One can always argue the details of this textual question in any given case. In Śāntideva’s case it’s not only a matter of arguing whether “his” two major works (the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Śikṣā Samuccaya) were written by the same person; it’s also the fact that these texts may themselves be the work of multiple writers, in that there’s an early version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (the “Dunhuang recension”) which differs from the received version known to tradition. But there’s an issue here much bigger than the interpretation of any one thinker: should one even try to find the coherent views of an individual author?

Gyatso greatly admired the works of Jacques Derrida, who threw doubt on the idea of authorship, and often focused on the “margins” of texts in order to highlight inconsistencies and ways in which the texts break down. Her course on Buddhist philosophy highlighted parallels between the work of Derrida and of Nāgārjuna. In some respects it’s not hard to see why: Derrida questions the idea of the subject or self, as most Buddhist thinkers do. If the self is unreal, as so many Buddhist thinkers have said, then so is the author. Thus perhaps Śāntideva’s disavowal of his own originality and profundity at the beginning of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. (I have tended to insist that the difference between Derrida and Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy is that Madhyamaka has a point. But that’s a topic for another time.)

It does help, I think, to be careful with questions of authorship – to think carefully about what one means when one speaks of “Śāntideva” (or “Plato”), when the texts come to us from such questionable sources. But I also think it’s all too easy to take the point too far. When one discards the search for coherence entirely, one discards most of one’s ability to learn from the texts one reads.

From the first draft of my proposal to the final draft of my dissertation, my research was guided by this quote from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. (from p. xii of his The Essential Tension)

Significant words here include “important thinker” and “sensible person.” You might find plenty of contradictions or other absurdities in the ramblings of an everyday, average person. But the writers of great works like the Bodhicaryāvatāra put a lot of thought into those works, and their value has repeatedly been discovered anew by thinkers in the generations that follow them. They’re not going to drop random inconsistencies into their work and just think “oh, that’s okay.” If there are contradictions, they’re going to be there for a good reason; at the very least, contradictions need to be explained.

It was this method of looking for coherence that allowed me to find what I think is the most innovative and important part of my dissertation’s interpretation of Śāntideva: the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I was looking at the combination of Śāntideva’s advice that material goods are harmful, and the fact that he urges one to give those gifts to others for their own benefit. Was there a way these two ideas could go together without contradicting each other? Sure enough, there was – you just had to get rid of the idea, which seems like common sense to us but not to Śāntideva, that the purpose of gift-giving is to ensure that the recipient possesses the gift. I could have shrugged my shoulders and said “well, this is a composite text, of course it contradicts itself.” But if I had, if I hadn’t taken contradiction in the important thinker as a problem, I wouldn’t have seen what I came to see.

As far as I know, it was just such an approach that led Kuhn to write his most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a physicist, Kuhn was trying to read Aristotle’s Physics, and found it full of what appeared to be unpardonable errors in logic and observation. Just from looking at the world around him, Aristotle should have known better. Now Kuhn could easily have said “well, we all contradict ourselves and make dumb mistakes; why should we expect better of Aristotle?” But he didn’t. He did expect better from the thinker whose works had been taken as canonical for a thousand years, and rightly so. Once he did, it fell into place: Aristotle was asking entirely different questions, for different purposes, from the questions a Newtonian physicist would ask. Aristotle’s work would make perfect sense if one’s underlying assumptions changed.

More broadly, I think, it’s this search for coherence in the great and admired minds of the past that leads us to find genuinely new insights, ones that change our current perspective. In constructive study, where one seeks to learn from a tradition and not merely about it, there is always the danger that one will only find what one was already looking for – pick out the ideas one already agrees with, and not be challenged by them. One of the best ways to avoid this, to learn something genuinely new, is to focus on those “apparent absurdities,” the things that don’t make sense, and ask how somebody intelligent could have believed them. One might not come to believe in the thing one thought was absurd; but one will likely come to see the world in a new way that will challenge other ideas.

But what about science? It’s intriguing to me that for one of the most highly regarded philosophers of science, Karl Popper, the central problem in philosophy of science is demarcation. That is to say, for Popper, the most important thing philosophy of science needs to do is to distinguish science from non-science.

