LET US PHILOSOPHIZE

A thought

2011-09-11T03:55:00.000-07:00

There is a world of difference between a sentence that clothes your thought and one that embodies your thought. The first is the result of a mechanical operation. The second is the fruition of a creative organic process.

Eighty-four

2011-09-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Today I'm 84. I never thought I would live this long. Had I died at 60, I would have thought my life wasted. Since then I have published six philosophical books in English, four of which have now been translated into Arabic and I am now going through the - hopefully - final revision of the fifth. Apart from a handful of congenial spirits (spread over the continents), my books have hardly been noticed, but I am hopeful that sooner or later my work will be appreciated as a highly original contribution to philosophical thought. I do not think I have much of value to add. If I die today, I will die contented. Please excuse this very egotistic posting.

Apology to my friends

2011-08-10T02:46:00.001-07:00

I am still enslaved to the translation of my books into Arabic. I am currently working on the fifth book, The Sphinx and the Phoenix, and yearning for the time when I can again have time to read and possibly to do some more original work.
I have lately taken a Twitter account; the postings will be partly in Arabic and partly in English.

Once again mind and brain

2011-08-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

This is a quick crazy note that I jotted down on reading “A Trick of the Mind”, Ronaly Bailey’s review of Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain: http://reason.com/archives/2011/08/02/a-trick-of-the-mind
I think that the modern mind in trying to explain everything human by reducing it to brain activity suffers from a blind spot. It cannot see that all that can be described – only described but never explained – in terms of the brain, can be explained, and can only be explained, in terms of the ideas that come into being through the activity of the brain.
Rather than saying that “brains are ‘belief engines’ that naturally ‘look for and find patterns’ and then infuse them with meaning”, I would say, and have long been saying, that the mind creates patterns that give meaning to the dumb and mute givennesses of our experience. Thus, in a sense, all reality is “belief-dependent reality”, for apart from the mind there is no reality but only dark phenomenal shadows.
The opening sentence of Ronald Bailey’s review says, “Superstitions arise as the result of the spurious identification of patterns.” This sets the tone of the review and apparently reflects the tone of the book reviewed. Apparently also it equates belief and superstition implying that as all superstition is bad, all belief is bad. This shares the fault of all brain science and all of modern ‘philosophy of mind’ wisdom: it is content with half-truths.
What if we, human beings, cannot live without ‘superstition’, without necessary fictions? There is no meaning in the world; we put meaning into the world. Plato taught that; Kant taught that. But ‘science’ that knows nothing of subjective reality and believes that the objective is ‘all there is’, does not understand that.
Shall we rest with superstition, then? The crazy superstitions of the ten-thousand religions and the perhaps crazier superstitions of politicians, economists, and even scientists? No. Plato prescribed the remedy: we have constantly, ceaselessly, to break down the grounds on which our superstitions, including our necessary and useful fictions, rest. Kant also gave us a half-remedy: for everything relating to the phenomenal, the actual, the objective, the ‘outside’ world, only the methods of objective science work. When it comes to considering purposes and values, we must go back to the Socratic examination of ideas, an examination that does not give us any new knowledge or any information but clears our minds of misconceptions and prejudices and false values.
D. R. Khashaba
6 August 2011.
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Once more, the brain and the mind

2011-08-06T03:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry. Having long neglected my blog, I meant to post here a note I have just dotted down. But the copy and paste method does not work on my laptop. I'll try to do it later on my desktop.

A free mind?

2011-04-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

No one knows what goes on in a newly-born baby's field of awareness. But with the first words a baby learns, we are already feeding in into her/his mind a previously formed view of the world. Then a child begins to ask questions, which are her/his tools for exploring the mysterious world into which s/he is plunged. It is then that we commit against the child the gravest sin. We blunt those wonderful explorative tools by giving the child ready-made answers that we expect the child to accept without question. It is no wonder then that very few persons exceptionally manage to break through those shackles and think for themselves. Most of us remain enslaved to what we were taught as children.

xxx

2011-04-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

If I were God I'd sue the writers of all Holy Scriptures for giving me a bad name.

Philosophy begins in awe

2011-04-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

"Philosophy begins in wonder." This is how it is commonly put. But it does not do Plato's thought full justice. In expressing this sentiment Plato used the word thaumazein. It would be truer to Plato's insight to say tha philosophy begins in awe -- in the sense of awe at that which is beyond understanding and beyond language, but which we must even aspire to understand and ever labour to clothe in language -- that which is within us, which is our very reality, but which is ever beyond us, but which yet we will ever yearn for and must ever stretch out to reach -- only then are we what we are meant to be. This is the whole of metaphysical reality and is what metaphysics is all about.

Philosophical feuds

2011-02-26T10:31:00.001-08:00

Comment posted on http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2630#comment-34273

All controversy (feud) in philosophy stems from the false assumption that philosophy, like science, deals with objective truth. Philosophy deals with meaning. The simplest meaning that a philosopher tries to convey in words is inexhaustible and in a true sense ineffable. Any verbal formulation necessarily falsifies the original meaning. The feuding party presents an equally ‘true’ and equally ‘false’ view of the issue. …

(I ran out of space, but may develop this later on)

Science, Theology, and Philosophy

2011-01-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Comment on “Philosophy Lives: Why Stephen Hawking’s attempt to banish natural theology only shows why we need it” by John Haldane, in First Things, January 2011 issue: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/12/philosophy-lives

This is another example of the interminable feud between theology and science in which philosophy is victimized by both sides. Obedient to my inveterate habit, I put down my raw comments as I read.
In the opening lines of his article, Professor John Haldane quotes a sentence from The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow which encapsulates the misconception under which all empiricists labour in their approach to philosophy. Apparently the authors of The Grand Design maintain that philosophy is dead since it has “not kept up with modern developments in science.” Some twenty-five centuries ago Socrates answered that objection, but it seems that the simple truth that Socrates spoke out in plain words was too simple to be taken in by highly sophisticated minds. Science and philosophy, Socrates found out, set themselves questions that are not only different, but are of two radically different kinds, so that no answers arrived at by scientific methods can answer a philosophical question. It should follow from this that philosophy has nothing to learn from science and whether it does or does not keep up “with modern developments in science” that can have no effect whatever on philosophy.
But we may find some excuse for scientists in their assault on philosophy when theologians, masquerading as philosophers confidently give answers to questions that can only be dealt with by the methods of science. Let us now see how Professor Haldane rebuts Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s contention about philosophy, which Haldane seems to equate with natural theology.
To speak of ‘spontaneous creation’ as “the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist”, is strictly nonsensical. It empties ‘reason’ and ‘why’ completely of meaning. In what sense is spontaneous creation the ‘reason’ for existence? How does it tell us ‘why’ there is something? That there is something rather than nothing is, to my mind, an ultimate mystery that we can only stand before in awe. But we may take ‘spontaneous creation’ not as the ‘reason’ or the ‘why’, but as an ultimate principle, itself a mystery, that we have simply to acknowledge. That is exactly what I do in my philosophy: I call it the Principle of Creativity. But Haldane’s natural theology too does not have the humility to confess the mystery a mystery. There must be a God who created the universe out of nothing; and to the five-year-old’s question, “And who created God?”, there is no answer, and God turns out to be no better than the scientists’ ‘law of gravity’ that apparently was before there was anything to gravitate.
I will not comment on Haldane’s discussion of details in Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s argument, because it would not be right to critique these at second hand. But when Haldane states that the universe’s “inexplicable regularity will have an adequate explanation if it derives from the purposes of an agent”, I permit myself to say that, although we may say – and I do say – that we only find the processes of the universe intelligible when we picture them as purposive, because that is how we find our own activity intelligible, yet that does not justify our asserting that there is actually an agent – and that outside the universe – whose purposes explain the processes of the universe. A purposiveness that I know in myself and the concept of which makes natural things intelligible to me is one thing; but “a transcendent cause outside of the universe” is quite another thing.
The idea of “multiple universes aris[ing] naturally from physical law” – a physical law that apparently had the power to create when it itself had no actual existence – and the idea of a transcendent God that suddenly had the whim to create the universe out of nothing — I find both these equally fantastic and equally hubristic, because they amount simply to our unwillingness to confess our ignorance.
If we were to ask Socrates what he thought of all this, he would repeat the words he gave when asked what he thought of the traditional tales about the gods: “I have no leisure for such inquiries … I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous” (Plato, Phaedrus, 229e-230a, tr. Jowett). That is the sole concern of philosophy, to try to understand what is of importance to us in our character as human beings. It is the absence of this kind of philosophy that is plunging humankind in barbarism, a barbarism armed with all the achievements of science and technology and with all the sophistications of our prolific theologies.
D. R. Khashaba
5 January 2011.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY ONCE AGAIN

2010-12-07T00:04:00.000-08:00

This is something I have been harping on for a long time and I have half a mind to write a new book to drive it home — but not before I have finished the translation into Arabic of my fifth book. I have no plan yet for translation of my most recent, the sixth: Plato’s Memoirs. Here we go:
For a time mathematicians seriously tried to square the circle. But eventually they were wise enough to realize that these are two original kinds of formal structure that intrinsically resist reduction in terms of each other. For more than four centuries now scientists (and philosophers who have been under the spell of science) have been trying to objectify the subjective. They have not yet shown themselves wise enough to see that these are two original kinds of thought that cannot be reduced to, or interpreted in, terms of each other. Socrates saw it clearly more than twenty-four centuries ago. More than two centuries ago Kant saw it, though not with completely unclouded eyes. Unless we go back to the insight of Socrates and see it as clearly as he did, scientists will futilely continue to try to answer questions – the ultimate origin of things, the meaning of life, the purpose of humanity, the origin and nature of mind – that can only be treated philosophically, and philosophers will foolishly continue to give factual answers to the same questions. Scientists will always only be able to give description after description – observational-cum-imaginative – of states of affairs preceded by and followed by other states of affairs, without ever being able to tell WHAT or WHY. The What and the Why are preserves of the gods. But philosophers and poets steal into the domain of the gods and come away with images of the What and the Why. They give us visions and dream-worlds which enrich our lives, shed meaning and value on life, but which have no right to claim objective validity. The creations of philosophers and poets are real for us, are the only reality we have and the only reality we know, but when they foolishly parade as facts, scientists will readily and rightly show them to be impostors. I can’t understand why philosophers can’t be satisfied with being dream-makers. Let’s look at it from another angle. Poets lie and theologians lie. But while a poet knows that s/he is, like an innocent child, making beautiful lies, and lives in a world made worthwhile, a theologian thinks that s/he is telling the truth and lives in a world of delusion. Now philosophers have to make a choice: they have either to stand with the poets and confess themselves makers of dreams or persist in posing as scientists and then they share the damnation of theologians. Scientists on the other hand, if they persist in posing as philosophers, will have a lesser punishment: they will be condemned to the endless toil of Sisyphus. They will continue to plod on vainly hoping to reach an ever-receding horizon.

D. R. Khashaba
December 7, 2010

SOCRATES, PLATO, AND SCIENCE

2010-09-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

Socrates, Plato, and Science

In an important paper on “Plato’s Ideal of Science”, Professor Sigurdarson[1] undertakes to defend Plato against the charge that “he did more damage to science than good” as many scholars maintain. (Sigurdarson cites in particular B. Farrington and Olaf Pedersen.) The charge finds support in a short passage in Republic 530b6-c1 about the way Plato proposes astronomy should be studied:
It is by means of problems, then, that we shall proceed in astronomy, in the same way as we do in geometry, and we shall let the things in the heavens alone if, by doing real astronomy, we are to turn from disuse to use that part of our soul whose nature it is to be wise (to phusei phronimon en têi psuchêi) (tr. Vlastos 1980 as quoted by Sigurdarson).
I have neither competence nor desire to enter into the scholarly fray about Plato’s approach to the study of astronomy, nor do I intend to comment on Sigurdarson’s main argument which leads up to the conclusion that in Republic 530 b-c Socrates was not “talking about science as such but only about how some of the sciences can be used as tools to improve our souls and prepare them for the ultimate telos.”
However, for some reason I cannot comprehend, before discussing the Republic passage, Sigurdarson speaks of the ‘autobiography’ passage of the Phaedo. I have in several of my writings discussed the Phaedo ‘autobiography’ passage[2], 95e-101e, as I believe that its most important message has escaped students of philosophy with damaging consequences for philosophy. Now I find Sigurdarson’s linkage of the Phaedo passage to the Republic passage strongly illustrative of the failure of mainstream philosophical thinking to absorb that crucial message.
Socrates’ decision to take refuge in reasoning to examine there the reality of things that be (eis tous logous kataphugonta en ekeinois skopein tôn ontôn tên alêtheian) was not an alternative method of ‘inquiry into nature’ (peri phuseôs historia) as Sigurdarson suggests, even though Socrates’ ironical tin’ allon tropon autos eikêi phurô (“muddle out a haphazard method of my own”, Tredennick) may give that impression. Socrates’ decision to seek aitiai in the realm of reason (en logois) and not in the world of actual things (en ergois), 100a, amounted to a separation of two modes of thought, a separation more radical and more consistent than Kant’s.
Socrates renounced completely all inquiry into the things of the world outside the mind, not as unimportant or uncertain, but as totally unrelated to the questions that concerned him and that concern all philosophy proper, questions that deal with ideals and values “that do not reside in nature, but only in the mind of man, in the sense that they do not come to us from outside, and can by no means be discovered by any objective approach”. It was not “a scientific method designed to give us knowledge about the world, but was a method designed to give us the only wisdom accessible to man: understanding of ourselves.”[3]
It is thus misleading and confusing to link the Phaedo ‘autobiography’ passage to that of the Republic passage where Plato was speaking (albeit through ‘Socrates’) of ‘real astronomy’ as distinct from empirical astronomy. These do not pertain the one to philosophical thinking as understood by Socrates and the other to the inquiry into nature renounced by Socrates. These both relate to the ‘outer’ world, which, according to the Socrates of the ‘autobiography’, lies outside the sphere of philosophy proper.
Although as a rule I shy away from trespassing into the realm of science, I will venture to suggest that Plato’s distinction between the two alternative approaches to the study of astronomy may perhaps be elucidated by comparing the approach of Galileo to that of Newton. Galileo experimented by dropping objects and invented the telescope to watch the planets and the stars. He came up with important empirical results. But it was the mathematician Newton who, proceeding on the lines of Plato’s ‘real astronomy’, created the concept and the theory of gravity. Both approaches were scientific, both related to the ‘outer’ world and not to the ‘inner’ world that was the sole concern of Socrates and, in my view, of all philosophy proper; and Newton was wise enough to see clearly that gravity was nothing but an idea, a useful fiction, that enabled us to calculate and to predict the motion of things in the phenomenal world, but did not explain anything as our modern philosophers fondly believe.
I will not hesitate to re-affirm the foolish stance that I have already often maintained, namely, that our failure to acknowledge the radical distinction between philosophical thinking and scientific thinking is doing serious damage to philosophy. It is not in the power of philosophy, and it is not the purpose of philosophy, to give us knowledge about the world, but to give us understanding of ourselves, an understanding of which our ailing humanity stands in dire need.
D. R. Khashaba
Sixth-October City, Egypt
[1] Sigurdarson, Erikur Smari, “Plato’s Ideal of Science” in Essays on Plato’s Republic, ed. Erik Nis Ostenfeld, 1998.
[2] Khashaba, D. R., “Philosophy as Prophecy” in The Sphinx and the Phoenix, 2009; Plato: An Interpretation, 2005, ch. 1, pp.24-26, and ch. 5, pp. 126-9.
[3] Khashaba, D. R., Let Us Philosophize, 1998, 2008, ch. 2, p.24, p,26.

PLATO: AN INTERPRETATION - errata

2010-09-21T04:07:00.000-07:00

PLATO: AN INTERPRETATION - errata

While translating my Plato: An Interpretation into Arabic, I made a number of corrections in the original, these were mostly minor typos, but there were also a couple of words that I had to alter and a couple of phrases that had to be reconstructed. I arranged with Virtualbookworm to incorporate the corrections in copies to be printed in future. I am giving below the list of corrections as submitted to Virtualbookworm, in case any reader who already has a copy may care to print out these corrections and pin them to the book. Subsequently I found that I had missed one typo: on page 196, para. 1, l. 7, the word eporexesthai appears with an extra h in the final syllable.

Page Para Line Present text Replace with
2 2 5 own garden. and offer own garden, and offer
2 4 last line consequence consequences.
2 5 7 intesity intensity
8 3 10 of Plato’a theory of Plato’s theory
11 2 4 in the Republic says in the Republic says
26 1 3 Ethics with his eight Ethics with his eight
27 3 11 phronêis phronêsis
27 4 4 phronêis phronêsis
29 3 17 (245e). (246a).
36 3 2 (choris men) (chôris men)
36 3 3 (choris de) (chôris de)
47 last line on page are not agred upon are not agreed upon
59 1 8 (29c-30a.) (29d-30a.)
66 2 2 but it does not give us but this does not give us
68 3 8 and readily agrees and he readily agrees
90 last 6 To lead people to care For people to care
119 1 2 neither adds nor neither adds to nor
135 2 8 comes Socrates warning comes Socrates’ warning
139 5 4 sense of proof. sense of proof
140 2 16 poteron on ê ouk on? poteron on ê ouk on;
141 1 5 poteron on ê ouk on? poteron on ê ouk on;
145 2 3 the greatest of studies the greatest of studies?
147 4 1 What gives truth to What gives reality to
164 2 18 anagkê toutous allelôn anagkê toutous allêlôn
191 2 7 (47a-e). (472a-e).
210 2 8-11 Present text: but since we say that reality and knowledge are a unity, we find one section also representing the lowest degree of knowing which we may call belief or opinion, and the other section the relatively higher degree of knowledge of things perceptible.
Replace with: but since we say that reality and knowledge are a unity, we find one section also representing the lowest degree of knowing, and the other section the relatively higher degree of knowledge of things perceptible which we may call belief or opinion.
228 last 1 imitator of imitators imitator of imitations
241 2 1 kai apodexesthai logon kai apodexasthai logon
251 1 3 Thales to Plato, 1914 Thales to Plato, 1914
308 1 7 Present text: dimension of reality, of the ultimate creative intelligence
Replace with: dimension of reality, these being two dimensions of the ultimate creative intelligence
312 6 9 and ship-buiding and ship-building

I am afraid the above may not be very helpful. If you would care to have it in a better form, email me at dkhashaba@yahoo.com and I will gladly send you a properly set version.
I have now edited the post to make it somewhat better. I hope now it is of some use.

D. R. Khashaba
September 21, 2010

Hawking and the search for reality

2010-09-14T01:43:00.000-07:00

The Guardian (September 14, 2010) has a delightful little piece: “Digested read: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow”: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/13/digested-read-grand-design-hawking -- I do not know how fair the ‘digest’ is to the book, but still I think I can safely venture to say that the troube with Hawking and all scientifically-moulded intellects is that they cannot get the simple insight of Socrates: no amount of objective investigation, no amount of objective speculation, can get us to the inside of what is outside of us. No science can give us the Why or the ultimate What of anything. The ultimate Why and the ultimate What only have relevance to what is of the mind and is in the mind. We can only ‘know’ what is outside us from the outside; the only understanding open to us is understanding of what is of us, in us, and we are denying outselves that by looking outwards, thinking that is the only Where of ‘reality’. But I have been saying all of this over and over and over again, and I am wasting my breath as much as Hawking seems to have been wasting his.

D. R. Khashaba
September 14, 2010.

MAD RAMBLINGS

2010-08-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

MAD RAMBLINGS: HOW ACADEMIA READS PLATO

A philosophical problem is not of the nature of a practical problem. To confuse these two is harmful. A practical problem has, in a certain sense, an objective existence. It can be approached by various persons severally; they can approach it from different angles and can bring to bear on the problem different viewpoints and different interests; but all the same they would be dealing with the same problem, a problem with definable, ascertainable, actual features. Not so the philosophical problem. A philosophical problem is a personal venture, a crazy quest for a private Holy Grail. A problem raised by a philosopher is a creation of that philosopher’s genius; it is that philosopher’s original contribution to philosophy.

Again, to seek to find in a philosopher’s work a solution to a problem not raised by that philosopher is as misguided and as hopeless a quest as trying to find Pegasus in the actual world – which, incidentally, our academic philosophers have been seriously trying to do notwithstanding all their loudly voiced disavowals.

The distortion and misunderstanding of Plato started with Aristotle. Plato created faeries, frolicked with faeries, and the faeries whispered to him the profoundest insights about the mysteries of reality and of the human soul, just as the cicadas whispered to Socrates under the tall plane tree by the bank of the Ilissus. Aristotle was interested in the actual world, he sought facts, and could never understand Plato. Like Johnson, he refuted Plato’s Idealism with a dash of the foot. And our academic and professional philosophers continue the distortion and the misunderstanding for the same reason – since for them only what is out there is real.

PLATO'S MEMOIRS

2010-07-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

My latest book, Plato’s Memoirs, has just been published.
In line with my Socrates’ Prison Journal, this has a fictional framework. I make Plato, after completing his last work, the Laws, put off the revision of the text to write a series of memoirs. In these, beside reminiscing about past events and reflecting on current goings-on, he is mainly concerned to fight certain misunderstandings and errors that continue not only to bedevil to this day our interpretation of Plato’s writings but also vitiate our understanding of the nature of philosophy and philosophical thinking – than which there can be no more pernicious error.
D. R. Khashabahttp://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=bookstore&Product_Code=Platos_Memoirs&Category_Code=

COMPUTATION AND PHILOSOPHY

2009-09-27T00:07:00.000-07:00

COMPUTATION AND PHILOSOPHY

The modern mind having been deluded by the dazzling successes of the natural sciences into absorbing unquestioningly the basic scientific tenet, that only the objective, the testable, the measurable, yields knowledge and understanding, was further lured by the tantalizing Leibnizean dream of a perfect symbolic language that would reduce metaphysical and moral problems to problems of computation. Ever since a major sector of philosophic thought has been sold to reductionism, which, I will doggedly maintain, is the death of philosophy.

The advent of cybernetics reinforced this harmful trend. Computers could work wonders provided they are fed with information in the form of symbols. This gave birth to Information Technology, a great science that has become all too important for our present-day civilization. But it should be clear that it is, or should be, a science with a strictly defined function: to translate all objective facts into a language that is serviceable for computation. Outside that area it has no competence. It cannot disclose the meaning of anything or determine the value of anything. The confounding of science and philosophy has already done and continues to do grave harm. When we are made to think that it is Information Technology that gives understanding, then – and I mean what I am saying literally – the very being of humanity is threatened. Witness our worthy economists and our worthy generals!

To transform information into symbols, the first prerequisite is to determine the purpose which the symbols are to serve. If the purpose is to launch a rocket to the moon, the consideration that lovers have for aeons delighted in walking side by side in the moonlight is of no relevance. For our specific purpose, the moon is nothing but mass, velocity, and I know not what other characteristics that can be expressed digitally.

To render information in a form serviceable for a strictly prescribed objective, symbols deplete the words of common language of meaningful content. The more of a symbol a word is, the flimsier in meaning it becomes. Thus while symbols may and do enable us to make use of information for specific purposes, they are incapable of performing the original and vital function of words in the common walks of life, namely, to enable human beings to communicate with one another as human beings. A living word suggests, alludes. Vagueness is an indispensable feature of a living word. It is not a defect. A word, when not reduced to a symbol, does not stand for a static thing but relates to the flow and tide of the actual world.

Marginally, I know that the adepts of logical symbolism vaunt of being able to deal with such puzzles as that of ‘reference to Nonexistents’ and the like. I have no desire to enter into that nest of hornets at this point. The problem of negative statements was raised by Plato in the Theaetetus, but left there standing, to be taken up again and resolved in the Sophist, but our philosophers persevere in keeping the conundrum rolling. The thrashing of logical problems and the problems of symbolism may have useful practical applications, but I do not see them as having any philosophical relevance. I think Wittgenstein was right when he said, “The propositions of logic are tautologies. Therefore the propositions of logic say nothing. (They are the analytic propositions.)” (Tractatus, 6.1 and 6.11.)

I do not think that all the labour analytical philosophers expend on the problems relating to truth-value has anything to do with philosophical understanding. It may help in laying down rules for manipulating symbols, but it cannot touch on the content of what the symbols stand for. That is why I shun the word ‘truth’ in my writings. In my view, philosophy proper is not concerned with truth but with insight, and the insight, in the end, if it is genuine philosophical insight, is always insight into our inner reality and our proper value as intelligent (I prefer this word to ‘rational’) beings.

The meaning of a word or a sentence is the subjective presence of the word or sentence. That is the great insight in Socrates’ foolish “It is by Beauty that the beautiful is beautiful.” To symbolize a word or sentence is to drain it of its lifeblood, to turn it into a dry shell. That can be very beneficial for certain specific purposes, but it is not the work of philosophy proper, and its utility should not deceive us into thinking that in that way we can gain any understanding.

Bertrand Russell, in offering an ingenious technical solution to a problem of logical symbolism, lured analytical philosophers into literally interminable quandaries. Neither Russell nor his followers realized that the genius who first gave us number had anticipated them without falling into their folly. A farmer and a weaver go to market. The weaver knows that one of his woollen shirts is worth two cabbages. He barters two shirts for four cabbages. Both the weaver and the farmer praise the gods for the gift of Number, but they are wise enough to know that Two could not give them warmth nor could Four stay their hunger. (I may one day write an article examining Russell’s classical essay “On Denoting”.)

By equating ourselves with computers, by reducing ourselves to information systems, we are in danger of becoming oblivious of our humanity and in the end losing our humanity.

The Socratic elenctic examination of ideas, rightly understood, shows that ideas such as love, friendship, loyalty, etc., cannot be reduced even to other intelligible ideas. You can create a digital counter for love and you can use it for making valid deductions. A robot may be able to calculate and simulate how a human being will behave, given that s/he loves her/his child, but the robot will not understand love unless it were endowed with the gift of experiencing love.

Cybernetics pundits, having modeled computers on brains, now propose that we see our brains (they have no use for minds!) as computers. We are told that our feelings are the response of our brains to information. My feeling is not a response of my brain to information – my feeling, as a subjective reality, is how the whole of my subjective personality answers to a total situation. I cannot accept the reductive implication of making the brain the author of my feelings and my behaviour. The reductive account cannot explain the spontaneity, the freedom, the creativity that are my birthright as a being endowed with intelligence.

Similarly, the attempt to reduce feelings to chemical reactions is equally deluded and equally harmful. I will grant that we can translate feelings into information rendered in terms of chemical reactions, but I would insist that it is morally and intellectually harmful to habituate ourselves to equating our feelings – and the whole of our inner life – with chemical, physical, neurological, etc., processes.

My doctor takes my pulse, my blood-pressure, my temperature, etc., etc. These are all given as digits. They are what are called my vital signs. My life depends on them, a few digits more here, a few digits less there, and I am no longer a living thing, let alone a thinking or feeling thing. To my doctor, in her/his capacity as doctor, these digits sum me up. But I would be gravely offended if my doctor regarded me as no more than a collection of digits on her/his laptop or in her/his notebook.

Again, to say that emotions are triggered in us by the sound of a phrase spoken to us — not, mind you, by the meaningful content but by the physical phenomenon of sound – is, at best, a damaging simplification. The words “I love you” spoken by my daughter or my granddaughter issues in an emotion distinctly different from the emotion which issues when the same phrase is spoken by someone else. To say that my brain triggers the emotion is a shorthand sign for indicating a slice of reality of inexhaustible interconnectedness. The emotion is not a brain response; it is a creative development in the living medium of my inner reality. By all means use your shorthand signs for computation purposes but don’t mistake them for the real thing. The sun also is a system of chemical formulae and physical equations. But the formulae and equations in your computer, however accurate, will not give light, or warmth, or life.

The deluge of information flooding down on humanity from the heights of technological sophistication, even in its positive character, threatens to destroy human civilization. When its pundits tell us that information is not only all the wisdom there is but also all the reality there is, that is no longer a threat; it is sure death.

D. R. Khashaba

PHILOSOPHY TO THE RESCUE?

2009-09-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

Here's another piece I wrote some time ago but did not post to my weblog:

PHILOSOPHY TO THE RESCUE?

Can philosophy help us overcome the current economic upheaval? For most people philosophy is at best a harmless pastime for the idle, without bearing on the practical problems of life. Professional philosophers cannot be exonerated of the guilt of having confirmed this false view and attitude. So we cannot blame those who would dismiss the question as unworthy of serious consideration. But let us give it some thought.
That the speciously glorious magnificence of modern human civilization stood on very shaky grounds should have been evident from the disgraceful disparity between the living conditions in the poorest and the richest regions of the earth. But only exceptional individuals here and there could see that, and when those spoke, their words fell on ears deafened by the din of modern life — until the world was plunged into the present economic crisis.
But is it not a mistake – indeed the most fateful kind of self-deception – to see this as an economic crisis? It may bare the chicanery of economists who tricked us with their esoteric and mystifying lingo into believing that theirs was a secure science that guaranteed continued success and prosperity. But that is not all. The roots of the economic problem strike deep into the infected soil of false values and a diseased philosophy of life.
The Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri commenting on the crisis (TimesOnline, October 30, 2008: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5041585.ece ) opens his insightful article with these words: “The crisis affecting the economy is a crisis of our civilization.” Further on he states that the only hope “lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values” that we have been living by. Again he says, “Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but on how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.” These are wise words and what Okri says in depicting the lack of vision in the contemporary human scene is no less wise.
But who is to carry out the deep and truthful examination of causes, the fundamental re-examination of values? On the face of it, this is a task for philosophy: but quite apart from the fact that our academic and professional philosophers are of all people the least concerned with the real problems of life, I do not believe that philosophy proper, philosophy as such, is equipped to deal with specific practical issues. In the closing chapter of my Let Us Philosophize (1998, 2008) I wrote:
Directly, philosophy has no contribution to make to the ordering of human society. Indirectly, the role of philosophy in the ordering of human society is immense and indispensable; immense beyond measure and absolutely indispensable, but it must always be and can only be indirect, because philosophy can only work on the individual and from within the individual.
The present confoundment of the human condition is at bottom, as Okri asserts, a crisis of civilization, or, as I prefer to put it, a crisis of culture. At one point in his article, Okri delivers a truly oracular pronouncement: “What is most missing in the landscape of our times is the sustaining power of myths that we can live by.” This sums a view that I have been putting forward in all my writings but that it is not possible to expound adequately within the confines of this paper. To put it as plainly as it is possible to do so in a few words: We need a philosophy that affirms the value of our inner reality — a reality that the outward-looking sciences are blind to and that the yonder-looking dogmatic religions mutilate and smother; a reality that only genuine philosophy and poetry and art can present, but only clothed in myth, since in its essence it is ineffable.
When I say this I am immediately bounced upon by those who believe that only positive, objective, empirical knowledge, arrived at by the methods of science, has validity and utility. But don’t they see where our marvellous scientific knowledge and our astounding technological capabilities, divorced of true wisdom, have landed us? As Ben Okri has it: “Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.”
Allow me to once more to reproduce words from an article (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=247) I wrote a long time before the present crisis loomed:
The human world is in very bad shape. There is abject poverty, disease, ignorance, misery, side by side with abundance, waste, astounding technology — I need not go on. Our politicians and economists play games in their artificial, closed systems of unquestioned fictions of expediency, power, market values, economic forces — all of which are worshipped more blindly than any supernatural god has ever been. The world of human beings must be re-formed on a wiser and more just basis.
We need a culture that gives priority to human dignity and integrity, to love and humaneness and the sense of beauty, and philosophy will be at the very heart of that culture.
D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt

BORN BELIEVERS?

