Andrew Pyle, Malebranche (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
– Milton, Paradise Lost
Nicolas MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715) represents a smooth philosophical transition between the thought of René Descartes (1596-1650) and David Hume (1711-1776). From Descartes, Malebranche appropriated the notion that anything necessarily exists which meets the criteria of clarity and distinctness. Such criteria were employed for the purpose of economy, streamlining the post-Renaissance philosophical universe closer to the proportions of Hume’s balanced cosmos, a world of natural beliefs, efficacious ideas, experiential souls, and blind, regular causation. Malebranche attempted to unite humanist-historical studies with natural-mathematical studies, scripture and philosophy, through a centralized, panoramic, illuminationist worldview, ambitiously affirming the interdependence of faith and reason.
Scholastics generally believed secondary causes within the causal order were responsible for becoming, while divine action sustained everything in being. Descartes economized this approach by stipulating that God’s concursus with created beings was exhausted by God’s conservation of matter. In the context of Descartes’ substantial-modal metaphysics, this introduced thorny difficulties in interpreting physical motion. Since modes as modes cannot be directly transferred from one substance to another, finding a home for secondary causes began to look problematic. If we consider that it isn’t obvious that we can perceive mundane particulars having active powers through clear and distinct ideas, our problem, on its own Cartesian terms, is exacerbated. The sun wouldn’t be able to act upon the mind not because of where it is, but because of what it is.
One way of addressing such concerns is through accepting their premises. Dead, inert, de-Aristotelianized particulars give us no clear and distinct idea that they are ultimately self-moving. Malebranche himself made no sharp distinction between logical and metaphysical necessity, which meant true causes are necessarily connected with their effects. But without any clear and distinct idea of any such connection available to us, an observer only has the capacity to merely believe causal powers of particulars. In contrast, we can apprehend that a necessary connection must exist between the will of an omnipotent being and its effects. So Malebranche discarded secondary causes, denying that created beings have any independent causal powers of their own, and asserted created beings each provide an occasion for divine action according to self-imposed rules. Hence, occasionalism. This isn’t as if one thing causes another, such as a mental event causing a physical event, only through God’s arbitrary help. Rather, the cause serves as the occasion of the effect — both cause and effect occurring together — as God’s initial act of creation organizationally and continuously sustains everything else through its becoming. The moment of creation does not pass.
Of Aristotle‘s classification of four causes, final causes make a natural fit for formal causes, just as efficient causes make a natural fit for material causes. Directedness conceptually fits with design, functionality, and organization, just as what determines a determinable conceptually fits with that which can be determined. Malebranche revolutionized the nature of formal and final causes, pushing Cartesian philosophy even further away from its scholastic roots. Ideas annex all of the conceptual work once performed by formal causes, while God creatively takes immediate charge of all directedness we find in the cosmos. The Cartesian revolution from essential/natural teleology to external/instrumental teleology is thereby solidified.
Like Descartes, ideas in Malebranche are loci of understanding operating as vehicles of intelligibility; to think truthfully, we must think through available clear and distinct ideas. Departing from Descartes, ideas here are completely distinct from modes of our own souls. Modes are mutable, particular, and contingent; ideas are immutable, universal, and necessary. Consider that in the thought of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), there are as many formal unities as there are things. Malebranche stretched this framework by concluding a thing is a copy of its idea, ideas being nothing else than archetypes in the mind of God. God contains the quidditatively specific informational pattern of the world, which accounts for its intentionality.
As the story continues, we perceive extension adverbially, regions of space-time cloaked with sensation. While the world has finite and divisible extension, God represents the world perfectly through ideal extension. Intelligible extension resides in the divine intellect, while finite things exist through the divine will. Malebranche insists that intelligible extension contains intelligible parts but not real spatial parts. I suspect Malebranche might mean that intelligible extension is composed of conceptual parts, but not fundamentally composed of material parts, like Leibniz’s refusal to ultimately equate plurality with numerical distinctness; this depends on how tight of a nexus Malebranche held between the intelligibility of matter and the intelligibility of mathematics. He’s clearly moving in the anti-scholastic direction of mathematics as fundamentally independent of matter, something that might consist in relations between ideas alone, though I’m not persuaded he travels the entire distance.
While it may seem like we have built an intellectual framework in which physical things superfluously “dangle” from their ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is not idealism, since God’s creative will still requires particulars individuated by their “thisness” if it is not to be aimless. Yet, if we can only think objectively through mind-independent ideas, then even lively sensations have no representational content. We could only have a confused and obscure knowledge of our own soul; intentionality no longer marks the mental. We could know that we exist, but not what we exist as. We know the mind as subject, but not as substance; raw, immediate experience provides certainty, but no insight. So our knowledge of the soul becomes experiential, not rational. In Descartes, there was what can be called occasional causation, which shouldn’t be confused with occasionalism. Cartesian brain-states, for instance, have triggering roles. Connected in part to a divinely pre-programmed innate repertoire of the soul, stimuli lawfully elicit ideas without any reason fundamentally perspicuous to us. In contrast, for Malebranche, talk of powers and faculties, even for our own souls, became pseudo-explanations. The substantial union between mind and body remained completely unintelligible. Unaided introspection no longer revealed any necessary connections between things; such certainty was now for God alone. Whether any particular law holds was a contingent matter, and we had no epistemic access to God’s will. When understanding the world, we must make educated guesses by forming hypotheses and testing them.
Malebranche synthesized Augustine and Descartes in what he called the “Vision in God.” Augustine’s Vision in God was only for the truths of pure intellection. Malebranche extended it to changeable things known through perception, perception now including both a sensory and an ideational component. Objectivity is secured through an illuminationist epistemology: we believe truthfully through the epistemic access given to us by God to the archetypes used in the sustained creation of the world. The human mind is an illuminated light, not an illuminating light; we arrive at error when we assent or dissent before we are in a position to truthfully do so. Human knowledge becomes similar to revelation; attention becomes similar to prayer. The Vision in God is not a Fregean third realm of inert propositions, for it stands as something like a productive blueprint, an order existing eternally in the divine intellect; one knows necessarily what one can make. Not a Jansenist, Malebranche believed God, because of his perfections, rules by wisdom, not will; as a corollary, God must act economically by means of general laws rather than special modifications. This leaves the world with imperfections, though it placed miracles within an order of grace.
The Vision in God purportedly secured the objectivity of knowledge against Pyrrhonist suggestions that we’re too integrated with life to achieve impartial perspectives. Malebranche enumerated candidates for the nature of ideas into four categories, identified by whether they might be innate or empirical, as well as active or receptive. From this enumeration, Malebranche made an elimination argument, rejecting all four possibilities. But on the assumption that we do have knowledge through ideas, we needed to explain how such knowledge can be possible, given the shortcomings Malebranche believed he found in Aristotle, Descartes, Plato, and Arnauld. His solution was to externalize rational insight; clear and distinct ideas are God’s ideas, and the Vision in God allows us to participate in the divine intellect. This also explains the capacity to think of an endless number of things throughout space and time, and our public epistemic access to a unique order.
Malebranche’s philosophy had several theological advantages. Unlike Aristotelian philosophy, Cartesians had an elegant account of the immortality of the soul. And, a world without natural powers prevents any slipping into pagan naturalism. Malebranche’s God wills that all men be saved, while leaving us dependent upon God’s grace. God, acting in reliable, predictable ways, is impartial, distributing grace like the rain. Malebranche concluded Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) fell into Calvinism, since the denial that God wills all men be saved supposedly is at odds with God’s benevolence, but Arnauld complained Malebranche denied God’s omnipotence by willing all men be saved while not allowing this end to be achieved. Arnauld would accuse Malebranche of Pelagianism, as if we could achieve salvation through merit alone. Malebranche’s anti-Pelagianism seemed completely contingent, as if we could achieve salvation based upon merit alone, but always required grace in fact. But Malebranche accepted original sin, denying the soul genuine powers of its own, believing reason alone could not suffice to enable us to will the good and do it. We can sense grace without consenting to grace; the assent of the soul would be a special kind of rest that isn’t productive of anything.
If the soul has no liberty of indifference, its strongest motive always prevails. There is no quietism in Malebranche; genuine self-love is needed to approach one’s salvation with fear and trembling. The human will is indeterminately directed toward the good; evil is a privation, a disorder within second-order acts embedded in the will toward particular, determinate objects. This jointly opened the road to a Humean philosophy. If we can’t restrain ourselves, then our behavior results from an involuntary, uncontrollable necessity, along with our natural judgments about the external world.
Philosophers, whether they admit it or not, always have a persona. Plato taught philosophy made one fit to be a king; Diogenes of Sinope taught philosophy made one fit to be a slave. For centuries, philosophy primarily concerned itself with practical, moral, legal, political, and theological issues. Natural philosophy — what we would today call science — remained a speculative, peripheral, individualistic domain of inquiry. It therefore is not an accident that the rise of modern philosophy coincides with the rise of modern science. Stephen Gaukroger argues that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) extended the quasi-moral standing of other realms of inquiry to natural philosophy, not only changing the role and place of science, but the very persona of a philosopher.
European governments in the sixteenth century began a long process of centralization and increased social discipline, a development which functioned as a catalyst for the self-examination found in the humanism of the age, along with its emphasis on civic virtue. Theoretical sensibilities were shaped by a legal-rhetorical tradition establishing a background for argument, persuasion, and discovery; law was the paradigm case of knowledge for Renaissance rhetorical writers. Rhetoric taught how to organize one’s thoughts: how to navigate within a comprehensive body of thought, how to investigate particular cases using general models, how to recognize where appropriate evidence may be found. From Machiavelli (1469-1527) forward, sound learning was increasingly seen as a foundation for sound government.
Humanists gained a sense of their responsibilities as humanists from the professional self-image generated by their legal personae. This contributed to the eclecticism of early modern scientific thought. Eclectics, indifferent and impartial, exemplified gentlemanly behavior. Avoiding fanaticism, eclectic thinkers remained self-critical, continuously aiming at self-reform; behaving virtuously and acting virtuously were the same thing for the humanists. Bacon extended this activist ethic to natural philosophy, changing the natural philosopher from an individual seeker to a public professional.
Sixteenth-century humanism had a second consequence: the historicization of knowledge. And the conception of knowledge as inextricably embedded in cultural conditions, often a feature of Pyrrhonism, led not to pessimism, but to optimism. For if the scope of human knowledge depends upon cultural conditions, then what is possible to achieve can indeed be widened, provided we alter the cultural conditions. Bacon looked at the centralized states of his time and envisioned possibilities that did not exist for ancient and medieval men. One could avoid the exclusivity of the guilds, and the esoteric university system, through public administration and public reform. Organizing natural philosophy around public practice would facilitate the realization of opportunities for innovation, the proper following up of empirical results, the stimulation of fresh efforts, and the building of a cumulative storehouse of knowledge.
While learning has traditionally been defended as something valuable for its own sake, Bacon wasn’t interested in truth per se, but informative truth. Aristotle, for example, conceived change in terms of the termini of directed processes, an explanatory approach that didn’t respect contingencies such as initial conditions and the “violent motions” external to any principles in play. Bacon changed what counted as relevant, focusing on beginnings: how to establish setup points operating as gateways to knowledge. Emphasis was no longer strictly placed upon the directed activity of nature, but upon the directed activity of the experimenter, who begins situationally with the available states-of-affairs he has carefully classified and/or prepared for organized manipulation.
A historicized model of knowledge makes one alert to the possibility of being trapped by one’s circumstances. Under such relativism, students of nature no longer needed to believe in the homogeneity of error. Bacon took the assumptions of his humanist predecessors precisely in this direction, developing what D.C. Stove might call a “nosology of thought.” We can go wrong by polluting our information train with endless types of cognitive bias. Given the sophistication of ancient and medieval thought, we can certainly say it was idiot-proofed; Bacon sought something better, methods and procedures that are savant-proofed. Bacon even distrusted ready assent to clear ideas. He recommended removing individuality from research and development completely, thereby transforming the entire process into impersonal, institutional machinery. The business of the state thus took precedence over contemplative detachment. Wonder, once linked with reverence of the divine, became characteristic of a stupefied ignoramus who cannot use novelties to open new paths to knowledge. Curiosity, once a vice of the idle, became a public virtue, as curiosity is active and probing. One must come to material well-prepared if one is to benefit from it.
Bacon retained an active, Renaissance conception nature, which suggests we know things when we can make or produce things. Bacon innovated by stripping all cosmological significance from productive activity, desacralizing natural powers and scrapping neo-Platonic hierarchies. An impartial legal attitude, when imported into natural philosophy, means that empirically-based procedures ought to replace textually-based procedures. What counts as a possible explanation is therefore redefined as a result. The humanist celebration of style is downplayed, along with the veneration of history and literature. In substitution, a neutral approach is recommended that measures, quantifies, segments, schedules, and obeys guidelines. Against the hairsplitting of the schoolmen, a distinction between demonstration and discovery is sharpened. Thinking through the application of our ideas will demand structural specificity as to what is combining and separating as spatial configurations and arrangements change. All possible natural entities are placed horizontally on the same ontological plane, an implicit reductionism that disallows the sustained employment of ad hoc principles applied to arbitrary domains to protect preconceived views. This changes what counts as plausibility. And, against occultists, who use fantasy more than imagination, Bacon stipulates ways to avoid constructing nothing out of nothing, through data collection and experimental observation. At the time, such advice was not common sense, given the prevalence of astrology, alchemy, and various artes magicae practiced among the learned.
