September 9, 2009 at 9:29 A.M. "Errors" inserted, perhaps while my access to this site was blocked by New Jersey hackers yesterday. New allegations of perversion among judges in Trenton (Ms. Poritz?), mafia arrests, disappearing funds from teacher contracts have also arisen in New Jersey. I will continue to write.
"The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness."
F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms (1930), 33.
Yesterday I received my copy of F.H. Bradley's Ethical Studies. I could not stop pouring over the book, together with Appearance and Reality. I recommend the sections of Bradley's treatise on metaphysics dealing with evil, self, and the Absolute. I also read a great deal about Bradley (W.H. Walsh, Brand Blanshard, Simon Blackburn, James Bradley -- all have written about him). I read the chapter on Hegel in my favorite History of German Philosophy. I studied J.N. Findley's article on Bradley's idealism and other sources.
I have read Edward Caird's biography and exposition of Hegel's philosophy. I also enjoyed Friedrich Beiser's excellent book about Hegel. I am about to read Alison Brown's essay on Hegel. Alison Brown is a young American academic. Professor Brown is part of the "feminist wave" of Hegelians that includes Kimberly Hutchins, Gillian Rose, Drucilla Cornell and others. Alison Leigh Brown, On Hegel (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001), http://www.wadsworth.com/
Bradley was always a philosopher I admired and is now one that I will study seriously. This will require a return to Hegel, as interpreted by the British during the nineteenth century. It is a strange experience to encounter and come to know someone only through his or her writings, to feel a bizarre intimacy or friendship with a person who is long gone.
My deepest appreciation of great philosophers is indistinguishable, in this sense, from lasting relationships with great novelists. As a reader, I "connect" with some writers and not so much with others. It is better to go along with such responses to books, not to wonder too much why a particular author seems important until after we have read the person's books. I feel much the same about painters, poets, actors, or directors, composers, and other artists. Trust the heart and all subconscious motivations in intellectual work or the arts.
In a mysterious way, this "connecting" with thinkers is not necessarily only about talent. Bradley is one of those writers I identify with and read with special pleasure. He is one of my best teachers. I think Bradley belongs in the same category with idealists like Schopenhauer, also with adversaries like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I have no doubt that F.H. Bradley is a philosophical genius. In reading through my much-thumbed copy of Alice in Wonderland, I find that Lewis Carroll's "Alice" is in equal parts F.H. Bradley and Charles Dodgson. This is a strange thing for a little girl to be ... "curioser and curioser."
Bradley is "present" in his books as few authors are. There is a vividness in his literary voice, a personality in his work which, today, could well cost him tenure at any university. I feel a comparable powerful identification with Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, being sure that she is someone I would love if I were to meet her. I suppose we can "meet" Wollstonecraft in the books she left behind, especially her novels. (See the film "Lost in Jane Austen.")
This makes me no different from Leslie Chamberlain, whose emotional connection to Nietzsche seemed silly to me. Chamberlain's book is beautifully written and provides excellent interpretations of recent scholarship concerning Nietzsche. Leslie Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography (New York: Picador, 1996), pp. 130-158 ("The Brahmin of Superabundance and the Mad Professor"). I also admire John Banville's essay review commenting on this book by Ms. Chamberlain and his visit to Turin while working on Shroud.
Philosophy -- which must be the most personal form of inquiry -- is turned into the least personal form of writing in the Anglo-American academy. This is all part of the inhumanity which is often mistaken for professionalism and objectivity in academia and the professions. Bradley writes well and is eloquent on many occasions when lesser figures make do with safe pronouncements. It is always a pleasure and instructive to read his work. Are there many philosophers who can be described in such terms today? I doubt it. Hume and Bradley are among the great masters of English prose. Santayana and Blanshard are among the best writers of American English.
The philosophy that interests me is the kind that is "written in blood," as Nietzsche puts it, which screams of desperation -- desperation to understand, to make sense of something, which will ultimately defy rational understanding, perhaps, but will simply not go away. For example, pain and/or love (probably a redundancy), evil, or the certainty of death. Despite the high level of abstraction in Bradley (or Hegel), one has the sense that both men are working out some serious personal "issues" in their theorizing. Me too. Philosophy as cleverness in the manipulation of symbols, or games with words, is uninteresting to me.
It may sound weird to say this, but I am sure that I can bring into relation Bradley's writings with the works of the great existentialists, especially Kierkegaard. Perhaps in terms of a shared longing for the Absolute in both men or "God-intoxication." And this is not to mention certain similar, very unfortunate episodes in their love-lives. On this point, C.S. Peirce (who was even crazier than Bradley!) is also a fellow sufferer. Absent lovers may be the world's greatest inducement to philosophizing. Santayana said that Peirce's name should be pronounced "Percy."
Bradley speaks of the particular as a moment in the realization of the universal, of the subject as a fragment of the Absolute. If you believe that you will see someone important in the fullness of time, or in the course of self-realization, then to the extent that the older version of yourself who will meet that person is present in you today -- to that extent -- you can say that the missing person is with you today, now, and that you are with that much-needed person always. Always.
Bradley's metaphysics of feeling has been described as his brilliant fusion of British empiricism with German idealism. It is the most profound connection in British thought to Romanticism in art: " ... feeling, as immediate experience must be seen as continuous with a form of feeling even larger than itself." Philip Ferreira, Bradley and the Struture of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999), pp. 172-173.
This next paragraph is dedicated to a Bradley scholar from "the University of Kent":
" ... the most philosophically accurate way to put the matter is to say that the Absolute thinks and feels through me. In other words, it is the condition of any finite centre's experience that there exists an Absolute experience of which our feeling as this or that finite centre is but a limited and partial manifestation."
Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge, at p. 174. (Wonderland?)
For Bradley, the wound or scar in the Western psyche -- separating spirit (philosophy, art) from nature (science) -- is overcome and the wound is healed with feeling. Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion is relevant, together with the writings of Walter Pater and Victorian Platonism. My deepest feelings are present and fresh, even more intense now than ever, when it comes to the most important relationships in my life. Time is no obstacle. They are directed not only at a specific object or person inhabiting a narrow quantum of space, at one specific time; rather, passion is "about" another human being living a life in its entirety, infinitely; or it may concern the "eternal" beauty in a work of art, that speaks so differently to us as we age together. ("'Star Trek 2009': A Movie Review.")
Compare Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), p. 181 with Walter Pater's description of La Gioconda, "Leonardo da Vinci," in Harold Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 46. ("The presence ... is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire.") Finally, see my essay "Arthur Schopenhauer and the Metaphysics of Art." Mona Lisa is a Renaissance version of "Alice in Wonderland." ("A Review of the Television Show, 'Alice.'")
With the coming of age and a mutual loss of "brilliance," there is something more that is acquired, shared wounds and a little wisdom. Maybe, if we are fortunate, we learn something along the way. To love another human being or a great artistic masterpiece (for me) is a "lifetime deal." Incidentally, this experience is available "in relation" with a great film, films change -- as we do -- over time, or other works of art, Opera, theater, dance. Peter Ackroyd summarizes Bradley's metaphysics, as absorbed by T.S. Eliot, whose "Four Quartets" is an exposition of "Bradleyan metaphysics":
"We live in a world of 'appearances' which partake of the Absolute without fully containing or representing it. And yet this Absolute can only be approached from the perspective of a number of finite centers -- not quite the same as the 'self' or the 'soul' but equivalent to them. And although 'finite truth must be conditional' it is only through such experience and through 'appearances' that we can begin to have any knowledge of the Absolute. [Absolute truth is not conditional.] This consorts very well with Eliot's own skepticism, and his awareness of the limitations of conceptual knowledge [no one is denying those] which he emphasized in Royce's seminars, but it provides also the comfort of an absolute reality or order which, however elusive it remains, is that unrealized whole in which we move and have our being."
Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), pp. 49-53.
Simon Critchley's book (I can't remember the title right now) begins with a meditation on his father's death and describes -- as the motive for a great deal of philosophy -- the need to come to terms with loss, incompleteness, inadequacy, failure ... all of which are universal. The sadness that is found between the lines of that book is, often, part of the experience of great philosophy. Critchley says: "Philosophy begins in disappointment." I agree. Santayana is the obvious thinker to illustrate this theme. But then, so is the philosopher who is probably Bradley's closest partner in dialogue, a person that Professor Bradley never met or spoke to, sadly, Mary Whiton Calkins.
Much of Bradley's best work is tinged with a frightening and dark "melancholy" (even when it is witty), so that he is always inspirational. You feel the man's solitariness, together with his effort and need to be understood. It is difficult not to admire him. It is also difficult not to feel sorry for him. Whatever you may think of his philosophy, it is not possible to doubt Bradley's genius or his capacity for love. Far from being a relativist in the sense that we use the term today, Bradley believed in the objectivity of ethical obligations at any given time, even as he insisted that full realization of the good is achieved only in the Absolute, with the realization of all: "Surely philosophy does not reach its end," Bradley writes, "till the 'reason of thought' is adequate to the 'reason of love'." All genuine revolutions are always unfinished. Philosophy's completion is religion.
Try putting together Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, with some of the great Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment, more Thomas Reid than David Hume. If you can do that, then you'll get Bradley -- or even someone like R.D. Laing, who was a very different kind of genius. Mary Wollstonecraft is so important a piece in this puzzle that it continues to baffle me that Wollstonecraft is not accorded due consideration as a thinker and "connecting" figure in the story of British philosophy.
Mary Whiton Calkins -- later Marjorie Grene -- continues this trajectory in America, as I continue to insist to young students of philosophy. Of course, no one has associated the works of these thinkers nor has it been noticed that this body of ideas overlaps in a number of academic areas, both in the sciences (including psychology) and humanities. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.") Incidentally, I would add Judith Butler to that list of thinkers who matter in ultimate terms, i.e., metaphysically. Professor Butler may disown the forbidden word "metaphysics."
I remember Bryan Magee's description of his discovery of Schopenhauer as one of the great events of his intellectual life. I think that I must include Bradley among the handful of philosophers who have spoken to me in a similar way, in the most powerful, life-altering kind of way -- along with Plato (when I was very young), Kant, Hegel (the latter mostly at second hand), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Ricoeur and a few others -- including Wollstonecraft and Angela Davis -- whose humanistic Marxism may be associated with these developments in an American context.
I am reading Royce now and having a similar reaction. If there is a good biography of Bradley, then I will certainly read it. Something comparable to Edward Caird's book about Hegel would be nice. I like Robert C. Solomon's book. I am struggling with Charles Taylor's massive study of Hegel. Unhappy lives make the best biographies. This is small consolation to those who must live them.
Bradley's work has been "rediscovered." Philosophers of genius go in and out of fashion much too quickly these days. Nietzsche was a non-subject in the forties and fifties, he is now the leading subject of analysis among philosophers in the U.S. After attacks by Russell and Moore, Bradley and the British idealists fell into neglect. Now people are figuring out that they are better philosophers -- better metaphysicians especially -- than many recent Continental heros, and they write so well.
This literary elan is especially true of Bradley who relishes the opportunity to charm the reader. I am told that a treasure trove of Bradley's papers has been left untouched for years at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, possibly including some of his letters. I would do (almost) anything to read those documents. Certainly, anything sexual would be oh-so easily extracted from me for a peek at those papers. These idealist philosophers wrote to be understood and to persuade.
It would be nice if accessibility became a goal for philosophers once again. Philosophy should matter in the public discourse of a free society. Philosophers must communicate with intelligent readers who are not philosophers. Improving the quality of legal writing may be a lost cause; happily, clarity is still possible in philosophy. Blanshard's treatise on philosophical writing is a book I am searching for right now. No luck so far. Blanshard's Reason and Analysis is highly recommended. (I did find and read, in a day, Blanshard's book on philosophical prose.)
The British idealists have been dusted off by eager graduate students in search of suitably obscure thinkers for doctoral research. I shudder to think of what they will do to poor Bradley. I fear that he was not politically correct. Chi-chi intellectual fashionistas of indeterminate gender (aren't we all?), may soon poke and prod him in his grave to establish his insentivity to abortion rights or to the glories of Silvia Plath's poetry. Worse, he was the subject of T.S. Eliot's dissertation and we all know that Eliot was ... gasp, a Christian and Conservative. And this must only be whispered, also an "antisemite." Horrors! So what if Eliot was a jerk, since he was also a great poet?
I will continue to read Bradley for the next few months, then I will write about him. His work means too much to me to be ignored. T.H. Green and John MacMurray are next. If Bradley's work speaks to me in so powerful a way, then there must be some good reasons for it -- aside from shared painful experiences. Consider this passage from Appearance and Reality:
"Without a metaphor, feeling belongs to perfect thought or it does not, there is at once a side of existence beyond thought. But if it does belong, then thought is different from thought discursive and relational. To make it include immediate experience its character must be transformed. It must cease to predicate, it must get beyond mere relations, it must reach something other than truth. Thought, in a word, must have been absorbed into a fuller experience. Now such an experience may be called thought, if you choose to use the word. But if anyone else prefers another term, such as feeling or will, he would be equally justified. For the result is a whole state which both includes and goes beyond each element; and to speak of them as simply one of them seems to be playing with phrases. For I must repeat it, when thought begins to be more than relational, it ceases to be mere thinking ... Thus, in reaching a whole which can contain every aspect within it, thought must absorb what divides it from feeling and will. But when these all have come together, then, since none of them can perish, they must be merged in a whole in which they are harmonious. But that whole assuredly is not simply ONE of its aspects. And the question is NOT whether the universe is in any sense intelligible. The question is whether, if you thought it and understood it, there would be no difference left between your thought and the thing [which is apprehended in thought]. And, supposing that to have happened, the question is then whether thought has not changed its nature." (Quantum Mechanics?)
If we need to think of something or someone outside of us, then the object of thought is discovered to be part of us already, as we are part of all that "is" in our constant "becoming." The Absolute that contains all individuals, where we ultimately dwell (here and now), is a powerful idea. It is the resolution of the fundamental tension between individual and social, self and other, one and many, concrete and universal, masculine and feminine. Analogies to the discoveries of particle physicists are available. ("Where are thoughts located?" and "Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?") What follows is a restatement of Bradley's metaphysics by a scientist who, probably, has never heard of Bradley:
" ... if quantum mechanics is right, even in some appropriately restricted domain, then the possible and the actual [both are real] are in much closer contact than we are used to thinking. ... And if that is right, all the usual bets in metaphysics are off." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Allen Stairs, "Quantum Mechanics, Mind, and Self," in Daniel Kolak & Raymond Martin, eds., Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues (New York: MacMillan, 1991), pp. 453-472. (" ... God is transcendent and imminent. Both are attempts to express a conception of a reality that cannot be captured by a single, non-paradoxical description.")
Concrete universals? Fact and value? To think of a person you love, is not only to be changed yourself but to transform the world. This is not mystical mumbo-jumbo. It is ethical wisdom compatible with the scientific search for a unified field theory linking Newtonian with Einsteinian physics that is also a theory of transcedence. What we discover at the end of all our exploring is merely what was looking for us. I will allow you to supply the missing word at this point. It is a short one. (See "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")
The only response to these arguments that I have encountered is "yuk-yuk-yuk" humor and insults. I have decided to respond in kind. It may help if I refer to a comedian on the old Ed Sullivan Show. It may have been Jackie Mason, whose routine was entitled: "Everybody's gotta be somewhere." If we can agree on the truth of this proposition, we all have to be somewhere, then we may also agree that the Absolute must contain everything and all times, including this instant and myself. If so, then the person that I seek must (for good or ill) share this Absolute philosophical space with me, no matter where she is -- and so do you -- so that it is now only necessary for us to meet in what is laughingly known as the "real world." And we will. Rest assured, we will meet again. ("Flower in the Cranied Wall.")
More "errors" inserted and corrected. September 9, 2009 at 9:25 A.M. This coincides with allegations of "peculiar" relationships by Ms. Poritz and new mafia arrests in New Jersey. What a coincidence?
We are "concrete universals," escaping what Bradley elsewhere describes as the "desolation" of alienation from ourselves and one another. The Absolute is the negation of self-division (the shadow of Hegel falls across these pages), and it is the "homecoming of the soul." Bradley's genius is to supplement and "fill in" (his term) Kantian ethics, by "dressing Hegel in silk phrases," completing the circle between those two greatest social thinkers of the modern world.
Bradley was a recluse, who delighted in shooting cats from the window of his rooms in Merton College, Oxford University, while taking aim at any American tourists who wandered by. If Bradley were around today, we might go out together, the two of us -- suitably armed with bows and arrows, of course, another of his favorite weapons -- in search of acountants and tax lawyers to shoot on a beautiful morning. Afterwards, over a picnic lunch, we may discuss the ultimate riddle of life, a greater paradox than the mystery of evil -- which is Woman, naturally -- and I think I know what Bradley would say to me:
"It is meaningless to suppose of something which always comes in combination with something else, [like men and women?] that it [the two of us?] can be capable of existing uncombined."
Right you are, sir. This is very much like "particle pairs." Bradley would insist (me too!), that we, she and I, are always combined. We are ONE. Talk about happiness. No wonder the trendy feminists don't like him. See the Matrix movies and listen to some great Opera duets. The finale in "Andrea Chenier" might do the trick:
"Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument," George Santayana comments in reference to Bradley's epistemological constructivism, " and not being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?"
This was written before Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, by a philosopher who regarded Bradley as a genius despite criticizing some of Bradley's ideas. Today, we see that Bradley anticipated phenomenologists, hermeneutic thinkers, and quantum physicists in works dating from the mid- to late-nineteenth century:
"Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy, provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or ignored. ... British idealists, in the act of defining knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a self-existing world" -- neither did Kant or Hegel -- "social and psychological, if not material: and they continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists."
"Fifty Years of British Idealism," in Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), pp. 52-53 (emphasis added). If you are British, please read Santayana's Soliloquies in England.
Showing posts with label Idealism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idealism. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
F.H. Bradley's "Concrete Universals."
Today's post is for F.H. Bradley (1846-1924), and for the mysterious lady "E --- R ---," to whom Bradley's "unworthy volume is respectfully dedicated." He was not referring only to his great book of metaphysical speculation, one of three dedicated to "E.R."
Women. The things a guy has to do ...
Primary Sources:
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan Co., 1897) (2nd ed., with Appendix and Response to Critics).
F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914).
F.H. Bradley, Writings on Logic and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951), this work first appeared in 1876.
F.H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), this work first appeared in 1874.
F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).
Scholarly Commentaries:
Anthony Manser & Guy Stock, eds., The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Phillip Ferreira, Bradley and the Sources of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Western philosophy has struggled with the tension between individualism and communitarianism in ethical, legal and political theory for centuries. The great theoretical moves and counter-moves in this controversy have fallen under one of two categories -- either rights-based, neo-Kantian, deontological theories (like those of Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin); or post-Hegelian, social-communitarian, "teleological" or consequentialist theories (Marx, Mill, Bentham, Sidgwick, Hart). The focus in these rival theories is either upon the rights-bearing individual "choosing agent" facing an ethical dilemma; or upon the decision-maker forced to consider the results of an action in terms of "the greatest good of the greatest number," from a social perspective, in which the worthiness of the act is measured by its consequences for the entire group, not only for the particular agent.
It should be noted that there are variations on the utilitarian position that seek to accomodate individualist values. Fundamental rights are insulated from majoritarian pressures, as in the Bill of Rights. Richard Brandt's rule-utilitarianism is one such variation, and there are others. For instance, the rationalistic utilitarianism of Brand Blanshard is another. There are also efforts to reconcile liberal individualism with communitarian or socialist values (a position I find attractive), as in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice or Noam Chomsky's "libertarian socialism."
This ethical dilemma pitting individual against collectivity both followed from and has led to a continuing metaphysical debate about which is primary, persons or communities. Can there be such a thing as a Kantian "transcendental ego," abstracted from the social entities that make the very notion of an individual meaningful at all -- such as language, gender, social and economic category, nationality, family, history and so on? After all, these are the things that make it possible to speak of individuals in the first place. A person removed from all of these contexts is no longer recognizably a person, to the extent that such a notion is even conceivable or meaningful. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
This charge of unreality has been a main criticism against Rawls's description of the "original position" and of his choosing agents, who operate behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents their knowing such things as social origins. Are such beings "individuals" or persons? Do they become drones? Or Republicans, perhaps? Communitarians say that Ralwsian agents are not persons, if removed to an abstract isolation from all defining conditions and qualities. The key word in this foregoing sentence is "all."
Among leading contemporary thinkers in this Hegelian school are philosophers as different as Charles Taylor and (to some degree) Alasdair MacIntyre, along with the inheritors of the Marxist tradition, whether Critical (Frankfurt School, Castro) or Scientific (Lenin) Marxists. (Compare "'The Island': A Movie Review" with "'I am Legend': A Movie Review.")
In reading Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "On Schopenhauer as Educator," we certainly have a sense of the primal, visceral reality of the unique existential agent or self, who feels, hurts, loves, desires and thinks, apart from all social settings. But is it apart from all social settings? You may wish to consult Miguel Unamuno on this issue. It may be only an illusion, but we certainly feel that there is something tangible and real that can be distinguished from all of the social factors that make up a person's identity. We are persons, with individual rights, but only because we are members of communities. To be human is to dwell within contradictions. (See Roberto Magabeira Unger's Knowledge and Politics.)
Friedrich Nietzsche, in celebrating autonomy -- incidentally, he does so in his own non-Kantian terms -- is in the room with you (as is Schopenhauer in his best work), because Nietzsche is present in his pungent and powerful prose:
"... we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops," Nietzsche writes, "that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism, but into stupidity. [Think of the various forms of totalitarianism in the twentieth century.] It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this -- and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroy stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too."
Niezsche rejects collectivism and total adjustment to any society as "stupidity," as an attempt to "evade yourself," to escape the responsibility of "becoming the person you are." What you are, fundamentally, is Kierkegaard's "individual." So the question becomes: How much of what goes into the concept of an individual is social? You are not a transcendental self, for Nietzscheans, not a cool, detached, "spectator" engaged in rational deliberation and searching for the "ethically optimal solution" (unless you are British, smoke a pipe, and study at Oxford University); rather, you are an embodied, contradictory, suffering human being, wrestling with mortality, longing -- perhaps irrationally -- hoping and loving, especially suffering. Notice the crucial distinction between "serving the state" and "realizing yourself in a community" (Bradley) or in "achieving a revolution" (Jefferson, Castro).
Take another look at Bradley's enigmatic dedication of Appearance and Reality to Ms. "E.R." And yes, I have read Terry Eagleton's Aesthetic Theory, Richard Wollheim and T.L.S. Sprigge are excellent commentators on Bradley. You cannot disappear into a crowd (the collectivity, Marxist or otherwise, unless you are a liberal Democrat residing in the East Village); nor can you vanish into the ethereal philosophical realm of Platonic forms or Kant's "noumenal" reality (i.e., "abstract individuality"), unless you are a Republican faculty member at Yale. You live here on earth and have to worry about such things as not running out of toilet paper. Running out of toilet paper at a crucial moment is what philosophers describe as an "empirical crisis." Regrettably, it appears that further disfigurements of this essay have taken place. I will struggle to continue making corrections of this work.
Sadly, this previous sentence was altered, once again, as I review this essay. A very sick or evil person must be responsible for these continuing crimes and a highly inept or corrupt legal system, evidently, allows them to go unpunished.
On second thought, Hugh Grant attended Oxford University and he certainly seems to have desires, including some for "Miss Divine" at $1000 per half hour. Marx? True, Mr. Grant may be the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps he was under the impression that he was going to school at UCLA?
Our sense of being separate and unique, our awareness of individual identity, is too primary and powerful to be destroyed by any theory. Even philosophy is only possible after we have eaten and done our best to get laid. Philosophy is best done if we are successful in our efforts to get laid. This constitutes a "very sticky wicket" indeed, as they say in cricket.
Enough about Mr. Grant, back to F.H. Bradley. We know ourselves to be defined by membership in groups and by aspects of our selves ("relationships") that are social: such as the languages in which we think, nations and families in which we take our place, the identity-conferring emotions that make us up, like the love we feel for those closest to us. Solipsism is disproven, for me, whenever I see an attractive woman and feel her "effects" (as it were) on me. The Catholic theologian Thomas Merton writes:
"... since faith [and art or love?] is a matter of freedom and self-determination -- the free receiving of a freely given gift of grace -- man cannot assent to a spiritual message as long as his mind and heart are enslaved by automatism. He will always remain so enslaved as long as he is submerged in a mass of other automatons, without individuality, and without their rightful integrity as persons. ..."
Merton's point applies to all of humanity, naturally, men and women. Selfishness and greed, vulgar materialism is always a great error:
"No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual. There is not much use talking to [persons] ... about love if they are not able to listen. The ears with which one hears the message of ... [love] are hidden in man's heart, and the ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence."
The neglected British philosophers in the idealist tradition -- some of the very best produced by that nation or anywhere -- from Berkely (an empiricist, whose work is foundational for these thinkers) to R.G. Collingwood, or a close cousin, Christopher Peacocke (an important young rationalist philosopher working today), in one way way or another, all speak to these epistemological and metaphysical issues. I know that rationalism and idealism are not the same thing. Professor Peacocke is concerned with defending the validity of a priori knowledge, which is highly important to the idealists as well as rationalists.
F.H. Bradley in particular, while a critic of "relations" as "contradictory," nevertheless sought to bridge the distance between self and other in the "Absolute." Bradley's "Absolute" is Hegel's "Spirit" wearing English tweeds. Perhaps, for Bradley, this quest for the Absolute had something to do with finding a space to meet that absent lady to whom he dedicated Appearance and Reality. The Absolute is a space in which relations are not only possible, but realized. You may recall my discussion of the Forest of Arden. More importantly, the Absolute is the only way in which relations can make sense or become meaningful.
The following words are among the most revealing and heart-breaking ever written by one of the great philosophers. They were set down by the reclusive Professor Bradley near the end of his life. I believe that they are incomprehensible without understanding that dedication of Appearance and Reality to the elusive "E.R.":
"In philosophy we must not seek for an absolute satisfaction. Philosophy at its best is but an understanding of its object, and it is not an experience in which that object is contained wholly and possessed. ... The shades nowhere speak without blood, and the ghosts of Metaphysic accept no substitute. They reveal themselves only to that victim whose life they have drained, and, to converse with shadows, he himself must become a shade." (Introduction to Bradley's final essays.)
To fully appreciate this paragraph, I ask the reader to compare my essays on Nietzsche and Santayana, with my comments on Bradley's works, then see my essay entitled "The Forest of Arden." A possible subject for a future dissertation in the history of philosophy is to discover the purpose and destination of Bradley's mysterious and frequent trips to France (Ms. "E.R."?). The literary-minded are asked to recall the name that Oscar Wilde took upon arriving in Paris after enduring an unjust prison sentence, "Sebastian Melmoth," inspired by Charles Maturin. See Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (London: The Folio Society, 1993), p. ix ("Melmoth's perpetual sorrow, loneliness, alienation from humanity and longing for peace burns fiercer as he realises the hopelessness of his desires.") and Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis," in De Profundis and Other Writings (London & New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 161 ("Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.")
Bradley is often misunderstood as a "relativist" concerning ethical obligations, when he was actually at the opposite end of the spectrum, a champion of absolute obligation in ethics. No, there is no contradiction between these two paragraphs:
" ... my duty may be mine and no other man's, but I do not make it mine. If it is duty, it would be the duty of any person in my case and condition, whether they thought so or not -- in a word, duty is 'objective,' in the sense of not being contingent on the opinion or choice of this or that subject."
Next is a comment, also from Ethical Studies:
" ... the end is the good will which is superior to ourselves; and again the end is self-realization. Bringing these together we see the end is the realization of ourselves as the will which is above ourselves. And this will (if morality exists) we saw must be 'objective,' because not dependent on 'subjective' liking; and 'universal,' because not identifiable with any particular, but standing above all actual and possible particulars."
It is ironic that Bradley -- whose genius and historical influence are difficult to deny -- is mostly out of print. I have experienced great difficulty in finding a copy of his Ethical Studies. Philosophical fame is a fleeting thing. Fortunately, Bradley has been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers and his books will soon be on their way to new editions from Oxford University Press, for $75.00 each, which is probably what Bradley earned in a month as a professor during the nineteenth century. ("Arthur's Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
F.H. Bradley is the best philosopher in Britain between Hume and Russell. Bradley may be better -- if less influential -- than Russell. Several recent sholarly works have been devoted to Bradley's philosophy. R.G. Collingwood described F.H. Bradley early in the twentieth century as "the finest philosophical intellect produced in Britain since David Hume." T.S. Eliot agreed and never escaped Bradley's influence. Collingwood learned from Bradley that "the chief business of twentieth century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth century history."
Bradley's Absolute contains all diversity, all fragments, yet is unitary and universal. In setting forth this notion, Bradley develops the concept of a "concrete universal." This language harks back to the Christian discussion of spirit in a material world, and/or the infinite within the finite. Think of Spinoza's "substance" and "the intellectual love of God." There is also a reaction by Bradley (based on Hegel's thinking) against Kant's dual-aspect theory (Bradley calls it "dualism"), or even against a Kantian minimizing of the particular for the sake of a categorical universal obligation attaching to an abstract self or "transcendental ego."
For Bradley, the Good (because it is objective and absolute) can only be ultimately or perfectly realized in religion. Being imperfect persons, however, does not diminish the objectivity of our ethical obligations in our flawed earthly societies. We still have to struggle to do the right thing, even if we know that we will never be perfect. Bradley's tragedy, I believe, is that he did exactly that in his own life. What he learned at the end of his life is that love, however painful, is the greatest good. Self-realization is "self-giving in love to one's community." ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "George Santayana and Quantum Mechanics.")
Although Bradley is usually listed as a conservative, which he was in lots of ways, Bradley may also be regarded as a kind of socialist. I say this knowing that he would hate the word. Compare T.H. Green's Prolegomena (deliberately echoing Kant) and Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, with key sections of Bradley's logic and with Bradley's posthumous Aphorisms.
Mind you, Bradley admires Kant, though he thinks more of Hegel, while admitting that we must be moral for the sake of being moral. Bradley reserves even more criticisms against Bentham-Mill-type utilitarianism. For Bradley, as I say, ethics is about self-realization in ultimate terms. To my knowledge, there is no book-length study comparing Mary Wollstonecraft's writings with Bradley's work. This is unfortunate. There are instructive parallels to be explored by scholars in the works and lives of these two philosophers. Until very recently, only one of these two persons would have been called a true "philosopher." This is significant in assessing their respective works and their importance. Mary Wollstonecraft could not have attended any university in England during her lifetime.
It is especially regrettable that Mary Whiton Calkins never established a dialogue with Bradley because their philosophical interests and solutions are so similar. I cannot say whether there were parallels in Calkins' life that suggest even greater affinity between the two philosophers. I believe that Ms. Calkins would have been, to say the least, "apprehensive" about approaching Bradley for an interview or scholarly dialogue, because (as a woman lecturer in philosophy and psychology) her place in academia was marginal and uncertain during the early years of the twentieth century.
Calkins lived in a time -- almost one hundred years after Wollstonecraft -- when women still could not study at most universities and were denied (as she was) the highest degrees because of their gender, despite achievements on a global level of importance. Calkins would have feared being thought presumptuous or "pushy" by seeking an encounter with Professor Bradley. We are the losers because of this nonsense. In Ethical Studies, Bradley says:
"Not troubling ourselves with our relation to Kant, we may say that the ideal is neither to be perfectly homogeneous nor simply to be specified to the last degree, but rather to combine both these elements. Our true being is not the extreme of unity, nor of diversity, but perfect identity of both. And 'Realize yourself' does not mean merely 'Be a whole,' but 'Be an infinite whole.' ..."
