Intro Philosophy study guide 1

I I I . R e a s o n a n d U n r e a s o n

From almost all sides existentialism has been proclaimed a movement of irrationalism. Political liberals contemn the movement on this ground above all others. They will not forget Heidegger’s brief involvement with Nazism and sometimes argue that fascism would be the logical outcome if the tenets of the movement were widely accepted. At the same time Marxists often see in existentialism a last desperate effort of the petite bourgeoisie, a group doomed by the objective march of history but anxious for one last fling. One Marxist, taking up this line of attack, called existentialism a “carnival of subjectivity,” a charge which infuriated Sartre and which his latest major work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, was designed to answer.

On the other hand, a relatively large group of artists, writers, intellectuals, and others have given unstinting praise to the movement precisely because of what they take to be its irrationalism. Members of the beat movement, which is a degenerate form of existentialism for the weak-minded and weak-willed products of America’s educational institutions, presently prefer soporific dope to kicks, the in-itself to the for-itself, Buddha to Sartre. But the Beats’ sympathy for continental existentialism in so far as they see in it a sanction for incoherence and self-pity will not be questioned.

It would, of course, be idle to deny the legitimacy of regarding existentialism as in some sense irrationalistic. Kierkegaard is certainly no blood brother of the Beats, but

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neither was it a country cousin who cried: “Oh, the sins of passion and of the heart—how much nearer to salvation than the sins of reason. . . . Yes, I believe that I would give myself to Satan so that he might show me every abomination, every sin in its most frightful form.”1 Nor have they any reason to feel great hostility toward Sartre, who found Jean Genet, France’s latest self-styled “black saint” (homosexual, petty criminal, police informer, etc.), worthy of seven hundred pages of close and sympathetic analysis.

The antipathy of liberals and Marxists, whose faith in reason is closely allied to their faith in the behavioral sciences and historical progress, is at least as well grounded from their standpoint as the sympathy of the Beats is from theirs. None of the existentialists profess sympathy for liberalism, and Sartre alone among them professes sympathy for Marxism. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, however, Sartre himself attacks Kierkegaard and Jaspers as belonging to “a certain element of the European bourgeoisie which wishes to justify its privileges by claiming a spiritual aristocracy, by fleeing . . . into an exquisite subjectivity and allowing itself to be fascinated by an ineffable present in order to ignore its future.”2 Moreover, his own attempt in the same work to reconcile the ideas propounded in Being and Nothingness with his personal brand of Marxism is incomplete and less than satisfactory as far as it goes.

So much granted, however, it remains to be said that the terms “rationalism” and “irrationalism” are among the most ambiguous in the vocabulary of every civilized people and that absolutely nothing of any real interest has been said so long as the sense in which these terms are used is unspecified. Empiricism, the philosophical movement whose present-day

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members are most vociferous in denouncing existentialism as anti-rationalistic, was not long ago denounced in the same terms; and while some early empiricists bore the label of antirationalist with a strident pride very much as Kierkegaard and sometimes Jaspers have done, others adopted Sartre’s tactic and claimed to be defending true rationality. It is interesting to speculate whether future descendants of the existentialists will not have to carry the banners of reason against some new enemy who dares to conceive the truth differently from them.

In order to make any sense at all out of the controversies which rage around this issue it will be necessary to consider three questions. First, what and how much can mankind expect to know? The answer to this question will depend largely upon one’s theory of being, or ontology. Second, what are the methods by which men may acquire whatever knowledge is possible? The answer to this question will depend upon one’s theory of knowledge, or epistemology. Third, how valuable would the knowledge which man can hope to acquire be to a living human being? The answer to this question will depend upon one’s theory of value, or axiology. In general the type of answer given to any one of these questions is accompanied by a specific type of answer to the others. By limiting the discussion to only the major historical positions and by remaining at a fairly high level of generality, it will thus be necessary to consider only three major movements: the movement known technically in the history of philosophy as rationalism, running from Plato through Descartes to Spinoza and Hegel; the movement known technically as empiricism, running from the seventeenth-century English philosophers Bacon, Hobbes,

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and Locke up to present-day philosophizing in the Anglo-American world; and finally existentialism itself.

P h i l o s o p h i c a l R a t i o n a l i s m

To the first question, “What and how much can man expect to know?” the rationalists answered: Whatever is eternal, necessary, immutable, and universal. The temporal, contingent, mutable, and particular cannot be known. To the second question, “What are the methods by which men may acquire knowledge?” the rationalists answered: Through the mind or intellect. Through the physical senses almost nothing can be known, their role is wholly subsidiary. To the third question, “What value has knowledge for the living individual?” their answer was twofold: Knowledge, they say, is valuable in its own right. Through knowledge, be it the contemplation of eternal Ideas and Aristotelian essences or a vision of things sub specie aeternitatis, the individual experiences the greatest pleasure of which he is capable and becomes immortal. But also knowledge is valuable because through it man learns how to conduct himself in the world of becoming. A good life, like a good political state such as Plato’s Republic, is one modeled upon or patterned after eternal and universal forms.

Two major arguments have been used to prove the existence of eternal objects knowable only through the mind. The first and most important of these is drawn from reflection upon mathematics. The great mathematical invention of the Greeks, who were perhaps the most visually minded people in history, was systematic geometry. In the development of systematic geometry the Greeks were led to adopt the notion of perfect geometrical figures (perfect circles, perfectly straight lines,

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etc.). These, it was said, were the objects of the mathematician’s study, and since systematic geometry actually existed as a science, these objects must exist. Moreover, the science of geometry could not be as exact as it is if the objects under study were constantly changing.

But what is the ontological status of these objects? Where do they exist? They cannot exist in nature or the world of becoming, conceived as the world revealed to the physical senses. All the spherical shapes and straight lines in nature are imperfect. At the same time, it is perfectly obvious that all bodies in nature are subject to change; wind, rain, the touch of human hands, or some other natural event is bound to affect them.

Do they, then, exist in the human imagination? Again the answer is no. For one thing, images in the mind are invariably images of physical realities. The imagination is limited to reproducing elements in the physical world. The blind man cannot imagine colors, and the deaf man cannot imagine sounds. The imagination is free only in the sense that it can combine images of physical things in ways that nature has not done—constructing, for instance, an image of Pegasus by combining the image of a horse and the image of wings. For another thing, the geometer’s objects include figures for which there are not even imperfect copies in nature or in the imagination. The geometer, for instance, knows an abstract triangle, a triangle which is neither a right triangle nor a scalene triangle nor an isosceles triangle. But who can form a mental picture of such a triangle? Similarly, a chiliagon or thousand-sided figure is an object of mathematical calculation; but how does the image of a chiliagon differ from the image of a centagon or hundred-sided figure? Clearly, the

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imagination cannot draw distinctions as sharp as those of the geometer. Consider also the concept of zero. Surely, zero does not exist either in nature or in the imagination. We can, of course, visualize the figure “0” or the word “zero,” but not the thing for which it stands.

Are the objects of mathematical study, then, concepts or ideas, as opposed to images? Do the objects of mathematical speculation reside in the human intellect, as opposed to the human imagination? Again the answer is no. The human mind, as human, is finite and mutable, whereas the objects of mathematical speculation are eternal and unchanging. That the human mind is mutable is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that in order to make inferences it must proceed stepwise. It acts, as the expression “operations of the mind” indicates. In technical language, the human intellect is “discursive.” Besides, if the objects of mathematic speculation were within the human mind, as marbles are within a box, if we already possessed them, why do we speak of grasping or seizing them, of making them ours?