Francis Bacon eventually became a symbol of the Enlightenment, earning a range of haters from William Blake to Joseph de Maistre, who found science, reform, and industry all having a net destructive effect upon man and the world he inhabits. While today, we strangely call such a suspicion of progress “progressive,” in Bacon’s time, there was no doctrine that could even be called progressive, whether it genuinely represented progress or not. So Bacon’s genius resides in teaching us what to wish for in natural philosophy. Sometimes scientism is criticized not for its vices, but for its virtues: its noble, active spirit of mastery and command. Rather than revering the world as something finished, as if we have reached the summit, Bacon pulls us away from such servile self-satisfaction by reminding us we haven’t even scratched the surface.
John B. Judis & Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Scribner, 2002)
However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
A leading progressive intellectual and a representative of pragmatist naturalism, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), once a graduate student of C.S. Peirce, combined Darwinian biology with a bureaucratic interpretation of modern life. Like most progressives past and present, Veblen was not a Marxist. Veblen felt that all people, rich and poor alike, operate similarly according to the same mechanistic laws. Marx in contrast had an organic view of society. Hegelian contradictions in capitalism would inevitably resolve themselves through conflict, polarizing society into the idle rich and industrious poor, reaching a point where workers would only need to smash the state in order to manage everything themselves. But like Marx, Veblen’s thought had emancipatory intent. Marx viewed workers initially rendered docile through modes of production that generate the self-serving cultural structures (family, religion, property, etc.) strictly beneficial to our richers; workers become free when economic breakdown generates a unitary class-consciousness amongst themselves, thus putting them in motion to remove the richers from the economic picture via revolution. But Veblen’s anti-psychologism and anti-individualism had Darwinian motivations: *all* people in a Veblenist universe, rich and poor alike, instinctively signal status to each other, often through conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. We’re simply hardwired, through millions of years of evolution, to be wasteful and distasteful, irrational and gaudy. Influenced by the austere Taylorism of his age, Veblen proposed a soviet of engineers. Or, as we word it today: technocracy. Letting businessmen, politicians, and/or workers make important decisions, for Veblen, meant rule by irrational passions. The idea was that we’d all be better off if we had the steady, impersonal, professional leadership of disinterested institutions composed of scientists, engineers, and other experts.
John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued, in The Emerging Democratic Majority, that the United States will be entering a lengthy period of progressive political dominance, which ultimately benefits the Democratic Party, though we’re interested here more in the wider implications than the partisan benefits. The book is modeled on Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority, written in 1969, which projected the subsequent decades of conservative vitality in American politics. Judis and Teixeira secured their case with detailed, quantified data. I shall argue that if we examine the wider qualitative implications, Judis and Teixeira are more correct than they think they are. Below, I turn Veblen’s thesis on its head and conclude progressivism appeals to growing ranks of SWPL professionals in the information economy precisely because it is their own form of status signaling: ostentatious indifference and ostentatious detachment, social climbing through self-abasement.
Post-modern culture has been given so many labels that some will draw the conclusion that contemporary life cannot be adequately labeled at all. This is an illusion. Our civilization does have a center of gravity: its coolness. Think of the irreverence of popular music, the self-conscious wink-wink irony of popular comedians, and the self-referential memes and commercials making fun of themselves as memes and commercials. Earnestness opens one to mockery, as in the cases of Sarah Palin, Tim Tebow, etc., not because of any object of their fervent behavior, but on account of their fervency in itself — it strikes us as naive, vulgar, cheesy… not cool. In a cool civilization, everything is to be viewed with neutral separation, our noncommittal commitments to the seriously unserious.
A civilization reaches a state of decadence when its mode of consumption is divorced from its mode of production. And the cardinal vice of America, as everyone knows, is gluttony. A decadent civilization cannibalizes itself, not understanding that all production rests on biological, social, strategic, and technological reproduction. A decadent civilization therefore consumes in a way destructive of its framework of investment, unable to not only innovate, but to tread water, since investment is the choice not to consume now, in order that we can have in the future. Taking away from future consumption eventually destroys present consumption as the future catches up to the present.
In twentieth-century America, the self-interest of the educated and the affluent expressed itself through the Republican Party. During this period, status was still its own status, so individuals found no shame in pursuing their own advantage. One could even distinguish fat cats by their fatness, as obesity signaled high status to the fat-nots. Most laborers, gaunt and haggard in appearance, found employment either on the farm or the factory; professional employment in an office was no mean achievement. But circumstances changed. Today, girth is not a sign of the elite, but of the common, as two thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. Similarly, even lowly computer janitors can drive SUVs and live in McMansions, even without going to the best schools, or not studying their livelihood when in school, or even going to school at all.
How can any Darwinian, socially-conscious creature signal high status under such conditions, especially when material largesse fails to impress others? This is especially pressing if one studied at and/or has a degree from an elite university — schooling still persists as a flimsy form of status signaling — and earns one’s living with the unwashed masses. An acquisitive lifestyle will not suffice to bestow superior status upon oneself, for flabbiness and wastefulness are within the reach of everyone. Want to be above others? Then show you are above it all. Be cool. Get a weird degree, volunteer to help worthless vagrants, eat organic food, get a tatoo, drive a hybrid car, buy junk from Apple Inc., pretend to like crappy art, pretend to enjoy primitive cultures, become a militant atheist — we can have an endless amount of disinterested interests that do not interest us, each one giving us yet another chance to sneer at the crass, shameless proles. Think of why some people shop at Target while calling it the Tar-shay. It is as if to say, “I’m really not one of those people. I’m better because I know better.”
Judis and Teixeira argue that the coalition behind this era of progressive dominance will be professionals, minorities, women, and, guiltily thrown in as an afterthought, working class whites. If the thesis is true, working class whites are of no great consequence. The shift of the professionals from conservative to progressive will be the lasting component of the political realignment. We’re given an ugly new term — ideopolis — which refers to those quasi-suburban areas loaded with professionals, such as North Carolina’s research triangle, or Virginia’s D.C. suburbs. The point is that previous modes of production tied people down at a single career at a single location all their life, while an information economy renders people more mobile, more transient, with an enhanced role for communication and networking, therefore expecting workers not only to show initiative in adding to their repertoire of skills, but to contribute something to the design, delivery, and so forth, of goods and services. The economy is now less like a giant military drill and more like an ecosystem, with workers expected to resourcefully make their own niche. Our current recession reflects this vast evolution from one way of doing business to another, and while it caught millions of people off guard, it should be embraced, not resisted.
Judis and Teixeira misleadingly make it sound as if professionals demand centrist government, though they are correct that such professionals do indeed have a centrist self-image. The phenomenon is the same as The Onion and The Colbert Report — cool, above-it-all moderates, pleading, with self-aware irony, for what they call civility, or coolness. For the most important thing we should understand about progressives, is that they are, first and foremost, cool. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are cool, just like Cornel West, Jon Stewart, and George Clooney. George W. Bush and John McCain are not cool, just like Charles Murray, Rush Limbaugh, and Ben Stein. One might suspect that professionals, closely embedded in the creative process, don’t always readily apprehend the organizational value of business management and financial capitalism in terms of putting a process in motion and sustaining it, believing that professionals themselves create value, while others without specialized skills somehow parasitically transfer it. Yet this is only part of the picture. Professionals often aren’t even the recipients of government largesse they vocally advocate — they frequently want to tax themselves and their superiors so their inferiors can receive the goodies. Ultimately, status signalling accounts for why professionals advocate what adds up to Fabian, hard-left, European-style socialism — when one can’t gain status from the advancement of one’s own self-interest, one will invent ways of gaining status from the far more numerous ways of denying one’s self-interest.
While cool progressives, ironic and self-aware, usually distance themselves from their own bullshit, stupid conservatives often take them seriously, and frequently misinterpret minority politics as identity politics. They believe they can gain the support of blacks, Latinos, and unmarried women by having black conservatives, Latino conservatives, and women conservatives run for office. And, weirdly, it makes conservatives feel good, like they’re pulling their weight to support diversity, equality, and the like, which is supremely foolish, because, again, progressives don’t even take themselves seriously when calling others racists, misogynists, and bigots in a cliche-like way. They don’t mean anything deep by it beyond the signalling of status to like-minded individuals.
Consider blacks. The GOP historically has been an anti-slavery, anti-secession, anti-segregation political party — Eisenhower used federal power to desegregate schools in the 1950s, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 attracted more Republican than Democratic support. Many remarks have been made how Republicans courted support of southern whites starting in the late 1960s; fewer have reflected why southern blacks aligned themselves with the Democrats well before such efforts. The answer is that socialism was always a better fit for American blacks, and blacks liked the Democratic Party more and more as it become more socialistic. It isn’t like blacks were helplessly brainwashed on some sort of Democratic entitlement “plantation.” Remember, blacks comprise most of what I call the “religious left” in the United States — it is not uncommon for leading black activists to be reverends. Blacks are historically accustomed to fighting against impossible odds, and socialism has the same emotional topography of wandering through the wilderness until one arrives in the Promised Land. While everyone wants a dialogue on race, the role of race in racial politics is quite overstated.
We shouldn’t expect much movement in the votes of women and Latinos. Catholic populism, mixed with an element of machismo, will keep the idea of strongmen fighting for the little guy alive in the imagination of Latinos, which is the bread and butter of progressive politics. In the case of unmarried women, progressives allow them to abort icky nerdspawn, while having taxpayers pick up the bill for fatherless thugspawn. Identity politics isn’t strictly about identity politics, because it is about identity politics. Expecting to capture such voters with a conservative who just happens to have the identity in question is fool’s gold.
Existing demographic trends mean we can eventually expect two versions of the Democratic Party fighting over how to spend themselves into oblivion. While the GOP is attacked for its lack of diversity, ironically, one day, the Republican Party will indeed be the party of white people, as it will represent aging entitled white hipsters who will clamor for more resources for an inefficient government health care system, and for what’s left of social security. We witness the seeds of this today; Keep Government Out Of My Medicare, demands the Tea Party. The Democrats will increasingly represent strictly the interests of baby mommas and minorities, who will clamor for more resources for child care, education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. After all, children don’t choose to be disadvantaged, right? With not enough people in families and businesses, there won’t be support for pro-family pro-business policies. Instead, American society will likely eat itself to death. But, as optimists may remind us, it is never too late to lose weight.
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? reprinted in Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (New York: Library of America, 2007) p. 431-608.
Maybe Buster is jealous, Isidore conjectured. Sure, that would explain it; he and Wilbur Mercer are in competition. But for what?
Our minds, Isidore decided. They’re fighting for control of our psychic selves; the empathy box on one hand, Buster’s guffaws and off-the-cuff jibes on the other. (p. 488)
Nature abhors a vacuum. Sometimes, vacuums are spiritual vacuums. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? delivers a moderately-sized story on a vast scale, assuming the tenor of the book of Ecclesiastes. Redemptory and anti-redemptory attitudes compete for authenticity in a world that blurs the difference between the artificial and the genuine.
Like the critically acclaimed film Blade Runner (1982), Rick Deckard is employed as a bounty hunter in the business of destroying escaped androids, who are not, at least not officially, allowed on Earth. This is where similarities end. For Philip K. Dick here explores the possibility of human deliverance in a fallen world. In the film, the androids, despite being synthetic organisms, could still give existential meaning to their own lives through their own actions. In the book, androids, as artificial people in an increasingly artificial world, lack this capacity, finding all forms of spiritual receptivity fraudulent and therefore shammed. In the film, the setting haphazardly incorporates trendy messages such as overpopulation, commercialization, and noir-like alienation. In the book, Dick paints a broken, depopulated, lifeless world, setting up emptiness not as something to confront in itself, but as a stage upon which to position fundamental spiritual alternatives. Deckard is married, not divorced, and is active duty, not semi-retired.
J.R. Isidore, a man whose faculties have been eroded due to the radioactive dust in the atmosphere, maladroitly works for a synthetic animal repair company. He finds meaning in Mercerism, Earth’s dominant religion, which, through widely available empathy box technology, allows users shared consciousness together with the suffering of Wilbur Mercer. Outside of this, he lives the life of a solitary.
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence — meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears by his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood there in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world of silence. (p. 447-8)
Human beings hate silence; we have the right to remain silent, but find it difficult to exercise such a right. Millions of men in the twentieth century filled an intolerable personal abyss with entertainment broadcasted directly through a television set. Emptiness filled emptiness; spectacles supplied through such means usually embodied commercial, secular values, as represented by the androids. Androids, without experiences of empathy, “just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing.” Because of this, androids sneer at Mercerism, not because they don’t like swindles, but because they believe empathy is a cheap swindle irrationally offered as something corresponding to our world. To heighten the folly of the androids, Dick masterfully gave their perspective some legitimacy by modeling empathy boxes on orgone accumulators from the 1950s — a genuine swindle at worst, a crackpot idea at best — which landed Wilhelm Reich, one of the first Freudo-Marxists and “sex educators,” in prison.
While the empathy boxes do not work for the androids, it remains the case that androids really don’t have empathy, and, without empathy, they have no way to clearly and distinctly ascertain their predicament. With very limited social awareness, the literal-minded androids aren’t attuned to others as others; their superior intelligence and ability to achieve goals does not prevent them from easily falling for very stupid human deceptions. The ease by which humans can dupe androids stands in sharp contrast to the androids’ skeptical outlook judging all humans as swindled sheep. Dick added loose oppositions paralleling the difference between Judaism and Christianity to heighten the difference between the letter and the spirit. The name “Wilbur Mercer” has the air of evangelical Christianity — “Wilbur” intimates a dearly loved stronghold, while “Mercer” echoes a merchant, which suggests that something is being peddled, albeit something that is dear. In contrast, the company that makes the Nexus-6 model androids is named the Rosen Association, which sends an android named Rachael to derail Deckard from completing his task by seducing him. And it is revealed near the end of the novel that Buster Friendly, the man who delivers a journalistic exposé proving the falsity of Mercerism, is an android. The mass media apparently brims with androids.
