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The Arrogance of Agnosticism
In contemporary popular culture it is quite common to hear theistic and atheistic positions described (or rather disparaged) as “dogmatic,” while epistemic modesty — and therefore epistemic virtue — is placed reverently upon the agnostic like a laurel wreath bestowed upon a general enjoying his triumph. It is bad form to be dogmatic in our time, and so the absence of dogmatism is accounted a virtue. But is the agnostic any less dogmatic than a theist or an atheist?
No, not at all. From a strictly epistemic standpoint, agnosticism is no less “dogmatic” than theism or atheism, though its dogmatism is differently expressed than that of theism or atheism, and there is the important caveat that, just as there are many formulations of theism and atheism, so too there are many different formulations of agnosticism, some of these being more dogmatic than others.
It was T. H. Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog” as he was known, who popularized the term “agnostic” in his 1889 essay Agnosticism. Huxley was a wonderfully voluble nineteenth century writer, and his essays are clear to the point of transparency even when a bit verbose. (The perceptive reader will no doubt have noticed that my own style is heavily indebted to that of the nineteenth century, though I look to F. H. Bradley as my model, rather than Huxley. Still, one sees the resemblance.)
Most people today, I think, have a vague notion of what agnosticism is, or what it is supposed to be, but it is interesting to understand something of the history of the term. “Agnostic” is formed from the negation of “gnostic,” just as “atheist” is formed as the negation of “theist” (the use of the letter “a” for negation is sometimes called the “privative alpha”). Way back when, in classical antiquity, there were a number of religions that scholars now call “mystery religions.” Some of these mystery religions are called “Gnosticism,” from the Greek word gnosis (γνῶσις) for knowledge. Gnostic religions claimed to have access to special knowledge, and this special knowledge, not available to the uninitiated, was revealed to initiates in special ceremonies and rituals unique to that religion. Agnosticism, then, is the conscious negation of any claim to possessing special religious knowledge.
When Huxley wrote this essay, agnostics were considered dangerous heretics, as deists had been considered dangerous heretics in the previous century to Huxley, and both agnosticism and deism were subjected to the familiar forms of abuse in their day (most typically, the charge of atheism). Huxley thus responded strongly to the calumnies charged against agnostics, though these charges and these calumnies are scarcely remembered today. Today, on the contrary, it is judged to be an admirable thing to be an agnostic, because in proclaiming one’s agnosticism one is proclaiming at the same time one’s epistemic humility.
Huxley wrote in his essay,
“…the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable.”
This sounds like an eminently reasonable proposition to maintain, but to see the problems that arise from it we need to go a little way into the logic of belief.
In the tradition of philosophical logic we will adopt the custom of employing the schematic letter “P” as denoting a proposition. Since we are discussing agnosticism, it may please the reader to substitute for P some appropriately theological proposition, such as, for example, “All gods are to be worshiped,” though you are free to make this any proposition you like, be it, “The Norns exist,” or “Athena grew out of the forehead of Zeus,” or something else yet.
A first step in expressing one’s lack of knowledge would be a proposition like this:
● “I am not in a position to say that P.”
This is a modest and personal knowledge-claim that any one of us could assert any number of times in a given day, and we would be right to do so. At the moment, I am not in a position to say that the sand of the Atacama Desert is hot enough at noon to burn the bottoms of my feet. However, I can certainly imagine ways in which I might go about affirming or denying this proposition. Thus it becomes problematic when framed in a stronger form, as in:
● “I will never be in a position to say that P.”
It must be a very special proposition indeed that I can not only say that I am not in a position to affirm or deny it at present, but that no conceivable circumstance will allow me to affirm or deny the truth of P.
When we pass on to further generalization of the proposition, speaking not merely of myself but of anyone and everyone, the problems are multiplied. Consider:
● “No one knows that P”
If it is the case that one one knows whether P is true or false, it is also the case that no one knows whether not-P is true of false, so that we can also say:
● “No one knows that not-P.”
With a little ingenuity it would be possible, I am sure, to frame a proposition of which it could be said that no one knows its truth or falsity. For example, I could specify some particular point within the mass of the sun, and say that no one knows its exact temperature. For example:
● “Point p within the sun at time t has the temperature of x degrees K.”
It would seem that we can pass on to further and stronger statements regarding this proposition, because of the practical difficulties presented by the problems of measuring temperatures within the sun:
● “No one will ever know that P.”
And even:
● “No one can ever know that P.” (I.e., it is theoretically impossible to determine the truth-value of P)
But in the case of a scientific proposition like the temperature within the sun, there are certainly theoretically conceivable circumstances under which a definite truth value could be assigned to the proposition above. We might someday develop sensors that can be inserted into the sun to measure its internal temperatures. We do not have this technology at present, but we cannot say that this will always be the case.
