John Searle recently wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books in which he asserts that it is a FACT that a mountain is not a giraffe. This Oxford trained philosopher feels that this is true not just in the mundane sense but in a fundamental sense. This irritates me.
On the most conventional, conversational level, indeed this is true enough (so true, it seems stupid to even point it out) – but Searle is paid to think about these things at a higher level than this. I would like to point out to Mr. Searle that at the subatomic level, the giraffe, the mountain and Professor Searle himself, are indeed the same. At the level of transcendence, again, they are the same, or, rather three aspects of the same thing.
Whether one wants to be very clean-cut about it or mystical, the conclusion is the same: SEARLE IS BOTH A GIRAFFE AND A MOUNTAIN! And this does not even touch on the funhouse structure of language and representation.
Much of Mr. Searle’s argument hinges on the notion of “fact.” A VERY troubling notion which Professor Searle takes for granted as perfectly equivalent to “reality.” If you can apprehend facts, according to Searle, you can apprehend reality. Does this make sense in even a conventional sense? There is a story about three blind men and an elephant….
Facts are not related to one another. A pizza in Beijing has no conventional relationship to my foot or the Bruce Springsteen concert. But reality is a unity. Mr. Searle may very well exist, but only in relation to his mother, his father, their parents, all the events and all the people that surrounded all of their lives and everything that ever existed (seen or unseen) since the dawn of time (and perhaps before). As an independent FACT, no, I do not think Searle exists. Facts are a fiction. Though very useful. Even necessary.
Searle believes that facts are meatier, meaner, tougher and more important than other forms of knowledge. For Searle, there exists a binary system: yes/no, true/untrue, fact/ fiction, chocolate/vanilla. Either chocolate gets to play or vanilla gets to play, but we cannot allow lemon and very berry to play and we certainly not a spectrum of flavors. And what about blueberry crumb cake?
Searle is a pre-Copernican thinker, believing that human rationality is the center of the universe. I see Searle’s objectivism – which is presumably aimed at truth or something like truth – as missing the mark in the deepest, broadest and most astonishing ways.
He is, however, a very clear writer.
Searle is a long-time contributor to the Review, as are most of the contributors of this interesting but increasingly musty forum. I just wish they would shake it up a little and introduce the giraffe to the mountain or even to the banana. Stanley Crouch once called The New York Review of Books the “white citizens council of literature.” Increasingly, I know what he means.
The Unknown Banana 