Tags
Aristotle, ascent/descent, G.W.F. Hegel, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Plato, postmodernism, relativism, skholiast (blogger)
It’s often said that philosophy is about questions rather than answers. Yet it is in the nature of a question that one who asks it at least wishes to find an answer, even if that answer remains elusive. Even rhetorical questions are rhetorical because they imply an assumed answer.
And so with the perennial questions, to which I regularly return on this blog. Central to the idea of a perennial question, as I have expressed it, is that the answers have never come easily. People across cultures, in different places and times, have asked the question – but in each place, people have come up with opposing answers.
To observe this diversity of opinion is humbling. Here are some of the greatest minds in human history, people smarter than I will ever be, reading each other’s work and still coming to opposite conclusions. Can an answer then ever be found?
The quickest, easiest and most tempting response is to throw up one’s hands and say no, or effectively say no: there’s no way to decide between these different answers. This is the postmodern or relativist response, and it’s one to which undergraduates gravitate very quickly – and understandably – when faced with the big questions. But this answer very quickly reveals itself to be both incorrect and unsatisfying – for reasons beyond the performatives I have previously discussed.
For to say “there is no answer” is itself an answer, and an answer that is itself in disagreement with those very great minds. Plato and Aristotle might disagree significantly on the answer to the question of Ascent and Descent, but they will certainly agree that there is an answer to be found. Take the Descent and you will reject Plato; take the Ascent and you will reject Aristotle; say there can be no answer and you will reject both. There’s no way around fundamental disagreement with at least one of the great thinkers on any perennial question.
Or is there? There is another way to address such questions, but it is more complicated than any of the options discussed so far: taking one side over the other; adopting one thinker’s solution as truth; rejecting attempts to find an answer. Skholiast nailed it in his response to my first post on perennial questions. On perennial questions like that of Ascent and Descent, there is in the great thinkers always a dialectic: an attempt not merely to refute the opponent’s position but in some way to incorporate it. Skholiast describes the dialectical process using Hegel‘s complex but key German term Aufhebung (which is the noun form; the verb is aufheben in the present tense, aufgehoben in the past). Aufheben is often translated ineffectively with the word “sublate,” a word which has no real English meaning other than as a translation of aufheben. Ken Wilber renders it as “transcend and include,” which provides a much more helpful understanding of what the German term gets at, but is wordy enough to be awkward. I prefer “supersede,” which covers a lot of the sense of the German word. The new edition of a book (ideally) supersedes, aufhebs, the old. It cancels the old in a sense, moves beyond it and makes it unnecessary, but does so by preserving what is most important in the old while adding things that are new and better.
In the case of Plato and Aristotle, it’s easy to fall into the temptation of portraying them roughly as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, or as Raphael does in The School of Athens: as polar and mutually exclusive opposites, Plato seeking only to escape the fortunes of the world and Aristotle to embrace them. But as Skholiast notes and as I have tried to emphasize in my own posts, there is always a Platonic element to Aristotle, an attempt to embrace and incorporate Plato’s transcendence within a philosophy whose overall tendency is more worldly. This Platonic Aristotle comes out above all in sections X.6-8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says that the contemplative life is the highest and best because it is the most godlike. This is a passage that Nussbaum has a hard time dealing with; she says effectively that Aristotle is contradicting the rest of his work (Fragility 375-7). But she agrees that he feels the power of Plato’s Ascent ideal, and is trying to consider it. It strikes me that his goal was very likely to supersede Plato, to transcend and include him, to be not merely a Descender but a Descender who includes Ascent within his thought. If Nussbaum’s interpretation is right, it may mean primarily that he failed at that task.
The point I’m trying to make is that the perennial questions are best addressed through a dialectical synthesis. What the greatest thinkers do when they address a perennial question is not merely to take a side, Ascent or Descent, ātmanism or encounter. If they do take a side, they will attempt to incorporate the best of the opposing side in their view.