At first this seems an oddly defensive position to take. Compare “philosophy of science” in this regard to “philosophy of religion.” As William Wainwright’s excellent book notes, “philosophy of religion” means almost entirely different things to analytic philosophers of religion (who usually belong to the American Philosophical Association and continental philosophers of religion (who are much more at home in the AAR). For APA philosophers of religion, the only real problem is God: does he exist or doesn’t he, and if so, what are his characteristics? For AAR philosophers of religion, the problems are more varied. But neither side would dream of saying that the central task of their field is to demarcate religion from non-religion! For the AAR philosophers, that task, if it matters, is a task for religious studies in general, not just philosophy of religion; for the APA philosophers, it is a trivial side matter compared to the object of religion, God.

And yet I would say there is something vital to Popper’s question, a good reason why demarcation might be more important in philosophy of science than in philosophy of religion. Asking the question “what is religion?” is generally useless and gets us mired in pointless debates that do nothing to enlarge our understanding. I don’t think the same is true of the question “what is science?”

What makes science different and important, in my view, is two things. First, it has a normative weight; to say that something is scientific is to say something epistemologically good about it, to say that we have particular reason to believe it. (I referred to this concept of normative weight or normative force before, in discussing dialetheism: to note that even Graham Priest, while arguing that there can be true contradictions, nevertheless agrees that something about contradictions is epistemologically bad.) Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that science in some sense deserves that normative weight.

This is not, of course, to say that science is necessarily superior to everything else or that it’s the only kind of knowledge worth having. Such a claim is self-refuting, as I’ve noted before, since it’s not scientific. Normative claims, including the claim that science has a normative weight, are not scientific either, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So then what is science? And why does it have this normative weight (if indeed it does, as I claim)? That’s a question for another time – first it’s important just to establish that the question is worth asking.

The issue surrounding encounter, in that case, goes well beyond one’s relationship with God, even one’s relationship with other human beings. Like the question of internalism and externalism, it hits deep issues both theoretical and practical, though from a different angle. And I suspect this is why the question is so pervasive throughout the Western monotheisms.

An earlier post on the subject noted the debate within Indian Sufism, between ibn Arabi’s wahdat al-wujūd and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī’s wahdat ash-shuhūd. But what was new in India with Sirhindī was only that the debate happened within Sufism – Sirhindī was the first Sufi to articulate the idea of irreducible encounter, the opposition to pantheism. Opponents of the Sufis had been putting forth that idea for a long time before that. Perhaps most famously there was the case of al-Hallāj, the tenth-century Persian Sufi, who in in his state of mystical experience proclaimed anā’l ḥaqq, “I am the truth!” Al-ḥaqq, “the truth,” was one of the traditional 99 Muslim names of God; for saying that he was God, al-Hallāj was swiftly put to death.

Non-Sufi Islam, it seems to me, stresses the gulf between God and man as a way of maintaining human humility. Stephen Prothero’s popular new book on religious difference identifies pride as the central problem in Islam, comparable to sin in Christianity or suffering in Buddhism. I suspect this is why Muslims lay so much stress on tawhīd, God’s inviolable unity, and treat shirk – idolatry or “associating partners with God” – as a cardinal sin. To raise anything in the physical world to God’s level is to assume an arrogant knowledge of God. In the early days of Islam, the Mu’tazila school, relying on this idea of tawhīd, had argued that the Qur’an was a created object like anything else perceptible, and so one should read it with a rationalistic and allegorical eye. To read it as literal and inerrant would be arrogant, idolatrously taking the Qur’an as a partner with God. But one of the reasons the Mu’tazila became a minority position was that their view was used to license human arrogance: the caliph, the human ruler, had no limits on his power if he could take the Qur’an as meaning something different from what it literally said.

It has been my sense that, while there has been some suspicion of Christian mysticism through the ages, it was not persecuted within Christianity as strongly as the Sufis were within Islam. I think this is because official Christianity has drawn the line between God and man far less sharply than has official Islam (and I suspect official Judaism). What defined the Christianity accepted as orthodox in the Nicene Creed was that God had in fact become man. This idea of God-become-man is, as I understand it, what James Doull finds most significant about Christianity: in it, objective truth (God) and subjective humanity can be united. The idea of God as man has been accepted by all the major strains of Christianity since then – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant – but in its time it had seemed absurd to many if not most. The Arians took a more traditionally Jewish view, that Jesus was merely a prophet, a teacher, an exemplary human being. To say that he was more than that would be impossible, for it would identify perfect God with imperfect humanity. Their foes the Docetists took the exact opposite view: that Jesus was purely God all the time and was never actually human. Despite being at opposite ends of the spectrum, the Arians and Docetists shared the view that no man could ever be perfect enough to be God.

