Critique of Plato's View of Art in the Ion

Since I presented on Plato's view of art earlier in the semester, I've had some thoughts running around in my head. One such thought concern his critique of the rhapsode Ion, concerning how Ion (and also Homer) have no real knowledge but only present appearances. Now, I think that there is a very real problem here, but there is also an extent to which the criticism is misplaced.

To summarize the Ion: The rhapsode Ion, a professional performer of Homer, tries to engage Socrates in a discussion about Homer. Socrates declines, but tries to understand which sort of skill Ion actually practices. Ion doesn't really understand poetry, since then he should be able to talk about Hesiod as well, but Ion just falls asleep when listening to all poets other than Homer. But Ion doesn't really seem to have any knowledge of what is in Homer's poetry either, since it is unclear that Homer himself understands anything about which he speaks. For example, when Homer talks about divination or charioteering, then we still would need to check out the passages with a diviner or a chariot driver to know whether these passages accurately describe those skills. Homer himself cannot be relied upon directly for knowledge of these activities. Ion makes an amusing attempt to say that he has the skill of being a great general because he knows Homer, but Socrates also shoots this down: you don't hire a performer of poetry to lead your army simply because they recite poetry well. In the end, Socrates says that Ion must either be a lying scoundrel, or inspired by the gods, since Ion himself certainly doesn't know anything. Ion prefers the latter option, since it is more beautiful.

My concern is with the Platonic idea that, beyond the appearances which the poet and the rhapsode present, there is some reality that people who actually engage in skills understand. I have no problem with saying that some people understand things better than others, or even that the poets and playwrights (or in our age, perhaps political speakers, news journalists, and pastors) are often not reliable for helping us understand the world better. What I wish to argue against is the suggestion that the poet has the appearances while the skilled worker has the reality. The skilled worker merely has more appearances with which to work, and I think this has an implication for the knowledge provided by art.

Homer presents the appearance of a chariot race in the Iliad. Socrates holds that Homer may have no actual knowledge of what is involved in chariot racing, and that one must go to a real chariot driver to find out the truth. But insofar as Homer gives a coherent account, he has something to say about chariot driving. He may simply have a very good imagination; think of The Red Badge of Courage, which is supposed to accurately depict a wartime situation even though the author Stephen Crane never participated in war.

It is the coherence of the account which gives it validity, and which perhaps simply is its validity. The actual chariot driver merely has more appearances which must be drawn up into the account. This may require some adjustments; perhaps Homer's imagination doesn't cohere well with the chariot driver's actual experiences. Then again, perhaps Homer's imagination presents something upon which the chariot driver's own experiences founder; perhaps the chariot driver has never made the same sort of risky maneuver recounted in the Iliad. But in either case this is not due to anything beyond the appearances, but merely due to the unity and coherence amongst the appearances themselves.

Therefore, insofar as there is any coherence and unity in art, it gets at something in the world. It may not get at it in the best possible way (although again, in might), but there is not a strict dichotomy between the artist and the person who actually understands; there is merely the differing degrees of coherence and the number of appearances which need to be made coherent.

Thoughts on Interpretation of Art

I've been shadow teaching a philosophy of art class this semester, and today the issue of the interpretation of art came up. Now, it seems that this often in practice gets reduced to the two following options: either the artist's intent determines the meaning of the artwork, or because we can't get into the artist's mind, it's all about the audience. Granted, this is an oversimplification, but what about the artwork itself? Why do we need to go beyond it to either the artist or the audience? Alternatively, what sense could it make to say that interpretation is left largely to either the artist or audience?

Any artwork is already delimited, structured in some way. Even if I only mark a black line on a piece of paper, I still have structured that line and that paper in a given way. Even if I have left the paper blank, the paper is then blank rather than filled. So every artwork, in virtue of being an artwork, is already structured, some (like a Mozart symphony) more so than others (like John Cage's 4'33").

Any artwork is also by its very nature public. The marks, the texture, the rhythm of an artwork is something that's been put out there in some shared space using, to at least some extent, some shared symbolism or set of markings. If I write a poem, I am using language to write it. This language is not my own, but part of a larger context. The act of putting down words creates something that goes outside of myself; it means something regardless of my intention. I can write a poem and discover a meaning which I did not intend, and this seems to be a legitimate meaning of the poem. This does not mean that there is a completely determinate reading of the poem, or that there even in principle exists a definitive interpretation (there can be irreducible ambiguity and underdetermination), but merely that there is this particular form put down, one which is shared in the community, rather than some other form.

Any interpretation of an artwork must be of the artwork. If I am sitting down and watching The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I turn to a friend to talk about it, and she responds with an analysis of Jedis and the Force, then she is not giving me a bad interpretation of a Woody Allen film; she is giving me an interpretation of a different film altogether. If any artwork has a certain structure, then an interpretation must be of that structure, whether it be a line or a portrait or a blank canvas, a chant or a concerto or a folk song, etc., and so on down to the details of the individual artwork.

The biggest problem is finding the proper context of the artwork. Language is public, so if I write a poem, I have written down something with a meaning beyond what I or the audience want. But what happens when the language changes? This becomes a difficult issue, because I can no longer simply say that the author wanted the artwork to be a certain way and so that is how we should take it. The artwork is the starting point of analysis, and it is here and now this public, structured object.

For example, take the line from The Tempest: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in 't!" What is the meaning of "brave"? If I were to take it in a modern context, it would mean something like "courageous", but this word meant "good, splendid" in Shakespeare's time (cf. the Italian "bravo"). One option would be to use the context that gives the artwork the most force (admittedly a notion that needs much more development): I use the standard of Elizabethan English in interpreting Shakespeare because his plays make more sense that way. I know what a splendid world would be, and this suits Miranda's amazement in the scene in which she speaks this sentence, but I have no idea what a courageous world is and the sense I can make of the phrase doesn't fit the play.