2009-09-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

This is one of a number of pieces which I found on my computer, which I do not seem to have posted to my weblog before:

Comment on “Born believers: How your brain creates God” by Michael Brooks, New Scientist, 04 February 2009.I will indulge my inveterate habit of reacting to what I sense (rightly or wrongly) to be assumptions underlying the title of a piece of writing and then proceed to comment on the argument of the writer as I read on. Mr Michael Brooks heads his article with the title “Born believers: How your brain creates God”. My first reaction is to ask: Is it our brain or our mind that creates God? Perhaps Mr Brooks sees no difference between the alternatives or possibly he may find the mind version of the question meaningless. But I contend that there is all the difference between a brain-created God and a mind-created God. I maintain that a brain, as brain, bereft of all mind-created ideas, may at best produce a sensation, a feeling, a vague urge, but not any thought. I restrain myself from peregrinating further: I have not yet read a word of what Mr Brooks has written beyond the title. The first two paragraphs of the article confirm my suspicion that Mr Brooks fails to distinguish mind and brain. We are told that “human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief” and then that our brains “effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters” and then again that “our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods”. So apparently ‘human beings’, ‘brains’, and ‘minds’ are for Mr Brooks interchangeable terms: I think this does not make for clear thinking. I detect another possible confusion behind the statement, “Religious ideas are common to all cultures”. Religious sentiment is possibly ubiquitous and ideas are commonly attached to the sentiments, but the ideas themselves are not commonly shared. The Buddha was deeply religious but he did not believe in any god or gods. Since my position, though far-removed from being monotheist or supportive of any established religion, is directly opposed to that of Mr Brooks, let me state it bluntly. I believe it is not for science to deal with religious belief or religious ideas. When scientists speak of our “religious beliefs” being “hard-wired”, I cannot help feeling that scientists are in as deep a befuddled state of mind as the worst of theologians. Both parties juggle with empty words that they think mean something. (Just as economists were fooling themselves and fooling all of us with their mystifying jargon until their illusionary edifices crumbled in their hands.) The mind – not the brain – poses questions; that is the nature of the mind, not the brain; and the mind produces answers, good or bad, to its questions, because that gives it satisfaction, not because it makes for survival. It is the task of the mind, in its philosophical capacity, to examine those answers, to show them to be reasonable or unreasonable, not to show experimentally that they are “hard-wired” and therefore to be rejected, which is both meaningless and inconsequent. Indeed, if it is our brains that produce belief in God, then that would be as good an argument for the claim that belief is implanted in us by God as for the assertion that it is engendered in us by evolution. It is science tampering with what is not its business that gives support to Creationists and Intelligent-Design propagandists. Only pure philosophy is competent to show what ideas are rational and what irrational. Reductionist scientists, determined to do away with the mind, leave us at the mercy of the mindless. I will not comment on all the arguments presented and all the experiments reported in Mr Brooks’ article. All of these are open to diverse interpretations and all controversy around such questions is futile. My concern is with the fundamental approach involved. Science can tell us how a given phenomenon comes about, but it cannot speak of the meaning or the value of the phenomenon. Early in his article Mr Brooks says that religious ideas “like language and music, … seem to be part of what it is to be human.” I could say that I wholeheartedly endorse that, but I know that what I mean by these words would be very different from what I assume the words mean for Mr Brooks. What I mean is that our dreams, our myths, our fantasies, as well as our most abstract mathematical and astrophysical theoretical constructions are what constitutes our special character as human beings and are what is most worthwhile in us: and all of that is mind, and all of that is our spiritual dimension. It has no being apart from our brain but it is not our brain. Brain is for science to examine and to study; mind with the spiritual realm it encompasses is for philosophy to examine and to study, and I maintain that any mixing of these two harms both science and philosophy. Let me assure all concerned that if “atheism will always be a hard sell” that will only be so when atheism is packaged with reductionist empiricism. Let people be assured that their inner life – the soul if I dare use the anathema word – is what is real and is what is truly worthwhile in them, and they can do without a transcendent God. God as pure idea, the God within them, will be enough for them. That is what I meant when I said at the beginning that a mind-created God is a very different thing from a brain-created God.D. R. KhashabaCairo, Egypt, 04 March 2009.

AGAINST MUCH ERUDITION

2009-08-07T05:41:00.000-07:00

AGAINST MUCH ERUDITION
Blessed are fools, for they are spared the absurdities of the learned.

Learning is a good thing. If anything goes without saying, that statement is as good a candidate for the honour as any other. But too much of a good thing can turn into a bad thing. I propose to defend the paradoxical claim that much learning is most of the time more bad than good.

I have been reading two learned papers read at two austerely learned conferences. Both papers treat of subjects that touch closely on some of the most ardent of my philosophical interests. Both papers are meticulously researched and carefully argued. Have I come out of them with anything, any insight, any understanding, any enjoyment? Not at all; not through any fault on the part of the author and not through any fault on my part, as I believe.

Let me schematize one type of such scholarly papers. Professor N argues that X (a philosopher, say, of the second century BC) believed that Y (of the fourth century) took Z (of the fifth century) to maintain that p. (The pattern can go to any degree of complication; but let us keep it at this simple level.) Now I would say that p, a given verbal formula, has no meaning in itself and by itself, since it cannot speak its own mind. By itself, p is a fish out of water; to vibrate, to send tremors to a receptive mind, it must be put back into the ocean in which it came into being in the first place. That ocean is the total context of a thinker’s life, circumstances, problems, beliefs. It is that living context that determines the meaningful content of p.

Now the context in which Z originally formulated p was unique t Z; the context in which Y sought to understand p was unique to Y; the context in which X sought to understand Y’s understanding of Z’s meaning was unique to X; and the context in which Professor N tries to grasp what X thought Y thought Z meant by p is unique to Professor N. The only way in which these diversely unique meanings can be related, compared, calibrated against each other is to turn the terms of the p formula into abstract tokens, lifeless counters.

This is a legitimate process for specific purposes, as legitimate as the process by which an employer translates the living energy of a worker into money tokens that are lifeless in themselves but can serve life in a specific way. In the same way, scholars, manipulating their token abstractions, can do useful work. But just as a worker would soon die if s/he thought that money by itself and in itself can provide her/his bodily and spiritual needs, so Philosophy would die – and in many academic circles she is actually dying – if we let the sophistications of scholars take the place of the living thought of original thinkers. Rather than arguing about what X thought Y thought Z meant, I would try sympathetically to envision what meaning, which point of view, each of X, Y, and Z was trying to convey, and I would not presume to say, even then, that I grasped what X or Y or Z meant, but only that I have found for myself some worthwhile meaning in the words of X, Y, and Z.

Again, the refinements of the learned may unravel the complications introduced by the learned, may correct the misunderstandings created by others of the learned, but they do not add to the insight that a naïve approach can find in the text of an original thinker.

Have I made my case, that much erudition can be a bad thing? Perhaps it is not without significance that the word ‘erudition’ comes from the Latin eruditus, meaning ‘instructed’. It is knowledge coming from outside. Plato in the Republic tells us that true education is the turning of the mind’s eye inside. So erudition and philosophizing are two distinct, opposed, things. Either is needed; either is good. But to put one in place of the other is bad.

Once again, brains and minds

2009-07-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

Comment on “Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain” by David Robson: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227141.200-disorderly-genius-how-chaos-drives-the-brain.html?full=true

The marvellous and fascinating work done by neurologists is marred by one basic fault: their refusal to realize that to study the brain is not to study the mind, which in turn arises from their failure to see that the mind is a reality in itself distinct from the objective stuff that is amenable to study by the empirical methods of science.

Scientists have no problem with working with the notion of our brain ‘operating on the edge of chaos’ or the notion of a state of ‘self-organized criticality’ as perfectly intelligible, but stall at the notion of a mind that has no being apart from the brain but that yet has a reality of its own and laws of its own.

We are supposed to find it not only believable, but in fact intelligible, that ‘the unpredictable world of chaos’ can produce a Mozart sonata, a Shakespeare sonnet, an Einsteinean equation. We are supposed to find that more acceptable than viewing the mind as creative.

“Researchers”, we are told, “built elaborate computational models to test the idea [of deterministic chaos], but unfortunately they did not behave like real brains.” Why? Not because they are not sufficiently elaborate or sufficiently refined, but because those fine computational models have no life in them, they may be perfect models of brains but not of minds.

Let me just forestall a possible misunderstanding: I am not speaking of a mind or soul separate from our body or brain but of the inner or subjective aspect of our being that is our proper, distinctive reality.

D. R. Khashaba

Philosophy and science, again!

2009-07-06T03:31:00.001-07:00

Comment on “Philosophy as complementary science” by Hasok Chang: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=375&cpage=1#comment-189

The embarrassment of philosophers when faced with the successes of science rests on the mistaken assumption that philosophy is required to deliver the same commodity that science delivers. Socrates saw that this was wrong. That was the point of his renouncing the investigation of things en tois ergois and limiting himself to investigating things en tois logois. This is an insight that even Plato wavered in holding to and that almost all following philosophers overlooked to their detriment. Philosophy creates imaginative ideal worlds which infuse meaning and value into the phenomenal world but which can not and should not claim any objective validity. This shares no common ground with science. Kant partly saw this but was not as clear-sighted as Socrates.

Philosophy of science is a much needed discipline of thought, but it is distinct from philosophy proper. Its main function is to shake all extant foundations and lay down others, to be broken down in their turn. This is the Platonic dialectic that has to destroy its own hypotheses. Chang’s ‘complementary science’ may possibly be seen as a special development of this.

D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

GOD OR DARWIN

2009-07-01T04:05:00.000-07:00

Comment on “God or Darwin”: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jul/01/evolution

The figures are a sad revelation. Not only such unfortunate countries as my own, Egypt, live as if the last four centuries or so of human history have never been, but humanity at large has hardly been touched by the Enlightenment. But much of the fault lies with those who should know better. Three different questions are jumbled together. (1) The principle of evolution. (2) Darwin’s special theory of natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution in the biological sphere. These two are scientific questions where only empirical evidence is relevant. (3) The question whether naturalism adequately explains the reality of life and intelligence: not the question how life and intelligence came to be but what they are. This is a philosophical question in relation to which the methods of objective science lead nowhere. It is the confusion of these three questions that enables the creationists to make a show of supplying the explanation that evolutionists have foolishly undertaken to supply but cannot, by their objective methods, ever supply.

D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

Comment on "Farewell to Judgment"

2009-06-09T03:45:00.000-07:00

Comment on Roger Scruton’s “Farewell to Judgment” in The American Spectator, June 2009: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/05/farewell-to-judgment

Roger Scruton’s “Farewell to Judgment” raises a question of vital importance for the future of human culture. I only wish he had defined the role of philosophy in the desired “restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities”. As I see it, part of the debility of the humanities in present-day education is due to the fact that philosophy has lost its central place within the humanities, and that in turn has been due to the failure of philosophers to see philosophy as distinct from and in a sense opposed to science. Philosophy was supposed to seek objective knowledge. When it was seen that only empirical science can yield verifiable knowledge, philosophers imitated science and broke up philosophy into specialized disciplines that at best could only be pseudo-sciences. Philosophy, to play its proper and vital role in human culture, must give up the vain dream of yielding objective knowledge of the external world and go back to its true task of giving us insight into our inner reality by examining our ideals and values. This is a task that philosophy shares with poetry, drama, fiction, and art.

D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

Plato's so-called Theory of Forms

2009-05-12T03:50:00.000-07:00

Comment in Bryn Mawr Classical Review http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/05/20090533.html#comment-form

The fault, to my mind, with all attempts to deal with Plato’s so-called Theory of Forms is that they start from the assumption that Plato had such a completely worked-out theory. If that were the case, it would certainly be strange that so much study of and so much research in the works of one who could think so clearly and could write so lucidly would fail to arrive even at an outline of the putative theory.

As I see it, Plato (1) inherited Socrates’ distinction between the intelligible ideas and ideals found only in the mind, on the one hand, and the sensible world on the other hand; (2) extended the scope of these intelligibles first to the mathematical sphere and then beyond that; (3) found in these intelligibles the answer to the Heraclitean challenge to the possibility of knowledge; (4) experimented with various modes of stating how the intelligibles are related to the sensibles, none of which modes he found satisfactory as is clear from the first part of the Parmenides; (5) lost interest in the thankless quest but never lost his faith in the primacy of the intelligible realm as the sole ground and home of true epistêmê and of the mind as the fount and begetter of the intelligible and all intelligibility, of phronêsis and noêsis. This is the position I maintain in Plato: An Interpretation (2005).

Because Plato never worked out a completed Theory of Forms the attempt to extract such a theory from his works remains a Holy Grail quest.

D. R. Khashaba

APOLOGY FOR METAPHYSICS

2009-05-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

AN APOLOGY FOR METAPHYSICS

Our animal kin, as far as we know, live in, inside, within the natural world. We, human beings, somehow live apart from, outside, facing the natural world. This is our special characteristic. We live in the world and we know that we live in a world that somehow is other than we. The emergence of this realization is the emergence of the human being. And when we come to this realization or when this realization comes to us, it comes, if not with a shock, at any rate with a disturbing, irritating, nagging feeling. It creates a sense of pressing puzzlement. The world as we encounter it is chaotic, formless, meaningless. We need to organize it, pattern it out, make it mean something to us. The first level of this process must have been gone through long before the emergence of humankind. Without it a hare would not recognize a fox as a threat and the fox would not recognize the hare as a meal. At a lower level still in the biological sphere action and reaction perhaps takes place without recognition or awareness but at a higher level, I fancy, the normal run of life would not be possible without recognition. For human beings the differentiation of objects and their elementary classification in groups that serve various practical purposes is completed early in the individual’s life. Then comes the puzzlement, the amazement, the fear that demand a higher level of ordering to appease the puzzlement and the fear and instil a sense of being at home. At this stage humans create myths. Their myths give them comfort and something more than comfort; they give them a refined pleasure, akin to aesthetic enjoyment. In time most of the myths are known for myths. What then? To some the sense of puzzlement is dampened. They are content to live at the level of the ordering of the natural world into objects and classes of objects enhanced with the introduction of so-called laws of nature and a store of information about the way things behave. This is science, adequate for the material needs of civilized life. With others, puzzlement and awe refuse to go away with the dismissal of the primitive myths. They still need their comforting and enjoyable myths. They create new myths. In place of the old gods and demigods and powers of good and powers of evil they have abstract personae – substances and forms and first principles. They obtain their comfort and their intellectual enjoyment, even when the comfort is, as with a Schopenhauer, grim. Just as the creators of the old myths, having found rest in their myths, believed their myths, so the creators of the new myths tended to believe their myths, forgetting that they were of their own creation. And creators of varieties of these latter myths fought each other, each refusing to concede to others the right to find rest in their particular myths. The feuds went on until the party of those that had easily given up myths for good cried in their face: “Oh, you fools, don’t you see that all your blabbering is sheer nonsense, since it can neither be verified empirically nor demonstrated by reason? That it cannot be verified empirically you yourselves are bound to admit. That it cannot be demonstrated by reason, your in-fighting shows beyond a doubt.”

Thus far the detractors of the traditional kind of metaphysical philosophy, even though they may not very much like the earlier portion of what I have written, will give me a big Bravo! for the latter part. But wait: I do not deserve your congratulations; I am not entirely on your side.

Given that all metaphysics is myth-making, must we be content with living – to put it briefly – within the domain of fact? In some of us humans there is a deep-seated need to see things whole, to see all things ranged in an intrinsically coherent pattern. This coherent pattern can only be of our own creation and therefore a myth. But it gives us a life, a full life, of a certain quality, that only becomes a delusion when we forget that it is a myth of our own making. When I read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or watch King Lear the experience I live through is real, is the fullest reality I know of, but it is not factual. In the same way, when I read Plato or Spinoza or Whitehead I live in a world that has a reality that nothing in the empirical world can match, and the experience I live through then is not a momentary experience as in the case of reading an epic or watching a drama, but gives me a vision that colours and moulds my whole life. And the mythical garb of the experience does not exhaust its reality, for the experience born of the metaphysical myth opens up to me my own inner reality, the reality of my subjective life. That is what I call the philosophic insight and that is what I mean when I say that philosophic insight can only be expressed in myth.

Human beings have been variously divided into opposed types. I propose to categorize human beings into physicals who are content with a world made up of what can be seen and touched and weighed and measured, and metaphysicals who are more at home with the creations of their minds and find there and only there what they deem to be real. I believe that the physicals miss a life of a fine quality. But the metaphysicals, when they take their myths too seriously, are enslaved to superstition, sometimes to the point of stultification. In this world things good are not only hard to achieve but they are also always hemmed with danger.

World, Mind, Freedom

2009-05-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

Comment on “Review: Providence Lost by Genevieve Lloyd” by Erik J. Wielenberg http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=110&cpage=1#comment-36

I find the conception of an “order that does not depend on the will of any orderer” to be incoherent. This does not entail that there must be a personal (transcendent) orderer, a conception which is in turn riddled with insuperable difficulties, but it suggests that intelligence (mind) is an original dimension of reality. That is why I see the current evolutionist-creationist controversy as wrong-headed on both sides. The evolutionists equate their position with outright materialism and the creationists commit themselves to transcendent theism. In my view both these positions fail to give us an intelligible reality. Although I say that only an ultimately intelligent reality is intelligible, yet, at variance with other idealists, I do not consider this position to be demonstrable. But it gives me a vision of reality that is intrinsically coherent, within which I find room for values and for a meaningful life.

This position agrees with Spinoza except on the question of demonstrability. Spinoza, accepting without reserve Cartesian rationalism with its implication of stringent determinism left no room for free will. It is true that Spinoza’s conception of freedom as autonomy is superbly noble. But if we see determinism as an empirical hypothesis that works well in general and serves all our scientific purposes but does not rule out creative origination, we can have a broader conception of freedom – a freedom which is to be distinguished radically from choice. Freedom as creativity, I maintain, is a reality that we know immediately in the creativity of thought and the creativity of art – a reality that must be seen as more indubitable than all the empirical laws of natural science. This creative freedom of our inner reality Spinoza had to sacrifice because he needlessly accepted the shackles of Cartesian determinism. Kant moved in the right direction – but did not go the whole way – when he relegated causality to the phenomenal world and seated freedom in our inner subjective reality.

COMMENT

2009-04-30T03:03:00.000-07:00

Comment on "How to see" by Mark Rowlands: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=84

I don’t see in what way How We See can be a problem for philosophy. It is a scientific problem to be investigated by the empirical methods of science. The philosopher, the poet, the artist, are concerned with the subjective experience. The only philosophically viable answer to the question about Where We See is, in my view, that it is in the totality where brain, eye, and world are one whole. The locus of experience is he Whole, and that is what is real for the philosopher as for the poet, not atoms or quarks or light rays or neurons or whatever reductionists want to trade our mind for.
D. R. Khashaba

Language, Creativity, and Freewill

2009-04-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

Comment on “Literary lessons” by Christopher Norris: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=77

Here is a much needed approach both to language and to the philosophic endeavour. We have to acknowledge the essential fluidity of language if we are to overcome the inescapable contradictoriness of all determinate thought (the undiscovered secret of Plato’s Parmenides). In what I call my version of Platonism I insist that philosophic insight can only be conveyed in myth, metaphor and paradox.
The thought that “modes of utterance” that “surpass the limits of received or communal usage … throw a sharply revealing light on the issue of freewill versus determinism” appeals to me in a special way. I have often cited poetic creativity as exemplifying a metaphysical principle of creativity strangely neglected by most philosophers, a principle in which I find the solution to the pseudo-problem of “freewill versus determinism”.

COMMENT ON "THE EMPTY NAME OF GOD"

2009-04-15T04:47:00.000-07:00

Comment on “The empty name of God” by A. C. Grayling, New Statesman, 09 April 2009: http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/superstitions-religions-living

Granted that the doctrines of religions “have their roots in the superstitions and fancies” of persons who lived long ago. We have to discard those superstitions. But those superstitions grew out of a compelling urge to answer certain questions. And if we throw away the questions along with the fanciful answers, we end up with a poorer, shallower Weltanschauung. I admit that those questions cannot have definitive answers: neither empirical science nor pure reason can provide those answers. Ask Kant. So, shall we give up? No!

Religion is a “man-made phenomenon”, but it is equally a man-making phenomenon. Those old superstition-mongers were seeking a meaning to their world. They were wrong in thinking they were finding that meaning in the world, but they were wiser than they knew in putting meaning into the world. We must keep puzzling about ultimate reasons, meanings, values, and keep creating myths about all that. Plato is the greatest philosopher because he gave no answers but made myths that keep the wonder and the puzzlement alive.

By all means pull down the edifices of dogmatic religions, but don’t tell me to live in a wasteland. Leave me the metaphysical dimension, Spinoza’s God-Nature, Schopenhauer’s Will and Idea, Whitehead’s organic vision of process: these are all myths, but they are myths that enable me to live in a rich, meaningful world, albeit a world that I know to be of our own making.

Plato spoke of a battle of Gods and Giants. What is wrong with the war waged by atheists against religion is that the atheism they advocate is equated with a narrow empiricism: they want us to accept the limits of objective science as the limits of all thought. I want to live in a meaningful world, and meaning is not to be found in the world but is only to be infused into the world by creative thought, by poetry, art, and a philosophy that dares to wrestle with ultimate, unanswerable questions.

D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
http://BackToSocrates.wordpress.com

ALAS FOR ORIGINAL PHILOSOPHICAL THINKING!

2009-03-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

COMMENT POSTED ON BRYN MAWR CLASSICAL REVIEW BLOG

COMMENT ON REYES BERTOLIN CEBRIAN’S REVIEW OF MARCELO D. BOERI’S APARIENCIA Y REALIDAD EN EL PENSAMIENTO GRIEGO.

I have to warn the reader that my comment is strictly idiotic. If the reader is not willing to bear with my idiocy let her or him not read one more word.

I find many phrases in Professor Cebrian’s review disturbing from the point of view of one who pursues philosophy not as a profession but as a personal mania. A philosopher philosophizes because s/he is haunted by nagging questions about reality and the meaning of life which to think about is constant irritation and to forget about is moral death. How sad it is that philosophy is no longer that holy madness but a respectable trade neatly parcelled out in distinct disciplines and sub-disciplines so that Professor Cebrian can find the book reviewed “intended mostly for other philosophers and students of philosophy” and would not necessarily “appeal to students in classics”.

I have no intention of belittling the value of the work done in the specialized disciplines of philosophy and classics departments. But the situation in the study of philosophy is as if professors of English Literature were to think that their academic work took the place of original, creative poetry and drama and fiction.

Professor Cebrian does not state it expressly, but one clearly senses that he finds it a fault that Professor Boeri’s “analysis is focused on primary texts.” Again I must say that I have nothing against engaging secondary literature and filling a book or article with citations of scholars “in the body of the text or in the footnotes”. But when an author explicitly announces it as his purpose to enter into “a critical dialogue with the ancient philosophers”, are we not to permit him to do that? (Personally, I prefer to speak of a creative dialogue rather than a critical dialogue.) How much engagement with secondary literature do you find in Hume or the daunting Kant or even Whitehead? I cannot help sensing the same note of disapproval in Professor Cebrian’s closing sentence: “The book remains a personal interpretation of some aspects of Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Stoic philosophies.” To me that makes it all the more a genuine work of philosophy.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
http://backtosocrates.wordpress.com

MY BOOKS

2009-03-07T11:31:00.001-08:00

MY BOOKS

“Let Us Philosophize: Second Revised Edition,” by D.R. Khashaba. ISBN 978–1-60264–232–4. 272 pages. $14.95. http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

This is a revised edition of a book that first appeared in 1998. The author has since published three other books, yet “Let Us Philosophize” remained the one that gives the author’s philosophy as an integrative whole. It presents a philosophy developed over a lifetime, in which questions about ultimate reality, knowledge, and values are interrelated in a coherent system. This is an approach frowned upon by most present-day academic and professional philosophers. The book indeed seeks to challenge the dominant analytic approach which has reduced philosophy to specialized disciplines and techniques which cannot approach the ultimate questions that originally gave rise to philosophy. Only by audaciously daring to philosophize ‘in the grand manner’ can philosophy once more be meaningfully relevant to life and human needs. However, in raising ultimate questions, the author does not pretend to offer acceptable solutions or ‘true’ answers. A philosophy that professes to offer truth on a platter is worse than worthless. This book seeks to provoke readers to question themselves and question the world and to venture on the soul-searching travail necessary for understanding their own mind and building up their own philosophy.
http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

"Plato: An Interpretation" by D.R. Khashaba. ISBN 978-1-58939-721-7. $15.95. Softcover. 320 Pages. http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

Our understanding of Plato and our understanding of the nature of philosophy are two sides of a coin. The dominant academic conception of the nature of philosophical thinking vitiates both our understanding of philosophy and our interpretation of Plato. Plato gave us the profoundest truths about ourselves and about Reality in winged myths. Our learned scholars turn the myths into silly dogmata, into transparently erroneous doctrines, and all is lost: the inspirational core, the inspired insight, is dissipated when its housing shell of myth is shattered.
No one is entitled to claim a monopoly on understanding Plato's 'true' meaning, and I certainly make no claim. I neither pretend nor intend to arrive at what Plato thought or taught. Plato has left us some thirty pieces of verbal composition, which he created for his own amusement. I enter into living dialogue with the living Plato and offer the understanding I come out with for myself from that dialogue, not claiming any authority or veracity for my interpretation. I do what Plotinus did; I draw from the flowing founts of Plato to water my own garden and offer my version of Platoism for what it may be worth intrinsically.
http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

"Socrates' Prison Journal" by D.R. Khashaba. ISBN 1-58939-848-3. Softcover. $13.95. 220 pages. http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

Socrates spent thirty days in prison awaiting execution. The author makes Socrates keep a prison journal in which he seeks to sum up the meaning of his life and his life's work. In imaginative reminiscences, meditations and fictional conversations Socrates discusses aspects of his philosophy, clears up misunderstandings and answers objections - misunderstandings and objections that are as rife today as they were among Socrates' contemporaries and immediate followers.
With Aspasia, the beautiful and gifted wife of Pericles, Socrates discusses Protagoras' agnostic stance regarding the existence of the gods. Repeatedly he voices his hopes and his fears about what might become of his philosophy in the hands of Plato. In a prophetic dream Socrates even discusses with Aristotle the latter's criticisms of Socrates' moral philosophy. In conversations with Diotima of Mantinea the author creatively develops aspects of Socrates' and Plato's philosophy.
The notes appended to the journal explain for the benefit of the lay reader biographical and historical allusions and expand somewhat upon certain issues. An Appendix deals with Plato's account of the last moments of Socrates, which has been questioned by some scholars. Within its fictional framework, the book offers a philosophy addressing the human situation in the twenty-first century.
http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

"Hypatia's Lover" by D. R. Khashaba. ISBN #1-58939-973-0, softcover, $13.95. http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

This is a fictionalized account of the last days of Hypatia’s life, leading to her brutal murder during Lent, 415 AD. The fictional love story is treated allusively, in very light touches, mostly through fleeting recollections evoked by incidents in the sad love stories of two of her students. The tragic tale is followed by a collection of imaginary excerpts from lectures and speeches of Hypatia. In the story line the author has not tampered with any known facts. The philosophy presented in the imaginary lectures and speeches is confessedly the author’s own. This is rendered pardonable and necessary by the fact that, thanks to the Church, Hypatia’s philosophical works have been completely lost to us. If the moving portrayal of Hypatia’s tragedy is met with ire in some quarters, the author offers no apology and has no regret. Hypatia’s atrocious slaughter is a sore wound in the human conscience that must be kept smarting if it is not to fester and poison the whole human body.
http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

"The Sphinx and the Phoenix," by D. R. Khashaba. ISBN 978-1-60264-309-3, $15.95, softcover. 376 pages. http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

This is a collection of philosophical essays, gropings for light in the dark den of life, so why the Sphinx and the Phoenix? To philosophize is to question everything, to subject all things to What? And to Why? There you have the Sphinx. What about the Phoenix? Philosophy is concerned with the ultimate mysteries of being, understanding, and value. In seeking to represent the ultimate and the absolute in finite and determinate formulations of thought, philosophy can only speak in allegory, metaphor, and myth and must constantly, as Plato insisted, destroy its own foundational postulates. True philosophy must burn in the fire of dialectic that from the ashes, Phoenix-like, new intelligible worlds may arise bringing with them enlightenment and insight. The essays range widely from the nature of philosophical thinking to the problem of free will, from Kant and Plato to Wittgenstein and Russell, from the objectivity of values to a critique of religion, from the creationism-evolutionism controversy to the brain-mind riddle, and together they reflect an integrative philosophy that the author characterizes as an original version of Platonism.
http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

BRAIN OR MIND?

2009-03-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

Comment on “Born believers: How your brain creates God” by Michael Brooks, New Scientist, 04 February 2009.

I will indulge my inveterate habit of reacting to what I sense (rightly or wrongly) to be assumptions underlying the title of a piece of writing and then proceed to comment on the argument of the writer as I read on.

Mr Michael Brooks heads his article with the title “Born believers: How your brain creates God”. My first reaction is to ask: Is it our brain or our mind that creates God? Perhaps Mr Brooks sees no difference between the alternatives or possibly he may find the mind version of the question meaningless. But I contend that there is all the difference between a brain-created God and a mind-created God. I maintain that a brain, as brain, bereft of all mind-created ideas, may at best produce a sensation, a feeling, a vague urge, but not any thought. I restrain myself from peregrinating further: I have not yet read a word of what Mr Brooks has written beyond the title.

The first two paragraphs of the article confirm my suspicion that Mr Brooks fails to distinguish mind and brain. We are told that “human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief” and then that our brains “effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters” and then again that “our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods”. So apparently ‘human beings’, ‘brains’, and ‘minds’ are for Mr Brooks interchangeable terms: I think this does not make for clear thinking.

I detect another possible confusion behind the statement, “Religious ideas are common to all cultures”. Religious sentiment is ubiquitous and ideas are commonly attached to the sentiments, but the ideas themselves are not commonly shared. The Buddha was deeply religious but he did not believe in any god or gods.

Since my position, though far-removed from being monotheist or supportive of any established religion, is directly opposed to that of Mr Brooks, let me state it bluntly. I believe it is not for science to deal with religious belief or religious ideas. When scientists speak of our “religious beliefs” being “hard-wired”, I cannot help feeling that scientists are in as deep a befuddled state of mind as the worst of theologians. Both parties juggle with empty words that they think mean something. (Just as economists were fooling themselves and fooling all of us with their mystifying jargon until their illusionary edifices crumbled in their hands.)

The mind – not the brain – poses questions; that is the nature of the mind, not the brain; and the mind produces answers, good or bad, to its questions, because that gives it satisfaction, not because it makes for survival. It is the task of the mind, in its philosophical capacity, to examine those answers, to show them to be reasonable or unreasonable, not to show experimentally that they are “hard-wired” and therefore to be rejected, which is both meaningless and inconsequent. Indeed, if it is our brains that produce belief in God, then that would be as good an argument for the claim that belief is implanted in us by God as for the assertion that it is engendered in us by evolution. It is science tampering with what is not its business that gives support to Creationists and Intelligent-Design propagandists. Only pure philosophy is competent to show what ideas are rational and what irrational. Reductionist scientists, determined to do away with the mind, leave us at the mercy of the mindless.

I will not comment on all the arguments presented and all the experiments reported in Mr Brooks’ article. All of these are open to diverse interpretations and all controversy around such questions is futile. My concern is with the fundamental approach involved. Science can tell us how a given phenomenon comes about, but it cannot speak of the meaning or the value of the phenomenon. Early in his article Mr Brooks says that religious ideas “like language and music, … seem to be part of what it is to be human.” I could say that I wholeheartedly endorse that, but I know that what I mean by these words would be very different from what I assume the words mean for Mr Brooks. What I mean is that our dreams, our myths, our fantasies, as well as our most abstract mathematical and astrophysical theoretical constructions are what constitutes our special character as human beings and are what is most worthwhile in us: and all of that is mind, and all of that is our spiritual dimension. It has no being apart from our brain but it is not our brain. Brain is for science to examine and to study; mind and the spiritual realm it encompasses is for philosophy to examine and to study, and I maintain that any mixing of these two harms both science and philosophy.

