Tag: The Return of Idealism

Thoughts are more real than objects

Reading | Metaphysics

Jeremy Dunham, PhD | 2024-04-20

What is idealism? Throughout history, in most cases, philosophical idealism is a metaphysical position. The idealist is concerned with reality’s fundamental nature. It is often mistakenly thought to be a reductive theory of the fundamental nature of reality. Many critics have supposed that the idealist tries to reduce reality to the subjective states of individual minds. According to this form of subjective idealism there is no world outside our minds. This view is often associated with the British empiricist Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753). Famously, when told that such idealism was irrefutable, the English author Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) shouted, “I refute it thus” and kicked a stone. The idealist therefore is thought to be the one who denies. They are anti-realist, anti-materialist, anti-naturalist, and certainly anti-stones.

This way of thinking about philosophical idealism is misleading. Many kinds of philosophers have both voluntarily and involuntarily been referred to as idealists. However, they are united by an understanding of idealism as a form of realism. Idealism is not a reductive philosophy. It argues for the real existence of elements of reality often dismissed. It is a realism about ideas. Even Berkeley frames his position as a realism. He wrote that “the real things are those things I see, and feel, and perceive by my senses.”

Berkeley opposed his view to those who regard our rich conscious phenomenal world, the world of tastes, feels, colours, and sounds, as in some way less real than the physical world. For Berkeley, the real stone is the coloured object which we see and feel and that resists us when kicked. If Johnson kicked the stone as hard as I imagine, he entered a world of pain. For Berkeley, this world is the real world. His idealism is ampliative, not reductive. Its aim is to account for the full extent of our reality. Berkeley, then, is not anti-stone. He argued that only idealism can do justice to stones.

Although idealism may refer to a doctrine that affirms the reality of our ideas in this subjective sense, there is another sense of the word ‘idea.’ This is the Platonic Idea, often referred to as ‘Form’ or ‘Universal.’ Idealism shares something in common with the modern philosophical view known as Platonism. But there are significant differences. Platonists defend the existence of universals in addition to particular properties. A Platonist about properties, for example, believes that in addition to the individual things in the world that have redness amongst their properties, such as the red pen in front of me and the red symbols on my computer screen, there is the universal redness. This universal isn’t in front of me. It doesn’t exist anywhere in space or time. It is an abstract object. An abstract object is neither physical nor mental. It is causally inert, fixed, and unchanging. Yet, when we see redness in the world, this redness is an exemplification or instantiation of that universal. Particular red things are united by the fact that they instantiate this universal. Accordingly, the modern Platonist seems to postulate two worlds. One of abstract objects and another in which they are instantiated. However, since the abstract objects are causally inert, the relationship between these worlds is mysterious.

One of the most important schools of idealism in its history is that known as absolute idealism. It originates with Hegel in Germany, but flourished towards the end of the nineteenth-century with many adherents in the Oxbridge philosophy departments and worldwide. Here, the idea in idealism explicitly refers to Plato’s ideas. However, the absolute idealist attempts to bring the two worlds described above together into one. Consequently, the abstract universal is made concrete.

In several places, Plato suggests that things have the properties they do in virtue of participating in the Idea (or universal). A beautiful thing is beautiful in virtue of the fact that it participates in the Idea of beauty. However, this suggests that the particulars stand in a causal relationship with the universals. Ideas are causally responsible for the existence of properties in the concrete world. Perhaps we are wrong to think of Plato’s Ideas as abstract objects after all? Abstract universals are causally inert, so whatever relationship there is between them and their instantiating particulars, it cannot be causal. This is the absolute idealist’s starting point. The universals do not exist outside of our world. They are immanent to it. They are not abstract, rather they are concrete. As Hegel claimed, since the living world is concrete not abstract, those who consider universals as abstract kill the living thing.

This kind of idealist argues that our world has the structure or form that it does because of the universals immanent to it. Hegel wrote that “The universal is the essential, true nature of things” and that “through thinking these over we become acquainted with the true nature of things.” Any individual bear, for Hegel, has a universal nature. It’s that aspect of its nature it shares with any other bear and thus enables us to identify it as a bear, even if we’ve never seen this individual bear before. But it is also different to every other bear. It has particular features that distinguish it from any other bear and make it an individual.

Crucially, in the case of the concrete universal, the particular features that make an individual the individual it is are not external to the universal but rather contained within it. You do not get the individual bear by bundling a bunch of extra particulars to the universal bear. Hegel dedicates much of his famous Phenomenology of Spirit to demonstrating that if you start with properties that are only externally related, it’s impossible to combine them together into the kind of unities that make up our world. A bear isn’t a bundle of qualities. It’s a self-preserving organism for which the parts depend on the whole as much as the whole depends on the parts. Its particular properties, like the thickness of its fur, are different in the winter than in the summer because they are internally related to the organism as a whole and sensitive to its survival needs.

What does it mean to say that the concrete universal contains particulars within itself? It means that the individual bear becomes the individual bear not by addition, but by negation. To think the abstract universal, you abstract away all the properties that differentiate one bear from another and the universal is whatever is left. The concrete universal, on the other hand, includes all those differences. The particularisation of the bear is the process by means of which it negates the properties that do not belong to it, leaving behind just those that make it the individual bear.

This is the meaning behind Hegel’s often quoted phrase: all determination is negation. ‘The true, infinite universal’, Hegel writes, ‘determines itself… it is creative power as self-referring absolute negativity. As such, it differentiates itself internally.’ This points to an important characteristic of the concrete universal: it determines the development of the individual. The universal guides the bear’s ideal development. It should develop from a cub to a yearling and then from a young adult to a mature adult. However, it develops in its own particular way. Although all bears develop from cub to yearling, only this individual cub developed in this particular way. The thought is that if you took away from the universal every particular way that the bear might develop, leaving us with the abstract universal consisting of just the features all bears share, you’re actually left with nothing. Certainly, you’re left with nothing living. You’ve murdered the living thing.

According to the most prominent contemporary metaphysical readings of Hegel, such as Robert Stern’s, the concrete universals should be understood as similar to Aristotelian substance kinds. This means that there are as many concrete universals as there are individuals to instantiate them. Emily is the individual human she is because she is a self-particularising concrete universal. However, the absolute idealists who dominated the British philosophical world towards the end of the nineteenth century believed that all these concrete universals were ultimately interrelated as parts of one all-encompassing concrete universal.

For the nineteenth-century British idealist Bernard Bosanquet, the perverse thing about abstract universals is that the wider their extension is, the less there is to them. This is because you get the universal giant panda when you abstract everything particular away from every individual giant panda. Then, to get the universal bear, you must abstract all the features that particularise it as one of its particular species of bear, like giant panda. To get the universal mammal you then abstract all the features that make each animal a mammal rather than a reptile, bird, or fish. The more things that supposedly instantiate a universal, the sparser the features of that universal are.

On the contrary, the logic of the concrete universal, Bosanquet says, does violence to the ‘inverse ratio of intention to extension.’ There is not less to the universal animal than there is to the universal bear, rather there is more because the universal animal contains bear within it and a whole host of other animals too. It’s the most substantial Noah’s ark you can imagine. However, if bears are part of a higher universal of mammals and mammals are part of a higher universal of animals, why stop there? Couldn’t there be a universal ‘living thing’? And perhaps one above that? For Bosanquet, this is exactly right. We keep going until we end up with just one concrete universal, the absolute Idea, the world as a whole. For Bosanquet this is ‘a system of members, such that every member, being ex hypothesi distinct, nevertheless contributes to the unity of the whole in virtue of the peculiarities which constitute its distinctness.’ In agreement with the Aristotelian reading of idealism, each individual is the self-particularising of the concrete universal, but, ultimately, it’s one and the same concrete universal self-particularising in various different ways.

