Recent Supreme Court Actions

While reading Plato's Laws in researching my recent post, I came across a phrase that seemed appropriate to the recent actions of our Supreme Court:

"No human being is competent to wield an irresponsible control over mankind without becoming swollen with pride and unrighteousness."  - Laws, Book IV

Relating Ourselves to Indirect Knowledge, pt. 1

In my last post I brought out the distinction between direct and indirect knowledge, and made the point that we can only evaluate indirect knowledge in light of direct knowledge; here I would like to explore that theme further.

Indirect knowledge is knowledge that we are unable to evaluate in the terms by which it is directly known. For example, it is only the cosmologist who has the time, resources and education to draw scientific conclusions about the physical history of the universe on a cosmic scale. The rest of us, to the extent that we can be related to that knowledge at all, are only related to it through the cosmologist and to the extent that we believe what he tells us about cosmology. The key characteristic of indirect knowledge is, therefore, that it is mediated by another.

Naturally we want to only believe things that are true and avoid believing things that are false. In the case of indirect knowledge, then, this must involve an evaluation of the mediator through which we are related to the knowledge. In direct knowledge, we evaluate the evidential and logical basis for the knowledge ourselves; in indirect knowledge, we evaluate the reliability of the mediator who is, presumably, himself directly related to the evidential and logical basis for the knowledge. (It should be remembered that there might be a chain of mediators; the significant point is that the chain must eventually end in someone directly related to the knowledge. For the purposes of this post, however, there is no significant difference between a chain of one or many so the chain will taken to have only one link for the sake of clarity.)

It would be defeating the purpose, of course, if we tried to evaluate the mediator in terms of a direct relationship to the knowledge itself. For instance, there is no point in me trying to evaluate whether a cosmologist is reliable by reviewing his work in light of an application of cosmological science itself. For if I could do that, I could relate myself directly to cosmological knowledge and wouldn't need the cosmologist in the first place. We only avail ourselves of indirect knowledge when direct knowledge is unavailable to us.

While we can't evaluate a mediator directly in terms of the science he mediates, we can evaluate him in terms of his general human nature as a knower. For the canonical example of how to do this, we turn to Socrates in Plato's Apology. It will be recalled that Socrates was told by the oracle at Delphi that he was the wisest of men. Incredulous at this, Socrates attempted to prove the oracle wrong by finding a man wiser than himself, which he thought would not be difficult to do. Among the individuals he interviewed in this quest were the skilled craftsmen. This is the result:

Last of all, I turned to the skilled craftsmen. I knew quite well that I had practically no technical qualifications myself, and I was sure that I should find them full of impressive knowledge. In this I was not disappointed. They understood things which I did not, and to that extent they were wiser than I was. But, gentlemen, these professional experts seemed to share the same failing which I had noticed in the poets. I mean that on the strength of their technical proficiency they claimed a perfect understanding of every other subject, however important, and I felt that this error more than outweighed their positive wisdom. So I made myself spokesmen for the oracle, and asked myself whether I would rather be as I was - neither wise with their wisdom nor stupid with their stupidity - or possess both qualities as they did. I replied through myself to the oracle that it was best for me to be as I was. (from the Apology, in the Collected Dialogues of Plato edited by Hamilton and Cairns)

What Socrates has noticed is that being in expert in one thing does not make one an expert in everything, which is of course common sense. But he has noticed something else which is more significant, and even paradoxical, which is that being an expert in a field has a tendency to make people think they have a competence in other areas that is undeserved. I say it is paradoxical because one would think that through the process of becoming an expert in one field a man would realize how difficult it is to become an expert in any field, and so would tend to a natural humility concerning knowledge outside his own specialized field. Yet the opposite seems to happen; becoming an expert in one field tends to make one think he is an expert everywhere.

This observation is even more relevant today than it was in Socrates's time. For as I pointed out in the original post, science becomes more specialized the further it advances. That is, to become a scientific expert today means spending an increasing amount of time on an increasingly narrow domain. Scientists are subject to opportunity cost as much as anyone else; a scientist can only become an expert today on early universe cosmology by spending his time studying that and not other things - for instance genetics, chemistry, electrical engineering or botany, not to mention law, economics, history or philosophy. But, just as in ancient Greece, the expert of today will pretend to a competence outside his narrow area of expertise.

How can we use this principle in our evaluation of indirect knowledge? We should not take for granted that an expert is able to distinguish that which he knows through his expertise and that which holds merely by his opinion or ordinary reason. In other words, he may have no clear self-understanding of what he knows and what he doesn't know and why. Thus what we get from him may be a mix of his expert opinion on the subject on which he is competent - what we want - and his opinions on other subjects on which he has no particular competence better than our own - what we don't want. It is up to us to sort out the one from the other. But beyond that, we should be more likely to rely on the expert testimony of an expert who has the self-awareness to distinguish his expert opinion from his merely ordinary opinion. Such self-awareness indicates that the expert is aware of what it means to know, and we can have more confidence that what he is giving us is in fact only that which is justified by his expert opinion.

The classic example of an expert who is the modern equivalent of the craftsmen Socrates encountered in Athens is Carl Sagan. Sagan, an expert in planetary science, wrote a number of popular books on science (e.g. Cosmos) that explored well beyond his particular competence in astronomy. One of his most popular books, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark attempts to trace science as a singular beacon of knowledge in a world haunted by superstition, religion and pseudoscience. The book is of interest here because of a passage on p. 256-257 where Sagan issues some "mea culpas" on instances where he went wrong. The instances include the following: Estimating the atmospheric pressure of Venus incorrectly; incorrectly estimating the water content of Venutian clouds; thinking there might be plate tectonics on Mars when in fact there weren't; attributing the wrong cause to the high temperatures on Titan; overestimating the effect of burning Persian Gulf oil wells on the agriculture in South Asia.

What do these instances all have in common? They are all cases of Sagan admitting error in his particular area of expertise - planetary science. Yet Sagan offered opinions on subjects far beyond planetary science; in the The Demon Haunted World itself he makes assertions about history, religion, philosophy, politics and economics among others. He gives no instances when he was wrong about politics or philosophy. Is this because, bizarrely, he's always right in areas where he's not an expert and only wrong in areas where he is an expert? More likely is that Sagan, in his area of expertise, knows when he is right and when he is wrong, but in areas outside of his expertise, he doesn't really know when he is right and when he is wrong.

And it is not hard to find instances when he is wrong in The Demon Haunted World. He claims on p. 155 that Plato "assigned a high role to demons" and quotes the following in evidence:

We do not appoint oxen to be the lords of oxen, or goats of goats, but we ourselves are a superior race and rule over them. In like manner God, in his love of mankind, placed over us the demons, who are a superior race, and they with great ease and pleasure to themselves, and no less to us, taking care of us and giving us peace and reverence and order and justice never failing, make the tribes of men happy and united.

Sagan gives no attribution for this quote, but a little research shows that it is from Book IV of Plato's Laws. The context of the quote makes clear that Plato is not speaking in his own voice, but is recounting the received tradition concerning how mankind was originally ruled in the ancient, golden age of Cronus. And the continuation of the passage shows that it means pretty much the opposite of what Sagan thinks it means:

So the story teaches us today, and teaches us truly, that when a community is ruled not by God but by man, its members have no refuge from evil and misery. We should do our utmost - this is the moral - to reproduce the life of the age of Cronus, and therefore should order our private households and our public societies alike in obedience to the immortal element within us, giving the name of law to the appointment of understanding.

(My translation in Hamilton and Cairns is slightly different than Sagan's, wherever he got it from.) So while the age of Cronus may have been ruled by benevolent demons, ours is not, but we can imitate that golden age by ruling ourselves through the immortal element within us - which for Plato is the soul and in particular the intellectual element of the soul - the "appointment of understanding." Plato, far from giving demons a "high role", is giving them no role at all and instead is urging us to order our affairs through reason. More deeply, Plato is wisely using the tradition of mythology to support the rule of reason; rather doing a Sagan-like move and dismissing any regard for mythology as foolish, Plato acknowledges the wisdom in mythology but turns that respect for tradition to his own purposes. In the present age, Plato argues, respect for tradition cannot take the form it once did - since the present age is manifestly not a golden age, we obviously are not being ruled by benevolent demons even if we once were - and can only take the form of ruling ourselves by the divine element within us, our reason. Sagan, rather than dismissing Plato, could probably have taken some lessons from him in how to influence people.

The point for present purposes, however, is that Sagan was clearly wrong about Plato, and in a way that a simple reading of the passage in context would have revealed to any intelligent reader. Furthermore, Sagan doesn't know he is wrong, the way he knows he was wrong about atmospheric pressure on Venus. The lesson to take away is to trust whatever Carl Sagan says about strictly scientific issues concerning planetary science, and to take anything else he says with truckload of salt.

The conclusion for now is that the first principle in evaluating indirect knowledge is to consider the mediator in terms of his character as a knower in the general sense: Is he able to distinguish what he knows from what he doesn't know? Does he know the limits of his own expertise, what he really knows through it and what he doesn't? A mediator for whom positive answers can be given is more trustworthy, both in his area of expertise and in the likelihood of not pretending to pass off as expert knowledge that which was not. In any case, it is important to sift through for ourselves what an expert tells us, sorting out what his expertise really justifies and what it does not.

Science, Philosophy, Direct and Indirect Knowledge

For many, including Jerry Coyne, the significant distinction in knowledge is between scientific knowledge and all other kinds of knowledge (if there are any; in his Faith vs. Fact, Coyne can barely bring himself to acknowledge anything other than science.)

