Man at the Center of the Universe

I’m looking forward to reading Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, The Tyranny of Cliches. From reviews, one of the myths he takes down is the notion that the Galilean revolution destroyed the classical view of man as the most important thing in the universe. More specifically, in the classical view of the world, the universe consists of a series of concentric spheres with Earth at the center and the sun, moon and stars situated like studs on various shells rotating about the Earth. This cosmology reflected (so the myth goes) the innocent but arrogant classical belief that man is the most important thing in the world. In the process of destroying the geocentric view of the universe that flowed from arrogant anthropocentrism, Galileo taught man a lesson in humility.

The problem with the myth, as many before Goldberg have pointed out, is that the center of the universe in classical cosmology is not a place of honor. Earth is at the center of the universe in the sense that a drain pipe is at the center of a toilet. It’s where everything repulsive ends up that that isn’t welcome at more august stations in the universe. Even the matter here on Earth is, for Aristotle, of a lesser kind than the matter of the moon and stars. In fact, one of the key discoveries of Galileo that destroyed the old Aristotelian cosmology was the existence of craters on the moon. Celestial matter wasn’t supposed to be “corruptible” the way it is on Earth; but if the moon can get knocked around and beat up just like a something here on Earth, then there is nothing special about it with respect to Earthly objects. In a sense, it could be said that Galileo didn’t knock down man and Earth, but he knocked down everything else.

So Galileo did not destroy the classical view of man as the most important thing in the universe, because the classical view did not think of man as the most important thing; there were plenty of things more important, including God and angels. But there is a counter-myth that arises from this understanding; the counter-myth that since the Galileo-proved-man-isn’t-the-most-important-thing myth is false, that Galileo and the Copernican revolution in general did not have a revolutionary cultural/philosophical impact.

In fact, it did have a revolutionary cultural/philosophical effect, one that is even more profound than if the effect had been merely to demote man in the natural hierarchy. For even a demoted man is part of a hierarchy, and hierarchy and order are the essence of the classical view of the world. The Aristotelian view of the world is one of profound unity and order; the hierarchy of the Earth at the center/bottom, with the celestial objects on various spheres, is not only a physical hierarchy but a moral one. The stars are better things than the things on Earth, and the meaning of the universe is wrapped up in its physical structure. Dante profoundly mediated on this in his Divine Comedy. Hell is at the center of Earth, Purgatory is a mountain reaching from the Earth up to the Heavens, and Heaven itself is located among the celestial objects. To travel from Hell to Heaven is to travel a road that is physical and moral, every piece of which bears meaningful relationship to the whole.

The Copernican revolution did something far more serious than merely demoting man in the hierarchy. It destroyed the hierarchy altogether. When the geocentric understanding of the world was undermined, the philosophical, cultural and even social order entwined with it was challenged as well. This is why the Church took such a serious view of Galileo’s publications. They had truly revolutionary implications in a way we have difficulty understanding today. Our view of the world, post-Enlightenment, tends to be fractured and piecemeal. We have political theories, physical theories, social theories, etc. Two men can share identical views of physics but hold opposite political ideas, as we can have both Marxist and Liberal-Democratic physicists. A revolution in physics holds no political implications, and vice-versa. But for classical man, physical revolutions certainly could have political implications, as well as religious and philosophical implications. Galileo did far more than move man down the prison cell-block. He destroyed an entire world.

Or, if we adopt the self-interpretation of the Enlightenment, he destroyed the prison. The elegantly integrated and complete classical view of the world may have been beautiful, but it was also a prison. It imprisoned man philosophically, religiously, scientifically and socially. It is hard not to be swept along with the passion of Enlightenment pioneers like d’Holbach, Bacon and Kant. Man, finally, was coming into his maturity, finally throwing off comforting illusions and taking charge of himself and his destiny in the cold light of things as they are. He has, after millenia, knocked the lock off his cell door and pushed open the creaking door. But what he finds is not what he expected. He encounters no prison guard to usher him back to his cell, or a warden to announce his release and direct him to his home. He finds no one and nothing to indicate what he should do with his newfound freedom. He sees that his prison was merely a cave in which he happened to fall at some forgotten moment in the distant past, and finds no indication of where his home might be or how to build one.

So we should reject the myth that Galileo knocked man off from his privileged place in the universe. But we should not fall into the mistake of thinking that he didn’t do something even more disturbing.

Luke 6:37 and Luke 6:29

Most of us find Luke 6:37 ("Judge not: and you shall not be judged") attractive. It seems to map nicely to our culturally dominant moral sensibility of live and let live, a philosophy always attractive since it simultaneously relieves one of the duty of caring what other people do while justifying a failure to make any moral demands on oneself. Who wouldn't be interested in a moral philosophy that turns moral laziness into a virtue?

