Ever since the Meditations, Descartes' Deceiving Demon has tended to strike people as a funny or absurd idea. Nevertheless, something far deeper and more significant is going on in the first meditation than we might think. It is a problem about the relation of causality to knowledge. The relation of cause to effect had been of interest since Aristotle. There was something odd about it. Given knowledge of a cause (and of the laws of nature), we can usually predict what the effect will be. Touch the hot stove, and you'll get burned. Step off a roof, and you'll fall. But given the effect, it is much more difficult to reason backwards to the cause. The arson squad shows up to investigate the cause of a fire, but that is not an easy task: many things could have caused the fire, and it is always possible that they might not be able to figure out at all what the cause was. The problem is that the relation between cause and effect is not symmetrical. Given a cause, there will be one effect. But given an effect, there could have been many causes able to produce the same effect. And even if we can't predict the effect from the cause. We can always wait around to see what it is. But if we can't determine the cause from the effect, time forever conceals it from us. This feature of causality made for some uneasiness in mediaeval Western, and even in Indian, philosophy. Many people tried to argue that the effect was contained in the cause, or the cause in the effect. None of that worked, or even made much sense.
With Descartes, this uneasiness about causality becomes a terror in relation to knowledge: for, in perception, what is the relation of the objects of knowledge to our knowledge of them? Cause to effect. Thus what we possess, our perceptions, are the effects of external causes. In thinking that we know external objects, we are reasoning backwards from effect to cause. Trouble. Why couldn't our perceptions have been caused by something else? Indeed, in ordinary life we know that they can be. There are hallucinations. Hallucinations can be caused by a lot of things: fever, insanity, sensory deprivation, drugs, trauma, etc. Descartes' Deceiving Demon is more outlandish, but it employs the same principle, and touches the same raw nerve. That raw nerve is now known as the Problem of Knowledge: How can we have knowledge through perception of external objects? There is no consensus on how to solve this even today. The worst thing is not that there haven't been credible solutions proposed. There have been, but that the solutions should explain why perception is so obvious in ordinary life. Philosophical explanations are usually anything but obvious, however, there is not or anyone sensible person, not even Descartes, really doubts that external objects are there. This is why modern philosophy became so entered on questions about knowledge: it is the Curse of Descartes.
In the second meditation, Descartes wants to begin building up knowledge from the wreckage of the first meditation. This means starting from nothing. Such an idea of building up knowledge from nothing is called Foundationalism and is one of the mistakes that Descartes makes. Descartes does not and cannot simply start from nothing. Nevertheless, he gets off to a very good start: he decides that he cannot be deceived about his own existence, because if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be around to worry about it. If he didn't exist, he wouldn't be thinking; so if he is thinking, he must exist. This is usually stated in Latin: Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am.’ That might be the most famous statement in the history of philosophy, although it does not seem to occur in that form in the Meditations.
But there is more to it than just Descartes' argument for his own existence. Thinking comes first, and for Descartes that is a real priority. The title of the second meditation actually says, ‘the mind is better known than the body, and the Cogito ergo sum makes Descartes believe, not just that he has proven his existence, but that he has proven his existence as a thinking substance, a mind, leaving the body as some foreign thing to worry about later? That does not really follow, but Descartes clearly thinks that it does and consequently doesn't otherwise provide any special separate proof for the existence of the soul. In the end Descartes will believe that there are two fundamental substances in the world, souls and matter. The essence of soul for him, the attribute that makes a soul what is it, is thinking. The essence of matter for him (given to us in the fifth meditation), the attribute that makes matter what is it, is extension, i.e., that matter takes up space. This is known as Cartesian Dualism that there are two kinds of things. It is something else that people have thought funny or absurd since Descartes. The great difficulty with it was always how souls and their bodies, made of matter, interact or communicate with one another. In Descartes' own physics, forces are transferred by contact; least of mention, the soul, which is unextended and so has no surface, in that might one say is that it is only matter holding to extension, and, cannot contact the body. It holds accountably for reasons from which are to maintain that there is no surface with which to press. The body cannot even hold the soul within it, since the soul has nothing to press upon or carry it along with the body. Problems like this occur whenever the body and soul are regarded as fundamentally different kinds of realities.
At the present time, it might seem easy to say that the body and soul communicate by passing energy back and forth, of these we might by their unexpressed principle for oscillating requirements deem necessarily for any, and, if not all, for acquiring everyone achievement. Still, might that we behold upon the proximity, for which at any given time can give as a presence upon their aforesaid bearings, because in of each are they that combine of combinations that await to the future. Justly, the presence of real energy in the soul would make it detectable in the laboratory: any kind of energy produces some heat (toward which all energy migrates as it becomes more random, i.e., as energy obeys the laws of the conservation of energy and of entropy), and heat or the radiation it produces (all heat produces electromagnetic radiation) can be detected. But, usually, a theory of the soul wants it to be some kind of thing that cannot be detected in a laboratory--in great measure because souls have not been detected in a laboratory.
Nevertheless, Descartes' problem is not just confusion or a superstition. Our existence really does seem different from the inside than from the outside. From the inside there is consciousness, experience, colours, music, memories, etc. From the outside there is just the brain: gray goo. How do those two go together? That is the enduring question from Descartes: The Mind-Body Problem. As with the Problem of Knowledge, there is no consensus on a satisfactory answer. To ignore consciousness, as happens in Behaviourism, or to dismiss consciousness as something that is merely a transient state of the material brain, is a kind of reductionism, i.e., to say the one thing is just a state or function of another even though they may seem fundamentally different and there may be no-good reason why we should regard that one thing is more real than of another having less. Much of the talk about the Mind-Body Problem in the 20th century has been reductionistic, starting with Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind, which said that ‘mind is to body as kick is to leg.’ A kick certainly doesn't have much reality apart from a leg, but that really doesn't capture the relationship of consciousness to the body or to the brain. When the leg is kicking, we see the leg. But when the brain is ‘minding,’ we don't see the brain, and the body itself is only represented within consciousness. Internally, there is no reason to believe the mind is even in the brain. Aristotle and the Egyptians thought that consciousness was in the heart. In the middle of dreaming or hallucinations, we might not be aware of our bodies at all.
At the end of the second mediation Descartes may reasonably be said to have proven his own existence, but the existence of the body or of any other external objects is left hanging. If nothing further can be proven, then each of us is threatened with the possibility that I am the only thing that exists. This is called solipsism, from Latin solus, ‘alone’ (sole), and ipse, ‘self.’ Solipsism is not argued, advocated, or even mentioned by Descartes, but it is associated with him because both he and everyone after him have so much trouble proving that something else does exist.
The third meditation for Descartes' next step was to try in restoring the common sense view as the limit point of knowledge. Even though he is ultimately aiming to show that external objects and the body exist, he is not able to go at that directly. Instead that where for Descartes the attempts to prove the existence of God. This is surprising, since the existence of objects seems much more obvious than the existence of God. All the same, Descartes, methodological work within the spirit of his mathematics, he lead us beyond the gathering the guilt of a conscience frame of mind or any such given to reference. Thereupon, the absence from which are foregathering toward an oftentimes overflowing emptiness he thinks that a pure rational proof of something he can't see is better than no proof of something he can.
Descartes' proof for God is not original. It is a kind of argument called the Ontological Argument (named that by Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804). It is called ‘ontological’ because it is based on an idea about the nature of God's existence: that God is a necessary being, i.e., it is impossible for him not to exist. We and everything else in the universe, on the other hand, are contingent beings; it is possible for us not to exist, and in the past (and possibly in the future) we have indeed not existed. But if God is a necessary being, then there must be something about his nature that necessitates his existence. Reflecting on this, a mediaeval Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm (1093-1109), decided that all we needed to prove the existence of God was the proper definition of God. With such a definition we could understand how God's nature necessitates his existence. The definition Anselm proposed was, that God is that which is no greater than he is less, as he ironically can be of his own receptive conceivability. Lesser than great and greater than he is less, each is to denote by him that relinquishes all valuing qualities as these are to distinguish upon all given quantities, in that of or in or even how it is given amongst us, that we have to preconceive in all that is consistently proper and directorially placed through the disposition fields of force, for which each is to control by his travelling navigation, into that of which is True and Right. The argument then follows: If we conceive of a non-existing God, we must always ask, ‘Can something greater than this be conceived?’ The answer will clearly be ‘Yes’; for a God that is existing would be greater than a nonexistent God. Therefore, we can only conceive of God as existing; so God exists.
This simple argument has mostly not found general favour. The definitive criticism was given by St. Thomas Aquinas (who otherwise thought that there were many ways to prove the existence of God): things cannot be ‘conceived’ into existence. Defining a concept is one thing, proving that the thing exists is another. The principle involved is that, Existence is not a predicate, i.e., existence is not like other attributes or qualities that are included in definitions. Existence is not part of the meaning of anything. Most modern philosophers have agreed with this, but every so often there is an oddball who is captivated by Anselm. Descartes was such an oddball.
Descartes' argument for God is not even as good as Anselm's. It runs something like this: I have in my mind an idea of perfection; Degrees of perfection correspond to degrees of reality; Every idea I have must have been caused by something that is at least as real [in objective reality, what Descartes calls ‘formal reality’ as what it is that the idea represents [in the subjective reality of my mind, what Descartes confusingly calls ‘objective reality’; Therefore, every idea I have must have been caused by something that is at least as perfect as what it is that the idea represents; Therefore, my idea of perfection must have been caused by the perfect thing; Therefore, the perfect thing exists. By definition the perfect thing is God; Therefore, God exists.
Descartes uses ‘perfection’ instead of Anselm's ‘greatness.’ The difficulties with the argument are, first, that the second premise is most questionable. Most Greek philosophers starting with Parmenides would have said that either something exists or it doesn't. ‘Degrees’ of reality is a much later, in fact Neoplatonic, idea. The second problem is that the third premise is convoluted and fishy in the extreme. It means that Descartes is forced into arguing that our idea of infinity must have been caused by an infinite thing, since an infinite thing is more real than we could ever conceive, or anything in us. But it seems obvious enough that our idea of infinity is simply the negation of finitude: the non-finite. The best that Descartes can ever do in justifying these two premises is arguing that he can conceive them ‘clearly and distinctly’ or ‘by the light of nature.’ ‘To remove obstructions from and appreciably abstractive ideas,’ are how Descartes claims something is self-evident, and something is self-evident if we know it to be true just by understanding it's meaning. That is very shaky ground in Descartes' system, for we must always be cautious about things that the Deceiving Demon could deceive us into believing. The only guarantee we have that our clear and distinct ideas are in fact true and reliable is that God would not deceive us about them. But then the existence of God is to be proven just in order that we can prove God reliable. Assuming the reliability of clear and distinct ideas so as to prove that God is reliable, so as to prove that clear and distinct ideas are reliable, makes for a logically circular argument: we assume what we wish to prove.
Descartes' argument for God violates both logic and his own method. In sweeping away the junk of history through methodical doubt, Descartes wasn't supposed to use anything from the past without justifying it. He is already violating that in the second mediation just by using concepts like ‘substance’ and ‘essence,’ which are technical philosophical terms that Descartes has not made up himself. In the third meditation Descartes' use of the history of philosophy explodes out of control: technical terminology (‘formal cause,’ etc.) flies thick and fast, the argument itself is inspired by Anselm, and the whole process is very far from the foundational program of starting from nothing. All by itself, it looks like a good proof of how philosophy cannot start over from anything.
With the existence of God, presumably, proven, Descartes wraps’ things up in the sixth meditation: if God is the perfect thing, then he would not deceive us. That wouldn't be perfect. On the other hand, when it comes to our perceptions, God has set this all up and given us a very strong sense that all these things that we see are there. So, if God is no deceiver, these things really must be there. Therefore, external objects (‘corporeal things’) exist. Simple enough, but fatally flawed if the argument for the existence of God is itself defective.
In the fourth and fifth meditation Descartes does some tidying up. In the fourth he worries why there can be falsehood if God is reliable. The answer is that if we stuck to our clear and distinct ideas, there would be no falsehood, upwards to this point our ambitions leap beyond those limits, so falsehood exists and is our own fault. Descartes does come to believe that all our clear and distinct ideas are innate: they are packed into the soul on its creation, like a box lunch. Most important is the idea of perfection, or the idea of God, itself, which is then rather like God's hallmark on the soul. Once we notice that idea, then life, the universe, and everything falls into place. Thus, Descartes eventually decides that the existence of God is better known to him than his own existence, even though he was certain about the latter first.
The fifth meditation says it is about the ‘essence’ of material things. That is especially interesting since Descartes supposedly doesn't know yet whether material things existed. It's like, even if they don't exist, he knows what they are. That is Descartes the mathematician speaking. Through mathematics, especially geometry, he knows what matter is like--extended, etc. He even knows that a vacuum is impossible: extended space is the same thing as material substance. This is the kind of thing that makes Descartes look very foolish as a scientist. But the important point, again, is not that Descartes is unscientific, but that he chose to rely too heavily on the role of mathematics in the nova scientia that Galileo had recently inaugurated. Others, like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), had relied too heavily on the role of observation in explaining the new knowledge. Bacon wasn't a scientist, or a mathematician, at all. Descartes was. It really would not be until our own time that some understanding would begin to emerge of the interaction and interdependency between theory and observation, mathematics and experience in modern science. Even now the greatest mathematicians (e.g., Kurt Gödel, 1906-1978) have a tendency by which are the kinds of Platonists.
Italian physicist and astronomer, the founder of experimental science. In a world dominated by the dogmatic enforcement of the teachings of Aristotle, Galileo used the systematic application of the experimental method to formulate the most basic laws of mechanics -inertia and the principle of the relativity of motion. By applying the telescope to observation of the skies, Galileo proved the validity of Copernicus's heliocentric system. Galileo thus developed a scientific method based on observation, experiment and the method of induction and a mechanical, causal conception of Nature. Concurring of our agreement, which we would agree, only for which is well to know that we know very well that Galileo suffered severe repression from the Church for his views, and was forced to write God into his system.
A good exposition of his works can be found in ‘The Galileo Affair,’ which collects a series of letters and statements by Galileo with the documents of the Inquisition demanding that Galileo recant and affirm the literal interpretation of the Bible upheld by the Inquisitors. The final document is Galileo's ‘self-criticism’
In 1600, the great Italian materialist philosopher, Giodarno Bruno, had been burnt at the stake for, among other things, upholding the Copernican conception of the Heliocentric universe, and despite the fact that Copernicus had been commissioned by the Church to formulate a better method of predicting the movement of the heavens in order to overcome defects in the Calendar, he was also forced to recant.
Not only are Galileo's arguments in defence of the Copernican view compelling to the point where it is difficultly for us to comprehend today how the Inquisitors could withstand them, but Galileo also demonstrates that they may silence him in vain, for conditions of life in Europe were leading ever more people to observe with their own eyes the movement and form of the heavenly bodies, and more people were coming to the same conclusions as he, and the Church would do well to stay away from anything that might prove liable to refutation by empirical observation or naturalistic reason.
The profundity of Galileo's understanding of the nature and tasks of natural science is astounding. Not only does he present the argument in favour of the Heliocentric System with a fine balance of empirical evidence and the evidence of Reason, but he very explicitly rejects the ‘compromise’ offered him -to admit that the heliocentric assumption is made solely ‘for the convenience of organising the observations,’ and not at all a statement that material bodies actually move in this way, outside of human perception! Right at the very beginning of the development of natural science then, we see its greatest advocate recognising positivism in the camp of theology! On the contrary, he says, astronomers have to reduce the positions calculated on the basis of a theory of objective heliocentric motion to lines-of-sight referred to the point of view of an Earthly observer in order to be able to utilise the mass of experimental data, all of which is made by Earth-bound human observers -in other words the germs of the twentieth century Principle of Correspondence, used by Einstein in his formulation of the Special Theory of Relativity.
Also, we see a clear formulation of the principle of relativity, and the conception of the distinction between Essence and Appearance, in so far as Galileo distinguishes between the ‘idealised’ motion and the minor ‘deviations’ from that trajectory. Galileo also did fundamental work on mechanics, rolling balls down inclined slopes and timing them with a very primitive ‘stop watch.’ The Problem of the Subject Matter and Sources of Logic is a most promising means of resolving any scientific problem is the historical approach to it. In our case this approach proves a very essential one. The fact is that what are now called logic are doctrines that differ considerably in their understanding of the boundaries of this science. Each of them, of course, lays claim not so much simply to the title as to the right to be considered the sole modern stage in the development of world logical thought. That, therefore, is why we must go into the history of the matter.
The term ‘logic’ was first introduced for the science of thinking by the Stoics, who distinguished by it only that part of Aristotle’s actual teaching that corresponded to their own views on the nature of thinking. The term itself was derived by them from the Greek word logos (which literally means ‘the word’), and the science so named was very closely related to the subject matter of grammar and rhetoric. The mediaeval scholastics, who finally shaped and canonised the tradition, simply converted logic into a mere instrument (organon) for conducting verbal disputes, a tool for interpreting the texts of the Holy Writ, and a purely formal apparatus. As a result not only did the official interpretation of logic become discredited, but also it’s very name. The emasculated ‘Aristotelean logic’ therefore also became discredited in the eyes of all leading scientists and philosophers of the new times, which is the reason why most of the philosophers of the sixteenth to eighteenth century generally avoided using the term ‘logic’ as the name for the science of thought intellect, and reason.
Recognition of the uselessness of the official, formal, scholastic version of logic as the organon of real thought and of the development of scientific knowledge was the leitmotif of all the advanced, progressive philosophers of the time. ‘The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors that have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search after truth. So it does more harm than good,’ Francis Bacon said [Novum Organum] ‘I observed in respect to Logic,’ said Descartes, ‘that the syllogisms and the greater part of the other teaching served better in explaining to others those things that one knows (or like the art of Lully, in enabling one to speak without judgment of those things of which one is ignorant) than in learning what is new.’ [Discourse on Method, and John Locke suggested that ‘syllogism, at best, be but the Art of fencing with the little knowledge we have, without making any Addition to it.’. [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding] On this basis Descartes and Locke considered it necessary to classify all the problems of the old logic in the sphere of rhetoric. And insofar as logic was preserved as a special science, but it was unanimously treated not as the science of thinking but as the science of the correct use of words, names, and signs. Hobbes, for example, developed a conception of logic as the calculation of word signs.
In concluding his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defined the subject matter and task of logic as follows: ‘The business [of logic] is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others.’ He treated logic as ‘the doctrine of signs’, i.e., as semiotics.
But philosophy, fortunately, did not jell at that level. The best brains of the period understood very well that it might be all right for logic to be interpreted in that spirit, but not for the science of thinking. True, in general, the representatives of purely mechanistic views of the world and of thinking held such a view of logic. Since they interpreted objective reality in an abstract, geometrical way (i.e., only purely quantitative characteristics were considered objective and scientific), the principles of thinking in mathematical science merged in their eyes with the logical principles of thinking in general, a tendency that took final form in Hobbes.
The approach of Descartes and Leibniz was much more careful. They too took to the idea of creating ‘universal mathematics’ in place of the old, ridiculed, and discredited logic. They dreamed of instituting a universal language, a system of terms strictly and unambiguously defined, and therefore admitting of purely formal operations in it.
Both Descartes and Leibniz, unlike Hobbes, were well aware of the difficulties of principal standing in the way of realising such an idea. Descartes understood that the definition of terms in the universal language could not be arrived at by amicable agreement, but must only be the result of careful analysis of the simple ideas, the bricks, from which the whole intellectual edifice of man was built. That the exact language of ‘universal mathematics’ could only be something derived from ‘true philosophy’. Only then would one succeed in replacing thinking about the things given in reflection or imagination (i.e., in the terminology of the day, in contemplation) and in general in people’s real sense experience by a kind of calculus of terms and statements, and in drawing conclusions and inferences as infallible as the solutions of equations.
In supporting this point of Descartes’, Leibniz categorically limited the field of application of the ‘universal mathematics’ solely to those things that belonged to the sphere of the powers of imagination. The ‘universal mathematics’ should also, in his view, be only (so to say) a logic of the powers of imagination. But that was precisely why all metaphysics was excluded from its province, and such things as thought, and action, and the field of ordinary mathematics, commensurate only in reason. A very essential reservation! Though, in any case, thus remained outside the competence of the ‘universal mathematics’.
It is not surprising that Leibniz, with unconcealed irony, classified Locke’s treatment of logic, by which it was understood as a special doctrine of signs, as purely nominalist. Leibniz revealed the difficulties associated with such an understanding of logic. Above all, he said, the ‘science of reasoning, of judgments and inventions, seems very different from recognition of the etymologies and usage of words, which is something indeterminable and arbitrary. One must, moreover, when one wants to explain words, make an excursion into the sciences themselves as was seen in dictionaries. One must not, on the other hand, engage in a science without at the same time giving a definition of the terms.
Instead of the threefold division of philosophy into different sciences (logic, physics, and ethics) that Locke had taken over from the Stoics, Leibniz therefore suggested speaking of three different aspects, under which the same knowledge, the same truth, would function, namely theoretical (physics), practical (ethics), and terminological (logic). The old logic thus corresponded simply to the terminological aspect of knowledge, or, as Leibniz put it, ‘arrangement by terms, as in a handbook’. Such systematisation, of course, even the best, was not a science of thought, because Leibniz had a more profound appreciation of thinking. And he classed the true doctrine of thought as metaphysics, in this sense following Aristotle’s terminology and the essence of his logic, and not the Stoics.
But why should be thought be investigated within the framework of ‘metaphysics’? It was not a matter, of course, of indicating to which ‘department’ the theoretical understanding of thought ‘belonged’, but of a definite way of approaching the solution of an essential philosophical problem. And the difficulty constantly facing every theoretician lies in understanding what it is that links knowledge (the totality of concepts, theoretical constructions, and ideas) and its subject matter together, and whether the one agrees with the other, and whether the concepts on which a person relies correspond to something real, lying outside his consciousness? And can that, in general, be tested? And if so, how?
The problems are really very complicated. An affirmative answer, for all its seeming obviousness, is not quite so simple to prove, and as for a negative answer, it proves possible to back it up with very weighty arguments, such as that, since an object is refracted in the course of its apprehension through the prism of the ‘specific nature’ of the organs of perception and reason, we know any object only in the form it acquires as a result of this refraction. The ‘existence’ of things outside consciousness is thus by no means necessarily rejected. One thing ‘only’ is rejected, the possibility of verifying whether or not such things are ‘in reality’ as we know and understand them. It is impossible to compare the thing as it is given in consciousness with the thing outside consciousness, because it is impossible to compare what I know with what I don’t know, what I do not see, what I do not perceive, what I am not aware of. Before I can compare my idea of a thing with the thing, I must also be aware of the thing, i.e., must also transform it into an idea. As a result I am always comparing and contrasting only ideas with ideas, although I may think that, I am comparing the idea with the thing.
Only similar objects, naturally, can be compared and contrasted. It is senseless to compare bushels and rods, poles, or perches, or the taste of steak and the diagonal of a square. And if, all the same, we want to compare steaks and squares, then we will no longer be comparing ‘steak and ‘square’ but two objects both possessing a geometrical, spatial form. The ‘specific’ property of the one and of the other cannot in general be involved in the comparison.
‘What is the distance between the syllable A and a table? The question would be nonsensical. In speaking of the distance of two things, we speak of their difference in space . . . Thus we equalise them for being both existence of space, and only after having them equalised sub specie spati [under the aspect of space] we distinguish them as different points of space. To belong to space is their unity. In other words, when we wish to establish a relation of some sort between two objects, we always compare not the ‘specific’ qualities that make one object ‘syllable A’ and the other a ‘table’, ‘steak’, or a ‘square’, but only those properties that express a ‘third’ something, different from their existence as the things enumerated. The things compared are regarded as different modifications of this ‘third’ property common to them all, but inherent in them as it were. So if there is no ‘third’ in the nature of the two things common to them both, the very differences between them become quite senseless.
In what are such objects as ‘concept’ (‘idea’) and ‘thing’ related? In what special ‘space’ can. they be contrasted, compared, and differentiated? Is there, in general, a ‘third’ thing in which they are ‘one and the same’, in spite of all their directly visible differences? If there is no such common substance, expressed by different means in an idea and in a thing, it is impossible to establish any intrinsically necessary relationship between them. At best we can ‘see’ only an external relation in the nature of that which was once established between the position of luminaries in the heavens and events in personal lives, i.e., relations between two orders of quite heterogeneous events, each of which proceeds according to its own, particular, specific laws. And then Wittgenstein would be right in proclaiming logical forms to be mystical and inexpressible.
But in the case of the relationship between an idea and reality there is yet another difficulty. We know where the search for some sort of special essence can and does lead, an essence that would, at this point, may, as perhaps, be an occupant for whom a finding peculiarity, and, might have not been confronted for any given contributive idea and justly by virtue of its character that is characterized for not being functionally distributed by some material reality, but would constitute their common substance, the ‘third’ that appears one time as an idea and another time for being. For an idea and being mutually exclusive concepts. That which is an idea is not being, and vice versa. How, then, in general, can they be compared? In what, in general, can the basis of their interaction be, what is that in which they are ‘one and the same’?
This difficulty was sharply expressed in its naked logical form by Descartes. In its general form, it is the central problem of any philosophy whatsoever, the problem of the relationship of ‘thought’ to the reality existing outside it and independently of it, to the world of things in space and time, the problem of the coincidence of the forms of thought and reality, i.e., the problem of truth or, to put it in traditional philosophical language, the ‘problem of the identity of thought and being’.
It is clear to everyone that ‘thought’ and ‘things outside thought’ are far from being one and the same. It is not necessary to be a philosopher to understand that. Everyone knows that it is one thing to have a hundred roubles (or pounds, or dollars) in one’s pocket, and another to have them only in one’s dreams, only in one’s thoughts. The concept obviously is only a state of the special substance that fills the brain box (we could go on, furthermore, explaining this substance as brain tissue or even as the very thin ether of the soul keeping house there, as the structure of the brain tissue, or even as the formal structure of inner speech, in the form of which thinking takes place inside the head); each latent subject is outside the head, in the space beyond the head, and is something quite other than the internal state of thought, ideas, the brain, speech, etc.
In order to understand such self-evident things clearly, and to take them into consideration, it is not generally necessary to have Descartes’ mind; however, it is necessary to have its analytical rigour in order to define the fact that thought and the world of things in space are not only and not simply different phenomena, but are also directly opposite.
Descartes’ clear, consistent intellect is especially needed in order to grasp the problem arising from this difficulty, namely, in what way do these two worlds (i.e., the world of concepts, of the inner states of thought, on the one hand, and the world of things in external space, on the other hand) nevertheless, to agree with each other?
Descartes expressed the difficulty as follows. If the existence of things is determined through their extension and if the spatial, geometric forms of things are the sole objective forms of their existence outside the subject, then thinking is not disclosed simply through its description in forms of space. The spatial characteristic of thinking in general has no relation to its specific nature. The nature of thinking is disclosed through concepts that have nothing in common with the expression of any kind of spatial, geometric image. He also expressed this view in the following way: though and extension are really two different substances, and a substance is that which exists and is defined only through itself and not through something else. There is nothing common between thought and extension that could be expressed in a special definition. In other words, in a series of definitions of thought there is not a single attribute that could be part of the definition of extension, and vice versa. But if there is no such common attribute it is also impossible to deduce being rationally from thought, and vice versa, because deduction requires a ‘mean term’, i.e., a term such as might be included in the series of definitions of the idea and of the existence of things outside consciousness, outside thought. Thought and being cannot in general come into contact with one another, since their boundary (the line or even the point of contact) would then also be exactly that which simultaneously both divides them and unites them.
In view of the absence of such a boundary, thought cannot, . . . limit the extended thing, nor the thing the mental expression. They are free, as it were, to penetrate and permeate each other and nowhere encountering a boundary. Though as such cannot interact with the extended thing, nor the thing with thought; each revolves within itself.
Straightly unmentionable some problem springs into the lead: how then are thought and bodily functions united in the human individual? That they are linked is an obvious fact. Man can consciously control his spatially determined body among other such bodies, his mental impulses are transformed into spatial movements, and the movements of bodies, causing alterations in the human organism (sensations) are transformed into mental images. That means that thought and the extended body interact in some way after all. But how? What is the nature of the interaction? How do they determine, i.e., delimit, each other?
How does it come about that a trajectory, drawn by thought in the plane of the imagination, for example a curve described in its equation, proves to be congruent with the geometrical contours of the same curve in real space? It means that the form of the curve in thought (i.e., in the form of the ‘magnitude’ of the algebraic signs of the equation) is identical with a corresponding curve in real space, i.e., a curve drawn on paper in a space outside the head. It is surely one and the same curve, only the one is in thought and the other in real space; therefore, acting in accordance with thought (understood as the sense of words or signs), I simultaneously act in the strictest accord with the shape (in this case the geometrical contour) of a thing outside thought.
How can that be, if ‘the thing in thought’ and ‘the things outside thought’ are not only ‘different’ but are also absolutely opposite? For absolutely opposite means exactly this: not having anything in ‘common’ between them, nothing identical, not one attribute that could at once be a criterion of the concept ‘thing outside thought’ and of the concept ‘thing in thought’, or ‘imagined thing’. How then can the two worlds conform with one another? And, moreover, not accidentally, but systematically and regularly, these two worlds that have absolutely nothing in common, nothing identical? That is the problem around which all Cartesians spin, Descartes himself, and Geulincx, and Malebranche, and the mass of their followers.
Malebranche expressed the principal difficulty arising here in his own witty way, as follows: during the siege of Vienna, the defenders of the city undoubtedly saw the Turkish army as ‘transcendental Turks’, but those killed were very real Turks. The difficulty here is clear; and from the Cartesian point of view on thought it is absolutely insoluble, because the defenders of Vienna acted, i.e., aimed and fired their cannonballs in accordance with the image of Turks that they had in their brains, in accordance with ‘imagined’, ‘transcendental Turks’, and with trajectories calculated in their brains; and the shots fell among real Turks in a space that was not only outside their skulls, but also outside the walls of the fortress.
How does it come about that two worlds having absolutely nothing in common between them are in agreement, namely the world ‘thought of’, the world in thought, and the real world, the world in space? And why? God knows, answered Descartes, and Malebranche, and Geulincx; from our point of view it is inexplicable. Only God can explain this fact. He makes the two opposing worlds agree. The concept God’ comes in here as a ‘theoretical’ construction by which to express the obvious but quite inconceivable fact of the unity, congruence, and identity perhaps, of phenomena that are absolutely contrary by definition. God is the ‘third’ which, as the ‘link’, unites and brings into agreement thought and being, ‘soul’ and ‘body’, ‘concept’ and ‘object’, action in the plane of signs and words and action in the plane of real, geometrically defined bodies outside the head.
Having come directly up against the naked dialectical fact that ‘thought’ and ‘being outside thought’ are in absolute opposition, yet are nevertheless in agreement with one another, in unity, in inseparable and necessary interconnection and interaction (and thus subordinated to some higher law and moreover, one and the same law), the Cartesian school capitulated before theology and put the inexplicable (from their point of view) fact down to God, and explained it by a ‘miracle’, i.e., by the direct intervention of supernatural powers in the causal chain of natural events.
Descartes, the founder of analytical geometry, could therefore not explain in any rational way whatever the reason for the algebraic expression of a curve by means of an equation ‘corresponding’ to the spatial image of this curve in a drawing. They could not, indeed, manage without God, because according to Descartes, actions with signs and on the basis of signs, in accordance only with signs (with their mathematical sense), i.e., actions in the ether of ‘pure thought’, had nothing in common with really bodily actions in the sphere of spatially determined things, in accordance with their real contours. The first were pure actions of the soul (or thinking as such), the second actions of the body repeating the contours (spatially geometric outlines) of external bodies, and therefore wholly governed by the laws of the ‘external’, spatially material world. (This problem is posed no less sharply today by the ‘philosophy of mathematics’. If mathematical constructions are treated as constructions of the creative intellect of mathematicians, ‘free’ of any external determination and worked out exclusively by ‘logical’ rules and the mathematicians that they had followed Descartes, are quite often apt to interpret them precisely so it becomes quite enigmatic and inexplicable why on earth the empirical facts, the facts of ‘external experience’, keep on agreeing and coinciding in their mathematical, numerical expressions with the results obtained by purely logical calculations and by the ‘pure’ actions of the intellect. It is absolutely unclear. Only ‘God’ can help.)
In other words the identity of these absolute opposites (‘thought’, ‘spirit’, and ‘extension’, ‘body’) was also recognised by Descartes as a factual principle without it even his idea of analytical geometry would have been impossible (and not only inexplicable) but it was explained by an act of God, by his intervention in the interrelations of ‘thought and being’, ‘soul and body’. God, moreover, in Cartesian philosophy, and especially for Malebranche and Geulincx, could be understood as the purely traditional Catholic, orthodox God, ruling both the ‘bodies’ and the ‘souls’ of men from outside, from the heights of his heavenly throne, and co-ordinating the actions of the ‘soul’ with those of the ‘body’.
Such is the essence of the famous psychophysical problem, in which it is not difficult to see the specific concrete and therefore historically limited formulation of the central problem of philosophy. The problem of the theoretical understanding of thought (logic), consequently, and hence not of the rules of operating with words or other signs, comes down to solving the cardinal problems of philosophy, or of metaphysics, to put it in a rather old-fashioned way. And that assumes mastering the culture of the genuinely theoretical thinking represented by the classical philosophers, who not only knew how to pose problems with maximum clarity, but also knew how to solve them.
An immense role in the development of logic, and in preparing the ground for modern views on its subject matter, a role far from fully appreciated, was played by Spinoza. Like Leibniz, Spinoza rose high above the mechanistic limitations of the natural science of his time. Any tendency directly to universalise partial forms and methods of thinking only useful within the bounds of mechanistic, mathematical natural science was also foreign to him.
Insofar as logic was preserved alongside the doctrine of substance, Spinoza treated it as an applied discipline by analogy with medicine, since its concern proved not to be the invention of artificial rules but the coordination of human intellect with the laws of thought understood as an ‘attribute’ of the natural whole, only as ‘modes of expression’ of the universal order and connection of things. He also tried to work out logical problems on the basis of this conception.