There are only three places where the objects of mathematical knowledge may be located. The first is the heaven of eternal Ideas, a realm which transcends both individual men and nature. This, of course, was Plato’s belief. The second is a nonhuman, nondiscursive, and universal mind such as that in which Aristotle said human beings can participate or such as the Christians believed God’s mind to be. St. Augustine, for instance, eliminated Plato’s transcendental realm of Ideas by conceiving of the Ideas as absorbed in the divine intellect. Thirdly, they might be located in nature—on condition that nature be conceived, not as the world directly revealed to the physical senses, but as a world lying behind or beyond the

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world revealed to the senses and itself accessible only to the intellect. This was roughly the position of Aristotle. In the last chapter it was said that Aristotle located his essences in the world of becoming, but this is not strictly correct if by the world of becoming one means the world revealed to the physical senses. The essences, according to Aristotle, could not be directly apprehended by the senses. This was also the position of Descartes, who was much clearer on this score than Aristotle. The real sun, said Descartes, is the sun of the mathematician or scientist. The sun which appears to the senses, an object of small dimensions and changing colors, is merely an illusory appearance. This was also the position of Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, and nineteenth-century scientism.

Having established to their satisfaction that the objects of mathematical knowledge are eternal and immutable objects, the rationalists did one of two things. Either they declared that all genuine knowledge is mathematical in character or else they declared that nonmathematical knowledge is similar to mathematical knowledge in that its proper objects are eternal and immutable entities which transcend the world and to which man has access only through the intellect.

To support this latter view the second major argument was invoked. This second argument consists in observing that words are singular whereas the physically observable things for which words are commonly said to stand are plural, and that words are constant in meaning whereas the physical objects to which words are applied are mutable. The clearest formulation of this doctrine is found in several of the early Platonic dialogues wherein Socrates attempts to explicate the meaning of words such as “courage” and “temperance.” “Courage,” he says, is one word with a constant meaning; but

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courageous men and courageous acts are many and changing. The meaning of the word cannot, therefore, be found in the mutable and particular world of becoming. Particular beings are referred to by a word only in so far as those particular beings resemble or in some way participate in the object which constitutes the true meaning of the word; properly speaking, the meaning of the term is never to be found in the physically observable world.

It will be noted that as the role of the physical senses is diminished, so is the role of the sensuous world of sights and sounds in which we normally live and about whose reality alone the ordinary man seems to care. But the physical senses and the ordinary man’s world do still have some importance. Aristotle and St. Thomas both declared that nothing is in the intellect which is not first in the senses. The point of this declaration is that man can intuit universal essences only through physical exemplifications of them. Aristotle called this process of intuiting universal essences through individual instances induction, and it is not uncommon for beginning students of Aristotle to seize upon this word “induction” in order to make an empiricist out of him. In fact, however, the Aristotelian use of the word “induction” is wholly different from that of modern-day empiricists. Though he uses the term “induction” and talks a good bit more than Plato about knowledge through the senses, Aristotle, and St. Thomas after him, remain squarely within the Platonic tradition.

This last point is worth elaborating upon. Plato was a believer in preexistence, and according to him at some point prior to physical birth we witnessed the eternal Ideas directly. Unfortunately, just before physical incarnation we passed through the waters of forgetfulness, and in our present

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physical state as prisoners within the body we remember these Ideas only when we behold their imperfect physical copies. This is the substance of Plato’s famous doctrine of “knowledge through reminiscence.” The description in the Symposium of our ascent to the Idea of beauty through love of beautiful bodies and beautiful souls is but an application of it. The Christian rationale for the use of images as an aid to meditation and the Christian doctrine of the mystic ladder by which we mount to God through contemplation of the various degrees of perfection in nature also derive from this source. And so does Aristotle’s doctrine of induction, according to which we must grasp essences through particular physical beings which exemplify them. In every case the physical object has worth, less in itself than as a symbol or indicator of something beyond it. According to one very old Christian doctrine the physical world is but a system of signs all of which point to God.

The chief difference between Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas turns on the nature of the something toward which physical objects ultimately point: transcendental Ideas, universal essences, or God. There are, however, other significant differences in this connection. One is that whereas Plato was by traditional interpretation an extreme dualist who boldly contrasted Being and Becoming, Aristotle and St. Thomas tended to think in terms of degrees of being. For Aristotle essences may be graded according to degree of inclusiveness, from the smallest species to the widest genus. St. Thomas says that God alone truly is; he alone has the full ontological dignity of Being. After God come the angels, and then man, who is a little below the angels and a little above the beasts. This doctrine of the degrees of being is also known as the

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doctrine of “the great chain of being.” Significantly, matter is invariably the last and least of the links in the chain.

Another area of disagreement finds Plato and Aristotle opposed to St. Thomas. Plato and Aristotle stated unequivocally that the rational intellect is man’s highest faculty and that through the intellect man can come to participate in immortality while yet in the body. St. Thomas, as a Christian, could not go this far. Some of the Christian mystics claimed a kind of personal participation in the divinity, but the participation was not ordinarily effected through the intellect and in any case the Catholic Church has constantly denounced mysticism of this type as heretical. The creature cannot merge with the creator. St. Thomas contented himself with listing the intellect as the highest of man’s natural faculties, the so-called theological virtues or faculties of faith, hope, and love being higher still. Through the intellect one can have partial access to God, but the intellect is neither the only mode of access nor in itself a sufficient one. None the less, St. Thomas must be counted among the rationalists. He did not, like St. Augustine, argue that since the fall reason will serve the individual only to the extent that the will has antecedently been turned toward the light by God’s grace. According to St. Thomas the independent exercise of God-given reason can take man a considerable distance along the path to God.

For the inferior grade of knowing which has as its object the mutable, singular, and temporal things in the world of becoming, rationalists employ the term “opinion,” the term “knowledge” being used narrowly and exclusively for the superior grade of knowing. As being is to knowledge, so

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becoming is to opinion. Knowledge is necessary, certain, and universal. Opinion is probable, uncertain, and particular.

Still another set of terms used to distinguish between the two types of knowledge is “a priori” and “a posteriori.” A proposition, regardless of how we are led to entertain it, is said to be a priori if its truth or falsity can be certified without recourse to sense experience. The qualification “regardless of how we are led to entertain it” is important, since even according to the rationalists sense experience will often lead us to entertain a proposition without thereby rendering the knowledge of its truth or falsity any the less a priori. If, for instance, one is led to assert that all men are mortal because one has observed Socrates and other individuals die, it does not necessarily follow that the proposition “All men are mortal” is not a priori. It suffices that the fact of death as observed through the physical senses not be needed to prove its truth. Propositions which are not a priori are, of course, a posteriori. A synonym for a posteriori knowledge is empirical knowledge.

A priori propositions fall into two classes. They are either immediately intuited or else deduced by principles of logic from immediately intuited propositions. According to classical rationalists the statements “Two parallel lines extended indefinitely will never meet” and “Either Socrates is mortal or Socrates is not mortal” are examples of immediately intuited a priori truths. The conclusions of any proof in a mathematical or logical system would be examples of deduced a priori truths.

The distinctive claim of the rationalists, however, is that there are many a priori truths, either directly intuited or deduced, other than those found in mathematical or logical systems as

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these are ordinarily conceived. Descartes, for instance, claimed “I think” is an immediately intuited a priori truth and he claimed that logical principles alone compel us to infer from it “I am.” “I think, therefore I am,” or cogito, ergo sum, is one of the cornerpieces of his philosophy. And by arguments which he believed to be of exactly the same type, though more complex, Descartes claimed to have proved the existence of God, the existence of an external world lying behind the veil of sense appearances, and the fundamental laws of nature which govern the external world. Aristotle claimed to intuit the essential properties of animal species, including man. Spinoza’s chief work, Ethics, consists of a set of definitions, axioms, and theorems after the manner of Euclidean geometry. And Leibniz actually claimed that the day would come when instead of arguing about right and wrong we would simply “sit down and calculate.”