A Bach fugue, as a Baroque piece of music, would have used terraced dynamics in its time period; that is, the individual instruments don't get louder or softer, but instrumentation is added and reduced to change the volume. But unlike the Shakespeare example, it seems possible that using later notions of dynamics in which individual instruments change volume may constitute a more powerful (more aesthetic? more coherent? I'm still searching for the right word) rendition of the score. It may not, but the possibility is open, in which case it would seem at least that there is some aspect, some potentiality of the score which Bach himself might not have noticed. The reason why this seems more likely in music than in literature may be that language is a highly complex phenomenon and changing the rules (say, by going from Elizabethan to Modern American English) is most likely going to reduce the coherence of a given piece.

The nature of interpretation will change from artwork to artwork as well. It does not need to be conceptual and linguistic. The interpretation of Stravinsky doesn't have to be a dissertation; it can simply be a certain playing of the score. Any interpretation of a painting will be, at some level, simply an appreciation of the specific way in which the brush strokes have fallen. Interpreting the artwork on these non-cognitive levels doesn't mean that there can't also be cognitive interpretations as well. In fact, on my current proposal, any way in which one interprets the given artwork (which, remember, necessarily entails that one pay attention the publicly given structure which is the artwork) is a legitimate interpretation of that artwork.

Negative Epistemology

Is epistemology about building up our knowledge? I would like to put forward an alternative: the goal of understanding is to reduce our knowledge; or rather, to reduce our habitual sedimentations and programmed responses to the world. It is not something we hold on to, but a clearing away and a freeing up.

For example, I can come to the world conditioned by a good number of anti-Islamic attitudes, conditioned by society. I can then approach scholarly research which points out a number of ways in which I am just wrong about the Islamicate world. What have I learned? Well, there have been facts involved, and it can be helpful to keep them on hand as tools for various purposes, not least of which is helping other people come to the same point. But what I have really gained is a removal of old habits and a new openness to people and society. Even if I forget everything I read, I keep this new freedom unless old habits find ways of re-asserting themselves.

So when I approach philosophy from an historical angle, I should sometimes remember the arguments; they are essential for publishing and teaching, and therefore securing a job. But the mere memory of ideas is not necessarily what I am after. Of what use is mere accumulation of knowledge, other than as a mere pastime? I want to free my thinking, to see how I have become blind to my own presuppositions, and to how I already hedge in the possibilities of the world.

Now, one might say that there certainly seem to be times at which we want to have knowledge, and we mean by that that we are actually building up facts about the world. Granted. To this end, I distinguish two types of knowledge. One the knowledge of means to a given end, and in this case we want positive knowledge of how to go about achieving our end. But how do we pick an end in the first place? How do we come at the world in general, aside for using it for our own purposes? It is in situations like these where I would suggest that a negative epistemology might be in order, at least as an interesting thought experiment.

Fractal Knowledge

What would a perfectly ordered world look like? I think that there is a tendency to think that it would be decomposable into nice, neat conceptual parts, amenable to our thought. But perhaps the opposite is true: perhaps the world which is rationally broken up for us is really arbitrary, while one which is perfectly ordered down to the very depths would forever defy our reasoning.

I bring up the analogy of a fractal. See here for an example. A property of the fractal is that it is infinitely self-similar (more precisely, quasi-self-similar): no matter how far you zoom in, no matter where along the boundary you look, you will find something which is in its own way similar to the whole. So the fractal is my paradigm of perfect order, down to an infinite precision and covering the entire figure.

Imagine living on the fractal. You are trying to make sense of the twists and turns which you encounter. You get a sense of order; it is indeed ordered. Parts do look like each other. But every time you think you have it down, you go a little bit further along the boundary, and something throws you off. You didn't get it quite right, so you have to go through your concepts and reanalyze the world. Since every part in its own way contains the whole (that is, it is in a way self-similar to the whole), you do gain some understanding of the entire fractal from each piece. But you also can't really get any part of the fractal unless you were to grasp the entire thing all at once.

So an infinite order would entire that we could understand something, and understand everything in understanding something, but no understanding would be unrevisable. No set of concepts, no affirmative propositions could be held for any length of investigation.

By contrast, what would a world be like which we could break down into nice, neat concepts? At first, such a world appears ordered. But then we turn to the concepts themselves. Why is green what it is? Just because. Why a straight line? Just because. This "just because" is the only answer givable to any such question, no matter what the basic concept or simple nature at hand is. In the end, we have to posit an Intelligent Kludger to put the mess of arbitrariness together, because there's nothing in the parts themselves to suggest order; only in the arrangements.

The Purpose of Inconsistency

Why would one would consider contradictory speech to be philosophically appropriate? Given that contradictions can be meaningful, why would one use them? First, it may be that one believes that all systems are going to be inconsistent at some point anyhow. If this is true, then there is relatively little value in ironing out all of the wrinkles of discourse instead of simply investigating what one can. Also, if I have doubts about any given chain of reasoning or system, I have much less reason to follow it through consistently. It may be far better to pursue many lines of reasoning, even if they are mutually inconsistent, since then I may hit the truth on a couple points at least.