Let me assure all concerned that if “atheism will always be a hard sell” that will only be so when atheism is packaged with reductionist empiricism. Let people be assured that their inner life – the soul if I dare use the anathema word – is what is real and is what is truly worthwhile in them, and they can do without a transcendent God. God as pure idea, the God within them, will be enough for them. That is what I meant when I said at the beginning that a mind-created God is a very different thing from a brain-created God.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt, 04 March 2009.

METAPHYSICS AND MYTH

2009-02-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

METAPHYSICS AND MYTH
A young relative of mine, having read my note on the possibility of metaphysics apparently found what I say there perplexing and wrote to me accordingly. I prepared the following as a reply, intending to email it to him, but then thought of posting it on my weblog thinking it might be of interest to other readers too.
…
You say you cannot understand “how creating myths would let us enjoy a rich spiritual life free of ‘superstition’.”
First let me begin with a general remark. Any statement in general, and any philosophical statement in particular, cannot be found meaningful except when taken in relation to its context. And the wider the context taken, the fuller will be the meaning arrived at.
The notion of myth in philosophical thinking and in human culture and in the spiritual life of human beings is central in my philosophy. Hence the answer I will try to give here will necessarily be partial and therefore only partially intelligible.
Let me now make another general remark. Words do not have fixed unique meanings except in artificial lingoes constructed for specific purposes. In philosophy, to express a given notion we have either to create a technical term not used in common speech or to take a word from common language and give it a special sense that has to be distinguished from the sense it has in common usage. Both alternatives have their drawbacks.
Now for my usage of the term ‘myth’. It is not only in philosophy that I find a role for myth. In science and in every walk of life, we cannot do without myth. Newton formulated the law of gravitation. That was a tremendous achievement in science. But what is gravitation? Newton himself said that he found it utterly unintelligible that one material body should act on another body at a distance. Gravitation is a myth, though a useful myth. But when we think of gravitation as a mysterious force that inheres in material bodies, that becomes a superstition. Einstein did away with the idea of gravitation and attributed the movement of bodies to a curvature in space. But does the curvature in space determine the way bodies move or does the way bodies move produce the curvature in space? We could see it either way, but in truth it is neither this nor that. There is no independently existing something called space. Space itself is a myth. But it is a myth that we cannot do without.
In the above paragraph I have ventured into the sphere of science which on principle I try to keep clear of, first because I claim no knowledge of science, and secondly because I maintain that philosophy and science are radically distinct modes of thought that should not be mixed or confused with each other. But since I have already trespassed into that area, let me just add that in mathematics there are many myths that are of the utmost importance: zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers, infinity, are all examples of such fruitful myths.
Let us move on to another area. All of our moral ideals are not things that you can find anywhere in the world outside the human mind. An honest person will readily suffer any disadvantage rather than cheat; a loyal friend will make grave sacrifices even where no law or convention requires him or her to do so; and so on. What is honesty? What is loyalty? What is justice? They are ideals but they are not facts in any acceptable sense of the word ‘fact’. A person without honesty, without loyalty, without a sense of justice, is not bound by these ideals. You can despise him or her, but you cannot prove that he or she is wrong. You may possibly show that in certain circumstances or under certain conditions the opposite qualities will not be advantageous but disadvantageous from a selfish point of view. But that is another matter. If you convince a certain person that in given circumstances it is in his or her interest to act ‘honestly’ and he or she acts accordingly, that person is not then truly honest: he or she does not have the inner glow that goes with genuine honesty. All these ideals are ideas created by the human mind. I often use the term ‘fiction’ as an alternative to the term ‘myth’. So I will readily call these ideals fictions, not however to suggest that they are false, but to emphasize that they are not facts to be ascertained by the methods of objective science, but are pure creations of the mind that give us the kind of spiritual life that gives us our true worth as human beings.
Let us move further on. Let us consider the idea of the soul. Theologians say that the soul is something put into the human being, in addition to the material constituents of the body. Scientists say that their investigations do not show any such thing in a human being and that in any case they do not need the idea of a soul in their work. I think it is the theologians’ assertion of the factual existence of the soul that gives the scientists the chance to affirm that we can do without the idea of the soul altogether. But if we say that the soul is not a fact but a pure idea that focuses our attention on our inner reality, then we can agree with the scientists that they can go on with their objective studies without making use of the idea of the soul, and we can agree with the theologians that there is a dimension of our being that is more valuable than the body. The theologians are wrong when they think that that dimension is a thing, however refined, that has or can have a separate existence. The scientists are wrong when they believe that what they observe and measure and analyze is all there is to a human being. The notion of the soul, I say, is a pure idea; when I call it a myth I want to emphasize that it is not a fact that can be verified by the methods of objective science, but at the same time I insist that it is a myth that is necessary for our appreciation of our true worth as human beings.
I have used the word ‘reality’ above. What is reality? Scientists would say that what they examine and what they ascertain in their studies is what is real. I have a special usage for the terms ‘reality’ and ‘existence’ but that is a mere matter of terminology. I would have no problem with saying that what scientists deal with is real, but when scientists assert that what they deal with as scientists is all that is real, I find that totally unacceptable. In my usage (again, it is not the usage but what is behind it that I care about) what objective science deals with exists but the ideas and ideals that are to be found nowhere but in the mind are real. So far this is merely a matter of usage; in principle there would be no harm in reversing the terms. But scientists imply, and often state explicitly, that there is nothing over and above the total things in the objective world. But for philosophy there is the idea of the All or the Whole which is other than the totality of things in the actual world. Science has no use for this idea because it does not stand for an actual thing that can be studied objectively. But this idea is the most important idea for philosophy. Philosophy was born when some creative mind put to itself a question about the All or the Whole. That is one with the problem of Ultimate Reality, which is totally outside the range of science and is the central concern of philosophy. The idea of the All, of the Whole, of Ultimate Reality, does not stand for a fact; it is a pure idea, a creation of the mind, that I call a myth. That is the core of what Aristotle called First Philosophy and what we, by an accident, have come to call metaphysics. All philosophy of any profundity does no more and can do no more than grapple with the elucidation of that myth. Since it is not a fact that may be verified or ascertained there is no true or final answer to any question raised about it. There are only various ways of trying to represent in finite and determinate formulations of thought and language what is above and beyond all finitude and all determination. Hence I call all such philosophical formulations mythical: all attempts to answer ultimate metaphysical questions are mythical. Are they therefore worthless? No, for the idea of the Whole, the idea of Ultimate Reality, is invaluable for our own wholeness, our own integrity, and we can only appropriate that idea through attempts to elucidate it. Hence the speculations of philosophers, diverse and apparently contradictory though they be, are valuable.
Here I have to apologize. You will certainly find this last paragraph more baffling than the text which you found perplexing and which I began by trying to clarify. Well, I go back to what I said at the beginning: to understand a philosophical text you have to take it in a wider context. The more you read of philosophy the more meaning you will find in what at first seemed to be without meaning.
Wishing you intellectual ventures without end!

fEBRUARY 28, 2009.

THE SPHINX AND THE PHOENIX

2009-01-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

THE SPHINX AND THE PHOENIX
The papers posted to this weblog up to the end of 2008 will shortly appear, with little correction and amendment, in a volume under the title The Sphinx and the Phoenix. The following excerpt from the preface explains what is meant by that title:
“This is a collection of philosophical essays written during the period from 2000 to 2008 and published in various online journals and/or in my website and weblog. So why the Sphinx and the Phoenix?
“To philosophize is to question everything; to question the world, our experiences, our beliefs, our motives, our ends; to subject all things to What? and to Why? There you have the Sphinx, and thus far few will be inclined to disagree.
“What about the Phoenix? Here I expect much and strong opposition. I maintain that no genuine philosophical question is amenable to a definitive answer. Philosophy is concerned with ultimate mysteries — the mysteries of being, understanding, and value. By raising questions about these mysteries we create for ourselves intelligible worlds, real in their own right, but which, in seeking to represent the ultimate and the absolute in finite and determinate formulations of thought, necessarily falsify what they set out to reveal. When philosophy fails to acknowledge that its best pronouncements do no more than stammer out the ineffable it turns into dogmatic superstition. That is why true philosophy, as Plato saw clearly, can only speak in allegory and metaphor and myth and must constantly, as Plato insisted in the Republic, destroy it own foundational postulates. True philosophy must burn in the fire of dialectic that from the ashes new intelligible worlds may arise bringing with them enlightenment and insight, but only if they are prepared to burn in their turn on the altar of dialectic.”
D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, 20 January 2009.

THE FAILURE OF HUMANISM

2009-01-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

THE FAILURE OF HUMANISM
Bookforum.com carried a highly perceptive and thought-provoking review by George Scialabba of John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_05/3270 . Following my inveterate habit of jotting down comments as I read on, I put down the following notes, imagining at first that I would find myself much in agreement with Carroll’s position, only to discover that his is a position I am radically opposed to. However, I leave my notes mostly as they were written down with little addition and alteration, even if this results in some incoherence and some loose ends in what I have written.
The failure of Humanism, in my view, does not signify that we cannot live by reason alone but rather that Humanism came prematurely, before the main body of humanity was mature enough to live by reason.
I maintain that only reason can secure a worthwhile life for human society: not reason in a single wise ruler, as Plato vainly hoped, or even in a limited body of wise rulers, but reason in all the members of the human community. And that, at the present juncture of the human adventure, seems to be an even wilder dream than Plato’s. The ‘myth of humanism’ is not false: humanism was a fond dream true for a humanity that has not yet come into being.
Scialabba quotes a paragraph of Carroll’s which amounts to “a proclamation of universal ruin” with no attempt to substantiate or elaborate on what it claims. Carroll’s “apocalyptic paragraph” does not need any substantiation or elaboration. It is highly rhetorical, but its depiction of the human condition (and not merely of ‘Western culture’) must, in my view, be seen as just by anyone concerned with the present plight of humanity.
Carroll is correct in affirming that the humanist ambition was “to found an order on earth in which freedom and happiness prevailed, without any transcendental or supernatural supports—an entirely human order.” But it is wrong to suppose that the fault of humanism was in seeking to do away with ‘any transcendental or supernatural supports’. From pre-historic times to the present day ‘transcendental and supernatural supports’ have done humanity no good, to put it most leniently.
Humanism is not bankrupt, but humanism has been corrupted. Humanism dreamed of establishing human civilization on the foundations of what is best in humanity, and that included spiritual and moral values that most decidedly did not come from a transcendental or supernatural source but stemmed from the nature of human beings and the natural aspirations of human beings. The spiritual dimension of human beings is, I will not say as real and natural as the physical dimension, but rather that it is the reality proper to a human being. The usurpation of all claim to knowledge and understanding by empirical science and the identification of all good with material or worldly good reduced the humanist aspiration to our present-day paltry secular humanisms and naturalisms that are as fiercely opposed to any mention of spirituality or idealism as the most recalcitrant of fundamentalist dogmatisms and leave us lost between the madness of other-worldly supernaturalisms on the one hand and the equal madness of worldly consumerism, competitiveness, and the lust for power and domination on the other hand.
I thought I agreed with Carroll in his insistence on the necessity of myth in human culture until I discovered the gulf between what he and I mean by that.
In book after book and essay after essay I have been affirming that what gives human beings their proper character as humans is that they live in a world of ideas of their own making; that these ideas are myths, and that these myths are the substance of culture and are the lifeblood of humanity. But for me these myths are not opposed to reason, unless reason is equated with the impoverished reason of empirical science. The making of cultural myth is the very life of creative reason or, as I prefer to say, creative intelligence. The one ground or condition for the reconciliation of the necessity of myth for human culture with the absolute necessity of reason for preserving human dignity is that our myths be acknowledged as myths and that all the postulates of reason itself be demolished by reason itself as Plato insisted in the Republic. And it is here that I not only part company with Carroll, but find my position directly opposed to his. I would find his Christian myth as inspiring and as valuable as any Hindu or Egyptian or Orphic myth, if only he offers it frankly as myth.
We do not have to look far for a saving cultural myth, and it is not a new myth; it is one that has been with us for more than two millennia. It is simply this: within every one of us is a soul that is not separate or separable from the body and that has not been fitted into us by a power outside us, but is simply what is real and what is most worthy in us; what Socrates designated as that in us that blooms by doing what is good and is harmed by doing what is bad.
In Plato’s Euthyphro Socrates poses the question: Is righteousness right because the gods will it or do the gods will it because it is right? Carroll, in ruing the loss of transcendental law, opts, like the soothsayer Euthyphro, for the wrong answer. Transcendental law is the negation of human dignity and human worth. It is only in the autonomy of the moral law that we find our proper excellence as Kant rightly insisted.
D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, 20 January 2009.

PLOTINUS ON PLATO

2008-11-23T10:44:00.000-08:00

COMMENT ON LLOYD P. GERSON’S REVIEW OF JEAN-FRANÇOIS PRADEAU (ED.) ÉTUDES PLATONICIENNES IV. LES PUISSANCES DE L’ÂME SELON PLATON
[Posted on Bryn Mawr Classical Review Blog on November 22 2008: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/11/20081121.html ]

I do not propose to comment on Professor Gerson’s review. I merely offer some reflections evoked by the first paragraph of the review.
Plotinus was not wrong in remarking that what Plato said about the soul was enigmatic, regardless of the fact that Plotinus’s own writings are enigmatic in the highest degree. Is there cause for complaint in that? I think not. A philosophical statement that is not enigmatic is of little worth. Philosophy deals with ultimates. All that is ultimate is in some significant sense absolute. What is absolute cannot be contained in a determinate linguistic statement — cannot be conveyed in fixed conceptual terms. Hence a statement claiming or seeking to give expression to a genuine philosophical insight cannot but be metaphorical, paradoxical, enigmatic or mythical. That is why (1) Plato asserts that the best philosophy cannot be put into any fixed text (Phaedrus 274b-278e, the Seventh Letter 341c-344a); (2) Plato insists in the Republic that dialectic must destroy all its hypotheses (tas hupotheseis anairousa); (3) Plato clothes his profoundest philosophical insights in myths, allegories, and enigmatic statements.
I maintain that myth in Plato extends far beyond the traditionally noted myths in several of the dialogues. The philosophical insight in the notion of anamnêsis for instance, is smothered when this is taken as a doctrine and is quickened when it is taken as a myth: the fecund idea of education in the Republic, for instance, as the turning of the mind’s eye inwards, can then be seen as one of the fruits of that myth. I will stick my neck out so far as to say that, where Plato is concerned, any ‘textually based argument’ is more likely to go astray than to penetrate to Plato’s true intention. Plato’s meaning is in the drama, in the whole, in the give and take of live dialogue, where, as Plato tells us in the Seventh Letter, “like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself” (341c-d, tr. Glenn R. Morrow) — not in fragments lifted from their natural milieu and subjected to laboratory testing.
Similarly, the idea of the soul and of the immortality – better still, the eternity – of the soul, taken as a myth representing what was for Socrates simply that in us which thrives by doing what is right and is harmed by doing what is wrong, gives insight into that inwardness, that locus of ideas and ideals engendered in and by the mind alone, which characterizes us as human beings and constitutes our whole worth, and which empirical and analytical philosophies seek to deny us. The soul as myth secures our spirituality, affirms the reality of spiritual life, assures us of the inward reality of spiritual values, endangered equally by the theological dogma of a separate and separable soul and by the reductionist approach of empiricism. (We then have no need to ascribe to the soul any ‘entitative status’.)
In vain do we seek to fix in definitive form any Platonic solution, or any philosophical solution at all, to any problem posed by Plato. Plato poses a problem; considers it from this angle and that angle, and leaves it without a final conclusion; thus it remains good for exercising our own mind, for it is only in the active process of phronêsis that we may glimpse our inner, strictly ineffable, reality. This is the Platonic development of the Socratic elenchus which, pace Aristotle, was not meant to reach definitions but to produce the aporia that leads the mind to look within itself, where alone it can behold what is real.
I cannot do better than conclude by culling a sentence from Professor Gerson’s article: “According to Plotinus, Plato taught that philosophy is the practice of self-transformation that is the achievement of self-awareness.” This agrees completely with my interpretation of Plato’s position, what I have elsewhere called my version of Platonism.
D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

NEWLY PUBLISHED

2008-09-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

"Let Us Philosophize: Second Revised Edition," by D.R. Khashaba

“Let Us Philosophize: Second Revised Edition,” by D.R. Khashaba. ISBN 978–1-60264–232–4. 272 pages. $14.95.This is a revised edition of a book that first appeared in 1998. The author has since published three other books, yet “Let Us Philosophize” remained the one that gives the author’s philosophy as an integrative whole. It presents a philosophy developed over a lifetime, in which questions about ultimate reality, knowledge, and values are interrelated in a coherent system. This is an approach frowned upon by most present-day academic and professional philosophers. The book indeed seeks to challenge the dominant analytic approach which has reduced philosophy to specialized disciplines and techniques which cannot approach the ultimate questions that originally gave rise to philosophy. Only by audaciously daring to philosophize ‘in the grand manner’ can philosophy once more be meaningfully relevant to life and human needs. However, in raising ultimate questions, the author does not pretend to offer acceptable solutions or ‘true’ answers. A philosophy that professes to offer truth on a platter is worse than worthless. This book seeks to provoke readers to question themselves and question the world and to venture on the soul-searching travail necessary for understanding their own mind and building up their own philosophy.

D.R. Khashaba, born in 1927, is an independent philosopher. Although enamored of philosophy from his early teens, harsh circumstances long denied him the leisure and peace of mind necessary for philosophical work. In 1998, when 71, he published Let Us Philosophize, followed by Plato: An Interpretation (2005), Socrates’ Prison Journal (2006), and Hypatia’s Lover (2006). He has also published numerous essays in various online journals, hopefully to be available in a collected volume before long. Khashaba, a widower with one daughter, Hanan, and one granddaughter, Farah, lives in his home country, Egypt. His website: http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com. Weblog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com.

http://www.virtualbookworm.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

MY BRAIN AND I

2008-09-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

MY BRAIN AND I
D. R. Khashaba
To Richard Schain, philosopher of the inner reality
[Submitted to Philosophy Pathways 10 September 2008]

Biologists, evolutionists, evolutionary psychologists have been busy with experimentation and research into human nature, behaviour, morals, beliefs. They study religious and philosophical issues and confidently expect science to explain spiritual experiences. Neuroscientists continue to probe deeper and deeper into the brain – human and other than human. That is all very good for science and may augur much good in the practical sphere. But, I am afraid, there is a fly in the ointment! False conclusions may be – and sometimes are – drawn; false expectations are fostered; questions are rendered unanswerable because the answers are sought where they cannot be found. (See for instance: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121450609076407973.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21575 - http://walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.09-the-other-darwin-mark-czarnecki-creationism-origin-of-the-species-evolution/ )

Thus neuroscientists continue to examine the brain in the hope – not of finding the mind, oh, no!, but of satisfying us – they are satisfied beforehand – that there is no such thing. And I readily grant them that: the mind is no thing; the mind is not even an entity if by entity we understand a definite or definitely fixed thing. The mind is the activity, the living fire that is kindled by the brain, that is inseparable of the brain and of the whole body, but is nevertheless a reality in its own right, over and above the elements and the processes of the brain and the body. But let me not run ahead of my argument.

Sandra Blakesless (“Flesh Made Soul”, Science & Spirit, March 1, 2008, http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=740 ) concludes her article by saying that “if our cultural upbringing has convinced us that God exists, we will interpret [our spiritual experiences] as proof of a divine power. But if we doubt that God exists, we will turn to science and hope that researchers will eventually learn how to induce spiritual experience in anyone who asks for it.” I think this epitomizes all that is wrong with current thinking about the mind-body problem: it confuses the issue in two ways, first by sneaking in the false assumption that either God exists or else the stuff of the phenomenal world is all there is, and secondly by ignoring the distinction between scientific and philosophical questions, assuming that all questions can be settled by the methods of science.

I am not a scientist and hence will not touch upon the brilliant work that is being done by biologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. I will merely try to clear away some of the haze gathering around the good scientific research. And let me at once make clear that in maintaining that certain questions raised in the course of or in conjunction with such research fall outside the proper sphere of science and are not amenable to the methods of objective science, I am not aligning myself with those who see the mind or soul as something superadded to or infused into the body, coming from a source beyond or above or apart from nature. I maintain that apart from nature nothing ‘exists’ (though what I exactly mean by that would take long to explicate).

We are told, for instance, that recent research has shown that, in situations involving choice, the brain determines the choice before we consciously ‘make’ our choice. (Whether the time-lapse between the brain-decision and the conscious decision be seconds or milliseconds is of no consequence.) So it would seem that it is not ‘we’ who make the choice but our brain. Here we have to stop and reflect: what do we mean by we and how do we distinguish between ourselves and our brains?

But before I go into that, there is one point I have to make to put the question in proper perspective. I believe that the problem of free will is unnecessarily muddled by identifying free will with choice. Choice, far from signifying freedom, is the consequence of an individual being placed in extraneously determined circumstances and always involves the weighing against each other of relative goods or of relative evils. The choice, when ‘free’ in the sense of being free of foreign coercion, is yet fully determined by antecedents. In true freedom, in the spontaneity of an act of love or of artistic creativity, there is never a question of choice. (In the case of artistic creation choice comes in only where the creativity lags or is hampered.) But even here the act is conditioned by antecedents. Freedom in this sense is autonomous spontaneity and creativity.

To go back to where we left off – my brain decides for me before I am conscious of making the decision. So what? I am walking along some uneven path; I trip and am about to fall down; my body makes the necessary adjustment and regains for me my balance; I wouldn’t for my life be able to explain how it did it. I step into the street to cross; a speeding car comes rushing; I step back in time to avoid being knocked down. I take a sip of water; I swallow; I am completely unaware of the very many and highly complex muscle movements involved. Was it my body that did all that or was it I? The question is fatuous. I am a whole which, when chopped up into segments is no longer I.

Further, none of us human beings is one person. Whether we speak of freewill or of choice, there is always room for the question: Whose freewill or whose choice? It is only the most fortunate of us that have their multiple persons coexisting in relative harmony and cohesion. But even those fortunate ones will often experience the tension and the stress between the needs, the claims, and the longings of their diverse persons, which need not be in conflict but which cannot all be satisfied or all satisfied equally within the essentially limited capabilities of a human individual.

But, it may be said, that is not the issue. The issue is whether my choice is pre-determined. All choice, indeed all behaviour – and on a more fundamental plane, all becoming, is conditioned by antecedents. But the larger question of determinism involves assumptions that cannot be examined here. (See “Free Will as Creativity” in my weblog http://khashaba.blogspot.com : an abridged version appeared in Philosophy Pathways http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_62.html ). My beliefs, my prejudices, my childhood experiences, my indigestion, and the faces I encountered on my way here, all go into making my choice – but all of that is I and I am all of that. And again I have to stress that it is wrong to confound this with the problem of spontaneity and freedom.

Not only the higher specimens of poetry and imaginative literary creations are creatively spontaneous. In ordinary conversation – be it refined or banal, sophisticated or naïve – we do not stop to deliberate what words to use in constructing the sentences we utter. The raw intent, meaning, or image, emerging vaguely in our mind, unfolds creatively in distinctly formulated linguistic structures. The sentences I utter grow naturally, organically, out of the existent matter: my experience, my acquired thoughts, the input I received last from my interlocutor. My utterances grow out of that matter, yet it is I that give the utterance, and this I is not one with that matter but is something over and above, something transcending, that matter. The I that engages in conversation is the totality that is other than the total content. The I that gives the utterance is a creative agent that does not exist objectively but is the reality apart from which that which exists objectively can have no being. The I is my reality.

Again, thinking is not the best part of us, nor is it what characterizes us as human beings. Our intelligence goes deeper. There is intelligence in a smile that gives encouragement and in a smile that forgives. There is intelligence in the deep breath taken at the sight of a thing of beauty.

Perhaps we would not err greatly if we say that my brain is a computer. I can do things with a computer that I can hardly do with my brain. But there are things my brain can do that a computer cannot do. Yet my brain is not I. My brain cannot say ‘I’. Only I can say ‘I’. This I, like the values, ideals, feelings, dreams, that I know immediately in and only in the I, cannot be given objectively, cannot be subjected to observation or analysis.

What are offered as ‘scientific explanations rooted in the physical world’ are only accounts of occurrences in the phenomenal world and they are only significant for and relevant to the phenomenal world. They have objective validity in the only sense in which there can be objective validity: they are objective because it is the nature of science to deal with objects, whereas philosophy can only look into the subject; its only sphere of vision is the subject.

In the mind-body problem, or the mind-brain problem, the controversy is wrong-headed because it asks the wrong question. The scientific question is, How does this state of things come about?, and science gives the right answer to its question. The philosophical question is, What is mind?, and philosophy answers, Mind is my inner reality. There is no other answer to the question. So far both science and philosophy are within their rights. Philosophy goes wrong when it tries to answer the scientific question and says that the mind is implanted by God or that the mind is there because we have a soul separate from the body. Science goes equally wrong when it tries to answer the philosophical question and says that the mind is such and such processes or such and such chemical or neural or electronic activity. The confounding of science and philosophy is the bane of human culture.

If evolutionary theory, let us day, gives a satisfactory account of the origination of the sense of beauty, does that explain away beauty or the sense of beauty? To say that would be crude reductionism. An objective account does not explain anything (except in an anaemic sense of the term). Beauty is only intelligible as an original dimension of reality, as a reality in its own right.

Evolution, we are told, made the male peacock’s tail beautiful to attract the female peacock. Why is the female peacock attracted to the male peacock’s tail? Not because it makes for survival – that may have been the ‘purpose’ of nature but it is not the ‘motive’ of the female bird. Shall we say the colours trigger certain chemical processes that give the bird satisfaction? Shall we say that the motley colours excite the bird’s curiosity? These may be true objective accounts but they do not explain the satisfaction (= pleasure) or the curiosity. These remain subjective realities. In the end the female is attracted because the tail is attractive – the tail is beautiful because it is beautiful, as Socrates said.

To take the objective account given by science of a certain feeling or emotion as the ‘definition’ of that feeling or emotion may be admissible for clearly specified purposes, provided that we do not equate ‘definition’ with ‘explanation’. A definition not only – in common with the objective account it encodes – exteriorizes, but it moreover abstracts, replacing actualities with tokens.

We run from a bear because we are programmed to run. The fear we experience is a by-product, but it is not reducible to the elements that occasion it. A robot can be programmed to react in the same way, but it would not have the experience unless it is ‘souled’ – which I do not hold to be impossible. What I insist on is that the robot would then have a spiritual life that has a reality the robot’s electrons and molecules do not share.

If we say that the spiritual is the divine that we discover in ourselves, must this be taken to imply that the spirit was injected into an originally spiritless, mindless, inanimate nature? As I see it, while the creationist claim is unjustified, the opposing naturalist reductionism is equally untenable.

We hear of the neurophysiology of spiritual experience and we are told of spiritual experiences artificially produced. We should ask, what meaning do we attach to the word ‘artificially’? If we mean ‘not spontaneously’, we should note that for a human being spontaneity is a relative thing. All our feelings, emotions, passions, whims, are occasioned by antecedent circumstances, near or far. In a sense, my elation at listening to Beethoven’s Ninth is artificially induced. Again, what counts is not the how but the what.

The creationist-evolutionist impasse is generated by the failure of both parties to acknowledge that they are dealing with two incommensurable dimensions of thought. The evolutionists err in failing to see that there is another way of looking at things. The creationists compound this error which they share with the evolutionists by superimposing on it a fatuous world-view. Both creationism and evolutionism or stark materialism are equally inimical to an open-minded humanism and equally injurious to an understanding of the reality of the mind.

When dogmatic religion was debunked and science sought meaning in the objective world where meaning cannot be found, the quest for meaning was baffled. Nobody thought of turning to the only place where meaning originated, the only place where it can be found – within ourselves; for we, human beings, are the creators of meaning and of values. When we lost the God outside we should have turned to the God within us, which was the maker of God in the first place. But between dogmatic religion and reductionist science we were cheated of our inner reality and left soulless.

Indeed, I think that, more than the scientist who refuses to acknowledge the subjective, it is the theologian who regards the I as an existent thing given by another existent thing called God, who does most harm to the notion of the I that I care to affirm and emphasize. My I is my whole being; it is nothing apart from my physical actuality, including, of course, my brain. Of all philosophers it was Spinoza who had it not only right but also most clearly. In one dimension I am God; in another dimension I am Nature. My whole being is a moment in Deus sive Natura. My life becomes so much the poorer when I am forgetful of the dimension of my I that is God. It is in that dimension that I – to resort again to Spinoza – live sub specie aeternitatis, that in fact and strictly speaking, I live in eternity.

D. R. Khashaba
E-mail: dkhashaba@yahoo.com – daoud.khashaba@gmail.com
Weblog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com
Website: http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com

On Szlezak on Plato's "unwritten teaching"

2008-08-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

Comment on a review by Lloyd P. Gerson in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/08/20080843.html Posted on 26 August 2008.

I wish to comment, not on Professor Gerson’s review, but on Professor Slezak’s position alluded to in the third paragraph of the review. It is true that I have not read Slezak’s contribution to the book under review, yet I have read his Reading Plato which, I suppose, represents adequately his fundamental standpoint.

Against Slezak I would argue that Plato’s objection to putting any profound philosophical insight in a written text applies with equal force to conveying any such insight in any fixed oral formulation. Plato’s opposition to putting serious philosophical reflection in a written text was not esoteric in intent. He did not abstain from writing serious philosophical dissertations because he wanted to confine the wisdom disclosed to a select few, but because he believed that any determinate formulation of a philosophical point of view is necessarily inherently defective. Hence he insists that philosophical insight can only be attained in the live give and take of a dialectic that destroys (transcends, if you will) its own presuppositions. The Lecture on the Good, I would imagine, would not be a pontifical pronouncement of doctrine, but a hornet’s nest of challenges and perturbing questionings.

Plato’s profound and rich philosophical insights are not to be sought in what his writings say, nor to be vainly chased in the phantom world of unwritten and, for us, unspoken, dogmata, but are to be garnered by creatively engaging with his writings as prophetic enigma’s.

That dialectic should form “a central part of the unwritten teaching” calls for no argument, for dialectic is the soul of philosophy for Plato: indeed dialegesthai and philosophein are interchangeable in Plato’s writings. This in no way supports the view that the ‘unwritten teaching’ was esoteric or that it incorporated a fixed body of doctrine. The ‘unwritten teaching’ – what Plato put through to his students in the Academy – could have nothing in the way of pure philosophy (that is, leaving aside mathematics and other specialized disciplines) over and above what we can derive – and what Plato, I believe, meant his readers to derive – from an imaginative reading of the dialogues.

If there had been a “doctrine of first principles contined in the unwritten teaching” that would have been just the thing Aristotle would have most firmly grasped, the thing most congenial to Aristotle’s special genius. Yet, for myself, I cannot find in what Aristotle ascribes to Plato anything worthy of being seen as the crème de la crème of any thinker worth his salt, let alone a Plato – barring the supposition that Plato had excluded Aristotle from the innermost circle of his students.

The possibility of metaphysics

2008-06-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

The following was posted as a comment on a Philosophers Magazine Blog article entitled: What is Metaphysics?"

I had written the following note just before reading “What is Metaphysics?”. It is not therefore properly a comment, but still it is, I think, relevant.

