Heidegger on Logic

Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, if one wishes to be kind, is a most difficult system to understand, complicated by his technical terminology, including new words which he coined, e.g., ‘thrownness,’ which is meant to indicate the human phenomenological experience of being confronted with, or by, the world of sense-data and experience. If one wishes to be less than kind, one may pose the blunt question whether or not Heidegger makes any sense at all, and whether his thoughts and writings are actually rational.

It is then perhaps an odd juxtaposition that we would turn precisely to Heidegger for words about that subdivision of philosophy to which he seems least attached: logic. Yet, as every philosopher must, he busied himself, at least for some fraction of his time, with logic. In his lecture notes for the 1925/1926 academic year, he wrote:

If we desire a more vital concept of “logic,” we have to ask a more penetrating question: what is the subject matter of the science of logic? In doing so, we leave aside any consideration of logic as one discipline among others - viz., the science of speaking and therefore of language - and focus instead on what it is about.

Heidegger here uses the word ‘science’ in the philosophical sense: in ordinary life, we think of ‘science’ as biology and chemistry, as geology and astronomy. The philosophical sense is broader, including those, but including also anything which can be made into a systematic body of knowledge, or an academic discipline. Not only is the philosophical sense of the word broader, but it carries a different emphasis: it is not the content of biology or astronomy (frogs and stars, respectively) which interests the philosopher, but rather the systematic arrangement of that content - that it can be categorized according to a taxonomy, or its events analyzed in terms of cause and effect. It was a philosopher, Aristotle, who organized not only a taxonomy for biology, but for political science and other fields as well.

It is in this sense, then, that Heidgger speaks of ‘the science of logic’ - and here also he is following a philosophical tradition; the very phrase ‘science of logic’ (die Wissenschaft der Logik) has a long and venerable history among philosophers.

Seen historically, Heidegger proposes that logic arose from the study of language (grammar), and the study of language arose from the study of speaking. After sketching his somewhat obscure distinction between ‘language’ and ‘speaking’ - the latter being the most literal study of making sounds with the mouth, and the former a somewhat more abstract study of meaning and grammar - he goes on to explain logic as an extrapolation from speaking and language: what the speaking is about, or what the language is about:

the basic achievement of speech consists in showing or revealing what one is speaking about, what one is discussing. Indeed, making vocal sounds was quite secondary to that.

As one abstracts from speech and language to logic, we see that grammar is to language as logic is to thought: and it is in thougt that the content of the “science” at hand will be defined and revealed:

In such acts of revealing, whatever one is speaking about shows up, becomes perceivable, and, as something perceived, get defined in and by the discussion about it. This revelatory defining of what is experienced and perceived is the very same thing that we generally call “thought” and “reflection”.

To speak of a process of ‘revealing’ is typically Heideggerian, for which he is alternately loved and hated. Heidegger’s concept of ‘truth’ is a notion of uncovering or disclosing, which stands in contrast to a competing concept, truth as corresponding. In a correspondence view of truth, symbols - be they spoken or written, be they mathematic, scientific, or ordinary words - are true if they are arranged in a patterns which corresponds to reality. Heidegger, to the contrary, embraces his own view of truth, that it consists in, not corresponding to reality, but rather revealing or disclosing it. Heidegger goes on:

In summary: in our primary, natural experience of how human beings live together with each other, we understand speech as the revealing of something by speaking about it, and as a thinking that determines and orders it. Language, speaking, thinking: they coincide as the human way of being. They are the way we reveal and illumine (both for ourselves and for others) the world and our won human existence, so that in this luminosity we gain sight: human insight into ourselves and an outlook on, and a practical insight into, the world. Logic as the science of speaking, studies speech in terms of what it properly is: the revealing of something. The subject matter of logic is speech viewed with regard to its basic meaning, namely, allowing the world, human existence, and things in general to be seen.

The subject matter of logic is not merely speech, but speech viewed viewed with regard to its basic meaning. Grammar, philology, and related disciplines are the study of speech; logic is the study of speech’s meaning. Phrased another way, logic is ‘deep grammar’, while the ordinary study of phonemes and morphemes is ‘surface grammar’. Because deep grammar is deep, it needs to be uncovered, discovered, and revealed:

The fact that existence has and understands and strives for this basic form of revealing implies that, for the most part, much of the world stands in need of ‘revelation’, of being uncovered and made known. In other words, much of the world and much of human existence is by and large not un-covered. So beings can be drawn out of their not-un-covered-ness, their hiddenness. They can be un-covered or un-hidden. This uncoveredness or unhiddenness of beings is what we call truth.

Following Aristotle (who followed Socrates), Heidegger sees definitions as central to logic:

Logic investigates speaking - the thinking that defines things - inasmuch as speaking uncovers things. The topic of logic is speech, specifically with regard to truth.

Observational sciences, natural sciences, like chemistry or biology, are also concerned with truth. Likewise, social sciences like sociology or political sciences seek truths. So what makes logic different, or even distinct, from them? Those other sciences seek to identify truths, or to sort out which statements are true and which are false. Logic, according to Heidegger, takes true statements and asks why they are true and how they are true.

Our definition of logic as the science of truth could be misunderstood. One might object that every science deals with truth, that truth is what all scientific knowledge is after. Yes, except that there is a misleading ambiguity here in how the word truth is being used. In a strict sense, no individual science other than logic deals with truth. The natural sciences, on the other hand, deal only and always with the true, i.e., what-is-true; and they do so within the arena of the knowledge of nature. Or outside of the natural sciences, one inquires into what-is-true for human action, or about the true that faith gives.

Logic deals with truths; the concrete individual sciences deal with truths. There are biological truths, spiritual truths, geological truths, ethical truths; but logic deals with truth itself, truth seen as truth, not seen in relation to the content of a particular science. Astronomy gives us truths; faith gives us truths; chemistry gives us truths; morals give us truths; but logic examines truth itself - what it is to be true.

But logic does not ask about the what-is-true in just any sense. Rather, it inquires primarily and properly into the truth of what-is-true. It asks: What makes this or that true thing be true in a given case? and what makes it be this true thing? The only way to make any grounded sense out of the truth of theoretical-scientific knowledge, practical reflection, or religious truth is to get to the foundation that lets us understand what truth means at all. Only from that foundation can we decide which kind of truth is most original, and whether the ideal of truth is to be found in theoretical-scientific truth or practical insight or religious faith. In other words, it is not easily decided which form of the true is primary and most basic. Even in today’s philosophy, this question has not yet been settled.

Heidegger indicates that we should seek which form of truth is most ‘primary’ and ‘basic’ - this will be a daunting task, for it is not clear which standards will allow us to judge in this case, and it is perhaps a bit too optimistic to assume that philosophers as a community will ever agree to any potential answer.

The Basis of Modern Science

Although we might sometimes think of science and philosophy as two rather different academic subjects, they are in many ways related. We can see this in, for example, some of the words used in a current science textbook (An Introduction to Physical Science, a commonly-used college freshman text, 2009, Houghton Mifflin). Early in the introduction, it offers us this quote from the Lutheran pastor and philosopher, Johannes Kepler:

Theory guides, experiment decides.

