Consciousness and Being

In Consciousness and Being: From Being to Truth in the Thomistic Tradition, Robert C. Trundle has provided a detailed and sophisticated defense of a strong realism based on an existential phenomenology. The author’s arguments, if sound, could have profound consequences for the philosophy of science, as well as for our understanding of gender, society, art, and politics. Trundle presents his work as a wake-up call to the academy to return to a common-sense Aristotelian realism and trust in the deliverances of the natural sciences, in contrast to what he perceives as the latent anti-realism of Karl Popper (1902-1994).

The central argument of Trundle’s highly technical monograph, which reappears in almost every chapter, claims that we have a primary and basic non-conceptual access to reality itself. This claim is vital for Trundle’s entire project. This basic or “elemental” consciousness is pre-theoretical and pre-cultural. We are provided with the example of a soup can as a key illustration:

Children learn to discern soup cans in our culture as things that contain potentially warm liquid to consume. This consumptive potential may be foreign to aborigines, though, although aborigines can still be said to see non-epistemologically or, alternatively, to be conscious non-conceptually of the same thing! Seeing the same aspects of a thing without concepts enables a conceptual construal of the ‘can’ by the aborigine as, say, something to carry water. (62)

While the meaning of some perception may vary between cultures, this is irrelevant to the reality contained therein. Another example of pre-conceptual consciousness in action is taken from Fred Dretske, who recalls walking down a street so preoccupied that he had been “seeing” without conception of his surroundings (31).

In this way, reality is first recognized according to certain “aspects,” which Trundle lists as continuity, extensiveness, individuality, and independence. We are non-conceptually aware of a thing’s evolving, its occupying a space, its boundaries, and of its resistance to our will: “These aspects are patently manifest to us by phenomena that change, occupy volumetric regions, have boundaries and ‘are as they are’ independently of our intentions (will, wish or thought)” (56).

For Trundle, we are always indirectly aware of this basic “undifferentiated” consciousness. It is this awareness of our own basic consciousness that Trundle presents as a knock-down argument for realism. This is because if we are aware of this basic consciousness, then we can differentiate between it and the phenomena of which it is conscious. Trundle makes use of a similar argument to demonstrate libertarian free-will. We have indirect awareness of the choice to think or not to think. So even the act of thinking of a deterministic world is a recognition of freedom to think this very thought (127).

Importantly, our conceptual consciousness is infused with our basic non-conceptual consciousness. This gives scientific discoveries a realist foundation. In this way, Trundle will claim that “theories can be true or false in virtue of what reality is really like apart from what we will, wish, or think” (2). In this light, Trundle presents a truth-growth theory of the development of the natural sciences. Here, the historical claims of natural science which have since been “disproved”, turn out to bear truth according to their domain (147). Trundle also details how this elemental consciousness can explain contradictory scientific theories (51).

This renewed trust in the reliability of scientific experiment and progress, we read, results in a renewed trust in our psycho-biological make-up. This leads Trundle to defend traditional heterosexual gender roles and the institution of marriage. The author makes ample use of studies which seem to demonstrate the health benefits of heterosexual and monogamous relationships (197).

There are clearly some severe obstacles to Trundle’s long-winded realist manifesto. Firstly, it appears that the author does not spend enough time demonstrating how the so-called aspects of our pre-cognitive, pre-conceptual awareness of reality are not themselves concepts.  The aspects listed by Trundle certainly appear to be, and have appeared to many philosophers throughout history, to be themselves thoroughly conceptual (note the medieval debates on “individuality”). Secondly, Trundle introduces multiple historical arguments which are dubious at best. Take for example the claim, famously promulgated by Radical Orthodox theologians, that the violence of the 20^th century had a clear philosophical basis in Kantianism (190). Trundle seems to ignore the fact that both Nazism and Communism have very little to do with Kantian ethics.

Thirdly, Trundle’s theory of art does not correspond in the desired way with his philosophy of science. According to the author, “In a manner reminiscent of verisimilitude in science, the ethics and art are ever more effective in prescribing truths about the goodness qua healthfulness of things that fulfill our psycho-biological nature” (211). If this were so, then we would expect art to increase in balance and form (Trundle’s characteristics of healthy art). However, there is no evidence of a gradual increase in such characteristics in the history of art, certainly not in the same way as a cumulative verisimilitude is found in the sciences. Finally, there are some quite noticeable spelling and grammar mistakes throughout the volume. In some places these errors completely obscure the meaning and seriously distract from the author’s train of thought.

Despite these issues, Trundle has produced a provocative defense of Aristotelian-Thomist realism which draws on a vast array of contemporary philosophers of science, and is presented, uniquely, as thoroughly based upon an existentialist phenomenology.

Harry Moore is a doctoral student in theology at the University of Oxford.

Harry Moore

Date Of Review:

May 30, 2022