The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter Lectures The

Central lecture of the book

The World explored, the world suffered: The Exeter lectures is the first part of a
trilogy and is a work of philosophical/ educational fiction(Published in
November 2017). Its fictional component is composed of a middle-aged Romeo-
Juliet drama which ends with two deaths in Venice and a youthful adventure that
takes Robert, the narrator from trauma in South Africa to a teacher training
institute in England where he discovers Philosophy and befriends an alcoholic
lecturer who had once studied under Wittgenstein.

The educational component is composed of a series of lectures on the

philosophy of religion, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, ethics, the philosophy of
natural science, human science and mathematics, philosophical psychology,
political science, philosophy of education. Three different lectures deliver a
series of lectures, the educational intention of which is to introduce the reader to
the world of Philosophy and the world of Education seen through the eyes of
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer,
Freud, William James, Wittgenstein Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Arendt,
Quine, Cavell, Paul Ricoeur, Brian O Shaughnessy, R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst,
Hudson, Adrian Stokes, T S Eliot, Julian Jaynes.

The book attempts to take the reader on a philosophical journey from curiosity
to commitment and it is hoped that the trilogy will serve as a general
introduction to Philosophy for all who are curious about the eternal
Philosophical questions such as What is the nature of Reality? Is God merely
an idea in our minds? Is the soul a function of the body? What is Justice?
What is ethics? What is the role of Education in the life of the individual and
society?How should we characterize the feeling of the sublime? How shall
we characterize the feeling of the beautiful? What properties do great works
of Art posses? What is the philosophical role of Psychoanalysis? How shall
we philosophically characterize the role of language in our understanding of the
world? What is the meaning of life?

Life, for the central character and philosophical explorer of the book , Jude
Sutton, was ebbing to its conclusion prematurely and his best friend Glynn
Samuels, a religious Welsh follower of Heidegger, Freud and T S Eliot could do
nothing but play the part of the spectator in a Greek ,Shakespearean tragedy,
watching the spectacle unfold to its inevitable conclusion. He could do nothing
but express his admiration for his friend and his suffering at his friends
misfortune in his lectures.

