La industria vitivinícola y sus competidores.

The question now arises: If an experience is capable of representing mind and matter and has relations as its parts, then why is it necessary to have innumerable experiences of a similar kind? One of the plausible reason may be his critique of Spinoza's so called idealistic monism.

Spinoza’s monistic theory can be identified with a type of monism called "substantival monism". According to this theory the apparent multiplicity o f substances is really a manifestation of only a single substance in different states or different points of view. Spinoza in his Ethics, defined "God" and "Nature" in synonymous terms. According to him, God is not a personal, creative agent, separate from the universe that he creates. God is being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes only, two of which are known by the human intellect. They are "extension" and "thought". To put it in Spinoza’s words:

The mind and body, are one and the same individual, which is

conceived now under the attribute o f thoughts, and now under the attribute o f extension .21

In other words "thoughts" and "extensions" are the two aspects of the same thing, now a thing and now a thought.

But James is critical of this account. Though he speaks of one stuff, the experience, it is the collective name of innumerable experiences. Where each experience can be simultaneously a "thing" and a "thought". We can represent both the views in the following schema:

20. 1 shall return to this discussion in Chapter Six to show that Russell also followed James in admitting that a neutral event admits of both physical and psychical elements, thus leaving it covertly dualistic.

21. Boyle, A., trans., Spinoza’s Ethics And On The Correction O f The Understanding, p. 58. Italics are mine.

Critique of James. 1 1 5

Spinoza

Cod, Nature. Substance

I substances / l \ / l \ / l \ attributes thing thought James I Experiences I * * * * * * * \ / \ / \ / \ / * thing thought thought and thing at the same tim e , being two aspects of one thing

one bit of experience isolated from innumerable

experiences

thing * thought

I

one bit can be both thing and thought at the same time.

What James disliked about Spinoza’s theory is that the substance which he speaks of is all thinking or mind oriented. But James’s experience is, as he claims, neutral. Again Spinoza deduced the multiplicity from single stuff, whereas James explained multiplicity by plural facts. But Spinoza explained that a single substance has attributes belonging to both mind and matter. To James one bit of experience is both mental and physical when related to other experiences. It is not difficult for the stuff to be thought and thing at once. How can, for James, one single bit o f experience be thought and thing at once and now? It is not difficult either for James. For an experience to be cognitive it does not always require a second experience because feelings are not psychical zero. By accepting dualistic epistemology James accepted metaphysical elements (mental and physical) within the structure of pure experience. It is not difficult for an experience to be both mental and physical at once.

I should not say that James’s theory is at bottom pure Spinozism. For Sinoza the relations between mentality and materiality shows that the possession of either may entail that o f the other.22 The fact is James could not totally disassociate himself from Spinozism. He tried in vain by bringing in a plurality of experiences. In the "open universe" where the new experiences are constantly "leaking in", James collapsed in a

Critique of James. 1 1 6

disguised foim of dualism. Unlike that of Spino7a, for James it would be that the possession of mentality or materiality may entail neither the possession nor the absence of the other. An experience can belong to mind in a particular arrangement. In another arrangement it can exclusively belong to matter. Since an experience can figure in both the groups James, in his over enthusiastic analysis of experience, tried to prove that a single experience, if need be, can be both mental and physical at the same time. There is no need to accept two kinds of distinct substances to explain the physical and the psychical distinction in Cartesian style.

3.4. Conclusion.

James failed in his effort to dispose of dualism. He could not fill the epistemological chasm without admitting mental elements together with the physical ones. His neutral experiences were a mixture of subjective and objective ingredients. Moreover the experiences were left as discrete as Humean atomic sensations. Although he only partly answered Hume with regard to experienced relations, he could not make relations external to experiences. A bit of experience became a "qua" thing and a "qua" thought. As a result he brought in dualism in a disguised form, which I call covert dualism.

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CHAPTER 4.

Russell’s Early Commitment to Neutral Monism;