There are two critical elements to the process of dialectical synthesis. First, it is an attempt to find synthesis, not compromise; it is not about finding a middle ground. The middle ground can turn out to be a vicious mean and not a virtuous one. (Compromise, I have argued, has its role in political practice but not in philosophy.) More important is to take seriously the underlying concerns that animate each side and bring them to where they are, and answer those concerns in a way that could be genuinely satisfying to those who have them.
And second, this process of “taking seriously” is a dialectical one: one starts from the positions one tries to supersede, and shows their inadequacies from within, making the opposing positions part of the process of reaching one’s own. It is in this sense that Nussbaum’s and Wilber’s major works are not themselves dialectical, though I think they may aspire to be; the endpoint of the inquiry has already been reached at its beginning. In their works, opposing positions are discussed only to be refuted. Nussbaum tries to make a movement from Plato through various other thinkers and ending in James Joyce; but by the time she gets to Joyce, there isn’t any Plato left.
Not much of what I’ve said here today is new; I’ve made most of these points in the various posts I have linked to above. But I’m trying to bring them together just because I do see my project as one of trying to work out some answers, however tentative they must be, to perennial questions – and I do not believe I’ve found those answers yet. In some respects this post is an attempt to remind myself, and hopefully others with me, of the best ways to think about the great questions – just because dialectical synthesis is such a difficult path to follow, and I think I’ve typically fallen short of it so far myself.
One interesting point about perennial problems (I might prefer calling them “problems” to “questions”) is that settling them, or settling one’s accounts with them, may involve essentially denying their legitimacy.
Recently it occurred to me that the philosophers to whom I was grateful for resolving some problem I faced – Locke on free will, Kant on the external world, Plato on moral motivation – all helped me not so much by offering answers to questions but by showing the questions themselves to be clumsy or poorly thought-out. In a sense I can’t take a stand on any of the perennial problems I feel I’ve grappled with successfully, because that successful grappling resulted precisely in a disinterest in the problem (at least as it is normally posed).
I think my approach differs from this fairly substantially. I’ve definitely had the kind of aha experiences you describe, where the only way to make progress on a problem was to go around it, to work in a way where the problem as previously phrased didn’t make sense. The thing is, I then find the old problem with its previous phrasing still tends to come back as you work on other questions. There’s something to every approach out there, including but not limited to the approaches that deny the value of other approaches.
“…where the only way to make progress on a problem was to go around it, to work in a way where the problem as previously phrased didn’t make sense.”
This description suggests that your experience is slightly different from the one I’m trying to relate. Thinking through the mind-world relation in Kantian terms, for instance, doesn’t amount to wending around skepticism and dogmatic idealism; instead it posits a conceptual grammar for those views (transcendental realism) and explains the ways in which that grammar is awkward, unstable, and dispensable. Transcendental realism does make sense, so the First Meditation and Berkeley remain touchstones, but the transcendental idealist is able to demote those discussions to secondary importance, as they lack a full view of their own logic.
There’s an issue about whether skepticism (of the modern, external-world variety) is an intuitive problem that tends to arise when we start doing epistemology. Some (Barry Stroud, for example) think it is a basic problem, maybe what Amod would call a perennial question. Others give either what Michael Williams calls a “therapeutic diagnosis” which says that skepticism is a pseudo-problem that arises due to a misunderstanding of language (Carnap, Austin, and with some reservations Wittgenstein and Cavell) or a “theoretical diagnosis” which says that skepticism only arises when you accept some contentious bit of theory (Kant, Heidegger, Michael Williams and others have views like this, although they disagree about what specifically the bad theory is).
Some possible evidence for skepticism being a perennial question is that the question is actually far easier to understand (to me, to millions of fans of the Matrix, etc.) than the proposed answers, which often rely on understanding hundreds of pages of difficult, controversial philosophy. This doesn’t mean that skepticism really is intuitive or true, but it gives some reason to think that skepticism might really be a perennial problem despite (or because of?) the many attempts at dissolving it. Or maybe I’m wrong?
In contemporary culture, when it comes to generating popular interest and breaking philosophical ice for novices, external-world skepticism seems to outstrip all other problems in the zone of metaphysics/epistemology. (“The existence of God” might be a contender.)
