What is a True Belief?/ PHI2301 WEEK 3 DISCUSSION

CHAPTER 5 Knowledge Sources: Do You See What I See?

BEFORE YOU READ . . . Ask yourself how you know whatever you care most about knowing reliably. When we begin to examine the large issue of Part Two—how am I to understand the world?—the first questions we must consider have to do with the process of knowing. All of us began asking questions early in life—about the world (what is above the sky?), about events (what does it mean to die?), about ourselves (where was I before I was born?). These very philosophical questions assume that we can know things, that there is a world outside us to be known, and that we have the mental and physical equipment to be able to know. Lack of knowledge is darker than the night. Hausa proverb You may be surprised to learn that philosophers have questioned all of these assumptions. Some philosophers, called skeptics, wonder whether knowledge is even possible, and others have doubted the independent existence of a world outside of and independent of our minds. Is knowledge a meeting between us and reality, or is what we call knowledge restricted to mental processes within us that may or may not match the world as it actually is? The Issue Defined All of us have been fooled by optical illusions into seeing things that are not actually there, or not there in the way we think they are (Figure 5.1). We are more seriously deluded by our ego-bound point of view—the perception that events in the world occur as a drama, with each of us the center of the drama as it unfolds for us. We are, in a manner of speaking, trapped inside our own perspective. Figure 5.1 Which Line Is Longer? When we trust our senses, we can easily be deceived. None of us is able to get inside the head of another person to “know” what that person knows. Even worse, none of us can step outside our own perceptions to determine what something is “really” like. Philosophers call this dilemma the egocentric predicament. Trapped inside our own heads, we can only guess or make assumptions (and hope they are valid) about what others think and about reality itself. The questions about reality—the questions of metaphysics—that we considered in Part One really depend on knowledge theory, or epistemology. Unless we can agree about “how” we know, we will never be able to agree on “what” we know. egocentric predicament the human condition of being unable to leave the boundaries of our individual selves to determine what anything is really like, as opposed to how it seems to us epistemology the branch of philosophy dealing with the study of knowledge, what it is, and how we acquire it Because the egocentric predicament limits all human knowing, some philosophers have taken what may seem to you an extreme position: Reality is not “out there” waiting to be discovered but instead is created by us in the act of perceiving. Perhaps even the most basic things, like space and time, exist only in our heads, and we filter all our perceptions through them. What all philosophers seem to agree on, however, is that knowing is crucial if we wish to understand reality. In the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes, “All men naturally desire to know.” Do you agree? Living in a time when knowledge seems to be exploding, we may be tempted to wish for a little less knowledge rather than a little more; however, for many of the thinkers we consider in this chapter, the freedom to know and the ability to follow knowledge wherever it might lead were privileges that had to be fought for and defended. He who knows not and knows not he knows not He is a fool, shun him He who knows not and knows he knows not He is ignorant, teach him He who knows and knows not he knows He is asleep, wake him He who knows and knows he knows He is wise, follow him Proverb attributed to King Darius, the Persian The Peoples of the Americas: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz In seventeenth-century New Spain (present-day Mexico), a girl was born with an insatiable desire to know. At the age of three she followed her older sister to school and “tricked the mistress—or so I thought—by telling her that my mother had directed her to give me lessons … I learned to read in so short a time that I already knew how when my mother found out …”1 When her mother refused her pleas to dress as a boy and study in Mexico City, Juana took some consolation from the books in her grandfather's library. Later, she did go to Mexico City to live at the court of the Spanish viceroy, where she astonished people with her learning (including “forty learned men” who were summoned to examine her) and wrote poetry, plays, and villancicos to be used at religious services.2 As an illegitimate child with no money, her only hope for an intellectual life lay in the convent. So, she professed her vows as a nun in 1669 at the age of eighteen in the Convent of Saint Jerome in Mexico City.3 I became a nun because, although I knew that that way of life involved much that was repellent to my nature—I refer to its incidental, not its central aspects—nevertheless, given my total disinclination to marriage, it was the least unreasonable and most becoming choice I could make to assure my ardently desired salvation.4 Sor Juana was fortunate that her “cell” was a private, two-story living space with its own kitchen, bath, bedroom, and a parlor, which she quickly converted into her study and filled with thousands of books. The viceroy and vicereine were frequent visitors, as Juana presided over a tertulia, or conversational gathering, that featured music, improvisational poetry, and philosophical discussion.5 When she was in her forties, Sor Juana received a letter from her bishop, instructing her to give up secular study and concentrate on matters of the spirit. Her elaborate defense of the intellectual life—for herself and all women—begins with the assertion that it is God who has made her want to know: What is true … is that from my first glimmers of reason, my inclination to letters was of such power and vehemence, that neither the reprimands of others—and I have received many—nor my own considerations—and there have been not a few of these—have succeeded in making me abandon this natural impulse which God has implanted in me.6 Being a woman and a nun in patriarchal New Spain created special problems for Sor Juana, and she shared with René Descartes in France the threat of the Spanish Inquisition. The Holy Office considered some things—such as the contention that Earth was not the center of the cosmos—inappropriate for discussion or study and conclusions that would not be permitted. Those who challenged the Church's authority were silenced. Those who persisted could end up tortured or even dead. In the end, Sor Juana gave away her books and abandoned the love of learning that had sustained her all her life.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramirez (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) (ca. 1650–1695) As an illegitimate child with no dowry in patriarchal New Spain, Juana had few prospects for fulfilling her intellectual gifts. When she arrived at the Spanish viceroy's court in Mexico City as a beautiful prodigy, her only long-term option—if she wanted time to study, think, and write—was the convent. After joining the Convent of San Jeronimo, she turned her “cell” into a meeting place for intellectuals and artists. Asked by her bishop to write down her sophisticated criticism of a sermon, Juana was stunned when he published it and urged her formally to turn her attention from secular to sacred subjects. In her response (Respuesta), she cites many women from the Bible and the classical past, including Hypatia, to justify women's right to the life of the mind. She cleverly explains that to study theology, the queen of sciences, she had to prepare herself by mastering the lesser disciplines of logic, rhetoric, physics, music, geometry, and architecture. She died nursing other nuns during a plague. The Rationalist Approach of René Descartes The medieval world into which René Descartes was born in 1596 was beginning to come apart. The great synthesis that had held knowledge together under the control of the Church and the authority of Aristotle was unraveling, and many things that had seemed settled or obvious were being questioned. The stable if somewhat stifling world of his childhood—in which the Church was the keeper of all knowledge and books were written in Latin, thereby limiting access to knowledge to scholars and churchmen—had been jolted by the scientific revolution. When he was in his twenties, Descartes had a kind of intellectual crisis. Taking seriously the questions we have been considering, he began to wonder whether there was anything in his mind that he could know with certainty. The Use of Methodic Doubt to Examine Knowledge When Descartes began his search for certain knowledge, he decided to doubt everything systematically and see whether anything remained after this process. Any knowledge that was left would have, by surviving such a test, achieved the status of certainty. Much of what he found in his mind seemed to have arrived there on the authority of someone else; he had been told many things and read others, without questioning the authority of the source. In other words, like most of us, he accepted as facts both things his teachers told him and things he read in books. He had no independent verification for this apparent knowledge; he had only the word or the authority of the source as assurance that what he thought was true was indeed true. What about the senses? Could they be relied upon to provide knowledge? To test the reliability of his senses, Descartes took a piece of beeswax and heated it in a candle flame, watching every property of the wax change before his eyes: Let us take, for example, this bit of wax which has just been taken from the hive. It has not yet completely lost the sweetness of the honey it contained; it still retains something of the odor of the hive from which it was collected; its color, shape, and size are apparent; it is hard and cold; it can easily be touched; and, if you knock on it, it will give out some sound … But now while I am talking I bring it close to the fire. What remains of the taste evaporates; the odor vanishes; its color changes; its shape is lost; its size increases; it becomes liquid; it grows hot; one can hardly touch it; and although it is knocked upon it will give out no sound.7 If he were to use the evidence supplied by his senses, Descartes concluded, he would have to declare that the wax after being heated was completely different from the wax before being heated. To conclude that the wax retained its identity during this transformation, Descartes realized that he had relied on his understanding, not on his senses. As the next step in his systematic process, Descartes applied methodic doubt to his ordinary perceptions of reality, comparing them with dreams and finding no clear way to distinguish between the two. In a very vivid dream, you are sure the events are really happening to you—until you wake up; only then can you look back and label as a dream the experience you had. While it is going on, a very realistic dream is virtually indistinguishable from waking reality. Although he was convinced that he was sitting at his writing table before the fire, Descartes realized that he had dreamed himself in this exact situation. While the dream was going on, it had seemed just as verifiable as ordinary reality.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

René Descartes (1596–1650) Born in Tours, France, into a prominent family, Descartes received a classical education from the Jesuits and at age twenty took a law degree from the University of Poitier. He joined the Dutch army and later the army of Bavaria. Armies didn't fight during the winter months, so he had time to think and write. First, he used mathematics to solve problems of military engineering and eventually invented analytic geometry. At the age of twenty-three, he “discovered the foundations of a wonderful science,” which was published as the Discourse on Method in 1637. Descartes was a loyal Catholic who wanted to be the Thomas Aquinas of his day, reconciling the teachings of the Church with the new science as Thomas had done with Aristotle. Invited to Sweden to instruct Queen Christina in philosophy (she sent an ambassador and a warship to fetch him), he caught pneumonia trudging through the snow at 5 a.m. and was dead within two weeks. To test this, think about how you would go about proving to yourself or to someone else that you are not dreaming right now. Chuang-tzu (399–285 b.c.e.), the Taoist philosopher, once had an incredibly realistic dream in which he was a butterfly, flying luxuriously from flower to flower and enjoying the warmth of the Sun. When he “awoke” to find himself sitting solidly on the earth and in his usual identity as a philosopher, he asked himself this question: Am I a Chinese philosopher who has dreamed himself a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who now dreams himself to be a Chinese philosopher? Another area of knowledge Descartes examined for possible certainty was mathematics, a field in which he, as the inventor of analytic geometry, was intellectually very comfortable. Surely, 2 and 2 must always equal 4, right? Descartes felt just as certain as you do that 2 and 2 do indeed add up to 4. He assumed, as we do, that what seems logically certain is very reliable as knowledge. What he questioned was the ultimate foundation for our certainty. Suppose a very powerful but very evil deity has amused himself or herself by making all of us believe that 2 and 2 add up to 4 when they really add up to 5, or to the square root of 10 or to anything other than 4. The fact that we are all secure in our agreement that 2 plus 2 equals 4 does not make it so if such a malevolent superior being has decided to confuse us. We really have no way of knowing that this is not the case, so even the so-called truths of mathematics must be doubted. Descartes went to his favorite restaurant for dinner. After recommending several good dishes, the Maitre d' said, “The duck is really excellent, Monsieur Descartes, may I bring you the duck this evening?” After thinking for a moment, Descartes replied, “I think not”—and disappeared. Author unknown Am I a Chinese philosopher dreaming I'm a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I'm a Chinese philosopher, and how can I decide? In applying this process of systematic or methodic doubting, Descartes realized he was rapidly eliminating almost everything he had previously thought of as “knowledge.” Finally, however, he came to something he felt was impossible to doubt—something, at last, of which he could be certain. In the following famous passage, Descartes concludes that, without doubt, he is doubting. If he is doubting, he is thinking and must therefore exist as a thinking thing: HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS: Methodic Doubt (Zero-Based Epistemology) You may be familiar with a budget-building method called zero-based budgeting. Instead of carrying everything in your present budget forward into the next year and writing justifications only for the new things you wish to add, zero-based budgeting starts from zero. Every item must be justified. All the things you spent money on in the current year must be rejustified, along with any new expenditures you'd like to make next year. Descartes does something like this with his method of doubt. He is unwilling to assume anything in his mind to be true, so he casts it all out by doubting in a systematic or methodic manner. This is a kind of zero-based epistemology because he will allow nothing into his mind as certain knowledge unless and until he justifies it by deducing or reasoning its certainty. Once he deduces the Cogito and admits his existence as a certainty, he insists that every other item be similarly justified—God, the material world, even his own body. Even though there may be a deceiver of some sort, very powerful and very tricky, who bends all his efforts to keep me perpetually deceived, there can be no slightest doubt that I exist, since he deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something. Thus, after having thought well on this matter, and after examining all things with care, I must finally conclude and maintain that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind.8 When the essence of this now famous proof was rendered in Latin, the translation of “I think, therefore I am” became “Cogito ergo sum.” As a result, this proof is known as the Cogito. With the Cogito, Descartes has finally arrived at certain knowledge, but it is unfortunately very limited knowledge. What Descartes can be sure of is only the contents of his own mind. In philosophy this is called solipsism, the belief that only minds and their contents exist. Even if Descartes can be sure he exists as a thinking thing, he still cannot trust his perceptions that he has a body and that there is a world outside his mind; nor can he be sure that the mathematical certainties he has are correct. In other words, he has reasoned himself into a very small box. Cogito [KO ghi toe] the proof by which Descartes established his mental existence solipsism belief that only my mind exists and everything else is a perception of that mind Beyond Solipsism to Belief in a Material World When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable. RenÉ Descartes To get out of this box, Descartes must prove to himself that a very powerful and very good God exists to serve as the guarantor that the certainties of mathematics are true and that Descartes's perceptions are not hallucinations. Only a powerful yet good deity—a nondeceiving God—would assure Descartes that his perceptions of his own body and of the material world were accurate and matched reality. You may recall that Thomas Aquinas used the world to prove God in his cosmological proofs (the Prime Mover, the First Cause, the Necessary Being). Paradoxically, Descartes must use God to prove the world, and to do so he must first define God into existence without being able to use any of Aquinas's proofs. Whether or not he does this successfully is for you to judge.

PHILOSOPHERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

René Descartes It is true that we never tear down all the houses in a city just to rebuild them in a different way and to make the streets more beautiful; but we do see that individual owners often have theirs torn down and rebuilt, and even that they may be forced to do so when the building is crumbling with age, or when the foundation is not firm and it is in danger of collapsing. By this example I was convinced that a private individual should not seek to reform a nation by changing all its customs and destroying it to construct it anew, nor to reform the body of knowledge or the system of education. Nevertheless, as far as the opinions which I had been receiving since my birth were concerned, I could not do better than to reject them completely for once in my lifetime, and to resume them afterwards, or perhaps accept better ones in their place, when I had determined how they had fitted into a rational scheme. And, I firmly believed that by this means I would succeed in conducting my life much better than if I built only upon the old foundations and gave credence to the principles which I had acquired in my childhood without ever having examined them to see whether they were true or not. For though I noticed several difficulties in the way, they were neither insurmountable nor comparable to those involved in the slightest reform of public affairs … From René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, translated, with an introduction, by Laurence J. Lafleur (The Liberal Arts Press, 1960), pp. 10–11. In his Meditations, Descartes used several proofs for the existence of God. The first is an ontological proof, similar to the one devised by Anselm in the eleventh century (see Chapter 4). Like Anselm, Descartes reasoned that, if I can conceive of a perfect God, then that perfect God must exist; otherwise, lacking existence, God would not have all the properties of perfection and would cease to be “perfect.” The world is the work of a single thought, expressed in a thousand different ways. Madame de StaËl Ideas that are both clear and distinct are, for Descartes, the only ones on which a thinking person may rely. Because Descartes does indeed have in his mind a “clear and distinct” idea of a perfect God, he reasons that the subject of this idea must have a real existence: I find it manifest that we can no more separate the existence of God from his essence than we can separate from the essence of a triangle the fact that the size of its three angles equals two right angles, or from the idea of a mountain the idea of a valley. Thus it is no less self-contradictory to conceive of a God, a supremely perfect Being, who lacks existence—that is, who lacks some perfection—than it is to conceive of a mountain for which there is no valley.9 Another proof concludes that only God could be the source of Descartes's idea of God, because any other source (like Descartes himself, for instance) would present the paradox of the lesser being the source of the greater. To Descartes, it seemed clearly illogical to believe that an inferior being such as himself was the cause of the idea of a superior being like the one he had in his mind as a “clear and distinct” idea. Only God was great enough to be the cause of this concept: And consequently we must necessarily conclude from all that I have previously said that God exists. For even though the idea of substance exists in me from the very fact that I am a substance, I would nevertheless have no idea of an infinite substance, I who am a finite being, unless the idea had been placed in me by some substance which was in fact infinite.10

HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS:

Circular Reasoning (Begging the Question) This is actually a logical fallacy, or an invalid form of reasoning. To beg the question is to begin with something you have already concluded, as in this example: “Of course that joke is funny; every joke he tells is funny!” The argument is a circle: The joke is funny because he is a funny joke teller. The conclusion “The joke is funny” is already assumed in the evidence (he's a funny joke teller). Descartes makes a similar mistake in the judgment of some critics by arguing that his “clear and distinct idea of God” proves God exists, while assuming that God guarantees the accuracy of his “clear and distinct” ideas. It may be perfectly true that each component justifies the other, but there is no outside justification for either of them. If every joke someone tells is funny, then the current one must be funny, too, but we have no evidence that every joke the person tells is funny. This critical piece is simply assumed as true. When you examine an argument, look for circular reasoning, or begging the question. That kind of reasoning does not lead to valid conclusions. Notice here that Descartes assumed certain ideas to be part of every rational being's mind from birth. Because he had observed the presence of certain ideas in his mind for as long as he could remember, Descartes concluded that these ideas had been present since birth. They were therefore innate, or inborn. Some rationalist philosophers, including Plato and Descartes, accept the possibility that certain ideas can be fully or partially present at birth, whereas others deny even the possibility of innate ideas. Empiricist philosophers, whom we consider later in this chapter, believe the mind to be totally without ideas until experience provides it with content. innate literally “inborn,” present from the moment of birth, not learned or acquired Once Descartes had demonstrated that God must exist, he was then able to trust his perceptions of his own body and of the world revealed to him by his senses, because a good God would, also by definition, not be a “deceiver.” Critics have argued that Descartes argues circularly, using the “clear and distinct” idea of God as the basis for his proofs of God and, at the same time, using God, the nondeceiver, as the guarantor of the accuracy and trustworthiness of his “clear and distinct” ideas. Each of these terms—God and clear and distinct ideas—does in fact “prove” the other, but it is a closed system and there is no outside justification for either of them. Critics refer to this as the Cartesian circle (a shorthand version of the Descartesian circle, or the circle created by Descartes). Cartesian circle the argument by which Descartes uses his clear and distinct idea of God to prove God's existence and uses God's existence as the justification for the accuracy of his clear and distinct ideas; each proves the other, but there is no outside justification for either In the course of deciding what was really knowable, Descartes made what was for him a very useful distinction between the substance called mind and the substance called matter. A substance is something primary, something about which things can be said. This split between mind and matter was not invented by Descartes: You may recognize it from our study of Plato and Aristotle who used the terms Form and matter to make a similar distinction. What Descartes did, however, was to apply this distinction to the most significant knowledge problem of his day—how to find an independent role for the new science that would not threaten the Catholic Church. Let's look at how he accomplished this. substance the underlying reality of something, containing its primary qualities; the essence of something that remains constant despite changes in its perceptible qualities Catholic Free Will in the “Clockwork Universe” of Science According to Descartes, reality is composed of two substances that possess opposite and complementary qualities: Mind is thinking and unextended, meaning it does not take up space, whereas matter is unthinking and extended (Figure 5.2). Because matter is both unthinking and extended in space, it is subject to the laws of physics. In the “clockwork universe” then being uncovered by the invention of telescopes and microscopes and by the discoveries of electricity, magnetism, and optics, it seemed as if it were only a matter of time before human reason could unlock all of nature's mysteries and demystify her deepest secrets. The realm of mind, by contrast with the realm of matter, was both thinking and unextended. (Recall that Descartes reasoned himself into being as a “thinking thing.”) Being unextended, mind was not determined by the laws of physics; its actions were not part of the “clockwork universe,” and so the very significant Catholic doctrine of the “freedom of the will” was not threatened. Unlike matter, mind was free to act independently on its own behalf. As free entities, human minds could make their own decisions and be held accountable as moral agents. My mind is a handgrenade—catch! Ice-T Descartes began by systematically doubting everything and ended with the Cogito. Only by proving the existence of a nondeceiving God was he able to move from solipsism to belief in the material world, including his own body. The reality of his rational mind was much clearer and more distinct to Descartes than that of his material body, and as we have seen, the two substances had separate and contrasting characteristics. His method had led him to affirm a basic distinction between mind and matter that had the additional advantage of being what today we might call “politically correct.” By affirming two substances, Descartes was able to assign the “clockwork universe” to science while reserving the mind (and the soul) as the province of the Catholic Church. However, there was an unanticipated consequence: the mind-body problem. mind-body problem a problem of metaphysics created when Descartes divided reality into mind and matter, making each a separate substance; how can two completely distinct substances interact in one person? The Mind-Body Problem By solving a problem in epistemology, Descartes had unknowingly created another in metaphysics. If mind and body are opposite in every respect (as Descartes had successfully argued), the next reasonable question is, How can they possibly interact? What connection can there be between a thinking and an unthinking substance, between an extended and an unextended substance? What possible point of contact could coordinate the smooth interaction of polar opposites? And yet, it seems clear to most people that mind-body interaction takes place all the time. Instruct your hand to move and it moves; tell your body to lie down and it obeys. Thinking, unextended substance (mind) tells unthinking, extended substance (body) to act and it acts. Figure 5.2 Descartes's Mind-Matter Distinction Separating mind and matter into two distinct substances created a domain in which the new science could operate without threatening the Church. Forced to deal with this truth of common sense, Descartes theorized that the pineal gland in the brain was the center of interchange between mind and body; at that location mental instructions were translated into physical responses. This explanation is the obvious weak point in Descartes's elaborate theory because pinpointing a location tells us nothing about how such an interchange might take place. Having convinced us too thoroughly that body and mind inhabit different realms, Descartes cannot successfully convince us that these realms can and do interact. Descartes did something all of us have done at one time or another: He concentrated so intently on solving one problem that he failed to see that he was creating another. In his eagerness to make clear the distinction between thinking, unextended mind and unthinking, extended body, Descartes seems to have painted himself into a metaphysical corner. Having declared mind and body as separate and distinct, he had no credible way to unite them in the mind-body interactions that are part of every person's lived experience. Even though Descartes more than any other philosopher defined the terms of the modern world's philosophical discourse, his unresolved mind-body problem remained for others to address.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677) Spinoza's Jewish family had left Spain to escape the Inquisition and settled in the Netherlands. He studied Hebrew literature and Jewish philosophy in Amsterdam in his youth but eventually learned Latin, the “priests' language,” which gave him access to the writings of Descartes and descriptions of the new science. Spinoza's writings were judged to be heretical, and he was excommunicated in 1656. After this he spent his life in quiet philosophic study, supporting himself by the trade of lens grinding. He corresponded with prominent thinkers and writers of his day, wrote an impassioned defense of free speech, but declined a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg University, fearing restrictions on his own freedom to speak. Glass dust from his trade eventually weakened his lungs and made him vulnerable to tuberculosis. He had always maintained that being obsessed with the fear of death was a kind of slavery and, true to that intellectual conviction, he died calmly and peacefully. Responses to the Mind-Body Problem Although Descartes died before working out a satisfactory resolution of the mind-body problem, it remains an issue in the Western world. Because Descartes's system had been so successful in resolving a potential conflict between religion and science, his successors tried to modify the absolute separation between mind and body without losing the distinction between them. Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Anne Finch Conway are all Descartes's heirs in the rationalist tradition. As the epistemology of the Akan of West Africa demonstrates, the mind-body problem arises out of a Western worldview and does not exist if one does not make Descartes's assumptions. THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) Leibniz worked as a librarian, historian, mathematician, political theorist, jurist, and philosopher, often with prominent political families, including the Prussian royal family. He spent a good portion of his life trying to demonstrate the power of logic to solve problems—like the royal succession in Poland and the reconciliation of Protestant and Catholic theologies. As the inventor of the integral calculus, Leibniz hoped to create a logical calculus, a universal language by which two philosophers who disagreed could take out their pencils and “calculate” a solution to their differences. His conclusion that this must be the “best of all possible worlds” was easily satirized, most famously in Voltaire's Candide in which Dr. Pangloss represents Leibniz. Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza Baruch Spinoza, Descartes's contemporary, was one of the first philosophers to consider seriously the dilemma posed by the mind-body problem. His solution, like Descartes's, solved one problem while creating another. For Spinoza, the mind-body problem could be solved very simply by considering both thinking and extension to be attributes, or characteristics, of God. If God is a single substance with two attributes—thinking and extension—then the characteristics associated with being a thinking substance and those of being an extended substance are not separate and distinct, as they were for Descartes. Instead, both are united in the one substance we call God. Even Descartes had admitted that though we use the word substance to refer both to finite thinking and extended substances (like ourselves) and to God (who is an infinite, thinking substance), the word substance is used in two different ways. Taking what he believed was already implicit in Descartes, Spinoza argued that the one substance, God, has an infinite number of attributes, of which we know two: thought and extension. Human minds are finite modifications of God considered under the attribute of thought, whereas human bodies are finite modifications of God considered under the attribute of extension. For Spinoza, mind and body are the same thing viewed in two different ways. The mind is the idea of the body, and the body is the extended aspect of the mind. If God is the ultimate substance, then his two attributes will have a necessary relationship with each other, much as our own minds and bodies are interrelated. Spinoza had neatly solved the mindbody problem, but his argument suggests that God actually has a body, and that body is the world. If the price of solving the mind-body problem was assigning God a body, some found the cure worse than the original disease. Spinoza was condemned as a heretic. As we saw in Chapter 4, describing precisely what kind of God you believe in is much more difficult, and sometimes much more perilous, than simply proving the existence of an abstract deity. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Monads Like Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz solved the mind-body problem by reducing the world to a single substance. For Spinoza, that substance was God and everything else was an attribute; for Leibniz, however, the primary substance, which he called the monad, was the basic constituent of everything. A monad is a simple, nonmaterial substance that can neither be created nor destroyed. It is both active and teleological—meaning it acts purposefully. What you think of as your mind is a monad. What you think of as your body is a collection of monads. Leibniz, another Western rationalist of this period, argues that bodies and minds are both spiritual substances or souls created by God—the ultimate spiritual substance, a kind of Monad of Monads. The only difference between what we call bodies and what we call minds is that some monads perceive more clearly than others and are called rational. monad Leibniz's word for the simple, unextended, teleological substances that make up the universe

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway (1631–1678) Anne Finch was born in London and, like many other women of her time, educated at home. After learning Latin and Greek, she could discuss philosophy with her brother John and others of his classmates at Cambridge University, one of whom she married (Edward, Viscount Conway). Through John she also met his tutor, Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist. Encouraged to think for herself, Anne Conway eventually undertook a formal criticism of both the rationalist philosophers Descartes and Spinoza and the materialist Thomas Hobbes. She suffered from what were probably migraine headaches and, influenced by Francis Mercury van Helmont, who tried to ease her suffering, she became a Quaker. Leibniz may have been influenced by her work—at the very least their ideas were remarkably similar. She died at the age of forty-seven, and her only published philosophical work is The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. The most startling thing about Leibniz's theory of monads is his declaration that, although all substances are intrinsically related to one another, no direct interaction occurs between them; they only appear to interact because of a preestablished harmony set up by God at the time of Creation. God knows the thoughts and perceptions that will pass through each monad's consciousness from the time of its creation and, acting as a divine orchestrator, harmonizes the thoughts and perceptions of all. So well regulated is the system that soul and body, each acting independently and following its own divinely implanted laws, agree “just as if there were mutual influence, or as if God in addition to his general cooperation constantly put his hand thereto.”11 In a bizarre way this solves the mind-body problem. What we are left with, however, is a situation that appears to contradict common sense—that substances do not interact. preestablished harmony the harmony between body and soul or between the world of efficient causes and the world of final causes established by God, according to Leibniz What is most interesting about Leibniz is the character of his monads. They are not like the atoms that Democritus and others described as the building blocks of matter; they more closely resemble energy and might be thought of as zones of force. Our current understanding of the universe, discussed in some detail in Chapter 2, depicts matter and energy as two aspects of the same thing (E = mc2). You may recall that in the heart of the atom, as well as in the macrocosm of the universe, what seems to be fundamental is the energy field. Especially within the atom, matter seems not to be very material. In the context of current particle physics, Leibniz's monads have an oddly modern character. Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway Anne Conway, a contemporary of the seventeenth-century rationalist philosophers we have been discussing, is credited with influencing Leibniz, who read her work twenty years after her death. He began using the term monad at this time, so he may have borrowed it from Conway as well. Leibniz's monads were purely spiritual, but Conway's monads have both physical and spiritual qualities. In The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, written in the mid-1670s and published in 1690, Conway insists that matter and spirit both exist on the same continuum, but spirit exists at a higher level than matter. God is pure spirit, and human creatures, which are a mixture of body and spirit, tend either toward higher things as a reflection of spirit or toward sin as a reflection of matter. Speaking directly to the mind-body problem, Conway wrote, To prove that Spirit and Body differ not essentially, but gradually, I shall deduce my Fourth Argument from the intimate Band or Union, which intercedes between Bodies and Spirits, by means whereof the Spirits have Dominion over the bodies with which they are united, that they move them from one place to another, and use them as Instruments in their various Operations.12 For Conway, asserting a complete separation between Spirit and Body creates absurd scenarios. Why, for instance, does Spirit not simply “leave the Body behind it when it is moved from place to place…” if there is no relationship between the two? More to the point, “Why is it [Spirit] grieved or wounded when the Body is wounded which is quite of a different Nature?” Recognizing that they are related though different allows reason and common sense to prevail: But if it be granted, that the Soul is of one Nature and Substance with the Body, although it is many degrees more excellent … then all the aforesaid difficulties will vanish, and it will be easily conceived, how the Body and Soul are united together, and how the Soul moves the Body, and suffers by it or with it.13 The Akan of West Africa The extent to which the mind-body problem is a distinctively Western problem can be seen by examining the conception of a person among the Akan people of West Africa. In the making of a human person, God fashions an okra, which is a life force or spirit, out of a portion of himself, then sends it to Earth with the blueprint for its life. This is similar to Leibniz's view of the monad into which God has built every thought and perception that will pass through its consciousness. okra [OAK rah] the life force in the Akan system Mogya (bloodline and clan identity), which derives from the mother, is material; sunsum (the distinctive aspects of personality), which derives from the father, is only partly material. The sunsum perishes with the body at death, whereas the okra (which is also quasi material) goes on to become an ancestor in a world that seems strikingly like the present one in many ways. mogya [MAHG yah] bloodline and clan identity in the Akan system sunsum [SUHN suhm] the distinctive aspects of personality in the Akan system The important difference from Descartes occurs with the concept of mind, or adwene. In the Akan language, adwene “is primarily the capacity to think thoughts, feel emotions, construct arguments, imagine things, perceive objects and situations, dream dreams of both night and day and so on.”14 Adwene does not signify anything like the thinking, unextended substance Descartes described when he used the word “mind.” adwene [ahd WAY nay] the mind, meaning the capacity to think and feel in the Akan system Although Descartes used the words mind and spirit more or less interchangeably, “to identify either the okra or the sunsum with adwene would be the sheerest gibberish” in the Akan language.15 Because there is no “mind” in the Cartesian sense—meaning an immaterial entity, separate and distinct from a material aspect of the person—the mind-body problem cannot arise. Figure 5.3 Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem If mind and body are completely separate, the question becomes, How do they interact? For the Akan, as for Conway, the parts that make up a human person are arranged on a continuum. Conway's continuum moves from more or less spiritual to more or less material, whereas the Akan continuum moves from purely material to quasi material. In both cases, the result is the same: an integrated person rather than a body and a mind essentially different one from another and unable to interact.16 (For a summary of some solutions to the metaphysical mind-body problem, see Figure 5.3.) The New Science Leads to Empiricism: Isaac Newton Descartes's theory of the clockwork universe led others to deepen the investigation into nature's mysteries, and in 1687 Isaac Newton stunned the scientific community with his Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Working from mathematical laws, Newton was able to use a few relatively simple principles to describe a vast array of phenomena in the physical universe. Things that had only recently been labeled “mysteries” and thus credited to a divine power were explained clearly and precisely by human reason. With no exaggeration, the poet Alexander Pope expressed the awe of his age: Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night God said, Let Newton be! and all was light17 Whereas Descartes had worked from one basic premise, the Cogito, and from it deduced a world in the same way that Euclid had deduced geometry, Newton had begun with nature. His laws of motion arose out of observation. Only after the data of sense experience were analyzed and developed into basic axioms did Newton use those axioms to generate a deductive system. His method was a major departure from Descartes's insistence that only reason—not the world of the senses and not even mathematics—could be the basis for knowledge about the world. After Newton, philosophers, too, began to turn their attention to observable phenomena, studying them with the expectation that they would provide a new route to knowledge. British Empiricism Once Newtonian science had become firmly enthroned as the explanatory principle of the physical universe, philosophers looked to the methods of science to provide a new understanding of how we know. The approach they took, beginning in the late seventeenth century, has come to be called empiricism. In the face of the big epistemological question of the relationship (if any) between my ideas of things and things themselves, Descartes had taken refuge in the guarantee of a nondeceiving God. Once he had reasoned a perfect God into existence, Descartes could assert with confidence that the contents of his mind bore a direct relationship with reality. Because a perfect God would not deceive him, Descartes reasoned, his perceptions of a material world must indeed come from and reflect an actual material world. empiricism the belief that meaningful knowledge can be acquired only through sense experience Seeking to make philosophical truth as firmly grounded as Newtonian physics, empiricist philosophers insisted that any statement that purports to tell us something about the world must originate in sense experience rather than in the mind. If philosophy wished to describe the world, empiricists believed, it must base any description on actual observations of the world itself rather than on our ideas about the world. Because Newton had unlocked the mystery of nature's processes through the formulation of his laws of motion, philosophy ought to begin with observation (as Newton had done) and either describe metaphysical reality or admit that it cannot be done. Three British philosophers—John Locke in England, George Berkeley in Ireland, and David Hume in Scotland—took up the challenge. Beginning rather modestly with the publication of Locke's An Essay on Human Understanding in 1690, the thought processes of these three empiricists evolved over the next century, culminating in Hume's radical skepticism.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