But 6:37 only comes after Christ has already spoken 6:29: "And to him that strikes you on the one cheek, offer also the other. And him that takes away from you your cloak, forbid not to take your coat also." We don't find this verse nearly so congenial; this isn't live and let live, but die so that another may live. We may think we can take 6:37 and leave 6:29, but in fact they are logically related and it is perfectly reasonable that Christ follows the one with the other. We may think of 6:37 in the context of John 8 (the woman caught in adultery), and we are not wrong to do so. But if we are not to judge, we are not only not to judge the situation of "consenting adults", but also the unpleasant situation of someone striking us or taking our cloak. Do we take umbrage when someone strikes or insults us? Then we are judging them and not living according to 6:37. Luke 6:37 isn't really about the superficial live and let live philosophy, but something far more demanding and disturbing.

Following Luke 6:37 the way Christ intends it, as it does with everything else Christ commands, leads eventually to the Cross.

A Tax on the Poor and the Stupid

One of my bugaboos is the lottery, recently in the news because its jackpot has reached more than a half billion dollars. I see in the morning news today that there were several winners in the most recent drawing.

Who plays the lottery? Not Donald Trump or Bill Gates. They've already got their millions. Nor people who are smart and have figured out that the state gives you much worse odds than you would get in Las Vegas or even from the local Mafia numbers game. The two kinds of people who play the lottery are the poor (or at least not rich) and the dumb. This makes it, in effect, a highly regressive tax on the poor and the stupid.

The lottery is deeply corrupting. Instead of promoting a work ethic that invites people to better their lives through hard work and education, the state invites people to hope for a quick shortcut to a life of leisure. It used to be that chasing after "get rich quick schemes" was the infallible mark of a loser. Forget about that, it was said; buckle down, work hard and you will find success. Now it is expected that everyone buys his ticket. Those who don't are dismissed as spoilsports. In our corrupt vision, we demonize as "one percenters" people who have had the vision, tenacity and persistence to create products and services that people voluntarily buy in numbers enough to make a man rich. Instead, we celebrate the occasional fool who, through luck rather than hard work and inspiration, happens to pick the right series of numbers. What wealth could be more undeserved than that?

The lottery is pure exploitation, and the defenses of it morally repellant. On Fox News this morning, the hosts praised the lottery because its revenues allegedly go towards "education and social services." Education? Why put all that effort into school when the state dangles a life of ease in front of you for the mere price of a lottery ticket? Anyone with an education should understand how and why the lottery is a scam and never play it again. The fact that allegedly educated people dump their money into the lottery shows the value of the "education" all that money is buying. Social Services? My father calculated that the amount spent on this recent lottery jackpot amounts to $5 for every man, woman and child in the country. Again, it's not Bill Gates who's buying all those tickets. Perhaps if all the lower and middle class people blowing their money on "investing" (Fox News's word) in lottery tickets, there wouldn't be quite such a need for social services? The lottery is classic Big Government exploitation. In the name of "helping the poor" through education and social services, the state encourages the poor to impoverish themselves by feeding Leviathan through the lottery, thereby exacerbating the problems the lottery was allegedly put in place to solve. But, of course, the lottery isn't really about helping the poor or anybody else, but is simply another instance of Leviathan expanding wherever and whenever it can.

GKC on Self-Censorship through Moral Intimidation

Chesterton, from his Illustrated London News column of March 10, 1906:

"A state of freedom ought to mean a state in which no man can silence another. As it is, it means a state in which every man must silence himself. It ought to mean that Mr. Shaw can say a thing twenty times, and still not make me believe it. As it is, it means that Mr. Shaw must leave off saying it, because my exquisite nerves will not endure to hear somebody saying something with which I do not agree."
 

The Metaphysics of Survival

Reading Paul Johnson's Heroes, he has a wonderful turn of phrase with respect to the remarkable 4,000 year survival of the Jews: "They consistently got the physics of survival wrong, but the metaphysics right."

More Trouble With Kant

This is a continuation of this post on Kant.

One way not to argue in support of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic is the way Dinesh D'Souza does in What's So Great About Christianity. D'Souza draws an analogy with a tape recorder, which I discuss in this post and will not repeat here. The problem with the analogy, and similar analogies, is that it is undermined by the very transcendental aesthetic it is meant to support. If Kant is right, and we have access to appearances only and not the reality behind appearances, then we have no way of knowing what is really going on with whatever reality is behind the appearance we call "tape recorder." Whatever thing or things out there in reality give rise to the appearance of a tape recorder, we can't know what they are or are not capable of. They may be capable of all sorts of things we can't imagine; including access to reality in ways we cannot imagine.

The examples generally used to support this sort of argument typically involve animals with different sensory capabilities than our own, like Thomas Nagel's bat (Nagel did not use his bat argument for the point I am making here.) The bat has poorer vision than us, but instead has a highly refined sonar system it uses to echolocate its prey. What must it be like, Nagel asks, to be a bat? What is a "bat's world" like? We can hardly imagine it, but by what right do we claim that our world is the "real world" in contrast to the bat's? If these sorts of examples impress us as support for Kant's views, we should remember that Kant himself did not argue from them. For if Kant is right, then what we call a "bat" is only a construction our consciousness puts on sense impressions. Imagining what it is like to be a bat is just another way of exploring our own consciousness, not a magic way to explore the possibilities of some other consciousness.

