Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Ken Armstrong <armstron AT ohiou.edu>]

At 01:48 PM 04/29/2002 -0400, you wrote:

> >>Well,
> I suppose that the author might argue something along those lines. 
> But supposing the author said the book came about as a result of many
> discussions.  Does this mean that free will was necessarily
> involved,  that the process was fully conscious or that
> consciousness was necessary for the book to have been produced. 
> Granted I think it is unlikely that the author would argue that
> consciousness did not even accompany the process by which the book
> developed but as you know correlation does not necessarily imply
> cause.  (Moreover there is some experimental evidence that
> consciousness occurs after one makes a choice  --not concurrently or
> before.) 

   Jim,

 Granted correspondence does not imply cause (thinking it did, M.
McLuhan would say, was why NASA's focus was on overcoming the power of
gravitational force rather understanding levity), let's take our loosely
used terms as precisely as we can. The question is not just whether
consciousness is involved in the book's coming into being, but conscious
will. Did the author decide to write a book? Or is will an illusion? I
submit to you that the willful act of seriously presenting an argument
for the non-existence of will is the plague of dyadic thinking, right
down to the end of excluding the legitimacy of triadic thinking. it would
be funny if it weren't happening.

  Josiah Royce created a schematic for cognition
(perhaps hoisted from Peirce?). On a line put perception, conception, and
interpretation. To steal my lit. theory professor's example: are the
stars out tonight? That question calls for perception. Why is it that
when I turn the key in the ignition, my car won't start? That calls for
conception. Why is it that when I move my lips and make faces at an
interlocutor, I think I am communicating? That calls for interpretation.
We live in a percept-concept oriented society, where the drive, as
exhibited in Wegner, is to subdue all phenomenon to the percept-concept
model. This is the world that WP is consciously reacting against in much
of his writing, esp. e.g. The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind. It
is, as someone else pointed out, the dualist world where one side is
always trying to subdue the other, and in this time of the heyday of
science, the humanity of the person is the constant target of people like
Wegner, Dennet,  and all the lords and ladies of dyadic thinking
whom logic fails when they are asked to reflect on their own actions.
Ironically, to the degree that Wegner is unconscious of this situation,
he lacks the "conscious will" to address the situation that he
thinks he's addressing. This does not prove him correct.

Yrs.,
Ken Armstrong