IDEALISTS AND MATERIALISTS
D. R. Khashaba
It seems that humans are divided into two fundamental classes more
radically distinct than the gender division of male and female. After all
we know that there are males with a high ingredient of femininity and
females with a high ingredient of masculinity. But among Idealists and
Materialists there is no sharing and no common ground.
Plato twice asserts and underlines this distinction. In the Sophist we read: “What we shall see is something like a Battle of
Gods and Giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality. …
One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the
unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands; for they lay
hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence
belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the
touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of
the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are
utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.” ( Sophist, 246a-c). And in the Crito Socrates, having
asserted with no less emphasis his conviction that “'we ought not to
retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone”, goes on to say, “this opinion
has never been held, and never will be held, by any considerable number of
persons; and those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this
point have no common ground, and can only despise one another when they see
how widely they differ” (Crito, 49c-d, tr. Jowett).
Socrates was speaking of moral ‘idealism’ but we can apply what he says,
word for word, to ‘metaphysical reality’, to what different persons mean by
reality, to what is real and what is not real, which is what I am concerned
with in this essay. This is a battle that has been raging between the two
camps from Plato and Aristotle, through Bishop Berkeley and Dr. Johnson, to
the present day.
First I have to confess that I am semantically at a disadvantage. It is so
common and so natural to speak of what can be touched and held in one’s
hand as real that it would be unrealistic to ask people to reverse this
usage. What I can and do ask for is that in philosophical discussions we
should keep in mind that the metaphysician’s (Plato’s say) ‘reality’ has
nothing to do with the commonsense usage of the term. When I wrote my first
book, Let Us Philosophize, I hesitated long between ‘Reality’ and
‘Being’ for designating what is ultimately real. I have repeatedly said
that my electing ‘Reality’ was foolish or at least unfortunate. But I don’t
think electing ‘Being’ instead would have made much of a difference. I have
lately found Berdyaev using the term ‘Spirit’ for what is ultimately real.
For a while I said to myself I wish I had hit on that, but once again I
don’t think that choice would have made any difference.
Thus once again, hoping against hope, I will try to clarify what I mean by
what is real and what I, chiefly in common with Plato, mean by saying that
the things we encounter in the world around us are – in the technical
meta[hysical sense of the term – not real.
We know that the things around us, from Dr. Johnson’s rock to Kim Jong-un’s
nuclear missiles at no moment of time have a constantly stable being.
Heraclitus knew that all things are constantly changing and that the sun
that came up this morning is not the same sun that came up yesterday.
Heraclitus affirmed this despite the fact that the state of knowledge at
his time seemed to belie him. The mountains at least seemed fixed and firm.
Now our scientists know that the particles that constitute the Himslayas
know no rest, that the sun today is one day nearer its final extinction,
that the farthest galaxies vie with our oceans in their ceaseless
commotion. Modern science taught us that this red rose is not in itself red
and that the colour I see is the joint product of a complex operation
involving rays of light, the physiology of my eyes, and the faery dances of
neurons in my brain. Scientists were so taken by their discoveries that
they, and not any Idealists, denied the ‘reality’ of the red colour. It was
left for A. N. Whitehead to call this denial the Fallacy of Misplaced
Concreteness.
In their search for what is ultimately real scientists went farther and
farther away from the ‘commonsense real’. They sought the final
constituent(s) of things, in other words, they continued the quest of
Thales and Anaximenes. For a time the atom was triumphantly hailed as the
answer, but then the ‘indivisible atom’ proved to be neither indivisible
nor final. The old naïve materialism represented by Dr. Johnson’s solid
rock was no longer viable. (The word is now used as a convenient blanket
term for physicalism, scientism, empiricism, etc.) The search continued
till we reached at one end Quantum Mechanics which nobody understands and
at the other end the Big Bang characterized as a singularity which is a
euphemism for absurdity.
But far more important than all of this is the following consideration:
Supposing we reached a final objective thing, and quite apart from the
question about the origin of that thing, we face the question: what
supports that thing, what gives it its credentials for being?
Confessedly, the Idealist has no answer to that question any more than the
scientist, but there is a difference. The Platonist would say: We do not
know of a single thing in the natural world whose being and whose character
may not be subjected to doubt. Our own subjective being is the one thing
whose self-evidence, immediate presence, and present immediacy are beyond
all doubt. This of course is what Descartes affirms in his unfortunate
formulation, je pense, donc je suis. This Is the thought
behind Kant’s noumenon set against all the phenomena of the
natural world. Shelley with the prophetic insight of a philosophical poet
condenses it all in one line: “Nought is but that which feels itself to be”
(Hellas).
But Platonism does not stop there. What is the worth of all the world, of
all we encounter in it and all we do in it as against the delight of
understanding, the peace of loyalty, the bliss of generosity? What gift has
the world to compare with the joy of intelligent contemplation?
To remove a widespread misunderstanding: neither Plato nor Berkeley nor any
sane Idealist denied or doubted the actuality of the world around us. But
which is more worthy of being held more real and more valuable: the hard
world outside us or our mind and the verities of the mind within us?
Socrates said it in a few words: The best thing for a human being is to
discourse of virtue every day.
D. R. Khashaba
December 1, 2917
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