The result of this is that we owe our individuality to a larger whole in which we are all systematically related and which relates us to each other in a fundamental way. Earlier I claimed that many people incorrectly regard idealism as a philosophy that is characterised by the things that it is against. However, here we find something that this kind of idealist really is anti: the idea of fundamental separateness. This has significant ethical implications. The most important absolute idealist of the twenty-first century, Timothy Sprigge (1932-2007), wrote that absolute idealism’s main message is that ‘we are nearer the core of things when we partly transcend it [our separateness] in cooperative ethical, cultural, and intellectual endeavours and in mutual aid.’

Idealism is a label that has been used to refer to a huge variety of different philosophical positions. I’ve focused on metaphysical versions to show how different idealism is from its common misconceptions. Idealism is not a reductive philosophy but an inflationary one. Idealism aims to do justice to the full extent of the characteristics of the world in which we live. Any thorough-going realism, any realism that takes every feature of our world seriously, must be a realism about the idea.

 

Many of the ideas in the article were developed in collaboration with Iain Hamilton Grant and Sean Watson when we wrote our 2011 Idealism book together. I’m also very grateful for many conversations with Robert Stern since then which have improved my understanding of the concrete universal. Thanks also to Joe Saunders and Emily Thomas for their comments on an earlier draft. 

A subjective world can still be real

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Paul Franks, PhD | 2024-03-31

For all I know on the basis of my current experience alone, I could be living in the matrix instead of inhabiting the mind-independent world. My experience could seem just as it seems right now, but it could be caused by something other than the mind-independent world in which I take myself to perceive and act. This familiar thought may be motivated by consideration of dreams, as it was for Descartes, or by more contemporary reflections on virtual reality. From this thought, many philosophers have inferred that what I perceive at any given moment is always and only mind-dependent, an inner world.  Kant calls this empirical or material idealism: the objects we experience, the material causes of our sensations, are not real. It seems to lead to a sceptical worry: how can I know that I don’t inhabit the matrix: a virtual or ideal reality, with an opaque causal ground? Both Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism and Kant’s empirical realism offer ways out of the matrix. But Kant’s solution does what Berkeley’s cannot: it vindicates the everyday world in which we determine the sequence of our thoughts in time by means of mind-independent objects and events.

According to what has come to be called Berkeley’s master argument, there is no way to think the idea that terms such as “mind-independent reality” purport to express.

But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance in a park, or books in a closet, and no one to perceive them. I answer, you may do so, there is no difficulty in it, but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive?  . . . you have the power of imaging or framing ideas in your mind: but it doth not show that you can conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. (Principles of Human Knowledge, sec. 23)

On its own, this argument seems fallacious. Perhaps, as Bertrand Russell suggested, Berkeley is confusing “idea” as act, which is mental, with “idea” as object of mental activity, which may not be mental. Others have suggested other fallacies.

But the argument should not be taken on its own. It needs supplementation by Berkeley’s account of idea formation and usage, roughly equivalent to what we would now call semantics. In his critique of Locke’s account of abstract ideas, Berkeley says in effect that ideas are sensible images, and that images are always concrete and determinate. To be sure, we use general words, such as “human” or “thing,” but we do not thereby signify indeterminate ideas, as Locke had suggested. Instead, we use words in general ways: I have formed concrete ideas of images of many humans, and I may now use the word “human” to signify any and all of them. There is no need to posit monstrosities such as Locke’s idea of a triangle that has no determinate angles or lengths of sides.

Now let us apply this rejection of Lockean abstraction to the term “mind-independent reality.” No idea can occur in the mind without my perceiving it. To separate ideas from mental awareness is no less absurd than the separation of triangle-images from determinacy of side and angle. Since we can attach no meaning to the sceptical worry that mind-independent reality is entirely different from what we perceive, we should stop worrying about it.

So what do we mean, according to Berkeley, when we think or talk about everyday objects, like the famous tree falling in the forest with nobody around?  We refer, he suggests, to reliable patterns of perceptions.  If I say that the tree’s fall makes a sound when nobody perceives it, I mean that, if somebody were to be there, they would perceive it. As a theist—indeed, a bishop of the Church of Ireland—Berkeley thinks that God guarantees the reliability of the patterns, although God can modify it when desirable, which explains miracles. (There are significant difficulties with the view—known today as phenomenalism—that objects are what J. S. Mill called “permanent possibilities of perception”, especially without theism, but those are for another day.)

This view goes along with Berkeley’s instrumentalism about natural science. In late antiquity, astronomy was distinguished from terrestrial physics. Terrestrial physics was realistic, dealing with mind-independent dispositions to motion. But the heavens were so remote that celestial physics lay beyond human comprehension, and astronomy was therefore nothing more than a mathematical model: an instrument for prediction using epicycles and other devices to which no reality could be accorded. In the early modern scientific revolution, thinkers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton aspired to a fully realistic physics, involving laws of motion and real forces operative both on earth and in the heavens. But Berkeley went in the other direction. He rejected the idea of a realistic, explanatory physics. Instead he understood all physics in terms of models with instrumental use only.

Berkeley’s way out of the matrix retains empirical idealism: what I perceive at any given moment is always and only mind-dependent. One of Kant’s major arguments—the Refutation of (Empirical) Idealism—offers another off-ramp. The argument is that I can have an inner, mental life only if I also have a life of perceptual engagement with the external, mind-independent world. It turns on what Kant calls time-determination.

I determine my inner, mental life in time insofar as I assign temporal sequence to, say, the parts of a thought, or the steps in an argument.  If I had only the capacity to assign temporal order to my mental acts, then I could not check or correct my order assignments at all.  But I can check and correct my order assignments, because I situate them within an objective temporal sequence that involves the external world. I determine objective time by perceiving regular change, such as the motion of clock hands, against a stable background, such as a clock-face. If my assignments of before and after to my subjective acts can be right or wrong, this can only be because I can also situate them within objectively determined time, and I can determine objective time only because I can perceive both relative motion and relative rest outside me in mind-independent objects. When I think of myself as having one thought before another, I am implicitly thinking of myself as being able to determine when in objective time I had those thoughts, so I am implicitly thinking of myself as perceiving a world beyond the mind.

Consequently, to think of myself as merely dreaming, or as trapped in the virtually real matrix, is to think of myself from a perspective outside the dream or the matrix—to think of myself as inhabiting mind-independent reality. It may be true that, for all I know, I am dreaming or in a matrix at the present moment. But this does not entail that there is no perceivable mind-independent world of the sort I take there to be.

Empirical realism is what Kant calls the resultant position that I can directly perceive the mind-independent objects of experience. But he famously argues that empirical realism is sustainable only if one also accepts transcendental idealism: the view that, although the objects of experience are perspectival, and appear to us in virtue of the spatio-temporal form of human sensibility, this does not impugn the mind-independence of the underlying material causes of sensation, any more than the fact that I can see the River Hudson only through a window partly occluded by a tree, means that the river is partly occluded in itself.

Kant’s own arguments for transcendental idealism are closely interwoven with his commitment to the mathematics and physics of his day.  In light of the development of non-Euclidean geometry shortly after his death, and the application of non-Euclidean geometry in relativity theory a century later, Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism have not aged well. Nevertheless, the basic insights of transcendental idealism—that human cognition is perspectival and, indeed, always involves taking a perspective, which is a human activity even if it is one of which we are usually unaware—still ring true. In fact, the very fact of scientific revolution, illustrated by the shift from classic to relativistic physics, deepens the point, because we are now inclined to say, not that there is one immutable human perspective, but that there can be several, which underlines the involvement of human activity, since we not only take perspectives, we change perspectives. Taking a perspective, as Kant was the first to insist, involves the active determination of a material world in which we can determine time. Relativity theory radicalizes this brilliant insight by introducing multiple perspectives from which time may be determined distinctly. But, even with this revision, time determination necessarily involves the material world external to the individual. So the world is both transcendentally ideal—relative to an actively taken perspective—and also empirically real.