Second, one may be strongly convinced by both the arguments for x and the arguments for not-x. The contradiction does not mean that there isn't some y which is coherent with x but which is semantically and practically similar to not-x. This is the problem with some ad hominem attacks: showing that a given person is inconsistent shows nothing about whether a better version of their views could succeed, entailing that they really were close to being right in the first place. In the meantime, holding on to the contradiction may be the most intellectually responsible choice, while pursuing a research program of eventually resolving the contradiction while keeping the insights.

Third, it may be that certain mystical views can only be couched in contradictory terms. If there is some reality utterly responsible for absolutely anything, then language which can only look at certain things at any given time will encounter difficulties. Contradiction shows language's (and thought's) breaking points, and it is the fact of breaking which points to what is to be communicated.

Fourth, one may be holding to a dialectical tension. This I think is closest to what I am talking about with skepticism. On the one hand, I think that everything is doubtable (and once this is realized, also already doubted, for those familiar with what I've said before on this blog). But I also think that we should continue investigating the truth. Should I throw one side or the other away because I can't unite them at one time? No; I continue in a constant back-and-forth, which seems to accomplish a number of aims (including understanding) better than any single idea or system.

But if nothing else, saying that someone is being contradictory is a paltry criticism. It contributes nothing to discussion; it merely wins points in debate. It is therefore sophistry and not philosophy, unless it is accompanied by substantial interaction. Show how some premise is wrong, show how my understanding is off, show some alternative, but show something of value.

Common Sense and Explainability

We should be skeptical of a belief given by common presuppositions in the case that they can be explained by some reason other than their veracity. If we can explain how a habit forms (say, the belief in external objects, that historical events are actual, or within a given religious context that certain dispositions are sinful and that we have an innate conscience) and give an adequate account of how it comes to be, why do we need to assume that it also gives us a direct window on reality? Belief in external objects comes about in early stages of development as we learn to deal with the bloomin' buzz and confusion around us, to organize it so that we can make sense of it. It it a very practical habit to believe that our blankie is still existent when it is put behind the pillow, even though we cannot see it.

Reality is such that the belief is practical. But this does not mean that reality is as the belief holds. I see a green leaf; the leaf itself is not green (at least while I'm taking off my idealist hat for a moment and speaking from the perspective of the realist), but is a physical object that reflects the light of a given wavelength such that it hits my eye, where due to a complex interaction of rods and cones and processing in the LGN followed by assimilation in the visual cortex I experience the qualitative experience of green on a leaf shape. The belief that the leaf is green is not caused by the leaf's actually being green, though the reality is such to produce that belief, produce it regularly, and make it a helpful belief for navigating the world. Similarly, belief in external objects can be caused by some feature of the world that is not the actual existence of external objects.

But if this is the case, why believe that there are actually external objects? I have explained why there is a wide-spread habit pertaining to them (and there is the experimental data to further substantiate my claims), and there does not appear to me at this point to be anything left unexplained. So why do we assume some mystical sense which gives us real knowledge of the way things are? There is no facet of our experience otherwise unexplained which needs such a faculty. Therefore, positing such a faculty is arbitrary, merely a means of allowing us to hold to the same things we have always held instead of actually trying to think through them and explain them. There is as little reason to assume that faculties of this sort exist, as that a misargued mathematical theorem gives us probable mathematical knowledge. But if such a belief only arises from practical engagement in the world, then it is hard to see without further argument how it could even possibly have metaphysical value unless as merely a different dimension of the same world.

There is a positive side to this, though. While it seems utterly arbitrary to multiply entities beyond what is needed for explanation (not that the simplest theory must be true, but that whatever is posited must play some explanatory role not otherwise accounted for in order to have any meaning), if we avoid doing such, then typical skeptical arguments melt away. Take Hume, for instance: Hume doubts causation, as to whether it is anything more than constant conjunction, but then returns to billiards where natural impulses make him believe in causation again. On my view (which likely is a repetition of the work of others who have explored this much more deeply), Hume isn't merely caused by natural impulses to believe in causation and so engage in self-deception. The language of causation is rooted in empirical life as a way of organizing it. Talk of one billiard ball causing another to move is perfectly legitimate; when we are talking about causation in billiards, we are not referring to features such as necessity, or universality, or quantum mechanics. We are explaining that aspect of our experience which involves the balls hitting each other regularly, enabling us to play the game, without thought of what might be causing this; there is continuity in practical discussions of causation even as philosophy and science radically change our understanding of it. To self-reflectively talk about causation is to enter into another context, and in this context causation as a general principle may be doubted, and may even be meaningless, but this self-reflection is not a feature of most everyday accounts of causation. This philosophical context is not illegitimate, but its concerns are not the concerns of the billiard player, and its accounts of causation get at something else. Now, for the philosophical billiard player, these two accounts may be entangled, or one may take priority; it depends on the specific context and the specific person, but there is nothing that says that different language games are hermetically sealed from each other.

Let us take Descartes as well. Descartes postulates an evil genius which could be messing with his mind. On my view, this is irrelevant. Concepts are taken from experience and explain experience. If that experience is of an evil genius messing with us, whether we know it or not, then these concepts explain that experience of human-nature-being-messed-with. They are concepts forged from inconsistent memories or other tricks which are thrown our way, but this does not make them false; they merely describe a rockier terrain than one in which we would have perfect memories and veridical habits. Similarly, if we were in the Matrix, our concepts would describe the world of the Matrix, again whether we would realize we were in it or not. It would be the world of our experience, and thus what concepts would arise from and refer to.

I do not mean by our "experience" merely the world of sense-data, but absolutely anything experienced. Consciousness, imagination, and our conceptual life seem to be legitimate realms of experience as well. If there is some Agent Intellect beaming intelligibles into our minds, then this is a part of our experience. The worlds of the poet are just as much experienced, even in the wildest cases. Skepticism isn't about strictly rationing our intellectual diet; it is about clearing away sedimentations and ossifications which obstruct living.