I don't know about you, but there are days when I find it difficult to be "infinite," except that it may be more difficult (if not impossible), on Bradley's terms, not to be infinite. This is called "physics" today. In fact, Bardley anticipated developments in quantum physics before Einstein's relativity theory. ("Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.") Bradley says:
"It [the Absolute] is the self-realization of each member because each member cannot find the function which makes him himself, apart from the whole to which he belongs; to be himself he must go beyond himself, to live his life he must live a life which is not merely his own, but which, none the less, but on the contrary all the more, is intensely and emphatically his own individuality. ... we have the end, we have found self-realization, duty, and happiness in one. Yes, we have found ourselves when we have found our station and its duties, our function as an organ in the social organism." (Ethical Studies, Ch. V.)
It is at this point that I wish to bring together Bradley's ideas with McTaggart's philosophy of love and spirit, also with the works of contemporaries John MacMurray and John Finnis. (Please see my essay "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.") Ironically, the greatest proximity to Bradley's thinking is found in the theoretical writings of contemporary physicists and other scientists. See David Deutsch, "The Ends of the Universe," in The Fabric of Reality (London & New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 361-363, then read Bradley on relations. The following quotes are from a summary by Professor Warnock:
"The Absolute must be One, a Unity, ... because plurality would involve relatedness. Yet it is a unity, ... which contains diversity. The Absolute would otherwise be empty of content. At this point, [the theory of concrete universals emerges] ... We are accustomed to think of things arranged in a classificatory order: horses included among quadrupeds, quadrupeds among animals, animals among living things. As the terms in this classification increase in generality, their own content diminishes in richness -- 'living things' is much more abstract and less specific than 'horses.' If we then think of the Absolute as the final point in such a classificatory system, it seems so poor in content as to vanish into nothing."
Now keep your eyes on Bradley's argument, as Professor Warnock in One Hundred Years of Philosophy shows him pulling not a rabbit, but a metaphysical elephant (or is it that "abstract" horse?) out of his top hat:
"Such a classification makes use of the 'abstract' universals beloved by thought. HORSE, the horse as such is, an abstraction from, and thus, a falsification of, experience. With this abstract universal the 'concrete' universal is contrasted. [The concrete universal] is not an abstraction from, but A COMMUNITY OF its members. It is an individual: we can understand its nature if we consider a person or, better still, a society. A society includes the rich diversity of all its members, in all their conflicts and cooperative efforts. It is richer, not more empty than any separate member of that society, just as a person is richer in content than any of the separate events which occur as part of his life. ... A person, a society, is 'universal' just in so far as it brings into unity a diversity -- as a class does also -- but it is individual, as a class is not." (Again: "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
No society is absolute, since it is defined by what it is not, i.e., other societies, but we can think in terms of an Absolute that contains all societies and their relations, each of which is still individual. We can think of humanity as "instantiated" not only in the persons we love or the self we encounter in the bathroom mirror, but in our neighbors and friends, even in our enemies in foreign lands. The challenge then becomes a problem of recognition, of SEEING the particularity and rights that we demand for ourselves as properly due to all others like us, who stand within or as part of the Absolute, as we do, being (in that sense) identical to us. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Bradley's response to Hume concerning the reality of the self is to emphasize that identity is a matter of totality, not of locating the self at any single point in time. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This argument was foreshadowed in some comments made to Hume by The Countess Mme de Boufflers, another woman whose philosophical and political brilliance has not yet been discussed by feminist scholars as far as I know. Maybe someone will steal the idea from me, after describing me as a "fool" of course. I am sure that Bradley was unaware of this correspondence between Hume and his French lady. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Bradley would not have regarded Mary Wollstonecraft as an important British philosopher, for example, despite being an enlightened male of his era. Considering that Bradley happened to be a philosophical genius -- he was certainly aware of Wollstonecraft's writings and role in history -- this omission is a significant illustration of the blinding effect of ideology in scholarship and all philosophical thinking.
We see both in the universe around us and in the suffering of a child in Darfur not only the pain of others, but kinship, sameness, shared suffering and mortality. I am beginning to think that it must be painful for readers to experience the mutilations of these texts along with me. I believe that these mutilations of my writings are attempts at refutation of my arguments by inarticulate persons who are adept at cybercrime and other forms of brutality who are protected by government officials. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.")
The importance of recognition has become a subject of debate for philosophers today. This is true of thinkers as diverse as Charles Taylor, Susan Wolf and Michael Walzer. Perhaps F.H. Bradley arrived at this insight before all of them. A person's physical absence does not diminish her importance or her presence, in other ways, for us. The distance or proximity of others does not alter their connection to us. Identity is a narrative project in time which is necessarily dialectical and holistic. Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom becomes inescapable. (''In Time': A Movie Review" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This same dialectical movement from particular to universal can now be traced entirely in the language of physics. It means that we must be wary of all talk of observers and observed, since in a fundamental sense, the observer is already a part of what he or she wishes to observe. Subject is object; fact is value. You are your neighbor. To be a person is to be "incepted" into a context. I believe that, as a matter of philosophical argument, this can be demonstrated. But it can also be shown scientifically, in physics, in terms of the ultimate building blocks of all matter out of which we are made; and biologically, in terms of our common genetic heritage. As a species, we are one. Hence, the connection between the objectivity and universality of humanity with the Good/Beauty is not too difficult to defend, while preserving our precious individuality is still possible.
Compare Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 63-147 ("Idealism and the Resolution of the Quantum Paradoxes") with Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 107-125 ("The Person That I Am: Quantum Identity" and "The Relationships That I Am: Quantum Intimacy").
Ms. Zohar should consider amending her chapter title to read: "The Relations That We Are." These writers and many others from several countries are scientist-philosophers whose core ideas were foreshadowed by Bradley and Mary Whiton-Calkins in the nineteenth century. To my knowledge, this integrationist-structuralist insight has not been communicated by humanistic scholars in the English-speaking world, until now. Under this reasoning, by the way, the Absolute includes the universe or any number of "multiverses." (See "The 'Matrix': A Movie Review" and the film Mindwalk, then, again, "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")
This idealist position overlaps with much of what is called "phenomenological-hermeneutics."
Scientists are directed to: Stuart Sim, "The Science and Technology of the Postmodern," in Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon, 2002), pp. 151-183. ("Physics is transformed into metaphysics ... and we seem to be on the verge of a new narrative [for the existence of God] based on that old favorite, the argument from design.") Admirers of Lewis Carroll will enjoy, P. Heath, The Philosopher's Alice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974). Mr. Heath is the author of the excellent article dealing with the "logic of Alice" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")
I discovered a modestly priced edition of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos at Strand Books. I immediately appreciated the work as a contribution to the latest thinking about physics and also another chapter in the history of the intellectual project of humanity or philosophy. Alice's puzzles about time are answered by Professor Greene. Greene displays joyful humanistic celebrations of intelligence as well as wonder at the universe. This paragraph and many others in the book might have been written by F.H. Bradley, who is not a thinker Professor Greene is likely to know:
"The central concern of this book is to explain some of the most prominent and pivotal of these revisions to our picture of reality, with an intense focus on those that affect our species' long-term project to understand space and time. From Aristotle to Einstein, from the astrolabe to the Hubble Space Telescope, from the pyramids to mountaintop observatories, space and time have framed thinking since thinking began." (pp. 5-6.)
Like most great philosophers and scientists, Greene's sentences have a child-like simplicity combined with genius. This foregoing elegant prose is produced by a scientist. Scientists who write this well are scary. Aside from chronology, this statement might have been written by Immanuel Kant.
We begin with an individualist ethics of duty or law, for Bradley, then move to a communitarian ethics of aspiration or love. The trajectory, for me, is from Plato/Kant (individualist, masculine) to Hegel/Bradley/Calkins (spiritual communitarian, feminine). What I admire most about the U.S. Constitution is that both elements are part of the architecture of that document: individualist elements or "freedom" (Bill of Rights) and communitarian elements or "equality" (forms of community representation in legislatures, federalism, and "equal protection"). Freedom and equality with due process of law from a government of limited powers is what the Constitution is about. (See again, if it has not been defaced once more: "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "Master and Commander.")
We can be certain that no ethics that neglects one aspect of this duality will be satisfactory. We insist on freedom with equality. Democratic socialism. We need autonomy, but we also need others whom we may love (and who may love us), as equals, in order to become fully healthy and autonomous individuals in supportive communities. We need others in order to be. This would be Bradley's response to Nietzsche in defense of ultimate "Reality" over mere "Appearance." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Women. The things a guy has to do ...
Primary Sources:
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan Co., 1897) (2nd ed., with Appendix and Response to Critics).
F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914).
F.H. Bradley, Writings on Logic and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951), this work first appeared in 1876.
F.H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), this work first appeared in 1874.
F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).
Scholarly Commentaries:
Anthony Manser & Guy Stock, eds., The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Phillip Ferreira, Bradley and the Sources of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Western philosophy has struggled with the tension between individualism and communitarianism in ethical, legal and political theory for centuries. The great theoretical moves and counter-moves in this controversy have fallen under one of two categories -- either rights-based, neo-Kantian, deontological theories (like those of Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin); or post-Hegelian, social-communitarian, "teleological" or consequentialist theories (Marx, Mill, Bentham, Sidgwick, Hart). The focus in these rival theories is either upon the rights-bearing individual "choosing agent" facing an ethical dilemma; or upon the decision-maker forced to consider the results of an action in terms of "the greatest good of the greatest number," from a social perspective, in which the worthiness of the act is measured by its consequences for the entire group, not only for the particular agent.
It should be noted that there are variations on the utilitarian position that seek to accomodate individualist values. Fundamental rights are insulated from majoritarian pressures, as in the Bill of Rights. Richard Brandt's rule-utilitarianism is one such variation, and there are others. For instance, the rationalistic utilitarianism of Brand Blanshard is another. There are also efforts to reconcile liberal individualism with communitarian or socialist values (a position I find attractive), as in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice or Noam Chomsky's "libertarian socialism."
This ethical dilemma pitting individual against collectivity both followed from and has led to a continuing metaphysical debate about which is primary, persons or communities. Can there be such a thing as a Kantian "transcendental ego," abstracted from the social entities that make the very notion of an individual meaningful at all -- such as language, gender, social and economic category, nationality, family, history and so on? After all, these are the things that make it possible to speak of individuals in the first place. A person removed from all of these contexts is no longer recognizably a person, to the extent that such a notion is even conceivable or meaningful. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
This charge of unreality has been a main criticism against Rawls's description of the "original position" and of his choosing agents, who operate behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents their knowing such things as social origins. Are such beings "individuals" or persons? Do they become drones? Or Republicans, perhaps? Communitarians say that Ralwsian agents are not persons, if removed to an abstract isolation from all defining conditions and qualities. The key word in this foregoing sentence is "all."
Among leading contemporary thinkers in this Hegelian school are philosophers as different as Charles Taylor and (to some degree) Alasdair MacIntyre, along with the inheritors of the Marxist tradition, whether Critical (Frankfurt School, Castro) or Scientific (Lenin) Marxists. (Compare "'The Island': A Movie Review" with "'I am Legend': A Movie Review.")
In reading Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "On Schopenhauer as Educator," we certainly have a sense of the primal, visceral reality of the unique existential agent or self, who feels, hurts, loves, desires and thinks, apart from all social settings. But is it apart from all social settings? You may wish to consult Miguel Unamuno on this issue. It may be only an illusion, but we certainly feel that there is something tangible and real that can be distinguished from all of the social factors that make up a person's identity. We are persons, with individual rights, but only because we are members of communities. To be human is to dwell within contradictions. (See Roberto Magabeira Unger's Knowledge and Politics.)
Friedrich Nietzsche, in celebrating autonomy -- incidentally, he does so in his own non-Kantian terms -- is in the room with you (as is Schopenhauer in his best work), because Nietzsche is present in his pungent and powerful prose:
"... we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops," Nietzsche writes, "that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism, but into stupidity. [Think of the various forms of totalitarianism in the twentieth century.] It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this -- and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroy stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too."
Niezsche rejects collectivism and total adjustment to any society as "stupidity," as an attempt to "evade yourself," to escape the responsibility of "becoming the person you are." What you are, fundamentally, is Kierkegaard's "individual." So the question becomes: How much of what goes into the concept of an individual is social? You are not a transcendental self, for Nietzscheans, not a cool, detached, "spectator" engaged in rational deliberation and searching for the "ethically optimal solution" (unless you are British, smoke a pipe, and study at Oxford University); rather, you are an embodied, contradictory, suffering human being, wrestling with mortality, longing -- perhaps irrationally -- hoping and loving, especially suffering. Notice the crucial distinction between "serving the state" and "realizing yourself in a community" (Bradley) or in "achieving a revolution" (Jefferson, Castro).
Take another look at Bradley's enigmatic dedication of Appearance and Reality to Ms. "E.R." And yes, I have read Terry Eagleton's Aesthetic Theory, Richard Wollheim and T.L.S. Sprigge are excellent commentators on Bradley. You cannot disappear into a crowd (the collectivity, Marxist or otherwise, unless you are a liberal Democrat residing in the East Village); nor can you vanish into the ethereal philosophical realm of Platonic forms or Kant's "noumenal" reality (i.e., "abstract individuality"), unless you are a Republican faculty member at Yale. You live here on earth and have to worry about such things as not running out of toilet paper. Running out of toilet paper at a crucial moment is what philosophers describe as an "empirical crisis." Regrettably, it appears that further disfigurements of this essay have taken place. I will struggle to continue making corrections of this work.
Sadly, this previous sentence was altered, once again, as I review this essay. A very sick or evil person must be responsible for these continuing crimes and a highly inept or corrupt legal system, evidently, allows them to go unpunished.
On second thought, Hugh Grant attended Oxford University and he certainly seems to have desires, including some for "Miss Divine" at $1000 per half hour. Marx? True, Mr. Grant may be the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps he was under the impression that he was going to school at UCLA?
Our sense of being separate and unique, our awareness of individual identity, is too primary and powerful to be destroyed by any theory. Even philosophy is only possible after we have eaten and done our best to get laid. Philosophy is best done if we are successful in our efforts to get laid. This constitutes a "very sticky wicket" indeed, as they say in cricket.
Enough about Mr. Grant, back to F.H. Bradley. We know ourselves to be defined by membership in groups and by aspects of our selves ("relationships") that are social: such as the languages in which we think, nations and families in which we take our place, the identity-conferring emotions that make us up, like the love we feel for those closest to us. Solipsism is disproven, for me, whenever I see an attractive woman and feel her "effects" (as it were) on me. The Catholic theologian Thomas Merton writes:
"... since faith [and art or love?] is a matter of freedom and self-determination -- the free receiving of a freely given gift of grace -- man cannot assent to a spiritual message as long as his mind and heart are enslaved by automatism. He will always remain so enslaved as long as he is submerged in a mass of other automatons, without individuality, and without their rightful integrity as persons. ..."
Merton's point applies to all of humanity, naturally, men and women. Selfishness and greed, vulgar materialism is always a great error:
"No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual. There is not much use talking to [persons] ... about love if they are not able to listen. The ears with which one hears the message of ... [love] are hidden in man's heart, and the ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence."
The neglected British philosophers in the idealist tradition -- some of the very best produced by that nation or anywhere -- from Berkely (an empiricist, whose work is foundational for these thinkers) to R.G. Collingwood, or a close cousin, Christopher Peacocke (an important young rationalist philosopher working today), in one way way or another, all speak to these epistemological and metaphysical issues. I know that rationalism and idealism are not the same thing. Professor Peacocke is concerned with defending the validity of a priori knowledge, which is highly important to the idealists as well as rationalists.
F.H. Bradley in particular, while a critic of "relations" as "contradictory," nevertheless sought to bridge the distance between self and other in the "Absolute." Bradley's "Absolute" is Hegel's "Spirit" wearing English tweeds. Perhaps, for Bradley, this quest for the Absolute had something to do with finding a space to meet that absent lady to whom he dedicated Appearance and Reality. The Absolute is a space in which relations are not only possible, but realized. You may recall my discussion of the Forest of Arden. More importantly, the Absolute is the only way in which relations can make sense or become meaningful.
The following words are among the most revealing and heart-breaking ever written by one of the great philosophers. They were set down by the reclusive Professor Bradley near the end of his life. I believe that they are incomprehensible without understanding that dedication of Appearance and Reality to the elusive "E.R.":
"In philosophy we must not seek for an absolute satisfaction. Philosophy at its best is but an understanding of its object, and it is not an experience in which that object is contained wholly and possessed. ... The shades nowhere speak without blood, and the ghosts of Metaphysic accept no substitute. They reveal themselves only to that victim whose life they have drained, and, to converse with shadows, he himself must become a shade." (Introduction to Bradley's final essays.)
To fully appreciate this paragraph, I ask the reader to compare my essays on Nietzsche and Santayana, with my comments on Bradley's works, then see my essay entitled "The Forest of Arden." A possible subject for a future dissertation in the history of philosophy is to discover the purpose and destination of Bradley's mysterious and frequent trips to France (Ms. "E.R."?). The literary-minded are asked to recall the name that Oscar Wilde took upon arriving in Paris after enduring an unjust prison sentence, "Sebastian Melmoth," inspired by Charles Maturin. See Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (London: The Folio Society, 1993), p. ix ("Melmoth's perpetual sorrow, loneliness, alienation from humanity and longing for peace burns fiercer as he realises the hopelessness of his desires.") and Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis," in De Profundis and Other Writings (London & New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 161 ("Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.")
Bradley is often misunderstood as a "relativist" concerning ethical obligations, when he was actually at the opposite end of the spectrum, a champion of absolute obligation in ethics. No, there is no contradiction between these two paragraphs:
" ... my duty may be mine and no other man's, but I do not make it mine. If it is duty, it would be the duty of any person in my case and condition, whether they thought so or not -- in a word, duty is 'objective,' in the sense of not being contingent on the opinion or choice of this or that subject."
Next is a comment, also from Ethical Studies:
" ... the end is the good will which is superior to ourselves; and again the end is self-realization. Bringing these together we see the end is the realization of ourselves as the will which is above ourselves. And this will (if morality exists) we saw must be 'objective,' because not dependent on 'subjective' liking; and 'universal,' because not identifiable with any particular, but standing above all actual and possible particulars."
It is ironic that Bradley -- whose genius and historical influence are difficult to deny -- is mostly out of print. I have experienced great difficulty in finding a copy of his Ethical Studies. Philosophical fame is a fleeting thing. Fortunately, Bradley has been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers and his books will soon be on their way to new editions from Oxford University Press, for $75.00 each, which is probably what Bradley earned in a month as a professor during the nineteenth century. ("Arthur's Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
F.H. Bradley is the best philosopher in Britain between Hume and Russell. Bradley may be better -- if less influential -- than Russell. Several recent sholarly works have been devoted to Bradley's philosophy. R.G. Collingwood described F.H. Bradley early in the twentieth century as "the finest philosophical intellect produced in Britain since David Hume." T.S. Eliot agreed and never escaped Bradley's influence. Collingwood learned from Bradley that "the chief business of twentieth century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth century history."
Bradley's Absolute contains all diversity, all fragments, yet is unitary and universal. In setting forth this notion, Bradley develops the concept of a "concrete universal." This language harks back to the Christian discussion of spirit in a material world, and/or the infinite within the finite. Think of Spinoza's "substance" and "the intellectual love of God." There is also a reaction by Bradley (based on Hegel's thinking) against Kant's dual-aspect theory (Bradley calls it "dualism"), or even against a Kantian minimizing of the particular for the sake of a categorical universal obligation attaching to an abstract self or "transcendental ego."
For Bradley, the Good (because it is objective and absolute) can only be ultimately or perfectly realized in religion. Being imperfect persons, however, does not diminish the objectivity of our ethical obligations in our flawed earthly societies. We still have to struggle to do the right thing, even if we know that we will never be perfect. Bradley's tragedy, I believe, is that he did exactly that in his own life. What he learned at the end of his life is that love, however painful, is the greatest good. Self-realization is "self-giving in love to one's community." ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "George Santayana and Quantum Mechanics.")
Although Bradley is usually listed as a conservative, which he was in lots of ways, Bradley may also be regarded as a kind of socialist. I say this knowing that he would hate the word. Compare T.H. Green's Prolegomena (deliberately echoing Kant) and Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, with key sections of Bradley's logic and with Bradley's posthumous Aphorisms.
Mind you, Bradley admires Kant, though he thinks more of Hegel, while admitting that we must be moral for the sake of being moral. Bradley reserves even more criticisms against Bentham-Mill-type utilitarianism. For Bradley, as I say, ethics is about self-realization in ultimate terms. To my knowledge, there is no book-length study comparing Mary Wollstonecraft's writings with Bradley's work. This is unfortunate. There are instructive parallels to be explored by scholars in the works and lives of these two philosophers. Until very recently, only one of these two persons would have been called a true "philosopher." This is significant in assessing their respective works and their importance. Mary Wollstonecraft could not have attended any university in England during her lifetime.
It is especially regrettable that Mary Whiton Calkins never established a dialogue with Bradley because their philosophical interests and solutions are so similar. I cannot say whether there were parallels in Calkins' life that suggest even greater affinity between the two philosophers. I believe that Ms. Calkins would have been, to say the least, "apprehensive" about approaching Bradley for an interview or scholarly dialogue, because (as a woman lecturer in philosophy and psychology) her place in academia was marginal and uncertain during the early years of the twentieth century.
Calkins lived in a time -- almost one hundred years after Wollstonecraft -- when women still could not study at most universities and were denied (as she was) the highest degrees because of their gender, despite achievements on a global level of importance. Calkins would have feared being thought presumptuous or "pushy" by seeking an encounter with Professor Bradley. We are the losers because of this nonsense. In Ethical Studies, Bradley says:
"Not troubling ourselves with our relation to Kant, we may say that the ideal is neither to be perfectly homogeneous nor simply to be specified to the last degree, but rather to combine both these elements. Our true being is not the extreme of unity, nor of diversity, but perfect identity of both. And 'Realize yourself' does not mean merely 'Be a whole,' but 'Be an infinite whole.' ..."
I don't know about you, but there are days when I find it difficult to be "infinite," except that it may be more difficult (if not impossible), on Bradley's terms, not to be infinite. This is called "physics" today. In fact, Bardley anticipated developments in quantum physics before Einstein's relativity theory. ("Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.") Bradley says:
"It [the Absolute] is the self-realization of each member because each member cannot find the function which makes him himself, apart from the whole to which he belongs; to be himself he must go beyond himself, to live his life he must live a life which is not merely his own, but which, none the less, but on the contrary all the more, is intensely and emphatically his own individuality. ... we have the end, we have found self-realization, duty, and happiness in one. Yes, we have found ourselves when we have found our station and its duties, our function as an organ in the social organism." (Ethical Studies, Ch. V.)
It is at this point that I wish to bring together Bradley's ideas with McTaggart's philosophy of love and spirit, also with the works of contemporaries John MacMurray and John Finnis. (Please see my essay "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.") Ironically, the greatest proximity to Bradley's thinking is found in the theoretical writings of contemporary physicists and other scientists. See David Deutsch, "The Ends of the Universe," in The Fabric of Reality (London & New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 361-363, then read Bradley on relations. The following quotes are from a summary by Professor Warnock:
"The Absolute must be One, a Unity, ... because plurality would involve relatedness. Yet it is a unity, ... which contains diversity. The Absolute would otherwise be empty of content. At this point, [the theory of concrete universals emerges] ... We are accustomed to think of things arranged in a classificatory order: horses included among quadrupeds, quadrupeds among animals, animals among living things. As the terms in this classification increase in generality, their own content diminishes in richness -- 'living things' is much more abstract and less specific than 'horses.' If we then think of the Absolute as the final point in such a classificatory system, it seems so poor in content as to vanish into nothing."
Now keep your eyes on Bradley's argument, as Professor Warnock in One Hundred Years of Philosophy shows him pulling not a rabbit, but a metaphysical elephant (or is it that "abstract" horse?) out of his top hat:
"Such a classification makes use of the 'abstract' universals beloved by thought. HORSE, the horse as such is, an abstraction from, and thus, a falsification of, experience. With this abstract universal the 'concrete' universal is contrasted. [The concrete universal] is not an abstraction from, but A COMMUNITY OF its members. It is an individual: we can understand its nature if we consider a person or, better still, a society. A society includes the rich diversity of all its members, in all their conflicts and cooperative efforts. It is richer, not more empty than any separate member of that society, just as a person is richer in content than any of the separate events which occur as part of his life. ... A person, a society, is 'universal' just in so far as it brings into unity a diversity -- as a class does also -- but it is individual, as a class is not." (Again: "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
No society is absolute, since it is defined by what it is not, i.e., other societies, but we can think in terms of an Absolute that contains all societies and their relations, each of which is still individual. We can think of humanity as "instantiated" not only in the persons we love or the self we encounter in the bathroom mirror, but in our neighbors and friends, even in our enemies in foreign lands. The challenge then becomes a problem of recognition, of SEEING the particularity and rights that we demand for ourselves as properly due to all others like us, who stand within or as part of the Absolute, as we do, being (in that sense) identical to us. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Bradley's response to Hume concerning the reality of the self is to emphasize that identity is a matter of totality, not of locating the self at any single point in time. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This argument was foreshadowed in some comments made to Hume by The Countess Mme de Boufflers, another woman whose philosophical and political brilliance has not yet been discussed by feminist scholars as far as I know. Maybe someone will steal the idea from me, after describing me as a "fool" of course. I am sure that Bradley was unaware of this correspondence between Hume and his French lady. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Bradley would not have regarded Mary Wollstonecraft as an important British philosopher, for example, despite being an enlightened male of his era. Considering that Bradley happened to be a philosophical genius -- he was certainly aware of Wollstonecraft's writings and role in history -- this omission is a significant illustration of the blinding effect of ideology in scholarship and all philosophical thinking.
We see both in the universe around us and in the suffering of a child in Darfur not only the pain of others, but kinship, sameness, shared suffering and mortality. I am beginning to think that it must be painful for readers to experience the mutilations of these texts along with me. I believe that these mutilations of my writings are attempts at refutation of my arguments by inarticulate persons who are adept at cybercrime and other forms of brutality who are protected by government officials. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.")
The importance of recognition has become a subject of debate for philosophers today. This is true of thinkers as diverse as Charles Taylor, Susan Wolf and Michael Walzer. Perhaps F.H. Bradley arrived at this insight before all of them. A person's physical absence does not diminish her importance or her presence, in other ways, for us. The distance or proximity of others does not alter their connection to us. Identity is a narrative project in time which is necessarily dialectical and holistic. Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom becomes inescapable. (''In Time': A Movie Review" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This same dialectical movement from particular to universal can now be traced entirely in the language of physics. It means that we must be wary of all talk of observers and observed, since in a fundamental sense, the observer is already a part of what he or she wishes to observe. Subject is object; fact is value. You are your neighbor. To be a person is to be "incepted" into a context. I believe that, as a matter of philosophical argument, this can be demonstrated. But it can also be shown scientifically, in physics, in terms of the ultimate building blocks of all matter out of which we are made; and biologically, in terms of our common genetic heritage. As a species, we are one. Hence, the connection between the objectivity and universality of humanity with the Good/Beauty is not too difficult to defend, while preserving our precious individuality is still possible.
Compare Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 63-147 ("Idealism and the Resolution of the Quantum Paradoxes") with Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 107-125 ("The Person That I Am: Quantum Identity" and "The Relationships That I Am: Quantum Intimacy").
Ms. Zohar should consider amending her chapter title to read: "The Relations That We Are." These writers and many others from several countries are scientist-philosophers whose core ideas were foreshadowed by Bradley and Mary Whiton-Calkins in the nineteenth century. To my knowledge, this integrationist-structuralist insight has not been communicated by humanistic scholars in the English-speaking world, until now. Under this reasoning, by the way, the Absolute includes the universe or any number of "multiverses." (See "The 'Matrix': A Movie Review" and the film Mindwalk, then, again, "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")
This idealist position overlaps with much of what is called "phenomenological-hermeneutics."
Scientists are directed to: Stuart Sim, "The Science and Technology of the Postmodern," in Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon, 2002), pp. 151-183. ("Physics is transformed into metaphysics ... and we seem to be on the verge of a new narrative [for the existence of God] based on that old favorite, the argument from design.") Admirers of Lewis Carroll will enjoy, P. Heath, The Philosopher's Alice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974). Mr. Heath is the author of the excellent article dealing with the "logic of Alice" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")
I discovered a modestly priced edition of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos at Strand Books. I immediately appreciated the work as a contribution to the latest thinking about physics and also another chapter in the history of the intellectual project of humanity or philosophy. Alice's puzzles about time are answered by Professor Greene. Greene displays joyful humanistic celebrations of intelligence as well as wonder at the universe. This paragraph and many others in the book might have been written by F.H. Bradley, who is not a thinker Professor Greene is likely to know:
"The central concern of this book is to explain some of the most prominent and pivotal of these revisions to our picture of reality, with an intense focus on those that affect our species' long-term project to understand space and time. From Aristotle to Einstein, from the astrolabe to the Hubble Space Telescope, from the pyramids to mountaintop observatories, space and time have framed thinking since thinking began." (pp. 5-6.)
Like most great philosophers and scientists, Greene's sentences have a child-like simplicity combined with genius. This foregoing elegant prose is produced by a scientist. Scientists who write this well are scary. Aside from chronology, this statement might have been written by Immanuel Kant.
We begin with an individualist ethics of duty or law, for Bradley, then move to a communitarian ethics of aspiration or love. The trajectory, for me, is from Plato/Kant (individualist, masculine) to Hegel/Bradley/Calkins (spiritual communitarian, feminine). What I admire most about the U.S. Constitution is that both elements are part of the architecture of that document: individualist elements or "freedom" (Bill of Rights) and communitarian elements or "equality" (forms of community representation in legislatures, federalism, and "equal protection"). Freedom and equality with due process of law from a government of limited powers is what the Constitution is about. (See again, if it has not been defaced once more: "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "Master and Commander.")
We can be certain that no ethics that neglects one aspect of this duality will be satisfactory. We insist on freedom with equality. Democratic socialism. We need autonomy, but we also need others whom we may love (and who may love us), as equals, in order to become fully healthy and autonomous individuals in supportive communities. We need others in order to be. This would be Bradley's response to Nietzsche in defense of ultimate "Reality" over mere "Appearance." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Monday, May 11, 2009
David Stove's Critique of Idealism.
David Stove, "Idealism: A Victorian Horror-Story (Parts One and Two)," in The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 83-179.
David Stove, "The Intellectual Capacity of Women," Chapter 5, in Cricket Versus Republicanism (Quakers Hill Press, 1995); http://web.maths.unsw.edu/~Jim/women.html
I cannot say how often vandalism has required me to make corrections of "errors" inserted in this essay. I am determined to make these corrections, as often as necessary, because I am confident that this essay will be helpful or suggestive to others.
This essay has grown much longer than I planned. I apologize for this. If there is a single slogan to bear in mind when reading it then perhaps this quotation from Friedrich Schiller will do:
"Man plays only where he is human in the full meaning of that word, and he is fully human only where he plays."
Introduction.
David Stove belongs in the category of cranky and quirky philosophers. Stove is wrong about most things. He is also a wonderful writer, accessible, popular and willing to engage in polemics with non-philosophers. Stove is worth reading and refuting.
Free speech means that you do not censor or suppress the speech of persons you regard as mistaken or even those you believe to be idiots. You respond to something written with which you disagree or invite an adversary to debate. Computer crime directed against an adversary is not a refutation of that person's opinions, but an admission of your inability to respond to the merits of his or her arguments.
Professor Stove has argued, for example, that women are not intellectually impressive and not very good philosophers. I have disagreed, publicly, with his view of this matter. Perhaps Stove's dismissals of idealism should not trouble us very much since I am sure that these opinions -- Stove's rejection of idealism and his "antifeminism" -- are related and (perhaps) they are inextricable.
I will reserve my discussion of this association for later in my essay. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
I believe that Stove was -- he is now deceased -- an idiot and bigot with a philosophy degree. May David Stove rest in peace even as his books go out of print, quickly.