Aristotle was not responsible for the introduction of the term ‘metaphysics’, yet he was responsible for the wrong direction the inquiry took and for all the misunderstandings that surrounded it. Aristotle was primarily a scientist: he wanted ‘correct’ answers to questions. Socrates had found that the investigation of the objective world of facts had nothing to do with or to say for the examination of values and ideals he was concerned with. He also found that questions not relating to the sphere of objective facts could not be answered but could be thrashed in questions and ‘answers’ that only raise further questions, but that through this apparently fruitless search both the questioning party and the answering party attain a measure of clarity within their own minds and that the aporia at which they end is translated into insight into themselves. Aristotle misunderstood this Socratic examination – the Socratic elenchus – and consequently represented it as a search for definitions, definitions which were never reached.

Socrates was interested exclusively in moral questions. Plato, who clearly understood that the Socratic aporia could not be – and was not meant to be – surmounted and at the same time also clearly understood its positive value, passed beyond Socrates’ moral questions and posed questions about ultimate reality. He knew full well that these questions are unanswerable. But he also knew that not to ask these questions is to trivialize our mind and impoverish our inner life. The celestial realm of forms in the Phaedrus, the absolute Beauty beheld through the ascent described in the Symposium, the Form of the Good in the Republic, are not ‘answers’, are not fixed ‘truths’, but are question-breeding wonders in wrestling with which our minds live to the full.

Aristotle in his First Philosophy (accidentally named ‘Metaphysics’) gave us an ideal system which exercises the mind as positively as Plato’s, but because Aristotle presented his system as true and demonstrable, it could, in the hands of a Thomas Aquinas, be turned into a system of beliefs that cripple the mind. We are then seemingly faced with the dilemma: either to follow the Empiricists and Analysts and live in a world of unintegrated fragments and depthless Humean ‘impressions and ideas’, or follow the theologians and subject our minds to revealed superstitions.

But the horns of the dilemma are brittle and can be broken. Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus frustratedly concludes that concerning that about which we cannot speak, we must be silent. This is regrettable pusillanimity. Rather, what we cannot speak about we must mythologize about, creating myths in which the world becomes meaningful to us and thus enjoy a rich spiritual life free of superstition, of dogma, of prejudice, of conceit, when we know with Socrates and Plato that every answer to a question must in turn be questioned, for philosophy, as Plato insists in the Republic, must constantly destroy all presuppositions.

This is the position I have been putting through in my writings, particularly in Let Us Philosophize (1998, second edition forthcoming) and Plato: An Interpretation (2005), a position which, being so alien to mainstream philosophical thought, naturally cannot be adequately expounded and justified in this short abstract.

THE FATUITY OF EXPLANATION

2008-05-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

THE FATUITY OF EXPLANATION
D. R. Khashaba

The word ‘to explain’ is ambiguous. Well, what word isn’t? Apart from abstract symbols in a closed, artificial lingo, every word is ambiguous, and must be; otherwise it cannot function as bearer of all the nuances in its infinite applications. In every particular instance a word necessarily assumes a unique hue imparted to it by the particular context in which it occurs. And who will determine the limits or the extent of that context? Like a Leibnizean monad, every word, strictly speaking, reflects – or, let us say, though Leibniz would not permit us, is open to – absolutely everything in the universe.

That is why no word can be truly defined by terms extraneous to it. That is the secret of the Socratic elenchus that has eluded the pundits, beginning with Aristotle. The message of the aporia with which every Socratic elenctic examination ends is that definition is an impossibility; that the meaning of an idea is only to be beheld in the idea; that the beginning and end of philosophical understanding is encapsulated in Socrates’ foolish dictum: It is by Beauty that all beautiful things are beautiful.

That too is what Wittgenstein, after much travail, came to see in his late philosophy when he declared that “the meaning is the use”.

But that is not the theme I intended for this essay. For while all words are ambiguous and can lead to confused thinking, I mean here to speak of the special traps inhering in the word ‘explanation’.

In fact my present train of thought was triggered by the question: Can evolution, or, more generally, biology, explain morality? Does the genesis of morality explain morality? Or, taking the question to a higher level of generality: Does the genesis of anything explain that thing? The answer to any of these questions depends on the sense in which we take the word ‘explain’. When we admit having explained a thing, taking ‘explained’ in one sense, and then claim or assume that we have explained the thing in a different sense of the word ‘explained’, that leads to confusion of thought that can, and usually does, have grave consequences.

Going back to the question of morality and evolution, there are those who tell us that sympathy, cooperation, helpfulness, even self-sacrifice, have been found in the course of the struggle for existence to be beneficial, and have consequently been taken up in our biological make-up. So far so good. Then it is said that the existence of these traits in humans (and in many other animals) has thus been explained: and in one sense of the term ‘explained’ that is true. But then again it is said, understood, or implied, that such traits have thus been explained as natural phenomena on a level with the phenomena of hunger, thirst, and fright. Morality, as a ‘natural’ thing, is affirmed, assumed, or implied, to have no unique character and no special worth; it is only valuable because it helps us survive. Let us just go one step further along this road: if the only value of morality is that it helps us survive, then if in any particular situation our survival requires that we go against all morality, there is nothing wrong in that.

All that comes from confusing explaining how a thing comes about with explaining what it is.

No matter how our moral attitudes and moral feelings have come about, the important thing is that those attitudes and feelings give us a quality of life, an inner reality, that we may rightly regard as that in us which makes us distinctively human and that is our whole worth and is all the good we can have in life.

Beauty also, we are told, is a product of evolution. The beauty of the male bird’s song has been furthered by evolution to attract the female bird. Question: Why is the female bird attracted by the male bird’s song? Answer: “To ensure the survival of the species.” Wrong answer, I would say. That is the effect of the attraction, not its aitia. The true answer: The female bird is attracted by the beauty of the song because it is beautiful — and, in Keats’s words, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The sense of beauty, the feeling of beauty, is a reality, is a mystery that, to be understood, must simply, innocently, foolishly, be embraced in its pristine self-evidence.

Let it be that my inner reality was forged by an omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent person; let it be that my inner reality was haphazardly produced by Democitian atoms; let it be that my inner reality was encoded in the Big Bang; let it be that my inner reality is a spark from the divine fire from which all that be has come to be; one thing I find needing neither explanation, nor proof, nor verification: my inner reality is what I know certainly and immediately; it is what I am. Proof, verification, explanation, are for what is not wholly real, for the shadows in the Cave.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt, April, 2008

KANT AND PLATO

2008-02-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

KANT AND PLATO
D. R. Khashaba

Prefatory

I have often before represented Kant’s position as a re-discovery or re-affirmation of an insight that we owe in the first place to Socrates, preserved for us in the works of Plato, though Kant failed to regain the full fruition of the Socratic-Platonic insight. That insight, not only as fully developed by Plato, but even in the partial recovery achieved by Kant, has remained lost to us.

Hume, taking to its logical conclusion Locke’s empiricism, in which the mind was a void receptacle, had shown that, if we took Locke’s assumptions more consistently than Locke himself did, we could have no secure knowledge. All judgment would be either tautologous or strictly contingent. Kant, in seeking to rescue the possibility of scientific knowledge, found that we have to acknowledge the active participation of the mind in knowledge, that what he termed synthetic a priori judgments rest on forms, concepts, and principles that have no source other than the mind. In so doing, Kant moved in the direction of the Socratic-Platonic conception of the mind as the ground and source of all knowledge and all understanding.

When I tried to follow in detail the points where the Critique of Pure Reason met with Plato’s position, I found that I had to highlight the differences more than the points of agreement. Possibly I had read more of Plato into Kant than Kant would have acknowledged. In this paper I mean to suggest that, while there is a considerable measure of convergence in the positions of two of the acutest minds that ever engaged in philosophical thinking, yet Plato opens up for us vistas of thought that Kant did not envisage.

Kant formulates the ‘general problem (Aufgabe) of pure reason’ thus: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? I think that the answer given to the question in the Critique of Pure Reason and the answer that may be garnered from Plato’s dialogues constitute two distinct universes of discourse that nevertheless reflect the same insight — and as a Platonist I may be permitted to say that the insight in Plato is deeper and less encumbered with non-essential adjuncts: for Kant had Aristotle’s fondness for technicalities, firm definitions, and complex theoretical structures; ‘architectonic’ was a term dear to Kant’s heart.

All quotations below from the Critique of Pure Reason are from the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood.[i] Figures preceded by the letter A and/or B refer to page numbers in the first and/or second editions, followed by page number in Guyer’s and Wood’s translation. Quotations from the Critique of Judgment are from the translation by Werner S. Pluhar[ii] and give the Akademie edition page number followed by the page number in Pluhar’s translation.

An outline of Socrates’ position

Whatever may be due to Plato of the philosophy we find in the dialogues, I think we can with confidence attribute to Socrates (1) the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible; and (2) the radical separation of knowledge relating to the natural world fromn the understanding that the philosopher seeks. Socrates was primarily concerned with moral ideas and values. In his tireless examination of his fellow-citizens, which was at the same time, as he said, an examination of his own mind and soul, he sought to clarify those ideas and values, illuminate them, disentangle them, and free them from foreign accretions. This is what Aristotle misrepresented as the search for definitions. In Socrates’ elenctic discourses all proposed definitions are rejected as unsatisfactory. The negative outcome with the resulting aporia was not accidental. It was not the purpose of Socrates to reach a formal or working definition but to free his interlocutors’ minds of confused notions and presuppositions and help them towards a better understanding of themselves.[iii] Later in life Plato may have experimented with methods of classification, of collection and division, as he experimented with hypothetical reasoning, to reach working definitions and sustainable propositions. That was not a substitute for the Socratic elenctic; it was a diversion in response to the branching interests of the Academy.

Socrates knew that the moral ideas in virtue of which alone we are human, which alone give meaning and value to human life, have no source other than the mind. They constitute an intelligible realm fully independent of the sensible world. The instances of justice, reasonableness, courage, that we find in the outside world are only seen as such, adjudged as such, in the light of the ideas. Socrates may have remained solely concerned with moral ideas, but Plato saw that not only are the moral concepts together with the notions of mathematical equality and number purely intelligible but that all things of the sensible world only have meaning for us in virtue of the intelligible forms engendered in the mind. Perhaps this is what Plato meant to point out when he made Parmenides, in the dialogue named after him, tell young Socrates that when philosophy has taken hold of him he will not think hair or mud or dirt unworthy of being illumined by intelligible forms.[iv]

In the Phaedo Plato makes Socrates give an autobiographical account,[v] the main lesson of which has not yet, I believe, been appropriated by students of philosophy. Socrates says that early in life he renounced inquiry into physical causes when he realized that the study of the outside world does not yield answers to the questions that concerned him. He draws a clear line between the kind of knowledge that can be obtained from a study of the outer world and the understanding[vi] that can only come from reflection by the mind on the ideas proper to the mind. The first, we may say, is the region of science and gives knowledge of the phenomenal world, and the second the region of philosophy and gives insight into the ideals and values by virtue of which humans are human. The scientist’s description of Socrates’ bones and sinews and neurons tells us how he sits crouched on his prison bed but only Socrates’ ideal of obedience to the law makes us understand why he chooses to remain in prison awaiting execution rather than seeking safety elsewhere. This is a corollary of the distinction between the intelligible realm and the sensible realm. The questions raised by physical investigation are distinct from those raised by philosophical inquiry, and the answers reached in the one area irrelevant to the other.[vii] Kant also saw this and the whole of his critical system affirmed it and yet philosophers, scientists, and theologians have equally failed to heed the lesson.

An outline of Plato’s position on knowledge and reality

The Socratic radical distinction between the intelligible and the sensible realms remained the basis of Plato’s philosophical outlook.[viii] For Plato, the intelligible realm was the realm of reality. He equated ousia, to on, alêtheia with the intelligible. The sensible world, the whole of the natural world with its phenomenal manifestations, ceaselessly changing and shot through and through with relativity, could not be but a world of shadows. This is the message of the famous Allegory of the Cave. In the Phaedo we are told that when we try to acquire knowledge through the bodily senses, the mind is dragged by the body into the realm of the changeable, and loses its way and becomes confused, but when it investigates by itself, it passes into the realm of what is pure.[ix]

In the Republic Plato gives an account of the philosophic ascent from the mutability and relativity of the sensible world to the contemplation of what is real in the realm of pure ideas. Then he represents the levels of knowledge possible to human beings in the graphic image of the Divided Line. Briefly, we have different levels of knowledge on two planes, that of the real and intelligible on the one hand, and that of the phenomenal, less real and less knowable, on the other hand. The divisions of the line representing these two levels are further each divided into two sections. In the lower section of the lower division we have images or illusions, and in the higher section we can have perceptions and opinions. On the intelligible plane, employing forms, we can have scientific knowledge of perceptible things on the lower level, and we can have a purer form of knowledge concerned with first principles on the higher level.

But for Plato that highest knowledge concerned with first principles, which is philosophy proper, cannot aspire to the possession of absolute or final truth. The intelligible realm is the realm of reality and we learn in the Republic that the apex and crown of that realm is the Form of the Good. That is the highest reality that philosophical thinking can lead to. But Socrates in the Republic cannot give an account of the Form of the Good. He can only give a simile. The Good is to mind and the intelligible as the sun is to sight and the visible. It is the cause of knowledge and truth but is beyond the reach of knowledge and truth. Thus just as the only outcome of the Socratic elenctic examination is to lead us to look within our mind, so for Plato all search for reality leads us back – not to mind as an abstract concept – but to the activity of the mind, the exercise of intelligence, as the only reality we know. Yet all representation of philosophical insight in determinate conceptual formulations must necessarily be imperfect. If we rest content with it, if we accept it as final, it turns into falsehood. Thus in the Phaedrus[x] and in the Seventh Letter[xi] we are told in the plainest terms that the profoundest insights cannot be expressed in a fixed formula of words. Therefore all philosophical formulations must be subjected to dialectical criticism which bares and destroys their conceptual presuppositions.[xii] This is the only way for the mind to remain alive.

An abstract of Kant’s critical system

In this essay I will not examine the argument of Kant’s Critique or subject his highly intricate analyses and deductions to criticism: all of these are accidental accretions to what is essential in Kant. I will not be so heartless as to echo Nietzsche’s lambasting of the “tartuffery, as stiff as it is virtuous, of old Kant as he lures us along the dialectical bypaths which lead, more correctly, mislead, to his ‘categorical imperative’ …”[xiii], but I will say that Kant’s laborious analyses and rigorous deductions do more to obscure his essential insights than to clarify them. Every philosopher arrives at (or adopts from another) his ‘conclusions’ first and then works out arguments to support them. No philosopher worth his salt has ever reached his most important positions by reasoning from neutral premisses.

The legend of Kant’s overnight awakening from his dogmatic slumber thanks to Hume, which was initiated by Kant himself in the Introduction to Prolegomena to Any Fiture Metaphysics, can be misleading. It is important to be clear about what Kant meant in speaking of his ‘dogmatic slumber’. Kant had his early schooling in philosophy at the hands of the Rationalists. He was influenced by Leibniz and Wolff who, in common with Descartes, believed that the world could be known a priori through analysis of ideas and logical deduction. It is this reliance on pure ideas for yielding knowledge of the outside world that Kant came, under the shock of Humean scepticism, to reject and to dub ‘dogmatic’. But he did not forgo his conviction in the active role of the mind. In place of Descartes’s innate ideas, he introduced transcendental forms, transcendental categories, and Ideas of pure reason. His inaugural dissertation was entitled “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World”. That was in 1770, eleven years before publication of the first Critique in 1781. No doubt the insight that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”[xiv] was then nascent in his mind even if not explicitly formulated yet.

Locke and Hume discounted the activity of the mind in their accounts of human understanding. Even Berkeley, for whom phenomenal things could only be for a mind, did not lay stress on the activity of the human mind and had to seek security for the being of the phenomenal in the mind of God. Kant had to remind us that without the activity of the human mind there can be no science, no knowledge, no understanding. Thus the first step towards achieving the double-goal of, on the one hand, getting rid of dogmatism, and, on the other hand, escaping Humean scepticism, was to reject Locke’s tabula rasa which Hume had accepted without question. Hence Kant sets on erecting the magnificent edifice of his critical system by proposing that human cognition has two sources, sensibility and the understanding: through sensibility we are presented with objects, but it is through the understanding that we think these objects.[xv] He finds that time and space, which Newton regarded as objective entities containing things, are forms contributed by the mind, and asserts that even sensible perception is only possible through synthesis under the categories of the understanding, so that “the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience, and are thus also valid a priori of all objects of experience.”[xvi] The human mind is active and contributes to knowledge at all levels, from simple perception to the highest levels of theoretical thinking. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique Kant says that whoever first demonstrated a geometrical proposition found that “in order to know something securely a priori he had to ascribe to the thing nothing except what followed necessarily from what he himself had put into it in accordance with its concept.”[xvii] The revolution brought about in the study of nature was due to “the inspiration that what reason … has to learn from nature, it has to seek in the latter … in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature.”[xviii]

In the first edition of the Critique Kant underlined in bold terms the role of the mind in actively forming our knowledge of the natural world: It is our own mind that confers on appearances the order and regularirty through which the chaotic presentations of our experience are turned into what we call nature.[xix] Thus the understanding, strictly speaking, legislates for nature, so that “without understanding there would not be any nature at all ..”[xx] In so far as human experience is concerned “the understanding is itself the source of the laws of nature.”[xxi] Kant found it necessary to re-write this whole section in the second edition. It was so shocking for both the rationalist and the empiricist frames of mind.

The empiricist position maintains that true statements are of two kinds only. They are either (a) empirical statements verifiable by observation and experiment or (b) analytical statements. Apart from these there are no true statements. To save mathematical propositions which were too important, practically, to be dumped, empiricists considered them to be analytical. Kant re-classified statements into three kinds. He went along with the empiricists in admitting analytical statements (which are only useful for clarification but do not add to our knowledge) and empirically verifiable statements which Kant termed synthetic a posteriori statements. In addition to these he maintained that there are synthetic a priori statements. He found the prime example of such statements in mathematical propositions, which the empiricits had considered as analytical. Kant, agreeing with Plato (whether consciously or unconsciously) said that 5 + 7 = 12 is not analytical but synthetical. This led him to raise the question how such synthetic a priori statements are possible. The answer he found was that the mind contributes forms, concepts, and principles that join distinct elements synthetically. Not only does the mind join 5 and 7 in the original form 12; the mind also joins an antecedent and a consequent event – which Hume saw as succeding each other without any necessary connection – under the form of causality, which decrees that the cause must be followed by its effect and that the effect must have had a cause.

This was the substance of what Kant announced as his ‘Copernican revolution’. While earlier it had been assumed by thinkers that “all our cognition must conform to objects”, he suggested that we “try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.”[xxii] But this is nothing but the Platonic principle that all knowledge – including empirical knowledge down to simple sensible perception – rests on ideas born in the mind. Here we have the same insight: that all things are only intelligible in virtue of the forms engendered in and by the mind; that concepts of relationship, identity, causation, etc., are not found in the natural world; they are contributed by the mind.

The first foundation of Kant’s epistemology, then, is the distinction between the sensibility and the understanding. The sensibility receives its content from the natural world, but this content only yields knowledge when subjected to the forms of the understanding, which forms do not come from the outside world but are provided by the mind. But the knowledge we thus obtain of the world is knowledge of the world as it appears to us under the garb supplied by our own mind. The concepts of the understanding, for all their vital importance, can only give us knowledge of objects in space and time, which are themselves not objective but are modes of our sensibility or, in Kant’s terminology, forms of intuition. It follows that “everything that the understanding draws out of itself, without borrowing it from experience, it nevertheless has solely for the sake of use in experience.”[xxiii] The understanding with its concepts and categories must be kept apart from the pure transcendental ideas of reason. We err when we try to apply the concepts and categories of the understanding – time, space, causality – to the final ground of things or the ultimate origin of things, which are beyond the range of all possible experience.

We need not at this point busy ourselves with the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. What is of consequence, under these conditions, is that all we can know a priori (= independently of experience, = by pure reason) is of the world as it may present itself to us under the forms of the understanding. This is the limit of our knowledge of the natural world: we know the immediate presentations of our experience and we can make judgment of possible presentations of our experience. Thus Kant heads section 22 of the second-edition version of the ‘transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding’ with the rubric: “The category has no other use for the cognition of things than its application to objects of experience”[xxiv], and opens the following section with the words: “The above proposition is of the greatest importance, for it determines the boundaries of the use of the pure concepts of the understanding in regard to objects.”[xxv]

In the Transcendental Dialectic[xxvi] Kant sets out to clear away the illusions of dogmatic metaphysics and theology. Thus in the extensive and laboriously argued Antinomy of Pure Reason Kant shows that, taking the concepts of the understanding – the mathematical notions and the principle of causality – which serve us so well in dealing with the phenomena of nature and employing them as abstract concepts without experiential content, we can build up logically valid inferential sequences yielding mutually contradictory propositions. He thus shows that the traditionally conflicting theological and metaphysical positions relating to the fundamental nature and ultimate cause of things that had been hotly debated for millennia could all be plausibly proved and disproved at the same time. What we must conclude from this is that these theological and metaphysical questions can neither be settled by the methods of empirical science, being beyond the scope of experience, nor by the procedures of pure reason.

As opposed to the concepts of the understanding, the concepts of reason, which Kant calls transcendental ideas, are concepts “to which no congruent object can be given in the senses.”[xxvii] While the concepts of the understanding bring about the synthetic unity of representations, the transcendental ideas of pure reason produce “the unconditioned synthetic unity of all conditions in general.”[xxviii] Kant brings all transcendental ideas under three classes: (a) the absolute (unconditioned) unity of the thinking subject, (b) the absolute unity of the series of conditions of appearances, (c) the absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought in general.[xxix] These translate into: (a) the idea of the self, (b) the idea of the world, and (c) the idea of the ultimate ground and origin of all being, or, using Platonic terms, into: (a) psuchê, (b) phusis, (c) to on. These transcendental ideas, according to Kant, have no application in experience and are thus of no theoretical utility. On the plane of theoretical thought, our only gain in being aware of them would be the negative (yet very important) one of avoiding the error of drawing from them judgments relating to the phenomenal world. However, Kant found employment for them in the postulates of practical reason: of this I will have more to say in what follows.

The end-result of all of Kant’s Herculean endeavours – and his system is truly an edifice that only a Hercules of Thought could have erected – was to re-state in more complex terms what Plato had already said: All that we know of the objective world, of the world of nature, we only know by means of and in the light of ideas engendered in and by the mind; that the mind-generated ideas that transform for us the world of shadows into an intelligible realm relate only to that actual world of shadows. Kant takes us on an exhilarating journey through the realms of the mind, but in the end, to me at at any rate, adds nothing to what I find in Plato’s Republic – and I find Plato’s account simpler, profounder, more inspiring, and less open to contradiction.

Kant expected his Critique of Pure Reason to bring about a complete change of thinking. His expectation was not unreasonable, and yet, even now, more than two hundred years after publication of the Critique, it is far from fulfilled. Despite the massive scholarly work done on Kant’s philosophy, philosophers are in as deep a ‘dogmatic slumber’ as before Kant completed the structure for which Hume had levelled the ground. The lesson has not been learnt: theologians and scientists on different sides and in opposite directions glibly and in all confidence believe themselves able to determine what is beyond experience by sheer reasoning. Not only do we find theologians arguing about God and immortality but we also find scientists seriously seeking to discover the ultimate origin of the world, an origin which, if in time, can never be the origin but must always have something preceding it as its ground and origin, and if outside time, cannot be subject to empirical criteria and empirical methodology and consequently does not lie within the scope of objective knowledge. They fail to see that all of human knowledge is comprehended exhaustively in two spheres: on the one hand we have factual information about phenomenal presentations and on the other hand we have awareness of the living, creative, inner reality of the mind. The one sphere is that of science which teaches us the what and the how but never the why of things, and the other sphere is that of poetry and art and philosophy in which our spiritual essence affirms its reality in living its own creativity.

Kant hoped to make of metaphysics a ‘secure science’, and indeed thought he did. That was the error that obscured his great insight — the insight that should have put philosophy on the true path. Science and theology together had conspired to bury the Socratic insight under heaps of brilliant knowledge and mountains of dazzling theoretical speculation. That went on for some twenty-two centuries. Then came Kant and after much knocking about he saw what Socrates had seen. But he constructed around the vital insight a massive edifice of analyses and deductions and architectonics, and scholars busied themselves studying the majestic surrounding structure – Kant’s cherished science –, admiring it or finding fault with its details, and both admirers and fault-finders lost sight of the treasure that lay hid within.

Criticism of certain aspects of Kant’s critical system

Kant seeks to deduce the a priori grounds for the possibility of experience. If we do not start from the self-evidence of intelligent experience as the ground of all understanding and all knowledge, we keep vainly going round and round in our epistemological and psychological theorizing. But if we start from the activity of the mind as a self-evident reality, then no argument and no proof are needed. By arguing for this, by advancing proofs for this, Kant was turning the mind into an objective, observable, analyzable thing, and was thus equally with the empiricists, opening the door for reductionists to throw the reality of the mind behind their backs. To my mind, the totality of our experience is what we know. The immediacy of intelligible living experience is the starting point, the springboard, for all thought.

After representing space and time as forms of intuition, Kant goes on, in the Analytic of Concepts, to argue that there are a priori categories that we apply to the natural world. Kant ‘deduces’ the complete set of these categories, arranging them in four groups, each containing three categories, making a total of twelve fixed categories.[xxx] Kant created for himself and for others unnecessary difficulties by limiting the contribution of the mind to fixed forms of intuition and fixed categories. Despite his sophisticated deductions and proofs, there is no necessity and no finality attaching to Kant’s Categories any more than to Aristotle’s, which Kant criticizes. Both thinkers overlooked that their sets of categories were merely a convenient classification of the kinds of concepts, as good as but no better than the grammatical classification of the ‘parts of speech’. That Kant’s categories were metaphysical while Aristotle’s were logical is beside the point. Both great thinkers were seduced by their fondness for the neat and finished.

All of Kant’s transcendental arguments, all of his elaborate analyses and deductions, can be replaced by a descriptive account of a world-view and a special universe of discourse that can exist side by side with other world-views and universes of discourse. Witness how radically distinct cultures embody concepts that are strictly untranslatable into each other. Even languages which are not widely different from each other contain concepts which cannot be translated into each other without some distortion. Every language is a special universe of discourse through which speakers of that language live out their special life as human beings.

In his ‘refutation of material idealism’, Kant offers to prove the existence of objects in space outside us. The proof runs as follows: I am conscious of my existence as determined in time, which presupposes something persistent in perception; but this cannot be something in me, since my own existence in time can only be determined through this persistent thing. “Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only by means of the existence of actual things that I perceive outside myself.”[xxxi] As a proof this is dubious; it is much better to present this as a creative idea. What I am aware of, what a new-born baby is aware of, what a pup is aware of, is the experiential continuum. By dividing this continuum into self and other than self, I become a person surrounded by an external world; the baby becomes a person surrounded by an external world; the pup may perhaps never achieves that separation and thus remains an undistinguished part of the continuum.

Kant says that inner sense “by means of which the mind intuits itself, or its inner state, gives … no intuition of the soul itself, as an object.”[xxxii] No wonder Kant finds a difficulty in the question “how a subject can internally intuit itself”. This is a difficulty in which Kant needlessly entangles himself. He speaks of the consciousness of the self in the representation ‘I’ and asserts that it is no intuition but only an intellectual representation of “the self-activity of a thinking subject.”[xxxiii] Since he chooses to speak of ‘the representation I’, then naturally to call that an intuition would be a contradiction in terms. But by refusing to break through the merely intellectual representation to the reality of the “self-activity of a thinking subject”, he renders himself powerless to extricate himself from the difficulty. He finds that inner sense “presents even ourselves to consciousness only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves, since we intuit ourselves only as we are internally affected, which seems to be contradictory, since we would have to relate to ourselves passively”.[xxxiv] What a maze of confusion! What a Gordian knot! But the knot can be broken at one blow by simply saying that our inner sense is ourselves. Kant continues the lines I quoted above to say that the difficulty he indicated is the reason why systems of psychology treat inner sense as the same as the faculty of apperception which, he reminds us, he carefully distinguishes. He does not see that it is by making too much of this distinction between apperception and inner sense that he creates difficulties for his system. On the one hand inner sense presents ourselves to ourselves “as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves’, and on the other hand apperception, to which Kant seemingly assigns a crucial position in his system, becomes a mere conceptual construct.

The transcendental unity of apperception – had not Kant thus rendered it sapless and lifeless – would be the most important notion, the most fundamental principle in Kant’s philosophy, being the final condition of the possibility of experience. But this is not something to be deduced or proved. It is Kant’s attempt to deduce or to prove this that lays his system open to criticism and obscures the great insight at the heart of his philosophy. The transcendental unity of apperception – that frightful mouthful – is simply the reality of the mind, is the nous, the phronêsis, which, for Plato, is the primal self-evident reality, the reality from which all knowledge springs, in which all awareness is grounded. Unless we start from the reality of the mind, of the transcendental unity of apperception, we cannot escape Hume’s destruction of rational knowledge, and cannot find any meaning in the world.

Our philosophers of mind and philosophizing neuroscientists, accepting with Kant that what he calls apperception cannot be an object, and, with him, failing to see that it is just because it is our inner reality that it cannot be objectified, end by turning it into a negligible epiphenomenon, a species of mental gossamer. This inner sense by which the mind ‘intuits itself’, is the only reality known to us immediately, transcending all the transient phenomenal givennesses, and it can never be given as an object, since subjectivity is its essence. This is the reality that empiricists and reductionists deny us; it is the reality that baffles all their efforts to represent the mind as something observable and measurable. This is the reality in which Socrates and Plato saw our distinctive character and our whole worth as human beings.

There are those who tell us that it is our neurons that determine our thinking, our behaviour, our will. With the advancement of research we will no doubt continue to find more and more concomitant incidences of brain states on the one hand and expressed thought and performed action on the other hand. But, I venture to assert, we will never understand how brain states produce thought and action. Well, nevertheless, let us say that I am my brain; I will not here make a bone of contention even of that. It is enough for me if we find that the act of thinking is what is real. But thinking is not a concatenation of Humean ideas. Thinking is an integrated, autonomous activity. And it is in that activity that I find my reality, and it is the inwardness of that activity that I call my mind, my self, my psuchê. Thus,
granted that I am my brain; still, my brain is a relatively autonomous organism,[xxxv] and it is the inwardness of that autonomous organism that is my reality, my mind, my soul. And that inwardness is what I call subjectivity. The intelligent mind is not aware of its reality; its reality is its awareness.

In the “Remark on the Third Antinomy” Kant says that though the thesis affirming that “the faculty of beginning a series in time entirely on its own (von selbst)” is proved, yet “no insight into it is achieved.”[xxxvi] To my mind this reveals a serious and seriously damaging fault in conventional philosophic thinking — that it needlessly limits its purview to discursive thought. Otherwise I don’t see how any intelligent person can say that we have no insight into spontaneous origination when every sentence we utter, let alone every poem or song or tale, is an instance of creativity, is an instance of a directly experienced act of creation. — Kant, in whose system the term ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) features prominently, narrows and depletes the notion and removes it from the richest and profoundest areas of our experience.

Similarly, when Kant says that “reason creates the idea of a spontaneity, which could start to act from itself, without needing to be preceded by any other cause that in turn determines it to action according to the law of causal connection”,[xxxvii] I would say rather that reason does not create for itself the idea of spontaneity as it creates for itself the idea of causality. It knows the reality of spontaneity in the immediacy of awareness. Causality is a working fiction; spontaneity is a lived reality, an aspect of our inner reality.