Now, in the formulation of theological and metaphysical propositions we are dealing with matters that cannot be settled as readily as scientific questions. We might even be able to formulate questions that we cannot conceive of any coherent answer being possible. But to take this failure of imagination as an absolute limit to knowledge is the height of folly. Before Cantor formulated this theory of transfinite numbers, there was a lot of foolish nonsense that was bandied about concerning the infinite. Many people would have said that this nonsense resulted from the essential questions about the infinite being unanswerable in principle. It would be easy to imagine Huxley himself saying that answers to the questions of the infinite are theoretical inconceivable. And then someone has a great insight that allows them to formulate a theory, and sudden we find that that which was inconceivable is now conceivable.
For the agnostic it is a particular point of pride to neither affirm nor deny the truth of any theological or metaphysical proposition, leaving these fields open to the wildest speculation — even irresponsible speculation — because with the way of knowledge forever closed, we cannot render judgement on such matters. Thus metaphysics and theology become as pointless as epistemology itself, because there is no assertion we can make that can be brought before the bar of reasons or evidence.
For the agnostic, knowledge of the truth or falsity of metaphysical and theological propositions is impossible. That means that no possible experience, no conceivable experience under any possible circumstances, no evidence of any kind whatsoever, no future change in circumstances of any kind whatsoever, and no reason or principle or argument or theory could ever, under any circumstances, resolve a theological or metaphysical question.
The agnostic is dogmatic on a point of epistemology, while the theist and the atheist are dogmatic on a point of theology, or a point of metaphysics. The agnostic is a nihilist — a nihilist in epistemology. He does not deny or affirm any metaphysical thesis, but he does affirm several interrelated theses in epistemology, and these theses amount to nihilism — in its strongest form: nothing is known, nothing ever will be known, and nothing ever can be known.
Even if you are willing to take this bold step and make such a sweeping epistemological claim, it does not absolve you of further difficulties stemming from the demarcation problem between science and metaphysics. We may be confident at the moment that we know where knowable scientific questions end and unknowable metaphysical questions begin, but this line of demarcation has changed in the past and is likely to change again in the future.
Both the theist and the atheist recognize that there can be rational debate upon metaphysical questions, and that reasons and evidence can be adduced in support or in criticism of these arguments. They believe in the efficacy of reason. If they are realists, they also believe that there is some metaphysical state-of-affairs that does hold whether or not human knowledge can yet grasp it. And the ability of human knowledge to grasp particular truths changes with the development of science and technology. The agnostic does not believe in the efficacy of reason, and because he does not believe in the efficacy of reason, he can say nothing about any possible metaphysical state-of-affairs.
Like most positions of extreme skepticism, the strong formulation of agnosticism is self-defeating: the agnostic claims to possess special knowledge that no special knowledge is possible. The special knowledge that the agnostic implicitly claims is that of being able to definitively determine the boundaries of knowable science and unknowable metaphysics. But this kind of special knowledge of the delimitation of metaphysics would constitute definitive knowledge of a metaphysical state-of-affairs, and this is precisely what the agnostic denies possessing.
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The Prodigal Philosopher Returns
Some years ago I became exasperated with contemporary philosophy of mind. I stopped reading books in philosophy of mind and I stopped making an attempt to keep up with what was going on in the field. It had come to seem pointless to me, not because I had lost interest, but because the issues and problems that had come to dominate the work of Anglo-American analytical philosophers seemed pointless to me. I didn’t get it anymore. This is not terribly unusual. Philosophers often find that the work of philosophers coming from different traditions seems unmotivated to the point of arbitrariness. Bertrand Russell, who was a close collaborator with Wittgenstein during Wittgenstein’s early period thought that Wittgenstein’s later work was trivial and without value; Russell thought that Wittgenstein’s work had become pointless.
Recently I have returned to philosophy of mind and have tried to survey the present situation. A lot has happened in the interim. I have listened to John Searle’s lectures for The Teaching Company, Daniel N. Robinson’s lectures for The Teaching Company, Patrick Grim’s lectures for The Teaching Company, and Andrew Pessin’s lectures for The Modern Scholar series.
What marks the difference between continental philosophy of mind and analytical philosophy of mind (one least one thing, I should say) is not so much two different perspectives on the same thing — like the eliminative materialist saying that there is no such thing as mind in the world while the Berkeleyan idealist says that there is no such thing as matter in the world, but both agree that there is one world composed of one kind of metaphysical substance — as it is about two different points of departure, i.e., where we start when we begin to philosophize about the mind.
One of the things that bothered me about philosophy of mind was the predominately behaviorist cast of Anglo-American thought. I didn’t see the point of much of the struggles that attended simply recognizing that there is such a thing as consciousness (by which I mean subjective awareness) and that a strictly behaviorist account was inadequate.