John Locke (1632–1704) Locke received a classical education and later trained as a physician, although he seldom practiced that profession. Sympathetic to the Parliamentary Party in England, he later wrote its philosophical defense and remained interested in politics. Best known for his defense of “natural rights,” Locke's ideas were influential in the establishment of the American republic as well as the “bloodless revolution” in England in 1688. As a physician, he was well acquainted with the work of his scientific contemporaries and impressed with their attempts to understand nature by “rational experiment and observation.” To clear the ground for this work, he was eager to root out the doctrine of innate ideas on which Descartes had built his system. Creating a Mind-World Connection: John Locke John Locke began the empiricist tradition in modern Western philosophy by asserting that he saw his task primarily as one of clearing away the metaphysical “rubbish” that was cluttering the path to knowledge. In his view, before we can speak about the world on the basis of our experiences with it, the “rubbish” left by the rationalists must first be discarded. In particular, Locke rejected the innate ideas that had figured so prominently in Descartes's philosophy. Two of the most fundamental of the innate ideas claimed by the rationalists are the logical principles of identity—“what is, is”—and of non-contradiction—“it is impossible for the same thing to be and not be at the same time.” In his Essay on Human Understanding, Locke argued that if there are in fact any innate ideas, they must be assented to by everyone. Because rationalists believed these ideas to be imprinted on the mind at birth, Locke reasoned that a test might be whether these ideas are present in the minds of every person, no matter how young or unintelligent. If such ideas are truly innate, then they neither require learning nor depend on a high degree of intelligence. Instead, Locke found the principles “what is, is,” and “it is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be,” not universally assented to—But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such; because there are none to which all mankind give a universal assent … For, first, it is evident, that all children and ideots [sic] have not the least apprehension or thought of them; and the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent, which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths …18 Having criticized the theory of innate ideas, Locke next described the mind as a tabula rasa—literally, a “blank tablet”—at the time of birth. Having spent its prenatal life in a warm, dark environment in which all its needs were met, the fetus would have no need of ideas, and no source for them. From the moment of birth, however, the child enters a world of sensation— sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells—and experience begins to write upon the blank tablet. This experience, according to Locke, is the only way any of us has of getting to know what the world is like. From these simple sensations, we form simple ideas, and by using our capacity for reflection (by thinking about them), we can combine these simple ideas into complex ones. But all our ideas have their origin in experience. When faced with the basic question of whether our ideas about the world match the world, Locke could not (within the limitations of empiricism) argue, as Descartes did, that the existence of a good God guarantees this connection. Locke does, however, borrow another very useful distinction made by Descartes in the example of the melting wax: Even though every sensation produced by the wax changed during the process of heating, we still understand that it is the same piece of wax. Descartes had declared that even though the color and scent and solidity of the wax had changed, its essential characteristics—whatever makes it wax—had not. Those primary qualities, the ones that persist through change, must be in the object itself, whereas the secondary qualities, the ones that change, must not. Descartes had used this example, in part, to discredit the senses; Locke picked up the distinction and used it to bridge the gap between ideas of the world and the world itself. If primary qualities are inherent in objects, then our ideas of primary qualities are copies of those qualities as they exist in perceived objects. The ideas are not the objects themselves but they are close enough to provide us a correspondence between mind and external reality. For Locke, primary qualities included solidity (size), extension (occupying space), figure (shape), mobility (in motion or at rest), and number: Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts, each part has still solidity, extension, figure, and mobility; divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on till the parts become insensible, they must retain still each of them all those qualities…These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz., solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.19 Secondary qualities, according to Locke, are not inherent in the object but are produced in the perceiver by contact with the primary qualities. To put it another way, the primary qualities have the power to produce in us sensations like color, sound, taste, texture, and smell. Because the secondary qualities are not, properly speaking, in the object and because they can be distorted by the medium through which they pass on their way to the perceiver, they do not produce the same kind of reliable knowledge that primary qualities do. If, for example, I am wearing my friend's glasses rather than my own or if I have had drops put in my eyes by an ophthalmologist, I may receive a garbled version of the secondary qualities. Even under these extreme conditions, however, I will recognize whether or not the object is extended, in motion or at rest, and so on. Locke believed he had created a mind-world connection sufficiently strong to guarantee that our ideas of the world really do resemble the world as it is. Furthermore, he had done it without resorting to Descartes's nondeceiving deity and had used only empirically acceptable methods. As we will see, once the methods of empiricism had been engaged, there was no restraining them. George Berkeley, an Irish bishop and philosopher writing during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, applied all the rigor of the empirical method to Locke's explanation and found it wanting. Reality as Mind Dependent: George Berkeley

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

George Berkeley (1685–1753) Born in Ireland, Berkeley studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and remained there, after becoming a fellow, until 1713. He traveled extensively in Europe and then spent a decade attempting to found a university in Bermuda. This effort brought him to Rhode Island in 1729 where he was remembered for saying “Westward the course of Empire takes its way.” The westward town of Berkeley, California, was subsequently named for him. He spent eighteen years overseeing an Irish diocese as the bishop of Cloyne and died in Oxford, England, in 1753. Berkeley reasoned that all the arguments used by Locke to prove that secondary qualities exist only in the mind of the perceiver applied equally to primary qualities (Figure 5.4). Actually, if we know the qualities of extension, figure, and mobility Locke had assigned to solid, senseless matter, those qualities must simply be ideas in our minds. Things, contended Berkeley, can correspond only to things like themselves, so whereas an idea can correspond to another idea, an idea cannot correspond to a piece of unthinking matter. Locke's careful distinction between the reliability of primary qualities and the unreliability of secondary qualities fails on empirical grounds in Berkeley's system. Both are unreliable as proof that a world outside our minds exists: Some there are who make a distinction betwixt primary and secondary qualities: by the former, they mean extension, figure, motion, rest, solidity or impenetrability, and number; by the latter they denote all other sensible qualities as colours, sounds, tastes, and so forth. The ideas we have of these last they acknowledge not to be the resemblances of any things existing without the mind or unperceived but they will have our ideas of the primary qualities to be patterns or images of things which exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance which they call Matter. By Matter therefore we are to understand an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist. But it is evident, from what we have already shown, that extension, figure, and motion are only ideas existing in the mind, and that an idea can be like nothing but another idea; and that consequently neither they nor their archetypes can exist in an unperceiving substance. Hence it is plain that the very notion of what is called Matter, or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it.20 Figure 5.4 Primary and Secondary Qualities Locke and Berkeley agreed on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities but disagreed about where the former could be found. For Berkeley the object would appear differently to different perceivers. Not only has Berkeley denied the mind-world connection Locke sought to make, he has gone much further and cast doubt on the entire external world. If both primary and secondary qualities exist only in the mind, then, in a very fundamental way, only mental substances (ideas) can be said to exist; physical (material) substances may or may not exist. We have only the contents of our minds to experience, and these contents consist entirely of ideas. The mental gymnastics required to hold primary qualities in one category and secondary qualities in another are too much for Berkeley, who invites you to try your mind on this puzzle: But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and nowhere else.21 If the material world exists only as a mental perception, then, as Berkeley puts it, “to be is to be perceived.” If this is true, then it must follow that “not to be perceived is not to be.” So in the classic philosophical riddle—if a tree falls in the middle of the forest and there is no one there to hear it— Berkeley's answer must be that it would not make a sound, for sound, like all other perceptions, requires a perceiver. Lacking one, the sound has no real existence even if we admit (as Berkeley might not) that sound waves have been produced. To Leibniz his nose was a congregation of spiritual beings To a modern physicist his nose is a wild dance of electrons To Bishop Berkeley his own nose only existed from time to time when he blew it. Desmond McCarthy Following this idea to its extreme, we might be forced to conclude that the world is not the same from one moment to the next. In the presence of a perceiver, the falling tree would make a sound, but with no perceiver, would there even be a tree? Given Berkeley's assertion that “to be is to be perceived,” it might be difficult to demonstrate rationally that the car you left in the parking lot is still there. Common sense may tell you it must be there, but if no one is perceiving it, how can you be sure? To be fair to Berkeley, he never took his ideas this far, but if we pursue their implications, some interesting questions arise. How, for instance, can we account for the fact that the world seems to remain intact even when all of us are asleep and not doing our “jobs” as perceivers? There was a young man who said, “God must think it exceedingly odd If he found that this tree continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad.” Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd I am always about in the Quad And that's why this tree will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God Ronald Knox Berkeley distinguishes between ideas of sense and ideas of the imagination. The latter are produced by human free will and tend to be random, whereas the former, ideas of sense, are produced by our perceptions and tend to be more regular and predictable. This distinction implies that there must be some perceiver who is always on the job even when we are not. Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that Bishop Berkeley next introduces God, the Author of nature and nature's laws, as the source of the regularity in the natural world: The ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the Imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series—the admirable connexion whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its Author. Now the set rules or established methods, wherein the Mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of Sense, are called the laws of nature; and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things.22 The very orderliness and steadiness of our perceptions suggests to Berkeley a constant perceiver. It is this “Author of nature” who is always perceiving everything, who guarantees that objects in your room are where you left them, and that even if a tree falls in the middle of a forest it makes a sound. But Berkeley, like many philosophers before him and since, had solved one problem only by creating another. Although introducing God, the perpetual perceiver, does restore a sense of order and regularity to nature, Berkeley did not arrive at his conclusion concerning the necessity for such a being on the basis of sense perception. Rather than an empirical demonstration, his “proof” for the existence of the “Author of nature” is a deductive one. Even though Berkeley the empiricist had reasoned his way out of an epistemological dilemma, Berkeley the cleric had in the process violated the assumptions on which empiricism is based. For all the rigor of his attack on Locke, Berkeley had been unable to stay within the first premise of empiricism: Any statement that purports to tell us about the world must originate in sense experience. You may have noticed that each empiricist philosopher discussed in this section has been more radical than his predecessor. Locke began somewhat modestly with the goal of clearing away the rubbish that lay between him and knowledge of the world. Applying Locke's own methods to his conclusions, Berkeley cast doubt on the independent existence of the material world if there is no mind to perceive it. David Hume, whose philosophy we will consider next, is the most radical of the three. His methods have been ruthless in their destruction of both the content and the methods of traditional philosophy.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

David Hume (1711–1776) Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at the university there, Hume first studied law but then resolved to become a philosopher. After an argument with a Jesuit over miracles, he began to write his first treatise. Hume spent his twenties working on this project and along the way had what we would today call a nervous breakdown. To make matters worse, the treatise received unfavorable reviews, falling “dead born from the Press” as Hume put it. He tried to restate the ideas more acceptably in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and was rewarded with critical and philosophical interest. Hume's mother characterized her Davy as a “well meanin' but weak-minded critter,” a strange description for a brilliant thinker whose ideas demolished most of traditional metaphysics and epistemology. Radical Skepticism: David Hume In Hume we find the rigorous, fully consistent application of empiricist principles. Hume, who died the year the Declaration of Independence was written, did not accept innate ideas, did not believe in God, and limited our knowledge about the character of the world to that which we can know through sense experience. It is, he wrote, “certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical.”23 If we look for the origins of our ideas, Hume argued, we will find them in sense impressions. If I accidentally hit my thumb while hammering a nail, the result is an “impression” that is very strong and vivid. For a moment my entire being seems centered in my thumb where I am experiencing intense pain. When a week later I tell you about hitting my thumb, I draw on my “idea” of the experience—what remains from the initial “impression”—which is much fainter and less powerful: All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning…24 Hume contended that all our ideas are but faint copies of previous sense impressions. Even the idea of something we have not perceived—say, a silver cloud—is a combination of previous impressions of silver and clouds. Hume summed up his general proposition this way: “That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.”25 Complex ideas are combinations of simple ones, and if something does not first exist as an impression, it cannot later exist as an idea. After advancing this innocent sounding proposition, Hume began to lead his readers through its implications. If all our ideas have their origin in impressions, then surely those who speak of “substance” are dealing in fantasy. What sense impression could we possibly have of either mental or physical “substance”? These may be concepts that philosophers use to entertain themselves, but they can tell us nothing about the nature of reality. Hume admitted to having perceptions of physical objects, but he found no impression in his mind of anything so slippery as physical “substance.” For that matter, he did not even find a “mind.” When he went in search of mental “substance,” or mind, what he found instead was the contents of what philosophers have called mind. He found a collection of perceptions and nothing else; he found no entity—no mind—that holds these perceptions and has an independent existence. What is called “mind,” Hume contended, is really nothing but a “bundle of perceptions.” In similar fashion, Hume found the supposed “idea” of God to have no basis in sense experience. Because there is no impression, there can be no idea. As Hume's skepticism continued to pound at the edifice of traditional philosophy, most of it collapsed under the assault of his radical empiricism. Failing the “impression” test, mental and physical “substance,” “mind” or “self,” and “God” all become epistemologically meaningless. If people want to talk about them as though something meaningful might be said, they may of course do so, but Hume was clear that such concepts, which do not have their origin in sense experience, can never lead us toward knowledge of the nature and character of reality. skepticism the philosophical doctrine that knowledge is uncertain and (in its strictest sense) that absolute knowledge is unattainable So, to Hume all of metaphysics must be dismissed as a blind alley, of no help whatever in our attempt to understand the world. What then of science, with its empirical methods and its apparent power to explain reality? To examine science's claim to knowledge, Hume looked at the ways in which ideas are connected or associated with each other. He found three patterns of association: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect; the first two are described here: Tis plain, that in the course of our thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. 'Tis likewise evident, that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie contiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects.26 The mind, of course, is just what the brain does for a living! Sharon Begley It seems clear that one of the patterns we follow in associating ideas is resemblance. All the flowers I think of are connected by resemblance. In a similar way, things contiguous (close together) in space-time provide natural associations. The events of my day, as well as all the entities in a given space, are related to one another through the pattern of association. The “gentle force” responsible for these patterns of association is not reason but the imagination. These connections are not necessary connections like those in mathematics, which lead us to conclude that, based on a proof, two triangles are congruent. The patterns of association, Hume insisted, arise more from feeling than from logic. The third pattern—cause and effect—has a similar origin. Like resemblance and contiguity, cause and effect is a pattern of association and nothing more. Part of our deep, visceral (gut-level) response to the world is that we want it to be an orderly place, so we associate events under the pattern of cause and effect, but the pattern is in us rather than in the events. Hume analyzed the principle of causation as put forth by scientists and concluded that to have meaning this principle must rest on “some relation” among objects. For causation to exist among objects, three criteria must be met: contiguity (the objects would have to be sufficiently close together), priority of time (the cause must precede the effect in time), and necessary connexion (this effect must follow from this cause). Although Hume granted our experience of the first two, he challenged the empirical basis for the third and crucial requirement: “necessary connexion.” His explanation of what happens is that, as a result of the “constant conjunction” of two events, we apply the pattern of cause and effect. After we have many experiences of two events in which one invariably follows the other, we conclude (with no basis in empirical reality) that the first event has “caused” the second. In fact, we can have no real knowledge of this “causation.” Imagination is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein Consider, for instance, a game of billiards or pool. We observe the white cue ball strike one of the striped balls, and then we observe the striped ball rolling into the corner pocket. Our conclusion is that the force of the cue ball “caused” the striped ball to move across the table. But Hume insisted that we have merely observed two events: (1) the white ball striking the striped ball, and (2) the striped ball rolling into the corner pocket. We have not observed any connection between the two events but instead have supplied the connection as a pattern of association: Consider, for instance, a game of billiards or pool. We observe the white cue ball strike one of the striped balls, and then we observe the striped ball rolling into the corner pocket. Our conclusion is that the force of the cue ball “caused” the striped ball to move across the table. But Hume insisted that we have merely observed two events: (1) the white ball striking the striped ball, and (2) the striped ball rolling into the corner pocket. We have not observed any connection between the two events but instead have supplied the connection as a pattern of association: We have no other notion of cause and effect but that of certain objects which have been always conjoined together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that, from the constant conjunction, the objects require an union in the imagination.27 Notice the use of the word imagination. Hume has reduced the foundation of the scientific method—the principle of cause and effect—to a psychological device. Indeed, Hume found the origin of many of our strongest held principles to lie not in reason but in our feelings; these principles are a consequence of our passionate response to the world. Even though reason is useful in revealing the abstract connections between ideas, it is useless in motivating our behavior. Our moral principles, for instance, derive not from reason, but from how we would prefer the world to be. Acts that preserve our humanity and foster cooperation and honesty bring us pleasure, and it is for this reason that they become enthroned as moral principles. Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind. Withering my intuition … Tool, “Lateralus” For similarly emotional reasons, we want to believe in a predictable world, governed by laws of cause and effect. Because Hume has shown that all events are independent (for example, the movement of the billiard balls), science cannot really predict the future based on an analysis of the past. Our psychological pattern of joining two events together to create “cause and effect” is nothing more than a mental exercise; it has no basis in reality. We may feel certain that striking one billiard ball with another in exactly the proper way will drive it into the pocket, and we confidently use this feeling to predict that in the future the same events will lead to the same result, but if the connection exists not in reality but in our interpretation of events, then this confidence is completely unfounded. Just because the Sun has risen every day of your life so far does not mean that science can guarantee that it will rise again tomorrow. The statement “The Sun will not rise tomorrow” does not produce a logical contradiction. Like other animals, we rely much more on instinct than on reason. Our instinctual nature allows us to act on our limited empirical knowledge and conclude that there is an external world in which cause and effect rule. Hume simply asks us to admit that we are kidding ourselves. It may be comforting to believe in Santa Claus, but philosophy cannot prove he exists; the same is true for cause and effect. Hume's radical empiricism created an intellectual dead end for philosophical speculation and scientific reasoning. If Hume was right, there was no point in pretending we could achieve reliable knowledge about the world. It seemed to some that philosophy might have outlived its usefulness. Implications of Empiricism for Philosophy During the twentieth century, both logical positivism and language analysis rigorously applied empiricism to ontological questions and concluded that very little of value can be known with certainty about external reality. If we are limited to the data of sense perception and strictly applied rules of logic, the result can be skepticism—a limitation on knowledge that also severely limits philosophy's usefulness in answering basic questions about what is real. After having seen where exclusive reliance on either perception or logic can lead, in a later section we step outside Western culture for a moment to consider a traditional African worldview that blends logic with other methods to arrive at reliable knowledge about reality. Hume's Fork and Logical Positivism By insisting that we cannot know anything about the character of the world as it exists apart from our sense perceptions, Hume radically restricted the territory in which philosophy can reasonably operate. In what has come to be called Hume's Fork, he divided the objects of human inquiry into two types: those that show the relations of ideas and those that describe matters of fact (Figure 5.5). Hume's Fork the doctrine that no middle ground exists between necessary truths, based on the relation of ideas, and contingent truths, based on experience; anything other than these two tells us nothing meaningful about reality Figure 5.5 Hume's Fork Hume dismissed everything as meaningless, except the two tines of the fork. Hume granted that there are truths of reason, which are either intuitively or demonstrably certain. Examples of this kind of knowledge are “the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides” and “3 times 5 is equal to half of 30.” These statements about the relations of ideas are self-evident or true by definition, but they tell us nothing about the world. They constitute one tine of Hume's Fork, and they provide knowledge about which we can be certain but about which we care very little. The other tine of the fork involves matters of fact that purport to tell us about the world, as in the statement “The Sun will rise tomorrow.” As we have seen, however, this knowledge is far from certain, for it is based on our perceptions only and is not demonstrably true. Actually, as we have already noted, there is no logical contradiction in stating, “The Sun will not rise tomorrow.” Hume's Fork leaves us a very unappetizing choice between (1) ideas that are certain but do not tell us anything we want to know and (2) ideas that tell us things we want to know but are not certain. Whatever belongs to neither tine meets an even harsher fate: Every supposed “idea” that neither expresses the relationships of ideas nor examines matters of fact is, by definition, outside the scope of knowledge. During the twentieth century, one group of philosophers who took Hume's radical empiricism seriously advocated what came to be called logical positivism. Accepting Hume's criteria for knowledge, they insisted that a proposition is epistemologically or cognitively meaningful only if it is either self-evident or can, at least in theory, be empirically verified. Because it is impossible even to conceive of actual conditions under which one might empirically verify the existence of God, the human self, or moral principles and because these entities are not self-evident, the result is a greatly diminished field of activity for philosophy. logical positivism a radical empiricist position based on Hume's Fork, asserting that propositions have meaning only if they are either analytic (true by definition) or synthetic (verifiable, at least in principle, in experience) Leaving aside the traditional emphasis on metaphysics and ethics, logical positivists have focused on bringing logical clarity to philosophical statements about the world. Real knowledge about the world can be derived only from scientific investigation, and value statements such as “Stealing is wrong” are only expressions of emotion (see Chapter 10). Philosophy, however, can perform a useful function by analyzing both everyday language and scientific language.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Born in Vienna, Wittgenstein was originally attracted to architecture and engineering but later studied pure mathematics and became interested in the philosophy of mathematics, which led him to philosophy. Arguing that philosophy is not a doctrine or set of doctrines but an activity, Wittgenstein insisted that whatever can be said can be said clearly. His emphasis on and investigations into the logical structure of language were major influences on logical positivism. He wrote his first treatise, the Tractatus, while serving in the Austrian army during World War I. He also worked as an elementary school teacher and gardener's assistant before taking a doctorate at Cambridge University in England where he used the Tractatus as his dissertation. He held a philosophy chair at Cambridge between 1937 and 1947, but during World War II he worked as a hospital orderly and as an assistant in a medical laboratory. His second major work, the Philosophical Investigations, was published two years after his death. Language Analysis and the Limits of Philosophy Much of the original inspiration for logical positivism came from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Viennese mathematician. Wittgenstein thought philosophical analysis could first reduce complex, descriptive propositions to the simple propositions of which they were composed, and then it could further reduce these to “names” that in combination were the most basic constituents of reality. In Wittgenstein's first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), he argued that language “pictures” the fact it represents because both the language and the fact share the same logical form. A combination of “names” (a proposition) is a picture of a combination of objects (a fact). Language, then, is our key to understanding the world, for if we wish to understand the world, we should begin by analyzing the language we use to “picture” it. In his second and final work Philosophical Investigations (1953), published after his death, Wittgenstein abandoned the idea that language had a universal function—like picturing reality—in favor of a more complex understanding of how language functions. Reasoning that we never have just a picture—we always have a picture of something—Wittgenstein concluded that we also have “language games” that are used to say the same thing in a number of critically different ways. Wittgenstein believed that we ignore or confuse language games to our peril. Philosophy, in particular, uses perfectly functional words such as mind and God to frame unnecessarily perplexing philosophical problems. Mind can be spoken about quite clearly in psychology, and God can be spoken about quite clearly in theology, but when we remove these words from the language game to which they properly belong, confusion is bound to result. By Wittgenstein's analysis, philosophy had reasoned itself out of a job. He believed philosophy's task was to decide what could logically be “said” and then let scientists “say” those things. When someone poses a metaphysical question, philosophy's job, according to Wittgenstein, is to point out that the question is meaningless, for most of the propositions in philosophical works are “not false but nonsensical.”28 What a comedown from the time of Descartes, when philosophy seemed to offer a route to certain knowledge about ourselves and about the world! In the West, logic is assumed to be the foundation of all true knowledge; what cannot survive the rigors of logical analysis has no claim to the status of knowledge or truth. And yet, there is nothing of art or intuition in logic, nothing of human emotion; indeed, these things are specifically and rigorously excluded. In the next two sections we'll look at challenges to these claims. American philosopher Alison M. Jaggar challenges what she calls “the myth of the objective observer” and suggests the value emotions have in identifying deep societal biases. And, in the second section, we learn that some African philosophers are questioning whether Western logic might not profit from a little more intuition. Challenging the Myth of the Objective Observer Within the positivist tradition that we have just been considering, Alison M. Jaggar contends, “the influence of emotion is usually seen only as distorting or impeding observation or knowledge.”29 The very objectivity of Western science allegedly rests on the elimination of emotional and evaluative biases in those doing the investigating. On the level of the individual investigator, Jaggar acknowledges, it might indeed be possible to root out or at least control for biases. But, on the level of society, values and emotions are inevitably woven into our methods and even into the more basic questions about what science is and how it should be practiced. From our vantage point, Jaggar suggests, it is easy to spot the racist biases that underlay nineteenth-century anthropology. But, these biases were not recognized at the time because they were so widely shared. Our own attitudes in the present, favoring some ways of behaving and disapproving others, operate as unchallenged guiding principles because we are too close to them to recognize them for what they are.30 There is no dispassionate observer. Those whose emotions and attitudes more closely mirror those of the dominant elements in society may mistakenly believe that these biases are built into the way things are “objectively,” but a little distance reveals the falsity of this assumption. Emotions, especially those experienced by less dominant groups, may be our essential clues to the biases of the dominant group. Those who experience what Jaggar calls “outlaw emotions”—socially unacceptable reactions—may be the first to point us toward unacknowledged assumptions that underlie our so-called value-free investigations. “They may provide the first indications that something is wrong with the way alleged facts have been constructed, with accepted understandings of how things are. Conventionally unexpected or inappropriate emotions may precede our conscious recognition that accepted descriptions and justifications often conceal as much as reveal the prevailing state of affairs.”31 Positivism views values and emotions as “alien invaders that must be repelled by a stricter application of the scientific method.”32 If, however, the scientific method itself is compromised, Jaggar argues that it would be wiser to consider reason and emotion not as opposites but as approaches that mutually constitute each other. This rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and emotion might provide a more reliable path to an accurate understanding of the way things are. Broadening the Definition of Logic in Traditional Societies As philosopher S. A. Mwanahewa of Uganda points out, logic can be used (consciously or unconsciously) to mislead society. Through the careful selection of content words, perfectly valid arguments can be framed so that they lead to dangerous conclusions.33 The “logic” of greed and prejudice can follow this pattern. Is there a way to arrive at useful and important knowledge about the world we live in through a combination of logical analysis and lived experience? Traditional societies identify what is important and communicate the resulting knowledge to the next generation through the use of proverbs and symbols rather than through logical analysis. In Ghanaian culture, for example, the egg has many symbolic meanings: feminine beauty, for those who find an egg-shaped head beautiful; easy labor in childbirth, because hens seem not to labor in laying eggs; and new and creative life or fertility. One of the more interesting symbolic uses of the egg is to represent love and state power, both of which are considered extremely fragile. Atop the wooden or metal staff of a linguist (who serves as a language medium between a chief and the people at court), one might find a carved hand with an egg in it. The translation of this symbol might be, “Power held in one hand is not safe,” and the egg in hand could be seen as a recommendation for shared power, an argument for democracy.34 Your mind is like a tree that grows; it is not a jar to be filled. Chinese proverb Let's return to the question that has dominated this chapter: What are the sources and foundations of knowledge? We have seen how Descartes and the empiricists answered this question and the implications of their answers for the West. In Ghana, a Yoruba proverb answers the question this way: “Knowledge is like a baobab tree, so no one person can embrace it with both arms.” This proverb has several possible meanings, including “He who knows all, knows nothing,” “Knowledge is so vast that no one person can grasp all of it,” and “Knowledge grows and grows so there is no limit to what any one individual can know.”35 Although traditional societies value reason (as Descartes did) and experience (as the empiricists did), their proverb-based epistemology insists that logic is not the only truth test. As we saw in Chapter 4, the West tends to be skeptical of truth claims based on intuitive knowing. But questions like the existence or nonexistence of God, to use one example, may not be best approached using reason alone. Suppose you lived in a culture that told you about knowledge through the use of simple proverbs rather than through learned treatises? Would you understand knowledge differently? Would your relationship with the world be different? Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. Albert Einstein Mwanahewa argues that, even though the logical approach is mainly scientific and the cultural approach is mainly artistic, both are practical and have cogent objectives. There is a definite logic to proverbs, and there should be an artistic element to logic. Either extreme provides a limited window on the world; balance between them should constitute the ideal.36 As we have already seen, Taoism believes that balance is the underlying principle of reality. Too exclusive a reliance on logic might be taking yang to the extreme, whereas excessive reliance on emotion might be too yin. Having taken our rational, scientific logic to its extreme, maybe we are ready to blend a little of the artistic and the human with deduction. The authenticity of the spoken word is found not only in its internal logic but also in its intuitively obvious application to human life.

HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS:

Calculative Versus Meditative Thinking: Martin Heidegger Writing almost sixty years ago, in what we have come to think of as a much simpler world, the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, identified and described a dilemma that we face today. The technology that is supposed to serve us seems often to rule us. In 1955, television was brand-new. Personal computers and the Internet were decades away. Yet, living at the dawn of the atomic age, Heidegger saw quite clearly the world in which we find ourselves, as well as our challenge to “let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside … as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher” (p. 54). The key is to reclaim another kind of thinking that he calls meditative thinking. Here is a short summary of Heidegger's argument: “Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities … Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself.” Meditative thinking, by contrast, “contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is” (p. 46). Without it, the world seems vulnerable “to the attacks of calculative thought” and “[n]ature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry” (p. 50). Are we, Heidegger wonders, “… at the mercy of the irresistible power of technology?” Only if we refuse to challenge “… merely calculative thinking … Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, not to turn down a one-track course of ideas” (pp. 52–53). Heidegger is not against technology; he knows we need it, and yet he acknowledges its seductive power: “But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. Still, we can act otherwise … We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste to our nature” (pp. 53–54). This is essential if we are to avoid losing touch with who we are. The threat is “that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking … And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive” (p. 56). Page numbers refer to Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). We find a similar emphasis on the value of the spoken word in the life of Socrates, who committed nothing to writing. His strong belief was that we are more likely to arrive at truth when we use the testing process of spoken language. Through the dialectic of verbal fencing, weak ideas will be challenged by both logic and experience and then defeated in plain view. When truth is tested in the marketplace or the political forum, only sound reasoning that accurately represents lived experience will survive. What remains unchallenged after the completion of this process of refinement reflects what people agree is true; in many traditional societies these truths are expressed in proverbs. In the Kinyankore orature (oral literature) of Uganda, the following proverb focuses on hypocrisy: “A woman who has killed her co-wife's child cries louder than the mother of the child.” The louder cry, intended by the weeping woman to indicate deep pain and loss, is actually a cover-up for guilt.37 Another Ghanaian proverb stresses the value of freedom over material well-being: “It is only the stupid slave who says that his condition of bondage is good after a heavy meal.” And, from the same culture, the following proverb emphasizes the need for adjustment to new situations in life: “If you visit the country of frogs and you find them squatting, you must squat too even though you may find it inconvenient.”38

DOING PHILOSOPHY

Knowing How to Cure Malaria When I was six or seven and living in Liberia, I became very ill with malaria. My father, who was a Western-trained physician, treated the disease using quinine and other standard methods, but I did not respond. In fact my fever grew higher and higher. My father respected the healing ability of bonesetters but trusted quinine to cure my illness—he was not going to have any “voodoo medicine” used on his daughter. But, as my condition grew worse, both my grandmothers stepped forward. “Doctor,” they said, “we respect you and your methods, but we think you've done all you can do. If we're not careful, this child is going to slip into the spirit world and we're not going to stand idly by and watch this happen.” So, they wrapped me in fever leaves and as the leaves dried out from the heat of my skin they wet more and applied them to my burning body. Then they mopped me down with other herbs and finally I broke into a sweat and the fever subsided. With a fever as high as the one I had, I should have hearing loss and other residual effects, but I'm perfectly fine. Source: Dawn Cooper Barnes, remembering her childhood in Liberia. In traditional societies, everyone becomes the judge of what is true and therefore what deserves to be passed on to the next generation in the form of a proverb; a proverb that did not “ring true” would simply fade away. Members of a traditional society might laugh at Descartes's philosophical doubts regarding the reality of his body and the external world (at the beginning of his Discourse on Method) or at Hume's logical demonstration that God and cause and effect do not exist because they cannot be proved logically. Is reality more complex and mysterious than we might have imagined? As we have seen, in the West, one path of reaction to the implications of empiricism (logical positivism, language analysis, and the limitations of logic) seemed in effect to put philosophy out of a job. With the exception of logical analysis of self-evident propositions, there was little if anything for philosophy to do, and nothing that resembled its traditional work of answering important questions about reality. For those who read Hume carefully in the eighteenth century and were stunned by the implications of his ideas, there was another possible response. Immanuel Kant, a Prussian philosopher, took Hume's empiricism seriously but refused to accept the implication that it was impossible to know anything meaningful about the world. Immanuel Kant Awakening from what he called his “dogmatic slumber,” Kant recognized that any progress in philosophy must take Hume into account. Kant granted what he saw as Hume's most fundamental proposition: All knowledge has its origin in sense experience. This is the basis of all empiricism, and Hume had simply taken the assumption as far as it could logically go. For Kant, however, this proposition about the origin of knowledge in sense experience did not tell the whole story. Even though knowledge must begin with sense experience, it does not end there.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Kant spent all his life in the city of Königsburg in East Prussia. He studied theology at the university and became a professor of logic and metaphysics there in 1770. He was also interested in natural phenomena and wrote treatises on earthquakes, wind, and the common generation of the Sun and planets, the so-called nebular hypothesis. He led a very patterned life, doing the same things at the same time every day. People in the town used to set their watches by him when he took his daily walk at 3:30. Hume's criticism of causality “awakened him,” he said, from his “dogmatic slumber.” For Kant, the data of sense experience form the content of all knowledge, and to these data is added the form of experience, which is supplied by a priori concepts (categories that exist prior to experience in the very structure of the mind). Kant began by asking us to imagine an object, but to imagine that object not existing in space. Although it is easy to imagine space with no objects in it, thinking of an object apart from space seems impossible. Similarly, he invited the reader to think of an event, but to think of it outside a temporal sequence. A little effort here will convince us, Kant believed, that space and time are not themselves perceptions but are patterns of perception through which every datum of sense experience passes. These two concepts—space and time—may be thought of as analogous to the operating system on a computer. Without an operating system, a computer responds only to on/off electrical impulses, and you will find it difficult to organize electronic bits of information into meaningful sequences. Once you have an operating system, however, data are accepted, stored, retrieved, and manipulated. Space and time may function in this way. If you think of the sectors on a formatted disk, it may be easier to understand Kant's second level of perception, what he called the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Like space and time, these categories are “hardwired” into the brain, and they provide a more complete context for incoming data. Once electronic impulses pass through the operating system and a word processing program and find their way to an identifiable sector on a formatted disk, they are organized meaningfully into words, sentences, and paragraphs and can be retrieved at will. This is Kant's model for the role the mind plays in sorting incoming data to make them useful and retrievable. First, everything is placed in space and time. Then, data are perceived under the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Raw, unprocessed data, Kant thought, would be meaningless and unusable. Kant took Hume's assertion about the limits of knowledge head-on and provided a commonsense solution to it. Granting that Hume is correct in asserting that all knowledge claims must be based in sense experience, Kant nonetheless insisted that all knowledge claims must also take into account the ordering, structuring concepts, or categories supplied by the mind. Even though Hume pointed out that we have no sense experience of “mind,” this need not mean there is no mind. For Kant, mind becomes visible when we examine its role in shaping the sense experience we receive. Our knowledge is still restricted to what we can experience through our senses, but we can make meaningful statements about reality (as it appears to us) because of the a priori concepts of the mind. Under the category of relation, for example, Kant included the concept of causality: When we receive our experience of the world, we receive it through the filter of causality. We recognize cause and effect in the world because one of the ways our brains are structured to perceive the objects that present themselves to our consciousness is causality. So we know that the things we experience, as we experience them, are related in a cause-and-effect way.

HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS:

Before and After Philosophers distinguish between knowledge that can be known before or independent of sense experience, and knowledge that can only be known after sense experience because it depends on experience rather than logic for verification. The key question is often phrased this way: Can we have certain knowledge about the world and, if so, which route must we follow? A priori: logically before, prior to, independent of experience and unable to be challenged by experience. Rationalists like Descartes believed it was possible to have certain knowledge a priori. A posteriori: after, posterior to, dependent on sense experience for verification. Empiricist philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume insisted that true knowledge is only possible using sense experience. Neither: Hume argued that the only a priori or certain knowledge was analytic or true by definition, such as “my brother is a boy”; it tells us nothing we don't already know and does not add to our knowledge of the world. What we can know a posteriori, according to Hume, is only probable and not certain. Both: Kant asserted that the categories of the mind were a priori and therefore certain. Combined with a posteriori sense experience, Kant believed the categories enable us to make synthetic a priori statements about the world. Of course, our knowledge is limited to phenomena, or things as they appear to us, and we can never know noumena, or things as they are in themselves. In a very significant sense, we are still limited in what we can know. We can know things only as they appear to us—what Kant calls phenomena— but we can never know things as they are in themselves—what Kant calls noumena. So, the inner essence of reality remains locked away, but it becomes possible for us to make meaningful statements about the world, at least as it appears to us. Kant calls these synthetic a priori judgments, meaning that they say something important about reality (they are synthetic rather than analytic, or merely concerned with definition) and they occur independent of experience (they are a priori, or logically prior, to experience): Our critical deduction by no means excludes things of that sort (noumena), but rather limits the principles of the Aesthetic (the science of the sensibility) to this, that they shall not extend to all things, as everything would then be turned into mere appearance, but that they shall only hold good of objects of possible experience. Hereby then objects of the understanding are granted, but with the inculcation of this rule which admits of no exception: “that we neither know nor can know anything at all definite of these pure objects of the understanding …”39 Phenomena in Kant's epistemology, things as they appear to us under the categories of perception noumena in Kant's epistemology, things as they are in themselves; this is always beyond the limits of human perception and knowing synthetic a priori in Kant's epistemology, a description of statements that tell us something meaningful about reality and are logically prior to (not dependent on) experience Kant is sometimes called the great synthesizer because he took the most significant aspects of both rationalism and empiricism and combined them creatively into a unified system. He accepted the empirical proposition that meaningful knowledge must have its basis in sense experience, but he also validated the rationalist emphasis on the mind as crucial to our understanding of the world. Kant, in a sense, put philosophy back together and allowed it to progress beyond the dead end of radical empiricism, but his ideas have implications as startling as those of Hume. Reality is not “out there” waiting for me to discover it through passive experience of it. Reality is in my head, shaped by the pure concepts and categories of my mind. Things like cause and effect that seem so obvious to me are part of the map, not part of the territory. Cause and effect does not reside in things but in my understanding of my experience of them. Newton's laws of mechanics exist not in the world but in the forms of consciousness by which we perceive the world. If our way of perceiving the world were to change substantially, our experience of the world would change with it. Because we cannot know noumena—things as they are in their inner essences—we are right back where we started in the egocentric predicament. I know how reality appears to me, but, according to Kant, I have little idea what it is really like. Indeed, as Kant showed us, the world appears to operate according to the principle of cause and effect, and our shared agreement of this interpretation allows us to reason about the world. However, we are still left to ponder the relationship (if any) between what I think I know and what is actually “out there.” Beyond the Egocentric Predicament: Edmund Husserl Despite our best efforts, must we remain trapped within the egocentric predicament? Nearly ninety years ago, Edmund Husserl challenged most of the assumptions made by Descartes and, later, by the empiricist philosophers— Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Rather than thinking of the mind as trapped inside the box of solipsism (Descartes's first position after engaging in methodic doubt), Husserl invites us to begin with our own lived experience. If we do, Husserl thinks we will intuitively realize that consciousness is always consciousness of something or other. Instead of feeling limited to contemplating our own thoughts and sense of self, Husserl suggests that we consider his claim that “to know means to see.”40 Descartes began by rationally doubting everything as a way of arriving at an undoubtable starting point. To arrive at his starting point, Husserl begins instead with the radical assumption that “direct seeing” is the starting point for all knowledge. What we need, he states, is not pure reason but a “rigorous, radically reflexive, phenomenological perspective” on experience that will allow us to see our experience as it is lived. According to what he calls the Natural Standpoint, the commonsense point of view we habitually assume, there is a real world “out there,” containing objects ordered in space and time, able to be perceived by us. These, by the way, were Descartes's assumptions. Reality is the object—our experiencing of the object is incidental. In order to “see” reality, as it is actually given, Husserl asserts, we must “bracket” this Natural Standpoint—methodically suspend it and shift in a conscious way from our habitual way of seeing the world toward the “pure, unadulterated experience [of seeing] in its brute givenness.”41 Just as Descartes used methodic doubt to suspend all the “knowledge” he had acquired, Husserl invites us to suspend our commonsense way of looking at the world. We are not denying or canceling out the world. Instead, it is as if we turned off a lamp. The lamp is still there. However, it is no longer that which illuminates everything. The lamp is now one datum in the room. In a similar way, the world is still there as a datum to be explained; however, it is no longer that which illuminates and explains everything. Instead: “Phenomenological bracketing allows us to ‘grasp’ the reality of the world as experience or, in Husserl's terminology, as phenomenon.” Hence, Husserl's philosophy is called phenomenology or the study of phenomena— by direct seeing.42 We and the world are correlated, according to Husserl. Rather than being trapped in the egocentric predicament, we discover our experiential engagement with the world as a source of knowledge and understanding. We have what Husserl calls “an infinitude of knowledge previous to all deduction.” And, because this a priori knowledge is “entirely intuitive,” we can know it with intuitive certainty.43 Husserl and his student Martin Heidegger (see Chapters 5 and 7) provide a bridge from traditional Western assumptions regarding knowledge sources and offer us a transition to Asian and African insights into epistemology. The Knower and the Known As we try to distinguish between ourselves as knowing subjects and the things of the world as known objects, we raise this question: What is the relationship between the subject and the object or between the knower and the known? As we will see, this is a Western way to put the question. In non-Western cultures, the egocentric predicament seems less significant and perhaps less useful as a way to talk about knowledge. We can begin by reviewing what we have already learned about the Western tradition. The Western Tradition Modern Western epistemology began with Descartes's Cogito, which assumes a distinction between the knower and the known. After establishing himself as a “knower” (using the Cogito), Descartes went on to prove the existence of a nondeceiving God, and as a result, he was able to establish the reliability of his perceptions regarding “known” objects in the material or “clockwork” universe. Since the time of Descartes, Western philosophers have either agreed with Descartes that by thinking (by using rationality) we can know, or they have disagreed with Descartes, arguing that sense experience rather than reason leads to knowing. Both rationalists and empiricists, however, have acknowledged the distinction between the knower and the known. Kant, too, as we have just seen, also honored the separation. This distinction was not created by Descartes. As you may recall, the pre-Socratic cosmologists assumed this distinction between the knower and the known when they took their first steps in inquiring what everything in the universe is really made of. And, Plato and Aristotle, despite their differences, shared an assumption that the world of Form and matter was one thing, and the human self another. The power of reason, they believed, would allow people to use the methods of inquiry and logic to unlock the apparent mysteries of the cosmos. Subsequent challenges to rationalism from empiricist philosophers insisted on a different way of knowing (through sense experience rather than through rational deduction), but empiricists did not question the basic separation of the knower from the known. Precisely because every Western philosopher we have studied in this chapter accepts this division, it may be useful to consider non-Western traditions that, on the whole, reject it. The split between knower and known— or to say it another way, between the subject and the object—is typically Western (Figure 5.6). It characterizes Western epistemology only and does not represent the epistemology of much of the world. Figure 5.6 The Knower and the Known East and West conceive this relationship differently. The Non-Western Tradition In Buddhism, as we saw in Chapter 2, the world of illusion to which we are attached and in which we are ensnared is not what is. In terms of knowledge theory, our everyday experience of the world often presents us with dualistic distinctions—me-you, subject-object—that arise because the artificial boundaries of what we think of as our separate selves (egos) fool us into seeing separation. From the perspective of enlightenment, or true seeing, however, this Western distinction between knower and known is essentially artificial. If I am not a separate self, there is no “me” to serve as knower. When the mind is most empty, it is most full. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer The knower and the known are one. Meister Eckhart Seng-ts'an, a Chinese Zen master who died in the early seventh century, puts it this way in the classic Hsin-hsin Ming (Affirming Faith in Mind): The object is an object for the subject, The subject is a subject for the object; Know that the relativity of the two Rests ultimately on one emptiness, In one emptiness the two are not distinguished, And each contains in itself all the ten thousand things; When no discrimination is made between this and that, How can a one-sided and prejudiced view arise?44 Subject and object each seem to define the other in a relationship that makes sense from our ego-bound perspective. Seen from what Seng-ts'an calls “the higher realm of true Suchness,” however, there is “neither ‘self’ nor ‘other'” and we can only say “not two.”45 Traditional African epistemology also denies the firm Western distinction between subject and object. This denial is rooted in a deeper unity that insists “man and nature are not two separate independent opposing realities but the one inseparable continuum of a hierarchical order.”46 Because reality is one, knowledge cannot be based on dualism. Knowledge can occur only when the subject is involved in seeing, thinking, experiencing, and discovering the world as a participant in it, not as detached from it. I can know the world only by being immersed in it, not by attempting to stand apart from it and study it objectively. In truth, the “self of the subject and the objective world outside of the self are really one.”47 Traditional African epistemology is always both theoretical and practical. By contrast, in the Western world, theory may address somewhat abstract concepts such as numbers or the forces of physics, whereas practice signifies putting ideas into use or applying them in a practical way. We assume that it is possible to have one without the other, and there is even some bias against purely abstract thought—as conveyed in the term ivory tower. Ideas conceived and discussed only in the “ivory tower” of a university or a laboratory and never tested in the “real” world are considered suspect in a practical culture like our own. Similarly, philosophy has sometimes been accused of arguing over concepts and ideas that have no bearing on the “real” world. The implication of this criticism is that there is theory and then there is practice. Postulating a fundamental unity between theory and practice and between knower and known as well eliminates this either/or condition. Knowledge in traditional African culture is always knowledge of something lived—politics, religion, art—not theoretical knowledge separate from the world of lived experience. Consequently, to become knowledgeable—and especially to become wise—one must have many experiences and reflect upon them to understand their meaning. In such a context, it makes no sense to speak of being knowledgeable in an exclusively theoretical sense. If one learns from others but does not think, one will be bewildered. If, on the other hand, one thinks but does not learn from others, one will be in peril. Confucius, The-Analects Being able to deduce the correct lesson from experience is highly valued in traditional societies, as the following proverb illustrates: “It is only a fool who allows his sheep to break loose twice.”48 Sheep can break loose once for any number of reasons, but the person who does not learn from each experience to avoid its repetition is a fool. We have a similar expression in English: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!” Not surprisingly, in traditional societies the elders are looked up to as sources of both knowledge and wisdom; as the Ghanaian proverb reminds us: “You get palm-wine only from mature palm trees.”49 A similar bias in favor of lived experience as a route to knowledge runs through many ancient Taoist stories. In the tale of “Duke Hwan and the Wheelwright,” the message seems to be that knowledge cannot really be transmitted at all. Phien, the wheelwright, asks Duke Hwan what he is reading, and Duke Hwan responds that he is reading “the experts, the authorities.” Phien shocks the duke by replying that if these so-called experts are dead, then the duke is only reading “the dirt they left behind.” Angered by this contempt for philosophy, Duke Hwan demands an explanation. Phien explains that when he makes a wheel there is a delicate balance between being too gentle and being too rough. “If I am neither too easy nor too violent,” he explains, “they come out right.… You cannot put this into words: you just have to know how it is. I cannot even tell my own son exactly how it is done, and my own son cannot learn it from me. The men of old took all they really know with them to the grave. And so, Lord,” Phien concludes, “what you are reading there is only the dirt they left behind.”50 Are the words of dead philosophers only “the dirt they left behind”? If you have ever tried to tell someone how to make piecrust or gap a sparkplug, you may understand what Phien is saying. So much of what we call knowledge concerns intangible qualities that are difficult (if not impossible) to put into words. Much of what we know concerns how something “feels” when it is “right.” This intuitive knowledge is often the critical part, but it is very hard to speak about it and even more difficult to write about it. Consider the impossibility of proving something like this using logic: When we try, based on our own experience, to save someone pain by advising them not to do something or to do something differently, they are unlikely to take our good advice. What we “know,” we know based on our lived experience, which is only theory to the person we are advising. Apart from lived experience, the only route to knowledge in the Taoist tradition is intuition. Because the Tao that can be talked about is not the eternal Tao, the deepest reality cannot really be expressed in words. As the Tao Te Ching puts it: “Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know.”51 You want knowledge, seek the Oneness within. There you will find the clear mirror, already waiting. Hadewijch II Summary We have examined three versions of skepticism. The Taoist version just discussed is a mild form of skepticism; it claims that when we try to know something from the outside we are barking up the wrong tree. If we want to “know” about the world, we must study nature and intuit its wisdom. Nothing lasts forever: Winter turns to spring and then to summer; night becomes day and day night. Paradoxically, it is by yielding that one can conquer. The Tao, the oneness that is the source of everything, cannot be spoken of because to speak it puts you immediately into the world of distinctions, the world of what Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things. Descartes's skepticism was methodic; he used it as a way of getting to the truth. By doubting all knowledge claims, he arrived at what remains—what cannot be doubted—and this he considered to be certain. Descartes never intended to end with skepticism; he always intended to arrive at a place of confidence with respect to knowledge about the world. Once he had proved himself using the Cogito and had proved God the nondeceiver, he was restored to certainty that his perceptions of the material world did in fact resemble the world as it existed. Only in Hume do we find a thoroughgoing skepticism. For Hume, this is no device but an accurate description of what we can and especially what we cannot know. Although we are quite capable of analyzing the relations of ideas, we cannot know anything about the character of the world as it exists apart from our sense perceptions. Our knowledge of the relations of ideas is certain but says nothing meaningful about reality, and our knowledge based on matters of fact informs us about the world but is uncertain because of the limitations of our perceptions. In Hume, we find a philosophical skepticism based on a carefully reasoned analysis of epistemological principles. Faced with such overwhelming limitations on our ability to know, it seems we have no option but to accept that most of our actions are based on feeling rather than on reason. Even Kant, who struck a balance between the extreme positions of Descartes's rationalism and Hume's empiricism and put human knowing back in place, has left us skeptical about the world. If we can only know the world as perceived by us, and never the world as it really is apart from us, most of our important questions about reality must remain unanswered (at least by human reasoning). Language analysts like Wittgenstein have reduced the world to “atomic facts” that are composed of simple objects. By naming the objects and combining them into simple propositions, we can depict possible states of affairs in the world. To describe reality we must say which of these possible states of affairs is true and which false. For language analysts, natural science, not philosophy, will define what can be said about reality; philosophy should be thought of as an activity—the clarification of language—rather than as a body of knowledge about the world. As we have seen, however, this point of view is not without its challengers. If the dream of an objective observer is a myth, we must accept the existence of both individual and societal biases and do our best to get beyond them, using both our reason and our emotions. And, the non-Western world reminds us that intuition can be a very reliable guide to what is, enabling us to find our way to essentials that can be obscured by syllogisms and omitted from narrowly conducted empirical observations. In the next two chapters we will further consider how we are to understand the world. Chapter 6 examines truth tests, and we will continue to take seriously the challenge of skepticism by exploring the possibilities and the limitations involved in truth claims. Chapter 7, the final chapter in Part Two, explores the role of art and aesthetic experience in helping us see the world in new ways. Like the proverbs in traditional cultures, visual art can give us fresh eyes and help us see things differently. For Further Thought 1. Try devising a test to prove to yourself that you are not dreaming right now, that you are actually awake. 2. Compare Descartes's skepticism with Hume's. In what ways are they alike? In what ways different? 3. What changes in thinking would have to occur in the West to eliminate the mind-body problem? What might be some of the implications of these changes? Would the change in thinking create problems greater than the mind-body problem? 4. Try Descartes's experiment in zero-based epistemology. Begin with nothing and see what you are able to establish as certain knowledge. 5. Do you believe any of your current ideas were innate? If so, which ones, and why do you believe them innate? Experiment with a willing young person. 6. Are philosophical proofs for the existence of God possible? Necessary? Explain. 7. Descartes assigned animals to the material side, the “clockwork universe,” calling them little robots. Why did he have to do this, based on the system he created? Do you agree or disagree with his classification? 8. Which do you find more persuasive: Descartes's dualism or any of the positions that view everything as one or on a continuum? Why? 9. What does Locke keep from Descartes's epistemology and what does he challenge? Do you find Locke's criticisms of Descartes valid? Why or why not? 10. Does Berkeley's thesis that “to be is to be perceived” solve the mind-body problem? If so, how? If not, why not? 11. Given Hume's denial of the self, would you retain your identity while asleep or unconscious and not perceiving? Explain. 12. Suppose our human way of perceiving the world underwent a radical change (because of a natural or nuclear disaster that altered basic functions). According to Kant, would the world change? Why, or why not? 13. Which aspects of the rationalist and empiricist positions does Kant synthesize? In your opinion, does he keep the best or worst of both worlds? Or some of each? Explain. 14. Gilbert Ryle, a contemporary analytic philosopher, has called Descartes's mindbody construction a “ghost in a machine.” How is this an appropriate analogy? 15. If space is a category of the mind, what does Euclidian geometry tell us about the world? 16. How, in your opinion, would Socrates judge Descartes's decision not to publish his paper on the Sun-centered universe after noting what happened to Galileo? How do you judge the decision? What might have been some results if Descartes had made the other decision? 17. Does the fact that as a culture we are getting more and more of our knowledge electronically (from TV, Internet, etc.) rather than from books change anything about how or what we know? Explain. 18. Is the knowing that derives from oral cultures in which the treasures of the past are preserved in the memories and spoken words of the wisdom keepers any different from the knowing in cultures in which written language is the storehouse of knowledge and wisdom? How would you test for accuracy and truth in each culture? 19. Have you ever turned on the TV and not been sure whether you were watching an unfolding “live” event, a videotape of something that occurred in the past, or a made-for-TV movie? How did you ultimately “know”? If forced to write a philosophical justification, could you really be sure of what you saw? Explain. 20. Is it possible to deny something others think you know? On what basis might you do this? For Further Exploration Fiction and Film Andrews, Lynn. Medicine Woman. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Like Casteneda (below), Andrews has written a visionary autobiography that is not technically fiction. Also, like Casteneda, Andrews has learned a new way of knowing through her contacts with a shaman known as Agnes Whistling Elk. At First Sight. This film dramatizes Virgil's experiences when he receives visual acuity and is not able to “see” as others do. What is the world really like before our minds process raw data for us? Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New York: Penguin, 1992. What would happen if everything you thought you knew no longer worked? This is the experience of Alice when she falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland and has to learn a whole new way of knowing the world. Casteneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. This is actually not fiction, but it reads like fiction. Casteneda, an anthropology student, met a Yaqui Indian named Don Juan and, through him, learned a whole new way of knowing. A similar theme is explored in Memento, a film that analyzes knowledge theory from the point of view of a person who can no longer form new memories. Proof. In this Australian film, a skeptical blind man takes photographs of his experiences, asks people to give verbal descriptions of the photographs, translates each description into Braille, and fastens it to the back of the relevant photo. Does he then have “proof” that his experiences were real? Or, is he caught in a Cartesian circle? Voltaire. Candide. New York: Random House, 1975. In this story, Voltaire satirizes Leibniz's characterization of this world as the “best of all possible worlds.” Dr. Pangloss is Leibniz. Nonfiction Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Translated by Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960. Often published together, these two short works reveal the key concepts and methods of Descartes as discussed in this chapter. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Translated by Peter G. Lucas. Manchester, Eng.: University of Manchester Press, 1953. Most of Kant's works are very long and difficult to understand; this slim volume is the exception. As a kind of abstract of the Critique of Pure Reason, it traces Kant's chief epistemological argument in a readable format. Merton, Thomas, trans. The Way of Chuang-tzu. New York: New Directions, 1965. Believed to be the disciple of Lao-tzu to whom the Tao Te Ching is attributed, Chuang-tzu, in Merton's playful translation, further explains Taoist ways of knowing. Mitchell, Stephen, trans. Tao Te Ching. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Mitchell gives a very poetic translation of this Taoist classic, using sometimes “he” and sometimes “she” to describe the Master. A good introduction to the Tao and the way of knowing associated with it. Pert, Candace B. Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 1999. Written by a research scientist with broad laboratory experience, this book explores how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body. Reps, Paul, ed. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, rev. ed. New York: Doubleday, 1989. A wonderful collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings, most of which are stories less than a page long. These stories provide an introduction to an Eastern way of “knowing.” Trueblood, Alan S., trans. A Sor Juana Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. This book contains Sor Juana's poetry and The Reply to Sor Philothea. Notes 1. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “The Reply to Sor Philothea,” in A Sor Juana Anthology, trans. Alan S. Trueblood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 211. 2. A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Salisbury, Conn.: Lime Rock, 1982), 7–11. 3. A Woman of Genius, 6. 4. A Sor Juana Anthology, 212. 5. A Sor Juana Anthology, 5–6. 6. A Sor Juana Anthology, 210. 7. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 87. 8. Descartes, 82. 9. Descartes, 121. 10. Descartes, 101. 11. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “The Monadology,” in Philosophers Speak for Themselves: Descartes to Locke, eds. T. V. Smith and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 304. 12. Anne Finch Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (The Hague: Kluwer, 1982), 211. 13. Conway, 213–216. 14. Kwasi Wiredu, “African Philosophical Tradition: A Case Study,” Philosophical Forum 24, nos. 1–3, Fall–Spring (1992–1993): 48. 15. Wiredu, 51. 16. Wiredu's concept of the human person has been challenged by Kwame Gyekye's An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) in which Gyekye postulates a Cartesian dualism. The balance of contemporary scholarship in this area seems to favor Wiredu's interpretation at this time. 17. Alexander Pope, “Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton.” 18. John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” in Philosophers Speak for Themselves: Descartes to Locke, eds. T. V. Smith and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 350. 19. Locke, 366–367. 20. George Berkeley, “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” in The Age of Enlightenment, ed. Isaiah Berlin (New York: New American Library, 1984), 135. 21. Berkeley, 136. 22. Berkeley, 140. 23. David Hume, “Treatise of Human Nature,” in Philosophers Speak for Themselves: Berkeley, Hume and Kant, eds. T. V. Smith and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 105. 24. Hume, 106–107. 25. Hume, 109. 26. Hume, 113. 27. Hume, in The Age of Enlightenment, 205. 28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 18. 29. Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, eds. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 155. 30. Jaggar, 156. 31. Jaggar, 160, 161. 32. Jaggar, 156. 33. S. A. Mwanahewa, “Logical Heritage: Cogency in Kinyankore Orature,” in The Foundations of Social Life: Ugandan Philosophical Studies, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), 53. 34. N. K. Dzobo, “African Symbols and Proverbs as Source of Knowledge and Truth,” in Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, vol. 1, eds. Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), 88. 35. Dzobo, 95. 36. Mwanahewa, 53. 37. Mwanahewa, 55. 38. Dzobo, 96. 39. Immanuel Kant, “A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,” in Philosophers Speak for Themselves: Berkeley, Hume and Kant, eds. T. V. Smith and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 314. 40. Erazim V. Kohák, “Edmund Husserl's Project of Phenomenology,” as summarized in Masterpieces of World Philosophy, ed. Frank N. Magill (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 505. 41. Kohák, 506. 42. Kohák, 506–507. 43. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962, 1969), 6. 44. Seng-ts'an, “Hsin-hsin Ming,” in Buddhist Scriptures, ed. Edward Conze (New York: Penguin, 1959), 172. 45. Seng-ts'an, 174. 46. Z. 'b. Nasseem, “African Heritage and Contemporary Life: An Experience of Epistemological Change,” in The Foundations of Social Life: Ugandan Philosophical Studies, vol. 1, ed. George F. McLean (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), 26. 47. 'b. Nasseem, 26–27. 48. N. K. Dzobo, “Knowledge and Truth: Ewe and Akan Conceptions,” in Person and Community, 75. 49. Dzobo, “Knowledge and Truth,” 77. 50. Thomas Merton, trans. The Way of Chuang-tzu (New York: New Directions, 1969), 83. 51. Tao Te Ching, chap. 56, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 56.

CHAPTER 6 Truth Tests: Do You Swear to Tell the Truth . . . ?

