Monism and Pluralism

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about someone warning us against some critical danger facing humanity. Global warming is the most dangerous issue facing us today, threatening unimaginable disaster. Abortion is the most terrible tragedy one could imagine, and it is vital that we do something to stop it. There is nothing more important than stopping the gay agenda, the conservative movement, religious intolerance, Islamic extremism, or corporate bonuses. Holocaust denial is undermining the foundations of Western civilization. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

These warnings have three things in common: a conviction that the issue in question is so important that we should ignore everything else and focus all of our energies and attention on it; a belief that overcoming this challenge will at least lessen, if not eliminate all of our other problems; and a tendency to view dissenters as evildoers. When I say “dissenters,” I don’t mean merely those who disagree with the speaker on the substance of the problem and its solution. I mean particularly those who don’t put the speaker’s issue at the top of their personal catastrophic hit parade.

I was taught by my first political science professor to mistrust monist explanations and to prefer pluralistic accounts. As soon as someone says, “The problem is …” my nonsense detector starts beeping. And when they say, “The solution is …” that beeping rises to a shriek. Life isn’t simple enough for any one thing to be the problem or for any one thing to be the answer to our problems.

Marx believed that everything in society arose from the distribution of economic forces. Even he, however, was forced to introduce the concept of “false consciousness,” in order to explain why people didn’t, in fact, behave according to his view of their economic interests. We have seen this variety of monism more recently, not only in James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” but from a number of analysts baffled by the tendency of working folk in the red states to persist in voting for Republican candidates. Economics is not the answer, and neither is original sin, man’s violent nature, man’s non-violent nature, women’s non-violent nature, Western imperialism, Zionism, or anti-Semitism.

There are many good examples of this sort of rhetoric in the current healthcare debate. Is the free market the solution to all of the problems we see in healthcare? Is, on the other hand, the creation of a government-owned health insurance company going to put a stop to all of the bad behavior of private insurance companies? Will the Obama administration’s efforts to extend health insurance to more people bring about the end of American civilization? Will they, on the other hand, save our society and economy from all of their problems?

No one problem is going to destroy this country, and no one government program is going to save us from all of our problems. Nor will the rejection of any one government program avert all foreseeable disasters. We have a multiplicity of problems, for which there are a multiplicity of solutions, some of which will raise new problems of their own.

Wittgenstein's Poker

Yes, my children, philosophers are human. Some may be more human than others, but all of them have their failings, their foibles, their quirks.

Wittgenstein's Poker was written by David Edmonds and John Eidinow and published in 2001. It concerns a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge University on October 25, 1946. The guest speaker was Karl R. Popper, recently appointed to a position teaching philosophy at the London School of Economics, and in attendance were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, as well as most of the philosophy faculty of Cambridge, and a good many students.

Popper, quite intentionally, threw down the philosophical gauntlet by taking as is topic whether there are real philosophical problems. Wittgenstein, as was his habit, interrupted Popper and began waving about a fireplace poker. Popper made a joke (or was it a joke?) about a moral rule not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers. Wittgenstein stormed out of the room, offended by the joke. Or maybe he didn't "storm"; maybe he just left. And maybe he left before Popper's little quip, in which case he could not have, as later reported, left because the comment offended him.

And so Edmonds and Eidinow take us on a fascinating journey from the Jewish community of pre-war Vienna, in which the Wittgenstein's were extremely wealthy and prominent - the Poppers less so, to post-war Cambridge, with the stained-glass windows from the King's College chapel still in the basement for fear of German air raids. Why were Popper and Wittgenstein such ardent opponents? Why was a rather arcane issue emotionally fraught? What was the meaning of the poker?

Along the way we get an explanation of how the Vienna Circle and logical positivism failed, and what role, if any, Wittgenstein and Popper had in that failure. Mixed in with the social and personal details is a good bit of quite lucid philosophy. There is even a discussion of Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II, to use Bertrand Russell's terminology. Finally, we get an assessment of whether Popper or Wittgenstein is the more influential, and a reminder that influence and fame are not the same thing.

At some point in the future I hope to read another book about philosophers' quarrels by Edmonds and Eidinow: Rousseau's Dog, but the time is not yet ripe.