Some recent analytical philosophy of mind has involved making a distinction between the “easy” problems of mind and what has come to be called “the hard problem” of consciousness. I believe that this distinction is due to David Chalmers, who has had a big influence in contemporary philosophy of mind.
I found this distinction to be interesting, since it is taken analytical philosophy so long even to get to the point where it is willing to consider arguments that there is such a thing as subjective awareness. I realize now in hindsight that part of my exasperation with analytical philosophy of mind was its belaboring of the mere recognition of consciousness, and that many of the issues that analytical philosophers had been discussing and calling “philosophy of mind” were philosophy of mind without any recognition of consciousness, which strikes me as perverse. For me, philosophy of mind was always about the hard problem of subjective awareness.
Contemporary analytical philosophers of mind like to formulate thought experiments based on philosophical zombies (and I have written about them also recently in A Note on Soulless Zombies), in which questions are asked such as whether a zombie twin that is functionally identical to me would be distinguishable from me even if it lacked consciousness. This strikes me as strangely self-referential, as though the analytical philosophers who have denied the very existence of mind in the form of conscious awareness have been engaging in a kind of “zombie philosophy” — i.e., formulating a philosophy of mind that pretends to be adequate but which is ultimately about mind without consciousness.
I find myself asking the reflexively obvious question, such that: if two philosophers formulate philosophies of mind, and each of these seems adequate to all aspects of intelligence and mind, with the one exception being that one philosophy of mind includes subjective awareness while the other simply doesn’t address it at all — i.e., functionally equivalent philosophical doctrines with subjective awareness being the only difference — are the two philosophies distinguishable? Is the zombie philosophy that postulates mind without consciousness just as adequate an account of mind as a philosophy of mind that says something about consciousness?
Here I return to my point about analytical and continental traditions having a different point of departure in the philosophy of mind. When I abandoned analytical philosophy of mind, I did not stop reading works in the phenomenological tradition. But you can’t so much say that phenomenology has a theory of mind anything like the theory of mind one finds in analytical philosophy. Phenomenology and its study of the structures of consciousness begins with the recognition of subjective awareness of the central reality of consciousness; analytical philosophy of mind has only of late culminated in the recognition of subjective awareness as a central feature of mind — and, even then, probably the majority of Anglo-American analytical philosophers continue to be functionalists of some sort or other, willing to say that consciousness is illusory, peripheral, non-existent, not as it presents itself to be, or merely epiphenomenal.
In the meantime, psychiatry and cognitive science built a very different theory of the internal workings of the mind, isolated from the phenomenological account of the structures of consciousness, because the kind of people who created cognitive science came from a scientistic background and were therefore unlikely to have read Husserl or those who followed in his tradition. When they did turn to philosophy, they turned to analytical philosophy where they found no comparable analysis of the workings of the mind.
As a prodigal philosopher returning to philosophy of mind after many years of riotous living in ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and even guilty pleasures like strategy, I cannot quite hope for the fatted calf of philosophy of mind to be served up for me exactly as I might like it, but I do definitely see possibilities.
While I could be said to have squandered my wealth on wild living in a distant country, I learned a lot while I was away. Now I know why I was dissatisfied with theories of mind as I read them in analytical philosophers, and simply knowing what the problem constitutes conceptual progress for me. I was lost, and now I am found.
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Nietzsche’s Project
There is an insufficient appreciation of Nietzsche’s philosophical Epicureanism. I think there is an insufficient appreciation of philosophical Epicureanism generally speaking, but it is especially striking in the case of Nietzsche because of the latter’s explicit paeans to the joy of philosophical thought.
Nietzsche, in fact, devoted an entire book to the idea of philosophical Epicureanism, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), first translated as Joyful Wisdom, and then later re-translated by Walter Kaufmann as The Gay Science.
Here is section 327 (from Book Four) of The Gay Science (though from the earlier translation):
The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it “taking a thing seriously ” when they work with this machine and want to think well — oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good-humour whenever he thinks well; he becomes “serious”! And “where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything” — so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all “Joyful Wisdom.” — Well, then! Let us show that it is prejudice!
Nietzsche obviously, and by contrast, did not find the intellect to be awkward, obscure, and creaking, but rather light, nimble, quick, and sure-footed. To say so reminds me of a passage from Galileo that shows that Galileo, too, understood the nature of joyful wisdom:
“…even in conclusions which can be known only by reasoning, I say that the testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing, and not like hauling, and a single Arabian steed can outrun a hundred plowhorses.”
Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 to 08 January 1642), The Assayer (1623
In Nietzsche’s Notebook 34 from the spring of 1885 he wrote:
“For many people, abstract thinking is fatiguing work — for me, on good days, it is a feast, an intoxication.”
Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 9
I am sure that every philosopher has had this experience, and in fact I recall a quote from that most un-Nietzschean of thinkers, John Dewey, to this effect:
“…philosophy performs for some exactly the same office that the fine arts perform for others. There is a kind of music of ideas that appeals, apart from any question of empirical verification, to the minds of thinkers, who derive an emotional satisfaction from an imaginative play synthesis of ideas obtainable by them in no other way.”
from Dewey’s article “Philosophy” in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 1934
I cannot resist one more Nietzsche quote, this from a sketch for a preface for The Will to Power:
“A book for thinking, nothing else: it belongs to those to whom thinking is a delight, nothing else.”
quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Niezsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 247 — recall that Nietzsche himself never wrote The Will to Power, but a volume by the title was assembled by Nietzsche’s editors after he lost his mind; this sketch for a preface was not used in that volume.
A few days ago in From Scholasticism to Science I mentioned that Professor Thomas Williams, in his lectures Reason & Faith: Philosophy in the Middle Ages, identified with the philosophers of the middle ages. He said that their questions were his questions, and their project was his project. This is how I feel about Nietzsche: his project is my project. But what is Nietzsche’s project? It is, at least in part, about thinking as a form of intoxication — about finding pure joy in ideas and their philosophical contemplation.
I think the thoughts that bring me pleasure. This sounds like a gross over-simplification of philosophy, but it is accurate. It is also something that I have come to learn is not universally shared among philosophers. Some people devote their lives to thinking just as I have done, but they seem intent on demonstrating their “seriousness” in the sense that Nietzsche ridiculed above.
As an autodidact, without credentials or institutional sanction, I once myself hungered to be taken seriously, but I am finally moving beyond that need for approval. In this and in my other blog I write whatever strikes my fancy and brings me pleasure. This non-method, which has become my characteristic approach to philosophical problems, is the antithesis to a career spent in the patient development of one or a few ideas.
I can easily imagine that someone else, a philosopher who also hears Dewey’s music of ideas, and for whom thinking is a delight and an intoxication, as it was for Nietzsche, might find my approach to philosophy irritating, even grating — the intellectual equivalent of fingernails scratching across a blackboard. Here I can quote Dostoyevsky: “…such persons …not only may, but positively must, exist in our society.”
This is as it should be. In Intellectual Personalities I attempted to describe how even those individuals who share the life of the mind may well be fundamentally diverse when it comes to temperament. Just as it takes all kinds of make a world, so it takes all kinds of philosophers to make philosophy what it is.
From Scholasticism to Science
I’ve just finished listening to Reason & Faith: Philosophy in the Middle Ages, a set of 24 lectures published by The Teaching Company, as delivered by Professor Thomas Williams, Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, University of South Florida.
While I enjoyed these lectures a lot, like most treatments of medieval philosophy the focus was the so-called 13th century synthesis. Professor Williams takes as his theme “faith seeking understanding,” and in the last lecture he reveals that this is what drew him to medieval philosophy. He wondered how this attitude to philosophy might be recaptured in a contemporary context, and he also honestly acknowledged that late medieval philosophy is usually treated as a breakdown of the Thomist scholastic synthesis, and that this is often treated as a philosophical catastrophe.
I personally find Thomism deadly dull, and can rarely make my way through a book or a commentary on Thomism without having my attention wander. However, I find late medieval philosophy absolutely fascinating. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed the later lectures most, and the early lectures second most.
Listening to these lectures reminded me of a passage from Alfred North Whitehead that has always resonated with me, suggestive as it is of paths not taken, unrealized opportunities, and poetically imaginative alternate realities:
“…Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on classification. The popularity of Aristotelian Logic retarded the advance of physical science throughout the Middle Ages. If only the schoolmen had measured instead of classifying, how much they might have learnt!” (Science in the Modern World, chapter II)
When I thought of this Whitehead passage today, in the light of Professor Williams’ lectures (who discussed the emergence of early modern science from late scholastic philosophy in the last lecture), I realized how Whitehead’s contrast of classifying schoolmen to measuring early modern scientists can be assimilated to Carnap’s treatment of scientific concepts as being classificatory, comparative, and quantitative.
The Schoolmen, following Aristotle’s logic, were arrested at the stage of classificatory concepts (a condition that we might call epistemic arrest). It could be argued that the attempt to assimilate ancient Greek philosophy forced scholastic philosophers to compare the Greek philosophical tradition with the Christian theological tradition, begetting comparative concepts.
With the emergence of quantitative thought in late scholasticism and early modern science, finally there is available to the Western tradition all the elements necessary to fully developed scientific thought, and it is not long after that the scientific revolution occurs.