Kant’s combination of transcendental idealism and empirical realism harmonizes far better with our ordinary experience of the world, and with the enterprise of natural science, than Berkeley’s combination of phenomenalism and instrumentalism. If you are looking for a way out of the matrix, I suggest you take Kant’s rather than Berkeley’s.

Does quantum mechanics beckon the end of naturalism? (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Bruce L. Gordon, PhD | 2024-03-10

Naturalism remains a popular philosophy in the academic world. Its articulation varies, so let’s be clear what we mean. Theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll’s definition will suffice: “Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world—the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world—no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.” Advocates of naturalism tend to regard it as the inevitable accompaniment of a scientific mindset. It seems appropriate, therefore, to undermine it using the most fundamental of sciences: quantum physics.

Given its scientific pretensions, it’s appropriate that the doctrine that the natural world is self-contained, self-explanatory, and exceptionless is at least falsifiable. All we need is one counterexample to the idea that nature is a closed system of causes and effects, or one clear example of nature’s non-self-sufficiency, to be justified in rejecting naturalism, yet contrary evidence and considerations abound. Rather than trying to cover the gamut of cosmological fine-tuning, the origin of biological information, the origin and nature of consciousness, and the evidentiary value of near-death experiences,  let’s focus on the implications of quantum physics as a less familiar aspect of naturalism’s failure.

Quantum physics sets aside classical conceptions of motion and the interaction of bodies and introduces acts of measurement and probabilities for observational outcomes in an irreducible way not ameliorated by appealing to our limited knowledge. The state of a quantum system is described by an abstract mathematical object called a wave function that only specifies the probability that various observables will have a particular value when measured. These probabilities can’t all equal zero or one and measurement results are irreducibly probabilistic, so no sufficient physical reason exists for one outcome being observed rather than another. This absence of sufficient material causality in quantum physics has experimentally confirmed consequences that, as we shall see, put an end to naturalist conceits.

The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment provides a good example with which to start. This experiment measures which path a particle took after wave function interference inconsistent with particle behavior has already been created. The interference can be turned off or on by choosing whether or not to measure which way the particle went after the interference already exists. Choosing to look erases wave function interference and gives the system a particle history. The fact that we can make a causally disconnected choice whether wave or particle phenomena manifest in a quantum system demonstrates that no measurement-independent causally-connected substantial material reality exists at the microphysical level.

We see this in other ways too. First, the physically reasonable assumptions that an individual particle, like an electron, cannot serve as an infinite source of energy or be in two places at once, entail that quantum particles have zero probability of existing in any bounded spatial region, no matter how large. Unobserved electrons (for example) don’t exist anywhere in space, and thus have no reality apart from measurement. In short, there is no intelligible notion of microscopic material objects: particle talk has pragmatic utility in relation to measurement results and macroscopic appearances, but no basis in unobserved (mind-independent) reality.

Secondly, microphysical properties do not require a physical substrate. Reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, quantum physics has its own Cheshire Cat in which quantum systems behave like their properties are spatially separated from their positions. For example, an experiment using a neutron interferometer has sent neutrons along one path while their spins follow another. In macroscopic terms, this would be like still having the spin once the top is taken away, having a dance without any dancer, or having a water wave without any water. Under appropriate experimental conditions, quantum systems are decomposable into disembodied properties—a collection of Cheshire Cat grins.

But how, then, should we understand the transition between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds? Every quantum wave function is expressible as a superposition of different possibilities (states) in which the thing it describes fails to possess the properties those possibilities specify. No quantum system, microscopic or macroscopic, ever has simultaneously determinate values for all its associated properties. You could think of it this way: imagine a house that, if you were looking at the front, didn’t have a back, and vice-versa. Everything we experience with our senses, if we take it to be a mind-independent object rather than just a phenomenological appearance, is metaphysically incomplete. What is more, under special laboratory conditions, we can create macroscopic superpositions of properties that are, classically speaking, inconsistent—for instance, a single object appearing in more than one location simultaneously. Large organic molecules have been put into such superpositions, and Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) have superposed a billion electrons moving clockwise around a superconducting ring with another billion electrons moving anticlockwise, so that two incompatible macroscopic currents are in superposition.

What this reveals is that the macroscopic stability we normally observe is the product of what physicists call environmental decoherence—the destructive interference of probability waves as quantum systems interact. You can imagine this as two water waves the same size meeting each other from opposite directions. When the crest of one wave meets the trough of the other, there is destructive interference as the waves cancel out and water’s surface is momentarily flat and calm. The quantum realm behaves analogously: our experiential world of appearances is cloaked in an illusory stability, while underneath, innumerable probability waves are destructively interfering in a roiling quantum sea.

It is important to keep in mind that, while this quantum sea is the basis of our experiential reality, none of the mathematical-structural components of interacting quantum wave functions are materially real. They are mathematical abstractions, a hollow and merely quantitative informational architecture. Speaking of the mathematical framework of physical theory, Robert Adams remarks that “[it] is a framework that, by its very nature, needs to be filled in by something less purely formal. It can only be a structure of something of some not merely structural sort… it participates in the incompleteness of abstractions… [whereas] the reality of a substance must include something intrinsic and qualitative over and above any formal or structural features it may possess.” Our experiential reality rests on a quantum-informational construct that is not materially substantial.

As a final observation before nailing the coffin of naturalism shut, in the case of laboratory-created macroscopic superpositions, our conscious self is not in the superposition but rather observing it. We are substantial, but the world of our experience is not. Our mental life transcends quantum reality. While this reality is given to us and not produced by our own consciousness, it is merely phenomenological—it goes no deeper than the perceptual possibilities across all five of our sensory modalities decohering (destructively interfering) to produce our world.

But why should this be so? When there is no sufficient physical reason why one observation occurs rather than another, why should mere perceptions cohere across our sensory modalities, and why should all of us inhabit the same world? Saying that since no physical explanation is possible, no explanation is required, would be a mistake of disastrous proportions. If there were no reason why we observe one thing rather than another, if the regularities of nature were metaphysically ungrounded, then our current perception of reality and its accompanying memories might be happening for no reason at all. How could we know? No objective probability and hence no likelihood is assignable to something for which there is no explanation, so we couldn’t even say this possibility is unlikely.

Let’s be perfectly clear. If we affirm brute chance by saying that some things can happen for no reason at all, we have deprived ourselves of any basis for deciding which things these are, and they could well include all of the perceptions and beliefs we currently take ourselves to have. This means we don’t even know whether we’re in touch with reality. We’re stuck with an irremediable skepticism that deprives our experience of any credibility, not only destroying any basis for doing science, but eliminating the very possibility of our knowing anything at all! Embracing brute chance by denying that every contingent event must have an explanation is the pathway to epistemic nihilism. An explanation must exist.

But what could the explanation be? The laws of nature, specifically those of quantum physics, won’t suffice. They’re neither logically nor metaphysically necessary. The reality they describe did not need to exist and they certainly didn’t cause its existence—in short, they are in need of explanation themselves. Clearly, naturalism is inadequate: it cannot meet the ineluctable explanatory demand. A proper ultimate explanation must terminate upon something that transcends contingent reality and has self-contained existence as its very essence.

The required conclusion is obvious: since every contingent state of affairs requires an explanation, there must exist a transcendent, independent, necessarily existent being the existence of which is explained by its intrinsic necessity. This being is unique, not just because two or more necessary beings is overkill, but because their mutual dependence would create unexplainable contingency. Furthermore, since spacetime and mass-energy are contingent phenomena, this transcendent being must be incorporeal. Finally, in explaining why any reality exists, especially in the absence of a uniquely best reality, a non-arbitrary self-determined decision based on a perfectly ranked and complete set of reasons known to this necessarily existent being must be made. This means the necessary ground for the phenomenological reality of our experience is a transcendent, omniscient Mind. Given such considerations, quantum physics not only shows the falsity of naturalism, it leads to a transcendent form of idealism. Goodbye, Richard Dawkins, and hello, Bishop Berkeley!

