Why Philosophy Buries Its Undertakers

There is a celebrated passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson where Boswell broached the subject of Bishop Berkeley’s idealist philosophy and his “ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter”. When he then suggested that the idea could not be refuted, Johnson moved rapidly to a nearby large stone and “struck his foot with mighty force” against it, till he rebounded from it. As he did so, he said, “I refute it thus.”

When we read this passage, we are impressed with Johnson’s commonsense approach to things. His answer appeals to us because the notion that matter is an illusion strikes us as plain silly. And yet, when we begin to reflect upon our own experience of the world we are forced to conclude that things are not always as they seem to be as represented by our senses and, indeed, many of our concepts do not appear to have their origin in sensory inputs. Through this gap in our understanding has poured out a huge range of diverse philosophies, all hoping either to deliver certitude or to convince us of the impossibility of doing so.

While the situation of imperfect knowledge has always been with us, only in the last few hundred years has it become a major concern for philosophers. For over a thousand years in the West—roughly from the time of Augustine through to the Middle Ages, a marriage (albeit uneasy at times) of Greek philosophy with Christianity provided a generally accepted solution to the uncertainties of human knowledge. This was achieved by allowing what might be called a “supersensible certainty”—a priori knowledge of what was true by what was, in essence, a sharing of the human intellect in the Divine mind. For Plato, it was an access to the intelligible world of the Forms, whereas for Augustine such knowledge was an “illumination” from the mind of God.

It is important here to stress that this traditional method of philosophical enquiry combined both an a priori and an a posteriori approach, famously defined by Anselm of Canterbury as Credo ut intelligam—“faith aiding reason”. This situation began to change after Descartes introduced the notion of what has been called “hyberbolic doubt”. At about the same time, Francis Bacon dismissed any use of an a priori approach, supposing that this simply spins the threads of a metaphysical fabric from the contents of a purely human mind without reference to the world as apprehended by the senses.

The subsequent movement in philosophical ideas very roughly tracked the rise of the scientific method and of scientific enquiry in general. We are told that the principal motive which impelled Immanuel Kant to produce his philosophy was a desire to bring a proper scientific outlook to the whole discipline. He was impressed by the huge advances made in mathematics and physics and the sort of systematic approach of fact-gathering which had been championed by Bacon as the only way to gain certain knowledge. Why should not philosophy, which seemed to be in a state of disarray (partly as a result of Hume’s scepticism), benefit from the same approach?

The subsequent history of philosophy in the West suggests that Kant’s great project was not successful in the way that he had hoped. No one could doubt the brilliance of his insights, but his radical new theories put an impenetrable barrier between things in themselves and human experiences (noumena and phenomena) and gave impetus to newer strands of philosophical thought far removed from Kant’s original desire. If anything, the result has been to muddy the philosophical waters even more, producing ever more abstruse theories, often mutually incompatible. Indeed, it is a feature of both modern philosophy and certain branches of modern science that their theories or explanations are often only accessible to the select few who can decipher them (or claim to). There may be people who can fully understand Heidegger, but I am certainly not one of them. Likewise, in theoretical physics there are characters who write at length about such things as the curvature of space and its implications regarding our common notions of time, but unless you are a mathematical genius, it is unlikely that you will fully understand the proffered explanation. Of course, simplified versions appear in popular science magazines, but these demand more faith than understanding. The same is true of “popular” accounts of much modern philosophy.

Here we encounter a difficulty which might well be called the Socratic Dilemma, as distinct from the well-known Socratic Paradox. The dictum, “Knowledge is virtue”, seems to imply an identity between human intelligence and the ability to discern good from bad. It almost seems that, the smarter you are, the better hope you have of seeing things as they really are. All of this invites the charge of gnosticism—the possession of a special and privileged knowledge which is not available to people of merely average intelligence and learning. But there is another disturbing feature of this claimed knowledge. The gnostics do not always agree with each other! In fact, they disagree violently on occasions. The scientists perhaps present a more united front but dissent is still common. Witness the current debate concerning the modelling used in the science of climate change.