Carnap intended his tripartite division of scientific concepts as characterizing an increasing precisification of scientific knowledge, but we see that we can also employ this motif in an exposition of the development of scientific thought.
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Cartesianism and Physicalism
Descartes is remembered mostly for his method of doubt — trying to doubt everything until what remained as indubitable could serve as the foundation for “first philosophy”
Most who come to Descartes’ Meditations for the first time read the first two meditations, in which he gives an exposition of methodical doubt — and this is probably what is of lasting value in Descartes. After Descartes’ initial excursion into radical doubt, however, what follows reminds me of a passage from Kierkegaard:
What is madness? When a privatdocent, every time his scholastic gown reminds him that he ought to say something, says de omnibus dubitandum est, and at the same time writes away at a system which offers abundant internal evidence in every other sentence that the man has never doubted anything at all: he is not regarded as mad.
The Cartesian madness was to systematically set out to doubt all of traditional philosophy, and then to painstakingly reconstruct scholasticism. One of Descartes’ favorite authors was Aquinas, and in the later portions of the Cartesian system there is more of Aquinas than there is of methodical doubt.
After doubting almost everything at the beginning of his philosophical effort, Descartes returns to a philosophical effort not unlike scholasticism, and patiently reconstructs not only the world simpliciter but also the philosophical world of his predecessors.
There is a sense in which this more comprehensive view of Cartesianism (i.e., understanding that once Descartes doubted the world away, he then reconstructed it in a fairly conventional manner for this time) resembles the theoretical position of physicalism.
Physicalism was formulated as a contemporary analog to materialism, though recognizing aspects of the world recognized in physical theory that did not figure in classical materialism. Contemporary physics requires a battery of entities that cannot be encountered in ordinary experience: “not just matter but energy, space, time, physical forces, structure, physical processes, information, state, etc.” (as Wikipedia puts it).
Contemporary physics not only entails unobservable entities and theoretical entities, among the theoretical entities it requires are those required by mathematics. The mathematization of physics has made the two — i.e., mathematics and physics — inextricable.
Moreover, we know from indispensability arguments in contemporary philosophy (sometimes called Quine-Putnam Indispensability arguments) that contemporary physical science requires mathematics, and quite a bit of “higher” mathematics, so that the reliability of physical science entails the reliability of mathematics. Mathematics quantifies over abstract entities, therefore physicalism requires quantification over abstract entities. Exactly how much mathematics is necessary to physics is a matter of continuing controversy, but no one doubts that a good deal of classical mathematics is implicated in physics.
I would argue that there is very little mathematics that can be excluded in good conscience on physicalistic grounds, up to and including large cardinal axioms for the farther reaches of transfinite set theory. If we can quantify over “lower” abstract entities and manipulate “smaller” infinite sets, at what point do we draw the line for “higher” abstract entities and “larger” infinite sets? And how can we even confront this question without seeing that we face a sorites paradox here?
I would further argue that quasi-Kantian transcendental arguments can furnish a bridge from the higher mathematics indispensable to physics to other abstract objects and non-observable entities not specifically mathematical. Once again, a sorites paradox would force us a draw a line that would, in practice, be arbitrary. To paraphrase F. H. Bradley, short of Platonism mathematics cannot stop, and, having reached that goal, mathematics is lost, and strict physicalism with it.
And so it is that, like Descartes, beginning with radical doubt and ending with a nearly conventional scholasticism, physicalism begins with an apparent radical rejection of all non-physical phenomena but is compelled to let back in — by the back door, as it were — all (or almost all) of the conventional non-physical apparatus of ontology, and in so doing rendering physicalism meaningless because indistinguishable from theories that do not deny the non-physical dimenstion of the world.
funnybunnydances asked: could you explain physicalism to me? im doing a research project and im having trouble understanding it
Physicalism is the simplest of doctrines. The easiest way to understand physicalism is to understand it as the contemporary expression of materialism. Physicalism is as old as Democritus claiming that the world was nothing but atoms whirling around in the void (this was, after all, the “best science” of the day). Since the time of the ancient Greeks there have been continuous re-formulations of physicalism in accord with the latest philosophical fashions (as, for example, La Mettrie’s L’homme machine).
Physicalism as we know it today is primarily derived from the success of the physical sciences in explaining the world. In the early twentieth century the claim was made that the science of physics was adequate to explain everything about the world (or, at least, everything that could be explained). Physicalism in this scientistic form, then, may be formulated in terms of the adequacy of the concepts and methods of physics. Once physics has had its say, there is really nothing more to add.