If it can be established that the knowledge of mathematicians has as its basis eternal objects, why should not all knowledge be of the same kind? And if it can be established that words are constant and unchanging in meaning, then it is clear that the true meaning of words cannot be the physical objects to which they are applied. Their true meanings must also be eternal objects.

E m p i r i c i s m

To the question “What can man know?” the empiricist answers: Particular beings and the relationships which obtain among them. To the question “How does man know?” the empiricist answers: Through the physical senses. To the question “Why should man want to know?” the answer is: For

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the sake of power, specifically power to transform the natural and social environment.

The empiricist movement is so overwhelmingly Anglo-American that the expression “British empiricism” for its early stages is almost redundant. During the eighteenth century empiricism was adopted enthusiastically by the Enlightenment thinkers, but they added nothing of importance to the doctrine and it never really took hold on the Continent. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Enlightenment ideas were incorporated by continental thinkers into systems such as humanism, Marxism, and scientism—all of which are more rationalistic than empiricistic.

The originators of empiricism are Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley. The movement achieved maturity with David Hume in the mid-eighteenth century and has survived with vigor up to the present day. All of the important philosophical movements in twentieth-century England and America—pragmatism, positivism, phenomenalism, and the more recent movement known as analytic philosophy—are among its offspring. In its earlier stages empiricism was much more rationalistic than its innovators believed, and at times it has veered toward scientism. From the perspective of the present day, however, its major outlines and its true direction are unmistakable.

It was David Hume who first clearly and without compromise declared that there can be no genuine a priori knowledge outside the field of mathematics or logic and that all knowledge of fact is knowledge of particular beings or the relationships between particular beings. In the peroration to one of his major works Hume tells us that when we pick up a book of philosophy we should look to see whether it contains

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statements of empirical fact or abstract reasoning in mathematics or logic. If not, he says, “commit it to the flames,” for it can contain nothing but “sophistry and illusion.”

It was also Hume who first drew from these premises the logical conclusion that the totality of being was contingent in the sense that man cannot know why it is and cannot rationally attribute to it design or purpose.

Again, it was Hume who most loudly defended the view that all general knowledge of fact is ultimately based upon simple induction, i.e., observation of a repeated or recurrent relationship between two or more kinds of things under similar circumstances. For instance, we know that fire burns because we have observed what happens when we put a match to a piece of paper or put our hands in an open fire. We could never know this simply by intuiting the essence of fire, as Aristotle presumably believed. Nor could we know that this was generally the case from a single experiment, as Aristotle also appeared to believe. If the event fire had been conjoined to the event burning only once in human experience there would be no way of knowing whether this was the result of a law of nature or whether it was a mere accident. It is only because fire and burning have been observed to be regularly or repeatedly conjoined in experience that we can establish the truth of the general proposition that fire burns.

Finally, it was Hume who most insisted that all general knowledge of fact, knowledge of the so-called laws of nature, is merely probable. Even if two kinds of events have always been regularly conjoined in the past, there is no guarantee that they will continue to be conjoined in the future. The principle

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of induction by which we infer that types of events conjoined in the past will continue to be conjoined in the future is the foundation of our reasoning, but as Sartre said of an individual’s choice of values it is a “foundation without foundation.” The principle itself cannot be justified. We cannot know that being or nature is necessary or eternal, as Aristotle believed. And although there may be a God, we can have no knowledge of him or his purposes. We cannot, therefore, appeal to him, as did Descartes, in order to guarantee that the course of nature will remain uniform throughout all time.

The chief contribution of later empiricists was to provide a more plausible answer than Hume to the arguments whereby rationalists attempted to prove the existence of eternal objects or universals knowable only to the intellect. Elements of the answer can be found among the earlier empiricists, but it is chiefly twentieth-century empiricists, especially twentieth-century logical positivists, who worked out the final answer.

The first of the rationalist arguments was based upon the actual existence of mathematical and logical systems whose objects are neither physically observable things nor entities in the human mind and whose propositions are eternal and necessary truths. The second of their arguments was based upon the observation that the meaning of words is one and unchanging whereas the physically observable things which in ordinary life are denoted by these words are many and mutable. The empiricists answer both arguments in roughly the same way, but it will simplify the exposition to consider them separately and to begin with the answer to the second argument.

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One part of the empiricist answer consists in pointing out that the rationalists have their facts wrong. The meaning of words is not necessarily either one or unchanging. Words are frequently ambiguous and they often take on new or different meanings in the course of time. The modern concept of courage is very different from that of the Greeks; and for the Greek term translated into English as “temperance” or “moderation” there is no precise equivalent in any of the modern languages. Had Socrates not been so convinced that every word had one unchanging meaning, he would perhaps have seen that the word “meaning” itself is ambiguous and that once one of the ambiguities in this term is cleared up, there is no longer any reason for assuming that words refer to eternal objects.

The ambiguity in question is that between meaning as “intension” and meaning as “extension.” Roughly speaking, the extension of a term is the set of objects denoted by the term; the intension of a term is a human conception of some set of properties regarded as common to the objects denoted by the term and setting them off from other objects. The term “swan,” for instance, means extensionally all of the individual birds which the term is used to refer to, while the intension of the term is our conception of some set of properties common and unique to these birds by virtue of which we consider ourselves justified in using the term “swan” to refer to them.

The extension of the term “swan” is obviously multiple and changing, but so is the intension. For a child the intension of the term “swan” probably consists of a set of properties such as whiteness, having a long neck, floating on ponds in public parks, etc. For the zoologist, on the other hand, the intension will be an altogether different set of properties. Moreover, if

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the zoologist found a more convenient principle of classification than the one currently employed or if through a slow evolutionary process the beings we now call swans were to change their fundamental properties, even the zoologist’s intension of the term would change.

None the less the intensional meanings of a term are ordinarily many times fewer than the extensional meanings; and the intensional meanings of a word ordinarily long outlast the lifetime of any individual object comprised in its extension. Swans have a very short life span; the current biological intension of the term “swan” has outlasted many generations of swans and will probably outlast many more. Socrates’ mistake, therefore, was to have failed to distinguish clearly between the extension and intension of a term and to have attributed absolute constancy and uniqueness to the relatively constant and relatively unique intensional meaning of a term.

An understanding of the empiricist position with respect to Aristotle’s theory of definition will further clarify the issue. Aristotle originated the idea that a proper definition will provide a list of properties common to all the objects denoted by a term and which, if taken jointly, exclude from the extension of the term all other objects. His own definition of man as a rational animal is of this sort. All men are rational animals, and no beings but men have both the properties of animality and rationality. This kind of definition is known as definition by genus and specific difference. The class of animals is the genus to which men belong and rationality is what makes them different or sets them apart from other animals. Up to this point the empiricist finds nothing objectionable. When, however, Aristotle goes on to say that

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the specific difference is the necessary and eternal essence of whatever is being defined and that the specific difference of a thing is that property without which it would cease to be what it is, the empiricist raises his voice in protest.

In the first place, evolutionary theory has once and for all exploded the doctrine of fixed species; present-day human beings are the offspring of irrational animals and there is no guarantee that our own offspring will not revert to a state of irrationality. No class of beings has necessary or eternal properties in this sense.

In the second place, it is pure nonsense to say that the essence of a thing is that without which it would cease to be what it is, if one means thereby that things have a given and predetermined nature which could not conceivably be altered. To say that a thing would cease to be what it is if it lost a certain property is either to utter nonsense or to express awkwardly the simple fact that we have so chosen to use a word that if something failed to possess that property the word would no longer be used to designate it. It may well be, to stay with the example of man, that if we encountered a being otherwise like man but without reason we would refuse to use the term “man” to refer to it. Similarly, if we knew that the present race of human beings would revert to irrationality, we might very well say that man will cease to be man. But in neither case would we be saying anything about an eternal or unchanging property of the beings presently comprised in the extension of the word “man.”