But the more important distinction for us is between direct and indirect knowledge. Direct knowledge is knowledge that is known immediately by us and on our own authority. Indirect knowledge is knowledge that we are related to only through someone else; it is mediated by those others and therefore always involves the issue of authority, for it is on the basis of authority that we determine whom to listen to or not.

Examples of direct knowledge include things like the fact that you can't be in two places at the same time, that you are younger than your parents, and that dogs are produced by nature but automobiles are only products of human artifice. Some (but not all) of mathematics is direct knowledge. You don't need an authority to tell you that 2+2=4. And if you can follow Euclid's proof that there are an infinite number of primes. then the fact that there are an infinite number of primes is direct knowledge for you.

Suppose you can't follow the proof. Then you can still be related to that fact as knowledge, but only indirectly through the authority of someone else who can follow the proof. A consequence of this is that the same piece of knowledge can be known directly by some and indirectly by others. Everyone knows 2+2=4 on his own authority; but very few people know that Fermat's Last Theorem is true on his own authority, for its proof is so sophisticated that only the most educated mathematicians can follow it.

It can be seen that indirect knowledge depends on direct knowledge. If I'm taking something on the authority of another, it is not unreasonable for him to be taking it on the authority of another as well, but somewhere the chain has to end with someone who simply knows it directly. Otherwise we have a train with nothing but freight cars and no engine. (An example is a child who believes in the Big Bang on the authority of his teacher, who in turn believes it on the authority of cosmologists. But the cosmologists know it directly because they have gone through and understand the scientific case for the Big Bang.)

What about science? Jerry Coyne tells us on page 187 of Faith vs Fact that "I see science as a method not a profession... Any discipline that studies the universe using the methods of 'broad' science is capable in principle of finding truth and producing knowledge. If it doesn't, no knowledge is possible." So to have "science" in the strict sense we must produce it through the method that defines science. Unfortunately, very few of us - actually no one - has the time or resources to develop his entire base of knowledge through the application of scientific methods. We must, to a great degree, rely on the application of the scientific method that others have performed and take their results as a given; or, rather, we can only be related to their scientific knowledge indirectly through appeal to their authority as scientists.

The irony of the advance of science is that the more it advances, the less it becomes directly available to any individual man. Back in the early days of modern science, an intelligent amateur could keep abreast of, and perhaps reproduce, most of the crucial scientific results. It's not hard to reproduce Galileo's experiments with rolling balls and, if he can get his hands on a telescope, verify the existence and movements of Jupiter's satellites for himself. And he can easily reproduce Franklin's experiments with electricity or Pascal's with atmospheric pressure. But as science advances, it requires increasingly expensive and elaborate apparatus to construct experiments; and those experiments themselves require a much larger base of knowledge to understand. A high school student can be brought to an understanding of Galileo's experiments in acceleration in the course of one day's class. He'll need another four or so years of intensive education, at least, to understand how and why recent experiments have demonstrated the existence of the Higgs boson, assuming he is capable of mastering the relevant material at all. And that student, while mastering physics, will not be spending his time mastering biology and genetic science, so that, however much he might end up directly related to knowledge in physics, he will still be indirectly related to all that genetic science produces, and all that the other sciences produce. So the more science advances, the more all of us are indirectly related to scientific knowledge, including scientists themselves.

It thus becomes crucial for us to understand the distinction between direct and indirect knowledge, how they are related, and how to handle each type of knowledge appropriately. I've already discussed the distinction between the two types of knowledge. How are they related? As pointed out above, indirect knowledge is dependent on direct knowledge, since indirect knowledge is really just direct knowledge removed some number of times from the original source.

But indirect knowledge is dependent on direct knowledge in another way, and that is subjectively. By that I mean the only means we have available to evaluate indirect knowledge is through direct knowledge. When a scientist says that the Big Bang is true, how do I know whether to believe him or not? I could appeal to some other instance of indirect knowledge, for instance that other scientists agree with him, but this only pushes the problem back a step, since I now have to think about how to evaluate that piece of indirect knowledge. Again, at some point I must have recourse to something I simply know directly, through which I can evaluate competing claims of indirect knowledge.

The process of analyzing and appropriating direct knowledge is philosophy. The crucial distinction with direct knowledge is that it is not mediated; that is, it must ultimately be known without reliance on anyone else. Kierkegaard discusses this in his analysis of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. A true teacher - that is, in my terms, a teacher of direct knowledge - is only the occasion by which someone comes to know, and the process has only completed when the teacher has become dispensable. It is for this reason that philosophy does not "progress" or produce "results" - one of the perennial charges against it. A "result" is knowledge that can be appropriated without reproducing the process by which it came to be known - for example, when an engineer uses the facts about electronic devices to design a system without first proving all those facts scientifically for himself. "Results" are therefore by nature indirect knowledge. Philosophy cannot produce "results" without falsifying itself; and everyone who would make progress in philosophy must reproduce for himself the process by which philosophers have come to know - and in the process, make those philosophers dispensable. There are no "results" that can be handed on from Plato's Republic. But someone who reads it may come to know things for himself that he might otherwise not know.

The fact that the teacher becomes dispensable is one characteristic of philosophy; another is that it appeals to direct experience as its evidential basis, on the eminently reasonable principle that it is the only possible basis. For my own, immediate experience is the only direct contact I have with reality (if in fact I have contact with reality at all); anything else is mediated and therefore a subject of indirect knowledge. This too, like the fact that philosophy doesn't produce "results", sometimes puts people off philosophy, for it makes philosophy seem a matter of purely "subjective" preference. And it is subjective, in the sense that it is only I that have access to my own experience. This is true, necessary and unavoidable, nearly tautological, yet is frequently overlooked. From p. 195 of Faith vs Fact:

"I'm hungry," my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it's true that you feel that way. What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

The fact you feel hungry is a fact concerning reality as much as any other. Whether you really need to eat or not is irrelevant to the truth that you in fact have the feeling . Ultimately, science itself depends on subjective knowledge, because scientists must read meters and look through microscopes - "I am seeing an amoeba through this lens" or "The voltmeter says 5 volts." There is really no way to escape the subjective nature of these experiences. For instance, trying to "independently verify" them as Coyne suggests, for instance, by asking someone else whether they see 5 volts as well, may be a reasonable procedure, but it only works because we take our subjective experience of what someone else tells us - "I am hearing Joe say the voltmeter reads 5 volts" - as itself not in need of independent verification. Otherwise, we are back to the familiar infinite regress that comes up so often in this context.

The philosopher faces the fact that all our knowledge - direct, indirect or otherwise - can ultimately be evaluated only in light of our own personal experience. The philosopher serves as an ultimately dispensable aid in analyzing and discovering the significance and meaning of that experience. The scientist simply takes the meaning of personal experience for granted so he can get on with his science. And he is perfectly justified in this, but he is in danger, like Coyne, of misunderstanding the real relationship between science and philosophy - which is really a misunderstanding of the basic human condition.

Coming next: How direct knowledge is used to evaluate indirect knowledge. Hint: Read Plato's Apology.

Game of Thrones, Machiavelli, Socrates and Plato

[This post has spoilers for Game of Thrones]

Ethan makes an interesting comment here on my earlier post concerning Game of Thrones. The context is the decision of Eddard Stark, while a prisoner of the Lannister family, to condemn himself as a traitor in return for the sparing of his daughter's life. He takes issue with my point that Stark would have done well to have heeded the Socratic principle not to voluntarily do evil to oneself, for even though things didn't turn out as he thought they would, at least his daughter's life was in fact spared.

Ethan is right about that, but I think to understand what is really going on here, we need to turn to Plato's modern nemesis, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli would tell us that there is a crucial difference between Socrates and Eddard Stark: Socrates is a private citizen and Eddard Stark is a king. And - according to Machiavelli - the morality of kings is different from that of ordinary citizens. Ordinary citizens live an intra-city existence in the context of the city's laws and courts; to be a good man in the city is to live well socially. It is to obey the city's laws and customs, and to follow the ordinary rules of morality with which we are familiar. It is to live in Plato's Republic. In that work Plato developed the notion of justice based on the well-ordered city, where every citizen knows his place and fulfills his duty.

But the king does not live an intra-city existence; his life is inter-city, dealing in the "community of the world", except that there is no such community. There is no world-wide law or court system, or world-wide set of customs in the context of which the king makes his decisions. The international world is not a well-ordered Republic but remains in the state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbes - a war of all against all, in which peace occurs not as a reasoned state achieved via a rational Republic, but merely as an agreement between two foes who realize they can't (for now) get the better of each other. And without a worldwide city in which to develop the notion of justice, the Platonic understanding of justice is stillborn - for the king if not the people.

The wise king, according to Machiavelli, understands this and does not make the mistake of judging his decisions in light of an understanding of justice - the justice appropriate to the life within the city - that cannot apply in the context of his life as king. The king must use "evil well", which means that he must not be afraid to perform acts that, according to ordinary morality, are base, but in the context of his rule as king he finds necessary. (Incidentally, this applies not only to his relations to other cities but to his rule as king in his own city. His rule constitutes the city, and so is not an appropriate subject of Platonic justice, which appears as a consequence  of the rationally founded city. The justice that comes into existence with the city cannot be the justice against which the city's creator is judged.)