“The final aim”, Kant says, “to which in the end the speculation of reason in its transcendental use is directed concerns three objects: the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God.”[xxxviii] Pure philosophy is concerned with these three problems. These in turn boil down to the question of what is to be done “if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world.”[xxxix] Kant not only narrows the scope of ‘pure philosophy’ unncessarily, but, more seriously, harms the autonomy and degrades the worth of the moral life. Philosophy is not concerned with ‘what is to be done IF etc.’ but with what is to be done SINCE we are creative intelligent beings that have insight into the ideals of eternity, reality, and goodness, ideals which are real in us and which constitute our reality and our worth. Since we are intelligent, creative beings, since that is our proper character and our true worth, if we understand ourselves as such, there is nothing for us but to live as such. Only that is wholesome for us. That is what Socrates and that is what Plato taught: our true worth, our true well-being, is to live intelligently, is to care for and to preserve that in us which thrives by doing what is consistent with intelligence and is harmed by doing what is inconsistent with intelligence: that is the sum of Socrates’ life, that is the gist of the whole of Plato’s philosophy. It takes away from this to be good because there is a God, to do good because there is a future life. Plato may or may not have believed in a future life, but he, following Socrates, most emphatically held that we must be good because only in being good are we true to ourslves, only by being good do we live the life proper to a human being, a being whose proper character is intelligence. That is why we should not (cannot, rather, if we are true to our humanity) live in deception, that is why we should not follow false or illusory values. And that is the sum of morality.

Kant sums up the interest of reason, speculative and practical, in the following three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What should I do? (3) What may I hope?[xl] I answer these questions as follows: (1) I can know (a) the appearances of things in the outer world, without penetrating to their essence, or origin, or purpose, and (b) the realities within me, principally my own inner reality. (2) I should value, care for, preserve my proper reality as active, creative, intelligence, and should take care not to harm or damage that reality. (3) Any hope beyond my present life is delusion, and in my present life, I may seek to live pleasantly, quietly, happily, but to think that it is in my power to secure that is folly. I cannot expect happiness, and to make happiness a prime end can lead to injury to my only certain good, the integrity of my inner reality.

Kant believed he had spoken the last word in philosophy. He was wrong, not due to any defect in his system, but because there is no last word in philosophy. The philosophical endeavour is even more radically insusceptible to completion than the scientific endeavour. Not only must philosophy remain an ever-renewed expression of the reality within us, but philosophy is also necessitated by its own central principle ever to destroy the foundations of its structures — Penelope-like, to be true to her own heart and to her absent lord, ever to unweave by day what she wove by night.

Kant’s violation of the limits of pure reason

On the strength of the separation between the understanding, which applies concepts to phenomena, and pure reason, which reflects on its own ideas, pure reason is found incompetent to pass judgment on the outer world. Yet Kant makes Practical Reason, which should be concerned solely with moral issues, rule on questions beyond its legitimate jurisdiction. Further, in the Critique of Judgment, having given us an area for ‘determinative judgment’ where we have empirical knowledge and another area for ‘reflective judgment’ which yields ‘regulative principles’, Kant inconsistently goes on to make the regulative principles of reflective judgment yield knowledge about God and the immortality of the soul, knowledge which he had shown lies outside the purview both of pure reason and of empirical knowledge.

Thus Kant’s inability to shed off the residue of religious belief harms his philosophical position. He avers that moral belief has an inescapably fixed end and that the only condition under which this end is consistent with all ends as a whole is that there be a God and a future world.[xli] He thus negates the autonomy of morality and turns the categorical imperative (whether he had formulated it at this stage or not is of no consequence) into a conditioned, contingent maxim. Kant condemns himself to live with a split mind when he seeks to combine the above statement with “moral principles … which I cannot renounce without becoming contemptible in my own eyes”, or to combine his determination to bellieve in the existence of God and a future life with his categorical denial of the possibility of knowing that there is a God and a future life. A God out there in the world can neither be discovered there by science nor installed there by reason — not even by Practical Reason. The only viable God must be a God confined within the bounds of the mind.

Kant says, “Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”[xlii] This can be and has been put to bad use by proponents of dogmatic religion. When Socrates renounced ‘knowledge’ he did not make room ‘for faith’ but ‘for intelligence’, for active, creative reason. When the mind transcends the limits of knowledge and works purely through pure concepts, it does not give us knowledge or belief – which is pseudo-knowledge – but gives us visions that have intrinsic intelligibility and inherent reality but which do not have and cannot aspire to have reference to objective actuality. The faith that Kant made room for, if Kant were to be consistent with himself, would not mean belief in a definite set of propositions. It would be the acknowledgment of rational ideals, ideals created by the mind, affirming the reality of creative intelligence.

In the Critique of Judgment (Section 88, “Restriction of the Validity of the Moral Proof), while acknowledging that the concept of a final purpose is “merely a concept of our practical reason” and that we cannot “apply it to cognition of nature”, Kant yet insists that “we have a moral basis for thinking that, since there is a world, there also is a final purpose of creation.”[xliii] Thus Kant continues to oscillate between acknowledging that pure reason, working solely with its pure ideas, cannot yield objective knowledge, and his desire to affirm the validity of the postulates of practical reason, between the strict consequences of his critical epistemology and his religious convictions. There is no way to unite these two drives in a common field of knowledge. In trying to accomplish this impossible feat Kant creates for himself an unresolvable dilemma and lays himself open to the charge of inconsistency. Apart from the empirical knowledge we have of the world by the procedures of the sciences, we can know nothing of the world outside us (which includes our own physical being). We can have no answer to ultimate questions when applied to the world. That is a limitation that we have to accept humbly. Theologians and scientists are equally deluded when they think they can answer such questions.

Kant allows practical reason “the right to assume something which it would in no way be warranted in presupposing in the field of mere speculation without sufficient grounds of proof; for all such presuppositions injure the perfection of speculation, about which, however, the practical interest does not trouble itself at all.”[xliv] But this concession, which Kant finds necessary in the interest of morality, not only breaches the integrity of the rational bieng, but is, besides being unjustified, actually unneeded. We have no need to assume the soul, the Good (Kant’s perfect being, God), the All, as objective entities. These are forms that give us, make us into, a reality we actually enjoy here and now within ouselves. Kant could not entirely free himself of the theological dream of a yonder and hereafter. Even Plato was not entirely free of that yearning. But to be completely rational and completely free we have to acknowledge that the only eternity we have a right to expect is the eternity of the supra-temporal reality we live ephemerally in our momentary life here and now. — We don’t have to assume or assert a reality outside us, for we have all the reality we need within us.

Beyond the illusions of pure reason

Kant’s ‘understanding’ corresponds to Plato’s dianoia, where the mind can legislate for the phenomenal world because what it may find in the world of regularity is only the order the mind itself confers on the world through ideas born in the mind. Here the mind finds meaning and order in the world as the world presents itself to the mind, but cannot go beyond the immediate presentations of the world. Yet beyond and above the dianoia, Plato had a place for nous, noêsis, phronêsis. Here the mind is not concerned with the phenomenal world but only with its own pure ideas, which are what is real in the truest sense. Kant too had a region of pure reason where the mind dealt with nothing but its own ideas, but Kant did not have the creative audacity of Plato that made of that region the realm of the highest Reality.

Kant tells us that “through the critique of our reason we finally know that we cannot in fact know anything at all in its pure and speculative use”,[xlv] in other words, through the ideas of pure reason alone and through the operations and processes of pure reason alone one cannot have factual, objective, knowledge. From a Platonic position, I readily admit that pure reason has nothing to do with objective truth. Pure reason produces visions of reality that create meaningful worlds within us, worlds in which we, as rational beings, live and move and have our proper human being. These visions are dreams, no more, but it is in these dreams, and only in these dreams, that we have our spiritual life, our spiritual reality. We are creators of worlds of our own and it is in these ideal worlds of ours that we have our worth and our glory or our misery and our perdition. Thus while, by means of reason pure and simple, unaided by empirical experience, we have no knowledge of objects, no objective knowledge, we do have a subjective life that has no need to go to the outside world for confirmation.

The pure transcendental ideas – the soul, the final origin of all things, freedom – are, according to Kant, natural to human reason, but they “effect a mere, but irresistible, illusion,” whose deception is hard to resist.[xlvi] The deception Kant wants us to guard against is the deception we fall to in theological or metaphysical speculation when we fancy that we can deduce from the ideas of pure reason the actual constitution of ultimate reality. Kant was right in warning us against the illusion of thinking that pure reason can give us factual knowledge about the world, the All, or ultimate reality. But in so doing Kant leaves us in want of something of the utmost importance for us as human beings. Though through ‘transcendental ideas’ we can never know the natural world, yet in them we comprehend the world. In the idea of ‘the absolute whole of appearances’ I do not take possession of the whole of appearances but I have possession of the idea of the Whole – an idea in which we humans transcend our ephemerality, our transience, our pettiness. When Thales said that the whole of phusis is water, he may have been speaking scientific nonsense (or making a crude start on the way to a scientific theory of the constituents of nature) but he was creating a vision through which he rose above the whole of space and the whole of time, and raised us with him. When Plato weaves of the intelligible forms a picture of the world, he is quick to tell us that the account he gives is no more than a ‘likely tale’, tôn eikotôn muthôn.[xlvii] The pure intelligible forms, which give us no objective knowledge, and which cannot be embodied in any definitive theoretical formulation are nevertheless the realm in which we have our intelligent being, in which we live intelligently and have our proper life as human beings. This is the spiritual realm which Kant’s transcendental system fails to account for. It is a mode of life, a plane of being, that has to be, and can only be, realized in constant creation of myth, acknowledged as myth, in art, in poetry, in metaphysical systems that declare themselves to be merely ‘likely tales’, and in the ideals of honour, friendship, loyalty, patriotism, which the cynic has no difficulty in showing to be one and all illusory. The cynic lives in the world of fact, the ‘deluded’ idealist lives in eternal reality.

Kant’s critical system undermines the Rationalists’ ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ which aspired to attain supersensible knowledge. But without metaphysics, without that ‘supersensible knowledge’, we are less than human. Human beings have an ingrained need to relate to the All; they have a need to see themselves whole; they have a need to find in their life and their being meaning and coherence. To live in a world that is not all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”, we need metaphysics, we need the idea of the All, the idea of the soul, the idea of freedom. These are creative ideas which give unity and meaningfullness to the insubstantial, transient givenness of the experiential stream. It is when we endue these ideas with objectivity, with independence of the intelligence that bred them, that we fall into illusion. I possess my soul, I live intelligently in my ideal world, I am in communion with the God – the absolute Reality – within me; but when I think of my soul as existing apart from my individuality, when I think I can know anything of the world as a whole other than as presented phenomenally in my experience, when I think I can discover a God other than the God within me, then I err. Plato would agree with Kant that objects can be given to us only in sensibility. But the highest order of knowledge for Plato is not knowledge of objects but is the insight of the mind (nous, phronêsis) into itself, disclosed in pure ideas engendered by the mind itself. It is true that Plato spoke of the immortality of the soul, of the origination of the cosmos, of a celestial sphere of eternal forms, of God and gods in the yonder and hereafter – in all of that Plato was a poet giving creative expression to the realities bred by the mind – it is in such dreams that the creative mind lives its own reality. That ‘supersensible knowledge’ was alone for Plato true epistêmê. The supersensible ideas and the Form of the Good that constitute the highest knowledge, are affirmed and expressed in thoughts and myths that must be constantly subjected to dialectic demolishing. In Plato the only reality that abides is phronêsis, the mind as pure creative activity.

Kant ends the section “On the impossibility of an ontological proof of God’s existence” with a short paragraph which shows clearly how Kant’s outlook falls short of Plato’s. After denouncing the futility of attempting to prove the existence of a highest being from concepts, Kant affirms that “a human being can no more become richer in insight from mere ideas than a merchant could in resources if he wanted to improve his financial state by adding a few zeros to his cash balance.”[xlviii] Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz, all had an inkling of a ‘truth of the heart’. We have the idea of a perfect being. That idea must be ‘real’. They sought to prove that by logical demonstration. Kant shows that their logic was faulty. Thus far he is in the right. But when he goes on to assert that a human being cannot “become richer in insight by mere ideas”, he misses something — indeed, I would say, he negates what is most important in the philosophical endeavour. Plato did not try to prove the ‘existence’ of the Form of the Good. He proclaimed that the Form of the Good is all that we know of what is truly real. Our conception of the Good is what gives us reality, what makes us real. While on a lower plane the ideas engendered in the mind shed intelligibility on the phenomenal world, on a higher plane, philosophy, in its pure use, gives us insight into and understanding of the life of intelligence in us that is the only real thing we know. Philosophy gives us ourselves, gives us our reality.

Metaphysics at its best is mythologizing — a mythologizing that affirms the reality of creative intelligence. It is this that vouchsafes its rationality. Formally, the rationality of such mythologizing consists in its intelligibility, its intrinsic coherence. I understand dialectic not as logical deduction and demonstration, but, with the Plato of the Republic, as the annihilation of all the grounds of our reasoning[xlix] — an annihilation that leaves us with nothing but the pure activity of creative reasoning itself, with pure creative inteligence as the final reality.

Shakespeare takes a silly and improbable story as the framework for a play and then makes us live through passions, emotions, and reflections more real than much of what we encounter or experience in the ‘real’ world. This is akin to what philosophers who engage in metaphysical system-building do: they create for us ideal worlds endowed with meaningfullness.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt, 16 February 2008
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
E-mail: dkhashaba@yahoo.com

[i] Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
[ii] Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.
[iii] See my Plato: An Interpretation (2005), ch. 3 “The Socratic Elenchus”.
[iv] Parmenides 130e.
[v] Phaedo 95e-101e.
[vi] My own usage of the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ differs from Kant’s, but in discussing Kant’s position the terms have the sense given them by Kant. I have to ask the reader’s indulgence for this discrepancy.
[vii] For a fuller discussion see my Plato: An Interpretation, pp.126-129.
[viii] Those who speak of a so-called Theory of Forms of the youthful Plato that he discarded in his later years are misled by Aristotle who constructed the putative ‘theory’ out of Plato’s experimentations with encapsulating the basic insight in a verbal formula, experimentations with the outcome of none of which Plato could rest satisfied. Once more I have to refer the reader to my Plao: An Interpretation, ch.1, pp.30-44, and ch.5, pp.117-122. (What other members of the Academy made of the ‘theory’ is another matter.)
[ix] Phaedo 79c-d.
[x] Phaedrus 247b-278e.
[xi] Plato’s Seventh Letter 341c-344a.
[xii] Republic 533c.
[xiii] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I.5, tr. R. J. Hollingdale.
[xiv] A51, B75, p.193-4.
[xv] Introduction, A15, B29, p.135 and pp.151-2.
[xvi] B161, p.262.
[xvii] Bxii, p.108.
[xviii] Bxiii, p.109.
[xix] A125, p.241.
[xx] A126, p.242.
[xxi] A127, p.242.
[xxii] Preface to the second edition, Bxvi, p.110.
[xxiii] A236, B295, pp.354-5.
[xxiv] B146, p.254.
[xxv] B148, p.255.
[xxvi] Kant, agreeing with Aristotle’s usage, takes dialectic to be a logic of illusion (Schein). This is diametrically opposed to Plato’s usage, where dialectic (in the Republic anyhow) is the highest level of philosophizing. It is best to keep the difference within its proper limits as a different choice of terminology.
[xxvii] A327, B383, p.402.
[xxviii] A334, B391, p.405.
[xxix] A334, B391, pp.405-6.
[xxx] A70, B95, p.206.
[xxxi] B275-6, p.327.
[xxxii] A22, B37, p.157 and p.174.
[xxxiii] B278, p.328.
[xxxiv] B152-3, p.257.
[xxxv] Since we are part of the universe there is no absolute autonomy for any particular thing.
[xxxvi] A450, B478, p.486.
[xxxvii] A533, B561, p.533.
[xxxviii] A798, B826, p.673.
[xxxix] A800, B828, pp.674-5.
[xl] A805, B833, p.677.
[xli] A828, B856, p.689.
[xlii] Preface to the second edition, Bxxx, p.117.
[xliii] Ak.454-5, p.345.
[xliv] A776, B804, p.662.
[xlv] A769, B797, pp.658-9.
[xlvi] A642, B670, p.590.
[xlvii] Timaeus 59c.
[xlviii] A602, B630, p.569.
[xlix] Republic 533c-d.

An Apology for Naive Philosophy

2007-12-19T01:49:00.000-08:00

AN APOLOGY FOR NAÏVE PHILOSOPHY
D. R. Khashaba

The following sketchy note will be found by many ambiguous and by many more wrong-headed. I offer it as a provocation and a challenge, no more.

If Socrates were to come back into our world and were invited to partake of the rich fare offered by our present-day philosophy departments with their numerous and continuously increasing disciplines, I believe that he would answer with words similar to those Plato makes him say, though in a different context: “I have no leisure for such inquiries. Because, my friend, I am unable yet to comply with the Delphian injunction to know myself. It would be ludicrous, while ignorant of this, to examine things which are not my concern. I leave such inquiries alone and, instead, examine myself.” [See Phaedrus, 229e-230a.] Not that he would belittle these sophisticated disciplines and studies, but he would simply say, as he said of physical inquiries in the ‘autobiographical’ passage in the Phaedo, that they are not his concern. For in that passage, Socrates draws a line between inquiry into nature, which is the concern of science, and the examination of one’s own mind, which is the proper concern of philosophy. He considers these as two completely independent domains.

You might say that Socrates should find in such a discipline as the philosophy of mind, with or without the support of neuroscience, something answering to his quest for self-knowledge. No, Socrates would say; the philosophy of mind makes of mind an object to be known by observation and objective analysis. The self-knowledge sought by Socrates is a probing within one’s soul — to use the word Socrates would have used but which has now become suspect, a probing of the subject and not of the object. Philosophy of mind, no less than psychology as it is now studied, no less than neuroscience, is a science that may give us much valuable objective knowledge, even knowledge about ourselves, but does not give us any understanding of ourselves.

What if Socrates were asked what he thought about Experimental Philosophy? Let me answer for him: Nothing in human life or human activity is clear-cut and hermetically sealed. (I am not contradicting what I said above.) So I will not say that the ‘experimental philosophy’ has no connection with philosophy. But it is not of the essence of philosophy. In philosophy proper we probe ourselves, we examine our values, and, most importantly, our presuppositions. A ‘philosophical experiment’ just like any chance event in life, may shock us into looking at a dormant or a gloomy nook of our thought. But it is not the ‘philosophical experiment’ or the outcome of the experiment that is philosophy; it is the incidentally triggered reflection and self-examination. A philosopher can derive as much good from observing and experimenting as he can from taking a good walk or a refreshing swim — positive good, no doubt; but equally accidental in both cases; it does not mean we may turn philosophy into a science: that way we lose much more than we gain.

But Plato, you might say, did not stop short at Socratic self-examination. He soared high into metaphysics. True. Plato caught from Parmenides the yearning for absolute reality. But where did he find absolute reality? Ultimately in the Form of the Good, which is nothing but our idea and our ideal of the highest goodness and the highest understanding. An idea and an ideal. When ‘Socrates’ is asked in the Republic to say what the Form of the Good is, he takes refuge in allegory. Plato knew that the reality sought by the philosopher is not be found outside of us and that the reality within us cannot be objectified except in allegory and myth — allegory and myth which the mind must create because that is its means to be in touch with its inner reality but must also destroy to remain free of superstition. In the Republic Plato relegates all natural science to the lower segment of the higher division of the Divided Line. He knew that any objective knowledge that presumed to transcend the shadows of the phenomenal world is illusion. That is my reading of the Republic Books V-VII, which is the crown of Plato’s philosophy in my view. If it sounds enigmatic in this condensed paragraph, my excuse is that what I tried to expound in book after book cannot be put more clearly in a few lines.

To return to the topic of sophisticated and naïve philosophy, I would say that what is presented in philosophy departments of universities today may be very good science but it is as far removed from philosophy as biology or astrophysics. Indeed, the best philosophy today may be found in literary essays, in fiction, in poetry, but not in academic dissertations on philosophy, least of all in academic dissertations on Plato and his philosophy.

Every time I see philosophy defined as the science of this or the science of that, I feel enraged. The sciences pursued by academic philosophers study the object, even if that object is the mind objectified; philosophy proper examines the subject, is concerned with our inner reality.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt
December 2007.
E-mail: dkhashaba@yahoo.com
Website: http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
Weblog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com

NIETZSCHE, SCHOPENHAUER, FREE WILL: A NOTE

2007-12-09T01:36:00.000-08:00

NIETZSCHE ON SCHOPENHAUER AND FREE WILL: A NOTE

Nietzsche finds fault with Schopenhauer’s conception of the Will. He writes: “Die Philosophen pflegen vom Willen zu reden, wie als ob er die bekannteste Sache von der Welt sei; ja Schopenhauer gab zu verstehen, der Wille allein sei uns eigentlich bekannt, ganz und gar bekannt, ohne Abzug und Zuthat bekannt.” (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, I.19.) [“Philosophers are given to speaking of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the world; Schopenhauer, indeed, would have us understand that the will alone is truly known to us, known completely, known without deduction or addition.” (tr. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics.)] Nietzsche fails to understand Schopenhauer’s position and the reason for that failure was that – like almost all who dealt and deal with the problem of free will – he confounded free will with choice and conation in gneral, what we might term volition. All volition, including choice, is conditioned and Nietzsche’s analysis in the section from which I have quoted the above lines is perceptive and just, but it misses the point of Schopenhauer’s principle. For Schopenhauer the Will is the primordial force that is one with life, one with nature. As such it is, as Schopenhauer holds, known to us immediately. I say that the mind is the one reality known to us immediately. But the mind is creative and active and Schopenhauer chooses to see it in its aspect as will. The action of the will, in my interpretation, while subject to the principle of sufficient reason, is not pre-determined. It is spontaneous and creative. A poet, a mother tending or defending her baby, a lover expressing his love in word or gesture, do not exercise choice, they have no choice, but they act freely: their action is originative and could not be predicted by a god or anticipated by a computer that possessed full knowledge of the state of the world the instant before the act. This is the freedom that Spinoza equated with autonomy, except that Spinoza, crippled by his rigid Cartesian rationalism, had no place for creativity or originality. This is the position that I put forward in “Free Will as Creativity” and that I think is needed to put an end to the endless quandaries of the Free Will controversy.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, 9 December 2007.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH DARWINISM?

2007-10-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

WHAT’S WRONG WITH DARWINISM?
D. R. Khashaba

I have lately been reading, for the first time, Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, first published in 1921.(1) In the long preface Shaw comments on the Darwinist-Creationist controversy of his day in a manner which is still relevant to the debate as it is currently waged.

Shaw begins by pointing out a truth that is generally obliterated in the current controversies, namely that Darwin was not the originator of the idea or theory of evolution. Darwinism – whether as originally propounded by Charles Darwin or as what it has become now – is a special theory of eveolution or a special chapter in the general theory of evolution. Among the many ancient and modern forerunners in the field, Shaw cites Goethe who “said that all the shapes of creation were cousins; that there must be some common stock from which all the species had sprung; that it was the environment of air that had produced the eagle, of water the seal, and of earth the mole.” Shaw then quotes Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, who, in a book published in 1794 says, “The world has been evolved, not created; it has arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come into being at an almighty word.” (p.xvi)

Shaw was not primarily concerned to criticize Darwinism as the scientific theory it was in Darwin’s work but as the philosophy of materialism and mechanism, of cut-throat competition and unfeeling struggle for survival that was appended to Darwinism by nineteenth century thought. He describes the atmosphere of thought in his day: “We were intellectually intoxicated with the idea that the world could make itself without design, purpose, skill, or intelligence: in short, without life.” (p.xxxvi) He goes on to say:

“We took a perverse pleasure in arguing, without the least suspicion that we were reducing ourselves to absurdity, that all the books in the British Museum library might have been written word for word as they stand on the shelves if no human being had ever been conscious, just as the trees stand in the forest doing wonderful things without consciousness.” (p.xxxvii)

For myself, I do not even care to quarrel with, or to charge with absurdity, one who maintains that physical elements tumbling and knocking blindly through trillions of years might produce Hamlet and Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and all that is good and all that is trash on the WWW. All that, in itself, would be dead, lifeless, meaningless. But a single conscious individual reacting intelligently to Hamlet, moved by Beethoven’s music, or feeling indignant at some imbecility on the WWW faces me with a reality that is other than the physical world. This reality, however it may have come about, is what I find meaningful, and it is in this reality that I find life and value and true being. And I cannot think of this reality as a by-product of anything that is without life and without intelligence. To me any existence devoid of life and intelligence is simply unintelligible. To me the fact that is elemental and ineradicable is not the world that presses on me from outside — it is something closer home; it is this life and awareness and will that is on the inside. And I believe that this life and intelligence in which alone I find meaningfulness is fundamental and ultimate.

Shaw, in opposing Darwinism or the Neo-Darwinism of his day, advocates a version of Lamarck’s theory. He writes that to one who “tells you that you are a product of Circumstantial Selection solely” you may offer “the counter-assurance that you are the product of Lamarckian evolution, formerly called Functional Adaptation and now Creative Evolution, and challenge him to disprove that, which he can no more do than you can disprove Circumstantial Selection, both forces being conceivably able to produce anything if you only give them rope enough.” (xxxviii)

This challenge, as I see it, involves the same confusion that vitiates the current controversies between the Darwinists and the Creationists or their present-day successors, the Intelligent Design advocates. Shaw, in my view, errs in treating the vitalism that may underlie Lamarck’s theory, Schopenhauer’s Will, Bergson’s Creative Evolution, as on a par with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. (Curiously, Shaw, while speaking of Creative Evolution and even using the expression Élan Vital, does not mention Bergson anywhere in his book.) Darwin describes a method, an observed process, which may or may not be seen as adequate to account for the successive changes in living species. Darwin, whether he was quite clear in his own mind on this point or not, was not concerned with what was behind the processes he described. It is not impossible that bilogists may find it desirable or necessary to supplement natural selection with a revised version of Lamarck’s adaptation and inheritance of acquired qualities or something similar to that. This would still exclude any consideration of what is behind the process. That cannot be approached by scientific method. Scientific method can only tell us how – in what manner – the change has come about, but not what made it come about.

The how remains a brute fact without intrinsic meaning. Then comes a Schopenhauer who says we may conceive of a Will at the heart of things. This confers meaning on the phenomena of life but does not add anything to the facts observed and reported by objective science. A Goethe, a Schopenhauser, a Bergson, a Whitehead, is a poet that takes hold of brute fact and educates its brutality, shapes it into meaning, but does not produce facts. You might say, Well, similarly, a Creationist or Intelligent Design advocate may say: I conceive of a Creator or a Designer behind nature. He may, but there is a difference. The Creationist means us to regard his Creator factually, as an existent entity. As I see it, that makes the Creator an object on a par with the physical world. He should then be subject to the same criteria and methods of verification applicable to nature, and by those criteria and methods he fails.

Moreover, suppose that you can demonstrate empirically that there is a mighty being out there controlling all the processes of the world. How can you show that that mighty being is not itself an automaton whose movements are purely mechanical? A mind out there is a contradiction in terms. It becomes a mere addendum to the natural world, a tortoise that carries the elephant that carries the world.

Metaphysics does not, or should not, pretend to give us knowledge of the world outside of us, though metaphysicians commonly speak as if they do. According to the point of view that I have been trying to put through in all my writings, a metaphysician, properly, gives us a principle of intelligibility which makes the world make sense for us, makes the objectively chaotic and dumb world orderly and coherent. The metaphysician is in the same business as the poet and the artist who make the mindless sound and fury of the world signify something. That is why there can be various metaphysical systems, equally meaningful, just as there can be various epics, dramas, symphonies, equally fulfilling.

Does this land us in unrepentant Protagorean relativism? No, since I maintain that what we find to be real – what gives us our concept of ultimate reality – is our inner reality, the reality of creative intelligence and creative love within us. This reality is absolute and ineradicable. But it is ineffable. It cannot be constrained in a determined formulation. But it can be given mythical expression. Hence the possibility of endless metaphysical representations, opposed in letter but one in affirming the one reality we find within us.

Shaw, in his espousal of Lamarckism in opposition to Darwinism, was trespassing into territory that he had no call to stray into, but he is on firmer ground when he takes up the opposition between mechanism and vitalism. (p.lv). I think he insightfully portrays the plight of philosophical thinking in his own day and in ours when he says: “Our minds have reacted so violently to provable logical theorems and demonstrable mechanical or chemical facts that we have become incapable of metaphysical truth.” (p.lvi) Metaphysical truth has become completely lost to recent and contemporary thinking. This is not only sad; at the present juncture of human civilization it is ominous.

Footnote:

(1) Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, 1921. The page references are to the Penguin Books edition, 1939.

THOUGHTS TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF RELIGION

2007-08-24T05:05:00.000-07:00

THOUGHTS TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF RELIGION
D. R. Khashaba

When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
King Lear

[The following is a skeletal outline for a Critique of Religion that at one time I had hoped to write. I don’t think it probable that I will live to do that. I offer the outline freely to anyone who would work it out. I have appended to the outline some disjointed but not unrelated thoughts.]

I.

There is a fact so simple, so basic, that it is difficult to bring it to our attention. It is something I have reperatedly asserted in my writings but which I think bears endless reiteration and emphasis because its profound and far-reaching significance easily escapes us. It is that, in the literal and strictest sense of the words, we live our specifically human life in a world of ideas, ideas humanly created. As humans, in what characterizes us as humans, we live in a world of beliefs, conventions, superstitions, science-supported conceptions and theories — in a world of ideas. At the same time we live biologically as animals and exist physically as physical objects; in those dimensions we are subject to whatever physical things and animals are subject to; but in the dimension which gives us our human character we are nothing but ideas. These ideas coalesce in collections of loosely related systems on various levels. I will pass over my ideas about my daily routine of life, about my work, about my social relations. I will also pass over my ideas about the possibility of the human race colonizing the moon within, say, five decades and also my ideas about the chances that the party winning the next elections will address my worst grievances. These are all ideas that, strictly speaking, shape my day to day life. On another level I may have ideas signifying that if I pray, in proper form, five times a day and keep certain rites and rituals then when I die I will go to paradise where I will enjoy fantastic pleasures; or that if I go to church, attend mass, and take holy communion then when I die I will go to a celestial heaven where I will continue to be endlessly; or alternatively that whatever I do, when I die I will be no more and the body that now I call mine will disintegrate and become part of the earth where it will be buried. These systems of beliefs stand, prima facie, on an equal footing. (Many will jump at me for saying this; but patience; you may find me in the end to be on your side.) Now let me put the idea I have been putting forward in the above lines in a different form of words. Human beings, as human beings, exercise their living in, by, and through systems of ideas, the – let me not say highest – but most abstract and most rarefied echelon of which may properly be called ideologies. We could call those ideologies religions in a special sense of the word, but many will find this unacceptable. So let us say that a number of those ideologies are properly called religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Hinduism; others may be called Weltanschauungen, which divide into a great number of isms, including scepticism and agnosticism which are decidedly positive systems of ideas.

II.

Religion is a human phenomenon. One could justifiably say that religion is a human property, in the logical sense of the term, an essential attribute of the human species. It would seem that however far back in the archaeological records of the earth we may go, we cannot find traces of a human group without accompanying traces of acts and deeds indicating that they somehow related themselves to the powers they sensed or imagined behind the happenings shaping and governing their lives.

That the feelings of awe and wonder should arise in thinking beings in the face of the mysterious phenomena of life and death and the dreadful forces and happenings of the natural world surrounding them is not surprising. That these overwhelming feelings of awe and wonder should issue in imaginative attempts at explanation, in daring experiments at influencing those happenings, in desperate motions aimed at propitiating those forces, and that those explanations, experimentations, magical operations, should vary with time and place and appear in countless shapes and forms — all of that is only to be expected. All of that is amply exemplified in the records of archaeology, of anthropology, of history, of the extant human scene. This is the material of the study of comparative religion.

In time these primordial feelings developed into institutions, communal arrangements, behavioural patterns, speculative systems, that were often beautiful and precious, and as often or more often ugly and harmful. Hence the need for a critique of religion to help us discriminate between what is good and what is bad, what is essential and what is an accidental accretion.