Kepler, often known today for his discovery that planetary orbits are elliptical and not circular, spent most of his life thinking about theology, having studied at the seminary in Tübingen in Germany.

The textbook goes on to state in its own words that

Based on the assumption that the universe is orderly enough to be understood, a method of observation and rules for reasoning and making predictions have been formulated.

The clear philosophical import of this text is the “assumption” that the universe is rational, that it follows the laws of algebra and geometry, and eventually, the laws of chemistry and physics. The universe, then, has been designed around a set of principles - according, at least, to the current thinking in physics departments at the nation’s universities. Further, there are “rules” for reasoning.

The idea that there are rules for reasoning, in physics at least, goes back as far as the theologian Isaac Newton. Outside of physics, in pure mathematics and logic, the idea is even older. This is the foundation of observational and empirical science as we now know it. Isaac Newton, because of his discovery of mathematical truths like the theorems and principles of calculus, and because of his discovery of physical laws like gravitation, spent most of his scholarly effort analyzing, and wrote most of his publications about, the Bible.

We see, from the works of men like Kepler and Newton, that there is a thick tangle where philosophy, mathematics, natural observational sciences, and theology meet. Assumptions about the possibility of phenomena in the universe being subject to mathematical modeling come very near expressing certain aspects or properties of God.

Anaximenes: Is the Universe a Machine?

Philosophers and scientists have long wrestled with notion of a mechanistic universe: it is attractive, to the extent that it reflects both the formalized assumptions and intuitive concepts of physics and chemistry, both of which can be modeled mathematically. On the other hand, it fails to correspond to our ideas of imagination, creativity, and chance. We can see clearly that some aspects of the cosmos are mechanistic - gravitational forces can be calculated and reliably predicted. But is there a decision process which would have allowed us to predict, after Beethoven finished his eighth symphony, which form and content would comprise his ninth symphony?

Anaximenes was perhaps the first to advance a strictly mechanistic cosmology. Even though Thales and Anaximander had rejected mythological “psyche” into their systems of physics, attributing something like a capability for arbitrary decisions to objects. Modern physics would like to tell us that even in a situation like the flipping of a coin, the results are, if not actually calculable, still in principle calculable. Anaximenes would agree. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes that Anaximenes

discovered that nature can be explained mechanically. Anaximenes thought that all changes were the result of changes in density brought about by the condensation and rarefaction of one underlying form of matter.

And this, in fact, is not far from current twenty-first century natural observational science. The vast majority of what is around us consists of three rather generic forms: electron, proton, neutron.

The great virtue of this new idea was that it gave the scientist experiments, models, and clear-cut physical explanations of changes and their causes. This is still our own way of thinking.

If we review the first three philosophers in succession - Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes - then we can see their cumulative progress:

To recognize the magnitude and importance of the Milesian achievement, with its three progressive insights into the materiality, uniformity, and mechanical causality of nature, the modern reader must realize that here we have the ancestors of contemporary physics and astronomy.

These first three philosophers lived in the town of Miletus, and are thus called Milesian; their lifespans overlapped and so they almost certainly knew each other. Anaximenes additionally proposed the notion of rotation as central to the universe, and so it is: planets rotate on their axes, orbit their stars, and a grouped into larger galaxies which also rotate and orbit. This notion of rotation fits well with his primary notion of density:

Modern astrophysics can trace the life histories of starts in terms of alternate increases and decreases in their density.

And so, Anaximenes has made a persuasive case for a mechanistic universe. Yet the counterexamples remain: artistic creativity among humans, the uncertainty principle in physics, and the question of the origin of the universe. Anaximenes is persuasive, but not conclusive.

Anaximander

It’s frustrating to come in second - most Americans know that George Washington was the first president, but far fewer can name the second president; John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, but the name of second American to orbit the earth is not so well known; Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic, but who was the second? Edmund Hillary was the first man to climb Mount Everest, but who was the second?

So it is with Anaximander: Thales was the first philosopher, and many textbooks begin with his name. But less often do philosophy classes dwell on the work of his successor.

Anaximander began where Thales left off: the quest for a grand unified theory, to borrow a phrase from modern physics, or, in older phrasing, cosmology. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Leaping beyond the brilliant yet simple notion that all things are made of the same stuff, Anaximander showed how deep an objective analysis of the real world must penetrate. He made four distinct and significant contributions to human understanding:

1. He realized that neither water nor, indeed, any such ordinary material could be the fundamental form of matter. He saw the basic stuff as a more sophisticated though somewhat obscure boundless something. This theory was to serve science well for twenty-five centuries.

2. He extended the concept of law from human society to the physical world - a clean break with the older view of a capricious, anarchic nature.

3. He invented the use of models to make complex natural phenomena easier to understand.

4. He deduced, in a rudimentary way, that the earth had changed over the ages.

Quite a list of intellectual accomplishments! His understanding of matter is a direct ancestor of both modern chemistry and modern atomic physics. His understanding of the laws of nature - which amounts to saying that the universe is rationally constructed using algebra and geometry - is the necessary precondition for the development of chemistry and physics. The skill of modeling, which follows from the fact that the universe is assembled using the laws of algebra, is the basis for the understanding of natural processes: they can be mathematically modeled, which allows us to predict where the planet Neptune will be at this time next year, or describe how continental drift has slowed from miles to per to inches per year. A fossil hunter himself, Anaximander reasoned that even the highest mountains must have at one time been covered by water, a massive world-wide flood.

Agreeing with Thales that there must be one common principle underlying all matter, he disagreed with Thales on what it was. Rejecting the first philosopher’s hypothesis of water, Anaximander noted that this proto-material must be able to manifest itself in nearly endless qualities and properties we see in different objects:

If everything real is a matter with definite qualities, it must be possible for this matter to be hot in some cases, cold in others, sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Anaximander thought of qualities as always being contrary pairs. If one identifies matter with one quality of such a pair, as in Thales’ “all things are water,” how can one explain the existence of the contrary quality? If “to be is to be material,” and “matter is water,” then it would seem to follow that “to be is to be moist.” All right: what happens when things become dry? If the matter they are made of its always wet, drying would destroy the matter of things: they would become immaterial and cease to be. In the same way, matter cannot be identified with any one quality to the exclusion of its opposite. From this, the concept of matter as the boundless, a neutral and indeterminate something, follows. From this reservoir, the opposite qualities “separate out”: from the boundless all specific things arise, and to it they return when they cease to be.

Although we don’t think of neutrons, protons, and electrons as “boundless”, they are in some sense “neutral” and, until they are placed into atoms and molecules, indeterminate. Anaximander was realizing that, in order to express all possible qualities and properties, the basic building blocks of matter would have none of those qualities or properties, and would be capable of being configured in many, perhaps infinitely many, different patterns to yield the different properties we experience in actual bits of matter.

Thales - the First!

It is widely-known, of course, that nearly every book on the history of philosophy lists Thales as the first philosopher. It is even more widely-known that this statement can be contested. Aren’t there other people who could claim the title of first philosopher? For example, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, which probably pre-dates Thales by several centuries?

