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 refelct 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 phenomenologist 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 countensnce 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, art. 38).
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 Phenomenologie 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.\\l Note3 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\\l Note5. 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 phenomenologist, 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 phenomenologist, 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 internationalities, 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 ftlinemetaphors 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).
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