Samuel ALEXANDER

Background

Alexander, Samuel was born on January 6, 1859 in Sydney, Australia.

Education

Wesley College, Melbourne. Balliol College, Oxford. /nfls. T. H. Green and C. Lloyd Morgan.

Career

Honourable : Professor of Philosophy at the Victoria University of Manchester since 1893.

Views

Samuel Alexander was an interesting person in many ways. Bom and brought up in Australia, he was the first Jew to become a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college. Leaving Oxford for thirty years’ tenure of a Chair in Manchester, he became widely known and loved in that city for his many virtues and his gentle eccentricity. His Oxford studies at the high point of British Hegelianism inspired him with the ideal of a systematic philosophy. But it turned out to be very different from the body of doctrine he had been taught. In the first place, it was naturalistic not spiritualistic. The world as a whole was not, for him, an absolute spirit, but was the totality of things in space and time. It was not contained within an all-encompassing, metaphysically demythologized God, but contained God, or, more precisely, a striving or nisus towards deity, within it. Secondly, his procedure was descriptive rather than argumentative. It was not provoked by a sense of the misconceptions of other philosophers. What led Alexander away from idealism was a profound conviction of the truth of Darwin’s evolutionism, which he took in a straightforwardly naturalistic way and extrapolated to cover the whole range of what there is. Thirty years before the publication of his system he applied the evolutionary principle to morality. Historically considered it turns out to be a constant field of conflict between alternative ideals. In part the change can be attributed to recognition of changed circumstances: in part it is a matter of conflicting impulses. Viewed as a whole the process of moral evolution can be understood as an increasingly successful pursuit of equilibrium as between the contending factors. At the basis of the metaphysics of Space, Time and Deity (1926) is a theory of knowledge, a bluntly realistic one which rejects the view that the immediate objects of knowledge are mental or subjective by simple assertion. Knowledge, for Alexander, is a particular version of the relationship of compresence or togetherness between two things, that, specifically, where one of the two is a consciousness. Compresence is not to be interpreted literally as contact, immediate juxtaposition in space. Memory, for example, is a direct awareness of past events. Ordinary perception, unless it is by the sense of touch, is always of objects at a distance. The object of knowledge is not altered or modified by our knowledge of it and is certainly not ‘constructed’ by our minds. Perception is always selective, it does not tell the whole truth. But it tells some truth. What is given to us are ‘perspectives' of things, but these are still parts of the real world, like the cross-sections of a tree. Illusions are the result of misplacing perspectives. The best-known part of Alexander’s theory of knowledge is his distinction between the contemplation of objects and the ‘enjoyment' we have of our own experiencings and mental acts. This is one of many attempts to get rid of the legacy of Locke’s doctrine of reflection, the idea that we have an introspective knowledge of our own mental states which is formally parallel to our perceptual knowledge of things outside us. Alexander’s metaphysics proper is introduced as an empirical study of the a priori features of the world. That is not quite as paradoxical as it sounds since for Alexander the a priori is not the rationally necessary and demonstrable but is the universal and pervasive. Space, Time and Deity does contain a theory of the categories, which is of reasonably conventional membership: existence, universality relation, order, substance, quantity, number and motion. These are all to be found in the fundamental stuff of the universe and go on to pervade everything that develops or emerges from that fundamental stuff. The stuff in question is space-time. There is some distant echo of the new physics of his epoch in this, but the considerations that weighed with Einstein and Minkowski played no part in Alexander’s thinking. He conceived space and time in a perfectly conventional way but as implying each other since always found together, space and time being, therefore, abstractions from the common matrix. Space-time is composed, in an abstract sort of way, of pointinstants; more concretely it proves to be composed of ‘pure motions’. These unappetizing ingredients are held to generate matter by a process of ‘emergent evolution’. Alexander derived that idea from the biologist C. Lloyd Morgan. Organisms or organic structures come into existence in the course of evolution which are, or appear to be, irreducible to the organic items from which they have developed. Such emergent things show unpredictable novelty. Matter, endowed with primary qualities, is the first new level of existence to emerge from the pure motions of space-time. Next, there is the physicochemical realm and, beyond it, life. From life, in turn, mind or consciousness emerges, specifically from the neural aspect of the living organism. The relation of a mind to its body is put forward as a model for every level of existence in relation to that from which it has emerged. In a particularly bold speculative flight Alexander maintains that time is the mind of space, which seems to imply that there was a time before time had emerged from space. The system is crowned with the account of deity, which is the next highest level of existence of mind and is destined to emerge from it. The world, indeed, is already pregnant with it, or has a nisus towards it. For obvious reasons little positive can be said about it. Alexander acknowledges an ambiguity in his account of God. On the one hand it is the being, not yet in existence, which the world is in process of gestating; on the other, it is the world as a whole, deific, as one might put it, by reason of the premonitory intimations of deity within it. The first is much like the God of Aristotle, an ideal towards which the world directs itself. The second is more like the God of Spinoza. Alexander has an account of values as tertiary qualities of things, different from other qualities in being not intrinsic to their possessors but as being relative to minds and their impulses. Our awareness of them must be a hybrid of contemplation and enjoyment. Linking value to impulse, he attributes the value we attach to art to the satisfaction it provides for our impulse to construct. Alexander had no influence in Britain whatever, but in a curious way was very important for philosophy in the land of his birth. John Anderson, a very independent-minded Scottish admirer of Alexander, went to Sydney in the mid- 1920s and came to be the very dominant leader of the country’s most powerful and distinctive philosophical school, numbering among its members J. A. Passmore. J. L. Mackie, D. C. Stove and, at a greater distance. D. M. Armstrong. Anderson held, not that space-time is the stuff of the world, but that to exist is to exist in space and time. He is as uncompromisingly realistic about knowledge as Alexander but is totally hostile to the latter’s conception of values as relational.

Interests

• Metaphysics; aesthetics: ethics.

References

• The philosophy of Samuel Alexander;: Idealism in "Space, time, and deity," Includes bibliography and index.