And yet Thales endures, and clings to his title of “first” philosopher, despite the fact that we have only a few small textual fragments from him, and they reveal a cosmology which is naive and overly-simplistic. He retains his title of “first” for reasons best described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s defense of him - and thereby also set the trend for several centuries of pre-Socratic philosophy. As Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes,

Thales could, with some right, have claimed the ideas of matter, of physics, of science, and of philosophy as his inventions. However strange this may seem, all of these ideas had to be discovered. And to be discovered, mythology had to be abandoned. To state - as Thales did - that “all things are water” may seem an unpromising beginning for science and philosophy as we know them today; but, against the background of mythology from which it rose, it was revolutionary. The break was not complete; it could not have been. Thales still had no abstract idea of matter, as opposed to an imaginative picture of a fluid sea; the two were mixed together. And his idea of change was still based on a feeling that “all things are full of soul.” But he had asked a new kind of question. His question has given distinctive shape to Western thought.

The question posed by Thales, if perhaps tacitly, is the question of cosmology: what is the nature and structure of the universe? what is its origin and design? His answer, if laughably wrong, is understandable in the sense that water is 75% of the earth’s surface, is 75% of every human being and most other living creatures, is necessary for all forms of life, is the only substance commonly seen in all three states (solid, liquid, gas), and is found everywhere except in the vacuum of deep space between planets.

The rejection of mythology by Thales led to other pre-Socratic philosophers, but perhaps most of all to Xenophanes, who would reject anthropomorphic deities of polytheistic mythologies, and instead move forward to a rational conception of God: invisible, eternal, and monotheistic.

To seek to provide an answer to the question, What are all things?, required tremendous insight and imagination. For the question assumes that everything forms a part of some single world of being, and that all things have some common property. It raises the question of what being is, as opposed to less general questions about what these or those particular being are. And prior to answering the question, Thales had assumed that there is enough system among the infinite variety of things in the world to permit some sort of single answer. This assumption marks the beginning of philosophy.

In Thales, then, we see already the notion of system, the notion that the world is rational and understandable - that the universe is constructed with axioms and principles. This is the foundational assumption of physics and chemistry. Thales has indeed earned his title as “first” philosopher.

Parmenides

Parmenides is pivotal in the history of philosophy - in order to understand Anaxagoras, Empedocles, or Zeno of Elea, one must first understand Parmenides, because those later thinkers were writing in reference to him. Yale’s Professor Robert Brumbaugh writes:

Parmenides was greatly influenced by the Pythagoreans. He invented formal logic by applying their mathematical methods of proof to the philosophical problem of the natures of being and not-being. Presenting his argument in the form of an epic poem, he used logic to show that being is unchanging and uncreated. This conclusion denied the possibility of any appearance of variety or change. A corollary to this positive, if mystical, conclusion was that human reason has the power to understand reality.

He is, then, not only foundational for understanding later generations of Greek philosophers, but also many modern philosophers, starting with Descartes: the philosophical admiration for the strength of mathematical reasoning has led a diverse set of people - from Spinoza to Hegel, from Wittgenstein to Quine - to model various branches of philosophy on the patterns of proof and theorem found in mathematics. Parmenides touches on another central point in philosophy: he poses a question about the strength and abilities of human reason. To be sure, he also answers that question - and thereby finds for himself both a number of allies and opponents. It is the question that is the beginning-point for Kant’s philosophy: which questions can human reason answer, and which ones can it not answer? Such a question is properly prior to any philosophizing, because before we can try to answer any further philosophical questions, we should first know whether or not those questions can be answered at all, and whether it is human reason, or some other faculty, which might be able to answer them.

Interestingly enough, Parmenides also wrote about astronomy, biology, and other sciences. Yet if his main insight was sound, the many changing things these sciences study could not be real. Vividly aware of change and the individuality in the world they observed about them

later Greek philosophers would try

to find ways to keep Parmenides’ logical method but to avoid his mystical conclusion.

It doesn’t bother Parmenides that the natural sciences must be, on his terms, dealing with what are illusions. He is content to deal with the parade of images presented by, as, or through sense-data, while realizing that they are merely images, that there is no underlying change behind the image of change, no underlying coming-to-be behind the image of coming-to-be, and no underlying passing-away behind the image of passing-away. Again, one sees here the seeds of Kant and phenomenology: the seeds of the former, inasmuch as the logic of causal relations in the phenomenal world does not apply to, or even entail the existence of, the noumenal world; the seeds of the latter, inasmuch as Parmenides brackets, even if he has already answered, the questions about the existence and natural of the noumenal world. Parmenides (as synopsized by the Brumbaugh) sets up his argument:

Suppose someone assumes that being is divided into many separate beings. Then what is it that separates them and holds them apart? It cannot be being, for then all of the parts would still all be together in one totality, and it not be distinct. On the other hand, if one says things are separated by not-being this leads to absurdity. For not-being, if it is the opposite of being,can only be a void, a kind of pure nothing: if one says that non-being is a separator, he is treating it as being, which by definition it is not. If one says that though it is nothing, it still separates the parts of being, this is the same as saying that “nothing separates being into parts,” which in fact is a statement denying that the parts are separated. How can nothing do something positive? The idea is self-contradictory.

Parmenides is both making a specific metaphysical statement here, and also laying down a principle for argumentation in general:

In explicitly recognizing that noncontradiction is a fundamental property of existence, as well as of thought, Parmenides hit a upon a most important principle. Once it is recognized that only consistent entities can exist, the truth of generalizations can be tested by examining their consistency.

It is worthwhile to sharpen the notion “that noncontradiction is a fundamental property ... of thought.” One might more specifically say “ ... of rational thought” or “ ... of logical thought” or even “ ... of significant thought,” for a self-contradictory sentence, and the proposition which is represents, cannot signify, i.e., cannot have a referent. The net impact on philosophy

was to reinforce philosophical formalism by showing that there is a close connection between reality and abstract logical form, and to make philosophers more conscious of the methods by which they arrived at their conclusions.

Future philosophers would appreciate “the value of precise logical form,” an impact which places Parmenides into the category of very important philosophers!

Empedocles

Empedocles wrote his philosophy partly in reaction against, and partly in support of, the ideas of Parmenides. Empedocles agreed that the basic nature of the universe was changeless, but he allowed for a changing arrangement of the changeless building blocks of the universe. Thus he is often seen as the first thinker to state the concept of elements, from which we get our modern idea of chemistry. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

To account for change, without assuming that “something comes from nothing,” he introduced the idea of a plurality of “elements,” which mix in different ratios but themselves remain unchanged. However, both the form and content of his poetry suggest that Empedocles was more interested in interpreting the vivid world of our sense than in finding some other reality behind appearance. He had an imagination able to combine the most divergent notions - so much so that many later readers have been unable to appreciate the originality of his work. Those of his ideas that were most philosophically influential were his notion of a plurality of “elements” ...

Brumbaugh goes on to describe one possible way to interpret the murky texts of Empedocles:

One can deny that there is any deep-hidden reality underlying appearance and argue that truth is to be found in close observation of what we can see or touch or imagine vividly. Someone who takes this standpoint will be less trustful of appeals to to mysterious “realities,” to highly abstract arguments, than he will be to more vivid items of experience.