A distinction is often made between reductive physicalism and eliminative physicalism. The former reduces all apparently non-physical phenomena to physical phenomena (for example, the mind is explained by, or reduced to, brain functions) while the latter outright denies that there are any non-physical phenomena whatsoever to be explained — or explained away (for example, consciousness is a “user illusion” with no underlying reality). Physicalism thus requires a robust distinction between appearance and reality (apparently non-physical phenomena in contrast to actual physical reality), and in this respect is very like the Platonism that physicalism claims to reject.
Another way to formulate physicalism is that it is realism limited to physical entities and their physical states (making it a kind of substance monism — there is only one kind of thing, namely physical things), in contrast to Platonic realism, which is a more comprehensive realism that includes everything identified as “real” by physics, as well as a great deal more — like minds and qualia and the Idea of the Good, etc.
Does that help?
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The Fourfold Root of Love
In The Symmetry of Our Affections I suggested that the rarity of ideal love is to be attributed to the difficulty of finding purely symmetrical affection between two persons, and I noted that the one-sided recognition of the perfect object of our affections is precisely half of that symmetry, and is a condition that ought not to be despised on that account.
Reflecting on this further, I realized that the recognition of the perfect object of one’s affections is in fact only one quarter of an ideal and perfect love. There are two forms of symmetrical affection, and each holds for each of two persons, so that a perfect and ideal love possesses a fourfold symmetry.
I hold that ideal love obtains when four conditions are met:
1. recognizing one’s capacity to give love to another particular individual
2. recognizing one’s capacity to receive love from another particular individual
3. recognizing in the other the capacity to give love to oneself
4. recognizing in the other the capacity to receive the love that one has to give
Moreover, if we recognize that these are the conditions of ideal love for one individual, reflecting on that individual’s relationship between self and other, the whole of love constituted by two persons each possessing these four conditions would mean that ideal love actually possesses an eightfold symmetry.
This still leaves “love” itself undefined. It would then be better to call these conditions “the parameters of ideal love” than to call it a definition of love.
In any case, I hold that ideal love possesses a fourfold (or quadruple) symmetry as outlined in the conditions above (or eightfold, if we considering the perspectives of two distinct individuals).
I see now that one way to approach the “problem” of love would be to simply remove love itself from all the above conditions (like taking it away from both sides of an algebraic equation).
Thus:
1. recognizing one’s capacity to give to another particular individual
2. recognizing one’s capacity to receive from another particular individual
3. recognizing in another particular individual the capacity to give to oneself
4. recognizing in another particular individual the capacity to receive that which one has to give
Certainly mutual generosity, if not constituting love itself, is involved in love.
Perhaps another condition must be added, and one that comes to mind would be not mere generosity, but joyful generosity — that is to say, a spontaneous enjoyment in mutual generosity with The Other.
So this brings me to my tentative definition of love:
Love is enjoyment in spontaneous mutual generosity with The Other.
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Cartesian Formalism
One of the biggest and yet one of the least recognized blunders in philosophy (and certainly not only in philosophy) is to conflate the formal and the informal, whether we are concerned with formal and informal objects, formal and informal methods, or formal and informal ideas, etc. (I recently treated this topic on my other blog in relation to the conflation of formal and informal strategy.)
Formal thought presents both dangers and opportunities. The unfamiliarity of formal thinking (except among logicians and mathematicians) makes it difficult, and its difficulty makes us vulnerable to errors. However, all abstract theoretical thinking involves formal elements — indeed, language itself involves formal elements, especially in grammar, so that thinking is impossible without some degree of formality — so that formal thought is a necessary condition of formulating a theory.
Some time ago in Foucault’s Formalism I attempted to point out the neglected formalism of Foucault’s thought, often unrecognized because of Foucault’s exclusively prosodic exposition. But while a symbolic exposition of a formal concept or a formal system has the advantages of brevity, there is no essential reason we cannot give a prosodic or informal exposition of a formal concept. In fact, we do this all the time, mostly without knowing it.
There are exceptions to this lack of self-knowledge in theorizing. Mathematicians usually know the difference. Very often in the exposition of logical and mathematical ideas an author will inform you up front when they are giving you an informal exposition and when they will switch to a formalized exposition of the same.
Idealization can be a step toward formal conceptions. The idea of idealization is almost completely confined to continental philosophers; Anglo-American analytical philosophy has little or nothing to say on this topic, since Anglo-American analytical philosophy usually takes its formalism directly from logic. But in continental philosophy, where there is an explicit awareness of the role of idealization in thought (and this awareness is by no means always present), the distinction between idealization and non-idealization roughly corresponds to the distinction between formal and non-formal thought.
One perfect example of idealization is the idea of the punctiform present. The debate other whether the human experience of time is punctiform or non-punctiform completely misses the point: to understand the point of consciousness analogously to a geometrical point (which, we recall, Euclid said had no parts, and is therefore unextended) is to liken a feature of experience to an ideal object (like saying that a tire is circular when it in fact only approximates an ideal of circularity). The punctiform present is a formal idea, and to analyze time in terms of the punctiform present is to engage in a formal analysis of time.