BEFORE YOU READ . . . Ask yourself how confident you are of your own ability to evaluate truth claims in science, history, literary texts,and your personal experience. In courts of law, before a witness is permitted to testify, he or she must be sworn in. In the United States this involves raising the right hand and answering yes to the bailiff's question: “Do you swear the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” The importance of this ritual seems clear: Jurors must be confident that witnesses are speaking the truth as they know it and not committing perjury—intentional lying on the witness stand. After all, a defendant's life or liberty may hang in the balance. There is a presumption that we know how to recognize the truth when we see it. Courses you have taken or will take in college purport to tell you what is true. In geometry you may have learned that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs—the theorem attributed to Pythagoras, whom you met in Chapter 1. In biology you were probably told that humans are mammals that bear their young alive rather than laying eggs that hatch later. In history class you read that a civil war was fought in the United States between 1861 and 1865. All of these bits of information were presented to you as true. If you had thought them false, you would not have bothered to remember them. Truth—is as old as God. Emily Dickinson There may be other truths you believe in. If someone says, “I love you,” your life may be significantly changed if you believe it to be true; sadly, those words are not true every time they are spoken. Are there tests we can apply? Can we use any one test to identify the truths of geometry, biology, history, and love? The Issue Defined Even if you do not know the official names of the following two laws of thought (Figure 6.1), you will probably grant them the status of truth. The first is known as the law of noncontradiction: A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time. The second is the law of the excluded middle: Something is either A or non-A. Another way of stating the first proposition is to invoke the law of identity: A is A (because it cannot be non-A). law of noncontradiction states that A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time law of the excluded middle states that something is either A or non-A, and no middle ground exists between these two possibilities law of identity states that A equals A Every statement we make presupposes these laws of thought. If A is not-A—if a house is not a house—we have no way of speaking to one another about houses. Similarly, the second principle states that something is either what we say it is or it is not; this is either a house or not a house, and there can be no middle ground between the two. Logically, there seems to be no way to speak of something that both is and is not a house, so the illogical middle ground is excluded. Even if you have not formally been taught these principles, they should be obvious to you. They are built into the way we see the world and the way we speak about things. We believe these two principles to be true because if they are not, then all logic and all language simply collapses into meaninglessness. If something is both A and non-A, we are operating under a new set of rules, a set none of us knows anything about. And if there is something that is neither a house nor not a house but something else, then we have no way to speak about this or understand it. The law of noncontradiction and the law of the excluded middle are part of our heritage from the ancient Greeks, and in particular from Aristotle. These laws have drawn the lines of logic in the Western world for more than 2000 years and have helped us make and clarify our black-and-white distinctions. (To read about an interesting challenge that insists that the world is mostly gray, skip ahead to the “How Philosophy Works” box in Chapter 10 and read about fuzzy logic.) Truth is the arena in which we test those distinctions. Something is either true or false, we insist, and some of the tests you take in college might require you to make such distinctions. We may have faith in a number of things—the love of our family, God, the appropriateness of democracy as a form of government, our own skill as a driver—but it will be another thing altogether to establish that these articles of faith are true. We live in a scientific age and, in part as a legacy of Hume's skepticism (see Chapter 5), we tend to demand proof by which we mean something more than “I believe this to be true.” In general, we insist on either logical or empirical proof: Something must either make sense logically, or we must be able to establish it as truth through our senses, by independent testing and verification. As Paul Simon reminds us, Figure 6.1 Laws of Thought According to Western logic, something is either A or non-A; there is no in-between, and both possibilities cannot exist simultaneously. Faith is an island in the setting sun But proof, yes Proof is the bottom line for everyone. We believe many things to be true, but belief alone does not guarantee truth. For many centuries people believed that the Sun moved about Earth, and they had very good reasons for this belief. Every morning the Sun rose above the eastern horizon; all day the Sun moved slowly across the sky; then, in the evening, the Sun sank below the western horizon. Today, we believe something else to be true: The apparent motion of the Sun results from the daily rotation of Earth, one of eight planets orbiting around the Sun. We used to believe that time moved at a fixed and regular pace—until Einstein's relativity formulas convinced us that what is true, instead, is that time is relative and slows down as we approach the speed of light (see Chapter 2). If we are unwilling to grant that truth is somehow relative—true at one time and in one place but not true at other times and places—then we must decide what makes a statement true or false. In this chapter we explore how we determine which of the many things we believe deserve the label true. We look at truth tests and how they work. Once we have established a few ground rules, we turn to the fields of religion, science, history, and literature to see how questions of truth are addressed in each of them. To obtain a warrant, police need to present evidence or justification for making a search or an arrest. Truth Tests Let's consider some of the ways philosophers test for truth. We begin by looking at warrantability, the general term for evidence or justification for making a truth claim. Next we turn to three truth tests traditionally employed by Western philosophers—the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic tests. Finally, we examine an African truth test—the Ewe creativity test. Truth is immortal; error is mortal. Mary Baker Eddy Warrantability You may recall that René Descartes began his search for truth by doubting the evidence of his senses, whether he was awake rather than asleep, and even the truths of mathematics. After he had established his identity as a thinking self, using the Cogito, he moved quickly to find a basis on which to believe in the other commonsense certainties of his life, such as the reliability of mathematics and the evidence from his senses that a material world existed outside himself. If you remember, Descartes could not move outside his own mind until he had established the existence of a nondeceiving God. HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS: Informal Fallacies—Part One A fallacy makes an argument invalid in some way. In other chapters we consider formal fallacies in which the rules of inference are not followed and the conclusion is not supported by the premises. In this chapter we want to look at some informal fallacies that attempt to distort an argument and make it appear either to work or not to work falsely. Along with the truth tests discussed in this chapter, another way to test the truth is to inspect an argument for fallacies. These are some of the most common types of informal fallacies: 1. Appeal to emotion. If you have ever been at a rousing speech and found yourself agreeing with the speaker but later read a transcript of the speech and found it to be weakly argued or perhaps even lacking in substance, you know how this fallacy works. The personal power and emotional language of the speaker appeal directly to your hopes and fears, bypassing logic and consistency altogether. 2. Appeal to authority. Parents try this when all else fails. After arguing unsuccessfully with a child that it is time for bed, a parent who has run out of cogent arguments may resort to “because I said so.” Both parent and child probably know that this constitutes a fallacy. The child's version of this fallacy is called appeal to the crowd and is most often expressed as “but everyone gets to stay up later than I do.” 3. Begging the question. This offers as proof the very thing one is trying to prove. Its most common formulation is a more complex version of this: “Janice could not possibly have lied to the house mother. She is not a liar.” Critics have accused Descartes of committing this fallacy when he argued: “God must exist because I have a clear and distinct idea of God which must be a true idea since God is its source.” These arguments are said to be circular because the premise proves the conclusion that proves the premise. 4. Appeal to ignorance or incomplete information. In this fallacy one claims either that something must be true based on the lack of contrary evidence (“There's no proof that picking daisy petals while reciting ‘He loves me, he loves me not’ does not yield accurate information; therefore, we are justified in believing it does yield accurate information”) or that a conclusion can be drawn from very incomplete information (“John isn't in his room; he must have been taken by extraterrestrials”). In general, arguing from an absence of information or making a case based on very little evidence creates a weak argument. 5. Ignoring alternatives. If one claims that the answer is either A or B, when in fact it might also be C–Z, this is the fallacy of ignoring alternatives. “You didn't call me last night as you promised; you either forgot or you purposely didn't call and either way I'm furious with you.” It is possible your love or your friend did not call because of illness, being kidnapped, telephone problems, a personal emergency, a confusion about when the call was to be made, etc., etc., etc. 6. Ad hominem or ad feminam. This strategy ignores the argument completely and falsely focuses on the person. “No statement by a homosexual can say anything worthwhile about military life” or “If you had a man you would stop making these ridiculous demands for an equality that simply isn't possible or desirable” or “Anyone wearing a tie that bad must be a complete jerk with nothing valuable to say” or “She's a Mormon; I rest my case” or “Anyone from the East (West, South) is so narrow- minded as to have nothing to add to this argument.” 7. Ambiguity. By using one term in two or more senses or with two or more meanings, you can appear to prove something but in reality prove nothing. “God is love. Love is blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.” Terms must be used consistently. In Descartes's rationalist system, God was an essential element in the process of establishing truth. We use the term warrant in a legal sense when we say that the police have a warrant for someone's arrest. What we mean is that there is enough evidence or justification to warrant arresting the person. In philosophy we mean much the same thing: A warrant provides the evidence or justification that something is so. warrant the evidence or justification for a truth claim All the philosophers we studied in Chapter 5 were looking for warrantability, and they found it to varying degrees. Descartes found in a nondeceiving God the explanatory principle for everything outside himself. Hume concluded that most of what passes for knowledge is not warranted and is merely belief or feeling. Our certainty about cause and effect, Hume concluded, does not rest on evidence; it is simply a reflection of our psychological need to believe in a predictable world. For Lao-tzu, the Taoist, the whole idea of objective knowledge and logical or empirical warrants seemed to him a distortion of the way things really are. If we accept the objective character of knowledge and the value of warrants— as the Western world does—then we can divide them into several categories. The laws of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle are examples of logical warrantability; these principles are correct, based on the logic of language and thought, and to reject them is to reject all meaning and sense. In contrast, the biological fact that humans are mammals is an example of semantic warrantability: a matter of definition or semantics. We have a definition for mammals and humans fit it. Other examples might be “My sister is a girl” or “My bachelor cousin is unmarried.” Either these are true or we must amend the definitions of “sister” and “bachelor.” Family heirlooms like these can help us verify the reality and accuracy of historical facts. The Pythagorean theorem, sometimes written a2 + b2 = c2, represents systemic warrantability. This theorem fits into a whole system of axioms and postulates we call Euclidian geometry, all of which are logically interdependent. In theory, if one of these axioms or postulates were erased or cut out from every text, we could derive it again from all the other propositions in the system. This is true of all deductive systems, which operate on principles of logic. The warranty of every proposition within the system ultimately rests on the integrity of the system as a whole. If we were suddenly to find ourselves in a one-dimensional world—a world of points and straight lines and nothing else—the integrity of the deductive system known as Euclidian geometry would unravel. The historical fact that the United States fought a civil war between 1861 and 1865 has empirical warrantability; that is, its warranty is the confirmation of a relationship between an event and the external world. Not so long ago, people who could remember the Civil War were still alive. Today, their descendants have stories, letters, and photographs of relatives in uniforms. The U.S. Government, in its archives, has thousands of records of pay disbursed and rations purchased to feed individual soldiers and entire armies. There are battlefields with monuments erected by those with memories of the events that happened there. Empiricist philosophers—such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—insisted that all knowledge must be derived from empirical experience, by which they seem to have meant direct contact with sense perceptions derived from the external world. Impatient with rationalist philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, they refused to believe that knowledge of the world could be generated by rational processes alone, without reference to sense data. Hume, as you recall, demoted all supposed “knowledge” that was not either logically certain or empirically based to the category of meaninglessness. Another kind of empirical warrantability relates to honestly reported first-person experience. If I tell you that I am thirsty, my experience of being thirsty is what we might call a testimonial warranty (assuming, again, that I am representing my experience honestly). If I remark that from an airplane, houses and automobiles look like toys, that remark is warranted by my personal experience. It does not make the houses and automobiles toys, but it does warrant both my experience of them and my statement representing that experience. If I say that I love you, my honestly reported experience is my testimonial warranty; your dilemma is deciding whether or not I am honestly representing my experience. An important aspect of warrants to keep in mind is that they operate independently from truth. Sometimes warrants and truth occur together, but sometimes they do not, and one does not logically imply the other. What this means is that not only can warranted beliefs be true and unwarranted beliefs false, but also warranted beliefs can be false and unwarranted beliefs true. Let's take a look at how this might be so. At present, we believe the claim that Earth revolves around the Sun to be a warranted true belief. A systemic warrant in the form of the Copernican system of astronomy explains the movement of the planets, and on the basis of this warrant we believe a heliocentric, or Sun-centered, system to represent reality. A few centuries ago, people accepted a strong empirical warrant for the belief that Earth is stationary and the Sun moves. Even today, our senses provide us with this apparent warranty, but we now assert that the medieval confidence in the Earth-centered hypothesis constituted a warranted false belief (Table 6.1). A warranty existed—the evidence of common sense and sense experience—but it did not make the theory true. It is fairly easy to imagine what an unwarranted false belief might look like. “The Moon is made of green cheese” would be one example. We have all had the experience of saying to someone, “You have no proof for that, so it's false.” Without a warranty of some kind, you will have a difficult time convincing anyone, even yourself, that something is true. Unwarranted true beliefs are also possible. You may in fact be the tallest, or the most athletic or musical, or the smartest person in your college or university, but you probably have no warranty to that effect. We can look to warrants as a first step in determining whether or not to believe a truth claim, but as we have seen, statements without warrants can be true and warranted statements can be false. We must make further distinctions to determine whether or not any given statement is true. In fact, Western philosophers have traditionally used three tests to determine truth: the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test. In the next few sections, we will consider each of these in turn. Table 6.1 Warrantability There can be unwarranted true propositions and warranted false propositions, as well as warranted true propositions. WARRANTABILITY Warranted Unwarranted True Water freezes into ice. I am the best cook in the class. False The Sun revolves around Earth. The Moon is made of green cheese. © Cengage Learning THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) Born in Wales, Russell was the grandson of Lord John Russell who had twice served as prime minister under Queen Victoria. Both his parents died while Bertrand was young, and he was raised by grandparents with John Stuart Mill (see Chapter 9) as an informal godfather. Russell had a lonely, troubled adolescence and was often on the verge of suicide. He always claimed he was “restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.” He was a fellow in the Royal Society and opened an experimental school called the Beacon Hill School. He may be best known popularly for his antiwar views. He was jailed twice—once in 1918 (during World War I) because of a supposedly libelous article he wrote for a pacifist journal, and again in 1961 at the age of eighty-nine because of his campaign for nuclear disarmament. Russell received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. The Correspondence Test Put simply, the correspondence test demands that, to be true, a proposition must correspond with an object or event. Derived from the correspondence theory of the nature of truth, it asserts that if things are as we say they are, then we have a true state of affairs. If someone tells you snow is falling, you can verify this truth claim by looking out a window. To determine whether it is true that the soup is too salty, you can taste it. This is the commonsense view of truth; it has a strong empirical flavor and probably makes a good deal of sense to you. correspondence test a true proposition must correspond with a fact or state of affairs One of its developers and leading exponents was twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell, who maintained that a world of facts existed independent of our minds. When we speak about reality, Russell says, we order the terms that refer to it. We might say “The Orioles beat the Phillies in the World Series,” for example. This would be true if and only if the Orioles won. If we kept the same terms but reversed the order, the resulting statement—“ The Phillies beat the Orioles”—would be false (assuming the Orioles won). The difference between the two statements, according to Russell, is that the first corresponds with a fact, whereas the second does not. There are two possible relationships between a proposition and a fact. Either the proposition is true, meaning the fact to which it refers exists in the world, or it is false, meaning the fact to which it refers does not exist in the world. If I say that Dublin is the capital of France, you will tell me that my statement is false—that Dublin is the capital of the Republic of Ireland and that Paris, not Dublin, is the capital of France. The true version of the proposition must match the fact to which it refers. What does it actually mean to say that there is (or is not) a correspondence between a proposition and a fact? Suppose I made a statement that unicorns are white and dragons are green. In what sense could we speak about my statement (proposition) as corresponding or not corresponding with a fact because unicorns and dragons are mythical creatures and thus cannot be said to “exist” in any commonsense definition of the term? What about events from the mythical/historical past? If I say that Arthur was king of Camelot and Guinevere his queen, how would we go about testing the correspondence, or lack of it, between this statement and fact? Some conditions limit the usefulness of the correspondence test, the most serious of which concerns the assumption upon which the correspondence theory of truth rests—namely, that there is a mind-independent reality. The correspondence test posits an external world that exists “out there” and is available for comparison with statements made about it, but this realist view is not universally accepted. Immanuel Kant, for instance, argued that reality, having been filtered through the intuitions of space and time and through the shaping categories of the mind as well, was not available for mind-independent reference. We can, he observed, never know things in themselves, or noumena, but only things as they appear to us (that is, phenomena). If Kant is correct, then there is no world “out there” that we can know about; the only knowable reality is the one in our heads. Kant assumes all of us share the same world in our heads because we share the same mental categories; thus, he asserts that we can make statements about the world that correspond to the world only as we experience it. Philosopher W. V. O. Quine goes further. He suggests that physical objects may be no more than theoretical posits—that in response to sense data we hypothesize the existence of physical objects to make sense of our experiences. Neurophysiologists provide some evidence for this view. Each of us has a blind spot in each eye, through which the optic nerve passes as it takes visual stimuli from the retina to the brain. Most of the time we are completely unaware of this, because our brains fill in the image with what seems to make sense—more blue sky, more human skin, a continuation of pattern and shape. theoretical posits our mental construction of physical objects in an attempt to make sense of our experience, according to Quine For Quine, only sense data are real; the rest we create out of our need to make sense of the world. This is also reminiscent of Hume, who insisted that we imagine we see cause and effect because of a similar psychological need. Hume's theory was that we cannot live without predictability and order; Quine's theory is that we cannot live without sense. In both cases our brains provide what we need on a feeling level, but this is a far cry from philosophical realism. According to the realist/representationalist view upon which the correspondence test rests, actual states of affairs exist in reality and true beliefs accurately represent them. Proponents of the antirepresentationalist view counter that, because of the egocentric predicament, no one can climb outside his or her own perspective long enough to speak about the world “as it really is.” Because each of us is limited to our own private perspective, it makes no sense, according to twentieth-century philosophers such as Richard Rorty, to speak about the mind or even language as representing reality. realist/representationalist view there is an external world outside our minds to which we may appeal for verification antirepresentationalist view we are limited by our own perspective and cannot rationally speak about a world that exists outside it When we say a belief is true, Rorty asserts, what we really mean is that we are applauding the belief for having been proved in terms of our own standards of rationality. The entire process of comparing a belief against a truth standard is going on within us because there is no possibility of comparison with something outside us. Antirepresentationalists think we should start being honest about what we can and cannot do and stop pretending that “the world as it really is” is available for comparison. If the reality of an external world is in doubt, it seems we must seek alternative methods of truth verification. Under conditions in which the correspondence test seems inadequate or inappropriate, Western philosophers have used a second truth test that appears to bypass the need for an external world of reality. The Coherence Test The coherence test of truth measures coherence and consistency among statements within a system. According to the coherence theory of truth, a belief or statement is true if and only if it coheres (literally, “sticks together”) with other beliefs that together form a comprehensive account of reality. coherence test measures coherence and consistency among statements within a system If you have ever served on a jury, you have been called upon to use the truth test that derives from this theory, whether or not you accept the coherence theory of truth. Each of the two attorneys, representing the prosecution and the defense, tries to construct as coherent a system as possible by ordering existing facts in a particular way. The task of the jury is to decide which has done a more effective job. In which case do the facts seem to cohere, or hang together, more effectively? Often the evidence itself is not at issue, but rather the relationship among the facts that each attorney assembles and constructs. Much of mathematics operates from this kind of test. In our example of the Pythagorean theorem, the statement that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides is judged to be true because it fits so well with other geometric statements. If we did not know that was an accepted theorem, we might subject it to the coherence test to determine how well it fits with other things we know about lines and angles and particularly about the properties of triangles. Because we know that the sum of the interior angles in a triangle always equals 180 degrees, or two right angles, we know that the right angle in a right triangle equals 90 degrees and the other two angles must total the other 90. Given this, it seems both coherent and consistent to assert a similar relationship between the side opposite the right angle (the hypotenuse) and the other two sides. Science, too, offers many examples of apparently coherent systems. Indeed, we will see later that it is in the nature of science to construct paradigms, or tightly coherent explanations of reality. One example of a paradigm is the theory of quantum mechanics we discussed in Chapter 2. Although at first quantum theory clashed with existing scientific explanations, it has been verified as a coherent explanation of reality in the world of the very small. To describe atoms and their smaller constituent parts today, one must speak from within the paradigm of quantum mechanics. Often there are competing, even conflicting paradigms that purport to explain the same reality. Two hundred years ago, for example, we believed the body was controlled by so-called humors; their balance meant health and their imbalance meant illness. If choler, the element representing anger or heat, were out of balance, the physician might try bloodletting. The prescription made perfect sense within the coherent theory of diseases and their cures then popular. Today, we subscribe to the germ theory of disease, and our repertoire of defenses includes antibiotics designed to kill germs. Today most of us would not dream of submitting to bloodletting, even though some people get better after such a practice. Blowfly maggots do a better job of eating dead tissue and the gangrene-producing bacteria in it than any modern scientific procedures, including aggressive drug therapy.1 Even though patients improve, the treatment does not fit our current model of medical theory. These graphic, perhaps repulsive, examples point us to one of the weaknesses of the coherence test. Where there are competing and apparently equally coherent models, how do we choose among them? Indeed, taking a very broad view, it is difficult to imagine any statement that does not fit into one coherent system or another. So, what does it really mean to speak of this as the coherence test of truth? THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER William James (1842–1910) Born into a family with wide-ranging cultural and intellectual interests, William James and his brother, the novelist Henry James, enjoyed frequent trips to Europe and a feeling of comfort in the entire Atlantic community. Henry James, Sr., was a theologian and philosophical writer. As a young man, William pursued a career as a painter, and—although he later turned to medicine, the natural sciences, and eventually philosophy—he retained the ability to capture in words the immediateness of a situation (as an artist might) and the discipline of using language exactly (as a scientist must). His book Pragmatism and his other writings have come to represent not only pragmatism but also American thought in general. They are characterized by an emphasis on immediate, concrete experience, and they recognize that no philosopher can set his or her own temperament aside—even though many try to cite “impersonal reasons only” for the conclusions they draw. Pragmatism, James believed, is like a corridor opening into many rooms. Because it is neutral, it can lead to many results. A related problem is that even if all the statements in a system cohere beautifully, what guarantees the truth of the whole system? Each belief may be verified for coherence with the other beliefs within the system, but such verification does not prevent the entire system from being wrong. Until about 500 years ago, a very coherent system insisted that Earth was flat. When people looked in any direction, their eyes fell on the horizon, the place where land (or water) and sky meet, and the line they saw was always flat. For many people who never traveled more than a few miles from the place of their birth, the 20 or so square miles visible in all four directions constituted the known world—and it certainly looked flat. If the Sun dropped below a flat line and disappeared, what else could that mean except that Earth ended at that point? By every reasonable measure and piece of evidence then, Earth was flat. No wonder people warned Columbus that his ships would sail off the edge of the world before reaching the wonders of Cathay. Without the careful distinctions that arise from critically examining competing systems, consistent error may seem just as coherent as consistent truth. Are we not at some point required to find out whether any part of the system (or the system as a whole) connects with reality (assuming that reality exists)? If we insist on correspondence, we find ourselves back where we started. If we do not, we may be forced to join the Flat Earth Society. There is a third possibility: the pragmatic test. The Pragmatic Test The pragmatic test of truth derives from the distinctly American contribution to philosophy known as pragmatism, perhaps best embodied in popular culture by former President Harry Truman, who was famous for saying “I'm from Missouri, show me!” What is real, according to the pragmatic theory of truth, is what works. Thus, pragmatists care more about results than theories; something is true, they say, if it makes a difference, if its power to explain clarifies our understanding and changes our lives. pragmatic test what is true is what works Here's a little bottom-line nineteenth-century American pragmatism for you from William James, the philosopher who insisted we choose between theism and atheism because the decision would make a difference in the way we lived our lives (see Chapter 4): “Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life . . . What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?”2 Whether Earth is flat or spherical may not make much difference to me, but whether or not you love me certainly does; the latter truth has a real “cash-value” in terms of my lived experience. From the beginning of their history, Americans have seen themselves as more practical and down-to-earth than the worn-out (in their opinion) European societies they had left behind. While Europe was fighting its dynastic wars and debating between rationalism and empiricism, Americans saw themselves as carving a society out of the wilderness. Lacking easy access to ready-made materials, they learned to “make do,” and the “Yankee ingenuity” in which they took so much pride was a reflection of their ability to use whatever was at hand to solve a problem. Moving ever westward, Americans saw themselves as living on the “frontier” of civilization, both literally and figuratively. Philosophical pragmatism was developed primarily by three nineteenthcentury American philosophers who were weary of the debate between idealism and materialism (see Chapter 2), which seemed to them only slightly more valuable or interesting than a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The outcome of such a debate, they felt, would make no difference in most people's lives. Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey offered the philosophical system of pragmatism as an alternative. THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) The son of a Harvard professor— Benjamin Peirce, who was probably the premier American mathematician of his day— young Charles developed an early interest in mathematics and logic. Before turning to philosophy, he worked for ten years in a chemistry lab. His interest in exact sciences like chemistry and in logic finally led him to philosophy. After graduating from Harvard in 1859, Peirce did some college lecturing—at Harvard (1864–1865 and 1869–1870) and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1879–1884)—but his independent and even rebellious nature made universities reluctant to hire him as a professor. Instead, he worked for thirty years as a physicist with the U.S. Coast Guard and Geodetic Survey. Peirce receives the credit for developing and bringing to clarity the ideas that became the core of pragmatism. Most of this work was done in informal gatherings of the “metaphysical club” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he conversed with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, philosopher William James, and others. For Peirce, truth is revealed in practical experience with concrete things, and beliefs are really “rules for action.” Thinking is but one step on the road to action. When we speak about truth, Peirce believed, what we really mean is that belief in a particular proposition would, “with sufficient experience and reflection,” lead us to action that will in turn satisfy our desires. If you tell someone that philosophy is difficult or interesting, that assessment may be “true” for you, but it can never be true for the person you tell unless he or she takes a philosophy course or begins reading philosophy books. Truth is revealed through lived experience rather than through logical proofs or laboratory experiments. William James developed this idea into a truth test for the proposition “God exists.” James advised us that being an agnostic was not a viable option, for deciding to believe or not to believe in God is, in his view, a “live, forced, momentous option.” In other words, whether you do or do not believe in God makes a tremendous difference in your lived experience. James applied Peirce's original principle to a specific philosophical problem. To understand the truth test aspect of this theory, we must first understand James's definition of truth. Like all pragmatists, James rejected the traditional idea of truth as absolute and unchanging; instead, he saw truth as relative and dynamic. In other words, truth is not a fixed or static quality but a part of the unfolding meaning that lived experience gives to something. “Truth happens to an idea,” James wrote; “it becomes true, is made true by events.”3 Thus, the truth of our assertion that democracy is the best form of government will be found, or not found, in our lived experience. Pragmatism arose as a conscious rejection of what seemed to be stagnant methods then in use in philosophy. Pragmatism was a turning away from abstraction and a turning “towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, towards power.”4 For a pragmatist like James, the definition of a true idea is a very straightforward one: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not.”5 Our third pragmatist, John Dewey, applied his ideas to education and is known as an advocate of learning by doing. One of Dewey's chief objections concerns the Cartesian separation of mind and body and its consequent negative results in the field of education: More than anything else it explains the separation of theory and practice, of thought and action. The result is a so-called cultural education which tends to be academic and pedantic, and in any case aloof from the concerns of life, and an industrial and manual education which at best gives command of tools and means without intelligent grasp of purposes and ends.6 THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER John Dewey (1859–1952) Born in Burlington, Vermont, Dewey soon left the East to venture west, spending nearly twenty years teaching at the universities of Minnesota, Michigan, and Chicago, before returning east to join and later lead the philosophy department at Columbia University. He had seen a good deal of the continent, and his philosophy—when he came to write it—reflected all of it. He apparently never lost a kind of rustic simplicity, which he learned in Vermont, and he retained a respect for the naturalism that characterized much of America at the turn of the century. He put his philosophy to work on educational reform, insisting that book learning should never take place in isolation from practice. Schools should teach what students need to know to be productive and happy in an industrial democracy; education, far from being a once-and-for-all enterprise, should be a process of continual, lifelong growth and illumination. At the celebration of his ninetieth birthday, Dewey remained optimistic. To lose faith in each other would be, he thought, to lose faith in ourselves, and that he labeled “the unforgivable sin.” Both extremes (one addresses the mind; the other, the body) are distortions because they fail to further the pragmatic goal of integrating intellectual learning with lived experience. The false separation of thinking and action that is our legacy from Descartes results, Dewey argued, in an inadequate education for both academics and technicians. Properly understood, education “is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience.”7 In its ideal form, there is a progressive quality to it. At the beginning, the study of any subject will focus on materials available in ordinary life experience. Gradually, the learner's experiences will modulate from a “social and human center toward a more objective intellectual scheme of organization . . .”8 All of this assumes the integration of theory and practice. “When education is based on theory and practice upon experience, it goes without saying that the organized subject-matter of the adult and the specialist cannot provide the starting point.”9 Learners must always begin with their own experiences. If theory and practice travel different paths, there may be no place where the beginner and the expert can meet—no place of connection possible between teacher and student. Thus, educational pragmatism insists that theory must always be based in practice. As the most fundamental discipline, philosophy, in Dewey's judgment, had a critical role to play in shaping our collective intellectual life. He was even willing to define philosophy as “the general theory of education.”10 To be effective, however, a philosophy “and its program of values must take effect in conduct.”11 In other words, it must pass the pragmatic test: A first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is offered us is this: Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?12 The pragmatic test is perhaps most easily applicable in response to statements involving values and emotions. Correspondence and coherence tests are not likely to do us much good in testing the truth of statements such as “I love you,” but it may be very easy to see the practical difference this declaration can make in a person's life. If you are willing to consider my welfare in addition to your own, to give me your time and attention and to listen when I need to talk, I may very well conclude that you do love me. If instead you make your declaration of love but continue to focus entirely on your own needs and to ignore mine, I may conclude that your declaration is nothing more than words; it will have failed the pragmatic test of truth. The biggest difficulty with pragmatism is that it is frequently unclear about the actual meaning of such terms as reality and truth, and so critics fault pragmatists for fuzzy thinking. An interesting variation on the pragmatic test among the Ewe people of Ghana takes a step in overcoming this objection. The truth will set you free. But first it will make you miserable. Seventies poster The Ewe Creativity Test In the creativity, or nyanono, theory of truth from West Africa, it is not only “the workability of an idea that makes it true, but its power to bring about a better human situation.”13 In the Ewe word nyano, nya is the root word for “truth,” and no represents “woman, mother, the female principle associated with life, creativity, growth.” Used as a term for truth, nyano means that a statement is alive with creative power. One way to command a person to speak the truth in Ewe is to say do nyanono, meaning “plant the truth” (Figure 6.2). The understanding is that if the statement is the truth, it will “germinate, grow and bear fruit.”14 Falsehood, being dead, does not have the power to germinate and grow. In the nyano or creativity test of truth, it is not enough that truth work in a pragmatic way; truth must also bear fruit. Using only the pragmatic test, a student might be tempted to conclude that “cheating is good” because he or she might have gotten a better grade on a test or paper by cheating. The richer rendering of the nyano truth theory, however, helps us realize that although cheating might work in the short term, it certainly will not generate better life situations over time.15 creativity test what is true is what promotes life and growth, according to the Ewe Like English, the Ewe language also has a correspondence test and a coherence test of truth claims. But, because in Ewe culture truth is seen as the highest spiritual value, the creativity test offers an added dimension to the pragmatic test. If truth is life promoting and falsehood leads to death, it is said that the person who loves truth will live a long life—a very pragmatic reward. Knowing the truth is finally a matter of doing the truth … that is, knowledge is alive … and doing the truth takes courage and demands risks. Dr. Elizabeth Tidball Figure 6.2 Do Nyanono (“Plant the Truth”) It is probably clear to you by now that each of these theories makes sense under certain conditions but that none is universally applicable to all times, places, and situations. When we are considering empirical questions, the correspondence test may be of greatest value; logical, semantic, and systemic truth can be evaluated most easily using the coherence test; and value judgments must pass the pragmatic test of truth, and perhaps the creativity test as well. Truth and the Really Real What we clearly want to know is the truth about reality. Both our own true nature and the true nature of external reality matter to us. Let's look now at two very different attempts to ascertain what is really real—Zen Buddhism and Christianity—to see how truth is tested in each of them. Truth in Zen Like the Buddhism from which it is derived, Zen Buddhism does not assert the existence of a divine being. In fact, Zen has only one “goal”: the direct experience of what is. Truth cannot be discovered in any objective way, and both warranties and truth tests badly miss the point. What we need to do is still our mental chatter and experience what is right in front of us directly—without the intervention of words and concepts. If we can get beyond words and concepts to direct experience, then and only then is truth possible. As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts The Buddha Truth is the present—past and future do not exist—and truth is the everyday, the mundane, the earthy: doing our work, eating our food. As the Zen masters put it: Draw water, chop wood. Live your ordinary life, but be there for the experience. If you are present—instead of letting your idea of something predetermine what you experience—you may be able to see truly. The only warranty is your own experience. Unarmed truth is the most powerful thing in the universe. Martin Luther King, Jr. No one can explain Zen to you, not even the most fully enlightened person (or perhaps especially such a person), because to explain something is to know it and speak about it from the outside. Truth lives instead on the inside, at the heart of life, and it must be experienced directly rather than talked about. There is no substitute for experience—your only entry point for a true encounter with the way things are. In contrast with religions that rely on sacred texts, Zen insists that the way to truth is not through reading or instruction. Actually, there is a real danger that teachers and concepts can get in the way, for it is easy to confuse the message with the messenger. If the master points at the Moon, do not confuse the master's finger with the Moon. Put in its most extreme form: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” All concepts—even the concept of the Buddha, the Enlightened One—that interfere with your direct experience can only get in your way; therefore, you must “kill” them. Seek instead the direct uncovering of truth. Koans are intended to stop logical thought. This excerpt from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince may help us understand the Zen approach to truth. Although the story of “taming the fox” is primarily a story of intimacy, it provides a metaphor for the process of apprehending truth about what is. We might think of the fox as the way things are and taming as the process of quieting our minds to become one with it: [The fox said] “To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . . One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox.16 In the process of taming (learning the truth), you must first sit very far away from your fox (the way things are). The next day you may be able to move a little closer, but you must still sit quietly and wait. Day after day you move closer; if you are patient, focused, and attentive enough, one day you will recognize that your fox has been tamed (and that you have been tamed by your fox). Practice in Zen means sitting meditation, or zazen. Every day Zen monks, nuns, and others spend hours sitting, often facing a wall. The first goal is to quiet the mind and gain control over it. sitting the Zen practice of silent meditation, designed to quiet the mind In Zen, studying and trying hard to “get it” are the things most likely to keep you from ever getting it. The truth cannot be commanded to appear; it cannot be conquered by reading, studying, and talking. You must patiently sit, like the Little Prince, until you have tamed your mind. Like the fox, truth will only open itself to you through patient, persistent, direct experience. So, the Zen method of seeking truth is not the traditional Western method of study: reading and thinking, listening to and learning from experts. Indeed, Zen masters are known for saying very little or nothing. They might sit in stony silence or dismiss you, or even hit you if you give a wrongheaded answer. The chief teaching method of the Rinzai branch of Zen is the koan—a kind of riddle. One of the best known is this: “You know the sound made by two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Koans are not meant to be answered in the ordinary way; they are instead designed to stop logical, analytical, discursive thought and force you into a direct encounter with what is. koan [KO ahn] a Zen riddle designed to stop rational, discursive thought in order to permit or force the direct experience of what is A Zen master who knows you well may assign you a koan. The best way to “attack” a koan is not to think about it and try to figure out what it means. Instead, you would be advised to focus your mind in meditation. Zen practitioners use zazen or sitting in silent meditation to quiet the mind and become receptive to the truth about the way things actually are. For most of us, this can be challenging. If you have never done so, try sitting quietly with your spine straight for five minutes, observing your own mind. Allow your thoughts to float by like clouds and rest in the blue sky of a quiet, awakened mind. Be in the present moment—not in the past or in the future. It's fine to notice the bird singing or even the hum of the refrigerator motor. What you might discover is that choosing what to think is not so easy. Your attention might keep jumping around in what Buddhists call “monkey mind.” Noticing how little control we have over our own thoughts is a good first step. Simply allow your thoughts to pass by without focusing your attention on them. Thinking can be very useful; Zen practitioners just don't find it helpful in learning the truth about what is. The Buddha was known for delivering sermons with no words. The emptiness of his silence created a meditative space in which his listeners sometimes “heard” important truths. His own enlightenment—coming to grips with the truth about what is and what is not—occurred when he sat silently all night, beneath the bodhi tree, vowing not to get up until he became enlightened. In the same way, Kasyapa became enlightened when the Buddha simply held up a flower. Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on. Winston S. Churchill Truth is right there, at the heart of the universe, waiting to be experienced. Warranties and truth tests will be useless. You will never find truth by walking around it, observing it from the outside and trying to analyze it. You must come face to face with it, so to speak. The best way to do this is to have what is called beginner's mind. Consider this description of how to do calligraphy: beginner's mind according to Zen, the state of openness in which one can directly access the truth about what is The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in it.17 When we think we already know the truth about what is, we become expert at life and believe we have nothing much to learn from it. Think about the first time you drove a car. Every action was important, and you approached the task with full concentration. Once things have moved to the automatic level, you really do not need to “be there.” That may be fine for driving, but it is not so good for living. If our experience of existence moves to the automatic level, we may miss it and the truth it has to tell us. Zen is unique in urging people to look for truth in direct experience rather than in sacred texts. By contrast, three religions that originated in the Middle East locate truth within a sacred book, and each urges the study of texts as one method of learning the truth about reality. PHILOSOPHERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES Hadewijch of Antwerp (a mystical vision) One Christmas night, when I was lying in bed in a very depressed frame of mind, I was suddenly taken up in the spirit. There I saw a very deep whirlpool, wide and extremely dark. And in this vast abyss all things were included, packed together and compressed. The darkness illuminated and penetrated everything. The unfathomable abyss was so deep and so high that nobody could reach it. I shall not describe it now, for it is not the moment to speak of it, and I cannot put into words what is indescribable. Moreover, I would not have time to do so, for I saw many other things: all the omnipotence of our Beloved. I saw the Lamb take possession of our Loved One. In the vast spaces I looked upon festivities, such as David moving his fingers over the harp strings. Then I saw a Child being born in the secret part of loving souls, souls hidden from their own eyes in the deep abyss of which I speak, and lacking nothing, except to be lost forever in this abyss. I perceived the forms of many souls, according to what the life of each had been. Those I saw and had already known [in life] remained familiar to me and those I had not known before became familiar to me; I received interior knowledge about some and also exterior knowledge about a great many. And some I knew inwardly, although I had never seen them outwardly … Eleventh Vision, from Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, Emilie Zum Brunn & Georgette Epiney-Burgard, eds., translated from the French by Sheila Hughes (New York: Paragon House, 1989). Truth in Religions of the Book In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the so-called religions of the Book, the Book (Torah, Bible, or Qur'an) is regarded as the source of truth. God or Allah is believed to have communicated the words of truth that are recorded in the Book. When debates in philosophy classes reach a point at which a theist says, “It's true because God says so” or “It's true because it's in the Bible,” an atheist, or an agnostic, or a theistic philosophy student replies, “In philosophy, that is not enough.” As we have observed, this is one of the major points of departure between theology and philosophy. For theists, however, God or the Bible can provide the ultimate warranty. For believers, a sacred text or the words and deeds of a religious leader can offer lessons in truth. Revelation, the direct revealing of truth by a divine figure, has a powerful warranty for those who accept it. Mystics, such as Mechthilde of Magdeburg and Hildegard of Bingen (whom we met in Chapter 4), asserted a truth claim based on their direct, personal, intuitive experience of the divine. Notice that this is quite different from the Zen path of direct, personal, intuitive experience of everyday existence. In both cases truth is possible, but mystics claim access to a reality that lies beyond the ordinary, everyday one. Zen insists there is only the everyday one—truly seen. For Jews and Christians, these Scriptures provide access to God's truth. Nearly every day, between 1376 and 1380, Catherine of Siena, after receiving Holy Communion, went into a trancelike state and spoke with God in a voice quite different from her ordinary one. She believed these mystical experiences to be revelations of truth. In a letter to another nun, Catherine explains that truth lies . . . where the soul tastes the ineffable love that God has for his creature, shown to us through that Word who ran, like someone in love, to the shameful death of the cross, for the honor of the father and our salvation. When the soul has known this truth with perfect light, it rises above itself . . ..18 Catherine used what she believed to be her access to divine truth to mediate when the Vatican declared war on Florence. Although this effort ultimately failed, she became advisor to Pope Gregory XI, once persuading him to walk barefoot to the Vatican as an act of penitence.19 Convincing a powerful person like the pope that he needed to acknowledge and share her sense of sin was clearly very risky business, but Catherine stayed alive and kept her freedom because she claimed God as her warranty in a way that was credible to the powerful Church hierarchy. As we saw in Chapter 4, a person who claims to speak with the authority of God behind him or her can be seen (by those who share these assumptions) to have a powerful truth claim. Catherine's right to speak derived not from her own insights but from the revelations of God she claimed to have received during her mystical trances. Her case seemed strengthened when marks resembling the nail wounds of Christ (called the stigmata) mysteriously appeared on her body. Only an extremely holy person, it was believed, would be marked by God in such a way. Catherine of Siena was named a Doctor of the Church in 1970 (one of only three women ever to receive this honor; the other two were Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux, both mystics who also claimed direct revelation of truth from God).20 THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Catherine of Siena (1347?