Spinoza understood thought much more profoundly and, in essence, dialectically, which is why his figure presents special interest in the history of dialectics; he was probably the only one of the great thinkers of the pre-Marian where who knew how to unite brilliant models of acutely dialectical thought with a consistently held materialist principle (rigorously applied throughout his system) of understanding thought and its relations to the external world lying in the space outside the human head. The influence of Spinoza’s ideas on the subsequent development of dialectical thought can hardly be exaggerated. ‘It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.
But orthodox religious scholasticism, in alliance with subjective idealist philosophy, has not ceased to flog Spinoza as a ‘dead dog’, treating him as a living and dangerous opponent. Elementary analysis reveals that the main principles of Spinoza’s thought directly contradict the conception of ‘thought’ developed by modern positivism all along the line. The most modern systems of the twentieth century still clash in sharp antagonism in Spinoza. That obliges us to analyse the theoretical foundation of his conception very carefully, and to bring out the principles in it that, in rather different forms of expression perhaps, remain the most precious principles of any scientific thinking to this day, and as such are very heatedly disputed by our contemporary opponents of dialectical thought.
Hegel once noted that Spinoza’s philosophy was very simple and easy to understand. And in fact the principles of his thinking, which constitute the essential commencement of all Philosophy, i.e., the real foundation on which alone it is possible to erect the edifice of philosophy as a science, are brilliant precisely in their crystal clarity, free of all reservations and ambiguities.
It is not so easy, however, to bring these brilliant principles out because they are decked out in the solid armour of the constructions of formal logic and deductive mathematics that constitute the ‘shell’ of Spinoza’s system, its (so to say) defensive coat of mail. In other words, the real logic of Spinoza’s thinking by no means coincides with the formal logic of the movement of his ‘axioms’, ‘theorems’, ‘scholia’, and their proofs. ‘Even with philosophers who gave their work a systematic form, e.g., Spinoza, the really inner structure of their system is quite distinct from the form in which they consciously presented it,’ Karl Marx wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle.
The job of the philosopher is then that he cannot be once more to paraphrase the theoretical foundations on which Spinoza built his main work, the Ethics, and the conclusions that he drew from them by means of his famous ‘geometric modus’. In that case it would be more proper simply to copy out the text of the Ethics itself once again. Our job is to help the reader to understand the ‘real inner structure’ of his system, which far from coincides with its formal exposition, i.e., to see the real ‘cornerstone’ of his reflections and to show what real conclusions were drawn from them, or could be drawn from them, that still preserve their full topicality.
That can only be done in one way, and one way only, which is to show the real problem that Spinoza’s thought, as it came up against exactly of the independent characterological features in showing how he himself realized, in of his terms that were expressed for him and for others (i.e., to set the problem out in the language of our century), and then to trace what were the real principles (once more independently of Spinoza’s own formulation of them) on which he based the solution of the problem. Then it will become clear that Spinoza succeeded in finding the only formulation exact for his time of a real problem that remains the great problem of our day, only formulated in another form. Formulated by this problem in the preceding essay. Spinoza found a very simple solution to it, brilliant in its simplicity for our day as well as his: the problem is insoluble only because it has been wrongly posed. There is no need to rack one’s brains over how the Lord God ‘unites’ ‘soul’ (thought) and ‘body’ in one complex, represented initially (and by definition) as different and even contrary principles allegedly existing separately from each other before the ‘act’ of this ‘uniting’ (and thus, also being able to exist after their ‘separation’; which is only another formulation of the thesis of the immortality of the soul, one of the cornerstones of Christian theology and ethics?). In fact, there is simply no such situation. Therefore, there is also no problem of ‘uniting’ or ‘coordination’.
There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation body and thought, but only one single object, which is the thinking body of living, real man (or other analogous being, if such exists anywhere in the Universe), only considered from two different and even opposing aspects or points of view. Living, real thinking man, the sole thinking body with which we are acquainted, does not consist of two Cartesian halves ‘thought lacking a body’ and a ‘body lacking thought’. In relation to real man both the one and the other are equally fallacious abstractions, and one cannot in the end model a real thinking man from two equally fallacious abstractions. That is what constitutes the real ‘keystone’ of the whole system, a very simple truth that is easy, on the whole, to understand. It is not a special ‘soul’, installed by God in the human body as in a temporary residence, that thinks, but the body of man itself. Thought is a property, a mode of existence, of the body, the same as its extension, i.e., as its spatial configuration and position among other bodies.
This simple and profoundly true idea was expressed this way by Spinoza in the language of his time: though and extension are not two special substances as Descartes taught, but only two attributes of one and the same organ; not two special objects, capable of existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two different and even opposite aspects under which one and the same thing appears, two different modes of existence, two forms of the manifestation of some third thing. The third thing, would be that real infinite Nature, Spinoza answered. It is Nature that extends in space and ‘thinks’. The whole difficulty of the Cartesian metaphysics arose because the specific difference of the real world from the world as only imagined or thought of was considered to be extension, spatially and geometric determinateness were to the influence that temporality. But extension as such just existed in imagination, only in thought. For as such it can generally only be thought of in the form of emptiness, i.e., purely negatively, as the complete absence of any definite geometric shape. Ascribing only spatial, geometric properties to Nature is, as Spinoza said, to think of it in an imperfect way, i.e., to deny it in advance one of its perfections. And then it is asked how the perfection removed from Nature can be restored to her again.
The same argumentation applies to thought. Thought as such is the same kind of fallacious abstraction as emptiness. In fact it is only a property, a predicate, an attribute of that selfsame body, which was spatially to realize upon those same existent qualities that, at that time were attributively unknown. In other words’, one can say very little about thought as such, as it is not reality existing separately form or independently of, because of an organically structured mode that of its existence is of Nature’s body. Though and space do not really exist by them, but only as Nature’s bodies linked by chains of interaction into a measureless and limitless whole embracing both the one and the other.
By a simple turn of thought Spinoza cut the Gordian knot of the ‘psychophysical problem’, the mystic insolubility of which still torments the mass of theoreticians and schools of philosophy, psychology, physiology of the higher nervous system, and other related sciences that are forced one way or another to deal with the delicate theme of the relation of ‘thought’ to ‘body’, of ‘spiritual’ to ‘material’, of ‘ideal’ too ‘real’, and such like topics. Spinoza showed that it is only impossible to solve the problem because it is absolutely wrongly posed; for that is such to be made known, as to came by itself, there where by any means have to a greater extent than is nothing itself, as for being skilled of which are the afforded efforts as drawn upon our imagination.
It is in man that Nature really does, in a self-evident way, that very activity that we are accustomed to calling ‘thinking’. In man, in the form of what is told that to be human, gave to represent humanity as he was existently to realize by the presences in that person. Nature itself thinks, and not at all in the same special substances that give to quantification, source, or principles in from the outside. In man, therefore, Nature thinks of itself. Becomes aware of itself, senses itself, acts on itself. And the ‘ reasoning’, ‘consciousness’, ‘idea’, ‘sensation’, ‘will’, and all the other special actions that Descartes described as modi of thought, are simply different modes of revealing a property inalienable from Nature as a whole, one of its own attributes.
But if thinking is always an action performed by a natural and so by a spatially determined body, it itself, too, is an action that is also expressed spatially, which is why there is not and cannot be the cause and effect relation between thinking and bodily action for which the Cartesians were looking. They did not find it for the simple reason that no such relation exists in Nature, and cannot, simply because thinking and the body are two different things at all, existing separately and therefore capable of interacting, but one and the same thing, only expressed by two different modes or considered in two different aspects.
Between body and thought there is no relation of cause and effect, but the relation of an organ (i.e., of a spatially determinate body) to the mode of its own action. The thinking body cannot cause changes in thought, cannot act on thought, because its existence as ‘thinking’ is thought. If a thinking body does nothing, it is no longer a thinking body but simply a body. But when it does act, it does not do so on thought, because it’s very activity is thought.
Thought as a spatially expressed activity cannot have possession in the quality of being segregated from the body performing it as a special ‘substance,’ distinct from the body in the way that bile is segregated from the liver or sweat from sweat glands. Thinking is not the product of an action but the action itself, considered at the moment of its performance, just as walking, for example, is the mode of action of the legs, the ‘product’ of which, it happens, is the space walked. And that is that. The product or result of thinking may be an exclusively spatially expressed, or exclusively geometrically stated, change in somebody or another, or else in its position relative to other bodies. It is absurd then to say that the one gives rise to (or ‘causes’) the other. Thinking does not evoke a spatially expressed change in a body but exists through it (or within it), and vice versa; any change, however fine, within that body, induced by the effect on it of other bodies, is directly expressed for it as a certain change in its mode of activity, i.e., in thinking.
The position set out here is extremely important also because it immediately excludes any possibility of treating it in a vulgar materialist, mechanistic key, i.e., of identifying thought with immaterial processes that take place within the thinking body (head, brain tissue), while nevertheless understanding that thought takes place precisely through these processes.
Spinoza was well aware that what is expressed and performed in the form of structural, spatial changes within the thinking body is not at all some kind of thinking taking place outside of and independently of them, and vice versa (shifts of thinking by no means express immanent movements of the body within which they arise). It is therefore impossible to understand thought through examination either, but exactly through the personal self-realization of spatially geometric change, in the form for which it is expressed within the body of the brain, or, on conversely, to some understood geometric changes in the brain tissue, in that most are the equivalent, if, in at all, to the graduating detailed consideration of the compositional characters that ideas existing in the brain. It is impossible, Spinoza constantly repeated, because they are one and the same, only expressed by two different means.
To try to explain the one by the other simple mean to double the description of one and the same fact, not yet understood and incomprehensible. And although we have fully and adequately given to description that of one are equally to resemble to both are the same event, equivalent to one another, the event itself falls outside both descriptions, as the ‘third thing’, the very ‘one and the same’ that was not yet understood or explained. Because the event twice described (once in the language of the ‘physics of the brain’ and once in the language of the ‘logic of ideas’) can be explained and correspondingly’ understood only after bringing out the cause evoking the event described but not understood.
Bishop Berkeley ascribed the cause to God. And so did Descartes, Malebranche, and Geulincx. The shallow, vulgar materialist tries to explain everything by the purely mechanical actions of external things on the sense organs and brain tissue, and takes for the cause the concrete thing, the sole object, that is affecting our bodily organisation at a given moment and causing corresponding changes in our body, which we feel within ourselves and experience as our thinking.
While rejecting the first explanation as the capitulation of philosophy before religious theological twaddle, Spinoza took a very critical attitude as well toward the superficial materialist mechanistic explanation of the cause of thought. He very well understood that it was only a ‘bit’ of an explanation, leaving in the dark the very difficulty that Descartes was forced to bring in God to explain.
For to explain the event we call ‘thinking’, to disclose its effective cause, it is necessary to include it in the chain of events within which it arises of necessity and not fortunately. The ‘beginnings’ and the ‘ends’ of this chain are clearly not located within the thinking body at all, but far outside it. To explain a separate, single, sensuously perceived fact passing momentarily before our eye, and even the whole mass of such facts, as the cause of thought means to explain precisely nothing. For this very fact exerts its effect (mechanical, say, or light) on stone as well, but no action of any kind that we describe as ‘thinking’ is evoked in the stone. The explanation must consequently also include those relations of cause and effect that of necessity generate our own physical organisation capable (unlike a stone) of thinking, i.e., of so refracting the external influences and so transforming them within itself that they are experienced by the thinking body not at all only as changes arising within themselves, but as external things, as the shapes of things outside the thinking body.
For the action produced on the retina of our eye by a ray of light reflected from the Moon is perceived by the thinking being not simply as a mechanical irritation within the eye but as the shape of the thing itself, as the lunar disc hanging in space outside the eye, which means that the Ego, the thinking substance or creature, directorially feels not the effect produced on it by the external thing but in other respects the things attracted of the retina are quite different, via, the shape or forms taken (i.e., the spatial, geometric configuration) and position of this external body, which has been evoked within us a resultant fact, through which of these things are mechanical or light caused to occur. In that lies both the enigma and the whole essence of thinking as the mode of activity of a thinking body in distinction to one that does not think. It will readily be understood that one body evokes a change by its action in another body; that is fully explained by the concepts of physics. It is difficult, and from the angle of purely physical concepts (and in Spinoza’s time of even ‘purely’ mechanical, geometric concepts) even impossible, to explain just why and how the thinking body feels and perceives the effect caused by an external body within itself as an external body, as it’s, and not as its own shape, configuration, and position in space.
Such was the enigma, in general, that Leibniz and Fichte came up against later -but, Spinoza had already found a fully rational, though only general, theoretical solution. He clearly understood that the problem could only be fully and finally solved by quite concrete investigation (including anatomical and physiological) of the material mechanism by which the thinking body (brain) managed to do the magic trick, truly mystically incomprehensible (from the angle of purely geometric concepts). Though it did the trick, which it saw the thing and not the changes in the particles of the retina and brain that this body caused by its light effect within the brain was an undoubted fact, although for reasons which its fact-calls for the fundamental structure that is built of some stony edifice that qualifies us to some explanation and in a general way outlining paths for even more of the practicalities that are stabilized in the subjective field studies directed toward the future.
What can the philosopher say here categorically, who remains a philosopher and does not become a physiologist, or an anatomist, or a physicist? Or rather, what can he say, without plunging into a game of the imagination, without trying to construct hypothetical mechanisms in the fancy by which the trick mentioned ‘might’, in general, be performed? What can he say while remaining on the ground of firmly also not facts known before and independently of any concrete, physiological investigation of the inner mechanisms of the thinking body, and not adequate too either being refuted or made doubtful by any further probing within the eye and the skull?
In the given, partial, though very characteristic case, there is another, more general problems, namely that of the relation of philosophy as a special science to the concrete research of the natural sciences. Spinoza’s position on this point cannot in principle be explained if we start from the positivist idea that philosophy has made all its outstanding achievements (and makes them) only by purely empirical ‘generalisation of the progress of its contemporary natural sciences’. Because natural science did not find the answers to the problem before us either in the seventeenth century, in Spinoza’s time, or even in our day, three hundred years later. Furthermore, the natural science of his day did not even suspect the existence of such a problem. When it did, knew it only in a theological formulation. As for the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and in general everything connected one way or another with ‘spiritual’, psychic life, the natural scientists of the time (even the great ones like Isaac Newton) found themselves prisoners of the prevailing (i.e., religious, theological) illusions. Spiritual life they gladly left to the Church, and humbly acknowledged its authority, interesting themselves exclusively in the mechanical characteristics of the surrounding world. And everything that was inexplicable on purely mechanical grounds was not subjected to scientific study at all but was left to the competence of religion.
If Spinoza had in fact tried to construct his philosophical system by the method that our contemporary positivism would have recommended to him, it is not difficult to imagine what he would have produced as a ‘system’. He would only have brought together the pure mechanical and religious, mystical ‘general ideas’ that were guiding all (or almost all) naturalists in his day. Spinoza understood very clearly that religious, theological mysticism was the inevitable complement of a purely mechanistic (geometrical, mathematical) world outlook, i.e., the point of view that considers the sole ‘objective’ properties of the real world to be only the spatial, geometrical forms and relations of bodies. His greatness was that he did not plod along behind contemporaneous natural science, i.e., behind the one-sided, mechanistic thinking of the coryphaei of the science of the day, but subjected this way of thinking to well-substantiated criticism from the angle of the specific concepts of philosophy as a special science. This feature of Spinoza’s thinking was brought out clearly and explicitly by Frederick Engels: ‘It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that from Spinoza right to the great French materialists it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future.
That is why Spinoza has come down in the history of science as an equal contributor to its progress with Galileo and Newton, and not as their epigone, repeating after them the general ideas that could be drawn from their work. He investigated reality himself from the special, philosophical angle, and did not generalise the results and ready-made findings of other people’s investigation, did not bring together the general ideas of the science of his day and the methods of investigation characteristic of it, or the methodology and logic of his contemporary science. He understood that way led philosophy up a blind alley, and condemned it to the role of the wagon train bringing up in the rear of the attacking army the latter’s own ‘general ideas and methods’, including all the illusions and prejudices incorporated in them.
That is why he also developed ‘general ideas and methods of thought’ to which the natural science of the day had not yet risen, and armed future science with them, which recognised his greatness three centuries later through the pen of Albert Einstein, who wrote that he would have liked ‘old Spinoza’ as the umpire in his dispute with Niels Bohr on the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics rather than Carnap or Bertrand Russell, who were contending for the role of the ‘philosopher of modern science’ and spoke disdainfully of Spinoza’s philosophy as an ‘outmoded’ point of view ‘which neither science nor philosophy can nowadays accept’. Spinoza’s understanding of thinking as the activity of that same nature to which extension also belonged is an axiom of the true modern philosophy of our century, to which true science is turning ever more confidently and consciously in our day (despite all the attempts to discredit it) as the point of view of true materialism.
The brilliance of the solution of the problem of the relation of thinking to the world of bodies in space outside thought (i.e., outside the head of man), which Spinoza formulated in the form of the thesis that thought and extension are not two substances, but only two attributes of one and the same substance, can hardly be exaggerated. This solution immediately rejected every possible kind of interpretation and investigation of thought by the logic of spiritualist and dualist constructions, so making it possible to find a real way out both from the blind alley of the dualism of mind and body and from the specific blind alley of Hegelianism. It is not fortunate that Spinoza’s profound idea only first found true appreciation by the dialectical materialists Marx and Engels. Even Hegel found it a hard nut to crack. In fact, on the decisive point, he returned to the position of Descartes, to the thesis that pure thought is the active cause of all the changes occurring in the ‘thinking body of man’, i.e., about the brain and sense organs, in language, in actions and their results, including in that the instruments of labour and historical events.
From Spinoza’s standpoint thought before and outside of its spatial expression in the matter proper to it simply does not exist. All talk about an idea that first arises and then tries to find materially suitable for its incarnation, selecting the body of man and his brain as the most suitable and malleable material, all talk of thought first arising and then ‘being embodied in words’, in ‘terms’ and ‘statements’, and later in actions, in deeds and their results, all such talk, therefore, from Spinoza’s point of view, is simply senseless or, what is the same thing, simply the atavism of religious theological ideas about the ‘incorporeal soul’ as the active cause of the human body’s actions. In other words, the sole alternative to Spinoza’s understanding proves to be the conception that an idea can ostensibly exist first somewhere and somehow outside the body of the thought and independently of it, and can then ‘express itself’ in that body’s actions.
What is thought then? How are we to find the true answer to this question, i.e., to give a scientific definition of this concept, and not simply to list all the actions that we habitually subsume under this term (reasoning, will, fantasy, etc.), as Descartes did? One quite clear recommendation follows from Spinoza’s position, namely: if thought is the mode of action of the thinking body, then, in order to define it, we are bound to investigate the mode of action of the thinking of a very thorough, and, in contrast to the mode of action (mode of existence and movement) of the non-thinking body; and in no case whatsoever to investigate the structure or spatial composition of this body in an inactive state. Because the thinking body, when it is inactive, is no longer a thinking body but simply a ‘body’. Investigation of all the material (i.e., spatially defined) mechanisms by which thought is affected within the human body, i.e., anatomical, physiological study of the brain, of course, is a most interesting scientific question; but even the fullest answers to it have no direct bearing on the answer to the question ‘What is thought?’. Because that, is another question. One does not ask how legs capable of walking are constructed, but in what walking consists. What is thinking as the action of, even if inseparable from, the material mechanisms by which it is affected, yet not in any way identical with mechanisms themselves? In the one case the question is about the structure of an organ, in the other about the function the organ does. The structures, of course, must be such that it can carry out the appropriate function; legs are built so that they can walk and not so that they can think. The fullest description of the structure of an organ, i.e., a description of it in an inactive state, however, has no right to present itself as a description, however approximate, of the function that the organ acts, as a description of the real thing that it does.
In order to understand the mode of action of the thinking body it is necessary to consider the mode of its active, causal interaction with other bodies both ‘thinking’ and ‘non-thinking’, and not its inner structure, not the spatial geometric relations that exist between the cells of its body and between the organs located within its body. The cardinal distinction between the mode of action of a thinking body and that of any other body, quite clearly noted by Descartes and the Cartesians, but not understood by them, is that the former actively builds (constructs) the shape (trajectory) of its own movement in space in conformity with the shape (configuration and position) of the other body, coordinating the shape of its own movement (its own activity) with the shape of the other body, whatever it is. The proper, specific form of the activity of a thinking body consists consequently in universality, in that very property that Descartes actually noted as the chief distinction between human activity and the activity of an automaton copying its appearance, i.e., of a device structurally adapted to someone limited range of action even better than a human, but for that very reason unable to do ‘everything else’.
Thus the human hand can perform movements in the form of a circle, or a square, or any other intricate geometrical figure you fancy, so revealing that it was not designed structurally and anatomically in advance for any one of these ‘actions’, and for that very reason is capable of performing any action. In this it differs, say, from a pair of compasses, which describe circles much more accurately than the hand but cannot draw the outlines of triangles or squares. In other words, the action of a body that ‘does not think’ (if only in the formality drawn upon the spatial movement, in the form of the simplest and most obvious case) is determined by its own inner construction by its ‘nature’, and is quite uncoordinated with the shape of the other bodies among which it moves. It therefore either disturbs the shapes of the other bodies or is itself broken in colliding with insuperable obstacles.
Man, however, the thinking body, builds his movement on the shape of any other body. He does not wait until the insurmountable resistance of other bodies forces him to turn off from his path; the thinking body goes freely round any obstacle of the most complicated form. The capacity of a thinking body to mould its own action actively to the shape of any other body, to coordinate the shape of its movement in space with the shape and distribution of all other bodies, Spinoza considered being its distinguishing sign and the specific feature of that activity that we call ‘thinking’ or ‘reason’.
This capacity, as such, has its own gradations and levels of ‘perfection’, and manifests itself to the maximum in man, in any case much more so than in any other creature known to us. But man is not divided from the lower creatures at all by that impassable boundary that Descartes drew between them by his concept of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’. The actions of animals, especially of the higher animals, are also subsumed, though to a limited degree, under Spinoza’s definition of thinking.
This is a very important point, which presents very real interest. For Descartes the animal was only an automaton, i.e., all its actions were determined in advance by ready-made structures, internally inherent to it, and by the distribution of the organs located within its body. These actions, therefore, could and had to be completely explained by the following scheme: external effect movement of the inner parts of the body external reaction. The last represents the response (action, movement) of the body evoked by the external effect, which in essence is only transformed by the working of the inner parts of the body, following the scheme rigidly programmed in its construction. There is a full analogy with the working of a self-activating mechanism (pressure on a button working of the parts inside the mechanism movement of its external parts). This explanation excluded the need for any kind of ‘incorporeal soul’; everything was beautifully explained without its intervention. Such in general, and on the whole, is the theoretical scheme of a reflex that was developed two hundred years later in natural science in the work of Sechenov and Pavlov.
But this scheme is not applicable to man because in him, as Descartes himself so well understood, there is a supplementary link in the chain of events (i.e., in the chain of external effect working of the inner bodily organs according to a ready-made scheme structurally embodied in them external reaction) that powerfully interferes with it, forces its way into it, breaking the ready-made chain and then joining its disconnected ends together in a new way, each time in a different way, each time in accordance with new conditions and circumstances in the external action not previously foreseen by any prepared scheme and this supplementary link is ‘reflection’ or ‘consideration’. But a ‘reflection’ is that activity (in no way outwardly expressed) which directs reconstruction of the very schemes of the transformation of the initial effect into response. Here the body itself is the object of its own activity. Man’s ‘response’ mechanisms are by no means switched on just as soon as ‘the appropriate button is pressed’, as soon as he experiences an effect from outside. Before he responds he contemplates, i.e., he does not act immediately according to anyone prepared scheme, like an automaton or an animal, but considers the scheme of the forthcoming action critically, elucidating each time how far it corresponds to the needs of the new conditions, and actively correcting, even designing all over again, the whole set-up and scheme of the future actions in accordance with the external circumstances and the forms of things. And since the forms of things and the circumstances of actions are in principle, infinite numbers, the ‘soul’ (i.e., ‘contemplation’) must be capable of an infinite number of actions. But that is impossible to provide for in advance in the form of ready-made, bodily programmed schemes. Thinking is the capacity of actively building and reconstructing schemes of external action in accordance with any new circumstances, and does not operate according to a prepared scheme as an automaton or any inanimate body does.
’For while reason is a universal instrument that can serve for all contingencies, these [’bodily’] organs have needed of some special adaptation for every particular action,’ Descartes wrote. For that reason he was unable to conceive of the organ of thought bodily, as structurally organised in space. Because, in that case, as many ready-made, structurally programmed patterns of action would have to be postulated in it as there were external bodies and combinations of external bodies and contingencies that the thinking body would generally encounter in its path, that is, in principle, an infinite number. ‘From this it follows,’ Descartes said, that it is morally impossible that there should be sufficient diversity in any machine to allow it to act in all the events of life in the same way as our reason causes us to act, i.e., each time taking account again of any of the infinite conditions and circumstances of the external action. (The adverb ‘morally’ in Descartes’ statement, of course, does not mean impossible ‘from the aspect of morals’ or of ‘moral principles’, etc., moralement in French meaning ‘mentally’ or ‘intellectually’ in general.)
Spinoza counted the considerations that drove Descartes to adopt the concept of ‘soul’ to be quite reasonable. But why not suppose that the organ of thought, while remaining wholly corporeal and therefore incapable of having schemes of its present and future actions ready-made and innate within it together with its bodily-organised structure, was capable of actively building them anew each time in accordance with the forms and arrangement of the ‘external things’? Why not suppose that the thinking thing was designed in a special way; that not having any ready-made schemes of action within it, it acted for that very reason in accordance with whatever scheme was dictated to it at a given moment by the forms and combinations of other bodies located outside it? For that was the real role or function of the thinking thing, the only functional definition of thinking corresponding to the facts that it was impossible to deduce from structural analysis of the organ in which and by means of which it (thinking) was performed. Even more so, a functional definition of thinking as action according to the shape of any other thing also puts structural, spatial study of the thinking thing on the right track, i.e., study in particular of the body of the brain. It is necessary to elucidate and discover in the thinking thing those very structural features that enable it to perform its specific function, i.e., to act according to the scheme of its own structure but according to the scheme and location of al other things, including its own body.
In that form the materialist approach to the investigation of thought comes out clearly. Too so extreme a degree is made the real materialist, functional definition of thought, or its definition as the active function of a natural body organised in a special way, which both prompts logic (the system of functional definitions of thought) and brain physiology (a system of concepts reflecting the material structure of the organ in and by which this function is performed) to make a really scientific investigation of the problem of thought, and which excludes any possibility of interpreting thinking and the matter of its relation to the brain by the logic of either spiritualist and dualist constructions or of vulgar mechanistic ones.
In order to understand thought as a function, i.e., as the mode of action of thinking things in the world of all other things, it is necessary to go beyond the bounds of considering what goes on inside the thinking body, and how (whether it is the human brain or the human being as a whole who possesses this brain is a matter of indifference), and to examine the real system within which this function is performed, i.e., the system of relations ‘thinking body and its object’. What we have in mind here, moreover, is not any single object or other in accordance with whose form the thinking body’s activity is built in anyone specific case, but any object in general, and correspondingly any possible ‘meaningful act’ or action in accordance with the form of its object.
Thought can therefore only be understood through investigation of its mode of action in the system thinking body nature as a whole (with Spinoza it is ‘substance,’ or ‘God’). However, if we examine a system of smaller volume and scale, i.e., the relations of the thinking body with as wide a sphere of ‘things’ and their forms as you like, but still limited, then we will not arrive at what thought is in general (thought in the whole fullness of its possibilities associated with its nature), but only at that limited mode of thinking that happens in a given case. We will therefore be taking only definitions of a partial case of thinking, only its modus (in Spinoza’s parlance) as scientific definitions of thought in general. The whole business consists in this, that the thinking body (in accordance with its nature) is not linked at all by its structural, anatomical organisation with any partial mode of action whatsoever (with any partial form of the external bodies). It is linked with them, but only currently, at the given moment, and by no means originally or forever. Its mode of action has a clearly expressed universal character, i.e., is constantly being extended, embracing ever newer and newer things and forms of things, and actively and plastically adapting itself to them. That is why Spinoza also defined thought as an attribute of substance, and not as its modus, not as a partial case. Thus he affirmed, in the language of his day, that the single system, within which thought was found of necessity and not fortunate (which it may or may not be), was not a single body or even as wide a range of bodies as you wished, but only and solely nature as a whole. The individual body possessed thought only by virtue of chance or coincidence. The crossing and combination of masses of chains of cause and effect could lead in one case to the appearance of a thinking body and in another case simply to a body, a stone, a tree, etc. So that the individual body, even the human body, did not possess thought one whit of necessity. Only nature as a whole was that system that possessed all its perfections, including thought, of absolute necessity, although it did not realise this perfection in any single body and at any moment of time, or in any of its ‘modi’.
In defining thought as an attribute Spinoza towered above any representative of mechanistic materialism and was at least two centuries in advance of his time in putting forward a thesis that Engels expressed in rather different words: ‘The point is, however, that mechanism (and the materialism of the eighteenth century) does not get away from abstract necessity, and hence not from chance either. That matter evolves out of itself the thinking human brain is for him [Haeckel] a pure accident, although necessarily determined, step by step, where it happens. But the truth is that it is in the nature of matter to advance to the evolution of thinking beings, hence, too, this always necessarily occurs wherever the conditions for it (not necessarily identical at all places and times) are present.’ That is what distinguishes materialism, sensible and dialectical, from mechanistic materialism that knows and recognises only one variety of ‘necessity’, namely that which is described in the language of mechanistically interpreted physics and mathematics. Yes, only Nature as a whole, understood as an infinite whole in space and time, generating its own partial forms from itself, possesses at any moment of time, though not at any point of space, all the wealth of its attributes, i.e., those properties that are reproduced in its makeup of necessity and not by a chance, miraculous coincidence that might just as well not have happened.
Hence it inevitably follows logically, as Engels said, ‘that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.
That was Spinoza’s standpoint, a circumstance that seemingly gave Engels grounds for replying categorically and unambiguously to Plekhanov when he asked: ‘So in your opinion old Spinoza was right in saying that thought and extension were nothing but two attributes of one and the same substance?’ ‘Of course,’ answered Engels, ‘old Spinoza was quite right’: Spinoza’s definition means the following: in man, as in any other possible thinking creature, the same matter thinks as in other cases (other modi) only ‘extends’ in the form of stones or any other ‘unthinking body’; that thought in fact cannot be separated from world matter and counterposed to it itself as a special, incorporeal ‘soul’, and it (thought) is matter’s own perfection. That is how Herder and Goethe, La Mettrie and Diderot, Marx and Plekhanov (all great ‘Spinozists’) and even the young Schelling, understood Spinoza.
Such, let us emphasise once more, is the general, methodological position that later allowed Lenin to declare that it was reasonable to assume, as the very foundation of matter, a property akin to sensation though not identical with it, the property of reflection. Thought, according to Lenin, is the highest form of development of this universal property or attribute, extremely vital for matter. And if we deny matter this most important of its attributes, we will be thinking of matter itself ‘imperfectly’, as Spinoza put it, or simply, as Engels and Lenin wrote, incorrectly, one-sidedly, and mechanistically. And then, as a result, we should continually be falling into the most real Berkeleianism, into interpreting nature as a complex of our sensations, as the bricks or elements absolutely specific to the animated being from which the whole world of ideas is built (i.e., the world as and how we know it). Because Berkeleianism too is the absolutely inevitable complement making good of a one-sided, mechanistic understanding of nature. That is why Spinoza too said that substance, i.e., the universal world matter, did not possess just the single attribute of ‘being extended’ but also possessed many other properties and attributes as inalienable from it (inseparably, though separable from any ‘finite’ body). Spinoza said more than once that it was impermissible to represent thought as attribute in the image and likeness of human thought; it was only the universal property of substance that was the basis of any ‘finite thought’, including human thought, but in no case was it identical with it. To represent thought in general in the image and likeness of existing human thought, of its modus, or ‘particular case, meant simply to represent it incorrectly, in ‘an incomplete way’, by a ‘model’, so to say, of it’s far from most perfected image (although the most perfected known to us). With that Spinoza also linked his profound theory of truth and error, developed in detail in the Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (Ethics), Tractatus de intellectus ernendatione, Tractatus theologico-politicus, and in numerous letters.
If the mode of action of the thinking body as a whole is determined in the form of an ‘other’, and not of the immanent structure of ‘this’ body, the problem arises, however are we to recognise error? The question was posed then with special sharpness because it appeared in ethics and theology as the problem of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’. The criticism of Spinozism from the angle of theology was invariably directed at this point; Spinoza s teaching took all the sense out of the very distinguishing of ‘good and evil’, ‘sinfulness and salvation’ ‘truth and error’. In fact, in what then did they differ?
Spinoza’s answer, once, again, was simple, and likely justifiably among those that are truly given to any fundamentally true answer. Error (just as ‘evil’ and ‘sin’), what has not been totally actualized through any charactologically defined, least of mention, their experiential qualities that can only prove for what has been already given by them, in that through unspecified actions are regarded as their own composition, and it is not placed upon the same positivity as attributed by them. The erring man also acted in strict accordance with a thing’s form, but the question was what the thing was. If it were ‘trivial’, ‘imperfect’ in itself, i.e., fortunately, the mode of action adapted to it would also be imperfect. And if a person transferred this mode of action to another thing, he would slip up.