If this is, in fact, what Empedocles thought, then he not only anticipated the modern chemical system of elements, but he may also have anticipated several other philosophical schools: phenomenology, epiphenomenology, and the radical empiricism of Hume and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.

Anaxagoras

To understand the work of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, it helps to see him against the backdrop of two other philosophers: Zeno of Elea and Parmenides. Parmenides emphasized what he believed to be the unchanging nature of the universe and its basic components: if something exists, it has always existed and always will exist, because nothing can come into being out of nothing - which is to say, something does not emerge from nothing. Because things don’t come into being out of nothing, it follows (at least for Parmenides) that things don’t cease to exist, either: something cannot disappear into nothing. Parmenides further extrapolated that, because things neither enter nor leave existence, things also do not change in any meaningful way. Finally, he concluded that because things neither change, nor begin to exist, nor cease to exist, then there is essentially only one thing in the universe: what seems to us to be many things is actually a type of cosmic unity.

Zeno of Elea (not to be confused with Zeno of Citium) was a follower of Parmenides, and wanted to support his theories via a set of paradoxes. Zeno wanted to show that if one holds views which contradict the views of Parmenides, then one will wind up believing absurdities. Zeno wanted to show that motion, because it is a type of change, doesn’t really exist, despite the testimony of our sense-data: motion entails paradoxical results when one uses rigorous logic in physics. Likewise, the overarching cosmic unity of all being is consistent, but Zeno says that if we assume the existence of many things, we encounter self-contradictory results.

We arrive then at Anaxagoras. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

Anaxagoras contributed three new ideas to Greek philosophy. First, he developed the view that matter is a continuum. This is one way to escape Zeno’s paradoxes, since it gives both space and time the property of infinite divisibility. Second, he presented a new concept of the mind and its place in the cosmic scheme, maintaining that although all other things mix together, mind remains pure. This was not yet a mind-matter dualism, but it was an important philosophic contribution. Third, Anaxagoras formulated a new way of relating these two dimensions, using mind as the motive power that sets matter in motion.

While Anaxagoras wanted to find solutions to some of Zeno’s paradoxes, he did not flatly reject Parmenides.

Impressed by Parmenides’ statement that “nothing can come from nothing,” Anaxagoras held that matter changes only through a different mixing of qualities which all things share. There is never a sudden bursting into being of something that was nothing just before. Instead there are changes in intensity of the mingled qualities that flow from one place to another. The qualities themselves, once they have separated out of the primordial state when “all things were together,” are conserved, not created or destroyed.

In this way, Anaxagoras tries to preserve Parmenides basic doctrine, while explaining the appearance of change and motion. There is something akin to modern molecular chemistry in the ideas of Anaxagoras, although he would not have thought of it that way: the individual atoms do not essentially change, but they can be recombined into different compounds.

Constructive Skepticism

Descartes seems to simultaneously seek an absolutely certain knowledge and direct a withering doubt at anything which presents itself as certain knowledge: not a contradiction, but a tension to be sure.

Yet Descartes saw his skepticism as constructive rather than destructive: those bits of knowledge which survived it would be certain, and would be the unshakable foundation stones for a new philosophical system. Russell Shorto writes:

It was necessary for him to prove both the existence of God and the innate goodness of God, for, given the corrosiveness of Cartesian doubt, these were the only assurances we have that the material world really exists. So his work has a theological grounding: not only do the world and science depend on God, but so does Cartesian philosophy.

If chemistry and physics are to bring us any knowledge, Descartes writes, it will be upon this basis: for him, the “divine spark” may be characterized as certainty. One of his followers, Nicolas Malebranche, would refine this theme:

To talk of Cartesian dualism is somewhat misleading; Descartes actually wrote that the universe consisted of not two but three substances: mind, body (that is, the material world), and God. God is the guarantor that the mind and the world can interact meaningfully - that we can reach truth using the power of reason.

Malebranche doesn’t seem to realize that his insight into Cartesian thought has an odd resemblance to Plato’s tripartite soul, and Shorto, in summarizing Malebranche’s view, doesn’t point out the same similarity to Freud’s tripartite mind. The central role of God in Cartesian thought translates into the central role of God in modern philosophy:

It would be wrong to imagine that the Enlightenment was antireligion. Its mainstream thinkers, as well as many if not most of the radicals, were antichurch, not antifaith. Their problem with religion was that it kept individual humans from exercising their own minds and applying their innate reason to understanding the world and their place in it. This criticism applied not only to Catholicism but also to Protestant theology.

Here Shorto relies on the somewhat sloppy shorthand of “Enlightenment” for “modern philosophy” or for “thinkers writing in era immediately after the death of Descartes.” The notion of the “Enlightenment” as a distinct historical era, even if we allow for some variations within the monolith, is so ambiguous as to be undefinable. But the point stands: there was an eager engagement in the concept of God, even as there was a violent rejection of institutionalized religion. Spinoza exemplifies this:

Spinoza insisted that there is such a thing as religious truth, but he also insisted that religious institutions were largely concerned with protecting their own position.

Descartes, who agreed with Aristotle very rarely, might have formulated the matter in terms of an Aristotelian golden mean: a healthy skepticism, even a bitter cynicism, about religious institutions does not entail a rejection of the concept of God. On the contrary, our assumption that the universe behaves in an orderly fashion (the laws of chemistry and physics) implies a theistic view.

Lost in Words

Trained philosophers are constantly confronted with the glaringly illogical writings which characterize both the popular press and contemporary politicians. Example follows example of inconsistency, faulty argumentation, ambiguity, and every other error which logicians teach their students to avoid. A recent example, from the autumn of 2010, is provided by Rand Paul in a newspaper column he wrote. Attempting to establish for his readers his location on the political landscape, he explains for several paragraphs that he is not a “Libertarian,” but rather a “Constitutional Conservative” — but never defines either term!

Fichte’s Categories

Although it is common, when studying the thought of J.G. Fichte, to consider his philosophical system as reduced version of Kant’s system - i.e., that Fichte’s system is Kant’s system minus the Ding an sich - it is also possible to see Fichte’s system as an augmented version of the Kantian system: “Kant plus something” instead of “Kant minus something.”

This becomes clear if we consider the role of time and space in the Kantian system: they are foundational in the psychology of perception, from them much else is deduced, and upon them much else is based. Time and space hold a prior position in Kantian metaphysics and epistemology, not only in the sense that they are located toward the front of the book (The Critique of Pure Reason), but also in the sense that they are the necessary condition for experience, perception, representation, and intuition. Time and space are not “real” in the sense of being noumenal, but rather are the structure or framework of the mind - or at least a part of such structure or framework - the machinery by which we process our sense-data into perceptions.