Below is the central lecture given by Glynn Samuels, the lecture has the same
title as the book:
Ladies and Gentlemen! How does man relate to the world? What is he that he
is capable of posing a further question for every answer he gives himself ? Why
is the mind of man so restless? Thanks to science we know why the sea is
restless. Indeed the behavior of all the other elements, earth, air, and fire have
been captured in our observations and equations. Science in this very restless
century has explored the outer regions of the heavens and the inner structures of
the smallest particles in the Universe: particles that are invisible to the human
eye. However, in a series of operations reminiscent of the unpacking of a
sequence of imbedded Russian dolls it looks to me as if an inevitable limit has
been encountered even for the eye equipped with various forms of microscopes
and telescopes. If this is true, does this signal that we have come to a resting
point in Science especially insofar as the exploration of the Natural physical
world is concerned? Are we detecting a winding down of the activity that
occupied the geniuses of Einstein and Bohr? Have the microscopes being
packed and moved off to other kinds of laboratories for the study of other kinds
of things? Will we now be eagerly awaiting the results from clinical laboratories
whose experiments save lives? The Frontiers of Science may have been moved
to Chemistry, Biology, Medicine and the Human Genome, but the methodology
is the same. Penetrate the phenomenon, reduce it to its smallest components and
measure these in a myriad of ways. What will the result of all this activity be,
ladies and gentlemen? Will we find a gene that explains my tendency to eat
porridge in the mornings or will I read a book one day that tells me that it has
now been established that mankind uses all his genes in his choice and eating of
porridge? Dr. Sutton in his lecture last year attempted to map out the
transformations in our intellectual landscape brought about by Science. He
reviewed the developments of science in this century and arrived at the
conclusion that though we have only completed 70 years of the cycle, this
century may well come to be known by historians as the century of terror,
counting amongst its happenings two world wars and the dropping of two
atomic bombs on civilian populations. He asked the thought provoking question:
on whom should we place our bets for the future: Einstein or Wittgenstein? I
believe in that lecture he gave very cogent and persuasive arguments for
believing that the processes of philosophical thinking are more to be trusted than
the processes of scientific thinking. A colleague of Einstein once wondered
what would have happened if Einstein had used his talents and genius to study
the question What is life? as if he was to science what Christ was to
Christianity. A famous psychologist who met Einstein at Princeton University,
thought there were contradictions in Einsteins theories. There certainly
appeared to be un- Christ-like practical contradictions in Einsteins personal life.
I am skeptical about the reasoning of Einsteins colleague, ladies and gentlemen,
because he was placing his faith in the science of Biology to investigate the gift
of life. Biological investigations, I wish to maintain, need to be conducted
holistically and philosophically, within an Aristotelian framework of Change:
kinds of change, principles of change and causes of change. The concepts of
matter and form, potentiality and actuality, the actualizing process, genus and
species need to lift the level of reflection above the so called material causes
relating to why we choose to eat porridge in the morning. The question of the
meaning of life, ladies and gentlemen, is a philosophical question, but it also a
religious question. Even the great Einstein believed in Spinozas God: the God
who ordered the world harmoniously in terms of principles and adequate ideas
that man could theoretically understand. We heard in last years lecture that
Wittgenstein too believed in God and the religious attitude, perhaps because he
believed that no other attitude could bring peace to his restless soul. The sign of
a great man, ladies and gentlemen may not be in the work that is immediately
published, but rather in what happens to the entire history of thought once the
published ideas have been assimilated, in our culture. Will these ideas still
permit a judgment of the culture, a judgment urging necessary change? Dr.
Sutton showed us how he himself through the work of Wittgenstein could
understand Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and all British
Philosophy in greater depth. He demonstrated that philosophical texts are not
atoms or particles in the cultural world but something more akin to living,
breathing beings working together to build and maintain our culture in
accordance with holistic principles. Man is a curious being, ladies and
gentlemen: he has intuition, intuition for the connection of things and the
relation of parts to a whole. He is, as Professor Heidegger so perceptively
maintained: a being for whom his very being is an issue. Heidegger also
believed that the philosophical issue of the nature of his own existence was
being addressed by the poets and their writings. The poets words, ladies and
gentlemen are drawn up very carefully, and with great effort, from the well of
suffering- not only the well of their own suffering but also the very deep well of
the suffering of the world. To fully understand the cathartic effect of the poets
words we may need to recall Dr. Suttons lecture which referred to the
Copernican Revolution of the work of the later Wittgenstein which in his words
shed the philosophical light of the sun on the role of language in our
understanding of the world and each other. T S Eliot had the following to say
about some cathartic uses of language: ..Words strain, Crack and sometimes
break, under the burden Under the tension, slip, slide, perish Decay with
imprecision, will not stay in place Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding,
mocking, or merely chattering Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is
most attacked by voices of temptation The crying shadow in the funeral dance
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera. You may guess to whom these
shrieking voices belong. Partly, to the manipulators of our diminishing dolls
whose language has been atomized to the point at which one no longer cares for
humanity in the way the religious man, the poet or the philosopher care.
Consequences are not arguments, ladies and gentlemen. The consequences of
medical science are indeed valuable but it is important to note that they are the
result of the deep cultural process, which, in spite of the scientific method,
inhabits the habitats of the universities. In relation to this deep cultural process
we intuit the purpose of engaging in the search for knowledge for the sake of
knowledge. We do not seek knowledge because it pays or gives us something.
Restless eyes look for payment, for reward. These are not the eyes searching
through the pages of books fighting the good fight that Eliot referred to in East
Coker of the Four Quartets: The fight to recover what has been lost And found
and lost again and again. There is hostility in restless eyes searching for a
reward. An ancient religion and these restless explorers par excellence may have
played a role in the Crucifixion of Christ. The restless eyes and minds of this
century, ladies and gentlemen are engaged on the project of culturally crucifying
religion and everything spiritual. We are, as Aristotle said, ladies and gentlemen,
social beings, we absorb language and attitudes: like impressionable children.
There is no longer any easy commerce of the old and the new to quote Eliot
again. We have learned from Wittgensteins Philosophy that two of the essential
characteristics of language are its Communication and Truth functions.
Heidegger, in an essay entitled The Work of Art talks about how art works
can be revelatory of the world we are attempting to understand. The poet is
conceived as an artist using words in a world revelatory manner. He is searching
for the moods of the restless sea, the moods of the restless world. The world of
Eliot was measured by a time older than chronometers, the time of a tolling bell
of an untethered sea buoy responding to the swell of an infinitely restless sea.
Who of you believe that this phenomenon can be caught in the torn nets of
science being sewn together by the wives of old mariners who have missed the
morning watch whilst the mariners themselves are searching the sea for what is
inside of themselves or nowhere. Religion is world revelatory, ladies and
gentlemen, it shows itself both in the commerce of the world and in the
explanations and justifications of the most important aspects of this commerce.
The world is laden with hidden values that reveal themselves, if and only if, one
learns to look in the right way and with the right attitude. The truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth is revealed or brought from concealment.
Heidegger uses the term aletheia for this process. Truth begins with the
Transcendental Aesthetic of the poet in his rendering of the spirit of place in the
rhythms of time. It flourishes further in a Transcendental Logic of the categories
of existence revealed in language. In the sea of meaning out of which the island
of truth arises we find castaway life forms living in flux. Religious truth, ladies
and gentlemen interprets life holistically. It can see a handful of dust particles
without fear and trembling. It can calmly survey the end of the world of things.
It can ask coolly and clinically Is this handful of dust a part of the corpse we
buried so long ago? The religious eye is not afraid to dwell in the pages of old
manuscripts and is not afraid to lift its eyes to the heavens and celebrate the
divine in the human. It is not afraid to embrace humanity as a whole. In the
beginning this embrace was carefree but time has taught us a lesson: that Care is
tinged with the mourning for aged lost friends and relatives, ancient forms of
life and forms of thought. Or if one wishes to change the key of this sung lament
from Heidegger to Freud, the ego has a heart of darkness within, a heart
composed of the memories of lost objects of the past. No one can live during
this period, during this century, and not feel transformative processes shaping
our world into something we know not what. Aristotle believed that every
human process aimed at the good but this terrible century has allowed the
skeptic to flourish. Where will it all end? In Eliots rose garden or in Kants
Kingdom of Ends, or perhaps in Eliots waste land, where the cultural attitude
will be shared by a few lost souls whose eyes will never dare to meet lest shared
sorrow about lost values releases an infinite flood of tears, making life
impossible. In the agony of such existence what comfort can there be other than
in Religion, Philosophy, Music and Poetry?

There are two more lectures in his series of three lectures on the themes of
exploring and suffering. These lectures complement the exploratory lectures of
Jude Sutton who is sublimating his suffering with alcohol and what it allows to
rise to the surface from the depths of his losses.

The book is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

If you wish to peruse the lectures which figure in the following two volumes of
the trilogy, you can do so via my blog situated at:

http://www.michaelrdjames.org

My author page is at :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B077JVNXCV and at

http:/www.amazon.com/author/mrdj

Dr Michael R D james