I mention all of the above simply by way of prefacing a discussion of matters which lie at the very heart of the quest for meaning and the claims of human knowledge. What can we know and how can this knowledge be validated so as to provide a universally accessible explanation of the cosmos and of our own existence? These questions actually define the quest of philosophy and act as a sort of Pole Star guiding the whole history of philosophy in the West since the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers. From the point of view of human reason alone, omitting the matter of faith, they have never been answered satisfactorily (that is to say, with unanimous or even majority approval) and yet, we cannot seem to rid ourselves of the urge to find some definitive answers by the use of human reason alone. If we did find such conclusive answers then philosophy would, perhaps, disappear since what were formerly philosophical ideas would then become scientific facts.

It is not the business of philosophy to provide “mechanical” explanations as to how we obtain knowledge of the world around us (that is, by what actual electro-chemical or physical process)—that is the province of science—but it is certainly the business of philosophy to comment upon whether or not the knowledge that we do gain (by whatever mechanism) is reliable. Moreover, philosophy has the task of explaining how we are able to proceed from the multiplicity of sensation, however mediated, to the unity of knowledge. The sort of analysis needed is not one amenable to the reductive processes of science but, rather, to the synthesis of philosophical thinking.

If all this seems to be far removed from the everyday of life, it is only because we rarely stop to reflect on the extraordinary fact that we can know objects with such seeming ease as to be totally unaware of it most of the time. But it is extraordinary that a biological entity—a trousered or skirted ape—should be not just a maker of meaning but also an entity capable of reflecting on this ability. Not for nothing did Plato suppose that a sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher and the origin of philosophy. No merely biological mechanism, however complex, can explain this for us. The attempts made by both the cognitive scientists and the sociobiologists in this area are ludicrously inadequate. The latter, for instance, usually explain their way out of the problem with a stock reply—“there is a gene for that”.

Historically, the quest for certainty has turned out to be a quest for unity—a way of pulling together the manifold of the experienced world into some overarching concept of the Parmenidean One. This endeavour of the human mind was traditionally known by the term “metaphysics” (or the science of the One). This was the core business of philosophy, and also an important aspect of Christian theology in the West. There were, of course, other important aspects of philosophy—logic, for instance—but by the very use of logic itself, one needed some overarching context to validate human reasoning.

Today the word metaphysics has been rendered almost useless as a philosophical term. Like the word love—which can mean anything from the act of copulation (as in that rather ludicrous phrase “making love”) to the essence of the Divine—metaphysics has been pressed into service to describe a multitude of different ideas. Traditionally though, the word metaphysics was much more tightly defined. In order to demonstrate this, we must first go back to the early development of Western philosophy and revisit some more general concepts and ideas.

It is probable that metaphysical enquiry is as old as human self-consciousness but it is customary for us to associate its birth with the pre-Socratic philosophers and especially with Parmenides of Elea (circa 500 BC). Ironically, we have only a few fragments of his work, these having been preserved in the writings of later commentators and quoted to augment or support some idea or other. The surviving fragments of Parmenides’s great poem on being are somewhat obscure, but the main theme is quite obvious. There is being, and since being is, it is impossible for us to conceive of non-existence. Being, then, is absolute.

It remained for successive generations of philosophers, including the great Plato, to develop from this concept of being some logical conclusions. If being did not exist, there could be nothing and, thus, being is necessary. If it is necessary, it must be given all at once and, hence, is immutable. Since being is coterminous with the One, nothing can be added to it, since all that could be added would still be being. In other words, there cannot be more in the multiplicity of things than in the One. Etienne Gilson, an historian of medieval philosophy, gives us a particularly good example of this latter conclusion by referring to mathematics. If we try to reconstitute the number one from the series one plus half, plus one third, plus one sixth, and so on, the series will extend indefinitely without ever attaining unity.

Here, of course, a problem arises. If being is immutable and unitary, how are we to explain a world in which we experience a multiplicity of contingent things? In other words, how do we relate the One (seemingly demanded by the exercise of human reason) to the many (equally demanded by our experience of the world around us)? To answer this question, Plato erected his theory of Forms. It was a nice try, but not altogether satisfactory. The status of these Forms was never fully explicated. Moreover, there was still the problem of explaining how the immutable One could or would produce or entail the world of “becoming”, otherness, and multiplicity. Plato’s difficulty is highlighted in the Timaeus, where the job of creating the visible universe is given to a Demiurge or intermediary to overcome the obvious difficulty associated with having a perfect and self-sufficient Unity produce something “extra” which was both impermanent and ceaselessly changing.