Oh, I wouldn’t deny that skepticism is a perennial or nearly perennial question. That’s why I was defending the skeptics in earlier posts; I think it does merit consideration as a position. I have little or no patience for the “therapeutic diagnosis,” tied up in that early-20th-century conceit that 2500 years of philosophical reflection across the globe is primarily a misuse of language, and all we need to do is get people speaking more clearly and we can finally end all this philosophy nonsense once and for all. (I’m paraphrasing, but that seems to me the gist.) The “theoretical diagnosis” is much more interesting and more likely to be correct; but as I understand it, you have to understand skepticism more thoughtfully and seriously to get why it would be the case. I think skepticism is worthy of our consideration even if wrong.
Amod, I am not sure I understand the goal of your post. Do you mean to say that historically the “best” philosophers have answered such questions in a dialectical way or that one *ought* to answer them in a dialectical way? If the latter, than I am afraid that “how to answer questions” is itself a “perennial question” and it is hardly the case that one can find a normative answer that suits all cases. I would rather say that the dialectic style is in itself methodologically interesting, because it forces you to take in serious account other philosophers’ thoughts. Hence, even if you do not find a valid answer, you would have done some meaningful exercise.
It’s really more of the latter – there are indeed some great philosophers who have not been particularly dialectical. Nietzsche comes to mind – merely raising new questions and leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces, so to speak. You’re right that the way to answer the perennial questions is itself a perennial question of its own; but as the post notes, that doesn’t mean the question is unanswerable. I think the method of dialectical synthesis has an advantage in that it’s reflexive – it stands up to its own test, it is an answer which is in some sense itself arrived at by dialectical synthesis. (That’s admittedly circular, but I think the circularity is virtuous rather than vicious, the necessary circularity of hermeneutics.)
There is something to the Ken Wilber view that “everybody is right” – everybody is right about something, but the challenge is to figure out what. There is also something to the approach that “my view is right and yours is wrong” – namely, that not everything is right, that there is some error to be found everywhere and it is important to discern it. There is even something to the relativist view: no one path or thinker will lead you in the right direction when taken by themselves. And that can apply to dialectical synthesis too, in that even once you’re going in basically the right direction (as I am hoping that dialectical synthesis is), things remain more complex than you have yet understood, and you need to remain humble and open to differing viewpoints that offer nuances and subtleties you weren’t yet aware of.
There are a few non-relativist, non-postmodern ways to make sense of the perennial difficulties of these questions without giving the blasé response that “there is no answer.” One is given by Colin McGinn who argues that things like the problem of consciousness are “mysteries” in that human cognitive abilities are not up to the task of answering such questions. This is an answer of some sort and it doesn’t claim (like postmodernists quite dogmatically do) that there is no answer. McGinn just suggests that the answer is beyond our ken. He thinks that consciousness is in fact produced by brains, but he suggests that that very consciousness can’t figure out how. It’s a pretty interesting hypothesis.
Another way of looking at this is to take the route of skeptics about philosophy itself (I think the prime examples here are Sextus Empiricus, Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi). For Sextus, one of the skeptical modes, the mode of relativity, is supposed to lead us to suspend judgment because there is so much disagreement. This isn’t the dogmatic relativist route that says the truth about such questions JUST IS whatever people say it is because it’s supposed to work together with other modes to suspend judgment about the truth. Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi are more straightforwardly negative than Sextus, but I think the goal is quite similar: Nāgārjuna’s outcome is the relinquishing of all views and Jayarāśi’s is to story worrying about philosophy so you can enjoy life.
I’m not endorsing either McGinn or these skeptics entirely (I’m always surprised that so many people, both in person and online, assume I agree with something 100% just because I study it!). I’m not sure McGinn is giving enough credit to possible future developments in neuroscience and philosophy and the three skeptics are missing what I think are some good points of doing philosophy (developing critical thinking skills, having fun, etc.). But where I do agree is that we should be prepared for utter failure if our goal is to actually come to satisfactory answers in philosophy and this should make us humble about the philosophical enterprise. After all, everyone before me has failed, so why should I hope for better results? Nonetheless, as Bertrand Russell says at the end of The Problems of Philosophy, despite the fact that we’ll probably never really know if any particular answers are true, it’s still worthwhile asking philosophical questions because doing so makes us more imaginative, less dogmatic and makes us feel connected to the universe.