After World War III, domesticated animals became status symbols for the remaining Terran inhabitants. Few living things can survive in the toxic, dimmed, polluted environment. Those who cannot afford real animals purchase synthetic creatures, repairing them discretely so neighbors can’t find out.
I’ve never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. (p. 591)
Androids, without the capacity for this kind of reverential awe, can calculate, but cannot appreciate. While avoiding capture in Isidore’s apartment, a spider is discovered, an extremely rare event. Having curiosity, but lacking wonder, the androids question why a spider needs eight legs, and begin pulling them off to see if it can still move with fewer. The androids are indifferent to whether anything lives or dies because they are ultimately indifferent whether they personally live or die. While the androids do indeed mercilessly fight to survive, the worst thing about them, Deckard finds, is how they become completely passive when trapped in a checkmated situation. They readily give up in the face of death; there is no noble resistance, no awareness that something is soon about to be lost.
One targeted android lives disguised as an opera singer; Deckard has these thoughts.
Thinking this he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake. Or anyhow so it must seem to them. (p. 504)
Humans have the ability to live zombie-like existences with simulated emotions, but they need not necessarily transform their lives into so unconscious a reality. Humanity has the possibility of redemption because it inhabits a tragic universe. Unlike the “peculiar and malign abstractness” that pervades the mental processes of androids, humans can live in contradiction with themselves. Human identity encompasses more than a purely neutral summation of strictly descriptive facts, for being about anything at all as a person means positioning yourself against events in a way that matters, from joys to griefs. The androids, without empathy, have no loyalty to another, or to anything for that matter. Their simulated lives are redundant, like the lives of rocks, because they are never awake living in the world in the first place. Since nothing happens *to* them, they can never be more than mere chunks of space-time. They cannot be redeemed. Consider Deckard’s own mystical union with Mercer.
“Go on and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” (p. 561)
Pain is often an essential ingredient in comedy, sometimes as simple as a pie thrown in someone’s face or someone slipping on a banana peel. Androids, who do not understand the meaning of suffering, therefore do not understand the meaning for humor, something even a subnormal “chickenhead” like Isidore can appreciate.
“This building, except for my apartment, is completely kipple-ized.”
“‘Kipple-ized’?” She did not comprehend.
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”
“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.
“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. “‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’ Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.”
“So it has been taken over completely,” the girl finished. She nodded. “Now I understand.”
“Your place, here,” he said, “this apartment you’ve picked — it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apts. But — ” He broke off.
“But what?”
Isidore said, “We can’t win.”
“Why not?” The girl stepped into the hall, closing the door behind her, arms folded self-consciously before her small high breasts she faced him, eager to understand. Or so it appeared to him, anyhow. She was at least listening.
“No one can win against the kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kipple-ization.” He added, “Except of course for the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer.” (p. 480-1)
Deckard eventually “retires” his assigned androids without much difficulty; the pragmatic, no-nonsense nature of their demise seems fitting. Mercerism persists, despite being exposed as a swindle. Androids are unable to figure out why this is the case.
Tad M. Schmaltz, Descartes on Causation (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2008)
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
– Principia philosophiae, Part I, Article 49
The Islamic world has always placed great emphasis on deity in its metaphysics, sometimes to the point of crowding out everything else. Islamic art typically depicts abstract patterns, rather than figures, since the depiction of the human form has idolatrous theological implications; this is especially true for art related to the purpose of Islamic worship. It is no accident that occasionalism, the stance that God is the only cause in the cosmos, occasionally makes a guest appearance in Islamic philosophy. As a contrast, no occasionalist position can be found in the scholastic universe; its trinitarian principles, designed to preserve the autonomy of body and personality in the world, always had anti-occasionalist aims. Descartes on Causation is an effort to understand how Descartes believed the world is glued together through the prism of this scholastic context.
Contemporary philosophy understands causation in a horizontal manner; medieval philosophy understood philosophy in a vertical manner. What is meant by this? Modern philosophies usually attempt to analyze causation in terms of the roles that discrete elements manifest through the ways they relate to each other; the task for the philosopher then becomes explaining the nature of the causal relata and the causal relationship. Such a treatment of causation will assume the “blanks” in our analysis will include something before, something after, and some connection, all of it inert stuff, like states-of-affairs, counterfactuals, and whatnot. For example, in a neo-Humean analysis, our elements are events, which, through their constant conjunction, become candidates for instantiating causal laws, laws which do not exist over and above events so related, but reduce to them. In contrast, medieval philosophy interpreted causation in organizational terms as the activity of productive things.
This is no trivial distinction. When working with a horizontal analysis of causation, medieval arguments for the existence of God become obvious fallacies. For example, if a cosmological argument affirms that whatever comes into existence has a cause, it will seem like an arbitrary exception to a general rule to conclude that God is the uncaused cause at the beginning of a temporal causal chain. Perhaps our universe is a grand sequence of events that just is, and begins with a raw event that just is. But on a vertical interpretation, thinkers attempt to establish what is first in an order of causes. By order, I mean not a sequence, but a hierarchy. Consider social analogies. In a business, the causality of actions taken by a CEO have wider generality than the actions taken by a worker on an assembly line, just as in an army, the causality of actions taken by a general have wider generality than actions taken by a private. So cosmological arguments don’t stipulate something most general to explain a given, for if that was the case, it would be left open for us to do without the explanation and live with the given. Rather, cosmological arguments attempt to prove that something must be most general, perhaps that the actualization of potentials ultimately requires pure actuality, or that we cannot fundamentally have contingent existence without necessary existence, or that composite entities cannot exist in principle without a unified cause, and so forth. In a horizontal view, God looks like a silly wizard who magically creates the universe in an abracadabra fashion; in a vertical view, God is first in the order of being.
Such arguments created philosophical problems, not because they were too weak, but because they were too strong. If God is too integrated with the world, the result is pantheism, while if things are too integrated with God, the result is acosmism. Even Aquinas worried about causal overdetermination, that is, about God ultimately causing everything directly, and made a distinction between causes of being and causes of becoming, thus placing secondary causes distinct from direct acts of God at different levels of causal organization. A concurrentist solution was thus developed arguing that God conserves the being of things through a single act of creation, while contributing a discrete concursus to every creaturely action. Additionally, Duns Scotus (~1265-1308) attempted to avoid blurring God and the world by introducing a variety of intermediaries while streamlining the fundamental categories. This encouraged a division between real distinctions, modal distinctions, and merely rational distinctions, all used to indicate the order of metaphysical dependence. Scotus also protected thinghood by shifting the principle of individuation from quiddity to haecceity, that is, from “whatness” to “thisness.” And between acts of intellect and the cognized object, Scotus introduced “objective reality.” Many of these innovations were still in currency during Descartes’ life. This distinction between object and subject, for instance, had the opposite of its current meaning until the work of Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762).
Such philosophical tools once used for intermediate fixes began to live lives of their own, eventually displacing the Aristotelian structure they were designed to reinforce. Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), a moderate realist, deviated from Aquinas in arguing that prime matter has its own essence apart from form as a potential recipient of change. The feature of the cause wouldn’t literally transfer to the effect; being flows forth from the cause to the effect, which produces a new being that is distinct from, though in some respect similar to, the being that the cause possesses. This could only occur because Suárez interpreted a causal action only existing as the mode of its effect; causality could therefore not exist over and above the action of a causal agent. The causal agent was still distinguished from the causal patient; the causal patient was still distinguished from the causal effect; the causal agent was still distinguished from the causal action. This kind of immanent realism, which allowed only qualities to be principles of action, had the consequence of elevating efficient causes above material, formal, and final causes as the only kind of causation in a full and proper sense. Since Suárez was thinking that causation inflows being, only efficient causation could perform this task.
Descartes had two causal axioms: the containment axiom, and the conservation axiom. The containment axiom states that the formal or eminent reality of an effect is contained in its cause. Suárez was a moderate realist in that he believed in universals in rebus, that is, immanent, Aristotelian universals. Yet Suárez was almost a nominalist in defending individuals as the only real unities in the world. Suárez theorized something very close to a layer-cake trope theory where unit-properties inhere in particular substances to make what he called “formal unities” of which only the intellect can apprehend their shared ideal unity. When Descartes discusses what kind of formal reality an idea contains, he is making it in this context, since any thing will have some degree of formal reality, depending upon where it is in the ontological hierarchy of things, in virtue of existing. Descartes does not believe we find detachable qualities in nature.
The conservation axiom states that no less a cause is required to conserve a thing than to produce it at first. Here, Descartes offered a deflationary thesis: God’s concursus is exhausted by God’s conservation of matter, both the forces of its parts and inclinations of its motions. Contemporary philosophers more often than not have a perdurantist model of persistence, believing things are sums of slices of space-time. But like his scholastic predecessors, Descartes had an endurantist model of persistence, building a philosophy around things rather than events, arguing we cannot distinctly think of a particular duration without thinking of a particular substance. While Descartes does have all body-body action occurring by means of contact action, all motion is merely a mode. Motion, since it is a mode, cannot migrate; it is produced by means of the application of force, which are themselves modes of duration. This resembles Suárez’s conception of the nature of prime matter, with an important distinction: while Suárez believed quantity exists directly in prime matter, quantity can neither be produced nor destroyed in Descartes.
Descartes employs natural teleology in the case of the soul-body union, and rational teleology in the case of the actions of created minds. In such instances, it can be said that we have finality, but without final causes. This is very much like Suárez, where directedness in the world ultimately comes from God as final cause, but only because there is no real distinction between God’s final and efficient causality. The occasional connection between body and mind is therefore grounded in divinely instituted natures; psychology, as for the scholastics, is still the science of the soul for Descartes. Concerning the soul-body union itself, Schmaltz warns us not to confuse issues of union and interaction. How body transfers motion to the mind isn’t an immediate problem for Descartes. While brain motions, when supplemented by the activity of the innate mental faculty, are efficient causes of sensations, he still has a modal conception of causation disallowing motions to be transferred even between bodies, as numerically distinct modes are always produced in a patient from an outside agent. Interaction has a foundation in the natures — ontically real powers — that God creates and conserves. God doesn’t produce the immediate effects of mind-body interaction, but creates and conserves the natures that make such interaction possible. Descartes had greater trouble getting his physical principles to line up in terms of motion and rest.
Philosophers following Aquinas subordinated will to reason. It was a scholastic commonplace that those who believe things unclearly believe willfully, for it was theorized our souls were directed toward the good and the true — a perfection of a determination, finality in the teleological sense, like being automatically drawn toward a certain end. The will was rational appetite, directed as appetite to goods as presented by the senses through the intellect. Suárez loosened this up a bit, believing our judgments of the good can be willful. With respect to necessary goods, the uncoerced will spontaneously assents, freedom here consisting in the perfection of an intellectual determination to good. But with respect to non-necessary goods, freedom is constituted by indifference, a perfection of control required for merit. Descartes innovated by extending Suárez’s model to truth. Concerning claims that are obscure and confused, freedom consists in indifference, our ability to withhold assent. In assenting to clear and distinct ideas, our freedom consists in spontaneity, the determination to the true. This becomes liberalized further in the Passions as the will assumes a larger role, Descartes placing more emphasis on the fact that attention depends upon the will. The pursuit of truth is subordinated to the pursuit of the good.
Descartes subjected all truths concerning creation, including eternal truths, to God’s will as their efficient cause. So instead of saying the source of divine knowledge is uncreated, Descartes makes it come from God’s will. Does this make God a universal possibilist, as if all necessity is relative to the character of our own minds? Harry Frankfurt and Jonathan Bennett concluded yes, though Frankfurt believes perceived necessity is only apparent in Descartes, while Bennett believes such necessity consists in our perception of it. Schmaltz disagrees, arguing for Descartes that the indifference of divine action is essential, which means there is not only no reason that we can comprehend for creation, but no reason for God to comprehend either. God is an efficient cause of himself only in a metaphorical sense.
Raymond Lull (1232-1315) was one of the first to explore computation theory, not a fruitless exercise in that it eventually gave birth, after development over the centuries, to the computer that you are at this moment using. As a missionary, Lull studied and experienced Islamic culture, and, with his own interest in astrology, likely came across Arabic devices used to generate new ideas by mechanical means. Lull hence imagined an ultimate general art that would first establish a master enumeration, i.e., a schematic blueprint of fundamental truths, from which one could generate all possible truths in terms of their combinations. Leibniz, in an extended version of his doctoral dissertation, would give Lull’s investigations the name ars combinatoria, aiming to flesh out Descartes’ vision of an alphabet of thought — grammar and logic coinciding.
In Matter Matters, Kurt Smith argued the thesis that, in thought of Leibniz and Descartes, mathematics is intelligible if and only if matter exists. Supposedly thought alone cannot secure the conditions of the possibility of mathematics, but corporeal divisibility can. In addition, a combination machine supposedly is possible only because bodies are inherently mathematical. Moving successively through semigroups, monoids, groups, rings, fields, we reach vector space, which underwrites the conditions for physics. This is math pornography: it looks sexy, gets the job done, but is only a facsimile of the real thing. After all, modern science isn’t strictly a deductive affair; its development coincides with the development of inductive methods, which themselves contain indeterminacy and uncertainty, features that contemporary physics builds into the constitution of the world. While possibility and probability are interrelated concepts, classical physics interpreted chances as equi-possible outcomes on some sort of physical configuration; probability merely expressed our ignorance of intersecting causal laws. This differs from modern interpretations placing statistical laws over and above their populations, considering means not as mere averages, but as objective quantities.