There were attempts by later neo-Platonists to rectify this problem by attributing the world of becoming to a sort of overflowing of goodness in the One. The One, in order to fulfil a principle of plenitude, must give existence to every possible mode of being, including modes which are both impermanent and changeable. In other words, every possibility of being must be realised for the sake of completeness. But there cannot be an “overflow” unless there is a limit, and the One is, by definition, without limit in this sense. An emanationist account is, of course, possible but the same problem arises. Why would a perfect, changeless and self-sufficient One cause itself to be diverted into a sort of anabranch of temporary and imperfect existence when the end result is merely for the latter to revert back to its source without any change having taken place?

These sorts of problems, arising from our attempts to achieve some sort of unity in a world of plurality, could be called the Parmenidean paradox. On the one hand, we seem to have this inbuilt need to gather all of our experience into some sort of unity yet, when we attempt to do so, we run into all sorts of epistemological problems. This is why we must ultimately have recourse to faith in any system of belief. This is as true for E.O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins as it is for the Pope. Here it is important to stress that the apprehension of being does not in any way presuppose a religious belief. It is antecedent to belief in a God and arises from the reflective experience of the mind. That is not to say that it is an automatic sort of knowledge. It seems to be the case that some people can apprehend it and others can’t and no reason can be given for the difference—“the Spirit bloweth where it listeth”.

Various strategies have been developed to deal with this apparently self-defeating status of metaphysics. They have been nicely summarised by Leszek Kolakowski in a small book entitled Metaphysical Horror. A common strategy is simply to deny that the problem exists by declaring such questions as meaningless. This was the move taken by A.J. Ayer in his well-known book, Language, Truth and Logic:

Our charge against the metaphysician is not that he attempts to employ the understanding in a field where it cannot profitably venture, but that he produces sentences which fail to conform to conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant.

Ayer goes on to introduce his “criterion of verifiability”—“We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express …” Unfortunately for Ayer and his followers, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, central to logical positivism, was soon called into question by W.V.O. Quine. As Kolakowski points out, “Die-hard analytical philosophers and old-style phenomenologists who openly philosophize within this framework are now, however numerous, endangered species.”

A more popular and enduring solution to the problem is to adopt what might be called the “inclusive” approach, usually based on the Wittgensteinian “language game”. Your explanation is just as valid as mine, even though the two differ because we are obeying different rules in different “language games”, or historical settings, or cultural backgrounds. So your explanation is entirely valid in your language game, whilst mine is valid in a separate one. And so, to quote Kolakowski again:

A philosophical truth, a solution of the problem may indeed be valid but, if so, it is valid in relation to a game, a culture or a collective or individual goal. We simply cannot go any further; we have no tools to force the door leading us beyond language, beyond a set of contingent cultural norms or beyond practical imperatives which mould our thinking process.

In such a situation “anything goes”. Indeed, one of the modern philosophical gurus, Paul Feyerabend, actually suggested this line from Cole Porter in his book Against Method. Of course, if anything goes, then my recourse to metaphysics is just as valid as your use of, say, cognitive science or sociobiology. To overcome this problem of thus letting metaphysics in via the back door, so to speak, less relative relativists simply decide to invalidate metaphysics in advance so that the question “what is real” is deemed to be illicit. Here of course we come to that epistemological problem which has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks. If we really insist on relativism, there is no point in distinguishing between metaphysical and empirical questions. As Kolakowski points out, we cannot make a set of questions permanently invalid unless we implicitly appeal to the permanent standards of rationality.

But this attempt to remove metaphysics from philosophy can also be viewed from a much wider perspective. In The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Etienne Gilson surveys almost eight centuries of philosophical thought from Peter Abelard to Karl Marx and finds this one consistent theme: whenever philosophers use the techniques of disciplines other than philosophy to investigate philosophical questions, they inevitably fall into error and their theories are eventually abandoned or severely modified. Thus, Abelard had recourse to logic alone, whilst Descartes employed mathematics and geometry. With Kant, it was what Gilson calls “physicism” and with Comte and his followers, “sociologism”. These observations led Gilson to erect several “laws” or principles pertaining to the philosophical method:

1. Philosophy always buries its undertakers. By this Gilson means that each new theory, hailed as the “solution” to philosophical problems—that is, the death of philosophy—is regularly attended by its later revival in some newer scheme which, in its turn, is superseded, and so on. I recall reading, I think in Ben Rogers’s biography of A.J. Ayer, that Ayer himself, after publication of Language, Truth and Logic, had (only half-jokingly) talked of “the end of philosophy”.