–1380) Catarina Benincasa was born in the city of Siena and died in Rome. She had her first vision while still a young girl. When she joined a religious order, she chose not to live in a convent. Instead, she lived as a recluse in her parents' home. Because she had received no formal education, she was illiterate at the time she took her vows. Often, she dictated what she had learned from her mystical visions to a group of secretaries. In 1370 she received what she interpreted as a divine command to go out into the world and save souls. Five years later she received the stigmata, the marks of the wounds of Christ, and this greatly increased her credibility. Because she believed she conveyed the will of God, Catherine became bold enough to intervene in the dispute between Pope Gregory XI and the city of Florence. She did persuade the pope to return to Rome from Avignon in France. This done, she composed the Dialogue, her major visionary work, and died at the age of thirty-three. Women like Catherine of Siena made truth claims based on belief in an extraordinary reality to which they had access through mystical experience. Let's turn now to a more ordinary kind of reality—the subject matter of science, history, and linguistics—to examine how truth claims are made and tested in each of these fields of study. Truth in Science The search for truth in science would seem to be a straightforward enterprise. After all, science is the realm of empirical data and logical theory in which ideas are tested and compared with the real world, so truth must be easy to spot and even easier to define. And aren't scientists, more than the rest of us, committed to remaining objective, even dispassionate? Not exactly, according to Thomas Kuhn, whose 1970 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revealed a much more complex picture of how scientific statements are confirmed or accepted as true within the scientific community. According to Kuhn, science operates within a prevailing paradigm—a shared assumption or view of what the world is like—and this paradigm determines how questions of truth will be asked and answered. The Nature of Paradigms During the period of what Kuhn calls normal science, students learn the prevailing paradigm in college, textbooks are written to reflect that paradigm, and anything that does not fit into it is more or less ignored. “Normal science . . . often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”21 As an explanation of the world, a paradigm is highly coherent, and it becomes the truth test in the field in which it operates. Let's look at what this means. paradigm according to Kuhn, a model that produces a coherent tradition of scientific research Before the development of a paradigm, various competing explanations of reality, each based on the facts at hand, exist in the scientific community; in the absence of an accepted paradigm, “all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant.”22 People looking at the same range of phenomena (although not necessarily the same phenomena) tend to interpret their meaning differently, but once a spectacular advancement gives one theory about the phenomena widespread acceptance, a paradigm has been created. “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.” The new paradigm does, however, more rigidly define the field in which it operates. “Those unwilling or unable to accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group.”23 Once agreement has been reached, writers of textbooks then explain the field in terms of the new paradigm, and researchers—operating from within the paradigm—take it as their starting point. HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS: Design Thinking: Charles Sanders Peirce and Abductive Reasoning What happens when a thinker encounters something that doesn't fit the existing paradigm? He or she might find analytical thinking frustratingly unhelpful. Deductive and inductive reasoning, the tools of analytical thinking, operate from within the scientific paradigm, as they seek to find and declare certainties about the world. What the thinker needs, in this case, is something new and fresh—what we have come to call a breakthrough. Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the American pragmatists we have been studying, was convinced that new ideas must come through “logical leaps of the mind” (p. 64). The actual first step in reasoning, Peirce asserted, is not observation; instead, it is wondering. This sense of being in the presence of a mystery can open a window to what lies beyond the confines of an existing paradigm (p. 7). Since no new idea could be proved deductively or inductively using past data, Peirce reasoned that there must be a third fundamental logic mode. Peirce is writing about that often paradigmbreaking moment, described below[LI1] by Thomas Kuhn, when an observation doesn't fit existing models. Faced with this paradox, a thinker might make an “inference to the best explanation,” using what Peirce called abductive logic (p. 64). What we are talking about here is not declarative reasoning that seeks to declare a conclusion true or false. Rather, it is modal reasoning that seeks “to posit what could possibly be true” (pp. 64, 65). This is the realm of what Roger Martin calls “design thinking”—thinking toward what is not yet known. Successful businesses, he claims, use a blend of analytical and intuitive thinking. And, the design thinker in any field probably starts with a hunch about something, a “prelinguistic intuition” (p. 10). What the design thinker knows cannot yet be put into words. As the process unfolds, a new form of reasoning guides the thinker—intuitive thinking or “the art of knowing without reasoning” (p. 6). How might you use abductive reasoning in your professional or personal life? Page numbers refer to Roger Martin, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009). My thanks to Jon Sandruck and Dr. Bernadette Sandruck for recommending Roger Martin's book. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new ways of seeing … [but] textbooks tend to tame revolutions, whether cultural or scientific. They describe the advances as if they had been logical in their day, not at all shocking. Marilyn Ferguson Because the paradigm has already been justified in the academic community and by textbooks and teaching methods, individual scientists are free to explore specialized implications of the new theory (without having to justify the theory itself). Publications are addressed to colleagues “whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the papers addressed to them.”24 What this means for the general public, and even for other members of the scientific community, is that the paradigm is accepted as a given within a particular field and assumed without being explained. Reading about and analyzing scientific explanations of reality becomes possible only within the highly specialized knowledge and methods of the prevailing paradigm. Only when a problem that ought to be solvable within the rules of the paradigm is not or a piece of equipment, designed for “normal research,” fails to perform as expected does a scientific revolution occur. (For a simple exercise that illustrates this point, see Figures 6.3 and 6.4.) Scientific revolutions are the “tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.”25 After a revolution, an existing paradigm is replaced “in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.”26 From the point of view of philosophy, what is most interesting is that the truth test applied is both a coherence test and a correspondence test. Scientists never reject one paradigm without accepting another at the same time, and the decision to do so rests on “the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.”27 Figure 6.3 Nine-Dot Problem Using four lines, touch all nine dots without lifting your pencil from the page. The answer appears in Figure 6.4. Before Copernicus described the Sun-centered view of our solar system we accept today, the prevailing paradigm—Ptolemy's commonsense Earthcentered system, developed between 200 b.c.e. and 200 c.e.—predicted the changing positions of stars and planets well enough, but the predictions never quite matched the best data gathered by observation. Ptolemy's successors continued to make minor adjustments to his system of “compounded circles” to make the theory more closely match observed reality. By the time of Copernicus, however, the calculations were very cumbersome and unwieldy. Nothing that complex, it seemed, could really describe how things actually are. The crisis that was produced when Ptolemy's theory became increasingly difficult to apply to reality led to what we know as the Copernican revolution. Once the Sun was accepted as the center of the solar system, many of the difficulties of the Ptolemaic Earth-centered system simply disappeared. Copernicus's explanation was finally accepted because his mathematical calculations and formulas were so much simpler. The revolution led to a new period of what Kuhn calls normal science, in which relatively detailed puzzles within the theory continue to be explored, but the paradigm remains intact. From the point of view of philosophy, the implications of a paradigm shift can be enormous. If Earth is no longer the center of the universe, but merely one of a group of planets circling the Sun, our worldview—including Earth as the unique site of human creation and salvation—must change to accommodate this new understanding. This helps explain why the Roman Catholic Church invested so much energy into suppressing this new paradigm and waited until late in the twentieth century to officially grant that Galileo's Copernican views were correct after all. What was at stake was not merely a scientific debate over theory but the very way we see ourselves in relation to the rest of the cosmos. The impact of paradigms on our ability to test for truth in science can be significant. Because the paradigm structures how we see the world, truth tests must operate from within it; this makes the objectivity for which science is known much more difficult to achieve. Truth Tests Once accepted, a paradigm, as we have observed, becomes the explanation for a range of phenomena. Conflicting data and theories are ignored or discredited until it is no longer possible to do so. “Normal science,” Kuhn says, “does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.”28 Even when one paradigm replaces another, the newer one does not disprove the coherence of the former one. Ptolemy's theory remains coherent. Here we see one of the shortcomings of the coherence test of truth in science. Two theories can be consistent and apparently coherent, and one is judged to more accurately correspond with reality—but only from within the rules of the new paradigm. Reality is always filtered for us through the lens of the version of it we currently accept. This is a very Kantian notion of perception. The paradigm provides a kind of mental category through which we interpret our perceptions of the world. We may be convinced that cause and effect exist or that the Sun (and not Earth) is the center of our solar system, and these beliefs may be thoroughly justified, according to the paradigm that provides the internal system of verification in our heads. But if we have already “agreed to agree” on a paradigm, then we have no way to independently prove the correspondence of those beliefs with the real world. Kuhn has provided support for Kant's claim that “mind is the lawgiver to nature,” rather than the other way around. Let's look at how scientists decide to accept one paradigm over another and to reject other apparently coherent systems as “unscientific.” Both astrology and creationism appear to some people to provide coherent explanations of reality. What scientists find lacking in these two systems is the deep connections among underlying subsystems and the capacity to explain wide ranges of phenomena that they insist on in a fully coherent scientific paradigm. A completely coherent system, scientists say, is superior to a superficially coherent one. For people outside a field, however, such comparisons are nearly impossible to make. Another difficulty is that both theories accepted by the scientific community (like quantum mechanics) and those rejected by the scientific community (like astrology and creationism) fail the correspondence test of truth. Only from within quantum mechanics, astrology, and creationism do the truth claims of the system make sense. If we cannot apply the coherence test and the correspondence test is not appropriate, we are left with the pragmatic test. Although this test apparently works for particle physicists, as we observed in discussing quantum mechanics (see Chapter 2), most of us are unable to see the “cash value” of quantum mechanics in our own lives. The nonexpert seems doomed to accept on “faith” the judgments of the scientific community as expressed in its prevailing paradigms. Paradigms exist in all academic fields. In history, the tension that exists among paradigms is reflected in the reciprocal relationship between the present and the past. Although they strive for objectivity, as scientists do, historians know that they inevitably see the past through the lens formed by the concerns of the present. Truth in History When we begin to talk about truth in history, it is a little easier to see from the start that we are on a slippery slope. Unlike science, history cannot claim to speak in a purely logical and empirical way. Historians are aware that their field is very largely governed by interpretation and that interpretations change over time. Even so apparently simple a matter as what constitutes history has undergone a significant revision during the past few decades. The Changing Definition of History Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes? The books are filled with the names of kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? Bertolt Brecht Fewer than fifty years ago, historians were more or less in agreement about what constituted history: The story of the past could best be told in terms of kings, presidents, battles, and political events. The “great man” theory of history asserted that history was molded by great men rather than the reverse. Whereas a powerful and influential man could alter future events by his actions, the poor, the weak, women, children, and minorities—all those without political power—were at best marginal to the great events of history that swirled around them. The important documents of history were those that created governments or defined rights, such as the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence, and, to a lesser but significant degree, the private papers of influential men. The diaries, letters, and other private glimpses into the personal motivations of these leaders were believed to round out our picture of history in any given period. History, then, was a narrative that weaves together pivotal events and great men into a compelling story, explaining who we are now by telling us who we once were. Today, things are quite different. Some historians are writing history “from the bottom up” rather than from the top down, beginning with the lives of ordinary people and describing what it was like to be a peasant, slave, maid, or factory worker. To tell the truth in history, they argue, we must include the poor and the powerless as well as the rich and influential. Social differences are being taken seriously. Is it really possible to speak about what it was like to be an eighteenth-century American without specifying this American's race, sex, and social class? Race, Class, and Gender in Historical Interpretation It was one kind of experience to be Abigail Adams, writing to her husband as he attended the Continental Congress while she ran the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, and quite another to be a slave on a tobacco plantation in Virginia. Even if we accept that we must include the experience of women as well as men in evaluating the past, we still must specify which woman we are looking at and when and where she lived. Put another way, we might ask what is true with respect to what it was like to be a woman at a particular moment in history. Racism is used both to create false differences among us and to mask very significant ones. Mirtha Quintanales Was it, for example, more significant for a woman that she was white rather than black, middle class rather than poor, living in the South rather than the North? Under certain conditions, race can be the most important factor. African Americans in post–Civil War America were discriminated against on the basis of their race—regardless of their gender or social class, slave or free status before the war. Women living under Reconstruction may have felt more solidarity with those of their own race than they felt with women of other races. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Sojourner Truth At other times, gender may have been the key concept. Vastly different as their lives were on many levels, the middle-class white woman whose children were apprenticed out by the father to pay his gambling debts may have had more in common with the slave woman whose children were sold to a neighboring planter than the white woman had with white men of her class or the black woman with black men of her class and condition. And there were times when social class was more significant than either race or gender. Even today, the very rich will always receive the best table in the restaurant, regardless of the feelings of the maître d' about their race or gender. Once a person has achieved economic success, he or she may find more in common with other successful people and be criticized for forgetting “where you came from.” Similarly, to be poor is to be poor, and it may not be materially different to be poor and Latina or poor and Caucasian. It is important for historians to find out which of these three factors—race, class, or gender—was the most significant one in shaping the life of a particular historical subject. Also, if we want to learn the complete truth about the historical past, the research methods of the “old history” will not suffice because the marginal and the powerless do not leave many written documents. A revolution within the field of history has produced a new subfield— social history—with its own focuses and methods. Racial oppression of Black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression … has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture. Eleanor Holmes Norton Research Methods of Social History Historians in the first decades of the twenty-first century are looking at court documents, geological data, and what they call material culture (material objects left behind by individuals, in bequests, or by societies, in trash piles and graveyards) in an attempt to understand the past. If we want to know what it was like to be a peasant in the fourteenth century, it may be very significant to find out how many eating utensils the family owned, how large the family was, and how much rain fell in any given year. Although our subject may not have left a diary or written letters, this kind of information can tell us a lot about what life was like for him or her. Did the family have barely enough to survive? Was the crop good? Was there plenty of food to go around and, perhaps, some to sell? Comparing marriage dates with baptismal records reveals the amount of time a couple was married before the first child was born. Fewer than nine months may indicate a premarital pregnancy and can tell us something about how acceptable it may have been to engage in premarital sex. In a similar way, what items a person left in an estate at death can reveal much about the kind of life that person lived. Having a plow or not having a plow made all the difference between mere survival and some modest comfort. Bones of the dead can reveal nutritional levels and tell us how hard the person may have worked while alive. After all this has been done, however, we still have some fundamental questions to ask about truth in history. In the first place, facts never come to us as “pure” facts. They are always subject to interpretation. If you have ever been involved in an automobile accident, you already understand how one fact or set of facts can easily have more than one interpretation. Second, facts always occur in a particular historical situation; to speak about them at all, we must speak about them in the context in which they occurred. And the historian is almost never an eyewitness, so our understanding of the past is filtered through the assumptions of those who reported the facts. In addition, our present concerns, as well as our current understanding of the world, provide the context in which we consider the facts of history. As historian Edward Hallett Carr points out, “The world of the historian, like the world of the scientist, is not a photographic copy of the real world, but rather a working model which enables him more or less effectively to understand it and to master it.”29 Accepting this, historians must strive for objectivity. They must not be limited by the vision of the present or of the particular circumstances in which they write. Figure 6.4 Answer to the Nine-Dot Problem If the paradigm requires your pencil not to extend beyond the dots, the puzzle cannot be solved—to solve it you must break the paradigm. Truth Tests The correspondence test of truth is really not a possibility because of the ambiguous nature of historical facts. A fact, it seems, is never entirely separate from the values that surround it. A historical fact lies somewhere between a valueless fact, such as “Most American slaves lived on plantations housing nine or fewer slaves,” and a value judgment, such as “Slavery is a great moral evil.”30 To illustrate this point, let's look at the fact of American slavery. It is a fact that several million people, mainly Africans, were brought forcibly to the Americas, denied all legal rights and even personhood while being forced to do the work assigned them by their “masters.” One question we might ask is, What effect did this have on slaves themselves? Historians have given various interpretations. Until the 1950s, U.S. history textbooks typically described slavery as a paternalistic institution in which slave owners brought both civilization and Christianity to savage and heathen Africans. Although they were bought and sold, history students were told, slaves were provided with food, clothing, and medical care into their old age and remained passive, happy-go-lucky children. Do not cheat me of the truth. Not to know the truth—that indeed would be my hurt. Sophocles Looking at slavery from the slaves' point of view, some revisionist historians found the slaves rebellious—overtly when it was possible, covertly when it was not. Others compared slavery with conditions in a Nazi concentration camp. Slaves living under such dysfunctional conditions, they argued, adopted the values of the master's “superego” and adapted, rarely running away or attempting to rebel. This view considers accommodation to be a successful survival strategy. Current debates focus on how much of African culture survived the brutal attempt to smash it and how much autonomy slaves experienced within their own community. Were they able to forge a stable family life and a separate spiritual life through worship, especially in free, black churches and in secret gatherings? Did acceptance of Christianity enable slaves to control their own religious activities and, in the process, resist some of the most dehumanizing aspects of the slave system?31 To come back to our original question: What is the truth about slavery in the United States, and how can we discover it? If we grant that any truth must contain some value judgment (otherwise, it is a statement like “Slavery existed,” which is not really true or false in a historically meaningful way), we eliminate the correspondence test of truth from consideration. Although we might be able to test correspondence with a “pure” fact, testing correspondence with a value is impossible. All the theories described earlier were coherent to some degree, in that they provided an explanation, based on data, that hung together well enough to convince some people. But because these theories differ so radically, it seems clear they cannot all be true; how can we determine which is coherent truth and which equally coherent falsity? Each of these theories made sense to at least some people living in the historical time period in which they were written. Although we might be able to agree on a core of independently derived facts, the interpretations based on those facts are likely to continue to vary. Unless we believe that our own era has somehow reached the ultimate in historical interpretation, it seems we must leave open the question of final truth based on the possibility of further developments and deeper understandings. History, like science, appears to be the product of a pragmatic test of truth: What is true in any given time period is what fits best within current understandings of life and human nature. G. W. F. Hegel, whose ideas we will consider in Chapter 8, saw history as a great mind coming to greater and greater self-consciousness, through the workings of the Absolute. According to Hegel's model of the dialectic, history is spiraling upward. A thesis gives rise to its opposite, which he calls the antithesis, and from the tension between thesis and antithesis something new is created: a synthesis that combines valuable parts from both the thesis and the antithesis. When a historian departs from the views of a predecessor, it is rarely to say that the previous view was just plain wrong. Usually, as we have seen with the historiography of slavery, each successive historian accepts some of what the previous generation of historians has said and adds a new twist in a dialectic method of truth evolution. Full truth lies somewhere in the future, and what the historian conceives of as truth today is what works with the materials and theoretical constructs available. If truth can be somewhat arbitrary, as in the paradigms of science, and constantly evolving, as in the methods of history, we must also carefully examine how language can subtly be employed to support existing power relationships. As words and concepts pass through a language system, they can take on hidden meanings. If we are to test for truth, we must at least acknowledge these underlying assumptions. Let's turn now to the question of language and meaning. Truth in Texts: The Deconstruction Test of Truth Beginning in the twentieth century, and especially since the early 1970s, much attention has been paid to the “deep structures” that lie within language systems and determine meaning. The question has been whether fixed or stable meanings are possible within a text. The word text provides the key to understanding what all of this has to do with truth. The book you are currently reading is obviously a text; however, so is the conversation you just had with a fellow student and the advertising slogan you heard on the radio this morning. In short, because everything intelligible to us becomes intelligible by passing through a language system, everything that uses language of any kind becomes a text. What is the meaning behind the meaning in any text? Our strong tendency is to assign stable meanings to terms and to assume that we understand what a given text means. Actually, according to deconstructionists, meaning occurs only through experience, and texts are being reinterpreted continuously. As we saw in the previous section, the meaning of slavery has continued to change and will continue to change as people encounter the text in which its meaning occurs; slavery will mean different things to different people, and it may mean different things to the same person at different times. We must, according to French philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida, the originator of the term deconstruction, continue to “question” the text to discern the multiple meanings it contains. deconstruction a method used to “question” texts and take apart their artificial constructions in order to reveal their hidden meanings If texts have no fixed meanings, then the question becomes, How is it that some terms have become privileged, whereas others—often those paired with the privileged term—have become almost invisible? Our language structure contains many dyads, or pairs of words, that tend to be used together as opposites; the first term in the pair is the privileged term. Some common dyads are male-female, white-black, and mind-matter. What Derrida wants us to understand is that male has no meaning without female in this dyad, white has no meaning without black, and mind has no meaning apart from matter. I like not to know for as long as possible because then it tells me the truth instead of me imposing the truth. Michael Moschen DOING PHILOSOPHY Deconstruction: Where Do We Stop? African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu claims that throwing the colonizing power out of your country is much easier than throwing the colonizer out of your mind. The real damage to indigenous people who are colonized by a foreign power or indeed to any group that internalizes negative assumptions about itself is the colonization of the mind. Women, gays, lesbians and bisexuals, and members of racial and ethnic minorities are especially vulnerable to mental colonization. We form our identity in large part from images of ourselves we find in visual media and in language systems. If we accept the premise that all texts are constructed, one task might be to uncover assumptions of superiority- inferiority built into the language system. In this chapter we've looked at some of the more obvious tasks of deconstructing racist, sexist, and classist assumptions about reality. Many of us would agree that deconstructing these often harmful assumptions is a good thing and will help us reach a more neutral way of describing reality. But our second challenge is, Where do we stop? If everything is a text—your conversations and even your thoughts—and if all texts are constructed, must we keep deconstructing until there is nothing left? At its extreme, the process of deconstruction seems to take us precisely to this point. In a certain sense, there are no “ neutral” statements. Every statement contains assumptions about reality, about the characteristics of what is being described, about what is “right,” “wrong,” “valuable,” “worthless.” When we start peeling away the constructed layers of meaning, we might agree that prejudice should go as should certain narrow ways of viewing the world that are based on economic system and lifestyle, but where do we stop? And, if there is no place to stop, what remains? Think about Descartes's careful distinction between mind and matter discussed in Chapter 5. Mind was thinking, unextended substance, whereas matter was unthinking, extended substance. The meaning of mind could not be clear unless it were contrasted with matter. Mind was thinking, whereas matter was unthinking; mind was unextended, whereas matter was extended. We clearly consider mind to be the superior term in the mindmatter dyad. To speak about one in this dyad is to simultaneously speak about the other. The meaning of each is implied in the other in much the same way that we can hardly imagine the front of a coin apart from the back of that same coin. Some interesting theories about the white-black dyad suggest that just such a pairing of implied opposites was absolutely necessary for one group to enslave the other. If white meant “civilized and Christian” and black meant “savage and heathen,” then a pairing of white and black in the institution of slavery could be justified. Master-slave is also a dyad; it is impossible to be a master if there are no slaves, and vice versa. Historians have struggled to understand what it meant to be a master and what it meant to be a slave. By questioning the text created by the social institution of slavery, the terms master and slave are revealed not as fixed entities but as terms in a dynamic relationship. By bringing the less privileged term to the foreground, Derrida thinks we can learn a lot about the assumptions built into our language system. When we use the male-female dyad, for example, male is the normative term, and female exists in relation to the standard set by the term male. This helps explain why it became acceptable to use the term men and maintain that it included men and women. If white sets the standard for what is normal, then black may appear aberrant or deviant. As long as all models of beauty were white, black children would be very tempted to look at their own skin and hair and find them abnormal, to even be tempted to lighten their skin and straighten their hair. When women entered the business world in large numbers during the 1970s, they often wore business suits and little ties, trying very hard to mirror the male stereotype as much as possible to fit in. Only recently have we discovered that “Black is beautiful” and that women may have an extremely effective style of leadership even if it does not fit the male model. When we pursue the truth, we must refuse to take these dyads at face value. Instead, we must deconstruct them, or take them apart, to learn about the ideas and processes embodied in them. If we do this, we will discover that these oppositions are not “natural” oppositions, as they may appear to be (and are often claimed to be), but oppositions that are constructed for specific purposes. Let's take a look at how this might operate in the current “equality-versus-difference” debates concerning women's rights and civil rights. If language is not correct then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything Confucius “Equality-versus-difference” appears to offer a choice. A group seeking justice can either claim equality (and deny all difference) or assert difference (and give up all hope of attaining equality). According to the terms of this dyad, women can either claim equality with men (in which case they'd better not ask for maternity leave), or they can argue from difference, demanding maternity leave as a necessity that also serves the good of society (and give up all hope of equal pay for equal work because they are clearly conceding that they are different from men). Deconstruction reveals this to be a false dichotomy. “In fact, the antithesis itself hides the interdependence of the two terms, for equality is not the elimination of difference and difference does not preclude equality.”32 To accept this false choice is to guarantee failure. Deconstruction reveals that it is not the case that equality and difference are opposites of which people may claim one but not the other. Instead of remaining within the discourse created by the term equality-versus- difference, we must critically examine the terms themselves. When we do, we will discover that the dyad is not an accurate one. In the context of justice claims made by excluded groups, equality contains within it an acknowledgement of difference. When the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in the years immediately following the Civil War, African American men gained the right to vote, whereas women of all races continued to be excluded. The equality implied in opening the franchise did not presume that no differences existed between former slaves and former slave owners or between free blacks and white industrial workers. The amendment was actually a tacit agreement to ignore the differences between these groups of men, while insisting on the difference remaining between men as one group and women as another group. Indeed, “If individuals or groups were identical or the same there would be no need to ask for equality. Equality might well be defined as deliberate indifference to specified differences.”33 An early example of this kind of deconstruction can be found—believe it or not—in Plato's Republic, when Socrates discusses whether both women and men should be eligible for the guardian class from which the philosopher- kings would ultimately be selected. Socrates and Glaucon agree that women and men are different; men beget and women bear children. The question, they agree, is whether this difference is a relevant one with respect to the question at hand. After all, some men are bald and others hairy, and this too is a clear difference. But does it make sense to forbid bald men to be shoemakers? They agree that it does not because hair on one's head (or lack of it) has nothing to do with shoemaking ability. Being absolutely consistent, they then also decide that bearing or begetting children is not a relevant factor in governing. What they will carefully consider are the qualities necessary to be a guardian. Using those qualities as a standard, they will select those individuals best suited by nature to rule and then educate and train them accordingly. (You may want to look ahead to the “How Philosophy Works” box in Chapter 8 to see how the argument progresses.) The Elusive Nature of Truth Plato lived in a very stable world, one in which a philosopher might be very confident of his ability to arrive at the truth about those best qualified to rule. In the postmodern world, we must consider the possibility that absolute truth—a truth for all times and places—or even a definitive truth for right now might not be possible. Yet, in the absence of clarity, we will still be called upon to make important decisions about how to live our lives. Can we bypass the formal systems of logic and empiricism and step outside the conventions of academic fields if we wish to ascertain what is true? If so, how? Truth and Time Let's consider something basic: the nature of time. One hundred years ago, the Western world was in virtual agreement that time was absolute—ticking along at a fixed rate, regardless of whatever else might be going on. Given the widespread acceptance of relativity theory, as we have seen, time is currently acknowledged not only to seem faster or slower but actually to be faster or slower, depending on the speed of moving systems. If this is so, what is the truth about time? What does this timeless design tell us about the relationship between past, present, and future? To complicate matters further, outside the Western world, other truths are known about time. Visitors to West Africa report that in that part of the world “time just is.” As we think of water as an inexhaustible resource, so Africans see time as an ever-present medium in which things happen. It can't be managed—who would want to try? And it doesn't limit what you do. Activities take whatever time they take, but there is no time pressure, no anxiety about time being out of control.34 This can be very disconcerting for Westerners who expect the ten o'clock meeting to start at ten and are surprised to find it beginning at two or even the next day. Time, it seems, is an abstraction that helps us account for apparent change around us—more useful to some people than to others. According to Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer N. Scott Momaday, we think of ourselves as remaining in place and observing the passage of time. Past and future tenses in English indicate the distance of events from us—either backward or forward from our place in the present. We imagine time moving and ourselves standing still.35 But, is this a true representation? “Much has been written,” Momaday says, “concerning the Indian's conception of time.” Stories about his long-dead grandfather, Momaday recalls, might begin in the past tense but slide imperceptibly into the present tense: For the Indian there is something like an extended present. Time as motion is an illusion; indeed, time itself is an illusion. In the deepest sense, according to the native perception, there is only the dimension of timelessness, and in that dimension all things happen.36 This description resembles the conviction of the aboriginal people of Australia that everything arises from and returns to “dreamtime.” For time-obsessed Westerners, this nonlinear sense of time as a kind of eternal present may seem like a fantasy. People with daily planners, fax, phone, and email messages to read and meetings to attend may be completely unable to imagine a time that “just is” and seems to go on forever in what we call the present moment. Does anyone know the truth about time? Truth and “Gut Feelings” For much of what we call ordinary life, truth tests and issues of warrantability will have little to offer. Yet, despite our inability to “prove” something true, we often have a conviction about what to do. Have you ever decided something was either true or not true, good or bad, based on a “gut feeling” you had? The results of an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Anthony Damasio indicate that we have a covert system in our brains, based on emotional memories, that tells us when our decisions are good and when they are bad. In a “rigged” card game, people rapidly reached a “hunch” stage at which, on some level, they could distinguish “good” from “bad” decks. Damasio speculated that what has happened to us in previous situations is drawn into the brain through a circuit in the decision-making prefrontal lobes. Although the memories we draw on remain covert, they provide us with valuable information on which to base decisions. In the game we call life, many of our decisions about relationships, career moves, and major purchases will not necessarily lend themselves to standard truth tests. Is it possible that we have a truth-testing mechanism “hardwired” into our neurobiology?37 Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings— that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide. The Buddha Summary We may agree with Paul Simon that “proof is the bottom line for everyone,” but that does not mean we agree, or even have a clear idea about, what constitutes truth and what does not. The further we investigate this concept, the more complex it seems to become. Warranties are fairly clear and easy to apply; the difficulty is that they provide no assurance of truth. Truth can exist without them, and their presence does not and cannot guarantee truth. Truth tests have built-in limitations and require so much qualification that we may be unsure of what we are left with even if a statement does indeed “pass” one or more truth tests. Even if we can decide what it means to say that a fact must correspond with a state of affairs, we are still left with the more basic question of whether or not there is a world out there with which facts can be said to correspond. Coherence can be very compelling, but it seems equally capable of leading us to coherent falsity as to coherent truth. When this occurs, we find ourselves back with the correspondence test and the problems it presents. Most of us probably live our lives relying more on the pragmatic test. We clearly understand what it means to say that something is true if it works, makes a difference, or changes things. The difficulty here is that we seem cut off from all standards of meaning and value. Is the simple fact that something works enough to make it true? Perhaps the Ewe creativity test provides the needed corrective: Only those things promoting growth and life pass the test of truth. The status of truth seems much more complicated than we may have suspected. Science, despite its reliance on logic and empirical warrants, is caught in paradigms and cannot see the world except through the lenses paradigms provide. History seems to move dialectically, as Hegel explained, continually opposing antithesis to thesis and arriving at a new synthesis. Even if our understanding is increasing, it seems clear that we have not arrived at any absolutes. Indeed, the very search for absolutes seems misguided when we consider the deconstruction test of truth. If texts are always changing and everything of meaning is a text, then how can we hope to pin anything down? By deconstructing we can reveal hidden meanings and consider things that were always present in the text but had remained hidden. This examination is useful, even educational, but it will not bring us to certainty. Have we then exhausted all hope of learning the truth about our world? Are there times when we should abandon all formal processes and trust our “guts”? Or, should we simply give up and settle for uncertainty and relativism? Is every statement potentially just as true as every other? When we become frustrated with truth tests, we are left with a more fundamental question: What does it mean to say something is true? Is truth something we discover—something that already exists in the world—or is truth something we create through active involvement with it? If we think it is the former, then things can, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, only end in confusion: What then is truth? a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now c onsidered as metal and no longer as coins.38 If truth is a kind of collective illusion, a useful fiction on which we have agreed to agree, then it will have little capacity to tell us anything we really want to know about the world or about ourselves. If, on the other hand, truth is the product of our creative involvement with the world, then its power to reveal is greatly enhanced. In Chapter 7 we will consider the lively relationship that can exist between beauty and truth by examining the aesthetic experience and what it might have to teach us about the nature of truth. As we observed in Chapter 4, the rationalist way is not the only route to knowledge of God. The same might be said about knowledge of the world. Just as the mystics claimed certain knowledge based on intuition, there are ways to learn about the world that do not depend on logic and truth tests. As we turn to an i nvestigation of the nature of truth, we will look at art and its power to help us see the world differently—and possibly more truly. For Further Thought 1. Think of something you are confident is true. On what basis do you believe it to be true? How would you prove or demonstrate its truth if called upon to do so? 2. The next time you say “That's not true!” to someone (or to the TV set), stop for a minute and analyze why you are so sure the statement or claim is false. What is the basis for your objection? 3. We seem to hear conflicting empirical claims on a regular basis: Coffee is bad for you/coffee, taken moderately, is good for you; alcohol is dangerous/alcohol (in certain forms) prevents heart disease; butter is a killer, use margarine/margarine is worse, go back to butter. From what you know about the methods of science, why do you think this happens? 4. If every age must reinterpret history for itself, will we ever reach the final revision? Is something or someone directing the process toward its own ends, as Hegel suggested, or does the process operate autonomously? If the latter, are we moving closer to or farther from the truth? How can we know? 5. Is “proof” the bottom line for everyone? Can you think of instances in which something other than proof functions as the bottom line in determining truth? Or are we dealing with varying definitions of the word proof and still insisting on proof of some kind? 6. Try to prove one very simple statement to be true. It might be best to choose something you don't have a strong emotional stake in. Notice how you construct your proof, what you choose as your warranty, and whether you rely on one or more of the truth tests discussed in this chapter. 7. What does it mean to be “true to yourself”? What is the standard against which your actions will be compared? Is this kind of truth different from the truth of propositions? How? 8. If deconstructionists are right and all language systems are texts, how can we “escape” the thought system of language to pursue the truth? Listen to a conversation and observe any dyads or other assumptions built into what is being said that the speakers may not be aware of. Find whatever hidden meanings you can find and write the subtext for the conversation whose text you heard. 9. What happens to our notion of truth if Zen masters are right and most of what we think we see and know is really illusion—a product of our conception of the way things are rather than the way things are? Is it possible to restructure our truth tests to match this understanding of reality? How? 10. In traditional societies, everything must meet the test of lived experience. What has enabled our technological society to produce ideas that are “true in theory but not in practice”? Does the division between mind and matter expressed by Plato and Descartes define traditional societies as it does our own? 11. Do you believe there is a world “out there,” independent of your mind? If so, on what basis? If not, on what basis? (Thinking about your own truth tests may help here.) 12. How much of what you believe to be true have you taken on “faith”—that is, how much rests on the authority of a textbook, a teacher, parents, or friends telling you something is true? Augustine thought most of what we believe to be true fell into this category, and he didn't mean only religious truths. If he is right, is your confidence (in what you “know” to be true) shaken or fortified? 13. It has been said that pragmatism is a distinctly American contribution to philosophy. From what you know of American history and culture, explain why this might be so. How has America's experience as a nation led to a pragmatic approach to life? 14. Imagine you are a slave owner writing what is “true” about slavery. Now imagine you are a slave engaging in the same exercise. Assuming your account is substantially different from the account given by the slave owner, how can we assess which of you has rendered a “truer” account? Is there some truth in what each of you write, or is one of you correct and the other incorrect? 15. Imagine you are a neutrino with virtually no mass, no electrical charge, and no magnetic field. You can travel at the speed of light through “solid” objects, including the Earth itself and human beings, as if they were not there. What is “true” about the world from your point of view? You see the world so differently from the rest of us, so are you right and we wrong, or vice versa? Who can decide which version is closer to the “truth”? 16. Suppose we discover a race of aliens (or they discover us) for whom space and time do not exist. They can be wherever or whenever they want to be just by thinking about it. Is it still “true” that space and time exist because they exist for us? 17. Can truth ever be absolute? Is there anything that will always be true at all times and under all circumstances? If you answer yes, what is your proof? How might someone question your proof? 18. If all truth is relative, we can make no definite decisions about reality or how to live our lives. Because we do make decisions of this type, on what basis do we decide among competing truth claims? 19. If we decide that information is exploding at such a rapid rate that we can never assess enough of it to make a truth claim, what implications would this decision have for our society? What would be your response to someone who announced that decision? 20. Here is a philosophical riddle: If I say “All statements are false,” is this a true statement? Why or why not? For Further Exploration Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. “Rashomon.” In Rashomon and Other Stories. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952. We read seven versions of a murder, including that of the murdered man as told to a medium. What really happened, and how would we go about deciding this? There is also an excellent film of the same name by Japanese director Akira Kurasawa. Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam, 1974. A man and his son travel across the country on a motorcycle in search of truth and meaning. The protagonist, who calls himself Phaedrus (a character in one of Plato's dialogues), has had a nervous breakdown after discovering that the number of scientific hypotheses expands much faster than our ability to test them. Science, he realizes, is leading us away from “single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.” Shakespeare, William. “As You Like It.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Cambridge Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1936. Rosalind disguises herself as a man and, as Ganymede, meets her lover Orlando in the forest, promising to cure him of love sickness if he will woo her as if she were Rosalind (which of course she is). This play, like several of Shakespeare's comedies, plays on the notion of what is true. Spinrad, Norman. Deus X. New York: Spectra, 1993. Before dying, people encode their entities onto the big electronic board that essentially represents reality. Do they have souls (as they claim), or have the souls left and gone before God for judgment? Which position is true? A dying priest promises the female pope that he will conduct an experiment to prove them wrong, but he ends up arguing that they are right (from the board). The Usual Suspects. This film is reminiscent of “Rashomon.” Be aware of the language and violence in this fascinating exploration of the changing nature of truth in a police investigation. Similar theme in Courage Under Fire and A Few Good Men. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. New York: Penguin, 1946. In the sixteenth century, a young man named Orlando is granted a house by an aging queen on condition that he never grow old. He lives until the present, changing sexes along the way and remarking as he sees his female body in the mirror, “Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex.” What is the truth about Orlando? About time? About the world? There is an excellent film by the same name. Notes 1. Carl Zimmer, “The Healing Power of Maggots,” Discover, August 1993, 17. 2. William James, “Pragmatism,” quoted in William James: Pragmatism and Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth (New York: World, 1970), 133. 3. James. 4. James, 45. 5. James, 133. 6. John Dewey, “Body and Mind,” quoted in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 606. 7. Dewey, 627. 8. Dewey, 677. 9. Dewey, 677–678. 10. Dewey, 259. 11. Dewey. 12. Dewey, 1046. 13. N. K. Dzobo, “Ewe and Akan Conceptions of Knowledge and Truth,” in Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, vol. 1, eds. Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), 81. 14. Dzobo, 80. 15. Dzobo, 83. 16. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943), 66–67. 17. Richard Baker, introduction to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, eds. Shunryu Suzuki and Trudy Dixon (New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 21. 18. Catherine of Siena to Sister Daniella of Orvieto in Medieval Women's Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 271. 19. Catherine of Siena, 55. 20. Catherine of Siena, 225, 226–227, 228. 21. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 5. 22. Kuhn, 15. 23. Kuhn, 17–18, 19. 24. Kuhn, 20. 25. Kuhn, 5–6. 26. Kuhn, 92. 27. Kuhn, 77. 28. Kuhn, 52. 29. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), 136. 30. Carr, 175. The distinction, not the example, is Carr's. 31. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History, vol. 1, 2nd ed., eds. Eugene Kuzirian and Larry Madaras (Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin, 1987), 248–249; and 5th ed., eds. Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle (Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin, 1993), 238–239. 32. Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies vol. 14, no. 1 (1988): 38. 33. Scott, 44. 34. Reported by Willie Cardwell, personal communication, May 1997. 35. N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 52. 36. Momaday, 53. 37. “In Work on Intuition, Gut Feelings Are Tracked to Source: The Brain,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, C1. 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), xxxi–xxxii.