Go to India, on the other hand, and the view is vastly different. There, to identify human and God is commonplace. It’s not just that God takes a physical form, in a way scandalous to Muslims. Many traditions – especially Jainism and Yoga – are all about becoming godlike, taking on superhuman powers and transcending the universe. And most prominently, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, we all already are God, we just don’t know it. For this reason, Nicholas Gier takes these mainstream Indian traditions as examples of what he calls spiritual Titanism: worrying attempts to make man into God. Gier clearly thinks that Titanism is a bad thing. He doesn’t explicitly argue the case against it, but he returns repeatedly to environmental crises: human beings have tried to become godlike in their attempts to master nature, and now we are paying the price. Here, the problem of human arrogance appears again with an ecological cast.

My own position on all this goes back to this post. I agree with the orthodox monotheists that humans are fallen creatures, not worthy of deification. In Buddhist terms, this is why I denied the Third Noble Truth: I have not met anyone I would consider awakened (“enlightened”) in this lifetime, and could not imagine becoming awakened in this life myself; and I also don’t believe in rebirth, so I don’t see our perfection as possible after this life. We are deeply flawed creatures and must always remain aware of those deep flaws; that’s why humility is important.

But. Unlike the monotheists, I don’t see any reason to prefer God to man. For in my view any capital-G God, any god that has created the world or is omnipotent, cannot be taken as a model of moral perfection. God’s track record as revealed in the world is no better than ours; his track record in scripture and tradition is often worse.

And all this, in the end, takes me back to the Aristotelian mean. We must be humble enough to recognize our deep flaws; but not so humble that we submit ourselves wholly to another entity with flaws as thoroughgoing as ours (or close to it). We cannot fully trust ourselves; but we have no choice but to trust ourselves to some extent. The line is difficult to walk, but no genuine virtue is ever easy.

EDIT (11 Jul 2010): The original version of this post claimed that James Doull was an Anglican preacher. A former student of his informed me that he wasn’t, although he was always a believing Christian and belonged to an Anglican community in his later life. A number of his students and grand-students became Anglican priests, however, and that’s probably where my confusion arose.

What is at stake on this point is a crucial feature of any foundationalist position – that is, a position that relies on basic first principles, such as the existence of truth, and not merely on pragmatic effectiveness. Any such position relies in its logic on the difference between demonstrative and dialectical argument – that is, between arguments from first principles and arguments to first principles. (I take the distinction from a short and helpful discussion on pp. 88-9 of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry.) This distinction is what that the young Socrates at first fails to grasp in Plato’s Parmenides: because Zeno’s arguments show the flaws in others’ positions, Socrates sees them only as sophistry rather than as what they are, namely dialectical arguments knocking down others’ premises in order to establish the truth of Parmenides’s view. The young Socrates knows only demonstrative argument, and not dialectical argument. In an anti-foundationalist position like Ni’s (or Richard Rorty’s), where there are no first principles, there is the opposite: only dialectical argument, and no demonstrative.

The point: One cannot deduce conclusions from first principles (demonstrative argument) with someone who does not share those principles. Rather, one must argue from the assumptions and principles of one’s interlocutor, in order to show that the interlocutor’s position is flawed and one’s own is preferable (dialectical argument). Only by doing so can one arrive at anything like a foundationalist position in the first place. No foundationalist that I am aware of has ever tried to argue otherwise. Even Descartes doesn’t begin his argument with cogito ergo sum; rather, he begins both the Meditations and the Discourse with everyday commonsense knowledge and why it isn’t good enough. The first principles – the existence of truth or self – are first only logically; they do not come first chronologically, in argument or in human development. And the question on which a foundationalist position stands or falls is whether the foundationalist can show his interlocutor’s position to be flawed enough that it merits abandoning in favour of one more like his own. In the case at hand, I believe that I have done this – argued why a position based entirely on pragmatic effectiveness will fail on the grounds of pragmatic effectiveness.

