reality

Nominalist, I and a few others have been rehearsing arguments about the mind's ability to understand or construct reality in the post that started with Heidegger below. The discussion had dwindled down, but this morning I saw this review of The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe by Michael Frayne. Colin McGinn is the reviewer. Introducing the book, he writes:

[Frayn's] question, central to philosophy, is to what degree, and in what ways, is the world dependent on the mind? Do we construct the world, or is it thrust upon us? He contends that reality has neither substance nor form without the constructive activities of the knowing subject, that space, time, causality and matter are all mental products, the results of our "traffic" with the world, not antecedent realities. He admits that the universe must exist independently of us in some way, but only as a kind of "undifferentiated mass." This is, he thinks, the basic paradox of philosophy: that we both create and are created by the world.

McGinn sides unequivocally with an anti-constructivist view.

although measurement can change the state of what is measured, it simply does not follow that the state has no reality independent of the act of measuring.

I am struck by -- the age of the questions being addresssed and the arguments employed to address them. For McGinn, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, neither Hume nor Kant ever happened.

Frayn also claims that the selectivity of attention shows that what we perceive depends on us, as when you focus on a bird in flight and ignore the sky behind it. But this rests on confusing the world as it appears to us with the world as it is in itself, a confusion that runs through the entire book. It is quite true that we contribute to the way things appear to us, but it doesn't follow that we construct the world that thus appears.

But this is not just a confusion that "runs through the entire book," but rather one that runs through a very long argument in philosophy. He's a professor of philosophy, so McGinn must know about this, but his review does a good job of pretending he knows nothing of it. How does McGinn suggest we handle the problem of "confusing the world as it appears to us with the world as it is in itself"? How else are we supposed to know about the world other than as it appears to us, and what, please, are we supposed to be able to know about the world as it is in itself, if it never makes an appearance?

Also, how is the last line from the quotation above supposed to work? On the one hand "it is quite true that we contribute to the way things appear to us," but on the other hand "it doesn't follow that we construct the world that thus appears." If there is reality, and if reality "in itself" has things in it, and if these things and, with them, reality, are shaped by our perception of them, then how have we not contributed to their construction? Or is McGinn expecting us to conclude that there is a reality in itself, only one that we can never reach? Again, an old question thatt McGinn dismisses with long-dismissed arguments.

It is also a mistake to suppose that because we must always be aware of the world through the medium of our own consciousness, we cannot think of the world except as represented by our consciousness. I cannot refer to things without using words to do so, obviously, but it is wrong to conclude that objects cannot exist without words. Frayn is here committing the same fallacy as the idealist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, who reasoned that objects had to be ideas, since no one can conceive of an object without having an idea of it.

No doubt, McGinn grants just above, "we must always be aware of the world through the medium of our own consciousness." But that doesn't mean "we cannot think of the world except as represented by our consciousness." So: there is some other way to "think of the world" besides . . . thinking about it.

True, McGinn continues, "I cannot refer to things without using words to do so." But from this "it is wrong to conclude that objects cannot exist without words."

There is a confusing ambiguity here, however. It appears to me to be nonsense to say "objects can exist without words," because not only do we mark objects with words, but even the word 'objects' is a word, and so to say that 'objects' can exist without 'words' just kind of gives me a headache. Objects can exist without words? But object itself is a word. Can McGinn point us to these wordless objects (without pointing, which is a sign and too language-like)? How does the author know about these wordless objects? And how can he communicate to me his knowledge? Because we're not to think that just because the word 'object' has been used that we have escaped language and the representations it produces in our minds, as if there were some big difference between saying 'bird' and 'object.'

Comments

[Nominalist]

That is, we were, sir. I admit my dilettante status in regards to german idealism. But apparently my contra-Heidegger (and contra-stalinist) perspective seems to have offended the LS politburo. Anyways, Herr Swifty, for cutting-edge Jargonosophy, call one Doc Holblo. Not only will you get the right terms attached to the right men, but some cool links to your favorite Batman episodes.

(delete after opening)

[Nominalist]

""""Bishop George Berkeley, who reasoned that objects had to be ideas, since no one can conceive of an object without having an idea of it.""""

Ultimately, this is actually a rather defensible position--certainly as defensible as Cartesian/catholic dualism---that is, after stripping away the theological gloss. Some parts of physical reality are capable of forming ideas, or thoughts, using language--i.e. your brain. So some parts of bio-chemical reality do apparently "think" and use language--. Call that material idealism or empirical idealism or whatever, but it's not as absurd as positing a cartesian ego-ghost.