In the third place, most things have more than one specific difference. The beings denoted by the word “man” are distinguished from other animals by a large variety of properties other than rationality. Man is the only animal who

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cooks his own food, the only animal who can make love all the year round, the only animal who knows he is going to die, the only animal who makes promises, the only animal who laughs, and so on. Who, then, is to say which of these various specific differences is the essence of mankind and on what grounds? For Gabriel Marcel, in whose system the notion of fidelity is central, a definition of man as the being who makes promises would be more adequate than a definition of man as a rational animal. For Adam Smith man was the bartering animal; never, he said, had he observed two dogs get up on their hind legs and exchange bones. Ontological considerations alone can never decide which of the various specific differences that characterize man ought to be regarded as the essential or defining property of the human species.

To say, therefore, that the essence of man is rationality can mean only some one or some combination of three things. (1) The beings ordinarily denoted by the term “man” have been observed to possess the property of rationality as a specific difference. (2) The speaker or other users of the term “man” would refuse to apply it to beings who lacked rationality. (3) Of all the properties which set man off from other animal species rationality is the one which the speaker, given his value orientation and his fund of knowledge, regards as most important, most interesting, or most valuable. To use the term “essence” to mean anything else would be to commit a gross logical blunder.

The empiricist answer to the argument based upon mathematics and logic is similar, but slightly more complex. Berkeley was the first of the empiricists to deal clearly and consistently with the problem of mathematical terms.

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According to Berkeley mathematical terms do stand for particular images or ideas and through them for particular physical objects. When for instance, we pronounce the word “triangle,” an image of a triangle is evoked in the mind, and by virtue of that image we are able to apply the term properly to things in the world. The fact that mental entities, ideas or images, are always particular does not have the importance rationalists attribute to it. To serve as a symbol of the many different triangles in nature it is not necessary that the mental image be exactly identical to each or all of the triangles in nature. Nothing prevents us from using a particular image of a triangle to stand for an indefinite number of physical triangles which only roughly approximate to the image, and nothing prevents us from annexing an image to a word. The word, the particular image in the mind, and the innumerable triangles in nature can be linked together by a personal decision or by social convention.

Later empiricists have pointed out many inadequacies in Berkeley’s answer to the rationalists. One of these is that he has not explained the meaning of mathematical terms which do not have and apparently cannot have any image or physical object annexed to them either by convention or by personal decision. The term “zero” is one of these, and in logic there are many others, especially words like “not,” “or,” and “and.” Another inadequacy is that frequently when we employ mathematical terms there is no mental imagery at all, even though there might be. In fact modern-day mathematicians are notoriously poor visualizers. None the less, Berkeley’s largely undeveloped suggestion that human conventions or personal decisions are the clue to the meaning of mathematical terms is at the root of the modern-day empiricist answer to the problem.

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According to contemporary empiricists, mathematical and logical propositions are necessarily and eternally true, not because they deal with necessary and eternal objects, but because human beings have decided that they will be necessarily and eternally true. In technical language, a priori truths, i.e., truths established without recourse to sense experience, are necessarily and eternally true because they are tautological or analytic, i.e., they say nothing about the world. They merely express a resolution or decision on the part of some individual or some group to use terms in certain ways. William James put the matter well when he said that a priori truths are merely eternal. Like Kant, the empiricists discover the source of universal and necessary truths in human subjectivity, but like the existentialists though in another sense they have pushed this Kantian view in a direction Kant would have found most distasteful. Kant retained the rationalistic conviction that the human mind was essentially the same in all individuals. The empiricists do not. It is not mankind as such, but individuals and groups within mankind who are responsible for there being necessary truths.

An example will help to make the empiricist position clear. The statement “All bachelors are unmarried men” is an a priori truth; nobody would conduct a survey of bachelors to verify it. At the same time it is an analytic truth or tautology; it gives us no information whatsoever about bachelors. Furthermore, it is because the statement is analytic or tautological that it is a priori; obviously recourse to experience is not required to verify a statement which says nothing about experience. In what sense, then, is this statement eternally and necessarily true? According to the rationalist, it is eternally and necessarily true because there is an idea or essence of bachelorhood and because an

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examination of that idea or essence reveals that it contains within it as components the ideas or essences of manhood and celibacy. According to the empiricist, all that one can possibly mean by saying that this statement is eternally and necessarily true is that social convention has decreed that the term “bachelor” be used to designate only unmarried men and that the person who denied that bachelors are unmarried men would be very rudely received.

Nothing absolutely prevents society from deciding to change the meaning of words. There is, of course, no good reason that society should change the conventions governing the use of the term “bachelor.” But there are many cases in which society does decide to change the meanings of words, with the result that statements which were once a priori truths cease to be true a priori. An example is the expression “pure water.” Once by this expression nothing was meant except that the water was clear or not muddy. Since the time of Pasteur, however, “pure water” has come to mean water free of germs noxious to the human organism. With this shift of meaning the statement “Pure water is clear water” has ceased to be true a priori. Today, even muddy water could properly be called pure.

Consider now an a priori statement which exemplifies a logical truth. An example would be: “Either John was born in 1950 or he was not born in 1950.” This statement, like “All bachelors are unmarried men” is obviously a priori; no one would think of examining John’s birth certificate in order to prove it. It is no less clearly analytic or tautological; it tells us nothing about John or the world in general. Again, the statement is a priori because it is tautological; since it tells us nothing about the world, empirical investigation could not

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possibly establish its truth. What, then, is meant by saying that this statement is eternally and necessarily true? The empiricist answer to this question is much the same as their answer to the similar question about “All bachelors are unmarried men.” Any statement of the form “Either A is B or A is not B,” say the empiricists, is true simply because of the rules governing the combination of words into sentences and the conventional usage of terms like “either,” “or,” and “not.” Statements of this form are not true because eternal Ideas or Aristotelian essences are related to one another according to some ontological pattern which we intuit. The person who denied the truth of “Either John was born in 1950 or he was not born in 1950” should not be accused of lack of insight into eternal verities, but rather of misunderstanding or misusing language.

This last example permits us to understand the empiricist position on logic and mathematics. Logical and mathematical systems are nothing more than sets of verbal symbols manipulated according to man-made rules. Aristotelian logic and Euclidean geometry are only two of these systems. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a large number of others have come into existence, and there is no limit to the number which could be constructed. But all of them are alike in that they are analytic or tautological. They say nothing about the world, at least not so long as they remain purely logical or mathematical. Not all of them, of course, abide by widespread social conventions; some of them are highly idiosyncratic creations of individual men. But they are all alike in that what makes them a priori is some sort of human decision to use symbols in a certain way.

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It is a tribute to the power of the rationalist tradition that talk about eternal and necessary truths still remains in vogue, even among empiricists; but it would conduce to clarity if the empiricists would simply quit using such language altogether and instead of telling us what the terms “eternal” and “necessary” really mean flatly declared that even a priori, analytic truths are neither eternal nor necessary. Their position, however, is clear. There are words, there are usages for these words determined by convention or individual decision, and there are things in the world. There are also sentences and human rules for the formation of sentences. And to understand the meaning and import of a priori truths it is these things alone which should be taken into account, not Platonic Ideas, Aristotelian essences, the divine intellect, or some mysterious order behind the flux of observable events.