Against Qualms Concerning Inconsistency

Continuing from the last post, I think that I've pinpointed a little bit more clearly what is going on when I reject claims of the self-defeating nature of certain views. Now, when one claims that someone is being inconsistent, they can refer to the language as being inconsistent, the concepts as being inconsistent, or a claim that the world is inconsistent. Further, the assumption seems to be that these three claims are more or less equivalent. But I disagree, and the inconsistencies I raise do not seem to be harmful ones.

Inconsistency in language, if by itself, doesn't seem pernicious. Inconsistent statements have some sort of meaning, as evidenced by the fact that people sometimes find them to be the most useful way of conveying a message. We can argue about their efficacy, but that they are meaningful is clear (they are meaningful to someone, at least; chances are, if you don't get them, it's your problem and not the other person's). And it would seem that concepts would work the same way, when considered independently of language.

The problem comes in when inconsistency in language or concepts would imply such an inconsistency in the world, which is nonsense. But why assume that an inconsistency in language implies that one claims a similar inconsistency in the world? There is an assumption of an isomorphism between world, language, and concepts. All three can be broken up into pieces which interrelate, whatever these pieces may be (perhaps form, matter, and esse, for example, where each of these can stand for a word, a concept, and an external reality). The interrelations in the world mirror those in language and concepts, and language and concepts can be made more or less precise enough to accurately mirror the world.

If there is such an isomorphism, then contradictions in language and concepts do seem to be problematic. But why assume the isomorphism in the first place? This is an assumption, and there seems to be no reason why it shouldn't be examined as well, especially when it is advanced as a weapon in some apologist's arsenal. Why can't we say that the world is a seamless whole, which nevertheless lends itself to being talked about and thought about in some way? Language and concepts are discursive, and reality is not (in this thought experiment), but that doesn't mean that language and concepts are worthless or meaningless. The point of them is a certain sort of interaction with reality, of which ultimately they are a part as well (and even here, I must use "part" language, which isn't accurate, but it may be a useful approximation for those with eyes to see). Contradictions in language then do not entail contradictions in reality. Assuming that contradictions in language do not entail anything whatsoever (and I see no reason to assume without argument that language works like a formal logical system), then why not allow contradictions?

Someone might say at this point, that it is only confused language which breaks the law of contradiction; phrases in such language might mean something, but the whole does not. Logic is the judge of language, whether language follows its laws or not. But why should we assume that? Logic is basically set theory, and works for those relationships capable of being modeled on sets. It is not clear to me that all philosophical relationships must be so clear and set-like; why assume that anything philosophical must therefore be able to be made clear, precise, and analytical?

And the next argument: "but the negation of the law of contradiction entails the law of contradiction; therefore it must be true", is pure sophistry. Not only does it not seem to be "true" anymore once one has negated it, but also, I am saying that language goes beyond precise boundaries. To revert to an argument that "the law of contradiction is either true or false" is already to miss the linguistic and ontological move I am making. In another way, the argument for the law of non-contradiction it is to assume the law of the excluded middle, as well as predicates for which both apply. I deny the law of the excluded middle too, or at least its applicability to any and all meaningful phrases.

Finally: "But with what you are saying, you can say anything and get away with it. This is just a ploy to avoid any criticism." No, it is a recognition that simply pointing out formal flaws has never been good philosophy. Look at the substance; to the reality itself! Logic is the handmaiden of true thinking, and not vice versa. We are engaged in far too difficult a program here to simply sort out arguments and thought based on cosmetic issues.

Is Skepticism Self-Defeating?

I was writing this as a comment on an earlier post, but I keep thinking of more stuff to say, so I think that I'll just make another post of it. The charge is this: skepticism is self-defeating. It asserts something, namely that nothing is to be asserted. I'm not a big fan of these types of "self-defeating" arguments, and I figured that I should lay out my reasoning. Of course, if anyone understands the reasoning, one will realize that all that I am about to say should not be held to, that one should look beyond the reasonings, but a first step must be taken.

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Language is practical. One uses it; it's not setting forward fixed propositional truth. This at least is the standpoint I want to explore here for the moment. It's hardly a critique of a statement to say that it falls apart in saying that language falls apart. Anyone who took the statement to be a set of propositions which I was strictly asserting would have gotten it wrong. Look at the moon, not the finger; or if you prefer, use the ladder then kick it away.

One can look at the meaning of such an argument in two ways. First, one can take the straightforward meaning. One will have missed the point then, since one will think it perfectly consistent, but it is helpful in leading one to a given state. The practical function of leading someone to a non-discursive state is the point, since I can't very well put that state down on paper or computer screen itself.

Alternatively, one can realize the inconsistencies, but then the meaning is in the performance. Treat it as a poem, if you prefer; there seems to be nothing wrong with putting down in performance and poetry what cannot be said in prose.

The criticism (and the related claim that from a contradiction everything follows) only operates on one level of language. But this is a fairly high level, and there is something going on underneath. Language affects us and moves us even before we have it completely rationally synthesized. Take the poem "Jabberwocky", for example. If I have to look at it in terms of referents and such, it is pure nonsense. The terms just have no meaning. But yet, one does have a vague sense of what goes on in the poem, regardless. Likewise, a contradictory statement might be nonsense when analytically interpreted, but that's not the only level on which that statement was functioning.