I tried to do the same in my arguments against postmodernism. It does little good to argue that postmodernism is false or contradicts itself, and therefore fails on my terms. It is far more important to argue that postmodernism’s performative effects are neutral or worse, so that it fails on its own terms.

Ni’s talk focused on the Chinese concept of gongfu 功夫, dating from the early centuries CE and meaning any practical art – it could include calligraphy, sports, cooking, good judgement or statecraft. (Although the word gongfu has long ago passed into English with an alternate spelling, it is probably best to keep using the Pinyin spelling rather than confuse people with a term most associate with goofy movies about roundhouse kicks.)

Gongfu as Ni understands it then bears some resemblance to the Greek concept of technē, or Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice, with one crucial difference. Aristotle’s technē involves a telos; it is embedded within a larger determinate framework of human flourishing. With gongfu, on the other hand, Ni agreed with my earlier characterization of the process as a technique. It is open to us to choose our aims; gongfu merely allows us to achieve those aims. There is a gongfu of killing as well as a gongfu of saving. (Ni effectively uses the concept to expand his previous characterization of Mencius into a constructive position.)

Ni urges us to a conception of practical philosophy in which gongfu, thus conceived, takes centre stage. Theoretical philosophy, especially metaphysics, then serves the function not of description but of recommendation. Philosophy is a way of achieving our chosen ends, a set of instructions rather than responsibilities. Philosophies, like other practices, can be evaluated as techniques – on their effectiveness at achieving their aims.

There’s a word for the kind of philosophy Ni is describing, and it’s relativism. Ni’s gongfu is not relativistic with respect to means; a philosophy can be discredited if it fails to achieve its goals. It is, however, entirely relativistic with respect to ends; ultimate ends are up to our decisions and choices, and there is no rational basis on which to criticize them. The value of each gongfu is relative to the incommensurable ends it aims to achieve.

As such, Ni’s approach seems vulnerable to the standard criticisms levelled at relativism. One asks: does this philosophy have any grounds on which to criticize evil actions – of which we might often take Adolf Hitler’s as the paradigm? Ni’s first answer was, to my mind, entirely unsatisfactory: that Hitler’s project failed on its own terms, that he committed suicide and ended his life in misery. This claim is of course true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far. It is not too difficult to imagine a Hitler who succeeded, perhaps by reining in his ambitions a little bit and maintaining the Nazi-Soviet pact. Such a Hitler, maintaining his reign of terror for decades or more, seems worse than the Hitler we know.

Ni then proceeded to offer a strong perspectival defence of sorts: criticism would be part of our own gongfu. We can criticize Hitler from our side, within our own ends; we can and should take this a step further and fight him. Action against Hitler is a part of achieving our aims; it’s just that there’s no objective ground from which to criticize him.

Against such a view, I developed some of the arguments I made in my critique of postmodernism. Relativism privileges the strong. It is no coincidence that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. believed in universal, objective truths; for it was only on such a basis that they could nonviolently shame their oppressors into relenting. Imagine King standing up and proclaiming: “I have a dream that my children will one day live in freedom and justice and brotherhood. But I know that you have a dream of maintaining this world of segregation, and I know that objectively my dream is no better than yours. So I will fight for my dream, and you fight for yours.” If civil rights leaders had all talked that way, even thought that way, it’s easy to imagine the South remaining segregated for centuries.

Moral persuasion works by imagining ideals larger than one person’s given ends. Without it, there is only violent persuasion, persuasion by force – which, by definition, favours the strong. It is no accident that the most powerfully expressed relativist position in Plato’s Republic – the one which ends on a note of “you have your position, Socrates, and I have mine” – is expressed by Thrasymachus, who has argued that justice is merely the interest of the stronger. Without an ability to cross paradigms and argue about ends, the interest of the stronger is what prevails. When the weak prevailed and achieved a more just world, as they did in Gandhi’s and King’s cases, they could only do so because they had on their side a conception of the good beyond their own limited paradigms, one which had a binding authority on everyone.

Knowing this point, those aiming for change could certainly try to lie – to proclaim universal ideals they did not themselves believe in, as itself part of the technique, the gongfu, for achieving their individually derived goals. (I believe that Gayatri Spivak has argued for a “strategic essentialism” that bears a strong resemblance to this approach.) An outsider might refer to such a person as a liar and a hypocrite, but such outside criticisms do not of themselves need to bear any weight on the relativist individual who disregards outsiders’ ends. More important is that such an approach can itself be rather self-defeating – public figures aiming for social change have their words and actions relentlessly dissected and examined. If King or Gandhi had really believed that what they were doing was only best for them and not universal – but proclaimed the opposite – their lies would have stood a good chance of being exposed.