I don’t generally find the skeptical answers satisfying, mostly because they do seem in the end to be self-contradictory. I haven’t explored them as thoroughly as I would like, though. I think I’ve tended to defend Nāgārjuna’s views in the comments on a lot of earlier posts, but that’s mostly because one certain commenter had a tendency to respond to them with the kind of knee-jerk hostility that would inhibit further learning and thinking. I actually tend to agree with much of the substance of that criticism.
McGinn’s point is more interesting. It depends on the kind of point I thought I would be learning about when I started reading up on internalism and externalism in analytic epistemology: can there be a truth we can’t know? (Not just that we can’t know in practice, like the total number of stars in the universe, but that we couldn’t even know in principle.) I keep wondering about this. There seems to be a basic contradiction in such a view: if you can’t know it, how can you know you can’t know it? Really, how can you know it even exists? I think Hegel’s critique of Kant actually proceeds on grounds a bit like this, as far as I can recall: if you can’t say what the noumena are, you can’t say that they are either.
Almost no philosophers find ancient skeptics satisfying. I suppose I don’t either, although I think this indicates that they are trying to do something radically different than the vast majority of philosophers, including modern skeptics (to the extent that there are any). Nāgārjuna seems to be asserting a thesis of universal emptiness. Lots of really smart contemporary scholars say this as did lots of really smart commentators in India and Tibet. But it’s worth considering whether this actually makes sense of Nāgārjuna’s texts, because an attempt to prove a thesis of universal emptiness is blatantly self-undermining (if it’s empty, it can’t be universal and vice versa). I think Nāgārjuna was not only well aware of this (several verses of the MMK say so), but that it was the key to his whole project: by demonstrating (but not ultimately asserting) that any attempted philosophical thesis is undermined by emptiness and that emptiness includes itself in this, you are supposed to be free from the compulsion of putting forward philosophical theories, even about emptiness itself. This, I think, makes much more sense of Nāgārjuna, although it means his whole project is more like quietist therapy for intellectuals than anything resembling the construction of a worldview or philosophical system or even a guide toward mystical experience. Interpretations like mine will never, I suspect, be popular because most contemporary philosophers wouldn’t find them philosophically interesting, but if we want to make sense of what Nāgārjuna said and take him at his word, I think this is how to do it.
There is a proof in epistemic logic that’s sometimes called “Fitch’s Paradox” that proves that there must be at least one unknowable truth. It’s pretty cool, although I don’t remember all the details. A nice succinct description of the proof and application to Indian philosophy can be found in Roy Perrett’s article “Is Whatever Exists Knowable and Nameable?”
While Kant says way too much about the things-in-themselves, there’s a difference in asserting the existence of something and knowing its qualities. I know that the Nabisco Corporation has employees, but I don’t know any of their names or favorite hobbies. I’m suspicious of the sort of “epistemologizing” of truth and/or reality that Hegel, some pragmatists and some anti-realists tend to do: just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean it’s not there. It doesn’t mean it is there, either. Some good old, fashioned skeptical suspension of judgment might do some good here.
Well, it’s not about whether you don’t know (as is the case with the Nabisco employees) but whether you can’t know, even in principle. If something is completely unknowable even in principle, that would seem to mean that all of its properties are unknowable, and – well, I guess then that gets us into the question of whether existence is a property, which is its own kettle of worms.
But then on the immediate question, if I read you right, McGinn is not saying that consciousness is completely unknowable – we can know some of its properties (for example that it is produced by brains) but not all. Which is also a different thing. Hmm. What’s the reference for his argument? I have a feeling it’ll be a long time before I get to it, but it is an interesting idea.