Why should we say that such statements have meaning? Because some people say they do. If Bob sees only that x is meaningful, but cannot see any meaning in not-x, while Alice claims to grasp the meaning of not-x, it would seem that Alice has the advantage. Bob's lack of imagination or overly-focused view of the world could just as much explain why he cannot get what not-x is getting at as not-x being meaningless. Not being able to conceive something (especially when someone else can conceive of it) doesn't amount to much in argument.

If anyone has been following this post, they will realize that what I am saying is primarily to be used, not judged right or wrong (although one can judge the post efficacious or not, and can judge whether the destination is worth arriving at). Of course it's all nonsense if one looks at it purely analytically; so find other ways of looking at it.

But let's take the worst-case scenario: the above just doesn't work (and I stress its working and not its veracity) and it all is just inconsistent without any directly redeeming value. Well, what is one to do? Pick up just another other system that's lying around to get out of the problem? But this seems to be at least as bad; leaps of faith are such because they are blind leaps, and blind leaps land you in chasms more often than not. If I can't escape from being embedded in some conceptual system, being human and thrown into the world as it is, this doesn't mean that I must therefore give my allegiance to some conceptual system. I can simultaneously recognize that no conceptual system is grounded, perhaps even that no conceptual system is completely coherent, while also recognizing that I must be implicated in one and can never simply jump out and either renounce all views or take a God's eye view. Will this pull me in two directions, and so be "inconsistent"? Sure, but it seems that a continuing movement between imperfect systems is better than giving up and artificially ironing out a problem of human living and dedicating myself to one of them.

The Point of Philosophy?

What is the point of doing philosophy? I've been reading Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and he seems to suggest that one sits down and figures out the basics of how we go about thinking. Once this is done, and it should be more or less simple (easy and simple matters are what knowledge consists of, not difficult, obscure, and uncertain ones), one goes off and starts the real learning.

On the one hand, it does seem that there is something unfruitful about spending ones time only doing philosophy. One keeps thinking about thinking, about the truth, about the good, etc., without really engaging it in any particular fashion. Sure, the philosophizing is important, so that we don't go gallivanting off in any ol' direction. And we need to think about the core issues of the different fields to keep them on track and from becoming ossified. But sometimes, I at least tire of merely talking about talking. I want some more tangible field of study. I am doing that to an extent with History (at least history of thought), and I am thinking more and more about doing further work in Islamic Studies. Sometimes, when I am really tired of the field and the books, I'll start thinking about doing something drastic like getting a Psychology degree and doing clinical work (I have enough mental problems that I'm already engaged first-hand in the field, right?). But the point is, it seems good for one to have some more empirical field in which the real work gets done, the work that actually embeds one in the world and gives one some meaning (whether that's a career change, a different focus in one's academic path, or merely extracurricular activities). Do philosophy, then contribute to medicine, or law, or social work, or (gasp!) business. If nothing else, sitting around talking Marxism isn't going to change the world's business practices; more philosophers becoming business people has no worse a shot of working.

On the other hand, the picture is more complicated than Descartes thought. First, the more we've been thinking about basic issues of knowledge and cognition, the murkier they appear. It no longer is plausible that we can simply sit down and work out the issues at one point and be reasonably right. So we need to continue to rethink the issues, and this seems to require at least some people who are really sitting down and devoting themselves to the task full time. There don't seem to be any clearly intuited simples for us anymore, and the Cartesian method requires these simple and perspicacious, independent absolutes which one takes apart and puts together like legos, such that one can track one's process of knowing.

Second, there is far greater specialization going on now than in Descartes' time. Even within a field as neatly defined as mathematics, there just aren't any mathematicians who can claim expertise in every subfield of math. A fortiori, there isn't too much place for someone wishing to learn deeply across discipline. Descartes thought that one can learn about all different fields by oneself. Due to this, he argues that theoretical sciences are fundamentally unlike practical arts: in art, one must focus on a specialty to be any good, but in science, one thinks better and more clearly the more one learns across sciences, since the subject matters come together. All of them rely on the same basic processes of thinking. And he seems right; being able to think across disciplines does seem to be helpful for understanding the individual ones. But there's too much to learn in any given discipline now to be competent in any given one while chasing others. And one can throw off the previous scholastic shackles only if one (a) is independently wealthy and not needing to find an employer or tenure, and (b) is willing to give up all of the richness of the past as well as its errors.

So, to pursue a career purely in philosophy feels sterile and confining, cutting one off from much purpose and meaning in life. But one can't solve the issues in philosophy once and for all to go work in the other disciplines, and the issues are hardly trivial. There are important ethical and political reasons for why we keep going back to them, to rethink them. There are also concerns intrinsic to the other disciplines: physics needs to have a good account of how to get good physics in order to actually get good physics consistently. So how does one balance these concerns, given that one has to get a job somewhere to give one the time to work on the issues?

Suarez, Damascius, and Ineffability

Time for philosopher mash-up. I've been thinking about the problem of ineffability: how does it make sense to say that you can't say something about something? After all, you seem to have just said something about it: that you can't say anything. I will first look at 16th-17th century scholastic Suarez, who is dealing with (what seems to me to be) a similar problem with potential essences which are "omnino nihil", nothing whatsoever. Next, I will look at Damascius, the 5th-6th century Neoplatonist, who makes use of Skeptical thought to show how statements concerning the One's ineffability and transcendence are statements about language, not about the One.

For Suarez, we can talk about the essences, the being, of things around us. There are trees and cats and humans. Each individual being has an essence, and is actual: this tree is right here and now existing, and this existence is merely the actuality of its essence. It is not as though there is some being to the tree which then needs to be brought into existence; any being to the tree whatsoever is its existence. Existence is merely actuality, and not an addition to an essence.