Or, pushing the point further, one might even try hard to believe in a universalist view in order to advance one’s own pragmatic goals. Ni’s interpretation of Mencius (about which I hope to say more) suggested such an approach: rather than deriving one’s ethical or political practice from a metaphysics of the world’s nature, one starts with the practice and employs the metaphysics as a part of it. So one might try to take on a universalist metaphysics in order to advance one’s pragmatic goals, even though one is convinced that there is no such universal metaphysics that transcends each individual’s given ends. I have somewhat more sympathy for this possibility, as I have explored a similar possibility with respect to hedonism. But I concluded there that such an attempt is self-defeating. More generally, from a commonsense point of view, it is bad to believe things one knows to be false; from a philosophical point of view, it is bad to avoid thinking too hard lest one think the wrong things. More specifically, contradictions get in the way of one’s own practice, whether personal or political: when one believes a contradiction, one cannot – pretty much by definition – believe either side of the contradiction wholeheartedly. It is much more difficult to fight for justice (or anything else) when one is already at war with oneself, for such a fight must be fought on two fronts.

Ni made one final reply before the lunch ended: he noted that I was myself arguing merely based on pragmatic effectiveness, not on the grounds of the larger metaphysical truth I hope to proclaim. He was absolutely right about this, I think, but in a way that does not undercut my position. I’ve said a lot here already; this point deserves enough attention that I will save it for another post.

The most widely read response to Harris (and the one that Harris himself responded to at length) is one by Sean Carroll. I find the Harris-Carroll debate instructive because both seem to miss the most important point; and that, in turn, would seem to be because both fall prey to an unfortunate empiricism.

At the heart of the debate is the supposed dichotomy between “facts” and “values,” or “is” and “ought.” (I would rather say “should” than “ought,” because “ought” sounds increasingly rare and archaic in contemporary North American English, but that’s a quibble.) Harris insists that values are a kind of fact, even objective fact, so that “should” or “ought” statements have a meaning grounded in reality, not entirely relative to or dependent upon the subjects making the claim. “Should” statements, on this view, are a kind of “is” statement. In this, I think, Harris is entirely right.

Where Harris slips up is in missing the elision of “fact” with “empirical fact.” It’s this point that lends plausibility to Carroll’s criticism: Carroll is right to reply that we get “off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts.” Harris’s reply, however, misses this elision, not challenging it, and that’s why he’s vulnerable to Carroll’s counter-claim: “there exist real moral questions that no amount of empirical research alone will help us solve.” (his emphasis)

On Harris’s example of corporal punishment, for example, let us assume that Harris is right that corporal punishment negatively affects the well-being of children and of society in general. Does that give us sufficient reason to say that corporal punishment is wrong? Not if we buy Kant’s theory of punishment, according to which punishment is an obligation owed to those punished, irrespective of its consequences. For Kant, as is well known, does not take the well-being of conscious creatures as the primary measure of goodness or rightness. Is Kant wrong? I think he is; but I also think there’s something wrong with a viewpoint that takes happiness, or even more broadly defined consequences like “well-being”, as the sole standard for ethics. I think Harris is right to say well-being should be a standard by which we judge actions, but as far as I can tell he’s got no ground whatever to say it should be the standard.

But to get back to Carroll, the next question to ask here is: just what kind of question am I arguing with Harris about here? Harris, I think, is right to say that they are questions of fact. And to some extent even of objective fact: claims about good and bad do not depend entirely or even primarily on the subject making those claims. Even Kant would agree: lying is wrong whether or not you think it’s wrong, whether or not you want it to be. It’s just that, contra Harris, it’s not an empirical fact; establishing it relies on procedures of dialectical and demonstrative argument that can, but do not necessarily, involve reference to empirical states.

For Kant, knowledge of moral principles is surer than knowledge of the empirical world, because empirical facts change, but moral principles – like mathematical principles – are derived from a priori principles which are true no matter what happens to the physical world. We can imagine ourselves waking up in The Matrix and finding that the laws of physics in this new reality are completely different from what we thought they were. We cannot really imagine 2+2 being 5, even in the Matrix. That’s why Plato looked to mathematics, not empirical science, as a source of certainty; Kant saw moral truths as being like mathematical truths.

