J.N. Findlay was a South African philosopher who published from the late 1940s into the 1980s. He had a prestigious international academic career, holding many academic posts around the world. This article uses a textual comparative approach and focuses on Findlay’s Gifford Lecture at St Andrews University between 1965 and 1970. The objective of the article is to highlight the extent to which Findlay’s philosophical writings were influenced by
This contribution forms part of a larger collection of essays investigating philosophical works that have had a significant impact on the study of religion. This contribution investigates the Buddhist influence on J.N. Findlay’s philosophical readings of Husserl and Hegel.
John Niemeyer (J.N.) Findlay was associated with Pretoria University, Rhodes University, and the University of Natal in South Africa. He was an international philosopher, holding posts at Yale and Kings Colleges in Newcastle and London, the University of Otago, and the University of Texas, Austin, and holding the prestigious Clark Chair of Metaphysics at Yale University. He died in Massachusetts, USA, in 1987. In South Africa, Religious Studies departments began taking an interest in Eastern religions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My research reveals that Findlay predated this trend, beginning to investigate Eastern philosophy in the 1960s. In this regard Findlay is sadly underappreciated, despite his international renown. The influence of Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies on his writings provides a new perspective on early research into Eastern philosophy in the South African academy. Findlay’s writings pioneered the way for a philosophical trend of drawing on Buddhist ideas.
Findlay adhered to a primarily Platonic approach and his writings were aligned to the Platonic resurgence among British philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s. These philosophers’ writings formed a value-based tradition that explored the Platonic Good as a reaction to the analytical and materialist traditions of, for example, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlieb Frege. Some of Findlay’s peers include: Alasdair MacIntyre, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Despite the common roots of their thinking, there are notable differences: Anscombe (
This article focuses on Findlay’s incorporation of Buddhism into his thinking on Hegel and Husserl. The Buddha’s rejection of a substantial transcendent metaphysic, I argue, leads Findlay to innovative approaches to reading Husserl and Hegel. Ultimately, he remained Platonic in his approach, particularly in his mystical ideas, in asserting the importance of what he termed neo-neo-Platonism (Findlay
Between the two World Wars and after the Second World War, there was a reaction against the emphasis on fact and opinion in philosophy. Analytical philosophy was still the dominant focus in, for example, the Vienna Circle (Grayling
By the mid-1960s, Findlay had embraced a value-based Platonic approach (Findlay
… The
According to Findlay, there is no special standpoint. Similarly, the fact that moving objects change size from a particular standpoint places objects in relation to space and time (Findlay
For, if the past is not part of the present, is this exclusion, this pastness of that past not part of the present, not something that now is the case, something without which, moreover, the present would have no position and only a vanishing content, and does not this in a fashion readmit the past, encapsulated and modified, no doubt, into the present that thus excludes it? (Findlay
This is very close to Nāgārjuna’s insights in
If the present and the future are to be dependent on the past, the present and future will be in the past.
Again, if the present and the future do not exist there, how would the present and the future depend on it (McCagney
Later, the notion of shared consciousness led Findlay to argue for the ‘logic of mysticism’, which holds that since mystics of all cultures have relayed valid accounts of extrasensory knowledge, it requires investigation (Findlay
My methods of examining the cave of human experience are all influenced by [
Findlay identifies the cave, where there is a profound mutual dependence of all things, as an obstacle to philosophy: ‘for on account of this interconnection, each factor and feature of cave-life encourages us to see all the features and factors in relation to itself’ (Findlay
In his work on Hegel, Findlay applies the dialectic method of thesis–antithesis–synthesis. The subject and the objectification of spirit provide the thesis and antithesis so that Findlay can argue for the actualisation of spirit as a synthesis. However, he deviates from Hegel’s idea of the spirit actualising itself in the State, arguing that it is actualised in a non-material mystical state. He uses the Plato’s Cave metaphor to argue for the ‘logic of mysticism’ as objects and phenomena present themselves as less distinct than Husserl would claim. In contrast to Husserl’s argument that phenomena can be viewed via his ‘suspension of conviction’, Findlay (
I am also no phenomenologist, since I believe in a probabilistic, as much as in a rigorously necessary
These reflections reinforce a Platonic sense of knowledge and value since what is perceived is contingent on the nature of the perceiver. In applying the metaphor of the Cave, Findlay holds to a two-tiered epistemological framework with conventional and absolute truth occupying different tiers. Nāgārjuna explains the two-tiered truth framework in his
8.