Before setting off on my own journey of discovery regarding idealism, I wish to recommend Professor Stove's writings to those who disagree with him, especially women, at the risk of offending them. You have to understand Stove's mentality because it is still "out there." There are many men -- often in law, academia, elite positions in society -- who believe, secretly, that Professor Stove's claims of female intellectual inferiority are valid. It is best to acquire sexist ideas from their most able defenders, in order to refute them. Adherents of such views may then be forced to cling to their ideologies, irrationally, no longer in a position to claim objective validity for their opinions.
My critique of Professor Stove's anti-idealism is best thought of as a phenomenological and hermeneutic form of feminist-socialist philosophy. I bring together in one package everything that Professor Stove deplores, philosophically and politically. Naturally, this means that I am often attacked by the very people who should agree with me. For example, as I write this sentence, my image-posting feature has been damaged again. I am running yet another scan of my computer for viruses.
Professor Stove has performed a valuable service by setting forth his unattractive views. We can examine those views most effectively in a clear statement by a philosopher making it easier to deal with the same ideas or claims when encountered in less cogent forms in the thinking of many people, who are not at all (in their own attitudes or self-understandings) "philosophical" or intellectual.
Non-philosophers often fail to realize that "practicality" combined with rejection of theory is also a kind of philosophy, though not a very good one. Philosophers always provide the most cogent and coherent articulations of positions that are widely held in society. If you read Thomas Hobbes, then you will understand fascism and what motivates fascism everywhere and at any time, even when it calls itself "liberalism," "behaviorism," or "fundamentalism."
Widely held opinions or creeds are often stated by people who are much less logical or articulate than philosophers. Hence, by analyzing and criticizing a philosopher's ideas we can unravel inconsistencies and contradictions in popular philosophies, treating or preventing an epidemic of contagious stupidity and/or misinformation.
I owe this insight to a great teacher of philosophy from my undergraduate years.
Stove's critique of idealism does not put a dent in that philosophy. This is because Stove misses the point of the philosophy under attack. It should be noted that none of the great or foundational positions in metaphysics can be defeated for all time because each is, among other things, reflective of a particular orientation towards the world, an expression of a kind of personal and cultural temperament.
Great metaphysical theories resurface in every age, in altered form, to reflect changes in the intellectual climate. A point for my adversaries in New Jersey to bear in mind is that it is impossible to criticize effectively what you do not understand. (See my comment on William James.)
This does not deprive us of the concept of truth in judging or evaluating those theories or perspectives. It does tell us that some ways of looking at the world are important to people. In every age these outlooks return, usually wearing a new outfit and new shoes. A good question to ask, then, is why these perspectives are important to persons in every historical period? I expect to address this issue in due course. ("Let's hear it for the boys.")
Both on the Continent and in the English-speaking world, idealism is in the midst of a come-back. What are called "semiotics" and "hermeneutics," some forms of "phenomenology" and other "poststructuralist" theories (Derrida), are theories compatible with key elements in idealist philosophy and are certainly historical developments from the idealist tradition.
Recent developments in the sciences are also compatible with a number of idealist premises. This is often not recognized in the scientific literature.
More efforts are needed to associate developments in the philosophy of science with emerging configurations within humanistic and social science thinking. The failure to make these associations will obstruct progress and lead to repetitions of past errors. I suggest a comparison between seemingly very different works drawing on rationalist, idealist, and quantum thinking which are mutually illuminating. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")
It is fascinating that these idealist principles have surfaced all over the world in different costumes, expressed in different languages, some aesthetic and others philosophical or theological, and even in scientific "languages" or disciplines.
I invite the reader to detect important associations between ideas presented by philosophers in the idealist tradition, who are (mostly) unaware of one another. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
Do not be governed by chronology in searching for these connections. Thinkers may "intuit" a pattern in the intellectual fabric of our lives, or in epistemological "maps" from different angles and places, not realizing that it is a unitary or all-inclusive pattern that is seen.
Philosophy has been called "veiled autobiography." (Sigmund Freud) To some extent, I admit the charge. More interesting to me is the realization that philosophers are among the authors of the intellectual history of their epochs, reflective of its moods expressed in culture, and (most importantly) inventors and chroniclers of their future.
Philosophers are the true biographers of their times.
Let us begin with Stephen Hawking, "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?," in Black Holes and Baby Universes (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. 49; then Roy Bashkar, "Dialectical Critical Naturalism," and "Space, Time, and Tense," in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (New York & London: Verso, 1993), pp. 152-173, pp. 250-258. (Notice that Hawking and Bashkar are writing their books at roughly the same time.)
Why are these authors never compared or related by scholars? Would you expect that their shared cultural mood or "moment" (Hegel, Marx) will affect their theorizing?
"Entanglement" and "dialectics" are parallel discourses seeking to capture the same territory in the intellectual landscape. It cannot be a coincidence that idealist works have appeared in Latin America, Asia, Europe and America, often in different areas of scholarly endeavor and with increasing frequency during the past two decades. ("Ted Honderich Says: 'You Are Not Free!'")
I suggest that readers will find some surprising similarities in the thinking of Hawking and Bashkar concerning the scientific enterprise. These similarities must be significant. I plan to devote a future essay to illustrating this point.
I am confident that much the same pattern of similarities and overlapping insights (expressed in totally different vocabularies) will become clear from even a casual perusal of the theoretical literature emerging in so-called postmodernist cultures. Stuart Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon Books, 2002), pp. 151-185.
How do Hawking and Bashkar understand scientific efforts? What would Karl Popper say concerning the task of these scientists?
Next, let us compare John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1984), pp. 165-223 ("... the flowing swirling universe is a mirror ...") and James Gleick, "Strange Attractors," in Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Viking, 1987), pp. 132-135 ("The equations of fluid flow [genius?] are non-linear partial differential equations, unsolvable except in special cases.") with Mark Buchanan, "No Dice," New Scientist, March 21, 2008, at p. 28 and http://www.newscientist.com/ ("Bohmian mechanics asserts that the outcome of an experiment [in quantum mechanics] isn't truly random, but is determined by the values of certain 'hidden variables.' ...").
The universe is playful and lawful, ordered and improvising all the time. Reality is a performance of a constantly varying set of narrative options offered to you. Juxtapose key provisions of Kant's first and final Critiques:
"Moreover, because of the tight link between space and time found by Einstein, the quantum connections also have temporal tentacles. We'll shortly encounter some clever and truly wondrous experiments that have recently explored a number of the startling spacio-temporal interconnections" -- dialectics, entanglements -- "entailed by quantum mechnics and, as we'll see, they forcefully challenge the classical, intuitive world-view many of us hold." (emphasis added)
Brian Greene, "Roads to Reality," in The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 12. (Perhaps an amendment to this chapter's title would be "Roads to Realities.")
Think of the "hidden variables" and values of the people around you. Do you think that you can control or determine entirely your friends' behavior or thoughts? Or your own behavior and thoughts? Finally, compare two literary works by a person who is an artist and also a serious scholar of philosophical systems -- works not associated by any critic to my knowledge, Rebecca Goldstein, "Strange Attractors," in Strange Attractors (New York & London: Penguin, 1993), p. 241 with Rebecca Goldstein, The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1989), pp. 115-117. (Spinoza and Strange Attractors?), then Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 53-121 (Were Einstein and Godel "strangely attracted"?) and Amir D. Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kaballah, and the Search for Infinity (New York: Washington Square, 2000), pp. 25-45.
You will find elements of idealism in all of the works cited in the foregoing paragraph.
Idealism allows adherents to be liberals in the classical sense -- which includes both Republicans and Democrats -- or democratic socialists, like me, even as all forms of totalitarianism (which deny human freedom) are excluded from compatibility with idealist premises as I understand them.
A recent discovery for me is a superb book-length essay by David Punter, Blake, Hegel and Dialectic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), which is much better than anything by Stove. For a comparison, see A.C. Ewing's The Idealist Tradition (New York: Free Press, 1957) and David Boucher, ed., The British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
I begin with definitions of key terms. Stove does not get around to a half-hearted and tendentious definition of "idealism" until near the end of his first essay, arguing with different straw men throughout most of it. I offer a very brief tour through modern philosophical understandings of idealism (these days the preferred terms are "representationalism" or "constructivism"), since this is crucial to appreciating the controversy that follows. I then criticize Professor Stove's contentions. I offer my opinions and suggestions for those who want to read more about all of this in the course of my discussion.
What is "Idealism"?
Berkeley to Kant.
People normally speak of "idealism" as the belief in high moral aims or "loftiness of purpose." Idealism in philosophy, however, is a metaphysical doctrine or theory that is usually compatible with some version of rationalism in epistemology. In other words, idealism is a view of what "is" that is associated, typically, with a view of "how" we know things.
It is important to distinguish idealism and rationalism, epistemology and metaphysics. The common failure to make these fundamental distinctions produces serious confusions among philosophers. This confusion concerning terms and lack of mastery of technical philosophical arguments by my adversaries was 90% of the problem in my debate at The Philosophy Cafe. (Empiricism is not "the same thing as" materialism.)
This need for distinctions has nothing to do with the ways in which these terms may be related or compared, since they refer to unitary subjects -- philosophy and reality -- as well as the connections between them considered as academic subjects. Thus, a legalistic attention to subtleties of construction comes in handy in theoretical discussions and debates. Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-19, 82-87 and Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 109-139 ("Understanding"), then Will Dudley's Understanding German Idealism (London: Acumen, 2007), pp. 106-140 and particle physicist David Bohm's, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London & New York: Routledge, 1981), p. 7, pp. 48-62 ("... wholeness is what is real ...").
When you are reading philosophy pretend that you are studying a criminal code looking for a loophole to get yourself out of jail. Reading philosophy -- even more than studying law -- is an active engagement with a text. Most lawyers are capable of first-rate intellectual work. Sadly, something in the law school experience kills this talent in them. After a few years in practice, mental cement has set in. For one explanation of this phenomenon, see Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (Cambridge: Afar, 1982), together with other CLS classics.
The first movement in the idealist symphony from Berkeley to Kant is best understood as a development of a conception of the self as individual "knowing agent." This move only became possible after the Cartesian revolution in modern thought.
A subsequent or second movement in idealism is concerned with the "self as social or communal entity" in the Absolute ("Wholeness"). According to one typical authority idealism states:
"... physical objects can have no existence [for knowers] apart from a mind which is conscious of them." (A.C. Ewing.)
The roots of this position may be traced at least to Plato, as in Socrates demonstrating to the slave boy in Meno the validity of a priori knowledge and anamnesis (look it up).
In modern thought, idealism originates with Bishop Berkeley's subjective version of the stance in the eighteenth century, as a negative reaction to Cartesian dualism and Locke's empiricism: "[Berkeley] argued that esse (existence or being) of physical objects is percipi (to be perceived) or that they are only ideas (hence, the term 'idealism)." (A.C. Ewing.)
This sounds really weird to people, until you say something like this: "Would you agree that if you did not exist, as a knowing subject, then this universe and everything in it would no longer exist or be, as far as you are concerned?"
At this point, education majors and psychobabblers are apt to throw their hands in the air and mutter ... "That's a tautology!"
Fine, I will not argue the point (though I think it is mistaken), but is it true? Most people would say, "yes."
Now, if all other knowing subjects in the universe are also removed, so that there is not one mind capable of knowledge of any kind in the vast totality of the universe (think of the House of Representatives), does the universe or anything in it continue to exist? How would anyone know whether the universe exists if there is no knowing subject in the universe? For whom would the universe exist if there are no minds? In what sense can you know what "is" when you do not exist?
It is crucial to see that this is a question concerning knowledge. It seems very difficult to deny that, on empiricist principles, we could ever know whether or not the universe exists in the absence of knowing agents.
For a great discussion of Berkeley's views, see David M. Armstrong's introduction to the edited collection entitled: Berkeley's Philosophical Writings (New York: McMillan, 1965), pp. 7-34 ("Physical objects cannot exist unperceived.") and G.J. Warnock, Berkeley (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1983), pp. 126-141.
For a comparison of Berkeley's "ideas" to Hume's philosophy, see Alasdair McIntyre's introduction and commentary to Hume's Ethical Writings (New York & London: Collier's, 1965), pp. 9-19. (Notice how crucial is point of view to this claim concerning knowledge and/as existence.)
I am suggesting, analogously, that the best versions of ourselves exist only when they are seen and encouraged by others close to us. Destruction of trust in fundamental relationships has the effect of disconfirming identity for all participants in such relationships.
Yes, we can picture the universe existing without us. This picturing is only our present act of cognition or mental operation. In other words, such picturing takes place "now," when we are here to "cognize." We "imagine" a future state of the universe, as though we were present to see it. This postulating is not the same as knowledge.
This is not to deny that we can speculate with great confidence that the universe will continue to exist without us, which really pisses us off. As Sartre remarked, "the one consolation about death is that everybody we can't stand will also have to die."
Please understand, again, that this is a claim about what we can KNOW. Speculation is not knowledge. We cannot know what the universe will be like without us or even whether it will continue to exist when we are gone, according to Berkeley's version of empiricism (idealism and empiricism are compatible in some theories), because we will not be present to see what it is like or if it still "exists" in our absence.
In answer to his own classic philosophical chestnut, Berkeley would say that, "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, then it makes no noise." For purposes of comparison, consider one scientist's use of Berkeley's reasoning:
"Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans wrote in the 1930s, '... the universe begins to look more and more like a great thought than like a great machine.' So, too, I am proposing, in The God Theory, that ultimately it is consciousness that is the origin of matter, energy, and the laws of nature in this universe and all others that may exist."
Bernard Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), p. xii. (Compare "Is it rational to believe in God?")
Let us engage in a "reality-check" at this point: Idealism is compatible with some forms of empiricism, as I have noted, and there is even an overlapping territory shared with nuanced versions of realism. (Bashkar, Hawking)
Continuities between these foundational positions and Asian philosophies that are highly useful in coming to terms with contemporary developments in physics and in the mathematical structures of biological systems should be mentioned.
See the summary of the ideas in religious and non-religious Taoism, in James K. Feibleman, Understanding Chinese Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1976), p. 137 and C. Wright Mills, "The Language and Ideas of Ancient China," in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Ballantine, 1963), p. 469. ("Thinking in shapes and movements.") Concerning the overlap between idealism-realism, see F. Beiser's Hegel (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 68-69. (It looks like Hegel is also a Chinese philosopher.)
Materialistic realists would say that the tree makes a noise -- especially if it falls on your head when the pain you experience provides sensory confirmation of the reality of this tree -- and of your stupidity. Idealists then simply close their eyes so as to make the realists no longer exist.
This joke about idealists making their opponents disappear by closing their eyes depends on Stove's misunderstanding which confuses an epistemological (knowledge) with an ontological (existence) claim.
Also, the realist would have to be in the forest for the tree to fall on his head -- unless he were in New Jersey, where a similar accident could easily be "arranged" for him by men in dark shirts and white ties, typically holding elective office or even judgeships. Knowledge of the pain produced by this falling tree is also "reducible" (but is it?) to signals or neurochemical processes "in" the brain.
Kant's innovation was to create an objective form of idealism, not limited to the particular individual knowing subject or self, developed from his synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. According to Kant, his Critical Theory is fully compatible with empiricism (you can still be a scientist!) because it is based on a new conception of a "transcendental self":
"[Kant] contends that we can account for a priori knowledge of things only by supposing that our minds" -- or those of any rational agents -- "have imposed on them a structure, [the categories of the understanding,] but only on appearances [known through the forms of sensibility fashioning order from sense data,] so for this very reason he held our knowledge to be limited to appearances [or phenomena]. The latter exist as objects of actual or possible experience and so must obey the conditions which our minds impose, since otherwise they could not appear to us [or become knowledge]. It is this which allows us to impose categories such as substance or cause to the physical world, but this very reason prevents us from proceeding to metaphysics, as Berkeley did, and applying them beyond the realm of human essences." (A.E. Ewing.)
The universe, as we know it, requires us to be in it -- or just "to be" -- as knowers in order for knowledge to exist, for us or any rational agents.
The universe "as it is," without any knowers, is "noumenal reality." Noumenal reality (by definition) is something that we cannot know, since we are not around to know it. This is kind of sad.
Get ready for a shock from this so-called abstruse philosopher: Rational agents would have to exist in order to know things while the universe that we know is only such as can be known by us -- or by any rational mind -- since it is the universe as it must "appear" to rational agents in order to be known by rational agents, like us.
Rational minds must know a universe existing in space and time, subject to causation, etc. This is OBJECTIVELY, UNIVERSALLY and NECESSARILY true, for all rational agents, like the proposition that 3 + 5 = 8. This is the objective component of the idealist position.
Notice that this says nothing about how we define space and time (or other crucial concepts) at any given juncture in our intellectual history as a species. Reason is universal.
Kant claims to state the foundational epistemic requirements for any rational agent. Kant's "transcendental idealism" is also a "Critical Realism."
Actual physical presence is no longer required for us to know how things must appear to rational minds (phenomenologically), anywhere or at any time, but not how things are in themselves (noumenally) in the absence of rational minds which is something that can never be known by us.
The definition of the terms "space" and "time" or other such terms will always change, again, but they will never be such as cannot be comprehended by us because we are the ones doing the defining. It will always be impossible to formulate a concept which we cannot formulate. How things must appear to knowers is an epistemological issue; how things are in themselves is an ontological and metaphysical issue. Paul Guyer, Kant (New York & London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 43-123.
Einstein would have agreed that the objectivity of scientifically detectable relations in the universe implies a knowing mind for -- or within -- which knowledge (as distinct from truth) is held. I have said nothing about an individual mind. "Truth is what stands the test of experience." (Einstein)
Not all truth is held by us and subject to that test -- at this "time."
Where could such unknown or possible truth exist except in Mind? Consciousness? Spinoza's God becomes very interesting to Einstein.
Before it is known truth does not exist as such, says the befuddled skeptic, except that such inexplicable "phenomena" intrude on our lives every day. Before there was a law to explain gravity's effects things fell to earth when we dropped them. Christopher Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 204. (" ... truth ... has an a priori component.") and G. Harman, "The Inference to the Best Explanation," in 74 Philosophical Review pp. 88-95 (1988), then Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Plume, 2001), pp. 249-253. ("Strong correlations" in mathematics.)
A crucial point to understand is that, even if we can not have certain knowledge about a matter, we may still have (or develop) a rational or "justified belief" based on our practical needs. I may not know with certainty and before the fact whether Barack Obama will win the U.S. presidential election in 2008. Nevertheless, I may develop a rational belief concerning the outcome of the election based on reading newspapers and talking to voters.
Regrettably, as philosophers and non-philosophers, we have a tendency to deify our beliefs and insulate them from rational criticisms (or disconfirmation) by way of experience or rationality. Thus, we may decide that one person has little to teach us or is "probably" guilty of "something." Subsequent evidence and rational demonstrations of an opposed conclusion will be ignored.
I describe such an irrational attitude as antiphilosophical or a form of fanaticism. An example of what I mean is the person who believes that John McCain will win the U.S. presidential election or even continues to hold this belief after the election is won by Obama. Royce summarizes Kant's great insight:
"I regard all human experiences as belonging to a single system, to a single unity of possible experience. There is then, says Kant, virtually but one experience. [God?] And all physical facts are conceived as facts existent for this one experience, and thus as mutually linked. We conceive all momentary observations of ours as fragmentary glimpses of that one experience. The unity of the physical world is therefore conceived by us in terms of the unity of a sort of ideal or virtual self, the self of an ideal or possible human observer of whom we conceive that whatever fact we acknowledge to be real in the physical world is ipso facto viewed as observable by this [abstract] self." (Royce, pp. 21-22.)
Think of this "unity" that we are as "freedom-that-becomes-love." Mind. Consciousness. Each of the terms in the foregoing sentence requires extensive definition and discussion. (Bradley, McTaggart.)
What is this "must appear" quality of the universe? Why must the universe present itself to rational agents in some forms and not others? Why is "love" a kind of directedness or calling in persons that is comparable to an instinct in other animals for completion or self-realization or happiness that involves "fitting" with (or into) the universe of others?
Cambridge University's superstar physicist Stephen Hawking says:
"... the only way [for us] to explain our universe is by our presence in it. 'This principle can be paraphrased as, 'Things are as they are because we [observers] are.' ..."
John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 112. (Hawking's observer of black holes is an abstract construct, by the way, not all that distant from Kant's "transcendental ego.")
Why is it that we are the way we are, intellectually? Why are we, as rational agents, able to comprehend the universe only when it presents itself to us -- as the universe is wont to do -- in a "rationally comprehensible manner"? Why are we called or driven to understand or be in harmony with the universe? I will call this harmony, love. How would you define the "fit" between individual minds and Mind? Is this "fit" another word for love? Intellectual order implies mind; mentality implies intellectual order and ordering. What is the compatibility between orders or intelligences, human and universal? Spinoza to Kant, then Hegel to Einstein. David Walsh, "Schelling on the Beyond of Existence," in The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 140-143.
"That is just anthropomorphism," you say? I do not think so.
If a supercomputer were to seek to know the universe, to impose form on chaos, then it would necessarily apply something like the "categories" -- in a semi-linguistic sense -- to the fruits of some kind of "sense-data": concepts of time, space, number would immediately be necessary. This is true even to formulate or articulate what may be called "facts."
You need fundamental concepts in order to have meaningful sense impressions. Merely because there are no uninterpreted facts, we are not required to accept that there are no objective truths. Facts are still real. Interpretations may be valid or objectively "better" for "really" excellent reasons, like truthfulness or accuracy to how things are. Albert Einstein insisted on this objectivity concerning general and special relativity as well as upon the absoluteness of, say, the speed of light:
" ... special relativity provided an absolute criterion -- one that all observers, regardless of their constant relative velocities, would agree on -- for deciding whether or not something is accelerating. [emphasis added] If the trajectory of an object follows through spacetime in a straight line, like that of the gently resting astronaut in Figure 3.7, it is not accelerating. If the trajectory an object follows has any other shape but a straight line through spacetime, it is accelerating. For example, should the astronaut fire up her jetpack and fly around in a circle over and over again, like astronaut (b) in Figure 3.7, or should she zip out toward deep space at an ever-increasing speed, like astronaut (c), her trajectory through spacetime will be curved -- the telltale sign of acceleration. And so, with these developments we learn that geometrical shapes of trajectories in spacetime provide the absolute standard that determines whether something is accelerating. Spacetime, not space alone, provides the benchmark."
Brian Grene, "Relativity and the Absolute," The Fabric of the Universe (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 61. (Einstein's theory establishes a new basis for objective truth.)
By way of comparison, see Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Oxford: Polity, 2003), pp. 13-88. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
I will now refer to a philosopher who is rarely mentioned in discussions of idealism or theology, Jurgen Habermas. Like Judith Butler, Habermas offers epistemological insights that are useful and relevant to the concerns of political, legal, theological theorists and some scientists:
"... Habermas's strategy is to return to the counterdiscourse of modernity -- neglected by Nietzsche and his followers -- in which the principle of a self-sufficient, self-assertive subjectivity was exposed to telling criticism and a 'counterreckoning' of the cost of modernity was drawn up. Examining the main crossroad in this counterdiscourse, he points to indications of a path opened but not pursued: the construal of reason in terms of a non-coercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition. Returning to the first major crossroad, [Habermas] uses this notion to reconstruct Hegel's idea of ethical life [Stillichkeit] and to argue that the Other of reason invoked by the post-Nietzscheans is not adequately tendered in their 'model of exclusion'; it is better seen as a divided and destroyed ethical totality."
What is this divided and destroyed "ethical totality"? Why do we miss this "home" where human intelligence wishes to dwell? Think of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland."
I realize that some of these books to which I refer are difficult to find. However, there are many important pieces of the knowledge puzzle that appear widely scattered and in danger of not being associated at all. Compare Beverly Nichols, The Fool Hath Said (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), pp. 52-56 (God and time) with D.M. McKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1957), pp. 1-22 (Pritchard's intuitionism), then pp. 61-174 (Kant and the notion of moral freedom):
"Habermas follows Hegel also in viewing reason as a healing power of unification and reconciliation; however, it is not the Absolute that he has in mind, but the unforced intersubjectivity of rational agreement." (Truth?)
Thomas McCarthy, "Introduction," in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. xv-xvi (emphasis added). (This translation is by Fredrick G. Lawrence.)
The conversation between Habermas and Pope Benedict becomes understandable in light of these ideas. Habermas also draws on the thoughts of Marx and Kant. David M. Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 75-94 ("Communication and the Law").
You may begin to appreciate the common association of contemporary science and social theory with natural law reasoning. I will now reach for my heavily annotated copy of John Finnis, "A Basic Form of Good is Knowledge," in Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 59-80.
More startling insights paralleling the conclusions of idealists and phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophers are found among mathematicians, not just quantum physicists. Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), pp. 279-287 (" ... He [Andrew Davies] also drew together the work of many fine mathematicians, linking ideas and creating concepts that others had feared to attempt.")
In order for key mathematical solutions to work -- as they demonstrably do -- there must be a shared mathematical "space" and language unifying researchers all over the globe who "meet" in numerical territory.
Much the same is true for philosophers. By silencing or censoring philosophers, or any thinkers, the only result is to obstruct the progress of knowledge. This has nothing to do with whether you "like" a person. I can contribute to knowledge by being wrong. So can you. There is no need to censor or suppress ideas that you believe are mistaken.
Powerful men and women are sometimes frightened of ideas that they dread precisely because those ideas are not mistaken. Ideas are indestructible and irrepressible. No society that fears ideas will last long.
Objections from social scientists, lacking a course or two in philosophy, will be based on contentions such as this: "How about God? Doesn't God know everything?!"
Well, God is a rational agent and would, thus, perceive the universe only as Kant suggests. "Aha!," say the psychobabblers, "so God is not omniscient."
Kant would respond by noting that God's perfect knowledge takes place "within" reason since God is the ultimate rational mind. The coherence in the rational order of the universe (rules of reason) are what makes God's freedom possible. God is the rules of reason and/or universal reason, everything revealed by science. Unity. Order. Beauty. Love. All of these words are ways of approaching the idea of God in the Kantian theological traditions that lead to classical hermeneutics. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
"I believe," Einstein said, "in Spinoza's God."
Notice the influence of Spinoza on German thought, including scientific thought. Reason was very popular in the eighteenth century, kind of like "The Beatles" in the sixties.
My sources here are The Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Doubleday, 1966), in F. Max Muller's translation of both the 1781 and 1786 editions, at pp. 452-457 and Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1919), especially pp. 1-87.
Other excellent recent discoveries for me are Arthur W. Collins, "Kant's Empiricism," in Thought and Nature: Studies in Rationalist Philosophy (Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 180-198 and E.J. Lowe, "Abstract Entities," in The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 210-228.
Kant's belief in God is not an item of knowledge. Kant regards this belief as a highly plausible, practical postulate. God belongs to what is outside the scope of the human mind's knowledge. However, God may be a necessary part of the human heart's knowledge or understanding.
Welcome to the Enlightenment, folks. Romanticism is coming up. Don't get up to buy pop corn, it gets better. Kant leaves the scene, like Elvis. After the music fades away, we realize that we are left with a dualism: 1) the way things are independently of all knowing subjects (noumenal reality); and 2) the way things must appear to all rational agents, in order for them to be known (phenomenal reality).
The post-Kantian challenge is to achieve a monism that makes reality singular, like those new fancy cellphones. The cognitive universe must become one by eliminating all dualisms. The empirical universe is admitted to be one, remember, whereas our knowledge is divided. This sets the scene for Romanticism and Hegel, then Britain's idealists will take their turn at philosophy's center stage.
If Kant may be thought of as the "Elvis" of modern philosophy, then Britain's idealists are "The Beatles."
Hegel and Bradley.
Romanticism is a reaction against this so-called excessive Kantian confidence in reason. Also, Romanticism is skeptical about the optimism of the Enlightenment. For the Romantics, the project of reconciling knower and known, subjective and objective in mind and being is an "endless" or always "unfinished" one. The Romantic sensibility is involved in an eternal quest for the "homecoming of the soul." ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
We live in a universe that is one, for us, even as it shatters into a million pieces in our scientific learning. We are animals, physically-bounded creatures, who (somehow) capture the truths of time and black holes, multiple dimensions, mathematical entities, time travel and other weird phenomena, mentally, by means of thought experiments.
How is such a knowledge and thinking possible? (See "Where are thoughts located?")
Hegel reacts against the Romantics even as he incorporates some of the "mood" of the movement in his dialectics.
Hegel insists that we can dispense with Kantian noumenal reality as all that exists outside or beyond the knowing subject because knowers are always already involved with what they seek to know. Knower-and-known are a bipolar unity, not mutually exclusive or independent terms.
Hegel challenges the individualism of Western epistemology and all metaphysics that seeks to abstract and isolate the agent from both cognitive matter and reality. Hegel anticipates developments in modern physics and the protean social realities that we must inhabit in postmodernity.
Like Aristotle, Hegel is one of the great philosophers of biology. Hegel appreciates that, as with many animals, ideas are social entities that become part of what is fundamental for threatened human creatures, ideas are necessary to survival, so that ideas must serve evolutionary purposes, dialectically, in terms of an ascending spiral, which is the only way ideas evolve.
"Can you distinguish the dancer from the dance?"
No? O.K., then think of the knower as the dancer and of knowledge -- the agent's known reality -- as the dance. They are always "identical."
My sources at this point are: Frederick Beiser, Hegel (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 53-79 ("Absolute Idealism") and Dieter Heinrich, "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's Aesthetics," in Michael Inwood, ed., Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp. 51-53.
I have just finished reading a helpful short book by Professor Alison Brown, On Hegel (California: Wadsworth, 2001), pp. 57-84. (See the quotation on pp. 66-67 from the Phenomenology.)
I recently purchased and I am looking forward to reading Paul Guyer's essays on Kantian aesthetics. I hope that this work will lead to Professor Guyer's encounter with Kant's theology. Paul Guyer, "The Symbols of Freedom in Kant's Aesthetics," in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 222-242.
Would it surprise us to discover that Professor Guyer is doing quantum physics?
Kant's aesthetics and religious writings seem to have the greatest influence on Hegel.
Doesn't this make all thoughts relative to thinkers? No, it makes thinkers "relative to" (expressive of) necessary thoughts or makes thinking possible that is always already within them, or us. The self only exists in and/or "as" history, context or culture -- as a flower lives in soil -- so that context is always defining of identity.
Like you, I am a "network of connections" developing as a project in time. To poison the soil is to kill the flower. Knower and known are each "in" the other. Each partner in this dance "mediates" the other through Hegel's process of "negation-of-negation." I negate the ways in which you negate me; I am altered as I alter you. This leads to Derrida's deconstructive project at the end of the twentieth century. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")
An important contemporary idealist, John MacMurray (also Marxist-existentialist-phenomenologist R.D. Laing), draws on Hegel by way of F.H. Bradley and John McTaggart, to emphasize the importance of love to this constitutive dialectic of self and other. Henry Paolucci, trans., & Anne Paolucci, ed., Hegel: On the Arts (Delaware: Bagehot Council, 1979), p. 11 ("The Symbolic Art Form.").
For a dramatization of these issues in aesthetics, theology and quantum mechanics, see Harold Pinter, "Screenplay: The Last Tycoon," in The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Screenplays (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 191.
Jean-Paul Sartre expresses this Hegelian idea of the Absolute in Marxist terms as a "totalization." ("'Che': A Movie Review" and "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
For those from the opposite side of the political spectrum, I suggest Jefferson and Lincoln. Today, I refer to philosophers like Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Charles Fried, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and (for Conservatives) Robert Nozick's Kantian individualism. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 294-397. (Best discussion of free will in the Kantian tradition leading to a return to the foundations of his ethics.)
Republicans should turn to Nozick's politics in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).
Hegel had an impact on Marx's materialist version of the dialectic, not on Marx's interpretation of history.