Bearing in mind, then, the centrality of space and time to the Kantian system, we see that Fichte writes, concerning those who consider ethical systems from a roughly Kantian point of view, that

I would like very much to know what those who assume a familiar air of superiority whenever they encounter any mention of “intelligible intuition” imagine our consciousness of the ethical law to be like, or how they are able to construct for themselves concepts such as “right,” “virtue,” and the like - concepts that they certainly to possess. According to them, there are but two a priori intuitions: time and space. They undoubtedly construct the [ethical] concepts in question within time, which is the form of inner sense. But they undoubtedly do not consider these concepts to be identical to time itself; they are only a certain way of filling time. With what then do they fill time in this case, and what underlies their construction of these concepts? The only a priori intuition that remains for them is space. Consequently, their “right” would have to turn out to be, let us say, square, while their “virtue” would perhaps have to be circular, in the same way that all of the concepts they construct on the basis of sensory intuition - the concept of a tree, for example, or of an animal - are nothing but certain ways of limiting space. But they do not really conceive of right or virtue in this manner. What then is it that underlies their construction of these concepts? If they observe correctly, they will discover that what underlies these concepts is acting as such, i.e., freedom. Both concepts, the concept of right as well as that of virtue, are for them determinate limitations of acting as such, just as all sensory concepts are for them determinate limitations of space. But how have they arrived at this foundation that underlies their construction of these concepts? One would hope that they have not inferred acting from the dead inertia of matter, nor freedom from the mechanism of nature. They must have obtained this by means of immediate intuition; consequently, in addition to the two intuition they recognize, there must also be a third.

Fichte points out that the quasi-Kantian ethicists cannot find an adequate foundation for moral thought in the two intuitions of time and space. (He seems careful not to attack Kant himself directly, either because he genuinely thinks that Kant is free from the errors of the later Kantians, or because Fichte’s respect for Kant is too great, or because a direct attack on Kant would not have been tolerated by Fichte’s contemporaries.) If time and space are the starting point for all mental processes, then there could be no moral thought: if there is moral thought, then there must be a third foundational intuition alongside the other two.

So Fichte builds his system on a three-legged stool, a philosophical tripod, and sees this as an advantage over the two-legged foundation which is supposed to support the Kantian system. Kant began his epistemology with the notion that space and time would be the framework, or would generate the framework, which the mind would use to perceive and understand. Fichte adds a third atom to this framework: an ethical intuition. This intuition will deal in some fashion with “action” and “freedom”.

Thus constructed, Fichte’s ethics will find their roots in the very foundations of his system. If the three feet of his system are time, space, and ethical intuition, then metaphysics and ethics will play the most central role in the system, relegating other types of philosophy to secondary roles, and Copleston will be correct in observing that Fichte has a “tendency ... to reduce religion to morals,” inasmuch as ethics are more foundational to the system than God is.

Offering a slightly different explanation of his addition to the Kantian system, Fichte reviews the attempts of Kantians to explain the self in the same manner in which they explain noumenal or phenomenal objects. Fichte objects that, if we treat the self the same way we treat a rock or a tree, we will miss important aspects of the self which make it a subject instead of merely an object.

If such an existence were ascribed to the self, it would cease to be a self; it would become a thing, and its concept would be abolished. Later, to be sure - not in time, but in order of dependence of thought - even the self, though still remaining, as it must, a self in our sense of the word, will also be credited with existence of this sort; in part with extension and subsistence in space, and in this respect it becomes a determinate body; in part with identity and duration in time, and in this respect it becomes a soul. But it is the business of philosophy to demonstrate and explain genetically how the self comes to thing of itself in this fashion; and so all this belongs, not to what we have to assume, but to what we have to derive. - It comes, then, to this: the self is originally a doing, merely; even if we think of it only as active, we already have an empirical concept of it, and so one that has first to be derived.

We have two arguments here: first, that we cannot create or justify the foundation of ethical concepts without adding a third intuition to the first two, i.e., adding “action” to time and space; second, we cannot explain or sufficiently express the nature of the self, i.e as active agent and knowing subject, without this third leg to the stool.

Fichte attempts - whether he succeeds or not, the reader may judge - to show that an accurate concept of self is impossible without his system:

The principle of life and consciousness, the ground of its possibility - is admittedly contained in the self; but this gives rise to no genuine life, no empirical existence in time; and any other kind, for us, is absolutely unthinkable. If such a genuine life is to be possible, we need for the purpose another and special sort of check to the self on the part of the not-self.

Fichte sees himself less as contradicting Kant, and more as extracting from Kant’s system that which is already hidden or latent within it. Thus he sees that Kant’s critical philosophy begins with the exploration of the mechanisms of the mind - e.g., how time and space are parts of the mind, or generated by the mind, and used by the mind to process experiences and sense-data into perceptions and representations. The mind is, then, essentially active; from this, Fichte proceeds to identify “action” as a fundamental or foundational intuition.

The New York Times and Pure Reason

Columnist David Brooks explores the question of why some religions are beneficial, generally bringing help to humanity, and other religions are useless or even damaging to the civilizations on this planet. He notes that

Many Americans have always admired the style of belief that is spiritual but not doctrinal, pluralistic and not exclusive, which offers tools for serving the greater good but is not marred by intolerant theological judgments.

He captures here a sentiment which characterizes some segment of our society. It seems to offer exactly those benefits one would hope to gain from a religion. But such religions eventually disappoint. What at first appears to promise a chance to harness civilization’s energies toward noble purposes turns out to be finally impotent, unable to organize the hoped-for charitable impulses. Or, even worse, it reveals itself to be blinding, rendering its adherents unable to perceive more nuanced moral realities.

Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

Brooks refers to the latter set of religions, those which benefit mankind, as those with “rigorous theology”:

Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality. These maps may seem dry and schematic — most maps do compared with reality — but they contain the accumulated wisdom of thousands of co-believers who through the centuries have faced similar journeys and trials.

Rigorous theology allows believers to examine the world intellectually as well as emotionally. Many people want to understand the eternal logic of the universe, using reason and logic to wrestle with concrete assertions and teachings.

Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity. Without timeless rules, we all have a tendency to be swept up in the temper of the moment. But tough-minded theologies are countercultural. They insist on principles and practices that provide an antidote to mere fashion.

Rigorous theology delves into mysteries in ways that are beyond most of us. For example, in her essay, “Creed or Chaos,” Dorothy Sayers argues that Christianity’s advantage is that it gives value to evil and suffering. Christianity asserts that “perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench real good out of a real evil.” This is a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition.

There is a slight confusion between religion and theology here: the two words are not synonyms. Overlooking that, Brooks here offers a fourfold definition: a belief which is systematic, rational, supra-contextual, and which approaches mysteries. Systematic beliefs can be codified in texts, which makes them publicly and objectively accessible. Rational beliefs respect the structures of the universe and of the human mind, and assess various explanations in light of these. Such beliefs provide a breakwater against the tides of conformity which sweep through societies on a regular basis. And such beliefs admit that there is possibly a limit to the powers of human reason, which means that being rational is being willing to admit the possibility of mystery.

Although religion is not morality - atheists can be very moral - there is some connection between religion and morality. Brooks notes this connection:

Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.

History will force us eventually to judge the net contributions of various religions. Some will have given benefits to the human race; others will have given misery. Just as no human being is morally pure - we all commit both good and bad actions - so no religion will be found pure. Even the best religions will have committed some evil, and even the worst religions will have given some benefit. No religion is perfectly evil, just as God is perfectly good. To judge a religion, therefore, is not to judge people, nor is it to judge God. We will find, in the end, that just as all humans are equal, not all religions are equal.