If some a priori truths and some logical or mathematical systems appear to be eternally and necessarily true, it is only because the social conventions which make them true are so firmly established and their practical utility so evident that we cannot easily imagine a change in those conventions. As the wheel is an early invention of mankind much needed for purposes of transportation, so are certain logical and mathematical systems early inventions of mankind much needed for purposes of communication and calculation; and if those systems are eternal and necessary, it is only in the sense that the wheel is eternal and necessary. It is conceivable that someday man could dispense altogether with the wheel; similarly, it is conceivable that someday man will be able to dispense with Euclidean geometry for purposes of land survey. A better system might be discovered. Already man has learned that Euclidean geometry is not a satisfactory instrument for the exploration of astronomical space, any

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more than the wheel is a satisfactory instrument for transportation by sea.

With this summary of empiricist epistemology in mind, it is time to turn to an examination of empiricist ontology. As noted earlier, empiricism has often veered toward scientism, but its epistemology demands that it move in another direction and in fact it has. Scientism holds that the world revealed by the senses, the world of colors and sounds and of everyday objects like tables and trees, is an illusory appearance. The true world is very different from it. Colors and sounds are not really qualities of objects; they are vibrations in the ether. Tables and chairs are not really solid objects; they are collocations of atoms occupying a certain region of space which they do not even begin to fill. This doctrine can be traced back to the philosophical school of antiquity known as atomism, but it entered the modern world through seventeenth-century science.

Descartes gave the doctrine its clearest and most logical formulation. God, said Descartes, is not a deceiver. Whatever, therefore, can be clearly and precisely conceived must exist, and whatever cannot be clearly and precisely conceived cannot truly exist. The human mind cannot clearly and precisely conceive physical objects with qualities such as color and heat; the human mind is so made that it can conceive clearly and distinctly nothing but entities susceptible of mathematical calculation. Heat, therefore, must be a mathematically measurable motion of molecules, colors and sounds measurable vibrations in the ether, and so on for the other directly unmeasurable qualities of objects observed through the physical senses. Galileo held to much the same doctrine. God, he said, is a master mathematician, and

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mathematics the language of the world. Since you cannot square or take the cube root of blue, blue is not in the world. It is only a subjective impression in us.

The essence of scientism is that the real world is not the world revealed to the physical senses, but a world more congenial to the mathematical or rational intellect of man lying behind the physically observable world and into which we can see only with the mind’s eye.

The later and more popular forms of scientism are nineteenth-century materialism, for which many philosophers reserve the term “scientism,” and Marxism. Marxism is scientistic not only through its alliance with nineteenth-century materialism, but also through its faith in the existence of a pattern of historical development which is not directly observable and which cannot be known by simple induction. In these later forms of scientism the reference to God drops out—a fact which inspired Sartre to say that though God is dead man wants to go on living as though nothing had changed. If there is no God to guarantee the pattern behind observable events or to endow man with a mind suited to discovering that pattern, what reason is there to believe either that the pattern exists or that we can know it? Einstein, who realized better than Descartes and the nineteenth-century materialists how beastly complicated the order of things is, again invoked the deity to justify his faith that the order exists. “God may be sophisticated,” Einstein said, “but he is not evil.” The pattern behind the scenes is there and with enough patience man can discover it.

The true empiricist, by contrast, holds that the real world is the world presented to the senses and that the unobservable entities of the scientist are merely “logical constructs” or

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useful conceptual tools by which it is possible to calculate more precisely the relationships among observable objects. The technical name for this doctrine is “phenomenalism,” and as the name indicates, it is an attempt to reinstate what Kant and the philosophers of scientism call “phenomena” or “appearances” as the ultimate realities.

The empiricist epistemology does not necessarily exclude the possibility of there being an orderly mathematical pattern behind observable things; but except by the most nimble sort of mental gymnastic it is difficult to see how an empiricist could consistently affirm either that a pattern behind the scenes does actually exist or that the mind could know it.

For the empiricist the only knowable natural order is the order in, not behind, observable events. Natural laws are ultimately nothing but the regular conjunction of observable kinds of things and events. If “faith in reason” is, as Whitehead says, “the faith that at the basis of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery,”3 then the empiricist is not a rationalist. Things have no basis, no ground, no bottom; but if we persist none the less in talking about a basis or a ground or a bottom of things, let us at least admit that it is an absolute mystery.

Furthermore, the empiricist is not logically justified in imputing to nature more order than has actually been observed. William James and his successors have made themselves the special guardians of this tenet of empiricist ontology. James saw the world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” a disorderly sequence of specific causal patterns without any master plan. He decried “monism,” by which he meant the theory that the universe constitutes a single bloc whose unity was guaranteed by a few simple and universally

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applicable natural laws. To monism he opposed his own doctrine of “pluralism.”

So much for empiricist ontology. The next question is what kind of value does empirical knowledge have. The classic statement of the empiricist theory about the value of knowledge is that of Francis Bacon, who declared simply that “knowledge is power.” The kind of power in question is largely the power to act upon and to modify the world, but this formula can be understood in two ways. For the ordinary man who takes the rough outlines of his natural and social environment for granted, empirical knowledge is valuable because through it he comes into possession of certain material devices which contribute to his wealth, pleasure, and prestige. Knowledge means television sets, automobiles, automatic washing machines, gray flannel suits, and ranch houses.

As a matter of historical record many of the major empiricist philosophers have been ordinary men, and the empiricists of the present generation are very ordinary indeed. Most philosophers of the present generation in England and America have gravitated to the analytic movement, according to which the practice of philosophy itself is nothing more than an innocent pastime in which a man may take pleasure, by which he may earn a living, and as a result of which he could not conceivably incur animosity from any quarter.

The analysts have taken over from the logical positivists of a few decades back the contention that statements of value are either meaningless or disguised factual claims which in the interests of clarity ought to be reformulated. At the same time they have propounded the view that the major philosophical issues of the past have either been solved or dissolved by

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linguistic analysis and that nothing remains for the philosopher to do except to clear up a few relatively minor linguistic ambiguities. Accordingly, they do not take up an official position with respect to any question of value, not even the value of empirical knowledge. It is only by observing their practice that one can place them on the side of the ordinary man who finds knowledge valuable only in so far as it contributes to personal comfort and security.

The second interpretation of Bacon’s dictum is that of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, of nineteenth-century utilitarian liberals such as John Stuart Mill, and of twentieth-century pragmatists such as John Dewey. For them empirical knowledge is valuable because it represents man’s only hope of progressively mastering nature and rationally reorganizing society. Knowing for them means human progress, not merely individual well-being.

Common to both the conservative and the liberal wing of the empiricist movements, however, is the view that empirical methods may be applied to the understanding of social institutions and of human nature. Just as the earlier stages of empiricism coincided with the rise of the modern physical sciences, so its later stages coincided with the rise of the behavioral sciences.

Also common to both wings of the empiricist movement is the view that happiness or contentment, not existential intensity, is the ultimate goal of human endeavor. Pragmatism is often rightly regarded as a movement favoring the active life, but it is most often a smooth, unimpeded form of activity that pragmatists favor. According to James, the whole “intellectual apparatus” of mankind has as its sole purpose the resolution of conflicts between the individual’s instincts or

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between the individual and his environment. It is simply an instrument by which the organism is restored to a state of internal and external equilibrium.

The chief difference between the two wings is that the conservative empiricist either does not believe that an understanding of social institutions and human nature can be used to benefit mankind or does not much care. The liberal empiricist for his part both believes and cares.

Also involved, however, is a difference of opinion about the status of value judgments. The conservative wing argues that value judgments are obviously neither statements about a regular conjunction of natural events nor a priori statements such as are found in logic and mathematics, from which it follows that value judgments must be meaningless. The liberal wing, on the other hand, argues that most value judgments are obviously meaningful and obviously not a priori statements, concluding that value judgments must be a special kind of empirical proposition which the behavioral sciences could conceivably confirm or disconfirm.