Wittgenstein on the practical significance of the physicalism vs idealism debate (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Philosophy

Prof. David R. Cerbone, PhD | 2024-03-03

In his very first meeting with Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein is reported to have said “that he did not think either realism or idealism was satisfactory: one would have to take some third position between them.” According to Rush Rhees, Russell rebuked the young Wittgenstein for seeking an intermediate position, since “you would have to have an intermediate position between this new one and each of the others, and so on ad infinitum.” But Wittgenstein’s early dissatisfaction with both realism and idealism persisted throughout the ensuing four decades of philosophical thinking and writing. He developed a neither-nor attitude towards realism and idealism, which is particularly clear in his much later comments on the subject in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (also published under the title Zettel, which means “scraps” or “fragments”). Here he suggests that the debate between idealists and realists has no practical significance for our lives.

These late remarks of Wittgenstein do not focus on the doctrinal details of these two “-isms.” In general, his writings are disappointing if one comes to them looking for attention to such details. In academic philosophy, realism and idealism come in myriad sophisticated versions with all manner of modifiers (transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, empirical realism, scientific realism, and so on). Wittgenstein’s interest lies instead with some of the more basic impulses that motivate philosophers to develop such intricate theories. He does so in the remarks we’ll be looking at by considering otherwise unnamed adherents to such views—the idealist rather than idealism, and the realist rather than realism. Wittgenstein invites us to consider the realist and idealist not so much as archetypical philosophical figures, but as otherwise ordinary people. What do these considerations reveal?

The first remark begins with Wittgenstein asking us to consider “a convinced realist” and “a convinced idealist,” each of whom has children. It would be natural to suppose that they would each want to pass on their respective convictions to their children: “In such an important matter as the existence or non-existence of the external world they don’t want to teach their children anything wrong.” However, Wittgenstein wonders what differences in parenting practices there might actually be between the idealist and the realist. “What will the children be taught?”, he asks, “To include in what they say: ‘There are physical objects’ or the opposite?” He indicates a degree of scepticism about this suggestion in his conclusion to this first remark: “If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children ‘There are no fairies’: he can omit to teach them the word ‘fairy’. On what occasion are they to say: ‘There are…’ or ‘There are no…’? Only when they meet people of the contrary belief.”

Wittgenstein’s appeal to fairies here is puzzling, since practically no one believes in the literal existence of fairies, yet children generally are taught the word ‘fairy.’ Little children tend to be quite conversant with fairy-talk, having been exposed early and often to storybooks, movies, and the like where fairies feature prominently (Peter Pan comes immediately to mind, but there are many others). While children may become adept at dressing like fairies or drawing them, none are taught to catch them (unless this is just a fanciful way of talking about catching fireflies), nor are fairies included when children start to learn about the kinds of animals that populate the world. They thereby pick up (eventually) that fairies are make-believe, usually without being told this explicitly. Occasionally, saying “there are no …” may come into play. If a child is instructed to make a list of things that fly and after listing birds, butterflies, and airplanes chooses to add fairies to the list, one might imagine the parent or teacher saying, “Well yes, I suppose, but of course there are no fairies.”

We might instead, then, be tempted to think of the differences between the practices of realist and idealist parents as akin to the differences between what a devout Christian and a committed atheist would teach their respective children. The Christian will talk to her children about God and Jesus, sin and atonement, salvation and redemption, both directly and through stories in which such ideas figure; moreover, she will talk of such matters in a manner and tone that conveys her convictions. Meanwhile, the atheist will by and large omit such topics of instruction and discussion, except when her children return from a playdate with the Christian’s children and she must explain to them what the other children believe. Of course, when she does this, the atheistic parent’s tone and manner is likely to be quite different from that of the Christian.

Wittgenstein does not directly answer his question about instruction when it comes to “There are physical objects.” The concept “physical object” is awfully abstract and it would seem that a child must learn a lot before being introduced to such a notion. The same goes for a child learning about appearances, which is of importance especially for the idealist (what the realist counts as physical objects, the idealist considers mind-dependent appearances). Wittgenstein instead pivots to a more pedestrian example. Even if the convinced idealist eventually teaches—or tries to teach—his children that there are no physical objects, nonetheless “the idealist will teach his children the word ‘chair’ after all,” since “of course he wants to teach them to do this or that, e.g. to fetch a chair.” He then asks: “Then where will be the difference between what the idealist-educated children say and the realist ones? Won’t the difference only be one of the battle cry?”

Wittgenstein is still asking here about just what kind of difference these supposed doctrinal differences really make. When it comes to chairs and the like, what the idealist’s children come to learn will not look much different from what the realist’s children learn: the children of both parents will become equally conversant with chairs, not just with talking about them, but with sitting on them, arranging them, counting them, making sure there are enough in the room for the number of guests, getting more from the other room if not, and so on.

Can we therefore say that the children of both the idealist and the realist are first taught to believe (naively, as it were) that there are chairs, to accept that there are chairs with a kind of certainty? Wittgenstein rejects this appeal to certainty: “There isn’t any question of certainty or uncertainty yet in their language-game. Remember: they are learning to do something.” So the realist’s children might in the fullness of time be taught that chairs are physical objects, while the idealist’s children might come to learn about chair-appearances, but all of that is subsequent to the kind of imitation and instruction that leads to children sitting on, arranging, and fetching chairs. Moreover, whatever they learned at that earlier time—what they learned to do with chairs—is unaffected by whatever is added later. Hence Wittgenstein’s likening of the addition as only one of “the battle cry.”

Notice that this is not the case when it comes to the contrast between the parent who is a devout Christian and the parent who is an atheist: the differences here are not superfluous in relation to practice in the way the respective convictions of the realist and idealist are. To be sure, there will be overlap in what the different children learn, but there will be divergence as well: the Christian children will spend their childhoods going to church, learning various prayers, saying those prayers earnestly in various settings, and even when the Christian and atheist children do the same thing, their reasons and motives might be quite different. Nothing like that divergence happens with idealist and realist children: the child who is eventually taught that the chair is a physical object will sit on, fetch, and count chairs in exactly the same way as the child whose parent told her that chairs were systems of appearances. Nor, we might add, will there ever be a “fairy moment” of that kind that happens with the child making a list of things that fly. “There are no chairs” will only ever mean what we mean when walking into an empty room expecting (or hoping) to sit down.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes his method in philosophy as “marshalling recollections.” Much later in the text, he describes himself as “supplying remarks on the natural history of human beings.” These remarks do not concern “curiosities” of the kind we might take in at a natural history museum (e.g. the finer points of seal hunting or the vast variety of early muskets). Instead, they are “facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes.” I think the remarks we have been considering about chairs are the kind of natural-historical observations Wittgenstein has in mind. “Human beings sit on chairs” strikes us as obvious and not even worth saying. A placard in a natural history bearing that observation would hardly warrant a passing glance. But confronted with the question, “Are chairs real?”—a question that sets us off in the direction of realism and idealism, appearances and physical objects, belief and certainty—that mundane observation is just the kind of thing we tend to ignore. “Are chairs real? I’ll have to sit and think about it.” Once the thinking has started, what the thinker did before getting started has already been forgotten.

Beyond scientism: Re-humanizing the mind (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Philosophy

Dr. Giuseppina D’Oro | 2024-02-24

Reductionism is no longer fashionable in philosophy of mind—the days when the idea that mental states are reducible to physical states was a given are over, and non-reductionism is the new orthodoxy. Yet, while many philosophers of mind would consider themselves card carrying non-reductionists, they also tend to think of psychology as a natural science of the mind. As a result, the defence of the autonomy of the mental one finds in most textbooks operates within a naturalistic framework which fails to acknowledge that humanistic explanations differ in kind from scientific ones.