Science and Truth

Among modern (as opposed to post-modern) thinkers, the natural or observational sciences are taken as paradigmatic for empirical knowledge. Among those whose thought is formed by the indirect influence of John Locke and David Hume, the input of the five senses, disciplined by the “scientific method,” is treated - explicitly or implicitly - as the fount of rational knowledge.

Inasmuch as philosophical influences, when they have decayed into cultural influences, are transmitted in a confused and garbled manner, it follows that many of those most influenced do not even know the names John Locke or David Hume, are unaware of the unresolved tensions between Lockean empiricism and Cartesian rationalism, and treat the “scientific method” as an undisputed axiom - having never learned that even Isaac Newton, now an icon for the natural sciences, directly contradicted the more common forms the “method” in his famous statement about not making hypotheses. Thus I justify my use of otherwise superfluous quotation marks around the phrase.

Yet it is precisely those icons - which like many icons, are emptied of actual content in the process of being used as an icon - who would most undermine this notion of disciplined a posteriori thought being the paradigm for certain knowledge - again, the irony that Cartesian certainty would be found through Lockean methods! - Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, etc. They were far less certain of themselves and their thoughts than their disciples seem to be.

Or, to bring the matter up to date, as Karl Popper wrote:

All scientific statements are hypotheses, or guesses, or conjectures, and the vast majority of these conjectures ... have turned out to be false. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; ... and our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; ... it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.

The assumption that modern science is a finalized and certain method to gain knowledge is not universally embraced by those very individuals who are allegedly the source of that assumption. The writings of these founders of modern science clearly state their understanding that the conclusions of observational science were not certainties, and that there were other sources of knowledge in addition to such natural sciences.

A Brief History of Nothing

What do you know about nothing? Philosophers have been writing about nothing in particular for a long time.

Among the pre-Socratics (around 500 B.C.), Leucippus and Parmenides argued about whether a true vacuum was possible. This was an embryonic form of the discussion of nothing.

One of the earliest philosophers to write about nothing was Fridugis (also spelled Fredegis or Fredegisus), who lived in the early 800’s. He was a student of the noted philosopher Alcuin, and part of the revival of learning and intellectual life which occurred during the reign of Karl the Great (Charlemagne). He died in 834 A.D.

His major work is entitled “On Nothing and Darkness,” which hints already at the notion that as darkness is a lack of light, so nothing is a lack of something. Fridugis recognized that the investigation of nothing is, at least in part, a linguistic investigation. We are led, or misled, by the fact that “nothing” is a noun, and as such, represents a person, place, thing, or idea. So we are compelled to conclude that nothing is something:

This is the nature of the question: “Is nothing something or not?” If one replies: “It seems to me that nothing exists,” the very negation of it which he assumes to be the case forces him to admit that nothing is something in that he says: “It seems to me that nothing exists.” This statement is such as if he were to say: “It seems to me that nothing is something.” If it seems to be something how can it appear not to exist in some way? Consequently it remains that it seems to be something.

Frigudis proceeds along grammatical lines, establishing that "nothing" is a noun, and therefore - following Aristotle - the name of something, i.e., the word “nothing” names some thing. Taking this as sufficiently demonstrated, Frigudis goes on to ask what type of thing nothing is. It is, he writes, “something great,” because, given the fact that the known universe was called forth ex nihilo (out of nothing),

those which are the first and foremost among creatures have been created out of nothing. Therefore, nothing is something great and remarkable, and its magnitude from which so many and such noble things have been produced cannot be grasped.

Nothing, then, according to Frigudis, is the source of everything, and so, in some way, everything must have been contained, even if only in an embryonic state, in nothing. This eerily anticipates remarks written by a thousand years later Hegel.

Between Frigudis and Hegel lived Albert of Saxony in the 1300’s. He carried out a rather even-handed exploration of nothing, neither affirming nor denying much, but examining what nothing might imply or entail.

In several different books in the early 1800’s, Hegel devotes a number of pages to the topic of nothing:

Pure being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just nothing. Hence was derived the second definition of the absolute: the absolute is nothing. In fact this definition is implied in saying that the thing-in-itself is the indeterminate, utterly without form and so without content - or in saying that God is only the supreme Being and nothing more.

(Hegel addresses here the philosophical system of Kant, in which “the thing in itself” is an object before it is processed by cognition of the mind, which is to say before it is placed into time and into space. The thing in itself lacks any of the properties which an object can have only if it is in time and in space - which is to say that the thing in itself is undefined and indeterminate.) Hegel writes that this “pure Being” is

in its indeterminate immediacy equal only to itself, and yet not differentiated in respect to other, and has no differentiation inside itself, nor towards anything external.

Any determination or content, which would posit any form of distinction or contrast, cannot be found in this “pure Being,” because it would no longer be pure. It would no longer be

maintained in its purity. It is pure indeterminacy and emptiness. - There is nothing to be perceived in it, if one can speak here of perception; or it is only pure empty perception itself.

And so nothing appears as the sole ingredient or content of pure Being!

Being, indeterminate immediacy, is in fact nothing, and no more nor less than nothing.

Hegel arrives at nothing by examining Being, just as Fridugis arrived at everything by studying nothing.

A century after Hegel, the philosopher Martin Heidegger researched nothing, and found it to be not merely a question in philosophy, but rather one of the central and foundational questions in philosophy, and specifically in that branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. Heidegger notes that modern science unwittingly includes nothing in its self-stated objects of study:

What is to be investigated is what-is — and nothing else; only what-is — and nothing more; simply and solely what-is — and beyond that, nothing.

Yet the study of nothing requires a different approach than the study of something. Different methods will be required.

we shall endeavour to enquire into Nothing. What is Nothing? Even the initial approach to this question shows us something out of the ordinary. So questioning, we postulate Nothing as something that somehow or other “is” — as an entity (Seiendes). But it is nothing of the sort. The question as to the what and wherefore of Nothing turns the thing questioned into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object.

Heidegger’s exploration of nothing is perhaps the high point of such studies. He will explain to us that emotion has a role in informing us about nothing. He contrasts fear and anxiety (Angst). Fear has an object: we are afraid of something. But anxiety is when we have a sense of fear about nothing. So it is anxiety, in contrast to fear, which leads us to learn about nothing.

Following Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre took up the study of nothing. Contrasting Heidegger’s investigation of nothing with Hegel’s, Sartre writes:

Heidegger, while establishing the possibilities of a concrete apprehension of Nothingness, never falls into the error which Hegel made; he does not preserve a being for Non-Being, not even an abstract being. Nothing is not; it nihilates itself.

The reader is advised to study the works of Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, from which he can learn much about nothing.

The Limits of Reason

What can the human mind do? What can it not do? These questions have long engaged philosophers. The first question, however, tempts them to make ever-grander claims, while the second calls them to a humility and sobriety which doesn’t flatter the collective human ego. Of the many who’ve dealt with these questions, Immanuel Kant has achieved breakthroughs in assessing the capabilities of human knowledge. It is essential to examine Kant’s writings themselves, rather than summaries written by others. Here, we will make do with such second-hand overviews, trusting that you, dear reader, will then explore Kant’s texts.