[tl]

"Objects can exist without words? But object itself is a word."
I think the distinction between use and mention sorts this one out. ('Object' is a word; an object is not a word, it's an object.)

"It is also a mistake to suppose that because we must always be aware of the world through the medium of our own consciousness, we cannot think of the world except as represented by our consciousness."
Part of the difficulty here, I think, is the role of imagination, which the analytic tradition has consistently downplayed in theory but heavily relied upon in practice, in the form of 'intuition', which in practice - and for all the advances of that tradition in terms of externalist semantics and so on - is very often the final court of appeal.

Thinking about the existence of the world independent of an observing consciousness involves imagining what it would be like without such a consciousness; but in imagining it, we place ourselves in the relation of an observing consciousness to it. So to assume that we have a grasp on what 'the world' would be like independent of 'thought' - on the meaning of 'world' purified of 'thought' - is at least problematic.

That said, I think the issue of realism vs. constructivism is somewhat at a tangent here, since it seems to presuppose that we know what 'world' and 'thought' are and how the concepts are logically distinguished; the question is just to establish the correct relation between them.

[Nominalist]

""""('Object' is a word; an object is not a word, it's an object.)""""

IS the perception the object itself? No: it's a mentally constructed representation or picture of the object. (eyelesss humans might eventually have developed geometry, but rather unlikely). The real issue is whether one can be sure that the object has some necessary relationship to the perception, and to subsequent thoughts or concepts. The cartesian/skeptic school wants to deny that relationship; empiricists generally claim the inference is warranted. The marxist tradition (stemming more from Hobbes than most continentalists will grant) itself holds that the world can be known, thus denying the endless cartesian doubt. It's really a silly quibble (tho' theists are fond of it): of course objects can be known. You have a stomach, or rather "Stomach" names something in objective reality: it could be called a "Hcamots." Humans are embedded in nature, even granting intentionality or the uniqueness of "consciousness" (it's not so unique to say people living in the slums of Ciudad de Mexico, and I doubt they generally pause to reflect on whether the raw sewage in the streets could possibly be part of a dream)............

[prasad]

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[Nominalist]

Yes choose prosperity, sahib: tell that to the idealists, postmods, and cartesians. Looks like an inference based on existing material conditions. The Heideggerian left doesn't need properity tho': they have some Dasein tucked away in their cottages in the Black forest, next to their Sturm und Drang collection.............

[tl]

Nominalist - forgive me for being obtuse, but i'm not sure i see how the use/mention distinction has anything to do with perceptions. I'm also not clear when epistemic warrant became "the real issue" - i thought we were talking about the relation between thought / consciousness / subjectivity and objects / the world, which is surely distinct from the epistemological question of the justifiability of propositions which are based on this relation.

[Roger Whitson]

I listened to the NPR's On Point interview with Frayn a few weeks ago. One of the callers (a philosophy professor I believe) mentioned Kant, and Frayn scoffed at Kant's elucidation of the "Ding an sich" (thing in itself). It was even more surprising when Frayn (who was rocketed to stardom with his play Copenhagen, which portrayed an imagined meeting between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) used Quantum Mechanics to support his theory but didn't mention that many of the people involved in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM relied heavily upon German Idealism.

I found much of the interview pedestrian, but telling of the difficulty of moving past this discussion--even, or perhaps especially, after Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida. Perhaps there is something historical or cultural about this impasse?

[Nominalist]

I would say the language/semantic issues follow the ontology: which is to say, philosophy ends (and politics and economics begin in some sense) when Descartes' unfounded skepticism towards the existence of the objective, physical world is rejected: external realism {and empiricism} being more warranted than well, metaphysical realism (and anti-empiricism, what have you); or rather, one simply rejects metaphysical propositions which do not refer to perceivable objects (or at least definable ala numbers, equations, logical form, etc.) ala Carnap & Co, and then dispenses with the jargon wanking. Kant himself upholds analytical and synthetic truths---those are most likely a posteriori, but even granting a prioricity, the language refers either to perceivable objects, or knowledge proceeds axiomatically. With an empirical, physicalist, a posteriori perspective, language and philosophy is also freed of all the platonic baggage: tho' that doesn't mean upholding some strict determinism (yet that is certainly a consideration, as it was even for Einstein).

