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There’s a recurring theme in Indo-European thought that has often perplexed me: categories. The Indian Vaiśeṣika school of thought is known primarily for enumerating a set of categories (padārthas) with which to understand reality. I always had a hard time getting why they spent so much time doing that. The thing is, they’re hardly alone in doing it. In an introductory class I took on reading philosophical Sanskrit, we read an 18th-century Sanskrit introduction to the thought of Rāmānuja, a thinker quite far removed from Vaiśeṣika – and that too was all about dividing the world into categories. I have not yet delved much into Aristotle’s difficult theoretical philosophy, especially his Metaphysics – but most introductions to that work will tell you that it too is all about categories. What’s going on here? Why would so many major thinkers do this sort of thing?
I think a key reasons the categories have puzzled me is that, like the majority of my readers, I have been brought up in a worldview heavily infused by scientism. In the English-speaking world, at least, we usually take it for granted that reality is made of matter; we are materialists. And we are wrong.
Like Aristotle and the Vaiśeṣikas, modern materialists have a set of categories for understanding the world: they are just the categories whose applicability to the material world has been tested by natural science. To the extent that we think about the categories of premodern thinkers, we understand them most easily by thinking of them as primitive science: attempts at understanding the world that have been wholly superseded by the experimentally tested categories available to us now.
For materialists, categories of knowledge can be divided into levels corresponding to the scientific disciplines. We place all living things into the categories of Linnaean taxonomy. Both living things and nonliving things are made up entirely of the elements of the periodic table, which form their own set of categories. And those elements, in turn, are made up of things we classify into the categories of subatomic physics, like electrons and quarks.
I believe this classification of categories to be correct as far as it goes. By and large I take it on faith in scientific authority rather than on any direct experience/experiment of my own, but there’s nothing wrong with that in principle; in a world where the accumulated wealth of scientific experience is so large, we must all necessarily take a great deal of our scientific knowledge on faith. These categories tell us accurately what matter, including living matter, is made of. (By “matter” I am referring to those things which make up the physical world, so I include energy. I’m not trying to debate physics in here, something I would be quite incompetent to do; substitute “matter and/or energy” everywhere I have said “matter” and the point would be the same.)
But when these categories tell us what matter is made of, do they tell us what reality is made of? There is a certain circular sense in which reality is indeed made of matter; that is, material reality is made of matter. But not all reality is material. The testable phenomena of experimental psychology – behaviours and neurons – are material, but it’s more questionable whether subjective psychological phenomena, like emotions, are material. Even if one did wish to reduce those to matter, there are other things that cannot be so reduced.
First among these is value, the subject matter of ethics, aesthetics and more. I have previously argued: The fact that particular organisms happen to view particular things as good and bad can be explained causally in terms of matter, by means of evolution. What science cannot explain is the fact that some things really are good and bad. Whatever goodness and badness are, they are not material – at least not entirely.
It goes further. The very idea of truth is itself a normative concept, a value; the rules of logic are themselves normative values, claims about good and bad forms of reasoning. And the very plausibility of science fundamentally depends on the rules of logic and the concept of truth. If the rules of logic are not correct, scientific experience make no sense. And those logical rules cannot be found by means of scientific experience; even to attempt to find them that way would involve circular reasoning, since they are the conditions that make that scientific experience possible.
If my argument to this point is correct, then it makes no sense to describe reality as something material. Claims of value, including the concept of truth and the rules of logic, are not material, but the very idea of the material world depends on them. And so, when we attempt to think about what the world is made of, we cannot limit that thought to what the material world is made of. To understand what the world is, we need more than the categories of natural science, because we need to understand more than just matter and the things that are made of matter. And so the classical schemes of categories turn out to be much more helpful than we thought they were. We cannot accept them wholesale; the evidence of natural science, on the whole, is too persuasive for us to accept classifications that contradict it, which most such premodern schemes of categories will do to at least some extent. (With this in mind I see more clearly the usefulness of Ken Wilber’s AQAL model, which works to incorporate scientific concepts into a map of all reality.) But it’s still worth thinking with the premodern schemes to figure out those vitally important pieces of reality that cannot be reduced to matter and its movements. Science does not supersede them.
With that in mind, I want to return to the importance of categories for Aristotle and Rāmānuja. These two thinkers had a great deal in common. They each followed a thinker – Plato and Śaṅkara respectively – who saw the everyday world of particulars as something of a problem, something to ideally be transcended in favour of a greater universal. Their own work tried to make room for that material world, but in a way that remained close to their predecessors. They were familiar with materialist worldviews – the Cārvākas, Democritus, Epicurus – but they understood the need for an understanding of reality that went beyond he material, as Plato’s and Śaṅkara’s had done. A comprehensive scheme of categories allowed them to think the world – the whole world, not only matter.
Ben said:
Foor for thought:
The fact that particular organisms happen to view particular things as good and bad can be explained causally in terms of matter, by means of evolution. What science cannot explain is the fact that some things really are good and bad. Whatever goodness and badness are, they are not material – at least not entirely.
If there were no thinking organisms, no sentient and sapient beings in the universe, would there still be things that are good and bad? I suspect not.
I wonder, then, if what really is good/bad is also dependent on the nature of the moral individuals involved. If ants were the moral species, would killing infertile workers be murder? This requires some big leaps of imagination (ants that are sentient, yet still function like ant hives wherein the reproductive model is that a bazillion workers die in every generation), but I think it serves to show that goodness and badness may be entailed by the physical specifics of the universe.