There is however a neglected form of non-reductionism that has its roots in the idealist tradition and is genuinely pluralistic from an explanatory point of view. This form of non-reductionism is motivated by a defence of humanistic understanding and is found in the work of late British idealists, Michael Oakeshott and R.G. Collingwood. They espoused a version of idealism according to which the task of philosophy is not to determine the constitution of reality, whether it is material or immaterial, but to expose the presuppositions on which all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, rests.

They argued that the methodological assumptions of scientific inquiry are very different from those of humanistic inquiry and that it is therefore a mistake to think it possible to explain the mind in scientific terms. As a result, unlike most non-reductionists in twentieth century philosophy of mind, they were sceptical of the view that psychology could be legitimately described as the science of the mind and endeavoured to expose the conceptual confusions implicit in the very idea of a natural science of the mind.

In On Human Conduct Oakeshott argued that there are “categorically different orders of inquiry,” the humanistic and the scientific, which are concerned with altogether different kinds of goings-on and whose subject matters are sui generis and irreducible. Humanistic inquiries are concerned with ‘goings-on’ the identification of which includes the recognition that they are themselves exhibitions of intelligence. Ethics, jurisprudence and aesthetics are distinguishable idioms within the order of inquiry concerned with goings-on identified as expressions of intelligence. Scientific inquiry is concerned with ‘goings-on’ which are not themselves exhibitions of intelligence. Physics, chemistry and psychology are distinguishable idioms within the order of inquiry concerned with processes. Psychology, as one of the idioms of natural science, speaks the language of laws and processes and, as such it is “categorically excluded from providing any such understandings.”

Consider for example the distinction between a blink and a wink. If a movement of the eyelid is described as wink this description entails that the person winking knew how to signal by rapidly closing and opening an eyelid. If one describes a person as blinking, by contrast, there is no such implication. A person blinking has not learned how to open and close the eyelid just as “a falling apple does not need to have learned the law of gravitation in order to fall.”

The descriptions of the movement of the eyelid as either a blink or a wink capture the explananda of two different orders of inquiry, humanistic and scientific and, as such, they are categorically distinct descriptions. Not all distinctions, according to Oakeshott, are categorial distinctions. The action of opening a window, for example, could be described either as an attempt to let an annoying insect out or to air a room. This sort of distinction captures two different interpretations of what was happening that belong to the same order of inquiry. ‘Letting a fly out’ and ‘letting air in’ are goings-on of the same kind, unlike a blink and a wink which are categorically distinct because they belong to different orders of inquiry. Philosophy disambiguates categorically ambiguous descriptions by distinguishing between the kinds of explanations which make such categorical distinctions possible in the first place.

Failure to disambiguate categorically distinct kinds of goings-on, such as a blink and a wink, and their corresponding orders of inquiry, obfuscates the difference between norms or rules, which need to be acknowledged to be operative and laws, which do not.  Since psychology is a natural science whose explanations invoke laws rather than norms, the explanation of what it is that someone does when winking, cannot be a psychological explanation.

Oakeshott’s criticism is not directed at psychology as a genuine natural science but at psychology as an ‘all-purpose’ science. The target is not science, which he recognizes as a legitimate cognitive enterprise, but scientism. The subject matter of psychology as a genuine natural science “is a world of quantitative concepts and measurements, not a world of ‘mental phenomena.’ And where psychology is a science, its conclusions will have the same character, significance and validity as the conclusions of any other science.” As an all-purpose science, psychology presents (psychological) mechanisms as the motives for actions or reasons for beliefs and is not a genuine natural science but the “spurious intellectual enterprise” which seeks “to understand ‘goings-on’ identified as themselves exhibitions of intelligence—expressions of sentiment or belief, arguments, practices, artefacts, intentions, motives, actions…” in terms of causal laws.

Oakeshott’s distinction between different orders of inquiry and the distinctive goings-on that they investigate gives rise to a defence of the autonomy of the mental that is quite different from the sort of non-reductionism that dominates contemporary philosophy of mind. What Oakeshott refers to as intelligent human conduct, or the sort of goings-on which are the subject matter of humanistic understanding, contemporary philosophy of mind explains by invoking laws as if they were falling apples.

A case in point is multiple realization functionalism, which claims that mental states could be realized in different kinds of physical systems. Since the mental state of being in pain, for example, could be realized in both a human and an octopus, who have very different physiologies, it is not possible to reduce mental states to physical states as reductionists hoped to do. This non-reductionist argument is not premised on the view that there is a categorically distinct kind of going-on which cannot be captured by law-like explanations.

Multiple realization functionalists do deny that mental states are reducible to physical states, but they still couch mentalistic explanations in the language of laws: stimulus of type x gives rise to behavioural response of type y. As a result, they fail to acknowledge the categorial distinction between different kinds of goings-on, such as that between a blink and a wink. For Oakeshott, physics, chemistry, biology—and indeed psychology—are idioms of one and the same order of inquiry, one whose explanations invoke laws. A non-reductionism worth its salt must acknowledge that the distinction between the kind of goings-on investigated by humanistic and scientific inquiry is not a mere idiomatic distinction within the same order of inquiry.

Nor would Oakeshott have been reassured by the recent resurgence of panpsychism informed by Russellian Monism. Panpsychists like Philip Goff and Galen Strawson have argued that to solve the hard problem of consciousness—the mystery of how consciousness is able to emerge from mere grey matter—one must assume that consciousness is already to be found in some rudimentary form in the fundamental constituents of reality.

But by and large, panpsychists are not explanatory pluralists who challenge the unity and completeness of scientific explanations. Instead, they simply claim that the ontological constitution of the particles whose behaviour physics describes through its laws is not what materialists thought it to be. While panpsychism denies the truth of physicalism, it does not challenge the idea that explanations of mental phenomena differ in kind, and are therefore irreducible to, the lawlike explanations one finds in other natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics.

One might not immediately recognize Oakeshott’s conceptual cartography in On Human Conduct as a form of idealism. But his denunciation of the ‘categorial rubbish’ that is produced by the failure to disambiguate different orders of inquiry has deep roots in his earlier work, Experience and its Modes, a work that is steeped in the idealist tradition.

In Experience and its Modes Oakeshott argues that different forms of knowledge or modes of experience rest on distinctive presuppositions and that any truths that are asserted within these modes are conditional upon those presuppositions. Different forms of knowledge or modes of experience bring not a subsection of reality, but the whole of reality, under different descriptions.

When one describes a painting as morally edifying but lacking aesthetic qualities, for example, one is not describing different sections of the canvas but examining the whole of it from different perspectives. Scientism is the attempt of any one form of knowledge or experience to assert its own truths absolutely and unconditionally as if it were presupposition-less, thereby resulting in a kind of intellectual Manicheanism. Experience and its Modes contrasted the presupposition-based knowledge obtained within forms of experience to philosophy which was deemed to be presupposition-less.

By the time Oakeshott wrote On Human Conduct he abandoned this conception of philosophy as a presupposition-less inquiry into the absolute. Instead, he saw philosophy as a second order investigation into the presuppositions on which knowledge rests. But his later defence of the claim that the subject matters of humanistic and scientific inquiries are distinct kinds of goings-on is firmly grounded in the earlier idealist view that different forms of knowledge or experience operate with different presuppositions which bring the whole of reality (not just a segment of it) under a different (categorial) description. It is the idealist slant of Oakeshott’s criticism of psychology as an all-purpose science that explains why the defence of the autonomy of humanistic understanding he develops in the later work is a genuine form of explanatory pluralism that differs from the bland forms of non-reductionism that have tended to dominate the philosophy of mind.

R. G. Collingwood, who greatly admired Oakeshott’s work, and also thought of psychology as a pseudo-science of the mind agreed that humanistic and scientific knowledge rest on different presuppositions which philosophy brings to the fore. The methodological assumptions which inform scientific and humanist inquiries give rise to the questions that are characteristically asked within their domains.

