Discussion.
Bertrand Russell on Neo-Realism.
There must be many who agree with the present writer that, in the recrudescence of non-idealistic tendencies, contemporary philosophy has lost more, through the necessity of traversing roads already travelled, than it has gained by the better delimitation of the issue between idealism and realism. All these should read with special satisfaction Mr. Bertrand Russell’s papers, in successive numbers of the Monist for 1914. In The Problems of Philosophy Mr. Russell had already indicated his disagreement with the usual realistic criticism of idealism as ‘plainly absurd’ and had openly conceived of sense-data as mental.[1] In these more recent papers he gives reason for his dissent from that emphatic form of neo-realism which he aptly names ‘neutral monism,’ the theory “that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly regarded as physical do not differ in respect of any intrinsic property … but only in respect of arrangement and context” (p. 161)[2]. According to this view consciousness is a relation between objects comparable to the spatial or the temporal relation; and “ideas of chairs and tables are identical with chairs and tables but are conceived in their mental not in their physical context.”
This reduction of consciousness to a relation perfectly comparable with physical relations is opposed by Russell primarily because such a reduction is inconsistent with our introspection. Being aware of my consciousness of x (a color, for example) is different, he shows, from being aware of a relation between x (the color) and y (whether y be taken as another color, or as a physiological process. Cf. p. 185; pp. 172–3; p. 436).
“It is difficult,” Russell points out (in the second place) for neutral monism “to define the respect in which the whole of my experience is different from the things that lie outside.” It is difficult, in other words, to account for the distinction actually made between myself and other realities. R. B. Perry’s naive explanation of a self, as that which is connected with a nervous system, is disposed of by the obvious fact that “in order to know that such and such a thing
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