The distance between the two wings has been narrowed somewhat by admissions from the conservative side that value judgments are often disguised empirical propositions, asserting implicitly that something is a useful means to an end. If, for instance, someone says that democracy is the best form of government, he may mean simply that democracy is the form of government which best conduces to universal well-being. And this is, in principle at least, an empirical proposition. None the less, the vast majority of present-day empiricists remain highly dubious both about the meaningfulness of value judgments and also about the propriety of philosophers’ making value judgments. If, they

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say, value judgments are empirical propositions, then the behavioral scientist rather than the philosopher is the man to deal with them.

T h e E x i s t e n t i a l i s t A l t e r n a t i v e

The existentialists answer the question “What can man know?” by saying that man can know the human condition. To the question “How can man know?” their answer is: by intuitive insight resulting from affective experiences such as anguish. To the question “What is the value of knowledge?” they answer that a proper understanding of the human condition is essential to the experience of existentialist values, the only values genuinely available to mankind.

The answer to the first of these questions is overly simplified and could be misleading. The rationalists say that man can know nothing but the eternal and the universal. The empiricists say that man can know nothing but matters of empirical fact and man-made a priori truths. The existentialists do not, however, say that man can know nothing but the human condition. Their position is rather that nothing but the human condition is ultimately worth knowing. They often deny that an alleged object of knowledge exists, and they often deny that the object could be known if it did exist. But the essence of their position is much more likely to be that even if the object existed and even if it could be known, the knowledge of this object would be without human significance. Existentialism is first and foremost an axiology, or theory of value.

Sartre, for instance, does not believe in the existence of God, and if he did he would certainly agree with Christian existentialists, who say that man cannot have an adequate

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knowledge of the divine nature. Yet, as he has repeatedly declared, emphasis should be placed upon the fact that even if God did exist and even if man could know God, nothing would be changed. Since man is free, he must choose his own values and take upon himself the responsibility for his choice. He cannot shift this responsibility to God. The rationalist who says that knowledge of eternal objects is valuable because the good life in the world of becoming should be modeled upon the eternal objects has simply forgotten that finitude means freedom and that freedom means man must choose for himself.

Similarly, few existentialists have shown much interest in determining whether abstract ideas have any ontological status, and none of them has hailed the empiricist attempt to reduce Platonic Ideas or Aristotelian essences to linguistic conventions. Most often they simply ignore the problem, apparently allowing that abstract ideas do have some sort of being. Heidegger goes so far by way of concession to the rationalists as to house abstract ideas in a special region of being. The principal existentialist argument is that whether abstract ideas exist or not they are uninteresting and unimportant to the existing individual who has to make concrete decisions.

Again, the existentialists agree with the anti-scientism of the empiricists; even more than the empiricists they are prone to insist that the totality of being has no ground and that there is no pattern or system of order lying beyond what we directly observe which explains the visible sequence of events. But even on this point there are exceptions. Kierkegaard, for instance, declared that nature does exist as a unitary system, adding simply that the system exists for God alone, not for

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man who is tied to the here and now. And of the majority, who wholeheartedly reject monism and scientism, few show any great interest in tracing the implications of this stand so far as it concerns the status and knowability of laws of nature. Are laws of nature merely observed regularities among different kinds of things in the world? Or are they, Kantian-fashion, forms imposed upon a nameless and shapeless matter? Sartre and Heidegger lean strongly toward a Kantian interpretation, but it would be hazardous to say much more on the subject. All existentialists agree, however, that knowledge of the laws of nature has no human value. Television and automobiles have not made man happy, and the chief accomplishment of medical science has been to prolong senility. Countries such as Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States with their high level of material prosperity and long average life span are also countries with an extremely high incidence of suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, and dope addiction.

The existentialist arguments against the behavioral sciences have a similar focus. The value of psychoanalysis has yet to be proved; no satisfactory study has yet been made showing that the rate of recovery for persons treated on the couch is higher than the rate of recovery among persons with similar ailments who have received no treatment at all. Experimental psychologists have successfully predicted the behavior of rats and of certain types of human behavior closely resembling that of rats. Sociologists have successfully predicted which segments of the population are most likely to buy striped toothpaste or powdered coffee. But neither the experimental psychologists nor the sociologists have much else to show for their efforts. And so on down the line of the behavioral sciences.

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To be sure, the existentialists explain the failure of the behavioral sciences by asserting the necessary unpredictability of human behavior in so far as it depends upon choices of vital concern to the individual. If a sociologist can successfully predict the proper time and place to market striped toothpaste, this is only because the choice of a dentifrice is a matter of little importance and most persons are quite willing to allow that choice to be made for them. None the less, even here axiological considerations predominate over ontological considerations. The existentialist does not say simply that since man is free human behavior cannot be predicted. The existentialist also says that since man is free he ought to take consciousness of the fact and act in a manner appropriate to a free man. Specifically, this means that although freedom is inalienable, it is still possible for the individual to choose that his behavior be dictated by others, thus permitting himself to become a manipulable and predictable object for the social engineer. This kind of behavior is what the existentialists call “flight from freedom,” an attempt to make life easy which succeeds only in depriving life of existential intensity. And it is their opposition to the flight from freedom, far more than their commitment to the ontological doctrine that freedom is ultimately inalienable, which lies at the source of their attitudes toward the behavioral sciences.

In sum, the proper object of human concern for the existentialists is not God, abstract ideas, laws of nature, or empirical knowledge of human beings. What man should strive to know is the human condition. And by an understanding of the human condition the existentialists do not mean knowledge of human history, of man’s natural and social environment, or of the so-called laws of human

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behavior. An understanding of the human condition is rather a knowledge of certain general traits of human existence which remain the same in all ages: of man’s contingency, particularity, and freedom; of man’s fundamental aspirations; and of the basic ways in which the individual can relate to the world and to other human beings.

With regard to the means by which man can know what is worth knowing, the existentialists are closer to the rationalists than to the empiricists. It is characteristic of them to assert that the fundamental features of the human condition are “ontological necessities” which can and must be known a priori. Their language itself often smacks of old-fashioned rationalism. In this connection, therefore, two problems arise. How does the method of the existentialists differ from that of the rationalists? And how can the existentialists defend their claim to know a priori certain necessary features of human existence?

Between the existentialists and the rationalists there are two important differences. First, for almost all rationalists intuitive insight is exclusively the function of the intellect; the passions, it was said, obscure the intellect. The existentialist, on the other hand, either denies that any sharp distinction exists between intellect and passion or else regards the latter as a condition for the successful operation of the former. The human condition is revealed to us in anguish. Second, almost all traditional philosophers regarded the acquisition of knowledge as an act of grasping or apprehending some external object. What is known lies outside the knowing subject, and in the act of knowing the individual comes into possession of the known for the first time. The existentialists, on the contrary, maintain that the insights delivered in the

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experience of anguish are merely a rendering explicit of a state of affairs in which the individual is himself deeply involved and that in some sense the individual already knows what anguish reveals to him.

The historical origins of the existentialist position are not easy to trace. Ironically, however, Plato himself with his doctrine of knowledge by reminiscence must be held partially responsible. A less distant source is St. Augustine, who held not only that God, the true object of human knowledge, is to be discovered in the inmost recesses of the human soul, but also that man can know the truth only if God first grants him the privilege of believing without understanding. Still nearer in time is Pascal, who said “the heart has its reasons which the mind does not know.”

Whatever the sources, the logical connection between the view that knowing is an act of making explicit what we already know and the view that passion is a condition of knowing becomes clear when one remembers that for the existentialist what is known is the human condition and that the index of involvement in the human condition is passion or intensity. When the tendency to incorporate into one’s very concept of a thing the necessary conditions of its existence is taken into account, one can also readily understand why some existentialists should prefer to say that passion is a mode of knowing rather than merely a condition of knowing. Wealth, for instance, is perhaps most properly regarded as a necessary condition of happiness, happiness itself being a subjective state of enjoyment or contentment. Many persons, however, do not bother to keep the concept of happiness as a subjective state rigidly separate from the concept of wealth. For them,

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wealth is not simply a condition of happiness; it is a part of happiness.