Error, consequently, only began when a mode of action that was limitedly true was given universal significance, when the relative was taken for the absolute. It is understandable why Spinoza put so low a value on acting by abstract, formal analogy, formal deduction based on an abstract universal. What was fixed in the abstract ‘idea’ was what most often struck the eye. But it, of course, could be a quite accidental property and form of the thing; and that meant that the narrower the sphere of the natural whole with which the person was concerned, the greater was the measure of error and the smaller the measure of truth. For that very reason the activity of the thinking body was in direct proportion to the adequateness of its ideas. The more passive the person, the greater the power of the nearest, purely external circumstances over him, and expansively more vast that his modes have of acknowledging, that of action must be determined by the changing through by its given opportunity for chance, in that, for all form of things, yet, conversely, more actively extended by the sphere of nature for determining his activity, a seemingly greater chance from which is more than has enabled by his ideas. The complacent position of the philistine was therefore the greatest sin.
Man’s thinking could achieve ‘maximum perfection’ (and then it would be identical with thought as the attribute of substance) only in one case, when his actions conformed with all the conditions that the infinite aggregate of interacting things, and of their forms and combinations, imposed on them, i.e., if they were built in accordance with the absolutely universal necessity of the natural whole and not simply with some one of its limited forms. Real earthly man was, of course, still very far from that, and the attribute of thought was therefore only realised in him in what is for that moment as there is for a limited and imperfect (finite) form, as, perhaps, it would be fallacious to build oneself an idea of thinking as an attribute of substance in the image and likeness of finite human thought. On the contrary one’s finite thought must be built in the image and likeness of thought in general. For finite thought the philosophical, theoretical definition of thinking as an attribute of substance poses some sort of ideal model, to which man can and must endlessly approximate, though never having the power to bring himself up to it in level of ‘perfection’.
That is why the idea of substance and its all-embracing necessity functioned as the principle of the constant perfecting or improvement of intellect. As such, it had immense significance. Every ‘finite’ thing was correctly understood only as a ‘fading moment’ in the bosom of infinite substance. Not one of its ‘partial forms’, however often encountered, should be given universal significance. In order to disclose the real general -truly universal forms of things in accordance with which the ‘perfected’ thinking body should act, another criterion and another mode of knowledge than formal abstraction was required. The idea of substance was not formed by abstracting the attribute that belonged equally to extension and thought. The abstract and general in them was only that they existed, existence in general, i.e., an absolutely empty determination in no way disclosing the nature of the one or the other. The real general (infinite, universal) relation between thought and spatial, geometric reality could only be understood, i.e., the idea of substance arrived at, through real understanding of their mode of interaction within nature. Spinoza’s whole doctrine was just the disclosure of this ‘infinite’ relation.
Substance thus proved to be an absolutely necessary condition, without assuming which it was impossible in principle to understand the mode of the interaction between the thinking body and the world within which it operated as a thinking body. This is a profoundly dialectical point. Only by proceeding from the idea of substance could the thinking body understand both itself and the reality with and within which it operated and about which it thought; any other way it could not understand either the one or the other and was forced to resort to the idea of an outside power, to a theologically interpreted ‘God, to a miracle. But, having once understood the mode of its actions (i.e., thought), the thinking body just so comprehended substance as the absolutely necessary condition of interaction with the external world.
Spinoza called the mode of knowledge or cognition described here ‘intuitive’. In creating an adequate idea of itself, i.e., of the form of its own movement along the contours of external objects, the thinking body thus also created an adequate idea of the forms and contours of the objects themselves. Because it was one and the same form, one and the same contour. In this understanding of the intuitive there was nothing resembling subjective introspection. Rather the contrary. On Spinoza’s lips intuitive knowledge was a synonym of rational understanding by the thinking body of the laws of its own actions within nature. In giving itself a rational account of what and how it did in fact operate, the thinking body at the same time formed a true idea of the object of its activity.
From that followed the consistent materialist conclusion that ‘the true definition of any-one thing neither involves nor expresses anything but the nature of the thing defined’. [Ethics] That is why there can only be one correct definition (idea) in contrast and in opposition to the plurality and variety of the individual bodies of the same nature. These bodies are as real as the unity (identity) of their ‘nature’ expressed by the definition in the ‘attribute of thought’ and by real diversity in the ‘attribute of extension’ Variety and plurality are clearly understood here as modes of realisation of their own opposition, i.e., of the identity and unity of their ‘nature’. That is a distinctly dialectical understanding of the relation between them, in contrast to the feeble eclectic formula (often fobbed off dialectics) that ‘both unity and plurality’, ‘both identity and differences equally really exist. Because eclectic pseudodialectics, when it comes down to solving the problem of knowledge and of ‘definition’ or ‘determination’, arrives safely at exactly the contrary (compared with Spinoza’s solution), at the idea that ‘the definition of a concept’ is a verbally fixed form of expression in consciousness, in the idea of a real, sensuously given variety.
Talk of the objective identity, existing outside the head, of the nature of a given range of various and opposing single phenomena thus safely boils down to talk about the purely formal unity (i.e., similarity, purely external identity) of sensuously contemplated, empirically given things, of isolated facts, formally subsumed under ‘concept’. And it then generally becomes impossible to consider the ‘definition of the concept’ as the determination of the nature of the defined thing. The starting point then proves to be not the ‘identity and unity’ of the phenomena but in fact the ‘variety and plurality’ of isolated facts allegedly existing originally quite ‘independently’ of one another, and later only formally united, tied together as it were with string, by the ‘unity of the concept’ and the ‘identity of the name’. So the sole result proves to be the identity in consciousness (or rather in name) of the initially heterogeneous facts, and their purely verbal ‘unity’.
Hence it is not difficult to understand why Neopositivists are dissatisfied with Spinoza and attack the logical principle of his thinking. ‘Spinoza’s metaphysic is the best example of what may be called ‘logic monism’ the doctrine, namely, that the world as a whole is a single substance, none of whose parts are logically capable of existing alone. The ultimate basis for this view is the belief that every proposition has a single subject and a single predicate, which leads us to the conclusion that relations and plurality must be illusory.
The alternative to Spinoza’ s view, in fact, is the affirmation that any ‘part’ of the world is not only ‘capable’ of ‘existing’ independently of all other parts, but must do so. As another authority of this trend postulated it, ‘the world is the totality of facts not of things’, by virtue of which ‘the world divides into facts’, and so anyone can also not have life or not as it is as well, for being the same and everything else remains persistently consistent. Thus, according to the ‘metaphysic of Neopositivism’, the external world must be considered some kind of immeasurable accumulation, a simple conglomeration, of ‘atomic facts’ absolutely independent of each other, the ‘proper determination’ of each of which is bound to be absolutely independent of the determination of any other fact. The determination (definition, description) remains ‘correct’ even given the condition that there are no other facts in general. In other words, ‘a scientific consideration of the world’ consists in a purely formal, verbal uniting of a handful of odd facts by subsuming them less than one and the same term, further down than one and the same ‘generalization’. The ‘mastered’, interpretation only has for its ‘meaning of the term or sign’, of always turn out to be something quite arbitrary or ‘previously agreed upon’, i.e., ‘conventional’. The ‘general’ (unity and identity) -as the turning of events have found the resulting amounts of ‘scientifically logical’ as, perhaps, its corrective treatment of ‘atomic facts’, is nothing but, however, it now seems that some consequents of events are not the result at all, but a previously established and yet the conventional means for which in terms, are but nothing more.
Spinoza’s position, of course, had no connection with this principle of ‘logical analysis’ of the phenomena given in contemplation and imagination. For him the ‘general’, ‘identical’, ‘united’ were by no means illusions created only by our speech (language), by its subject-predicate structure (as Russell put it), but primarily the real, general nature things. And that nature must find its verbal expression in a correct definition of the concept. It is not true, moreover, that ‘relations and plurality must be illusory’ for Spinoza, as Russell said. That is not at all like Spinoza, and the affirmation of it is on Russell’s conscience, that he should have stooped so low to discredit the ‘concept of substance’ in the eyes of ‘modern science’ as ‘incompatible with modern logic and with scientific method’. One thing, however, is beyond doubt here: what Russell called ‘modern logic and scientific method’ really is incompatible with the logic of Spinoza’s thinking, with his principles of the development of scientific definitions, with his understanding of ‘correct definitions’. For Spinoza ‘relations and plurality’ were not ‘illusory’ (as Russell described them) and ‘identity and unity’ were not illusions created by the ‘subjective-predication as a structure’ (Russell). Both the one and the other were wholly real, and both existed in ‘God’, i.e., in the very nature of things, quite irrespective of whatever the verbal structures of the so-called ‘language of science’ were.
But for Bertrand Russell, both the one and the other were equally illusions. ‘Identity’ (i.e., the principle of substance, of the general nature of things), was an illusion created by language and ‘relations and plurality’ were illusions created by our own sensuality. But what, in fact, is independent of our illusions? I do not know and I don’t want to know; I don’t want to know because I cannot, Russell answered. I know only what is the ‘world’ given to me in my sensations and perceptions (where it is something ‘plural’) and in my language (where it is something ‘identical’ and related). But what is there besides this ‘world’? God only knows, answered Russell, word for word repeating Bishop Berkeley’s thesis, though not risking affirming categorically after him that ‘God’ in fact ‘knew’ it, because it was still not known if God himself existed.
There we have the polar contrast of the positions of Spinoza and of Berkeley and Hume (whom the Neopositivists are now trying to galvanise back to life). Berkeley and Hume also primarily attacked the whole concept of substance, trying to explain it as the product of an ‘impious mind’. Because there is a really unpersuasive alternative here, namely two polar and mutually exclusive solutions of one and the same problem the problem of the relation of ‘the world in consciousness’ (in particular in ‘correct definition’) to the ‘world outside consciousness’ (outside ‘verbal definition’). For here a choice must be made: either nature, including man as part of it, must be understood through the logic of the ‘concept of substance’, or it must be interpreted as a complex of one’s sensations.
But let us return to consideration of Spinoza’s conception. Spinoza well understood all the sceptical arguments against the possibility of finding a single one correct definition of the thing that we are justified in taking as a definition of the nature of the thing itself and not of the specific state and arrangement of the organs within ourselves, in the form of which this thing is represented ‘within us’. In considering different variants of the interpretation of one and the same thing, Spinoza drew the following direct conclusion: ‘All these things sufficiently show that everyone judges things by the constitution of his brain, or rather accepts the affections of his imagination in the place of things.’ In other words, we have within us, in the form of ideas, not the thing itself and its proper form, but only the inner state that the effect of the external things evoked in our body (in the corpus of the brain). Therefore, in the ideas we directly have of the external world, two quite dissimilar things are muddled and mixed up: the form of our own body and the form of the bodies outside it. The naive person immediately and uncritically takes this hybrid for an external thing, and therefore judges things in conformity with the specific state evoked in his brain and sense organs by an external effect in no way resembling that state. Spinoza gave full consideration to the Cartesians’ argument (later taken up by Bishop Berkeley), that toothache was not at all identical in geometric form to a dentist’s drill and even to the geometric form of the changes the drill produced in the tooth and the brain. The brain of every person, moreover, was built and tuned differently, from which we get the sceptical conclusion of the plurality of truths and of the absence of a truth one and the same for all thinking beings. ‘For everyone has heard the expressions: So many heads, so many ways of thinking; Each is wise in his own manner; Differences of brains are not less common than differences of taste; all which maxims show that men decide upon matters according to the constitution of their brains, and imagine rather than understand things.
The point is this to understand and correctly determine the thing itself, its proper form, and not the means by which it is represented inside itself, i.e., in the form of geometric changes in the body of our brain and its microstructures. But how is that to be done? Perhaps, in order to obtain the pure form of the thing, it is simply necessary to ‘subtract’ from the idea all its elements that introduce the arrangement (disposition) and means of action of our own body, of its sense organs and brain into the pure form of the thing: But (1) we know as little of how our brain is constructed and what exactly it introduces into the composition of the idea of a thing as we know of the external body itself. (2) the thing in general cannot be given to us in any other way than through the specific changes that it has evoked in our body. If we ‘subtract’ everything received from the thing in the course of its refraction through the prism of our body, sense organs, and brain, we get pure nothing. ‘Within us’ there remains nothing, no idea of any kind. So it is impossible to proceed that way.
However differently from any other thing man’s body and brain are built they all have something in common with one another, and it is to the finding of this something common that the activity of reason is in fact directed, i.e., the real activity of our body that we call ‘thinking’. In other words an adequate idea only the conscious state of our body identical in form with the thing, outside the body. This can be represented quite clearly. When I describe a circle with my hand on a piece of paper (in real space), my body, according to Spinoza, comes into a state fully identical with the form of the circle outside my body, into a state of real action in the form of a circle. My body (my hand) really describes a circle, and the awareness of this state (i.e., of the form of my own action in the form of the thing) is also the idea, which is, moreover, ‘adequate’.
And since ‘the human body needs for its preservation many other bodies by which it is, as it were, continually regenerated’, and since it ‘can move and arrange external bodies in many ways’, it is in the activity of the human body in the shape of another external body that Spinoza saw the key to the solution of the whole problem. Therefore ‘the human mind is adapted to the perception of many things, and its aptitude increases in proportion to the number of ways in which its body can be disposed.’ In other words, the more numerous and varied the means it has ‘to move and arrange external bodies’, the more it has ‘in common’ with other bodies. Thus the body, knowing how to be in a state of movement along the contours of circle, in that way knows how to be in a state in common with the state and arrangement of all circles or external bodies moving in a circle.
In possessing consciousness, especially, of my own relational states, that ‘I’ in such a way am also in possession of awarenesses, that are given by the embers that bring aflame from the sparking individualized forms of awarenesses, in that consciousness is derived by some valued quality, but which in some exacting but lesser in pertinence are factors that our ability of enabling us to think is because of our awakening state into consciousness. Still, there lives by its engulfing vanquishment, for which are, however, by its own latent confessions telling about us, that the unconscious implication against the conscious mind, is forever the unchangelessness that endorse of itself to a greater of powers. That, however, only happens where and when I actively determine myself, and the states of my body, i.e., its actions, in accordance with the shape of the external body, and not in conformity with the structure and arrangement of my own body and its ‘parts’. The more of these actions I know how to perform, the perfect is my thinking, and the more adequate are the ideas included in the ‘mind’ (as Spinoza continued to express it, using the language normal to his contemporaries), or simply in the conscious states of my body, as he interpreted the term ‘mind’ on neighbouring pages.
Descartes’ dualism between the world of external objects and the inner states of the human body thus disappeared right at the very start of the explanation. It is interpreted as a difference within one and the same world (the world of bodies), as a difference in their mode of existence (‘action’). The ‘specific structure’ of the human body and bra n; is here, for the first time, interpreted not as a barrier separating us from the world of things, which are not at all like that body, but on the contrary as the same property of universality that enables the thinking body (in contrast to all others) to be in the very same states as things, and to possess forms in common with them?
Spinoza himself expressed it thus: ‘There will exist in the human mind an adequate idea of that which is common and proper to the human body, and to any external bodies by which the human body is generally affected of that which is equally in the part of each of these external bodies and in the whole is common and proper.‘Hence it follows that the more things the body has in common with other bodies, the more things will the mind be adapted to perceive.’ Hence, also it follows that ‘some ideas or notions exist which are common to all men, for . . . all bodies agree in some things, which . . . must be adequately, that is to say, clearly and distinctly, perceived by all.’ In no case can. These ‘common ideas’ be interpreted as specific forms of the human body, and they are only taken for the forms of external bodies by mistake (as happened with the Cartesians and later with Berkeley), despite the fact that ‘the human mind perceives no external body as actually existing, unless through the ideas of the affections of its body.
The fact is that the ‘affections of one’s body’ are quite objective, being the actions of the body in the world of bodies, and not the results of the action of bodies on something unlike them, ‘in corporeal’. Therefore, ‘he who possesses a body fit for many things possesses a mind of which the greater part is external’.
From all that follows is more than is possibly understood, yet of case-by-case objects be more that we can understand in apprehension to God, i.e., the general universal nature of things, world substance; the more individual things our activity embraces and the deeper and more comprehensively we determine our body to act along the shape of the external bodies themselves, and the more we become an active component in the endless chain of the causal relations of the natural whole, the greater is the extent to which the power of our thinking is increased, and not to a lesser extent than there is of the ‘specific composition’ of our body and brain mixed into the ‘ideas’ as in making them ‘vague and inadequate’ (ideas of the imagination and not of ‘intellect’). The more active our body is, the more universal it is, the less it introduces ‘from itself’, and discloses the real nature of things. And the more passive it is, the more the constitution and arrangement of the organs within it (brain, nervous system, sense organs, etc.) affect ideas. Therefore the real composition of psychic activity (including the logical component of thought) is not in the least determined by the structure and arrangement of the parts of the human body and brain, but by the external conditions of universally human activity in the world of other bodies.
This functional determination gives an exact orientation to structural analysis of the brain, fixes the general goal, and gives a criterion by which we can distinguish the structures through which thinking is carried on within the brain from those that are completely unrelated to the process of thought, but govern, say, digestion, circulation of the blood, and so on.
That is why Spinoza reacted very ironically to all contemporaneous ‘morphological’ hypotheses, and in particular to that of the special role of the ‘pineal gland’ as primarily the organ of the ‘mind’. On this he said straight out: since you are philosophers, do not build speculative hypotheses about the structure of the body of the brain, but leave investigation of what goes on inside the thinking body to doctors, anatomists, and physiologists. You, as philosophers, not only can, but are bound to, work out for doctors and anatomists and physiologists the functional determination of thinking and not its structural determination, and you must do it strictly and precisely, and not resort to vague ideas about an ‘incorporeal mind’, ‘God’, and so on. But you can find the functional determination of thought only if you do not probe into the thinking body (the brain), but carefully examine the real composition of its objective activities among the other bodies of the infinitely varied universum. Within the skull you will not find anything to which a functional definition of thought could be applied, because thinking is a function of external, objective activity. And you must therefore investigate not the anatomy and physiology of the brain but the ‘anatomy and physiology’ of the ‘body’ whose active function in fact is thought, i.e., the ‘inorganic body of man’, the ‘anatomy and physiology’ of the world of his culture, the world of the ‘things’ that he produces and reproduces by his activity.
The sole ‘body’ that thinks from the necessity built into its special ‘nature’ (i.e., into its specific structure) is not the individual brain at all, and not evened the whole man with a brain, heart, and hands, and all the anatomical features peculiar to him. Of necessity, according to Spinoza, only substance possesses thought. Thinking Asignecessarv premise and indispensable sqndition (sine qua non) in all nature as a whole. But that, Marx affirmed, is not enough. According to him, only nature of necessity thinks, nature that has achieved the stage of man socially producing his own life, nature changing and knowing itself in the person of man or of some other creature like him in this respect, universally altering nature, both that outside him and his own. A body of smaller scale and less ‘structural complexity’ will not think. Labour is the process of changing nature by the action of social man, and is the subject’ to which thought belongs as ‘predicate’. But nature, the universal matter of nature, is also its substance. Substance, having become the subject of all its changes in man, the cause of itself (‘causa sui’). The most direct path to the creation of dialectical logic, as we have already said, is ‘repetition of the past’, made wisely by experience, repetition of the work of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, or critical, materialist rethinking of the achievements that humanity owes in the realm of the Higher Logic to classical German philosophy of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, to the process of spiritual maturing, striking in its rapidity, associated with the names of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
The ‘matter of logic’ then underwent, in a very short historical period, the most prodigious ‘flight of imagination’ since antiquity, marked in itself by an inner dialectic so tense that even simple acquaintance with it still cultivates dialectical thinking. First of all we must note that it was the German classical philosophy that clearly recognised and sharply expressed the fact that all problems of philosophy as a special science somehow or other turned on the question of what thought was and what were its interrelations with the external world. Understanding of this fact, has already confronted us, that in the systems of Descartes and Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz, was now transformed into the consciously established spring-off point of all investigations, into the basic principle of a critical endorsing by which we can find of some comforts to a second thought, by its second thought, is the result of the preceding development as accomplishing of Kant, yet is to a greater extent than the circularity established over two-centuries, and, lest of mention, that Kant’s investigation, had entered on a fundamentally new stage of understanding events as resolving of its specially dynamical parts of conceptual representations.
The need to examine and analyse the path critically was not of course dictated only by the inner needs of philosophy itself, by the striving to completeness and orderliness (although the philosophers themselves so expressed it), but mainly by the powerful pressure of outside circumstances, the crisis-ridden, prerevolutionary state of all intellectual culture. The intense conflict of ideas in all spheres of intellectual life, from politics to natural science, willy-nilly involved in ideological struggle, ever more insistently impelled philosophy to dig down ultimately to the very roots and sources of what was happening, to understand where the general cause of the mutual hostility between people and ideas was hidden, to find and point out to people the rational way out of the situation that had arisen.
Kant was the first to attempt to embrace within the framework of a single conception all the main opposing principles of the thought of the time that was approaching a catastrophic collision. In trying, to unite and reconcile those principles within one system he only, against his will, exposed more clearly the essence of the problems that were unresolvable by the tried and known methods of philosophy.
The actual state of affairs in science presented itself to Kant as a war of all against all, in that one to imagine by natural and related states, be it that following Hobbes, he is characterized (as applied to science) by, a state of injustice and violence. In this state scientific thought (‘reason’) ‘can establish and secure its assertions only through war . . . In that case ‘the disputes are ended by a victory to which both sides lay claim, and which is generally followed by a merely temporary armistice, arranged by some mediating authority . . . Putting it another way, it was the tension of the struggle between opposing principles, each of which had been developed into a system claiming universal significance and recognition, that constituted the ‘natural’ state of human thought for Kant. The ‘natural’, actual, and obvious state of thought, consequently, was just dialectics. Kant was not at all concerned to extirpate it once and for all from the life of reason, i.e., from science understood as a certain developing whole, but only ultimately to find a corresponding ‘rational’ means of resolving the contradictions, discussions, disputes, conflicts, and antagonisms arising in science. Could reason itself, without the aid of ‘authority’, overcome the anguish of dissension?
‘The endless disputes of a merely dogmatic reason,’ as he put it, ‘thus finally constrain us to seek relief in some critique of reason itself, and its legislatively based criticism.’ The state of endless disputes, and hostility between theoreticians, seemed and Kant to be a consequence of the fact that the ‘republic of scholars’ did not as yet have a single, systematically developed ‘legislation’ recognised by all, or ‘constitution of reason’, which would enable it to seek solution of the conflicts not in war ‘to the death’ but in the sphere of polite, academic discussion, in the form of a ‘legal process’ or ‘action’ in which each party would hold to one and the same ‘code’ of logical substantiation and, recognising the opponent as an equally competent and equally responsible party as himself, would remain not only critical but also self-significant, in that being critically essential, for which it still as Is always ready to recognise his mistakes, nonetheless of the transgressions against every one of a logically geometric ruling held in stability? This ideal of the inter-relations of theoreticians and it is difficult to raise any objection against it even now loomed before Kant as the goal of all his investigations. But thereby, at the centre of his attention, there was above all that field that tradition assigned to the competence of logic. It was clear to Kant, on the other hand, that logic in the form in which it existed could not in any way satisfy the pressing needs of the situation created, or serve as a tool to analyse it. The very term ‘logic’ was so discredited by then that Hegel was fully justified in speaking of the universal and complete scorn for this science that for ‘hundreds and thousands of years . . . was just as much honoured as it is despised now’. [Lectures on the History of Philosophy] And only the profound reform that it underwent in the work of the classical German philosophers restored respect and dignity to the very name of the science of thought. Kant was the very first to try to pose and resolve the problem of logic specifically by way of a critical analysis of its content and historical fate. For the first time he compared its traditional baggage with the real processes of thinking in natural science and in the sphere of social problems.
Kant above all set himself the goal of bringing out and summing up the undisputed truths that had been formulated within the framework of traditional logic, though also scorned for their banality. In other words he tried to bring out those ‘invariants’ that had remained unaffected during all the discussions on the nature of thinking stretching over centuries and millennia, the propositions that no one had called in question, neither Descartes nor Berkeley, neither Spinoza nor Leibniz, neither Newton nor Huygens, not one theoretically thinking individual. Having singled this ‘residue’ out from logic, Kant was satisfied that what remained was not very much, a few quite general propositions formulated in fact by Aristotle and his commentators.
From the angle from which Kant surveyed the history of logic it was impossible to draw any other conclusion; for it went without saying that if one sought only those propositions in logic with which everyone equally agreed, both Spinoza and Berkeley, both the rationalist-naturalist and the theologian, and all their disagreements were taken out of the brackets, then nothing else would remain within the brackets, nothing except those completely general ideas (notions) about thought that seemed indisputable to all people thinking in the defined tradition. There thus existed a purely empirical generalisation, really stating only that not a single one of the theoreticians so far occupying themselves with thought had actually disputed a certain totality of judgments. But you could not tell from these judgments whether they were true in themselves, or were really only common and generally accepted illusions.
For all theoreticians had hitherto thought (or had only tried to think) in accordance with a number of rules. Kant, however, transformed the purely empirical generalisation into a theoretical judgment (i.e., into a universal and necessary one) about the subject matter of logic in general, about the legitimate limits of its subject matter: ‘The sphere of logic is quite precisely delimited; its sole concern is to give an exhaustive exposition and a strict proof of the formal rules of all thought. Here ‘formal’ means quite independently of how thought precisely is understood, and of its origins and objects or goals, its relations to man’s other capacities and to the external world, and so forth, i.e., independent of how the problem of the ‘external’ conditions within which thinking is performed according to the rules is resolved, and of metaphysical, psychological, anthropological, and other considerations. Kant declared these rules to be absolutely true and universally obligatory for thought in general, ‘whether it be a priori or empirical, whatever be its origin or object, and whatever hindrances, accidental or natural, it may encounter in our minds’. Having thus drawn the boundaries of logic (‘that logic should have been thus successful is an advantage that it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting indeed, it is under obligation to do so from all objects of knowledge and their differences. . . .’), Kant painstakingly investigated its fundamental possibilities. Its competence proved to be very narrow. By virtue of the formality mentioned, it of necessity left out of account the differences in the views that clashed in discussion, and remained absolutely neutral not only in, say, the dispute between Leibniz and Hume but also in a dispute between a wise man and a fool, so long as the fool ‘correctly’ set out whatever ideas came into his head from God knew where, and however absurd and foolish they were. Its rules were such that it must logically justify any absurdity so long as the latter was not self-contradictory. A self-consistent stupidity must pass freely through the filter of general logic.
Kant especially stresses that ‘general logic contains, and can contain, no rules for judgment’, that is ‘the faculty of subsuming under the rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae legis.)’. The firmest knowledge of the rules in general (including the rules of general logic) is therefore no guarantee of their faultless application. Since ‘deficiency in judgment is just what is ordinarily called stupidity’, and since ‘for such a failing there is no remedy’, general logic cannot serve either as an ‘organon’ (tool, instrument) of real knowledge or even as a ‘canon’ of it, i.e., as a criterion for testing ready-made knowledge.
For what then, in that case, is it in general needed? Exclusively for checking the correctness of so-called analytical judgments, i.e., ultimately, acts of verbal exposition of ready-made ideas already present in the head, however unsound these ideas are in themselves, Kant stated in full agreement with Berkeley, Descartes, and Leibniz. The contradiction between a concept (i.e., a rigorously defined idea) and experience and the facts (their determinations) is a situation about which general logic has no right to say anything, because then it is a question already of an act of subsuming facts under the definition of a concept and not of disclosures of the sense that was previously contained in the concept. (For example, if I affirm that ‘all swans are white’, then, having seen a bird identical in all respects except colour with my idea of a swan, I will be faced with a difficulty, which general logic cannot help me to resolve in any way. One thing is clear, that this bird will not be subsumed under my concept ‘swan’ without contradiction, and I will be obliged to say: it is not a swan. If, all the same, I recognise it as a swan, then the contradiction between the concept and the fact will already be converted into a contradiction between the determinations of the concept, because the subject of the judgment (swan) will be defined through two mutually exclusive predicates (‘white’ and ‘not white’). And that is already inadmissible and equivalent to recognition that my initial concept was incorrectly defined, and that it must be altered, in order to eliminate the contradiction.)
So that every time the question arises of whether or not to subsume a given fact under a given concept, the appearance of a contradiction cannot be taken at all as an index of the accuracy or inaccuracy of a judgment. A judgment may prove to be true simply because the contradiction in the given case demolishes the initial concept, and reveals its contradictoriness, and hence its falsity. That is why one cannot apply the criteria of general logic unthinkingly where it is a matter of experimental judgments, of the acts of subsuming facts under the definition of a concept, of acts of concretising an initial concept through the facts of experience. For in such judgments the initial concept is not simply explained but has new determinations added to it. A synthesis takes place, a uniting of determinations, and not analysis, i.e., the breaking down of already existing determinations into details. All judgments of experience, without exception, have a synthetic character. The presence of a contradiction in the make-up of such a judgment is consequently a natural and inevitable phenomenon in the process of making a concept more precise in accordance with the facts of experience. To put it another way, general logic has no right to make recommendations about the capacity of a judgment since this capacity has the right to subsume under the definition of a concept those facts that directly and immediately contradict that definition.
Any empirical concept is therefore always in danger of being refuted by experience, by the first fact that strikes the eye. Consequently, a judgment of a purely empirical character, i.e., one in which an empirical given, sensuously contemplated thing or object functions as subject (e.g., our statement about swans), is true and corrected only with the obligatory reservation: ‘All swans that have so far come within our field of experience are white’. Such a statement is indisputable, because it does not claim to apply to any individual things of the same kind that we have not yet been able to see. And further experience has the right to correct our definitions and to alter the predicates of the statement.
Our theoretical knowledge is constantly coming up against such difficulties in fact, and always will.
But if that is so, if science develops only through a constant juxtaposition of concepts and facts, through a constant and never-ending process of resolving the conflict that arises here again and again then the problem of the theoretical scientific concept is sharply posed immediately. Does a theoretical scientific generalisation (concept), claiming universality and necessity, differ from any empirical, inductive ‘generalisation’? (The complications that arise were facetiously described of a century that later of Russell, in the form of a fable. Once there was a hen in a hen-coop. Every day the farmer brought it corn to peck, and the hen certainly drew the conclusion that appearance of the farmer was linked with the appearance of corn. But one fine day the farmer appeared not with corn but with a knife, which convincingly proved to the hen that there would have been no harm in having a more exact idea of the path to a scientific generalisation.) In other words, are such generalisations possible as can, despite being drawn from only fragmentary experience relative to the given object, nevertheless claim to be concepts providing scientific prediction, i.e., to be extrapolated with assurance to future experience about the selfsame object (taking into consideration, of course, the effect of the diverse conditions in which it may be observed in future)? Are concepts possible that express not only and not simply more or less chance common attributes, which in another place and another time may not be present, but also the ‘substance’ itself, the very ‘nature’ of the given kind of object, the law of their existence? That is to say, are such determinations possible, in the absence of which the very object of the given concept is absent (impossible and unthinkable), and when there is already another object, which for that very reason is competent neither to confirm nor to refute the definition of the given concept? (As, for example, consideration of a square or a triangle has no bearing on our understanding of the properties of a circle or an ellipse, since the definition of the concept ‘circumference of a circle’ contains only such predicates as strictly describe the boundaries of the given kind of figure, boundaries that it is impossible to cross without passing into another kind). The concept thus presupposes such ‘predicates’ as cannot be eliminated (without eliminating the object of the given concept itself) by any future, ‘any possible’ (in Kant’s terminology) experience.
So the Kantian distinction between purely empirical and theoretical scientific generalisations arises. The determinations of concepts must be characterised by universality and necessity, i.e., must be given in such a way that they cannot be refuted by any future experience.
Theoretical scientific judgments and generalisations, unlike purely empirical ones, in any case claim to be universal and necessary (however the metaphysical, psychological, or anthropological foundations of such claims are explained), to be confirmable by the experience of everybody of sound mind, and not refutable by that experience. Otherwise all science would have no more value than the utterances of the fool in the parable who produces sententious statements at every opportune and inopportune moment that are only pertinent and justified in strictly limited circumstances, i.e., thoughtlessly uttering statements applicable only on particular occasions as absolutes and universals, true in any other case, in any conditions of time and place.
The theoretical generalizations of science (and their judgments linking to them) have to indicate not only the definition of the concept but also the whole fullness of the conditions of its applicability, universality, and necessity. But that is the whole difficulty. Can we categorically establish that we have listed the whole series of necessary conditions? Can we be sure that we have included only the really necessary conditions in it? Or have we perhaps included superfluous ones, not absolutely necessary?
Kant remained open on this question, too. He was right, since there is always the chance of a mistake. In fact, how many times are the revered paradigms of scientific knowledge have in taking such a particularity for the all-comprehended. In any case it is clear that ‘general’, i.e., purely formal, logic has no right here either to formulate a rule making it possible to distinguish the simple general from the universal; to distinguish that which has been observed up too now from that which will be observed in the future, however long our experience goes on for and however broad the field of facts that it embraces. For the rules of general logic judgments of the type of ‘all swans are white’ are quite indistinguishable from statements of the type of ‘all bodies are extended’, because the difference in them consists not in the form of the judgment but exclusively in the content and origin of the concept embraced in it. The first is empirical and preserves its full force only in relation to experience already past (in Kant’s parlance it is only true a posteriori); the second claims to a greater force, to be correct also in relation to the future, and to any possible experience regarding natural bodies (in Kant’s parlance it is true a priori, i.e., prior to, before being tested by experience). For that reason we are convinced (and science lends our conviction the character of an apodictic affirmation) that however far we travelled in space and however deep we penetrated into matter we would never and nowhere encounter a ‘natural body’ that refuted our conviction, i.e., ‘a body without extension.
Why? Because there, cannot be a body without extension in nature? To answer thus, Kant said, would be impudent. All we can say is the following: if, even in the infinite universe, such remarkable bodies did exist, they could never, in any case, come within our field of vision, within our field of experience. And if they could, then they would be perceived by us as extended, or would not be perceived at all. For such is the structure of our organs of perception that they can only perceive things in the form of space, only as extensions and continuities (in the form of time).
It may be said that they are such ‘in themselves’; Kant did not consider it possible to deny that, or to assert it. But ‘for us’ they are precisely such, and cannot be otherwise, because then they would not in general be part of our experience, would not become objects of experience, and therefore would not serve as the basis for scientific statements and propositions, for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other disciplines.