(btw, Heisenberg routinely denounces Kant and the entire metaphysical tradition; Einstein praised Newton quite consistently.)

[Nominalist]

And if you think is vulgar, reductionist, naive, etc., read a few scrawlings of KM's The German Ideology and you get much the same perspective, with any remaining traces of Hegelianism more or less de-ghosted--tho' that doesn't mean KM does the right thang with the Hegelian traces, or with his economic critique--but ontologically, Marx sides with those vull-garians Hobbes and Locke, if not Malthus and Darwin, and dialectical mat. seems closer to even the positivists such as Carnap (tho' the positivists deny dialectic, of course) than to the anti-rationalists or neo-hegelians, existentialists, yada yada yada. Metaphysics only became an issue again because of massive windbags such as Heidegger and Sartre, and perhaps a few Hegelian-intoxicated marxist ideologues: and in some sense, even Nietzsche has quite an empiricist or at least physicalist perspective, and realizes, indeed shudders at, the swindles of platonism and idealism....

[tl]

Thanks, that helps - but i'd say the epistemology also follows the ontology. So the question of whether scepticism re the external world is warranted needs a clarification of what the external world is. Doubtless you'll dismiss this question as meaningless - but then we seem to have no common ground on what the purpose of this discussion might be.

As the post pointed out, the persistence of a debate which Kant already claimed to have gone beyond is slightly troubling. Science fortunately doesn't wait around for philosophers to get their act together, but there does seem to be a remarkable continuity between the Cartesian / Lockean problematic and the predominant perspectives taken on these issues outside philosophy depts to the present day ...

[Swifty]

Marx addresses the key points in our discussion directly in his Theses on Feuerbach. Here's the first one:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.
[end quotation]

Yes: "the active side was developed abstractly by idealism." As a rule, revolutionaries and reformers lean in the direction of idealism because there's more elbow room there, intellectually, where the "world as it is" does not hold such immediate sway. Also, if you want to change things, you want a theory -- or if not that, a 'mood' -- that does not emphasize the dominance of things. That's because today's dominant things didn't enjoy that role 'yesterday,' and probably won't 'tomorrow,' and yet they sure do talk as if they're going to last forever. The realist will always say "that's the way things are; that's reality," which has to be read as "let's leave things the way they are because I like it this way."

My view is that the Hegelian inheritance of spirit is by no means burned away in Marx. Here's what he wrote in 1873 in his Afterword to the Second German edition of Capital:

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.
[end marx excerpt]

Let me emphasize the following: The value of the dialectic, first described by Hegel, is that it "regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence." For obvious reasons, that kind of perspective is very valuable and attractive to someone interested in reform or revolution

[Nominalist]

""the Cartesian / Lockean problematic""

OK, but I do not think the issues are as vague as you suggest (tho' postmodernists and Heideggerians, along with traditional metaphysicians, might prefer issues to remain vague, suggestive, sublime, etc.). One key issue which Locke was correct in raising was the status of "nativism": (tho' other physiologists of the day had suggested that as well). Locke's denial of innate mental qualities was quite obviously a denial of a priori-city--tho' some academic hacks (funny, many of them seem to be xtians) refuse to grant this. Many interesting perspectives---and really, Locke was an epistemologist of sorts -follow from that view of knowledge as a posteriori, most of which are not too appealing to metaphysicians who want to retain some idea of substance, or teleology, "necessity," classical arguments for Gott, etc.

One can understand why that view of knowledge as a posteriori was so troubling to the Germans (who even in the case of say a Leibniz were aligned with the leading clerics and theologians of the day). Subjectivism! Humanism! Relativism! Quatsch. Empiricism calls into question all the concepts needed to
justify the church, and really to justify ""Gott". And Locke's own feeble sort of design argument (which one suspects he may have been required to retain--it is like a few paragraphs in the ECHU) cannot really be defended: one cannot infer the existence of a God merely by observation (a point which Hobbes states boldly, and was promptly excommunicated, at least by the English fruitcakes). Locke probably realized (as Kant does a few years later) that there were no convincing theological arguments, and that he more or less undermines the Church (prot or cat.) with about each of the chapters in the ECHU, but he refuses to engage in the sort of odd quasi-arguments and speculations of the continentalists, used to prop up various theological concepts.

[tl]

The charge of vagueness is perfectly reasonable - i was just trying to gesture at the lack of impact 200+ years of philosophical speculation have had on the way these debates play out outside of technical philosophical contexts: as a zero-sum confrontation between 'mind' and 'world'. It's not a new or subtle point, but it seemed worth dwelling on briefly.

