Celia Green
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Celia Green (born 1935) is a British intellectual and author, notable for her advocacy of comprehensive philosophical skepticism, her critique of 20th-century thought, and her psychological theories.
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[edit] Biography
Celia Elizabeth Green was born on 26th November 1935 in East Ham, London. Her parents were both primary school teachers, who together authored a series of geography textbooks which became known as The Green Books.
Green was educated, first at the Ursuline Convent in Ilford, and later at the Woodford High School for Girls, which was part of the state sector. Green has written widely on education, notably in her most recent book, Letters from Exile (2005), which includes detailed comparisons between these two schools, from which she draws conclusions very much to the detriment of the state sector as compared with parentally financed education.
In 1953 Green won the Senior Open Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. She was then 17, an age which might normally be regarded as comparatively young, but which Green has described as disastrously old, her education having been held up for three years by the post-war Labour Government setting a minimum age limit of 16 for the taking of the O-level examination. Green has written with intensity in Letters from Exile and elsewhere of the damage which can be done to exceptional children by holding back, rather than pushing, a topic which she regards as subject to extreme misrepresentation among current educational theorists.
In 1961 Green founded the Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford, to research areas of philosophy, psychology and theoretical physics being neglected by the universities. Its main benefactor, from 1963 to 1970, was Cecil Harmsworth King, then Chairman of the IPC group, which owned the Daily Mirror.
Green’s relations with academia have been fraught. Her first attempt to obtain a research doctorate from Oxford University was undertaken under the faculty of Literae Humaniores (Philosophy) and supervised by the then Wykeham Professor of Logic, H. H. Price. The thesis was entitled An Enquiry into Some States of Consciousness. It was initially understood that it would not be necessary for the project to include experimental work, but in the end Green was awarded a B.Litt. rather than a D.Phil., and the criticism was made that experimental work should have been included.
In 1996 Green was awarded a doctorate by the same Oxford faculty, Literae Humaniores, for a purely philosophical thesis called Causation and the Mind-Body Problem.
In 1999 Green founded the publishing imprint, Oxford Forum, which was designed to give a voice to dissident intellectual positions. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Liverpool University.
[edit] Thought
Green’s basic philosophical position may be described as one of radical scepticism, based on a perception of what she calls ‘the total uncertainty’. This perception leads her to agnostic positions, not just on traditional philosophical issues such as the nature of physical causation (The Lost Cause, 2003), but also on current social arrangements, such as state education and the monopolistic power of the medical profession, of both of which she is a relentless critic.
There are also strong hereditarian and anti-feminist elements in her thinking. The former element may have been part of the reason she received support from the psychologist, the late Professor Hans Eysenck, who for a number of years was Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research which Green founded.
Reinforcing the impression of someone out of sympathy with the modern Zeitgeist is Green’s interest in the concepts of royalty and aristocracy. This interest appears to relate, not to their political significance, but to their symbolic power as representing certain ideals of responsibility and self-reliance. In several of her books Green develops a concept of ‘centralisation’, which is far removed from the ‘Californian’ concept of ‘centredness’, and has more to do with a heroic reaction to the perception that the human condition is intolerable, and that single-mindedness and urgency are the only appropriate responses.
On questions of ethics, in Letters from Exile (2004) Green proposes a distinction between tribal and territorial morality . The latter is largely negative and proscriptive: it defines a person’s territory, which is not to be invaded, stolen or damaged, such as his or her property, dependants and family. Outside this defined area territorial morality is permissive, leaving the individual free to have whatever wealth, opinions or behavioural habits do not harm others.
Tribal morality, by contrast, Green characterizes as prescriptive, imposing the norms of a group on the individual. Whereas territorial morality attempts to set up rigid, universal, abstract principles (such as Kant’s categorical imperative), tribal morality is contingent, culturally determined, and ‘flexible’.
Green links the rise of territorial morality to the development of the concept of private property, and eventually of market capitalism, including the primacy of contract over status. Her evident preference for territorial morality can be related to the centrality of the existential uncertainty in her thinking: under territorial morality it is prohibited to do good to someone against their will because it is impossible for another individual to know with certainty what is in that individual’s best interests.
To the extent that a conventional political position can be inferred from Green’s writings it would appear to be one of extreme libertarianism, and in fact a pamphlet of Green’s on education was published in the 1990s by the Libertarian Alliance.