The spatial-temporal determinations of in contact with each other. The modes of describing them mathematically are in that way, as rescued from any danger from being questionable by each possible experience, that, nevertheless, they are precisely true on condition of that very experience being favourably possible. All theoretical propositions as such that their statements that linking of both determinants together, may by acquiring a universal and necessary character and no longer need to be confirmed by experience. That is why Kant defined them as a priori, synthetic statements. It is by virtue of this character of theirs that we can be quite confident that two times two are four and not five or six not only on our sinful earth but also on any other planet that the diagonal of a square will be just as incommensurate with its sides. That the laws discovered by Galileo, Newton, and Kepler will be the same in any corner of the Universe as in the part investigated by us. Because only and exclusively universal and necessary definitions (in the sense explained above), predicates of the concept, are linked together (synthesised) in these propositions.
All the same, the main inconvenience that science comes up axiomatically proven, that for their analytical judgments yet synthetic ones, are understood for commonsensical logic, for which is only competent to judge analytical correctness, then we must inevitably conclude that there must be to arriving in favour of logic, apart from what is held to some foreignly general logic. This having to do only with theoretical applications of the intellect, with rules of producing theoretical assessments, i.e., judgments that we are entitled to appraise as universal, necessary, and therefore deliberatively objective.
When we have reason to consider a judgment necessarily universal, as we must consider it objectives also, that is, that it expresses not merely a reference of our perception to a subject, but a quality of the object. For there would be no reason for the judgment of other men and found it necessarily agreeing with mine that, if it were not for the unity of the object for which they all refer, and for which they have in accord, therefore they must all agree with one and the other. Still, it is true, that we do not know of anything about things in themselves, i.e., yet, outside the experience of all people are overall, that they, by some familiarized experiences that all existing and future people are likely as systematized, as if, by saying, we are alike in ourselves, as to no choice of necessities that we look the same (and therefore anybody will be able to test the correctness of our statement.) A theoretical judgment will guarantee, that for Kant, he also drew the conclusion that there must be of some logic (or rather a section of logic) that dealt specially with the principles and rules of the theoretical application of thought or the conditions of applying the rules of general logic to the solution of special theoretical problems, to acts of producing universal, necessary, and thus objective judgments. This logic was still not entitled, unlike general logic, to ignore the difference between knowledge (ideas) in content and origin. It could and must serve as an adequate canon (if not as an organon) for thinking that laid claim to the universality and necessity of its conclusions, generalisations, and propositions. Kant conferred the title of transcendental logic on it, i.e., the logic of truth.
The centre of attention here naturally turned out to be the problem of what Kant called the intellect’s synthetic activity, i.e., the activity by which new knowledge was achieved, and not ideas already existing in the head clarified. ‘By synthesis, in its most general sense,’ he said, ‘I understand the act of putting different representations together and of grasping what is manifold in them in one (act of) knowledge.’ Thus he assigned synthesis the role and ‘sense’ of the fundamental operation of thinking, preceding any analysis in content and in time. Whereas analysis consisted in act of arranging ready ideas and concepts, synthesis served as an act of producing new concepts. And the rules of general logic had a very conditional relation to that act, and so in general to the original, initial forms of the working of thought.
In fact, Kant said, where reason had not previously Joined anything together there was nothing for it to divide and ‘before we analyse our representations, the representations must themselves be given, and therefore as regards content no concepts can arise by way of analysis.’ So the original, fundamental, logical forms, it far spired, were not the principles of general logic, not the fundamental principles of analytical judgments (i.e., not the law of identity and the principle of contradiction), but only universal forms, schemas, and means of uniting various ideas into the body of some new idea, schemas ensuring unity of diversity, means of identifying the different and uniting the heterogeneous.
Thus, notwithstanding the formal order of his exposition, and despite it, Kant in essence affirmed that the really universal initial and fundamental logical forms were not those at all that were considered such by traditional formal logic, but that these were rather the ‘second storey’ of logical science, and so derivative, secondary, and true only insofar as they agreed with the more universal and important, with the propositions relating to the synthesis of determinations in the composition of a concept and judgment.
It was clearly a complete revolution in views on the subject matter of logic as the science of thought. Not enough attention is usually paid to this point in expounding Kant’s theory of thought, although it is here that he proved to be the real progenitor of a fundamentally new dialectical stage in the development of logic as a science. Kant was the first to begin to see the main logical forms of thinking in categories thus including everything in the subject matter of logic that all preceding tradition had put into the competence of ontology and metaphysics, and never into that of logic. The union of representations given upon a first-effect-impression, are to some an awareness of judgment. Thinking therefore is the same as judging, or referring representations to judgments in general. Hence judgments are merely either subjective, when representations are conceptual or absorbed contentually, for which consciousness in the evolving range from which the psychological subject is prognostically unified or most distant from his objectivity, as when they are united comprehensively conscious, that is, of some blending necessarities. The logical functions of all judgments are but various modes of uniting representations in consciousness But if they serve for concepts, they are concepts of their necessary union in a consciousness, and so principles of objectively valid judgments. Categories are also ‘principles of objectively valid judgements’. And just because the old logic had turned up its nose at investigating these fundamental logical forms of thinking, it could neither help the movement of theoretical, scientific knowledge with advice nor tie up the loose ends in its own theory. ‘I have never been able to accept the interpretation which logicians give of judgment in general,’ Kant said. ‘It is, they declare, the representation of a relation between two concepts. I do not here dispute with them as to what is defective in this interpretation that in any case it applies only to categorical not to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (the latter two are in containing the relation as not of their concepts but for judgments), an oversight from which many troublesome consequences have followed. I need only point out that the definition does not determine in what the asserted relation consists.
Kant clearly posed the task of understanding categories as logical units, and of disclosing their logical functions in the process of producing and transforming knowledge. True, an almost uncritical attitude to the definitions of the categories borrowed by logic from ontology. But the problem was posed: the definitions of categories were understood as logical (i.e., universal and necessary) schemas or the principles of linking ideas together in ‘objective’ judgments.
Categories were thus those universal forms (schemas) of the activity of the subject by means of which coherent experience became possible in general, i.e., by which isolated perceptions were fixed in the form of knowledge: ‘...Since experience is knowledge by means of connected perceptions, the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience, and are therefore valid a priori for all objects of experience. Any judgment, therefore, that claimed to universal significance, always overtly or covertly included a category:’we cannot think an object save through categories.
And if logic claimed to be the science of thinking it must also develop just this doctrine of categories as a coherent system of categorical determinations of thought. Otherwise, it simply had no right to call itself the science of thought. Thus it was Kant (and not Hegel, as is often thought and said) who saw the main essence of logic in categorical definitions of knowledge, and began to understand logic primarily as the systematic exposition of categories, universal and necessary concepts characterising an object in general, those very concepts that were traditionally considered the monopoly of metaphysical investigations. At the same time, and this is linked with the very essence of Kant’s conception, categories were nothing other than universal forms (schemas) of the cognitive activity of the subject, purely logical forms of thinking understood not as a psychic act of the individual but a ‘generic’ activity of man, as the impersonal process of development of science, as the process of the crystallising out of universal -scientific knowledge in the individual consciousness.
Kant, not without grounds, considered Aristotle the founder of this understanding of logic, that same Aristotle on whom, following mediaeval tradition, responsibility had been put for the narrow, formal understanding of the boundaries and competence of logic, though in fact it was not his at all. Kant, however, reproached Aristotle for not having given any ‘deduction’ of his table of categories, but simply only setting out and summing up those categories that already functioned in the existing consciousness of his time. The Aristotelean list of categories therefore suffered from ‘empiricism’. In addition, and on Kant’s lips the reproach sounds even more severe, Aristotle, not having been content with explaining the logical function of categories, had also ascribed a ‘metaphysical meaning’ to them, explaining them not only as logical (i.e., theoretically cognitive) schemes of the activity of the mind but also as universal forms of existence, universal determinations of the world of things in themselves, that is to say he ‘hypostasised’ the purest logical schemas as metaphysics, as a universal theory of objectivity as such.
Kant thus saw Aristotle’s main sin as having taken the forms of thinking for the forms of being or existence, and so having converted logic into metaphysics, into ontology. Hence also the task of having, in order to correct Aristotle’s mistake, to convert metaphysics into logic. In other word’s Kant still saw the real significance of Aristotle, through the converting prism of his initial precepts, as the ‘father of logic’ and understood that Aristotle was such in his capacity as author of the Metaphysics. So Kant once and for all cut the roots of the mediaeval interpretation both of Aristotle and of logic, which had seen the logical doctrine of the Stagirite only in the texts of the Organon. This unnatural separation of logic from metaphysics, which in fact was due not to Aristotle at all but to the Stoics and Scholastics, acquired the force of prejudice in the Middle Ages, but was removed and overcome by Kant.
Kant did not give his system of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason, but only posed the task of creating one in general fashion, ‘since at present we are concerned not with the completeness of the system, but only with the principles to be followed in its construction . . . ’. He also did not set out the logic, but only the most general principles and outlines of its subject matter in its new understanding, its most general categories (quantity, quality, relation, and modality, each of which was made more concrete in three derivatives). Kant considered that the further development of the system of logic in the spirit of these principles no longer constituted a special work: ‘. . .it will be obvious that a full glossary, with all the requisite explanations, is not only a possible, but an easy task.’ . . . .It can easily be carried out, with the aid of the ontological manuals for instance, by placing under the category of causality the predicables of force, action, passion; under the category of community the predicables of presence, resistance; under the predicaments of modality, the predicables of coming to be, ceasing to be, change, etc.
Here again, as was the case with general logic, Kant displayed an absolutely uncritical attitude to the theoretical baggage of the old metaphysics, and to the determinations of categories developed in it, since he reduced the business of creating the new logic to very uncritical rethinking, to a purely formal transformation of the old metaphysics (ontology) into logic. In practice it sometimes resulted simply in the renaming of ‘ontological’ concepts as ‘logical’. But the very carrying out of the task posed by Kant very quickly led to an understanding that it was not so simple to do, since what was required was not a formal change but seriously afar from reaching, as given rise to free radical qualitative change, for which the sum of its parts attribute to the totality of everyone system of rules, in that is to implicate of its owing philosophy. Kant himself still did not clearly and completely realise this fact; he had only partially detected the dialectical contradictions of the old metaphysics, in the form of the famous four autonomies of pure reason. A start, however, had been made.
According to Kant categories were purely logical forms, schemas of the activity of the intellect linking together the facts of sensuous experience (perceptions) in the form of concepts and theoretical (objective) judgments. In themselves categories were empty, and any attempt to use them as other than logical forms of the generalization of empirical facts had led one way or of another, and, Kant expressed this idea in his own manner, affirming that it was impossible in any case to understand categories as abstract determinations of things in themselves as they existed outside the consciousness of people and outside experience. They characterised, in a universal (abstract-universal) way only the conceivable object, i.e., the external world as and how we of necessity thought of it, as and how it was represented in consciousness after being refracted through the prism of our sense organs and forms of thinking. Transcendental logic, therefore, the logic of truth, was logic, and only logic, only the doctrine of thinking. Its concepts (categories) told us absolutely nothing about how matters stood in the world outside experience, whether in the world of the ‘transcendental’ outside the bounds of experience, there was causality, necessity, and chance, quantitative and qualitative differences, a difference in the probability and inevitability of an event occurring, and so forth. That question Kant thought it impossible to answer, however in the world as given to us-by-experience matters stood exactly as logic pictured them, and science needed nothing more.
Making use of the principles of probability, one may calculate probability that a given hypophysis has on one’s evidence base. Nevertheless, if our evidence-base is composed only of necessary truths and facts of inner perception, least be mention, the difficulty to envision the possibility that it could provide justification for any contingent truths other than those that pertain to related mental states of consciousness. How could such an evidence-base even lend probability to the hypothesis that there is a world of external physical things? By the person of Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was reluctant to concede that his theory of knowledge might have such sceptical consequences. In his theological writings, he attempted by proving the existence of a personal God and he concluded that we have ‘a probability approaching certainty’ that such a being exists. But, unlike Descartes, he does not attempt to base his theory of knowledge upon such a conclusion. Perhaps the most significant thing about its theory is the general problem that it leaves us with, (1) the knowledge that we have is based upon necessary truths and certain facts about our conscious states, and if (2) application of the principles of probability to this evidence base does not provide probability for our common sense beliefs, then (3) it would seem to be questionable whether we can have any justification for such beliefs.
It would, of our’s to suggest, in at least in one solution, as, perhaps, in those intentional attitudes that we ordinarily cal ‘perceiving’ and ‘remembering’ provide ‘presumptive evidence’ -that is to say, prima facie evidence -for their intentional objects, for example, believing that one is looking at a group of people tends to justify the belief that there is a group of people that one is looking at. How, then, are we to distinguish merely ‘prima facie’ justification from the real thing? This type of solution would seem to call for principles that specify, by reference to further facts of inner perception, the condition under which merely prima facie justification may become real justification.
Basically, knowledge is defined as the intellectual ‘perception’ of connections, or agreements and disagreements, between ideas. Such connections may be immediate and intuitively perceived, or mediate by other ideas and so matter of demonstration. Where we can perceive such connections, we have certain and universal knowledge, where we cannot, we lack ‘knowledge,’ and at best, have ‘belief’ or ‘opinion.’ This account fits well with our knowledge in the subjective matter that are of them subject to geometry. These, because of their systematic developments, were standard 17th century examples of ‘science.’ But, like others of the ‘new philosophers’ of the time, Locke did not accept the details of the Scholastic account of scientia, according to which scientific knowledge involved a rigidly defined structure, and is arranged and developed according to strict canons of syllogistic reasoning which has as its premises abstract maxims and definitions to the real essences of things.
To have ‘scientia’ with respect to a given thing is to have complete and certain cognition of its truth, that is, to hold a given proposition on grounds that guarantee its truth in a certain way. Following Aristotle, Aquinas holds that grounds of t his sort are provided only by demonstrative syllogisms, and so he maintains that the objects of scientia are propositions one holds on the basis of demonstrative syllogisms. To have scientia with respect to some preposition ‘p’ is to have a particular sort of referential justification for ‘p.’
Now Aquinas holds that because the sort of justification essential to scientia is inferential, I t is also derivative: scientia acquires its positive epistemic status from the premises of the demonstrative syllogism and the nature of the syllogistic inference. Hence, he holds a principle of inferential justification according to which one is justified in holding the conclusion of some demonstration only if on e is justified in holding the demonstration’s premises. The premisses that ground scientia are not only logically but also epistemically prior to the conclusion.
Aquinas argues that our justification for holding the premisses of demonstrative syllogisms cannot in every case be inferential. So then, least of mention, if one holds that all justification is inferential and if a person is inferentially justified in holding some proposition only if he is justified in holding the premisses of the relevant inference, then one is committed to an ‘infinite regress of justification.’
Regress arguments are not limited to epistemology. In ethics there is Aristotle’s regress argument (in Nichomachean Ethics) for the existence of a single end of rational action. In metaphysics there is Aquinas’s regress argument for an unmoved mover: If everything in motion were moving only by a mover that an infinite sequence of movers each moved by a further mover; science there can be no such sequence. There is an unmoved mover. A related argument has recently been given to show that not every state of affairs can have an explanation or cause of the sort posited by principles of sufficient reason; such principles are false, for a priori reasons having to do with their own concepts of explanation.
How can the same argument serve so many masters, from epistemology to ethics to metaphysics, from fondationalism to coherentism to scepticism? One reason is that the argument has the form of a reduction to absurdity of conjoined assumptions. Like all such arguments it cannot tell us, by itself, which assumption we should reject in order to escape the absurdity. Foundationalists reject one, coherentists anther, sceptics a third, and so on. Furthermore, the same argument form can be instantiated by different subject matter, of which epistemology is but one.
Nevertheless, for reasons that stand alone, let us suppose that there is some property ‘A’ pertaining t o aan observational or experimental situation, and that out of a large number of observed instances of ‘A,’ some fraction m/n (possibly equal to 1) have also been instances of some logically independent property ‘B.’ Suppose further that the background circumstance not specified in these descriptions have been varied to a substantial degree and that there is no collateral information available concerning the frequency of ‘B’s’ among ‘A’s’ o r concerning causal or nomological connections between instances of ‘A’ and instances of ‘B.’
In this situation, an enumerative or instantial inductive inference would move from the premise that m/n of observed ‘A’s’ are ‘B’s.’ (The usual probability qualification will be assumed to apply to the inference, than being part of the conclusion.) Here the class of ‘A’s’ should be taken to include not only unobserved ‘A’s’ and future ‘A’s’ but also possible or hypothetical ‘A’s.’ (An alterative conclusion would concern the probability or likelihood of the very next observe ‘A’ being a ‘B.’)
The problematical tradition of induction, often referred to simply as the problem of induction, is the problem of whether and w hy inferences that fit this schema should be considered rationally acceptable or justified from an epistemic or cognitive standpoint, i.e., whether and why reasoning in this way is likely to lead to true claims about the world. Is there any sot of argument or rationale that can be offered for thinking that conclusions reached in this way are likely to be true if the corresponding premiss is true -even that their chances of truth are significantly enhanced?
The briefest acquaintance with modern philosophy -which is often taken to start with Descartes' 'radical doubt' as to whether all his experiences were plants from some evil demon or other deceptor -shows how few things we can directly, clearly know. We naturally want to move on from these sparse certainties -essentially just the existence of our selves and our current experiences -to other facts that we do not initially know. One of the most common methods for doing so is induction, used not only by scientists but also by everyone, everyday when they expect the world to react or remain a certain way. Obviously, we do not directly perceive that it will do so, as we do recognise that 'Cogito ergo sum.' How do we reason inductively, then? Is it rational?
Induction is often defined simply as taking the past as evidence of the future, but it is in fact broader than that. It takes place whenever we use specific, observed instances as evidence of the generalisations or laws they would fit into. It can, and has, been applied to the past, as in the fierce arguments in the early 19th century over whether the geological record proved a very ancient earth. This split uniformists from those who preferred denying induction and the similarity of the past to the present to denying Bible, which gave a genealogy of Adam's descendents used by Bishop Ussher to date the creation to 4004 BC. Likewise, when a birdwatcher argues from his lengthy observations that all swans are white, this is an instance of (overconfident) induction about the past, present and future. The most famous inductive argument, though, is that if a cause and effect seem to have been constantly conjoined, there exists a necessary connection between them (a natural law), which will continue to hold in the future.
David Hume, the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, first raised the 'problem of induction' with reference to this type of argument, but all his complaints and questions apply equally to inferences about past and present laws and generalisations. He considered the question: ‘Why do we think that past regularities will continue to hold in the future?’
His central insight was that there can be no a priori reason, as laws of nature are never understood directly, but only known through experience: ‘Adam, though all his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water, that it would suffocate him.’ In fact, he would have had no deductive or intuitively certainties of its rationality for thinking that there were uniform natural laws. Gravity has always applied and does not logically imply ‘this rock won't move to and fro’ as we could imagine it as moving to and fro. To make this a valid argument, we would have to assume a hidden premise -nature is uniform -and this begs the question of why we think this. This can only be because it seems to have been uniform in the past. So induction must be justified inductively, relying on past regularities -and this is circular, as a look at Hume's initial question shows. A circular reason can be no reason at all, or we would accept the spurious reasoning Descartes puts in the mouth of ‘learned’ theologians: ‘...we must believe in the existence of God because it is a doctrine of Holy Scripture . . . we must believe Holy Scripture because it comes from God . . .’
This should make us worry that since we lack any reason for thinking inductively, we are being irrational in vast spheres of our life. Imagine a philosophy student who goes for lunch with a friendly scientist, who prides herself on her empiricism and rationality. Feeling that he ought to show that what he learnt that morning has some use (even if it is only in confusing the hungry), the philosopher asks his friend, just about to munch on a sausage roll: ‘How do you know that won't poison you?’ Perplexed, the scientist points out that the eatery isn't that unhygienic, only to be given a rundown on the problem of induction, which cuts short her attempts to appeal to natural laws and medical observations. Eying her sausage roll suspiciously, she puts it down, only to see her friend start to eat his. ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’, she cries. ‘I'm not in a philosophy lecture any more,’ he replies. His attitude reflects that of most philosophers who have been perplexed by the problem of induction. But, as we share her concern for rationality, we should sympathise with the worried scientist.
In fact, things are even worse than they might seem to the scientist. It is not just that she cannot know that the roll will not poison her; she has no reason for thinking this to be any more probable than it being poisonous, or bitter, or tasteless, or hallucinogenic. All options are equally (im)probable, unless she can establish the principle of the uniformity of nature a priori, without reference to the scientific observation which in fact convinces her (and the rest of us.) Descartes tried to do this, by arguing a priori that God exists, and that as he is no deceiver, the world must be largely as it appears. His argument is widely agreeing to have failed, and we are nowadays suspicious of attempts to prove facts about the world a priori, thanks in part to Hume, in part to people like the scientist.
Nor will we be helped here by Occam's Razor, the hugely useful principle that, all else being equal, we should prefer the simplest explanation. Just like the uniformity of nature, this is only based on experience. Perhaps we thought we could know (as Descartes had faith he did) that there was an author of the universe who favoured simplicity, understood in terms of uniform laws and similar features among similar groups. But we cannot -and, in the absence of a God, this is a hopelessly anthropomorphic concept of the universe. Why are laws we find simpler to understand more likely, or simpler from a cosmic perspective? Couldn't the universe just as well act randomly, or switch laws periodically?
Still, we may feel that the evidence for induction we are left with -experience -is enough. F.L. Will argues that it is. Separating the problem of induction from its typical temporal formulation, he gives the metaphor of a pasture (or past-ure?) inhabited by chicken farmers who cannot wander or gaze outside, but do steadily reclaim new land. As the pasture expands, the new roosters it gains are always more aggressive than the hens -don't the farmers have grounds for thinking that roosters outside are more aggressive? They would argue that they have a large, and growing, body of evidence for this. Will accuses sceptics of induction of constantly shifting the definition of 'the future' forwards to neutralise our evidence that laws will continue to hold, just like a sceptical chicken farmer might complain that the newly reclaimed land is no longer an example of what's outside the pasture. This consciously contradicts Bertrand Russell's dictum that past futures can never be evidence of future futures.
Hasn't induction proved to hold true a vast number of times, more than any individual law? This is certainly true, and without a doubt why we do in fact believe in induction, as Hume observed (though the psychological fact that regularities lead us to infer general principles does not prove anything -witness the way in which we are disposed to believe all sorts of pleasant superstitions on tenuous evidence.) But on its own, it is not sufficient reason for favouring the sorts of unchanging laws we want to favour over a law which changes tomorrow, or the day after. As Nelson Goodman pointed out in his seminal lecture on ‘The New Riddle of Induction,’ the evidence fits, the hypothesis that all emeralds are 'grue' (green up until tomorrow, blue afterwards) just as well it fits them remaining 'green.' Perhaps, it's just human favouritism to see the latter for being better confirmed. Simon Blackburn has challenged this, claiming that 'green' really is a simpler concept which we should interpret the evidence as suggesting, because unlike 'grue' it makes no reference to specific times or places. Whether this criticism works or not depends again on whether Occam's Razor can be justified a priori, and whether we can objectively define simple.
A sceptic of induction can always question this, and any other justification we might offer, pointing out either its circularity or its question-begging assumption of a priori principles. Perhaps he is being unfair, though. After all, what on earth would he count as a reason? The answer is clearly ‘nothing.’ Paul Edwards has argued that this reveals a misunderstanding of the word 'reason', since past instances of a law clearly do count as a reason for believing that law, in our sense of the word. This argument would not convince the most tentative sceptic. Not only does it ignore Goodman's riddle of which law to accept (are all emeralds 'green' or 'grue'?); it is at bottom a piece of semantic sleight-of-hand -we understand the sceptic's worry that induction may not constitute a real reason, however you wish to phrase it. As Simon Blackburn has pointed out, the mere fact that we use the principle of induction as a reason for beliefs does not mean that it is analytic, any more than our frequent appeals to majority opinion make that a good reason for thinking anything.
Nonetheless, there is more than a grain of truth to the complaint that the sceptic is being unreasonable in his demands. He is in effect asking us to give a deductive argument for inductive reasoning, and it should be no surprise that this is impossible. Deductive reasoning, of the sort that mathematicians and logicians use to prove things, is a wholly different method, concerned not with establishing natural laws and other putative facts about the world, but with syllogisms (eg. if all as are b’s and all b’s are c’s, then some as are c’s.) It should be no surprise that it can provide no foundation for induction. Philosophers generally favour deductive arguments and justifications (often derived from analyses of the meaning of words, as in Edwards' defence of induction.) But perhaps we can begin to see the best response -though it can only be a response, not a solution -to the seeming invulnerable problem of induction when we recognise that we cannot deductively justify deduction either, at least not without being accused of circularity.
What we seem to be left with, then, are two completely different modes of thinking, deduction and induction. Do both have to stand on themselves for their own justification? Well, we have seen that induction certainly does. Deduction is often seen as more basic, thanks to its employment in pure reasoning and mathematics, but in fact it may have arisen from induction. It is historically far more likely that the first cave dwellers started from observations like ‘All apples are fruit, all fruit grows on plants -and apples grow on plants!’ than that they sat inventing a formal syllogistic system, which proved useful enough to endure. On a more theoretical level, it is difficult to see how a disembodied brain separated from any experience of our universe could come up with such laws of inference, let alone the concept of discreet objects that they operate on.
Now if deduction stands on induction, this doesn't help us, but only spreads the contagious scepticism we have encountered. And if it stands on itself, it seems no better off than induction. What have we accomplished then, beyond calling maths and logic into as much doubt as science and sausage rolls? Well, we have come up with a response to the sceptic: if he wants to be consistent, he will have to give up deduction too. If he accepts this, then we have no counterattack. But if he doesn't, then he will have to accept that he has somehow set his standards too high. Like P.F. Strawson, he will have to accept that asking what reason we have for following these modes of reasoning is like asking: ‘Is the law legal?’
But if we can't find any reason for it, outside its own standards, doesn't that make it irrational and arbitrary? Imagine someone came up with a method of justification -there's no need to imagine, people have -called faith-duction. This would simply state if something feels true, right and beautiful, then it is true. Clearly we need some grounds for preferring deduction and induction to faith-duction. Since all three set themselves up as basic ways of thinking, we can't ask why faith-duction is correct any more than we can justify deduction and induction in this way. We will have to use the same tactic employed a moment ago, teasing out consequences a fan of faith-duction will not want to accept, and then pragmatically showing why we should employ deduction and induction in our reasoning.
The flaw of faith-duction is that, unlike deduction and induction, it leads us to results that we find unacceptable. It has made people believe in old superstitions, like that of a flat earth, which have proved hopelessly inadequate for navigating our world, and which no modern person would want to accept. When the choice is laid out between faith-duction and a round earth, most people will choose the round earth. Another problem is that at any one time, there may be a number of mutually incompatible things which feel ‘true, right and beautiful’ to us. A faith-ductionist could choose to accept them all, but she will soon find this an impossible way to go on living and thinking.
Induction and deduction are modes of reasoning that have been carefully adjusted to avoid giving patently false answers. For all the theoretical arguments against believing induction, you cannot accuse it of having let us down in the same way that faith-duction does. People cite the example, given early on, of the birdwatcher who inductively assumes that all swans are white. But it is for this reason that refined induction specifies that all relevant facts about the world (for instance, our knowledge that colour can vary within species) have to be taken into account, and that narrow inductions about closely bound causes and effects are more reliable than others. The overconfident birdwatcher is to blame here.
The positive reason we have for believing these ‘ductions’ is that, in some way that we cannot understand, they seem lead us away from falsity and toward truth (their stem is derived from the Latin verb for leading, after all.) As Hume pointed out, we can't have any direct knowledge of uniform natural laws, which seem quite mysterious things. But we can have knowledge of specific instances where an apple snapping of a branch is conjoined with it falling to the ground: this is one of those concrete facts that we can know. And induction seems to lead us to these facts, just as deduction could lead us to the fact that apples grow on plants -this is why we accept it. We can always be surer of a specific inductive inference than of the general principle or law that seems to lie behind it. And Goodman's riddle shows the need for work understanding how our inductive thought distinguishes true possible hypotheses from false ones.
But our adoption of induction is practically justified by the facts about the world which led us to believe it in the first place. In this sense it is not irrational, though we cannot give the type of watertight reasoning for it that we can give for a conclusion inside a deductive system like logic. The difficult task of thinking about systems from inside them, from other systems, and from outside systems together (if that is possible -a matter for great debate) is what makes philosophy, . . . -philosophy.
For the last four centuries -ever since the French philosopher René Descartes -epistemology has been a central concern for philosophers. Indeed, it has often been the central concern, and on the occasions when it has not, the central concern has often been whether it should be the central concern! What is epistemology, why have philosophers been so obsessed with it, and should they be?
Simply, epistemology is the Theory of Knowledge. It asks such questions as: What is knowledge? How does knowledge relate to belief, truth, and rationality? Are there different kinds of knowledge? If so, how do they relate? How are these kinds of knowledge possible? Is knowledge of any kind really possible? If the goal of philosophy is ultimate knowledge about the world, then the starting point for investigation must be the concept of knowledge itself. That is what has made epistemology the ‘First Philosophy’ of ‘Modernity.’ Or, in the jargon of ‘post-Modernity,’ that is what made epistemology the putative meta-narrative for all legitimation discourses. In the tradition of all good philosophical answers, this one is singularly unhelpful, raising many more questions than it answers. But, also in that tradition, many of the questions it raises are very good ones. What is First Philosophy and what is Modernity? What is a meta-narrative and what is a legitimation discourse? And why say it was it only putatively such? Taking these in turn:
Modernity, in Philosophy, is the era since Descartes — the era of epistemology -so this is a circular characterization. So turn to ‘First Philosophy’ for an entry into the circle. The phrase goes back to Aristotle, used in describing what later became metaphysics. Aristotle thought that certain metaphysical questions, because they are concerned with Being as such, were so general that they had to be addressed before any other philosophical questions could get answers. Aristotle’s goal was to know the truth about the world. This seems to require understanding the framework for truth itself, viz., the categories of Being. Descartes’ project focussed on the knowing. His goal was attaining absolutely certain knowledge, not merely accidentally believed truths. The way Descartes saw it, before we could have any knowledge about the world, we first have to have knowledge about knowledge itself. After all, how could we really know anything without knowing what constitutes knowing? The answer that Descartes gave to this question -that our knowledge is structured like an immense building, and thus we must pay special attention to the foundational beliefs upon which all the rest rests -marks the birth of philosophical Modernity.
Modern epistemology, then, is the discourse that developed with Cartesian philosophy as its First Philosophy. Its aim is to provide an explanation, an understanding, and a knowledge of, among other things, explanation, understanding and knowledge! It can, therefore, be called a ‘meta-narrative’ with justification because it is a narrative about narratives themselves. And (to stay with the jargon) it is a ‘legitimation discourse’ insofar as its purpose is to justify or ‘legitimate’ the rest of our claims to well-grounded beliefs. On this view, epistemology is not concerned with justifying any specific claims, like the claims that the earth orbits the sun, that humans evolved from other animals, that government deficits lead to high interest rates, or that the ego acts as a mediator between the id and the superego. Those hypotheses are for the various ‘special sciences’ to justify. Rather, epistemology is concerned with justifying all the different kinds of justifications. And if anything can be said to characterize the loose confederation of writings that count as Post-Modern, it would be their shared assessment that the Cartesian epistemological project failed. But that claim, too, is part of the discourse of epistemology
Science was therefore always and everywhere obliged to discover causes and laws, to differentiate the probable from the absolutely inevitable, to explain and numerically express the degree of probability of any particular event happening, and so on. In the world with which science was concerned there was no need, even as hypothetically assumed factors, for ‘unextended’ or ‘eternal’ factors (i.e., taken outside the power of the categories of space and time), ‘incorporeal’ forces, absolutely unalterable ‘substances’, and other accessories of the old metaphysics. The place of the old ontology must now be taken not by some-one regarded through the paradigms of science, even though new in principle and clarified by criticism, but only the whole aggregate of real experimental sciences mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, celestial mechanics (i.e., astronomy), geology, anthropology, physiology. Only all the existing sciences (and those that might arise in the future) together, generalising the data of experience by means of the categories of transcendental logic, were in a position to tackle the task that the old ontology had monopolised.
To tackle it Kant, however, emphasised, but by no means to solve it. They could not solve it; for it was insoluble by the very essence of the matter and not at all because the experience on which such a picture of the world as a whole was built was never complete, and not because science, developing with time, would discover ever more new fields of facts and correct its own propositions, thus never achieving absolute finality in its constructions of the world in concepts. If Kant had argued like he would have, he would have been absolutely right, least of mention, with this it is quite true of his thoughts that must he acquired of some relevantly different forms of expression, in that he was converted through some basic forming thesis of disbelief, that to any affirmation it was impossible to construct a unified, scientifically substantiated picture of the world even relatively satisfactory for a given moment of time.
The trouble was that any attempt to construct such a picture inevitably collapsed at the very moment of being made, because it was immediately smashed to smithereens by autonomies and immanent contradictions, by the shattering forces of dialectics. The picture sought would inevitably be self-contradictory, which was the equivalent for Kant of its being false. Why was that so? The answer is in the chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason devoted to analysis of the logical structure of reason as the highest synthetic function of the human intellect.
Another task, it turned out, remained outside the competence of either general or transcendental logic, a task with which scientific understanding was constantly in collision, that of the theoretical synthesis of all the separate ‘experimental’ statements that made up a single theory developed from a single common principle. Now the job was already not to generalise, i.e., to unite and link together, the sensuously contemplated, empirical facts given in living contemplation, in order to obtain concepts, but the concepts themselves. It was no longer a matter of schemas of the synthesis of sensuous facts in reason, but of the unity of reason itself and the products of its activity in the structure of a theory, in the structure of a system of concepts and judgments. Generalising of the data by means of a concept, and the generalising of concepts by means of a theory, by means of an ‘idea’ or general guiding principle, were of course quite different operations. And the rules for them must be different. There is therefore yet another storey in Kant’s logic, a kind of ‘metalogic of truth’ bringing under its critical control and surveillance dividual acts of rational activity but all reason as a whole: Thinking with a capital ‘T’, so to say; thinking in its highest synthetic function is not divided into components and partial operational schemas of synthesis.