The sense in which we already know what is explicitly revealed in the experience of anguish is by no means clear. Through Freud the notion of the unconscious has become exceedingly popular in the twentieth century. When, therefore, the existentialists say that anguish merely makes explicit what we have in some sense known prior to the experience, the contemporary reader finds nothing exceptionally puzzling in this and almost irresistibly understands that what was already known was known by a kind of Freudian unconscious. This interpretation could lead to serious misunderstandings. For one thing, Freud’s unconscious consists among other things of biological needs or innate drives, in which the existentialists do not believe. In the existentialist view what makes man go is not a set of innate drives or biological needs but free and fully conscious choices. Man is not driven by animal exigencies; he makes himself by his own choices. For another thing, several existentialists have denied the existence of the unconscious as an ontological entity. Sartre even argues that the concept of the unconscious is self-contradictory.

Is it then possible, without invoking the notion of the unconscious, to make sense out of the contention that we know what is revealed through the experience of anguish prior to that experience even though we have no explicit awareness of it? It would seem that we can in either of two ways.

One way in which we may know something without being explicitly aware of it is illustrated by the act of remembering. It frequently happens that one knows another person’s name

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without being able to think of it. A second way is illustrated in certain problem-solving situations. It frequently happens that a person has present to mind all the ideas needed to resolve a problem on which he is working, that the solution is somehow there in his mind the way the conclusion of an argument is in the premises, but that he is unable to articulate the solution. In this case, as in the first, we often say that we know something even though there is no explicit awareness of it.

No doubt, these two kinds of situations have helped to give rise to the concept of the unconscious. Since one of the criteria of knowing is having explicitly present to mind and being able to articulate what is known, we tend to say that we do not know the name or the answer to the problem. But since there are other criteria of knowing which permit us to say that we do know the name or do know the answer to the problem, we introduce the idea of an unconscious. On one level of consciousness we know; on another level we do not.

There is no need, however, to invoke the idea of the unconscious to explain these situations. There is no more reason to believe that the solution to a problem is literally in the mind so long as we are unable to articulate it than there is to believe that the conclusion of an argument is literally in the premises. And the same remark applies to the name we have forgotten. The mind is not a box, and to say that something is “in” the mind could be a purely metaphorical mode of speech.

Since, therefore, many existentialists do not believe in the unconscious as an ontological reality, it would probably be best to interpret their doctrine that anguish merely makes explicit or fully conscious what we already know in the light of the above remarks. Their probable intent is to suggest that

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in the experience of anguish either facts which we have always known in the noncontroversial sense of “to know” take on a new significance and we draw from them their full logical conclusions, or else facts which we had known before are recalled. An example of drawing the logical implications of what we already know would be the anguish before the here and now. We all know that we are tied to a limited region of space and time; but how many of us have drawn from this simple item of knowledge the logical implications which the existentialists claim to have drawn from it? An example of recall might be the anguish of freedom. All of the existentialists insist that man can and frequently does conceal from himself fundamental facts about his being. We “flee” from freedom by refusing to focus attention upon it, by deliberately diverting the mind to other things. The anguish of freedom could therefore be produced by a simple act of recall.

How does the existentialist support his claim to have an a priori intuition of necessary features of human existence? According to the empiricist we can know nothing about mankind except by induction from particular instances of human behavior in determinate natural and social conditions. If in the past men have always behaved in a certain way in a certain type of situation, then one can infer with a high degree of probability that they will continue to behave that way in similar situations in the future. But no empiricist would admit that a universal pattern of behavior is an “ontological necessity ” or that any pattern of human behavior can be known a priori.

It would be possible to present the existentialist argument by taking any one of the features of the human condition revealed in the three basic types of anguish as a basis of

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discussion. The issues will emerge most clearly, however, by considering the fact of freedom. The existentialist cannot and does not pretend to prove that man is free by logical argument or by empirical observation. Freedom, he insists, is a directly and immediately intuited fact of human existence, and the person who does not intuit it cannot be made to accept it by a process of reasoning. The existentialist, therefore, limits himself to showing that the empiricist contention according to which man is not free is itself incapable of rational demonstration, that if it can be known that man is not free this will have to be known by an intuitive insight of exactly the same character as the one by which the existentialist claims to establish human freedom.

Belief in determinism is closely associated in empiricist thinking with belief in the validity of the principle of induction. If, says the empiricist, two kinds of events have been uniformly conjoined in the past, then we have good reason to believe that they will continue to be conjoined in the future. If human beings have behaved in certain ways in the past, then they will continue to behave in the same way under similar conditions in the future. They are not free to do otherwise. What, then, asks the existentialist, is the status of these statements? What reason has the empiricist for believing them to be true? If he cannot present an argument for these statements he is in no position to criticize the existentialist for maintaining their contraries.

Since the time of Hume, of course, empiricists have recognized that the principle of induction and along with it the belief in determinism cannot be established by rational argument unless one invokes God to guarantee that the course of nature will remain uniform. And since they are unwilling

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to do this, they have usually admitted that there is no argument by which their position can be confirmed.

Hume’s view was that man believes in the principle of induction and in determinism because he cannot help doing so, because it is psychologically impossible for him to do otherwise. To this the existentialist retorts by saying that if it were psychologically impossible for man not to believe in determinism then he would not be subject to the anguish of freedom, which in fact he is. Hume conceded that in the quiet of his study a man could imagine the course of nature not remaining uniform, but added that his doubts on this subject would be merely hypothetical and could not be maintained over any period of time. To this the existentialists reply that the anguish of freedom is a concrete fact of life from which no man ever really escapes.

The logical positivists and pragmatists have typically taken a different position. They claim, not that men are psychologically compelled to believe in determinism, but rather that men ought to act as if determinism were a fact. When they say that the course of nature will remain uniform or that men will behave in the future as they have behaved in the past, they are not asserting the truth of a factual proposition. They are rather exhorting us to persist in the search for undiscovered uniformities and to utilize the results of past scientific inquiry for the purpose of predicting and controlling future behavior. The grounds for so exhorting us are purely pragmatic: it is only by acting in this way that we may hope to contribute to human progress. Here, too, however, the existentialist has a retort. How can the logical positivist or the pragmatist support his contention that by acting as if the course of nature would remain constant we

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advance the cause of human progress, without presupposing that the course of nature will remain uniform? If the course of nature does not remain uniform, then the results of past scientific inquiry will be utterly useless for the purpose of prediction and control and faith in the principle of induction will not lead to future discoveries.

Still a third position has been taken by members of the analytic movement. Many of them argue that the statement “These two types of events have always been conjoined in the past” is logically substitutable for the statement “We have good reason to believe that these two types of events will probably be conjoined in the future,” in much the same way that “10” and “X” are substitutable. Rules governing linguistic usage decree that the person who asserts the former must also assert the latter, and vice versa. In effect, this is to make the principle of induction an a priori truth. “If two types of events have always been conjoined in the past, then we have good reason to believe that these two types of events will probably be conjoined in the future” becomes a statement very similar to “All bachelors are unmarried men.” Most existentialists have never heard of this argument and would probably consider it beneath their dignity to answer it if they had. But, no doubt, if they did answer it they would point out that linguistic rules require a justification, and that the only possible justification for making the principle of induction an a priori truth in the sense in which empiricists have analyzed a priori truths is that one first accept it as a statement of fact and that one believe in its truth in so far as it is taken as a simple statement of fact.