[edit] Writings
Green’s published writings fall under two main heads, empirical and philosophical. In the former category are her three books on hallucinatory experiences of the sane, Lucid Dreams, Out-of-the-body Experiences and Apparitions. In the latter category are The Human Evasion, Advice to Clever Children, The Lost Cause and Letters from Exile. The Decline and Fall of Science is something of a hybrid, containing both a collection of philosophical aphorisms and a theoretical discussion of hallucinatory experiences and other phenomena.
[edit] Empirical books
Green’s empirical work, some of it undertaken in collaboration with an Oxford psychologist, Charles McCreery, has focussed mainly on hallucinatory experiences in ostensibly normal people.
Green has put forward the idea that lucid dreams (dreams in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming), out-of-body experiences and apparitions have something in common, namely that in all three types of case the subject’s field of perception is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one. In the first two types of case this is self-evident from the nature of the experience, but in the case of apparitional experiences in the waking state the idea is far from obvious. The hypothesis, and the evidence and arguments for it, were first put forward in her book Apparitions, and later developed in her book Lucid Dreaming, the Paradox of Consciousness during Sleep, both of which she co-authored with Charles McCreery.
This preoccupation with the extent of the hallucinatory element in various anomalous perceptual experiences is an indication that for Green the main interest of all these experiences is in the light they shed on normal perception, and on our theories of such perception, both philosophical and psychological. Prior to Green’s work these various hallucinatory phenomena had been of interest only to parapsychologists, who had studied them with a view to seeing, either whether they provided evidence for extra-sensory perception, or whether they shed light on the question of whether human beings could be said to survive death.
Unfortunately (from Green’s perspective), following her original study of out-of-body experiences in the 1960s, this latter, survival issue, rather than questions about the nature of perception, has remained the main focus of public interest in out-of-body experiences due to the popularisation of the concept of the near-death experience. In reality it appears that only a minority of out-of-body experiences occur in states which could be called near death.
[edit] Philosophical books
Green’s most widely-read philosophical book is probably The Human Evasion, which an enthusiast took the trouble to upload, in toto, in the early years of the web. Its tone is somewhat different from Green’s other books, being a curious combination of the oracular and the humorous. It consists almost entirely of a destructive analysis of twentieth century thinkers, from Wittgenstein to Tillich, but at the same time it seems to have a positive sub-text of its own, which is never made explicit. This ambiguity seems to have enabled readers of various ‘spiritual’ persuasions to think that they could assimilate it to their own beliefs, despite Green’s extreme agnosticism.
[edit] Aphorisms
One of Green’s most distinctive contributions is to the form of the aphorism or epigram. Ten of her aphorisms were included in the Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams (2001) – a relatively high number for a living author, perhaps indicating that Green is better appreciated by literary people than by professional philosophers. The aphorism, with its tendency to paradox and extreme compression, seems to be particularly suited to Green’s confrontational mode of thought. Some of her ‘anti-feminist’ aphorisms have the power to shock even after long familiarity; for example: ‘If you think of women as human, they are exasperating on account of their incredible feebleness; of course, it’s all right if you don’t think of them as human at all.’ Remarks like this have earned Green the bizarre distinction of being the only woman included in the recommended reading of a literary website devoted to misogyny. [1]
[edit] CDs
In 1995 Celia Green was involved in the release of a CD entitled Lucid Dreams 0096; narrated by Green for the label Em:t, and recorded at the Institute of Psychophysical Research, Oxford, April 1995. Earlier Green had contributed a nine-minute track to a compilation CD put out by the same recording label. The track was entitled ‘In the Extreme’ and consisted of readings by the author from her books, The Human Evasion, and Advice to Clever Children.
[edit] Bibliography
- Lucid Dreams (1968)
- Out-of-the-body Experiences (1968)
- The Human Evasion (1969)
- The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)
- Advice to Clever Children (1981)
- The Lost Cause: Causation and the Mind-Body Problem (2003)
- Letters from Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline (2004)
with Charles McCreery:
- Apparitions (1975)
- Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep (1994)
[edit] Selected papers by Green
'Waking dreams and other metachoric experiences', Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, 15, 1990, pp. 123-128.
'Are mental events preceded by their physical causes?' (with Grant Gillett), Philosophical Psychology, 8, 1995, pp. 333-340.
'Freedom and the exceptional child', Educational Notes, No. 26, Libertarian Alliance, 1993.
[edit] External links