What would Machiavelli think of Eddard Stark? One thing we are taught by Machiavelli is that, if you are going to play the "game of thrones", you must play it all the way or not all. The prince who only goes halfway and remains constrained by "conscience" will find himself a victim of his more ruthless rivals. He will be the man who brings a knife to a gunfight. Eddard Stark is such a man. He wants to play the game of thrones and is not above practicing deceit in pursuing his aims, most notably in his revision of Robert Baratheon's final words concerning his heir (which Stark changes from specifically naming Joffrey Lannister to the generic "rightful heir.") But Stark is also constrained by his conscience. When he discovers that Joffrey is actually the product of incest between Cersei and Jaime Lannister, he informs Cersei in private and offers her the chance to flee with her children. Cersei uses the opportunity, and Robert Baratheon's death, to orchestrate the assassination of Stark's bodyguards and his arrest as a traitor.

Machiavelli would have predicted such a result, for he tells us in The Prince that "men must either be caressed or annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones." The most dangerous thing a prince can do is injure a rival but leave him in a position to retaliate. Cersei does not make the same mistake, for when she turns on Eddard she makes sure he is thrown in prison in chains, completely helpless. Once this has occurred, Eddard really has no good alternatives. He's lost the Machiavellian game he entered without understanding what was necessary to win it; by falsely reporting Robert Baratheon's final words, he has also compromised his own integrity and turned away from the Socratic path. In the end, he's listened neither to Socrates nor Machiavelli. So it is true that, by the time he receives Varys's counsel in prison, his doom is already more or less sealed and he makes the best of a bad situation.

It doesn't help him that Varys is hardly Socrates, and is a poor Machiavelli as well. The Machiavellian truth of Eddard's situation in prison is that he and Sansa will live only insofar as they are useful to the Lannisters. The Lannisters have already demonstrated their ruthlessness by assassinating Eddard's guards, throwing him in prison, and demanding that he falsely testify against himself. It should be obvious to anyone, and especially to a supposedly wise counselor like Varys, that the Lannister's word means nothing in this context. Machiavelli: "A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them."

Furthermore, Joffrey is now king, and it is in Joffrey's hands - a man who is an obvious psychopath - that Eddard's life will be placed, whatever agreements he might have made with other Lannisters. And with respect to Sansa, does Varys really expect the Lannisters to spare Sansa should they find it expedient to do away with her, based on some private agreement they made with Eddard? Such an expectation would be dangerously naïve. Probably nothing Eddard could do in prison would change how things turned out for himself and Sansa, except for Eddard doing an injustice to himself by falsely confessing to treason.

The Stark family in general suffers the same ambivalence of character shown by Eddard and, unfortunately for them, learn no lessons from his demise. Robb Stark accepts the consensus of northern nobles and becomes King of the North. He prosecutes the war against the Lannisters with both skill and zeal and, moreover, claims to fight in the name of justice. He executes Lord Karstark, again in the name of justice, for the murder of two Lannister prisoners, even though his mother Catelyn correctly predicts that this will cause the Karstark forces to abandon Robb's army and seriously weaken it. But when it comes fulfilling a vow he made to marry a daughter of Walder Frey, his commitment to justice wavers and he breaks the vow in favor of marrying the woman he loves, a healer attached to his army named Talisa.

Robb later realizes he can't win his war without Frey's forces, and attempts to reconcile with him by offering to apologize as well as have one of his nobles marry a Frey daughter. Robb would have done well to listen to this piece of Machiavellian advice : "And whoever thinks that in high personages new benefits cause old offenses to be forgotten, makes a great mistake." And, as happened with Eddard, Robb find himself in a situation where he has injured an enemy and also put himself in a vulnerable place. At the wedding banquet at the Frey castle, Robb, his family, and their forces are all slaughtered at the infamous Red Wedding.

The argument I am making is that the Starks come to a bad end because of their ambivalent moral nature: They follow neither Socrates nor Machiavelli; they attempt to play the game of thrones, but don't do it with the ruthlessness that Machiavelli teaches us is necessary to succeed. Instead, their half-hearted commitment to justice, sometimes submitting to it and other times ignoring it,  only creates a series of dangerous enemies who are powerful, devious and ruthless, and furthermore, are themselves more consistent followers of Machiavelli.

It's clear how a more consistent Machiavellian approach might have changed things for the Starks. After Eddard discovers that Joffrey is a product of incest, instead of warning Cersei and giving her a chance to escape (as well as retaliate), Eddard would have used the information to destroy Cersei outright, and in a context in which he was safe from retaliation. Robb would not have executed Lord Karstark, the justice of the situation not even entering the calculation, and his forces would have been sufficient for him to continue his string of battlefield victories.

But how might things have changed for the Starks if they had been more consistent followers of Socrates? Socrates would surely have advised them that they can't both be committed to justice and yet pursue the game of thrones. This doesn't mean they couldn't be kings. But it does mean they can't try to manipulate events, especially when doing so involves compromising justice. Eddard could have honestly reported King Robert's final words and let the chips fall where they may. He could have acknowledged Joffrey as Robert's successor and simply gone back to Winterfell, forgetting any notions of scheming events to his liking. And Robb Stark could have forestalled his unfortunate end by simply fulfilling in justice the vow he made to marry a daughter of Walder Frey.

It remains to ask the question: Who is truly wiser, Socrates or Machiavelli? We can first note that Machiavelli takes the prince's motivation for granted. He addresses the question of how the prince shall gain and retain power and defeat his enemies, and never asks the question of the ultimate purpose for which the prince wishes to use power. It is a Socratic principle, however, that one should pursue wisdom before power, for the man who gains power without wisdom will only become a danger to himself as well as others. Joffrey Lannister is a good example of such a man. But we may also ask the question of a thoroughly Machiavellian character like Tywin Lannister. Tywin is no fool and regularly demonstrates his superiority in the game of thrones over his opponents. He is not constrained by notions of justice in formulating and carrying out his plans. Nor is he constrained by sentimentality in using the marriages of his children for political ends. But what has he won with all that scheming? Power, yes, but he is hated by both his daughter Cersei and his son Tyrion. He has no real friends and has in fact become a lonely, bitter old man, prosecuting the game of thrones in the name of the family Lannister when the meaning of family has long since been lost on him. He is reminiscent of Michael Corleone, another man who ends up destroying his own family by "being strong" for that family.

We might also consider the character of Robert Baratheon. He ends up miserable as king, frankly confessing to Eddard Stark that he thought being king meant doing whatever he wanted, when it turns out he is constrained by the necessities of state and politics. Worst of all, from the Socratic perspective, is Joffrey Lannister, whose ascent to the throne permits him to unleash the worst aspects of his character. The fact that Joffrey fails to appreciate the evil he does to others and himself only makes the situation all the more horrifying.

Perhaps the difference between Socrates and Machiavelli can be cast in terms of being careful what you wish for. Machiavelli may be able to get you what you want (if you are a prince), but he cannot help you understand if it is something you should really want after all. For that, you need Socrates.

Derbyshire and the Red Pill

John Derbyshire's latest column is an interesting example of what happens when an intelligent but non-philosophical mind bumps up against some realities that can only be addressed philosophically.

The most fundamental of these realities is that most people live non-reflectively and accept uncritically whatever the conventional wisdom tells them. One reason this happens is that it is simply easier to live as one of the crowd ("the herd" as Kierkegaard put it). Challenging the conventional wisdom, the established ways, is perceived by the crowd as a threat to the stability of the established order (which, in truth, it may very well be); so the critical thinker will naturally find his life more difficult than one who just goes along with the prevailing wisdom. As Derbyshire puts it:

It is also antisocial. Who wants to hear you say that the emperor has no clothes, when everyone else they know—including all the cool people!—says otherwise.

Those who follow the crowd are known as the "well-adjusted."  In the terms of Derbyshire's column, they have taken the "blue pill", an apparent reference to the film The Matrix (which I haven't seen). The far fewer people who take the "red pill" are the "realists", the ones who take the truth as it is and damn the consequences. Naturally, Derbyshire includes himself in this latter group. (How can one be sure which pill you actually took? Maybe the red pill is just a blue with some food coloring on it.)

Derbyshire finds demoralizing the fact that most people are non-reflective, and so not open to the truth he wants to tell them. He consoles himself that there are still, in fact, some redoubts of reason left in the modern world:

Crazy as the social and political worlds undoubtedly are, looking at things realistically, reason still holds its fort. Mathematics, the homeland of reason; science, the mostly-well-behaved offspring of math; and technology, the child of pure science, continue to produce wonders and enlarge our understanding.

Noticeably absent from the list of citizens Derbyshire welcomes into the fortress of reason is philosophy. But without philosophy, the fortress of math and science will not last long, for the question of the value of math and science is a philosophical one, not a scientific one. No wonder he is depressed. His own canon of reason is in effect a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of those who would undermine the things he loves.

 

Putting yourself outside the circle of reason would make anyone gloomy. Yet Derbyshire's occupation - writing pop math books and opinion columns - qualifies as neither math, science nor technology, and so does not qualify as reason under his requirements. This gives Derbyshire's columns their peculiar flavor: He desperately wishes that everyone would take the red pill and deal with reality, but can't make an argument to that effect since no such argument is possible in terms of math or science. All he can do is lament the fact and report that he, unaccountably, prefers the red pill to the blue pill.