We can also talk about a potential essence of trees, not yet made actual. But a problem arises: if there is any reality to the essence at all, it is actual. But if it is actual, it is not merely potential; potentiality by definition means that something is not actual. So a potential essence is nothing in any way. But how then do we talk about it?

Suarez says that we talk about it because of "extrinsic denomination", that is, we reference it purely through other things. A couple examples are in order. When I predicate a universal of things, I am using this same process of extrinsic denomination. I can talk about this human and that human, and I mean the same thing in both cases, and so "human" must have some generality about it. But general things don't really exist; only individual things do. There is Alice and Bob, but I don't encounter "humanness" except as the individuals. Instead, I meet Alice, and she causes a concept in my head. I can work with this concept and pick out some formal feature which have some unity to them. I'll call this her humanity. Next, I meet Bob, and do the same thing. Lo and behold, when I compare these formal features, I realize that the two individuals have caused the same concept in my mind, and so I can predicate it of both of them. So I call them both "human", where "human" is some universal concept. Technically speaking, though, "human" is a universal in my mind while they are individuals in reality, so I only call them this universal because of the similar effect the individual humans caused in me. So I call them "human" by extrinsic denomination: not something which they are simply in themselves in reality, but by something else which has some foundation in them.

Similarly with potential essences, we talk about them by extrinsic denomination by not actually talking about them, but talking about God's power to produce them. In effect (and I may be going beyond Suarez here, but this is how I make sense of what he is saying), I pick something, I have something in mind in my discourse, and I ask, "Is this potential?" But I'm not really talking about the essence of the thing itself: what I am asking about is God's power and what it can do. I think that the case can be generalized to other fields as well; Suarez thought that species are eternal, so God's power is the only thing responsible for them, but we think of species in an historical light. So it doesn't seem to me to be contrary to Suarez' project to say that we speak of, say, the essence of dinosaurs not insofar as they have being (there are no actual dinosaurs), but by extrinsic denomination from what is actual (fossils, shared biological laws with critters today, etc.). Without these sources of actuality, there would be nothing to say about dinosaurs. So talking about potential (or non-existent) essences is really a shorthand way of talking about actual essences.

What I want to take from that is this: there can be a grammatical referent without an ontological one. I talk of potential essences, but the potential essence is nothing at all. But it still may make the most sense the frame the discussion in terms of potential essences, as the lack of ontological significance does not mean that I must rephrase all of my sentences accordingly. There is a proper mechanism by which I can attribute "potential essence" to things which actually are, so my assertion of truths about a potential essence don't entail its existence in any way.

Next, Damascius. I know less about him (though I probably need to go back and brush up on the details of Suarez' account too), but there is one idea of his which I found quite interesting. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are various realms of reality (or perhaps ways of looking at the world; I can never quite tell). There is material reality, which is too multiple to be intelligible. There is ensouled reality, which is outside of space and which provides some unity and movement, as well as discursive thought. There is noetic reality, which is also outside of time and which is quite unified, with everything reflected in everything else. But even that has some division, something which had to come together, and so there must be something else grounding it, something which has absolutely no division to be grounded, and thus is beyond thought.

This is the One, so called not because "One" applies to it so much as it is the cause of unity for everything else. But this creates a problem: if the One is so removed from division, how is it the cause of everything else? It would seem to get mixed up in multiplicity if it were tarnished by the rest of the world. This was one of the most significant problems in Neoplatonism. Damascius takes an extreme view and distances the One from everything else, such that the One isn't even really the cause of everything else.

I'll leave aside the issues of what exactly the One "is" for Damascius. What is important is that, without any causal relation to the world, we seem to have no way of talking about the One. So all we can say is that we can't talk about the One. But even that is too much. So Damascius interprets this as a claim about language itself. Statements about the One's ineffability are statements about the paucity of language. Language wants to reach beyond itself, but cannot. This is a "peritrope" of language, in Skeptical terminology and Damascius' account: language turns around and refutes itself, and this internal problem within language is what we are referring to.

Putting this all together: By Suarez, we can talk about things without necessarily commenting on their ontological status through extrinsic denomination. By Damascius, statements about the ineffability of the One are statements about the peritrope of language. So perhaps we can say that, in the statement such as "the One/God/Reality/Absolute is ineffable" is an extrinsic denomination taken from the problematic character of language itself.

Skepticism and the Will

I propose that there are two orders of our being which run contrary to each other. The first is the order of knowledge, in which the negative statement has priority and the affirmative must be argued for. Thus, skepticism doesn't need an argument; all other views do. However, this is actually freeing, since in the second order of being, that of willing, the affirmative has priority and prohibitions must be argued for. Relative traditions give determination to the will instead of absolute reason.

Why does skepticism hold sway in matters of reason? It is because if there is no connection between pieces of discourse, there is no connection. If we think that there is a connection and there is not, we are mistaken; we are not half right, or even necessarily on the right track. If I have a proof for a mathematical theorem, and the proof has a single detail wrong, I have proven absolutely nothing; I haven't given a proof that the theorem is 99% likely. If a single case falsifies a scientific theory, the theory is wrong.

Now, I might be able to pick up the pieces of the old proof or the old theoryand get something out of them, but this points to something else that they were telling us all along. The broken scientific theory still told us about the data we were experiencing, even if not about the world in general. Or perhaps we wish to talk about the historically formed concept given by science which has structured our world, and this was actually part of our reality apart from any inferences. But in these cases, I have presented the immediate, non-inferred connection between what I was doing in science and what I was experiencing in the world, and so I have given a proper connection for a qualified affirmative proposition.