The Marx is useful here because, inter alia, it points to the sense in which the pre-dialectical materialism-idealism debate takes place within the framework of the assumption that it is the job of thought to decide the nature of concrete reality and not vice versa. I'm not convinced that Nominalist's "empiricism" gets us beyond this point: the issue for us (if not, as you point out, for Locke) is not whether to posit God/thought/whatever as ultimate reality, but what is at stake in this act of positing.

[Nominalist]

""""The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

A claim about intention, creativity, freedom--tho' whether his grand conceptions are, uh, "true" is another matter; like many Hegelians, he is rather fond of making great abstractions about thinking, creativity, consciousness, ideas which may be stirring or somewhat plausible, but not exactly precise or even sound, inductively speaking. As with current leftist Hegelians, Marx's writing (translation always an issue) also tends to sound a bit more like say Ezekiel than , well, inductive or deductive reasoning. Which is to say, one is not obligated to side with the proles in the great historical world cup: by invoking Marx one sort of moves into a type of dogmatic position, and be assured Heidegger was not sympatico with that dogmatism, nor was the neo-Aristotelian Nietzsche (who will often have to suffice when engaging in continental swordfights, since few postmods take Locke much less a Carnap seriously: Nietzsche spews a lot of belle-lettrist quatsch, but he remains a physiologist underneath the belle-lettres, tho' not exactly Darwinist). And Nietzschean misanthropy is always a nice antidote to any world-redemption chat, whether xtian or kommie.

[jholbo]

swifty, I've already noted this once, but I'll note again: your argument - to the extent that it is discernable from what you have written in these posts - is simply a bald assertion of Berkeley's most famous proposition. That is, your position is not really Kantian, but a form of (pre-Kantian) empirical idealism. Do you disagree? If so, why?

[Swifty]

jholbo, it's more that I'm discussing these thinkers. I think Kant is a shame-faced idealist, so the comparison to Berkeley doesn't put me off. If I am a Berkeleyan then I am glad to know it. Discussions that treat philosophers like so many trading cards to be brandished often go nowhere.

[jholbo]

But it's useful to get clear about which philosophy you are talking about - e.g. whether it is a post- or pre-Kantian sort of thought (not because Kant, the man, is so important, but because the features of post and pre-Kantian philosophy are significantly different.) I think you are mistaken in thinking your philosophy is Kantian, and that is why you are confused by contemporary thinkers like McGinn. In a nutshell, I think McGinn is a post-Kantian philosopher. That is, he has taken on board a raft of arguments and ideas that have come into currency since Kant (and Hume.) You, I think, are actually offering pre-Kantian (and pre-Humean) arguments. But you are quoting post-Kantian thinkers like Schelling and Marx. Precisely because the latter are post-Kantian thinkers, I don't think that their positions are clearly relevant to the sorts of positions that would be supported by the arguments you are inclined to offer.

The way to start a discussion on the subject (if you wish to carry it past the trading card stage) would be for you to explain how you think it is possible for there to be dreams, by way of explaining how you think non-veridical experience and thought is possible. Since you deny the intelligibility of thought-independent objects (on Berkeleyan grounds) yet the notion of non-veridical thought seems to depend on the possibility that thought could fail to correspond to the way 'things are anyway', you seem to face a serious difficulty providing an account of the very possibility of error. (Likewise, you can't very well go describing our thought as 'biased', or 'slanted' or 'partial' if you do not admit some distinction between the way things seem and the way things are. Or so it would seem.) In short, if we construct the world with our thought, why aren't we omniscient? I'm not saying you can't give an answer. But what answer you can give is not obvious from what you have said. It's a serious problem. In your previous post you wrote 'obviously there are dreams'. Actually, given your philosophy, it isn't obvious. Why don't our dreams construct the reality they seem to be about, at which point they would hardly qualify as dreams any more. Rather, they would be perfectly veridical beliefs about the world. Berkeley tied himself in knots over this one (whereas Kant, not being a Berkeleyan, didn't really face this problem - his whole philosophy neatly routs around it, because he saw that Berkeley was in trouble.) I'm curious which knots you will select.