Similarly considerations hold for the theory of ecological temporality for which I have been giving an unfolding exposition on my other blog. If I should make the effort to do justice to the concept of ecological temporality with a fuller exposition, a formal theory of ecological temporality would be an idealization of demarcations within temporal processes that do not admit of unambiguous distinctions in empirical fact.
In the messiness of the real world no hard-and-fast distinctions can be made on the boundaries of micro-temporality, meso-temporality, exo-temporality, macro-temporality, and meta-temporality, but for the sake of a formal theory we drawn such distinctions. To divide up the continuum of experience into discrete parts always involves idealization and formalization; experience of the world does not come with handy little labels attached.
This is very much like the species problem, i.e., whether there are species in nature, or whether species are human constructs. When you have examples of, say, reticulate speciation (where population x can produce fertile offspring with population y, and population y with population z, but population x cannot produce fertile offspring with population z), it is very difficult to understand how this can be analyzed with the traditional species concept. In other words, the species concept is a formal idea of biology, and this formal idea gives us highly formalized systems of taxonomy. Linnaeus was a formal thinker.
It has been on my mind for some time to given an analysis of this in greater detail, though I haven’t yet made the effort to do so. At present I simply want to point out the formal character of some ideas not usually understood in these terms.
And all of this is simply to point out that Cartesian dualism can be best understood not as an egregious falsification of the integrated character of human experience (which is how most contemporary philosophers present it — I have noted in Naturalism and the Mind that almost all philosophers today, whatever their other differences, join in the condemnation of Cartesian dualism) but rather as an idealization and formalization of certain prominent features of human experience.
Descartes was a mathematician, and it is to be expected on this account that he was a formal thinker. Indeed, Descartes’ work lies at the foundation of analytical geometry, which is one of the greatest examples in all mathematics of the unity of formal and intuitive thought. Analytical geometry shows us the systematic interrelationship between geometrical entities revealed to us in geometrical intuition and the formulas of algebra which have been painstakingly arrived at through the abstract generalization of formal arithmetical thought.
Descartes brought his mathematician’s perspective to his theory of mind, and in so doing gave us the rudiments of a formal theory of mind. To point out that a formal theory fails to capture the imperfections of empirical facts is to miss the point. A formal theory seeks the skeleton key to the world, and makes no attempt to describe the flesh and viscera in all their detail. You may as well refute an apple with an orange as falsify a formal theory with an empirical fact.
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Kantian Non-constructivism
Kant is not infrequently called a “proto-constructivist,” by which is meant that Kant staked out positions that are constructivist in spirit but which preceded the explicit formulation of constructivism by more than a hundred years. I believe that there are good reasons for calling Kant a proto-constructivist, given his insistence upon the exhibition of objects in intuition. I have argued elsewhere (in an unpublished manuscript) that in fact this Kantian focus on exhibition in intuition is the authentic core of constructivism.
Nevertheless, even as a proto-constructivist (a constructivist before constructivism was cool), Kant was far from a thorough-going constructivist. In fact, I just realized today that Kant makes a spectacularly non-constructive argument in his transcendental aesthetic, which lays the foundation for the whole of his philosophy that followed.
Near the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, when Kant gives an exposition of the concepts of space and time in the transcendental aesthetic, Kant offers parallel formulations of the two concepts. Here is Kant’s exposition of space:
Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to our- selves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the con- dition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determina- tion dependent upon them. It is an a priori representation, which necessarily underlies outer appearances.
And here is Kant’s exposition of time:
Time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions.
We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove time
itself, though we can quite well think time as void of
appearances. Time is, therefore, given a priori. In it alone is
actuality of appearances possible at all. Appearances may, one
and all, vanish; but time (as the universal condition of their
possibility) cannot itself be removed.
In his twin expositions of space and time, Kant asserts that, while we cannot imagine objects outside space or time, we can nevertheless imagine space and time without objects. Kant makes this assertion, but he does not demonstrate how space or time without objects can be constructed, not does he exhibit empty space or empty time in either sensory or intellectual intuition. Here the Kantian insistence upon exhibition is utterly absent.
I can still remember how I was struck by this passage the first time I read it. It has stayed with me all these years. Philosophers today consider the ideas of empty space and empty time to be problematic; indeed, the defense of these concepts has become a minority (if not a marginal) view. (In the interest of full disclosure, I will state here I find the concepts of empty space and empty time to be perfectly legitimate, but even in so saying I know that it is a minority view made all the more marginal by the most common interpretations of relativity theory.)
