patterns, hegel, theory, disputes, multiculturalism

Quite a few years ago, I found myself in the middle of a light debate among several of my philosophy professors. Someone had asked "what is music theory, exactly?" Before majoring in philosophy I'd majored in music theory & composition and so I felt qualified to pipe in with "well, it's mostly the study of harmony, of what happens when certain pitches overap, and also the study of larger-scale forms of compositions . . ." and so on. Before I could finish, the only non-analytic philosopher of the group shut all of us up by stating (with a smart-assed delivery he'd clearly picked up from his younger, analytic, collegues): "It's the arrangement of the notes."

I don't think any of us got it -- or even knew whether to take him seriously. But certainly none of us knew how to respond. In fact, I still don't, but since then I've been haunted by the notion that if I could understand what he meant, I'd see the the whole world anew.

I knew enough about Hegel to know to characterize my professor's remark as somewhat Hegelian, but I didn't know enough at the time to say why. Recently, however, I picked up a used copy of "Hegel: A Re-examination" by J. N. Finlay, and therein found a clue. At first this passage (below) seems almost as difficult to digest as one by Hegel himself; yet I believe that part of the difficulty is that what it asserts strikes one as deeply counterintuitive -- as if Copernicus himself rose from the dead to announce that the whole of the cosmos does, in fact, revolve around the earth after all. Read the passage slowly and take it quite at face value. Findlay's not waxing poetic, nor does he engage in the sort of linguistic slight-of-hand to which philosophers are prone. He means what he says. As incredible and downright wacky as it sounds.

[Consciousness] is not [...] the illumination of an unchanged object by a metaphorical searchlight trained on it ab extra: it is rather a process in which an object yields up a universal meaning or unifying pattern of which it is an instance. Such universals or patterns exist in natural objects in an unconscious 'petrified' form: their disengagement, and the ranging of objects under them, is, however, an affair of 'consciousness', and consciousness is, in fact, no more for Hegel than just the disengagement of such universals and patterns. For there to be consciosuness of something [...] it must decalre itself as a case of some general kind, of which no case is perhaps an adequate embodiment: it must align itself with other objects in a connected picture governed by some unifying rule.

In other words, consciousness of an object comes from the object itself. Yes, I meant to say that. Consciousness of an object comes from the object itself. It really does. In this view of things, at least.

So, my awareness of the fact that a computer screen now sits before my eyes was somehow already implicit in the computer screen itself. My consciousness of the screen before me -- that is, not merely my sensory perception of the screen's light, but rather my awareness of the screen as a screen (and not, say, as a window, a wall, an unorganized chaos of sensory perceptions, or even nothing at all) -- is nothing other than "the disengagement" of "screen-ness" itself from the screen. The screen "declares itself" as a case of screens in general, and this very declaration is precisely what we call "consciosuness of" the screen.

To translate this roughly into Hegel-ese, we could say that the screen "in-itself" always already contains within it my consciousnes of it: which is to say, the screen "for-itself". Findlay continues:

To say that I exist, or I think, is therefore simple to say that varying items are brought together as in a single conscious focus or crucible -- that latter image is Hegel's own -- and that as so brought together they lose their hard outlines, and their random diversity, and become instances of a kind, or elments in a unified pattern.

But the process doesn't stop there. It culminates not in the production of individual selves, but

is rather manifest in the various intesubjective norms which raise conscious experience above what is merely personal and infinite, in the cateogires and canons of logic and science, the rules of legal and moral behaviour, of aesthetic taste.

So our collective knowledge of everything-there-is-to-know about computers screens is the ultimate for-itself of the all of the in-themselves of all of the comptuer screens that anyone, anywhere, has ever been conscious of.

And music theory is (the for-itself of in-itself of) the arrangement of the notes.

Ok, then where do disputes over theories and facts come from? How can more than one theory exist? How can bodies of knowledge compete? And doesn't this imply the existence of one monolothic, incontestable, absolute culture? What about other cultures? These are issues I'm wrestling with right now. I'll try to post some thoughts in the days to come.

quotes from Hegel: A Re-examination by J. N. Finlay, Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 41-43