Karl Popper's admiration for Schopenhauer, inherited from his father and shared with Wittgenstein, made his views compatible with many idealist concepts, as noted by Bryan Magee and others. See Magee's Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper's Philosophy (New York: Open Court, 1985), p. 69. (Discussing Popper's defense of intuition and imagination in science and strong critique of "scientism.")
In a Kantian moment, Karl Popper says:
"Man has created new worlds -- of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for FREEDOM, and for helping the weak." (Popper, Open Society, vol I, p. 65.)
Here is the celebrated fusion of Thomism-Idealism in the thinking of John MacMurray, also Catholic priest Bernard Lonergan:
"The motive of love arises out of the human capacity for self-transcendence and leads to a fellowship based on care of the other-than-self. When we love, we live in the world, not for ourselves; we locate the reference of our activity beyond the self in others. Whereas fear is of the other for oneself, love is for the other. To let love dominate is, therefore, to give expression to the inherently social nature of our being." (Bevir and O'Brian, on MacMurray)
Each self is like a flower growing and living in the "soil" of his or her relations with all others: "Thought can grasp the real," Hegel argues, "only when it has fully grasped its own structures."
The only structure by which thought knows the world (for Hegel) is the dialectic. There may be other ways in which thought and empirical reality interact or may be associated by thinkers and/or scientists. For example, intentionality for phenomenologists; or constructivism for some scientists. Husserl and all phenomenologists and hermeneuticists, like Paul Ricoeur, are "methodological idealists." (Terry Eagleton's phrase in his summary in Literary Theory, pp. 48 -51, and elsewhere.)
Compare Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1983) with John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Now please turn to: Kimberly Hutchins, "Thinking the Second Sex," and "Re-Thinking the Second Sex," in Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Polity, 2003), pp. 55-111; then (get ready for a shock) Quentin Lauer, S.J., "Domination and Servitude," in A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), pp. 123-134, then it is back to Aristotle and Aquinas: Hugo A. Meynell, Redirecting Knowledge: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge From Plato to Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998), pp. 222-241, pp. 226-279, and in conclusion, Hugo A. Meynell, "Lonergan and the Problems of Contemporary Philosophy," in Introduction to the Philosophy of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991), pp. 141-169 (1st ed. 1976).
The dialectic is the "music" to which the dancer creates his/her dance:
"It should be obvious even from this brief account," Eagleton writes, "that [phenomenology] is a form of methodological idealism, seeking to explore an abstraction called 'human consciousness' and a world of pure possibilities." (p. 49.)
These various theories come together in contemporary phenomenology leading both to existentialist and non-existentialist forms of phenomenological thinking and to Paul Ricouer's "hermeneutics of freedom" -- all of which are highly compatible with feminist thinking (and re-thinking) of identity, gender-roles, sexual-orientations (plural) and politics or justice in society:
"No philosopher has gone further in the direction of a reduction of the 'being of the phenomenon' to the 'phenomenon of being' than Berkeley. And so it might seem strange that, at the beginning of Section III of the Introduction, [Being and Nothingness] Sartre should appeal to the Berkleian [sic.] formula 'Esse est percipi,' and, moreover, should link Berkeley quite explicitly with Husserl in this connection. Admittedly, if being is reducible to its being perceived, then, in the first instance at any rate, it becomes impossible to attribute transphenomenality to being. Being just is its appearing. But what if we shift the focus of attention from the percipi to the percipere, from the perceived object to the perceiving subject? Even Berkeley will concede a being to the subject, to the perceiver, indeed will not permit substantial reality to anything but a mind or spirit, whether finite or infinite."
Christopher McCann, Four Phenomenological Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 113.
The knowing agent must "be" whatever the status of ultimate reality. But then the knowing agent and how he or she knows anything is recognized as inherently social. Idealism is not solipsism. To be is to be with others. To be a woman must be to exist as some entity "defined" differently than a man. However, this difference in definition is only meaningful "in relation to" a man or masculinity. Hence, there must be a third term containing both masculine and feminine. Otherwise, both categories become meaningless.
It follows that masculine and feminine are mutually dependent within the subject as well as in the world. Homosexual and heterosexual; black and white; rich and poor -- all are dialectical partners. Each is meaningless, ultimately, without the other. (Simone de Beauvoir.)
Hegel's dialectic is a set of triadic relations describing a movement of estrangement (thesis), opposition (antithesis), reconciliation, return and transcendence (aufheben), leading to a synthesis, that becomes a new thesis. The Hegelian dialectic becomes a key cluster of ideas in the modern world. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
These ideas are connected to the theory of representation-construction that has taken on new urgency in postmodernist aesthetics. The hermeneutic circle may be applicable to political phenomena (trials) as well as art (movies). Prosecution and Defense? Verdict? McTaggart writes:
"If we examine the [dialectic] in more detail, we shall find that it advances, not directly, but by moving from side to side, like a ship tacking against an unfavorable wind. [Masculine/Feminine] The simplest and best known form of this advance, as it is to be found in the earlier transitions of the logic, is as follows. The examination of a certain category leads us to the conclusion that, if we predicate it of any subject, we are compelled by consistency to predicate of the same subject the contrary of that category. [Hegel's Science of Logic] This brings us to an absurdity, since the predication of two contrary attributes of the same thing at the same time violates the law of contradiction. On examining the two contrary predicates further, they are seen to be capable of reconciliation in a higher category, which combines the contents of both of them, not merely placed side by side, but absorbed into a wider idea, as moments or aspects of which they can exist without contradiction." (McTaggart, p. 1, emphasis added.) ("Master and Commander" and "God is Texting Me!" then "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
This "idea of the synthesis of opposites is the most characteristic in the whole of Hegel's system." (Ibid.)
Notice that the centrality of time in logic appears in Hegel long before Einstein. I refer the reader, once again, to Mr. Beverly Nichols' essay (cited above) developing the ontological argument for our time.
At the end of history, for Hegel, Spirit is revealed in the reconciliation of particular controversies and divisions that seemed inexplicable at each historical moment that are made comprehensible only in the perspective of the dialectic's complete ascending spiral and terminus, the Absolute ("Wholeness").
The knower's (mirror 1) encounter with reality (mirror 2) parallels this process of knowing-as-unfolding. The unitary subject of reflection is found in both mirrors, knowing-and-knowledge. Yet it can be seen as such only at the conclusion of the process of unfolding.
"The owl of Minerva takes wing," Hegel says, "only with the falling of the dusk." ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review" and, again, "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Love is a similar process of mutual construction. It is a kind of ultimate "knowing" in which each lover "becomes" (through defining) the other, and this sharing in identity is often something which is evident only at the end of people's lives together. Marriage is a dialectic, dialogue, or conversation.
I cannot be my best self without the person or persons, the human environment, making that best self possible.
A woman cannot realize herself, freely, if she lives in a sexist society. This is because the preconditions of her perfectly realized identity are missing. Hence, her very selfhood or identity is disconfirmed or denied and limited all the time.
Consider the effects of racial or other hatreds. I think of one woman, in particular, whose early "total life-circumstances" were a complete denial of her humanity. Such a woman's survival alone is a miracle. Hegel's Logic sets forth this universal process of knowing:
"The immediate sense-certainty of what is in front of you is, Hegel argues, not immediate at all. Your certainty that there is a page [or person?] in front of you is dependent on the other, i.e., the particular page, but the page is only certain because you perceive it as a page, which requires a general concept that can apply to any page. The supposedly immediate particular fact is therefore thoroughly mediated via a universal. The concreteness of looking at the particularity of what is in front of me can only be asserted as concrete because we use the universal notions of 'this,' 'here,' 'now' to indicate particularity. [See my essay "Why philosophy is for everybody."] These are 'indexical' words, which only gain their meaning by being applied in concrete contexts. What they apply to is, though, ... unstable." (Bowie, on Hegel.)
Please see my essays on F.H. Bradley and "Bernard Williams On Identity." Notice that this leaves us with the entangled concepts of instantiation/judgment:
"Without the universals the particular has no way of becoming knowable, but without the particular the universals have no content. Hegel insists, though, that the truth of immediate perceptions lies in the conceptual universality of the ways in which we talk about them; without this universality the particular is incommunicable, and so cannot be talked about in terms of its truth at all." (Contrast "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" with "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
My meaning and yours is found within a total coherence that is truth. Meaning is a "fit" between the individual and the organic whole of his society and species, only then within the totality of its history. We are "concrete universals." (See my essays on Bradley's philosophy.)
There is truth -- including ethical truth -- which is concrete and universal, objective and total, transcending all particulars or partial relations, for it is found only in the Absolute (think of another word for "Absolute"). Quantum theorists say: "Wholeness is truth."
Richard Wollheim, who was an expert on Bradley and a philosopher of psychology, approaches these issues from a different direction in "Cutting the Thread: Death, Madness, and the Loss of Friendship," in The Thread of Life, pp. 257-281. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
In his appendix to Appearance and Reality, Bradley writes:
"With regard to the unity of the Absolute we know that the Absolute must be one, because anything experienced is experienced in or as a whole, and because anything like independent plurality or external relations cannot satisfy the intellect. And it fails to satisfy the intellect because it is a self-contradiction. Again, for the same reason the Absolute is one system in the very highest sense of that term, any lower sense being unreal because in the end self-contradictory." (Bradley)
Any one item in the cosmos -- if we could discern all relations relevant to it and all that is -- would necessitate the totality of those relations that are the Absolute making that one item meaningful.
From contemplating my left sock, if I were smart enough, I should be able to deduce the totality of relations of meaning in the universe. It is important to see the ethical implications of this crucial insight concerning all that is with regard to every individual human being:
"... suppose that in theology I say that all men before God, and measured by Him, are equally sinful -- does that preclude me from holding that one is worse or better than another? And if I accept the fact of degrees in virtue, may I not believe also that virtue is one and is perfection and that you must attain to it or not? ... Suppose that for a certain purpose I want a stick exactly one yard long, am I wrong when I condemn both one inch and thirty-five inches, and any possible sum of inches up to thirty-six, as equally and alike coming short? Surely if you view perfection and completeness, in one way, it is a case of either Yes or No, you have either reached it or not. [The ideal.] But in the imperfect [messy, daily particularity we inhabit,] there is already more or less of a quality of character, the self-same character which, if all defect were removed, would attain to and would itself be perfection."
Even imperfection implies or requires perfection. ("Is this atheism's moment?")
A fundamental tenet of the Hebrew religion is that God is one in (or "as") a "Covenant" with Israel. Think of the different ways that you "constitute" the objects of relationships through your conceptualizing. Is a "Covenant" not another way of speaking of the Absolute? Think of an entire society choosing to develop its moral identity and aspirations through a shared "Constitution." If you call someone a "spic" or "fag," then what are you making that person "into"? How are you determining future relations between the two of you? ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
The most important chapter in Judith Butler's recent, very readable book, is the final political meditation: "Precarious Life," in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York & London: Verso, 2006), pp. 128-156. That chapter opens with a revealing quotation from Emmanuel Levinas: "... the surplus of every sociality over every solitude."
Butler and Derrida develop a greater awareness of their Jewish roots and increasing concern with social justice as they mature intellectually. A "sociality" may be indestructible even if a "solitude" is not. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
We are an unbreakable unity even when we are, physically, separated if we remain spiritually linked as a community. The danger for United States of America today is the threat to the spiritual unity of our society.
What if a person is viewed, exclusively, as a "customer" or "Jew," "inmate" or "defendant"? If you relate to a label or social science category as opposed to me, a name associated with a specific human being; if you turn away from an optimistic ideal or hope, like "person," to refer to a reified external category (file number #3356) or "behavior"; then is it more (or less) likely that you will achieve understanding of what is a person? Or who is this person? Or who am I? (See the writings of Bernard Lonergan on "insight" and "horizon" then "Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood.")
I suggest that our "constitutive dialectics" cannot be understood in purely external, instrumental terms. All forms of behaviorism and positivism in the human realm will fail, if our goal is to understand people (philosophy, hermeneutics), as opposed to knowing how their bodily mechanisms function (science).
See Scott Ryan, "Objective Idealism and Ethics," http://home.neo.rr.com/jsryan/writings/idealism_and_ethics.html (Persons are not abstract variables like "A" and "B.")
Let us "associate" this set of ideas with contemporary scientific phenomenology in the human sciences:
"... Husserl will admit that the law of being of consciousness is to be conscious 'of.' In so much as, for phenomenology, consciousness is already a consciousness 'of,' it pertains to the very being of consciousness to transcend itself, to pass beyond itself 'towards.' But even if the positionality of consciousness is sufficient to confer a certain transphenomenality upon consciousness, does it indeed follow that a being can be conferred upon consciousness as self-transcending? And if so, what conclusions can be drawn from the being of the phenomenon?" (McCann, p. 113.)
Forget the labels and try to see me. You will find yourself resorting to universals or categories immediately in any effort to communicate with me through symbols. The word "fact" is also an abstract category. This categorizing power is the essence of language -- our most common symbol is the word -- and all languages are shared if they are to function as languages, so that we find ourselves already joined by standing on common ground in language.
Each of us is and must be a part of the other long before the conscious act of mutual apprehension can take place. Language is a "Covenant." ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
This is called socialism or communitarianism, but you may call it anything you like: "Wholism is truth."
The puzzle only deepens when we ponder the mystery of language in which we are, right now, together with our drive towards ever greater connection with others through that same language. Self-interest is a clever if autistic child's understanding of human motivation.
Contrast Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 19, with C.S. Peirce, "Evolutionary Love," in Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1988), pp. 267-301; and Thomas S. Knight, Charles Peirce (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 69 ("Scientific Phenomenology").
Bradley points to the importance of feelings in knowing of others. To love others is to constitute a new world for others and the self. This suggestion has startling implications for our thinking about the environment, also socially and politically. I wish to refer the reader, once again, to the works of R.D. Laing.
Dialectics replaces a "masculine" metaphor of "conquering" nature, by which persons or societies are also seen as "things to be dominated and controlled," with an organic or "feminine" model of a universe in which we find ourselves that we help to create even as it creates us. The key Hegelian insight is to make use of both perspectives -- masculine and feminine -- at the same "time."
You may begin to see why Stove dislikes this "variable" intellectual disposition. This is mere "womanly wisdom." (David Stove) The universe "divides 'herself' into us." All of the images to capture this more flexible thinking are feminine. Mythological representations of this insight are also feminine. The idea is to give up the attempt to control or repackage the lives of others to suit our wishes and learn to live with other "freedoms in the world" as mysteries. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Conservatives will now accuse me of being a "woman," or gay. Leftists will complain about all of this talk of God or religion. This means that I am probably on to something true and important. I will refer to an essay by Professor Robin West entitled "Jurisprudence and Gender," which appeared originally in volume 55 of University of Chicago Law Review at page 1, in 1988.
I have reservations about doing so because West's comments concerning Unger's theory, especially, are inadequate and more so in light of Unger's post-1988 writings, which overlap with the type of feminist jurisprudence defended by Ms. West. However, Professor West offers flashes of insight that one would like to see developed by many scholars in feminist legal thinking that lead to new forms of communitarian politics. From these idealistic premises a complete feminist metaphysics and ethics may be developed. Please see the film "Mindwalk" and also Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point.
See Judith Butler's Gender Studies: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 119 and Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (New York: Anchor, 1982), p. 291.
I highlighted this passage, noting that Ms. Morgan anticipated -- by a decade or more -- the fancy theories of the eighties and nineties:
"That everything is energy, that everything moves, that everything is somehow discrete or separate, and interrelated or interconnected -- these seem rather vital scientific facts that politics would do well to examine. Furthermore, as Arthur Koestler wrote, 'The nineteenth-century model of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been dematerialized, materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy.' ..." ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
Why did scholars not see the obvious association between these interpretations of scientific developments and idealism as well as Continental phenomenology-hermeneutics and liberation theology or literary criticism?
Most of this idealistic philosophy is not understood by Professor Stove in his misleading and irrelevant criticisms of idealism. For Stove, this "feminine" (or sissy-like?) caring, concern or emotive "knowing" is only ambiguous, fuzzy, not sufficiently "rigorous."
Professor Stove should have attended an American law school since his intellectual attitude or method would have been richly rewarded there -- sadly, even by women. Stove is the philosophical dinosaur, not his feminist opponents. Asian cinema is discovering many of these ideas. See Wong Kar Wai's 2046 (Sony Pictures) and Takashi Yamazaki's Returner (Time Warner?).
An essay that seems to have nothing to do with feminism -- unless feminism is regarded as a form of madness -- which it once was, and this may explain Mary Wollstonecraft's stay at Bedlam is Adam Phillips, "Around and About Madness," in Equals, pp. 77-88 and Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, pp. 64-77. ("How has 'Woman' come to be?")
French historians concerned with the concepts of madness during the medieval and Renaissance eras have detected patterns that should interest feminists. This is pre-Foucault. Get busy, ladies. (I mean, women.) Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 20-27, discusses the Act of Parliament of 1742 governing the mad housed in "correctional facilities with criminals and paupers." Most of the persons to whom this law applied were poor women with children. For centuries the understanding of feminine identity really amounted to a conception of an insane man. A woman was defined by Victorians as a man who had gone crazy. I think it is more accurate to think of it the other way around. Men are illogical and deranged versions of women. ("Why Philosophy is For Everybody" and "Raymond Chandler and 'The Simple Art of Murder.'")
Loving another person -- even giving up my life -- may be in my self "interest," if I define my greatest interest as being fully human. Such thoughts make me hateful to those hostile both to the African-American religious tradition of moral struggle ("Soul") and to genuine philosophical feminism in the phenomenological tradition. Such views make me "a kind of woman" (horrors!), not "tough" enough, for those failing to understand what real "toughness" love provides. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
See the excellent introduction by Janet Todd to the novels Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft with Mary Shelley's Matilda, both published by Penguin in 1992. Professor Todd is the biographer of Wollstonecraft and the best authority I have discovered on nineteenth century novels by women, which includes two of the greatest novelists in world literature -- George Eliot and Jane Austen, both of whom display idealistic tendencies. From those two great women to Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt today by way of Virginia Woolf is but a single step. (George Eliot was a translator of German philosophers who was well-aware of German and British idealism.)
Professor Stove's Attack On Idealism.
Stove is a self-described "positivist" and "materialist." These philosophical commitments are crucial to an appreciation of his antagonism to idealism and (presumably) to his rejection of my position on foundations, phenomenological-hermeneutics.
Stove's antagonism to idealism and Continental thought is presented, of course, as entirely a matter of rational argument and judgment.
Judges in law courts similarly write in a neutral tone when analyzing legal issues, even when their conclusions are often determined by pre-analytical and non-rational philosophical commitments, or (to quote Holmes) "what the judge had for breakfast."
Among philosophers -- unlike judges -- theories are usually a matter of what they had for dinner sometime last week since ideas need to settle in the mind before they become clear.
After discussing Stove's foundational theoretical assumptions, which are not defined or defended by him in these essays (a common problem for fans of game theory), I turn to Stove's arguments in the order in which they are presented. I will examine essays one and two, by Stove, concluding with my opinions and suggestions for further reading.
Positivism and Materialism.
According to the Dictionary of Philosophy, "Positivism holds that the highest or only form of knowledge is the description of sensory phenomena. [Auguste Compte] holds that there were three stages of human belief: the theological, metaphysical and finally the positive, so-called because it confined itself to what is positively given, avoiding all speculation."
Notice how close positivism once was to phenomenology. A.J. Ayer is the superstar philosopher among logical positivists in the twentieth century. My guess is that Professor Stove placed Ayer's picture in his office.
Those who are "into" the now mostly discredited and abandoned logical positivism of, say, Language, Truth and Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936) may appreciate Stove's essays more than the rest of us. I usually do not "like" positivists, since I reject their philosophical views. However, I like Ayer. I always enjoy reading his work.
Ayer once came to the rescue of a lady arguing with her husband, who was about to become violent. The husband turned out to be Mike Tyson when he was heavyweight champion of the world. Tyson said to the seventy-eight year-old, diminutive Ayer: "I'm the heavyweight champion of the world."
Professor Ayer responded, with a very British aplomb: "And I am the Waynflete Professor of Logic at Oxford University. Let us discuss this matter as civilized men."
Frederic Raphael once said to Ayer that he admired Language, Truth and Logic only to have Ayer turn to him and comment with a satisfied chuckle, "I still get 2,000 a year from that book."
Clearly, Ayer was sympathetic to forms of American pragmatism.
Ayer's followers display a Stove-like slavish adherence to the fact/value and a priori versus a posteriori distinctions. Necessary claims are dismissed as tautologies. Only contingent claims about empirical reality ("I want the facts!") are deemed to constitute knowledge.
This claim concerning knowledge -- as only what is verifiable empirically -- is a metaphysical claim and cannot itself be verified empirically. It may be self-contradictory, but it sure sounds "tough-minded." Here is a summary of the "judo-flip" critique (Simon Blackburn) of the verification principle:
"I still find it difficult to understand the status of the principle of verification. It is either a proposition or no proposition. If it is [a proposition,] then it must be, on your [Ayer's] premises, either a tautology or an empirical hypothesis. If the former, no conclusion follows as to metaphysics. If the latter, then the principle itself would require verification. But the principle of verification cannot itself be verified." (Frederick Copleston.)
"Materialism is the view that the world is entirely composed of matter." What is matter? Physicists tell us that "matter resolves into forces and energy, and is just one among other physically respectable denizens of the universe."
It turns out that matter is only a kind of energy, as Mr. Talbot writes, like cerebral activity and/or thoughts possibly. (See again: "Where are thoughts located?")
Interactions at the sub-atomic level are more extensive and variable than first imagined. Material objects are "really" only particles in motion.
Material entities exchange particles all the time. All matter in the universe participates in this swirling particle soup at the tiniest levels of reality to say nothing of chaos and indeterminacy.
Solid objects (as opposed to ideas) having a fixed and unchanging "weight and mass" are non-existent, from the perspective of science, but they sure feel real to us.
Positivists shout: "Thoughts cannot affect reality!"
To which I answer: "Sure, they can. Nothing affects reality more than minds, which are also part of reality." See Amir D. Aczel, Descartes' Secret Notebook (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), pp. 1-10. (Descartes' ideas -- not Al Gore's -- are essential to the Internet.)
Ethically speaking, "it's all relative." Right? I'd say "wrong."
There is truth in ethical and all other matters. It is up to us both to construct and discover that truth. Truth is a little of both -- discovery and construction, or interpretation.
"Both Bohm and Pribam have noted that the experiences mystics have reported throughout the ages -- such as feelings of cosmic oneness with the universe, a sense of unity with all life, and so forth -- sound very much like descriptions of the implicate order. They suggest that mystics [philosophers, artists, mad persons] are somehow able to peer beyond ordinary explicate reality and glimpse its deeper, more holographic qualities."
Michael Talbot, "The Holographic Model and Psychology," in The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper & Collins, 1991), p. 63.
I have just read a wonderful short book discussing metaphysics after an essay by this same philosopher examining the ideas of F.H. Bradley. I am more convinced every day that Bradley was a century ahead of his era. Bradley's philosophy is more relevant today and may be suggestive to many thinkers who seem unaware of his works. Please see W.H. Walsh, Metaphysics (London: Hutchison, 1963), pp. 73-77 ("Metaphysics Without Ontology") and W.H. Walsh, "F.H. Bradley," in D.J. O'Connor, ed., A Critical History of Western Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 426-436 ("... reality comes to us in the form of immediate feeling!"), then compare Ken Wilber, "The Start of Personal Discovery," in No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), pp. 76-94 with Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down (New York: Perseus, 2005), pp. 47-57:
"Deterministic motion in quantum mechanics means logical and systematic evolution of the rule as time advances. Entanglement means interdependency in the rule."
Think carefully about this phrase "interdependency in the rule." Dialectic. Instantiation. Substitute for the word "rule" the term "network." Turn to the theory of representation and the "triangle of representation" (or meaning) and then to "Instantiation" in philosophy and theology. What is the rule? What does the rule "mean"? From Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), pp. 62-63 ("Duration") to F.H. Bradley, "On Floating Ideas and the Imaginary," in Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), pp. 28-29 ("Every idea qualifies reality ..."), finally, back to Hegel:
"... 'Here' and 'now' have elastic boundaries. If it is not to contract into a point without extention, 'here' manifestly suggests any part of space. 'Now,' too, connotes any portion of time, if it is not to collapse into an instant without duration." (Eternity in time.)
Jacob Lowenburg, "Introduction," in Hegel Selections (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1929), pp. xxiii-xv (discussing early Hegelian philosophy).
Hegelian reasoning has now become -- often unknowingly -- the epistemological basis for a new science of networks, systems, fusions of biology-chemistry and bio-physics in recent idealist theories:
"When Luhman's argument is read through Hegel's dialectical analysis of identity and difference, it becomes clear that the relation between systems and environment involves the very self-reflexivity characteristic of autopoietic systems. ... the environment is not an indifferent [inert object] but is itself a differential network comprised of a group of systems. If the differences that establish the identities of these systems display the self-reflexive structure of the systems themselves, then the relations between and among systems form something like autopoietic systems. [Humberto Maturana] Within this system of systems, parts and whole are not only reciprocally related but are virtually fractal -- the structure of the part mirrors the structure of the whole and vice versa." (Where's my left sock?)
Mark C. Taylor, "The Beauty of Organisms," in The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), p. 92. ("Strange Loops.")
Our ancestors discovered that a bridge or tower would not stand beyond a certain height, but would stand if the base or foundations were strengthened. They then constructed taller, also better buildings and bridges, by discovering reality's truths, which are both empirical and formulated as abstractions, abstractions possessing a necessary logic, or a structure of ideas.
"God" is indeed in the details (Einstein); also in the finished products and (mostly) in the relationship of all that is, which is where we also find freedom. (See "Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
What we call "music" is not a bunch of unrelated notes; rather, music emerges from the connectedness -- or legato phrasing -- between and among notes that constitutes the magic of music. Relationship(s) is how music -- and you -- come to "be."
Great literary music, poetry, is as much about the silences as the words linked by, and to, the mystery of a single personality as experiencing and communicating subject. Surely, the universe is meaningful and cogent only as an Absolute (or interconnectedness) in which each of us is a part that implies the whole. This is to find ourselves contemplating the idea of God, for it is to restate the ontological proof in contemporary terms. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?" then: "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
What word could we use to identify that totality from which every meaning is drawn and to which each entity and item contributes? Order? Intelligence? Absolute? Network? One more --God?
Please compare Julius Portnoy, The Philosopher and Music: An Historical Outline (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), pp. 195-218 with Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 213-265. ("The Re-Enchantment of the Person."), then compare these two works with Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Bantam, 1990), pp. 295-341 ("Breaking the Mirror") with James K. Feibleman, Understanding Oriental Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1976), pp. 172-174 ("One comes from an examination of Chinese philosophy with an impression of human dignity and timeless value.")
What idealism and phenomenology share with forms of classical Chinese thought is the understanding that ideas and thoughts are "realities," eternally, that create new realities, including the philosopher's reality within the confines of his or her study.
We find the sentences of others in the silences between our own sentences. Derrida is a Chinese philosopher. Arkady Plotinsky, "Complementarity and Deconstruction," in Complementarity (London & Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 191-271. ("Complementarity" -- compatibilism -- "enables one to describe comprehensively and employ productively the conflictual aspects of quantum phenomena that cannot be accomodated by classical theories.")
The relationship between "conflictual" qualities and Derrida's "deconstructive" linguistic-metaphysics should be obvious. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
If you were to appear at F.H. Bradley's doorstep in, say, 1897 and enter his home and observe him writing at his desk. Would you know his thoughts or his reasons for his beliefs only from what is visible on the outside?
No, you would need to read his books, talk to him, listen, sympathize and empathize, discover his pains and ways of easing them, his perspective on the universe and what he sees from that perspective that you may not see, but also what he feels and, perhaps, even what he may not understand about himself that lingers in the subconscious.
You must share a person's "form of life" to understand him or her (Laing, Lacan, Wittgenstein), discovering how much you share with others -- including those who seem most distant from you -- merely through their use of words in a common language.
Again: Feelings will be crucial. Has anyone been to Scarsdale, Connecticut? Bear this aggregationism or connectionism "in" mind. (I love all of these trendy terms.) ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Stove forgets what idealism is during the course of his discussion, undermining his own position.
"A Victorian Horror Story"?
Essay One.
Professor Stove begins with an attack on religion, an attack which is mostly irrelevant to what religions are or why people have religious needs or beliefs:
"In short men have always believed that there are gods around them, though they knew there were none." (p. 83.)
Joseph Campbell explains that religions and all mythical systems are within the human psyche, regardless of whether you believe that they are also "out there" as features of empirical reality.
The same is true of any scientific hypothesis or all concepts. Concepts enjoy an intellectual existence regardless of their merits as descriptions of material reality. The meaning of, and explanation for, religions has to do with what they say about us, by means of symbols, most of which are built into our languages. (See my essay on Ernst Cassirer's work.)
Derrida's writings should be consulted at this point, along with Cassirer's Essay on Man, Carl Jung's writings, and Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative/ Narrative and Interpretation.
If you admit that persons are "in the world," and if you recognize that religions are something "real" in persons, then religions are also in the world since they are part of persons living in the world and of human culture in every civilization. Religions are certainly "real" in that sense.
Nothing that exists, objectively, exists for no reason. And the objectivity of religious experience should be beyond dispute after 9/11 -- both in horrible ways (fundamentalist terrorism) and in noble ways (selfless heroism and loving compassion from rescuers).
Religion exists, on one theory, because human beings need shared religious experiences. "If God does not exist," Voltaire remarked, "it would be necessary to invent Him."
Professor Stove finds religious beliefs ridiculous. Stove asserts that anyone who believes in religion must not really mean it. "Such are the facts, and we all know them; but we are so constituted as to be unable to take them in." (p. 85.) (emphasis added.)
I find not religion to be ridiculous, but the literal types interpreting all religious texts as though they were police or income tax reports to be idiotic and irrelevant.
Religious texts communicate at symbolic and other levels beyond, or in addition to, their literal meanings. (George Santayana.)
Stove fails to appreciate why we are unable to take in what he calls "the facts." ("Daniel Dennett and the Science of Religion.")
Religions communicate ethical and psychological truth, not empirical "facts" -- whatever "facts" may be. Scriptures are not accounts of "what happened" historically, but attempts to say what happens to all of us psychologically and ethically, to examine the point of our lives. Truths of meaning (or interpretive-hermeneutic truths) and facts (descriptive or instrumental truths) are distinct.
Religions speak to us in the language of art and dreams, which must be symbolic and metaphorical; symbols and metaphors are structural components of all human languages, including scientific languages.
The narrative of science is also filled with metaphors and symbols. (Magee on Popper, pp. 65-74.)
At the foundations of all knowledge and languages are modes of "consciousness characteristic of the human mind throughout the ages. They are usually called the intuitive and rational and have traditionally been associated with religion and mysticism [also, equally,] with science. "... The rational and intuitive are complimentary modes [compatibilism] of functioning of the human mind. Rational thinking is linear, focused, and analytic. ... Intuitive knowledge is based on a direct, non-intellectual experience of reality arising in an expanded state of awareness."
The Turning Point, pp. 37-39. ("Spock and Kirk," or "Scully and Mulder.")
These are the words of a physicist. The question to ask about religion or myth, literature and many philosophical claims, it seems to me, is not whether these claims are factual; rather, the question to ask yourself is what does this proposition or claim "mean" to me? What is it "about" for me? Is the wisdom in this claim true? The "issue," in lawyer's jargon, is not whether there "really" was a Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve (or Adam and Steve?), a serpent or a magic apple, but what is the meaning (or meanings) of that story?
Religion is about the meanings of our actions and lives. Religions are not descriptions of events taking place in nature. My view is that the Adam and Eve story is about what makes us human: freedom and the risk of evil that freedom brings.
No meaning that holds (as meaning) is merely "relative." Meanings are shared because they are (or become) objective for rational agents who are similarly situated. This is true as a matter of rational necessity. (Kant) Otherwise, meanings could not function as meanings.