For some reason, humans – alone among living beings as far as we can tell – are obsessed with the urge to seek explanations. ‘Why?’ seems to be a specifically human creation. To see something happen and not know what made it happen leaves us uneasy. An explanation, any explanation, puts the happening in a larger context which shows consistency, which shows kinship between the constituent elements of the larger situation, and that somehow relieves the uneasy feeling of puzzlement. Any imaginary explanation serves that primary purpose. It is only gradually that a primitive human being or a growing human child finds out that some explanations hold and some don’t. This has nothing to do with the emotional comfort given by the explanation; it has to do with its pragmatic serviceability. Thus it was inevitable that humans should at the earliest times form myths to explain the phenomena surrounding them and the happenings of their daily lives. Only later on did they begin to sort out and prune their myths, applying the criteria of rationality and serviceability.

III.

Thus humans created myths to enjoy the sense of understanding, that peculiar human need. Over millennia the old myths were replaced with new explanations over a wide area of phenomena and happenings. But there remained other areas of human interest which proved impervious to the new methods of explanation. ‘How did it all begin?’, ‘What happens when I die?’ With regard to such questions we could adopt any of the following attitudes:
(1) We could say that they were unanswerable and leave it at that.
(2) We could hold on to myths of the old kind, as institutionalized religions do.
(3) We could attempt to force those myths into the moulds of the new methods, as either in various projects of pseudo-science or in proper scientific hypotheses and theories which, while extending our factual knowledge of the phenomenal, inevitably fail to reach ultimate answers to ultimate questions.
(4) We could produce new myths with a difference. This is the province of poetry and art. I maintain that metaphysical speculation also is such, creating myths that lay a veneer of intelligibility on the unintelligible. Such myths give us the ease of ‘understanding’ while preserving the integrity of our reason since we know our myths to be no more than beautiful tales.

IV.

Under the cloak of religion we commonly find four characters which it is necessary to distinguish and separate. First there is the religious feeling, the spiritual experience which in its most intense form is characterized as mystic. Second, there are beliefs and thought systems which may partly seek to interpret the religious feeling but which mainly seek to give answers to natural, cosmological, and philosophical puzzles. Third, there are rites, ceremonies, and rituals, which mostly have their origin in magic and in endeavours to influence the processes of nature. Fourth, there is morality, with principles, maxims and codes of behaviour. I think it imperative first of all to insist on separating this last character.

Advocates of religion are vociferous in claiming that moral and spiritual values are inextricably bound up with some form of religion. This claim does not bear serious examination; it is utterly groundless. Morality arises and persists in complete independence of religion even though the two often come mixed together. Religion is more often than not damaging to morality. We can all readily verify by surveying in our mind the people with whom we have daily contact that the most religion-bound among them are not always the most morally sound while on the other hand among the least religion-bound we may find the most morally sound.

Next we have to separate the element of inward feeling, religion as a spiritual experience. This we stand in need to preserve. It is the element which those who fight against the evils of religion risk sacrificing because they fail to see it as a separate and most precious element. This is the element A. N. Whitehead has in mind when he defines religion as what one does with his solitariness. It is also the element that Schleiermacher refers to in saying:

“To have religion means to intuit the universe, and the value of your religion depends upon the manner in which you intuit it, on the principle that you find in its actions. Now if you cannot deny that the idea of God adapts itself to each intuition of the universe, you must also admit that one religion without God can be better than another with God.” (1)

The combination of religious feeling with fixed beliefs – dogmas – is most damaging; even when the beliefs are refined, they still obscure and impair the purity of the feelings.

If rite and ritual could be kept completely free of any dogmatic admixture, they could be useful as a communal bond, bringing people together and giving them a sense of belonging; they could also have value as an art-form. Unfortunately, once rite and ritual relate in any way to religion, it is impossible to keep them free of superstitious overtones.

So of the four characters wrongfully forced together under the shabby cloak of religion:
(1) morality should simply be kept apart; it is secure in its independent life;
(2) spiritual experience has to be rescued and preserved;
(3) dogmatic beliefs and doctrines must be exposed and demolished;
(4) rites and rituals, however aesthetically and emotionally valuable, if they have to go with what is bad in religion, so be it; humankind will never cease inventing other forms of communal and social cementing.
(2) and (3) are what I am concerned with in this series of essays.

V.

If we ask, are any religious beliefs true?, again we have to distinguish carefully between various types of belief. Beliefs about moral values should not, strictly speaking, be called beliefs, and they can neither be true nor false. They are real (2) and valuable in so far as they affirm our inner reality. They can be narrow and trite when they are the reflection of an impoverished personality, and they can be sublime when they reflect the inner reality of a Gandhi.

Primitive beliefs about the creation and constitution of the world (which survive in institutionalized religions) were brave flights of the human intellect which have been and are being corrected by natural science. It is sheer stupidity to hold on to opinions long ago replaced by better ones.

Beliefs about a supernatural world, about life after death, and the like, were also brave flights of imagination. In time, intelligent humans realized that all answers propounded to such questions are pure fiction. Yet today we have many people, intelligent and seemingly learned, who hold on to certain beliefs in this area. These believers may be subdivided into two classes: (1) the ones who maintain that we have to accept those beliefs on the authority of divine revelation; and (2) those who, in addition to trusting revelation, attempt to show that the beliefs can also be supported by reason.

The argument for revelation is always circuitous. We have to believe the doctrines handed down to us by the sacred books. Why? Because those books were revealed by God? Who says the books were revealed by God? The sacred books say it. Well, we could perhaps turn a blind eye to the illogic of such a shaky argument if those sacred books did not (one and all without exception) contain much that is atrocious, absurd and morally revolting.

As for those who attempt to provide rational support for their favoured beliefs, not only do theologians of one faith contradict those of other faiths, but the more theologians of one faith and creed attempt to refine and sophisticate their arguments, the more does every one of them find her/him/self at variance with their remaining co-religionists.

VI.

First a word to remove a possible misunderstanding. I have sometimes been decried because I spoke of spiritual life. For some materialists and atheists to speak of spiritual life is tantamount to dogmatism and belief in superstitions. I insist that without the conception of a spiritual life our cultural life and our rational discourse are seriously impoverished. For me the spiritual life is our subjective, inner life, which is the focal point and the source of all our worth and our proper being as humans. Let me explain.

‘Man liveth not by bread alone.’ This is a profound saying. We become human when we realize that there is a side of us that is not body. Of course Plato had taught the same thing some four centuries before the Nazarene. And not Plato alone.

Imagine intelligent beings living in a world where they have ample, wholesome food without any relish, clothing good for winter and summer without any refinement, comfortable housing without a touch of beauty; they spend their day doing work well-suited to their strtength and abilities and spend the night fast asleep. If they had no idea of any life different from that, they might be content with their lot as we imagine ants to be content with their lot. (Actually, I consider that impossible, because without a sense of the zest of life – I believe – there can be no life, but let the supposition stand.) But would anyone of us humans, however tried with troubles and pains in our human world she or he may be, bear to live in that materially perfect world?

Without song or dance, without a touch of poetry even in everyday language, without a thing of beauty for the eye to light upon, who of us would rather live than die?

That is what I mean by spiritual life. A life in which not all our cares and concerns are for the needs of the body. A life in which philosophical questions tease our intelligence, in which a line of Wordsworth sends a vibration through our inner being, in which Beethoven’s Ninth makes us rise from the abyss of dejection to touch the stars; a life in which a kind word, a shy smile, gladden the heart — that I call spiritual life and have no other word for it than spiritual life.

Those who start in alarm at the word spirittual are like the proverbial one that dreads a rope because once bitten by a snake.

VII.

We need religion. We need to get rid of all religions. These two statements are not mutually contradictory. To accept either alone as sufficient is to risk ending up with a deformed humanity. The reconciliation of these two propositions is arguably the most urgent and most critical task facing human culture and human civilization at this juncture of human history.

Indeed, in one interpretation the claim that we need religion is justifiable — but that is an interpretation that sets Religion in opposition to all religions. That is the religion of the philosophers, the religion A. N. Whitehead speaks of in Religion in the Making and Julian Huxley in Religion Without Revelation. But since the whole issue of religion is submerged in confusion, mixing of issues, and muddled thinking, it would be best, in the interest of clear thinking, to avoid using the term ‘religion’ in that sterilized sense.

“Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” A. N. Whitehead repeats this definition more than once in his Religion in the Making.(3) By this definition Whitehead makes of rites, rituals, dogmas, and creeds mere external trappings. Unfortunately, these external trappings are the whole of religion for most followers of institutionalized religions. So it would seem that the simplest way, or perhaps the only way, to bring that religion of one’s own solitariness to its rightful place in human life is to do away with all ‘religion’. Today, nearly all discussion of religion, by advocates and opponents alike, tends to obliterate the notion of that spirituality necessary for a properly human life. To put it differently, it is bad religion that militates against our appreciating the importance of good religion. The word ‘religion’ has been thoroughly corrupted by bad company; it is best to give it up and speak of spirituality instead.

Perhaps only the most primitive of religions, living in isolation, did some good and little or no harm. Apart from these, all religions have done much more harm than good. And yet we cannot live without religion. Without religion we cannot be whole human beings. We desperately need an alternative to religion: not an alternative religion; that would only perpetuate the harm; but an alternative to religion. The alternative I propose is a culture, and education in a culture, that frees the human mind of all shackles and at the same time leaves it fully aware of its own reality and of a reality above and beyond its individual being and above and beyond all the finite and ephemeral existents and happenings of the natural world in which we have our finite and ephemeral being.

Our myths are the substance of our spiritual life. That is the paradox of human culture. Without myth our life is barren, bestial, banal. With myth unsubjected to critical reasoning it is stultifying. Only intelligent creative imagination can secure for us a spiritual life consistent with human dignity.(4)

So to the question, Do we need religion?, our answer should be, There is an element in what is commonly covered by the term religion that is necessary for true human life, but that element has to be very carefully and delicately isolated because it is always covered by layers upon layers of foul dross.

One thing that I never cease to find most bewildering is how highly intelligent persons, many professionally trained to think scientifically, accept unquestioningly the dogmas of whatever established religion they happen to be born into. Even in the case of religious conversion, the conversion rarely rests on intellectual grounds, and once the new faith is taken to heart, the dogmas and superstitions associated with it are accepted without question. I cannot help feeling baffled by this, but there are in fact multiple explanations for it. There are good psychological and anthropological explanations which I do not intend to go into here.

The religion of mystics, poets, and philosophers is all subjective, is an inner experience. The religion of the followers of the established religions is primarily objective, extraneous; it is bound up with creed and dogma, rites and rituals. These two types are so different, so opposed, that it would be best if they are not referred to by the same word. But good philosophers have spoken of religion, meaning the purer type; good poets have used religious language when giving expression to their subjective, spiritual, experience; and good musicians have composed great music on religious themes. All of this cannot be reversed. The resulting confusion is regrettable; all we can do is to draw the distinction clearly and try to keep it in mind.

VIII.

I have often argued against reductionist thinking. To track the origins of something, to enumerate and describe its constituent elements, however accurately, however comprehensively, does not exhaust the reality of the thing. To suppose it does is the deadly error of reductionism. On all planes of being – on the most exalted plane of spiritual experience, on the most highly abstract plane of theoretical thinking, just as on the plane of emotional reaction or physical action – the activity is a modification of the whole person and is subtended by the totality of the individual. This does not in any way detract from the reality of the final flowering just as the origination and the grounding of the rose in soil and water and sunshine does not negate the reality of its fragrance and its radiance. So, on the one hand, I appreciate the theoretical justice of the protest against attempts to denigrate religion by showing its origins in magic, sorcery, shamanism, and the like. After all, art too must have grown out of such origins, and that does not belittle the importance of art and its necessity for a fully human life. On the other hand I say that an objective, a clear-headed study, of the history of religious beliefs, an unprejudiced and clear-sighted look at the phenomena of diverse religious beliefs and experiences displayed side by side, should convince any intelligent observer of the fictitiousness of the claims of all such religious beliefs and practices. In holding these two apparently opposed views I am not contradicting myself. The natural origination of religious beliefs and practices does not negate the emotive and spiritual reality of religious and mystic experience. The religious attitude and the religious feeling are part of the most valuable treasures of humankind. But this true core of religious experience necessarily always comes clothed in external trappings, the product of contingent circumstances, historical, cultural, social, etc., and it is imperative that we see these artificial trappings for what they are, that we clearly recognize the illusory character of the outward raiment shrouding the true essence. Without this insight we are trapped between two equally damaging intellectual tyrannies. On the one side, the tryranny of reductionist scientism, demanding that we forgo our inner reality, and on the other side, the tyranny of religious dogma, demanding that we forgo our right to question and to understand.

IX.

All established religions are shrouded in deception. Ordinary Christians are encouraged to believe that Christianity came into being whole and entire. They do not know that Christianity began to be forged by various persons and influences shortly after the departure of the putative founder of Christianity and that the new religion that was built up over generations and centuries has little to do with the thought or teaching of the man of Nazareth. This false belief is carefully guarded by the Church.

Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History (5) recounts an incident that illustrates how the commonest of events can be mythicized within the lifetime of some of its original witnesses, or even of its participators. When we read that, we find it easy to understand how, within a few years of the tragic death of Jesus of Nazareth, that audaceous moral reformer could be transformed into the Saviour, the Son of God, and God incarnate.

Beside the queer conceptions of Paul and the strange fantasies of John, Christianity had the good fortune of absorbing much of the cultural milieu of Hellenism. The best of what is in Christianity is borrowed from Platonism. What gives Christianity its lure to thoughtful and sensitive spirits is its Platonic core. Christianity is a core of Platonism hidden under layers upon layers of superstition.

Similarly, in the best specimens of present-day Islam there are embedded borrowings from Greek wisdom and Persian mysticism. Ordinary Moslems are encouraged to believe that all the highest ideals of humanity which have been absorbed by Moslem culture came to light only with Islam. This deception is perpetrated, consciously or unconsciously, even by writers and thinkers who should know better.

Again, the Buddhism that is followed by millions and that in many ways may be much better than all the other world religions has departed far from the teaching of Gautama Siddhartha. Are common Buddhists aware of this?

We may readily admit that every one of the major world religions played an important role in human history, but this does not mean that we have to submit to those religions and accept all the junk they came with originally and all the junk they accumulated along the way.

The argument that defendants of religion continue to advance in spite of its patent banality, namely, that without belief in an overruling God and in reward and punishment after death all people would behave immorally does not deserve serious consideration. Let any decent person look within her/him/self. A decent person does not behave properly for fear of punishment here or hereafter. There are two sources for the behaviour of ordinary decent human beings. On a lower key, people behave properly because they want to conform to social norms, because they value belonging to society. On a higher key, people do good deeds because, to put it simply, it feels good to do good. Benevolence is as natural as selfishness and anyone who has grown up in a good ambience soon learns by experience that benevolence gives greater satisfaction than selfishness. Providing the opportunity of such experience is indeed the essence of moral education in childhood.

X.

Every time-honoured religious system existing in the world today is the dead body, dried and fossilized, of myths and rituals that may have at one time represented or symbolized something with some meaning in it. It could not have turned up as an established religion if it had not already lost all life and all meaning. It is possible that even today the dead body of a religion may house a living emotion for some of the followers of the religion. The living emotion is the subjective reality of the person concerned and is only accidentlally related to the beliefs and practices of the particular religion. In fact the beliefs and practices hamper and constrain the living subjective experience. But in most cases only individuals with sufficient intelligence, intellectual integrity, and moral courage come to realize this. Unusual circumstanmces may also lead other individuals to this conclusion. It is the duty of thinkers to widen the scope of this realization.

The history of religion on the world scale from the most primitive to the most sophisticated provides a coherent continuity, or at any rate a coherent progression, with the coherence of the evolution of species from primitive protozoa. The valiant, rather quixotic, efforts of theologians of the various religions – even students of Comparative Religion among them – to invent arguments founding their creeds on special revelations are exemplary instances of failure of self-criticism, or refusal to see the simple truth.

As I see it, in philosophy humanity has attained a level of intelligence above that of religion. It is simply unacceptable for humans to continue to think and live on the lower plane of religious thought and feeling. All the reasons and arguments advanced in defence of such religiosity is nothing better than self-deception. And – being the fool that I am – I will go on to alienate those who thus far will have been on my side. I will say that I speak of humanity attaining a higher level of understanding in philosophy, not in science. I reiterate here a position I have often stated.(6) It is not the function of science to give us the understanding we crave; that is the role of philosophy. I readily admit that science has been a most powerful tool in freeing human beings from the slavery of religious superstition. But we still have to realize that while science gives us power and gives us informational knowledge of the phenomenal world, of natural actualities and natural happenings, there remains a kind of epistêmê or rather a kind of insightful ignorance that it is the function of philosophy to give. A scientist finds satisfaction in knowing that water is reducible to hydrogen and oxygen. S/he is content with that knowledge and calls it understanding. A philosopher will say, with Socrates, that that knowledge does not answer the question, What is water? The mystery of oxygen and hydrogen becoming water with all its amazing original characteristics persists. It is the philosophical aporia, the confession of ignorance, that gives us the experience of the immediacy of awareness of that mystery, an awareness that is necessary for ridding us of the worst ignorance, the ignorance in the soul, that enslaves us to the delusion of understanding what we do not understand. In philosophy we learn that the only understanding we have, the understanding we should seek, the understanding that is possible and simultaneously is all important for us, is the understanding of our motives, our emotions, our feelings, our attitudes. This is the understanding that constitutes true liberation. This is the essence of the injunction gnôthi sauton that Socrates gave us for heritage.

XI.

As I have put it elsewhere, though perhaps not in these same words, I care little for the god whose creatures we are; I care more for the God whose creators we are.

We humans are all fools and half-insane; it is good literature that gives us a flicker of sanity.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” — We are only wise when we know that all our wisdom is foolishness.

The worst effect of institutionalized religion is that it blocks the way to contemplation, to looking for reality and truth within one. Institutionalized religion is the worst enemy of that religion which A. N. Whitehead finds in what one does with one’s solitariness.

If we choose to take our leave from reason, we can always find a sophisticated Kierkegaardian interpretation of any deed, happening, or text, however irrational; we can invent a higly sophisticated construction for any statement however banal, as the pundits of the so-called scientific interpretation of the Koran have been nauseatingly demonstrating. Or even as some literary critics from time to time demonstrate. True, there is wisdom in folly and sometimes we have to be mad enough to break beyond and through the bonds of accepted wisdom; but we are only properly human when we reason. Some poetry, some art, designedly shows want of coherence and rationality. But unless beneath the apparent incoherence and irrationality there is discoverable coherence and rationality it is not poetry and it is not art. Poetry is communication and art is communication and the condition of communication is intelligibility, coherence, rationality.

A human being cannot live by reason alone, but s/he cannot be human unless s/he live always under the searching beam of reason.

Perhaps a more serious evil that religion wreaks than even all the conflicts, animosities, and killings it inspires is that it kills the sense of wonder in a person. A person who has been fully saturated with religious thought may no longer be liable to experiencing the creative unease which impels a person to keep wondering why and how, since s/he has been habituated to the comfort of being contented with the ready answer: because God wanted it this way; because God made it this way. I will not delve into regions that are not mine, but perhaps historians may find in this an explanation for the stagnation of many a society.

I am all for the Sermon on the Mount. I take its injunctions more seriously, more foolishly, than this or that Pope. But if it comes packaged with Matthew’s hell-fire, with Paul’s obsessions, with John’s mystifications, I would rather give up the whole package. I have all the morality I want in the Crito and the Gorgias and all the spirituality I need in poetry, in philosophy, and in music.

Footnotes:

(1) Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, tr. Richard Crouter, 1988, 1996, p.52.
(2) I use the term ‘real’ in a special sense, for which I would refer the reader to “On What Is Real: An Answer to Quine’s ‘On What There Is’”: http://khashaba.blogspot.com , “Must Values Be Objective”, http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_52.html , and Chapters 5, 6, 7 of Plato: An Interpretation (2005).
(3) A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 1926, pages 16, 47, 58.
(4) The role of myth in human culture – in the spiritual life of humans – is a theme that runs throughout my writings. For a short presentation, see “Philosophy as Prophecy” in my blog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com
(5) Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History, tr. Willard R. Trask, 1954, 1959, pp.44-6.
(6) See “Explaining Explanation”: http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_135.html - also in my blog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com )

D. R. Khashaba
August 2007
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

BERGSON AND RUSSELL: TWO POSITIONS ON BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

2007-08-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

BERGSON AND RUSSELL
TWO POSITIONS ON BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
D. R. Khashaba

Bertrand Russell and Henri Bergson were veritable antipodes. Russell early shed off his youthful Platonism in favour of a thorougoing empiricism. Bergson discarded his early interest in mathematics, turning to psychology, then progressing from biology to high mysticism. The contrast is clearly illustrated in their respective approaches to the notions of being and nothingness.

In “Why I Am Not A Christian”(1) Russell shows the inanity of the First-Cause argument for the existence of God. He says, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God …”. The argument from First Cause does not tell us anything about the nature of the First Cause: call it God or Nous or Big Bang, that, in itself, does not tell us anything about the character or nature of that First Cause.

Thus far I go fully along with Russell. But when he goes on to say, “There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed”, I think Russell is wrong in implying that these two alternatives stand on an equal footing. I find the suggestion that the world could “have come into being without a cause” simply unintelligible. If we begin with nothing, I find it utterly inconceivable that anything should then have come to be.

To my mind, being – that there should have been anything rather than nothing – is the ultimate mystery. It is unexplainable and that’s that. The idea of God does not explain it. If we begin by assuming the existence of God, then that may explain the existence of our actual world, but it leaves the being of God unexplained; so we are back where we were.

It is true that Russell goes on to say, “There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. ”That I accept. But Russell immediately adds, “The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.” I do not feel easy about that. It damps the sense of the mystery of being, and I believe it is this sense, when heightened, that gives birth to philosophic wonder, without which there is no genuine philosophy.

Now to Bergson. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Bergson writes, “We have shown elsewhere that part of metaphysics moves, consciously or not, around the question of knowing why anything exists — why matter, or spirit, or God, rather than nothing at all? But the question presupposes that reality fills a void, that underneath Being lies nothingness, that de jure there should be nothing, that we must therefore explain why there is de facto something. And this presupposition is pure illusion, for the idea of absolute nothingness has not one jot more meaning than a square circle.”(2) Let us just recall in passing that Plato also in the Sophist(3) says that absolute nothingness is unthinkable. But does not Bergson’s dismissal of the question deflate the sense of the mystery of being which I hold to be valuable? No. The human intellect inevitably poses the question Why and inevitably raises the chimera of Nothingness, and so we are not wrong when we say that for the human intellect Being will remain an ultimate mystery and that mystery unfolds in the profoundest reflections on the meaning and value of our own being.

(1) “Why I Am Not A Christian”, a lecture delivered by Russell to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall, on March 6, 1927, available online at http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html
(2) Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, 1935, 1954, p.251.
(3) Plato, Sophist, 237b-239c.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, August 2007
http://www.Back-to-Socrtaes.com
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

When is truth a bad thing?

2007-08-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

When is truth a bad thing?

On the question of truth I have been saying things that have put me in opposition with people with whom I share much. That I regret, but I cannot refrain from reiterating my position, since I cannot betray the ‘truth’ as I see it.

In science and for science truth is a prime virtue. Without truth science is the antithesis of science and is far worse than ignorance.

In the practical walks of life, truth is vital. Without truth you lose your way in the walks of life.

In poetry truth is a fault. Truthfulness and veracity are needful for poetry, but not verity.

In philosophy truth is a deceptive demon. Truthfulness and veracity are the very soul of philosophy, but not verity.

Science deals with a determinate object. There truth has its proper place.

Philosophy is concerned with absolutes and with the absolute. There truth is death.

Philosophy presents a vision, an essentially transient view of reality from an evenescent viewpoint. If it deny equal truthfulness to alternative viewpoints it thereby destroys its sole ground of meaningfulness.

Mystics dwell closest to the heart of Reality. But it is only their subjective experience that is valuable. Their articulations of that experience become hurtful when they lay claim to truth.

Plato always sang the praises of alêtheia, but alêtheia for Plato was not truth but reality: not the meretricious ‘reality’ of things we can see and touch and measure, but the reality of intelligible forms beheld in active phronêsis, as I have shown in chapters six and seven of Plato: An Interpretation.

Of all modern philosophers, it was only Nietzsche who saw all of this in the clearest light, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, “Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers”.

A MARGINAL NOTE ON THE MENO 'EXPERIMENT'

2007-08-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

A marginal note on the Meno ‘experiment’

In many of my writings I strongly opposed the commonly sanctioned view (which we have Aristotle to thank for in the first place) that Socrates in his elenctic discourses aimed at reaching definitions. I have expounded and defended my unorthodox position throughout my writings but particularly in “The Socratic Elenchus” (Chapter Three of Plato: An Interpretation) and in “The Euthyphro as a Philosophical Work” http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_101.html (also to be found on this blog). Here I wish merely to add the following marginal note:

Although in the Meno ‘experiment’ the boy in the end reaches a positive, true, answer, this does not contradict Socrates’ usual elenctic procedure. Up to 83e10 we have the common elenchus, leading to aporia, and at 84a2 the boy confesses: alla ma ton Dia, o Socrates, egôge ouk oida. But at this point Socrates had already moved from refuting to showing. He says to the boy: peirô hêmin eipein akribôs· kai ei mê boulei arithmein, alla deixon apo poias. — The significant phrase here is mê arithmein, alla deixon and Socrates goes on to help the boy to ‘show’ or rather to see. For, as Kant insisted, geometry rests on intuition, and I will venture – although here I am uncomfortably conscious that I am swimming out of my depth – that when mathematicians calculate (arithmein) for such a problem, they work backwards from intuition. So the boy in the ‘experiment’ is helped to look and see just as in the properly elenctic discourses the interlocutor is led to look within her/his own mind to behold the meaning sought after in the immediacy of active intelligence (nous, phronêsis) and realize that there is no other explanation than “It is by Beauty that all that is beautiful is beautiful” and that it is in vain to seek understanding in the objects of the phenomenal world.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt, August 1, 2007

WHAT IS GOD?

2007-07-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS GOD?
D. R. Khashaba
[First appeared in www.butterfliesandwheels.com on July 1, 2007: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=257 ]

I have repeatedly complained of the shallowness, triviality, and anaemia of current theism/atheism discussions. In the following contribution (hopefully to be followed by others) I mean to infuse some lifeblood into the discussion. If, on whichever side of the discussion you may be, you still find much in what I say with which you strongly disagree, which indeed irritates you, that will be all the better. I mean to stir stagnant waters, inject turbulence into placid intellectual positions.

The idea of a creator or of creation is metaphysically bankrupt. It is a silly notion that breeds more riddles than it solves. In fact it solves nothing. If we ask: Why should there be anything rather than nothing?, we see immediately that there can be no answer. To advance the idea of a creator to resolve the mystery of being does nothing but confound and complicate the issue. In the first place, the ultimate mystery remains where it was. For why should there be that creator or first being rather than not? There is no answer. Moreover we have the riddle of why the creator took it into its head to produce something where there was nothing. Being is the ultimate mystery and there is no way to make it yield to our questioning. We have to accept it on its own terms.

It would be easy to see the idea of a creator producing the world as the understandably crude attempt by human beings in the infancy of humanity to resolve the riddle. The answer would easily suggest itself to them on the analogy of their own production of things.

Why do so many humans today accept that answer and believe it to be reasonable and obvious? The answer again is simple. Traditional cultures inculcate it in them. If you ask, Why should we accept those traditions as true?, the traditional answer is that that answer was revealed by that creator itself. Who says that? That same tradition. We have to believe the traditional doctrine because the tradition tells us it was revealed by the creator and we have to believe that it was revealed by the creator because the tradition tells us that.

I say it would be easy to see the fatuity of all that, if only we could bring ourselves to think for ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us do not think for ourselves. It is so much more comfortable to have others think for us and to receive our mass-produced thought finely packaged, home delivered, user-friendly, and with promises of luring rewards thrown into the bargain.

Let us ask again: Why should we believe our traditional teachings? Because they come from God. Well, let us close our eyes to the circularity of the answer. Let us look at the credentials of that God as that tradition itself presents him. Let us try for a while to put aside the reverence and awe instilled in us by our traditional upbringing and look at the God of the Pentateuch, the God of Paul, the God of the Book of Revelation, the God of the Koran. Let us judge him by the common moral standards that we now accept in decent, civilized society. We find him a liar, a despot, a capricious, vengeful, cruel creature. True, we will find in the Torah, in the Gospels, and in the Koran, many fine sentiments and ideals. But we find similar and even finer ones in cultures either with no gods or with gods we no longer take seriously, which should show us that those sentiments and ideals which we rightly value are independent of belief in our monotheistic God.

So much for the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Let us move on to ontology.

The question Does God exist? is inane. The existence of the existent does not need proof. You go to a primitive tribesman and ask him: ‘Does God exist?’ He answers: ‘Of course. Come, I’ll show you.’ He takes you into his cave or his hut and shows you the effigy he worships saying, ‘Here is God.’ What proof better than that can you ask for? On the other hand, how would you go about proving the non-existence of God? To try to prove logically the non-existence of an unknown nothing is the height of absurdity, the worst kind of eristic juggling.

The sensible thing then is not to ask: ‘Does God exist?’ but to ask: ‘What do we mean by God?’ Throughout the history of humankind, humans have had many differing ideas of God. Many of the old conceptions are no longer taken seriously by present-day members of the human race, so we can leave those to anthropologists. What about extant ideas within the established religions? Then, you may argue that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is revolting, the God of the New Testament is replete with contradictions equally with the Allah of the Koran. So what? There is no logical impossibility in the idea of a being mighty and clever enough to make the universe and run it in accordance with its whims and who may yet be as imperfect and as unaccountable as Yahweh or God or Allah.

A. N. Whitehead’s final answer to the question, What is God? is summed up in the final paragraph of chapter III of his Religion in the Making (1926). I will quote this beautiful paragraph in full:

“The order of the world is no accident. There is nothing actual which could be actual without some measure of order. The religious insight is the grasp of this truth: That the order of the world, the depth of reality of the world, the value of the world in its whole and in its parts, the beauty of the world, the zest of life, the peace of life, and the mastery of evil, are all bound together—not accidentally, but by reason of this truth: that the universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but that this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God.”(1)

Does this prove the existence of God? The question is, strictly speaking, meaningless. What Whitehead gives us is a way of looking at the world, a vision of the world, in which the world exhibits meaningfulness and value. And the gist of that outlook is that, if we are to find meaning and value in the universe, we must see order, coherence, intelligence, and goodness as ultimate characters of reality. This is what I mean when I say that to be is to be good, when I maintain that ultimate reality must be intelligent and good, when I describe ultimate reality as Creative Eternity and say that Creative Eternity is Love.(2)

If we replace ‘the soul’ by ‘God’ in the famous proof of the immortality of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus (3), we have an exquisite ‘proof’ of the eternity of God. But what would the ‘proof’ prove after all? Nothing. It woul neither prove the existence of God nor would it tell us anything about what God is. What it does is to establish the ideal reality of our idea of eternity, in the same way as Plato’s ‘proof’ both in the Phaedrus and the Laws and his arguments in the Phaedo establish the reality of the ideals of autonomy and integrity embedded in the Socratic-Platonic concept of the soul.(4)

But while some of the philosophers I admire most speak of God and though I could without qualm declare that I believe in God in a very real and profound sense, yet I think it advisable to avoid using the term ‘God’ in philosophical discussion, since a philosopher using the term will find it necessary to spend as much time explaining what s/he does not mean as expressing what s/he does mean. The same holds for the term ‘faith’. I could readily affirm that without a core of faith philosophy would be vacuous and valueless. But this word ‘faith’ is laden with untoward associations with the ideas of revelation and dogma. While therefore I maintain that reason is not only compatible with, but is in fact meaningless without, a certain something that could be called faith, yet in general I try to keep clear of this suspect word.

