a few additional remarks

a few additional remarks
by doctorzamalek
March 6, 2009

A few things to add to the previous post…

*there have been some negative reactions now and then to my claim that philosophy has the right to deal with the same objects as the sciences, but in a different manner. Mainstream continentals deal with the situation by trying to set up a privileged inner human realm that the sciences cannot touch. The emerging naturalist strain in the ex-continental circles (which I largely welcome, as a healthy anti-correlationist impulse) thus focuses on trying to show that no such privileged realm exists. Phenomenology is to be torn down by means of Metzinger, the Churchlands et al.

It is by now widely known to readers that my position rejects both alternatives: the correlationist ghetto, and eliminationist naturalism which tries to reject the manifest reality of the human phenomenal sphere. The correlationist objections to this step are familiar enough. The naturalist objections I’ve received have intimated that metaphysics really can’t add anything to the non-human sphere, and hence our role with respect to the sciences should merely be one of supplement, commentary, and appreciation. To this I would say the following:

(a) it is a grave mistake to tether philosophical speculation to the current state of the sciences in any era. Some of the least readable passages in Bergson, James, and the German Idealists arise from such concessions to the scientific “state of the art,” which rarely remains the state of the art for long.

(b) many of the greatest scientists have gained inspiration from metaphysical speculation. The first two who come to mind are Einstein and Bohr, surely the two greatest scientists of the past century. I’m not sure that the best of the scientists even want us to stick too closely to what they are doing at the moment. This may be true of the more dogmatic practitioners of the state of the art, but I see no more reason to follow them than to follow dogmatic “state-of-the-art” correlationists in metaphysics. The cross-fertilization of disciplines is important, and for this reason philosophers must always try to keep somewhat abreast of what is going on in neighboring disciplines. But the findings of these disciplines are not always binding on philosophy, and moreover it often takes work to decide just what their implications really are. Sometimes, for instance, one specific reading of the quantum theory is imported into philosophy and asserted as having decisive implications for metaphysics. I don’t think that’s quite how it works. There is a certain autonomy of the disciplines that does not preclude frequent relevance (Darwin certainly struck an important blow against the “natural kinds” theory of essence, to give just one example). But there are many different possible lessons to be drawn by philosophy from each of the sciences.

Science can change directions in a hurry. Science is riddled with unresolved problems just as philosophy is. So is mathematics, as Whitehead reminds us, and hence the mathematical procedure of rigorous deduction from first principles is not the best method for metaphysics, which fails more often through incoherence and inadequacy rather than from choosing the wrong unshakeable first principles. To assume in advance that physics or mathematics are privileged disciplines is essentially to cave in to extra-philosophical considerations. I would not say that the various sciences are “grounded in” metaphysics, but neither should metaphysics be eliminated in favor of the natural sciences or mathematics. The faulty assumption is that one discipline must contain the others implicitly. Will the principles of geology be “implicitly contained in” a successful string theory, for instance? I don’t see why, and this leads to my next point.

*there are already different layers of reality even in the physical world. It seems clear to me that geological, chemical, and paleontological facts are not reducible to lower-level facts about microparticles. And incidentally, we have no idea what these supposed microparticles are, or even if any such particles exist. Electrons date only to the 1890’s, protons to around 1920, and the neutron to 1932. The reducibility of protons and neutrons to quarks comes from the 1960’s and was experimentally verified much later. Strings are still entirely unverified, and may remain so for a long time or forever. It seems a strange piece of faith to assume that reducibility rests ultimately on some final turtle in the cosmos.

To assume a final layer of particles also amounts to a relationist ontology, which cuts against the grain of realism. What you’d be saying is that this final layer is adequately expressed in the cosmos in terms of tangible properties registered in the environment, with nothing held in reserve. Materialist types generally scoff at Latour for allowing Hamlet and unicorns to be real actors, but when you get right down to it all they really dislike is Latour’s distaste for reductionism; at the final material layer their particles inevitably behave like Latourian actors, fully exhausted by what they do (even if the doing is just sitting around in space-time at a specific location). In short, realism is sold out in the name of materialism.