Now is Kant right about that? Not wholly. He is right to move the question beyond the realm of the entirely empirical; some ethical claims, especially those at the foundations, must involve the a priori. In his counterargument, Carroll starts to show that he gets this point: “The crucial point is that the difference between sets of incompatible moral assumptions is not analogous to the difference between believing in the Big Bang vs. believing in the Steady State model; but it is analogous to believing in science vs. being a radical epistemological skeptic who claims not to trust their sense data.” Indeed. What Carroll doesn’t get here, though, is that the disagreement between the scientist and the skeptic is itself a disagreement about facts, about the way that the universe is. It can in principle be resolved through argument, just as Carroll tries to resolve his own debate with Harris through argument, while still acknowledging that the debate does not rest on empirical evidence.

And so, while the analogy stands up very well, what doesn’t stand up is the way Carroll resolves the analogy: “In the cosmological-models case, we trust that we agree on the underlying norms of science and together we form a functioning community; in the epistemological case, we don’t agree on the underlying assumptions, and we have to hope to agree to disagree and work out social structures that let us live together in peace.” The assumption here seems to be that scientists can reach agreement because they share underlying assumptions, but that no agreement can be reached with those who don’t share those underlying assumptions. But if that’s so, science is wrong – or at least it’s no more right than Christianity, the Taliban, or any other belief system that Carroll might otherwise wish to condemn. Because of course the Taliban agree on underlying norms and form a functioning community – much more so, I dare say, than scientists do. The hard part, and the place where the norms of ethics are to be established, is arguing across the boundaries of those communities, finding truth between people whose assumptions are radically different. This is exactly what advocates of science like Carroll need to do, not just on questions of ethics, but on the value of science itself. For Carroll – unlike Harris – is saying here that science, like ethics, is itself true only relative to the assumptions of the scientific community. But the whole point of science is to do better than that – to say something about how the physical universe actually works, not just about how we think it works. (In other posts Carroll speaks of wanting to “convert” Catholics to atheism or naturalism or skepticism, which suggests that he does indeed think science’s views are not just different but better; for him to really claim that his views were simply equivalent to Christianity would, I think, be disingenuous.) Ethics is much the same here. Science and ethics both try to establish matters of fact; both rest on assumptions that are always disputed. But we do ourselves no favours in either arena by throwing up our hands and saying there is no truth that crosses communities.

Wittgenstein begins the book with a critique of a passage in Augustine’s Confessions, on a subject whose Christian significance is not discussed. Speaking of his childhood, Augustine – a Platonist – explains how he came to understand concepts:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out….. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified… (Confessions I.8)

On such an account, Wittgenstein thinks, words have a meaning correlated with them, and their meaning is an object they stand for. Wittgenstein replies that such an account is true, at best, only of nouns. It is not true of other parts of speech. To argue his point he gives the following example, often cited in others’ expositions of Wittgenstein’s thought:

Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked “five red apples.” He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers – I assume that he knows them by heart – up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. — It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words. — “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” — Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanatons come to an end somewhere. – But what is the meaning of the word “five?” – No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used. (Philosophical Investigations I.1)

I hope that Wittgenstein’s arguments get better as the book goes on, or that this excerpt turns out to be only a piece of a larger and better argument. For it strikes me as rather a poor piece of reasoning. Indeed the meaning of the word “five” was not in question in the transaction – but neither was the meaning of the word “apples,” for both participants already knew what the word meant.

But the issue here, I think, has more to do with Wittgenstein’s more specialized definition of “meaning”: meaning is an object (re in Augustine’s Latin, Gegenstand in Wittgenstein’s German, a thing, an item) for which a word stands. On Wittgenstein’s view, as expressed in this passage, only nouns stand for such objects. The word “apples” has an object, then; but “five” and “red” do not, they are merely used in a certain way.

This point puzzles me. I know there is a view, which I think Wittgenstein shares with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, according to which the meanings of words are essentially arbitrary, deriving a sense only through their relationship to other words in the system of language. I’m skeptical of such an account, but even if it were true, I don’t see why nouns should be exempt from it. If “five” and “red” derive their meaning only from use, then so, it seems to me, does “apples.”