When natural scientists ask, for example, why litmus paper turns pink, they are not asking the same kind of question that historians pose when asking, for example, why a country amassed troops on its borders. Answering the historian’s question requires uncovering the point of amassing the troops, rather than finding out what normally happens when certain antecedent conditions obtain. These questions are answered by different kinds of explanations to which there correspond two categorically distinct kinds of goings on: actions, the subject matter of humanistic inquiry; and events, the subject matter of scientific inquiry.

For Collingwood, the natural scientist is categorically excluded from answering the questions of the historian (and vice versa), just as for Oakeshott, psychology, as a natural science, is categorically excluded from understanding intelligent goings-on. Neither Oakeshott nor Collingwood intended to preclude the possibility that one might investigate human behaviour in the way in which one investigates the behaviour of litmus paper. But what they did claim is that, in so doing, one changes the subject matter.

Oakeshott’s and Collingwood’s idealism leave behind the dichotomy between scientism and historicism. Their goal is not to promote a form of inverted scientism claiming that all knowledge is humanistic knowledge relative to knowers at a time and a place, but that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is based on presuppositions and that acknowledging the methodological assumptions which govern their domains of inquiry is a condition sine qua non for being able to make the categorial distinction we make, such as the ones between a wink and a blink, or between (natural) evolution and (historical) revolution. They do not argue that all knowledge is historical knowledge (history being seen as the paradigm of humanistic disciplines) but that the presuppositions of humanistic knowledge are not the same as those of scientific knowledge.

Above all, the idealism of Oakeshott and Collingwood eschews the dichotomy between naturalism and supernaturalism. Actions, or the kind of “goings-on” which are best accounted for by humanistic explanations, are not supernatural or not-natural entities. They are reality understood under the presuppositions of humanistic inquiry, just as events are the kind of goings on which scientific inquiry investigates; they are reality known under a different set of presuppositions. It is the commitment to scientism, or the view that scientific knowledge is presupposition-less, that relegates the domain of inquiry of the humanities to a supernatural realm.

Idealism comes in different shades of grey. It can be an ontologically ambitious claim about the nature of reality, as in the case of Berkeley’s phenomenalism, or an epistemically humble claim about the limits of knowledge, as in the case of Kant’s transcendental idealism. It can also be a form of conceptual analysis which denies the meaningfulness of any talk about presupposition-less knowledge and reminds us of the dangers associated with asserting the truths of any one form of knowledge or experience absolutely and unconditionally as if they were presupposition-less.

As long as we fail to acknowledge that idealism is a broad church, and the differences between the varieties of idealism available, we will also fail to see how the idealism of Oakeshott and Collingwood informs a defence of the autonomy of humanistic understanding that rejects naturalism without endorsing supernaturalism and provides a much-needed alternative to forms of non-reductionism which remain committed to scientism.

 

Bibliography

Collingwood, R.G. (1940), An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, revised edition, with an introduction by Rex Martin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

D’Oro, G. (2023) Why Collingwood Matters: A Defence of Humanistic Understanding. Bloomsbury.

Fodor J. A. (1989), “Making Mind Matter More”, Philosophical Topics 17: 59-79.

Goff, P. (2019) Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a new Science of Consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books.

Nardin, T. (1942). The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, University Park, Pennsylvania: the Pennsylvanian University Press.

Oakeshott, M. (1933). Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge University Press.

Oakeshott, M. (1975). On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Russell, B. (1927). The Analysis of Matter. London: Kegan Paul

Strawson, G. (2006). “Realistic Physicalism: Why Physicalism entails Panpsychism”, in A. Freeman (ed.), Consciousness and its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism entail Panpsychism? , 3-31, Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Understanding collective self-consciousness in Hegelian pragmatism (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Continental Philosophy

Prof. Terry Pinkard, PhD | 2024-01-28

Hegelianism is often thought of as the super-theoretical German mishmash of absolutist philosophy that is great in theory but ridiculous in practice, whereas pragmatism is often thought of a kind of philosophical version of ‘who cares whether it’s true, the question is whether it works,’ which is enough for some to reject it as crass and unphilosophical. Or, to reverse the joke ascribed to Sidney Morgenbesser: The problem with pragmatism is that it is great in practice but not in theory.

Given the diametrically opposed reputations these philosophical movements have, it might come as a surprise to many people just how close the two schools of thought actually are. Sure, people might know that Hegel influenced many of the early pragmatist thinkers, but the suggestion that he himself was a pragmatist of any sort has until very recently been out of bounds. That has all changed in the last couple of decades as many non-Hegelian pragmatists have been taking a new look at Hegelian thought, and Hegelians have been enticed to start working out an updated Hegelianism via a refreshed investigation of twentieth century pragmatism. Most recently, the noted contemporary philosopher of language, Robert Brandom, has taken to describing his own analytical work as pragmatist and Hegelian, a combination that only a few decades ago would have resulted in strict social sanctions against such intellectual heresy.

But this turn of fortune shouldn’t actually surprise anybody. If anything, Hegel shares with the pragmatists an opposition to misplaced abstraction in philosophical thought. “Man” as such doesn’t exist, he would tell his students, and “laws and principles have no immediate life or validity in themselves. The activity that puts them into operation … has its source in the needs, impulses, inclinations and passions of man.”

Like the pragmatists who (much later) came after him, Hegel opposed a tempting but ultimately false view of human action. On that view, we must distinguish sharply between the meaning and truth of thoughts taken on their own, and the force we give those thoughts when we do things like use them to make assertions. For example, many philosophers would hold that the truth or falsity of the abstract thought, “The state is best comprehended in terms of a social contract,” stands independent of whomever is asserting it and whenever it’s asserted. As the great logician-philosopher, Gottlob Frege, put it, the meaning and truth of a concept should be entirely distinct from the force we give it when we put it to use to assert things. Hegel, on the other hand, thought that this suggestion falsified the intricate way in which thought and action are linked to each other. In particular, in his practical philosophy, Hegel often spoke as if he were a pragmatist avant la lettre. What we do with the words and thoughts makes an enormous difference to the very meaning of the concepts themselves. The real meaning of a concept does not emerge until it gets put to use, and that means that its materiality in use makes a difference to its meaning.

In particular, Hegel rejected a hard and fast distinction between—to use the terms given to it in contemporary discussions—justifying and motivating reasons. Motivating reasons are the ones that can causally explain your actions, such as ‘She was really angry, which explains what she did.’ Justifying reasons are, well, the ones that justify (or don’t) your actions—such as ‘Yes, being angry may prompt you to say such and such, but it never justifies it.’ Sometimes the two—justification and motivation—may coincide, but it might seem as if that is just a happy accident when it happens. However, if we are to hold onto the idea that human life involves some measure of free action, it cannot be the case that justifying reasons are completely irrelevant when explaining one’s actions. What we think is right must have some explanatory value in accounting for our actions. For both Hegel and the pragmatists, there has to be a way in which the ‘ideal’ also explains the material course of human life and can make a difference as to what we do. ‘Concepts’ are not merely abstractions that don’t motivate and hence don’t explain actions. They link up with ‘passions and interests’ in very concrete ways.