If there were a God, why would such a Being communicate or "be" by means of "narratives" is a popular question in recent theology? This is a way of asking why we need to communicate by means of "narratives." How many narratives do we enter into as a matter of "becoming" persons? Are you and the universe not narratives? Is there any way for you not to be a social entity? What would you call the binding element in your "relationships"? We all know where the narratives of our lives are going, except that (as they used to say about TWA airline in the sixties) "getting there is half the fun." Actually, getting there may be all the fun.
Maybe God may be thought of as a kind of "narrative" in which we all participate. According to some trendy theologians, God chooses to participate in, or "as," the collective narrative(s) of our lives? ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
"The known is the knower; thought and being are one. This is Hegel's avowed idealism -- the identification of the essence and evolution of the universe with the activity of an all-pervading mind -- resulting from making central the dialectical process as a mode of insatiable experience."
Hegel Selections, at p. xxxiii.
Stove complains that the motive for idealist philosophy is religious. There are several responses to this claim:
This is irrelevant to whether idealist claims are true or to the assessment of idealism's meaningfulness in capturing important aspects of human experience. The motive for a philosophy is distinct from whether that philosophy is true, in a factual or literal sense, or whether its arguments are valid and suggestive or helpful to adherents in living their lives. A bad argument may be highly suggestive, by the way, leading to a good one.
The motive for a lot of scientific work is also religious or mystical. This was true for Einstein. Certainly, this is historically true, given the accounts of alchemy and religious associations with the tradition of medicine and natural philosophy in Aristotle's thought.
Scientism is also a quasi-religious attitude motivating many philosophers today, like Stove perhaps. This is distinct from whether what Stove says is persuasive, which it is not. (See David Deutsch's classic paper on "Physics, Philosophy and Quantum Technology.")
Motives for philosophies or religions are irrelevant to the merits of those modes of discourse. If idealism is a child of religion then so is the narrative of modern science. Nothing follows from this claim of origins concerning the value or validity of idealism, religion, or science.
See David Deutsch, "Comment on "'Many Minds' Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by Michael Lockwood," http://www.qubit.org/people/david/Articles/CommentOnLockwood.html (1996). (The "Many Minds" quantum theory is matched, almost identically, in several stories found in Hindu mythology and in Kant's as well as Hegel's works.)
All of us (on one account) are "many minds" unified, if at all, through a creative process of identity-making. Perhaps something similar may be said of the universe. Compare Roy E. Peacock, "An Ocean of Truth," in A Brief History of Eternity: A Considered Response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Suffolk: Monarch, 1989), pp. 145-152 ("The search is on for the mind of God!") with Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Relevance of the Beautiful," in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3-53 (" ... the word becomes binding, as it were; it binds one human being with another.")
Concerning the history of scientific thinking, Islamic civilization provides foundations for much Western scholarship in mathematics and physics, see H.J.J. Winter, "The Arabic Achievement in Physics," in Robert M. Palter, ed., Studies in Ancient and Medieval Science: Towards Modern Science (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1961), pp. 171-179.
Stove objects to the identification of "reality with experience." (p. 91.) Also, he rejects the claim that the universe should be thought of as "kindred." (p. 91.)
The picture of the universe increasingly revealed by science -- chaos theory in particular -- may be associated with the intricate design and decorations in Mosques, often these decorations are made from the lettering of texts in the Koran, where elaborate and subtle patterns in nature intercommunicate to create a larger kind of beauty or unity.
Water is "kindred" to fish, in the sense that they swim in it and die without it; likewise, the universe is "kindred" to us because we are made up of the same particles and energy that constitutes everything else. In terms of the "story" of evolution, we are related to all other life on the planet. There is nothing irrational in such a belief or observation. It would be irrational to believe that a marble statue ("Galatea"?) is not related to the marble from which it is made. Perhaps the statue is even related to the sculptor, and vice versa, also as an image it reveals the culture to which it belongs. In our relationships, each of us is both sculptor and statue, dancer and dance. Of course, humanity and the universe are kindred. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "Pieta.")
Stove objects to Christian charity in the Third World because it makes people in such countries "reach for Russian rifles." Independence is not acceptable in "wogs"? Stove can barely refrain from using the word. (p. 93.)
Real independence is not only a matter of rifles. It is obtained by people, for themselves, and not brought to them by others. In this process of freeing ourselves, both philosophies and religions -- as interpreted and altered by free people everywhere -- may be useful, regardless of their places of origin or the motives which lead to their creation. See Sushil Kumar Saxena, "Thought and Reality," in his Studies in the Metaphysics of Bradley (New York: Humanities, 1967), pp. 172-193. (This Indian scholar's fusion of idealism with Hindu metaphysics is fascinating.)
There are many insults directed at idealist terms by Stove, which does not amount to an argument of any kind. For example, "The absolute was a fine garbage disposal unit for matter and space, but also, it shredded and emulsified minds as well as bodies, values as well as facts, religion as well as science, all with the same sublime indifference." (p. 95.)
This amounts to objecting to the definition of the word "absolute," which is the idea of "all-inclusive." My shoe is in the absolute, the t.v. set, the pen I write with, science, Yankee Stadium -- everything. Again, what follows from Stove's disdain? Nothing. You may not like the word, but it exists and is being used. Everything is in the Absolute, because every thing is related to all other things. Each item remains distinct and is not "emulsified." ("F.H. Bradley's Concrete Universal.")
What is more, scientists now agree that nothing retains its identity or meaning in "splendid isolation" (which may be impossible); everything is realized only in "community" (or connectedness), as part of the Absolute. The concept of the "Absolute" is necessary, even indispensable. In explaining his own position Stove says: "... my materialism could be epitomized, adequately for most purposes, as follows: human beings are a race of land-mammals, the most intelligent things known to exist, but things [emphasis added] which are born, develop and die like all other mammals." (p. 98.)
I do not regard any person as only a "thing." No human being is only an object. Many idealist philosophers can accept Stove's naturalism, without accepting his disregard for the ethical and ontological special or unique qualities of humans.
A person -- or any other living creature -- that suffers has a greater call on my concern and attention than any "thing" or object, including a gold watch or Mercedes Benz automobile.
If you regard persons merely as "things" then what you do to them becomes insignificant. Is this ethically desirable? I doubt it. See Cornel West's warnings about nihilism, or turn to Marx and humanistic Marxists.
Humans are animals that are born and die. Humans are also beings with spiritual lives who are capable of love. These claims are not contradictory.
Just as sense data and concepts are equally necessary for thought, so persons live materially and spiritually, legally and ethically, physically and aesthetically -- all of these ways of living our lives are aspects of our one life. They take place inside and outside the subject, until that distinction collapses. These unities-in-differences are our shared lives, which are "experienced" ultimately (Bradley, Royce and also in the Idealism-Romanticism of Jose Marti), as "unities-in-search-of-others," or "unity-without-difference." ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Societies with different economies and political values may be "compatible"? Cuba and the United States, for example, Israel and Palestine?
We share in a paradoxical situation called "being-in-the-world-with-others."
We are all "linked words" in a language called "the Absolute" for idealists. There is and can be no plausible human philosophy which excludes women as equal creators and recipients of thought -- despite Stove's discontent -- since human (and philosophy) must include, EQUALLY, both masculine and feminine. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Feminism focusing on gender complexity and equality does not involve fashion requirements or instructions concerning what words may be used in the privacy of our bedrooms. Feminism should be more interested in power issues among genders and sexual identity issues (Foucault and feminism is a future topic), also in how power is unequally distributed in sexist societies.
Sexism damages both men and women, especially women. Feminism is compatible with a spiritual life for persons of all faiths or no religious faith, atheists and scientists -- all may share in this brand of feminism. Idealism has been deemed helpful by a number of leading feminist philosophers, like Kimberly Hutchins and Iris Murdoch as well as many more. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women" and "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Philosophy of Science.")
A culture or an individual that undermines or disempowers the "feminine principle" will gradually weaken and may self-destruct. Masculine and feminine must be in harmony within and beyond the subject:
"It is a necessary part of a man's development to meet the anima first in her projected form, that is, out in the world, and deal with her there. Concomittantly, the same thing needs to happen to the woman in connection with her animus. Otherwise, anima and animus remain locked in the unconscious and are not released to create the struggles that bring with them the potential for a widening of consciousness. ..."
Judith Singer, "Anima and Animus," in Boundaries of the Soul (New York: Anchor, 1973), p. 252. (To break the connection between animus and anima, male and female is to invite psychological suicide.)
See also M.-L. Von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," in Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1968), pp. 157-255.
Western culture has threatened the feminine principle with obliteration for the Jungians. The entire culture is "out of balance and, therefore, self-destructive," violent and irrational in many ways because of this devaluing of the feminine powers of the psyche. ("'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review.")
These are developments of "archetypal" thinking that are a psychological evolution of Kant's categories and Hegel's dialectic in Jungian analytical psychology.
If you oppress women, Carl Jung warns, your entire society may well suffer a kind of creative strangulation. Release of the feminine powers in the psyche (for a man) or masculine powers (for a woman) is essential to integration. Integration of masculine and feminine powers in culture is necessary in all human societies, and not only for atomized individuals, but (collectively) for nations.
Stove's complaints about idealist wishes for a "congenial universe" (who wants an uncongenial universe?), are also irrelevant. Wishes have no bearing on idealists' efforts to defend their views in the public square.
Bradley is one of the fiercest polemicists in the history of philosophy. Bradley relies only on reason. I say much the same of Kant, Hegel, many other idealists and phenomenologists, including Gabriel Marcel, who may be classified as an idealist and a phenomenologist. Kolakowski's essay on Husserl is must reading. Ricoeur may also be included in both categories, arguably, despite Ricoeur's rejection of Cartesian dualism and classical rationalism.
In America, idealist Josiah Royce and Mary Whiton Calkins may be recommended on these issues, and a complex hybrid-philosophy, such as Judith Butler's idealistic-phenomenological-hermeneutic theorizing, is highly recommended along with Marjorie Grene's socio-bio-ethics.
No scholar, to my knowledge, has associated Butler's and Grene's feminist philosophies. Butler is also a fusion-thinker, dissolving boundaries between analytical and Continental approaches -- like Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze before her work appeared.
American women are among the most important contemporary philosophers. If you are a student of philosophy in Latin America (or Europe) interested in American thought, I urge you to study Butler's and Grene's books.
Stove is baffled that Kant says "space is empirically real (even if it is also transcendentally ideal) ... " (p. 103.)
The human experience of things being either close or far away is organized, made possible and communicated, Kant says, by means of the concept of space and a few others. My shoe is here, but my sock is over there. I apply a concept (shoe) to: 1) my interpretation of sense data (what I see over here); so I can 2), put on my socks and shoes. What part of this do you not get?
Stove confuses Berkeley's claim about what we know and the knowledge that exists for the knower, with what exists in fact -- which may be unknowable, except for Berkeley's God. Yet Stove has no problem saying: "... since it was published, [Berkeley's idealism] has done so much damage to sanity that, if syphilis had been introduced into Europe deliberately by one man, that man would have done less harm than Berkeley." (p. 109.)
This statement provides a glaring example of the censorship that is seen as convenient for dealing with ideas that fascism cannot understand or defeat. This is the same David Stove who said "ideas do not affect reality"?
If Stove believes that idealism has this formidable negative power, then he is an idealist.
The Absolute is our "experience," Professor Stove, because it is a concept. Hence, the Absolute is experienced, mentally, like all concepts. (p. 116.)
Stove spends most of his essay telling us that no "womanly emotions" must be allowed to cloud our "manly judgment," then he writes: "Their [idealists'] anthropocentrism was the reverse of unflinching: you can FEEL [emphasis added] it everywhere in their writing, but you can pin it on them nowhere." (p. 119.)
This is the epitome of what Stove rejects as "unphilosophical."
Stove's reliance on "feeling" as a source of insight that he cannot "pin" on these philosophers makes everything he has claimed in his foundational stance false or contradictory.
Professor Stove was wearing a dress, as it were, under his gray suit.
Stove then has the nerve to complain of idealists' "logical falsity" (p. 120.) This is without citing a single persuasive instance or example of such falsity. (p. 120.) Incidentally, "Absolute" is a concept and so is "person." Just as you are a person -- no matter who you are -- so it is certain that no matter where you are, even in New Jersey, you are and must be part of the Absolute.
Is this claim that idealists' "anthropocentrism" is contradictory valid? Why? Is it based on Stove's "feeling"? Even if he cannot "pin" it on anyone? Stove's "womanly intuition" fails him.
Notice that this is granting Stove the cognitive value of feelings -- which idealists and existentialists admit (Marcel, Dr. King) -- but noting that Stove fails to articulate a persuasive basis for such intuitions, or to remain consistent with his own premises.
It is Stove -- not feminists -- who has a problem with acknowledging his own unavoidable reliance on traditionally "female" forms of cognition -- emotional knowledge included -- supplementing and improving any so-called rationality seeking only to be "tough minded."
Professor Stove's sheltered life has not brought him into contact with many "tough-minded" women. I can think of several women who would easily "kick Stove's ass," philosophically speaking. Examples? Mary Wollstonecraft (rights theorist), Mary Whiton Calkins (idealist), Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch (both phenomenologist-existentialists), Angela Davis (Marxist), Susan Haack (not an idealist, analytical pragmatist), Judith Butler (gender and culture theorist), Marjorie Grene (phenomenologist, even in her eighties or nineties Ms. Grene would "knock out" David Stove) -- all are philosophical "tough gals" and all seem to be more sympathetic to idealism as well as its legacy than Stove.
Women were traditionally required to master learning in both the public world of power and commercial activities, philosophy and science, while also developing "wisdom" about emotional relationships and a kind of control in private life that provided a back door to power that was denied to them by way of the front door.
The great "Salons" of seventeenth century France provide a clear example of women who were scholars and leading intellectuals -- despite being denied access to universities -- who also dominated the private realm of relationships and governed nations from behind the scenes. ("Master and Commander.")
It may be useful to think of idealism as an early philosophical form of the famous "womanly aptitude" for "multitasking." It relies upon an ability to dwell in two worlds at once, even as these dual realms are brought together in one world of personal experience (Absolute?) as opposed to behavior. See again: Professor Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, pp. 148-155. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
Another example of women playing a leading role in politics and power, culture, and in the development of ideas is the world of Venetian courtesans -- who served as diplomats and intelligence agents as well as Davidsonian "radical translators" of meanings from the political and diplomatic world to the intellectual world, then to the world of the arts.
This "bridging-role" is one that seems to be common to women in all civilizations. It is vital to the progress of civilization and growth of learning. Yet this crucial role is mostly ignored by historians of philosophy as is the mechanism for the translation of ideas defining the movements of Western thought from one social context to another. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
The parade of prominent men we associate with the intellectual project of the West -- this is no criticism of those men -- must be supplemented with the narratives of drawing room (and bedroom) conversations as well as palace intrigues that established necessary connections in thinking, conversations often lighting the fuse to Modernity's intellectual and cultural revolutions.
See generally, John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 300-459 and Lujo Bassermann, The Oldest Profession: A History of Prostitution (New York: Dorset Press, 1967), pp. 104-138. (Courtesans and prostitutes provide an important chapter in the chronicle of Western thought about politics, society, manners and love.)
Every history of the philosophy of love in Western civilization ignores the role of love's professionals. This is like writing a history of Western philosophy and ignoring professional philosophers. How is eros transformed by commerce? How is sex distinguished from love-making in different historical epochs?
Tulia D'Aragona's life and philosophical acumen have not been captured in a biography by any feminist scholar of which I am aware. Ms. D'Aragona's client list as a prostitute in ancient Rome was such that streets were paved so that she might walk easily to her appointments. The empress Theodosia is reported to have begun her life-story as a prostitute in the circus maximus while contributing later to Justinian's famous legal code, also displaying a fondness for "disputation" with philosophers -- among other things. Theodosia was a self-taught jurist, philosopher, poet and advocate for the satirists, and all women.
I continue to believe that a modern form of idealism and/or phenomenology, drawing on neglected thinkers would provide a solid foundation for a truly radical, egalitarian, and non-sexist feminist political theory in postmodernist culture.
I believe that it is precisely this compatibility between idealism and some forms of feminism that Stove dislikes.
See Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan, 1917), pp. 6-12, pp. 557-560. Professor Calkins describes David Hume's philosophy as: "pluralistic phenomenalistic idealism." (pp. 150-190.) See also Professor Drucilla Cornell's discussion of "The 'Postmodern' Challenge to the Ideal of Community," in The Philosophy of the Limit (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 39-62.
Stove has made his confusions clear: "What idealism requires is that billiard balls, and everything else, be thoughts ... in the sense of an identity claim." (p. 123.)
Everything you can know about billiard balls or anything else is (for Stove and all materialistic-empiricists) "electrical signals interpreted by your brain" so as to be found in your mind, allegedly. Your "experience" of the billiard ball is what the billiard ball is "for you." Some aspects of the experience ("round") will be pretty universal because they are based on concepts ("roundness"). Like any rational mind, you will deploy your concept of "roundness" to allow you to have a sensory experience of the billiard ball. Thus, your subjective experience of the billiard ball also has an objective component.
"Roundness" is a shared theoretical construct. There is no fact or concrete reality that comes before thinking. "Concrete," "reality," and "fact" are all abstract concepts, like "mind." Thinking or concepts are part (or constitutive) of all experience.
"The self and the world," Putnam says, "jointly make up the self and the world."
Your experience also has a subjective component. It is with your eyes that you see the billiard ball and with your hands that you touch it, deriving sense-data from these actions.
There is, on the one hand, Carmen Electra. She exists as a concept or idea. She is also, on the other hand, a person living materially somewhere -- a person that I might touch -- so as to have sensory experience to confirm my conceptual or "ideational" knowledge. This touching is only desired for philosophical reasons.
Having concluded Stove's first essay, it becomes clear to me that Stove has no clue of what is idealism.
Brand Blanshard may help readers to understand idealism a little better than Stove does, before moving on to essay two.
"Mind, in taking thought, attempts to pass beyond its present experience to what it would be but is not yet, and so far as it has the thought of this end, it already is the end in posse. The idea is thus both identical with its object and different from it. It is identical in the sense in which anything that truly develops is identical with what it becomes. It is different in the sense in which any purpose partially realized is different from the same purpose realized wholly." (Brand Blanshard.)
My purpose (and yours) is to realize myself. This is something I cannot accomplish without you. We cannot accomplish this shared realization without all others to whom we are joined, spiritually, through love. Love is what we are all here to do. (See my essay "Flower in the Crannied Wall.")
It is this sense of being part of something much larger which draws us to idealist thinking, also to much speculative work in the hard sciences and to religious commitment or social struggle. Deus caritas est.
Some people are able to think in terms of this flexible "yes-and-no" quality which is human "being-in-the-world"; others cannot think in such terms, or reject such thought for temperamental reasons. This theme of "doubleness" is essential to the work of writers like John Fowles and Gore Vidal.
I may have a unique experience of this matter, but I have found such intellectual flexibility more often in feminine styles of thought, which are available to all, than in typically male patterns of thought, if there is such a thing.
I am certain that such flexible thinking will be essential in the future, if we are to have a future.
Essay Two.
Stove's assessment of Berkeley would not pass an examination in that thinker's work at any university today. I suggest that you consult Professor Warnock's book on Berkeley or the introduction to my trusty paperback copy of Berkeley's writings by David M. Armstrong. Stove begins by saying:
"A useful collection could be made of idols of the philosophical tribe: falseties [sic.] which are carefully handed down, as though they were precious truths, from each generation of philosophers to the next." (p. 135.)
Stove's own "scientism" is one such false ideology -- a kind of religious faith -- which will soon be seen as such by many more persons. Continental thinkers are already clear about this: I am sure that scientism, as opposed to real science, will become a subject for much wonder by future scholars.
Stove indulges in a weird self-disgust and misanthropic ranting in his essays. I will provide an example of his venom in my closing remarks in this section. For some reason, Stove associates women with humanism (or humane compassion) as an evil. (See my essay on John Finnis and my comments about witchcraft.)
Hence, Stove's disdain for the feminine mind. It is Professor Stove's mind that is less than dazzling. Imagination and sensitivity are terms of abuse for David Stove.
1): Stove tells us that there can be "no demonstrative argument for a matter of fact and existence." (p. 136.)
This claim may be valid or not, but it is impossible to tell which it is since Stove does not define his terms. What is a "fact"? How does he understand a "demonstrative argument"? Is this not Stove's demonstrative argument concerning a matter of fact? How does this relate to his own attempt to establish women's lack of intellectual capacity on the basis of a priori arguments?
Not all necessary propositions are tautologies. There are propositions which are certain and not purely formal. Take another look at the paper I mentioned by Professor David Deutsch, a world famous scientist and not a philosopher, "Is the human race a universal constructor? [or an idealist?] -- a question with tremendous reverberations for things like epistemology and cosmology, and actual metaphysics." http://www.david.deutsch@qubit.org/ (Deutsch's e-mail address is published.) ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
Kant rescues a priori knowledge of the world with the concept of synthetic a priori propositions. Recent and highly persuasive defenses of a priori knowledge are provided by Christopher Peacocke of Columbia University. Christopher Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 148-194. Professor Copleston says:
"Now take the principle of contradiction. I think that there is a metaphysical version of the principle which is not simply what is sometimes called a 'law of thought,' but rather is imposed on the mind by its experience of being, or rather, by its reflection of its experience of being." (Copleston, emphasis added.)
I agree. Stove does not. Yet he offers no reason (nor any argument) to refute Kant or Copleston on this issue. (p. 137.)
No, this is not contradicted by our encounter with quantum physics. This is a point about how to understand and transmit quantum physics, or anything else to others. This need for a public discourse is what allows us to say that our STATEMENTS about dialectics or the paradoxes of quantum interactions are true and not the opposite. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 578-609. ("The Entangled Quantum World" then see my essay "Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
The statement that there is uncertainty in the quantum realm and the opposite statement that there is no uncertainty cannot both be true at the same time if made by the same speaker about the same subject-matter. Yes, I am aware of Schrodinger's cat.
It may be the case that the speaker does not know which statement is true. However, the speaker cannot, simultaneously, know and yet not know whether his or her statement concerning any single aspect of quantum interactions is "true."
This is an epistemological claim that suggests Schrodinger's cat is never knowably both alive and dead, but must be known as one or the other, alive or dead, when we open the box to see that cat. The act of opening the box (subjective knowing) CREATES or contributes to creating the reality that is observed (what exists objectively). Until the box is opened the cat has an equal probability of being either alive or dead. Quantum reality is undetermined, a mere flux of possibilities, uncertainties. Alternatively, there is a universe in which the cat is alive and another in which it is dead, depending on your preferred quantum theory.
We provide the "form" and existence (realities) provides the "content." Reality is instantiated in the act of knowing the object-of-knowledge. There is a "fusion of horizons" between knower-and-known in quantum mechanics as in Gadamer's aesthetics without, necessarily, sacrificing either objectivity or truth in either setting. Charles Taylor, "Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes," in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, J. Kertscher, eds., Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 279-299. This is to enrich and deepen our understanding of truth and beauty by restoring the Romantic insight that these concepts are related in our "elegant" universe.
2) Stove suggests that idealism is false because "birds land on trees." (p. 140.)
Yet if Stove and every other knowing subject were removed from the universe, there would be no one left to know whether birds land on trees, or whether either one or both (tree and bird) continue to exist, though it is likely that they would exist which is what idealists have argued all along. This includes Berkeley, who suggested that God's presence always guaranteed the continued existence of knowledge and of the universe.
Quantum physicists insist on a need for an observer that allows the universe to snap into existence for the observer. Think of the word "God" as designating the "rational and all orders of the universe," everything revealed by science and all other human experiences -- including "feelings" -- then take another look at Professor Deutsch's paper in quantum physics. If reality is the dance and love is the music to which we all dance, then what would you call the "dancing" that you are? (See "Is this atheism's moment?")
3) Stove objects to the claim that there are shared abstractions or universals because ideas of "roundness," universals, differ from mind to mind. (p. 146.)
In fact, Stove commits the logical error of confusing a judgment made about a particular billiard ball (individual), with a general idea (or universal) concept of roundness, which is the same for all, always and everywhere (universal). The concept is abstract; the judgment is concrete. Universals and particulars are necessary to cognition or judgment. This is to suggest a postmodernist collapse, at the ultimate stage, between these "antinomies" which is a kind of methodological idealism. (Unger, Ricoeur, Greene and phenomenological-hermeneutics.)
Lawyers may wish to recall the distinction between law and equity. Any sophisticated legal system must allow for both law and equity. It is a fact that you exist. As a factually existing being you are, simultaneously, a valuing person whose own life has value. You exist as both subject and object. To limit the way you understand or regard persons to only one of these categories -- say, as "objects" -- is to fail to understand persons who must be subjects (experiencing agents in themselves) and objects (to others).
Roundness, number five, the idea of Carmen Electra -- are all entities that are quite real and universal, especially the last of these items or entities, as I can attest. However, if applied to particular experiences, they will differ for each person. Think of ethics, values and valuing. I will think of Carmen Electra. Surely, the idea of Carmen Electra and her warm reality are connected. "Ideally," they are connected to oneself.
Befuddled psychobabblers will interrupt to argue that "quantum mechanics means that, like, everything is all contradictory and stuff ... you know, relative, so ... um, the cat is dead and not dead, or whatever."
Not really. A person is either knowably alive or dead at any one moment in time. If we stretch the understanding of time ("now") to encompass, say, one hundred years, then "alive" and "dead" become points on a spectrum -- a unity -- for a single organism, man or cat. If we do the same for an electron in the quantum realm ("now"), the measure of time is much more brief and "location" more fleeting, or close to instantaneous. However, remember that Schrodinger can not KNOW his cat ("electron") to be alive or dead until he opens the box.
Placement of an organism in eternity includes the conditions "alive" and "dead," which are time-dependent; knowledge of which condition obtains at any point will be limited to one or another condition of the organism (alive or dead) "when" that organism is, in fact, "observed." The complexity of the above position is compatible with quantum mechanics and idealism or phenomenology, also with many new forms of mathematics, which must become the language for describing -- with extraordinary beauty -- these conceptual realities.
4): Stove suggests that it is crazy to say that there are no trees without minds, but he ignores the more interesting claim that there can be no knowledge of trees without minds. If he is willing to suspend actual sensory confirmation needs, so as to "know" what exists in his absence or without his "empirical experience" (by Stove's understanding of the term), then why not believe in God?
5): Referring to Schopenhauer as a "pathological wind bag" (p. 157), does not prove that Schopenhauer was wrong. A person may be both a good philosopher and a "pathological wind bag," as both Schopenhauer and I may illustrate. You decide. Much worse is the pathological wind bag who is not a good philosopher (Stove?), but enough about New Jersey's politicians. (Senator Bob?)
Given Schopenhauer's view of women, Stove and Schopenhauer should get along famously, like the porcupines in the great misanthrope's parable.
Most of Stove's criticisms of F.H. Bradley (Bradley certainly is a genius) are wildly off the mark. Stove argues against a straw man by failing to notice the first three words in this quote from Bradley's writings: "... that for me experience [including mental experience] is the same as reality." (p. 158.) This says nothing about what Bradley knows of "non-human objectivity" (?) in his own absence, as opposed to what Bradley can say without contradiction.
6): Kant's most famous argument is the opposite of what Stove believes it to be. Stove's failure in philosophical scholarship is stunning in a person who taught the subject at a university. (p. 161.)
For Kant, our knowledge is indeed real knowledge because it is such knowledge as "any rational agent must have" and is, therefore, objective. Take another look at my point about the principle of contradiction. Stove is wrong in saying that Kant "believes our knowledge is not real knowledge." (p. 161.)
Kant limits the scope of knowledge to make room for faith, but there is still -- within the narrowed range of the knowable -- objective and certain knowledge. Any questions?
7): Stove writes: "She [the cultural relativist] says that it is not only injurious but logically limiting to defend our [our?] science based, Europe-centered, white male cultural perspective." (p. 167.)
As Red Fox used to remark on his old t.v. show: "Say what?" Why the sudden transition to the female pronoun? Why "white male"? I am no fan of ethical relativism or epistemological skepticism. Hence, I feel no hesitation about informing the world that this claim by Stove is nonsense. Men are just as often stupid or philosophically ignorant -- as demonstrated by Professor Stove -- as some women are said to be by Stove.
Women have been known to write philosophy as well as any man who has ever written philosophy books or is ever likely to engage in the practice of philosophy. Race is entirely irrelevant to philosophical ability and to this discussion, except as Professor Stove reveals his prejudices and limitations. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
I will provide, once more, only a few names of important or great (this is my opinion) philosophers who are women: Martha Nussbaum, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller (see the introduction to Radical Philosophy), Angela Davis, Mary Warnock, Judith Butler and many others may be listed.
Every one of these women are better, MUCH BETTER philosophers -- and human beings probably -- than either Professor Stove or I can claim to be. None of them say that there is no truth. None say there is no good and evil in any meaningful sense of these words. Each of them is a refutation of Stove's antifeminism.
This is to say nothing of Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf (whose essay "A Room of Her Own" I am about to read), George Eliot, St. Theresa of Avila, and many others.
Are these women not "Europeans"? Stove makes use of non-philosophical locutions "Everyone knows ... " (pp. 167-174.) I am someone and I don't know what Stove claims "everyone knows."
I have a "feeling" and I am going to "pin" it on Stove.
I suspect that Stove's hatred of women became so overwhelming in his life (and this is very sad, for I have known such people), that it devoured his intellect.
Here are some textbook philosophical blunders of the kind Stove cannot weasel out of: Stove alleges that idealists were ALL secretly motivated to retain "belief in the grossest absurdities of the Christian religion." (p. 171.) This would have come as news to the atheist John McTaggart.
Here is another error by Stove based on ignorance of the philosophical tradition: "The idealists Compte, Marx ..." (p. 173.) Compte was a positivist; Marx's mature works are classified as historical materialism, since his late writings react against Hegelian idealism.
Here is Stove indulging in the ad hominem fallacy: "It can hardly be an accident that Coleridge, who introduced German idealism into Britain, was also the slave of another and less intellectual anodyne." (p. 174.)
This point, if true, is irrelevant to the merits of Coleridge's idealism.
Finally, here is a sample of Stove's bizarre and increasingly popular hatred of humanity: "Humanity is like garlic: a little goes a long way." (p. 172.)
It is not far from Stove's view of persons to Buchenwald or Auschwitz. When Stove's anti-woman, anti-black, anti-human party comes to power, claiming an affiliation with science, I will fight against it. So will many scientists. I would prefer the company found in a concentration camp to the wisdom of Stove's philosophy or to his company.
Suggestions for further reading:
Rather than providing a long list of books which I have read, I will mention an exchange between Richard Rorty and Brand Blanshard, which is a paragon (or ideal?) of what philosophical dialogue can be:
Richard Rorty, "Idealism, Holism, and the Paradox of Knowledge," and Brand Blanshard, "Reply to Mr. Rorty," in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (La Salle: Open Court, 1980), pp. 742-776. My views are similar to Blanshard's. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: Dover, 2006), p. 7.
David Stove, "The Intellectual Capacity of Women," Chapter 5, in Cricket Versus Republicanism (Quakers Hill Press, 1995); http://web.maths.unsw.edu/~Jim/women.html
I cannot say how often vandalism has required me to make corrections of "errors" inserted in this essay. I am determined to make these corrections, as often as necessary, because I am confident that this essay will be helpful or suggestive to others.
This essay has grown much longer than I planned. I apologize for this. If there is a single slogan to bear in mind when reading it then perhaps this quotation from Friedrich Schiller will do:
"Man plays only where he is human in the full meaning of that word, and he is fully human only where he plays."
Introduction.
David Stove belongs in the category of cranky and quirky philosophers. Stove is wrong about most things. He is also a wonderful writer, accessible, popular and willing to engage in polemics with non-philosophers. Stove is worth reading and refuting.