Descartes innovated beyond scholasticism because he worked within scholasticism. Thinking of mathematics and matter in an integrated fashion goes back at least to Aquinas, who held that the subject matter of physics is sensible matter, while the subject matter of mathematics is intelligible matter — a conceptual distinction, not a real distinction. If we understand Descartes as a modal actualist, as Smith recommends, then Descartes charts a new path by separating possibility from potentiality, which gave him the option of analyzing all possibles in terms of existing things. This means the intelligibility of body is not something we learn from sensory experience, in the sense of the agent intellect apprehending a sensible species after a formal propagation through the successive actualizations of various media. Descartes’ truncation of scholasticism didn’t have the consequence of minds detached from and yet directed at extension. Rather, extension became that by which objects are presented to the mind. It is like the transcendental idealism of Kant, but without the transcendental idealism, for Descartes was an absolutist philosopher in an absolutist age. There is no “beyond” perfection in Descartes; mystery can only emerge if we metaphysically press up against the inscrutability of God’s purposes.
Smith argues for the classical assessment of Descartes as a representationalist — not a direct realist, nor an idealist about particular things. Descartes fashioned ideas as modes of thinking substance. A primary idea can represent something only if an idea’s objective reality has its origin in that something’s formal reality. Reality comes in degrees in Descartes, but being does not. Something has formal reality in virtue of existing. Something has objective reality in virtue of being a representation. The objective reality of an idea also assumes a material role, the act of ideation as conceptually distinct from the content of the idea, which means that ideas are not the sole factor as acts in producing representational content. Putting all of this together, Smith’s interpretation torments the ghost of Richard Rorty by using the helpful analogy of a mirror. Suppose there is a mirror, an object, and the image of an object on the surface of the mirror. The surface is that by which the object is represented, an idea taken materially. Objectively, the image is of the object. Formally, the idea is a mode of the mind, as the image is a mode of the mirror’s surface. And if the image is not blurred or confused, the objective reality of the image may not be possible without the formal reality of that which the mirror reflects. Smith wants to avoid interpretations that place the image on the object instead of the surface, as if there are mirror images without mirrors, and also wants to avoid interpretations where the mirror produces images without the reflection of objects.
Descartes makes elimination arguments supporting metaphysical conclusions that require the exhaustion of alternatives. For example, if have a sensory idea, and know it is caused by something that contains at least as much reality formally or eminently contained objectively in the idea, then we can ask whether it comes from God, body, or ourselves, and arrive at body through the process of elimination. Such partitioning is related to Descartes’ use of the concepts of clarity and distinctness. A master enumeration is a logical partition produced by establishing equivalence relations, to use Smith’s mathematical analogue, or “common natures,” to defer to the language of Descartes. A square as a raw phenomenal mass is an obscure idea, while a square as a closed four-sided figure is clear. It is still confused, since parallelograms and rectangles fit under the idea; to make it distinct, we need to mention that squares have sides of equal length forming four right angles. Analysis for Aristotle took a similar form as a method of sorting: we collect the objects of investigation, and then divide them up. To take an example for Descartes, if something is not a thought nor extended, then it is not distinct. A mind-body unity, for instance, is a unity by composition, but not by nature, since we can’t distinctly perceive it; it is confused, since it isn’t fundamentally sortable in Descartes’ partition. In contrast, while sensible bodies are never clear and distinct, bodies as bodies are clear and distinct. If one doubts extension, one is simply confused. Clarity works here in a teleological way, since truth, being, and intelligibility all harmonize.
Descartes’ philosophy thus weaves intelligibility together with analysis and synthesis. Pappus of Alexandria once divided analysis into two categories: theoretical analysis, and problematical analysis. A theoretical analysis assumes something is true, and then moves horizontally through the consequences it entails. A problematical analysis assumes something is given, and moves vertically through possibilities it entails. Descartes’ metaphysical thought, Smith observes, exemplifies problematical analysis, aiming to discover a “conceptual landscape,” that is, a conceptual hierarchy. In Descartes, only complete or “adequate” ideas are true; truth is being, the whole. Less adequate levels of reality contain visibles, including images and sensible objects, while the higher levels contain intelligibles, including the transparent world of space and time, with metaphysical forms standing above them. In analysis, we move up the chain of intelligibility, perhaps treating a sensible object mathematically, while synthesis may for example deduce empirical consequences from a given set of theoretical assumptions. This definitely has Platonic overtones; Descartes’ res extensa takes the place of the “receptacle” in the Timaeus and Plotinus’ “container.” But Descartes differs somewhat in building the metaphysical structure in terms of attributes, modes, and substances. His “factitious” ideas are like constructions, while “adventitious” ideas, though obscure and confused, can still be schematized under pure mathematics.
Like Descartes, Leibniz did not believe thinking substance secures the conditions for mathematics, since a thinking substance is indivisible. Adhering to the identity of indiscernibles, Leibniz argued further that plurality was not sufficient to secure quantity. This meant that while things can be numerically distinct, they cannot be fundamentally numerically distinct; something else underwrites the conditions for the reality of quantity. If matter brings with it modal divisibility, then it brings the arrangeability of that which can be divided. Therefore, it would be the combinatorial nature of body that is sufficient for guaranteeing the intelligibility of mathematics.
Descartes never achieved a clean explanation of the transference of motion between bodily modes that cohered cleanly with his ontology. The difficulties notoriously multiply when we consider modes that differ substantially, though what was problem for others often was a brute fact for Descartes. Leibniz, from the premise that substances must include a principle of motion within their own natures, concluded that extension could not metaphysically account for motion; it followed that extension is not substantial. What is substantial for Leibniz, what expresses the deepest level of reality, is the level of information, the level of monads. A monad isn’t information, but a logical locus of information, an internally determined system of predicates lawfully acting as a generating function of its own manifestation. (Smith introduces analogies from matrix algebra, which Leibniz pioneered.) The ideal therefore underwrites the possibilities of the real. While the monads cannot interact, as an ensemble they express an informational structure generating a system of relations accounting for the activity, harmony, diversity, directedness, and organization one finds in the cosmos.
While matter arises as a set of relations that monads represent to one another, remember that matter for Leibniz isn’t strictly body, since matter is extension, while body results from matter being divisible. Matter is necessary for body, but not sufficient. Matter, metaphysically prior to body, unlike body cannot in principle be observed, yet there is no inert, unmathematized extension. Any perceived region of the cosmos, no matter how small, is completely informed. Such information introduces the combinability of one body with another. Each monad runs its own program in a sense, while Leibniz’s God perhaps sits back as the Chief Software Architect.
Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
bene vixit, bene qui latuit
– Descartes
René Descartes (1596-1650) is widely considered to be the father of modern philosophy. And rightly so. Before Descartes, thinkers understood the physical world in terms of the biological world; after Descartes, thinkers commonly understood the biological world in terms of the physical world. Before Descartes, geometry and algebra lived in separate apartments; after Descartes, they could cohabitate under a single coordinate system. Stephen Gaukroger’s biography of Descartes emphasizes his contributions to the mechanical, mathematical worldview that even today continues to dominate the imagination of serious men. But the book contains more than detailed examinations of work contributing to Snell’s law, or the solution to the Pappus problem. Context brings mundane facts to life, such as the Meditations resembling common devotional exercises where a rebirth follows a purging, or the didactic nature of the autobiographical portion in the Discourse as a distinct genre with an implicit emphasis on preconceived moral lessons. And, as a good biography should, we never lose sight of Descartes as a particular human being.
Descartes, as a member of the gentry, or upper bourgeoisie, was educated at La Flèche, an institution run by Jesuits, the principal arm of the Counter-Reformation. Its graduates were usually expected to enter military and/or administrative careers. Innovations in the nature of fortifications transformed the nature of warfare from open battles to sieges and skirmishes, which required not merely nobles for leadership, but personnel with a degree of expertise. The Augsburg Settlement of 1555 — a treaty between Charles V and a coalition of Lutheran princes — accelerated the centralization of European life by establishing the principle of cuius regio, eius religio. Secular institutions, now allied with religion, legitimized themselves in part through sacred doctrine, an innovation necessitating spiritual uniformity amongst congregations.
It therefore isn’t an accident that the individualist flavor of Descartes’ thought parallels a renewed discipline in European society. In the pre-modern age, what habitually took place at many churches intersected with a variety of ancient rites, pagan practices, local traditions — Gaukroger informs us some churches had even been used at times as marketplaces and granaries, or for the purposes of gambling, fighting, and erotic dances. But things were to eventually change. The standardization of Christianity led to the internalization of Christianity, for as Christianity became more public, it became more private. Self-imposed vigilance became mandatory with respect to one’s passions. Hence the spread of humanism and its secular emphasis on civility; Christianity had always positioned itself as the answer to what the classical philosophers were striving for.
Que sais-je? Descartes’ skeptical method aimed in part to show that imperfect-nature doubt, the relativism of his era, was confused. (Other targets included schoolmen, atomists, and non-Cartesian mechanists.) This is an important fact, since Descartes did not employ skepticism in the sense of his contemporaries. Relativists today frequently attempt to construe everything as interwoven with perspectives and conceptual schemes, which are still claims asserting something positive about the constitution of knowledge. Ancient and medieval skepticism was also deeply relativist, but of a strongly externalist character. Pyrrhonism wasn’t designed to make a claim about the nature of knowledge, but to show the futility of attempting to obtain knowledge. For Aristotle, since properly functioning sense organs take the forms of the objects perceived, error when our sense organs successfully operate under normal conditions was unintelligible. Pyrrhonism attacked this teleological model on its own terms by claiming there were no conditions under which our beliefs could be said to be veridical; there couldn’t be a single way of functioning or a right set of conditions for perceiving. It wasn’t that we were too detached from the world, or we were blinded by a veil of ideas, that motivated the skepticism. It was the feeling that perceivers and circumstances were too integrated with the world for us to rationally choose between different alternatives. Pyrrhonism enjoyed a revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among various Catholics as a weapon against Protestantism, arguing the futility of anyone attempting to achieve certainty without the help of intermediaries; we witness it in Montaigne, Pascal, and so forth.
The interpretation of Descartes using skepticism to motivate the reconstruction of knowledge on secure foundations goes back to Kuno Fischer, who, in the nineteenth century, wrote a history of philosophy responsible for a pedestrian division of philosophers of the early modern period into rationalists and empiricists. He regarded philosophy since the seventeenth century as epistemology, which supposedly superseded a previous emphasis on metaphysics. It follows that if we’re dealing with mere epistemologists, they ought to be sorted by their epistemological methods. Gaukroger is correct to challenge this. In the Cartesian utilization of skepticism, the individual isn’t interpreted as something hopelessly embedded in the world, but marked off from it, and not merely marked off as a discrete nature, but as a discrete individual. Indeed, the Cartesian focus was not merely on human cognition, but on anyone’s particular cognition. It is important to remember such doubt was not used to give knowledge a firm foundation, but to secure the intelligibility of the Cartesian metaphysical system, as degrees of intelligibility were still linked to degrees of perfection, and hence to degrees of reality. For Descartes, we arrive at truth by resolving problems into their simplest elements.
On a personal level, disciplined training from the outside defeats itself, paradoxically when such training is successful, by nurturing the inner strength needed for pioneering a new path. While the casting of Descartes in the role of an epistemologist leaves much to be desired, the notion had the right spirit in understanding Descartes as an independent thinker — “independent thinker” here meant literally. As a student, Descartes had been taught an organic conception of the mind dealing with logic ultimately in terms of cognitive functions rather than formal features of valid inference patterns. But rather than rules imposed from the outside, Descartes now wanted to capture an internal process operating with a built-in criterion of truth and falsity. This suggested there were intrinsically rational cognitive states that could not be explained reductively. The rhetorical-psychological theories of Quintillian may have inspired this, since it was taught one cannot evoke clarity and vividness in others if one cannot do it in oneself first. The possibility of us understanding any rules of method as rules of method suggested that intellect could not be taught, which didn’t mean that we could not learn from others, only that we grasped first principles through insight, like a light bulb turning on upstairs. Intuitus thus became the paradigm form of inference.
As we saw when we looked at the logic curriculum at La Flèche, the Jesuit account of logic was one in which logic or dialectic was construed above all as a psychological process which required regulation if it was to function properly. In the light of this, one thing that we can take Descartes to be denying is that mental processes require external regulation, that rules to guide our thought are needed. (p. 116)
Expressed differently, Descartes’ predecessors privileged synthesis over analysis; their paradigm of knowledge started us with primitive notions, and then moved us down a conceptual hierarchy through deduction. In contrast, Descartes privileged analysis over synthesis by advocating problem-solving as a method of discovery — begin with a given, and jump up through organizational levels instead. For example, if the transparency of algebraic operations marks them out as certain, analytic geometry, with its employment of the shiny new Cartesian coordinate system, will allow us to conceptualize the structural conditions of entities in the world in a clear and distinct fashion, delivering us the quantitative essence of things.
Greek mathematicians, especially the later Alexandrian authors, had used two modes of mathematical argument, analysis and synthesis. Analysis consisted of techniques enabling one to find a solution to problems, either by establishing the truth of some theorem (‘theoretical analysis’) or by finding some unknown quantity or construction (‘problematical analysis’). Such problem-solving techniques had a heuristic value, and they did not amount to proof. Synthesis, on the other hand, shows how a solution is to be derived from first principles. For the Greek mathematicians, both methods were needed, although the actual proof was conducted in the course of the synthesis, so it was usually only the synthesis that was presented. (p. 125)
Descartes got the notion of providing quantitative micro-mechanical explanations of a macroscopic phenomena from his apprenticeship with Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637), one of Europe’s most educated men. Largely self-taught, Beeckman was a man motivated by practical, rather than contemplative, concerns; he found no point in talking about effects if we could not imagine how they are produced. A context including hydrostatics and hydraulics strongly suggested the essence of change is the displacement of parts, with speed and motion now doing the explanatory work; all action becomes contact action. The study of imperfect motions — impacts, rebounds, and the like — rendered Aristotle’s outlook not so much as false but useless, a methodological failure without measurable conservation principles. The study of hydrostatics also illuminates Descartes’s commitment to a plenum, his rejection of the void, and his theory of vortices, since if any part of the physical universe moves, another part must move.