Philosophical "Mistakes"

I thought about posting here about Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, which I have in the Penguin Classics edition, translated with an introduction by Victor Watts (1969, 1999). I like Boethius, and I have reasons, at the moment, when the consolation of philosophy is something for which I might have some need. But I think I'll get into Boethius on another occasion.

I also thought about discussing Horace. I'm not sure why Horace's Odes and Epodes are not in the Great Books series, but they are fine works. I have The Complete Odes and Epodes, a new translation by David West, from the World's Classics series from Oxford University Press (1997). I think Horace, too, can wait for another day, and maybe another blog.

I just finished The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. Helen and I were watching Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The War, and one of his interviewees was this guy named Paul Fussell. I kept thinking that the name sounded familiar, and then I remembered I had a book upstairs written by the guy. So I went upstairs, found it, and I've been reading it. Fussell was a professor at Rutgers who was into Augustan poetry. The Great War and Modern Memory is probably the most extended work of literary criticism I’ve ever read. Fussell has read poetry, war memoirs, history, and a lot of literary stuff from before the war that would have influenced writing during and after the war. He spends a lot of time on Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Robert Graves, using their works to illustrate his point that war memoirs are a form of fiction, and that irony is almost inevitable in the face of unimaginable horror. He also relates the manner in which World War I was written about to the literature of World War II and later. He has one entire chapter on homoerotic poetry, especially noting Wilfred Owen, who was influenced by the Uranian pederastic poetry from before the war, although lots of people wrote scenes featuring blue-eyed lads with curly, golden hair.

But Fussell's work isn't the topic I want to get into now, and, in any event, I'm no expert on literary criticism.

Back in 1985, the late Mortimer J. Adler published a slim (200-page) volume entitled Ten Philosophical Mistakes. I have a copy of the Touchstone paperback edition from Simon & Schuster of New York (1996). Ten Philosophical Mistakes, as the title indicates, points out ten positions taken by various philosophers, in the taking of which Adler contends they have made errors. In general, I think it fair to say, he thinks that these philosophers (mostly "moderns") have errored in departing from, or even rejecting, the positions of more ancient philosophical schools, such as that of Aristotle. In the Prologue, Adler states, "All of [these mistakes] are modern philosophical errors, mistakes made by philosophers since the seventeenth century, the century that was marked by departures in thought initiated by Thomas Hobbes in England and by Rene Descartes in France." (Page xiii)

What does it mean to make a philosophical mistake? When Adler uses the term "mistake" he opposes it to "truth", so that a "mistake" or an "error" is a statement which is not true, and which opposes a statement, already current, which is true. At least, that is how I interpret Adler's statement, also from the Prologue, that "they are extremely simple mistakes, capable of being stated in a single sentence or two. The truth that corrects them is correspondingly simple and similarly capable of brief statement. (Pages xiv)

If I add 2 and 2 and write down the answer as "5," I have evidently made an error. 2+2=4, and we all know that. If I attempt to prove that two parallel lines cannot meet in a plane geometry class, and my proof fails, I have made a mistake. Somewhere in the chain of reasoning that leads up to the conclusion, I have misstated some axiom or definition, or made some other error. This latter example is, more than the former, something like Adler's perception of these ten philosophical mistakes. They are errors, somewhere near the beginning of a chain of reasoning, which lead to errors such as parallel lines meeting, or the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right triangle not being equal to the square of the hypoteneuse.

One example of such an error, according to Adler, is given in the first chapter of this book. John Locke, Adler states, conceived of our ideas as that which we apprehend when we know something, which Aristotle (Adler uses a statement from St. Thomas Aquinas as the support for this position) and his school conceived of our ideas as that by which we apprehend what we know. Is Locke's position definable as an error?

Adler certainly thinks so, and he goes to some length in this chapter to show that Locke is in error, while the older, traditional view is correct.

I would suggest, however, that there is no error here, because the difference between the two positions is either purely verbal, or reflects an unprovable assumption on the part of the Aristotelians.

