside, it is tempting to a certain, scientific mind to suspect that Bosanquet's claims about common experience are just false or theory-influenced. Such a mind will read, say, Locke and Hume and note that their reports of experience are similarly tainted by theory.* But this stance prevents one from discovering to what degree experience is changed by one's cultural-historical environment. For example, Bosanquet is writing in a context in which an "intimate knowledge of the countryside" can be taken for granted in his audience. Such intimacy is now largely absent.
Bosanquet has another, Spinozistic card to play: "I suppose when you speak of relations and terms you do necessarily isolate them from the rest of the world." (18) I call it 'Spinozistic' because it echoes the Letter on the Infinite's criticism of mathematical natural philosophy. By adopting a scientistic stance, the Russelian philosopher gives up on the most general perspective (even if it is the most exacting, precise, and scientifically respectable, etc). Bosanquet continues with a striking claim:
You exclude, pro tempore, the bearing uponi them of any thing or fact, not specified in the terms, or in those relations between them, which have been named. I do not mean that you deny the existence of anything else; but ex hypothesi qua thinking relationally, you disregard it ad hoc. It is this negative aspectof relations that makes them suspect to common sense.
Bosanquet overplays his hand here. The suspicion does not arise to common sense (whatever that means), but, if this is possible at all, only to a philosophically awakened common sense, or, at least, in those who are engaged in active sympathy. Be that as it may, Bosanquet is right to suggest that things are left out, even unsayable/unthinkable, within a scientific image or during research and that while such omissions are entirely sensible from within the scientific enterprise it does not follow that if one's interests (feelings, aspirations, etc.) that are available from within the manifest are so ignored there is no sufficient reason, not to mention love and justice, for leaving them (e.g., interests/feelings/aspirations) out. That is, while one can justify scientific philosophy on broadly future-oriented-consequentialist grounds (and be distinctly reserved about Bosanquet's philosophy), Bosanquet is right that at some point the scientific philosopher will have to appeal to either arbitrary fact (recall) or to arbitrary exclusion of important matters from the domain of philosophy.
*Here I draw on conversation with Daniel Dennett.
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