The striving of thought to create a single, integral theory is natural and ineradicable. It cannot be satisfied, and does not wish to be, by simple aggregates, simple piling up of partial generalisations, but is always striving to bring them together, to link them together by means of general principles. It is a legitimate striving, and since it is realised in activity and thus appears as a separate power, Kant called it reason in distinction from understanding. Reason is the same as understanding, only it is involved in the solving of a special task, explanation of the absolute unity in diversity, the synthesis of all its schemas and the results of their application in experience. Naturally it also operates there according to the rules of logic, but in resolving this task, thought, though exactly observing all the rules and norms of logic (both general and transcendental) without exception, still inevitably lands in a contradiction, in self-destructing. Kant painstakingly showed that this did not happen as a consequence of slovenliness or negligence in any thinking individuals at all, but precisely because the individuals were absolutely guided by the requirements of logic, true, where its rules and norms were powerless and without authority. In entering the field of reason, thinking invades a country where these laws do not operate. The old metaphysics struggled for whole millennia in hopeless contradictions and strife because it stubbornly tried to do its job with unsuitable tools.
Kant set himself the task of discovering and formulating the special ‘rules’ that would subordinate the power of thinking (which proved in fact to be its incapacity) to organise all the separate generalisations and judgments of experience into a unity, into the structure of an integral, theoretical schema, i.e., to establish the legislation of reason. Reason, as the highest synthetic function of the intellect, ‘endeavours to carry out the synthetic unity, which is thought in the category, up to the completely unconditioned’. In this function thinking strives for a full explanation of all the conditions in which each partial generalisation of understanding (each concept and judgment) can be considered justified without further reservations. For only then would a generalisation be fully insured against refutation by new experience, i.e., from contradiction with other, just as correct generalisations.
The claim absolutely to complete, unconditional synthesis of the existing determinations of a concept, and so of the conditions within which these determinations are unreservedly true is exactly equivalent to a claim to understand things in themselves. In fact, if I risk asserting that subject A is determined by predicate B in its absolute totality, and not just in part that existed or might exist in our field of experience, I remove the very limitation from my assertion (statement) that transcendental logic has established for all experimental judgments; that is to say, I am no longer stating that it is true only in conditions imposed by our own forms of experience, our modes of perception, schemas of generalisation, and so on. I begin to think that the statement ascribing predicate B to subject A is already true not only within the conditions of experience but outside them, which it relates to A not only as the object of any possible experience but also irrespective of that experience, and defines A as an object existing in itself. That means to remove all the limitations governing it from the generalisation, including the conditions imposed by experience. But all the conditions cannot be removed, ‘for the conception of the absolute totality of conditions is not applicable in any experience, since no experience is unconditioned’. This illegitimate demarche of thinking Kant called transcendental application of reason, i.e., the attempt to affirm that things in themselves are such as they appear in scientific thinking, that the properties and predicates we attribute to them as objects of any possible experience also belong to them when they exist in themselves and are not converted into objects of somebody’s experience (perceptions, judgments, and theorising). Such a transcendental application of understanding entails contradictions and autonomies. A logical contradiction arises within reason itself, disrupting it, breaking up the very form of thinking in general. A logical contradiction is also an index for thought indicating that it has taken on the solution of a problem that is in general beyond its strength. A contradiction reminds thought that it is impossible to grasp the ungraspable (boundless)
Understanding falls into a state of logical contradiction (antinomy) here not only because, and even not so much because, experience is always unfinished, and not because a generalisation justified for experience as a whole has been drawn on the basis of partial experience. That is just what reason can and must do, otherwise no science would be possible. The matter here is quite different; in trying fully to synthesise all the theoretical concepts and judgments drawn from experience, it is immediately discovered that the experience already past was itself internal antinomic if it of course was taken as a whole and not some arbitrarily limited aspect or fragment of it in which, it goes without saying, contradiction may be avoided. And the experience is already antinomic because it includes generalisations and judgments synthesised according to schemas of categories that are not only different but are directly opposite.
In the sphere of understanding, as transcendental logic showed, there were pairs of mutually opposing categories, i.e., schemas of the action of thinking having diametrically opposite directions. For example, there is not only a category of identity orienting the intellect to discovering the same invariant determinations in various objects, but also its polar category of difference, pointing to exactly the opposite operation, to the discovery of differences and variants in objects seemingly identical. In addition to the concept of necessity there is the concept of chance, and so on. Each category has another, opposite to it and not unitable with it without breaking the principle of contradiction. For clearly, difference is not identity, or is nonidentity, while cause is not effect (is non-effect). True, both cause and effect are subsumed purely formally less than one and the same category of interaction, but that only means that a higher category embracing both of them is itself subordinated to the law of identity, i.e., ignores the difference between them. And any phenomenon given in experience can always be comprehended by means both of one and of another categorical schema directly opposite to it. If, for example, I look on some fact as an effect, my search is directed to an infinite number of phenomena and circumstances preceding the given fact, because behind each fact is the whole history of the Universe. If, on the contrary, however, I wish to understand a given fact as a cause, I will be forced to go into the chain of phenomena and facts following it in time, and to go further and further away from it in time with no hope of encountering it again anywhere. Here are two mutually incompatible lines of search, never coinciding with one another, two paths of investigating one and the same fact. And they will never converge because time is infinite at both ends, and the causal explanation will go further and further away from the search for effects.
Consequently, relative to any thing or object in the Universe, two mutually exclusive points of view can be expressed, and two diverging paths of investigation outlined, and therefore two theories, two conceptions developed, each of which is created in absolute agreement with all the requirements of logic and with all the facts (data of experience) relating to the matter, but which nevertheless, or rather precisely because of this, cannot be linked together within one theory without preserving and without reproducing this same logical contradiction within it. The tragedy of understanding is that it itself, taken as a whole, is immanently contradictory, containing categories each one of which is as legitimate as the other, and whose sphere of applicability within the framework of experience is not limited to anything, i.e., is as wide as experience itself. In relation to any object, therefore, two (at least, of course) mutually opposite theories inevitably must always arise and develop, before, now, and henceforth, forevermore, each of which advances a fully logical claim to be universal, to be correct in relation to all experience as a whole.
The autonomies could be eliminated in one way only, by discarding from logic exactly half of its categorical schemas of synthesis, recognising one category in each pair as legitimate and correct, and banning the other from use in the arsenal of science. That is what the old metaphysics did. It, for example, proclaimed chance or fortuity a purely subjective concept, a characteristic of our ignorance of the causes of phenomena, and so converted necessity into the sole objective categorical schema of a judgment, which led to recognition of the fatal inevitability of fact, least of mention, the immediate apprehension for the moments consequence may speak only as implied of being ridiculous.
That is why Hegel somewhat later called this method of thinking metaphysical. It was, in fact, characteristic of the old pre-Kantian metaphysics, in delivering itself from internal contradictions simply by ignoring half of all the legitimate categories of thought, half of the schematic of judgments with objective significance, are to this point, to have in the same time that questions arise from which are categorically prioritized of their item preference, and, as yet, we discard and declare for being ingested through ‘subjective illusion’. Here, Kant showed, there was not, and could not be, any objective basis for choosing. It was decided by pure arbitrariness, by individual preference. Both metaphysical systems were therefore equally correct (both the one and the other went equally with the universal principle) and equally subjective, since each of them denied the objective principle contrary to it.
The old metaphysics strove to organise the sphere of reason directly on the basis of the law of identity and of the principle of contradiction in determinations. The job was impracticable in principle because, if categories were regarded as the universal predicates necessarily inherent in some subject, then this subject must be the thing in itself, the categories considered are the predicates of one and the same branch of knowledge, that of any judgmental proof is for us to consider as we are contradictorily of our same creation, that such as this period that time has allotted too lay of succumbing to such a paradoxical situation. And then the statement fell under the principle of contradiction, which Kant formulated that no predicate contradictory of a thing can belong to it. . . .’. So, if I determine a thing in itself through a category, I still have no right, without breaking the principle, to ascribe the determinations of the opposing category to it.
Kant’s conclusion was this: quite rigorous analysis of any theory claiming to be an unconditionally full synthesis of all determinations (all the predicates of one and the same thing in itself, claiming the unconditional correctness of its own judgments, will always discover more or less artfully disguised autonomies in the theory. Understanding, clarified by criticism, i.e., conscious of its legitimate rights and not claiming any sphere of the transcendental banned to it, will always strive for an unconditionally full synthesis as the highest ideal of scientific knowledge, but will never permit itself to assert that-it has already achieved such a synthesis, that it has finally determined the thing-in-itself through a full series of its universal and necessary predicates, and so given a full list of the conditions of the truthfulness of its concept. The age-old theoretical opponents should therefore, instead of waging endless war to the death, come to some kind of peaceful co-existence between them, recognising the equal rights of each other to relative truth, to a relatively true synthesis. They should understand that, in relation to the thing-in-itself, they are equally untrue, that each of them, since he does not violate the principle of contradiction, possesses only part of the truth, leaving the other part to his opponent. Conversely, they are both right in the sense that understanding as a whole (i.e., reason) always has not only different interests within it but also opposing ones, equally legitimate and of equal standing. One theory is taken up with the identical characteristics of a certain range of phenomena, and the other with their differences (the scientific determinations, say, of a man or of the animal, man and machine, and lastly, a flora of plant life and some sorted animal). Each of the theories realises in full the legitimate, but partial interest of reason, and therefore neither the one nor the other, taken separately, discloses an objective picture of the thing as it exists outside of and prior to consciousness, and independently of each of these interests. And it is impossible to unite these theories into one without converting the antinomic relation between them into an antinomic relation between the concepts within one theory, without disrupting the deductive analytical schema of its concepts.
What should ‘critique of reason’ give to scientific understanding? Not, of course, recipes for eliminating dialectics from knowledge; that is impossible and impracticable because knowledge as a whole is always obtained through polemic, through a struggle of opposing principles and interests. It is therefore necessary that the warring parties in science will be fully self-critical, and that the legitimate striving to apply its principle rigorously in investigating the facts will not be converted into paranoiac stubbornness, into dogmatic blindness preventing the rational kernel in the theoretical opponent’s statements from being seen. Criticism of the opponent then becomes a means of perfecting one’s own theory, and helps stipulate the conditions for the correctness of one’s own judgments more rigorously and more clearly, and so forth.
Thus the ‘critique of reason’ and its inevitable dialectic were converted by Kant into the most important branch of logic, since prescriptions were formulated in it capable of rescuing thought from the bigoted dogmatism into which understanding inevitably fell when it was left to its own devices (i.e., thinking that knew and observed the rules of general and transcendental logic and did not suspect the treacherous pitfalls and traps of dialectics), and from the natural complement of this dogmatism, scepticism.
After this broadening of the subject matter of logic, after the inclusion in it both of the categorical schemas of thinking and principles of constructing theories (synthesis of all concepts), and after the comprehension of the constructive and regulative role and function of ideas in the movement of knowledge, this science acquired the right for the first time to be, and to be called, the science of thinking, the science of the universal and necessary forms and patterns of real thought, of the processing of the facts of experience and the facts of contemplation and representation. In addition, dialectics was also introduced into the structure of logic, as the most important branch crowning the whole, that same dialectics that had seemed, before Kant, either a ‘mistake’, only a sick state of the intellect, or the result of the casuistic unscrupulousness and incorrectness of individual persons in the handling of concepts. Kant’s analysis showed that dialectics was a necessary form of intellectual activity, characteristic precisely of thinking concerned with solving the highest synthetic problems and with constructing a theory claiming universal significance, and so objectivity (in Kant’s sense). Kant thus weaned dialectics, as Hegel put it, of its seeming arbitrariness and showed its absolute necessity for theoretical thinking.
Since it was the supreme synthetic tasks that were pushed to the foreground in the science of that period, the problem of contradiction (the dialectics of determinations of the concept) proved to be the central problem of logic as a science. At the same time, since Kant himself considered the dialectical form of thought a symptom of the futility of scientists’ striving to understand (i.e., to express in a rigorous system of scientific concepts) the position of things outside their own Ego, outside the consciousness of man, the problem also rapidly acquired ideological significance. The fact is that at that time the development of science was generating ever tenser conflicts between its theories, ideas, and conceptions. The Kantian ‘dialectic’ did not in fact indicate any way out, no path for resolving conflicts of ideas. It simply stated in general form that conflict of ideas was the natural state of science, and counselled ideological opponents everywhere to seek some form or other of compromise according to the rule of live and let live, to hold to their truth but to respect the truth of the other man, because they would both find themselves ultimately in the grip of subjective interests, and because objective truth common for all was equally inaccessible to both of them.
In spite of this good advice, however, not one of the really militant theories of the time wanted to be reconciled with such a pessimistic conclusion and counsel, and orthodoxy became more frantic in all spheres as the revolutionary storm drew nearer. When, in fact, it broke. Kant’s solution ceased to satisfy either the orthodox or the revolutionaries. This change of mood was also reflected in logic in the form of a critical attitude to the inconsistency, reticence, and ambiguity of the Kantian solution.
These moods were expressed most clearly of all in the philosophy of Fichte; through it the ‘monistic’ striving of the times to create a single theory, a single sense of law, a single system of all the main concepts on life and the world, also burst into the sphere of logic, into the sphere of understanding of the universal forms and patterns of developing thought.
Placed vaguely under the answering of its question ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’ in the affirmative. But what sort of brain process? It is natural to feel that there is something ineffable about which no mere neurophysiological process (with only physical intrinsic properties) could have. There is a challenge to the identity theorist to dispel this feeling.
Suppose that I am riding my bicycle from my home to the university. Suddenly I realise that I have crossed a bridge over a creek, gone along a twisty path for half a mile, avoided oncoming traffic, and so on, and yet have no memories of all this. In one sense I was conscious: I was perceiving, getting information about my position and speed, the state of the bicycle track and the road, the positions and speeds of approaching cars, the width of the familiar narrow bridge. But in another sense I was not conscious: I was on ‘automatic pilot’. So let me use the word ‘awareness’ for this automatic or subconscious sort of consciousness. Perhaps, I am not 100% on automatic pilot, nonetheless, one thing I might be absent-minded would be of thinking to the opposite direction to philosophy. Still, this would not be relevant to my bicycle riding. One might indeed wonder whether one is ever 100%, as perhaps, one hopes that one isn't, especially in Armstrong's example of the long distance truck driver (Armstrong 1962). Still it probably does happen, and if it does the driver is conscious only in the sense that he or she is alert to the route, of oncoming traffic etc., i.e., is perceiving in the sense of ‘coming to believe by means of the senses’. The driver gets the beliefs but is not aware of doing so. There is no suggestion of ineffability in this sense of ‘consciousness’, for which I will reserve the term ‘awareness’.
For the full consciousness, the one that puzzles us and suggests ineffability, we need the sense elucidated by Armstrong in a debate with Norman Malcolm. Somewhat similar views have been expressed by other philosophers, such as Savage (1976), Dennett (1991), Lycan (1996), Rosenthal (1996). A recent presentation of it is in Smart (2004). In the debate with Norman Malcolm, Armstrong compared consciousness with proprioception. A case of proprioception occurs when with our eyes shut and without touch we are immediately aware of the angle at which one of our elbows is bent. That is, proprioception is a special sense, different from that of bodily sensation, in which we become aware of parts of our body. Now the brain is part of our body and so perhaps immediate awareness of a process in, or a state of, our brain may here for present purposes be called ‘proprioception’. Thus the proprioception even though the neuroanatomy is different. Thus the proprioception that lay the groundwork for consciousness, as distinguished from mere awareness, the least be of mention, that it is highly organized by the coordinating oscillations from which are adjusted to combining the immeasurable quality values if, at all, the awareness makes more intensely of an order of magnitude, withdrawing upon their equalling of patterns, rules, functions, and so on, so much that the states of awareness prove relevantly significant? The perception of one part of (or configuration in) our brain by the brain itself. Some may sense circularity here. If so let them suppose that the proprioception occurs in an in practice negligible time after the process propriocepted. Subsequently, there can be proprioceptions of proprioceptions, proprioceptions of proprioceptions of proprioceptions, and so on up, since by some dogmatic religiousness, and purely non-epistemological companionship, that, in fact, such a sequential sequence will probably, if, and only if, there be to measurement, that this will not go up more than two or three steps. The last proprioception in the chronological succession that will not be propriocepted, and this may help to explain our sense of the ineffability of consciousness.
Place has argued that the function of the ‘automatic pilot’, to which he refers as ‘the zombie within’, is to alert consciousness to inputs that it identifies as problematic, while it ignores non-problematic inputs or reroutes them to output without the need for conscious awareness. For this view of consciousness; Space is the real world, while our world is an artificial one. It is the One Unity throughout its infinitude: in its bottomless depths as on its illusive surface; a surface studded with countless phenomenal Universes, systems and mirage-like worlds. Nevertheless, to the Eastern Occultist, who is an objective Idealist at the bottom, in the real world, which is a Unity of Forces, there is 'a connection of all matter in the plenum', as Leibnitz would say.
Most people think of space as a barren void, occupied at various points by diverse living and non-living entities. The vibrant life and dynamic interactions of these entities are usually seen as a complex web of causation wherein previous conditions bring about, through intermediate modes of transmission of energy, the present and future states of things. The persistence of discrete entities through time and their capacity for intense interaction with each other are both attributed to the more or less abstract material of which they are composed and the varying forces with which they are endowed. In such a conception, space itself is a purely neutral venue, capable, according to Locke, of neither resistance nor motion. The passive proscenium of Nature plays no part in the drama that unfolds among the entities making up the universe. From this perspective, the geometrical division of space into points is understood as a conceptual convenience that permits a description of the careers of entities in terms of spatial coordinates, but has no bearing upon the origin of those entities or the significance of their interactions.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The points comprising space are the real entities, the noumena of all things, and the origin of their epiphenomenal embodiment and material interaction. Beginning with the abstract Primordial Point, the successive orders of concretion within the geometric manifold of Space are identical with the series of states of existence sometimes spoken of as planes of consciousness and substance. The totality of these states constitutes the cosmos. The manifold points in each of these derivative and differentiated spaces are equivalent to a host of beings, and the limits and possibilities of their interactions are a function of the geometric characteristics of the space in which they exist as points.
Space includes myriads upon myriads of entities, invisible beings far beyond man's ability to comprehend, classify or even conceive. What is ordinarily called the world of manifestation is only an appearance, a skin that conceals the real activity of hosts of invisible beings in invisible space. Every point of every class is connected with every other point, and all points are essentially identical with the First Point. Known variously as the Divine Unmanifest Logos, the Pythagorean Monas and as Anu, the Primordial Atom, that Point is a nucleolus of Spirit-Matter. In the most fundamental sense, it is the metaphysical cosmos, and within the evolving elaboration of its intricate geometry all beings live, move and have their being. Within the cosmos, of which we can extract by our immediate visual perception through which we are only be capable of take to be, that, of all distinctions toward the subjective and objective interactions, form and function, entity and environment, identity and understanding, the interaction might that we say, have only to prove by some consequential circumstance, that we are, once, again, as to lay of rest the substantiations that lay the groundwork for through what has to a its found validity is different among their set categorical classes, in that, the elementarity that exists, when this process occurs with sufficiently intense emotion, energy or will, the resulting aggregate of elementarity assumes a definite shape. Then the idea becomes not just an incorporeal formless being in abstract space, but an incorporeal being that is enclosed corporeally in a more concrete space. Such forms, though invisible to the physical senses, are discrete entities on the astral plane. Through a similar process these may then give way, through the power of thought, to visible, dynamic forms in physical space. Thus, the potency of thought and the reality of ideas is the starting point of the Platonic conception of the universe as a living geometry in repose.
Crookes's great strength was in his courageous challenging of the prevailing notion of an element. More than simply questioning a particular physical interpretation of the concept of atoms as units of chemical combination, he challenged the hitherto unquestioned assumption that chemical atoms are themselves incapable of further subdivision. He refused to admit that the periodic table of elements, which successfully accounted for many of the chemical properties of physical compounds, included the ultimate elements of chemistry. Thus, Crookes anticipated much of what came to be discovered early in the twentieth century concerning the atomic constitution of physical matter. Now, of course, there are many subdivisions in the realm of subatomic physics, all of which were completely unknown in the nineteenth century, and virtually inconceivable in terms of nineteenth-century conceptions of atoms. Despite this radical reformulation of the science of chemistry and despite the tremendous advances that have been made in confirmation of what Crookes pointed out, the essential challenge implicit in his thought goes far beyond anything that has already happened. That challenge was made not merely in relation to the finality of any particular scheme of classification of constituents of matter, but also to the absolute conviction that there is ultimately a fundamental element or Prostyle. Though still unknown to science, this must eventually be discovered.
In her analysis, H.P. Blavatsky complimented Crookes on having set out two postulates. The first of these, the possible existence of a Prostyle, was argued for extensively by Crookes and was held by him to be connected with the nineteenth-century conception of 'radiant matter'. The second recognizes that if there is such a Prostyle, then there must be an ‘internal action akin to cooling, operating slowly in the Prostyle.’ Consider, for example, the behaviour of crystals, which require heating and cooling for their dissolution. But quite apart from crystals, which are, after all, only particular visible geometrical forms, Crookes's postulate regarding internal action echoes the doctrines of the ancient Gupta Vidya. If one goes behind all that is regarded as possible phenomena on the material plane, penetrating to the notion of a root matter or primordial Prostyle, it must be possible to relate this Prostyle to all manifestation. There must be some process of development within the pregenetic stage of manifestation that corresponds to internal activity in the Prostyle and can be represented as a kind of cooling. Gupta Vidya designates this substance-principle as the Father-Mother, and speaks of the hot and cold breaths within this principle as governing the processes of creation and dissolution through expansion and contraction. This is only an analogical account, but it does presuppose the existence of antecedent forms of energy having periodic cycles of ebb and swell, rest and activity. Once one grants such a possibility even in relation to the primordial Prostyle, one grants the possibility of a potential release, through cooling, of that which is latent.
Important as these two postulates of Crookes are, they must be supplemented by a third postulate, which is essential as a point of departure of esoteric science. This third postulate is that there is no such thing in Nature as an inorganic substance, or that whatever is seemingly inorganic is merely in a state of profound lethargy. If awakened, even the atoms within a stone become dynamic. In the course of Nature, this awakening takes place in cycles through Fohatic impulses. On a very wide scale, this progressive activation of points of life has to do with the differences between various Rounds and Races. But this awakening can also take place through the self-conscious intervention of an Adept. With sufficient knowledge, in theory and practice, of the inner nature of things, an Adept can, through concentrated ideation, quicken the sleeping atoms in anybody.
Given this potential, it is necessary to rethink together our customary distinctions between organic and inorganic. Like Leibniz, one must come to see the ubiquity and inexorable nature of the principle of continuity throughout all manifestation. Like Leibniz, one must acknowledge the continuity between mind and matter that is either obscured or missing in Cartesian thought. For Descartes, matter is characterized by extension in space, while mind is characterized by the power of thought. Whereas matter is held to be capable of interacting with matter, and mind can interact with mind, the radical difference between thought and extension, between mind and matter, creates a fundamentally dualistic system with a 'mind-body problem'. In such a system, 'force' is merely that which acts upon bodies from outside; all motion is understood as imparted motion, according to a Newtonian scheme.
Both Leibniz and Spinoza were in sharp disagreement with the Cartesian system. Spinoza argued that everything that exists ultimately derives from one homogeneous substance. By its essential nature, that substance has two necessary attributes, which may be put in terms of mind and matter, thought and extension. The one substance in the system of Spinoza corresponds to spirit-matter, the one substance-principle of Gupta Vidya. That substance-principle is able to manifest and maintain a myriad of modes of existence. Each of these modes has latent the power of preserving its own being; every mode of the one substance can maintain itself by its own inherent power of self-maintenance. Man, however, is that distinctive mode of substance that is capable of developing the power of reason. Therefore, man, as a mode of the one substance, is a rational being capable of preserving himself and seeing the world as it is through understanding what are the logically necessary preconditions and relations for all these modes of the one substance to exist. Through this capacity to comprehend the world and its laws of necessity, man can come closer to God. For Spinoza, God equals that one substance. Thus, through participating in the power of ideation, man is able to recognize, adore and apprehend the nature of the one divine substance.
Like Spinoza, Leibniz refused to absolutize the concept of Cartesian extension, but unlike Spinoza, who emphasized the principle of a single substance, Leibniz elaborated the proposition that everything that exists must be seen in terms of monads that are like mathematical points. Leibniz was influenced by the Pythagorean conception of the Monas, by Giordano Bruno's conception of monads and by the thought of Jan van Helmont. Each of Leibniz's monads is without extension, each has within itself a vital energy or entelechy, capable of moving it toward a full realization of what is potential within it. The whole of existence may be seen in terms of millions upon millions of monads, each a simple, incorporeal and indestructible spiritual unit or substance. These monads are inaccessible to all changes from without, but through the internal activity of the entelechy, capable of active expression of the essential nature of substance. Every monad, at any given time, contains within itself the sum of all its possible states, past, present and future. All of these are implicit in the present condition of the monad. The extent to which a monad will be able to realize its potential is determined by the clarity or obscuration of its intelligence. Every monad is a mirror of the totality of monads, and yet each monad is self-contained. Monads differ from each other not in relation to their essential capacity but in regard to their greater or lesser clarity in mirroring the whole.
Force becomes an active principle that inhabits mind and moves matter, and it may be seen as mediating between the two. In the Leibnizian system the entelechy is locked within each monad, but in Gupta Vidya the ray of Divine Thought in each Atma-Buddhic monad is, in its ultimate metaphysical nature, absolutely universal and uncircumscribed. Nevertheless, there is in Leibniz a very profound system that certainly could serve to change one's view of motion and inertia.
In the Newtonian system, the physical world is seen entirely in terms of relations between particles that impart motion to each other from without. Inertia is the tendency of an object to resist changes in its state of motion, whether by speeding up, slowing or changing direction. Motion is simply change of position in space. All interaction is understood in terms of the collision of objects with various velocities and inertias, resulting in various reactions evident in their changes of states of motion. The capacity of one body to alter the state of motion of another is referred to as a force. It is essential to this view that all action and interaction is accomplished through external contact of bodies. There is no ‘action at a distance’ in the Newtonian scheme. In Leibniz, however, the interior activity of the monad involves a quite different notion of the actualization of potential. Thus Leibniz, unlike Newton, did not analyse force and motion purely in terms of categories of physical geometry. Nor was he committed, like Newton, to a conception of physical space as purely neutral in relation to motion. Leibniz's conception of the abstract internal relations of monads is consistent with a conception of a series of progressively more abstract spaces, tending toward the conception of metaphysical Space.
While all monads possess the same essential internal capacity for action, they are not all equally conscious or all equally capable of acting. To account for this variety among monads, it is necessary to join certain elements of Spinoza's philosophy to Leibniz's monadology. Leibniz sought to encompass the entire range of mentality -including unconsciousness, partial unconsciousness and semi-consciousness, all the way to full consciousness -through the conception of apperception. Apperception is consciousness of perception. Therefore, apperception involves going beyond the mere capacity to experience sensation or even an awareness of one's capacity to know what one is doing. This awareness that one is, in fact, perceiving becomes in itself a crucial element in perception.
H. P. Blavatsky preferred to use the word 'apperception' more in the sense of 'semi-consciousness'. This she attributed to the entire field of monads and atoms, it being the one thing in common between them all. She tended to reserve the term 'perception' for those ranges of monadic activity that encompass self-consciousness. The vast hosts of merely apperceptive monads constitute the semiconscious vestured of other monads that are partially or fully self-conscious. In this series of ordered hierarchies, the less-developed monads constitute a kind of clothing for the gods. In Gupta Vidya the gods are not personal beings or vast elemental congeries of devas, but are rather arupa and rupa Dhyanis. The highest among these are fully perfected self-conscious beings, who stand at the head of the various cosmic hierarchies and can therefore clothe themselves in monads and atoms. In Spinoza's terms, these are beings who have realized the full wisdom of necessity and thereby have plumbed to the depths the mysteries of the one universal substance. Through this critical modification in Leibniz's system, one may avoid settling for the conversion of the Pythagorean supreme Monas into a personal God. It is questionable how much Leibniz really wanted to support the conception of a personal God, and how much of his accommodation in this area was due to a sense of prudence in relation to the church. Nevertheless, by joining the two systems, one can preserve all the advantages of Spinoza's form of subjective pantheism --with its acceptance of the multiplicity of modes of substance --and the advantages of Leibniz's objective pantheism, with its metaphysical scheme of abstract monadic individuation. By seeing these as two aspects of a single universal substance, one will come to recognize that there corresponds to monads and atoms hosts of Dhyanis or gods in the sense of universal self-conscious beings.
Clearly, such conceptions go far beyond any merely rational conceptions of prototypes in Nature. At the same time, they demand a fundamental concept of continuity that accommodates all possible forms of matter and degrees of mentality. Such a conception must span not only the manifest realms of existence but also the Unmanifest. It must accommodate the essence of matter that is pure Spirit. Seen from the standpoint of metaphysical continuity, all differentiations within metaphysical space are movements from lower to higher subdivisions of Spirit-Matter. In Gupta Vidya, what is demanded of the principle of continuity is that it must encompass everything that is potential in the Unmanifest. It must, therefore, be much more systematic and thoroughgoing than anything that could be generated through a rationalist metaphysical system. Further, within the framework of such a principle it would be necessary to generate a totally different notion of motion, one that transcends the dichotomy between manifest activity and apparent rest that is derived from the movement of objects and material particles in what is thought to be blank or empty space. For the occultist and the theurgist, there is tremendous activity going on in the interstellar and interplanetary spaces. In these seeming voids, shoals upon shoals of scintillas, atomic or monadic souls, wheel and whirl in endless spirals. That activity takes place on so vast and fundamental a cosmic scale that it is constantly affecting the manifested world in ways that cannot be explained in terms of the conventional categories of mind, matter or motion.
All of this is, therefore, terra incognita to modern science. If it is true, then the individual would be well advised to see how much wisdom there is in the metaphysical notion so well summed up by Philo Judaeus: The air is at all times full of invisible souls. Human beings are constantly in touch with vast congeries of invisible lives, elemental and gods. Every point in any space is the focus of energies that ultimately are commanded by Dhyanis or perfected beings. While this entire way of looking at the world is far beyond the frontiers of existing knowledge, it is, at the same time, hospitable to the earnest enquirer and honestly capable of doing full justice to the wisdom of the ancients. All the ancient cosmogonies, which are now often misconstrued as atheistic systems, assigned a central and active place to the notion of gods. These cosmogonies were only atheistic in that they dispensed together with the notion of some whimsical creator or single maker of the whole. The entire spectrum of ancient thought was a celebration of the possibilities of human perfectibility in a cosmos governed by Dhyanis. Furthermore, all the great hymns and mantrams of the ancient Aryans embody an exact knowledge of the basis of the conscious command by the perfected human being of gods, monads and atoms. It lies within the potentiality of man to attain an unlimited perspective at the very apex of the cosmos. There is no conception of perfectibility or sovereignty that is higher than that which is open to the perfected human being.
This might first be interpreted as a demand to return to a supposedly simple knowledge of things against the distortions of philosophical speculation. We now know that what is ever meant by the expression 'the things themselves' does not mean the simple apprehension of things, if what is meant by 'apprehension' is the direct unmediated knowledge of things.
Husserl would go far as to say that even God must see physical things in this way, due to the very fact that they exist in space, and could be present in no other way, unless they cease to be physical things. But it is equally clear, Husserl would say, if we simple reflect upon our perception of things, they we do not just see aspects and profiles, rather there is another element.
We need to stress again and again in Husserl, and it this that distinguishes him from the two world view of the metaphysics of subjectivity, as in the case in Descartes, and even in Kant, despite is critique of the intellectual intuition, is that he does not oppose appearance to essence. For Husserl, on the contrary essences appear. The essence of the object, the immanent object appears coextensively with the transcendent object. This, however, does not mean, as we will see, that the immanent and transcendent object are equivalent, for the transcendent object, in quite the opposite direction of the 'natural attitude' is dependent on the immanent object.
To grasp these distinctions I am going to use the example of the perception of the Ideas. Husserl writes: Let us start with an example. Constantly seeing this table and meanwhile walking around it, changing my position is space in whatever way, and I have continually the consciousness of this one identical table as factually existing ‘in person’ and remaining quite unchanged.
The claim, therefore, is that we are continuously conscious of this one and the same table as really existing yet our perceptions of it change. My perceptions of the object are perspectival while I am conscious of the table in person for being there as one thing. We can, therefore, also make a fundamental distinction between appearing and appearance. There is one and the same appearance, Husserl would say, though the appearing of this appearance is always changing. The one and the same appearance is the immanent object, and the changing manner of the appearance is the transcendent object. It is in this way of distinguishing between what appears and the appearance of what appears that we can see how phenomenology does not fall into the metaphysical opposition of appearance and essence, where the manner of the way something appears is supposed to me a sign of a deeper essence that is only available to intellectual intuition; that is to say the eyes of God.
What is the aim of phenomenological analysis is the structure of appearance? For it is this that gives a coherence and objectivity to our experience. We confuse objectivity with the transcendent object, but it is this object that is continually changing and therefore could never be the ground for scientific knowledge. It is the immanent object that gives unity and sense to our experience of things in the world. That I see this table as a table, even though its aspects are continually changing. It is this unity that is valid meaning of objectivity. This unity provided by the immanent object already organises, or synthesises Husserl would say, our experience of the world, prior to theoretical or scientific judgements that I might make of it. It is because the world is already organised by the immanent intentional structure of consciousness that we see things as having such and such meanings and therefore can make judgements about them. Husserl is very much against the empiricists’ view of knowledge that we first of all have sensations and then this sense data are secondarily organised into to recognisable objects. My experience of the world is already organised by the structure of intentionality before I have any sensations. Thus I do not hear noise outside my window, which I then in a second moment construct into the sound of a car, but straight away I hear a car. This is why my perceptions can always be disappointed, because my expectations might be disappointed. It is not a car, but the sound of the wind and so on. Appearing is already meaningful, but it does not require an act of judgement or the understanding to make it so.