Because this sounds so complicated, let me put it in a different way. Faith as commonly understood is, in my view, a mockery of reason and an insult to human intelligence, and the usual attempts to reconcile faith and reason turn out to be no more than word jugglery or self-deception. But on the other hand, through mere reason we cannot find our way to any reality or any value. Kant had to support and supplement pure reason with practical reason. Kant’s followers restored Reason to the Whole to rescue it from its sterile purity. Whitehead put reality and value back into the world by insisting on the integrity of experience. These were all insightful moves. To preserve our dignity and our worth as human beings, we must have unfettered Reason, but it must be Reason with a throbbing heart. I hold that the one way to achieve that object is to find all reality and all value within ourselves. The self-evidence of the reality and value within us is the Faith we need, is the God the believers craved and the unbelievers sacrificed.

William Ernest Hocking expresses this elusive idea well in the following words: “The birth of the idea of God in the mind – the judgment ‘Reality is living, divine, a God exists’ – is so subtle, like the faintest breath of the spirit upon the face of the waters, that no look within can tell whether God is here revealing himself to man, or man creating God.”(5)

If I have not irritated you enough already, dear Reader, let me tease you with with some mystic-mongering:

god is real
therefore god does not exist
for reality is opposed to existence
the circumference of a circle is not in the circle
the circumference is not outside the circle
the circumference does not exist
it is an idea
it is a reality
it does not exist
but without it no circle exists
there may be round things in the world
but without that reality that does not exist
no round thing is a circle
nor is it even round
god is an idea
god is real
god does not exist
but without that real god that does not exist
no thing in the world has meaning
no thing in the world has value
no thing in the world has reality
no thing in the world has existence
the idea that constitutes my world is my idea
it springs from my mind
my idea encompasses my world
whose idea constitutes the world encompassing me?
what mind gives it birth?
that is a question no one can answer
neither science nor pure reason can tell
that is a question about which we can only mythologize
and mythologize we must
without mythologizing our world rots
but when we forget that our myths are myths
the mind that created the myths
rots
rots and dies and petrifies
with the death of the mind
god dies
god then exists
but is no longer real
that dead existing god is the god of religion

Maximus of Tyre in the second century of the Christian era wrote winged words in his beautiful “defence of idols” with which I like to close this essay: “Let men know what is divine (to theion genos), let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire — I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.”(6)

D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com

Footnotes:

(1) Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 1926, pp.119-20.
(2) See my Let Us Philosophize, 1998, Book Two “Reality”.
(3) Plato, Phaedrus, 245c-246a.
(4) See my Plato: An Interpretation, 2005, especially chapters 5, 7, and 12.
(5) William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 1912, “The Will as a Maker of Truth”, reproduced in Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, 1954, ed. Daniel J. Bronstein and Harold M. Schulweis, p.20.
(6) Maximus of Tyre, quoted by Gilbert Murray in Five Stages of Greek Religion, 1935, p.77, n.1.

Richard Harries on Christopher Hitchens

2007-06-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

RICHARD HARRIES ON CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
D. R. Khashaba

Yet another adverse review of Christopher Hitchens’ apparently provocative book God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, but this time the attack from the Christian camp is staid and soberly reasoned, as befits a former Bishop of Oxford and honorary professor of Theology at King’s College, London: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2109068,00.html

I’ll set down my thoughts and reactions as I jotted them down while reading the review without much editing or refinement.

First I must say that I am not defending Dennett or Dawkins or Hitchens whose “diatribes against religion” Professor Richard Harries is concerned to counter. In my view the onslaughts of recent advocates of atheism while satisfying confirmed atheists fail to win over any believers.

Professor Harries admits that the evils perpetrated in the name of religion are real enough. He also admits that the intellectual crudities of some of religion’s defenders are obvious enough. I would say that the theological subtleties of some other defenders of religion while the reverse of crude are still as absurd as the crudities of the first group.

Then Professor Harries poses a good question: “But how is it that the majority of the world’s great philosophers, composers, scholars, artists and poets have been believers, often of a very devout kind?” This is a very good question and I think that the major fault of the advocates of atheism is that they direct their energies to the easier task of showing the crudities and absurdities of common religion instead of addressing the harder question posed by Harries.

My answer in brief to the question – the brief answer I give here can be no more than a rough sketch; all my writings can be seen as an attempt to give a fuller answer – is that the religion of an Einstein, a Whitehead, a Schleiermacher, a Shelley (to throw in some names at random) has nothing to do with the religion of even the best of ‘ordinary’ Christians, Jews, or Moslems. Shelley’s poetry reveals a deep devotion to the all-pervading, all-encompassing spirit of Nature, yet he was expelled from Oxford for defending atheism. Whitehead defined religion as what one does with one’s solituude. Schleiermacher said: "Religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling … religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite … to accept everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite is religion. But whatever would go beyond that and penetrate deeper into the nature and substance of the whole is no longer religion, and will, if it still wants to be regarded as such, inevitably sink back into empty mythology."

These are specimens of ‘religion’ with which no observing Jew, Christian, or Moslem can identify. Let us remember that many a profoundly ‘religious’ mystic was murdered by his co-religionists. I need only mention Giordano Bruno among Christians and Al-Hallaj among Moslems. Personally, I wish Schleiermacher, Whitehead, Einstein, had not spoken of religion or of God; that only makes for confusion, for what these words meant for them was utterly diferent from what they mean for the followers of established religions.

Professor Harries writes: “Religion is rooted in our capacity to recognise and appreciate value; in our search for truth; in our recognition that some things are good in themselves.” I am all for that, except for my reservation as to the use of the word ‘religion’. Harries goes on to say that “it is in this capacity to recognise, appreciate and respond to what is of worth that religion has its origin.” The roots in their natural soil and without external manipulation flower in Kant’s “ever new and increasing admiration and awe” that fill the mind when we reflect on “the starry heavens above and the moral law within”, but no further. They certainly do not bear the fruit of “submission and surrender” which Hitchens rightly rejects and Harries tries to justify. But how does that support belief in a personal creator? The weakest link in Kant’s majestic critical system is his jump from the Ideas (in Kant’s sense) or ideals of reason to a justification of belief in God and the immortality of the soul.

Harries says: “If ‘submission and surrender’ have a place, it is only in the final insight that, if there is an ultimate goodness, it will by definition make a total difference to the way we view life.” I believe in “an ultimate goodness”, and this is a point where I part company with some of my atheist or anti-religion friends. (Incidentally, this is also what makes my position so unpopular, angering both the theists and the atheists equally.) But then my position differes from that of Professor Harries in two ways: (1) Mt idea of “an ultimate goodness” in no way leads to belief in a personal creator over and bove and beyond Nature (which includes human beings and human minds). (2) My idea of “an ultimate goodness” is my idea, is a vision that lends intelligibility to the dumb appearances thrust by the world on my apprehension but that in no way justifies me or anyone else in making an objectively valid judgement of the world.

I also agree implicitly with Professor Harries’s penultimate paragraph. I agree that secular ideologies can be as pernicious as religious ones. Materialism, consumerism, cut-throat competitiveness are such ideologies. A humanity where abundance exists side by side with poverty, a humanity where scientific and technological miracles rub shoulders with deprivation, disease, and starvation, is a very sick humanity. But the cure is not in the unreason of established religions; the cure of reason gone astray is in yet more reason.

Professor Harries is certainly right in maintaining that the real problem of humanity resides in human beings being “organised in groups of various kinds, still beset by … lack of self-knowledge, viciousness and moral weakness.” He is right in saying that “all people of wisdom need to cooperate, whatever the springs of their moral outlook.” But are the followers of established religions prepared for such cooperation? The politicizing of religion not only by fundamentalist Moslems but also by fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews is ominous.

Besides, supposing we could have a world where all the major religions, not only the monotheisms but also Hinduism, Buddhism, etc., agreed to a policy of peaceful co-existence, would it really be a good thing for humans to live under x different dogmatic belief-systems where x-1 systems are necessarily false and no one can decide which is the one that is the exception? That would be the final surrender to unreason.

Harries concludes that “Hitchens has written a book that is seriously harmful.” I beg to disagree. I would say that Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and others have written books that fall short of the mark. They do not do enough to free people from the bondage of dogmatism and superstition. Kant wrote a book entitled “Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone”. What recent advocates of atheism failed to do was to address the need for “Spirituality Within the Bounds of Reason Alone”.

D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com

"The Problem and Promise of Consciousness" by Richard Schain

2007-05-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

“The Problem and the Promise of Consciousness” by Richard Schain

Departing from my habit of posting only my own writings in this blog, I reproduce here an article by Richard Schain, first published in Philosophy Pathways, Issue number 127, 30th May 2007: http://www.philosophypathways.com/newsletter/issue127.html

Richard Schain is one of the very few philosophers who swim against the current of present-day materialism and empiricism in their endless metamorphoses. Towards the end of the article Schain refers to “a certain Quixotism inherent in philosophical activity.” Here’s certainly a veritable Don Quixote fighting in the cause of the inner reality of a human being. I simply love the final six paragraphs of the article.

I have appended a few peripheral remarks which I jotted down while reading the article in obedience to an inveterate habit of mine.

[I apologize for the defective manner in which the article appears here. I have twice tried to copy it in proper form and will try again. The reader may look it up in the PhilosophyPathways site.]

***
II. 'THE PROBLEM AND PROMISE OF CONSCIOUSNESS' BY RICHARD SCHAIN
'The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after all, the most amazing fact of human life...' Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, 1917

In a recent interview with David Chalmers conducted by Seher Yekenkurul(Philosophy Pathways Issue 123), it was stated that the 'basic question in thephilosophy of mind is the mind/ body problem.' The term body really refers tothe brain since it is the connection of mind to brain that concerns a largenumber of philosophers who are attempting to decipher the mystery of thisrelationship. The vast majority of these individuals accept the materialistthesis of modern science, namely, that all reality is reducible to materia.Lately, however, because of the intractability of the problem of reducing theconscious mind to brain processes, the dichotomy between monism and dualism hasbeen fudged by philosophers like David Chalmers and John Searle who say thatconsciousness is an 'emergent property' of the brain and is not reducible tospecific neuronal events. A growing literature exists on the merits of this idea.

The concept of philosophy as an aspect of the human condition refers to one'sconsciousness of the nature of the self and of the universe, the so-calledhigher consciousness. This is a primary datum, first arising in the westernworld within the Ionian societies of Greek-speaking peoples. Philosophy came tobe valued by these peoples as a unique aspect of their culture. Subsequently, itwas adapted by the Romans and then by all later European civilizations. Theestablishment of philosophy in universities rather than solely within churchinstitutions resulted in the widespread dissemination of philosophic thought inwestern culture. It became an independent branch of European culture, intimatelyassociated with the Enlightenment movement in Europe.

However, coincident with the Enlightenment and the rise of an independentphilosophy, a distractive phenomenon began to emerge, namely, the preoccupationof philosophers with the mind-brain relationship. It had been known since thedays of Hippocrates that the brain was intimately connected to the psyche, butnot much importance was given to this realization except in certain diseasestates like epilepsy or brain damage. Philosophers did not concern themselveswith the mundane issue of the mind-brain relationship. They concentrated on thedevelopment of their minds. The establishment of the Christian doctrine ofduality of spirit and body strengthened this approach. Descartes was perhapsthe first philosopher to concern himself closely with the nature of themind-brain relationship. His infamous assertion that the pineal gland was thesite of interaction of soul and brain irreparably damaged his reputation in themodern era. Soon afterwards, Leibniz asserted that brain processes and mentalprocesses unfolded simultaneously, but without any connection other than thatin the mind of the Creator. Here was the ultimate dualism looked upon now withderision by hardheaded scientists.

These questions were peripheral to mainstream philosophy until the nineteenthcentury when the scientific revolution extended into detailed studies of thehuman brain. Scientists began to wonder about the significance of higherconsciousness if it could only arise from an inauspicious-looking three-poundlump of grayish, gelatinous substance in the cranial cavity. The eminent German neuropathologist Rudolf Virchow joked that after examining hundreds of humanbrains, he had never found any evidence of a soul. Gradually philosophers beganto turn their attention to the brain, especially since the prestige ofscientific investigation could be used to bolster the reputation of a fieldthat many thought of as worthless, unscientific rumination. The discovery ofthe microscopic complexity of the brain underneath its undistinguished physicalappearance lent fuel to their interest. Somewhere, amidst the billions ofneurons making up the human brain and their complex interactions must lie thesecret of consciousness.

Actually, from the point of view of rigorous science, there is no moreknowledge today about the relationship of consciousness to the brain than therewas in the era of Vesalius in the sixteenth century. Vesalius was a Flemish anatomist who was the first to carefully describe the anatomy of the brain,based on his many dissections of that organ. He knew that the living brain wasnecessary for the mind to function but could say no more than that. What morehas been added by all the variegated descriptions of neurons, synapses,neurotransmitters and brain electrical phenomena? Much has been learned aboutthe fine structure of the brain and associated neural mechanisms. However,there is virtually no connection of all these details to an understanding ofthe conscious mind.

Neuroscientists who study the brain are much more inclined to relate theirfindings to disease states originating from pathological processes. Infinitelymore is known now about the pathophysiology of neurological disorders such asParkinson's disease, epilepsy, paralytic strokes and encephalitis. Motor andsensory functions and, to a lesser extent, speech mechanisms have beenlocalized to specific brain areas. Most neuroscientists, however, avoid theproblem of the mind-brain relationship. Those few who have done so, likeCharles Sherrington, John Eccles and Wilder Penfield, have often ended with aposition of frank dualism. For a long time, reputable British and Americanneurophysiologists confined themselves to studying the reflex systems of thespinal cord. Moving above this locus would expose them to the charge ofmysticism.

There is probably no one in the history of philosophy who thought more deeplyabout the problem of the relationship of the mind to the brain than did WilliamJames, longtime professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard University. Itis worth quoting from him. After the most detailed consideration of all thepossible relationships of consciousness to brain, he concluded that 'nature inher unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind,that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being,but how or why, no mortal may ever know' (Principles of Psychology, Chap. VI,The Mind-Stuff Theory, 1890). I cannot see how this situation has changed anysince James penned his profound thought on the matter.

In recent decades, however, philosophers have moved in where angels feared totread. It is in the modern era of analytic philosophy that intricatespeculative webs have been spun about ways in which consciousness may make itsappearance in individuals. Utilizing behavior theory, cybernetics, quantummechanics or recent advances in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, philosophershave rivaled medieval scholastics in speculating about the nature ofconsciousness.

One of the leaders in this modern day scholasticism is John Searle who isexplicit that 'Consciousness is caused by lower-level neuronal processes in thebrain and is itself a feature of the brain' (The Mystery of Consciousness,1997). Intuitive thought does not permit one to conceive how billions ofindividual neurons, modifying billions of synaptic structures secreting myriadsof neurotransmitter substances can give rise to a unitary sense of self with aunitary consciousness. Recognizing this problem, some contemporary'neurophilosophers' like Searle have resorted to the metaphysical idea ofconsciousness as an 'emergent property' of the brain. In other words, it isstill a mystery from the point of view of scientific monism.

Thus the difficulty in imagining any way in which even an elementaryconsciousness can be reduced to neuronal processes -- not to speak of thehigher consciousness out of which philosophy itself has emerged -- has forcedphilosophers with a broader scope to acknowledge that the traditional conceptof dualism has some merit albeit they will rarely acknowledge themselves asdualists. Instead, the idea is put forth of 'property or emergent dualism' inwhich subjective experiences ('qualia,' a resort to the time-tested scientifichabit that if you don't understand something, think up a new name for it)represent a different ontological reality from the material brain. Stubbornly,however, philosophers like Chalmers and Searle maintain that they are notreally dualists because they conceive of the conscious mind as a feature orproperty of the brain. All this may seem like pedantic quibbling to theordinary observer. But such is the ingrained resistance against dualisticthought in an academic philosophy imbued with the worldview of scientificmonism.

I fail to see any logical contradiction to the concept of dualism except thereis no reason to believe that reality is limited to only two realms ofexistence. Physicists now talk of an eleven dimensional universe instead of theconventional three or four, if time is included. The notion of a concretematerial reality is ever more blurred by advances in sub-particle physics. Eventhe apparent phenomenon of absolute time and space has disappeared, to bereplaced by relativity theory. Philosophers, more than others, should realizethat our awareness of reality is as much determined by our own perceptualapparatus than by what is actually out there beyond our selves. It is all welland good to confine oneself to strict materia-oriented, causality-determinedscientific principles when building a bridge or repairing the plumbing but whenit is a question of higher consciousness, it is philosophic insight notscientific methodology that is needed.

It seems to me that with respect to the question of consciousness, much ofcontemporary philosophy has lost itself in the pursuit of trivia. What is to begained by the continuous pursuit of newly discovered brain functions thatcorrelate with conscious states? The philosophic fallacy referred to byAristotle as a metabasis eis allo genos (Posterior Analytics), a passing fromone realm of being to another in philosophic discourse, is constantly beingcommitted. Now that neurologists have learned with the use of radioisotopes toconvert metabolic activity of the brain into brightly colored visual images,one can foresee a whole new domain of brain correlates to be related toconscious states. Perhaps we will be confronted with a new form of phrenologythat will connect characteristics of the mind to images generated by positronemission tomography (PET) rather than to bumps on the cranium. But all this isso much trivial pursuit. One thought from Plato is worth a thousand PET scans.For the philosopher, the temptation to sell one's philosophic soul for a messof neurological pottage is best avoided. Anyway, since philosophers do notengage in laboratory studies, they will never be more than camp followers of the neurosciences.

The history of conceptions of a higher consciousness in the western world goesback thousands of years to what Bruno Snell called 'the discovery of the mind'in Greek-speaking civilization. Subsequently, philosophy as a manifestation ofhigher consciousness continued its development in the west, even with therestrictions laid upon it by Christianity and the backwardness of the MiddleAges. The European Enlightenment gave rise to a flowering of philosophy thatcould be compared to the heyday of the Greek polis. A new phenomenon inphilosophy arose in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with theemergence of a remarkable group of 'existentialist' philosophers, the mostnotable of which were Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But after that, a blight seems to have descended upon philosophy. Instead offresh insights into the nature of man and the universe, there has appeared anobsessive preoccupation with science -- cognitive science, computer science,neurological science, critical thinking science -- anything to avoid thechallenges of philosophical thought as it was known to Plato and his successorsin the history of western philosophy. Perhaps Nikolai Berdyaev, Teilhard deChardin and Abraham Joshua Heschl were the last important philosophical mindsof our era not to be intimidated by the sciences. Today the old physicaltyrannies of Christianity have been replaced by the psychological tyranny ofscientific thinking. The models of creative metaphysical thought seem to beconfined to representatives of churches, albeit still constrained by Christianor Judaic dogmas. This is a sad situation for philosophy.

Since the neurosciences have given no insights into the basic phenomena ofconsciousness such as wakefulness or intentionality, it is hardly to beexpected that they will shed light on higher consciousness; e.g. ideas aboutthe significance of man in the universe, about the nature of time andcreativity, and on the traditional areas of philosophy -- axiology,epistemology and eschatology. These are the substance of philosophy; theirimportance lies in their intrinsic content, not their connection to the brain.Philosophic thought is a dimension of reality in its own right and not merely avehicle for some other purpose. There is a certain Quixotism inherent inphilosophical activity. No pragmatic or sophistical benefits should be expectedof it. The unique mix of intuition, rationality and passion that enters intophilosophy represents the highest achievement of the human condition.

Individuals may die, the whole human race may come to an end; but with thegrowing awareness of the relativity of time, it is reasonable to envision thatthe phenomenon of a higher consciousness will find its place embedded in thecanvas of eternity (R. Schain, In Love With Eternity, 2005). With such aperspective, consciousness does not represent a problem of cognitive orneurological science but a promise of personal fulfillment. If I may paraphrasean assertion by that unique philosophical mind of antiquity, Jesus of Nazareth,the kingdom of heaven is to be found within the mind of every authentic philosopher.

(c) Richard Schain 2007
E-mail: richardschain@yahoo.com
Web site: http://www.schainphilo.com/

***

I have some reservation about the Hamlin Garland quote which speaks of the ‘emergence’ of consciousness ‘from the void’. In my opinion, the notion of emergence blurs the question. I find it inconceivable that mind/intelligence should have come into being from stuff devoid of intelligence. In the same way I find it inconceivable that life should have come into being from stuff without life. That is why I have repeatedly said that I can only think of the ultimate source and origin of all things as creative intelligence. Human consciousness (a word I usually shun) and the human faculty of discursive thinking may have come into being as the evolutionary answer to circumstantial challenges. But I don’t see ‘consciousness’ (narrowly understood, not the ‘higher consciousness’ Schain is concerned with) and thinking as exemplifying what is best in human intelligence, just as I don’t see choice as exemplifying free will at its best and purest. I see the best of intelligence and freedom in creativity and spontaneous activity. But I do not want to repeat here what I have often said before. (For instance, in Hypatia’s Lover (2006), pp. 153-7.)

With regard to the basic mind/brain problem or pseudo-problem, I can sum up my position in two moves. First, attempting to find mind by examining the brain is a sample of the reductionist illusion. It is no better than trying to understand “I love you, Mom” spoken by a child to her mother by analyzing and describing the sound waves conveying the spoken words: the meaning of what is whole is in the whole. Second, however mind may have come about and however the intelligent activity in me may be engendered, it is in this intelligent activity – of which I am immediately aware – that I find my proper character and my whole worth, and it is in this active intelligence that I find reality as opposed to which all else is evanescent shadow, and it is this intelligent activity, this creative reality, that is the proper study of philosophy.

Let me just add another note on terminology. I have more than once expressed my dissatisfaction with the way contemporary philosophers use the terms monism and dualism. Philosophers with whose position I find myself in basic agreement – Richard Schain for one – have been calling themselves dualists. To me the term dualism suggests the Cartesian separation of mind and body as two substances apart. (I will not cite the putative soul-body dualism attributed to Plato since my view on this question goes against mainstream scholarly wisdom and would call for lengthy explanation and defence.) The term monism has been – in my opinion wrongly – ceded to materialists and out-and-out empiricists. But again I must refrain from expanding on a theme I have dealt with at some length elsewhere.

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt
31 May 2007

ATHEISTS VERSUS THEISTS

2007-05-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

ATHEISTS VERSUS THEISTS
D. R. Khashaba
[Appeared in www.butterfliesandwheels.com on 25 May, 2007: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=247 ]

The ongoing debate between atheists and theists has become ludicrous, banal, and unprofitable. I have long thought that the more vociferous atheists were following a wrong strategy and wrong tactics, leaving the religionists free to pose as unrivalled defenders of moral values and the realities of the life of the spirit (the expression ‘spiritual life’ has become suspect among rationalists and been ceded to religion, which is a pity). The propagandist and frenzied approach of the fashionable atheists is reducing us to the sorry choice between dogmatic religion and stark materialism. So it was a pleasure to come across a sane and balanced review article by Anthony Gottlieb: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/21/070521crbo_books_gottlieb

Gottlieb reminds us that in the second century of the Christian era “it was Christians who were called ‘atheists,’ because they failed to worship the accepted gods.” We may also recall that in fifth century BC Athens Anaxagoras was accused of atheism because he taught that the sun was not a god but a flaming piece of matter. Socrates was accused of atheism because he did not revere the gods that the city revered, even though he could pray not only to Zeus and Pan but also to the sun.

Anaxagoras, Socrates, and early Christians, beside rejecting the beliefs commonly accepted by those around them, had their positive beliefs. Today vocal atheists are all energetically engaged in the task of breaking down dogmatic beliefs, but they do not show as much energy in advancing the positive aspect of their thought.

The task of emancipating humanity from the clutches of superstition, fanaticism, and bigotry, is needed and is urgent. But neither the enthusiasm of the all-out atheists nor the desperate but tepid efforts of the religious moderates show any signs of success in that direction. The outspoken atheists are read and applauded by those who are already convinced of the harm done by religions. The moderate religionists cannot make headway with their fundamentalist co-religionists, because in each of the major established religions (I speak chiefly of the monotheisms that I know at first hand) there is as much authoritative textual support for the extremists as for the moderates; and all talk about inter-faith conciliation and understanding is deception or self-deception because each religion in its heart of hearts denounces the others as worthy of damnation. The best they can achieve among themselves is a truce necessitated by the inability of any one of them to eradicate the others.

The human situation is sickening. If there are gods up there they must be debating not if but how to put an end to the whole bad project. If we give up on the gods and decide that we have to rely on our own devices, then the way forward as I see it is a two-pronged drive.

The human world is in very bad shape. There is abject poverty, disease, ignorance, misery, side by side with abundance, waste, astounding technology — I need not go on. Our politicians and economists play games in their artificial, closed systems of unquestioned fictions of expediency, power, market values, economic forces — all of which are worshipped more blindly than any supernatural god has ever been. The world of human beings must be re-formed on a wiser and more just basis. This is the first prong of the combined drive. In the short term we may have to fight terrorism and all sorts of conflict by various means but in the long term a united world based on justice, equal opportunity for all humans, and dignity for all humans, is the prerequisite for withering the roots of terrorism and conflict.

Secondly, we have to work towards a new age of enlightenment, to spread understanding and fellow-feeling among all humans. No amount of bare, disjointed facts, can infuse sense into life. The positive, empirical knowledge obtained by the methodology of the sciences, can be useful (or harmful) but cannot nourish the human spirit. Humans need a ‘likely tale’ (to borrow a phrase from Plato) to hold on to, to give the chaotic mass of their experiential content some coherence. To the naïve and simple masses of humankind their received religions satisfies that need but – as we should by now have discovered – it does so at a heavy cost. We need a culture that fosters moral and spiritual values unlinked to dogma and superstition. This is the task of art, literature, and philosophy. That will be our alternative to religion, but we should take great care not to turn it into a new religion: we need an alternative to religion, not an alternative religion.

The way forward I have indicated, with its two branches, will be slow, full of hardship, and not at all certain. But there is no other way.

In Let Us Philosophize (1998) I concluded the chapter on Religion as follows:

“The one perfect religion that has ever been given to mankind has been grossly misunderstood, neglected and almost completely forgotten; the religion whose prophet claimed no knowledge, no wisdom, no power, no authority — whose name was Socrates. Socrates may have had the temperament of a mystic. Yet we acclaim him as a philosopher precisely because he went beyond mysticism. He demanded that whatever we hold valuable be fully intelligible. He was deeply religious; he sought the fullness of the inner life. But he was not content with a mystical richness of life, and there lay his glory.

“No specific knowledge, no body of doctrine, can secure our salvation: Only a free, ever-creative mind will give us salvation. Not any body of knowledge, but the creative pursuit of understanding, makes us into what we crave to be — whole human beings. That should be the ideal of education.”

D. R. Khashaba
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

PLATO SCHOLARSHIP

2007-05-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

THE SORRY STATE OF PLATO SCHOLARSHIP
D. R. Khashaba

The state of Plato scholarship is deplorable. It has become an industry. But in saying this I am wronging industry. Progressive industry has creative research behind it. Plato scholarship has become a mechanical skill off which anyone who is not a complete dunce can make a lucrative business.

I have just read a learned review and I am saddened: a review by Professor Dustin A. Gish of Professor Devin Stauffer’s The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias: Rhetoric, Justice, and the Philosophic Life: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-05-09.html I give here a selection of the many angry notes I jotted down while reading the review.

We read that “Socrates counters Polus in a Machiavellian mode, adopting an extreme stance, commonly known as the ‘Socratic thesis,’ according to which doing injustice, far more than suffering injustice, is the greatest evil for human beings.” To say this, in my view is to reveal the sad fact that we have become incapable of understanding the ground principle of the Socrates-Platonic moral philosophy. What, in the hands of academic pundits has become a paradoxical Socratic thesis to be explained and confuted, is the insight by which Socrates lived and for which he died. To have a particle of doubt about this is to make of Socrates’ whole life and of his death a mascarade. In the Crito we read that we are never intentionally to do wrong … doing wrong is always evil and dishonourable … Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine, for we must injure no one at all … We may do no evil … Nor do evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many … [I am picking up phrases from Jowett’s translation, which may not be state-of-the art for our pundits, buth which is good enough for my purpose.] Can anyone say that this is a ‘stance’? Socrates may have been truly a fool, but Plato was under no illusion; he makes Socrates warn that “this opinion has never been held, and will never 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.” (Jowett) (See my “The Rationality of Socrates Moral Philosophy” available under Essay in my website: http://www.back-to-socrates.com/essays/4-%20Rationality%20of%20Socrates'%20Moral%20Philosophy.htm This was subsequently included as Chapter Two in my Plato: An Interpretation (2005).)

So when we read of a “seemingly impassable divide between” Callicles and Socrates, I would say that the divide, far from being merely ‘seemingly impassable’, is the totally unbridgeable one between “those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this point”

Professor Gish writes, “Stauffer’s thesis is that the unity of the Gorgias derives from Socrates’ concern throughout the dialogue with rhetoric. This means that the ascent implied by the tri-partite division of the dialogue … is deceptive, for the thrust of its arguments toward (a defense of) the philosophic life – its action – never transcends rhetoric at all.” I will not argue against this. I will simply say that, in my reading of Plato, all that he wrote had one lodestar, the philosophic life. To look for any overriding concern other than that in any work of Plato’s is to miss its central nexus and give it a false interpretation.

Evidently the book not only makes Socrates concerned with rhetoric; it also makes much of a “Socratic rhetoric” and of a “noble rhetoric” which Socrates is supposed to advocate. The insistence on transforming Socrates’ dialectic into a ‘noble rhetoric’ on the strength of a marginal remark by Socrates about a possible proper use of rhetoric, and the making of the ‘noble rhetoric’ into the central theme of the dialogue, is a distortion of the position of Plato and a corruption of Plato’s linguistic usage. What do we gain by calling Socrates’ dialectic rhetoric, obliterating the distinction that Plato was at pains to establish? It is one thing for us moderns (and for the ancients outside the Academy) to speak of rhetoric in a new sense, a proper rhetoric that may be part of serious literary studies; it is quite another thing, which makes for confusion, to make the term cover both the rhetoric of the Sophists and the dialectic of Socrates in discussing a work of Plato’s. (It is only in the Phaedrus that Plato showed tentative interest in rhetoric as an art of effective writing or effective speech.)

We read of the “mystery of Socrates’ interest in Gorgias” as a mystery “raised but not resolved in the dialgue’s prelude”. This is one of those pseudo-problems that academic philosophers fabricate to keep themselves in business. The Socrates of the dialogue is interested in Gorgias because the author of the Gorgias was throughout his life concerned with the opposition between rhetoric and the candid give and take of philosophical discussion.

However plausible Stauffer’s psychological analyses of the dramatic personae of the dialogue may be, I think it perverts Plato’s intention to think that his primary object was to expose the conflicts and contradictions inhering in the souls of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. In the Socratic elenctic discourses, Socrates unravels the contradictions and confusions in the minds of his interlocutors to make them look inward into their own minds. The Gorgias is not properly an elenctic discourse. Here Socrates is not in search of the meaning of a term (which is the common scheme of the elenctic discourses) but is actively advocating the one positive principle of his life: the whole worth of a human being is in the integrity of the soul which we must preserve at all costs, even at the cost of readily suffering injustice in preference to committing injustice.

So they make of the Gorgias, the manifesto of the philosophic life, an insincere tournament of wits in which the wily Socrates, with his Machiavellian rhetoric beats the more naïve rhetoric of the Sophists. They murder both Socrates and Plato — I wish they did it in anger! No, they do it coldly to find in the cadavers matter for their learned dissertations.