The fact that most people do not prefer to face the truth, and resent those who would reveal it to them, is no recent discovery. It is, in fact, one of the original insights of philosophy and is memorably allegorized (yes, that is a word) in Plato's parable of The Cave. The difference between Plato and Derbyshire (or, at least, one of them) is that Plato didn't simply throw up his hands in light of this situation, but thought deeply about it and its implications for the practice of philosophy. The result was The Republic, one of the great philosophical documents of Western culture, in which Plato makes the argument that the city in which philosophers rule is not only ideal for the philosopher, but for everyone else as well. Plato's ideal city was never realized in fact (and, indeed, even in The Republic he acknowledges that it was never really practical), but that doesn't mean the work was without influence. The alternative to crowning the philosophers kings is to make kings, to the extent it is possible, philosophers. Another way of saying it is that it isn't necessary that the mass of people become philosophers - it is only necessary that the influential ones become philosophers. That has happened in history - Marcus Aurelius comes to mind - but most notably in the founding of our own nation. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are nothing if not documents claiming to found a nation on reason.

Derbyshire ends his column with a note of demoralization, lamenting the fact that he is on the red pill:

I want to believe the pretty lies. I’ve had enough of depressive realism. I want to take the blue pill. Where’s the nearest retail outlet?

It's a little hard to take Derbyshire seriously in his melancholy, for there is about him a bit of what G.K. Chesterton called the "boyish delight in the grim and unapproachable pose of the realist." In any event, the answer to depressive realism is more realism, not less, and we can only hope that Derbyshire's depression might drive him to the point of reconsidering the scientistic (not scientific) dogmas that prevent him from thinking truly philosophically.

The Legacy of the Enlightenment

I'm just finishing reading The Enlightenment And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden, an excellent history of the enlightenment as well as Pagden's interpretation of its significance. His last chapter - The Enlightenment and Its Enemies - is a robust defense of the Enlightenment legacy against its critics.  While Pagden is certainly right that the Enlightenment has bequethed us some genuine treasures, in particular the modern theory of rights and constitutional government, he gives the Enlightenment far too much credit. Why, for instance did the Enlightenment happen at all?

What so many of these opponents of Enlightenment have failed even to ask is why the world of virtue and moral authority that had apparently served our ancestors so well should have been overturned in the first place. Why, in other words, did the Enlightenment happen at all? It cannot simply be explained away, as the De Maistres and the Burkes had hoped, as the murderous revenge of disinherited minorities suddenly - and inexplicably - grown powerful. I have tried to offer an answer, not in terms of a conflict between "reason" and belief, between science and religion, but rather in terms of the historical failure of Christianity to continue to provide the kind of intellectual, and consequently moral, certainty that it had once done. By the mid-seventeenth century the entire structure on which all monotheistic beliefs rest, that the universe had been the creation of a divinity who continues to dictate every aspect of its being, had come to seem to many Europeans as threadbare as paganism had once seemed to Plato and Aristotle. In origin, all except the strictly theological aspects of Christianity - all that it could salvage from its Judaic origins - everything that relates to the human, and to life on earth - derived exclusively from ancient pagan sources manipulated by a powerful and often brilliantly imaginative clerical elite. Hence the description of it as "Hellenized Judaism." What the Enlightenment did was to replace this Christianized vision of the human condition with a more appealing, less dogmatic account, derived initially from the same attempt to reshape the most powerful of the ancient philosophical schools.

It is appropriate that Pagden gives a characteristically Enlightenment-style argument in defense of the Enlightenment. What makes it peculiarly Enlightenment is its use of history as a category that stands in judgement of all other modes of thought. By the mid-seventeeth century, Pagden tells us, the ancient view of God as Creator and Sustainer of the Universe had "come to seem to many Europeans as threadbare as paganism..." (that's my emphasis.) What is significant, and what justifies the Enlightenment, is the historical fact that the ancient view came to seem threadbare; whether it actually was threadbare, whether that perception was in accord with the truth of the matter, is irrelevant. History has spoken and the "age of theology" was over and the "age of reason" had begun.

The difference between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and the Enlightenment thinkers on the other, is that paganism (and by that I assume Pagden means the sophists and pre-Socratics) was more than merely apparently threadbare to Plato and Aristotle. They provided extensive arguments to show that the older pagan philosophy actually was threadbare and inadequate. Enlightenment thinkers by and large could not be bothered with such details. Descartes, for instance, merely informs us that he found the scholastic philosophy he was taught in school unbelievable and decided to chuck it overboard and start afresh. The great polemicists of the Enlightenment like Voltaire, and like their contemporary counterparts Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, didn't and don't actually refute their medieval nemeses. Instead, they heap scorn on traditional philosophy and theology, flattering their readers that they are too smart to believe such nonsense, and hope no one sees the bluff.

It is understandable why they took this approach. The sense of the Enlightenment thinkers was that the ancient ways of thinking had played themselves out and a new approach was needed. Whether this was true or not, coming to terms with  someone like Thomas Aquinas to the point of genuinely demonstrating the bankruptcy of his thought is potentially the task of a lifetime. But that very task, through the length and difficulty of its execution, would thwart its purpose - which was not to spend a lifetime in scholastic thought, but to move beyond scholasticism to something new.  The whole point of the Enlightenment was to get out of the (so they thought) suffocating thicket of medieval thought.

But "moving beyond" St. Thomas is not the same as refuting him. Ironically, instead of trying to sidestep the scholastics, St. Thomas might have served as a model for a genuine movement of Enlightenment rather the icon of medieval obscurity he became. For St. Thomas actually performed the task mentioned in the last paragraph - the task of moving beyond an older school of thought via a thorough refutation of it. And this brings me to Pagden's counterfactual account of history.

Pagden imagines what might have happened had the Protestant Reformation never taken place:

Luther, who was burned as a heretic in 1521, has gone down in history as nothing more than yet another troublesome friar hankering after the purity of the early Church. Christianity, although rarely ever at peace, remains united. The discovery of America has led to some flutters of uncertainty within the universities, but any thought that it might present a challenge to the traditional view of the laws of nature or God have been successfully repressed. There have been no French Wars of Religion, no English Civil Wars. The Revolt of the Netherlands, lacking ideological cohesion and foreign aid, has been swiftly suppressed. There has been no Thirty Years' War. Spain continues to be the richest, most powerful nation in Europe and remains locked in an unending struggle with France. Copernicus and Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Mersenne succeed in creating a new kind of Renaissance, which flourishes for a while under moderately tolerant regimes. Thomas Hobbes, however, although he enjoys some small success as a mathematician, eventually follows his father into the Church and dies, like him, an embittered alcoholic. John Locke is an obscure doctor at Christ Church, Oxford, renowned only for the silver tap he succeeded in inserting into the Earl of Shaftesbury's lower intestine without killing him in the process. Newton achieves recognition as a gifted astrologer and competent administrator and some notoriety as a somewhat heterodox theologian. By the end of the century the "Scientific Renaissance," as it later came to be called, as been silenced, the heliocentric theory and Descartes's atomism between them having proved too much for the Church to tolerate. The next generation has nothing to build on. The "mighty Light which spreads itself over the world," which Shaftesbury had seen in 1706 and which he believed must ensure that "it ... is impossible but Letters and Knowledge must advance in greater Proportion than ever," is instead a steadily darkening cloud. Western Christendom drops behind its centuries-old antagonist to the east, the Ottoman Empire. In 1683 Vienna falls to the armies of Sultan Mehmed IV. Russia, or "Muscovy," as it still calls itself, backward and divided, is easily defeated and overrun in January 1699. Spain and France still control the western Mediterranean and dominate most of northern Europe. But threatened by the seemingly irresistible Ottoman armies, they become increasingly theocratic and resistant to any innovation, from mechanical clocks to vaccination, which, they fear, might offend their ever-unpredictable God... Lacking any capacity for scientific or social innovation, the European powers not already under Ottoman control steadily decline until finally, in May 1789, Sultan Selim III marches into Paris. Within a few years what the English ecclesiastical historian Edward Gibbon had predicted in 1776 has come true, and "the interpretation of the Koran is now taught in the schools of Oxford and her pupils demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet." United in one massive religious and political community, which reaches from the Himalayas to the coasts of Scotland, the Ottoman Empire survives into the twentieth century... 

An utterly implausible flight of fancy? An illusion? Perhaps, but something not wholly dissimilar did, in fact, befall the Islamic world. During the reigns of the Caliphs al Mansur (712-75) and his successors Harun-al Rashid (786-809) and al-Ma'mun (813-33), an entire school of Hellenizing philosophers, jurists and doctors greup: men like the surgeon Abul Qasim Al-Zahravi, known as "Albucasis"; the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi, after whom a crater on the far side of the moon is now named; Abu or Ibn Sina, called "Avicenna" in the West, the author of a vast treatise that brought together all the medical knowledge of the ancient Greek world then available, from Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen; Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, physician, astronomer, mathematician, physicist, chemist, geographer, and historian, who in 1018 made calculations, using instruments he had created himself, of the radius and circumference of the Earth that vary by as 15 and 200 kilometers from today's estimates. The best known in the West, however, was Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd, or "Averroes" as he was called by his Latin readers, who was so highly regarded in the Christian world that he became known simply as "The Commentator" (just as Aristotle was known as "The Philosopher)... But Averroes was not only the greatest of the Arab Muslim scholars and perhaps the most influential of all Muslim philosophers, he was also the last. In the late twelfth century the Muslim clergy began a concerted onslaught on translation from the Greek and against all forms of learning that did not derive from either the Qur'an itself or from the sayings of the Prophet...