The upshot of all this is that the existentialist refuses to accept criticism from the empiricist, since he believes that ultimately

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the empiricist uses the very same method of intuitive insight he uses himself. And once the indispensability of intuitive insight in order to found a philosophical position is admitted, there is no reason to accept as correct only those insights required to found an empiricist theory of knowledge.

As remarked above, the case for the indispensability of intuitive insight could also be made out with respect to traits such as the contingency of being and the particularity of human existence. On the face of it, it seems absurd to claim that man’s being limited to the here and now is a fact known by induction. On the contrary, this appears to be a fact which each of us knows immediately and directly; it is a condition of our making any empirical observations at all, not a fact established by empirical observation. At the same time, it would not be difficult for the existentialist to argue that the empiricist proof for the contingency of being based on their theory of knowledge is circular. If the empiricist did not know by intuitive insight that the whole of things is contingent, he would never have been led to adopt a theory of knowledge according to which only particulars and the relationships between particulars can be known. Since, however, empiricists and existentialists agree about the contingency of being and about human particularity, there is no compelling reason to go into these matters.

There is, however, one further point which does require consideration. If the empiricists’ fundamental “intuitions” are correct, then any trait of human existence which could be established by induction can only be established by induction. Heidegger, for instance, claims that death is an ontological necessity, but since there is no reason to say that mortality as a fact of human existence could only be established by

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intuitive insight, the empiricist will have to deny Heidegger’s claim. The empiricist does not, of course, believe that someday man will become immortal; there are very good inductive grounds for asserting the contrary. Nor does he object strongly, if at all, to listing mortality among the defining properties of man. The issue is how and with what degree of certainty we can know that the objective property of mortality characterizing the beings presently denoted by the word “man” will continue to characterize these or similar beings in the future. Heidegger claims to know this with absolute certainty by intuitive insight. The empiricist asserts that we know it by induction from particular instances and that our knowledge of this fact, as of all matters of fact, is probable. The degree of probability is so high that for all practical purposes no harm is done by claiming complete certainty. Still we cannot exclude a priori the possibility of man’s becoming immortal unless we choose to define man as mortal. And if we define man as mortal, we are no longer asserting that man is mortal; we are simply resolving not to use the word “man” to denote immortal things. According to the empiricist, Heidegger has surreptitiously defined man as mortal and has illegitimately attributed to an objective state of affairs the subjective impossibility of imagining a being without the property of mortality whom he would be prepared to call man. A confusion of this kind would not be difficult to make, especially by philosophers who have little sympathy with Anglo-American philosophy and who have often not kept up with its latest developments.

Moreover, whether one accepts or rejects the empiricistic theory of knowledge, one must distinguish between the contention that certain issues must and consequently should be decided by intuitive insight and the contention that one

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may and should use intuitive insight to establish facts which could be established by other methods. Unfortunately, it is very common for a person who believes himself to have proved the indispensability of intuition in deciding certain issues, to feel himself justified without further reason to use intuition in order to decide any and all issues.

After this unavoidably long review of the major answers to the three questions raised at the beginning of this chapter, it is now possible to ask “Are the existentialists irrationalists or are they not?” Like the word “happiness” and its synonyms, the word “rationalist” and its synonyms have both a general and several more specific meanings. In the widest and most general sense of the term, a rationalist is one who believes that there exists some method by which those things which it is humanly desirable to know may be known. Now, if the existentialist ontology, epistemology, and axiology are acceptable, the existentialists have almost as much right to call themselves rationalists as either the philosophical rationalists or the empiricists. To the extent that they do not do so, it is largely because they wish to avoid misunderstandings due to the crowd of associations which have accrued to the term “rationalist” in the course of Western history.

The qualification “almost as much right” is owed to the fact that most of the existentialists, especially Kierkegaard and the religious existentialists, do not fully believe that a method exists for knowing what it is humanly desirable to know. The anguish of the religious existentialists stems in good part from their belief that God cannot be known. But even this qualification may be unwarranted; for if the universal existentialist conviction that life is fundamentally tragic is

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accepted, it would make as much sense to qualify the definition of rationalism as to qualify the existentialists’ claim to the term. Why not define a rationalist as one who believes that it is possible for man to know whatever it is desirable for a being irrevocably condemned to incompleteness and tragedy to know?

The pragmatists have actually done something similar. To take a specific example, Dewey believed that rationality consists in the ability to adjust oneself to the circumstances of one’s life, where by “adjustment” is meant either “accommodation,” i.e., a kind of Stoic renunciation of impossible desires, or “adaptation,” i.e., a transformation of the physical and social environment permitting the realization of desire. Where possible we transform the environment; where this is not possible, we accommodate ourselves to it. But according to Dewey, perfect adjustment is an impossible ideal both for the individual and for the race. The rational being does not attempt to create a paradise on earth, nor does he deceive himself into believing that he can be happy even on the rack. The rational man is one who attempts by a gradual and piecemeal process to eliminate the hardships of life which it is within his power to eliminate and to accommodate to those hardships which he cannot eliminate—but bearing always in mind that total adjustment is impossible.

Some persons, of course, would argue that the essence of rationality is a willingness to accept the elementary principles of logic and would refuse existentialists the title of rationalists on the grounds that they disdain these principles. In fact, however, the existentialists do not disdain the principles of logic. The existentialists do have a penchant for paradox, but

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almost all of their paradoxes are purely verbal. When Jaspers says that he who loves everybody loves nobody or when Sartre says that man is not the being which he is, neither of them is betraying the logical principle of contradiction. They are merely expressing themselves in a rhetorically arresting manner.

The closest one comes to genuine logical paradoxes in the whole of existentialist literature is in the elaboration of the Christian existentialist doctrine of faith. For the empiricists faith means a willingness to act on the basis of probable knowledge. If one has good but not conclusive evidence that a friend is trustworthy, one nevertheless reposes faith in him. This kind of faith is in no sense irrational. For the traditional Christians faith meant belief in a proposition for which there is no evidence one way or the other, but which might so far as logic is concerned be true. St. Augustine and St. Thomas speak of Christian mysteries, but they emphatically deny that any article of faith contradicts reason. Faith is nonrational, but not irrational. Faith surpasses reason, but it does not cancel it out. The Christian existentialists, however, strenuously insist that Christian dogma, notably the dogma of creation, of the Man-God, and of the Trinity, do contradict reason. It is logically impossible that God be a creator, that he be both wholly divine and wholly human, that he be simultaneously one and three persons. Thus faith becomes belief in the logically impossible—or so it would seem.

In fact, Kierkegaard did occasionally define faith in this manner. But so long as he did, he insisted that he was not a Christian—that he was arguing for honesty, not Christianity. Nobody believes in the logically impossible. The logically impossible cannot be conceived, much less believed in. That

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was Kierkegaard’s despair. He was a man who wanted to be a Christian, who wanted to believe in the absurd, but who could not succeed. He was merely the “poet of Christianity.” The source of his despair, it should be observed, was nothing other than his extreme respect for the principles of logic. The irrationality is all on the side of the traditional Christian who either ignored the essentials of Christian doctrine or refused to recognize the evident logical contradictions in those essentials.

Since, however, faith defined as belief in the logically impossible is a human impossibility, Kierkegaard more frequently used a different definition of faith. Faith became simply the desire to believe, intense care or concern for one’s fate. “Faith,” he says, “is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty.” At the same time Kierkegaard redefined religious truth. Religious truth, he declared, was not objective belief, but subjective passion. The savage who worshipped an idol with passion was in the truth, whereas the civilized man who worshipped the “true God” without passion was false. Nothing would be more illogical, however, than to take the Christian existentialists’ redefinitions of faith and religious truth as evidence of illogicality. These existentialist redefinitions are a tribute to logic of the very highest order. They may also be a reductio ad absurdum of Christianity, but in this case Christianity, not logic, is the loser.

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