Free speech means that you do not censor or suppress the speech of persons you regard as mistaken or even those you believe to be idiots. You respond to something written with which you disagree or invite an adversary to debate. Computer crime directed against an adversary is not a refutation of that person's opinions, but an admission of your inability to respond to the merits of his or her arguments.
Professor Stove has argued, for example, that women are not intellectually impressive and not very good philosophers. I have disagreed, publicly, with his view of this matter. Perhaps Stove's dismissals of idealism should not trouble us very much since I am sure that these opinions -- Stove's rejection of idealism and his "antifeminism" -- are related and (perhaps) they are inextricable.
I will reserve my discussion of this association for later in my essay. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
I believe that Stove was -- he is now deceased -- an idiot and bigot with a philosophy degree. May David Stove rest in peace even as his books go out of print, quickly.
Before setting off on my own journey of discovery regarding idealism, I wish to recommend Professor Stove's writings to those who disagree with him, especially women, at the risk of offending them. You have to understand Stove's mentality because it is still "out there." There are many men -- often in law, academia, elite positions in society -- who believe, secretly, that Professor Stove's claims of female intellectual inferiority are valid. It is best to acquire sexist ideas from their most able defenders, in order to refute them. Adherents of such views may then be forced to cling to their ideologies, irrationally, no longer in a position to claim objective validity for their opinions.
My critique of Professor Stove's anti-idealism is best thought of as a phenomenological and hermeneutic form of feminist-socialist philosophy. I bring together in one package everything that Professor Stove deplores, philosophically and politically. Naturally, this means that I am often attacked by the very people who should agree with me. For example, as I write this sentence, my image-posting feature has been damaged again. I am running yet another scan of my computer for viruses.
Professor Stove has performed a valuable service by setting forth his unattractive views. We can examine those views most effectively in a clear statement by a philosopher making it easier to deal with the same ideas or claims when encountered in less cogent forms in the thinking of many people, who are not at all (in their own attitudes or self-understandings) "philosophical" or intellectual.
Non-philosophers often fail to realize that "practicality" combined with rejection of theory is also a kind of philosophy, though not a very good one. Philosophers always provide the most cogent and coherent articulations of positions that are widely held in society. If you read Thomas Hobbes, then you will understand fascism and what motivates fascism everywhere and at any time, even when it calls itself "liberalism," "behaviorism," or "fundamentalism."
Widely held opinions or creeds are often stated by people who are much less logical or articulate than philosophers. Hence, by analyzing and criticizing a philosopher's ideas we can unravel inconsistencies and contradictions in popular philosophies, treating or preventing an epidemic of contagious stupidity and/or misinformation.
I owe this insight to a great teacher of philosophy from my undergraduate years.
Stove's critique of idealism does not put a dent in that philosophy. This is because Stove misses the point of the philosophy under attack. It should be noted that none of the great or foundational positions in metaphysics can be defeated for all time because each is, among other things, reflective of a particular orientation towards the world, an expression of a kind of personal and cultural temperament.
Great metaphysical theories resurface in every age, in altered form, to reflect changes in the intellectual climate. A point for my adversaries in New Jersey to bear in mind is that it is impossible to criticize effectively what you do not understand. (See my comment on William James.)
This does not deprive us of the concept of truth in judging or evaluating those theories or perspectives. It does tell us that some ways of looking at the world are important to people. In every age these outlooks return, usually wearing a new outfit and new shoes. A good question to ask, then, is why these perspectives are important to persons in every historical period? I expect to address this issue in due course. ("Let's hear it for the boys.")
Both on the Continent and in the English-speaking world, idealism is in the midst of a come-back. What are called "semiotics" and "hermeneutics," some forms of "phenomenology" and other "poststructuralist" theories (Derrida), are theories compatible with key elements in idealist philosophy and are certainly historical developments from the idealist tradition.
Recent developments in the sciences are also compatible with a number of idealist premises. This is often not recognized in the scientific literature.
More efforts are needed to associate developments in the philosophy of science with emerging configurations within humanistic and social science thinking. The failure to make these associations will obstruct progress and lead to repetitions of past errors. I suggest a comparison between seemingly very different works drawing on rationalist, idealist, and quantum thinking which are mutually illuminating. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")
It is fascinating that these idealist principles have surfaced all over the world in different costumes, expressed in different languages, some aesthetic and others philosophical or theological, and even in scientific "languages" or disciplines.
I invite the reader to detect important associations between ideas presented by philosophers in the idealist tradition, who are (mostly) unaware of one another. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
Do not be governed by chronology in searching for these connections. Thinkers may "intuit" a pattern in the intellectual fabric of our lives, or in epistemological "maps" from different angles and places, not realizing that it is a unitary or all-inclusive pattern that is seen.
Philosophy has been called "veiled autobiography." (Sigmund Freud) To some extent, I admit the charge. More interesting to me is the realization that philosophers are among the authors of the intellectual history of their epochs, reflective of its moods expressed in culture, and (most importantly) inventors and chroniclers of their future.
Philosophers are the true biographers of their times.
Let us begin with Stephen Hawking, "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?," in Black Holes and Baby Universes (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. 49; then Roy Bashkar, "Dialectical Critical Naturalism," and "Space, Time, and Tense," in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (New York & London: Verso, 1993), pp. 152-173, pp. 250-258. (Notice that Hawking and Bashkar are writing their books at roughly the same time.)
Why are these authors never compared or related by scholars? Would you expect that their shared cultural mood or "moment" (Hegel, Marx) will affect their theorizing?
"Entanglement" and "dialectics" are parallel discourses seeking to capture the same territory in the intellectual landscape. It cannot be a coincidence that idealist works have appeared in Latin America, Asia, Europe and America, often in different areas of scholarly endeavor and with increasing frequency during the past two decades. ("Ted Honderich Says: 'You Are Not Free!'")
I suggest that readers will find some surprising similarities in the thinking of Hawking and Bashkar concerning the scientific enterprise. These similarities must be significant. I plan to devote a future essay to illustrating this point.
I am confident that much the same pattern of similarities and overlapping insights (expressed in totally different vocabularies) will become clear from even a casual perusal of the theoretical literature emerging in so-called postmodernist cultures. Stuart Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon Books, 2002), pp. 151-185.
How do Hawking and Bashkar understand scientific efforts? What would Karl Popper say concerning the task of these scientists?
Next, let us compare John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1984), pp. 165-223 ("... the flowing swirling universe is a mirror ...") and James Gleick, "Strange Attractors," in Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Viking, 1987), pp. 132-135 ("The equations of fluid flow [genius?] are non-linear partial differential equations, unsolvable except in special cases.") with Mark Buchanan, "No Dice," New Scientist, March 21, 2008, at p. 28 and http://www.newscientist.com/ ("Bohmian mechanics asserts that the outcome of an experiment [in quantum mechanics] isn't truly random, but is determined by the values of certain 'hidden variables.' ...").
The universe is playful and lawful, ordered and improvising all the time. Reality is a performance of a constantly varying set of narrative options offered to you. Juxtapose key provisions of Kant's first and final Critiques:
"Moreover, because of the tight link between space and time found by Einstein, the quantum connections also have temporal tentacles. We'll shortly encounter some clever and truly wondrous experiments that have recently explored a number of the startling spacio-temporal interconnections" -- dialectics, entanglements -- "entailed by quantum mechnics and, as we'll see, they forcefully challenge the classical, intuitive world-view many of us hold." (emphasis added)
Brian Greene, "Roads to Reality," in The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 12. (Perhaps an amendment to this chapter's title would be "Roads to Realities.")
Think of the "hidden variables" and values of the people around you. Do you think that you can control or determine entirely your friends' behavior or thoughts? Or your own behavior and thoughts? Finally, compare two literary works by a person who is an artist and also a serious scholar of philosophical systems -- works not associated by any critic to my knowledge, Rebecca Goldstein, "Strange Attractors," in Strange Attractors (New York & London: Penguin, 1993), p. 241 with Rebecca Goldstein, The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1989), pp. 115-117. (Spinoza and Strange Attractors?), then Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 53-121 (Were Einstein and Godel "strangely attracted"?) and Amir D. Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kaballah, and the Search for Infinity (New York: Washington Square, 2000), pp. 25-45.
You will find elements of idealism in all of the works cited in the foregoing paragraph.
Idealism allows adherents to be liberals in the classical sense -- which includes both Republicans and Democrats -- or democratic socialists, like me, even as all forms of totalitarianism (which deny human freedom) are excluded from compatibility with idealist premises as I understand them.
A recent discovery for me is a superb book-length essay by David Punter, Blake, Hegel and Dialectic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), which is much better than anything by Stove. For a comparison, see A.C. Ewing's The Idealist Tradition (New York: Free Press, 1957) and David Boucher, ed., The British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
I begin with definitions of key terms. Stove does not get around to a half-hearted and tendentious definition of "idealism" until near the end of his first essay, arguing with different straw men throughout most of it. I offer a very brief tour through modern philosophical understandings of idealism (these days the preferred terms are "representationalism" or "constructivism"), since this is crucial to appreciating the controversy that follows. I then criticize Professor Stove's contentions. I offer my opinions and suggestions for those who want to read more about all of this in the course of my discussion.
What is "Idealism"?
Berkeley to Kant.
People normally speak of "idealism" as the belief in high moral aims or "loftiness of purpose." Idealism in philosophy, however, is a metaphysical doctrine or theory that is usually compatible with some version of rationalism in epistemology. In other words, idealism is a view of what "is" that is associated, typically, with a view of "how" we know things.
It is important to distinguish idealism and rationalism, epistemology and metaphysics. The common failure to make these fundamental distinctions produces serious confusions among philosophers. This confusion concerning terms and lack of mastery of technical philosophical arguments by my adversaries was 90% of the problem in my debate at The Philosophy Cafe. (Empiricism is not "the same thing as" materialism.)
This need for distinctions has nothing to do with the ways in which these terms may be related or compared, since they refer to unitary subjects -- philosophy and reality -- as well as the connections between them considered as academic subjects. Thus, a legalistic attention to subtleties of construction comes in handy in theoretical discussions and debates. Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-19, 82-87 and Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 109-139 ("Understanding"), then Will Dudley's Understanding German Idealism (London: Acumen, 2007), pp. 106-140 and particle physicist David Bohm's, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London & New York: Routledge, 1981), p. 7, pp. 48-62 ("... wholeness is what is real ...").
When you are reading philosophy pretend that you are studying a criminal code looking for a loophole to get yourself out of jail. Reading philosophy -- even more than studying law -- is an active engagement with a text. Most lawyers are capable of first-rate intellectual work. Sadly, something in the law school experience kills this talent in them. After a few years in practice, mental cement has set in. For one explanation of this phenomenon, see Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (Cambridge: Afar, 1982), together with other CLS classics.
The first movement in the idealist symphony from Berkeley to Kant is best understood as a development of a conception of the self as individual "knowing agent." This move only became possible after the Cartesian revolution in modern thought.
A subsequent or second movement in idealism is concerned with the "self as social or communal entity" in the Absolute ("Wholeness"). According to one typical authority idealism states:
"... physical objects can have no existence [for knowers] apart from a mind which is conscious of them." (A.C. Ewing.)
The roots of this position may be traced at least to Plato, as in Socrates demonstrating to the slave boy in Meno the validity of a priori knowledge and anamnesis (look it up).
In modern thought, idealism originates with Bishop Berkeley's subjective version of the stance in the eighteenth century, as a negative reaction to Cartesian dualism and Locke's empiricism: "[Berkeley] argued that esse (existence or being) of physical objects is percipi (to be perceived) or that they are only ideas (hence, the term 'idealism)." (A.C. Ewing.)
This sounds really weird to people, until you say something like this: "Would you agree that if you did not exist, as a knowing subject, then this universe and everything in it would no longer exist or be, as far as you are concerned?"
At this point, education majors and psychobabblers are apt to throw their hands in the air and mutter ... "That's a tautology!"
Fine, I will not argue the point (though I think it is mistaken), but is it true? Most people would say, "yes."
Now, if all other knowing subjects in the universe are also removed, so that there is not one mind capable of knowledge of any kind in the vast totality of the universe (think of the House of Representatives), does the universe or anything in it continue to exist? How would anyone know whether the universe exists if there is no knowing subject in the universe? For whom would the universe exist if there are no minds? In what sense can you know what "is" when you do not exist?
It is crucial to see that this is a question concerning knowledge. It seems very difficult to deny that, on empiricist principles, we could ever know whether or not the universe exists in the absence of knowing agents.
For a great discussion of Berkeley's views, see David M. Armstrong's introduction to the edited collection entitled: Berkeley's Philosophical Writings (New York: McMillan, 1965), pp. 7-34 ("Physical objects cannot exist unperceived.") and G.J. Warnock, Berkeley (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1983), pp. 126-141.
For a comparison of Berkeley's "ideas" to Hume's philosophy, see Alasdair McIntyre's introduction and commentary to Hume's Ethical Writings (New York & London: Collier's, 1965), pp. 9-19. (Notice how crucial is point of view to this claim concerning knowledge and/as existence.)
I am suggesting, analogously, that the best versions of ourselves exist only when they are seen and encouraged by others close to us. Destruction of trust in fundamental relationships has the effect of disconfirming identity for all participants in such relationships.
Yes, we can picture the universe existing without us. This picturing is only our present act of cognition or mental operation. In other words, such picturing takes place "now," when we are here to "cognize." We "imagine" a future state of the universe, as though we were present to see it. This postulating is not the same as knowledge.
This is not to deny that we can speculate with great confidence that the universe will continue to exist without us, which really pisses us off. As Sartre remarked, "the one consolation about death is that everybody we can't stand will also have to die."
Please understand, again, that this is a claim about what we can KNOW. Speculation is not knowledge. We cannot know what the universe will be like without us or even whether it will continue to exist when we are gone, according to Berkeley's version of empiricism (idealism and empiricism are compatible in some theories), because we will not be present to see what it is like or if it still "exists" in our absence.
In answer to his own classic philosophical chestnut, Berkeley would say that, "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, then it makes no noise." For purposes of comparison, consider one scientist's use of Berkeley's reasoning:
"Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans wrote in the 1930s, '... the universe begins to look more and more like a great thought than like a great machine.' So, too, I am proposing, in The God Theory, that ultimately it is consciousness that is the origin of matter, energy, and the laws of nature in this universe and all others that may exist."
Bernard Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), p. xii. (Compare "Is it rational to believe in God?")
Let us engage in a "reality-check" at this point: Idealism is compatible with some forms of empiricism, as I have noted, and there is even an overlapping territory shared with nuanced versions of realism. (Bashkar, Hawking)
Continuities between these foundational positions and Asian philosophies that are highly useful in coming to terms with contemporary developments in physics and in the mathematical structures of biological systems should be mentioned.
See the summary of the ideas in religious and non-religious Taoism, in James K. Feibleman, Understanding Chinese Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1976), p. 137 and C. Wright Mills, "The Language and Ideas of Ancient China," in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Ballantine, 1963), p. 469. ("Thinking in shapes and movements.") Concerning the overlap between idealism-realism, see F. Beiser's Hegel (New York & London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 68-69. (It looks like Hegel is also a Chinese philosopher.)
Materialistic realists would say that the tree makes a noise -- especially if it falls on your head when the pain you experience provides sensory confirmation of the reality of this tree -- and of your stupidity. Idealists then simply close their eyes so as to make the realists no longer exist.
This joke about idealists making their opponents disappear by closing their eyes depends on Stove's misunderstanding which confuses an epistemological (knowledge) with an ontological (existence) claim.
Also, the realist would have to be in the forest for the tree to fall on his head -- unless he were in New Jersey, where a similar accident could easily be "arranged" for him by men in dark shirts and white ties, typically holding elective office or even judgeships. Knowledge of the pain produced by this falling tree is also "reducible" (but is it?) to signals or neurochemical processes "in" the brain.
Kant's innovation was to create an objective form of idealism, not limited to the particular individual knowing subject or self, developed from his synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. According to Kant, his Critical Theory is fully compatible with empiricism (you can still be a scientist!) because it is based on a new conception of a "transcendental self":
"[Kant] contends that we can account for a priori knowledge of things only by supposing that our minds" -- or those of any rational agents -- "have imposed on them a structure, [the categories of the understanding,] but only on appearances [known through the forms of sensibility fashioning order from sense data,] so for this very reason he held our knowledge to be limited to appearances [or phenomena]. The latter exist as objects of actual or possible experience and so must obey the conditions which our minds impose, since otherwise they could not appear to us [or become knowledge]. It is this which allows us to impose categories such as substance or cause to the physical world, but this very reason prevents us from proceeding to metaphysics, as Berkeley did, and applying them beyond the realm of human essences." (A.E. Ewing.)
The universe, as we know it, requires us to be in it -- or just "to be" -- as knowers in order for knowledge to exist, for us or any rational agents.
The universe "as it is," without any knowers, is "noumenal reality." Noumenal reality (by definition) is something that we cannot know, since we are not around to know it. This is kind of sad.
Get ready for a shock from this so-called abstruse philosopher: Rational agents would have to exist in order to know things while the universe that we know is only such as can be known by us -- or by any rational mind -- since it is the universe as it must "appear" to rational agents in order to be known by rational agents, like us.
Rational minds must know a universe existing in space and time, subject to causation, etc. This is OBJECTIVELY, UNIVERSALLY and NECESSARILY true, for all rational agents, like the proposition that 3 + 5 = 8. This is the objective component of the idealist position.
Notice that this says nothing about how we define space and time (or other crucial concepts) at any given juncture in our intellectual history as a species. Reason is universal.
Kant claims to state the foundational epistemic requirements for any rational agent. Kant's "transcendental idealism" is also a "Critical Realism."
Actual physical presence is no longer required for us to know how things must appear to rational minds (phenomenologically), anywhere or at any time, but not how things are in themselves (noumenally) in the absence of rational minds which is something that can never be known by us.
The definition of the terms "space" and "time" or other such terms will always change, again, but they will never be such as cannot be comprehended by us because we are the ones doing the defining. It will always be impossible to formulate a concept which we cannot formulate. How things must appear to knowers is an epistemological issue; how things are in themselves is an ontological and metaphysical issue. Paul Guyer, Kant (New York & London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 43-123.
Einstein would have agreed that the objectivity of scientifically detectable relations in the universe implies a knowing mind for -- or within -- which knowledge (as distinct from truth) is held. I have said nothing about an individual mind. "Truth is what stands the test of experience." (Einstein)
Not all truth is held by us and subject to that test -- at this "time."
Where could such unknown or possible truth exist except in Mind? Consciousness? Spinoza's God becomes very interesting to Einstein.
Before it is known truth does not exist as such, says the befuddled skeptic, except that such inexplicable "phenomena" intrude on our lives every day. Before there was a law to explain gravity's effects things fell to earth when we dropped them. Christopher Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 204. (" ... truth ... has an a priori component.") and G. Harman, "The Inference to the Best Explanation," in 74 Philosophical Review pp. 88-95 (1988), then Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Plume, 2001), pp. 249-253. ("Strong correlations" in mathematics.)
A crucial point to understand is that, even if we can not have certain knowledge about a matter, we may still have (or develop) a rational or "justified belief" based on our practical needs. I may not know with certainty and before the fact whether Barack Obama will win the U.S. presidential election in 2008. Nevertheless, I may develop a rational belief concerning the outcome of the election based on reading newspapers and talking to voters.
Regrettably, as philosophers and non-philosophers, we have a tendency to deify our beliefs and insulate them from rational criticisms (or disconfirmation) by way of experience or rationality. Thus, we may decide that one person has little to teach us or is "probably" guilty of "something." Subsequent evidence and rational demonstrations of an opposed conclusion will be ignored.
I describe such an irrational attitude as antiphilosophical or a form of fanaticism. An example of what I mean is the person who believes that John McCain will win the U.S. presidential election or even continues to hold this belief after the election is won by Obama. Royce summarizes Kant's great insight:
"I regard all human experiences as belonging to a single system, to a single unity of possible experience. There is then, says Kant, virtually but one experience. [God?] And all physical facts are conceived as facts existent for this one experience, and thus as mutually linked. We conceive all momentary observations of ours as fragmentary glimpses of that one experience. The unity of the physical world is therefore conceived by us in terms of the unity of a sort of ideal or virtual self, the self of an ideal or possible human observer of whom we conceive that whatever fact we acknowledge to be real in the physical world is ipso facto viewed as observable by this [abstract] self." (Royce, pp. 21-22.)
Think of this "unity" that we are as "freedom-that-becomes-love." Mind. Consciousness. Each of the terms in the foregoing sentence requires extensive definition and discussion. (Bradley, McTaggart.)
What is this "must appear" quality of the universe? Why must the universe present itself to rational agents in some forms and not others? Why is "love" a kind of directedness or calling in persons that is comparable to an instinct in other animals for completion or self-realization or happiness that involves "fitting" with (or into) the universe of others?
Cambridge University's superstar physicist Stephen Hawking says:
"... the only way [for us] to explain our universe is by our presence in it. 'This principle can be paraphrased as, 'Things are as they are because we [observers] are.' ..."
John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 112. (Hawking's observer of black holes is an abstract construct, by the way, not all that distant from Kant's "transcendental ego.")
Why is it that we are the way we are, intellectually? Why are we, as rational agents, able to comprehend the universe only when it presents itself to us -- as the universe is wont to do -- in a "rationally comprehensible manner"? Why are we called or driven to understand or be in harmony with the universe? I will call this harmony, love. How would you define the "fit" between individual minds and Mind? Is this "fit" another word for love? Intellectual order implies mind; mentality implies intellectual order and ordering. What is the compatibility between orders or intelligences, human and universal? Spinoza to Kant, then Hegel to Einstein. David Walsh, "Schelling on the Beyond of Existence," in The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 140-143.
"That is just anthropomorphism," you say? I do not think so.
If a supercomputer were to seek to know the universe, to impose form on chaos, then it would necessarily apply something like the "categories" -- in a semi-linguistic sense -- to the fruits of some kind of "sense-data": concepts of time, space, number would immediately be necessary. This is true even to formulate or articulate what may be called "facts."
You need fundamental concepts in order to have meaningful sense impressions. Merely because there are no uninterpreted facts, we are not required to accept that there are no objective truths. Facts are still real. Interpretations may be valid or objectively "better" for "really" excellent reasons, like truthfulness or accuracy to how things are. Albert Einstein insisted on this objectivity concerning general and special relativity as well as upon the absoluteness of, say, the speed of light:
" ... special relativity provided an absolute criterion -- one that all observers, regardless of their constant relative velocities, would agree on -- for deciding whether or not something is accelerating. [emphasis added] If the trajectory of an object follows through spacetime in a straight line, like that of the gently resting astronaut in Figure 3.7, it is not accelerating. If the trajectory an object follows has any other shape but a straight line through spacetime, it is accelerating. For example, should the astronaut fire up her jetpack and fly around in a circle over and over again, like astronaut (b) in Figure 3.7, or should she zip out toward deep space at an ever-increasing speed, like astronaut (c), her trajectory through spacetime will be curved -- the telltale sign of acceleration. And so, with these developments we learn that geometrical shapes of trajectories in spacetime provide the absolute standard that determines whether something is accelerating. Spacetime, not space alone, provides the benchmark."
Brian Grene, "Relativity and the Absolute," The Fabric of the Universe (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 61. (Einstein's theory establishes a new basis for objective truth.)
By way of comparison, see Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Oxford: Polity, 2003), pp. 13-88. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
I will now refer to a philosopher who is rarely mentioned in discussions of idealism or theology, Jurgen Habermas. Like Judith Butler, Habermas offers epistemological insights that are useful and relevant to the concerns of political, legal, theological theorists and some scientists:
"... Habermas's strategy is to return to the counterdiscourse of modernity -- neglected by Nietzsche and his followers -- in which the principle of a self-sufficient, self-assertive subjectivity was exposed to telling criticism and a 'counterreckoning' of the cost of modernity was drawn up. Examining the main crossroad in this counterdiscourse, he points to indications of a path opened but not pursued: the construal of reason in terms of a non-coercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition. Returning to the first major crossroad, [Habermas] uses this notion to reconstruct Hegel's idea of ethical life [Stillichkeit] and to argue that the Other of reason invoked by the post-Nietzscheans is not adequately tendered in their 'model of exclusion'; it is better seen as a divided and destroyed ethical totality."
What is this divided and destroyed "ethical totality"? Why do we miss this "home" where human intelligence wishes to dwell? Think of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland."
I realize that some of these books to which I refer are difficult to find. However, there are many important pieces of the knowledge puzzle that appear widely scattered and in danger of not being associated at all. Compare Beverly Nichols, The Fool Hath Said (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), pp. 52-56 (God and time) with D.M. McKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1957), pp. 1-22 (Pritchard's intuitionism), then pp. 61-174 (Kant and the notion of moral freedom):
"Habermas follows Hegel also in viewing reason as a healing power of unification and reconciliation; however, it is not the Absolute that he has in mind, but the unforced intersubjectivity of rational agreement." (Truth?)
Thomas McCarthy, "Introduction," in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. xv-xvi (emphasis added). (This translation is by Fredrick G. Lawrence.)
The conversation between Habermas and Pope Benedict becomes understandable in light of these ideas. Habermas also draws on the thoughts of Marx and Kant. David M. Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 75-94 ("Communication and the Law").
You may begin to appreciate the common association of contemporary science and social theory with natural law reasoning. I will now reach for my heavily annotated copy of John Finnis, "A Basic Form of Good is Knowledge," in Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 59-80.
More startling insights paralleling the conclusions of idealists and phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophers are found among mathematicians, not just quantum physicists. Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York: Walker & Co., 1997), pp. 279-287 (" ... He [Andrew Davies] also drew together the work of many fine mathematicians, linking ideas and creating concepts that others had feared to attempt.")
In order for key mathematical solutions to work -- as they demonstrably do -- there must be a shared mathematical "space" and language unifying researchers all over the globe who "meet" in numerical territory.
Much the same is true for philosophers. By silencing or censoring philosophers, or any thinkers, the only result is to obstruct the progress of knowledge. This has nothing to do with whether you "like" a person. I can contribute to knowledge by being wrong. So can you. There is no need to censor or suppress ideas that you believe are mistaken.
Powerful men and women are sometimes frightened of ideas that they dread precisely because those ideas are not mistaken. Ideas are indestructible and irrepressible. No society that fears ideas will last long.
Objections from social scientists, lacking a course or two in philosophy, will be based on contentions such as this: "How about God? Doesn't God know everything?!"
Well, God is a rational agent and would, thus, perceive the universe only as Kant suggests. "Aha!," say the psychobabblers, "so God is not omniscient."
Kant would respond by noting that God's perfect knowledge takes place "within" reason since God is the ultimate rational mind. The coherence in the rational order of the universe (rules of reason) are what makes God's freedom possible. God is the rules of reason and/or universal reason, everything revealed by science. Unity. Order. Beauty. Love. All of these words are ways of approaching the idea of God in the Kantian theological traditions that lead to classical hermeneutics. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
"I believe," Einstein said, "in Spinoza's God."
Notice the influence of Spinoza on German thought, including scientific thought. Reason was very popular in the eighteenth century, kind of like "The Beatles" in the sixties.
My sources here are The Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Doubleday, 1966), in F. Max Muller's translation of both the 1781 and 1786 editions, at pp. 452-457 and Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1919), especially pp. 1-87.
Other excellent recent discoveries for me are Arthur W. Collins, "Kant's Empiricism," in Thought and Nature: Studies in Rationalist Philosophy (Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 180-198 and E.J. Lowe, "Abstract Entities," in The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 210-228.
Kant's belief in God is not an item of knowledge. Kant regards this belief as a highly plausible, practical postulate. God belongs to what is outside the scope of the human mind's knowledge. However, God may be a necessary part of the human heart's knowledge or understanding.
Welcome to the Enlightenment, folks. Romanticism is coming up. Don't get up to buy pop corn, it gets better. Kant leaves the scene, like Elvis. After the music fades away, we realize that we are left with a dualism: 1) the way things are independently of all knowing subjects (noumenal reality); and 2) the way things must appear to all rational agents, in order for them to be known (phenomenal reality).
The post-Kantian challenge is to achieve a monism that makes reality singular, like those new fancy cellphones. The cognitive universe must become one by eliminating all dualisms. The empirical universe is admitted to be one, remember, whereas our knowledge is divided. This sets the scene for Romanticism and Hegel, then Britain's idealists will take their turn at philosophy's center stage.
If Kant may be thought of as the "Elvis" of modern philosophy, then Britain's idealists are "The Beatles."
Hegel and Bradley.
Romanticism is a reaction against this so-called excessive Kantian confidence in reason. Also, Romanticism is skeptical about the optimism of the Enlightenment. For the Romantics, the project of reconciling knower and known, subjective and objective in mind and being is an "endless" or always "unfinished" one. The Romantic sensibility is involved in an eternal quest for the "homecoming of the soul." ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
We live in a universe that is one, for us, even as it shatters into a million pieces in our scientific learning. We are animals, physically-bounded creatures, who (somehow) capture the truths of time and black holes, multiple dimensions, mathematical entities, time travel and other weird phenomena, mentally, by means of thought experiments.
How is such a knowledge and thinking possible? (See "Where are thoughts located?")
Hegel reacts against the Romantics even as he incorporates some of the "mood" of the movement in his dialectics.
Hegel insists that we can dispense with Kantian noumenal reality as all that exists outside or beyond the knowing subject because knowers are always already involved with what they seek to know. Knower-and-known are a bipolar unity, not mutually exclusive or independent terms.
Hegel challenges the individualism of Western epistemology and all metaphysics that seeks to abstract and isolate the agent from both cognitive matter and reality. Hegel anticipates developments in modern physics and the protean social realities that we must inhabit in postmodernity.
Like Aristotle, Hegel is one of the great philosophers of biology. Hegel appreciates that, as with many animals, ideas are social entities that become part of what is fundamental for threatened human creatures, ideas are necessary to survival, so that ideas must serve evolutionary purposes, dialectically, in terms of an ascending spiral, which is the only way ideas evolve.
"Can you distinguish the dancer from the dance?"
No? O.K., then think of the knower as the dancer and of knowledge -- the agent's known reality -- as the dance. They are always "identical."
My sources at this point are: Frederick Beiser, Hegel (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 53-79 ("Absolute Idealism") and Dieter Heinrich, "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's Aesthetics," in Michael Inwood, ed., Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp. 51-53.
I have just finished reading a helpful short book by Professor Alison Brown, On Hegel (California: Wadsworth, 2001), pp. 57-84. (See the quotation on pp. 66-67 from the Phenomenology.)
I recently purchased and I am looking forward to reading Paul Guyer's essays on Kantian aesthetics. I hope that this work will lead to Professor Guyer's encounter with Kant's theology. Paul Guyer, "The Symbols of Freedom in Kant's Aesthetics," in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 222-242.
Would it surprise us to discover that Professor Guyer is doing quantum physics?
Kant's aesthetics and religious writings seem to have the greatest influence on Hegel.
Doesn't this make all thoughts relative to thinkers? No, it makes thinkers "relative to" (expressive of) necessary thoughts or makes thinking possible that is always already within them, or us. The self only exists in and/or "as" history, context or culture -- as a flower lives in soil -- so that context is always defining of identity.
Like you, I am a "network of connections" developing as a project in time. To poison the soil is to kill the flower. Knower and known are each "in" the other. Each partner in this dance "mediates" the other through Hegel's process of "negation-of-negation." I negate the ways in which you negate me; I am altered as I alter you. This leads to Derrida's deconstructive project at the end of the twentieth century. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")
An important contemporary idealist, John MacMurray (also Marxist-existentialist-phenomenologist R.D. Laing), draws on Hegel by way of F.H. Bradley and John McTaggart, to emphasize the importance of love to this constitutive dialectic of self and other. Henry Paolucci, trans., & Anne Paolucci, ed., Hegel: On the Arts (Delaware: Bagehot Council, 1979), p. 11 ("The Symbolic Art Form.").