Pagden mentions Averroes "Latin readers", among whom were Thomas Aquinas, but doesn't seem to see the implication for his counterfactual history. At the time St. Thomas was reading Averroes, Platonism was the reigning philosophical school in Christendom and set the terms within which the Christian Revelation was interpreted. Aristotle was, in the twelfth century, a recent, revolutionary discovery. His major works had been lost in the West and only became known when translations from the Arabic (which themselves were translations from the Greek) became available. Not only because he was a pagan philosopher, and not only because he contradicted Plato in fundamental ways, but also because he came via the Arabs - complete with Muslim gloss by Averroes and Avicenna - Aristotle was greeted with a great deal of ecclesiastical skepticism. So much skepticism that the teaching of Aristotle was banned by the Church for decades, with his advocates like Aquinas also coming under a cloud of suspicion.

But Thomas Aquinas was not Descartes or Voltaire. He criticized the reigning philosophical regime from the inside, showing that he was its master and knew it better than did its defenders. He also demonstrated that, for those who love the truth, there was nothing to fear from Aristotle. For the truth cannot contradict itself. If the Gospel is true, whatever is true in Aristotle cannot contradict it, despite superficial appearances. Far from his faith being in conflict with reason, Aquinas's faith was a spur to an intellectual revolution in Christendom: His faith that Christianity was true meant that Christianity could have nothing to fear from the truth wherever it is encountered, even if it comes through pagan philosophers and Muslim translations.

Something similar could have happened with the revolution of thought that occurred in the Enlightenment. Like Aristotle and before him, Plato - who was also initially resisted as a pagan interloper ("what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?") - Enlightenment style thinking would have gone through some bumps and bruises but what was good in it would have eventually been accepted by the Church. This, in fact, was what was happening with Galileo. He initially had the support of the Pope, but through a series of unfortunate circumstances and scheming by the established bureaucracy, found himself on the wrong side of an ecclesiastical ban - just as had happened to Aristotle. But, unfortunately, Galileo was not St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was not merely brilliant, but also humble, pious, charitable and selfless - a saint. Galileo, in contrast, was vain and egotistical, and it is interesting to wonder how things might have turned out if the Galilean personality was more Thomistic. Nonetheless, the Church would have come around to Galilean physics eventually, as it had come around to Plato and then Aristotle.

In Pagden's counterfactual history "by the end of the century the 'Scientific Renaissance,' as it later came to be called, has been silenced, the heliocentric theory and Descartes's atomism between them having proved too much for the Church to tolerate." But there is no precedence for this in the (even by then) long history of the Church. The Church successfully absorbed Plato and other Greek thinkers, the pagan Latin intellectuals like Cicero and Virgil had been taught for centuries (and even figured as heroic figures in works like The Inferno), and only relatively recently Aristotle had been absorbed through his Islamic commentators. Pagden's alternative, anti-intellectual history, a history where the truth is "too much for the Church to tolerate", is without precedent in Christian history.

A crucial difference between the Church's approach to truth and the Enlightenment's is that the Church was not willing to absorb new truth at the expense of old. It is certainly true that scholastic-type thinking was in many ways proving a hindrance rather than a help at the dawn of the modern age, and the temptation to clear the thickets by slashing away wholesale at traditional thought is understandable. But it is surely an unwise thing to destroy that which you don't really understand,  for you may very well destroy a cultural inheritance that was gained by centuries of effort, and that could be gained no other way. And that is what happened with the Enlightenment, which in its efforts to get on with the scientific revolution, destroyed the ancient philosophical inheritance of the Greeks. The result is the modern world: Scientifically unsurpassed but philosophically bankrupt. The Church, in its efforts to avoid losing the accumulated wisdom of centuries in the hurry to get on with novel investigations, surely slowed the pace of scientific progress, and did so consciously; but it is a mistake to confuse a commitment to a measured pace of scientific progress with an opposition to scientific progress altogether, which is Pagden's mistake.

Pagden's counterfactual military history has a contradiction in it. He uses the history of the Ottoman Empire as an example of what might have happened had the Enlightenment not occurred in the West, but then has the Ottomans defeating the West because of the subsequent lack of innovation in the West.  But if the Ottomans are the actual historical exemplar of a culture that lacks Enlightenment and stagnates for lack of innovation, wouldn't the lack of Enlightenment in the West simply have resulted in a stalemate between East and West, rather than the Western triumph that actually occurred?

In fact, the Western superiority in innovation long predated the Enlightenment. This is ably documented in the works of Victor Davis Hanson (e.g. The Western Way of War, Carnage and Culture, The Soul of Battle) among others. All the way back to the ancient Greeks, the West showed a unique openness to innovation, particularly in military matters, that provided a sometimes subtle but persistent military superiority with respect to the East. The only way the medieval Crusades were possible was that Western technological superiority - both in arms and in logistical support - allowed far smaller Christian armies to compete on level terms with Islamic hordes.

The Enlightenment did not happen out of the blue, but was made possible by the medieval innovations that pre-dated it. Innovations in agriculture like the plow and the harness, which made medieval farms far more productive than their ancient (or Eastern) counterparts, contributed to population growth; medieval navigational innovations like the compass and the sextant made possible the voyages that discovered new worlds, and medieval inventions like modern banking made possible their financing.

The truly interesting counterfactual history would be one in which the Enlightenment acknowledges its debts to the past and remains within the innovative tradition going back to the Greeks, rather than constructing a mythology of the past that justifies its own revolutionary, and philosophy destroying, origin.

Creating the Abstract

Ed Feser has a post on his blog concerning the Cartesian/scientistic error of "concretizing the abstract." He describes abstraction, and what it means to "reify" an abstraction, this way:

[Modern Scholastic writers often distinguish three “degrees” of abstraction.  The first degree is the sort characteristic of the philosophy of nature, which considers what is common to material phenomena as such, abstracting from individual material things but retaining in its conception the sensible aspects of matter.  The second degree is the sort characteristic of mathematics, which abstracts not only the individuality of material things but also their sensible nature, focusing on what is intelligible (as opposed to sensible) in matter under the category of quantity.  The third degree is the sort characteristic of metaphysics, which abstracts from even the quantitative aspects of matter and considers notions like substance, existence, etc. entirely apart from matter.]

Abstractions can be very useful, and are of themselves perfectly innocent when we keep in mind that we are abstracting.  The trouble comes when we start to think of abstractions as if they were concrete realities themselves -- thereby “reifying” them -- and especially when we think of the abstractions as somehow more real than the concrete realities from which they have been abstracted.

Feser later discusses scientism as the error of mistaking scientific abstractions for reality itself:

The irony is that while New Atheists and others beholden to scientism pride themselves on being “reality based,” that is precisely what they are not.  Actual, concrete reality is extremely complicated.  There is far more to material systems than what can be captured in the equations of physics, far more to human beings than can be captured in the categories of neuroscience or economics, and far more to religion than can be captured in the ludicrous straw men peddled by New Atheists.  All of these simplifying abstractions (except the last) have their value, but when we treat them as anything more than simplifying abstractions we have left the realm of science and entered that of ideology. 

My purpose here is not to argue with Feser's conclusions, but to point out something about scientific abstractions that makes his case even stronger. The great revolution that occurred in the development of modern science was that abstractions were not simply read out of nature in the manner of classical philosophy, but read into nature by the actively creative mind. This is what Kant was getting at in this famous passage from the Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason:

When Galileo rolled balls of a weight chosen by himself down an inclined plane, or when Torricelli made the air bear a weight that he had previously thought to be equal to that of a known column of water, or when in a later time Stahl changed metals into calx and then changed the latter back into metal by first removing something and then putting it back in again, a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgements according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. (From the Cambridge Edition of the works of Immanuel Kant.)

We don't necessarily need to agree with Kant's view that "reason has insight only into what it itself produces" to see that he was saying something deeply significant about modern science and its differences from classical modes of inquiry. The classical philosopher pondered nature and subjected it to rational analysis; this starts by abstracting form (principle) from being as the intellectual basis of analysis. Therefore the forms the philosopher considered were those derived from his experiential encounter with being. The modern scientist, by contrast, does not abstract his scientific principles from nature, but creates them a priori and imposes them on nature.

Consider the principle of inertia - "an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest." Inertia runs counter to our common experience because the objects of our common experience are generally subject to frictional forces, and so don't "tend to stay in motion" when they are in motion. Slide a beer across the bar and it comes to a stop after a few feet. So the principle of inertia is not something abstracted from experience, because we never really experience it. Instead, it is that marvelous invention of modern scientific inquiry, the theoretical construct. Galileo created the principle of inertia and used it to interrogate nature in his scientific experiments.  Kant's point is that science works so well, and gives such transparent results, because there is nothing obscure about its principles; and there is nothing obscure about them because we ourselves create them.

Similar to inertia, the force, mass and acceleration of Newtonian physics were not abstracted by Newton from nature, like Aristotle abstracted rational animal from the nature of man. If they were, we might expect Aristotle to have discovered them. Nor is it an accident that force, mass and acceleration are mathematically related as force equals mass times acceleration. They are related in that equation because Newton created and defined them through the equation. Newton created his second law as a mathematical tool with which to interrogate nature, as Galileo had created inertia. This intellectual procedure - the creation of mathematically susceptible principles that form the basis of a subsequent investigation of nature - is the great breakthrough of modern science.