Kant is understood against the historical background in which the two main currents of thought were Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism. The former took mathematics as paradigmatic for a priori knowledge and certainty; the latter was concerned about the process by which gathering sense-data into perceptions could be formalized into something like the modern observational sciences. In opposition to each other, the philosophers had to then choose either to embrace metaphysical certainty at the cost of reliable knowledge of the perceivable world, or to embrace observational realities at the cost of any other form of reality. Dinesh D’Souza notes, regarding the latter view especially, that empiricists

may not recognize it, but there is a huge assumption being made here. These men simply presume that their rational, scientific approach gives them full access to external reality.

Which is to say, having sacrificed Cartesian metaphysics for the sake of empirical natural sciences, they may find that they have gotten a bad deal: this scientific method may not yield as much as they had hoped. Isaac Newton, after, warned against framing hypotheses - a foreshadowing perhaps of Kant’s more thorough critique. Whether through a naive direct realism, or a more nuanced indirect realism, or even a radical empiricism, a claim is made about the mind’s ability to gather information about the world.

Before Kant, most people simply assumed that our reason and our senses give us access to external reality — the world out there — and that there is only one limit to what human beings can know That limit is reality itself. In this view, still widely held by many in our society, human beings can use the tools of reason and science to continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing else to discover. The Enlightenment fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, gain access to and eventually comprehend the whole of reality.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, and urged a humility in making claims about what human reason can discover.

In fact, he argues, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. In other words, human reason raises questions that — such is the nature of our reason — it is incapable of answering. And it is of the highest importance that we turn reason on itself and discover what those limits are. It is foolishly dogmatic to go around asserting claims based on reason without investing what kinds of claims reason is capable of adjudicating. Reason, in order to be reasonable, must investigate its own parameters.

It is human nature to ask questions. We will ask many more questions than our reason can answer. We therefore can create two categories of questions: those answerable by human reason, and those not. If a question cannot be answered by human reason, we might then go on to ask whether it can be answered at all - and if so, how.

Kant begins with a simple premise: all human knowledge is based on experience. We gain access to reality through our five senses. This sensory input is then processed through our brains and central nervous systems. Think about it: every thought, even the wildest products of our imagination, are exclusively based on things that we have seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. If we imagine and draw creatures from outer space, we can give them four eyes and ten legs, but ultimately we have no way to conceive or portray them except in terms of our human experience. It is an empirical fact that our five senses are our only lenses for perceiving reality.

More accurately, Kant writes that all knowledge begins with experience. Even that knowledge which has no basis in experience (Cartesian a priori mathematical certainties) arises in the course of experience. So we all knowledge begins with experience, but some knowledge is based on experience.

Now Kant asks a startling question: how do we know that our human perception of reality corresponds to reality itself? Most philosophers before Kant had simply taken for granted that it does, and this belief persists today. So powerful is this “common sense” that many people become impatient, even indignant, when Kant’s question is put to them. They act as if the question is a kind of skeptical ploy, like asking people to prove that they really exist. But Kant was no skeptic: he saw himself as providing a refutation of skepticism. He knew, however, that to answer skepticism one has to take the skeptical argument seriously. The way to overcome skepticism is by doing justice to the truth embodied in it. Kant’s goal was to erect a dependable edifice for knowledge on the foundation of extreme skepticism.

Like Descartes, Kant finds a constructive use for skepticism. Like Hume, Kant asks if we have any justification for positing whatever ontology we may embrace. Unlike Thomas Reid, Kant denied that common sense provided enough justification.

Kant’s question about the reliability of human perception has been the central preoccupation of Western philosophy since Descartes. How do we know what we claim to know? Locke had famously pointed out that material objects seem to have two kinds of properties, what he called primary properties and secondary properties. Primary properties are in the thing itself, whereas secondary properties are in us. So when we perceive an apple, for example, its mass and shape are part of the apple itself. But Locke ingeniously pointed out that the redness of the apple, its aroma, and its taste are not in the apple. They are in the person who sees and smells and bites into the apple. What this means is that our knowledge of external reality comes to us from two sources: the external object and our internal apparatus of perception. Reality does not come directly to us but is “filtered” through a lens that we ourselves provide.

Kant writes to the effect that the human mind provides a great deal of structure to what we perceive as reality. The structuring process begins with space and time - two products of the mind. What we naively perceive as one object’s being “there and then” and another object’s being “here and now” is merely our five senses importing information about the world, but rather largely a creation of our mind. Methodically internalizing the notion that time and space are not facts about the world, but tools created by our mind for the purpose of organizing sense-data, will change our assessment of observational natural sciences regarding their ability to give us information about the world.

Philosopher George Berkeley radicalized this mode of inquiry: “When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas.” Berkeley’s argument was that we have no experience of material objects that exist outside the perceptual apparatus of our mind and senses. Both the primary and the secondary qualities of objects are perceived in this way. We don’t experience the ocean, we experience only our image and sound and feel of the ocean. Berkeley famously concluded that we have no warrant for believing in a material reality existing independent of our minds!

Although Berkeley’s idealism can be seen as the organic consequence of the epistemology of his era, it would seem to Kant to be perhaps equally unwarranted: positing the existence of physical objects in the world requires justification just as much as positing the lack of their existence.

Hume completed Berkeley’s skeptical argument by applying it to human beings themselves. We have no experience of ourselves other than our sensations and feelings and thoughts. While we know that sensations and feelings and thoughts exist, we have no basis for postulating some “I” behind them that is supposed to be having those reactions.

Hume’s radical empiricism, while a direct descendant of Locke’s thought, took the matter to this arresting extreme. Berkeley had denied the existence of a material external world; Hume denied the existence of a self or perceiving mind. All that remained, then, was a collection of sensations, corresponding to no objects, and perceived by no subject.

Kant conceded Berkeley’s and Hume’s point that it is simply irrational to presume that our experience of reality corresponds to reality itself. There are things in themselves — what Kant called the noumenon — and of them we can know nothing. What we can know is our experience of those things, what Kant called the phenomenon.

At first blush, Kant is saying that not only can we not know what the external world is like, but also that we cannot even know if it exists. He embraces the extremes of Berkeley and Hume, but only as a starting-point: the constructive use of skepticism.

Our senses place absolute limits on what reality is available to us. Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on reality. Kant’s point has been widely misunderstood. Many people think that Kant is making the pedestrian claim that our senses give us an imperfect facsimile or a rough approximation of reality.

Not only would Kant claim that our sense limit what we can know, but also that the structure of the human mind limits knowledge as well. We can, for example, know or imagine only objects in space and time, and only in our particular type of space and time. It is important to understand what Kant is not writing: he is not dealing with, for example, the limitations on eyesight, that we can’t see further away, or with more magnification, or beyond the spectrum of visible light. That’s not his point - those are mere differences of degree. He is speaking about differences of kind - knowledge which is not only impossible for us to gain, but which is in principle impossible.