This focus on the link between concept and action has been given a renewed twist in the writings of some recent Hegelian scholars who have looked for the link between Hegel and pragmatism to be found in terms of Hegel’s own concept of ‘life.’ Building on, extending and transforming some older work on Hegel, several younger philosophers—Karen Ng (Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic), Thomas Khurana (Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie, soon to be translated into English), Dean Moyar (Hegel’s Value: Justice as the Living Good), and Andreja Novakovic (Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life)—have recently made the case that Hegel picked up on the idea of life as self-maintenance to give a unified shape to the more abstract and dualistic distinction of explanation and justification. It is when life on earth becomes self-conscious life in its human form that Hegel’s own conception of Geist—mind or spirit, depending on the translator—comes into view. Geist is a specific type of unity of self-conscious lives. It is not merely the sum of various individuals. You don’t just add up individuals as if they were all just separate little individual data points and arrive at Geist. On the other hand, Geist is also not some super-entity swallowing everything else into itself and thereby obliterating the individuality of the individuals within it. Instead, it is the non-additive collection of self-conscious individuals whose individuality emerges only in terms of their being those individuals within that collective life. Or, as Hegel puts it, Geist is the unity that shapes the individuals contained within it, but it does not exist without those individuals, and the role of self-consciousness in all this makes, according to Hegel, all the difference in the world.

An analogy that might help to make this more intuitive would be that of the relation between a language and its speakers. English is a language that shows itself in the individual speech acts of its speakers, and each of us English speakers manifests the entire language as we use it in on our day to day lives. Each of us is carrying around, as it were, the entire language with us as we make our way through daily life. To use Hegel’s own rather inimitable vocabulary, if the language is a ‘universal,’ we, as its individual speakers, are ourselves also ‘the universal.’ Without the speakers, the language could not exist; without the language, we could not be its speakers. Each is bound together as an ‘I’ that is a ‘We,’ and a ‘We’ that is an ‘I’ (as Hegel defines Geist). An abstract language (‘English’) is not fully real unless it is lived and developed by its speakers. It is no accident that Hegel himself stated in a couple of different places in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit that language in fact was the very existence of Geist: if no language, then no Geist; if no Geist, then no language.

Hegel’s conception of Geist—neither additive nor subsumptive, not just a heap of atomized individuals nor a state swallowing and abolishing individuality—led him to develop his version of an idealist conception of world history. The very nature of self-conscious life is always to be beyond itself, to be striving to determine what it would be best to be and to make sense of what it is doing. Ultimately, that means that self-conscious life strives for a kind of self-determination, a comprehension of itself as existing only in the self-conscious apprehension of itself as an I that is a We, and a We that is an I. In other words, a conception of not just a species with individual exemplars, but a species that lives in its social practices where the practices themselves are a form that unites the people who bear that form. Hegel calls that form, variously, a form of life, a shape or Gestalt of consciousness, even a shape of a whole world (as a kind of culture or civilization). Those forms of life as ensembles of social practices, held together by various shared commitments and meanings, are articulated in the materiality of its technologies, the institutions of its political lives, and in the art, religion and philosophy. Like the languages we speak, those deep meanings and commitments show themselves in our activities, and they are all implicated in our collective self-consciousness.

The history of the world was the history of the ways that these different forms of self-conscious life developed. And they developed by gradually uncovering the ways that their own deep commitments to doing things were at odds with themselves, which in turn had led them into a more and more uninhabitable world of their own making. Their shared life, their living in the light of what ultimately mattered to them, had turned out to be ultimately contradictory. As the realization of this set in among its members, that form of life began to lose their allegiance and started breaking down. In that setting, the people living in the rubble of the breakdown had to pick up the parts that still worked, discard the parts that did not and put together a new form of life. (Hegel called that an Aufhebung—an activity of both cancelling and preserving.) The new form in turn developed itself up to its own limits and at those limits where the contradictions became more glaring and unconcealed, broke down again. The history of the world was the history of whole ways of life breaking down in this way and being succeeded by others. But this was not a cyclical process—that of kingdoms come, kingdoms go—it was a more linear and progressive affair as Geist—self-conscious life, humanity—learned from its failures and improved on its past.

This historical learning process did not always go smoothly. Progress almost never proceeded without bumps in the road, and in too many cases it did so in darkly comical and sometimes violently sinister ways. But, so Hegel argued, all in all it did mark progress. We were getting better at collectively shaping our shared lives in terms of what ultimately matters, and what we had learned by the modern period was that what had turned out to matter to us absolutely in the course of history was the idea of freedom itself. Freedom not just as an abstract ideal but as what Hegel called (again in his own inimitable way) the “Idea”, as the unity of the concept of freedom and what was required to put that concept into practice – the concrete, material shape of specific arrangements of property rights, moral commitments, family life, social and economic organization and a political life conceived around the idea of a universal equality of freedom among all people.

For both Hegel and the pragmatists, one had to determine what to do with the concepts at stake in world history. For some of the pragmatists, Hegel had turned to be a great philosopher but not much of a prophet. Thus, some of them—most notably John Dewey—tried to give Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history a more down to earth and “naturalized” feel. What history as a learning process really did with its ideas is create what Dewey called “permanent deposits”—conceptions of life and the world that once laid down and articulated proved very resistant to being cast aside. Modern science was one such problem-solving “permanent deposit.” In the practical realm, in the 19^th and 20^th century, one had the idea of democracy as just such a “permanent deposit.” Updating and correcting Hegel, Dewey called democracy a “way of life”—not just a matter of suffrage and voting, nor just a matter of unicameral versus bicameral legislatures. Democracy concerned itself with much the same kinds of things Hegel thought—laws, morals, family life, economic organization and political association, and as Dewey wrote in 1919 in a short piece, “Philosophy and Democracy,” democracy had to do with “a conviction about moral values, a sense for the better kind of life to be led.”

However, whereas in 1820 Hegel had thought history was pointing toward a kind of British constitutional monarchy staffed by ultra-efficient Prussian bureaucrats, for the twentieth century pragmatists, history was pointing at democracy as a way of life, even if it’s not where history sometimes seems to be going. Updated by modern pragmatism, democracy is thus a Hegelian Idea demanding its own actualization.

Or at least that’s the theory. But, as Hegelians and Pragmatists both say, what we have to do now is see if it can be put into practice.

The birth of Idealism in the West (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Tom Rockmore, PhD | 2024-01-07

Philosophy seeks to arrive at, analyze and choose between different views against the background of the ongoing philosophical tradition. Many exponents of philosophy, talented or otherwise, believe that, in at least some instances, there is a correct answer to the difficult questions that continue to attract philosophers. Others, including myself, believe that we cannot go further than framing or at least seeking to frame philosophical questions in the most useful ways possible. This includes what we might consider to be the correct approach to answering a question. But it need not include anything so grand as proposing a solution to any philosophical concerns.

According to Plato, Parmenides, a sixth century pre-Socratic thinker, invented what has since been known as philosophy or perhaps more narrowly Western philosophy. Numerous other qualified observers also believe that Parmenides began Western philosophy, and that once it began, philosophy has always been and still remains Platonic. The relationship of Parmenides to Plato is crucial but complicated. Parmenides advances a theory of knowledge according to which we can, or at least hope to know in some general way. He famously believed that thought (or thinking) and being (or reality) are the same. The meaning of this claim is uncertain, but one way it can be read is as a defense of philosophical idealism. Parmenides then can be seen as the first idealist in the Western tradition. What is more, his idealism is a form of anti-realism, the view that we cannot have direct knowledge of reality.

 

Parmenides on Thought and Being

There is a difference between Parmenides, who began philosophy, and later thinkers beginning with Plato, who sought to build on the Parmenidean view. Parmenides formulated what according to Plato and others became the initial view of philosophy which echoes through the entire tradition, that thought and being are the same. In his claim that thought and being are the same, Parmenides seems to be suggesting that cognition depends on either or both of two basic claims. One possibility is that he is making the ontological claim that when we know something we know mind-independent being, that is, the way the mind-independent reality is. The other possibility lies in the view that we do not and cannot grasp the mind-independent world as it is, but cognition is still possible through an indirect grasp, by the construction of the cognitive object.

At this point in many texts, one might anticipate a series of learned remarks, often of a philological nature, since Parmenides wrote in ancient Greek, intended to demonstrate the true meaning of the Parmenidean view.  This seems unnecessary in the present context. Suffice it to say that Parmenides neither demonstrates nor attempts to demonstrate his thesis which, since pre-Socratic philosophy, continues to function as the only universal criterion of knowledge.