For a dramatization of these issues in aesthetics, theology and quantum mechanics, see Harold Pinter, "Screenplay: The Last Tycoon," in The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Screenplays (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 191.
Jean-Paul Sartre expresses this Hegelian idea of the Absolute in Marxist terms as a "totalization." ("'Che': A Movie Review" and "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
For those from the opposite side of the political spectrum, I suggest Jefferson and Lincoln. Today, I refer to philosophers like Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Charles Fried, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and (for Conservatives) Robert Nozick's Kantian individualism. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 294-397. (Best discussion of free will in the Kantian tradition leading to a return to the foundations of his ethics.)
Republicans should turn to Nozick's politics in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).
Hegel had an impact on Marx's materialist version of the dialectic, not on Marx's interpretation of history.
Karl Popper's admiration for Schopenhauer, inherited from his father and shared with Wittgenstein, made his views compatible with many idealist concepts, as noted by Bryan Magee and others. See Magee's Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper's Philosophy (New York: Open Court, 1985), p. 69. (Discussing Popper's defense of intuition and imagination in science and strong critique of "scientism.")
In a Kantian moment, Karl Popper says:
"Man has created new worlds -- of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for FREEDOM, and for helping the weak." (Popper, Open Society, vol I, p. 65.)
Here is the celebrated fusion of Thomism-Idealism in the thinking of John MacMurray, also Catholic priest Bernard Lonergan:
"The motive of love arises out of the human capacity for self-transcendence and leads to a fellowship based on care of the other-than-self. When we love, we live in the world, not for ourselves; we locate the reference of our activity beyond the self in others. Whereas fear is of the other for oneself, love is for the other. To let love dominate is, therefore, to give expression to the inherently social nature of our being." (Bevir and O'Brian, on MacMurray)
Each self is like a flower growing and living in the "soil" of his or her relations with all others: "Thought can grasp the real," Hegel argues, "only when it has fully grasped its own structures."
The only structure by which thought knows the world (for Hegel) is the dialectic. There may be other ways in which thought and empirical reality interact or may be associated by thinkers and/or scientists. For example, intentionality for phenomenologists; or constructivism for some scientists. Husserl and all phenomenologists and hermeneuticists, like Paul Ricoeur, are "methodological idealists." (Terry Eagleton's phrase in his summary in Literary Theory, pp. 48 -51, and elsewhere.)
Compare Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1983) with John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Now please turn to: Kimberly Hutchins, "Thinking the Second Sex," and "Re-Thinking the Second Sex," in Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Polity, 2003), pp. 55-111; then (get ready for a shock) Quentin Lauer, S.J., "Domination and Servitude," in A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), pp. 123-134, then it is back to Aristotle and Aquinas: Hugo A. Meynell, Redirecting Knowledge: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge From Plato to Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998), pp. 222-241, pp. 226-279, and in conclusion, Hugo A. Meynell, "Lonergan and the Problems of Contemporary Philosophy," in Introduction to the Philosophy of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991), pp. 141-169 (1st ed. 1976).
The dialectic is the "music" to which the dancer creates his/her dance:
"It should be obvious even from this brief account," Eagleton writes, "that [phenomenology] is a form of methodological idealism, seeking to explore an abstraction called 'human consciousness' and a world of pure possibilities." (p. 49.)
These various theories come together in contemporary phenomenology leading both to existentialist and non-existentialist forms of phenomenological thinking and to Paul Ricouer's "hermeneutics of freedom" -- all of which are highly compatible with feminist thinking (and re-thinking) of identity, gender-roles, sexual-orientations (plural) and politics or justice in society:
"No philosopher has gone further in the direction of a reduction of the 'being of the phenomenon' to the 'phenomenon of being' than Berkeley. And so it might seem strange that, at the beginning of Section III of the Introduction, [Being and Nothingness] Sartre should appeal to the Berkleian [sic.] formula 'Esse est percipi,' and, moreover, should link Berkeley quite explicitly with Husserl in this connection. Admittedly, if being is reducible to its being perceived, then, in the first instance at any rate, it becomes impossible to attribute transphenomenality to being. Being just is its appearing. But what if we shift the focus of attention from the percipi to the percipere, from the perceived object to the perceiving subject? Even Berkeley will concede a being to the subject, to the perceiver, indeed will not permit substantial reality to anything but a mind or spirit, whether finite or infinite."
Christopher McCann, Four Phenomenological Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 113.
The knowing agent must "be" whatever the status of ultimate reality. But then the knowing agent and how he or she knows anything is recognized as inherently social. Idealism is not solipsism. To be is to be with others. To be a woman must be to exist as some entity "defined" differently than a man. However, this difference in definition is only meaningful "in relation to" a man or masculinity. Hence, there must be a third term containing both masculine and feminine. Otherwise, both categories become meaningless.
It follows that masculine and feminine are mutually dependent within the subject as well as in the world. Homosexual and heterosexual; black and white; rich and poor -- all are dialectical partners. Each is meaningless, ultimately, without the other. (Simone de Beauvoir.)
Hegel's dialectic is a set of triadic relations describing a movement of estrangement (thesis), opposition (antithesis), reconciliation, return and transcendence (aufheben), leading to a synthesis, that becomes a new thesis. The Hegelian dialectic becomes a key cluster of ideas in the modern world. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
These ideas are connected to the theory of representation-construction that has taken on new urgency in postmodernist aesthetics. The hermeneutic circle may be applicable to political phenomena (trials) as well as art (movies). Prosecution and Defense? Verdict? McTaggart writes:
"If we examine the [dialectic] in more detail, we shall find that it advances, not directly, but by moving from side to side, like a ship tacking against an unfavorable wind. [Masculine/Feminine] The simplest and best known form of this advance, as it is to be found in the earlier transitions of the logic, is as follows. The examination of a certain category leads us to the conclusion that, if we predicate it of any subject, we are compelled by consistency to predicate of the same subject the contrary of that category. [Hegel's Science of Logic] This brings us to an absurdity, since the predication of two contrary attributes of the same thing at the same time violates the law of contradiction. On examining the two contrary predicates further, they are seen to be capable of reconciliation in a higher category, which combines the contents of both of them, not merely placed side by side, but absorbed into a wider idea, as moments or aspects of which they can exist without contradiction." (McTaggart, p. 1, emphasis added.) ("Master and Commander" and "God is Texting Me!" then "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
This "idea of the synthesis of opposites is the most characteristic in the whole of Hegel's system." (Ibid.)
Notice that the centrality of time in logic appears in Hegel long before Einstein. I refer the reader, once again, to Mr. Beverly Nichols' essay (cited above) developing the ontological argument for our time.
At the end of history, for Hegel, Spirit is revealed in the reconciliation of particular controversies and divisions that seemed inexplicable at each historical moment that are made comprehensible only in the perspective of the dialectic's complete ascending spiral and terminus, the Absolute ("Wholeness").
The knower's (mirror 1) encounter with reality (mirror 2) parallels this process of knowing-as-unfolding. The unitary subject of reflection is found in both mirrors, knowing-and-knowledge. Yet it can be seen as such only at the conclusion of the process of unfolding.
"The owl of Minerva takes wing," Hegel says, "only with the falling of the dusk." ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review" and, again, "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Love is a similar process of mutual construction. It is a kind of ultimate "knowing" in which each lover "becomes" (through defining) the other, and this sharing in identity is often something which is evident only at the end of people's lives together. Marriage is a dialectic, dialogue, or conversation.
I cannot be my best self without the person or persons, the human environment, making that best self possible.
A woman cannot realize herself, freely, if she lives in a sexist society. This is because the preconditions of her perfectly realized identity are missing. Hence, her very selfhood or identity is disconfirmed or denied and limited all the time.
Consider the effects of racial or other hatreds. I think of one woman, in particular, whose early "total life-circumstances" were a complete denial of her humanity. Such a woman's survival alone is a miracle. Hegel's Logic sets forth this universal process of knowing:
"The immediate sense-certainty of what is in front of you is, Hegel argues, not immediate at all. Your certainty that there is a page [or person?] in front of you is dependent on the other, i.e., the particular page, but the page is only certain because you perceive it as a page, which requires a general concept that can apply to any page. The supposedly immediate particular fact is therefore thoroughly mediated via a universal. The concreteness of looking at the particularity of what is in front of me can only be asserted as concrete because we use the universal notions of 'this,' 'here,' 'now' to indicate particularity. [See my essay "Why philosophy is for everybody."] These are 'indexical' words, which only gain their meaning by being applied in concrete contexts. What they apply to is, though, ... unstable." (Bowie, on Hegel.)
Please see my essays on F.H. Bradley and "Bernard Williams On Identity." Notice that this leaves us with the entangled concepts of instantiation/judgment:
"Without the universals the particular has no way of becoming knowable, but without the particular the universals have no content. Hegel insists, though, that the truth of immediate perceptions lies in the conceptual universality of the ways in which we talk about them; without this universality the particular is incommunicable, and so cannot be talked about in terms of its truth at all." (Contrast "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" with "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
My meaning and yours is found within a total coherence that is truth. Meaning is a "fit" between the individual and the organic whole of his society and species, only then within the totality of its history. We are "concrete universals." (See my essays on Bradley's philosophy.)
There is truth -- including ethical truth -- which is concrete and universal, objective and total, transcending all particulars or partial relations, for it is found only in the Absolute (think of another word for "Absolute"). Quantum theorists say: "Wholeness is truth."
Richard Wollheim, who was an expert on Bradley and a philosopher of psychology, approaches these issues from a different direction in "Cutting the Thread: Death, Madness, and the Loss of Friendship," in The Thread of Life, pp. 257-281. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
In his appendix to Appearance and Reality, Bradley writes:
"With regard to the unity of the Absolute we know that the Absolute must be one, because anything experienced is experienced in or as a whole, and because anything like independent plurality or external relations cannot satisfy the intellect. And it fails to satisfy the intellect because it is a self-contradiction. Again, for the same reason the Absolute is one system in the very highest sense of that term, any lower sense being unreal because in the end self-contradictory." (Bradley)
Any one item in the cosmos -- if we could discern all relations relevant to it and all that is -- would necessitate the totality of those relations that are the Absolute making that one item meaningful.
From contemplating my left sock, if I were smart enough, I should be able to deduce the totality of relations of meaning in the universe. It is important to see the ethical implications of this crucial insight concerning all that is with regard to every individual human being:
"... suppose that in theology I say that all men before God, and measured by Him, are equally sinful -- does that preclude me from holding that one is worse or better than another? And if I accept the fact of degrees in virtue, may I not believe also that virtue is one and is perfection and that you must attain to it or not? ... Suppose that for a certain purpose I want a stick exactly one yard long, am I wrong when I condemn both one inch and thirty-five inches, and any possible sum of inches up to thirty-six, as equally and alike coming short? Surely if you view perfection and completeness, in one way, it is a case of either Yes or No, you have either reached it or not. [The ideal.] But in the imperfect [messy, daily particularity we inhabit,] there is already more or less of a quality of character, the self-same character which, if all defect were removed, would attain to and would itself be perfection."
Even imperfection implies or requires perfection. ("Is this atheism's moment?")
A fundamental tenet of the Hebrew religion is that God is one in (or "as") a "Covenant" with Israel. Think of the different ways that you "constitute" the objects of relationships through your conceptualizing. Is a "Covenant" not another way of speaking of the Absolute? Think of an entire society choosing to develop its moral identity and aspirations through a shared "Constitution." If you call someone a "spic" or "fag," then what are you making that person "into"? How are you determining future relations between the two of you? ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
The most important chapter in Judith Butler's recent, very readable book, is the final political meditation: "Precarious Life," in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York & London: Verso, 2006), pp. 128-156. That chapter opens with a revealing quotation from Emmanuel Levinas: "... the surplus of every sociality over every solitude."
Butler and Derrida develop a greater awareness of their Jewish roots and increasing concern with social justice as they mature intellectually. A "sociality" may be indestructible even if a "solitude" is not. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
We are an unbreakable unity even when we are, physically, separated if we remain spiritually linked as a community. The danger for United States of America today is the threat to the spiritual unity of our society.
What if a person is viewed, exclusively, as a "customer" or "Jew," "inmate" or "defendant"? If you relate to a label or social science category as opposed to me, a name associated with a specific human being; if you turn away from an optimistic ideal or hope, like "person," to refer to a reified external category (file number #3356) or "behavior"; then is it more (or less) likely that you will achieve understanding of what is a person? Or who is this person? Or who am I? (See the writings of Bernard Lonergan on "insight" and "horizon" then "Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood.")
I suggest that our "constitutive dialectics" cannot be understood in purely external, instrumental terms. All forms of behaviorism and positivism in the human realm will fail, if our goal is to understand people (philosophy, hermeneutics), as opposed to knowing how their bodily mechanisms function (science).
See Scott Ryan, "Objective Idealism and Ethics," http://home.neo.rr.com/jsryan/writings/idealism_and_ethics.html (Persons are not abstract variables like "A" and "B.")
Let us "associate" this set of ideas with contemporary scientific phenomenology in the human sciences:
"... Husserl will admit that the law of being of consciousness is to be conscious 'of.' In so much as, for phenomenology, consciousness is already a consciousness 'of,' it pertains to the very being of consciousness to transcend itself, to pass beyond itself 'towards.' But even if the positionality of consciousness is sufficient to confer a certain transphenomenality upon consciousness, does it indeed follow that a being can be conferred upon consciousness as self-transcending? And if so, what conclusions can be drawn from the being of the phenomenon?" (McCann, p. 113.)
Forget the labels and try to see me. You will find yourself resorting to universals or categories immediately in any effort to communicate with me through symbols. The word "fact" is also an abstract category. This categorizing power is the essence of language -- our most common symbol is the word -- and all languages are shared if they are to function as languages, so that we find ourselves already joined by standing on common ground in language.
Each of us is and must be a part of the other long before the conscious act of mutual apprehension can take place. Language is a "Covenant." ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
This is called socialism or communitarianism, but you may call it anything you like: "Wholism is truth."
The puzzle only deepens when we ponder the mystery of language in which we are, right now, together with our drive towards ever greater connection with others through that same language. Self-interest is a clever if autistic child's understanding of human motivation.
Contrast Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 19, with C.S. Peirce, "Evolutionary Love," in Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1988), pp. 267-301; and Thomas S. Knight, Charles Peirce (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 69 ("Scientific Phenomenology").
Bradley points to the importance of feelings in knowing of others. To love others is to constitute a new world for others and the self. This suggestion has startling implications for our thinking about the environment, also socially and politically. I wish to refer the reader, once again, to the works of R.D. Laing.
Dialectics replaces a "masculine" metaphor of "conquering" nature, by which persons or societies are also seen as "things to be dominated and controlled," with an organic or "feminine" model of a universe in which we find ourselves that we help to create even as it creates us. The key Hegelian insight is to make use of both perspectives -- masculine and feminine -- at the same "time."
You may begin to see why Stove dislikes this "variable" intellectual disposition. This is mere "womanly wisdom." (David Stove) The universe "divides 'herself' into us." All of the images to capture this more flexible thinking are feminine. Mythological representations of this insight are also feminine. The idea is to give up the attempt to control or repackage the lives of others to suit our wishes and learn to live with other "freedoms in the world" as mysteries. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Conservatives will now accuse me of being a "woman," or gay. Leftists will complain about all of this talk of God or religion. This means that I am probably on to something true and important. I will refer to an essay by Professor Robin West entitled "Jurisprudence and Gender," which appeared originally in volume 55 of University of Chicago Law Review at page 1, in 1988.
I have reservations about doing so because West's comments concerning Unger's theory, especially, are inadequate and more so in light of Unger's post-1988 writings, which overlap with the type of feminist jurisprudence defended by Ms. West. However, Professor West offers flashes of insight that one would like to see developed by many scholars in feminist legal thinking that lead to new forms of communitarian politics. From these idealistic premises a complete feminist metaphysics and ethics may be developed. Please see the film "Mindwalk" and also Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point.
See Judith Butler's Gender Studies: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 119 and Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (New York: Anchor, 1982), p. 291.
I highlighted this passage, noting that Ms. Morgan anticipated -- by a decade or more -- the fancy theories of the eighties and nineties:
"That everything is energy, that everything moves, that everything is somehow discrete or separate, and interrelated or interconnected -- these seem rather vital scientific facts that politics would do well to examine. Furthermore, as Arthur Koestler wrote, 'The nineteenth-century model of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been dematerialized, materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy.' ..." ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
Why did scholars not see the obvious association between these interpretations of scientific developments and idealism as well as Continental phenomenology-hermeneutics and liberation theology or literary criticism?
Most of this idealistic philosophy is not understood by Professor Stove in his misleading and irrelevant criticisms of idealism. For Stove, this "feminine" (or sissy-like?) caring, concern or emotive "knowing" is only ambiguous, fuzzy, not sufficiently "rigorous."
Professor Stove should have attended an American law school since his intellectual attitude or method would have been richly rewarded there -- sadly, even by women. Stove is the philosophical dinosaur, not his feminist opponents. Asian cinema is discovering many of these ideas. See Wong Kar Wai's 2046 (Sony Pictures) and Takashi Yamazaki's Returner (Time Warner?).
An essay that seems to have nothing to do with feminism -- unless feminism is regarded as a form of madness -- which it once was, and this may explain Mary Wollstonecraft's stay at Bedlam is Adam Phillips, "Around and About Madness," in Equals, pp. 77-88 and Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, pp. 64-77. ("How has 'Woman' come to be?")
French historians concerned with the concepts of madness during the medieval and Renaissance eras have detected patterns that should interest feminists. This is pre-Foucault. Get busy, ladies. (I mean, women.) Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 20-27, discusses the Act of Parliament of 1742 governing the mad housed in "correctional facilities with criminals and paupers." Most of the persons to whom this law applied were poor women with children. For centuries the understanding of feminine identity really amounted to a conception of an insane man. A woman was defined by Victorians as a man who had gone crazy. I think it is more accurate to think of it the other way around. Men are illogical and deranged versions of women. ("Why Philosophy is For Everybody" and "Raymond Chandler and 'The Simple Art of Murder.'")
Loving another person -- even giving up my life -- may be in my self "interest," if I define my greatest interest as being fully human. Such thoughts make me hateful to those hostile both to the African-American religious tradition of moral struggle ("Soul") and to genuine philosophical feminism in the phenomenological tradition. Such views make me "a kind of woman" (horrors!), not "tough" enough, for those failing to understand what real "toughness" love provides. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
See the excellent introduction by Janet Todd to the novels Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft with Mary Shelley's Matilda, both published by Penguin in 1992. Professor Todd is the biographer of Wollstonecraft and the best authority I have discovered on nineteenth century novels by women, which includes two of the greatest novelists in world literature -- George Eliot and Jane Austen, both of whom display idealistic tendencies. From those two great women to Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt today by way of Virginia Woolf is but a single step. (George Eliot was a translator of German philosophers who was well-aware of German and British idealism.)
Professor Stove's Attack On Idealism.
Stove is a self-described "positivist" and "materialist." These philosophical commitments are crucial to an appreciation of his antagonism to idealism and (presumably) to his rejection of my position on foundations, phenomenological-hermeneutics.
Stove's antagonism to idealism and Continental thought is presented, of course, as entirely a matter of rational argument and judgment.
Judges in law courts similarly write in a neutral tone when analyzing legal issues, even when their conclusions are often determined by pre-analytical and non-rational philosophical commitments, or (to quote Holmes) "what the judge had for breakfast."
Among philosophers -- unlike judges -- theories are usually a matter of what they had for dinner sometime last week since ideas need to settle in the mind before they become clear.
After discussing Stove's foundational theoretical assumptions, which are not defined or defended by him in these essays (a common problem for fans of game theory), I turn to Stove's arguments in the order in which they are presented. I will examine essays one and two, by Stove, concluding with my opinions and suggestions for further reading.
Positivism and Materialism.
According to the Dictionary of Philosophy, "Positivism holds that the highest or only form of knowledge is the description of sensory phenomena. [Auguste Compte] holds that there were three stages of human belief: the theological, metaphysical and finally the positive, so-called because it confined itself to what is positively given, avoiding all speculation."
Notice how close positivism once was to phenomenology. A.J. Ayer is the superstar philosopher among logical positivists in the twentieth century. My guess is that Professor Stove placed Ayer's picture in his office.
Those who are "into" the now mostly discredited and abandoned logical positivism of, say, Language, Truth and Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936) may appreciate Stove's essays more than the rest of us. I usually do not "like" positivists, since I reject their philosophical views. However, I like Ayer. I always enjoy reading his work.
Ayer once came to the rescue of a lady arguing with her husband, who was about to become violent. The husband turned out to be Mike Tyson when he was heavyweight champion of the world. Tyson said to the seventy-eight year-old, diminutive Ayer: "I'm the heavyweight champion of the world."
Professor Ayer responded, with a very British aplomb: "And I am the Waynflete Professor of Logic at Oxford University. Let us discuss this matter as civilized men."
Frederic Raphael once said to Ayer that he admired Language, Truth and Logic only to have Ayer turn to him and comment with a satisfied chuckle, "I still get 2,000 a year from that book."
Clearly, Ayer was sympathetic to forms of American pragmatism.
Ayer's followers display a Stove-like slavish adherence to the fact/value and a priori versus a posteriori distinctions. Necessary claims are dismissed as tautologies. Only contingent claims about empirical reality ("I want the facts!") are deemed to constitute knowledge.
This claim concerning knowledge -- as only what is verifiable empirically -- is a metaphysical claim and cannot itself be verified empirically. It may be self-contradictory, but it sure sounds "tough-minded." Here is a summary of the "judo-flip" critique (Simon Blackburn) of the verification principle:
"I still find it difficult to understand the status of the principle of verification. It is either a proposition or no proposition. If it is [a proposition,] then it must be, on your [Ayer's] premises, either a tautology or an empirical hypothesis. If the former, no conclusion follows as to metaphysics. If the latter, then the principle itself would require verification. But the principle of verification cannot itself be verified." (Frederick Copleston.)
"Materialism is the view that the world is entirely composed of matter." What is matter? Physicists tell us that "matter resolves into forces and energy, and is just one among other physically respectable denizens of the universe."
It turns out that matter is only a kind of energy, as Mr. Talbot writes, like cerebral activity and/or thoughts possibly. (See again: "Where are thoughts located?")
Interactions at the sub-atomic level are more extensive and variable than first imagined. Material objects are "really" only particles in motion.
Material entities exchange particles all the time. All matter in the universe participates in this swirling particle soup at the tiniest levels of reality to say nothing of chaos and indeterminacy.
Solid objects (as opposed to ideas) having a fixed and unchanging "weight and mass" are non-existent, from the perspective of science, but they sure feel real to us.
Positivists shout: "Thoughts cannot affect reality!"
To which I answer: "Sure, they can. Nothing affects reality more than minds, which are also part of reality." See Amir D. Aczel, Descartes' Secret Notebook (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), pp. 1-10. (Descartes' ideas -- not Al Gore's -- are essential to the Internet.)
Ethically speaking, "it's all relative." Right? I'd say "wrong."
There is truth in ethical and all other matters. It is up to us both to construct and discover that truth. Truth is a little of both -- discovery and construction, or interpretation.
"Both Bohm and Pribam have noted that the experiences mystics have reported throughout the ages -- such as feelings of cosmic oneness with the universe, a sense of unity with all life, and so forth -- sound very much like descriptions of the implicate order. They suggest that mystics [philosophers, artists, mad persons] are somehow able to peer beyond ordinary explicate reality and glimpse its deeper, more holographic qualities."
Michael Talbot, "The Holographic Model and Psychology," in The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper & Collins, 1991), p. 63.
I have just read a wonderful short book discussing metaphysics after an essay by this same philosopher examining the ideas of F.H. Bradley. I am more convinced every day that Bradley was a century ahead of his era. Bradley's philosophy is more relevant today and may be suggestive to many thinkers who seem unaware of his works. Please see W.H. Walsh, Metaphysics (London: Hutchison, 1963), pp. 73-77 ("Metaphysics Without Ontology") and W.H. Walsh, "F.H. Bradley," in D.J. O'Connor, ed., A Critical History of Western Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 426-436 ("... reality comes to us in the form of immediate feeling!"), then compare Ken Wilber, "The Start of Personal Discovery," in No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), pp. 76-94 with Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down (New York: Perseus, 2005), pp. 47-57:
"Deterministic motion in quantum mechanics means logical and systematic evolution of the rule as time advances. Entanglement means interdependency in the rule."
Think carefully about this phrase "interdependency in the rule." Dialectic. Instantiation. Substitute for the word "rule" the term "network." Turn to the theory of representation and the "triangle of representation" (or meaning) and then to "Instantiation" in philosophy and theology. What is the rule? What does the rule "mean"? From Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), pp. 62-63 ("Duration") to F.H. Bradley, "On Floating Ideas and the Imaginary," in Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), pp. 28-29 ("Every idea qualifies reality ..."), finally, back to Hegel:
"... 'Here' and 'now' have elastic boundaries. If it is not to contract into a point without extention, 'here' manifestly suggests any part of space. 'Now,' too, connotes any portion of time, if it is not to collapse into an instant without duration." (Eternity in time.)
Jacob Lowenburg, "Introduction," in Hegel Selections (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1929), pp. xxiii-xv (discussing early Hegelian philosophy).
Hegelian reasoning has now become -- often unknowingly -- the epistemological basis for a new science of networks, systems, fusions of biology-chemistry and bio-physics in recent idealist theories:
"When Luhman's argument is read through Hegel's dialectical analysis of identity and difference, it becomes clear that the relation between systems and environment involves the very self-reflexivity characteristic of autopoietic systems. ... the environment is not an indifferent [inert object] but is itself a differential network comprised of a group of systems. If the differences that establish the identities of these systems display the self-reflexive structure of the systems themselves, then the relations between and among systems form something like autopoietic systems. [Humberto Maturana] Within this system of systems, parts and whole are not only reciprocally related but are virtually fractal -- the structure of the part mirrors the structure of the whole and vice versa." (Where's my left sock?)
Mark C. Taylor, "The Beauty of Organisms," in The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), p. 92. ("Strange Loops.")
Our ancestors discovered that a bridge or tower would not stand beyond a certain height, but would stand if the base or foundations were strengthened. They then constructed taller, also better buildings and bridges, by discovering reality's truths, which are both empirical and formulated as abstractions, abstractions possessing a necessary logic, or a structure of ideas.
"God" is indeed in the details (Einstein); also in the finished products and (mostly) in the relationship of all that is, which is where we also find freedom. (See "Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")
What we call "music" is not a bunch of unrelated notes; rather, music emerges from the connectedness -- or legato phrasing -- between and among notes that constitutes the magic of music. Relationship(s) is how music -- and you -- come to "be."
Great literary music, poetry, is as much about the silences as the words linked by, and to, the mystery of a single personality as experiencing and communicating subject. Surely, the universe is meaningful and cogent only as an Absolute (or interconnectedness) in which each of us is a part that implies the whole. This is to find ourselves contemplating the idea of God, for it is to restate the ontological proof in contemporary terms. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?" then: "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
What word could we use to identify that totality from which every meaning is drawn and to which each entity and item contributes? Order? Intelligence? Absolute? Network? One more --God?
Please compare Julius Portnoy, The Philosopher and Music: An Historical Outline (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), pp. 195-218 with Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 213-265. ("The Re-Enchantment of the Person."), then compare these two works with Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Bantam, 1990), pp. 295-341 ("Breaking the Mirror") with James K. Feibleman, Understanding Oriental Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1976), pp. 172-174 ("One comes from an examination of Chinese philosophy with an impression of human dignity and timeless value.")
What idealism and phenomenology share with forms of classical Chinese thought is the understanding that ideas and thoughts are "realities," eternally, that create new realities, including the philosopher's reality within the confines of his or her study.
We find the sentences of others in the silences between our own sentences. Derrida is a Chinese philosopher. Arkady Plotinsky, "Complementarity and Deconstruction," in Complementarity (London & Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 191-271. ("Complementarity" -- compatibilism -- "enables one to describe comprehensively and employ productively the conflictual aspects of quantum phenomena that cannot be accomodated by classical theories.")
The relationship between "conflictual" qualities and Derrida's "deconstructive" linguistic-metaphysics should be obvious. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
If you were to appear at F.H. Bradley's doorstep in, say, 1897 and enter his home and observe him writing at his desk. Would you know his thoughts or his reasons for his beliefs only from what is visible on the outside?
No, you would need to read his books, talk to him, listen, sympathize and empathize, discover his pains and ways of easing them, his perspective on the universe and what he sees from that perspective that you may not see, but also what he feels and, perhaps, even what he may not understand about himself that lingers in the subconscious.
You must share a person's "form of life" to understand him or her (Laing, Lacan, Wittgenstein), discovering how much you share with others -- including those who seem most distant from you -- merely through their use of words in a common language.
Again: Feelings will be crucial. Has anyone been to Scarsdale, Connecticut? Bear this aggregationism or connectionism "in" mind. (I love all of these trendy terms.) ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Stove forgets what idealism is during the course of his discussion, undermining his own position.
"A Victorian Horror Story"?
Essay One.
Professor Stove begins with an attack on religion, an attack which is mostly irrelevant to what religions are or why people have religious needs or beliefs:
"In short men have always believed that there are gods around them, though they knew there were none." (p. 83.)
Joseph Campbell explains that religions and all mythical systems are within the human psyche, regardless of whether you believe that they are also "out there" as features of empirical reality.
The same is true of any scientific hypothesis or all concepts. Concepts enjoy an intellectual existence regardless of their merits as descriptions of material reality. The meaning of, and explanation for, religions has to do with what they say about us, by means of symbols, most of which are built into our languages. (See my essay on Ernst Cassirer's work.)
Derrida's writings should be consulted at this point, along with Cassirer's Essay on Man, Carl Jung's writings, and Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative/ Narrative and Interpretation.
If you admit that persons are "in the world," and if you recognize that religions are something "real" in persons, then religions are also in the world since they are part of persons living in the world and of human culture in every civilization. Religions are certainly "real" in that sense.
Nothing that exists, objectively, exists for no reason. And the objectivity of religious experience should be beyond dispute after 9/11 -- both in horrible ways (fundamentalist terrorism) and in noble ways (selfless heroism and loving compassion from rescuers).
Religion exists, on one theory, because human beings need shared religious experiences. "If God does not exist," Voltaire remarked, "it would be necessary to invent Him."
Professor Stove finds religious beliefs ridiculous. Stove asserts that anyone who believes in religion must not really mean it. "Such are the facts, and we all know them; but we are so constituted as to be unable to take them in." (p. 85.) (emphasis added.)
I find not religion to be ridiculous, but the literal types interpreting all religious texts as though they were police or income tax reports to be idiotic and irrelevant.
Religious texts communicate at symbolic and other levels beyond, or in addition to, their literal meanings. (George Santayana.)
Stove fails to appreciate why we are unable to take in what he calls "the facts." ("Daniel Dennett and the Science of Religion.")
Religions communicate ethical and psychological truth, not empirical "facts" -- whatever "facts" may be. Scriptures are not accounts of "what happened" historically, but attempts to say what happens to all of us psychologically and ethically, to examine the point of our lives. Truths of meaning (or interpretive-hermeneutic truths) and facts (descriptive or instrumental truths) are distinct.
Religions speak to us in the language of art and dreams, which must be symbolic and metaphorical; symbols and metaphors are structural components of all human languages, including scientific languages.
The narrative of science is also filled with metaphors and symbols. (Magee on Popper, pp. 65-74.)
At the foundations of all knowledge and languages are modes of "consciousness characteristic of the human mind throughout the ages. They are usually called the intuitive and rational and have traditionally been associated with religion and mysticism [also, equally,] with science. "... The rational and intuitive are complimentary modes [compatibilism] of functioning of the human mind. Rational thinking is linear, focused, and analytic. ... Intuitive knowledge is based on a direct, non-intellectual experience of reality arising in an expanded state of awareness."
The Turning Point, pp. 37-39. ("Spock and Kirk," or "Scully and Mulder.")
