마음(Mind)과 철학: Alfred North Whitehead 의 책에서

 

Alfred North Whitehead, "Science and the Modern World" (1925)

"The pleasure of reading Whitehead is quite different from that of

reading Locke or Mill, for he opens perspectives that enlarge

the imagination and are closely akin to those of poetry."

Clifton Fadiman 이 그의 "Lifetime Reading Plan" (3rd ed, 1978)에서

이 책을 소개한 글을 맺으며 한 말이다.

 Whitehead 를 젊었을 적에 읽은 생각이 나서 책장에서  찾아 보니 바로

이 책이다. 그때와 지금의 관심의 차이를 보여주듯, 열 세 장 중에 세 장에는

밑줄이 안 쳐져 있다. 그중 제9장 "Science and Philosophy" 를  이번에 읽었다.

(이 에세이를 읽으면서 Jaegwon Kim, "Philosophy of Mind" 를 떠올렸다.)

Fadiman 의 말에 적어도 Mill 과 Whitehead 에 대해서는 수긍이 간다.

 '마음'에 관한 William James 의 구절들을 여기서도 읽게 되다니!

아래는  "Science and Philosophy" 에서 따온 몇 구절이다.

Descartes starts with himself as being a mentality, ...

conscious of its own existence as a unit entity. (p 141)

... there still remains a certain fitness in contrasting his[William James']

essay, Does Consciousness Exist, published in 1904, with

Descartes' Discourse on Method, published in 1637. ...

Take for example these two sentences from his[William James'] essay:

'To deny plumply that "consciousness" exists seems so absurd on the

face of it -- for undeniably "thoughts" do exist -- that I fear some readers

will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only

to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically

that it does stand for a function.' (p 143)

In the sentence which immediately follows the one which

I have already quoted he[James] says:

'... That function is knowing. "Consciousness" is supposed

necessary to explain the fact that things not only

are, but get reported, are known.' (p 144)

Locke discovered that the philosophical situation bequeathed by Descartes

involved the problems of epistemology and psychology. (p 148)

"Bergson introduced into philosophy the organic conceptions of

physiological science. He has most completely moved away from

the static materialism of the seventeenth century. (p 148)

In biochemistry, the delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of

parts to the preservation of the whole organism is detected. Thus the

mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality,

reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. (p 148)

The model of approach to the problem, so far as science is concerned,

is merely to ask if molecules exhibit in living bodies properties which

are not to be observed amid inorganic surroundings, (p 149)