CHAPTER 7 Aesthetic Experience: Is Truth Beauty and Beauty Truth?

BEFORE YOU READ . . . Ask yourself what you might have learned from the arts that you could not have learned elsewhere. Have you ever looked at something really beautiful and found yourself with no words to describe what you were feeling? An incredible sunset, the smile of a baby, the first flower of spring—all these and many more experiences of beauty have the ability to “take our breath away” and with it the power of speech. Like these experiences of what we might call “natural art,” or the art of nature, the art humans create has the same potential to render us speechless. When we look at something beautiful, sometimes it seems that in the process of seeing we “know” something very certainly, and yet, if someone asked us what it is we “know,” we would probably be at a loss for words. All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. Thomas Browne The Issue Defined Art is like other intuitive experiences: It provides a way of knowing that runs parallel to the rational, linear, logical kind of knowing with which we are very familiar and comfortable in the Western world. Like the intuitive knowing of the mystics we discussed in Chapter 4, this experience carries with it a conviction of certainty that seems to defy verbal description. This noetic quality−the sense of “knowing” associated with nonrational knowledge about reality−seems present in the experience of genuine art. It can bring instant and “irrational” tears to our eyes, and yet the experience seems ineffable, unable to be spoken in words. noetic having the quality of knowledge, seeming to be knowledge ineffable unable to be spoken in words If you have ever had a brush with death, you know what it feels like to see the world as precious and new, to judge everything to be beautiful because you are truly seeing and knowing it, maybe for the first time. Walking away from an auto accident or breathing the relief that comes from a negative lab test, you may find even the ordinary and boring things of life charged with intensity and overflowing with meaning. Most of the time the incredible stamina of a dandelion or the simple elegance of a cat curled up in the Sun is invisible to us because we are preoccupied by very important tasks; we have places to be, things to do, schedules to keep. Let the ordinariness of life be threatened, however, and we may, perhaps for the first time, really begin to look at life and to see it. In his classic play Our Town, Thornton Wilder has the stage manager allow Emily, who has died as a young woman, to select one day of her life to live over again. She chooses her twelfth birthday. From her present state, death, there is nothing about her house, her family, or the ordinary life she has left behind that she can treat casually, as if it did not matter or would always be there tomorrow. Things she had never really noticed while alive are suddenly filled with a poignant and unspeakable beauty. “I didn't know Mamma was ever that young,” Emily gulps through her tears. In the end she is unable to finish the day; her emotions are too intense and she cannot bear the beauty and the loss associated with everything she has loved and no longer has. She chooses to go back to the graveyard, and in her final speech she cries, “Oh earth, you're much too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” Here should be a picture of my favorite apple. It is also a nude and bottle. It is also a landscape. There are no such things as still lifes. Erica Jong Faced with the loss of life, we would take a new look and probably find incredible satisfaction in the most humdrum of things. The thought that tonight's sunset would be the last we would ever see would certainly charge it with intensity and focus our attention on it. Art, and the experience we have in viewing it, has the same kind of power; it can clarify and crystallize our perceptions by clearing away all of today's superficial concerns and by cutting through our belief that we have unlimited tomorrows. If there are a thousand rainbows waiting to be seen, it may not be worth my time to turn off the TV or wake up from my nap to go out and see one, but if today is my last, I may find that the rainbow reveals the world to me in a wholly new and meaningful way. I got the idea from Ernest Hemingway … instead of eating lunch, he would go to a museum and look at paintings on an empty stomach. When he looked at art with that edge of hunger, he saw more … that ís the point of all the great spiritual teachings and paths: to become awake. Dan Wakefield Art can stop us in our tracks, wake us up, and bring us face-to-face with what is real. In the presence of genuine art, we come to know things about the world, and about ourselves, that seem certain to us even if we cannot put them into words. A number of philosophers have suggested that the search for truth leads us inevitably to the realm of the aesthetic−that through art we can learn the truth about reality. In this chapter we consider the medium of aesthetic experience, look at some philosophical reflections on the beautiful, and examine the role art can play in bringing us to aesthetic forms of knowing. Our focus will be less on aesthetics than on an aesthetic approach to examining truth. aesthetics a philosophical reflection on art and the beautiful Our first task will be to survey the role of art in Western, Asian, and African societies and the special position held by the artist. As we will see, the artist can serve as a mediator between reality as it is and our perception of it, interpreting significant knowledge that cannot be adequately expressed in words. Although we begin with Plato's and Aristotle's views on art, love, and the beautiful, our main focus will be on the relationship between beauty and truth, as we explore the writings of four philosophers from the last two centuries: Friedrich Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. In the final section of this chapter, we look at art as a vehicle for helping us to see the world differently. HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS: Informal Fallacies—Part Two Several philosophers discussed in this chapter favor approaches to truth that rely on the aesthetic experience rather than on logic. One of the advantages they see to the aesthetic experience is that it bypasses words altogether. Although language is a wonderful tool that allows us to discuss certain aspects of reality with great precision, it can mislead us or fail us completely in certain other areas. Philosophers try to avoid confusion in language. To assist us in this effort, let's examine several potential traps in the hope of avoiding them ourselves and spotting them in the writings of others. Fallacies of Ambiguity Amphiboly. This is a grammatical construction that can be understood in more than one way and thus is ambiguous. For example, in the sentence “This blood test will evaluate you for hepatitis, anemia, and AIDS, which you will receive absolutely free,” it is not clear whether the test or the diseases are yours at no charge. We should try to say exactly what we mean so that our meaning will be clear to others. Composition. This fallacy attributes what applies to the parts of something to the whole thing. For example, “Because every word in this essay is a good word, the whole essay must be a good essay.” Division. Division reverses the process and attributes the characteristics of the whole thing to one or more of its parts. For example, “Because this is a good essay, every word in it must be good.” Equivocation. This fallacy involves changing the meaning of a word or expression in the course of an argument. For example, “That suit doesn't suit you very well, and if you don't change it immediately, I will bring legal suit against you.” We can also observe equivocation in this syllogism: All men are mortal. No woman is a man. Therefore, no woman is mortal. In the first premise, men clearly includes all human beings, whereas in the second it clearly includes only those of the male gender—hence, the confusion. Hypostatization. In this fallacy, abstract words are treated as if they were concrete. In literature, this is known as personification and is perfectly acceptable as a method of comparison. In philosophy, however, we need to avoid this confusion. When we say “Life owes me a better deal” or “You know the truth will set you free,” we aren't speaking precisely enough to construct a valid argument. Misplaced accent. This fallacy misleads by de-emphasizing or omitting relevant information. For example, “Double coupons at this store” may be followed in smaller print by “coupons for 50¢ or more redeemed at face value.” Functions of Art in Society What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see. Edith Sitwell Let's begin by looking at the sharply contrasting views of art expressed by Plato and Aristotle. If art represents reality, Plato fears it will lead to confusion, but Aristotle is confident it can convey truth. As we consider three representative artists—Michelangelo in the West, Khing in Asia, and Edogo in Africa—the artist's role as a kind of priest emerges. Artists, it seems, can understand important truths and illuminate them for the rest of us, capturing reality in terms we can understand. Plato, however, remained skeptical. Art as Representation of Reality Plato and Aristotle both believed that art tries to represent the universal and is one source of information about reality. The term mimesis refers to this quality of representation, and the classical theories of art developed by Plato and Aristotle assume that the purpose of art is to represent reality. Because of his metaphysics, Plato was wary of art and artists because he saw art as being an image of an image and thus twice removed from the Form itself. mimesis [mih MEE sis] the aesthetic theory of art as representation If you recall from Chapter 2, Plato believed that true reality can be found only in the Kingdom of Ideas, or the World of Forms, in which the perfect prototype of everything in this world exists. Artisans represent ideas in their work. A carpenter, for example, must have the idea of a table in mind as he sets out to construct a table—the carpenter's image, or idea, of “tableness” made concrete in a particular object. What the carpenter makes is once removed from the Form of a table that is its source and inspiration. Artists, Plato concluded, work one step farther removed from reality. Because they begin with the images found in this world, artists make what amounts to copies of copies. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. Pablo Picasso Not only are these imitations of imitations twice removed from the real thing, but they are also illusions of reality. If our goal is to know the Forms ever more truly and accurately, then−rather than helping−art is more likely to get in the way. Operating through the medium of the senses, art can entertain and provide pleasure, Plato believed, but it is unlikely to lead us to true knowledge of the Forms−the only kind of knowledge worth having. Even worse, we may be manipulated by art in the form of propaganda. A skillful artist can make us accept a false view of the world and perhaps even arouse us to immoral action. This is the view of current critics of TV violence who make similar claims. Aristotle was much kinder to artists than Plato was. Far from being mere imitators or reporters of experience (a job he reserved for historians), Aristotle contended that artists showed nature not as it is but as it could be. Believing that they began with the ideal or universal aspects of human nature, Aristotle applauded the brilliant Athenian playwrights for their depictions of deep (as well as universal) human feelings. A well-constructed tragedy could, he thought, arouse in the audience feelings of pity and fear (for the characters in the play) and free people of the need to act out in their own lives the mistakes depicted in the tragedy. By experiencing rage, resentment, and jealousy secondhand, spectators could also experience a catharsis, or purging of those emotions. catharsis the emotional cleansing achieved by viewing tragic drama, according to Aristotle Leaving an amphitheater after watching a tragedy, Aristotle believed, viewers would be purified of any desire to repeat the mistakes made by the protagonist. Unlike Plato, who worried about the potential of art as propaganda, Aristotle was confident that a tragedy would teach a lesson to the audience even as it entertained them. Rather than being stirred to imitate the tragic actions they have just seen enacted on stage, people may avoid tragedy because they have already experienced the emotions those actions generate and been cleansed of them, just as if they had taken the actions themselves. The sense of the absurd, the ability to defamiliarize, the absurd humor, these are the possible routes by which the contemporary man achieves catharsis; they are possibly the only ways of “cleansing” him adequate to the world in which he lives. Vaclav Havel Because Plato believed the Forms to be outside the sense world, he understandably assumed that each representation took the viewer farther and farther from what is real. Aristotle−who insisted that the Forms can only be found in this world, joined with the concrete objects that embody them−found Greek tragedy to be a transparent medium for universal ideas. Thus, although Plato and Aristotle agree that the universal Forms are the basis of knowledge and that the function of art is mimesis, or representation of the Forms, they reach very different conclusions about the effect this mimesis might have on observers. Plato fears art's potential for manipulating observers, whereas Aristotle applauds its potential for eliciting catharsis. Both the sculptors Plato may have had in mind and the Athenian playwrights praised by Aristotle were well known in Greek society. Artistic competitions were routinely held and widely attended. Prizes raised the individual artist's status in society. Many centuries later, when art in Western society had become almost exclusively associated with and in service to the Christian Church, the identity of an individual artist was regarded as unimportant, perhaps irrelevant. The Role of the Artist in Western Society During the Middle Ages, it would have been unthinkable for artists to sign their work. Almost all art had a religious theme, and artists saw themselves as a kind of medium for religious messages, as if the goal were to be as invisible as possible so that the glory or majesty of God could shine through. With the Renaissance came a new enthusiasm for the powers of human reason and creativity, as well as an accompanying shift in theme: Subjects of art were as likely to be idealized human beings as divine personages, and artists dared to claim credit for their work. Upon hearing a debate about the identity of the sculptor of a particular work (neither name mentioned was his), the creator of that work got his chisel and carved “Michelangelo Buonarotti, the Florentine, made this!” on its base. Although he is well known for his masterful Sistine Chapel ceiling, which is filled with religious imagery from Hebrew and Christian scriptures (the Old and New Testaments), Michelangelo also took pride in accurately sculpting the human form. By stealing and dissecting corpses, he learned the relationship of muscles and ligaments to bones, and his statues have an amazingly lifelike quality. Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know it doesn't seem fair, that I'm living for some thing I can't even define. And there you are right there in the mean time. Ani DiFranco One of his best-known sculptures is a fourteen-foot-high marble figure of the young David, with his slingshot in hand, soon to hurl the stone that will fell the giant Goliath (as described in the Bible). What one sees is the zestful energy of a youth on the verge of manhood—an image as well of the emerging power of the city of Florence. Michelangelo's work is only part mimesis; the rest is the vision of the artist. In this combination, Renaissance artists believed, true art is born. The goal is not the most accurate possible representation of a subject but a kind of blending of what we might call photographic accuracy and interpretation. Indeed, being capable only of flawless representation came to be seen as not nearly enough. PHILOSOPHERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES Plato and Aristotle In one of his most famous poetic monologues, the nineteenth-century British poet Robert Browning criticizes Andrea Del Sarto, the “faultless” painter. “That arm is wrongly put,” he has Del Sarto remark about a work by Raphael, “its soul is right … still, what an arm! and I could alter it.” The arm is technically flawed, but Raphael's work as a whole is an artistic success, while the work of Del Sarto is technically perfect, but lacks “soul.” An artist must have both vision and technique; to lack either is to be less than whole, but vision is the indispensable ingredient. Let's consider why dramatic poetry must be banished from our republic. We must begin with the notion of imitation or representation. A carpenter who wishes to make a bed or a table relies on the idea or type of a bed or a table, which contains its essence. But, we understand that the carpenter does not make the idea or type itself. Now, let's broaden the focus and consider all the particular things, both natural and manufactured, that exist in the cosmos. Can you imagine one craftsperson capable of making all these things? What if you yourself were that person? Suppose you carried a mirror around with you everywhere you went. You could capture images of everything that exists, but they would be appearances only and not the things themselves. That's basically what a painter does. The painter creates a bed on canvas—an apparent bed rather than a real one. Even the carpenter is making only a particular bed and is incapable of making the type on which every particular bed is based. So, although the bed made by the carpenter seems more real than the bed made by the painter, it still lacks the complete reality—what we might call bedness—that exists only in the original type. Plato, from Republic, Book X A tragedy is an imitation of an action; it is serious, self-contained, described in poetic language, told dramatically rather than narratively, and it uses plot twists to first arouse pity and fear and then resolve them through the purging of catharsis … Of the six ingredients that together make a tragedy—plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song—plot is the most vital. Since tragedy imitates life rather than persons, it must follow the pattern of our own lives in revealing its truth through action. Character gives us certain qualities, but it is our actions that lead us either to happiness or unhappiness. Dramatic action rather than character development is what drives the tragic drama to its climax… The function of a poet or playwright is to describe not what has happened—that is the job of the historian—but what might happen, according to the laws of probability and necessity. And, contrary to popular opinion, it is more than the choice of prose or verse that separates historians from poets. Put the work of Herodotus into verse and it would still be history. Poetry is closer to philosophy than to history and, like philosophy, it has the high calling of dealing with universals rather than particulars … Aristotle, from Poetics [6, 9] Simplified Rendering: Copyright 2000 by Helen Buss Mitchell In one of his most famous poetic monologues, the nineteenth-century British poet Robert Browning criticizes Andrea Del Sarto, the “faultless” painter. “That arm is wrongly put,” he has Del Sarto remark about a work by Raphael, “its soul is right … still, what an arm! and I could alter it.” The arm is technically flawed, but Raphael's work as a whole is an artistic success, while the work of Del Sarto is technically perfect, but lacks “soul.” An artist must have both vision and technique; to lack either is to be less than whole, but vision is the indispensable ingredient. To be a “faultless” painter like Andrea Del Sarto is to be a technician, but art must do more than imitate; it must be more than what Plato would call a copy of a copy. What we value most in art is what the artist brings to the work. We might say that technique is a necessary but not a sufficient gift to bring. Although an artist, even one with a superb vision of reality, who is unable to render proportion correctly may be unable to share that vision with others through the medium of painting, a technician, who is only that, has nothing of what matters most to offer. Thus, Raphael's work endures, despite a badly drawn arm, because of the vision he saw and was able to create using materials in the visible world. Real art, like real philosophy, has something to offer us each time we look at it. It is larger than itself and points beyond itself. Visual arts may be the clearest medium for communicating a vision, but they are not the only one capable of doing so. Another kind of artist uses words and music to connect listeners with a more inclusive reality. In the ancient Celtic world, the poet, who was often a harper as well, was second only to the king in status and power because he, like the king, had the power to call the people to action and show them their true identity. Working in a culture in which the line between history and myth was not so rigidly drawn as it is today, the poet told the story of the past in its truest way. This task was not understood to mean telling the story with historical accuracy. As we discussed in Chapter 6, facts and experiences rarely exist in an objective state−that is, out there somewhere pristinely waiting to be analyzed and studied. Instead, meaning seems intimately connected with subjective overlays. What image of human nature is Michelangelo able to convey through this statue that appeared to him in marble? What a poet does is evoke a larger vision within which ordinary events of the present can be interpreted. We retain a sense of this poetic function even in our very rationalist, Western culture of the early twenty-first century when we celebrate national holidays like the Fourth of July. Reverential readings from the Declaration of Independence, with their emphasis on the Enlightenment idea that “all men are created equal,” tell us something true about ourselves as a people even as we realize that we have in practice treated people unequally. What is honored is not the scientific or historical accuracy of the concept of equality, but rather the truth that equality is what we stand for. Reformers know this, and by calling us to our ideals, they can successfully negotiate change. If standing for equality were not a part of what we truly are as a people, modern reformers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Betty Friedan, who called people to action and a larger vision like the ancient Celtic poet-harpers did, would have been ignored. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King called America to the dream of racial equality, and in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan described “The Problem That Has No Name” and launched twentieth-century feminism. Reformers are not poets, but they express a larger vision as poets do. The poet-harper of the Celtic world, as he sang his stories, called the people to their greatness by reminding them of their noble past and challenging them to create a noble future. Whether the call was to war or to peace, it was the poet as much as the king who understood what was real and what was true. In the presence of this kind of art, the audience might be moved to tears or to battle, but they would recognize what they know because the poet sings so truly of what is real. The calligraphy says, “The sky is so open even fish can swim in it.” The calligraphy says, “Though birds always love to fly, they thrill to the cool, crisp air of fall.” The Role of the Artist in Asian Society Because the Western distinction between the knower and the known (see Chapter 5) is absent or at least significantly blurred in Asian cultures, the idea that artists succeed by becoming one with their creations seems much more natural in Asian art. When artists forget their own small concerns, they can become mediums of expression for a deeper reality as truth and beauty express themselves through the work of the artist. In the third century B.C.E., Chuang-tzu told a wonderful story of Khing, a master wood-carver, who made a bell stand of such beauty that all who saw it were amazed. Some thought that an artistic creation of such perfection must be the work of spirits. When questioned by the Prince of Lu, Khing gave this explanation: “I am only a workman,” he said. “I have no secret. There is only this.” Khing began by focusing his spirit on the task at hand and by fasting “in order to set my heart at rest.” After a week of fasting, he had left behind thoughts of success, of possible criticism, even of the prince and his court. Everything that might distract him—including the awareness of his own body—had been banished. “I was collected in a single thought: of the bell stand.” In this state Khing went to the forest to see the trees in their natural environment, and “when the right tree appeared before my eyes, the bell stand appeared in it.” Khing's explanation to the Prince of Lu is that his focused and collected thought met “the hidden potential in the wood,” and the rest was only technical work.1 Today, like every other day, I wake up empty and frightened. Don't go to the door of the study and read a book. Instead take down the dulcimer, let the beauty of what you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground, there are a thousand ways to go home again. Rumi The idea of a union between raw material and artist's vision is not a uniquely Asian one. Aristotle also spoke of the statue existing potentially in the marble and being made actual by the sculptor, and Michelangelo told a similar story when asked about the creation of his incredible David. According to Michelangelo, when he set off in a focused state to look for a piece of marble, it was just a question of finding the right one—the one with the David already in it. Once he had found that piece of marble, all that remained to be done was to chip away the pieces of marble that did not belong. When looking at a group of unfinished Michelangelo statues today, you get a strong sense of figures straining to emerge from the marble. There is, then, something that happens when the focused idea of the artist meets exactly the right medium, the right tree or the perfect piece of marble; the result is unmistakably a work of art, a work of vision. The bell stand appears in the tree, the David appears in the marble. Once the vision of the artist has fused with the medium, there is nothing left to do but remove what does not belong. In the presence of works like these, viewers can learn something about themselves. Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. Bertrand Russell The aesthetic experience of the viewer comes close to the creative experience of the artist. In this sense, art is a window on truth not only for its creator but also for those who enjoy it. Just as the audience at a Greek tragedy could experience secondhand the emotions of the characters on stage—without having to repeat their tragic mistakes—the viewer of the bell stand or the David has at least partial access to the vision of the artist. What we learn often cannot be put in words, but it is knowledge all the same. As a mediator of ultimate or eternal realities and values, the artist serves as a connection between the spiritual and the temporal (Figure 7.1). This kind of art elevates by pointing to what is finally real. We might see the connection between reality, artist, and viewer more easily by looking at two of the arts associated with Zen—calligraphy and sand gardens. Both of them should be created (and appreciated) in a meditative state. As we saw in Chapter 6, the ideal state of mind or of being, in Zen, is described as beginner's mind. In this state, one resembles Khing the master carver or Michelangelo the sculptor. No longer the expert, one sees the world as if for the first time, focused entirely on the task at hand. Like Emily in Our Town, every simple, ordinary thing is charged with meaning and beauty because we are really seeing it with fresh appreciation and a sense of wonder. From the state of beginner's mind, one is able to put one's whole self into a task as only a beginner can do. Once we have done something repetitively, it loses its freshness, and the experience can all but disappear for us. Even the pleasures of eating and sexual intimacy can become dulled if we perform them mechanically without really being present to ourselves and to our experience. beginner's mind according to Zen, the state of openness in which one can directly access the truth about what is The intention in Zen is to do whatever you are doing mindfully, fully present in the task, instead of thinking ahead to the next thing on your busy schedule or back to the events of the past. To do calligraphy in this state is to do it naturally, from the heart, rather than in a practiced way. To draw a Chinese character with your whole being is to be both artist and priest in the sense of being mediator between the temporal and the spiritual. In the same manner, a Zen rock garden can be an exercise in meditation for the person who creates it and the visitor who experiences it. When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think of how to solve the problem. But when I am finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. Buckminster Fuller Figure 7.1 Artist as Mediator The artist mediates between eternal reality and temporal reality. Raking a sand garden can be an exprience in active meditation. Zen gardens have none of the elements usually associated with gardens: flowers, trees, living plants, and insects; instead, they are large rectangles of flat, raked gravel, standing stones (alone or in groupings), and empty space. To view a Zen garden is to be soothed and startled at the same time. Perhaps it is the emptiness, the space going on to what seems infinity, that is the most unexpected and that calls us to empty ourselves of our usual mental clutter, our preconceived notions of what reality is all about. If we do, we may see anew, with the immediacy and spontaneity of a child, into the depths of what is. A similar experience is possible with a miniature Zen garden made of sand and stones and raked with a wooden rake into swirls of pattern. To create a Zen garden yourself, mindfully and fully present, is to be (at least in a limited way) an artist and a priest.2 Unlike the West, the East blurs the distinction between professional artist and layperson. The tea ceremony, flower arranging, archery, and martial arts are all available to people who may not call themselves artists. Once the artist has showed us what is and allowed us to glimpse a vision of something larger and more complete, we are empowered to do some exploring on our own. Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for “artist” or “art.” Everyone is an artist. AnaÏs Nin The Role of the Artist in African Society The role of the artist as intermediary between the divine and the human is clearly evident in traditional African societies. Even in the case of court art, which proclaimed the power and glory of kings on palace walls and entrance arches, the individual artist was not considered to be acting alone. Instead, according to W. Emmanuel Abraham, the work of art was often described as “the self expression of the Supreme Being himself relying on human instruments.”3 The artist who produced ritual objects was regarded as a kind of priest. “He was steeped in the metaphysics of his people and possessed the skill to concretize it in his creations.” Like Khing the master carver or Michelangelo the sculptor, the African artist at the peak of his work “enters into a trance-like condition and becomes oblivious of the public and its doings.”4 Here is Edogo, the carver of ritual masks, in Chinua Achebe's novel Arrow of God: 1. The hut was dark inside although the eye got used to it after a short while. Edogo put down the white okwe −wood on which he was going to work and then unslung his goatskin bag in which he carried his tools. Apart from the need for secrecy, Edogo had always found the atmosphere of this hut right for carving masks … Edogo sat down on the floor near the entrance where there was the most light and began to work. Now and again he heard the voices of people passing through the market place from one village of Umuaro to another. But when his carving finally got hold of him he heard no more voices. The mask was beginning to come out of the wood when Edogo suddenly stopped and turned his ear in the direction of the voices which had broken into his work.5 Creating a sacred mask such as this one, the artist must work in a focused state that excludes ordinary concerns. Within his ritual space, insulated from everything that might distract him, the artist is free to become tuned to the ideas he wishes to make concrete. Once the right material has been selected and the proper incantations recited, the artist invokes the forces that will animate his creation. In the process he becomes “a channel of communication with them, the means of mediation between them and his society, he constitutes a priest-like figure.”6 As contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton points out, art may serve in the modern world, as prayer has traditionally done, to awaken the “memory of enchantment,” for art “properly understood, is a kind of prayer; it is an attempt to call the timeless and the transcendental to the scene of some human incident.”7 Art objects, produced in this way, are clearly sacred; they are frequently used in connection with public festivals and religious ceremonies. The purpose of such ceremonies is often to “restore and strengthen the orderliness of nature and of society and to evade the tragedy which a disconnection from that orderliness would entail.”8 The sacred art object cannot merely represent order, but must embody order: It must itself be the order it illustrates. The power of the artist lies not in the degree of individuality he or she brings but in the degree of universality he or she is able to evoke. Like the Greek tragedies we have already examined, village ceremonials involve everyone. After days of drumming, dancing, chanting, and sacrifice, throughout which negative and destructive feelings that have been suppressed build, the peak of the ritual creates a release of passions and a joyous celebration of a return to stability. Once this emotional purging has occurred, the ritual objects are again put away out of public view. What is drastically missing from our culture, although some of us might glimpse it in sporting events and rock concerts, are the regular occasions when you are lifted out of yourself in some joyous community feeling. Barbara Ehrenreich We see in a traditional African society exactly the same function of art and the same role of the artist as we saw in ancient Greece as described by Aristotle. Whether by drumming and dancing or by intensely watching a play, people are drawn into the destructive possibilities of anger, envy, and resentment that are ever present in the human person and in human society. Then, at the moment of climax, these negative emotions are released and the comfort of order is restored. Having seen an alternative vision—a negative and frightening one—people may be more open to seeing and appreciating the value of order with fresh eyes. Like the rituals of priests, the rituals presided over by artists bring us in touch with bigger things and take us out of the everyday—if only for a moment. The Celtic poet-harper, the Zen master in the teahouse, the African mask dancer—all mediate at public ceremonies as priests sometimes do. The artist becomes a luminous figure, almost transparent, a medium through which important knowing can be transmitted. Just as in a religious ritual we often cannot speak what we feel, in the presence of genuine art we may find no words to express our experience. The artist, like the God of Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. James Joyce Our own culture has compartmentalized art and restricted it to museums, but many societies have given art a more central and less formal role. As we have just seen, the arts of Zen are available to all, and the African carver makes his mask for a public ceremony to be enjoyed by everyone in the community. Such was also the case in ancient Athens where subjects such as the role of art and the always-interesting topics of love and beauty were regularly discussed. Love was recognized as intimately connected with the Idea of Beauty and Art—not separate from it. Indeed, for Plato, love appeared to be one route to the contemplation of pure Beauty. Art and Beauty Art is, at least in part, concerned with beauty, and the branch of philosophy called aesthetics describes what we mean by the beautiful and how we apply standards of value in judging art. We turn now to Socrates' education in how Platonic love can lead to beauty itself, and then we move on, in the next section, to examine the relationship between truth and beauty. Socrates and Diotima Much of what we have to say about art begins with the idea of beauty. In the playful Platonic dialogue called the Symposium, we find Socrates at the age of fifty-three enjoying with a group of much younger men an evening of light conversation that ultimately turns to the relation between love and beauty. According to the protocol of a symposion (symposium), each man in turn would drink and speak on a given subject (frequently, love or sex). symposion [sim PO zee ahn] a male drinking group held in an andron, or men's room The fourth speaker is Aristophanes, the comic playwright, who offers a fascinating myth to explain the erotic attraction we have for each other. In the beginning, he says, we were two-headed, four-armed, and four-legged creatures. Because we threatened the gods with our hubris, or arrogance, Zeus retaliated by splitting all the creatures in half. Each of these creatures− now possessing only one head, two arms and two legs−wanders the world, looking for its “other half.” Earthly love is only the yearning to regain our original wholeness. hubris [HEW bris] human arrogance or pride When his turn arrives, Socrates declares that all the previous speeches have been lies, and his conversational contribution is a retelling of instructions in love he received from Diotima, a holy priestess. According to Diotima, eros (earthly love) offers us a way to go from the human to the divine. In other words, love functions as art sometimes does−as a link between the temporal and the spiritual. eros [AIR ros] earthly love, the love of bodies To be fully initiated into the mysteries of love, one must pursue beauty throughout one's life. First, he will fall into Platonic love with one particular, beautiful person. This will ultimately lead him beyond the love of one beautiful body to the love of all physical beauty. Next he will learn to find the beauty of the soul more valuable than that of the body and be able to love a “beautiful” soul, even if it is housed in a less than beautiful body. From this, he will be led to contemplate beauty as it exists in abstract thought and the moral law. This, at last, will bring him to the true object of the whole enterprise—the love of beauty itself: This is the right way of approaching or being initiated into the mysteries of love, to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one's aim, from one instance of physical beauty to two and from two to all, then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of various kinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.9 Truth and Beauty If truth is beauty, how come nobody has their hair done in a library? Lily Tomlin To speak about truth and beauty, we will use art forms themselves. In considering the West, our subject will be a poem by John Keats that equates truth with beauty and beauty with truth. To explore aesthetic experience in Asia, we will focus on Chinese and Japanese landscape painting and calligraphy. In art there is no such thing as universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true… the truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks. Oscar Wilde Truth and Beauty in the West What is the relationship between beauty and truth? What did the English Romantic poet John Keats mean when he wrote in his ode “On a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”? Is there in beauty something beyond enjoyment and admiration that might lead us to truth? Looking at a Grecian urn (such as the one in the photo), Keats is struck by two things: the permanence of the life depicted in the painted scenes, which will endure long after he has passed away, and the cold, static quality of the frozen moments they depict. The youth whose lips are poised above those of his love will never kiss the maiden; the people of the town will never return home from the sacrifice; the trees will never bear fruit. In short, there is no life on the Grecian urn. Keats is keenly aware of the irony. An artistic rendering of life in an ordinary, little Greek town has made it immortal (as long as the urn endures, at least), but it is an unappealing sort of immortality—the villagers on the urn no longer have access to life. There is, however, something in that cold beauty that can lead us (its viewers) to truth. Great art, Keats seems to say, has the power to fix beauty in such a way that those who contemplate it can continue to be stirred in the imagination just as the artist was in the original creation of the work of art. The villagers are long dead, but an artist's rendering of them retains the power to inspire us. As a glimpse of unchanging perfection, great art is superior to nature. Unlike nature, it has a direct link with knowledge of the truth. Images and sometimes whole stories were told in paint on Grecian urns, one of which inspired John Keats to write “truth is beauty, beauty truth.