Kant’s argument is that we have no basis to assume that our perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. Our experience of things can never penetrate to things as they really are. That reality remains permanently hidden to us. To see the force of Kant’s point, ask yourself this question: how can you know that your experience of reality is in any way “like” reality itself? Normally we answer this question by considering the two things separately. I can tell if my daughter’s portrait of her teacher looks like her teacher by placing the portrait alongside the person and comparing the two. I establish verisimilitude by the degree to which the copy conforms to the original. Kant points out, however, that we can never compare our experience of reality to reality itself. All we have is the experience, and that’s all we can ever have. We only have the copies, but we never have the originals. Moreover, the copies come to us through the medium of our senses, while the originals exist independently of our means of perceiving them. So we have no basis for inferring that the two are even comparable, and when we presume that our experience corresponds to reality, we are making an unjustified leap. We have absolutely no way to know this.

What we know, then, as the laws of chemistry or physics, are actually psychological laws about the functioning of the mind. Given that I know only my perception of atoms or stars, the laws which I think regulate atoms and stars actually regulate only my perceptions of atoms and stars.

It is essential, at this point, to recognize that Kant is not diminishing the importance of experience or of the phenomenal world. That world is very important, if only because it is all we have access to. It constitutes the entirety of our human experience and is, consequently, of vital significance for us. It is entirely rational for us to believe in this phenomenal world, and to use science and reason to discover its operating principles. A recognized scientist and mathematician, Kant did not degrade the value of science. But he believed science should be understood as applying to the world of phenomena rather than to the noumenal or “other” world.

We understand that Kant is not denying the existence of an external world - he pointed out that we have no justification for denying its existence - but rather he is demonstrating the inability of reason to know about that world. Kant ultimately disagrees with Berkeley. Nor is he saying that we can know nothing about the external world - he is saying that our reason can know nothing about it. He leaves the door open for other types of knowledge.

For Kant, the noumenon obviously exists because it gives rise to the phenomena we experience. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Moreover, Kant contends that there are certain facts about the world—such as morality and free will—that cannot be understood without postulating a noumenal realm. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the reality that we experience and reality itself. The important thing is not to establish which is more real, but to recognize that human reason operates only in the phenomenal domain of experience. We can know that the noumenal realm exists, but beyond that we can know nothing about it. Human reason can never grasp reality itself.

The warning is worth repeating, however, we have not yet looked directly at the texts written by Kant; we have here quoted from a summary written by Dinesh D’Souza, who teaches at Stanford University. We have, in fact, seen that his summary needs a few small correctives along the way. This is the perpetual problem confronting those who would produce an accessible and popular explanation of a philosopher’s works: Kant’s text are hundreds of pages long, written with bizarre neologisms and interminable sentences. It is necessary to produce some type of popular summary, because these books will be forever inaccessible to some readers; yet while it is necessary to do so, it is also to some extent impossible.

The Rise of Modern Science

We have learned that the word “modern” can be applied to concepts which may be several centuries old - Descartes founded “modern” philosophy around the year 1600 A.D., give or take a few decades. What we call the “modern” natural sciences are likewise the result of activities a few hundred years ago. We can gain insight, and a few surprises, into the essence of such observational sciences by reviewing their inception.

Thomas Aquinas, publishing around 1250 A.D., wrote that the task of the scholar was

to manifest the truth that faith professes and reason investigates, setting forth demonstrative and probable arguments, so that the truth may be confirmed.

Aquinas is offering several foundational principles: reason investigates, reason formulates demonstrative arguments, reason formulates arguments from probability, and reason finally confirms truth. Although these principles are necessary for modern science, they are not sufficient. A few more principles are needed.

From Mumbai (Bombay), India, Dinesh D’Souza writes that, as part of the foundation for modern observational sciences, we also need

the presumption, quite impossible to prove, that the universe is rational. Scientists today take for granted the idea that the universe operates according to laws, and that these laws are comprehensible to the human mind.

These same axiomatic notions are phrased differently by various scientists, but remain effectively the same. Thus James Trefil writes

that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time.

Steven Weinberg, who earned the Nobel Prize in physics, writes “that there is order in the universe,” because “we have found that the laws, the physical principles, that describe what we learn become simpler and simpler,” and “the rules we have discovered become increasingly coherent and universal.” Weinberg is saying that the further we proceed with rational investigation of reality, the more we uncover a logical structure in the physical universe:

There is a simplicity, a beauty, that we are finding in the rules that govern matter that mirrors something that is built into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.

The patterns which reason discovers in physics and chemistry are mathematical. Mathematics, as an extension of logic, is at the core of our notion of science. As D’Souza writes:

The laws that govern the universe seem to be written in the language of mathematics.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman noted that “why nature is mathematical is a mystery,” and “the fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle.” The universe could have been different: it could be irrational and illogical - it could have been so structured that algebra would be of no use whatsoever in any physical or practical endeavor.

The belief “in the fundamental rationality of the cosmos,” as D’Souza phrases it, and the “belief that rationality of the universe is mirrored in the rationality of our human minds,” are so inculcated into the modern natural science that any hypothesis that calls these principles even partially into question - as we find in some speculations about quantum physics - is regarded as a shocking yet fascinating idea. Those tentative statements about quantum physics cast into high relief the how central the notion of a rational universe is in observational science.

Francis Bacon, author of a translation and commentary on the Psalms, is often cited as the formulator of method for the natural sciences. Inasmuch as empiricism ultimately includes some reference to probability, Bacon echoes the formulation by Aquinas about “demonstrative and probable arguments.” In any case, it is worth realizing that the notion of a rationally structured universe is central, not only to the scientific work of Bacon, but also to each of the following:

Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Herschel, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere, Steno, Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Lemaitre, and Mendel.

The list could be much longer, and by reference include anyone who properly bears the label “scientist.” As Einstein formulated it: “God does not play dice with the universe.”

The Universe is a Giant Brain!

According to G.W.F. Hegel, the universe and all its contents is a sort of mind: Absolute Truth in the process of self-knowledge. Yes, this is kind of spacey. Whether we call it a brain or a mind is a little murky, because for Hegel, the distinction between mental substance and physical substance gets blurred when we realize that all those physical objects out there are projections of the universal mind - projections which that mind in turn examines, hence the concept of self-knowledge. Inasmuch as we humans, who of course are also projections of that cosmic consciousness, exist in time, that self-knowledge is perceived by us as a process, self-discovery. And so the history of the world is a record of the universal mind examining itself, and in turn revealing itself, ever more clearly. There is something optimistic about Hegel’s view of history:

Philosophical history not only apprehends the principle of a nation from its institutions and destinies and develops the events from that principle, but considers especially the universal World-Spirit, how, in an inner context, through the history of nations in their separate appearances and their destinies, it has passed through the various stages of its formation. It exhibits the Universal Spirit in its accidents so that shape or externality is not developed conformably to its essence. Its higher representation is its shaping in a simple spiritual form.

(Every nation does not count in world history. Each has its point, its moment, according to its principle. Then, as it seems, it departs for good. Its turn does not come by chance.)

So each nation takes a turn being the center of world history, at a specific moment, when that culture’s character and nature plays a crucial role in the process of revealing the world-spirit to itself. Thus, nations like Persia, Greece, Egypt, and Rome had their moments of glory, in a precisely logical order, as each represented a step past the previous one and step toward the next one.