These are the words of a physicist. The question to ask about religion or myth, literature and many philosophical claims, it seems to me, is not whether these claims are factual; rather, the question to ask yourself is what does this proposition or claim "mean" to me? What is it "about" for me? Is the wisdom in this claim true? The "issue," in lawyer's jargon, is not whether there "really" was a Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve (or Adam and Steve?), a serpent or a magic apple, but what is the meaning (or meanings) of that story?
Religion is about the meanings of our actions and lives. Religions are not descriptions of events taking place in nature. My view is that the Adam and Eve story is about what makes us human: freedom and the risk of evil that freedom brings.
No meaning that holds (as meaning) is merely "relative." Meanings are shared because they are (or become) objective for rational agents who are similarly situated. This is true as a matter of rational necessity. (Kant) Otherwise, meanings could not function as meanings.
If there were a God, why would such a Being communicate or "be" by means of "narratives" is a popular question in recent theology? This is a way of asking why we need to communicate by means of "narratives." How many narratives do we enter into as a matter of "becoming" persons? Are you and the universe not narratives? Is there any way for you not to be a social entity? What would you call the binding element in your "relationships"? We all know where the narratives of our lives are going, except that (as they used to say about TWA airline in the sixties) "getting there is half the fun." Actually, getting there may be all the fun.
Maybe God may be thought of as a kind of "narrative" in which we all participate. According to some trendy theologians, God chooses to participate in, or "as," the collective narrative(s) of our lives? ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
"The known is the knower; thought and being are one. This is Hegel's avowed idealism -- the identification of the essence and evolution of the universe with the activity of an all-pervading mind -- resulting from making central the dialectical process as a mode of insatiable experience."
Hegel Selections, at p. xxxiii.
Stove complains that the motive for idealist philosophy is religious. There are several responses to this claim:
This is irrelevant to whether idealist claims are true or to the assessment of idealism's meaningfulness in capturing important aspects of human experience. The motive for a philosophy is distinct from whether that philosophy is true, in a factual or literal sense, or whether its arguments are valid and suggestive or helpful to adherents in living their lives. A bad argument may be highly suggestive, by the way, leading to a good one.
The motive for a lot of scientific work is also religious or mystical. This was true for Einstein. Certainly, this is historically true, given the accounts of alchemy and religious associations with the tradition of medicine and natural philosophy in Aristotle's thought.
Scientism is also a quasi-religious attitude motivating many philosophers today, like Stove perhaps. This is distinct from whether what Stove says is persuasive, which it is not. (See David Deutsch's classic paper on "Physics, Philosophy and Quantum Technology.")
Motives for philosophies or religions are irrelevant to the merits of those modes of discourse. If idealism is a child of religion then so is the narrative of modern science. Nothing follows from this claim of origins concerning the value or validity of idealism, religion, or science.
See David Deutsch, "Comment on "'Many Minds' Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by Michael Lockwood," http://www.qubit.org/people/david/Articles/CommentOnLockwood.html (1996). (The "Many Minds" quantum theory is matched, almost identically, in several stories found in Hindu mythology and in Kant's as well as Hegel's works.)
All of us (on one account) are "many minds" unified, if at all, through a creative process of identity-making. Perhaps something similar may be said of the universe. Compare Roy E. Peacock, "An Ocean of Truth," in A Brief History of Eternity: A Considered Response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Suffolk: Monarch, 1989), pp. 145-152 ("The search is on for the mind of God!") with Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Relevance of the Beautiful," in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3-53 (" ... the word becomes binding, as it were; it binds one human being with another.")
Concerning the history of scientific thinking, Islamic civilization provides foundations for much Western scholarship in mathematics and physics, see H.J.J. Winter, "The Arabic Achievement in Physics," in Robert M. Palter, ed., Studies in Ancient and Medieval Science: Towards Modern Science (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1961), pp. 171-179.
Stove objects to the identification of "reality with experience." (p. 91.) Also, he rejects the claim that the universe should be thought of as "kindred." (p. 91.)
The picture of the universe increasingly revealed by science -- chaos theory in particular -- may be associated with the intricate design and decorations in Mosques, often these decorations are made from the lettering of texts in the Koran, where elaborate and subtle patterns in nature intercommunicate to create a larger kind of beauty or unity.
Water is "kindred" to fish, in the sense that they swim in it and die without it; likewise, the universe is "kindred" to us because we are made up of the same particles and energy that constitutes everything else. In terms of the "story" of evolution, we are related to all other life on the planet. There is nothing irrational in such a belief or observation. It would be irrational to believe that a marble statue ("Galatea"?) is not related to the marble from which it is made. Perhaps the statue is even related to the sculptor, and vice versa, also as an image it reveals the culture to which it belongs. In our relationships, each of us is both sculptor and statue, dancer and dance. Of course, humanity and the universe are kindred. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "Pieta.")
Stove objects to Christian charity in the Third World because it makes people in such countries "reach for Russian rifles." Independence is not acceptable in "wogs"? Stove can barely refrain from using the word. (p. 93.)
Real independence is not only a matter of rifles. It is obtained by people, for themselves, and not brought to them by others. In this process of freeing ourselves, both philosophies and religions -- as interpreted and altered by free people everywhere -- may be useful, regardless of their places of origin or the motives which lead to their creation. See Sushil Kumar Saxena, "Thought and Reality," in his Studies in the Metaphysics of Bradley (New York: Humanities, 1967), pp. 172-193. (This Indian scholar's fusion of idealism with Hindu metaphysics is fascinating.)
There are many insults directed at idealist terms by Stove, which does not amount to an argument of any kind. For example, "The absolute was a fine garbage disposal unit for matter and space, but also, it shredded and emulsified minds as well as bodies, values as well as facts, religion as well as science, all with the same sublime indifference." (p. 95.)
This amounts to objecting to the definition of the word "absolute," which is the idea of "all-inclusive." My shoe is in the absolute, the t.v. set, the pen I write with, science, Yankee Stadium -- everything. Again, what follows from Stove's disdain? Nothing. You may not like the word, but it exists and is being used. Everything is in the Absolute, because every thing is related to all other things. Each item remains distinct and is not "emulsified." ("F.H. Bradley's Concrete Universal.")
What is more, scientists now agree that nothing retains its identity or meaning in "splendid isolation" (which may be impossible); everything is realized only in "community" (or connectedness), as part of the Absolute. The concept of the "Absolute" is necessary, even indispensable. In explaining his own position Stove says: "... my materialism could be epitomized, adequately for most purposes, as follows: human beings are a race of land-mammals, the most intelligent things known to exist, but things [emphasis added] which are born, develop and die like all other mammals." (p. 98.)
I do not regard any person as only a "thing." No human being is only an object. Many idealist philosophers can accept Stove's naturalism, without accepting his disregard for the ethical and ontological special or unique qualities of humans.
A person -- or any other living creature -- that suffers has a greater call on my concern and attention than any "thing" or object, including a gold watch or Mercedes Benz automobile.
If you regard persons merely as "things" then what you do to them becomes insignificant. Is this ethically desirable? I doubt it. See Cornel West's warnings about nihilism, or turn to Marx and humanistic Marxists.
Humans are animals that are born and die. Humans are also beings with spiritual lives who are capable of love. These claims are not contradictory.
Just as sense data and concepts are equally necessary for thought, so persons live materially and spiritually, legally and ethically, physically and aesthetically -- all of these ways of living our lives are aspects of our one life. They take place inside and outside the subject, until that distinction collapses. These unities-in-differences are our shared lives, which are "experienced" ultimately (Bradley, Royce and also in the Idealism-Romanticism of Jose Marti), as "unities-in-search-of-others," or "unity-without-difference." ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Societies with different economies and political values may be "compatible"? Cuba and the United States, for example, Israel and Palestine?
We share in a paradoxical situation called "being-in-the-world-with-others."
We are all "linked words" in a language called "the Absolute" for idealists. There is and can be no plausible human philosophy which excludes women as equal creators and recipients of thought -- despite Stove's discontent -- since human (and philosophy) must include, EQUALLY, both masculine and feminine. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Feminism focusing on gender complexity and equality does not involve fashion requirements or instructions concerning what words may be used in the privacy of our bedrooms. Feminism should be more interested in power issues among genders and sexual identity issues (Foucault and feminism is a future topic), also in how power is unequally distributed in sexist societies.
Sexism damages both men and women, especially women. Feminism is compatible with a spiritual life for persons of all faiths or no religious faith, atheists and scientists -- all may share in this brand of feminism. Idealism has been deemed helpful by a number of leading feminist philosophers, like Kimberly Hutchins and Iris Murdoch as well as many more. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women" and "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Philosophy of Science.")
A culture or an individual that undermines or disempowers the "feminine principle" will gradually weaken and may self-destruct. Masculine and feminine must be in harmony within and beyond the subject:
"It is a necessary part of a man's development to meet the anima first in her projected form, that is, out in the world, and deal with her there. Concomittantly, the same thing needs to happen to the woman in connection with her animus. Otherwise, anima and animus remain locked in the unconscious and are not released to create the struggles that bring with them the potential for a widening of consciousness. ..."
Judith Singer, "Anima and Animus," in Boundaries of the Soul (New York: Anchor, 1973), p. 252. (To break the connection between animus and anima, male and female is to invite psychological suicide.)
See also M.-L. Von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," in Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell, 1968), pp. 157-255.
Western culture has threatened the feminine principle with obliteration for the Jungians. The entire culture is "out of balance and, therefore, self-destructive," violent and irrational in many ways because of this devaluing of the feminine powers of the psyche. ("'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review.")
These are developments of "archetypal" thinking that are a psychological evolution of Kant's categories and Hegel's dialectic in Jungian analytical psychology.
If you oppress women, Carl Jung warns, your entire society may well suffer a kind of creative strangulation. Release of the feminine powers in the psyche (for a man) or masculine powers (for a woman) is essential to integration. Integration of masculine and feminine powers in culture is necessary in all human societies, and not only for atomized individuals, but (collectively) for nations.
Stove's complaints about idealist wishes for a "congenial universe" (who wants an uncongenial universe?), are also irrelevant. Wishes have no bearing on idealists' efforts to defend their views in the public square.
Bradley is one of the fiercest polemicists in the history of philosophy. Bradley relies only on reason. I say much the same of Kant, Hegel, many other idealists and phenomenologists, including Gabriel Marcel, who may be classified as an idealist and a phenomenologist. Kolakowski's essay on Husserl is must reading. Ricoeur may also be included in both categories, arguably, despite Ricoeur's rejection of Cartesian dualism and classical rationalism.
In America, idealist Josiah Royce and Mary Whiton Calkins may be recommended on these issues, and a complex hybrid-philosophy, such as Judith Butler's idealistic-phenomenological-hermeneutic theorizing, is highly recommended along with Marjorie Grene's socio-bio-ethics.
No scholar, to my knowledge, has associated Butler's and Grene's feminist philosophies. Butler is also a fusion-thinker, dissolving boundaries between analytical and Continental approaches -- like Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze before her work appeared.
American women are among the most important contemporary philosophers. If you are a student of philosophy in Latin America (or Europe) interested in American thought, I urge you to study Butler's and Grene's books.
Stove is baffled that Kant says "space is empirically real (even if it is also transcendentally ideal) ... " (p. 103.)
The human experience of things being either close or far away is organized, made possible and communicated, Kant says, by means of the concept of space and a few others. My shoe is here, but my sock is over there. I apply a concept (shoe) to: 1) my interpretation of sense data (what I see over here); so I can 2), put on my socks and shoes. What part of this do you not get?
Stove confuses Berkeley's claim about what we know and the knowledge that exists for the knower, with what exists in fact -- which may be unknowable, except for Berkeley's God. Yet Stove has no problem saying: "... since it was published, [Berkeley's idealism] has done so much damage to sanity that, if syphilis had been introduced into Europe deliberately by one man, that man would have done less harm than Berkeley." (p. 109.)
This statement provides a glaring example of the censorship that is seen as convenient for dealing with ideas that fascism cannot understand or defeat. This is the same David Stove who said "ideas do not affect reality"?
If Stove believes that idealism has this formidable negative power, then he is an idealist.
The Absolute is our "experience," Professor Stove, because it is a concept. Hence, the Absolute is experienced, mentally, like all concepts. (p. 116.)
Stove spends most of his essay telling us that no "womanly emotions" must be allowed to cloud our "manly judgment," then he writes: "Their [idealists'] anthropocentrism was the reverse of unflinching: you can FEEL [emphasis added] it everywhere in their writing, but you can pin it on them nowhere." (p. 119.)
This is the epitome of what Stove rejects as "unphilosophical."
Stove's reliance on "feeling" as a source of insight that he cannot "pin" on these philosophers makes everything he has claimed in his foundational stance false or contradictory.
Professor Stove was wearing a dress, as it were, under his gray suit.
Stove then has the nerve to complain of idealists' "logical falsity" (p. 120.) This is without citing a single persuasive instance or example of such falsity. (p. 120.) Incidentally, "Absolute" is a concept and so is "person." Just as you are a person -- no matter who you are -- so it is certain that no matter where you are, even in New Jersey, you are and must be part of the Absolute.
Is this claim that idealists' "anthropocentrism" is contradictory valid? Why? Is it based on Stove's "feeling"? Even if he cannot "pin" it on anyone? Stove's "womanly intuition" fails him.
Notice that this is granting Stove the cognitive value of feelings -- which idealists and existentialists admit (Marcel, Dr. King) -- but noting that Stove fails to articulate a persuasive basis for such intuitions, or to remain consistent with his own premises.
It is Stove -- not feminists -- who has a problem with acknowledging his own unavoidable reliance on traditionally "female" forms of cognition -- emotional knowledge included -- supplementing and improving any so-called rationality seeking only to be "tough minded."
Professor Stove's sheltered life has not brought him into contact with many "tough-minded" women. I can think of several women who would easily "kick Stove's ass," philosophically speaking. Examples? Mary Wollstonecraft (rights theorist), Mary Whiton Calkins (idealist), Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch (both phenomenologist-existentialists), Angela Davis (Marxist), Susan Haack (not an idealist, analytical pragmatist), Judith Butler (gender and culture theorist), Marjorie Grene (phenomenologist, even in her eighties or nineties Ms. Grene would "knock out" David Stove) -- all are philosophical "tough gals" and all seem to be more sympathetic to idealism as well as its legacy than Stove.
Women were traditionally required to master learning in both the public world of power and commercial activities, philosophy and science, while also developing "wisdom" about emotional relationships and a kind of control in private life that provided a back door to power that was denied to them by way of the front door.
The great "Salons" of seventeenth century France provide a clear example of women who were scholars and leading intellectuals -- despite being denied access to universities -- who also dominated the private realm of relationships and governed nations from behind the scenes. ("Master and Commander.")
It may be useful to think of idealism as an early philosophical form of the famous "womanly aptitude" for "multitasking." It relies upon an ability to dwell in two worlds at once, even as these dual realms are brought together in one world of personal experience (Absolute?) as opposed to behavior. See again: Professor Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, pp. 148-155. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
Another example of women playing a leading role in politics and power, culture, and in the development of ideas is the world of Venetian courtesans -- who served as diplomats and intelligence agents as well as Davidsonian "radical translators" of meanings from the political and diplomatic world to the intellectual world, then to the world of the arts.
This "bridging-role" is one that seems to be common to women in all civilizations. It is vital to the progress of civilization and growth of learning. Yet this crucial role is mostly ignored by historians of philosophy as is the mechanism for the translation of ideas defining the movements of Western thought from one social context to another. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
The parade of prominent men we associate with the intellectual project of the West -- this is no criticism of those men -- must be supplemented with the narratives of drawing room (and bedroom) conversations as well as palace intrigues that established necessary connections in thinking, conversations often lighting the fuse to Modernity's intellectual and cultural revolutions.
See generally, John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 300-459 and Lujo Bassermann, The Oldest Profession: A History of Prostitution (New York: Dorset Press, 1967), pp. 104-138. (Courtesans and prostitutes provide an important chapter in the chronicle of Western thought about politics, society, manners and love.)
Every history of the philosophy of love in Western civilization ignores the role of love's professionals. This is like writing a history of Western philosophy and ignoring professional philosophers. How is eros transformed by commerce? How is sex distinguished from love-making in different historical epochs?
Tulia D'Aragona's life and philosophical acumen have not been captured in a biography by any feminist scholar of which I am aware. Ms. D'Aragona's client list as a prostitute in ancient Rome was such that streets were paved so that she might walk easily to her appointments. The empress Theodosia is reported to have begun her life-story as a prostitute in the circus maximus while contributing later to Justinian's famous legal code, also displaying a fondness for "disputation" with philosophers -- among other things. Theodosia was a self-taught jurist, philosopher, poet and advocate for the satirists, and all women.
I continue to believe that a modern form of idealism and/or phenomenology, drawing on neglected thinkers would provide a solid foundation for a truly radical, egalitarian, and non-sexist feminist political theory in postmodernist culture.
I believe that it is precisely this compatibility between idealism and some forms of feminism that Stove dislikes.
See Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan, 1917), pp. 6-12, pp. 557-560. Professor Calkins describes David Hume's philosophy as: "pluralistic phenomenalistic idealism." (pp. 150-190.) See also Professor Drucilla Cornell's discussion of "The 'Postmodern' Challenge to the Ideal of Community," in The Philosophy of the Limit (New York & London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 39-62.
Stove has made his confusions clear: "What idealism requires is that billiard balls, and everything else, be thoughts ... in the sense of an identity claim." (p. 123.)
Everything you can know about billiard balls or anything else is (for Stove and all materialistic-empiricists) "electrical signals interpreted by your brain" so as to be found in your mind, allegedly. Your "experience" of the billiard ball is what the billiard ball is "for you." Some aspects of the experience ("round") will be pretty universal because they are based on concepts ("roundness"). Like any rational mind, you will deploy your concept of "roundness" to allow you to have a sensory experience of the billiard ball. Thus, your subjective experience of the billiard ball also has an objective component.
"Roundness" is a shared theoretical construct. There is no fact or concrete reality that comes before thinking. "Concrete," "reality," and "fact" are all abstract concepts, like "mind." Thinking or concepts are part (or constitutive) of all experience.
"The self and the world," Putnam says, "jointly make up the self and the world."
Your experience also has a subjective component. It is with your eyes that you see the billiard ball and with your hands that you touch it, deriving sense-data from these actions.
There is, on the one hand, Carmen Electra. She exists as a concept or idea. She is also, on the other hand, a person living materially somewhere -- a person that I might touch -- so as to have sensory experience to confirm my conceptual or "ideational" knowledge. This touching is only desired for philosophical reasons.
Having concluded Stove's first essay, it becomes clear to me that Stove has no clue of what is idealism.
Brand Blanshard may help readers to understand idealism a little better than Stove does, before moving on to essay two.
"Mind, in taking thought, attempts to pass beyond its present experience to what it would be but is not yet, and so far as it has the thought of this end, it already is the end in posse. The idea is thus both identical with its object and different from it. It is identical in the sense in which anything that truly develops is identical with what it becomes. It is different in the sense in which any purpose partially realized is different from the same purpose realized wholly." (Brand Blanshard.)
My purpose (and yours) is to realize myself. This is something I cannot accomplish without you. We cannot accomplish this shared realization without all others to whom we are joined, spiritually, through love. Love is what we are all here to do. (See my essay "Flower in the Crannied Wall.")
It is this sense of being part of something much larger which draws us to idealist thinking, also to much speculative work in the hard sciences and to religious commitment or social struggle. Deus caritas est.
Some people are able to think in terms of this flexible "yes-and-no" quality which is human "being-in-the-world"; others cannot think in such terms, or reject such thought for temperamental reasons. This theme of "doubleness" is essential to the work of writers like John Fowles and Gore Vidal.
I may have a unique experience of this matter, but I have found such intellectual flexibility more often in feminine styles of thought, which are available to all, than in typically male patterns of thought, if there is such a thing.
I am certain that such flexible thinking will be essential in the future, if we are to have a future.
Essay Two.
Stove's assessment of Berkeley would not pass an examination in that thinker's work at any university today. I suggest that you consult Professor Warnock's book on Berkeley or the introduction to my trusty paperback copy of Berkeley's writings by David M. Armstrong. Stove begins by saying:
"A useful collection could be made of idols of the philosophical tribe: falseties [sic.] which are carefully handed down, as though they were precious truths, from each generation of philosophers to the next." (p. 135.)
Stove's own "scientism" is one such false ideology -- a kind of religious faith -- which will soon be seen as such by many more persons. Continental thinkers are already clear about this: I am sure that scientism, as opposed to real science, will become a subject for much wonder by future scholars.
Stove indulges in a weird self-disgust and misanthropic ranting in his essays. I will provide an example of his venom in my closing remarks in this section. For some reason, Stove associates women with humanism (or humane compassion) as an evil. (See my essay on John Finnis and my comments about witchcraft.)
Hence, Stove's disdain for the feminine mind. It is Professor Stove's mind that is less than dazzling. Imagination and sensitivity are terms of abuse for David Stove.
1): Stove tells us that there can be "no demonstrative argument for a matter of fact and existence." (p. 136.)
This claim may be valid or not, but it is impossible to tell which it is since Stove does not define his terms. What is a "fact"? How does he understand a "demonstrative argument"? Is this not Stove's demonstrative argument concerning a matter of fact? How does this relate to his own attempt to establish women's lack of intellectual capacity on the basis of a priori arguments?
Not all necessary propositions are tautologies. There are propositions which are certain and not purely formal. Take another look at the paper I mentioned by Professor David Deutsch, a world famous scientist and not a philosopher, "Is the human race a universal constructor? [or an idealist?] -- a question with tremendous reverberations for things like epistemology and cosmology, and actual metaphysics." http://www.david.deutsch@qubit.org/ (Deutsch's e-mail address is published.) ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")
Kant rescues a priori knowledge of the world with the concept of synthetic a priori propositions. Recent and highly persuasive defenses of a priori knowledge are provided by Christopher Peacocke of Columbia University. Christopher Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 148-194. Professor Copleston says:
"Now take the principle of contradiction. I think that there is a metaphysical version of the principle which is not simply what is sometimes called a 'law of thought,' but rather is imposed on the mind by its experience of being, or rather, by its reflection of its experience of being." (Copleston, emphasis added.)
I agree. Stove does not. Yet he offers no reason (nor any argument) to refute Kant or Copleston on this issue. (p. 137.)
No, this is not contradicted by our encounter with quantum physics. This is a point about how to understand and transmit quantum physics, or anything else to others. This need for a public discourse is what allows us to say that our STATEMENTS about dialectics or the paradoxes of quantum interactions are true and not the opposite. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 578-609. ("The Entangled Quantum World" then see my essay "Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
The statement that there is uncertainty in the quantum realm and the opposite statement that there is no uncertainty cannot both be true at the same time if made by the same speaker about the same subject-matter. Yes, I am aware of Schrodinger's cat.
It may be the case that the speaker does not know which statement is true. However, the speaker cannot, simultaneously, know and yet not know whether his or her statement concerning any single aspect of quantum interactions is "true."
This is an epistemological claim that suggests Schrodinger's cat is never knowably both alive and dead, but must be known as one or the other, alive or dead, when we open the box to see that cat. The act of opening the box (subjective knowing) CREATES or contributes to creating the reality that is observed (what exists objectively). Until the box is opened the cat has an equal probability of being either alive or dead. Quantum reality is undetermined, a mere flux of possibilities, uncertainties. Alternatively, there is a universe in which the cat is alive and another in which it is dead, depending on your preferred quantum theory.
We provide the "form" and existence (realities) provides the "content." Reality is instantiated in the act of knowing the object-of-knowledge. There is a "fusion of horizons" between knower-and-known in quantum mechanics as in Gadamer's aesthetics without, necessarily, sacrificing either objectivity or truth in either setting. Charles Taylor, "Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes," in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, J. Kertscher, eds., Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 279-299. This is to enrich and deepen our understanding of truth and beauty by restoring the Romantic insight that these concepts are related in our "elegant" universe.
2) Stove suggests that idealism is false because "birds land on trees." (p. 140.)
Yet if Stove and every other knowing subject were removed from the universe, there would be no one left to know whether birds land on trees, or whether either one or both (tree and bird) continue to exist, though it is likely that they would exist which is what idealists have argued all along. This includes Berkeley, who suggested that God's presence always guaranteed the continued existence of knowledge and of the universe.
Quantum physicists insist on a need for an observer that allows the universe to snap into existence for the observer. Think of the word "God" as designating the "rational and all orders of the universe," everything revealed by science and all other human experiences -- including "feelings" -- then take another look at Professor Deutsch's paper in quantum physics. If reality is the dance and love is the music to which we all dance, then what would you call the "dancing" that you are? (See "Is this atheism's moment?")
3) Stove objects to the claim that there are shared abstractions or universals because ideas of "roundness," universals, differ from mind to mind. (p. 146.)
In fact, Stove commits the logical error of confusing a judgment made about a particular billiard ball (individual), with a general idea (or universal) concept of roundness, which is the same for all, always and everywhere (universal). The concept is abstract; the judgment is concrete. Universals and particulars are necessary to cognition or judgment. This is to suggest a postmodernist collapse, at the ultimate stage, between these "antinomies" which is a kind of methodological idealism. (Unger, Ricoeur, Greene and phenomenological-hermeneutics.)
Lawyers may wish to recall the distinction between law and equity. Any sophisticated legal system must allow for both law and equity. It is a fact that you exist. As a factually existing being you are, simultaneously, a valuing person whose own life has value. You exist as both subject and object. To limit the way you understand or regard persons to only one of these categories -- say, as "objects" -- is to fail to understand persons who must be subjects (experiencing agents in themselves) and objects (to others).
Roundness, number five, the idea of Carmen Electra -- are all entities that are quite real and universal, especially the last of these items or entities, as I can attest. However, if applied to particular experiences, they will differ for each person. Think of ethics, values and valuing. I will think of Carmen Electra. Surely, the idea of Carmen Electra and her warm reality are connected. "Ideally," they are connected to oneself.
Befuddled psychobabblers will interrupt to argue that "quantum mechanics means that, like, everything is all contradictory and stuff ... you know, relative, so ... um, the cat is dead and not dead, or whatever."
Not really. A person is either knowably alive or dead at any one moment in time. If we stretch the understanding of time ("now") to encompass, say, one hundred years, then "alive" and "dead" become points on a spectrum -- a unity -- for a single organism, man or cat. If we do the same for an electron in the quantum realm ("now"), the measure of time is much more brief and "location" more fleeting, or close to instantaneous. However, remember that Schrodinger can not KNOW his cat ("electron") to be alive or dead until he opens the box.
Placement of an organism in eternity includes the conditions "alive" and "dead," which are time-dependent; knowledge of which condition obtains at any point will be limited to one or another condition of the organism (alive or dead) "when" that organism is, in fact, "observed." The complexity of the above position is compatible with quantum mechanics and idealism or phenomenology, also with many new forms of mathematics, which must become the language for describing -- with extraordinary beauty -- these conceptual realities.
4): Stove suggests that it is crazy to say that there are no trees without minds, but he ignores the more interesting claim that there can be no knowledge of trees without minds. If he is willing to suspend actual sensory confirmation needs, so as to "know" what exists in his absence or without his "empirical experience" (by Stove's understanding of the term), then why not believe in God?
5): Referring to Schopenhauer as a "pathological wind bag" (p. 157), does not prove that Schopenhauer was wrong. A person may be both a good philosopher and a "pathological wind bag," as both Schopenhauer and I may illustrate. You decide. Much worse is the pathological wind bag who is not a good philosopher (Stove?), but enough about New Jersey's politicians. (Senator Bob?)
Given Schopenhauer's view of women, Stove and Schopenhauer should get along famously, like the porcupines in the great misanthrope's parable.
Most of Stove's criticisms of F.H. Bradley (Bradley certainly is a genius) are wildly off the mark. Stove argues against a straw man by failing to notice the first three words in this quote from Bradley's writings: "... that for me experience [including mental experience] is the same as reality." (p. 158.) This says nothing about what Bradley knows of "non-human objectivity" (?) in his own absence, as opposed to what Bradley can say without contradiction.
6): Kant's most famous argument is the opposite of what Stove believes it to be. Stove's failure in philosophical scholarship is stunning in a person who taught the subject at a university. (p. 161.)
For Kant, our knowledge is indeed real knowledge because it is such knowledge as "any rational agent must have" and is, therefore, objective. Take another look at my point about the principle of contradiction. Stove is wrong in saying that Kant "believes our knowledge is not real knowledge." (p. 161.)
Kant limits the scope of knowledge to make room for faith, but there is still -- within the narrowed range of the knowable -- objective and certain knowledge. Any questions?
7): Stove writes: "She [the cultural relativist] says that it is not only injurious but logically limiting to defend our [our?] science based, Europe-centered, white male cultural perspective." (p. 167.)
As Red Fox used to remark on his old t.v. show: "Say what?" Why the sudden transition to the female pronoun? Why "white male"? I am no fan of ethical relativism or epistemological skepticism. Hence, I feel no hesitation about informing the world that this claim by Stove is nonsense. Men are just as often stupid or philosophically ignorant -- as demonstrated by Professor Stove -- as some women are said to be by Stove.
Women have been known to write philosophy as well as any man who has ever written philosophy books or is ever likely to engage in the practice of philosophy. Race is entirely irrelevant to philosophical ability and to this discussion, except as Professor Stove reveals his prejudices and limitations. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
I will provide, once more, only a few names of important or great (this is my opinion) philosophers who are women: Martha Nussbaum, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller (see the introduction to Radical Philosophy), Angela Davis, Mary Warnock, Judith Butler and many others may be listed.
Every one of these women are better, MUCH BETTER philosophers -- and human beings probably -- than either Professor Stove or I can claim to be. None of them say that there is no truth. None say there is no good and evil in any meaningful sense of these words. Each of them is a refutation of Stove's antifeminism.
This is to say nothing of Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf (whose essay "A Room of Her Own" I am about to read), George Eliot, St. Theresa of Avila, and many others.
Are these women not "Europeans"? Stove makes use of non-philosophical locutions "Everyone knows ... " (pp. 167-174.) I am someone and I don't know what Stove claims "everyone knows."
I have a "feeling" and I am going to "pin" it on Stove.
I suspect that Stove's hatred of women became so overwhelming in his life (and this is very sad, for I have known such people), that it devoured his intellect.
Here are some textbook philosophical blunders of the kind Stove cannot weasel out of: Stove alleges that idealists were ALL secretly motivated to retain "belief in the grossest absurdities of the Christian religion." (p. 171.) This would have come as news to the atheist John McTaggart.
Here is another error by Stove based on ignorance of the philosophical tradition: "The idealists Compte, Marx ..." (p. 173.) Compte was a positivist; Marx's mature works are classified as historical materialism, since his late writings react against Hegelian idealism.
Here is Stove indulging in the ad hominem fallacy: "It can hardly be an accident that Coleridge, who introduced German idealism into Britain, was also the slave of another and less intellectual anodyne." (p. 174.)
This point, if true, is irrelevant to the merits of Coleridge's idealism.
Finally, here is a sample of Stove's bizarre and increasingly popular hatred of humanity: "Humanity is like garlic: a little goes a long way." (p. 172.)
It is not far from Stove's view of persons to Buchenwald or Auschwitz. When Stove's anti-woman, anti-black, anti-human party comes to power, claiming an affiliation with science, I will fight against it. So will many scientists. I would prefer the company found in a concentration camp to the wisdom of Stove's philosophy or to his company.
Suggestions for further reading:
Rather than providing a long list of books which I have read, I will mention an exchange between Richard Rorty and Brand Blanshard, which is a paragon (or ideal?) of what philosophical dialogue can be:
Richard Rorty, "Idealism, Holism, and the Paradox of Knowledge," and Brand Blanshard, "Reply to Mr. Rorty," in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (La Salle: Open Court, 1980), pp. 742-776. My views are similar to Blanshard's. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: Dover, 2006), p. 7.
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