We might be gaining some insight, therefore, into how the phenomenologists sees the world. It is not something that is outside of us in the sense of nature in the scientific or commonsense attitude. Rather the world should be understood as the network of meaning, or essences, which are the horizon in which we encounter objects. The world is this region of sense in which we are oriented. This world for Husserl is identical to the immanent life of consciousness. It is constituted through it. The key to understanding this claim, is to no longer to see the world on the analogy of a natural thing, but in terms of language. For the self same and identical appearance that appears at the heart of appearing is sense or meaning. It is not a natural thing, and nor does it have any basis in nature, yet it is the ground and possibility of our experience and judgement about nature. H. Hall make clear this transcendental function of consciousness in the following passage: What Husserl’s generalisation of the notion of meaning comes too is the claim that consciousness can and must be understood as active or interpretative in all its functions. Experience is never just the passive registering and subsequent associating of independently meaningful data. It involves the bringing to bear by consciousness of intensional structures or meanings (noemata) through which the systematic organisation of some less meaningful or relatively unstructured material is accomplished.
Husserl's work include lengthy treatment of universals, categories, meanings, numbers, manifolds, etc. from an ontological perspective. Here, however, we will concentrate almost exclusively on the Logical Investigations, which contain in a clear form the ontological ideas that provided the terminological and theoretical basis both for much of the detailed phenomenological description and for many of the metaphysical theses presented in Husserl's later works.
The ontology of the Logical Investigations is of interest first of all because of its clear conception of a formal discipline of ontology analogous to formal logic. (Here Husserl's thinking parallels Meinong's development of ontology as a general 'theory of objects.). Formal disciplines are set apart from 'regional' or 'material' disciplines in that they apply to all domains of objects whatsoever, so that they are independent of the peculiarities of any given field of knowledge.
Meinong’s most famous doctrine derives from the problem of ‘intentionality,’ which led him to countenance objects, such as the golden mountain, hat are capable of being the object of thought, although they do not actually exist. This doctrine was one of the principle targets of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions. However, it came as part of complex and interesting package of concepts in the theory of meaning, and scholars are not united in supporting that Russell was fair to it. Meinong’s works include, Über Annahmen (1907, trans., as On Assumptions, 1083) and, Über Möglichkeit und Wahrschein-lichkeit (1915).
Logic, as Husserl sees it, is concerned in the first place with meanings (propositions, concepts) and with associated meaning-instantiating acts. Most important, it is concerned with that sort of deductively closed collection of meanings that constitutes a scientific theory. For Husserl, as for Bolzano, logic is a theory of science. Only where we have an appropriate unity and organisation also on the side of the objects (states of affairs, properties) to which the relevant acts refer, however, will we have a scientific theory, so that the unity that is characteristic of the latter must involve both (1) an interconnection of truths (or of propositional meanings in general), and (2) an interconnection of the things to which these truths (and the associated cognitive acts) are directed.
Where formal logic relates in the first place to meaning categories such as proposition, concept, subject and predicate, its sister discipline of formal ontology relates to object categories such as object and property, relation and relatum, manifold, part, whole, state of affairs, existence and so on. Logic in a broader sense therefore seeks to delimit the concepts that belong to the idea of a unity of theory in relation to both meanings and objects, and the truths of logic are all the necessary truths relating to those categories of constituents, on the side of both meanings and objects, from out of which science as such is necessarily constituted (including what we might think of as bridge-categories such as identity and truth which span the division between meanings and objects).
Husserl's conception of the science of logic is not an arbitrary one.
For formal-ontological concepts are like the concepts of formal logic in forming complex structures in non-arbitrary, law-governed (‘recursive’) ways. And because they are independent of any peculiar material of knowledge, we are able to grasp the properties of the given structures in such a way as to establish in one go the properties of all formally similar structures.’
The term `formal ontology' has been given two different interpretations. The first of these, entirely in keeping with the mainstream of contemporary philosophy, has been what I will call analytic: formal ontology is that branch of ontology that is analysed within the framework of formal logic. The leading exponent of this approach has undoubtedly been Nino Cocchiarella.' On the premise that each particular science has its own `mode of being', Cocchiarella has written that 'metaphysics [ . . . ] -or what we might instead call formal ontology --is concerned with the study and development of alternative formalizations regarding the systematic coordination of all the 'modes' or 'categories of being' under the most general laws' (1). From this point of view, formal ontology studies the logical characteristics of predication and the various theories of universals.
The other interpretation, which I will call phenomenological, developed from Husserl's early works, in particular Logical investigations. As a first approximation, we may say that this approach mainly addresses the problems of parts and wholes and of dependence. Despite their differences, these two varieties of formal ontology quite frequently overlap each other, although to date there has been no systematic study of the categories and layers that constitute formal ontology and no systematic analysis of the issues addressed by it.
The best way to deal with Husserl's theory of formal ontology, therefore, is to explicate both the connections between the formal and material, and those between the ontological and the logical.
In introducing his distinction between formal and material ontology, Husserl asserts that the former is descriptive and involves analytic a priori judgements, and that the latter involves synthetic a priori judgements. In its most general sense formal ontology concerns itself with characterizing the simple `something'. Depending on how this `something' is conceived, Husserl adds, the `field of formal ontology should be the ‘formal region’ of the object in general' (Formale und transzendentale Logik 1929).
Characterizing material ontology is a more complicated matter, because the term can be interpreted in either of two ways. In the genetic interpretation it relates to the field of perception and its foundations (Husserl Krisis 1954, art. 6, sec. 1). In the descriptive interpretation, material ontology is instead optic and concerns the highest material genera, i.e., the material categories in which single ontologies are rooted (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenolgie 1913, vol. 1, art. 75). The sphere of material ontology in this sense are the laws of non-independence (2) which delimit the ontological regions. For the genetic interpretation, material ontology precedes formal ontology; for the descriptive interpretation it is the other way round (1913, art. 10). Here emerges `the fundamental distinction between formal and material ontology': namely, the distinction between analytic a priori and synthetic a priori.
Detailed treatment has never been given to the stratified connections between material ontology in the genetic sense, formal ontology, and material ontology in the regional sense. It would, however, go beyond my present brief to investigate this question in detail, even though one should have at least a general topographical outline in mind. The second opposition distinguishes the `formal' into ontological and logical. In this sense, we must not confuse or superimpose that which pertains to formal logic and that which pertains to formal ontology. Likewise, we should not superimpose or mix the formal and material meanings of the concepts used.’
‘The conception of a pure logic, -Husserl himself freely admitted that this was anything but a new idea. He mentions Kant, Herbart, Lotze, and Leibniz between its proponents and gives special credit for the nearly forgotten Bernhard Bolzano, 'one of the greatest logicians of all times.'
But Husserl's own blueprint shows several original features, among which I will mention merely what one might call the two-level structure of pure logic. The first level is that of the propositions or 'truths' studied by the logic of statements ('apophantics') as composed of meanings and their various combinations. The second level consists of the 'things' to which these statements refer, i.e., of the states of affairs (Sachverhalte) which they assert, the relations, complexes, and other configurations that they can enter and which are to be investigated by what Husserl calls a formal ontology.
Actually, this two-level pattern incorporates two one-level conceptions of pure logic, formulated most impressively by Bolzano and by Meinong respectively. Bolzano had organized his pure logic on the propositional level around representational ideas, propositions, and truths (Vorstellung un sich, Satz n sich, Wahrheit un sich). Meinong knew only of the 'state of affairs,' which he had named ‘Objektiv,’ and of other categories of formal ontology. Husserl's conception incorporated both these levels that of the propositions, which are valid or invalid, and that of the states of affairs, which do or do not ‘subsist,’ as Bertrand Russell rendered Meinong's term. (‘To be the case’ might be a less hypostasising equivalent of the rather harmless German word 'bestehen'.)
However, the development of this pure logic in Husserl's own published writings, originally planned for a third volume '(1) is rather sketchy, although the mathematician Husserl continued to show interest in its mathematical formalization. He even seems to have taken notice of Bertrand Russell's work, but remained sceptical toward the value of a merely symbolic logic and of logical calculus, in which he took no active share. His Formale and transzendentale Logik (1929) contains some important additions to the conception of pure logic. Among them is that of a third level of logic, likewise of ideal structure, namely, that of speech, which consists of the identical sentences that express our propositional meanings: ideal, since, even when uttered at different times and places and by different speakers, they remain identically the same sentences. ( . . . )
Husserl's major interest, once he had established the possibility of a pure logic, turned immediately to different problems. He left its more systematic development to works like Alexander Pfänder's Logik (1921), which investigated the logic of concepts, of propositions, and of inferences, and to studies undertaken by some of his students based on this work, which dealt with the logic of questions, of assumptions, and of laws and commands. Roman Ingarden, one of Husserl's Polish students, gave a particularly impressive application of this type of analysis to the literary work of art, in which he explored separately and in considerable detail its main strata such as that of the sounds, that of the meanings, and that of the object meant, without neglecting additional aspects and the total structure of the work.’
Husserl begins from a problem not unlike that of Descartes, the problem of the grounding of the sciences and the possibility of knowledge. Elizabeth Ströker explains the logical problems that Husserl initially took up arose from the state of the discipline of logic at that time, as well as Husserl's clear insight into the growing significance of this discipline for philosophy. In order to make up for a lack of conceptual clarity and rigour in the traditional philosophy of logic, a fundamental distinction first of all had to be made.
Ströker explains that logic, for Husserl, is neither a normative discipline nor a doctrine of the art of ‘right thinking,’ but, as a pure logic, it is the realm of analytic truths, formal laws and ‘principles’whose validity lies in their form alone, which constitutes the indispensable theoretical foundation that delimits the range of possibilities for any reality. Thus, pure logic is not merely one science among others. Rather it is the science of the most general, formal conditions of the possibility of science as such.4 Husserl is interested in returning to lived experience as lived, in order to disinter the logical structures that order that experience. It is these structures that will furnish the principles of ‘pure phenomenology,’ the unique science fundamental to all the sciences and to philosophy. However, in the course of Husserl's investigations of those structures, in Ideas, it becomes evident that, with regard to those acts of experience in the ego's primordial realm, only immanence is given absolutely, and therefore all claims about transcendence cannot be said to constitute datum, but only conjecture. Actual physical existence outside of intention is always contingent, even the physical thing that is given ‘in person.’
This conclusion sets in relief the problem with the ‘natural attitude’ whereby we approach the world unreflectively in our ‘common sense’ kind of way. We assumed the real existence of the things of the world as objects ‘out there’ with their own reality exposed as ‘self-evidence’ or concealed as some hidden substratum whose secrets are the object of scientific inquiry. But Husserl reminds us that the lived experience is the primordial sphere, and the objectification that occurs with the ‘natural attitude’ only ever secondary --already theoretical, already an interpretation of that original experience. An object existing in itself is never one with which consciousness or the Ego pertaining to consciousness has nothing to do. 7 We may experience the world of appearances that arise for us as a gathering of things which claim to exist independent of the experience, but that claim, accepted naively by the ‘natural attitude,’ is posited by those things within the primordial sphere of the lived experience.
Since the reality of those things that appear in the primordial sphere is only ever derivative, and since even the intrinsic intelligibility of the experience of them as real does not establish their reality, we can have no certainty whatsoever regarding their actual existence. What we mean by calling the world ‘real,’ then, is that it can be experienced. Thus, the very premises of Husserl's ‘pure phenomenology’ result in a troubling conclusion: despite all my well-founded statements about the world of my experience, about the existence of other egos that share that world, and about the psychophysical interconnections that I experience with them, those experiences do not require, for their existence, any other actual entity outside of me, as experiencer
Consciousness considered in its ‘purity’ must be held to be a self-contained complex of being, a complex of absolute being into which nothing can penetrate and out of which nothing can slip, to which nothing is spatiotemporally external and which cannot be within any spatiotemporal complex, which cannot be effected by any physical thing and cannot exercise causation upon any physical thing --it being presupposed that causality has the normal sense of causality pertaining to Nature as a relationship of dependence between realities.
Husserl initiates the phenomenological project beginning from the Cartesian Cogito, employing the radical doubt at the heart of that rigorous method to ‘bracket’ the assumptions made by the ego in the unthinking, commonsense stance of the ‘natural attitude.’ Cartesian dualism cannot even become a problem for the phenomenologists, since the single stream of consciousness becomes the one material for his reflection, and here, another mind's existence is every bit as contingent as another body. For the phenomenologists, the problem becomes: how does the ego break free from its self-imprisonment in the stream of consciousness and make contact with another?
Husserl responds to the charge that transcendental phenomenology results in a solipsism that militates against phenomenology's claim to be viable philosophy. Husserl admits that this criticism ‘may seem to be a grave objection,’ (emphasis mine), rephrasing the charge in phenomenological language: When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epoché do I not become solus ipse. Do I not remain that as long as I carry on a consistent self-explication under the name phenomenology?
Husserl summarizes the critics' concerns: ‘if phenomenology cannot really reach the Other from the hypostasis of the transcendentally reduced realm, is it merely a well-intended, thought-provoking experiment that nevertheless has no claim to being a valid philosophy? Does transcendental phenomenology have nothing whatsoever to add to the problem of how to understand our world and our ethical place therein? If phenomenology is to be branded ‘transcendental solipsism,’ can it claim to solve, from within the limits of the transcendentally reduced ego, the transcendental problems pertaining to an Objective world?’ Husserl concludes: ‘...and indeed it seems obvious that such unities [other entities constituted in my stream of pure conscious processes] are inseparable from my ego and therefore belong to his concreteness of self (emphasis mine). The problem does appear to be a ‘grave’ one. The world as disclosed in lived experience is always a world for me. Its concreteness can never be separated from its concreteness in my experience of it. The world's real being can never be claimed with certitude solely by reference to my experiences of it. Its independent reality could perhaps be explained if I could be certain of the existence of other monads, other egos, who, through their experiences of it, share the world with me. Objectivity could be posited and exhibited if diverse theses of objective being which originate for different subjects could be shown to harmonize. But the real existence of other egos falls prey to the same difficulty as the existence of the rest of the objective world. The Fourth Meditation's reduction only underscored this fact when it led to the logical consequence that all being is reduced to ‘being-sense,’ and all sense is part of the intentional life of the ego. It seems, then, that all difference, ‘smoothed out’ by means of the eidetic variations, is thus absorbed and negated, sucked up into my own conscious life.
Husserl notes that transcendental phenomenology seems to share this problem with transcendental realism, since both essentially result in a search for a path that might connect the immanency of the ego with the transcendency of the Other. It appears as though for both: The Nature and the whole world that are constituted ‘immanently’ in the ego are only my ‘ideas’ and have behind them the world that exists in itself. The way to this world must still be sought.
Husserl takes very seriously the critics' objections, affirming their suspicion that reaching the Other directly from within the epoché is utterly problematic. However, the language he employs in explicating the objection repeatedly yawns a gap between the seriousness of the charge and the ‘seeming’ nature of the charge. ‘The problem seems to be . . . ‘; ‘It appears as though . . . ‘ What is suggested by underscoring the ‘seeming’ nature of the charge is that the problem that is commonly considered threatening to the viability of phenomenology be only a problem that ‘seems’ to be. The nature of that ‘seeming’ is left to stand for the moment, unresolved, unglorified.
Husserl continues his account of the charges against phenomenology, but now he executes a shift --a subtle shift that converts the gaze of the problematic from the charge levelled from outside phenomenology's project into a challenge to be taken up within the project. He asks: But what about other egos, who surely are not a mere intending in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely others? The problem now has ceased to be ‘How can we have direct knowledge of the Other within the primordial realm?’ but has become ‘What does it mean, in view of the impossibility of the ego's direct access to the Other, that the very 'sense' by which he presents himself to me includes the claim of absolute otherness?’ This shift of perspective, from the outside looking into the inside looking out of the ego's primordial realm permits an insight into the ‘seeming’ nature of the externally-levelled charge. This is further clarified with the ‘unavoidable’ corollary to the question concerning the seeming identity of phenomenology's problematic with that of transcendental idealism. The difference between the two lies in the fact that: The very question of the possibility of actually transcendent knowledge -- . . . this question cannot be asked purely phenomenologically.
Husserl reasserts that the very field of knowledge for the transcendental ego has to do exclusively with what is synthetically comprised within the transcendental ego itself. Phenomenology begins from that self-understanding. Phenomenology in principle chooses the method of a self-imposed solipsism, deliberately bracketing out all claims to objective existence in order to investigate what such claims intend. In reducing the subject to the absolute transcendental ego through the phenomenological epoché, the subject is rendered radically isolated. He is circumscribed as solus ipse and remains thus for as long as phenomenology is being carried out, precisely in order to arrive at a consistent self-explication. The charge that the processes and unities that comprise the stream of pure consciousness are inseparable from the ego is an absurd charge, from the point of view of the phenomenological project. The question that is being raised as an objection from without cannot even be asked within the phenomenological project itself. It can never become a problem for phenomenology to explain why it cannot pretend to achieve that which it does not intend to achieve, that which is, so to speak, not its business to achieve. Johanna Tito explains: The very thought of a transcendental ‘outside’ with respect to my field of consciousness would be absurd.
However, Husserl does not abandon the problem in view of its inapplicability to phenomenology, but, rather, takes up the objection as a challenge to be addressed from within the epoché . . . it might indeed be more fitting to undertake the task of phenomenological explication indicated in this connection by the ‘alter ego’ and carry it through in concrete work.
Rather than dismiss the charge, Husserl chooses to put it to concrete use as an opportunity to investigate a new realm. He allows the charge to determine the new philosophical task. One more appropriate to phenomenology. We must, after all, obtain for ourselves insight into the implicit and explicit intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced and verified in the realm of our transcendental ego; we must discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense ‘ other ego’ becomes fashioned in me and, under the title, harmonious experience of someone else, becomes verified as existing and even as itself there in its own manner.
The problem now has to do with explaining the phenomenal fact that, in limiting my reflection to the stream of my own conscious mental processes and my own lived experiences, otherness somehow forces itself in upon me, compelling me to attribute physical truth to its existence, compelling me to experience it as absolute otherness even where I know that experience is mine, is fashioned within me and verified within me. Though I know all experiences to be mine, I do nevertheless experience this world not as my world, but as a ‘real world’ independent of my positing, a ‘world of phenomena’ there for other egos to experience as well. And I do experience other beings, ‘alter egos,’ in the mode of a self-presentation within my conscious life, with an originality and a specificity that requires my conclusion of their radical otherness. How are we to understand? : the datum's forcing itself against the ego as a cause of the ego's turning-toward, of becoming wakeful or reflective. Thought thrown back on itself, reflective thought, is at the same time pulled out of itself and forced to go beyond itself.
This new problem, replacing the external objection, will be the focus of Husserl's contemplation throughout the remainder of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation.
However, we must ask why Husserl chooses to take up the problem of solipsism, levelled by critics from a position external to phenomenology, if the charge is not one that is genuinely applicable and meaningful within the phenomenological project. On the one hand, the objection is taken up as an act of sheer philosophical courage on Husserl's part In fact, that decision underlines the phenomenological perspective itself: to investigate all things that arise in lived experience, and most especially those things that appear as most certain, for Husserl understood it to be phenomenology's task to be surprised at what is taken for granted in the ‘natural attitude’ --to wonder at what arises as already ‘self-evident.’
But, perhaps even more significantly, the external objection is taken up because it sets in relief the new problem, the problem of explaining the sense of ‘otherness’ contained in the experience of the Other, and this new problem is one of serious import, having truly ‘grave’ consequences for phenomenology. Paul Ricoeur calls it ‘the touchstone of transcendental phenomenology . . . extending much further than the merely psychological question of the way in which we know other men.’ Ricoeur explains what is at stake: (1) the objectivity of the world insofar as it is the object of a plurality of subjects, and (2) the reality of the historical communities built upon the network of exchanges going on among real men. In this respect the problem of the Other plays the same role in Husserl that the divine veracity plays in Descartes, for it grounds every truth and reality that goes beyond the simple reflection of the subject on itself.
Thus it can be argued that the new problem, the problem of how the transcendental ego experiences the Other as other, has far more at stake than the external charge, since it puts into question the credibility of phenomenology from within. The gravity of this problematic can be witnessed by the fact that it became the focus of Husserl's thought for four decades beginning in 1910. In the remainder of the Fifth Meditation, Husserl will confront the paradox of the self-presentation of the Other as other, taking the ‘modes of givenness’ of the experience of the Other as his ‘guiding thread. Husserl will go on in the Fifth Meditation to clarify the sense of the Other, to explicate him as a special mode of transcendence, to demonstrate that otherness creeps into the seemingly solipsistic primordial realm of transcendental experience even in its most radical reduction in the state of ‘ownness. The full course of these investigations cannot be treated here, but we wish to draw out the implications of that experiment with respect to the ‘grave objection’ from which the current analysis began. An important consequence of this experiment speaks directly to that original charge of solipsism and at the same moment opens, in phenomenology, an ethical dimension with which it is rarely credited. The paradox of the impossible yet undeniable meeting place of the I and the Other emerges as a paradox only in the failure of solipsism, in the demonstrated impossibility of erasing the Other from my world. The second degree reduction, the radical reduction to the sphere of my ‘ownness,’ forces me to confront the limit of that purification, the terminus that refuses to yield to my reflective operation. Tito describes the limit succinctly: In descriptive psychological terms, one might say that through lack of gratification, I become aware of my limitations, I begin to define myself (fines= boundaries, limits) and am at the same time thrust on the path of seeking to restore the sense of continuity that has been disrupted, to restore my strength. The latter necessitates thought to go into the world and to make of it an ally.
No matter how I attempt to purge it of the alien, my primordial sphere becomes the space that always collapses into a site of constitution, my ‘ownness’ becoming a point of departure from the ‘me’ and an entry point of the Other. Husserl sketches the implications of this encroachment: The fact of experience of something alien (something that is not I), is present as experience of an Objective world and others in it (non-Ego in the form: other Ego); and an important result of the ownness reduction was that it brought out a substratum belonging to them, an intentional substratum in which a reduced ‘world’ shows itself, as an ‘immanent transcendency.
The inevitable arrival of the Other in my world demonstrates that the I ‘owns’ nothing that is entirely its own. Contrary to the ‘grave’ objections of phenomenology's critics, every dimension of the primordial realm is invaded by the Other. The ego is never enclosed only within its own self. In fact, on the contrary, it is clear that my world only comes about -and comes about in the richness and the fullness that characterize it as a world -as a result of that encroachment, since the ‘transcendent world,’ regardless of its ideality as a synthetic unity belonging to an infinite system of my potentialities, . . . is . . . a determining part of my own concrete being. I come to be with the arrival of the Other. The invasion of the Other achieves something that, alone, the ego cannot accomplish. Through the Other, the ego's world takes shape, accomplishes a density that emerges precisely because of the limitations imposed by the foreign upon the ego's sphere of ‘ownness.’ His world is built upon the impossibility of his absolute dominion.
Therefore, it is the conclusion of this paper that Husserl does not take up the problem of the objective world because he considers it a ‘grave objection’ which threatens the very viability of phenomenology as philosophy. Rather, he takes up the objection as a challenge to phenomenology in order to call into question one of phenomenology's own deepest conclusions up to this point-the absolute dominion of the ego in the transcendental realm of his own lived experience. As David Carr expresses this, this project reflects back on phenomenology as a whole, calling into question one of its most explicitly Cartesian elements, its dependence on the apodicticity of the ego Cogito.
Solipsism is traditionally a Cartesian problem, or possibly a Leibnizian one. And Husserl is often mistaken as attempting a Cartesian or Leibnizian solution to it. But this is another misunderstanding on the part of phenomenology's critics. Rather, the objection of solipsism affords Husserl the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of the phenomenological method for revealing dimensions of existence that do not readily offer themselves up to the common sense gaze. The result of the Fifth Meditation's reflections upon the question of intersubjectivity reveals the limitations that reside within the constitutive powers of the ego. And it reveals the impossibility of arriving at a full account of the Other as a being-for-me. Significantly, only with the investigation of the excluded Other from the ‘solipsistic’ realm of the ego's stream of consciousness does the uniqueness of other human beings come to the fore. Others are revealed in the Fifth Meditation as absolutely other than any other entity that enters my primordial realm. The ‘alter ego’ is not even susceptible of the kind of treatment afforded other kinds of things within the world. He cannot even be considered purely as meant. This revelation underscores the phenomenal fact, deeply laced with ethical meaning, that other egos are not reducible to the certain kind of appresentation that I have of them. Though the Other ‘gives’ himself to me in my lived experiences, that ‘giving’ is accomplished against my will, not in submission to it. And even once ‘given,’ unlike represented objects, he cannot even be considered truly ‘given.’ He gives himself to me, but he exists only for him. Phenomenology is a rationality, a reflection on the stream of consciousness that studies the essential structures of a wakeful ego. The Fifth Meditation demonstrates that this ego is intersubjective through and through, from the lowest level of sensible awareness of other things in the world to the highest level at which the Cogito willfully grasps the Other ego in his view. By the end of the Fifth Meditation, we see Husserl insisting upon the equal dignity, even the primacy of intersubjective phenomenology and its correlate, transcendental intersubjectivity.
The point of that Meditation, then, is not merely to consider the ‘grave objection’ of solipsism to the project of phenomenology, but, rather, to demonstrate the paradox of the invaded solipsism that distinguishes phenomenology from other idealistic philosophies. Husserl had already exposed the fact that objective thought, forgetful of its origin in lived experience, runs the risk of falsifying its understanding of its own world and others in its world. A naive phenomenology reveals the falsification of that common sense attitude, but, considered purely logically, issues in a solipsism. However, a deeper phenomenology, performed through a more radical reduction, exposes the falsity of that naive phenomenology, exposes the radical intersubjective nature of all egos.
Heidegger's Being in the World starts from the assumption that humans are inseparable from their world. That is, the essence of human existence is inseparable from the surrounding social, natural, and divine world. As Gray (1957) describes man, of holding to some untold story of being human, this reality must be discovered in the world and the world belongs to his reality. All of what we are and ought be, is the consciousness of some challenging dialectic awarenesses that brings within it, both a conceptual and contentual representation for which we are to think or to experience of the analytic situation, and that be within that world. (Haar, 1993). Gray (1957) goes on to say that Heidegger believed that: The ontological reality of the non-human world cannot appear through the manipulations of man. But things will not appear as things, he hastens to add, `without the alertness of mortals.` In other words, human beings form an integral part of reality, a necessary part of the whole. Humans are never isolated subjects, according to Heidegger, rather their very essence is constituted by their world.
The concept of Being (always capitalized) is central to Heidegger view of reality. Being is allowing the self-revealing or self-manifesting of other beings. As Guignon, `Being comes to be thought of as a temporal event, a `movement into presence` inseparable from the understanding of being embodied in Daseins forms of life. It is the event (Ereignis) of disclosedness in which entities come to be appropriated into intelligibility.` (Dasein is a German expression (lit: being there) used by Heideggerean scholars, and by Heidegger himself, to refer to human existence.)
Heidegger said that very way of looking at it is all wrong. You simply can't have the ‘mind’ part without the ‘stuff out there’ part and you can't have the ‘stuff out there part’ without the ‘mind’ part. You cannot just have ‘the thing that spews lava occasionally’ without also, always, at the same time, having an ‘angry god’ or ‘plate tectonics’ and vice versa. You cannot have ‘things’ without also having something that knows them. You can't have knowledge without things to know. We have already learned that our knowledge of things is always understood through the filter of a paradigm. We interpret things and events that appear to us.
Heidegger says that there is a type of creature where things in the world and interpretations of what those things are comes together. It is called a ‘Dasein.’ A Dasein combines, no–is the combination of real events in the world with the meaningful interpretation--the ‘knowledge’--of what they are.
Heidegger inquired about what we are. What he came up with was that we are a particular type of creature called a ‘Dasein’ which means ‘the there-being.’ What Heidegger means by this is that we are always there, in a world full of real things that then must be given some kind of meaning. The key here is that there is no world without a meaningful interpretation and there is no meaningful interpretation without a world. We are the ‘creature-that-interprets.’ Homo hermeneuticus.
So, for instance, a volcano is a real event in the world. A Dasein is the creature that combines this with a meaningful interpretation such as ‘angry god’ or ‘a mechanistic result of geology and plate tectonics.’ The things in the world and our interpretations are not two separate, mechanistic parts. They are one whole thing. You can't have one without the other. They are not two interacting parts. They are two sides of the same coin.
In general, most people interpret the world according to how they have been taught to interpret it. Daseins though, do have a small degree of freedom to choose how to interpret events. For instance, if you have a fight with your best friend how will you interpret it? What will it mean to you? Was she just having a bad day? Maybe he has the flu? Perchance, you may have done something to anger her? Perhaps he has found someone he likes better and doesn't want to be your friend anymore? How will you interpret the fight? Only a Dasein has such an ability to choose what things will mean. If you were abused as a child does that mean ‘you have an excuse,’ ‘need help,’ or ‘it doesn't matter now?’ Everything we experience is a combination of real things and what they mean to us.
We never know things in themselves, as they actually are. We only know our meaningful interpretations of things, and we have some freedom to change interpretations. We interpret in ways no other animal displays. Other animals do not appear to be Daseins. Their interpretation of events in the world appears to be solely a result of genetic programming and training (think of pet tricks). Basically, for animals that are not Dasein, things are either ‘’safe’ or ‘not safe,’ ‘comfortable’ or ‘not comfortable.’ Daseins, however, are not so constrained.
We live in a world of quarks and neutrons, pulsars and black holes. Other animals only have comfort, hunger, and such. Our relationships with others of our kind have frustration, justice, love, hate and infinite gradations of thought and feeling. Other animals have attraction or avoidance. We manipulate the natural world in unbelievable ways. I mean, we don't react to the moon by howling. We build a ship and go there! We display evidence of reflective awareness of our own existence and nonexistence in monuments and art that is not seen in any other animal. We are distinct and unique. We are Dasein. Space has a history. In the cosmology of classical Greece, as F. M. Cornford writes, ‘the universe of being was finite and spherical, with no endless stretch of emptiness beyond. Space had the form of . . . a sphere with centre and circumference.’ This classical-space essentially survived the biblically derived ‘flat earth’ of early Christian doctrine, to reemerge in the late Middle Ages. In medieval cosmology, supercelestial and celestial spheres encompassed, but did not touch, a terrestrial sphere -the space of human action -in which every being, and each thing, had a place preordained by God and was subject to. His omnivoyant gaze. Foucault has termed this medieval space the ‘space of emplacement’; this space, he observes, was effectively destroyed by Galileo: ‘For the real scandal of Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved . . . starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localisation.
The vehicle of this changed cosmology was Euclidean geometry. Euclid wrote the Elements of Geometry around 300 BC. Husserl, in The Origin of Geometry, supposes that this system arose out of practical activities, such as building. However, the classical conception of space seems to have been based upon visual evidence rather than technique the horizon appears to encircle us, and the heavens appear to be vaulted above us. In the Renaissance this conflict between observation and intellection, between hyperbolic and Euclidean space, has played out during the early stages of the invention of perspective. (The absence of a necessary connection between knowledge of Euclidean geometry and the development of perspective is evident from the example of the Islamic world.) In the West, the primacy of geometry over perception was stressed by St Augustine, who wrote: ‘reason advanced to the province of the eyes . . . It found . . . that nothing that the eyes beheld, could in any way be compared with what the mind discerned. These distinct and separate realities it also reduced to a branch of learning, and called it geometry.
Although dependent upon Euclid’s Elements, Renaissance perspective took its most fundamental concept from Euclid’s Optics. The concept is that of the ‘cone of vision’. Some two thousand years after Euclid, Brunelleschi conceives of this same cone as intersected by a plane surface -the picture-plane. By means of this model, something of the pre-modern world view passes into the Copernican universe -a universe that is no longer geocentric, but which is nevertheless homocentric and egocentric. A basic principle of Euclidean geometry is that space extends infinitely in three dimensions. The effect of monocular perspective, however, is to maintain (he idea that this space does nevertheless have a centre -the observer. By degrees the sovereign gaze is transferred from God to Man. With the ‘emplacement’ of the medieval world now dissolved, this ocular subject of perspective, and of mercantile capitalism, is free to pursue its entrepreneurial ambitions wherever trade winds blow.
Entrepreneurial humanism first took liberties with, then eventually replaced, theocentric determinism, according to a model that is implicitly Aristotelian. And in a manner that exemplifies the way in which spatial conceptions are projected into the representation of political relationships. In Aristotle’s cosmological physics it was assumed that the preponderance of one or other of the four elements first posited by Empedocles (earth, water, air and fire) would determine the place of that body within a continuum from the centre to the periphery of the universe. This continuum of actual and potential ‘places’ constituted space. Analogously, the idea that a human being will find his or her natural place within the social space of differential privileges according to his or her ‘inherent’ qualities has remained a cornerstone of humanist-derived political philosophies. Newton disengaged space per se from Aristotelian ‘place’, and Newtonian physics was in turn overtaken by the physics of Einstein, in which, in the words of Minkowski, ‘space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality’. More recently, the precepts of general relativity have themselves come into question in ‘quantum theory’. The cosmology of modern physics has nevertheless had little impact on the commonly held world view in the West, which is still predominantly an amalgam of Newton and Aristotelianism -‘places in space’, a system of centres of human affairs (homes, workplace, cities) deployed within a uniform regular and vaguely endless ‘space in itself’.
