The solalterist description of the world, as used openly by the Behaviourists, and as used covertly by such scientists as Ross Ashly, contains a hidden ‘dishonesty principle’ (i.e., active functioning of ignorance as self-deception) when it claims and believes its description to be subjectively adequate and altogether complete.
The difficulty of the ‘Theory of Types’ which questions, the validity of any ‘complete’ description of ‘all’ because it cannot include itself, need not be brought in here. The ‘dishonesty principle’ is evident in Ross Ashly in his, on the one hand, admitting that he is not dealing with consciousness and, on the other, claiming that pain ‘is’ a certain physical behaviour pattern.
Association (whether absolutely co-essential or not, is not known) of purely subjective pain is identified with that behaviour pattern, which, unlike the pain aspect, is describable in purely physicists’ terms. That includes the two principles of Adaptation and Feed-back. Resting on that identification, which is false, the conclusion that conscious man is only an elaborate machine follows, and it proves that he has no soul. This proof has nothing to do with the Buddhist proof of anattā.
The illusion created by the apparent completeness of behaviourist-physicist description is reinforced by the absence of any strict solipsistic (correspondingly inversely false) description to oppose to it. All solipsistic theories so far have been badly self-deceptive on the point that they have never been pursued with scientific and logical ruthlessness and have always contained a large element of properly solalteristic material mixed up. They are thus easily shown to be absurd and consequently solipsistic thought has been bullied and frightened off the subject.
The difficulty lies in re-stating and purifying the true solipsistic from injected solalteristic material and in finding a set of terms in which to describe it.
What is essential therefore is (a) to show clearly where the solalterist treatment (absolutely necessary as it is) must necessarily end in incompleteness (which can only be glossed over by false identification with the purely subjective) and where it deceives itself and others by covertly smuggling in (properly) solipsistic material (pain) and (b) to make a correspondingly adequate solipsistic description showing where the deception and the ‘smuggling-in’ or injection of solalterist material lies. (Sep. 56)
658. …And this is so not only with technicalities as these but also with theories of importance current in Western thought, about Perception, Causality, Consciousness and Being. It is said that the (strictly objective and so most respectable) sciences have abandoned speaking in terms of ‘causes’ and ‘effects’; and Hume remains unrefuted where Causes (as usually conceived) are upheld. There is no agreed theory of Perception. That, perhaps most fashionable now, which (tacitly treating consciousness as an ‘epiphenomenon’) looks for its justification to the laws of Physics, to Neurology and to Protoplasm, is an admitted makeshift at best and ultimately vitiated by its failure to take proper account of the subjective side of experience (to deal with ‘I’); for it remains awkwardly incontestible that all data are ultimately private. Should Consciousness be taken to include, or not, also the ‘Unconscious’ of the Psychoanalysts, which Existentialists deny? Fear of solipsism seems to have shepherded the main body of thinkers towards the opposite, perhaps more insidious, fallacy of solalterism.
Schopenhauer described the Solipsist as ‘a madman shut up in an impregnable blockhouse’. But the Solalterist, who ignores the observer,—the Behaviourist who only admits the existence of ‘the Other’—may perhaps be considered scarcely more sane and to have shut himself out of his house, slamming the door with the latchkey inside: ‘the philosophy of the subject leaving himself out of his calculations,’ to quote Schopenhauer again. Then the indispensable words ‘being’ and ‘existence’ (there are and is—as copula or as absolute), with their ambiguity and the homeless family of fundamental assumptions that they are often made to shelter, are normally taken for granted (the otherwise critical authors of The Meaning of Meaning, for example, are strangely content not to examine them at all), or they are left to the more inaccessible of the post-Hegelian ontologists. It has even been complained that there is no longer in European philosophy any agreement on what these words stand for. Such conditions have made of European Ethics, as it were, a displaced person: she has to take shelter where she can.
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22. The observer does not appear in his observed field in any way at all, which ‘lacks nothing’ (§ 7), which is why he is symbolized by ‘o.’ While he is everywhere, while he is absolutely essential, he ‘does not count’ at all. Whether he is one or many it is impossible to tell except from the field or fields that are being observed. But this anticipates. Consequently, while his singularity or plurality may be a matter for consideration in an inquiry into his nature, in an inquiry into the nature of the observed he can be disregarded (so long as I remember that there I learn nothing about him). I shall therefore, for the moment at least, put him in brackets (‘o’) and forget him (remembering, of course, that I have forgotten him).
This is what all Objective Science claims to do (and often forgets to do) and for which admiration is commonly expected.
(The results of this I shall call ‘Solalterism’ or the ‘Science of the Subject leaving himself out of his calculations’). Since He counts for zero in the observed, which is not observed without him, he can easily be reintroduced. It is, of course, the converse of the opposite procedure, where results are usually condemned without trial as detestable and are commonly called solipsism’ or that of the ‘madman who has shut himself up in, an impenetrable ‘blockhouse.’ (the last passage comes from The Essential Relation in Observing 195
Nanamoli Thera
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