The more sophisticated move is to say that ultimate reality is not made of objects at all, but of some “heterogeneous yet continuous” realm of pre-objectivity. While increasingly popular among today’s avant garde, it doesn’t seem to me to be a coherent theory. (I made a post about this in January.) You can’t say that ultimate reality is both heterogeneous and continuous, because these two qualities work against one another. If ultimate reality is continuous, it will slide toward an unarticulated apeiron unless artificial corollaries are introduced to prevent this disaster. If you say instead that ultimate reality is heterogeneous, it cannot be thus unless entities are partly withdrawn from any relational expression, and then you have object-oriented philosophy. And this is the ultimate choice, as I see it… you can have monism, or you can have objects, and monism is inadequate as a philosophy of our world.

It’s generally important to think one avant garde ahead; otherwise one can become drunk on the battles of the moment. There is still too much fascination with slashing and pistol-whipping naive theories of substance, while not as much attention is being paid to the drawbacks of the proposed alternative.

One of my criteria for genuine realism is that all relations must be placed on the same ontological footing. (No, I don’t necessarily think that rocks feel happy and sad, though the possibility is worth considering.) It is the Kantian tradition that prevents this, even if we hold that the Ding an sich is in principle a realist concept.

But another of my criteria for realism is that something like substantial forms must be accepted. In other words, an object has a hidden unified reality that is never fully expressed in any of its interactions. Materialism flouts this criterion by holding that scientific knowledge can adequately replace the things by a specific model of the things, and I don’t see how this is possible. I don’t think models are just language games or cultural presuppositions– better approaches to reality are possible; not all models are equal. But it is helpful to remember that we are the heirs of Socrates and Plato. Socrates does not hold that all opinions are equal (that was the Sophists) but just look at the Meno, where Socrates does hold that virtue must be defined as what it is, not in terms of qualities (as Meno wishes). This is the founding paradox of Socratic philosophy, which I have no wish to escape– things can be known only through qualities, yet qualities are nonetheless not equipped to do the job.

I think this important consideration has been lost by the eliminativist position. I’ll leave some of this for my review of Brassier’s book this summer. But one of our disagreements is that he sets up on opposition between discursive knowledge and the pathos of Heideggerian poetry. What is missing from this opposition is the Socratic option, in which knowledge of virtue can never be fully discursive, simply because no list of properties of virtue will ever quite capture what it means. This is why we are lovers of wisdom and not wise.

But it’s not just Brassier, of course. Kant is equally convinced that all knowledge is discursive, he simply holds that such knowledge is unattainable whereas Brassier and other naturalists find it much more attainable.

My objection to this is that knowledge is not necessarily discursive. Knowledge of objects is a more than discursive knowledge; we cannot spell out exactly what it means to be a wolf or a tree. Within certain practical limits we can assemble criteria for categorizing entities into these classes, but there will always be something that escapes the grasp of such categories, because knowledge is not just an amassing of lists of true statements about things.

This is not just a doctrine of poets. I’ve been rereading anecdotes from the history of atomic physics– Fermi replacing lead with paraffin for some strange instinctive reason that he couldn’t quite explain, and ending up with slow neutron capture and the Nobel Prize as a result; Bohr withdrawing from a conversation at Princeton, scootching away from the table without a word, and walking in a daze to his office as he tried to conceptualize what he had only barely and intuitively grasped– the difference between U-235 and U-238. This is how the great moments in science happen. Discursivity comes later, as they try to fill in the blanks and put their intuitions into communicable form, in which holes and paradoxes will always remain no matter how hard they try. Intuition is a cognitive function, not a “merely emotional” one. And as I’ve argued in an earlier post, emotion is cognitive as well– we have fleeting moods when encountering people or things, and it often takes awhile to put these moods into discursive form. Try to do philosophy by purely discursive means, and you’ll end up as an aggressive chatterbox analytic philosopher whose arguments go only skin deep and influence no one for longer than it takes the next issue of Mind to appear and refute you. We are more characterized by our intuitions and our sincerities (”man is a creature whose substance is faith”- Bhagavad-Gita) than by our definite predicative statements. Ask what someone really believes, and you can discover what they really are.

Also, I object to the idea that poetry is some sort of delightful ornament that doesn’t rise to the level of cognition. In Guerrilla Metaphysics I tried to argue for the critical importance of metaphor in human knowledge. I think Dante tells us as least as much about hell as Averroes does.

But we’re all too busy to get this debate going at the moment, and I think it will take a couple of years before it really blossoms.