In the modernist avant-garde in art, references to a mutation in the apprehension of space and time brought about by modern physics and mathematics are usual. Thus, for example, in 1925 El Lissitsky wrote: ‘Perspective bounded and enclosed space, but science has since brought about a fundamental revision. The rigidity of Euclidean space has been annihilated by Lobachevsky, Gauss, and Riemann. Nevertheless, modernists more commonly ascribed the changed apprehension of space not to scientific concepts per se, but rather to technology. Thus, Vertov wrote: ‘I am the cinema-eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, can show you the world as only I can see it . . . I ascend with aeroplanes, I fall and rise together with failing and rising bodies.’ Constrained by mechanical metaphors, Russian futurism, like cubism, ultimately failed -notwithstanding El Lissitsky’s pronouncement -to abandon Euclidean geometry. The mirror of perspectival representation was broken only in order that its fragments, each representing a distinct point of view, be reassembled according to classical geometric principles -to be returned, finally, to the frame and the proscenium arch.
In the modern period, space was predominantly space traversed (by this token we judge that the prisoner has little of it). In the ‘postmodern’ period, the speed with which space is traversed is no longer governed by the mechanical speed of machines such as aeroplanes, but rather by the electronic speed of machines such as computers and video links, which operate at nearly the speed of light. A mutation in technology therefore had, arguably, brought the technologies inherited from the spatial perceptions of modernist aesthetics into line with the perceptions of modern physics. Thus, for example, Paul Virilio writes that ‘technological space . . . is not a geographical space, but a space of time’. In this space/time of electronic communications, operating at the speed of light, we see things, he observes, ‘in a different light’ -the ‘light of speed’. Moreover, this space seems to be moving, once again, toward self-enclosure. For example, David Bolter, a classics professor writing about computer programming, concludes, ‘In sum, electronic space has the feel of ancient geometric space.’ One of the phenomenological effects of the public applications of new electronic technologies is to cause space to be apprehended as ‘folding back’ upon itself. Spaces once conceived of as separated, segregated, now overlapped: live pictures from Voyager II, as it passes through the rings of Saturn, may appear on television sandwiched between equally ‘live’ pictures of internal organs, transmitted by surgical probes, and footage from Soweto. A counterpart, in the political sphere, of the fold-over spaces of information technologies is terrorism. In the economic sphere it is the tendency of multinational capitalism to produce First World irruptions in Third World countries, while creating Second World pockets in the developed nations. To contemplate such phenomena is no longer to inhabit an imaginary space ordered by the subject-object ‘stand-off’ of Euclidean perspective. The analogies which fit best are now to be found in non-Euclidean geometries -the topologist’s Mobius strip, for example, where the apparently opposing sides prove to be formed from a single, continuous, surface.
Space, then, has a history. It is not, as Kant would have it, a product of a priori, inherently Euclidean. Categories. It is a product of representations. Primordial space is imbounded, as things within it are assigned a place along a predominant vertical axis -heaven-earth-hell, or the ‘chain of being’ to extend from God down to stones. Modern space (inaugurated in the Renaissance) is Euclidean, horizontal, infinitely extensible, and therefore, in principle, boundless. In the early modern period it is the space of the humanist subject in its mercantile entrepreneurial incarnation. In the late modern period it is the space of industrial capitalism, the space of an exponentially increased pace of dispersal, displacement and dissemination of people and things. In the ‘post-modern’ period it is the space of financial capitalism -the former space in the process of imploding or ‘unfolding’; to appropriate a Derridean term, it is space in the process of ‘intravagination’. Twenty years ago Guy Debord wrote about the unified space of capitalist production, ‘which is no longer bounded by external societies’, the abstract space of the market which ‘had to destroy the autonomy and quality of places’, and he commented: ‘The society which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation’. Such ‘internal distance’ is that of Psychical space. Nevertheless, as I have already remarked, psychoanalytically inspired theories of representation have tended in recent years to remain faithful to the Euclidean geometrical-optical metaphors of the modern period.
One thing that happened during the Renaissance that was of great importance for the later character of modern philosophy was the birth of modern science. Even as in the Middle Ages philosophy was often thought of as the ‘handmaiden of theology,’ modern philosophers have often thought of their discipline as little more than the ‘handmaiden of science.’ Even for those who haven't thought that, the shadow of science, its spectacular success and its influence on modern life and history, have been hard to ignore.
For a long time, philosophers as diverse as David Hume, Karl Marx, and Edmund Husserl have seen the value of their in work in the claim that they were making philosophy ‘scientific.’ Those claims should have ended with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who for the first time clearly provided a distinction between the issues that science could deal with and those that it couldn't, but since Kant's theory could not be demonstrated the same way as a scientific theory, the spell of science, even if it is only through pseudo-science, continues.
The word ‘science’ itself is simply the Latin word for knowledge: scientia. Until the 1840's what we now call science was ‘natural philosophy,’ so that even Isaac Newton's great book on motion and gravity, published in 1687, was The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis). Newton was, to himself and his contemporaries, a ‘philosopher.’ In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley written in 1800, Thomas Jefferson lists the ‘sciences’ that interest him as, ‘botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy [this probably means physics], agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, law, arts, fine arts.’ The list begins on familiar enough terms, but we hardly think of history, ethics, or the fine arts as ‘sciences’ anymore. Jefferson simply uses to the term to mean ‘disciplines of knowledge.’
Something new was happening in natural philosophy, however, and it was called the nova scientia, the ‘new’ knowledge. It began with Mikolaj Kopernik (1473-1543), whose Polish name was Latinized to Nicolaus Copernicus. To ancient and mediaeval astronomers the only acceptable theory about the universe came to be that of geocentrism, that the Earth is the centre of the universe, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars moving around it. But astronomers needed to explain a couple of things: why Mercury and Venus never moved very far away from the sun--they are only visible a short time after sunset or before sunrise--and why Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn sometimes stop and move backwards for a while (retrograde motion) before resuming their forward motion. Believing that the heavens were perfect, everyone wanted motion there to be regular, uniform, and circular. The system of explaining the motion of the heavenly bodies using uniform and circular orbits was perfected by Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Egypt probably during the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180). His book, still known by its Arabic title, the Almagest (from Greek Tò Mégiston, ‘The Greatest’), explains that the planets are fixed to small circular orbits (epicycles) which they are fixed to the main orbits. With the epicycles moving one way and the main orbits the other, the right combination of orbits and speeds can reproduce the motion of the planets as we see them. The only problem is that the system is complicated. It takes something like 27 orbits and epicycles to explain the motion of five planets, the sun, and the moon. This is called the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.
Copernicus noticed that it would make things a lot simpler (Ockham's Razor) if the sun were the centre of motion rather than the earth. The peculiarities of Mercury and Venus, not explained by Ptolemy, now are explained by the circumstance that the entire orbits of Mercury and Venus are inside the Earth's orbit. They cannot get around behind the Earth to be seen in the night sky. The motion of Mars and the other planets is explained by the circumstance that the inner planets move faster than the outer ones. Mars does not move backwards; it is simply overtaken and passed by the Earth, which makes it look, against the background, as though Mars is moving backwards. Similarly, although it looks like the stars move once around the Earth every day, Copernicus figured that it was just the Earth that was spinning, not the stars. This was the Copernican Revolution.
Now this all seems obvious. But in Copernicus's day the weight of the evidence was against him. The only evidence he had was that his system was simpler. Against him was the prevailing theory of motion. Mediaeval physics believed that motion was caused by some forming ‘impetus.’ Things are naturally at rest. Just as an impulsion that makes in of something have to locomotion, and just as it runs out, leaving the object to slow and place in rest. Something that continues moving therefore has to keep being pushed, and pushing is something you can feel. (This was even an argument for the existence of God, sometimes often comes of something very big
-instances from God -for which, of pushing to keep the celestial orchestrations going.) So if the Earth and Heaven remain unified, might that we that is, our spatiality is moving, and why don't we feel its temporal state? Copernicus could not answer that question. Neither was there an obvious way out of what was actually a brilliant prediction: If the stars did not move, then they could be different distances from the earth. As the earth moved in its orbit, the nearer stars should appear to move back and forth against more distant stars. This is called ‘stellar parallax,’ but unfortunately stellar parallax is so small that it was not observed until 1838. So, at the time, supporters of Copernicus could only contend, lamely, that the stars must all be so distant that their parallax could not be detected.
Copernicus was also worried about getting in trouble with the Church. The Protestant Reformation had started in 1517, and the Catholic Church was not in any mood to have any more of its doctrines, even about astronomy, questioned. So Copernicus did not let his book be published until he lay dying.
The answers, the evidence, and the trouble for Copernicus's system came with Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Galileo is important and famous for three things: (1) Most importantly he applied mathematics to motion. This was the real beginning of modern science. There is no math in Aristotle's Physics. There is nothing but math in modern physics books. Galileo made the change. It is inconceivable now that science could be done any other way. Aristotle had said, simply based on reason, that if one object is heavier than another, it will fall faster. Galileo tried that out and discovered that Aristotle was wrong. Aerodynamics aside, everything falls at the same rate. But then Galileo determined what that rate was by rolling balls down an inclined plane (not by dropping them off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is the legend). This required him to distinguish between velocity (e.g., metres per second) and acceleration (change in velocity, e.g., metres per second per second). Gravity produced an acceleration--9.8 metres per second per second. Instantly Galileo had an answer for Copernicus: simple velocity is not felt, only acceleration is. So the earth can be moving without our feeling it. Also, velocity does not change until a force changes it. That is the idea of inertia, which then replaced the old idea of an impetus. All this theory was ultimately perfected by Isaac Newton (1642-1727).
(2) With the objections to Copernicus's theory removed, the case was completed with positive evidence. Around 1609 it was discovered in the Netherlands that putting two lenses (which had been used since the 13th century as eye glasses) together made distant objects look close. Galileo heard about this and he produced the first astronomical quality telescope. With his telescope he saw several things: (a) the Moon had mountains and valleys. This upset the ancient notion that the heavens, the Moon included, were completely unlike the Earth. (b) the Planets all showed disks and were not points of light like stars. © Jupiter had four moons. This upset the argument, which had been used against Copernicus, that there could only be one centre of motion in the universe. Now there were three (the Sun, Earth, and Jupiter). (d) There were many more stars in the sky than could be seen with the eye; and the Milky Way, which was always just a glow, was itself composed of stars. And finally (e) Venus went through phases like the Moon. That vindicated Copernicus, for in the Ptolemaic system Venus, moving back and forth at the same distance between the Earth and the Sun, would only go from crescent to crescent. It would mostly have its dark side turned to us. With Copernicus, however, Venus goes around on the other side of the Sun and so, in the distance, would show us a small full face. As it comes around the Sun toward the Earth, we would see it turn into a crescent as the disk grows larger. Those are the phases, from small full to large crescent, that Galileo saw. The only argument that could be used against him was that the telescope must be creating illusions. In fact it was not well understood why a telescope worked. Some people looked at stars and saw two instead of one. That seemed to prove that the telescope was unreliable. Soon it was simply accepted that many stars are double. They still are.
(3) With his evidence and his arguments, Galileo was ready to prove the case for Copernican astronomy. He had the support of the greatest living astronomer, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), but not the Catholic Church. He had been warned once to watch it, but then a friend of his became Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644). The Pope agreed that Galileo could write about both Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, setting out the arguments for each. Galileo wrote A Dialogue on the Two Principal Systems of the World (1632). Unfortunately, the representative of the Ptolemaic system in the dialogue was made to appear foolish, and the Pope thought it was a caricature of himself. Galileo was led before the Inquisition, ‘shown the instruments of torture,’ and invited to recant. He did, but was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, it was too late. No serious astronomer could ever be a geocentrist again, and the only discredit fell against the Church. Descartes is justly regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy. This is not because of the positive results of his investigations, which were few, but because of the questions that he raised and problems that he created, problems that have still not been answered to everyone's satisfaction: particularly the Problem of Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem. And in a day when philosophy and science were not distinguished from each other, Descartes was a famous physicist and mathematician as well as a philosopher. Descartes' physics was completely overthrown by that of Newton, so we do not much remember him for that. But Descartes was a great mathematician of enduring importance. He originated analytic geometry, where all of the algebra can be given geometrical expression. Like Galileo combining physics and mathematics, this also combined two things that had previously been apart, arithmetic and geometry. The modern world would not be the same without graphs of equations. Rectangular coordinates for graphing are still called Cartesian coordinates (from Descartes' name: des Cartes). Seeing Descartes as a mathematician explains why he was the kind of philosopher that he was. Now it is hard to reconcile Descartes' status as a scientist and the inspiration he derived from Galileo and others with his clear distrust of experience. Isn't science about experience? We might think so. But the paradox of modern science is its dependence on mathematics. Where does mathematics come from? What makes it true? Many mathematicians will still answer like Plato, but that certainly has little to do with experience. So Descartes belongs to this puzzling, mathematical side of science, not to the side concerned with experience.
Meditations on First Philosophy is representative of his thought. ‘First philosophy’ simply means what is done first in philosophy. The most important thing about Descartes as a philosopher is that ‘first philosophy’ changed because of what he did. What stood first in philosophy since Aristotle was metaphysics. Thus the first question for philosophy to answer was about what is real. That decided, everything else could be done. With such an arrangement we can say that philosophy functions with Ontological Priority. In the Meditations we find that questions about knowledge come to the fore. If there are problems about what we can know, then we may not even be able to know what is real. But if questions about knowledge must be settled first, then this establishes Epistemological Priority for philosophy. Indeed, this leads to the creation of the Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology, as a separate discipline within philosophy for the first time. Previously, knowledge had been treated as falling in the domain of Aristotle's logical works (called, as a whole, the Organon), especially the Posterior Analytics. Modern philosophy has been driven by questions about knowledge. It begins with two principal traditions, Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism. The Rationalists, including Descartes, believed that reason was the fundamental source of knowledge. Empiricist’s believed that experience was. Epistemological priority makes possible what has become a very common phenomenon in modern philosophy: denying that metaphysics is possible at all, or even that metaphysical questions mean anything. That can happen when epistemology draws the limits of knowledge, or the limits of meaning, so tight that metaphysical statements or questions are no longer allowed.
The most important issues get raised in the first three of the six Meditations. In the first meditation Descartes begins to consider what he can know. He applies the special method that he has conceived (about which he had already written the Discourse on Method), known as ‘methodical doubt.’ As applied, methodical doubt has two steps: (1) doubt everything that can be doubted, and (2) don't accept anything as known unless it can be established with absolute certainty. Today Descartes is often faulted for requiring certainty of knowledge. But that was no innovation with him: ever since Plato and Aristotle, knowledge was taken to imply certainty. Anything without certainty would just be opinion, not knowledge. The disenchantment with certainty today has occurred just because it turned out to be so difficult to justify certainty to the rigour that Descartes required. Logically the two parts of methodical doubt are very similar, but in the Meditations they are procedurally different. Doubt does its job in the first meditation. Descartes wonders what he can really know about a piece of matter like a lump of wax. He wonders if he might actually be dreaming instead of sitting by the fireplace. Ultimately he wonders if the God he has always believed in might actually be a malevolent Demon capable of using his omnipotence to deceive us even about our own thoughts or our own existence. Thus, there is nothing in all his experience and knowledge that Descartes cannot call into doubt. The junk of history, all the things he ever thought he had known, gets swept away.
Ever since the Meditations, Descartes' Deceiving Demon has tended to strike people as a funny or absurd idea. Nevertheless, something far deeper and more significant is going on in the first meditation than we might think. It is a problem about the relation of causality to knowledge. The relation of cause to effect had been of interest since Aristotle. There was something odd about it. Given knowledge of a cause (and of the laws of nature), we can usually predict what the effect will be. Touch the hot stove, and you'll get burned. Step off a roof, and you'll fall. But given the effect, it is much more difficult to reason backwards to the cause. The arson squad shows up to investigate the cause of a fire, but that is not an easy task: many things could have caused the fire, and it is always possible that they might not be able to figure out at all what the cause was. The problem is that the relation between cause and effect is not symmetrical. Given a cause, there will be one effect. But given an effect, there could have been many causes able to produce the same effect. And even if we can't predict the effect from the cause, we can always wait around to see what it is. But if we can't determine the cause from the effect, time forever conceals it from us. This feature of causality made for some uneasiness in mediaeval Western, and even in Indian, philosophy. Many people tried to argue that the effect was contained in the cause, or the cause in the effect. None of that worked, or even made much sense.
With Descartes, this uneasiness about causality becomes a terror in relation to knowledge: for, in perception, what is the relation of the objects of knowledge to our knowledge of them? Cause to effect. Thus what we possess, our perceptions, are the effects of external causes. In thinking that we know external objects, we are reasoning backwards from effect to cause. Trouble. Why couldn't our perceptions have been caused by something else? Indeed, in ordinary life we know that they can be. There are hallucinations. Hallucinations can be caused by a lot of things: fever, insanity, sensory deprivation, drugs, trauma, etc. Descartes' Deceiving Demon is more outlandish, but it employs the same principle, and touches the same raw nerve. That raw nerve is now known as the Problem of Knowledge: How can we have knowledge through perception of external objects? There is no consensus on how to solve this even today. The worst thing is not that there haven't been credible solutions proposed, there have been, but that the solutions should explain why perception is so obvious in ordinary life. Philosophical explanations are usually anything but obvious, as anyone thing can and cannot be, and to further this justification in its claim are for those who know and not-know, a seeming paradox bound within its own spontaneity, accounted by such as for no sensible person, not even Descartes, really doubts that external objects are plausibly in that respect. This is why modern philosophy became so entered on questions about knowledge: It is the Curse of Descartes?
In the second meditation, Descartes wants to begin building up knowledge from the wreckage of the first meditation. This means starting from nothing. Such an idea of building up knowledge from nothing is called Foundationalism and is one of the mistakes that Descartes makes. Descartes does not and cannot simply start from nothing. Nevertheless, he gets off to a pretty good start: he decides that he cannot be deceived about his own existence, because if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be around to worry about it. If he didn't exist, he wouldn't be thinking; so if he is thinking, he must exist. This is usually stated in Latin: Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am.’ That might be the most famous statement in the history of philosophy, although it does not seem to occur in that form in the Meditations.
But there is more to it than just Descartes' argument for his own existence. Thinking comes first, and for Descartes that is a real priority. The title of the second meditation actually says, ‘the mind is better known than the body,’ and the Cogito ergo sum makes Descartes believe, not just that he has proven his existence, but that he has proven his existence as a thinking substance, a mind, leaving the body as some foreign thing to worry about later. That does not really follow, but Descartes clearly thinks that it does and consequently doesn't otherwise provide any special separate proof for the existence of the soul. In the end Descartes will believe that there are two fundamental substances in the world, souls and matter. The essence of soul for him, the attribute that makes a soul what is it, is thinking. The essence of matter for him (given to us in the fifth meditation), the attribute that makes matter what is it, is extension, i.e., that matter takes up space. This is known as Cartesian Dualism, which there are two kinds of things. It is something else that people have thought funny or absurd since Descartes. The greater of difficulty came with its own principle of verification, and will always implicate upon the thesis of how are souls and their bodies made of matter, interactual or communicative communication is left with one another. In Descartes' own physics, forces are transferred by contact, but the soul, which is unextended and so has no surface (only matter has extension), cannot contact the body because there is no surface to press with. The body cannot even hold the soul within it, since the soul has nothing to press upon to carry it along with the body. Problems like this occur whenever the body and soul are regarded as fundamentally different kinds of realities.
Today it might seem easy to say that the body and soul communicate by passing energy back and forth, which doesn't require contact, or even their close proximities, all for which is the presence of real energy in the soul that would make it plausibly detectable in this field of study, any kind of energy produces some heat (toward which all energy migrates as it becomes more random, i.e., as energy obeys the laws of the conservation of energy and of entropy), and heat or the radiation it produces (all heat produces electromagnetic radiation) can be detected. But, usually, a theory of the soul wants it to be some kind of thing that cannot be detected in a laboratory--in great measure because souls have not been detected in a laboratory.
Nevertheless, Descartes' problem is not just a confusion or a superstition. Our existence really does seem different from the inside than from the outside. From the inside there is consciousness, experience, colours, music, memories, etc. From the outside there is just the brain: gray goo. How do those two go together? That is the enduring question from Descartes: The Mind-Body Problem. As with the Problem of Knowledge, there is no consensus on a satisfactory answer. To ignore consciousness, as happens in Behaviourism, or to dismiss consciousness as something that is merely a transient state of the material brain, is a kind of reductionism, i.e., to say the one thing is just a state or function of another even though they may seem fundamentally different and there may be no-good reason why we should regard that one thing as more real and the other less so. Much of the talk about the Mind-Body Problem in the 20th century has been reductionistic, starting with Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind, which said that ‘mind is to body as kick is to leg.’ A kick certainly doesn't have much reality apart from a leg, but that really doesn't capture the relationship of consciousness to the body or to the brain. When the leg is kicking, we see the leg. But when the brain is ‘minding,’ we don't see the brain, and the body itself is only represented within consciousness. Internally, there is no reason to believe the mind is even in the brain. Aristotle and the Egyptians thought that consciousness was in the heart. In the middle of dreaming or hallucinations, we might not be aware of our bodies at all.
At the end of the second mediation Descartes may reasonably be said to have proven his own existence, but the existence of the body or of any other external objects is left hanging. If nothing further can be proven, then each of us is threatened with the possibility that I am the only thing that exists. This is called solipsism, from Latin solus, ‘alone’ (sole), and ipse, ‘self.’ Solipsism is not argued, advocated, or even mentioned by Descartes, but it is associated with him because both he and everyone after him have so much trouble proving that something else does exist.
The third meditation is Descartes' next step in trying to restore the common sense limits of knowledge. Even though he is ultimately aiming to show that external objects and the body exist, he is not able to go at that directly. Instead the third meditation is where Descartes attempts to prove the existence of God. This is surprising, since the existence of objects seems much more obvious than the existence of God but Descartes, working with his mathematician's frame of mind, thinks that a pure rational proof of something he can't see is better than no proof of something he can.
Descartes' proof for God is not original. It is a kind of argument called the Ontological Argument (named that by Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804). It is called ‘ontological’ because it is based on an idea about the nature of God's existence: that God is a necessary being, i.e., it is impossible for him not to exist. We and everything else in the universe, on the other hand, are contingent beings; it is possible for us not to exist, and in the past (and possibly in the future) we have indeed not existed. But if God is a necessary being, then there must be something about his nature that necessitates his existence. Reflecting on this, a mediaeval Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm (1093-1109), decided that all we needed to prove the existence of God was the proper definition of God. With such a definition we could understand how God's nature necessitates his existence. The definition Anselm proposed was: God is that than which no greater can be conceived. The argument then follows: If we conceive of a non-existing God, we must always ask, ‘Can something greater than this be conceived?’ The answer will clearly be ‘Yes’; for an existing God would be greater than a non-existing God. Therefore, we can only conceive of God as existing; so God exists.
This simple argument has mostly not found general favour. The definitive criticism was given by St. Thomas Aquinas (who otherwise thought that there were many ways to prove the existence of God): things cannot be ‘conceived’ into existence. Defining a concept is one thing, proving that the thing exists is another. The principle involved is that, ‘Existence is not a predicate,’ i.e., existence is not like other attributes or qualities that are included in definitions. Existence is not part of the meaning of anything. Most modern philosophers have agreed with this, but every so often there is an oddball who is captivated by Anselm. Descartes was such an oddball.
Descartes' argument for God is not even as good as Anselm's. It runs something like this: (A) I have in my mind an idea of perfection. (B) Degrees of perfection correspond to degrees of reality. ©) Every idea I have must have been caused by something that is at least as real [in objective reality, what Descartes calls ‘formal reality’] as what it is that the idea represents [in the subjective reality of my mind, what Descartes confusingly calls ‘objective reality’]. (D) Therefore, every idea I have must have been caused by something that is at least as perfect as what it is that the idea represents. (E) Therefore, my idea of perfection must have been caused by the perfect thing. (F) Therefore, the perfect thing exists. (G) By definition, the perfect thing is God. (H) Therefore, God exists.
Here Descartes uses ‘perfection’ instead of Anselm's ‘greatness.’ The difficulties with the argument are, first, that the second premise is most questionable. Most Greek philosophers starting with Parmenides would have said that either something exists or it doesn't. ‘Degrees’ of reality is a much later, in fact Neoplatonic, idea. The second problem is that the third premise is convoluted and fishy in the extreme. It means that Descartes is forced into arguing that our idea of infinity must have been caused by an infinite thing, since an infinite thing is more real than us or anything in us. But it seems obvious enough that our idea of infinity is simply the negation of finitude: the non-finite. The best that Descartes can ever do in justifying these two premises is arguing that he can conceive them ‘clearly and distinctly’ or ‘by the light of nature.’ ‘Clear and distinct ideas,’ are how Descartes claims something is self-evident, and something is self-evident if we know it to be true just by understanding it's meaning. That is very shaky ground in Descartes' system, for we must always be cautious about things that the Deceiving Demon could deceive us into believing. The only guarantee we have that our clear and distinct ideas are in fact true and reliable is that God would not deceive us about them. But then the existence of God is to be proven just in order that we can prove God reliable. Assuming the reliability of clear and distinct ideas so as to prove that God is reliable, so as to prove that clear and distinct ideas are reliable, makes for a logically circular argument: we assume what we wish to prove.
Descartes' argument for God violates both logic and his own method. In sweeping away the junk of history through methodical doubt, Descartes wasn't supposed to use anything from the past without justifying it. He is already violating that in the second mediation just by using concepts like ‘substance’ and ‘essence,’ which are technical philosophical terms that Descartes has not made up himself. In the third meditation Descartes' use of the history of philosophy explodes out of control: technical terminology (‘formal cause,’ etc.) flies thick and fast, the argument itself is inspired by Anselm, and the whole process is very far from the foundational program of starting from nothing. All by itself, it looks like a good proof of how philosophy cannot start over from anything.
With the existence of God, presumably, proven, Descartes wraps things up in the sixth meditation: if God is the perfect thing, then he would not deceive us. That wouldn't be perfect. On the other hand, when it comes to our perceptions, God has set this all up and given us a very strong sense that all these things that we see are there. So, if God is no deceiver, these things really must be there. Therefore, external objects (‘corporeal things’) exist. Simple enough, but fatally flawed if the argument for the existence of God is itself defective.
In the fourth and fifth meditations Descartes does some tidying up. In the fourth he worries why there can be falsehood if God is reliable. The answer is that if we stuck to our clear and distinct ideas, there would be no falsehood; but our ambitions leap beyond those limits, so falsehood exists and is our own fault. Descartes does come to believe that all our clear and distinct ideas are innate: they are packed into the soul on its creation, like a box lunch. Most important is the idea of perfection, or the idea of God, itself, which is then rather like God's hallmark on the soul. Once we notice that idea, then life, the universe, and everything falls into place. Thus, Descartes eventually decides that the existence of God is better known to him than his own existence, even though he was certain about the latter first.
The fifth meditation says it is about the ‘essence’ of material things. That is especially interesting since Descartes supposedly doesn't know yet whether material things existed. It's like, even if they don't exist, he knows what they are. That is Descartes the mathematician speaking. Through mathematics, especially geometry, he knows what matter is like-extended, etc. He even knows that a vacuum is impossible: extended space is the same thing as material substance. This is the kind of thing that makes Descartes look very foolish as a scientist. But the important point, again, is not that Descartes is unscientific, but that he chose to rely too heavily on the role of mathematics in the nova scientia that Galileo had recently inaugurated. Others, like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), had relied too heavily on the role of observation in explaining the new knowledge. Bacon wasn't a scientist, or a mathematician, at all. Descartes was. It really would not be until our own time that some understanding would begin to emerge of the interaction and interdependency between theory and observation, mathematics and experience in modern science. Even now the greatest mathematicians (e.g., Kurt Gödel, 1906-1978) tend to be kinds of Platonises at heart.
We have especially connected with issues surrounding certainty with those concerning of explicit connections with ‘scepticism,’ although Greek scepticism centered on the value of enquiry and questions to issues of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic, and among others, least of mention, the view that quality values have a role to play in cognitive assumptions held by sceptics yet, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or rational belief is possible, making space for legitimate, fallible alterative for conceptual representations of reality. Aristoteleans whose natural science dominated Western thought for two thousand years, believed that man could arrive at an understanding of ultimate reality by reasoning a form in self-evident principles. It is, for example, self-evident recognition as that the result that questions of truth becomes uneducable. Therefore in can be deduced that objects fall to the ground because that’s where they belong, and goes up because that’s where it belongs, the goal of Aristotelian science was to explain why things happen. Modern science was begun when Galileo began trying to explain how things happen and thus ordinated the method of controlled excitement which now form the basis of scientific investigation.
Classical scepticism springs from the observation that the best methods in some given area seem to fall short of giving us contact with truth (e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality), and it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the results that question of truth becomes undeniable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict are a systemized or argument and ethics, as opposed to dogmatism, and particularly the philosophy system building of the Stoics
The Stoic school was founded in Athens around the end of the fourth century Bc by Zeno of Citium (335-263 Bc). Epistemological issues were a concern of logic, which studied logos, reason and speech, in all of its aspects, not, as we might expect, only the principles of valid reasoning - these were the concern of another division of logic, dialectic. The epistemological part, which concerned with canons and criteria, belongs to logic canceled in this broader sense because it aims to explain how our cognitive capacities make possibly the full realization from reason in the form of wisdom, which the Stoics, in agreement with Socrates, equated with virtue and made the sole sufficient condition for human happiness.
Reason is fully realized as knowledge, which the Stoics defined as secure and firm cognition, unshakable by argument. According to them, no one except the wise man can lay claim to this condition. He is armed by his mastery of dialectic against fallacious reasoning which might lead him to draw a false conclusion from sound evince, and thus possibly force him to relinquish the ascent he has already properly confers on a true impression. Hence, as long as he does not ascend to any false grounded-level impressions, he will be secure against error, and his cognation will have the security and firmness required of knowledge. Everything depends, then, on his ability to void error in hi ground-level perceptual judgements. To be sure, the Stoics do not claim that the wise man can distinguish true from false perceptual impression: impressions: that is beyond even his powers, but they do maintain that there is a kind of true perceptual impression, the so-called cognitive impression, by confining his assent to which the wise man can avoid giving error a foothold.
An impression, none the least, is cognitive when it is (1) from what is (the case) (2) Stamped and impressed in accordance with what are, and, (3) such that could not arise from what is not. And because all of our knowledge depends directly or indirectly on it, the Stoics make the cognitive impression the criterion of truth. It makes possibly a secure grasp of the truth, and possibly a secure grasp on truth, not only by guaranteeing the truth of its own positional content, which in turn supported the conclusions that can be drawn from it: Even before we become capable of rational impressions, nature must have arranged for us to discriminate in favor of cognitive impressions that the common notions we end up with will be sound. And it is by means of these concepts that we are able to extend our grasp of the truth through if inferences beyond what is immediately given, least of mention, the Stoics also speak of two criteria, cognitive impressions and common (the trust worthy common basis of knowledge).
A patternization in custom or habit of action, may exit without any specific basis in reason, however, the distinction between the real world, the world of the forms, accessible only to the intellect, and the deceptive world of displaced perceptions, or, merely a justified belief. The world forms are themselves a functioning change that implies development toward the realization of form. The problem of interpretations is, however confused by the question of whether of universals separate, but others, i.e., Plato did. It can itself from the basis for rational action, if the custom gives rise to norms of action. A theory that magnifies the role of decisions, or free selection fro amongst equally possible alternatives, in order to show that what appears to b objective or fixed by nature is in fact an artefact of human convention, similar to convention of etiquette, or grammar, or law. Thus one might suppose that moral rules owe more to social convention than to anything inexorable necessities are in fact the shadow of our linguistic convention. In the philosophy of science, conventionalism is the doctrine often traced to the French mathematician and philosopher Jules Henry Poincaré that endorsed of an accurate and authentic science of differences, such that between describing space in terms of a Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, in fact register the acceptance of a different system of conventions for describing space. Poincaré did not hold that all scientific theory is conventional, but left space for genuinely experimental laws, and his conventionalism is in practice modified by recognition that one choice of description may be more conventional than another. The disadvantage of conventionalism is that it must show that alternative equal to workable conventions could have been adopted, and it is often not easy to believe that. For example, if we hold that some ethical norm such as respect for premises or property is conventional, we ought to be able to show that human needs would have been equally well satisfied by a system involving a different norm, and this may be hard to establish.
Poincaré made important original contributions to differential equations, topology, probability, and the theory of functions. He is particularly noted for his development of the so-called Fusian functions and his contribution to analytical mechanics. His studies included research into the electromagnetic theory of light and into electricity, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. He also anticipated chaos theory. Amid the useful allowances that Jules Henri Poincaré took extra care with the greater of degree of carefully took in the vicinity of writing, more or less than 30 books, assembling, by and large, through which can be known as having an existence, but an attribute of things from Science and Hypothesis (1903; trans. 1905), The Value of Science (1905; trans. 1907), Science and Method (1908; trans. 1914), and The Foundations of Science (1902-8; trans. 1913). In 1887 Poincaré became a member of the French Academy of Sciences and served at its president up and until 1906. He also was elected to membership in the French Academy in 1908. Poincaré main philosophical interest lay in the physical formal and logical character of theories in the physical sciences. He is especially remembered for the discussion of the scientific status of geometry, in La Science and la et l’ hpothése, 1902, trans. As Science and Hypothesis, 1905, the axioms of geometry are analytic, nor do they state fundamental empirical properties of space, rather, they are conventions governing the descriptions of space, who e adoption too governed by their utility in furthering the purpose of description. By their unity in Poincaré conventionalism about geometry proceeded, however against the background of a general and the alliance of always insisting that there could be good reason for adopting one set of conventions than another in his late Dermtêres Pensées (1912) trans. Mathematics and Science: Last Essays, 1963.