2. By his very nature, man is a metaphysical animal. By this, Gilson means that the failure of philosophical schemes invariably relates to their abandonment of basic metaphysical principles natural to human thought. Discussing Hume and Kant, he puts this principle in perspective this way:

Hume had destroyed both metaphysics and science [Humean scepticism]; in order to save science, Kant decided to sacrifice metaphysics. Now it is the upshot of the Kantian experiment that, if metaphysics is arbitrary knowledge, science also is arbitrary knowledge; hence it follows that our belief in the objective validity of science itself stands or falls with our belief in the objective validity of metaphysics. The new question then is no longer, why is metaphysics a necessary illusion, but rather: Why is metaphysics necessary, and how is it that it has given rise to so many illusions?

Gilson answers this last question by developing a series of arguments leading to conclusions which comprise the remainder of his “laws” or principles:

1. Metaphysics is the knowledge gathered by a naturally transcendent reason in its search for the first principles, or first causes, of what is given in sensible experience.

2. As metaphysics aims at transcending all particular knowledge, no particular science is competent either to solve metaphysical problems, or to judge their metaphysical solutions.

3. The failures of metaphysicians flow from their unguarded use of a principle of unity present in the human mind.

4. Since being is the first principle of all human knowledge, it is a fortiori the first principle of metaphysics.

5. All failures of metaphysics should be traced to the fact that the first principle of human knowledge has been either overlooked or misused by the metaphysicians.

Why is being the first principle of human knowledge? Because we are simply incapable of conceiving of its absence within our usual logical rules of thinking and, therefore, it must be the absolute ground of all knowledge. Incorrigible sceptics might answer that it cannot be an a priori certainty that our logic is infallible so that talk of some Absolute is not permissible in this way. But this is to miss the point. The necessity of the existence of such an Absolute is its own necessity and not ours. As Kolakowski points out, “our logic discovers the self-contradiction in the Absolute’s non-existence because its non-self contradiction is actually there and not vice versa”.

Granted that metaphysics does pose difficult problems, this still does not explain why modernity is so keen to dispense with it. Perhaps the answer lies in a persistent attempt to see the human mind as something of a detached observer looking out at “things” which exist around it and are quite separate from it. This view is obviously important to scientists, especially cognitive scientists whose aim it is to fully identify the workings of the human mind. In order to do this one must, of necessity, treat the mind as an object available for analysis, just like any other.

Metaphysics clearly hints at things which lie outside the purview of a reductive scientific method and thus it suggests a limit to any full analysis of the working of the human mind. That there might be things unsolvable by any science now or in the future is an uncomfortable notion, for it hints at the possibility of other ways of knowing—religion for instance. More generally, it reopens the gate which was closed to metaphysics by empiricism and the analytical tradition in philosophy. What Rough Beast might enter the now unprotected groves of Academe and the fields of Parnassus? The answer, of course, is rather obvious—the very same one that first grazed there!

What are these things that lie outside the purview of a reductive scientific analysis? Surely, as Gilson claims, they relate to the ability of the human mind to produce some unity out of a mass of sensory data—sometimes called percepts. In other words, we need some explanation of how we get from raw data (or percept) to idea—that brick, this table. Empiricists are hazy on this score. Locke seems to treat percepts as if they were ideas whereas Hume gives us the rather unhelpful notion of ideas as “sense impressions”. Neither of these approaches explains how we get from the multiplicity of raw data as input to the finished product—the unitary idea. Hume blithely assumes that some “associating quality”—resemblance, contiguity, or causation—does the job but we must then ask how such qualities can arise from sense-impressions (since no other origin is allowed in his philosophy).

For Coleridge, on the other hand, the process of getting from percepts to ideas was carried out by what he called the “primary imagination” and here, at last, we are getting to the heart of the matter. I take it that Coleridge’s “primary imagination” is analogous to what Aristotle called the “agent intellect” and which the scholastic philosophers further subdivided into a sequence of actions involving apprehension, judgment and reasoning. In the scholastic schema, it is important to note that the judgment implies the use of some sort of reference point and this reference point is being itself. To make sure that what I judge to be the case is really so (in uniting concepts and affirming or denying that this is the way they are found outside the mind), I have need to return to the source from which all my knowledge ultimately comes—being itself. In other words for the scholastics, there is a direct relationship between being as the One and that facility in the human mind which transforms mere data into an intelligible whole. On this point Platonists and traditional Christians would have some basic agreement.