It's also why modern science is riven with priority claims in a way that classical philosophy was not. The idea that Plato might dedicate himself to a public campaign to prove that he was real inventor of the theory of the forms, and not Socrates or Aristotle, is laughable. Or that Thomas Aquinas might engage in a publicity battle to prove that he was the real originator of the cosmological argument rather than, say, Averroes. But the modern scientific world was subject to such acrimonious disputes from its inception, as exemplified in the long battle between Newton and Leibniz for the title of inventor of calculus. The reason, of course, is that Plato and Aquinas weren't inventing anything but explicating what was already given - nature - while Newton and other modern scientists were doing more than mere explication; they were inventing the tools that made the interrogation of nature possible. And over inventions there may be priority disputes.

Returning to Feser's point about the reification of abstractions, the situation under the understanding of scientific abstractions I've just presented is even worse for scientism than it is if scientific abstractions are considered as plain, old classical abstractions. Classical abstractions are at least derived from nature. In Aristotle's understanding, substance is a composite of form and matter, and the form analyzed in the philosopher's intellect is the same form as in the substance under analysis, since it is abstracted from substance. The mistake of "concretizing the abstract" is to mistake this abstracted form for fundamental reality rather than the substantial being from which it was abstracted. But the Aristotelian abstracted form at least has the advantage of being an aspect of fundamental reality, if not the whole of it. The situation is different with the theoretical constructs of modern science. They are creative products of the human mind and nature is interrogated in their terms; to reify them is to mistake pure products of the human imagination for reality itself.

This is not a novel point: Kant makes it in his Critique in the form of his distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. If we take science as the only true means of the investigation of reality (other than pure reason, which - according to Kant - can't issue in any genuine metaphysical insights), then what we learn through science is not reality itself, but only reality as it is interpreted through the theoretical constructs of science, which are themselves creative products of the human mind. To reify those theoretical constructs is literally to live in a fantasy world of your own creation.

It was obvious to Kant, and should be to us, that the mind that creates the theoretical constructs of science is both more real than those constructs and yet ultimately unknowable through them, since it necessarily transcends them. Henry Ford's Model T factory in Detroit could be constructed of many things, but one thing it couldn't be constructed of is Model T's, since the Model T's don't exist until the factory produces them. Similarly, the mind of Newton can't ultimately be composed of force, mass and acceleration (as strictly understood under Newton's Second Law) since those things are not naturally occurring elements, but the creative products of the genius of Newton. (It is important to keep in mind the distinction between the common sense meaning of terms like force, mass and acceleration, and their strictly scientific meaning as force, mass and acceleration. Commonsensically, mass means "how much stuff there is", but that isn't what it means under Newtonian science. What mass means under Newtonian science is the strict mathematical relationship of force divided by acceleration. And that meaning of mass is a creative product of the genius of Newton, not existent in the world until Newton created it.) 

The early modern scientists and scientific philosophers like Galileo, Francis Bacon and Kant were quite self-conscious about what they were doing and the genuine revolution in thought modern science represented. Rather than being led around by the nose by nature like the classical philosophers, the modern scientist turns the tables and submits nature to an interrogation of his own invention, literally: Scientific constructs are constructs and nature is forced into their categories. The vindication of a scientific theory through repeatable experiments indicates the extent to which nature submits to the categories created by the scientific mind; but no level of vindication changes the fact that the substance of the scientific theory is a creative product of the mind rather than the substance of nature itself.  These early modern philosophers saw science as a manifestation of the transcendent power and reality of the human mind: The classical philosopher thought the mind, though part of nature, transcended nature by knowing it. The modern scientific mind also transcends nature but in a way far more significant than that supposed by Aristotle. The modern scientific mind is not a part of nature at all because it is behind and prior to nature: Nature comes into existence only when spoken through the creative products of the scientific mind. 

More on D'Souza on Kant

I wrote about Dinesh D'Souza's take on Kant the other day here. D'Souza goes on to claim that Kant is in the mainstream of Western thought:

Though this conclusion that our reason is confined within the borders of our experience, and that reality in itself is permanently screened off from us by our own sensory limitations, may seem to some to be a very outlandish idea; in fact it is at the very center of Western philosophy. In perhaps the most famous metaphor in Western thought, Plato likened human beings to people living in a cave, shut out from the light of the sun, seeing only shadows and mistaking them for reality. Plato regarded our perceptions as mere images of a deeper and higher reality, the so-called Platonic forms, that he located somewhere outside the realm of human experience. And Plato's teacher, Socrates, regarded himself as the wisest man in Athens because he alone knew how little he knew. For all his breathtaking originality, Kant is squarely in the mainstream of Western thought.

D'Souza describes the beginning of Plato's allegory of the cave, but leaves out the second half. In Plato's story, one of the men chained in the cave is released and is able to make his way outside the cave, experience the sun, and see reality as it is. This process is, of course, the allegory of philosophy. The ordinary man is trapped within the conventional understanding of things (that is, common opinion); the philosopher is the man who, through philosophy, is able to transcend convention and understand reality as it is. If we are to interpret Plato's cave in terms of Kant, then we need to remove any hope that the man in chains is able to escape. Instead of philosophy arising when the man escapes his chains, it occurs when the possibility of his predicament occurs to him. He begins to distrust his naive deductions from his phenomenal experience and invents the critical philosophy. While he can never escape his chains, he has gained the only liberation possible to him: An understanding of his position and release from his prior false beliefs. He can never know reality as it is, but no longer does he labor under illusion.

The liberation Kant provides is superficially similar to that of Socrates, but they are radically different. Socrates's ignorance is subjective; he knows that he knows nothing, but he does not pretend to know that no one else knows anything, and even less, that no else can know anything. The Socratic conclusion is a beginning to philosophy; realizing that all his prior opinions were poorly founded, the Socratic philosopher is spurred to search for true wisdom. The Kantian conclusion is an end to philosophy, classically understood. The philosopher realizes that his prison is his own nature and is inescapable; he universalizes this conclusion to the point that no one else can or ever will know anything (about reality as it is, of course). The philosopher's task from thenceforward is not to search for true knowledge of reality (since he has concluded it is impossible), but to help his fellow men by bringing them to what truth is available to us: The truth provided by the critical philosophy that exposes the Socratic quest for the fool's errand it is.

Battle of Titans: Omniscience vs Omnipotence

Imagine that you and I each plan a vacation starting from Boston. You consult the family, do your research, and conclude that Disney World is the ideal destination. You plan your route accordingly. I don't do research, don't consult the family, and just figure we'll go to Disney as well. We start out together but, as we approach Washington after eight hours of driving, we've decided Disney isn't really the place we want to visit after all. We've heard good things about Niagara Falls. So we turn around and head north. As soon as we arrive, however, we realize how boring we'd find the Falls so instead of spending our vacation there, we head to Dollywood in Gatlinburg, Tennessee; one of my son's friends thought it was cool. After another day in the car, we arrive in Gatlinburg and are immediately repulsed by the country, honky tonk feel of the place. So again we pile into the car; being a Civil War buff, I decide to head to Gettysburg. Unfortunately, when we get there, I'm thrilled but everybody else is bored. By now we are tired of driving, so we head back to Boston. We end up spending an afternoon at Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire as our vacation.

You on the other hand, having done the research and preparation, are quite confident of what you'll find in Disney World and have no second thoughts about going there. You drive straight there, have a ball at Disney, and come home refreshed and pleased with your vacation. Everything happened just as you planned.

Here is the question: Did all your prior planning, which lead to a confident expectation concerning what would happen on the vacation, somehow constrain your freedom of action? Is there some conflict between your knowledge of what was going to happen and your ability to "change your mind." Are you a hopeless slave to your knowledge and am I a true free spirit?

Richard Dawkins seems to think so, at least given what he writes in The God Delusion. While discussing arguments for God's existence, he says this in passing:

Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

I hope we can see from the vacation example that "changing your mind" isn't really an expression of power and freedom; it's an expression of weakness and ignorance. We change our minds when we realize our actions are counter-productive; and that happens when some mistaken view of the world we hold gets corrected. Since God is omniscient, He's never in that position. He's never mistaken about the way things are so His decisions are always optimal. That makes Him more powerful, not less, because He never wastes his energy on useless or counterproductive endeavors. Sure, God always knows what He's going to do, but it's not possible for Him ever to have a reason to do anything other than what He will do.

The deeper import of the apparent "conflict" between omniscience and omnipotence is its basis in the modern understanding of freedom. Freedom, for the modern mind, is found in the spontaneous act of the will uninformed by the intellect. This is why Dawkins sees "changing your mind" as just another arbitrary choice, like deciding you like chocolate rather than vanilla ice cream. "Know the truth and it shall make you free" is the foundational principle of classical philosophy established by Plato, because Plato saw the rational soul of man as an intrinsic part of nature. It is man's nature to know the universe, and through that knowledge he rises above his beastly nature and expresses the freedom unique to him. But the Enlightenment brought in the idea that the universe is fully governed by non-rational laws (e.g. the laws of science); the rational principle essential to man's nature is either placed outside nature (Kant) or simply denied. In either case, reason only applies to the universe known by science, and reason only reveals ever new laws that govern man's behavior. The more man knows, the more he realizes his actions are dictated by unconscious urges, psychological conditioning, genes, etc., etc. Freedom, it turns out, is only an illusion that persists as long as we are ignorant of the forces controlling us. It's not knowledge, but ignorance, that makes us free, or at least grants us the illusion that we are free. This is why Dawkins grants such significance to the act of "changing your mind": It's the paradigmatic act of modern freedom.

This modern and paltry understanding of freedom shouldn't be laid at the feet of the God of classical philosophy. His freedom is much more profound.