Amod Lele said:
In general I think I agree with you here. This is where the “not entirely” is important. If there were no material reality, there wouldn’t be goodness and badness. I mean, I suppose one could theoretically imagine immaterial beings with subjectivity for whom that could be the case (angels or gods have sometimes been supposed to be that, I think) but I don’t think we have any evidence for such beings. Anyway, the bigger point is that physical reality doesn’t exhaust value – but that doesn’t mean physical reality is irrelevant to value. It is very relevant.
skholiast said:
Excellent post on the way metaphysics and morals are bound up with one another, Amod. Reality itself can’t be “made of” anything; it isn’t incremental. C.S. Lewis is not usually considered a heavy-hitting philosophical thinker, but he made a marvelous bon mot when he said, “Everything is real; the question is — a real what?”
Just fyi., yr link re. Ramanuia is either broken or sends one to a firewall, I’m not sure which.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks, Skholiast. The Rāmānuja link should be fixed now. It goes to the entry for him at the MediaKron map/timeline database I referred to a couple weeks ago. The site is supposed to be open to the public, but for some reason it had been set to private.
What do you mean by “incremental”?
skholiast said:
What I mean by “incremental” is that something can’t be “partly” real. Macbeth’s dagger is a phantasm, but the phantasm is an entirely real phantasm — it isn’t a little bit real dagger but mostly phantasm.
Amod Lele said:
So I guess I’m not understanding how that relates to “made of”. The Advaita snake is really a rope; couldn’t you say the illusion of snake is an entirely real illusion, but one which is effectively made of rope (or of ropeness)?
skholiast said:
Amod, I’ve got my brow furrowed, which is a sign that I may have conflated two separate issues. I was too quickly associating increments with building-blocks (of which something would be ‘made’), but of course one can conceive of increments very differently, as I ought to have reflected. Lewis’ point still seems pertinent to me, but just how isn’t in focus. I’ll think about this some more. Real philosophy happening in real time!
Amod Lele said:
That makes sense. I’d be interested to hear your further thoughts.
Thill said:
1. It is pretty obvious that not everything is a material object or made of “material stuff”. Norms, rules, or values, are all concepts and it doesn’t make sense to say that concepts are material or made of “material stuff”.
2. But it doesn’t follow from this that materialism is false! This is because materialism is not the silly view that everything is a material object, or event, or process, but that all reality is either constituted of, or dependent on, material entities, processes, or events
3. The fact that norms, rules, and values are not material entities does not imply that they are causally independent of material objects, events, and processes. Therefore, this fact is perfectly compatible with materialism, i.e., the view that all reality is either constituted of, or dependent on, material entities, processes, or events.
4. To show the falsity of materialism, we must successfully show that:
A. There is an X which is not a material entity, process, or event.
AND
B. This X is not causally dependent on any material entity, process, or event.
Since this has not been shown, materialism has not been refuted.
If a brain dead person exhibits signs of consciousness, this would be conclusive refutation of materialism. But I dare say that we will have to wait until “Kingdom Come” for that refutation to occur.
If a person with significant amounts of plaques and tangles in the brain shows no cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer’s disease, this would certainly undermine materialism. I suspect that the search for this counterexample to the materialist truth of the causal dependence of cognitive functions on a material structure, the brain, would be akin to the search for a unicorn to refute the claim that horses do not have horns or wings!
5. Value presupposes evaluation. There is no value without evaluation, the making of value judgments. And evaluation or the making of value judgments is dependent on a functioning brain, surely an organic material entity! Hence, value is dependent on a material entity.
Further, what do judgments of value pertain to? Surely, material or physical objects, events, processes, actions or behaviors, and/or their effects!
6. Matter or “stuff” comes in two basic forms: inorganic and organic. We don’t understand everything about the relationship of these two forms, except that the organic is dependent on the inorganic.
Further, the only entities we know which exhibit signs of consciousness are entities made of organic matter, e.g., cells, tissues, etc. This certainly tells us that consciousness must be dependent on organic matter and its organization, but, of course, there is a great deal about this relationship we don’t understand.
7. Thus, the basic thesis of materialism, that all reality is either constituted of, or dependent on, material entities, processes, or events, is true, but, given that we do not have a complete explanation of the dependence of organic matter on inorganic matter and the dependence of consciousness on organic matter, materialism is far from being a complete account of reality.
Thill said:
Ramanuja believed that the jiva or soul (cit or consciousness) is the “controller” of the body (acit or matter) and drew an analogy between this alleged “lordship” of the soul over the body and God’s “lordship” over the soul and matter.
But he seems to have missed the obvious fact of the subjection of the soul to bodily states and conditions, that the capacities of the soul, e.g., cognitive functions, can be affected by the states and conditions of the body, e.g., sleep, aging, disease, etc. This obvious fact undermines the claim that the soul is the “lord” of the body.
The same problem arises for the Sankhya thesis of the the independence of Purusha or consciousness from Prakriti or matter. If the Purusha is independent of Prakriti, how can it be subjected so pathetically to the vicissitudes of Prakriti?
The standard answer is that this is due to the identification of the Purusha with Prakriti, the identification of the soul with the body.
But this identification is simply a delusion of the soul. The soul can never be identical to the body. They are eternally separate in reality.
How then can this identification lead to a causal dependency of the soul on the body?
If I delusionally identify myself with a bird, this doesn’t mean that the delusion has the power to actually create wings in my body and make me fly.
How then is it possible for modifications or changes in Prakriti or matter to bring about, in a causal, law-governed fashion, modifications or changes in the Purusha or soul? How can such causal relations spring from a delusional identification of the Purusha with Prakriti?
For instance, how can memory, a faculty of the Purusha or soul, be affected by changes in Prakriti or the body?
Surely, the correct explanation of this fact lies in the truth that there is a real dependence of the soul or consciousness (cit) on matter (acit, prakriti).
And this implies the falsity of the claim that the Purusha is independent of Prakriti.