However, Descartes’ commitment to mechanism was not a commitment to kinematics. Mechanism in Descartes’ time often had strong theological motivations, and Descartes was no exception. Since the Aristotelian worldview held that nature was fundamentally active, Renaissance thinkers polluted nature with all sorts of occult powers, many of which acted at a distance. This had the unwanted effect of blurring the difference between the natural and the supernatural. Pantheism, animism, magic, divination, all earned the scorn of thinkers such as Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). The solution to such a mess was to reconceive matter as something wholly inert, while rejecting the immanency of the soul, thus stopping all theological troublemakers before they even begin.
Descartes’ problems in physics arise not because he reduces physics to kinematics, but because he cannot do kinematics — to do kinematics one needs motions, and all Descartes has is a series of instantaneous tendencies to motion. The interpretative problems are compounded when commentators, unable to reconcile Descartes’ instantaneous tendencies with their preconceived view of Cartesian physics as kinematics, then proceed to solve the ‘problem’ by construing the former as something which derives from the metaphysical doctrine that God recreates the universe at each instant. (p. 13)
Since Gaukroger is correct that Descartes was not an occasionalist, Gaukroger unfortunately must be making a colossal blunder on his own terms by arguing that Descartes was “superficially orthodox” in his use of a metaphysical architecture inclusive of substances, modes, attributes, accidents, and so forth. While he may have taken such a hardline stance to avoid an occasionalist rendering of Descartes’ thought, this isn’t necessary. Gaukroger even gets it right that Descartes had no temporal gap between cause and effect. So think about this. Like his scholastic predecessors, Descartes held an endurantist model of persistence. Causation, as that which ultimately puts everything in motion, was still about things, the paradigm instance more like a brick crashing through a sheet of glass, and less like billiard balls colliding. It therefore made no sense to talk about past events causing present occurrences. The scholastics reasoned if the world cannot sustain itself, what must sustain the world must be in play now. We must conclude that the divine action of God does not merely legitimate Descartes’ physics; it comes from a view of causation, likely stemming from Francisco Suarez, where God as creator sustains things as a primary cause in their being, but works together with secondary causes in their becoming. While this wasn’t occasionalism, God isn’t left out of the causal picture either. Secondly, Cartesian physics was only possible because of the previous Scotism that developed the modal and formal distinctions necessary for Descartes to integrate his metaphysics in a vertical fashion, thus allowing him to strip out the horizontal components of the Aristotelian schema. Even a moderate Thomist like Suarez employed Scotist innovations to give a larger role to efficient causes, as did many of Descartes’ contemporaries. Furthermore, Descartes’ successors continued to think in terms of substance and mode, not merely lesser known minds such as Arnauld, La Forge, Regius, and so forth, but big hitters like Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. And most importantly, Gaukroger correctly noted Descartes had an implicit doctrine of analysis, but such a doctrine does not make sense unless one can move up and down various levels in a hierarchy of intelligibility. For that, we definitely need substances, modes, and the like. Descartes was a mechanist, but could not do kinematics, precisely because he thought of forces statically in the language of modes. This becomes even more obvious when we consider that Descartes did not place abstracta in a third realm, or make them accessible to us via divine illumination; we gain insight through thinking about what is formally contained within various perfections in our minds objectively. The independence and transcendence of God neatly ties into this picture, known a priori as that which has the most reality, the most perfection.
The most suggestive piece of scholarship produced by Gaukroger may be his investigation of Cartesian automata, which crosses paths with philosophy of language. Materialism, Gaukroger reports, didn’t look even remotely plausible as a theory of cognition until the research of Helmholtz in the 1860s. An automaton in Descartes’ time was merely a self-moving thing; Descartes did not explain away the experiences of animals, but merely argued their experiences were not like ours because they lack a robust capacity for language. Gaukroger used the metaphor of camouflage to describe Descartes’ theory of perception — color is a real feature of things, but context-dependent and response-dependent. But for representation, we need more than causality and resemblance; there are hints in Descartes that we need information, a finite set of signs from which we can generate an infinite number of ideas. One can’t help but think of Leibniz, who indeed took Cartesian thought in this direction, envisioning a universal language in combinatorial terms. There is a book yet to be written here by an enterprising young man, perhaps titled Generative Grammar: Descartes, Leibniz, and the Philosophy of Language.
As a personality, Descartes was casual, yet very businesslike with others. Melancholy was a fashionable malady during Descartes’ life; intellectuals, to appear sensible and urbane, were expected to pose in an “emo” style as we might describe it today. Still, Descartes usually remained secretive, misanthropic, non-combative, moody, introverted, morose, and sometimes paranoid.
Descartes, while having an ethics of a stoic flavor, was not a literally a stoic, since stoicism places reason and the passions in conflict. Descartes didn’t understand emotions/the passions as disequilibria from natural states; the passions themselves are integrated with the clockwork of life. Descartes did not see the passions as necessarily perverting judgment, as he took a functional understanding of the passions taking them as usually, but not always, assisting judgment. Reason here takes a step in the direction of regulation, legislation, and rationality.
And for music, of course I’m going to share something exhibiting clarity and distinctness.
Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
[T]he development of German idealism consists not in an increasing subjectivism but in the very opposite: a growing realism and naturalism. (p. 3)
F.C. Beiser wants to persuade us that German idealism represents the de-subjectivization of the Kantian legacy. Kant and Fichte bat first as critical, classical thinkers deliberately seeking round philosophical architectures balancing the subjective and the objective, rather than incoherent patchworks of contradictory ideas, or wild, lopsided disequilibria. The absolute idealists fill out the rest of Beiser’s roster, overcoming flaws in the critical philosophy by developing solutions containing greater naturalism and externality. Hegel takes the day off, though most of the hard work will be completed without his aid.
I. Kant
The German idealists all aimed to surmount and explain the subject-object dualism of ordinary experience by developing a principle of subject-object identity. Immanuel KANT (1724-1804) explained the accessibility of being to thinking by denying the status of existence as a predicate, thus rendering being and thinking an identity within difference.
Kant cannot accurately be said to be a subjectivist, given Kant allowed no self-transparency. His transcendental unity of apperception was only a formal condition of experience. This entailed we cannot know ourselves as things-in-themselves. We know of our existence through our interactions within the empirical world, but not our essence; we know that we interact, but never how. The same agnosticism followed for the mind-independent cosmos. According to Kant’s strictures, we can definitely think things-in-themselves as things-in-themselves, but we can never know things-in-themselves only as things-in-themselves.
While not subjectivist, Kant assigned a large role for subjectivity; given his epistemological intentions, the phenomenological dimension of Kant’s philosophy in principle cannot be reduced. In the thought of Leibniz, all presentations in experience were representative, which meant a complete analysis of sensation, even if achievable in theory only, in principle would leave us with a purely intellectual perception of reality. But for Kant, all intellectual cognition was fundamentally discursive, not intuitive, and the representation of space was fundamentally intuitive, not discursive. This meant that space was a whole that preceded its parts, a totum, not a compositum. If we rejected the interpretation of our perception of space as a confused intellectual perception, we’d have strong grounds for believing the falsity of the identity of indiscernibles in the domain of phenomena. Kant was aiming to outmaneuver an entrenched monadological doctrine: that all change in a substance only arises from within that very substance alone. So Kantian space isn’t abstracted off of experience, and it isn’t a figment of the imagination either.
Kant’s theory of space made sensibility a distinct faculty in its own right, complete with an empirical criterion of significance, similar in kind to the verification theory of meaning advanced a century later. Yet Kant’s philosophy was not merely an agnostic flavor of Berkeleyian idealism, for it had the added component of rationalism. Kant intended his conditions of experience to be valid not for human nature, but for any rational being. The reality of a Kantian representation did not consist in a resemblance to an experience-independent reality, but in a conformity to a rule as part of a lawfully connected conceptual network. Coherence — the necessary and universal structure of experience — constituted truth, not correspondence. Kant’s categories were not just ideas on par with sensations, but rules having a normative status as neutral and inescapable laws. A raw sensation left unschematized by a confirmatory attitude within a temporal-spatial framework would signify nothing at all; objective intelligibility demands stability within a single, unified system.
In the second edition of the first Critique, Kant treated appearances as of things-in-themselves, while remaining agnostic about their essence in-themselves, stressing that only the form of their appearances depends upon us. For things as considered in-themselves, as opposed to the appearances of things-in-themselves, rational insight into their experience-independent essence remained cognitively off limits. Before Kant, ideas in early modern philosophy were fixed media through which we become aware of the world; they were the basic units bearing metaphysical meaning, which we could apprehend through reflection. In contrast, like Hume, Kant emphasized the contribution of the knowing subject to experience. Kant’s philosophy retained a generative, Wolffian aspect — the spirit that we know what we create — in treating experience as a product of the synthetic activities of the understanding, with the perception of objects arising from such activities. Yet Kant didn’t believe we literally make the essence of such objects; he was clear that objects are wholes of which representations at most could be only parts. While such wholes existed through their parts, their significance was more than a mere phenomenalist conjunction of such parts.
[F]or all his apparent adherence to the theory of ideas, Kant’s allegiance was shaky and ambivalent, to say the least. For he also undermines, if only implicitly, each of the central assumptions behind the theory of ideas. First, he questions its assumption about the origin of ideas. For Kant, no idea is simply given, but all are constructed, the products of more basic synthetic activities. While he indeed admits that an idea might be given to consciousness, he still insists that its appearing to consciousness is the result of subconscious activities. Representation is never something simple, basic, and given, but it is always something complex, derived, and constructed. According to one line of argument in the Analytic, especially evident in the first edition of the Kritik, the very possibility of representation depends on more fundamental activities, such as apprehension, imagination, and apperception (A 98-104).
Second, Kant also contests the assumption about meaning. He denies that ideas have a self-sufficient meaning, as if they somehow represent objects by virtue of their own nature alone. It is one of Kant’s central theses in the Analytic that ideas acquire their representative status — their capacity to designate or refer to an object — only if the understanding synthesizes a manifold of sensations according to a rule. This act of synthesis creates a necessary connection between these sensations, such that each plays a necessary role in the whole. The sensation of a red patch becomes the representation of a rose, for example, because it, along with many other sensations, can be subsumed under the concept of a rose in a judgment like ‘This is a rose.’ Without being combined with other sensations according to rules — without being able to serve as the possible subject of a judgment — a sensation would be “impossible to us,” that is, it would not represent anything at all, and so would have no cognitive significance.
Nowhere is Kant’s distance from the theory of ideas more apparent than when he writes in the opening section of the B Deduction that all analysis presupposes synthesis (§15, B 130). Here, by implication if not by intention, Kant denies that there can be any such thing as a simple idea. An idea is not something complete and self-sufficient, he is saying, because it acquires its significance only from the whole of which it is a part. The very idea of a simple idea now shows itself to be a false abstraction from its whole. In these lines Kant rejects the analytical paradigm of explanation of the theory of ideas, which understood something by analyzing it into its separate components. It is no accident that his own paradigm is more holistic: a system organized around and derived from a single principle (A 654/B 673; A 833-834/B 861-862). (p. 134-5)
II. Fichte
Johann Gottlieb FICHTE (1762-1814) always insisted his philosophy was not transcendent, but merely transcendental, identifying the limits of experience but never moving beyond them. Reacting to the criticisms of Kantian philosophy by Schulze and Maimon, Fichte banished the thing-in-itself, affirmed the unity of the empirical and the intellectual, and established transcendental philosophy on a purely immanent basis.
Fichte explained the interdependence of subject and object by removing any hard distinction between knowing and doing. Since sensations didn’t represent anything in themselves, the possibility of any representation thus rested upon our active attitudes. Fichte accepted that we couldn’t prove or refute the reality of the external world from constitutive principles alone, but believed we could through regulative principles sourced in action, arguing that reason could not even be theoretical if it was not practical first. While God, immortality, and providence may not be objects of belief, they give us the right to act.
The concept of freedom was the keystone of Fichte’s explanatory model. The ego was said to be absolute — or infinite, or unlimited — because it was the absence of all determinations. If we can make explanations only by relating events within experience, we cannot explain that which relates, since the application of determinate concepts to the ego that relates would make it passive, thus contradicting the premise of its activity. While we are free in a formal sense, in that freedom is a condition underlying the possibility of knowledge, we cannot know if we are free or not in a material sense. We may find ourselves willing, Fichte explained, but we could never knowingly make the stronger claim that we are free. But while we could not discover and could not deny freedom on the basis of evidence, and while we necessarily lacked any immediate knowledge of our freedom, we could still posit our freedom. If the self has no fixed knowable essence, and if the limits of knowledge prevent us from transcending experience, then the ‘I’ is what it is for the ‘I’. Since we cannot have an explanation of the mind, given that such an explanation would have to be given in terms of its own experience, Fichte concluded that the mind’s very essence and existence are determined by its own self-conception.
If the ego could have no ultimate explanation, neither could the non-ego. We internalized matter by making it submit to some form, and externalized what we could not completely dominate and control. Intellectual intuition — nonconceptual, indemonstrable, and giving us no metaphysical knowledge — consisted in the consciousness of acting as opposed to being acted upon. Hence, we find the thing-in-itself changed into recalcitrant experience, like the given of C.I. Lewis, as a mere check on the ego’s activity. Fichte explained that while we cannot represent such a check as an appearance, we could feel the resistance to our will as if it were a thing-in-itself. We become self-conscious, aware of our finitude, as we become aware of the possibility of an order independent of our will.