And this gets me to the gist of my point. Words, it seems to me, refer to real things. It’s hard for me to imagine a necessary relation between the sound of the word and its referent in the world, as Plato is sometimes supposed to have thought; but the point, or at least a point, of language is that it refers to real things that are not reducible to language. Contrary to some mistranslations of Jacques Derrida, there is indeed something outside of the text.

But if what I’ve said so far is true – if there is a reality that is not reducible to language, and if there is no qualitative difference in this regard between a noun like “apples” and adjectives like “five” and “red” – it implies, against Wittgenstein, that fiveness and redness, the states of being five or red, are themselves real things, out there in the world. And to say this, it seems to me, is to accept something much like Plato’s theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos): there is some sort of idea or form or essence that underlies individual things, a real redness or fiveness that red things or sets of five partake of. There are of course many problems with this theory, problems that Plato himself sees in many of his dialogues. But it seems that I have arrived, at least, at Plato’s starting point – having been led there by Wittgenstein’s anti-Platonic arguments.

New Atheists often don’t want to admit this point. When they accept common-sense views at odds with their exultation of science as the only true way of knowing, they do it by equivocating on their definition of “science.” One finds the point in a recent exchange on P.Z. Myers’s blog. Responding to Larry Moran, Myers attacks what he calls:

the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.

“Critical, rational examination,” eh? If that’s all science is, then every theologian is a scientist par excellence. I don’t think that’s a claim the New Atheists want to be making. Rather, the “science” they are defending is a) completely empirical, and b) based on the controlled experimental testing of hypotheses. So John Pieret responds to Myers by saying:

Really? What tests did you do on yourself to see if you love your wife and children? Hormone testing, eegs, what? Thinking about things is not “science” per se. Science is empiric investigation. Nor is the question whether “love” can be scientifically investigated, the question is whether individual scientists do it before they decide who they love.

Myers’s response:

John, yes, we carried out a long period of empirical investigation. It’s called “dating”. Both my wife and I studied the problem carefully, and if I’d been a jerk or she’d tormented me cruelly, we’d probably have reached the rational decision that we shouldn’t marry.

I really don’t understand how people can fail to recognize that we do carry out critical examinations of others and ourself. Love doesn’t just pop into existence in the absence of knowledge or experience.

And as I predicted, you do have a naive view of what “scientific” means. It does not mean hormones and eegs. You don’t have to put on a lab coat to do it. It’s simple, rational, evidence-based thinking.

An excellent point by Chris Schoen skewers Myers’s attempted defence:

We’re all aware that the practice of science, while it perhaps has some blurry edges, generally relies not just on empirical observation, but also on the testing of hypotheses, and also to the related practices of replicating the results of such tests, and publishing such results for the scrutiny of other scientists. Eliding any number of these steps is a sure way to have your findings (or “findings”) mocked. And it is on these shoals that most “pseudo-sciences” founder. There is plenty of what a lawyer would call circumstantial evidence for things like ESP and homeopathy. What there is not, in support of these phenomena, is hypothesis testing, controlled experiment, and peer review.
…
No doubt the probability of denial was bound to increase in proportion to how personal the counterfactual is (your wife.) But it is remarkable how much a scrupulous scientist has left out of his definition. White lab coats aside, without hypothesis testing and publication and replication of results, Myer’s courtship is about as scientific in its method as UFOlogy. Probably less, given the number of publications devoted to the latter. Which is not to say, of course, that PZ’s love is not real, or that his knowledge of it is flawed.

Pieret and Schoen do a solid job of demonstrating that Myers’s love for his wife is not based on “science” – not, at least, on the kinds of criteria that scientists use to distinguish science from pseudoscience. In the further comments to Myers’s post, he and his defenders try to argue that Myers’s love was still better than “religion” because it was based on empirical evidence.

But this hardly satisfies. When one is dealing with individual issues in particular lives, the evidence can lead to conclusions that would be unscientific in any sense of science accepted by New Atheists. A grad-school colleague of mine, who was proclaimed a reincarnated lama in Tibet, told me that he as a child had been able to recite things he had no way of knowing without his being a lama. Based on the evidence of his life alone, rebirth was the best explanation. He had based this view on the empirical evidence of his life. I don’t imagine it would hold up under hypothesis testing in controlled conditions; but it was based on as much empirical evidence as Myers’s love for his wife.

