Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 1, April 2014
___________________________________________________________________
Langsam, Harold. The Wonder of Consciousness: Understanding the Mind through Philosophical Reflection. Cambridge, Mass., 2011. Hb, $35. ISBN 9780262015851, 224pp
Reviewed by
University of KwaZulu-Natal
I approached the initial reading of this book with enthusiasm, hoping that, by virtue of the title, there would be a modern philosophical exegesis of consciousness that conceptually attests to my own growing wonder of the fact of consciousness that is experientially apperceived. However, this book, finally, is only peripherally about consciousness and is more about mind as an expression of the former. And while academic philosophers may delight in these accounts of mind, the actual wonder of consciousness as the ground of Being, is actually ignored.
In fact, there is no reference to Being; that is, this is not an ontologically grounded inquiry, but an epistemological one; one that is fraught with same conceptual limitations that have hindered academic philosophy for so long.
I do not doubt that Langsam has probably touched, through introspection, the nonreductionist quality of consciousness, but I assume that when Langsam uses the word introspection, he is using it in its generally defined way, which is to contemplate one’s thoughts and sensations. And herein is the problem with this methodology, which, I suggest, has been the Achilles’ heel of most Western philosophers inquiring into consciousness. And this problem, so very self-evident from the perspective of nondual methodologies developed in the East, is not easily recognised in the West because the tool of exploration is thought, not what is prior to it. And thought can only produce concepts that, in some cases, give the illusory sense of being in direct contact with the object of inquiry. In fact, even my formulation here is just a concession to language; consciousness can never be on object of inquiry, but can only be what makes inquiry possible.
This fact about consciousness does not mean that we cannot then proceed to say something about it, but what is said will always be known to be a conceptual approximation, not the living reality itself. To get to this place of nondual seeing, we will have to challenge what appears to be intuitive modes of perception of what we take to be real. Berkeley did this and was scorned, because what he proposed was so counter-intuitive; that everything sensed as self-existing objects, can be shown, through careful inquiry and analysis, and finally, direct apperception, to be nothing but consciousness. And what a mystery this is! The implications are vast; that all of life is utterly nondual; no object can actually be found and known as things in themselves, and what is found is a wondrous play of consciousness which no concept can ultimately grasp, as the quantum physicists are finding.
So, the book treads along familiar paths of philosophical analysis and the wonder, for me, was not touched.