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote Keats, and he concluded “that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Somehow, understanding this mystery would be a sufficient task for a human life. The powerful message here is that beauty and truth are two aspects of one ultimate reality. We will experience and express each of them in different ways—beauty through the medium of the senses and the exercise of the imagination, and truth through thought, knowledge, and wisdom—but the two are no less identical. What we experience as beautiful would, if it were adequately expressed intellectually, be a truly conceived reality. Similarly, truth, if it were adequately transformed into sensation or imagination, could only be beautiful. One of the difficulties, as we have already noted, is expressing beauty in words; very often words simply fail us. Language works quite well in describing many aspects of life, but it seems to fall short in the expression of deep feeling of any kind. As contemporary American philosopher Susanne Langer observes, there is “an important part of reality that is quite inaccessible to the formative influence of language; that is the realm of so-called ‘inner experience,' the life of feeling and emotion.”10 People sometimes conclude that feelings and emotions are irrational because they cannot be spoken through language, but Langer disagrees. Art serves as the translator of this “inward experience”; it “objectifies the sentience and desire, self-consciousness and world-consciousness, emotions and moods, that are generally regarded as irrational because words cannot give us clear ideas of them.”11 When an artist apprehends a truth about reality, the resulting work of art becomes an expression of that truth. Those of us who are not creative artists can still share the experience of the artist when we contemplate the work because the artist has translated his or her experience into the medium of the work and left it there for us to “read.” Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature. Susanne K. Langer Most of us seem to be constantly in motion, always “on the go.” To have the aesthetic experience we have been discussing, the first thing we will have to do is stop long enough to really look at the natural and artificial beauty all around us. Twentieth-century philosopher Mortimer Adler suggests that we might begin with the notion of enjoyable beauty and the rest it can introduce into our lives. One ingredient in the happiness of a well-lived life is the rest that the contemplation of art can provide. When we pause in our very busy lives to look with pleasure on the art of nature or the art of human artists, we give ourselves a breather and open the possibility for deeper thoughts to arise. THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) Born into Manhattan's German-American community, Susanne Knauth acquired a love of music and the ability to play the cello from her father and, under her mother's influence, learned to read, recite, write, and love poetry. From these early experiences, she began to develop what would become a deep understanding of a work of art as a “non-discursive symbol that articulates what is verbally ineffable, the logic of consciousness itself.” She studied philosophy at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also met and married historian William Leonard Langer. In a distinguished career of teaching at Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Smith colleges, Langer worked out her conviction that humans are symbolmaking creatures—in art, myth, and science. For Langer, the arts are no less significant as forms of knowledge than are mathematics and physics. Books in symbolic logic and aesthetics followed, explaining the function and value of symbols in conveying meaning. Art presents emotional experience or the nature of emotion to us through a symbol system, Langer believed, and the role of the artist is to portray not his or her own particular feelings but the nature of feeling itself. And beauty is, or can be, a window on reality; it has its own kind of truth. A gifted artist can show us or tell us truths about the world that may not be available to us in any other way. Alfred North Whitehead, who was Susanne Langer's teacher, believes that the art we produce has a unique role to play in inspiring us to pursue perfection: “A million sunsets will not spur on men towards civilization. It requires art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.”12 Art, like science, seeks to uncover the harmony of the universe. Both are, Whitehead insists, “the consciously determined pursuit of Truth and of Beauty. In them, the finite consciousness of mankind is appropriating as its own the infinite fecundity of nature.”13 Both science and art capture a manageable slice of the infinite richness of nature for us and let us glimpse a moment of perfection. Just as exemplary individuals held out as role models can inspire us to greater civic achievement, so a civilization “interfused with art” can reveal infinite or immortal possibilities to very finite humans. Great art, Whitehead seems to be saying, always points beyond itself to the source of its vision. As we contemplate great art, we get a glimpse of something larger and more perfect than what we see around us. Where “precision of consciousness fails” we have the possibility of “a message from the Unseen.” In the West, truth and beauty can be seen as two aspects of one reality. Let's examine whether this is also true in Asia. Truth and Beauty in Asia Like the Zen gardens we previously considered, Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings speak to the inner life of the person who looks at them. The first thing you might notice is the amount of empty space. In contrast with Western art, which often fills the canvas, Asian art uses emptiness as an ingredient in the composition. The message seems to be that emptiness is a significant part of existence itself and must be an essential quality in the person who seeks to understand existence. The next thing likely to reveal itself is the smallness of any human figures present and the vastness of nature; if emptiness or the white silk or paper background is the main component, nature is second, and the human presence is a distant third. This tells us something about the proportion of things, that we are specks in the natural world and that even nature exists amidst the emptiness that characterizes the way things are. Human figures are not seen as dominating or imposing order on nature but, rather, as being dwarfed and rendered insignificant by nature and by the even greater emptiness. As you may recall from Chapter 3, in much of Asian thought, distinctions are not made among the human, the natural, and the emptiness; everything is connected. Only our human eyes see division and multiplicity where there is essential unity. As the “Heart Sutra” (see Chapter 2) put it, form is emptiness and emptiness is full of form. Often the human figure is entirely absent from works of art. An entire painting may consist of a few simple strokes of brush and ink, producing a single stem and perhaps a bird. If only we could empty ourselves of all our judgments and assumptions, the painting seems to say, perhaps we could get close to our original nature and regain the ability to react freshly to life or to conceive an original idea of our own. According to Zen, words put up a screen between us and what is; we have an inner wisdom that is sometimes thwarted or confused by the words we tell ourselves or hear. Turn them off and the inner life can flourish. Art is not a luxury, but a necessity. Art is, at least in part, a way of collecting information about the universe. Rebecca West When we look at Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, we can reach beyond words to the inner knowledge or wisdom that lies too deep for words but is clearly recognizable when we reach it and allow it to speak. A scroll painting might be the source of meditation, one of those moments of rest Adler spoke about that give us a window on larger concerns. To sit quietly and observe such a painting is to be drawn both into oneself and out into the larger reality. With an artist's skill, a few simple lines can convey an entire world of reality. Some Asian art combines both painting and words. On the scroll or canvas is a traditional painting of a human subject or of nature, and of course the emptiness in which nature moves, but across the top or down the side there may be a series of Chinese characters in the beautiful calligraphy that is itself an art form. To the Western mind, this might seem a complete painting, one that speaks to both the heart and the head, because those who understand the language can read the words as well as contemplate the brush strokes that constitute the painting and the calligraphy. But the point, of course, is not to read the words, as you might read the words in this text or even in a novel, but to see them with beginner's mind—as separate from and yet a part of the more clearly visual art of the remainder of the painting. These ink drawings and paintings are sometimes called “landscapes of the soul.” For the artist-priest who painted these artworks, they were a product of intense contemplation, of an active meditation by their creator that may inspire a similar response in those who view them. The “technique” of such paintings is rather unconventional. The painter strives to empty himself or herself as much as possible of ego, of preconceived ideas and judgments, so that in the contemplation of what is, the essential will be revealed. In a state of deep meditation, the artist then executes the brush strokes without consciously controlling the brush. From this state of emptiness, the painting can almost be said to paint itself, just as a poem sometimes seems to write itself or the runner becomes the race. What we see in contemplating such a work, then, is not so much the work of a particular artist as the glimpse of reality that artist's egoless work has brought into being. The possibility exists that the viewer and the painter can become one across cultures, oceans, and centuries in a mutual act of creativity. As an empathetic observer, you may be open to the nonanalytic truth a particular painting reveals. If you grasp it, you share in that moment the experience of the artist who “discovered” the truth and passed it on. For an instant, something of his or her vision is yours and can remain a part of you forever. For that moment, you too have an artist's or a philosopher's vision because you see directly into what is—in Western terms, you have moved from beauty to truth. In Zen art, beauty (as well as worth and social correctness) really is in the eye of the beholder. These judgments are part of our evaluation of things and have nothing to do with the way things are. Everything, it is said, exists in its own nature; it simply is. The rest are labels we attach and should not be confused with reality. There is something very calming about contemplating Asian art. At the heart of all nature in the Chinese system is the mysterious Tao, which appears to do nothing but accomplishes everything, seemingly without effort. There is a restfulness in this and in our connection with the Earth itself and with our own distant ancestors: How can we fret and stew … under the calm gaze of ancient Tao? The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile. The winds rage and we bend before them. The blossoms open and we rejoice. Earth is our long home.14 In Shakkai: Woman of the Sacred Garden, Lynn Andrews describes in Taoist language the truth and beauty captured in creation of a sacred garden that is a mirror of the whole universe: “‘It is going to be very beautiful,' Shakkai said. ‘It is a very difficult thing to do. A true master of the garden works a lifetime to develop the ability. How you place each stone is essential … It must come from a place of truth within yourself … We are talking about communication … with the Tao, with our creator. To manifest a truth into the world is sometimes better done through art … A stone placed in a certain way in a garden stimulates a sense of knowing that is indescribable, that is beyond the spoken word.”15 The words truth and beauty might convey something different for each person who speaks or hears them. A work of art has the power to reveal what is … directly. Keeping in mind the connection art can help us make between beauty and truth, we turn now to four Western philosophers who wrote about aesthetics: Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Each of them sees a way in which art can overcome divisions that appear to exist and lead us to a true understanding of reality. Truth and Beauty in Western Philosophy The first two philosophers, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, began with the dilemma created by the philosophy of their contemporary Immanuel Kant (see Chapter 5). If we can know only phenomena, or things as they appear to us, then noumena, or things as they are in themselves, will remain hidden from us. In other words, truth about reality becomes impossible because we have no independent way of knowing that reality. Overcoming the Subject-Object Split: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling In his philosophy of transcendental idealism, Schelling posed this question: Is there a way to re-create the original unity between subject and object and then understand it? If this were possible, we might be able to speak about truth. If our ambition is to know things in themselves and not merely things as they appear to us, then, Schelling was convinced, we cannot use cognitive processes that employ logical analysis in arriving at concepts. The “in-itself” cannot be known from the outside the way we can know appearances, but only from the inside, through the process of intuition. You might be reminded here of the mystics (see Chapter 4) who rejected the possibility of knowing God rationally in favor of knowing God intuitively. Schelling's solution to the Kantian dilemma relies on the kind of knowing that only art can make possible for us. To begin, he made very clear the distinction between true art, which can only be produced in aesthetic freedom, and ordinary art, which may be in the service of sensuous enjoyment or even utility or usefulness. Genuine art, Schelling insisted, can be recognized because it alone depicts the unconscious in action as well as its “original identification with the conscious”: Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought must forever fly apart. The view of nature which the philosopher frames artificially, is for art the original and natural one … Each splendid painting owes, as it were, its genesis to a removal of the invisible barrier dividing the real from the ideal world … Nature… is … simply the ideal world appearing under permanent restrictions, or merely the imperfect reflection of a world existing, not outside him, but within.16 THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) Schelling was known as Proteus because he shared a character trait with the mythological shape-shifter known as the master of changes. As a young man, Schelling fascinated those he met with his flexible and agile mind; he was full of new ideas and an astute judge of people and situations. The great German poet Goethe considered him the most “congenial” of philosophers. Some believe Schelling inspired G. W. F. Hegel. As an old man Schelling became intellectually rigid and repudiated many of his earlier views. Although he became a defender of religious orthodoxy and an extreme conservative in politics, many continued to quote the writings of his youth on transcendental idealism. Like Hegel (see Chapter 8), Schelling adopted an organic rather than a mechanistic view of reality. Earlier, Hegel had insisted that nothing could be understood apart from the whole to which it belonged, including its historical circumstances. For both Schelling and Hegel, the world more closely resembles a living organism than it does a machine. A gear may be understandable, have meaning, and even function separately from the machine of which it is a part, but my hand cannot function, and indeed has very little meaning, apart from my body. Cut off from the living organism of which it is essentially a part, the hand will quickly wither and die. For Schelling, the self and the world are two aspects of one organic unity. Differences between mind and matter, which were so critical to a rationalist philosopher like René Descartes, are, in Schelling's philosophy, only apparent rather than real differences. From the point of view of the Absolute, these distinctions are irrelevant, and the Absolute is indifferent to them, much as a magnet is indifferent to our observation that it has negative and positive poles. Schelling contended that the Absolute, or creative spirit in the universe, creates nature and operates at an unconscious level in its processes (chemical reactions, the force of gravity, the instincts of animals, and so on). When the creative spirit reaches the level of human development, it becomes free and rational; it attains self-consciousness. The highest human function, therefore, is imitation of and participation in this same creative process. As selfconscious subjects, we are able to imitate the creative activity of the Absolute through creative art, which is the highest possible activity for a person. In aesthetics Schelling saw a joining of the world of phenomena, or appearances (the sense world), and the world of the mind. An artistic creation represents a fusion of object and subject, according to Schelling. The artist experiences the original harmony, or identity, between subject and object through the creative process and then represents it in an object we can contemplate: It is as if, in the exceptional man (which artists above all are, in the highest sense of the word), that unalterable identity, on which all existence is founded, had laid aside the veil wherewith it shrouds itself in others, and, just as it is directly affected by things, so also works directly back upon everything. Thus it can only be the contradiction between conscious and unconscious in the free act which sets the artistic urge in motion; just as, conversely, it can be given to art alone to pacify our endless striving, and likewise to resolve the final and uttermost contradiction within us.17 Sometimes the best art isn't immediately obvious. You might not get it or even like it the first time you experience it. But, if you take a moment and give it another try, it might reach you in a way you never thought possible. It's a bold move to see again, read again, listen again. Erin McKeown Art accomplishes what philosophy alone cannot do: It provides a finite rendering of an infinite reality. Like the mystics, we cannot approach this artistic creation logically or rationally; it is not knowable through these means. We can, however, use a particular kind of intuition. We are not talking here about intellectual intuition, which is the province of philosophy and may lead us to some level of understanding. Schelling called the kind of intuition we need aesthetic intuition and defined it as intellectual intuition become “objective and universally valid.” aesthetic intuition knowing available through aesthetic experience, according to Schelling Through the creative process, the artistic genius can apprehend the truth about reality in a way that simply is not available to the philosopher who uses only intellectual intuition. Once an artistic genius has created the fusion between subject and object, however, then through aesthetic intuition or contemplation the philosopher can share in the knowledge that is revealed. Schelling was clear that even though philosophy, acting according to its own scope and methods, can approach an understanding of reality, only art can arrive at certainty: The one field to which objectivity is granted is art. Take away objectivity from art, one might say, and it ceases to be what it is, and becomes philosophy; grant objectivity to philosophy, and it ceases to be philosophy and becomes art. Philosophy attains, indeed, to the highest, but it brings to this summit only, so to say, the fraction of a man. Art brings the whole man, as he is, to that point, namely to a knowledge of the highest, and this is what underlies the eternal difference and the marvel of art.18 Here we have a powerful affirmation of Keats's observation that truth is beauty and beauty truth. When the whole human person contemplates the whole of reality and is able to fuse its apparent divisions, between matter and mind, between the unconscious and the conscious, what we have is art. It renders objectively what philosophy, acting alone, can only render subjectively: The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are themselves products of one and the same activity; the concurrence of the two (the conscious and the nonconscious) without consciousness yields the real, and with consciousness the aesthetic world. The objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit; the universal organon of philosophy−and the keystone of its entire arch−is the philosophy of art.19 Make your life a work of art. Jill Ker Conway Art, according to Schelling, can give us access to the world as it is in itself. This was also the view of Schelling's contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, although Schopenhauer used a somewhat different process to arrive at a similar conclusion. Escaping the Force of Will: Arthur Schopenhauer Schopenhauer began where Schelling did−with the dilemma posed by Kant's metaphysics: our inability to know noumena, or things as they are in themselves (and independent of our perceptions of them). If we are confined to knowledge of the world of phenomena, or appearances, then real knowledge and the possibility of truth remain hidden. Unlike Kant, however, Schopenhauer did not locate reality in idea; instead, he asserted that the thing-in-itself is what he called the Will. The Will−which he understood as the ultimate, primeval principle of being−is the source of the world of appearances and in fact the source of all life. The Will is the will to live, a blind, uncaused, unmotivated impulse to achieve and cling to life. The Will is neither the perceiving subject nor perceived matter; both proceed from the Will. THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) Born in the free city of Danzig, Schopenhauer spent time living in France and England before taking an extensive European tour. His father, a wealthy merchant, apparently committed suicide, releasing young Arthur from the obligation to work in his father's business. His mother, a novelist, established a literary salon whose circle included the poet Goethe. Schopenhauer quarreled with his mother over her love affairs and her “romantic” friends, and they parted company, hating each other until their deaths. At the University of Göttingen, he studied Plato and Kant before moving to Berlin where he explored the natural sciences. At Jena, he submitted the work that would become known as The World as Will and Idea as his doctoral dissertation. Disregarded during his lifetime, the book became famous after his death. He lectured briefly at the University of Berlin but lived most of his life in solitude, accompanied by his poodle Atma whose name means “world soul.” Existing outside time, space, and causality—the filters that Kant insisted shape all our perceptions of reality—the Will greedily and ruthlessly demanded life and thus its own objectification. In its blind urge toward life, the Will objectified its original unity into the multiplicity of the phenomenal world. The Will also created mind to be a light for it in its higher stages of evolution. Notice here the inversion of more traditional philosophical thought, which declares the intellect primary and the will secondary. Plato, for instance, declared that to know the good was to do the good; will, in other words, would follow intellect. Schopenhauer reversed this order. For him, intellect, like everything else in the phenomenal world, is in the service of the Will and owes its very existence to it. In his master work The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer, like Schelling, saw the route to knowledge as lying in aesthetic contemplation. Schopenhauer began by considering various kinds of knowing, including natural science and mathematics, and ended with this question: But what kind of knowledge is concerned with that which is outside and independent of all relations, that which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and therefore is known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas, which are the direct and adequate objectivity of the thing-initself, the will? We answer, Art, the work of genius.20 aesthetic contemplation a route to knowledge, according to Schopenhauer Ideas, understood in the sense in which Plato used the term as the eternal, primeval, original forms of all things, are the Will made objective. We may try to frame or explain the world through concepts, but our efforts are doomed to fail, in Schopenhauer's view. It is a case of using the wrong medium, the wrong kind of language. The proper (indeed the only) medium that is adequate for this task is art. The Idea can be expressed in a variety of forms that Schopenhauer viewed hierarchically. On the most primitive level, the Idea may be expressed in architecture, and it may ascend through sculpture, painting, and literature (especially tragedy in which events happen of necessity because of the reality of the situation and the being of the characters) to music. Music, in Schopenhauer's view, has the capacity to leave the world behind and express the very heart of reality. All the other arts are copies of the Ideas; music, alone, is the copy of the Will itself. All of us have the capacity to know the Idea in things—to transcend, if only for a moment, our own individual personality. A genius excels by “possessing this kind of knowledge in a far higher degree and more continuously.” 21 Even though both nature and works of art have the power to reveal the Idea to us, works of art are more effective because of the genius of their creators. The artistic genius grasps the pure Idea and is able to express it in a work of art. Here, we are reminded of Khing, Michelangelo, and Edogo who in focused states became oblivious to the world of actual things and understood something of the thing-in-itself (to use Kant's term). According to Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge, The artist, who knew only the Idea, no longer the actual, has reproduced in his work the pure Idea, has abstracted it from the actual, omitting all disturbing accidents. The artist lets us see the world through his eyes. That he has these eyes, that he knows the inner nature of things apart from all their relations, is the gift of genius, is inborn; but that he is able to lend us this gift, to let us see with his eyes, is acquired, and is the technical side of art.22 With the help of the artistic genius, we have the ability to become what Schopenhauer called a “pure will-less subject of knowledge.” As long as our consciousness is occupied with the “endless stream of willing,” we can never really be happy or have peace of mind. Our natural state, the natural state of everything in the world, is slavery to the Will. Only by going beyond personal interest and losing ourselves in the pure contemplation the aesthetic experience offers can we escape time and place and achieve peace of mind. Of all the arts, Schopenhauer found music the most sublime. Because it does not rely on visual images, music has the capacity to bring us more directly to the state of pure contemplation that leads to true knowledge. Schopenhauer regarded music as a direct expression of the Will itself: Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as the Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.23 Music, my joy, my full-scale God. Gwen Harwood The kind of music Schopenhauer seemed to have in mind is Baroque music in which form predominates over content. A Bach fugue, for example, in which a particular musical form repeats many times with many variations, fulfills Schopenhauer's requirements. Popular music, with its sensuous, emotional content, leaves us firmly in the grasp of the Will. Even more formal classical music like Handel's Pastoral Symphony might conjure up visual and sensual images of a pastoral scene. The goal of art, in Schopenhauer's system, is to take us out of the world of the devouring Will and into the contemplation of the Ideas. Clearly, Schopenhauer was not an optimist. Seeing the world as a manifestation of blind, voracious Will did not make him hopeful about what humans would do if left to their own devices. As slaves to the Will we act in its service, seeking first of all to procreate and continue life, and then to fulfill our own desires for more, more, more! Sigmund Freud's concept of the id—the pleasure principle that is such a strong ingredient in the human personality— owes much to Schopenhauer. Much of Schopenhauer's pessimism, as well as his vision of the liberation offered by the aesthetic, was shared by Friedrich Nietzsche. Combining the Merging of Dionysus and the Separation of Apollo: Friedrich Nietzsche In his remarkable first book, The Birth of Tragedy,24 written in the 1870s, Nietzsche draws our attention from the modern world back to the world of Aristotle and the classic Greek dramatists of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Like Aristotle, who saw the ability of the Greek tragedy to transform human understanding, and like Schopenhauer, who saw the tragedy as second only to music in its power to help us escape the Will, Nietzsche evoked the power of tragic drama. In the culture of ancient Athens, he believed, the tragic poets fused the insights of two Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus. The gift of Apollo is the state of contemplation in the presence of a world of beautiful appearances, whereas the gift of Dionysus is the wild intoxication of creation and destruction. Greek tragedies combine both Apollonian and Dionysian elements. As Aristotle pointed out, the audience could achieve a catharsis by seeing the wildness and violence of human nature expressed and resolved on stage. To watch a Greek tragedy is to lose one's everyday sense of optimism and confidence in an ordered world. When Medea, in order to avenge herself on her husband Jason, kills their children by her own hand, we see a side of human nature we would prefer to ignore. Although few of us will ever act as Medea did, many of us can identify with the rage and irrationality that can consume us when we feel we have been wronged. Aristotle felt that we had to periodically come face-to-face with the darker side of human nature—through the relative safety of drama—so that we can avoid its consequences in our lives. Nietzsche shared this pessimism about what psychologist Carl Jung calls the shadow self, those parts of ourselves we prefer not to own but that travel with us, like our shadows, whether we will them to or not. He found it unfortunate, and a little frightening, that we are apparently no longer able to confront the vitality of our dark human nature as the Greeks were able to do. Our arts have, in his judgment, become far too tame, and as a result they have lost their power to warn us of our potential for violence and evil. Nietzsche's answer to the question “What killed Greek tragedy?” is Greek philosophy. shadow self unaccepted parts of the self, according to Jungian psychology Nietzsche claimed that theoretical man—of which Socrates was perhaps the best example—arrived to calm our fears and represent nature as perfectly rational, understandable, and intelligible. With the advent of philosophy in Athens, art was replaced by philosophy. The method of understanding reality became not the drama but the dialectic. We could, theoretical man assured us, reason our way to an understanding of both the world and human nature; what is more, the will is in service to the intellect. What we understand with our minds, we will be able to will in our lives. theoretical man the philosopher who imposes reason on reality, according to Nietzsche This exclusive reliance on reason was, in Nietzsche's view, a very grave mistake: Socrates might be designated as the specific non-mystic, in whom the logical nature is developed … to the same excess as instinctive wisdom is developed in the mystic … But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did not even “tell the truth” … Optimistic dialectics drives music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms: that is it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be explained only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian states ….25 THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) Nietzsche was born on October 15, just as the church bells were ringing to celebrate the birthday of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Young Friedrich was named for the royal benefactor. After his father's death from an accidental fall, Nietzsche returned with his mother to her family home where he was raised by five women: his mother, grandmother, aunts, and sister. At Bonn University, he studied philology (the structure of languages) and theology. He also exhibited musical talent and did a lot of drinking. Following his teacher to the University of Leipzig in 1865, he met both Schopenhauer (whose book The World as Will and Idea impressed him) and the composer Richard Wagner (whose force of character Nietzsche admired). Nietzsche's brilliant beginning as a professor and writer as well as a composer of symphonies was cut short when he contracted syphilis, a then incurable disease, and experienced bouts of apparent madness. Although he was considered a genius, many found him difficult if not impossible to live with. As an adult he was often in poor health, suffering migraine headaches and nausea. In this view, tragedy appears illogical to the philosopher who believes that reason explains the world and its human occupants, for tragedy is full of causes that seem to be without effects and effects that seem to lack causes. There is nothing logical about Medea's slaughter of her children. The adoration of reason, which theoretical man brought, also cuts us off from much of what makes us feel alive and makes life worth living: Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of existence … We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of individual existence— yet … we are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence ….26 The appeal of the Dionysian, for Nietzsche, is that it opens for us the universal and takes us out of the particular. In this, he agrees with Schopenhauer about the role of art and the function of the artist. Whereas Schopenhauer's vision is of quiet contemplation in the presence of a work of art, Nietzsche's vision is alive with passion: Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an impending re-birth of Hellenic antiquity; for in it alone we find our hope of a renovation and purification of the German spirit through the fire-magic of music…how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilderness of our exhausted culture changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A hurricane seizes everything decrepit, decaying, collapsed, and stunted; wraps it whirlingly into a red cloud of dust; and carries it like a vulture into the air.27 What Nietzsche believed (or at least hoped) is that “the time of the Socratic man is past.” With the rebirth of tragedy will come the rebirth of the aesthetic hearer—the person able to respond with feeling and involvement to art. aesthetic hearer a person who can respond to art with feeling and involvement, according to Nietzsche Nietzsche was also distressed with the attitude of the critic—the person who watches a play dispassionately and is therefore incapable of enjoyment. It is easy to be a critic. The spirit of his age he saw as a criticohistorical spirit that kills myth and approaches all of life with detachment and distance: He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the true aesthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community of the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he accepts the wonder represented on stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which insists on strict psychological causality, insulted by it, whether with benevolent concession he as it were admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether he experiences anything else thereby.28 According to Nietzsche, art, science, and philosophy are all forms of illusion. They are all methods for ordering the meaningless swirl of experience into a meaningful whole. In his view, we need the spirits of both Apollo and Dionysus—both the impulse of Apollo toward individuation and the delights of the world of appearance and the impulse of Dionysus toward the merging of self into oneness symbolized by intoxication. If either predominates excessively, a culture will suffer. Both are needed to present a unified vision of reality. Nietzsche felt that the defeat of the Dionysian elements in Western culture began with the advent of philosophy in the Western world. Just before the rise of Socrates—the ultimate theoretical man—both elements were fused in Greek tragedy. Then, when it became too painful for us to look unflinchingly at the tragic elements in human life, we learned to tame them, to intellectualize them, by denying their reality and insisting that everything is explainable and controllable by reason. We may have gained a certain amount of security (false though it is), but in Nietzsche's view what we have sacrificed is the truth about reality. Our culture has no rival in the realm of technology; we understand how to use logic and the methods of science to solve problems and to impose order. What we lack, however, is access to the irrationality Nietzsche saw in Dionysus. When we shut off the irrational impulses that Dionysus represents, we become critics of life rather than participants in it. We have, he believed, closed our eyes to a vital