The instruction of the teachings of the
The truth of common-sense conventions about the world and truth in the higher sense of the word.
9.
Those who do not understand the distinction between the two truths do not understand the profound reality in the teaching of the Buddha.
10.
Higher truth is not taught independently of common practice.
Liberation is not accomplished by the unattainable higher truth. (McCagney
Similarly, Findlay (
19.
There is no distinction whatever between
There is no distinction whatever between
20.
The limit of
The subtlest difference is not found between the two. (McCagney
Although Findlay was a leading Hegelian and Husserlian scholar, as demonstrated by his forewords for translations of both philosophers (Hegel & Miller
Although Findlay embraced a neo-Platonic mysticism, his ideas about the Cave are infused with the insubstantiality of all things. He innovatively associates this inessentiality with Hegel’s absolute negativity. He writes in his foreword to
Mind can step out of its abstract, self-existent universality, out of its simple self-relation, can posit within itself a determinate, actual difference, something other than the simple “I,” and hence a negative; and this relation to the Other is, for mind, not merely possible but necessary, because it is through the Other and by the triumph over it, that mind comes to authenticate itself and to be in fact what it ought to be according its Notion, namely, the ideality of the external, the Idea which returns to itself out of its otherness; or expressed more abstractly, the self-differentiating universal which in its difference is at home with itself and for itself. (Findlay in Hegel & Miller
Here Findlay argues that the other provides the means, via the dialectic, for the self to find substance and identity. Findlay’s reading of Hegel in his 1965 Gifford Lectures emphasises a different outcome of the absolute negativity of the other. Here he evokes the absolute emptiness of
We proceed [
Findlay’s mysticism, based on interdependence, comes to rest in nonsubstantial mystical awareness. The following passage demonstrates his understanding of the self as insubstantial:
The ego’s essential freedom and openness, its resemblance to a free mathematical variable rather than a mathematical constant, was further evinced in all these higher feats of imagination, essential to morality and philosophy, in which we conceive our-selves in personal positions utterly unlike our own … The idea of an ego is, however, against all such arguments [
Findlay’s sense of interdependence emerging from absolute negativity is closer to the Buddhist idea of interdependence, or
Similarly, in Findlay’s Foreword to Husserl and Findlay (
The essence of meaning is seen by us, not in conferring experience, but in its ‘content’, the single, self-identical intentional unity set over against the dispersed multiplicity of actual and possible experience of speakers and thinkers. (Husserl & Findlay
In his 1965 Gifford Lecture, however, he offers a Buddhist-influenced perspective of phenomena as entangled with empty space, which enfolds them and determines their relative states:
But, when deeply reflected on, void, neutral space and time show themselves up as not being truly self-sustaining, being no more than a foil to bodies and to bodiliness, as organically related to body and as shown only in bodily behaviour and pattern and in inseparable from these last. To enter into this new point of view is to view body in a manner which demotes it from its independence, its pure bodiliness: it becomes dependent upon its foil, and as moulded by its foil’s permanent structure, as that foil depends on it. We are introduced to the possibility of queer spaces which are as positive in their nature as the bodies which occupy them, which in a sense decide what forms bodies take and where they go, though it is in bodily manifestation that their deciding influence is made known. (Findlay
Instead of the phenomenological method arriving at fixed knowledge, Findlay asserts that positing a plethora of complex phenomenologies and ‘shifts and transitions’ (Findlay
In order to prove this, we need to scrutinise the diction of Findlay’s Gifford Lectures. Some of the words and phrases in the lectures show striking resonances with Buddhist ideas and phrasings. Initially, we must emphasise that he identifies space and time as the fundamental building blocks of knowledge (Findlay
It [
Nāgārjuna makes a very similar reference to the phantasmagoric or unreal nature of objects. In verse 64 of the
Thus the Buddha said:
All things arise from causes and conditions;
To view them as real is ignorance. (Komito
And in the
[
Space does not occur prior to some characteristic of space.