Old vs new philosophy

One thing of which I am thoroughly convinced is that there is no such thing as a perfect philosophy. By that I mean a philosophy free from any knotty problems or apparent contradictions. If someone claims to have such a philosophy, what it means, invariably, is that the philosophy has not been thought through enough to make the problems apparent. Chesterton's dictum that "nine out of ten new ideas are old mistakes" is appropriate here.

I believe one reason people avoid classical philosophy is because, having been thoroughly thought through, its problems have been exposed and are apparent to the uninitiated. Plato's philosophy, for example, struggles with the problems of the ontological status of the Ideas (where exactly do these things exist?) and their relationship to the physical world (how do physical beings "participate" in Ideas?) The long history of struggling with such questions led to Aristotle's revision of Platonic philosophy, through the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and culminated in the synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas, each step having its own peculiar difficulties. Since the opponents of classical philosophy are quick to home in and advertise the problem areas, even those only passingly acquainted with classical philosophy are likely to know what they are.

But another way to look at the situation is to recognize that there won't be any surprises in classical philosophy. Whatever the difficulties are (and there will always be difficulties), they will have been smoked out by the centuries of philosophical reflection. There is virtually no chance that a philosopher will come along who notices some grave difficulty that hadn't already been noticed; anyone who thinks he has stumbled across such a thing only proves that he is not familiar with the history of philosophy. In vulgar marketing terms, in classical philosophy you can rest assured you will get a product that has been thoroughly tried and tested. (And not just in abstract philosophical reflection; classical philosophy has been tested in the court of life as well, forming the foundation of Western civilization in Greece and sustaining it for millennia through the Middle Ages).

It is tempting, in the face of some of the difficult problems classical philosophy has struggled with, to abandon the tradition altogether and start afresh from a clean state. This is essentially the attitude that gave birth to modern philosophy, most explicitly stated in Descartes. The experience can be heady, but it soon becomes apparent that the modern philosopher has only exchanged one set of problems for another. Descartes may have been satisfied with his philosophy, but the philosophers who followed him certainly weren't. Yet rather than drawing the lesson that it may have been foolish to abandon the classical tradition in the first place, modern philosophers adopted an attitude of permanent revolution. Each one starts philosophy afresh, convinced that his effort, finally, will put philosophy on the one absolutely sure footing. The most serious effort in this regard was that of Immanuel Kant, who was convinced he had established with his "critical philosophy", once and for all, the permanently sure foundation of philosophy. Alas, his followers were not convinced, but only drew the lesson that they themselves must begin philosophy yet again anew. The history of modern philosophy is a form of degenerate tradition; not a tradition that absorbs and organically grows an ongoing project of philosophical knowledge, but a "tradition" that repeatedly rejects as problematic all that came before and starts philosophy afresh. The hope of a modern philosopher is not to understand his philosophical predecessors and expand on their reflections, but to discover a "revolutionary and new" technique or principle in terms of which philosophy must be recast, and which will free philosophy from the problems discovered in the last revolutionary cycle. Since the problems latent in this new technique are as yet undetected, this ignorance offers the philosopher the illusion of the hope that he has finally "solved" philosophy. This continual cycle of creation, revolution and destruction is what gives philosophy its bad name in the modern world; it actually does go nowhere as its critics claim.

In any event, the upshot is that there isn't much point in trying to convince someone of the value of classical philosophy who is under the illusion that he possesses a problem-free modern philosophy. Classical philosophy is preferable to modern philosophy because the problem areas of classical philosophy are the problem areas of reality; trying to escape them is as futile as trying to escape from reality. But the appropriate response to someone attempting to escape from reality is not to convince him of the benefits of reality; it is to show him that in trying to escape reality he has only exchanged one set of problems for a worse set and, furthermore, the problems of reality remain. In other words, before introducing classical philosophy, a modern mind must first be convinced of the unsatisfactory nature of whatever modern flavor of philosophy he has adopted.

My experience commenting on philosophy blogs bears this out. I've found there is no point in discussing the virtues of Aristotle or Aquinas immediately, because whatever their virtues might be, the modern thinker usually only knows some of the problems associated with them, and he is usually convinced that he himself is in possession of a philosophy that does not suffer similar flaws; his own philosophy, at best, suffers from minor problems. (On the blogs I haunt, this philosophy is generally some form of empiricism.) Why waste time on some ancient philosophy with unresolved problems when there is a straightforward modern philosophy that suffices? Only when someone sees that the modern philosophies not only have a raft of critical problems of their own, but evade rather than face the problems addressed by classical philosophy, will Aristotle and friends get a hearing.

Irony Proof

Reading Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, he has this to say with reference to Plato:

The endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shortening attention span go back to Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorizing.

And Plato did it in writing. I wonder what that means?

Kierkegaard didn't think there was any point in trying to directly argue people out of the modern philosophical point of view.  Modern philosophy is irony-free because it is not subjective; to become subjective means to understand the meaning of irony. But whatever is said ironically can also be taken in its direct sense; we can, if we choose, interpret Plato as simply meaning directly what he wrote, as Ridley does. There is no way to prove, in any way acceptable to modern philosophical demands, that there is any more to Plato than this.

But, thank God, there is...

In Defense of the Intelligibility of Thomistic Metaphysics

In this post I referred to a post by the Maverick Philosopher in which he questions the intelligibility of Thomistic metaphysics. The critical passage in the Mav's post is the following:

The idea is that one and the same item — humanity in our example — can exist in two ways. It can exist in particular concrete things outside the mind, and it can exist in an abstract and universal form in minds. But in and of itself it is neutral as between these two modes of existence. Taken by itself, therefore, it does not exist, and is neither particular nor universal. In itself, it is neither many in the way human beings are many, nor is it one, in the way in which the universal humanity in the mind is one.

So this Thomist essence is an item that is some definite item, though in itself it does not exist, is neither one nor many, and is neither universal nor particular. I hope I will be forgiven for finding this unintelligible.

The best way I have found to think about essence in the Thomistic sense is as a way of being. I see the street sign in front of me that says Porter St.; I notice that it is in the form of a rectangle, and therefore has four right angles. To that extent, at least, the street sign has being in the way of four. It is also a physical being located at a certain place in time and space, and is subject to material division, and so it has being in the way of body. I could keep going along these lines, describing the many different ways in which the street sign manifests being. But, no matter how far I go along these lines, I am not bringing anything into existence in describing the variety of ways of being. In other words, a way of being is not itself a being, at least in the sense that the street sign is a being. A way of being is just that, a way of being. It is the difference between the plans for Fenway Park and Fenway Park itself. The plans for Fenway Park describe one way of being a baseball stadium; Fenway Park itself is a being that is being in the way of its plans. Similarly, four is a way of being or a plan of being; the Porter St. sign is an actual being that is being in the way of four.

We describe the Porter St. sign according to a variety of ways of being, but what of that sign in itself? In itself, it is not an amalgamation of ways of being; it is what it is simply. The analysis of being in terms of ways of being is a peculiarity of the way of knowing of a rational animal (our way), a way St. Thomas calls "composing and dividing." Our nature is not such that we can know being simply and directly; we can't immediately know the way of being the Porter St. sign. Our initial impression of being is confused and opaque ("Something is there, but I don't know what it is...") and, over time, as we analyze being in terms of its ways, it unfolds its nature to us. But it would be a mistake to confuse the multiplicity in our way of understanding being with a multiplicity in being itself.

That can happen if we confuse the two meanings of the word is. As St. Thomas discusses in his On Being and Essence, we use is (being) in two ways: In one way, as a fundamental existential predicate, and in another way, as indicating truth through a relationship of ideas. In my terms, the first way of using is is when it is used to say that something is actually fulfilling a particular way of being, and the second way is when it is used to express relationships among ways of being. For example, if I say the Porter St. sign is four in the second way, what I mean is that the way of being the Porter St. sign includes the way of being four. If I mean it in the first sense, I mean the actual Porter St. sign is actually fulfilling the way of being four. Similarly, If I say Hamlet is a man in the second way, I mean that Hamlet's way of being, if he is, is that of a man. I can say the same thing in the same way, with the same meaning with respect to Socrates: Socrates is a man. But in the first way, the statements are not equivalent, because Socrates actually fulfills the way of being man in a manner that Hamlet does not, since Socrates is an actual man and Hamlet only a fictional character.

Much of philosophical history can be traced to not getting this right, as Etienne Gilson demonstrates in his Unity of Philosophical Experience and Being and Some Philosophers. It is tempting, on seeing that Socrates is a man and Plato is a man share the idea man, that the beings of both Plato and Socrates "participate" in the idea of man, which is itself some third thing above and beyond the beings of either Socrates or Plato. The temptation results from the failure to take account of the multiple meanings of the word is.

Returning to the Maverick Philosopher, he wonders about the nature of the existence of the "item" called "humanity." But humanity is not an item, as though it has substantial being in its own right. It is only a way of being, and has existence either in its fulfillment in actual men, or in abstraction as a plan for being. To wonder about some third way it might exist is to misunderstand the nature of essence. Similarly, the plans for Fenway Park exist in the actual Fenway Park by way of fulfillment, or in blueprints in the builder's office. There doesn't need to be any third way beyond these ways to make sense of things.

Essences are universal in the sense that blueprints universally apply to whatever actual things are built according to their plans. But blueprints are only useful as a means to an end, and essences in the universal sense in which they exist in the mind are only useful as a way for the human mind to know being. An intellect, like that of an angel, that knows being simply and directly has no need of universals.