portion of the truth. Opening our eyes, however, solves only part of the problem. Martin Heidegger argued that being must also open itself to us. If both processes occur, we have the possibility of truth. Viewing Truth as Unconcealment: Martin Heidegger The question of truth cannot be separated from the question of being, according to Heidegger, the twentieth-century intellectual heir to Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Although he originally wanted to go directly to phenomena, or “the things themselves,” he soon focused more directly on being, rejecting in the process the Cartesian view of the human person as a thinking substance and the world as extended substance. This image of the world as a container with people inside is a false one, he argued, because people and the world share a much more dynamic and intimate relationship: The natural state of the human person is as a Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world the natural state of the human person, according to Heidegger Heidegger wanted to ground truth in something deeper than phenomena−in Being itself. If the natural state of human beings is one of dwelling in the world, then the Western scientific view of ourselves as masters of nature is not only arrogant but also false. Being exists prior to thought and makes thought possible; if we want to discover the truth, we must look to Being. Verifying the truth about something is not a process of representation (or mimesis); it is more accurately a process of unconcealment, or revealment. If something lays itself open to us−if it unconceals itself−we may learn the truth about it. unconcealment/ revealment the disclosure of Being as truth, according to Heidegger Our stance toward the world, Heidegger contended, is crucial. Systematic philosophy, with its mind-matter split and other dichotomies, must give way to a more poetic kind of thinking. In fact, Heidegger described poetry, which he defines quite broadly to mean any authentic writing or speaking that has not lost its magic and power by being overused or abused, as “the saying of the unconcealedness of what is.”29 Thought must be expressed poetically because poetry is the saying of truth. We might say that truth, in Heidegger's way of thinking, can only be expressed poetically because it concerns being. Furthermore, only as Being-in-the-world does the human person have the possibility of discovering the truth. This idea is similar to knowing the world from within it and is very different from the standpoint of the natural sciences, which try to understand the world from the outside. The truth is first and foremost the action of letting something become accessible—that is, uncovered or disclosed—and only secondarily the thing that becomes uncovered. THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) Heidegger had a sense of being called to do philosophy. He believed it is in the nature and vocation of all of us to ask what it means to be. When we fail to do this, it is the task of philosophy to call us back to ourselves and warn us of our failure. The question of what it means to be dominates Being and Time, which Heidegger published in 1927. Most people, he said, do not confront the question of being. They prefer to accept society's values rather than struggle to formulate their own. As a result, they live inauthentically, having forfeited the defining human characteristics of freedom and creativity. These ideas form the core of existentialism, which we will explore in Chapter 10. Heidegger saw his own country of Germany as existing between two barbarian superpowers− the United States and the Soviet Union−and he believed philosophizing was possible only in the German language (or possibly German and Greek). This extreme nationalism also led him to join the National Socialist Party in 1933, and he publicly praised both Hitler and the Nazi regime. His sympathy for Nazi ideals has caused some to dismiss his ideas. The quiet, simple way of thinking that Heidegger advocated led him to readings in Eastern philosophy and to the composition of original poetry. His new way of thinking has much in common with both Taoism and Zen in seeking the wisdom found in nature and in believing that most of what passes for knowledge is really ignorance. To Heidegger, the poetic element opens for us the possibility of authentic human existence; without it, we become brutes—or, as we might put it, automatons—living by the dictates of self-will. The artist, and indeed anyone who lives poetically, escapes this fate by being willing to stop, listen, and respond to the call that comes from Being. We have made what Heidegger thought were unhelpful distinctions between, for example, the fine arts (which produce the beautiful) and the applied arts (which produce the useful). Truth has been said to belong to logic and beauty to aesthetics. Heidegger found an integration of truth and beauty in a work of art: In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work…Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being…The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work.30 One of our mistakes is the assumption that truth exists “in itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only later to descend elsewhere among beings.”31 Only the openness of beings provides a “somewhere” for truth to happen. Through the creative process, the unconcealedness of what-is is brought forth into “movement and happening.” What a work of art does is preserve truth in the work. “The nature of art,” Heidegger wrote, “on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth.”32 In a way, it is art that lets truth originate or come into being. Art, Heidegger believed, is a distinctive way in which “truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.”33 If art can perform a function nothing else can perform, it is uniquely responsible for making truth historically available to us. If Heidegger is right, this restores to art the vitality that Nietzsche feared had been killed by Greek philosophy. Let's look now at how art functions in our own time. Art as a Vehicle for Experiencing the World Differently At the very least, visual art and the artists who create it have the potential to give viewers a new experience of reality. When it is well done, art can re-order and re-form the world for us in a way that words alone cannot do. A gifted artist, like a skilled philosopher, can lead us to question our commonsense version of reality and call us to see the world differently. In this section we consider Impressionism, Cubism, and an inventive art installation to see how they are able to accomplish this visionary task. Finally, we will look at art's ability to widen our world. Moving away from mimesis, modern artists have sometimes intentionally created works that do not imitate reality the way a snapshot does but, rather, reconstitute it in new forms. As we will see, theories of art have arisen that credit the artist with creating new forms every bit as real as the old ones. Although someone outside the art world might fault an artist for failing to successfully imitate reality, it is equally possible to see that artist as having captured reality more accurately (or at least equally so) by not employing mimesis.34 Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth. Iris Murdoch Olafur Eliasson's stainless steel sculpture “Flower Observatory” might be described as anti-mimetic. It intentionally plays with our certainties about space. When you step under the canopy of what looks like a fourteen-foothigh metal flower, but is actually a thirty-sided regular polyhedron, you see a night sky sprinkled with sixteen different kinds of stars—eighty total. It's all kaleidoscopic illusion, of course, created by mirrored surfaces, right next to tiny apertures that capture the ambient light. It's impossible to tell how close or far away the lights are. Chris Gilbert, contemporary art curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, describes the experience this way: “When you're underneath it, you can't know what's receding and what's projecting, or even what's flat. It brings one to the realization that perception is not out there but in here, that the world we experience is partly a human creation.”35 Leonard Shlain, whose book about the impact of alphabet literacy on image and the feminine we discussed briefly in Historical Interlude A, contends that artists are the harbingers of major shifts in our worldview. In Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, Shlain examines concepts of space, time, and light as they have been understood by artists and scientists during the past few millennia. His discovery is a recurring pattern: Again and again, “the artist introduces symbols and icons that in retrospect prove to have been an avant-garde for the thought patterns of a scientific age not yet born.36 For Shlain, art and physics are complementary partners; like the two manifestations of light as wave and particle that we examined in Chapter 2, art and physics should be seen as an “integrated duality: They are simply two different but complementary facets of a single description of the world.”37 From idealized Greek sculptures and Euclid's crisp geometric theorems, to the Renaissance discovery of perspective and Newtonian physics, through modern art and the breakthroughs of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, Shlain shows the artist anticipating in image what the scientist will later explain in words. To use only one example, Claude Monet announced the impressionist discovery that “the real subject of every painting is light.” Einstein would later agree: “For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is.” And, Shlain concludes this comparison by reminding us that God's act of creation did not involve space or time. Instead, we have creation out of nothing in God's fiat: “Let there be light!”38 Perhaps the most interesting comparison Shlain makes is between the startling and impossible to picture claims of quantum mechanics and relativity theory on the one hand and the parade of ever more obscure forms of art, such as Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, on the other. In a bizarre but perfectly predictable coincidence, “the branch of science primarily responsible for explaining the nature of physical reality became unimaginable at the very moment that art became unintelligible.”39 Although they apparently did not read about or understand the emerging theories in physics, surrealists like Rene Magritte (whose painting L’Eschelle du Feu appears in Chapter 5) did image in their work concepts such as the flattening of space that occurs as we approach light speed (in The Glasshouse) and the stopping of time at the speed of light, as described in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (in Time Transfixed). The difficulty we experience trying to picture the four-dimensional space-time continuum is partially alleviated by Salvador Dali's Crucifixion. The suffering Christ is pressed against a three-dimensional rendering of a four-dimensional hypercube, which according to mathematical calculations would consist of eight cubes, seven of them sharing one contiguous side, and one cube (the central one) that would share all of its sides.40 Keeping all of these possibilities in mind, let's look at the ways in which art has what might be a unique power to help us see the world differently. Impressionism, Cubism, and art installations all invite us to reconsider the commonsense version of reality that presents itself to us minute-by-minute. DOING PHILOSOPHY Music and the Mind Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans reveal that musicians possess significantly more information-processing “gray matter” than nonmusicians, according to neurologist Solomon Snyder. And, thanks to the “whole-brain effort that music requires” they enjoy a thicker corpus callosum, “the fibrous bridge that links and coordinates the left and right hemispheres of the brain.” Intensive music training has also been correlated with “improved memory, geometric skills and even reading.” This is precisely the idea behind OrchKids, a program created by Marin Alsop, Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who used $100,000 of her $500,000 MacArthur Foundation Grant as seed money to create a pilot program designed to transform the lives of children in one of Baltimore, Maryland's poorest neighborhoods. Inspired by a similar program in Venezuela, El Sistema, OrchKids introduces students to musical instruments, provides them with CDs and CD players, and takes them on field trips to libraries and music halls. Energizing the six- and seven-year-olds musically is only part of the initiative. A broader aim is using music as a vehicle for social change, says OrchKids Coordinator Nick Skinner. “We want them to see there's a lot of Baltimore out there besides the Harlem Park neighborhood they know.” As they grow older, the students will mentor younger children; and all of them will become part of an ensemble—“part of something greater than themselves,” in the words of co-leader Dan Trahey. A performance with the Baltimore School for the Arts orchestra, conducted by “Miss Marin,” inspired the current OrchKids class to commit to an arduous summer program. Sources: Bob Schwerin, “The Musical Mind,” Overture: A Magazine for the Patrons of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, January 19, 2009–February 28, 2009, 10–11; Marla Blackburn, “For OrchKids, the Future Is Now,” Overture, May 1, 2009–June 14, 2009, 8–12. Impressionism One of the clearest examples of the power of art to raise metaphysical and epistemological questions is the Impressionist revolution of the nineteenth century. Impressionist painters have showed us that once we move beyond the conventions of studio painting, the material concreteness of reality breaks down into impressions of light and color. Their great discovery was that light accounts for the changes in how we see things. Given the seemingly infinite variety of light effects, the universe seems to be in perpetual movement, ever changing and never fixed into a finished product. (See Virgil's experience in Chapter 2.) Seen through the eye of an Impressionist painter, reality appears to be composed of the many and varied discrete bits of sensation described by empiricist philosophers. The apparently stable and quite rational knowledge of the world that realistic art seems to offer is dethroned by Impressionism. What is revealed instead is a volatile succession of colored snapshots. The same object can appear endlessly varied as light modulates over its surfaces. If you stand directly in front of an Impressionist painting, it may be difficult to determine what the painting represents; all your eye can take in are the many dots of color. It is necessary to step back and view the painting from a distance before you can really see the people and objects it contains. Once you have gained this needed perspective, the artist seems to be telling you, your eye can form images of objects out of the multiplicity of sensations. If you focus too closely on some of the splotches to the exclusion of others, you will see nothing at all.41 Cubism If Impressionism tends to resolve images into bits of light and color, Cubism makes an even more radical statement about reality by breaking up objects to such an extent that they must be reconstituted by the observer. Believing that the senses deform objects, Cubist painters sought to reduce or eliminate the distorting effects of light and color. Cubist art dissects a form—takes it apart—and then reconstructs it, using the entire surface area of the painting. The artist represents the subject of the painting from every conceivable point of view—from above, below, the front, the back, and each side—to in effect let the viewer move around the subject the way one moves around a piece of sculpture, without moving at all. When looking at a Cubist painting, you see not what the ordinary casual gaze might reveal but focused glimpses of reality. The artist can draw our attention to small bits of form by disconnecting them from any natural surrounding. Bits of form are in effect highlighted the way a strobe light can bring something into momentary illumination before dropping it back into darkness. Cubism is an assault on—a radical dissection of—the wholeness that ordinary vision presents us. Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso In Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, we see the bodies of the young women from the “red light district” as smooth, geometric fragments. Body parts seem almost disconnected, some are distorted, and there is an overall sense of violent energy. Picasso had recently discovered the art of African masks, and we can see that influence as well, especially in the stylized and staring quality of the eyes. Apparently far removed from reality, Cubism offers access to another kind or level of reality. As Picasso explained it, “I paint things as I think them, not as I see them.”42 Do we see more or less truly when we focus first on one plane and then on another? Is reality unified and continuous or broken and distorted? How much of what we think we know about reality is a fiction created by our minds? Mining the Museum Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. Susan Sontag There is another way in which art can pose questions about reality and make us question what we really know. A permanent exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society uses juxtaposition of objects to consider the experiences of African Americans and Native Americans in Maryland. The issue being explored is the extent to which the experience of these two groups of people is reflected (or not reflected) in the Society's collection. Are we able to “see” reality more clearly when Picasso dissects it into geometrical planes and draws masklike faces? By placing slave's shackles in the same case with a beautiful silver service and by placing velvet Victorian chairs in front of a whipping post, New York installation artist Fred Wilson encouraged visitors to reexamine their attitudes and their understanding of history. An empty pedestal bearing the name of Frederick Douglass placed next to a bust of Andrew Jackson dramatizes omissions from both history and art. Called “Mining the Museum,” the exhibit speaks to the descendants of both slaves and slave owners. Both experience a jolt and feel compelled to rethink their assumptions about history, race, and art itself. Record crowds have visited the exhibit, and Wilson has found the experience very satisfying: “It made my faith and trust in others bloom—and my faith that art can make a difference in people's lives, museums can make a difference in society and I can make a difference as an artist.”43 What do we learn by placing slave shackles next to a silver tea service? Opening a Wider World It was precisely this challenge to the content of museums that led artist Judy Chicago to create an installation she calls The Dinner Party. On a huge equilateral triangle (forty-eight feet on each side) are thirty-nine place settings honoring women from history and legend, including many who appear in this text. Each woman has her own unique porcelain plate with a raised design; a fabric placemat-runner, with needlework techniques appropriate to her period; and a drinking chalice. On the marble floor beneath the dinner table are the names of an additional 999 women. More than 100 women joined Chicago in bringing this design to completion. “Mining the Museum” and The Dinner Party aim to bring the previously excluded within the walls of the museum. This is also the intention of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. According to the museum's driving force Helen Valdez, “This museum is about people and about freedom… This is about breaking stereotypes that limit not only our community but the whole country. It's about possibilities.”44 Committed to connecting popular and high culture, the museum features so-called fine art as well as the arts of the people: We are not creating something that isn't already there. We are formalizing it, enhancing it, highlighting it, celebrating it. You know all those little quinceaneras, the celebrations of a girl's fifteenth birthday, that go on in church, the music, the beliefs, all those are parts of the culture in its most popular form and in its most sophisticated form as well.45 On a larger scale this is also the intention of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, its eighteenth and last major museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Committed to honoring nature and people who live off the land, while abiding by federal architectural restrictions, the designers have created a building that suggests natural forms even within the artificial setting of a busy city. “The exterior alludes to a mountain or mesa that has been shaped by wind and rain. Its curving walls are clad in Kasota stone, with a rough finish suggesting cliffs or rock formations.”46 Architect Johnpaul Jones, who is Cherokee and Choctaw, wrote of the challenges, “Washington is not a very Native place. It's full of Greeks and Romans; even the trees along the Mall are planted in straight lines.” Working within strict height and setback limitations, Jones and the rest of the design team creatively used available space. Their plan was this: “If we took that three-dimensional space, imagined it as a chunk of rock, and carved into it, as wind and water would do, we could create a design that had a very natural quality to it.”47 The museum's entrance faces east to meet the rising Sun, and plantings of corn and beans recall the bounty of the land. Interior spaces, based on circular forms, continue to remind visitors that they are in “a place apart.” The first-level auditorium “evokes a clearing in the woods at night, with vertical wood panels suggesting a dense forest, fiber-optic ceiling lights representing stars in the sky, and wall sconces bearing faces of the moon.”48 Artworks on display sample the tremendous diversity of artistic traditions from people who inhabit the land from the Arctic Circle to the top of South America. And, the artworks capture a shared worldview, in which an omnipresent spirit unites everything—mountains, plains, animals, people— and connects humanity with the universe. “All forms of expression tell of who we are,” explains Truman Lowe, a Native American artist and curator at the museum. “Our art is an attempt to find ourselves.”49 Art, like philosophy, has the possibility of opening us up to ourselves and to our world. It can be our window on a wider world—but only if it is also a mirror, reflecting back something we already recognize. Healing Communities Singing has saved me, taught me, healed me. Judy Collins Traditional cultures understand the power of the arts to heal the community in times of trauma and tragedy. Drumming, dancing, and singing figure prominently in some funeral rituals, making possible both grief and catharsis. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, musicians and actors in the United States rediscovered this essential function of the arts. Art exists, said Richard Kalter of the Maryland Institute College of Art, “to witness the feelings and aspirations” of humanity—to offer an alternative to “military or extreme religious” responses. Preparing to conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony two months after the attacks, Edward Polochick reflected on the capacity of music to “lessen the hurt of what has befallen us.” Feeling blessed to never be without music in his life, Polochick added, “I am also keenly aware of the great privilege of offering people the possibility of healing and comfort through the performance of music.” In New York City, Les Miserables was packed night after night following September 11, 2001. One cast member described what he observed: “Again and again, people came to be wracked and relieved, to undergo some personal catharsis. Such, after all, was an original purpose of theater.” And, one critic added, “This was the show I wanted to see again … I wanted to immerse myself in a stirring tale of ordinary people rising above mankind's inhumanity with compassion and faith.”50 Aristotle understood this essential role for art within the human community. As Langer points out, art helps us sort and understand the roiling emotions that words can neither capture nor calm. As Nazi armored vehicles rolled into Paris in 1940, loud speakers played a Chopin polonaise as an affirmation of the ongoing life and courage of an occupied city and its people. And, music was an early affirmation of repressed emotions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. On September 15, 2001, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra opened its scheduled concert with “God Bless America.” Then, Jeff Stewart stepped out from the ranks of musicians and spoke for the orchestra of the power to heal they knew music held. He offered concert goers the gift of music to lighten their spirits and encourage their hearts. The choral fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ends with these words: “Let me embrace you, O millions. This kiss is for the whole world!” April is the month when Rwandans allow themselves to publicly grieve their 1994 genocide. From the “haunting lyrics” of Dieudonne's music on the radio and in the streets to Jean Paul Samputu's plaintive musical question, “Where were you, God, during the genocide? Why did you abandon us?” the country engages in “collective mourning.” Within each province, thousands of people process from one site to another. Music and memory blend. As author Terry Tempest Williams reports, “The people stop, the music stops, and a story is told about who once lived here, who was killed, how, where, why. There is a moment of silence, and then the music begins, and the procession continues…It is an homage to those who died and those who remain.51 Summary Art appearing on the walls of caves is dated to 30,000 years ago—masterpieces of sophisticated realism, impressive even by today's standards.52 And, 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals fashioned musical instruments—flutes and tubas, triangles and xylophones—from bone. There is even evidence of a bagpipelike instrument made from the bladder of some large animal.53 Art appears to be co-extensive with human existence. What essential function does it perform? Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death … To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self. Madeleine L'Engle American artist Audrey Flack has this to say: Art is a powerful force in the world. It is the visual representation of what we think … what we feel … how we think … how we feel. Art makes life more livable, more beautiful, more comprehensible. It helps us deal with … all that is perishable in the world, and attempt to reach a higher reality—to fill the soul, to excite the mind, to go beyond. Its message cuts through time and space and lasts for centuries. Art is a protest against death.54 We have considered in this chapter the role that beauty, especially the beauty created by visual art, can play in helping us arrive at truth. From the classic understanding of art as mimesis (representation of reality), we have moved through history, exploring Western, Asian, and African art and artists. Like philosophers, artists seem to bridge the distance between the commonsense world of appearances and whatever underlies it. As priestlike figures, artists speak the transcendent to us in a language without words. Though we may not be able to speak the insights we receive in the presence of genuine art, there is a kind of certainty we feel. Art has a language of its own that codifies inner experience, just as language codifies outward experience. Traditional philosophy, relying as it does on language, has its own built-in limitations; knowing what is true may be more a question of seeing truly than of speaking accurately, and art can be the vehicle for a critical kind of knowing. Every culture produces art, and art has a way of signaling new ways of seeing and being. When a society's artistic forms change, we may be fairly confident that society has found a new way of seeing itself and reality. Art takes us out of ourselves and out of our ordinary concerns, and it gives us access to a wider world. Although words may fail us, we should not be misled into thinking that we have learned nothing; real art speaks to us just as truly as words do, and perhaps more deeply. This helps explain why we often keep coming back to the same painting or sculpture, the same symphony or concerto, the same ritual mask or sand garden. As a work of art continues to reveal itself to us, we get ever-new meanings, each one full of richness. When it works, art seems to be a window on a fuller reality. Beauty is truth and truth beauty. If we can understand this, we will have learned something really worth knowing. Once we know what is true and what is real, we are in a position to consider what we value. Part Three, the next and final section, deals with questions of axiology and asks this question: By what values shall I live in the world? We will look at the relationship between the individual and the state, consider the extent to which we are or should be connected with one another, and explore what moral standards are appropriate in the living of an individual life. Before we begin this section, however, let's explore the transition from the modern to the postmodern world and its effect on values. axiology the branch of philosophy dealing with the study of values For Further Thought 1. Are there things you know with certainty that you cannot put into words? If so, what kinds of things are they, and why is it so difficult to verbalize them? Does the fact that they cannot be spoken make them any less certain? 2. What kind of window on a culture does art provide? In other words, what kinds of things can we learn about a culture by studying its art? 3. If we study only the written documents of a culture or only the visual arts, are we getting an incomplete and perhaps inaccurate picture of the culture? Explain. 4. Why do people turn to artistic expression in times of emotional pain or confusion? What does the experience of being a performing artist (even if you are the only audience) provide that seems unavailable outside it? How is it that one can lose oneself in playing the piano or guitar, painting, woodworking, sculpting, or writing? 5. What kind of culture would we have if artists played the role traditionally played by priests? What might our “religious rituals” look like if they were based in art rather than religion? 6. Why do people return time after time to a favorite piece of music or a favorite painting? What is being communicated? 7. Give some thought to what you feel you can be certain about. If you conclude there is something, decide the basis for your certainty. Does aesthetic experience play any role in giving you certainty? 8. Can you think of some examples of art being used for propaganda purposes? (Hint: Remember the “good guy/bad guy” stereotypes. What function is being served by portraying a group of people as “bad guys”? This is clearly a perversion of art, but is it functional? Does it work?) 9. Talk to an artist or read a biography of an artist whose work you know something about. If you are an artist yourself, think about this question: What is it like to create a work of art? What does it cost the artist? What does the artist receive? How does it feel? 10. Have you ever seen a movie or play about an event that you witnessed or even lived through yourself and found your emotional reaction to the staged event stronger than your emotional reaction to the actual event? What, if anything, does this tell us about the relationship between art and truth? 11. What is the sense in which art is a mirror of the culture that produced it? Does this have any connection with questions of truth? Explain. 12. What role does perspective provide in art and in the assessment of reality? What is our feedback mechanism for determining whether our own perspective is accurate or not? Who ultimately decides what an accurate or appropriate perspective is? Who should decide? 13. Why do people differ so profoundly in their opinions of art objects? 14. Who decides when something moves from the category of “mindless garbage” to that of “sheer genius”? How does a person become an “expert” in matters of aesthetic judgment? What kind of knowledge does that person have to have? 15. Are there conditions under which art could be used for purely instrumental purposes (as something to be used rather than admired)? Do we want our art to be useful as well as beautiful? As we move toward the useful and away from the beautiful, is there a point at which an object stops being art and starts being something else? 16. How does “folk art” differ from “fine art”? What do the two art forms have in common? Where do the differences exist? Is folk art, like quilting, a legitimate art form? Why, or why not? 17. Some serious questions about censorship in art are being raised today. Under what circumstances would a work of art, in your judgment, be deserving of censorship? 18. Should we allow the “expert” to determine when a work of art becomes “pornographic”? Current Supreme Court guidelines rely on “community standards,” which seems to imply that something can be pornographic in one community but not pornographic in another. Who should make these judgments, and how should they be made? 19. If artists were the arbiters of truth and were looked to for decisions about what is true and what isn't, do you think our understanding of truth would undergo a radical change? Explain. It might help to consider who we now acknowledge to be arbiters of truth. 20. Think of something that offers you a genuine “aesthetic experience” when you are in its presence (a painting, a piece of sculpture, a piece of music). When you contemplate this art form, do you learn anything you might classify as knowledge or truth? If so, think about the nature of that knowledge. (Note: It may be difficult for you to put what you think you know into words.) For Further Exploration Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. New York: John Day, 1967. Achebe describes what it is like being an artist in a traditional African society. Asimov, Isaac. The Foundation Trilogy. New York: Ballantine, 1983. Asimov offers the saga of a thousand years of a galactic empire (the Foundation) dedicated to art, science, and technology. Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. New York: Vintage, 1953. Herrigel shows why it takes years to learn the art of archery, why it has nothing to do with hitting the target, and why if you learn it you will hit the target every time—even blindfolded. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Random House, 2006. Progressive educators use student artwork to prove that the clones who created them have souls. James, Henry. “The Real Thing.” In The American Novels and Stories of Henry James. New York: Knopf, 1947. Issues addressed in this story are why real people can't portray themselves as effectively as actors can and why a movie can affect us more powerfully than the event on which it was based. Kafka, Franz. “Hunger Artist.” In The Complete Stories and Parables. New York: Schocken, 1983. This short story centers around an artist whose “art” consists of fasting for many days. Langer, Susanne. Philosophical Sketches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962. Langer offers philosophical musings on reality and the value of art in helping us manage our dealings with it. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003. When a professor resigns her position at a Tehran university because of its repressive policies, she invites seven of her best female students to secretly study Western literature in her home. Art meets life as these veiled women discover resonances between their own lives and the lives of the women between the covers of their forbidden books. Plato. The Symposium. Translated by Walter Hamilton. New York: Penguin, 1951. This work contains meditations (some humorous) on beauty. Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy. New York: Anchor, 1989. This historical novel depicts the experience of being an artist (Michelangelo) in a traditional Western society. Yalom, Irven. When Nietzsche Wept. New York: Basic, 1992. This is an imaginary encounter between Joseph Breuer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud (Breuer's student in the emerging field of psychoanalysis); Breuer tries to analyze Nietzsche and ends up being analyzed; a good introduction to Nietzsche's ideas. Notes 1. “The Woodcarver,” in The Way of Chuang Tzu, trans. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1969), 110–111. 2. Abd al-Hayy Moore, Zen Rock Gardening (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1992), 16–34. 3. W. Emmanuel Abraham, “Sources of African Identity,” in Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, vol. 1, eds. Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), 50. 4. Abraham, 51. 5. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (New York: John Day, 1967), 62–63. 6. Achebe. 7. Roger Scruton, “The Philosopher on Dover Beach,” in The Philosopher on Dover Beach (New York: St. Martin's, 1990), 10. 8. Scruton, 49. 9. Plato, the Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 1951), 94. 10. Susanne Langer, “The Cultural Importance of Art,” in Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 88. 11. Langer, 90. 12. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 271. 13. Whitehead, 272. 14. Stewart W. Holmes and Chimyo Horioka, Zen Art for Meditation (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1990), 37. 15. Lynn V. Andrews, Shakkai: Woman of the Sacred Garden (New York: Harper- Collins, 1992), 223–224. 16. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 231–232. 17. Schelling, 222. 18. Schelling, 233. 19. Schelling, 12. 20. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, ed. Will Durant (New York: Ungar, 1955), 105. 21. Schopenhauer, 117. 22. Schopenhauer, 117. 23. Schopenhauer, 150. 24. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Or Hellenism and Pessimism, trans. Wm. A. Haussmann (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). 25. Nietzsche, 105, 107, 111. 26. Nietzsche, 128. 27. Nietzsche, 156. 28. Nietzsche, 173–174. 29. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought: Martin Heidegger, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 74. 30. Heidegger, 36, 39. 31. Heidegger, 61. 32. Heidegger, 71, 72. 33. Heidegger, 78. 34. Arthur Danto, “The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, eds. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 173. 35. Glenn McNatt, “Inside a Flower, Gazing at Stars,” Baltimore Sun, 10 October 2004, 12F. 36. Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (New York: Quill, William Morrow, 1991), 19. 37. Shlain, 24. 38. Shlain, 179. 39. Shlain, 222. 40. Shlain, 230, 233, 236. 41. Gina Pischel, A World History of Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Decorative Arts, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 611–612. 42. Pischel, 649–650. 43. Fred Wilson, in the Baltimore Sun, 1 March 1993. 44. Helen Valdez, in Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, ed. Denis Lynn Daly Heyck (New York: Routledge, 1994), 297. 45. Valdez, 297. 46. Edward Gunts, “Native Spirit,” Baltimore Sun, 21 September 2004, 1C. 47. Gunts, 1C, 2C. 48. Gunts, 2C. 49. Glenn McNatt, “Recognizing the Art of Native Americans,” Baltimore Sun, 21 September 2004, 1C, 2C. 50. Stephanie Shapiro, “Art Emerges from Tragedy, as It Should,” Baltimore Sun, 17 September 2001, E1; Edward Polochick, “Let Music Restore Joy in Our Lives,” Baltimore Sun, 1 November, 2001, A23; Iain McCalman, “Javert's Hunt Comes to an End,” New York Times, 18 May 2003, WK13. 51. Interview with Terry Tempest Williams, Utne, November–December 2008, 53. 52. “The Birth of Cro-Magnon Art,” Baltimore Sun, 23 August 1996, 19A. 53. “Human Origins,” Discover, April 1997, 19. 54. Audrey Flack, “Some Notes on Art and Life,” in Audrey Flack on Painting (New York: Abrams, 1981), 28.