In Fichtean philosophy, rational self-consciousness was inherently a social phenomenon; all knowledge, because it depends on a normative structure of mutual recognition, was intersubjective. The ego existed only in embodied form through its empirical determinations and its relations to selves and the world. We couldn’t have knowledge without the assumption of freedom, and the existence of other rational subjects was a necessary condition for the positing of one’s own self-awareness. We could only postulate our freedom in a limited manner, the conditions of which imply one’s freedom limited by and limiting the freedom of other rational subjects.
Monism ties together Fichte’s entire system of philosophy as a regulative ideal: the absolute ego not merely in the formal sense, but in an additional material sense. The absolute ego consists in the autonomous making of itself what it is. In its formal aspect, the absolute ego is self-determining only in existence, but from its material aspect, it is self-determining in both existence and essence. In other words, practical reason demands that the formal ego ought to become the material ego, with unrestricted domination over its environment, uncontrolled by anything outside of itself. Fichte made this maneuver to overcome the Kantian abyss between the sensibility and understanding, explaining the unity of the phenomenal and noumenal self by arguing that the ‘I’ is only possible through the ‘I’ of the absolute ego: the world is not rational, but ought to become so. This relativized Kant’s dualism — as we increase our power over nature, we increase the created content of experience at the expense of the given. But given the regulative status of Fichte’s solution, the progress of any such striving will necessarily be infinite; something always necessarily remains to be surmounted.
III. Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel
Of the romantics, Beiser selected Friedrich HÖLDERIN (1770-1843), NOVALIS (1772-1801), and K.W.F. SCHLEGEL (1772-1829) to demonstrate that the core components of absolute idealism, albeit unsystematized, had already been in the air well before Hegel arrived at Jena in 1801. For the absolute idealists, the absolute was pure being itself. No longer regarding self-consciousness as a philosophical starting point, the subject-object identity necessary for the possibility of knowledge now transcended consciousness. This meant the absolute was nothing less than the whole independent reality of nature: the in-itself that “just is” not depending upon anything else for its existence. The absolute idealists believed something could be subjective or objective only within the context of experience where one thing is opposed to another, while the absolute was that which made such experience possible.
Spinoza had been deliberately merged with Fichte. It was argued that Fichte’s ego could not be the unconditioned since it must oppose itself to the non-ego. And such opposition lacked a context, since Fichte, without any interest in physics or history, lacked a firm stage for his realm of action. In addition, the romantics felt Fichte’s practical philosophical foundation undermined itself, since insurmountable striving could only lead to despair and alienation, thus sapping all strength from his activist premise.
The philosophies of Kant and Fichte suffered from the fact that they could not internally secure their own completeness based upon their own resources. Anything could be imported into the thing-in-itself, and Fichte’s check or “impetus” (Anstoß), while not foreign to the ‘I’ as the encounter within itself of its own finitude, suggested we had yet to touch metaphysical ground. The romantics recommended using a synoptic method — both analytic and synthetic — that starts with the whole, moves from the whole to its parts and then to the whole from its parts. We can arrive at a system by identifying a unity, demonstrating how a unity is opposed by another unity, and ascending to a unity that cannot be opposed by anything else. With the significance of anything resting upon its place within a system, all philosophy must become regulative. Because the underdetermination of evidence by theory meant a proposition could be demonstrated in a variety of ways, the absolute idealists drew the conclusion that we should become critical of our cognitive powers while using them, not before using them.
Absolute idealism was idealism because of its Platonist aspect, its rationalism. The ideal referred to the structural/archetypical/intelligible pattern weaving together the subjective and objective in the unity of knowledge. Holism implied that all conceptualization was determination, a negation where one predicate is contrasted against another. Since unity involved opposition, and opposition involved unity, dynamism remained a key feature of German idealism. Knowledge involved both appropriation and alienation; everything could only become what it is through its opposite.
Such coherentism, the premise of a unity that contained all divisions, was authorized by aesthetic experience. While reason and action presupposed but could never experience the idea of the whole, the romantics believed we became aware of an unconditioned universe outside ourselves through our experience of the sublime — a longing for union with nature replaced Fichte’s infinite striving. The whole preceded the possibility of its parts, and only what is created could be rationally known. The universe, as pure productivity, was therefore nothing less than a natural work of art. Spirit is invisible nature, and nature is visible spirit.
The objective realizes itself as the subject because nature reaches its perfection in art and human consciousness, which is its highest degree of organization and development. Conversely, the subjective realizes itself as the objective because art attains its perfection in becoming nature, and because human activity realizes its final end only in becoming one again with all of nature. (p. 400)
IV. Schelling
While Schlegel was the first to present absolute idealism to a public audience, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph SCHELLING (1775-1854) was the first to give absolute idealism a systematic exposition. Like Hegel, Schelling emphasized the rational nature of our knowledge of the absolute, employing a synoptic, integrative conception of reason.
Schelling defines intellectual intuition in general terms as “the capacity to see the universal in the particular, the infinite in the finite, and indeed to unify both in a living unity.” An intellectual intuition, he explains, consists in my grasping an individual as a member of a whole, in seeing how its essential nature or inner identity depends on the totality of which it is only a part. When I have an intellectual intuition of an object, Schelling, says, I do not explain it, and I do not deduce it, but I contemplate it. To explain an object is to show how other objects act on it and cause it to act as it does; to deduce an object is to derive it from higher principles, showing how it is only a single instance of a general universal. But to contemplate an object is to consider it in itself, apart from its relations with other objects. When I contemplate an object, Schelling maintains, I also see how it is part of a wider whole, how it represents the entire universe from its own point for view, because in themselves all objects are one and the same.
Schelling calls this kind of knowledge intellectual intuition to distinguish it from both sensible intuition and conception. To grasp the universal in the particular in this way cannot be sensible intuition because the senses grasp each object singly and individually, and they therefore do not recognize the wider whole of which it is a part. To see the object in itself, apart from its relations to other things, also cannot be an act of conception, because to conceive an object is to subsume it under some universal, and so to compare or contrast it in some respect to other things. When I grasp the universal in the particular through an intellectual intuition I do not simply subsume the particular under some general concept or universal; for then there is no real identity between particular and universal. When a particular is subsumed under a universal there are other universals true of it, and there are other particulars that instantiate this universal. In an intellectual intuition, however, what I intuit is the identity of the universal and the particular; I see how the particular is inseparable from the whole from which is is a part, and how the whole cannot be without that particular. Because I do not use a concept, and because I grasp the object directly or immediately, apart from its relations to other things, I have an intuition of it. Here, of course, Schelling follows Kant’s definition of an intuition as purely immediate representation.
Now it is in terms of this concept of intellectual intuition that Schelling and Hegel define reason itself. Theirs is not an arbitrary or stipulative definition, but it is based on a common general sense of the term, according to which knowing the reason for a thing involves seeing its place in a whole. Schelling’s and Hegel’s concept of reason is therefore essentially holistic. According to their definition, the task of reason is to comprehend something by showing how its identity depends upon its place within a whole. (p. 580-1)
The arrival at truth through the intuition of wholes made truth a function of systematicity. All that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real. Since it is only known a priori what conforms to the law of one’s self-activity, it follows that nature is absolute self-activity — not an organism, since that would suggest nature is a product, but pure productivity itself. This had direct implications on the metaphysical status of mechanism, since at an ultimate level, nothing could be truly conceived as just sitting there where it is, waiting for something else to clang into it. As the universe develops, everything transforms, like foam at the edge of the wave of becoming; something purely passive and inert, that does not exist in any way, shape, form, etc., was a contradiction in terms. And as mentioned above, form was inherent in an object, not only for its structure, but for its very existence as a unity. Yet any conceptual determination meant an essential contrast against something else, not just an opposite, but its opposite — every limitation meant we could think both sides of the boundary. So within a system, interaction stood conceptually prior to action; causation wouldn’t be paradigmatically unidirectional, as if one active thing changes one passive thing, but reciprocal and bidirectional. Schelling thus believed we can give the idea of an organism — life itself — a constitutive status, departing from Kant in his late period, who indeed gave systematic unity a constitutive status in philosophy, but only in the realm of appearances.
The intellectual determinacy of the natural world integrated with the immediacy, unity, and wholeness of the historical, in the creative activity of the artist, thus synthesizing the objective and the subjective. Channeling unconscious forces, a creative artist could realize a plan he cannot intend nor predict, a result explicable only in terms of being directed by powers beyond himself. This was an intensified realism — a transcendental naturalism — since nature developed itself rationally as its own directing intelligence; every thing was therefore explicable according to the laws of nature. The transcendental subject, no longer a starting point, now derived from its place in nature, the absolute coming to its fullest realization, organization, and development only in the self-awareness of the knowing subject — its highest manifestation, its highest expression, its highest embodiment.
For Schelling, all opposition was purely ideal; knowledge of the absolute belonged to its form rather than its essence. The absolute was utter, impersonal, indifferent self-sameness, without difference, distinction, or multiplicity. Ideas were the self-knowledge of the absolute, though ideas could only know themselves through finite things, knowledge here being understood, again, in terms of subject-object identity. However, Schelling not only assumed such knowledge existed in the first place, but did not explain how the finite subject knowingly participates in such subject-object identities. So another philosophical chasm opened up between our knowledge as finite subjects and the infinite self-knowledge of the absolute itself. Hegel, whose strengths resided in his synthetic powers of rationalizing and organizing rather than originality, would make an effort to complete the system of absolute idealism by moving negativity into the absolute itself, making free, integral, rational self-expression a constitutive feature of his philosophy.
V. Musical selection
Below, Beethoven — perhaps unknowingly — expresses the spirit of his age. Rather than clockwork, the music moves forward through the juxtaposition of opposites: starts and stops, constantly positioned changes in volume, sweeping simple movements through arpeggios that immediately reverse themselves, etc. The development is dialectical — at times voices move in opposite directions, only to simultaneously change direction, like a double-helix. A self-animating totality, the music is filled not with mechanism, but with living, vital force, like an organism — some fragments of sound scurry away like animals, others cascade like waterfalls. Most importantly, the end is contained in the beginning. The destination is the unity of the destination and the going to the destination, the immanent drive, the expansion and closure, with the moment of greatest conflict realizing the moment of greatest reconciliation. If music could be absolute idealism, this would be it.
Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
– Emerson
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The French Revolution made freedom popular everywhere; the everyman sought self-determination as Reason became king in the hearts of men. Romanticism superseded neo-classicism when the latter’s universality became universal, that is, when the Enlightenment’s encyclopedic drive for comprehensiveness and completeness aimed to reach and include two limits: the immanent, and the transcendent. Lived individual experience thus became something both general and autonomous in its own right. The Fate of Reason details this transition in philosophy through the development of Kantianism in Germany.
Immanuel Kant famously denied that reason provides conclusions of existential import, demoting it from a faculty of knowledge to a regulative ideal necessary for the possibility of inquiry. Kant’s “dogmatic slumbers” were awakened by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), who introduced him to the thought of David Hume. Hamann believed reason, governed by subconscious factors, could not grasp nor explain life in its entirety. Expressed differently, by divorcing reason from nature, Hamann naturalized reason. If the lack of a rational starting position to survey reality denies us privileged access to ourselves, then our very identity will depend upon our relations to everything else. Hume, if we remember, was a historian, and Hamann took the lesson of treating custom as something necessarily, unavoidably, and involuntarily internalized. It follows that philosophical reflection must include and must begin with life in a community where actions govern and are governed by others. If reason is embodied in language and action, but not in a metaphysical, Aristotelian fashion, then there is, strictly speaking, no faculty of reason, but only measured and unmeasured ways of participating in life, each incomprehensible in itself.
It is difficult to exaggerate the many respects in which Hamann influenced the Sturm und Drang, and ultimately Romanticism itself. The metaphysical significance of art, the importance of the artist’s personal vision, the irreducibility of cultural differences, the value of folk poetry, the social and historical dimension of rationality, and the significance of language for thought — all these themes were prevalent in, or characteristic of, the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. But they were first adumbrated by Hamann, and then elaborated and promulgated by Herder, Goethe, and Jacobi. (p. 16)
Unlike Hamann, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) held that rational and non-rational forms of life can only stand in direct conflict; this meant we must choose between the exclusive and exhaustive alternatives of rational nihilism and irrational fideism. For Jacobi, thought as thought always involves factors that cannot be explained: the irresolvable, the immediate, the simple, the incomprehensible, the inexplicable. He despised the principle of sufficient reason, the notion that all contingencies can be subsumed under their conditions into a system of complete necessity — it allows truth to no statement unless we have sufficient reason why it should not be otherwise. Philosophically, fatalism and atheism had been frequently associated with Spinozism, a philosophy that portrays a determined, indifferent universe without final causes, miracles, or providence; Spinoza even recommended naturalizing the Bible through philological and historical methods. But criticism combined with mechanistic science together showed Jacobi a world “out of nothing, to nothing, for nothing and in nothing” — in short, “nihilism,” a term Jacobi himself first introduced into philosophical discourse. Jacobi believed the world runs on faith in the light of Humean considerations: our existential needs as human beings, the ultimate dependence of the goals and standards of inquiry on human will, and the necessary lack of a hard distinction between instinct and reason within a holist interpretation of a human being. Yet Jacobi’s public dispute with Mendelssohn over Lessing’s closet Spinozism had the ironic result of transforming Spinoza from a common boogeyman into a philosophical hero. With the added prestige of the deceased Lessing’s blessing, the monism of Spinoza’s One and All displaced the pluralist views of Leibniz; no one could now resist Spinoza’s religious attitude toward the world depicting man in communion with nature.
