It is important to keep this distinction between the
“what” (existents) and the “how” (modal aspects) in mind. Many problems in philosophy can be traced
back to treating “hows” (limited ways things function) as if they were things.
Consider how common it is to speak of physical reality as if some entity could
be purely physical. For example the
Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart, who was one of the first philosophers to
propose that the mind just is the brain and nothing more, wrote this concerning
the picture science gives us:
“It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able to be seen as physicochemical mechanisms: it seems that even the behaviour of man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms. There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness.”
On this view consciousness, or what Smart refers to as “raw sensations,” are strange things that just don’t fit into the universe understood as a purely physical thing. On the basis of Occam’s razor we are best advised to hold out the expectation that it can only be a matter of time before consciousness will be given a fully mechanistic explanation based on our growing understanding of the brain.
Smart makes a number of problematic assumptions here,
including that science deals only with “physicochemical mechanisms,” which
cannot be sustained even should we narrow our view only to physics. However the
main problem from our perspective is that the abstract viewpoint of the
physical aspect is here identified with reality per se. This is a classic
confusion between aspects and entities.
So how should we understand the difference and
connection between aspects and entities?
Modal theory closely relates to the special sciences
which take a modal aspect as the point of view through which to study
reality. The theory of entities relates
more to the ‘integral wholeness’ of things rather than the functions of those
things. This means that from a
theoretical point of view the modal aspects have priority and provide the
framework for developing a theory of entities; however from the perspective of
our experience we start with the rich interwoveness of reality where we
experience things in their unity, in their existence through time and as
totalities which bring various elements together. As such our everyday experience is closer to
the theory of entities. In naïve
experience we only perceive the modal diversity implicitly whereas we know
immediately the identity of the entities we experience. In contrast theoretical analysis reveals the
modal diversity while the unity and identity of things remain a mystery that
can only be approximated. Reality as it
presents itself to us in our everyday experience functions in all of the modal
aspects. We never experience a purely
physical or purely ‘mental’ reality. The
physical and psychical, for example, are only modal aspects of our experience
and not separate entities.
Our experience of things, events and forms of social
life in so-called naïve experience are not modal in character. When I experience a passing car, or a dog at
the park I experience them as an individual whole with their own unity despite
the great diversity of modal aspects in which they function. Each individual entity is not just a
collection of modal aspects, rather the unity comes first and the modal aspects
are functions of the individual whole.
Whereas the modal aspects are universal we need to speak of “typical
structures” with respect to an analysis of entities (we will call these idionomies, see the next section). Here too there is universality, this
individual tree exhibits the universal typical-structure of trees.
What is the link between the modal aspects and
entities? We can start to appreciate
this when we remember that entities function in all of the modal aspects. What we notice when looking first to the
concretely functioning entities is that the way they function in a modal aspect
takes on a specific character according to the kind of entity it is. So for example the way a family functions
economically will be different to the way a church or a business functions
economically. Again the command to love
our neighbour applies to all our relationships but the way we should love our spouse
is different (must be different!) from the way we love the person next door,
which in turn is different from the way we love our colleagues and so on. In this way the theory of modal aspects
already gives us a clue to the different types of entities that there are. For example an apple tree differs from a
stone not because it functions in different modal aspects but because of the way
it harnesses those aspects it is active in as a subject and thereby realises
itself as a living thing in a typical way.
The idionomies (typical structures) of entities must
also be understood in their temporality, this is due both to the temporal
character of the modal aspects and because the typical structure of an
individual guides its actual functioning in the modal aspects which are brought
together into a dynamic unity. Then
there is also the temporal duration of an entity so, for example, the
individual duration of a plant is determined by its most characteristic active function,
the biotic, which guarantees the continued existence of the plant’s life. In contrast the duration of the existence of
a work of art is typically determined by the preservation of the aesthetically
qualified form that the artist has given to the material.
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