There is an illusion involved in arguments like these, as though we can assume for the sake of argument that we do have access to the true nature of things, then argue from there that we don't have access to the true nature of things. If the conclusion is true, then it was true at the beginning of the argument as well as the end. The argument apparently starts with some premises concerning the variety of the nature of things, e.g. the variety between our sensory apparatus and a bat's. What it really started with was the variety in our conscious constructions on sense impressions which, according to Kant, say nothing about any actual variety in reality. So what if the conscious construction we put on sense impressions and call a "bat" has a different character than the conscious construction we put on sense impressions of ourselves and call "men"? Whatever conclusions we might draw from this fact says nothing about the actual sensory capabilities of either men or bats, or the relationship between the two. It is at best about the quirky nature of our own consciousness.

Kant's argument for the transcendental aesthetic is simple and is the only possible one. It starts and ends with the fact that space and time are not conclusions from empirical experience, but the form of it. Kant isn't wrong but, as I argued in the earlier post, we need not accept his conclusions.

But let us grant, for the sake of argument, the natural facts in support of Kant's position to which some of his more naive supporters resort but his philosophy actually doesn't allow. That is, let us suppose that we know bats really do have an excellent echo location system and poor eyesight relative to our own. The argument still does not work. For the bat's echo location system is obviously not intended to discover the true nature of things but merely to help the bat locate its prey; and it serves that purpose magnificently. We see the same thing with the features of other animals. Hawks have excellent vision, but the vision isn't for understanding the world per se, but for tracking prey far below on the ground. The dog's nose is far superior to our own, and the dog lives in a "smelly world", which is perfect for a dog since it hunts through scent.

Our senses, however, and our natures themselves, have no immediate and single purpose the way a bat's sonar is immediately directed toward prey location. We don't hunt by instinct in the manner of a hawk or dog, but must consider the nature of possible prey and how best to capture it. We must understand the world in order to survive in it. Neither are we born with fur like a bear or build nests by instinct like a bird. We must figure out what will work for clothing and how to get it, and what will work for shelter and how to make it. This is why Aristotle says that the relevant distinction with respect to man is that he is rational, which means more than merely the degenerate "thinker" of modern thought, but an animal whose nature is to understand the world.  And since we see that nature doesn't fail in its purposes (the bat's sonar does locate it's prey, the hawks eyes do see the mouse on the ground, etc.), why should we entertain the idea that our nature, uniquely among the creatures, fails to do what it is clearly meant to do - and that is to understand the world as it really is?

My Trouble with Kant

Kant is the greatest modern philosopher because he perceived the far consequences of the premises of modern thought earlier than others, and to an extent that many today still do not appreciate. He is the indispensable philosopher to understand the meaning of philosophy since it began to take its cue from Descartes and Hume.

But that doesn't mean that we must believe that Kant was right. The conclusions follow only if both the logic and the premises are true; Kant is correct in his logic but his premises are not true. In other words,  if Kant is wrong, he was wrong right at the beginning. And his beginning was the assumptions constitutive of modern thought.

It is difficult for us raised in the modern world to get the distance necessary to be genuinely critical of modern thought. The assumptions of modern thought have become the very air we breathe; for us they are simply taken for granted. This is why Kierkegaard is so indispensable. Kierkegaard understood that modern thought must be attacked at its root; and since it is modern first principles that are the problem, those principles must be addressed front and center. Kierkegaard has a wonderful way of getting behind the defenses of his reader and bringing him to a reconsideration of first principles, before the reader knows what is happening and can set up psychological self-defenses:

If it were true - as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks - that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not one then be deceived? Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true; one can be deceived by appearances, but one can also be deceived by the superficiality of shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain that it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of him who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see? Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake? (From the start of Ch.1 of Works of Love, Harper Torchbooks, 1962).

This passage always comes to mind when I think what is wrong with Kant. For a fundamental modern principle is that doubt is self-justifying: If something can be doubted, then it should be doubted. Kant's transcendental aesthetic gets rolling when he points out that time and space are not something we encounter in experience, but are the conditions of experience itself. So we can only safely conclude that space and time are parameters of our consciousness, not necessarily of reality itself. From this start Kant brilliantly, thoroughly and ruthlessly draws out the logical consequences in his "transcendental philosophy."

But looking at the transcendental aesthetic with Kierkegaard in mind, and granting Kant's point about the conditions of experience, we can still ask Kierkegaard's question about deception: Time and space may be conditions of our experience, but they may nonetheless also be conditions of reality itself. We can go wrong thinking time and space are qualifications of reality if they are only qualifications of our consciousness, but we can also go wrong thinking time and space are not qualifications of reality if in fact they really are. Deception is possible either way. The modern philosopher is simply wrong in thinking his self-justifying doubt is a bulletproof way to avoid deception. And if we do not accept the modern premise that doubt is self-justifying, then we may ask: Why should we grant Kant's conclusions from the transcendental aesthetic? What reason do we have for doubting the reality of time and space beyond the bare possibility of deception?

There doesn't seem to be any such reason, and I suspect there can't possibly be one. Any reason would have to be an argument from experience, which would necessarily take experience for granted, and the argument concerns the conditions of experience itself.

To be continued in a forthcoming post.