In the eighteenth century, all sorts of human activity, from art to science to religion, became targets for naturalization. Consider language — Rousseau attempted to explain its origins in terms of the emotions, while Condillac introduced a conventionalist model. In the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), understanding anything necessarily involved an account of its origin, growth, and development. To explain something therefore was to identify its organization, the principle of explanation being a self-activating teleological vitalism. Interpreting man as a single, living whole, Herder therefore theorized the dependence and independence of mind and body through a non-reductionist naturalism. Reason emerges at higher levels of organization as an integrative function that directs and controls. Kant wrote his third critique with Herder in mind, repeatingly making a case why we never have warrant for taking analogical principles as constitutive principles. Herder however had a theory of interpretation that made all thinking analogical, bounded in scope by language and its temporal social/historical context. His vitalism, like Spinoza’s monism, would be an essential ingredient in the evolution of absolute idealism. However, the mere addition of vitalism + monism can’t get us farther than Schopenhauer; absolute idealism required vitalism + monism + rationalism, that is, the added component of capital-R Reason, that which knows a priori what conforms to the laws of its own activity.
Following Kant, philosophy took a phenomenological turn in the thought of Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823). Instead of integrating metaphysics and knowledge together through a basic conceptual framework that takes an isomorphism between reason and being for granted, the idea of a framework itself came under fire; criticism turned on itself in the form of meta-criticism. The demands of systematicity meant the conditions of knowledge should not be sought in the nature of what exists, but in the laws that govern our knowledge of what exists. This advanced consciousness and self-consciousness beyond their previous methodological employment to a central philosophical position. While Kant’s philosophy contained many hard divisions, it lacked any inner resource establishing its completeness. His neo-classical symmetries began to seem artificial, as nothing within his philosophy showed us why his philosophy must take the specific form of organization as a whole that it did. Reinhold attempted to put Kantianism on a more secure basis by establishing a principle of consciousness, uniting everything under a general theory of representation like the followers of Wolff, but with a phenomenological flavor.
For Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833), just as all criticism must become skepticism, all meta-criticism must become, for lack of a better word, “meta-skepticism.” His complaint basically was that Kant used the synthetic a priori to explain the possibility of the synthetic a priori; there is no rational guarantee that everyone’s experience is organized in the same fashion at a fundamental level. The problem was that Kant’s philosophy was synthetic, but insufficiently synthetic. When we think about how our knowledge is produced, Kant’s explanation always at some point introduced a noumenal “source,” “origin,” “basis,” “ground,” “foundation,” and the like, which brings questions about the Kantian thing-in-itself into focus. Jacobi had previously complained that without the thing-in-itself, Kant’s philosophy is nihilism, but with the thing-in-itself, there is nothing in principle keeping the subject as a law-giver within the boundaries of Kantian philosophy. It needed an explanation for why we cannot willfully generate the content of our own experiences without admitting formless representations or surrendering the distinction between mind and that which is independent of mind. Reinhold’s solution attempted to vitalize representation in the same way Wolff intellectualized desire. Objective content, e.g. recalcitrant experiences we cannot alter through will alone, would quickly morph into Fichte’s “obstacle” as he rebooted Kant’s critical philosophy on a practical basis.
Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) showed how to take the holes in Kant’s philosophy and make them wholes. Kant’s philosophy contained a dualism between the independent faculties of the understanding and sensibility. The understanding was intellectual, active, and timeless; sensibility was empirical, passive, and temporal. How could such heterogeneous faculties interact? More specifically, how do synthetic a priori concepts apply to a posteriori intuitions? If Kant may have demonstrated the necessary conditions of possible experience, he did not demonstrate that any such experience in fact obtains. Maimon agreed with Kant that the application of a category to experience requires a temporal schema; he simply objected that knowing a temporal schema in itself does not justify a specific application of a category. Nothing within experience provides a criterion for when an a priori concept applies to it; Kant for instance leaves us with no means of distinguishing cases where there is a contingent constant conjunction from those where there is a universal and necessary connection. If it is always doubtful that the synthetic a priori applies in any specific case, then it is doubtful that it applies in general, whether it actually applies or not.
Maimon’s solution filled the Kantian abyss with an unlimited understanding present within our limited understanding, infinite understanding here being understood as a regulative, rather than constitutive, principle. If we ultimately know only what conforms to the laws of our own self-activity, then only an unlimited understanding could be said to create everything it knows. Against Reinhold, Maimon privileged synthesis over representation. This had the effect of making the dualism between understanding and sensibility fluid and moving, rather than static and unbridgeable. If truth is the organization of everything into a complete and integrated system, then the more understanding increases, the more sensibility diminishes. This move gave transcendental philosophy a purely immanent status. The need for first principles was obviated — one could move up and down different levels of conceptual organization in different ways without the necessity of a unique starting position. While Maimon made infinite understanding the ultimate goal of inquiry, Fichte soon made the unlimited the ultimate goal of action — complete self-determination as a practical ideal.
Below, Don Giovanni uncompromisingly chooses to stay true to himself, even if it entails being dragged to hell.
Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)
The rationalists held that a beautiful work of art should have a specific form, express emotion, and imitate reality. (p. 10)
While not universally true, that the literature and fine arts of the twentieth century revolved around a cult of ugliness, wickedness, and unreality, we can safely generalize. This spirit, wanting to do graffiti on life, expressed both more and less than the nihilistic urge to convert somethings into nothings. Indeed, it strove for the hellish middle ground between being and nothingness, as if to render the entire world deformed, defaced, mutilated, mangled, dismembered, disfigured, paralyzed, pulverized.
Contemporary Western culture is increasingly untethered from Jerusalem and Athens. For centuries, men affirmed the wisdom and goodness of God through the experience of beauty. The classical trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty stood together as different facets of a unified perfection. Socratism had a similar message: the key to happiness resides in virtue, and we acquire virtue through knowledge. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates reveals the teachings of Diotima of Mantinea, who taught him that love, as a desire for beauty, is fundamentally spiritual, an ascent to the contemplation of the divine.
Once we see Diotima’s role as the fount of aesthetic rationalism, we can begin to appreciate why aesthetic rationalism gave such importance to beauty, and why contemporary aesthetics is so blind to dismiss it. By making beauty the object of love, Diotima shows us that it is integral to life, that it is behind our strongest drives, the goal of our deepest aspirations. If she is right, beauty must be central to aesthetics, and we can no more eliminate it than love itself. The central and vital role of beauty in all volition was fully appreciated by all the rationalists, who made perfection, the order behind beauty, the object of all desire. (p. 22)
German aesthetic rationalism began with G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716), who claimed beauty consists in the perception of perfection. Perfection consists in harmony, which is unity-in-variety. Leibniz also defined substance in terms of living force, which is the power to create a manifold, i.e., to create unity-in-variety. Since Leibniz conceived perfection as positive, actualized reality, substances of greater power have greater beauty. With rational insight held as the paradigm of knowledge, the end of life rested in the contemplation of beauty, the greatest possible pleasure being the beatific vision, the intuition of God. Note here that Leibniz was attempting to reinstate the aesthetic realm against the empiricist, nominalist austerities of Protestant theology.
Leibniz’s emphasis upon contemplation does not mean, however, that he somehow anticipates Kant in thinking that aesthetic pleasure is disinterested, completely distinct from the desire. Rather, he expressly maintains, as a true disciple of Diotima, that the perception of beauty gives rise to love. Whenever we take pleasure in the perfection, well-being, or happiness of some other animate or rational being, we love that being. We do not love all beauty, however, because some inanimate objects can be beautiful and we do not love them; we talk about love for inanimate objects, viz., a painting, only by extension. However, whenever we are aware of the perfection of another animate or rational being and value it for its own sake — whenever, in other words, we are aware of its beauty — we love it. (p. 36)
Christian Wolff (1679-1754) believed the arts widen our field of experience by channeling the creative powers of nature. Knowledge, for Wolff, depended in part on action, which itself consisted primarily in productive activity. Wolff used the concept of representation to unite all of the faculties of the soul, each faculty understood as an active potency. Post-Kantians have difficulty interpreting appreciation as something distinct from simple, hard, irreducible likings — the only things popularly considered metaphysically absolute and morally inviolable in our post-modern world. In contrast, the rationalist tradition conceived pleasure in part as a cognitive state, that is, the perception of an excellence, the insight being that there are reasons why we may feel satisfied and nauseated in different contexts. Since our preferences do not exist in a vacuum — as if divorced both from our individual nature and the nature of our surroundings — an arbitrary taste was considered a contradiction in terms.
Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766) best exemplified the rationalist doctrine that aesthetic criticism and production are governed by standards. Discovering, systematizing, and reducing such regulations to first principles are tasks left to a philosopher. Rules are preferable to whims for several reasons. Violations of non-contradiction, such as plot holes, irritate an audience. Improbability destroys verisimilitude by producing an effect we would casually call “fakey,” “cheesy,” “over-the-top,” “tacky,” or “campy.” The lesson isn’t to pursue pure imitation by strictly copying nature; the principles of Leibniz and Wolff allow an artist to remain within the realm of truth by creating a possible world.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) taught that the irreducibility of aesthetic experience was not a sufficient reason for the rejection of a cognitivist theory of beauty. Just as Aquinas once held that claritas — translated as splendor, radiance, light, brilliance — is a characteristic of beauty in addition to wholeness/integrity and proportion/harmony, Baumgarten established a place for the indefinable and ineffable, what Leibniz called the “je ne sais quoi.” Baumgarten gave aesthetics a less ancient meaning, still a general theory of how we receive knowledge from the senses, but placing the science of sensual perfection in a conceptual compartment distinct from, albeit inferior and subordinate to, a science of logic. It is important to remember Baumgarten’s aesthetic principles gained their a priori status from their location within his system, and not from a source outside of experience. Like Leibniz and Wolff, he adhered to the principle of sufficient reason, the idea that there must be a reason why something has a certain place within a given order and not another. Unity without multiplicity is boring uniformity, while multiplicity without uniformity is irritating confusion. We prefer holism in our aesthetic (modern sense) experience — we’re frustrated by the neglect of central elements that have been introduced, while the unification of disparate elements in a resolution, especially in an unexpected yet realistic fashion, has a satisfying effect, even when the outcome, even a tragic result, is never in doubt. Beauty is not a demand for prettiness, but the principle of criticism itself. Baumgarten didn’t use the principle of sufficient reason to replace pleasure, but to explain it.
Neither Wolff nor Baumgarten understands perfection so narrowly that it is limited to intrinsic purposiveness. By perfection Wolff and Baumgarten mean something very general: unity-in-diversity, the conformity of many into one. What unites the many into one is some sufficient reason, where the sufficient reason is any reason from which we can understand why a thing exists or acts as it does. Understood in this broad sense, perfection is mainly a structural or formal feature of an object; and it has no necessary reference to an underlying purpose. There is no reason why the sufficient reason has to be a purpose at all; it can be any kind of cause, whether efficient, formal, material, or final. In general, Baumgarten and Wolff give no special role to final causes in their metaphysics. While they think that teleology is a legitimate part of metaphysics, they assign it more to the realm of theology after the development of ontology and cosmology. (p. 148)
The impersonal neutrality of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) entailed the maintenance of a critical distance from all aesthetic standards. Such detachment fitted well with a historical and naturalistic approach to aesthetics. Winckelmann theorized that every artistic style, according to its own inner logic, is born, grows, flowers, declines, and dies. When art is seen as inseparable from customs, religion, and the natural environment, the question of the cultural value of aesthetic experience begins to outweigh the question of its cognitive worth. Knowing the ancient alternatives, Winckelmann viewed classical Greek culture as a context where the integration of beauty with cultural life allowed many men to achieve their full humanity. Influenced by the erotic doctrines of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Winckelmann encouraged artists to achieve the inimitable through imitation, using idealization as a method to embody perfection. Innovation, spontaneity, uniqueness, all emerge as the artist forges torrential passions into a clear, graceful equilibrium. An untamed extreme in itself lacks the composure to effectively express an artist’s feelings, individuality, and personality.
It is important, however, to distinguish Winckelmann’s understanding of the Greeks from what a later generation read into him. That there is something problematic with their interpretation becomes clear as soon as we understand more precisely what Winckelmann meant by Greek simplicity and serenity. He never understood these qualities as attributes of an innocent natural goodness. Rather, he reads simplicity and serenity into Greek statues because he sees them as the embodiment of the Greek ethic of Sophrosyne, the ethic of self-restraint, moderation, and self-possession. If Laocoön did not scream, that was because his virtue gave him composure and dignity in the face of fate. Winckelmann knew all too well that the Greeks’ simplicity and serenity were not qualities given to them by nature, but that they had acquired them through culture and education. This alone involves some recognition of the deeper and darker side of human life. For to acquire virtue means that one has struggled with and surmounted refractory impulses and desires. Winckelmann characterized Greek virtue in terms of moderation, the power to find a balance between extremes; and surely no one could achieve moderation without a deep awareness of what it means to live through extremes. It is for this reason that Winckelmann, in describing the beauty of Greek sculptures, always notes that their calmness and serenity is that which emerges from the turbulent depths beneath. So Winckelmann would have entirely agreed with Nietzsche’s claim that superficiality came from depth. (p. 192-3)
The rise of empiricist aesthetics — the view represented by La Mettrie, Holbach, Maupertuis, Burke, and Dubos — nourished the proposition that pleasure is simple, unanalyzable, sensual, and non-contemplative. The new, the great, and the violent, all may give us pleasure, pleasure without conformity to order, proportion, and measure. This suggested there may be forms of aesthetic experience radically unlike beauty. For example, the sublime, characterized by unfathomable unboundedness, produces awe, wonder, and astonishment. If there are irrational pleasures, that is, forms of human experience beyond the sphere of reason, then the entire rationalist project falls into question. In addition, the experience of tragedy, which initially suggests we can take pleasure in evils, questions the rationalist conception of the will as a power to realize what the intellect regards as good. The arts and sciences may even have a corrupting, as opposed to a perfecting, influence on men, if we take literally writers such as Rousseau.