Common sense seems to me to be the worst possible means of ascertaining the truth about the world. The reason is this: common sense is simply the habit of a group of people. Habits don't tell us that they represent reality accurately, merely that they are some way of working within reality. The habit of common sense tells us on a pragmatic level that what the community does works, and so the structure of reality must be such that what the community does works. However, where is the connection between the habitual belief that individual and separable things in the external world exist, which is a pragmatic tool for navigating the world, and the metaphysical fact that such individual and separable things exist externally? How does the first, the way we get understanding, connect at all to the common sense belief to provide any grounds? How does common sense provide any ground whatsoever for the belief that we are not in the Matrix or deluded by an evil genius? Of course if we were deluded, we would not instantly recognize that we were deluded, so what does our lack of recognition actually tell us about the world?

Without some sort of connection, without showing some way in which we legitimately get information for any specific idea, and without introducing some "just so" story to beg the question, what is left? Without some connection, there is no reason inclining us one way or the other. Without reason, all views are epistemologically equivalent; common sense belief in metaphysically individual entities, without some proper grounding beyond "we just intuit them", is equivalent to talk of aliens on the Hale-Bopp comet coming to take us away.

So if some connection must be established to give any sort of rational justification to an idea, and any flaws in this connection make it a different sort of connection, the skeptic is automatically justified in pursuing her project. The connection needs to be made, and the skeptic merely points out that it has not been made and so may very well be worthless. It may very well not be, also; we have no way of telling yet.

But what is the positive side of this? The positive side is that the Good is self-diffusive, that goodness is the one thing that needs no reason. There doesn't need to be a reason to follow our desires or what we find good (desirable, aesthetic, holy) in our culture, but rather the reason must be supplied as to what not to do. Reason can prohibit, but the prohibition must be established.

For example, it is not the homosexuals that should have to argue for their unions, as this needs no argument or rational support, but rather those opposed. And if we are confronted by the Matrix scenario, the correct response is not the deny the premise (how would we even possibly do that?) but rather to say, "So what? My acting is just as real in a simulation as in a so-called 'real world'". And while I may have no theoretical justification for believing in the existence of individual middle-sized objects such as chairs and trees, there is nothing stopping me from living as if there were.

But this leads to the problem that our willing would seem undetermined. This would seem to be the argument of some against skepticism: the skeptic can't live daily life, because she needs to determine her actions in some way and can never really give reasons for doing so. Therefore, no one really is a skeptic on an existential level. But the skeptic doesn't need to give rational arguments for everything she does; her actions can be non-rational as long as there is some other method of determining them.

This would seem to be where culture and tradition comes in. Let me compare the situation to that of languages, which are one of the forms of culture: I can speak in English, formulate my thoughts and poetry in it, look to the great masters of the language such as Shakespeare and Chaucer, and enjoy the heritage and what I can do with it. English determines my speech in a way that lets me actually talk. But there is nothing rationally determinate about English (indeed, there isn't much rational about the language at all!). And there is nothing saying that English is overall a superior language to, say, Arabic. I have something given to me to determine my will in matters of communication, even though I have no arguments for how to speak in general.

I can criticize my culture, just as I can point out some particularly annoying inconsistencies in typical English which spoil its communicative abilities. The point is not that nothing is prohibited; it is that there must be a sound argument for the prohibition before anything is legitimately prohibited.

Now, the problem is that traditions don't see themselves as quite so relative as languages. They make demands and see themselves as being ultimate. And taking any tradition to determine one's acting will most likely involve illegitimate prohibitions as well. But these prohibitions can be seen to have some purpose, just as the artist must determine her work in some fashion to get anything of beauty, even if other determinations (and even opposite ones) were equally possible. Concerning the ultimacy which traditions claim, though, I really don't have much sympathy. If it can't be demonstrated, then there is no reason to believe it, other some some fideism on par with chasing after leprechauns.

Cosmological Argument from Completeness

According to one of the forms of the cosmological argument (given by Aquinas and Avicenna), God exists because there must be some necessary existent. Everything we encounter is contingent, merely possible when considered in and of itself and only necessitated through another. But if it is necessitated through another, then there must be something necessary in itself which grounds everything else. It seems to me that this argument fails: first, because it does not have any force when considered in a concrete case, and second, because the nature of any given existent in question is unclear. I think that a different version of argument can be made out of the latter point, however.

So Jill is a human being, and as such is contingent. She did not have to exist; something else made her exist. This something else in the present case would be her parents. Now, the argument could be taken in two different directions. One would argue that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes in time. So her parents had parents, and her grandparents had parents, and so on, but this had to begin at some point. It is not exactly clear, though, why there absolutely cannot be an infinite regress here, and even many of the defenders of the cosmological argument have had no problem with such an infinite regress in time: Aquinas and Scotus thought such a regress possible though not actually true, and Avicenna thought it actually true. If nothing else, one is faced with the problem of a first moment: any given moment of time has the structure that it has something preceding it, and something following it. But a first moment would have nothing before it. It seems that such a concept of a first moment then would be at least as difficult to understand as an infinite regress of times.

What infinite regress does the argument disallow, then? An infinite regress of necessitation, for Avicenna, and similarly (perhaps identically), an infinite regress of actualization for Aquinas. That is to say, there are multiple causes working at the same time and not merely stretched out with the cause one moment and the effect in the next. This sort of causation would be logical or metaphysical. But what is this in our concrete example? Why say that there is anything to Jill's existence beyond what her parents gave to her? Once we have explained the physical act of generation, we have everything we need. Or perhaps we could allow in other causes at the same level, but nothing on a fundamentally different level. Any talk of possibility and contingency beyond this is over-abstraction which does not explain actual, concrete existents and so does not command any assent as to a first, necessary Existent whose being is simply is existence.