I am looking out the window of my study in Colorado Springs. I see a house across the way. It is a house of two stories, of a pastel orange color, and there is a cafe umbrella on its back deck. Is this house inside my head? Of course not: the house is much, much larger than my head, and something cannot go into something smaller than it is. That is inherent in the concepts of larger and smaller. So, if the house is not inside my head, what is? An image of the house, or, as Locke would say, a idea of the house. So, from Locke's point of view, what I know about the house is only what I know about the idea of the house that is in my head. From Aristotle's point of view, I know about the house, because I have introduced the idea of the house into my head.

Therefore, in either case, whether I am St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, or John Locke, I don't hold the house in my mind; I hold my ideas of the house in my mind. Now, are these ideas that which is known, or that by which something is known? Well, they appear to be both: We know our ideas directly, and we know the house indirectly, through our ideas.

Now, Locke doesn't deny that our ideas give us knowledge of the house. What Locke (see also Berkeley, Hume, etc.) does deny is that we can know for sure that our ideas are based on a real, objective house. My ideas of my neighbor's house, based only on this one observation, would be the same if the house were painted on the outside of my study window in an expert trompe l'oeil style. So, the real difference between Locke and Aquinas is this: Locke is not prepared to assume that the ideas in his head always and everywhere relate to a real object outside his head (although, as Hume points out, everytime Locke goes to the pub for a beer he is acting upon such an assumption), while Aquinas is prepared to make that assumption.

Thus, in my opinion, Locke is not making an error. This is not an error, and cannot be an error, because, in effect the two universes of discourse never meet. The traditional view is that we can assume (but not prove) that what we see is what we get; the Lockean view is that such an assumption is risky (since it cannot be proved).

Kant, Locke, Hume and causality

One of the issues of contention between the enlightenment philsophers Kant, Locke and Hume was causality. Hume stated that causal connections were mere habits of the mind that we were never philosophically justified in taking. Kant said that causal connections are the minds bridge between sensory stimulus and pure concepts and are made possible by apriori concepts like space and time that pre-exist in the mind independent of any experience we might have. Locke stated that understanding is created by the mind reflecting on sensory input-this understanding would include understanding causal connections.

How do we come to say that 'A' causes 'B'? Consider a collision of pool balls. Pool ball 'A' approaches pool ball 'B', we hear a click and the second ball zooms off. A precedes B in time and occurs in the same physical space. It does so very reliably so we say that A causes B. I don't know about you, but I hear echoes of all three philosophers in this.

The preceding example was of physical things. We might also say that 'oppression causes rebellion' or 'rising prices cause demand to fall'. That would be a different notion of causality since it involves social phenomena and our notions of free will might enter into the picture. Statements of social or economic causality might only be true on the average. The case is complicated still further by three different kinds of physical causality recognized by physicists: deterministic causality, quantum causality and ill-conditioned causality. Deterministic causality (like pool ball collisions) is 'one event has one and only one set of causes'. Quantum causality (like subatomic particle collisions) is 'one set of causes may initiate any one of a set of effects'. Ill-conditioned causality (like the weather or traffic patterns) is 'apparently identical causes may have wildly varying effects'.

I think humans have a built-in psychological hunger for causal connections. (there is my nod to Kant and his apriori concepts). At a certain age, human children ask why? why? why? until their parents go mad. When confronted with an unexpected, especially traumatic event, humans console themselves with causal explanations. Religions often provide these explanations which are so comforting when humans are faced with death or loss. Lack of an ability to explain the cause of a traumatic event can be psychologically devastating and result in loss of confidence and the will to engage in life's activities. My point here is that, whether the universe was causal or not, humans would seek and invent causal explanations anyway.

Next, there is the existence of some pretty convincing physical laws which really do seem to work all the time. Gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear force, conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum. These really work. Pretty hard to explain if the world really isn't causal and this is just wishful thinking. Sorry Mr. Hume, I think we really can and must accept causality.

So I have a species with a built-in desire for causal connections and a universe which happens to be causal. That the universe should so fit in with our desires is a pretty amazing thing. It is under no obligation to conform to our fantasies or desires, but in this case, it does. Is this an ontological argument for God? Is it a case of simply our being a product of a causal universe? If so, I wish I desired reality more consistently. It might improve my state of happiness.