Now, one can understand why empiricists would want to rid the world of metaphysics, but this does not explain the virtual absence of metaphysics in modern Christianity. Here we must look for other reasons. Historically, there has always been an uneasy relationship between religion and metaphysics. This applies not only to Christianity, but to Islam as well. Al Ghazali, in the tenth century, wrote his Incoherence of the Philosophers against the deployment of philosophy in religious matters.

In Christianity, it was often thought that the God of the philosophers (the One) was far too abstract and remote from the biblical God and the Christ of the New Testament to be of any real value to the faithful. But the fact remains that metaphysics has, for a thousand years or more, played an important part in Christian theology. The marriage of philosophy and theology, first begun by Augustine and the Greek Fathers and later developed by the medieval Scholastics, brought Athens and Jerusalem together in a synthesis which was only finally destroyed in our own era. In an afterword to The Oxford History of Western Philosophy, Anthony Kenny suggests that scholastic philosophy, Marxism, existentialism and analytic philosophy were the four major “branches” or lines of enquiry in philosophy until the early 1960s when they all began to disintegrate.

Today, it is difficult to know just what sort of philosophical backup, if any, accompanies religious belief in the West. It certainly does seem that a very hazy sort of existentialism is at work—one which almost seems to involve a total surrender of rational thought along the lines of Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”. One can understand why. In the Gospel account of Martha and Mary we have those well-known words—“only one thing is needful and Mary has chosen the better part”. But, of course, this is not to say that Martha’s part was unnecessary. The pre-eminence of faith and devotion does not negate the need for rational thought in developing doctrine, and such a process will, at some stage, always need to refer back to metaphysical principles. No human organisation without rules or conditions of association—even one claiming Divine origin—can persist as an organisation in the long term. A believing Christian will, of course, point out that the persistence of his or her faith is guaranteed by Scripture but, of course, such persistence might be in places other than its traditional home in the West.

This question of the persistence of beliefs based on a combination of faith and rational enquiry is of particular importance in an age when traditional standards in morality are being attacked in every quarter. Advances in science and technology have far outstripped our ability to apply widely accepted moral judgments to them. Huge controversies rage over matters such as human cloning and other forms of genetic manipulation in humans. We seem to have no agreed way of adjudicating on such matters.

This was a central concern for Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 book After Virtue. He begins by asking us to consider a science fiction scenario in which the general public blames the scientists for some great environmental disaster. Violent mobs storm the research institutes and wreck them. Scientists are lynched and books of science are burnt. Eventually, a government is established whose purpose is to purge science and scientists from the land. Later, a few enlightened people come to see this destruction as an error and attempts are made to reconstitute the sciences. But all that remains of this former scientific knowledge are bits and pieces, such as half-burnt manuscripts and partially wrecked equipment. “Nonetheless,” MacIntyre says, “all these fragments are re-embodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry, and biology.” But, of course, these “practices” have been cobbled together without any reference to that general context in which they were originally constituted. Thus, many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of such terms as “neutrino”, “mass” and “specific gravity” would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in the application of such expressions (almost certainly, MacIntyre has in mind a famous science fiction novel called A Canticle for Leibowitz).

This, says MacIntyre, is exactly the state of moral discourse today: “the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world I have described”. We have, in other words, lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. Hence we get a variety of incommensurable positions on moral questions and a variety of ways in which the history of moral philosophy is interpreted.

It is my belief that this situation is a direct consequence of the absence of metaphysics in modern philosophy and its effective gelding in modern-day Christianity in the West. We are without a map in a totally strange landscape. MacIntyre himself has gone back to Aristotle for answers and from there to Aquinas. Perhaps we will see a more general rehabilitation of metaphysics such that it may again take its rightful place. If Gilson is right with his general thesis, only then can we hope to see real philosophy being taught in the universities and forming the basis of a widely accepted moral code. The alternative is not promising. History suggests that when “anything goes”, it usually does so with disastrous consequences.

B.J. Coman’s most recent book, A Loose Canon (Connor Court Publishing), comprises essays most of which originally appeared in Quadrant.