The Mind as a Model-Maker

I just finished reading The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger, which is subtitled The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. The book joins a steady stream of books from neuroscientists and philosophers (e.g. Descartes' Error and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness ) all of which tell more or less the same story: The mind is nothing but the brain; the brain understands the world through model-making; the conscious self is but a part of that model and is therefore an illusion or a "myth." V.S. Ramachandran says it straightforwardly in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness:

"Our brains are essentially model-making machines. We need to construct useful, virtual-reality simulations of the world that we can act on." [p. 105]

Thomas Metzinger's version is this:

"From a philosopher's point of view, there is a lot of nonsense in this popular notion. We don't create an individual world but only a world-model. Moreover, the whole idea of potentially being directly in touch with reality is a sort of romantic folklore; we know the world only by using representations, because (correctly) representing something is what knowing is." [p. 9]

What is so fascinating about these assertions is that the authors sincerely believe they are breakthroughs based on recent advances in neuroscience, but if they are, then the only thing to which neuroscience has broken through is a poorly understood version of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The Metzinger quote seems almost a direct lift from Kant; surely he is familiar with Kant, because he is a philosopher (and a German one at that). In fact, Kant is mentioned on page 26, but more on that passage later.

What makes a great philosopher great is his ability to plumb the full implications and meaning of a particular line of thinking, even if that line of thinking is ultimately mistaken in its foundation. Kant was a great philosopher, and if you want to understand the true meaning of the recent deluge of books on the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, read the Critique of Pure Reason and then the neuroscience books. Kant thought through this whole "mind is a model-maker" principle to its furthest implications, implications the more contemporary philosophers and scientists are still struggling to reach.

The key insight from Kant is this: If the mind is nothing more than a model-maker, if it doesn't have some direct contact with reality in its foundation, if all it knows is its representations of things, then whatever science or philosophy we construct will be a science or philosophy of those representations, not of the reality behind the representations. This is the basis of Kant's distinction between the phenomenal (things as they appear to us) and the noumenal (things as they are in themselves.) The recent philosophers/scientists of the mind, however, don't want a science merely of phenomena; they want a science of the things themselves. But they can't tell us how such a science is possible, so they just quickly brush the problem off and hope we don't notice. In the Metzinger quote above, he notes that knowledge is not merely representing something, but correctly representing it; there is a whole world of philosophy in that "correctly." How is that we can come to know that some representations are correct and others are not? The best answer Metzinger gives is this:

"Nor is it true that we can never get out of the tunnel or know anything about the outside world: Knowledge is possible, for instance, through the cooperation and communication of large groups of people - scientific communities that design and test theories, constantly criticize one another, and exchange empirical data and new hypotheses." [p. 9]

So knowledge is possible because we talk to each other and do science. This is straight question-begging, because science itself can get started only if we already are in possession of certain elements of knowledge (e.g. that mathematical knowledge reflects reality itself and not just our perception of reality. Kant held the latter position, which is why he insisted on the phenomenal/noumenal distinction.)

Metzinger discusses Plato's Cave on p. 22, but without understanding its full implications. The prisoners in Plato's Cave must be released from their chains in order to know the sunlit reality outside the cave. As long as they are chained in the cave and only watching shadows, it doesn't matter how clever their science is, how deep their philosophers think, or how much they talk to each other. Their science will necessarily be a science of the shadows, not a science of the sunlit reality outside the cave. Kant showed the limits of how far the philosophical prisoner could go: He could, through the a priori use of reason, come to know that his thought and his science was a science of shadows (the phenomenal) and not a science of real things themselves (the noumenal.) But he can't go beyond that; he can't know anything about the noumenal itself, only that it is something beyond his ability to comprehend through his science.

There is another implication of Plato's Cave that is sometimes overlooked. Even after the prisoners are released from the Cave and experience the sunlit reality outside the Cave, that experience will mean nothing to them unless their nature already has the capacity to benefit from that experience; they must be able to perceive and comprehend sunlit reality for it to mean anything to them. If their eyes are such that they can only perceive shadows (i.e. two-dimensional images of only two contrasting colors, in black and white without any gray), or their minds are such that they can only process the images of shadows, then the experience outside the cave will be worse than useless. It will be completely unintelligible and probably fatal. Plato, another great philosopher who understood the deep implications of his own thought, recognized this and so, in his story, the prisoners are initially baffled when released from the Cave. They initially refuse to believe that the world outside the Cave is the real world. It takes time for them to grow accustomed to the sunlit world, but that accommodation is only possible because the prisoner's nature already has the potential to understand it. Even while in the Cave, the prisoners have the faculties to perceive and comprehend three-dimensional, sunlit reality should they be exposed to it; those faculties are merely dormant in the Cave and need "waking up" outside the Cave. This is why Plato supposed that man was more a soul than a body, because the most significant aspect of his nature was that which enabled him to comprehend true reality when he encountered it. The soul is the part of man that is "woken up" in philosophy and begins to perceive reality as it is.

Now we may disagree with Plato's notion of human nature, but he at least understood the question and his answer is an attempt to address it. Kant disagreed with Plato about the connection of human nature with basic reality, and so concluded that man can never know more than the shadows (although he can come to know this fact itself, which was Kant's particular contribution.) The contemporary philosophers never reach the debate between Plato and Kant. They bake the Kantian cake by insisting that the mind of man is a model-maker through and through, but avoid eating the cake by insisting that their science of the mind is truly about the mind ("the brain") and not just the phenomena as they appear to scientists.

The real myth here is not the self, but the myth that a model-making mind can transcend its own models through science. Back to Metzinger's mention of Kant on p. 26 of his book:

"Philosophers like Immanuel Kant or Franz Brentano have theorized about this 'unity of consciousness': What exactly is it that, at every single point in time, blends all the different parts of your conscious experience into one single reality? Today it is interesting to note that the first essential insight - knowing that you know something - is mainly discussed in the philosophy of mind, whereas the neuroscience of consciousness focuses on the problem of integration: how the features of objects are bound together. The latter phenomenon - the One-World Problem of dynamic, global integration - is what we must examine if we want to understand the unity of consciousness."

Metzinger has gotten half of Kant but missed the other half. The blending of conscious experience into one single reality includes the empirical unity of consciousness, or the One-World Problem. But there is a deeper unity implicit, the transcendental unity of apperception, that is the unity of the thought of the scientist analyzing the empirical unity of consciousness. We might call this the One-Science Problem. Here is a concrete case: The neuroscientist examines the subjective experience of time of subjects in the lab. He notes how long they think different things have taken in different contexts, how long they think dreams are compared to how long they really are, that sort of thing. He stimulates various parts of the subject's brain and induces different time disorientations; the subject suddenly thinks it is tomorrow, or yesterday, or that lifting his hand took an hour instead of a second. The details don't matter. The point is that there is a distinction between the time experienced by the subject, and the time the scientist measures in his lab through his instruments; but both depend on structures of the human mind for their meaning. The time measured by the scientist in the laboratory, against which he judges the subjective time of his subject, has meaning only in terms of the concepts of before, now, after and duration that are basic cognitive elements of the human mind; science does not discover these cognitive elements but is constructed in their terms. What is the unity that brings these cognitive elements together into one science? It's not the empirical unity of consciousness, because the scientist is taking apart the empirical unity of consciousness in terms of his science. It is a unity that is not apparent in empirical experience, but is implied in our conduct of a science that permits us to decompose the empirical unity of consciousness. Kant called this deeper unity transcendental because it transcends empirics altogether; we know about it not through scientific analysis of empirical data but through pure reason, or thinking about what must be necessary for science to happen at all.

Either these basic cognitive elements of the mind are reflective of reality or they are not. If they are not (i.e. if our minds are model-makers through and through) then our science can't be a science of reality as such. Our construction of scientific theories to make sense of our experience may be models, but their basic cognitive elements (before, now, after, here, there, unity, multiplicity) had better not be, or we've got to eat the Kantian cake, frosting and all. If we don't want to end up with Kant, the only way is to accept that the human mind in its basic cognitive elements directly reflects reality. When we are confused about reality, it is not because our basic contact with reality is confused, or is merely a model of reality, but because we have constructed a false perception or understanding of reality through the elements of reality itself.

When reading a philosopher who starts with the principle that the mind is thoroughly a model-maker, but also wants to have a science that reflects reality itself, it is always possible to find a place where he surreptitiously slips out of Plato's Cave to find an anchor in reality, then slips back in the Cave and claims he never left. One of the favorite ways of doing this is by invoking evolutionary theory. We evolved as model-makers, you see, and we can have confidence that our models accurately reflect reality because organisms with poor models simply won't survive as well as organisms with better models. Over the millions of years of human evolution, this resulted in the very accurate models we human beings now possess.

That's a fine story, but it all hinges on this proposition: "Organisms with more accurate models of the world will survive better than organisms with less accurate models." Is this proposition a model of the world, or does it directly reflect reality? If it's merely a model of the world, then we can't use it to bootstrap all our other models, can we? It might be that, in true reality, it doesn't matter what sort of models organisms have, or they might not have models at all, or even that our model of the world as having "organisms" is itself mistaken. This tactic works only if it is granted that the evolutionary principle is an absolute anchor in the real world, not merely yet another model constructed by the model-making mind; which is what it must be if the mind is purely a model-maker. Typically, this assumption is never made explicit but is hidden in a bold assertion of evolutionary principle.