C. S. Pierce’s comment on his study of Kant is quite interesting in this context, so I will quote Pierce at some length:
The first strictly philosophical books that I read were of the classical German schools; and I became so deeply imbued with many of their ways of thinking that I have never been able to disabuse myself of them. Yet my attitude was always that of a dweller in a laboratory, eager only to learn what I did not yet know, and not that of philosophers bred in theological seminaries, whose ruling impulse is to teach what they hold to be infallibly true. I devoted two hours a day to the study of Kant’s Critic of the Pure Reason for more than three years, until I almost knew the whole book by heart, and had critically examined every section of it. For about two years, I had long and almost daily discussions with Chauncey Wright, one of the most acute of the followers of J. S. Mill.
The effect of these studies was that I came to hold the classical German philosophy to be, upon its argumentative side, of little weight; although I esteem it, perhaps am too partial to it, as a rich mine of philosophical suggestions. The English philosophy, meagre and crude, as it is, in its conceptions, proceeds by surer methods and more accurate logic.
Despite many years of study of one of the most difficult books ever written, Pierce found Kant to be “of little weight” when it came to argument. Well, I will admit that the argument of the transcendental aesthetic is pretty weak, and I say this on general principles, and not because it is a non-constructive argument. However, I can imagine that Pierce, with his “pragmatic” turn of mind, may have discerned the non-constructive core of Kantianism and found it to be a weak argument.
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A Clausewitzean Conception of Philosophy
I have been listening to Daniel N. Robinson’s Teaching Company lectures Consciousness and its Implications, and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve been planning on brushing up on philosophy of mind for a manuscript I’ve been working on, but this has had unintended consequences of giving me a lot of new ideas, and my manuscript has been neglected while I work on these new ideas.
Here is a passage from Professor Robinson’s lectures that I found particularly compelling:
Some philosophers have suggested that we should content ourselves with ordinary forms of explanation. The philosopher Georges Rey suggests that problems be divided into those “peculiar to the mind” and those outside the mind. This fits the notion of customary explanations as containing the “causal” conditions within themselves. But the central task of any discipline, once it has mapped out its territory, is to arrive at a settled position on just how far its explanatory resources are likely to take it. In philosophy of mind, to raise the question of mental causation moves the philosophical question to a scientific question. Is it any surprise that the philosopher asking what is, at base, a scientific question, soon discovers the inability of philosophical modes of explanation to settle it?
And he goes on to add:
It can be argued that questions of causation are, in principle and always, scientific questions.
I don’t agree with the professor on this. For my part, I think I would be at least as likely to find scientific modes of explanation unable to settle philosophical questions as I would be to find philosophical modes of explanation unable to settle scientific questions, and as soon as this thought came to me while listening to the above passage I realized that it suggests a Clausewitzean conception of philosophy (and of science).
Clausewitz famously maintained the continuity of war and politics, as expressed in this famous passage of On War:
“…war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.”
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, Chapter 1, section 24
I have written about how Foucault has inverted this famous Clausewitzean doctrine that war is the pursuit of politics by other means (for example, in Toward a Dialectical Conception of War), by saying the politics is the pursuit of war by other means. Clausewitz and Foucault put together suggest that war and politics are to different forms of essentially the same human activity — two sides of the same coin.
A similar claim could be made for science and philosophy, i.e., that they are two sides of the same coin, and I would furthermore suggest that the coin in question is understanding — i.e., understanding the world.
That is to say, and to say it in other words, that the claim could be made that science is the pursuit of philosophy by other means, or it could be just as well claimed the philosophy is the pursuit of science by other means.
The ultimate continuity of science and philosophy means that philosophical explanations would approach by degrees providing an answer a question framed in scientific form, just as a scientific explanation would approach by a matter of degree providing answer to a question framed in philosophical terms. Each explanation would ultimately prove unsatisfactory, not because it is “wrong,” but because it is framed in different terms than that to be explained.
If we take the further step and reformulate an essentially scientific answer to a philosophical question in philosophical terms, we are simply doing philosophy, just as if we reformulate an essentially philosophical answer to a scientific question in scientific terms, we are simply doing science.
But to say “simply” in this context does not do justice to the relationship between science and philosophy. The larger point here is that there is a scientific way of approaching questions and a philosophical way of approaching questions. They are distinct paradigms, if you will (understanding “paradigms” in the Kuhnian sense). The distinction, however, is far from absolute. Each shades over into the other at the far edge of inquiry.
Philosophical questions pushed to the brink of philosophy can become scientific questions, just as scientific questions pushed to the brink of science can become philosophical questions.
Under these conditions of conceptual transgression we have the intellectual equivalent of war when science becomes a continuation of philosophy pursued by other (i.e., scientific) means and philosophy becomes a continuation of science pursued by other (i.e., philosophical) means.
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