According to Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), no one should ever believe that sentiment alone is a sufficient guide in life. Rightly suspicious of primitivism, Mendelssohn believed self-improvement is, well, self-improvement; as we perfect ourselves, we increase the amount of good in the world, thereby making our lives more worth living. We are rational beings because we desire and take pleasure in things we think are good. Reason can direct human actions by creating habits and cultivating senses in an organized fashion. Rejecting the possibility of pure perversity — which is something I’d never do — deliberate evil is explained by the passions and habits that overwhelm or bypass reason. Mendelssohn believed the sublime, like tragedy, arouses admiration; he explained the sublime as unexpected magnitude of perceived perfection in events otherwise lacking such perfection. For example, while clouds are ordinary, when rays of sunlight break through a cloud formation down to the surface of the earth, we may call it sublime. Mendelssohn’s independence of mind, always aiming to push inquiry in pursuit of fundamentals, could never find common ground with the views of the kind represented by Hamann that rejected any pursuit of fundamentals as untrue to lived life.
It is tempting to dismiss Mendelssohn’s demand for clarity and concision as question-begging, as a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of Hamann’s style. It seems as if Mendelssohn thinks Hamann should explain things in clear and distinct terms, when it is precisely Hamann’s aim to allude to those things that are inexplicable and indemonstrable. The purpose of his obscure style is to make us aware of what is obscure, to point to or suggest what ultimately can be revealed only through intuition or feeling. Here, it seems, in Mendelssohn’s reviews of Hamann, Aufklärung and Sturm und Drang clash head-on, and there cannot be any easy resolution of the debate between them. Perhaps! But let us leave Mendelssohn with the last word. In his last review, Mendelssohn provides the advocates of genius, who so love metaphors, with one telling metaphor of his own. He asks them: Is not a book that is deliberately obscure, that costs so much trouble to penetrate, and that leaves us with so little in the end, not like a sedan chair without a bottom? Rather than carrying us somewhere new and interesting, the author leaves us pretty much where we were in the first place. In that case, is it not better just to walk on our own? (p. 235)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) stood with Mendelssohn and Baumgarten against Wolff and Gottsched in treating beauty in a cognitive but not purely cognitive manner. Loyal to the classical trinity and Wolffian psychology, Lessing, like the rest of the rationalists, made no sharp distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances. The distinction between conscious and subconscious perceptions was one of degree, and not one of kind. As a result, Lessing theorized the intuitive intelligence of genius as something hyperrational, not irrational. A genius intuitively through his success allows us to identify standards that have been misformulated and misapplied while illuminating the possibility of standards that have yet to be discovered. Acknowledging that the ends of various forms of aesthetic experience must be squared with their media, Lessing didn’t judge standards as something constrictive in themselves, given they follow, explicitly or implicitly, but always constitutively, from an artist’s purpose. Lessing also held the artist must aim for the arousal of a specific feeling, rather than intellectual insight; sentiment causes aesthetic perception, while reason justifies aesthetic judgment. Discipline, training, and education are required for proper form, though these are necessary conditions and never sufficient conditions. With a deep sense of the limits of reason, Lessing’s inductive/a posteriori approach recommended a comprehensive survey of a form of art before attempting to formulate any standards.
Philosophers often overlook the destructive philosophical influence of Kant’s thought. Against the Wolffian single-faculty of representation, Kant theorized a strict separation between the faculties of cognition, desire, and feeling. This exploded the classical trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty. If our perception of beauty must be disinterested, we divorce it from its connection with the moral and the erotic. If our perception of beauty is non-cognitive, we divorce it from any robust notion of truth. Beiser warns us not to cherry-pick doctrines to make other philosophers appear as stepping-stones to an inevitable Kantian system, such as Baumgarten’s treatment of sensation as having independent perfections, or Mendelssohn’s practical (but not theoretical) tripartite division of faculties developed near the end of his life. Diotima’s Children thus performs a useful service in rehabilitating the classical German rationalists as thinkers in their own right.
Ram Adhar Mall, Hume’s Concept of Man: An Essay in Philosophical Anthropology (Calcutta: Allied Publishers, 1967)
It lies in yourself, not in the object. — Hume
Ram Adhar Mall, an Indian philosopher with a German university education, views all philosophy, as philosophy, as rooted in our lived anthropological context. Influenced by writers such as Dilthey, Scheler, Heidegger, Arendt, and Jaspers, Mall developed an existential-anthropological interpretation of Hume. Interestingly, this is how Hume was also received in Germany in the 1700s, though Mall did not develop, let alone introduce, this fact, an oversight that retrospectively makes Mall’s approach look less original, but more truthful.
Like all pre-Kantian moderns, Hume engineered his epistemology in a metaphysical style. To borrow a Kantian concept, man was a noumenon for Hume, in that, human nature was a principle of explanation rather than something to be explained. Like scholastic philosophy, Hume thought of men as systems with their own tendencies, themselves each part of a greater order. Unlike the schoolmen, Hume divorced reason from nature. Scholasticism understood worldly processes in terms of growth and decay, thereby linking up nature with substances, forms, and perfections. But for Hume, we have no special insight into any rational railroad tracks that may possibly underlie physical processes. His universe was like a watch allowing us to tell time by looking at the hands, but forbidding us from breaking it open and tinkering with the pre-established harmony of its inner components. When thinking of generative principles, the most Hume allowed us to say was that human nature assimilates, transforms, and mixes various factors to produce various phenomena. But the only directly accessible necessity to us would be the felt-necessity of our minds having the character of a compulsion. The lesson is that nature is subconscious and automatic — necessity is irrational, not rational. This is mechanism, but of an organic, subterranean, teleofunctional variety.
Mall followed the scholar N.K. Smith in identifying sympathy as the lynchpin of Hume’s entire system. Nature directs us towards ends such as other people, the existences of which do not register in the ultimate inventory of what we find in a purely mechanistic/scientific description of the universe. Hume didn’t look at sympathy as a commitment, as if we freely choose to treat certain objects as persons and other objects as non-persons, though Mall came close to suggesting this at times. Rather, it isn’t that we just can be actively involved with others as others as a possibility; Hume wanted to convey that we can’t help but be actively involved. Mechanistic to the core, Hume believed natural processes ultimately remain involuntary — a directed process, such as helping a child, is never a process finally directed by reason.
Unlike the logical positivists, phenomena are not inert in Hume. They are frequently described in language such as “forceful,” “impulsive,” “vivid,” and “lively.” It appears Hume placed all ideas on the same horizontal level; the only functional differences are their intensities, that is, their tendencies as stimuli to activate the rest of the human organism into motion. Reason can only abstract, construct, and explain; it can only work piecemeal with fragments supplied by phenomena. To get off the ground, it requires the imagination to supplement units of sensation with sheer synthesis. This is where human nature, instinctive and subconscious, is always at work.
Hume judged the imagination to be a creative principle, the guiding force behind all experience: it forges gappy, transitory sensations into a permanent and coherent order. The imagination establishes our background and elevates some ideas over others, automatically identifying objects and persons of interest. The imagination allows us to transcend the present by making active and practical leaps, from postulating entities, to coordinating activities, to envisioning the future, to making inductions. Imagination leaves us with our sense of identity, stability, and continuation. Reason, now theorized as inanimate, is left with a purely analytic office.
Hume found skepticism to be valuable precisely because he believed man, as an innately credulous animal with a fictive tendency, can’t help but to make wholes out of parts. If reason cannot perform existence-proofs of matters of fact, if no opposition of a fact in itself implies a contradiction, then an experimental approach to gaining knowledge from the world becomes necessary if we are to avoid falsehood and unintelligibility. Mall’s Hume does embrace naturalism, in that nature is not animated by logic. But Mall’s Hume, in the neo-classical spirit, does not embrace a complete, elimimative naturalism, thus leaving nature and reason balanced in suspense.
Hume, by detaching reason from nature, and nature from reason, had a decisive influence on the philosophical anthropology of J.G. Hamann (1730-1788), the grandfather of Romanticism. J.G. Herder (1744-1803), Hamann’s most important student, transmitted his influence to Goethe, the Shakespeare of the German literary tradition and the key figure of the Sturm und Drang movement. With reason demoted, the economical restraint of Hume’s neo-classical style lacked the conceptual resources to prevent the inflation of nature — human nature — with all things irrational and non-rational.
Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Germans of the seventeenth century made a discovery that the rest of the world had to wait until the twentieth century to make, namely, that Descartes himself was a good Aristotelian scholastic.
– L.W. Beck, Early German Philosophy
Roger Ariew believes it is wrong to interpret the relationship between Descartes and scholasticism as representing a severe break. An examination of the roles various concepts played within the context of Descartes’s life helps us distinguish between the aims and the merely tactical measures in the philosophical conversation of which Descartes was a participant.
In the seventeenth century, violent conflicts continued to bubble up between Protestants and Catholics. In France, philosophical compatibility with Catholic doctrine concerning the Eucharist was, for all intents and purposes, mandatory. During the sacrament of communion, the substance of the bread and wine supposedly transformed into the body of Christ, while various accidents, which included all physical properties, remained. Philosophical arguments of the time and place often attempted, as an opening maneuver, to disqualify opponents by deploying demonstrations as to an incompatibility with the requirements of Eucharistic theology. In the censure of Descartes in 1663, authorities focused on Cartesian substantial doctrines which introduced unwanted theological problems, such as the definition of extension as the essential attribute of matter; other issues attracting censure dealt with unwanted restrictions on the omnipotence of God, including Descartes’s rejection of multiple universes, along with his affirmation of an indefinitely extended universe.
Unlike Cartesian philosophy, with its strong emphasis on first principles, the Gassendists, who couched their philosophy of atomism in the tentative language of probability, escaped censure. Yet Cartesian philosophy had far more in common with scholasticism than it ever did with atomism. Descartes rejected the indivisibility of corpuscles, the possibility of a vacuum, and the reality of gravity as something inherent in any mass. In addition, Descartes agreed with scholastic philosophy that natural bodies do not act at a distance without a medium, that the intellective soul is the form of the human body, that each man has a unique soul, and that evil should be defined as a privation of good. Even nature is not left inert, as Descartes left God as the ultimate cause of the motion of all matter. Descartes did employ atomist modes of explanation, in the sense that instead of using the macro to explain the micro, the micro is used to explain the macro. Ariew has Descartes rejecting any notion of natural place, thereby employing motion to explain natural phenomena, rather than using forms inherent in substances as tendencies toward movement; some scholars have an even more conservative view and do not even give Descartes this much, thus making the relationship between Descartes and scholasticism even stronger. However, like Gassendi, Descartes departed from scholasticism in his use of generative principles. External teleology replaced inner teleology; God now established harmony instrumentally, not organically from or through the machine of the world.
The Cartesian universe consists of a solid extended block occasionally dotted with minds according to divine decree. This is different than understanding the universe as an interconnected web of media: substantial forms that organize, animate, and actualize matter. Descartes retained hylomorphism in a limited respect, understanding mind as the form of the body, and treating this form as a principle of individuation for persons. While Thomism began philosophical analysis from quiddity, the “whatness” of things, as a principle of individuation, Descartes individuated things formally by their haecceity, or “thisness.” Similarly, an idea for Descartes was a cognitive vehicle for the conformity to things, rather than the standard to which things must conform.
Such shifts don’t appear as shifts if we consider that Ariew wants us to believe, against writers such as Étienne Gilson, that self-consciously anti-Thomist Scotists dominated the philosophical climate among university doctors in early seventeenth-century France, though he concedes that Thomism remained popular in the Jesuit schools. Thomists believed that only analogical predication holds between God and creatures, that prime matter is pure potency, that universe as a whole is an immobile frame of reference for motion, and that time cannot exist without motion. In contrast, the Scotists, motivated to preserve the omnipotence of God, argued that God in principle could have created matter distinct from form, though this was not done in fact; expressed differently, Scotists did not conceive formless matter as self-contradictory. Scotism developed several other consequences, such as the univocity of being, the inherently relational character of space, time as independent of motion, and being in general upheld as the proper object of the human intellect.
Ariew traced the notion of an idea back to the notion of an exemplar, along the lines of formal causation. As a generative principle, formal causation suggests development through an intelligible pattern. For example, we might explain inheritable traits through the genetic in-form-ation contained within DNA. When something is created or realized, we identify a structure, model, schematic, blueprint, architecture, plan, or design, though how literally we take such talk depends upon our basic metaphysical assumptions.
Ideas had been formerly conceptualized as pure cogitations in the mind of God; things must conform to the mind of their maker. Descartes took the built-in character of ideas and moved them to the human case, where they played a new role in making pure thought in principle independent from sensation and imagination. The end result was a liberation from a strict form/matter ontology.
An idea, for Descartes and his immediate predecessors, existed simultaneously as content and as mental act. While we must think through inert ideas, Cartesian thoughts, as passions, belong to the understanding; discrete affirmations and negations, as acts, belong to the will. This is why the cogito received little attention in the seventeenth century. Critiques of the cogito traditionally attempted to show that the cogito is an argument which either begs the question, or contains an unspecified major premise, both criticisms suggesting we cannot go from truth to truth without a first truth, or prior truth. If we understand Descartes as having a metaphysical, as opposed to an epistemological, starting position, then the criticism is invalid, since Descartes would not be building an argument, but would be reflectively showing what is entailed from a single act of thought. Descartes’s skeptical method aimed to demonstrate what is systematically first in order of existence, with being more general than thought.