Beyond this point, I don’t think it can be said too many times that empiricism is self-refuting. Can statements only be true if they can be empirically tested, even in the sense that Myers tested his love for his wife? Well, the statement “statements can only be true if they can be empirically tested” cannot be empirically tested. Therefore, if it is true, it is false. The appeal to empirical evidence won’t get you out of the hard work of assessing the logic of individual claims made by both “science” and “religion.”

There are, I think, two basic classes of answer to this question, which analytic philosophers classify as internalism and externalism with respect to ethical motivation. On an internalist view, to have a reason to do something is to have a motivation, perhaps even a desire, to do it. If you don’t at some level want to do something, or at least feel or believe that you should do it, then you shouldn’t do it. On an externalist view, by contrast, reasons are independent of us. There are things we just should do, period, whether or not we have any desire or other motivation to do them.

Each position faces wrenching difficulties. The externalist view is always subject to the laughing, scathing criticism of a Nietzsche. If you can’t tell me why I would want to do something, then bollocks to your “should.” I’ll do what I want instead. External reasons don’t feel like real reasons; Bernard Williams, indeed, has argued that they only really become reasons for action if we acquire motivations to do them. Yet the internalist view seems to collapse into relativism and conservatism. If our existing motivations are the only source of reasons for action, then how can those motivations ever be criticized? On what grounds can you tell Pol Pot he’s doing the wrong thing by killing his citizenry? You run, effectively, into the problems with classical relativism, which show up in a variety of ways, such as the political problems of postmodernism, or the problems of contradiction for spiritual growth.

Some way of reconciling internalism and externalism, without the problems of each, seems necessary. But what way?

What makes the question of ethical internalism and externalism still more intriguing is that it seems to parallel a very similar theoretical question about truth. Could there be a truth we can’t know? Say, a kind of knowledge only achievable by gods and not humans? If so, on what grounds can we say that something really is a truth, if we can’t know it? If not, do we not collapse back into the problems of relativism, where everything is subjective, since knowledge is reducible to our own minds?

Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.

As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)

The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.

The second comparison is a bit more far-reaching, and I think more intriguing. The more I read about Speculative Realism, the more this thought came to me: the basic goal of Speculative Realism is to make Western thought less Indian and more Chinese.

A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (r?pa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.

Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)

Either way, though, the lack of attention to the subjective world in classical Confucianism is striking. Aaron Stalnaker’s comparison of Augustine and Xunzi is instructive here. Both Augustine and Xunzi are deeply concerned with the bad tendencies in human nature; but for Xunzi this remains almost entirely at the level of behaviour. Not for him Augustine’s pained reflections on memory, worrying that he still enjoys the memory of past sins even after he’s stopped sinning; nor Augustine’s worries that he still sins in his dreams. The problem for Xunzi isn’t with what we think and feel; it’s only with what we do. On a first glance at Speculative Realism, this Confucian world seems a lot like the intellectual world they’d like to create. Nor is the nonsubjective world of Chinese philosophy limited to Confucianism; Ch’an Buddhism itself attempts to decentre the subject in favour of the natural world (rather than the mental aggregates of Indian Buddhism).

I recall Harman once saying something on his blog to the effect that you could tell the essentials of any philosopher’s thought from that philosopher’s aesthetics; and the point seems very much validated by classical Indian and Chinese aesthetics. Anne Monius once pointed out to me that classical Indian aesthetics are extraordinarily anthropocentric. Until the medieval Indian Muslims, and perhaps even after that, one does not find any paintings or statues depicting the natural world by itself, or even at the centre of a picture. The centre of every art object is a human or humanlike being. The closest one gets to a painting of a nonhuman is anthropomorphic animal deities like the monkey god Hanumān. It is the human(oid) subject that matters. The most characteristically Chinese style of painting, by contrast, is the landscape, in which human beings’ presence is tiny. This is object-oriented art.

I don’t know nearly enough about Speculative Realism to say anything about whether they’re right. My sympathies usually lie with Indian over Chinese philosophy, and strongly against eliminative materialism; so I view this new tradition’s ideas with considerable caution. But I’m not trying here to engage with them constructively yet – just to see if I can get a first grasp of what they’re up to. And it does seem like the idea, put crudely, is to make us less Indian and more Chinese.