If it would exist prior to having a characteristic, it follows that there would be space without characteristic. (McCagney
And more aptly in relation to Findlay, he writes in the
Physical form, sound, taste, touch, smell, and events made-up imaginary cities in the sky, dreams and fantasies. (McCagney
Similarly, Findlay avers that knowledge is not structured according to a subject-object relation, but rather founded in consciousness. He observes:
The inner dimension of consciousness reveals presence in the constantly exposed inauthenticity of bodily phenomena, solid and real as they may at first seem to be, it reveals itself in the constantly changing stress upon different features of bodies, it reveals itself in a constant variation of interpretative slant, it is shown in the contrast of a great number of different senses and degrees of ‘presence’, it is lastly in a variety of changes which are utterly alien to bodily changes … (Findlay
In describing the nature of things, Findlay’s epistemology is closer to
Much of what we were aware of must therefore not merely pass into some obscure margin of consciousness but into its readily available,
Out of the vast range of facts and circumstances that we say we ‘know’, those matters must come to consciousness and those alone, that fit in with the task at hand, that are relevant to the line of our conscious voluntary activity. Now it is plain empirically that selections are made, and solutions arrived at, in manners of which we have no ordinary awareness; in this sense the requirement of unconscious co-operation is indeed met. (Findlay
Findlay’s concept of an unconscious ‘storehouse’, from which items can be withdrawn at need, is very similar to
3. Two kinds of people are to be distinguished:
Meditative thinkers and ordinary folk.
The concepts of the ordinary give way,
Refuted by the views of meditators.
4. And within the ranks of these philosophers,
The lower in degrees in insight are confuted by the higher.
Comparisons are held in common;
In order to achieve the goal, analysis is left aside. (Dalai Lama
The original Sanskrit text of this section from the
Findlay’s value-based approach also asserts the importance of the yogic perspective, where knowledge changes as one approaches what Shantideva refers to as meditative-based knowledge. Findlay draws on the idea of
Beyond the trances which involve penetration, discernment, are the yet more profound trances which are undiscerning (
Similarly, Findlay interprets Husserl in Buddhist terms:
The inner dimension of consciousness reveals presence in the constantly exposed inauthenticity of bodily phenomena, solid and real as they may at first seem to be, it reveals itself in the constantly changing stress upon different features of bodies, it reveals itself in a constant variation of interpretative slant, it is shown in the contrast of a great number of different senses and degrees of ‘presence’, it is lastly in a variety of changes which are utterly alien to bodily changes … (Findlay
Findlay’s use of Hegel and Husserl paradoxically arrives at the exact opposite of what they were aiming to achieve. Instead arriving at fixed, unmodifiable knowledge, he asserts that there is a plethora of complex phenomenologies, and ‘shifts and transitions’ (Findlay
I regard religion as the most embracing of the rational enterprises, one that engages the heart and the will as well as the mind. I give it as a verdict of my feeling that only a Form, something basically universal, though uttering itself in the individual and the specific, can be truly adorable, can in any way deserve the name of ‘God’. (Findlay
My study of J.N. Findlay’s philosophical thought reveals the potential of Western philosophy to engage with non-Western philosophical and wisdom traditions. While Findlay wrote the texts nearly 50 years ago, he provides a useful blueprint for a syncretic global philosophy that critically evaluates and compares different philosophies. His readings of Husserl’s and Hegel’s writings from a Buddhist and Asian perspective demonstrates how creative and informative hermeneutics can be when opened to global philosophical and wisdom traditions. Kevin Schilbrack (
As a South African philosopher who had a global presence, Findlay’s writings have immense value. Since the latter decades of the 20th century, Religious Studies departments at South African universities have kept alive research into Asia religions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. As a philosopher who explored Asian religions, particularly Buddhism, Findlay shows that philosophy is an excellent conduit for the study of Asian philosophies. In addition, via his Platonic perspective, he demonstrates that philosophy is adept at integrating religion into its critical scope. In this regard, Findlay’s writings proffer an invaluable contribution to the global project in philosophy and religious studies.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
G.J.M. is the sole author of this article.
This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the author.