A completed Unification Field Theory touches the ‘grand aim of all science,’ which Einstein once defined it, as, ‘to cover the greatest number of empirical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.’ But the irony of a man’ quest for reality is that as nature is stripped of its disguises, as order emerges from chaos and unity from diversity. As concepts emerge and fundamental laws that assume an increasingly simpler form, the evolving pictures, that to become less recognizable than the bone structure behind a familiar distinguished appearance from reality and lay of bare the fundamental structure of the diverse, science that has had to transcend the ‘rabble of the senses.’ But it highest redefinition, as Einstein has pointed out, has been ‘purchased at the price of empirical content.’ A theoretical concept is emptied of content to the very degree that it is diversely taken from sensory experience. For the only world man can truly know is the world created for him by his senses. So paradoxically what the scientists and the philosophers’ call the world of appearances - the world of light and colour, of blue skies and green leaves, of sighing winds and the murmuring of the water’s creek, the world designed by the physiology of humans sense organs, are the worlds in which finite man is incarceratly by his essential nature and what the scientist and the philosophers call the world of reality. The colorless, soundless, impalpable cosmos which lies like an iceberg beneath the plane of man’s perceptions - is a skeleton structure of symbols, and symbols change.
For all the promise of future revelation it is possible that certain terminal boundaries have already been reached in man’s struggle to understand the manifold of nature in which he finds himself. In his descent into the microcosome’s and encountered indeterminacy, duality, paradox - barriers that seem to admonish him and cannot pry too inquisitively into the heart of things without vitiating the processes he seeks to observe. Man’s inescapable impasse is that he himself is part of the world he seeks to explore, his body and proud brain are mosaics of the same elemental particles that compose the dark, drifting clouds of interstellar space, he is, in the final analysis, is merely an ephemeral confrontation of primordial space-time - time fields. Standing midway between macrocosm an macrocosm he finds barriers between every side and can perhaps, but marvel as, St. Paul did nineteen hundred years ago, ‘the world was created by the world of God, so that what is seen was made out of things under which do not appear.’
Although, we are to center the Greek scepticism on the value of enquiry and questioning, we now depict scepticism for the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area elsewhere. Classical scepticism, sprouts from the remarking reflection that the best method in some area seems to fall short of giving to remain in a certain state with the truth, e.g., there is a widening disruption between appearances and reality, it frequently cites conflicting judgements that our personal methods of bring to a destination, the result that questions of truth becomes indefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.
Steadfast and fixed the philosophy of meaning holds beingness as formatted in and for and of itself, the given migratory scepticism for which accepts the every day or commonsensical beliefs, is not the saying of reason, but as due of more voluntary habituation. Nonetheless, it is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Despite the fact that the phrase Cartesian scepticism is sometimes used, nonetheless, Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the method of doubt uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of ‘distinct’ ideas, not far removed from that of the Stoics.
For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. And, of course, they claim that not all of the knowledge is achievable. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it’s a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true it is not necessary for an effect to be predictable as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, in order to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty. For some alleged cases of things that are self-evident, the singular being of one is justifiably corrective if only for being true. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well for being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by deduction or induction, there will be criteria specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of consideration that will make such standard in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.
Besides, there is another view - the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge whatsoever. In whatever manner, it is doubtful that any philosopher would seriously entertain to such as absolute scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-evident standards that no such hesitancy about asserting to the evident, the non-evident are any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.
René Descartes (1596-1650), in his sceptical guise, but in the ‘method of doubt’ uses a scenario in order to begin the process of finding himself a secure mark of knowledge. Descartes himself trusted a category of ‘clear and distinct’ ides not far remove d from the phantasia kataleptike of the Stoics, never doubted the content of his own ideas. It’s challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they corresponded to anything beyond ideas.
Scepticism should not be confused with relativism, which is a doctrine about nature of truth, and may be motivated by trying to avoid scepticism. Nor is it identical with eliminativism, which counsels abandoning an area of thought altogether, not because we cannot know the truth, but because there are no troths capable of being framed in the terms we use.
All the same, Pyrrhonism and Cartesian form of virtual globularity, in that if scepticism has been held and opposed, that of assuming that knowledge is some form is true. Sufficiently warranted belief, is the warranted condition that provides the truth or belief conditions, in that of providing the grist for the sceptics manufactory in that direction. The Pyrrhonist will suggest that none if any are evident, empirically deferring the sufficiency of giving in but warranted. Whereas, a Cartesian sceptic will agree that no empirical standards about anything other than ones own mind and its contents are sufficiently warranted, because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it. Out and away, the essential difference between the two views concerns the stringency of the requirements for a belief being sufficiently warranted to take account of as knowledge.
A-Cartesian requirements are intuitively certain, justly as the Pyrrhonist, who merely require that the standards in case value are more warranted then the unsettled negativity.
Cartesian scepticism was unduly the fluence with which Descartes agues for scepticism, than his reply holds, in that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical standards, in that of anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason is roughly in the position that there is a legitimate doubt about all such standards, only because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some sense, for which it is radically different from the objects which we normally think, in whatever manner they affect our senses. Therefrom, if the Pyrrhonist is the agnostic, the Cartesian sceptic is the atheist.
Because the Pyrrhonist requires much less of a belief in order for it to be confirmed as knowledge than do the Cartesian, the argument for Pyrrhonism are much more difficult to construct. A Pyrrhonist must show that there is no better set of reasons for believing to any standards, of which are in case that any knowledge learnt of the mind is understood by some of its forms, that has to require certainty.
The underlying latencies that are given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting their presence to the future that of specifying to the theory of knowledge, is, but, nonetheless, the possibility to identify a set of shared doctrines, however, identity to discern two broad styles of instances to discern, in like manners, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, nonetheless, of responding very differently but not forgone.
Even so, the coherence theory of truth, sheds to view that the truth of a proposition consists in its being a member of same suitably defined body of coherent and possibly endowed with other virtues, provided these are not defined in terms of truths. The theory, at firs t sight, has two strengths (1) we test beliefs for truth in the light of other beliefs, including perceptual beliefs, and (2) we cannot step outside our own best system of belief, to see how well it is doing in terms of correspondence with the world. To many thinkers the weak point of pure coherence theories is that they fail to include a proper sense of the way in which actual systems of belief are sustained by persons with perceptual experience, impinged upon by their environment. For a pure coherence theory, experience is only relevant as the source of perceptual belief representation, which take their place as part of the coherent or incoherent set. This seems not to do justice to our sense that experience plays a special role in controlling our system of beliefs, but Coherentists have contested the claim in various ways.
However. a correspondence theory is not simply the view that truth consists in correspondence with the ‘facts’, but rather the view that it is theoretically uninteresting to realize this. A correspondence theory is distinctive in holding that the notion of correspondence and fact can be sufficiently developed to make the platitude into an intersetting theory of truth. We cannot look over our own shoulders to compare our beliefs with a reality to compare other means that those beliefs, or perhaps, further beliefs. So we have no fix on ‘facts’ as something like structures to which our beliefs may not correspond.
And now and again, we take upon the theory of measure to which evidence supports a theory. A fully formalized confirmation theory would dictate the degree of confidence that a rational investigator might have in a theory, given some body of evidence. The principal developments were due to the German logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), who culminating in his Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), Carnap’s idea was that the measure needed would be the proposition of logical possible states of affairs in which the theory and the evidence both hold, compared to the number in which the evidence itself holds. The difficulty with the theory lies in identifying sets of possibilities so that they admit to measurement. It therefore demands that we can put a measure ion the ‘range’ of possibilities consistent with theory and evidence, compared with the range consistent with the enterprise alone. In addition, confirmation proves to vary with the language in which the science is couched and the Carnapian programme has difficulty in separating genuine confirming variety from less compelling repetition of the same experiment. Confirmation also proved to be susceptible to acute paradoxes. Briefly, such that of Hempel’s paradox, wherefore, the principle of induction by enumeration allows a suitable generalization to be confirmed by its instance or Goodman’s paradox, by which the classical problem of induction is often phrased in terms of finding some reason to expect that nature is uniform.
Finally, scientific judgement seems to depend on such intangible factors as the problem facing rival theories, and most workers have come to stress instead the historically situated sense of what looks plausible, characteristic of a scientific culture at a given time.
Once said, of the philosophy of language, was that the general attempt to understand the components of a working language, the relationship that an understanding speaker has to its elements, and the relationship they bear to the world: Such that the subject therefore embraces the traditional division of semantic into syntax, semantic, and pragmatics. The philosophy of mind, since it needs an account of what it is in our understanding that enable us to use language. It mingles with the metaphysics of truth and the relationship between sign and object. Such a philosophy, especially in the 20th century, has been informed by the belief that a philosophy of language is the fundamental basis of all philosophical problems in that language is the philosophical problem of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape to metaphysical beliefs of logical form, and the basis of the division between syntax and semantics, as well a problem of understanding the number and nature of specifically semantic relationships such as meaning, reference, predication, and quantification. Pragmatics includes the theory of speech acts, while problems of rule following and the indeterminacy of translation infect philosophies of both pragmatics and semantics.
A formal system for which a theory whose sentences are well-formed formula of a logical calculus, and in which axioms or rules of being of a particular term corresponds to the principles of the theory being formalized. The theory is intended to be framed in the language of a calculus, e.g., first-order predicate calculus. Set theory, mathematics, mechanics, and many other axiomatically that may be developed formally, thereby making possible logical analysis of such matters as the independence of various axioms, and the relations between one theory and another.
Are terms of logical calculus are also called a formal language, and a logical system? A system in which explicit rules are provided to determining (1) which are the expressions of the system (2) which sequence of expressions count as well formed (well-forced formulae) (3) which sequence would count as proofs. A system which takes on axioms for which leaves a terminable proof, however, it shows of the prepositional calculus and the predicated calculus.
It’s most immediate of issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning scepticism. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best methods in some area seem to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the result that questions of verifiable truths convert into undefinably less trued. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.
As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue undesirable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptic concludes eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.
Fixed by its will for and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism which accepts every day or commonsense belief, is that, not the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, it is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus, despite the fact that the phrase Cartesian scepticism is sometimes used. Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the method of doubt uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of clear and distinct ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.
For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. And, of course, they assert strongly that distinctively intuitive knowledge is not possible. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it’s a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true it is not necessary for an effect to be predictable as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, in order to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty. Refusing to consider for alleged instances of things that are explicitly evident, for a singular count for justifying of discerning that set to one side of being trued. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well for being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by deduction or induction, there will be criteria specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of consideration that will make such standards in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree. The form of an argument determines whether it is a valid deduction, or speaking generally, in that these of arguments that display the form All Ps are ‘Q’s: t is P’ (or a P), is therefore, ‘t is Q’ (or a Q) and accenting toward validity, as these are arguments that display the form if A then B: It is not the case that ‘B.’ and, therefore, it is not the case that ‘A’, however, the following example accredits to its consistent form as:
If there is life on Pluto, then Pluto has an atmosphere.
It is not the case that Pluto has an atmosphere.
Therefore, it is not the case that there is life on Pluto.
The study of different forms of valid argument is the fundamental subject of deductive logic. These forms of argument are used in any discipline to establish conclusions on the basis of claims. In mathematics, propositions are established by a process of deductive reasoning, while in the empirical sciences, such as physics or chemistry, propositions are established by deduction as well as induction.
The first person to discuss deduction was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who proposed a number of argument forms called syllogisms, the form of argument used in our first example. Soon after Aristotle, members of a school of philosophy known as Stoicism continued to develop deductive techniques of reasoning. Aristotle was interested in determining the deductive relations between general and particular assertions - for example, assertions containing the expression all (as in our first example) and those containing the expression some. He was also interested in the negations of these assertions. The Stoics focused on the relations among complete sentences that hold by virtue of particles such as if . . . then, it is not the action that or and, and so forth. Thus the Stoics are the originators of sentential logic (so called because its basic units are whole sentences), whereas Aristotle can be considered the originator of predicatelogic (so called because in predicate logic it is possible to distinguish between the subject and the predicate of a sentence).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the German logician’s Gottlob Frége and David Hilbert argued independently that deductively valid argument forms should not be couched in a natural language - the language we speak and write in - because natural languages are full of ambiguities and redundancies. For instance, consider the English sentence every event has a cause. It can mean that one cause brings either about every event, or to any or every place in or to which is demanded through differentiated causalities as for example: ‘A’ has a given causality for which is forwarding its position or place as for giving cause to ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘D,’ and so on, or that individual events each have their own, possibly different, cause, wherein ‘X’ causes ‘Y,’
‘Z’ causes ‘W,’ and so on. The problem is that the structure of the English language does not tell us which one of the two readings is the correct one. This has important logical consequences. If the first reading is what is intended by the sentence, it follows that there is something akin to what some philosophers have called the primary cause, but if the second reading is what is intended, then there may well be no primary cause.
To avoid these problems, Frége and Hilbert proposed that the study of logic be carried out using set classes of categorically itemized languages. These artificial languages are specifically designed so that their assertions reveal precisely the properties that are logically relevant - that is, those properties that determine the deductive validity of an argument. Written in a formalized language, two unambiguous sentences remove the ambiguity of the sentence, Every event has a cause. The first possibility is represented by the sentence, which can be read as there is a thing ‘x,’ such that, for every ‘y’ or ‘x,’ until the finality of causes would be for itself the representation for constituting its final cause ‘Y.’ This would correspond with the first interpretation mentioned above. The second possible meaning is represented by, that which can be understood as, every thing ‘y,’ there is yet the thing ‘x,’ such that x gives Y. This would correspond with the second interpretation mentioned above. Following Frége and Hilbert, contemporary deductive logic is conceived as the study of formalized languages and formal systems of deduction.
Although the examples in this article are simple, the process of deductive reasoning can be extremely complex. Conclusions are obtained from a step-by-step process in which each step establishes a new assertion that is the result of an application of one of the valid argument forms either to the premises or to previously established assertions. Thus the different valid argument forms can be conceived as rules of derivation that permit the construction of complex deductive arguments. No matter how long or complex the argument, if every step is the result of the application of a rule, the argument is deductively valid: If the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true as well.
Although the examples in this process of deductive reasoning can be extremely complex, however conclusions are obtained from a step-by-step process in which each step establishes a new assertion that is the result of an application of one of the valid argument forms either to the premises or to previously established assertions. Thus the different valid argument forms can be conceived as rules of derivation that permit the construction of complex deductive arguments. No matter how long or complex the argument, if every step is the result of the application of a rule, the argument is deductively valid: If the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true as well.
Additionally, the absolute globular view of knowledge whatsoever, may be considered as a manner of doubtful circumstance, meaning that not very many of the philosophers would seriously entertain of absolute scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonism sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-evident standards that no such hesitancy about asserting to the evident, the non-evident are any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.
We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton Principia Mathematica in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume all tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that Liberty, Equality, Fraternities are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the general will of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of deism, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. In that the only accomplishing implications for mediating the categorical prioritizations that were held temporarily, if not imperatively acknowledged between mind and matter, so as to perform the activities or dynamical functions for which an impending mental representation proceeded to seek and note-perfecting of pure reason. Causal traditions contracted in occasioned to Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.
The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Wolfgang von Johann Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854) proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that loves illusion, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. The principal philosopher of German Romanticism Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854) arrested a version of cosmic unity, and argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and undivided wholeness.
The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the incommunicable powers of the immortal sea empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.
The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundations of the mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a social physics that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of Cartesian dualism with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). After declaring that God and divine will do not exist, Nietzsche reified the existence of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual will and summarily dismissed all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the will to truth. The problem, claimed Nietzsche, is that earlier versions of the will to truth, disguised the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressions or manifestations of individual will.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total that had previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no real or necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he declared that we are all locked in a prison house of language. The prison as he conceived it, however, was also a space where the philosopher can examine the innermost desires of his nature and articulate a new massage of individual existence founded on will.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, says Nietzsche, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the non-existent altars of religious beliefs and/or democratic or socialist ideals and become, therefore members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said, not only exalted natural phenomena and favors reductionistic examinations of phenomena at the expense of mind. It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow any basis for the free exercise of individual will.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche reified the existence of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual will and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the will to truth. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the will to truth, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of will.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. To serve as a basis on the assumptions that there are no really imperative necessities corresponding in common to or in participated linguistic constructions that provide everything needful, resulting in itself, but not too far as to distance from the influence so gainfully employed, that of which was founded as close of action, wherefore the positioned intent to settle the occasioned-difference may that we successively occasion to occur or carry out at the time after something else is to be introduced into the mind, that from a direct line or course of circularity inseminates in its finish. Their successive alternatives are thus arranged through anabatic existing or dealing with what exists only in the mind, so that, the conceptual analysis of a problem gives reason to illuminate, for that which is fewer than is more in the nature of opportunities or requirements that employ something imperatively substantive, moreover, overlooked by some forming elementarily whereby the gravity held therein so that to induce a given particularity, yet, in addition by the peculiarity of a point as placed by the curvilinear trajectory as introduced through the principle of equivalence, there, founded to the occupied position to which its order of magnitude runs a location of that which only exists within self-realization and corresponding physical theories. Ours being not rehearsed, however, unknowingly their extent temporality extends the quality value for purposes that are substantially spatial, as analytic situates points indirectly into the realities established with a statement with which are intended to upcoming reasons for self-irrational impulse as explicated through the geometrical persistence so that it is implicated by the position, and, nonetheless, as space-time, wherein everything began and takes its proper place and dynamic of function.
Earlier, Nietzsche, in an effort to subvert the epistemological authority of scientific knowledge, sought to appropriate a division between mind and world was much as rigid and yet sternfully austere than was originally envisioned by Descartes. In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously thought. Based on the assumption that there is no real or necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, but quick to realize, that there was nothing in this of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that we know from direct experience as distinctly human. Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by taking a leap if faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, in accordance with the mathematical ideas that our minds are capable of uncovering in their pristine essence. The truth of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally revealed truths, and this was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the hidden ontology of classical epistemology, however, if there is no real or necessary correspondence between non-mathematical ideas in subjective reality and external physical reality, how do we know that the world in which we live, breath, and have our Being, actually exists? Descartes resolution of this dilemma took the form of an exercise. But, nevertheless, as it turned out, its resolution was considerably more problematic and oppressive than Descartes could have imagined, I think therefore I am, may-be marginally persuasive in the ways of confronting the real existence of the thinking self. But, the understanding of physical reality that obliged Descartes and others to doubt the existence of this self clearly implied that the separation between the subjective world and the world of life, and the real wold of physical reality as absolute.
There is a multiplicity of different positions to which the term epistemological relativism has been applied, however, the basic idea common to all forms denies that there is a single, universal context. Many traditional epistemologists have striven to uncover the basic process, method or determined rules that allow us to hold true belief’s, recollecting, for example, of Descartes’s attempt to find the rules for directions of the mind. Hume’s investigation into the science of mind or Kant’s description of his epistemological Copernican revolution, where each philosopher attempted to articulate universal conditions for the acquisition of true belief.
The coherence theory of truth, finds to it view that the truth of a proposition consists in its being a member of some suitably definied body of other propositions, as a body that is consistent, coherent and possibly endowed with other virtues, provided there are not defined in terms of truth. The theory has two strengths: We cannot step outside our own best system of beliefs, to see how well it is doing in terms of correspondence with the world. To many thinkers the weak points of pure coherence theories in that they fail to include a proper sense of the way in which include a proper sense of the way in which actual systems of belief are sustained by persons with perceptual experience, impinged upon using their environment. For a pure coherence theorist, experience is only relevant as the source of perceptual representations of beliefs, which take their place as part of the coherent or incoherent set. This seems not to do justice to our sense that experience plays a special role in controlling our systems of belief, but Coherentists have contested the claim in various ways.
The pragmatic theory of truth is the view particularly associated with the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), that the truth of a statement can be defined in terms of the utility of accepting it. Put so badly the view is open too objective, since there are things that are false that it may be useful to accept, and conversely there are things that are true that it may-be damaging to accept. However, their area deeply connects between the ideas that a representative system is accurate, and he likely success of the projects and purposes formed by its possessor. The evolution of a system of representation, of whether its given priority in consistently perceptual or linguistically bond by the corrective connection with evolutionary adaption, or under with utility in the widest sense, as for Wittgenstein’s doctrine that means its use of deceptions over which the pragmatic emphasis on technique and practice are the matrix which meaning is possible.
Nevertheless, after becoming the tutor of the family of the Addé de Mably that Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) became acquainted with philosophers of the French Enlightenment. The Enlightenment idea of deism, when we are assured that there is an existent God, additional revelation, some dogmas are all excluded. Supplication and prayer in particular are fruitless, may only be thought of as an ‘absentee landlord’. The belief that remains abstractively a vanishing point, as wintered in Diderot’s remark that a deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist. Which can be imagined of the universe as a clock and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency at the moment of creation? It also implied, however, that all the creative forces of the universe were exhausted at origins, that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter, and pure reason. In the main, Judeo-Christian has had an atheistic lineage, for which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing rationality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that the truth of spiritual reality can be known only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelations that persists to this day. And it also laid the foundation for the fierce competition between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which the special character of each should be ultimately defined.
Obviously, here, is, at this particular intermittent interval in time no universally held view of the actual character of physical reality in biology or physics and no universally recognized definition of the epistemology of science. And it would be both foolish and arrogant to claim that we have articulated this view and defined this epistemology.
What is not widely known, however, is that Nietzsche and other seminal figures in the history of philosophical postmodernism were very much aware of an epistemological crisis in scientific thought than arose much earlier that occasioned by wave-particle dualism in quantum physics. The crisis resulted from attempts during the last three decades of the nineteenth century to develop a logically self-consistent definition of number and arithmetic that would serve to reenforce the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality.
Nietzsche appealed to this crisis in an effort to reinforce his assumptions that, in the absence of ontology, all knowledge (scientific knowledge) was grounded only in human consciousness. As the crisis continued, a philosopher trained in higher mathematics and physics, Edmund Husserl attempted to preserve the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality by deriving the foundation of logic and number from consciousness in ways that would preserve self-consistency and rigor. Thus effort to ground mathematical physics in human consciousness, or in human subjective reality was no trivial matter. It represented a direct link between these early challenges and the efficacy of classical epistemology and the tradition in philosophical thought that culminated in philosophical postmodernism.
Exceeding in something otherwise that extends beyond its greatest equilibria, and to the highest degree, as in the sense of the embers sparking aflame into some awakening state, whereby our capable abilities to think-through the estranged dissimulations by which of inter-twirling composites, it’s greater of puzzles lay withing the thickening foliage that lives the labyrinthine maze, in that sense and without due exception, only to be proven done. By some compromise, or formally sub-normal surfaces of typically free all-knowing calculations, are we in such a way, that from underneath that comes upon those by some untold story of being human. These habituating and unchangeless and, perhaps, incestuous desires for its action’s lay below the conscious struggle into the further gaiting steps of their pursuivants endless latencies, that we are drawn upon such things as their estranging dissimulations of arranging simulations, by which time and again we appear not of any-one separate subsequent realism, but in human subjectivity as ingrained of some external reality, may that be deducibly subtractive, but, that, if in at all, that we but locked in a prison house of language. The prison as he concluded it, was also a space where the philosopher can examine the innermost desires of his nature and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defense of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought, With which apprehend the valuing cognation for which is self-removed by the underpinning conditions of substantive intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor was to resolve this crisis resulting in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
Heidegger, and the work of Husserl, and Sartre became foundational to those of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two world dilemmas in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic paradigm of the late nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Machs critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, relativistic notions.
Two theories of unveiling to unfold, as their phenomenal yield held by Albert Einstein, attributively appreciated that the special theory of relativity (1905) and, the calculably arranging affordance, as drawn upon the gratifying nature whom by encouraging the finding resolutions upon which the realms of its secreted reservoir in continuous phenomenons, in additional the continuatives as afforded by the efforts by the imagination were made discretely available to any the unsurmountable achievements, as remain obtainably afforded through the excavations underlying the artifactual circumstances that govern all principle forms or types in the involving evolutionary principles of the general theory of relativity (1915). Where the both special theory gives a unified account of the laws of mechanics and of electromagnetism, including optics, yet before 1905 the purely relative nature of uniform motion had in part been recognized in mechanics, although Newton had considered time to be absolute and postulated absolute space.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to a higher level of complexity, and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a singular point of significance as a whole, evincing the progressive principle of order, for which are complemental relations represented by their sum of its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain, like all physical phenomena can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever toward any conception of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, If one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific descriptions of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, which can be dismissed, undermined or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
Uncertain issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning scepticism. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that at best unify the methods by some visual appearances yet seemingly less contractual than areas of greater equivalence, but impart upon us, as a virtual motif, least of mention, a set for which a certain position is to enact upon their forming certainties, in that of holding placements with the truths, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the result that questions of truths overcoming undesirability. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.
As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue decidable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptics conclude eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.
Fixed by its will for and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism which accepts every day or commonsense belief, is that, not the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, it is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Despite the fact that the phrase Cartesian scepticism is sometimes used, Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the method of doubt uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of clear and distinct ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.
Nonetheless, of the principle that every effect is a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true it is not necessary for an effect to be predictable as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, in order to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty. Except for alleged cases of things that are evident for one just by being true, it has often been thought, however, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well for being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by deduction or induction, there will be criteria specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of consideration that will make such standard in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.
Besides, there is another view, with which the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge of whatsoever, for whichever prehensile excuse the constructs in the development of functional Foundationalism that construed their structures, perhaps, a sensibly supportive rationalization can find itself to the decision of whatever manner is supposed, it is doubtful, however, that any philosopher seriously thinks of absolute scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any principled elevation of unapparent or unrecognizable attestation to any convincing standards that no such hesitancy about positivity or assured affirmations to the evident, least that the counter-evident situation may have beliefs of requiring evidence, only because it is warranted.
René Descartes (1596-1650), in his sceptical guise, never doubted the content of his own ideas. Its challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they corresponded to anything beyond ideas.
All the same, the Pyrrhonism and Cartesian outward appearance of something as distinguished from the substance of which it has made the creation to form and their unbending reservations by the virtual globular scepticism. In having been held and defended, that of assuming that knowledge is some form of true, if sufficiently warranted belief, it is the warranted condition that provides the truth or belief conditions, so that in providing the grist for the sceptics mill about. The Pyrrhonist will suggest that there is no counter-evidential-balance of empirical deference, the sufficiency of giving in but warranted. Whereas, a Cartesian sceptic will agree that no empirical standards about anything other than ones own mind and its contents are sufficiently warranted, because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it. Inasmuch as, the essential difference between the two views concerns the stringency of the requirements for a belief being sufficiently warranted to take account of as knowledge.
A Cartesian requires certainty, but a Pyrrhonist merely requires that the standards in case are more warranted then its negation.
Cartesian scepticism was unduly an in fluence with which Descartes agues for scepticism, than his reply holds, in that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical standards, in that of anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason is roughly in the position that there is a legitimate doubt about all such standards, only because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some sense, for which it is radically different from the objects which we normally think, in whatever manner they affect our senses. Therefrom, if the Pyrrhonist is the agnostic, the Cartesian sceptic is the atheist.
Because the Pyrrhonist requires much less of a belief in order for it to be confirmed as knowledge than do the Cartesian, the argument for Pyrrhonism are much more difficult to construct. A Pyrrhonist must show that there is no better set of reasons for believing to any standards, of which are in case that any knowledge learnt of the mind is understood by some of its forms, that has to require certainty.
The view of human consciousness advanced by the deconstructionists is an extension of the radical separation between mind and world legitimated by classical physics and first formulated by Descartes. After the death of god theologian, Friedrich Nietzsche, declaring the demise of ontology, the assumption that the knowing mind exists in the prison house of subjective reality became a fundamental preoccupation in Western intellectual life. Shortly thereafter, Husserl tried and failed to preserve classical epistemology by grounding logic in human subjectivity, and this failure served to legitimate the assumption that there was no real or necessary correspondence between any construction of reality, including the scientific, and external reality. This assumption then became a central feature of the work of the French atheistic existentialists and in the view of human consciousness advanced by the deconstructionalists and promoted by large numbers of humanists and social scientists.
The first challenge to the radical separation between mind and world promoted and sanctioned by the deconstructionists is fairly straightforward. If physical reality is on the most fundamental level a seamless whole. It follows that all manifestations of this reality, including neuronal processes in the human brain, can never be separate from this reality. And if the human brain, which constructs an emergent reality based on complex language systems is implicitly part of the whole of biological life and desires its existence from embedded relations to this whole, this reality is obviously grounded in this whole and cannot by definition be viewed as separate or discrete. All of this leads to the conclusion, without any appeal to ontology, that Cartesian dualism is no longer commensurate with our view of physical reality in both physics and biology, there are, however, other more prosaic reasons why the view of human subjectivity sanctioned by the postmodern meta-theorist should no longer be viewed as valid.
From Descartes to Nietzsche to Husserl to the deconstructionists, the division between mind and world has been construed in terms of binary oppositions premises on the law of the excluded middle. All of the examples used by Saussure to legitimate his conception of oppositions between signified and signifiers are premises on this logic, and it also informs all of the extensions and refinements of this opposition by the deconstructionists. Since the opposition between signified and signifiers is foundational to the work of all these theorists, what is to say is anything but trivial for the practitioners of philosophical postmodernism - the binary oppositions in the methodologies of the deconstructionists premised on the law of the excluded middle should properly be viewed as complementary constructs.
Nevertheless, to underlying and hidden latencies are given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting the presences to the future under which are among them who narrow down the theory of knowledge, but, nonetheless, the possibilities to identify a set of common doctrines, are, however, the identity whose discerning of styles of instances to recognize, in like manners, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, even though of responding very differently but not fordone.
Repudiating the requirements of absolute certainty or knowledge, as sustained through its connexion of knowledge with activity, as, too, of pragmatism of a reformist distributing knowledge upon the legitimacy of traditional questions about the truths-conditionals of our cognitive practices, and sustain a conception of truth objectives, enough to give those questions that undergo of gathering in their own purposive latencies, yet we are given to the spoken word for which a dialectic awareness sparks the flame from the ambers of fire.
Pragmatism of a determinant revolution, by contrast, relinquishing the objectivity of early days, and acknowledges no legitimate epistemological questions over and above those that are naturally kindred of our current cognitive conviction.
It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be assembled to either a person or a belief. We can say that a person, ‘S’ might be certain or we can say that its descendable alignment is coordinated to accommodate the connexion, by saying that ‘S’ has the right to be certain just in case the value of ‘p’ is sufficiently verified.
In defining certainty, it is crucial to note that the term has both an absolute and relative sense. More or less, we take a proposition to be certain when we have no doubt about its truth. We may do this in error or unreasonably, but objectively a proposition is certain when such absence of doubt is justifiable. The sceptical tradition in philosophy denies that objective certainty is often possible, or ever possible, either for any proposition at all, or for any proposition at all, or for any proposition from some suspect family (ethics, theory, memory, empirical judgement etc.) a major sceptical weapon is the possibility of upsetting events that can cast doubt back onto what was hitherto taken to be certainty. Others include reminders of the divergence of human opinion, and the fallible source of our confidence. Fundamentalist approaches to knowledge look for a basis of certainty, upon which the structure of our system is built. Others reject the metaphor, looking for mutual support and coherence, without foundation.
However, in moral theory, the views that there are inviolable moral standards or absolute variable human desires or policies or prescriptions, and subsequently since the 17th and 18th centuries, when the science of man began to probe into human motivations and emotions. For writers such as the French moralistes, and political philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-76), and both Adam Smith (1723-90) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whereby the prime task to delineate the variety of human reactions and motivations, such inquiry would locate our propensity for moral thinking about other faculties such as perception and reason, and other tendencies, such as empathy, sympathy or self-interest. The task continues especially in the light of a post-Darwinian understanding of the evolutionary governing principles about us.
In some moral system notably that in personal representations as standing for the German and founder of critical philosophy was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), through which times real moral worth comes only with acting rightly because it is right. If you do what you should but from some other motive, such as fear or prudence, no moral merit accrues to you. Yet, in turn, for which it gives the impression of being without necessarily being so in fact, in that to look in quest or search, at least of what is not apparent. Of each discount other admirable motivations, are such as acting from sheer benevolence or sympathy. The question is how to balance the opposing ideas, and also how to understand acting from a sense of obligation without duty or rightness beginning to seem a kind of fetish.
The entertaining commodity that rests for any but those whose abilities for vauntingly are veering to the variously involving differences, is that for itself that the variousness in the quality or state of being decomposed of different parts, elements or individuals with which are consisting of a goodly but indefinite number, much as much of our frame of reference that, least of mention, maintain through which our use or by means we are to contain or constitute a command as some sorted mandatorily anthropomorphic virility. Several distinctions of otherwise, diverse probability, is that the right is not all on one side, so that, qualifies (as adherence to duty or obedience to lawful authority), that together constitute the ideal of moral propriety or merit approval. These given reasons for what remains strong in number, are the higher mental categories that are completely charted among their itemized regularities, that through which it will arise to fall, to have as a controlling desire something that transcends ones present capacity for attainment, inasmuch as to aspire by obtainably achieving. The intensity of sounds, in that it is associated chiefly with poetry and music, that the rhythm of the music made it easy to manoeuver, where inturn, we are provided with a treat, for such that leaves us with much to go through the ritual pulsations in rhythmical motions of finding back to some normalcy, however, at this time we ought but as justly as we might, be it that at this particular point of an occupied position as stationed at rest, as its peculiarity finds to its reference, and, pointing into the abyssal of space and time. So, once found to the ups-and-downs, and justly to move in the in and pots of the dance. Placed into the working potentials are to be charged throughout the functionally sportive inclinations that manifest the tune of a dynamic contribution, so that almost every selectively populated pressure ought to be the particular species attributive to evolutionary times, in that our concurrences are temporally at rest. Candidates for such theorizing include material and paternal motivations, capacities for love and friendship, and the development of language is a signalling system, cooperatives and aggressive tendencies our emotional repertoire, our moral reactions, including the disposition to denote and punish those who cheat on agreements or who free-riders, on whose work of others, our cognitive intuition may be as many as other primordially sized infrastructures, in that their intrenched inter-structural foundations are given as support through the functionally dynamic resources based on volitionary psychology, but it seems that it goes of a hand-in-hand interconnectivity, finding to its voluntary relationship with a partially parallelled profession named as, neurophysiological evidences, this, is about the underlying circuitry, in terms through which it subserves the psychological mechanism it claims to identify. The approach was foreshadowed by Darwin himself, and William James, as well as the sociologist E.O. Wilson.
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