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 nature 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.