McGinn’s basic argument is in several places. An article called “Consciousness and Content” is the one I’ve read. I’m planning to read his book Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry. There he looks into a lot of the big perennial problems in philosophy (consciousness, self, free will, skepticism, etc.). He also discusses his view of consciousness in a book called The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. Other interesting work on the limits of thought is found in Graham Priest who gives a basic logical schema for how the totality and reflexivity of philosophy often lead to contradictions (he wrote an article with Jay Garfield applying this idea to Nāgārjuna, too.) I’m planning to look at McGinn and Priest in more detail to figure out what the underlying structure of philosophical problems might be that allows the skeptics I’m thinking about to do their thing.
There’s another related argument for certain things being unknowable. It comes out of mathematics, so it’s up for debate how well the idea applies to philosophy. But, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show, basically, that no system of mathematical logic can prove everything; there will always remain true-but-unproveable things. (The wikipedia article on the theorems is quite good.)
As I mentioned somewhere in the mass of prior discussions, I’m extremely sympathetic to the idea that there are unknowable things. The alternative would require our minds to be a truly universal architecture, able to think all possible thoughts; in which case, if bees someday evolved to consciousness, their minds would work within the same boundaries as ours.
As you’ve noticed, by definition it’s impossible to be certain what the unknowable things are. “Consciousness” is a big bag; some aspects of it clearly fall under “knowable things” (e.g. it depends on our brains), while others may not (e.g. how). I’m inclined to believe that the mechanisms of consciousness may indeed be beyond our ken; we can’t even yet ask the question clearly enough to study it in any meaningful scientific sense. But maybe we’re just waiting for some clever guy to pop onto the scene with a new framework!
Ben:
Unknown things like unknown objects will always be there as a possibility. Unknown things like unknown unknowns are also intelligible. Aren’t facts about anything potentially infinite? In any case there’s an openendedness about knowledge. McGinn’s ‘cognitive closure’ is also valid I think in that there may be things like ‘self’, ‘consciousness’, ‘identity’ that we can know of but not know in a comprehending or grasping way. These are perhaps the sort of things that traditional wisdom claims that we can realize but not comprehend. That is just the sort of talk that makes the positivist nervous
Gödel is another interesting case. Thanks, Ben. Interestingly, Gödel thought that his theorem showed that consciousness could never result from algorithmic processes (like a computer), because he thought he had demonstrated that human beings can know the truth of something (i.e., the unprovable Gödel sentence) that a mechanical process could in principle never know. Strictly speaking this is an interpretation that goes beyond the logical results, since Gödel assumes humans do know that the Gödel sentence is true by some sort of Platonic mathematical intuition. But it’s pretty interesting.
Interesting, indeed! My knowledge of Gödel is pretty surface-level, I confess. That is an intriguing idea… On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the possibility that linear algorithmic approaches might be the wrong approach to model/create consciousness. But on the other hand, an ordinary computer can definitely run a parallel distributed architecture (albeit slowly), and I’m not sure how intelligible that idea becomes once you start using algorithms to simulate a non-algorithmic process. And on the third hand, Gödel’s idea (like e.g. Searle) rests on the intuitive but unverifiable assumption that there’s Something Different About Consciousness. Which may be true, or may be wrong. Definitely a known unknown!
It’s not the mystics that make me nervous — in the view of a materialist, even something unknown is quite solid — maybe even something to start a war over.
“There are the known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
— Donald Rumsfeld U.S. Sec’y of Defense at 2/12/02 press briefing justifying a war based on the pretext of finding weapons of mass destructions that were never found.
There is of course the aspect of ascent/descent in the contrast between the thought of Plato and Aristotle but they are fundamentally united in their conceptual realism which is to say that both claim to be able to trace the contours of reality. One finds the truth ghosting through the dim adumbration of matter and the other by force of active intellect extracts that gold from the raw ore. The poor sceptic is classically a ‘mentalist’, a term that has been taken I know, but it marks the sense of the bootstrapping effort of writing the book of nature yourself. To mix metaphors further, the clean slate man is without a compass.