Second, the argument seems to assume that Jill is an existent. But this would seem to assume that she is an individual, such that we can put her together with other individuals and count each up. Jill and Susan together in a room would then make two individuals. But for this to be the case, there must be a clear-cut logical (not merely practical!) distinction for each individual. There must be an exact criterion of life and death, and of spatio-temporal location. But it would seem that one could pull a sorites paradox for any suggested definition. I can't see any reason for saying that their individualities are anything beyond practical constructions on our part for dealing with a confusing world. Since we start off in life making practical distinctions and only afterward make these practical distinctions precise, the onus is on my opponent to argue for why there are metaphysically as opposed to practically distinct individuals: how do we cross the gap from what is merely practical? But without metaphysical individuals, what is there around to be a merely possible existent? If anything, since the existent (and therefore its possibility) is grounded in our construction of it, the "cosmological" argument would prove the necessity of our stipulation (or better: what for practical purposes could be considered our stipulation, since we ourselves are are stipulating are constructions, as is any talk of constructions. Just as talk of mid-sized objects makes sense whether or not we think they exist metaphysically, it would seem that all this is practically meaningful even without a firm metaphysical foundation).

But there seems to be something we can take from the latter point. There is some reason why we construct "Jill" and "Susan", as well as "this tree" and "that stone". These may not be individuals we can consider on their own, such that they are real albeit contingent existents, but there must be some particularity which allows us to construct these forms.

"Particularity" is not the same as "individuality" in the way I am using it (perhaps my usage is arbitrary; all I am concerned with is that some distinction is made). If Jill is an individual and Susan is also an individual, than there are two defined and delimited individuals. If Jill and Susan each have particularity, though, then we cannot say how many individuals there are, or even if the question makes sense. Particularity undergirds any other statement of quantity, quality, construction, or the like. There is not a "this something" involved; there is merely the "this".

"Jill" and "Susan" then refer to particulars, but the construction makes them out to be individuals: something defined, delimited, and countable. We need this delimitation to think about them, we need some completeness. And here is the problem: nothing exists merely as incomplete. Such a thing would be only partially actual, but every actuality is actually actual. We may speak of, say, an incomplete paper. But what is already down is completely actual; it is the mismatch between our expectations and what is there that introduces the incompleteness, not anything in the bits and bytes or ink and paper themselves. (I think this point needs to be qualified, but I'll perhaps do that in a later post after we get some of the basics down here.)

But while our construction has this foisted completeness or incompleteness, the actuality itself is on the one hand incomplete, and on the other hand complete. Insofar as I mark off simply this little section of reality, it is incomplete. Physically, this computer screen is affected by gravitational forces from the farthest quasars and cannot be completely delimited as an individual without reference to them. They are not something external, but part of the very makeup of this screen itself, however minutely. I currently am constituted by the actual contents of my perception and consciousness: sight is nothing without a seen and intellect is nothing without an intellected, so any reference to me as a separate individual which sees without what it sees, points to something incomplete. This incompleteness, though, is an incompleteness precisely because it is impossible. The incomplete being is lacking something which it logically needs: not as something to bring it into existence or that previously brought it into existence (as with the version of the cosmological argument which I reject), but as what constitutes it here and now. It is the internal constitution of the being which needs explanation, not external factors or its existence in general.

So the fact that we can point to particularities means that we can pick out these incomplete beings. But the notion of an incomplete being is incoherent without its completion. So there must be complete being, some unity of being. I am inclined to say that this includes at least everything involved in any given causal system, but that would be another argument. There may even be levels of different completions, or perhaps different degrees of incompleteness and unity, which are again separate issues.

The incomplete beings would be particular expressions of complete being, since all of them are nexuses of complete being in a way; my computer screen (or at least its completion which is demanded by the incomplete being which I am regarding) is being regarded in one way, and distant quasars are this being regarded in another way, perhaps under a complex coordinate change. Perhaps one could take an analogy: the axioms and rules of inference of a mathematical system already have determined the entire rest of the system, such that they logically entail as their completion all of the system's theorems, while each theorem is the complete system regarded in a different way, or at least complete portions of the system regarded differently (though I question whether most of reality can be made precisely definite at all without violence). But the computer simply regarded in itself is not the complete being. The computer in itself is in fact merely an illusion, since we would take what is really incomplete (and so therefore unthinkable as such) and regard it as complete, just as the axioms regarded in themselves without any entailments have not been understood but have merely formed some basic intelligible impression (although again, the computer may be more purely illusion since it would seem to lack the definiteness of the axioms).

The presence of incomplete beings then logically entails complete being, and the incomplete beings are expressions of the complete being, illusory when considered simply in themselves and theophanies when considered in their completion. What this cosmological argument arrives at is perhaps different from "that which we call God", but it avoids hierarchical notions of causation which do not appear to have any concrete correlate.

This is my attempt to formulate an argument from the unity of being, as found in the Neoplatonists, the school of Wahdat al-Wujud in Islam, in Vedanta (expecially Advaita Vedanta), or in some schools of Buddhism; the analogy from mathematical systems in fact comes from Plotinus. It is not, then, an argument "for God" in the sense of some Creator completely distinct from creation.

Is the complete being itself delimited? The false completion of incomplete beings does involve delimitation, because there are other beings separated out from them. A complete being which does not have anything else, complete or incomplete, over and against it would not seem to have this delimitation. So it is not the degree of delimitation itself which makes something complete, but rather delimitation may already be a sign that something is incomplete since what is truly complete does not need to be marked off.