Rationalists like Descartes and empiricists like Locke agree we can know the mind-independent real but differ about how to do so. Others believe that at the end of the day there has never been any progress towards that goal. The alternative to these options of naive realism and extreme skepticism is epistemic constructivism, which I will understand as a three-fold claim: (1) we must avoid cognitive skepticism; (2) though we cannot demonstrate or otherwise show that we know the mind-independent real; (3) we can avoid skepticism since we can at least demonstrate that we know what we construct.

 

Plato’s development of Parmenides

It is often said that Western philosophy begins in Plato, not Parmenides. But if Plato is a post-Parmenidean beyond just coming after him time-wise, then he does not break with, but rather builds on and further develops the Parmenidean theory. Philosophy then starts with Parmenides, as Plato himself thought.

Plato states a version of the relation of his view to Parmenides in several places, perhaps most famously in the tenth book of the Republic. According to Plato, knowledge is based on mimesis, or imitation. He claims that we apply a single form to the things to which we apply the same name.

Take the example of a piece of furniture. Socrates believes craftsmen who, in the process of making things, for instance beds and tables, rely on pre-existent images, which they do not create, but only use as a model for different kinds of furniture. According to Socrates, no individual makes the form of the thing, such as the table or a chair.

The suggested demonstration culminates in a three-fold distinction on three different levels between three kinds of beds. They include (1) the form of a bed that no human being but only a god can make; (2) for instance, the work of a carpenter who relies in turn on whatever the god creates in the process of naming, and (3) the painter who depicts one or more pre-existent objects he does not create.

Parmenides sees the problem, which he formulates but does not solve, and which in turn Plato also sees and also does not solve.  According to Parmenides, cognition is possible if and only if thought and being are the same. In the theory of forms, Plato seeks to show that there is cognition if there are mind-independent forms, which at least some gifted individuals can know. The required demonstration of the identity of thought and being lies in the Platonic view, which is intended to solve the Parmenidean problem. Plato’s suggested solution is his theory of forms, namely the identity between the object we do not make or construct and the object we can know or think.  If this is true, then thought and being are indeed the same, and cognition is possible. Plato is attracted to this argument as a possible solution to the problem of knowledge, since he suggests, some exceptional individuals – men of gold-  can grasp the forms, and therefore the mind-independent world. But the solution fails since even in the Republic itself, we never find out who these exceptional individuals are supposed to be – there are no men of gold.

 

Thought and being after Plato

The Parmenidean problem of cognition, which Plato failed to fully solve, arguably remains on the agenda of the entire later philosophical tradition, still unresolved. The Parmenidean view suggests there are two and only two general ways to know the world.  Let us call them i) materialism (or realism), the view that we can and do grasp the mind-independent real, and ii) idealism (or anti-realism), the view that we can only interact, but never know the mind-independent world as it is.

Materialism is often described as a naïve doctrine that asserts, but cannot demonstrate, claims about the mind-independent world. Materialism is a strategy for cognition through the immediate or direct grasp of the way the world is. Materialists seek to demonstrate that we can have a direct, immediate grasp of the mind-independent world.

Philosophical idealism on the other hand is often understood as the view that mind is the most basic reality, whose inner essence is in some way mental. There are numerous kinds of philosophical idealism, including British and German varieties. Idealist thinkers claim we can only infer, but never know what appears to be the case. In modern philosophy, arguably the best-known idealist is Berkeley. The latter was an immaterialist, who denied the existence of matter in favor of a view of finite mental substance that he understood as a collection of ideas.

 

Kant and Idealism as Anti-realism

In following the path opened by Parmenides, we have distinguished two main cognitive strategies, namely materialism and idealism. The difference between the two cognitive strategies is clear. Materialism is a version of the familiar, realist correspondence view of truth. Materialists think, but cannot show, that our grasp of the real corresponds to what is. Idealists, on the contrary, think that, though we cannot grasp what is, through the interaction between the knower and the knowable, we construct cognitive objects that we know.

Idealist thought arises in Parmenides and continues in modern philosophy. The term “idealism” was initially used by Leibniz in 1702. Berkeley thinks idealism favors immaterialism, or the view that substance does not exist. Idealists, for instance the later Kant, are constructivists, not realists. Kant began as a representationalist, initially favoring the view that cognition requires the correct representation of the object. He later gave up representationalism in favor of constructivism. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggested that metaphysics, which previously assumed that knowledge must conform to objects, “must [now] suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge” (CPR B xvi).

If this is correct, then the complicated link between Parmenides, who precedes Plato, and Plato, who succeeds Parmenides, turns on demonstrating either one of two general claims. We recall that Parmenides believes that thinking and being are the same. This suggests that thinking and being are two names for precisely the same thing. On the other hand, it paradoxically also suggests thought and being are not similar but utterly different in every way.

Parmenides’s view that thinking and being are the same echoes throughout the tradition from the pre-Socratic beginning of the tradition right up until today. A turning point arises in the transition between two phases in the development of Kant’s position. The turning point occurs in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770). In his initial view, before the Dissertation, Kant defends a pre-idealist representationalist approach to cognition. In this early phase, he understands cognition as requiring an apodictic grasp of what is. After the Dissertation, Kant gives up any claim to apodictic knowledge in favor of his famous Copernican revolution.

In On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), Copernicus proposes that geocentric planetary motion can be replaced by a heliocentric explanation. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests that metaphysics, which previously assumed that knowledge must conform to objects, “must [now] suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.”

Kant was a physicist. In the process of the development of his position Kant changed his mind. He initially held that there is a mind-independent world that we know to a later view and we know it. An example is Newton’s laws, which are supposedly unalterably true or necessarily correct about the mind-independent external world, and will never be superseded.  In other words, Kant’s early view defends a view of science that claims but cannot show that we know the way the mind independent world is. In this initial phase of his development, Kant holds that we know what is necessarily correct since it cannot not be true. This view restates in different language the Parmenidian belief that knowledge requires a correct grasp of being.

Kant later changed his mind in adopting the basically different view according to which the cognition requires no more than the construction of what is on the level of thought. In this later phase Kant no longer believes that cognitive claims are unalterably true or even true at all, a view he abandons in favor of the belief that cognitive claims are not necessarily true but rather depend on our experience.

The evolution of Kant’s conception of knowledge runs from a stronger claim about the mind-independent external world before his Inaugural Dissertation to a weaker claim after the Dissertation about the way we merely experience but cannot know the world. More recent scientists think that cognitive claims are historically limited. In an informal statement, Einstein, the physicist, writes:

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious, he may form some picture of a mechanism, which could be responsible for all the things that he observes, but he may never be quite sure that his picture is the only one which could capture his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

 

Parmenidean idealism

Coming back to Parmenides and his claim that thought and being are one. Plato understood Parmenides to mean that the condition of knowledge is to grasp the unity of thought and being. Following that idea, Plato suggested that knowledge would be possible only if we could know the mind-independent world as it is. But ultimately his theory of forms failed.

The ancient Parmenidean claim runs through the philosophical tradition, returning in different forms in German idealism (e. g. Kant, Fichte and Hegel) in the canonical choice between thinking and being. But if demonstrable knowledge of the mind-independent real is the main thrust of the philosophical tradition, in other words, if materialism/realism is the dominant strain of Western philosophy, then Western philosophy fails. On the other hand, if constructivism is a plausible alternative, cognition can in principle be redeemed through the ongoing interaction between finite human beings and their surroundings, above all in Hegel’s view of epistemology as circular. Though Kant did not invent epistemic constructivism, he gave it a powerful impulse in his later view of knowledge in context.  I conclude that we can and indeed must accept the Parmenidean unity of thought and being as a cognitive condition. But we must reject the unavailing effort to grasp the mind-independent real in favor of a constructivist account of objects as they emerge in experience.