[jholbo]

HINT: one obvious pressure point is the word 'correspond', but don't make the mistake of assuming that it is sufficient merely to deny the so-called correspondence theory of truth. Because - since I am asking you for your account of how non-veridical experience and belief is possible - I am only using 'correspond' in a sort of place-holding sense: place YOUR account of the difference between truth and falsehood/correctness and incorrectness/error and accuracy HERE. Clear?

[Swifty]

Hi jholbo, thank you for your very interesting post and questions. I have to go on a little trip but will have a response by the weekend, if not sooner.

[swifty]

tl writes:

That said, I think the issue of realism vs. constructivism is somewhat at a tangent here, since it seems to presuppose that we know what 'world' and 'thought' are and how the concepts are logically distinguished; the question is just to establish the correct relation between them. [end tl excerpt]

Yes, I agree completely. The original reason for my post was Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) anniversary, and there he proposes a new understanding of the word 'world.' But from the point of view of a history of philosophy, I suggest that the move to this 'wrong' question about "how in the heck does a subject over here get into contact with and gain knowledge about things over there" represents a profound advance in intellectual human freedom. It's a question that is free of a lot of older prejudices about how thought should work and whom it should serve. Thus, I'm a bit put off when Heidegger does say that the whole Western philosophic tradition has gotten the whole philosophic effort wrong because it asks the wrong kinds of questions. There is no 'developmental' or 'historical' element in Heidegger's treatment. This ahistorical approach to philosophy allows him to treat a certain kind of everydayness as 'everydayness' itself.

[tl]

re swifty's last comment: i see what you're saying, and it's easy to take this intellectual freedom for granted. However i suspect that the charge of ahistoricality can be turned back on you here, particularly the dismissal of pre-modern thought as serving particular (political?) interests, as against the modern discovery of an autonomous individual.

Heidegger's inclined to these big historical statements (like the post-Kehre view of the whole history of the tradition between Socrates and, er, himself as some sort of interregnum of Being), and it's hard to know how seriously to take them. The readings of particular figures (the lectures on Aristotle, the Kant book etc.) fill in some of the gaps - whether a coherent history of philosophy can be reconstructed in this way i couldn't say.

I was approaching this from a standard historical periodisation which sees Descartes standing at the beginning of one era (i assume you're broadly going with this also) and Kant standing at the beginning of another. With the Kantian 'Copernican turn' philosophy is recentred around metaphilosophy. (This is what i was thinking in saying that, these days, deciding on the ultimate nature of reality is less pressing than understanding what the question means.) From there on the tradition (or traditions, analytic & continental) evolves away from the 'how does the subject get in touch with the world' question towards a greater attention to the processes from which subject & world emerge together. But the 2nd moment - of which, for me, Heidegger is still a part - very much builds on the 1st.

Got to go away for a couple of days - it's been fun.

[CBR]

I remember a few years back I read a review by McGinn in the New York Review of Books where he stated that the fundamental philosophical problem is how two such heterogeneous things as mind and world come to be in contact. This way of putting the problem is clearly a few hundred years behind. I don't even know where to start, but if, as John Holbo says, McGinn is somehow post-Kantian (I'm willing to consider the proposition that you can come out of Kant and still put the problem that way, since the problems German Idealists saw with Kant are similar, substituting knowledge and its object for mind and world) he is clearly pre-Hegelian (read the intro to the Phenomenology, and, whether or not you dig Hegel's solution, you can see the problem being fundamentally reformulated so that at the very least the problem can no longer be a relation between 2 stable terms) and very much pre-Heideggerian.

I don't think it's true that SZ is ahistorical, although a lot is left out about history that has to be filled in later and that does problematize the account there. In other words, SZ is in a sense transcendental philosophy, but what you are missing is the hermeneutic aspect of the inquiry, the ontic roots of ontological inquiry, what Heidegger calls the "factical ideal," and the account of destiny in part V.

[jholbo]

I think the way you come through Kant and say such a thing is by concluding, rightly or wrongly, that Kant is wrong. Likewise, Hegel.

[Deke]

x doesn't conclude Kant is wrong in toto: x points out that arguments for the synthetic a priori (and similarly for all rationalists who uphold a priori "truths") are speculative and inferential, and themselves not necessary (indeed they were probably pragmatic in a sense--intended to buttress Lootheranism)--especially that great guffaw (Hume busted his gut somewhere) that classical physics (i.e. causality) is itself known a priori. So whose inferences in regards to first philosophy are more sound? (hint: Constructivism. Einstein is closer to Hobbes than to Kant. A really smart primate--one who spins integrals---yet still a primate).