A QUESTION ABOUT RANDOMNESS

2007-04-25T02:39:00.000-07:00

A QUESTION ABOUT RANDOMNESS

A visitor to my website sent me a message saying: “How would you view an opinion that puts an origin of life in randomness, as opposed to a unity. Wittgenstein’s stumbling place might have been that logic does not understand randomness. etc.” The reply I sent him may be of interest. I reproduce the main body of it here:

Since you seem to have been into my writings, you will probably know that I insist on drawing a clear line between philosophy and science, leaving the investigation of the objective world, as Socrates did, to science, and confining philosophy to the study of the ideas and ideals bred in the mind and by the mind, and which alone give us our proper character as human beings. I may soon be writing a paper on Kant and Plato in which I revert once more to the elucidation of this idea.

Randomness may be a concept, hypothesis, or theory, with a useful role (perhaps rather different roles) in the various sciences and mathematics. As such, in my view, it lies outside the sphere of philosophy proper, and it is not for me to hold or give an opinion about it.

You ask about “an opinion that puts an origin of life in randomness”. Again I would say that the origin of life is a scientific question to be investigated by the objective methods of science and subjected to the objective criteria of science. But while these methods and criteria may give us a description of how life came to be, they cannot tell us what life is. The meaning of life is a philosophical question that is not affected one way or the other by the results of scientific investigation. I maintain that all the hubbub and controversy between creationists, Darwinists, and advocates of Intelligent Design, is wrong-headed on all sides. I have written repeatedly on this and do not wish to go further into it here.

Also I do not think that the concept of randomness is of any relevance to the question of free will. If you care to look into my views on this question you may read “Free Will as Creativity” which is available on my blog. A shorter version appeared in Philosophy Pathways and may be found in philosophos.com under Feature Articles.

I am afraid I don’t understand what you mean by your remark that “Wittgenstein’s stumbling place might have been that logic does not understand randomness.” Let me first say that although I have written a long essay about Wittgenstein I must confess that my knowledge of Wittgenstein’s work is very fragmentary. And while your statement that “logic does not understand randomness” is open to various interpretations, I do not feel that in any case it offers a fair critique of Wittgenstein. But, having confessed to my fragmentary acquaintance with Wiggenstein’s work and my failure to understanding the meaning of your statement, any comment I try to make will be mere fumbling in the dark. Still, I will suggest (perhaps rashly) that if you have not yet read my essay on Wittgenstein, you may find it of interest. It is available on my blog.

http://www.back-to-socrates.com/
http://khashaba.blogspot.com/
http://khashaba.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_archive.html
http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_62.html

My correspondent answered with an email packed with thought-provoking questions. I give below the gist of my reply:

Your questions, or rather questionings, especially those packed in the fifth paragraph of your email, suggest to me that you are working towards an integrated philosophical outlook of your own. That, believe me, is a journey that one can only accomplish unaccompanied. A philosopher, like a poet, is a lonely soul. And a philosophical question cannot have one ‘correct’ answer. A question that can have a definitive answer is decidedly not a philosophical question. A philosophical question is an incitement to original, creative thinking. The reason why I value Plato above all other philosophers is that Plato does not give us answers to questions but infects us with his perplexity and makes us think for ourselves.

You ask if Socrates thought of the world as belonging to a whole. It seems that Socrates did not concern himself with metaphysical questions, but in Plato’s development of Socrates’ thought, he (according to my interpretation) not only thought of the world as a whole but considered the idea of the whole the major key to philosophizing. But I cannot compress my views on this question in a short statement. I may say that each of the four books I have published so far is an attempt to make such a statement.

Where does that leave randomness? If randomness represents the seemingly chaotic world that confronts us and presses in on us on every side, then not only philosophy but the whole of the human endeavour is a ceaseless effort to find order, intelligibility, unity, in that chaos. On that view randomness would not have its place within philosophy but would be the outer darkness that philosophy battles against.

28 April 2007

A NOTE ON REDUCTIONISM

2007-04-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

A NOTE ON REDUCTIONISM

Thoughts suggested by John Dupré’s review of Alex Rosenberg’s Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (American Scientist online, May-June, 2007: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/55122 )

Prefatory Note: Reductionism is a subject that has often provoked me to strong comment, and the first part of the following note was an almost involuntary reflex to the title of Professor Dupré’s review of Alex Rosenberg’s book, which I jotted down before I had read a single word beyond the title. The tone of the note is perhaps somewhat irritated and whimsical. Further, at least the first paragraph must sound enigmatic. If what I have just said sends the reader off, neither s/he nor I will have lost anything of much value.

I

Reductionism is always right and, at the same time, always wrong. Yet advocates and opponents of reductionism are not thereby reconciled. Those who find satisfaction in reductionist ‘explanations’ normally fail to see how those ‘explanations’ are the wrong answer to a certain type of question while those who see the wrongness of reductionist answers for a specific kind of question tend to ignore the validity and value of those same reductionist answers to a different kind of question. The failure of understanding between reductionists and their opponents may be partly congenital – we are all born into the one category or the other – but it is compounded by the failure of mainline philosophy to acknowledge that philosophy and science are radically distinct approaches. This is the heterodoxy I have been trying to advance in all my writings, from Let Us Philosophize in 1998 to “Explaining Explanation” quite recently: http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_135.html .

Since everything that comes into being in the natural world has an ancestry of other beings in the natural world, it is always possible to break down what has become into what it had been and in a sense it is right to equate the new and the old. But when the scientist says that the flower is earth and water and energy from the sun, the fool says: No, it is not; and the fool is not always wrong. Kant said that 5+7 = 12 is a synthetic, not an analytic, judgement, and Plato had said the same thing, using the very same figures 5, 7, and 12. Why? Plato says that 12 is an instance of auto to on and, on Plato’s behalf, I would venture to say that the flower also is an instance of auto to on.

Perhaps this does not seem like so much after all. Well, it may not seem like much to say that the idea of 12 is something over and above the ideas of 5 and 7. It may even not seem like much to say that the flower is something over and above the components and processes that went into its flowering. But perhaps it begins to like something when we say that the mind is something over and above the brain and all its neuronal doings and happenings. And perhaps it begins to look like something when we say that life is something over and above all that biochemistry has it in its ken. And it begins to look like very much to say that the mind is not only a reality but is the only reality of which we have immediate and self-evident knowledge and that life is a reality and is the most precious thing we know. This is Platonism as I understand it.

Now theologians come and, in opposition to reductionists who tell us that life is nothing but so-and-so and that the mind is nothing but so-and-so, want us to believe that life and mind are mysterious entities introduced by or from some supernatural source. They make life and mind alien intruders in our world. Instead of holding that life and mind are something over and above the physical elements that go into their making, they make life and mind into something foreign to nature and opposed to natural processes. And the battle rages between those who tell us that there is nothing real beyond, apart from, or other than the elements and processes of the natural world, and those who assure us that the account given of life and mind in terms of the elements and processes of nature is false and that the truth comes from a source outside the natural world.

What is the relevance to all of this of the radical distinction I said we have to draw between science and philosophy? And what did I mean when I said at the beginning of this note that reductionism is always right and always wrong? It is this: Science, with its reductionist approach and reductionist methods, will tell us how things come to be. That is its work. That is the only way we can have knowledge of things – all things – as they are. But science will not give us understanding of the meaning, the inner essence, of anything. It is the business of philosophy, of poetry, of art, to explore the meaning and reveal the essence of things. Science can tell us how a flower comes to be, but only a poet, an artist, will put us in possession of the meaning, in communion with the essence, of a flower, or, as Socrates would say, it is by the idea of beauty – a pure creation of the mind that you can find nowhere but in the mind – that a beautiful thing is beautiful for us. The danger of failing to make this radical distinction between the proper spheres of science and philosophy is that otherwise we find ourselves pressed between the claims of a supernatural source for all value and meaning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an exclusive reliance on natural explanation, which, to say the least, tends to enfeeble our awareness of the inner realities of life and the mind.

This is what I tried to bring out in all my books and in such essays as “On What is Real”, “God or Nature?”, “Must Values be Objective?”, “The Need for Spirituality”, etc., etc.

II

Coming now to the review article, Professor Dupré states that Alex Rosenberg “believes that everything is ultimately determined by what happened at the physical level — and that this entails that the mind is ‘nothing but’ the brain.” I see the first part of this statement as a serviceable working hypothesis for science, but it is with the ‘nothing but’ section that things start to go awry. To put it strongly, perhaps rather offensively, I believe that Professor Rosenberg, as a scientist, has no business with the mind. Well, I’ll be told that Professor Rosenberg is a philosopher of biology, which, to me, has an incongruous ring: I believe that mixing science and philosophy inevitably leads to confusion. I would prefer to speak of theoretical biology, a discipline which should concern itself with general, basic principles of the phenomena of life but which should keep clear of any question of meaning, purpose, or essence.

Since I make no claim to any specialized scientific knowledge, I am not qualified to comment on Dupré’s criticism of Rosenberg’s position. I have no problem with supposing that, whatever the state of the theory of biology may be at present, some day a complete reduction of biological phenomena to what happens at the physical level may be achieved. That will not, in my view, mean that such a theory will be in a position to provide answers to the philosophical questions about the meaning and value of life. These can only be answered in terms of ideas and ideals generated by and in the mind.

But, marginally, I will allow myself to say that the paragraph quoted by Dupré fom Rosenerg on Dobzhansky sounds as stolid as the most extreme of theological dogmatisms. It is a pity that the absurdities of Creationists and Intelligent-Designists practically discourage rational criticism of the over-confident claims of Darwinists. They also keep in check a needed distinction between Darwinian theory and the more general theory or principle of evolution.

Professor Dupré seems to be justified in referring to Rosenberg’s “implausible position” and “reactionary argument”. Perhaps Professor Rosenberg’s reductionism is of a kind that effectively falsifies my opening contention that reductionism is always right and, at the same time, always wrong. His seems to be very little in the right and very much in the wrong. But I confess this is a personal impression on the part of a confessed ignoramus and on very meagre evidence to boot.

D. R. Khashaba
April 2007
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
http://khashaba.blogspot.com

"Creating the World"

2007-03-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

“Creating the World”
I wrote the following lines commenting on Professor Colin McGinn’s review of The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe by Michael Frayn, in the Washington Post, March 25, 2007, and intended to post it there, but failed to have it posted.

My first reaction upon looking at the headlines of the present review was to feel delighted that Michael Frayn seems to have adopted an approach that I – an independent philosopher sunk in deep obscurity – have been trying to advance. I found it no wonder that this hopefully clear-sighted approach should come from a non-professional philosopher.

The starting point of my philosophical position as expounded in all of my books and published essays has been that what properly characterizes humankind is that humans live in an intelligible world of their own making, meaning by that not only the world of ideals and values which are a creation of the human mind, but also the conceptual and even the perceptual representations which confer intelligibility on the dumb givennesses of the phenomenal sphere. In all of my writings I presented this as an interpretation of the Socratic-Platonic heritage which, sadly, has been partly obliterated and grossly misrepresented in mainstream academic philosophy. (That was the reason behind naming my website Back-to-Socrates.) Of all modern philosophers, I maintain, it was Kant who came nearest to rediscovering the Socratic-Platonic insight (even though Kant accepted without question the traditional misrepresentation of Platonism). It might be that Frayn’s position is a fresh development of the Kantian transcendental philosophy.

I have not yet seen Frayn’s book and therefore cannot tell what measure of justice there is in Professor McGinn’s unfavourable assessment. It may be that Frayn had an insight which, through lack of fundamental philosophic discipline, he failed to expound adequately. I can well agree with McGinn that it was ominous for Frayn to seek support for his view in quantum theory. One other position that I have been advocating in opposition to conventional and mainstream philosophy is the need for a radical separation between science and philosophy. Again this is a position that I claim to derive from Socrates who turned his back to physical investigation and was concerned solely with the ideas and ideals bred in the mind and by the mind; and again I find support for this position in Kant’s distinction between the empirical use of the understanding and the transcendental use of pure reason.

It would be absurd of me to comment on Professor McGinn’s detailed criticism, but I suspect that Professor McGinn might have found the book more meaningful had he been prepared to approach it with a greater measure of sympathy. I find support for this suspicion in McGinn’s summary dismissal of Berkeley’s philosophy as a fallacy. Berkeley took Locke’s presuppositions to their logical conclusion in one direction just as Hume was to take the same presuppositions to their logical conclusion in another direction. It is simplistic to suppose that Berkeley could have “reasoned that objects had to be ideas, since no one can conceive of an object without having an idea of it.”

Professor McGinn apparently confounds idealism, subjectivism, and solipsism. The tone of the final two paragraphs suggests to me that there must have been more lack of imagination on the part of the critic than lack of discretion on the part of the criticized author.

D. R. Khashaba
March 2007

Is morality a natural phenomenon?

2007-03-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

Comment on “Knowing Right and Wrong: Is morality a natural phenomenon? by Alex Byrne, Boston Review, March/April 2007, http://bostonreview.net/BR32.2/byrne.html .

Is morality a natural phenomenon? My first reaction to the question (voiced in the following somewhat whimsical lines jotted down before I had read a single word beyond the title) is to feel a little dumb. I don’t seem to understand what the question means. Presumably there is such a thing as morality; and we meet with that thing in our world, which, to my understanding is the natural world; ergo, morality is a natural phenomenon. Oh! Perhaps the question means: Does morality arise in the natural course of things or could it not have come into the world unless it were introduced from some supernatural source? That would seem to make it a more interesting question. But then I hear the Socrates of the Euthyphro asking: Is morality moral because the supernatural source wanted it that way or did the supernatural source opt for it because it is moral? With Socrates I feel that if I were to accept the first alternative I would lose all self-respect. Once that alternative is removed, then however morality may have come about, I find that it is the moral sense that gives me the finest experiences I ever have in life. In the same way, however our enjoyment of beauty in sound and shape may have come about, that enjoyment of beauty is among the most precious treasures that make life worthwhile. [On reading further I found that Professor Byrne also refers to Socrates’ seminal question in the Euthyphro.]

Professor Byrne seems to brush aside Kant’s well-known remark about “the starry firmament above and the moral law within”. I should be very much saddened if my knowledge of the composition of the sun and the distance of the Horsehead Nebula were to expel the sense of sublime awe that I experience at the spectacle of the starry firmament, which, begging Professor Byrne’s pardon, is still “above”. Above and below are ideas created by the mind and they are real and remain real for the mind.

Professor Byrne writes: “arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have … a lively lobster” (or, he could have said, a Shakespeare or an Einstein). But the lobster is not “bits of matter”. That is the reductionist sleight-of-hand the empiricists play in all innocence. The lobster is a new reality, an original form of being, whose coming into being may be described but never explained. The only way I can find the coming of the lobster into being intelligible is through the idea of the creativity of Reality or Nature or whatever you may call the First Principle which we have to think of as the ultimate ground and source of all “stuff”. We – you and I – are intelligent beings, there is no denying that. And your intelligence and my intelligence have come out of “physical stuff” arranged in a certain way, but this intelligence is not just “stuff”. Stuff, matter, neutrons, neurons, quantum, light years, are all creations of the mind: the mind is the reality, the one reality, of which we have immediate knowledge, and yet we turn our back to it and, with Plato’s cave captives, seek to find reality in shadows.

Hume’s puzzle about the derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ finds its solution in the same way. ‘Is’, as Hume rightly saw, will not explain ‘ought’; but ‘ought’ is an undeniable reality, a true daughter of the intelligence that we have to acknowledge as the one final reality we know of. To obviate a possible misunderstanding, I do not equate that final creative intelligence with a personal God. We can say no more of that ultimate creative intelligence (which elsewhere, in a purely metaphysical orientation, I call Creative Eternity) than that it is the one reality we are immediately aware of and that is the source of all intelligibility.

Thus I cannot accept without qualification the view that “moral facts can be squeezed into the natural world with no effort at all” and that “if this is right, Hume was completely wrong. ‘Ought’ does not express ‘a new relation or affirmation’: an ‘ought’ turns out to be a kind of ‘is’.” Hume may have been the greatest founding father of empiricism, but he did not share the empiricists’ gravest error, reductionism. He understood that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’ just as he new that the idea of the cause cannot be derived from any succession of events. It is because he was not deluded on that count that Kant could find in him the impulse that shook him out of ‘dogmatic slumber’ and led to his transcendental system that reinstated the mind as the source of all intelligibility: an insight that had been amply expressed by Socrates-Plato but had been lost sight of in the interval.

Marginally, I am uneasy about the term ‘meta-ethics’, along with all the other ‘meta’s that have been proliferating lately. To my mind Ethics considers fundamental problems and first principles of the moral life. Discussions about the application of ethical principles in practice may be referred to simply as moral discussions. I would not even speak of applied ethics because that suggests that there can be fixed, final principles and rules in that area. Earlier in his paper Professor Byrne alludes to controversies around such questions as: “Should we give more to charity than we actually do? Is torture permissible under extreme circumstances? Is eating meat wrong? Could it ever be permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five?” To my mind, it is a sad feature of the present philosophical scene that such questions are debated as if there can be a unique, definitive answer to such questions. Each side tries to prove by argument that it is right and the other side wrong. This is wrong. In our actual imperfect world there can be no perfect solutions. While there are things that are clearly right and things that are clearly wrong, over large areas of the imperfect world of practice different values and different principles can and often do clash. And the proper, civilized, and morally responsible way to deal with such questions is to be sympathetic and understanding towards the opposed viewpoints and to know that practical solutions always involve losses and sacrifices. Only abstract principles are absolute. In practice there has to be give and take and sympathy and understanding. This is the way it should be in discussing such questions as those relating to abortion and euthanasia.

Who is the author of the moral law? Socrates in the Crito emphatically affirms that we must never wrong another; we must never injure another, nor return injury for injury, nor ever do evil in return for evil. Socrates did not receive that injunction from a supernatural source, nor did he acquire it from the conventional morality under which he was reared. He drew that principle from within himself because he felt that not to comply with that rule would be to injure his own integrity. This, I blelieve, is also the point of Kant’s Categorical Imperative and of his insistence on the value of moral autonomy and his assertion that the only absolutely good thing is a good will. Kant’s fondness for grand and intricate theoretical superstructures may have obscured the great insight at the foundation of his position, but if “in the juggernaut of contemporary meta-ethics [Kant] has not been in the driver’s seat”, so much the worse for contemporary meta-ethics.

I am not commenting on Professor Byrne’s survey of various meta-ethical theories. I have always maintained that it is not the proper task of philosophy to prove or disprove any theoretical position. Philosophy is not concerned with establishing the truth of any statement or discovering any fact relating to the actual world but with attaining and giving insight into our own proper inner reality. But I will put in a word about a sentence Byrne quotes from John Mackie, that if there were moral facts “they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” Well, so they are. Those who find this queer do so because they have a very narrow conception of what is in the universe. In the universe there is beauty and love and humour and sadness, which are all “utterly different from anything else in the universe”. I call these realities as opposed to actualities or phenomenal existents. I know that my linguistic usage here sounds queer, but I find my unconventional terminology necessary to give expression to my non-mainstream philosophical position.

I do not agree that “once all the naturalistic facts about suffering, enjoyment, and so on are in place, the moral facts are implicitly settled: an ‘ought’ does follow from an ‘is’.” The facts of a situation do not generate or dictate the ‘ought’ but, the ‘ought’ being independently given, determine the specific form in which the ‘ought’ is to be applied.

“Concerns about the status of morality soon spread like spilled ink: if there’s no room for ethics in a disenchanted nature, most of our distinctively human form of life is also excluded”, says Professor Byrne, and I couldn’t agree more.

One final trifle: Professor Byrne refers to “about 100 years’ worth” of philosophizing that helps to show naïve moral judgements “might even be right”. I risk disclosing a blameful personal prejudice: I do not feel that the philosophy of the past 100 years or so, on balance, contributed much that is positive to our understanding. For “more philosophy” to cure the harm done by “a little bit of philosophy” I would rather go some twenty-four centuries back. Would that the philosophers of the past 100 years did not think themselves so much wiser than their ancient predecessors. Professor Byrne concludes by quoting Bertrand Russell’s statement that “philosophy removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.” For myself, I know no one who did that better than Socrates-Plato (one cannot really split these).

D. R. Khashaba
March 2007.

Some papers on this weblog which amplify on or clarify certain points raised here: “Must Values Be Objective?”, “Free Will as Creativity”, “Five Notes on Relativism”, “Explaining Explanation”. Also, “Is There Mind in Nature” where I reproduce a passage from my recently published Hypatia’s Lover.

Know Thyself: Impossible?

2007-03-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

Comment on “Do the Impossible: Know Thyself” by Theodore Dalrymple, New English Review, March 2007.

In the following lines I approach the question from an angle different from but not opposed to or at variance with that of Dr. Dalrymple, whose conclusions I find insightful, sagacious, and truly enlightening. Indeed, I fear that my angle of approach being so different, my comments may be thought irrelevant to the content of the article.

I agree that it is an illusion to think that we are “on the verge of … a breakthrough in self-understanding”, not, however, because self-understanding is an impossibility but because we are taking the wrong road to that destination.

A question ‘that is in principle unanswerable’ might be unanswerable not because it demands the impossible but because the question-form suggests that the answer be sought outside the terms of the question, whereas the terms of the question do constitute the reality sought. Thus the endless quandaries of neuroscience and philosophy of mind stem from the error of treating the mind as an object to be explained in terms of other objects – be those elements, concepts, or processes – instead of seeing the self-evident reality of the mind as the first principle of all meaning and all explanation.

This position is not to be confounded with the belief that the thorny practical problems of human existence have been solved. The inner reality of the mind may be our citadel, but on the outside not only the world at large, not only human society at large, not only our body, but even all the drives, inclinations, fears, imposed dogmas and superstitions that throng the mind, form a dark and fearsome jungle that we can only cut through slowly by the instruments of empirical inquiry and pragmatic trial and error. Only those who have surrendered their minds to dogmatism of whatever kind think there are ready, definitive answers to the problems of human existence. But this question is distinct from and should be kept distinct from that of the philosophical question about the mind.

I have no problem, for instance, with conceding that neuropsychiatry may be of help in dealing with certain behavioural or interpersonal problems.

However, self-understanding, the self-understanding that Socrates preached, that Buddha sought, is not something to be achieved, by an individual person or by humanity at large, definitively and once for all. It is not knowledge arrived at and established by some science: it is a way of life, founded on the realization that our inner reality, our inner life, which can only be in the exercise of intelligence, in living as rational beings, is what makes us human and is what gives us what worth we might claim. This self-understanding is not impossible, it is something all normal human beings have some flicker of, but it is not something that may be captured in any fixed objective formulation.

IS THERE MIND IN NATURE?

2007-03-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

IS THERE MIND IN NATURE?
D. R. Khashaba

The ever escalating heat of the Creationist-Darwinist polemics, patterned, on both sides, on the worst kind of factional fanaticism, is doing great damage to rationalism and freedom of thought. Neither party shows any readiness to stop for a moment to say, I may not have the whole truth on my side. Either all design, all purpose, all mind is brought into the world of nature from on high or there is no design, no purpose, and no mind at all in the world of nature. Either Jehovah has revealed it all or Darwin has revealed it all, and there is no more question. They do not reason but wrangle, either party loudly proclaiming they hold the absolute truth captured for all time in a holy book, whether it be the Bible or The God Illusion.

In this short note however I do not intend to discuss the question at length. I reserve that task for a future paper where I hope to examine some more fruitful approaches such as that suggested by the Aristotelean notion of entelechy, by Bergson’s concept of creative evolution, by Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and process. Here I simply offer some rambling thoughts on the subject.

Daniel Dennett, for instance, sees "humans, the human soul and culture as natural products of the primordial soup." In this deceptively simple statement there are at least three dangerously ambiguous terms – 'natural', 'product', 'primordial', leaving alone the metaphorical 'soup' in which one can easily drown – which naturally produce their own primordial haze that must be made more distinct if we are to think a little more clearly.

It is so unfortunate that the notion of 'intelligent design' has been kidnapped by creationists and tied to the carriage of monotheistic revelation. The notion certainly deserved better, for it can justly claim a worthy ancestry from the Logos of Heraclitus and the Nous of Anaxagoras through the Aristotelean Entelechy to the Will and Idea of Schopenhauer. Creationists, by pitting intelligent design against evolution in an either-or contest, have made it possible for Darwinists (who in turn confusingly conflate Darwinism with the basic notion of evolution) to claim that, since it can be shown by empirical evidence that evolution is a fact, we can forget about intelligence and purposiveness in the processes of nature. This does as much wrong to the scientific evolutionary concept as to the philosophical concept of inherent creative intelligence and inherent purposiveness in all becoming. Evolution (Darwinian or non-Darwinian) is a scientific theory (not in the corrupt sense of 'theory' forged by the creationists but in the sense in which all scientific findings are theoretical) that gives an objective account of phenomenal happenings. Science tells us How, it never tells us Why. When certain scientists say that science 'explains' things, this only shows that their minds are innocent of the wondering Why: for them to explain is simply to show how; that is all they are interested in. Newton did not think that his theory and his equations explain why things behave as they do; nor did Einstein. But the unreasonable (I have more than once been chided for using stronger words) controversy wants to force us to choose between a whimsical creator taking it into its head to fabricate a world out of nothing and the equally absurd idea of an inert, lifeless, mindless something also suddenly taking it into its head to start moving and developing.

So once again I find it necessary to reiterate what I have been maintaining in my writings, that the failure to distinguish between the radically different roles and spheres of science and philosophy is damaging to both science and philosophy. Thus here we find ourselves required to make the sorry choice between saving intelligence in the universe by accepting the arbitrary authority of revealed religion, and vainly seeking to save our own intelligence by resting content with something mindless and lifeless as what is ultimately real. But we need not be reduced to that sad choice. Science, and only science, is entitled and able to give us an account of how things are and how they have come to be as they are, and that account remains valid until science has a (by its own criteria) better account to give. At the same time, poetry and philosophy and art (yes, these belong together in one family) are entitled and able to give us a vision through which we find meaning and value in the world and in ourselves. Can that vision be true? If we take the notion of truth as meaning that which conforms to things as they are objectively, which reports what is the case, then the notion of truth is inapplicable to the creative vision of poetry/philosophy/art whose reality is inherent and self-contained. That vision is meaningful and as meaningful constitutes the reality we live in as intelligent beings. That is all we have, all we can have, and all we need to have.

Philosophers must learn humility from poets, though poets are with justice a very proud race. Poets do not bother to say that their visions have any truth or validity outside themselves. Philosophers too should refrain from the attempt to assert that their visions and principles apply to the world outside. Their visions and principles are true of the only real world they know. They should be content with that. The Unknowable is unknowable and that's that. The only noumenon we know is our own inner reality. The noumenon of the world is our idea. To match our idea of the noumenon of the world with the noumenon of the world we have to be outside the world and inside the world at the same time, which is nonsensical.

Creationists and the advocates of the new-fangled Intelligent Design doctrine place all intelligence outside us and reduce us to miserable beggars depending for all intelligence and all understanding on dole. Materialists, Darwinists, and their tribe, when they step out of their proper place as scientists and parade as philosophers, banish all intelligence and all mystery and give us a world that is pale and stale.

Permit me to conclude these thoughts by reproducing an excerpt from the supplementary part of my latest book, Hypatia’s Lover, giving an imaginary answer of Hypatia’s to an imaginary question.

“From Hypatia’s answers to students’ questions:

“Is there mind in the cosmos, in the world we see around us? This is a question which only a fool would rush to answer confidently. Plato told us in the Sophist about the ongoing battle of the Gods and the Giants. The Giants would make even of the mind in us a phantom thing not worthy of being dignified with the title of reality. The Gods see mind as the root and source and ground of reality. Now, I am no goddess of course, but you all know that I side with the philosophical Gods. To my mind the notion of a thing, any thing, existing apart from mind, is unintelligible. I cannot see how a thing that is not rooted in mind can be.
“But in what sense is there mind in things that we call material? In what sense is there mind in a rock, in a log of wood, in a manufactured article? These are intricate questions about which we can speculate endlessly. Here I would only explain that when I say that I cannot see how there can be anything apart from mind, I am not referring to mind as we habitually know it in ourselves. Mind as we habitually know it in ourselves is conditioned by the limitations and special circumstances of human life. And most manifestations of mind in our normal life and normal experience do not represent what we should see as most valuable or most real in us. Skill and shrewdness and even praiseworthy ingenuity are not what is best and happiest in us.
“But mind, or, as I prefer to say, intelligence, is to me an inseparable aspect of life, of creativity, of what is real. So, while I say that, theoretically, I cannot see how there can be a rock that is not grounded in mind, I yet confess that I have no notion as to how mind is related to the rock. But I can say with more confidence that I feel there is mind in a flower or a bee in the same sense as there is mind in our best moments of tranquility and of happiness. And I have to explain that when I speak of mind in the bee I do not mean the amazing abilities of the bee that put our best skills to shame, but I mean the intelligence inherent in its sheer vitality.
“I know that my thoughts on this subject are vague and nebulous and in need of development and clarification, but not more so – I unhesitantly say – than my thoughts on any other subject, the only difference being that, on the other subjects, I employ terms and notions that seem sensible to you because they sound familiar. But in truth, if we are not to delude ourselves, we must confess that all our theoretical thinking is of necessity always vague and nebulous, in need of constant examination, clarification, and re-formulation. When we forget this, we fall into the gross and deadly delusion of thinking ourselves in possession of final, definitive truth. This, after all, is the core message of the Socratic elenchus and of Plato’s conception of dialectic.
“I have said this before and I feel it bears repetition. When any of you puts to me any question, I hope that the questioner may never be under the delusion of expecting me to give a true answer. A question for which there can be a true answer is foreign to philosophy. A philosophical question is an invitation, an incitation, to reflection, to the clarification of our own thoughts. If you want true answers, go to the artisans, or go to the theologians! All their answers are absolutely true, even when they are absolutely contradictory! When you ask me a question, then whatever I may say – at least that’s what I hope – I am not giving you an answer but am inciting you to look into your own mind.”(1)

D. R. Khashaba
Cairo, Egypt
E-mail: dkhashaba@yahoo.com – daoud.khashaba@gmail.com
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com

(1) Hypatia’s Lover (2007): http://www.virtualbookworm.com/store/search.php?mode=search&page=1

DUALISM AND MONISM: A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

2007-02-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

DUALISM AND MONISM:
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

I will begin with a statement which many will find shocking: There has never been and there can never be an agreed, uniform, standard terminology in philosophy. The reason for this is that philosophy is not, and it is not in its nature to be, a science. Philosophy is a never-ending exercise of contemplating the inexhaustible and strictly ineffable reality of our inward being. In giving expression to that inexhaustible and ineffable reality philosophy must ever create new concepts and clothe those new concepts in new language.
If we were absolutely free, unembodied spirits, that would be the whole truth of the matter. But we are not. We are imperfect human beings living together in a common world and need to communicate with each other and be understood by each other. We need a language that is not completely originative, as the ideal language of philosophy or of poetry would be if we were free spirits, but is a language with some measure of fixity and some degree of uniformity. But we should not make the mistake of thinking this a step in the direction of what is best. Our aim should not be ever to achieve more fixity and uniformity; rather we should gladly welcome loosening the fixity and disturbing the uniformity. And yet the contingent necessities of our imperfect nature must be addressed. Let this be my excuse for the following note.

I have often felt that the usage of the terms ‘dualism’ and ‘monism’ in contemporary philosophical discussions calls for clarification. Some of my friends, with whom I stand on common ground with regard to certain important philosophical questions, describe themselves as dualists and, when counting me on their side, have called me a dualist. I find this confusing and, to me personally (if you will excuse the egotism), irritating.
I cannot accept the dualism we meet with in the Aristotelean misrepresentation of Platonic idealism or in Descartes’ separation of mind and body any more than I can accept the dualism represented by primitive notions of the self. Starting from this dualism, it is impossible to make sense of either mind or body. But the alternative is not the ‘monism’ which maintains that the body is all there is and that the mind is a gossamer apparition, a delusion. When I insist on the reality of the mind and affirm that the mind is the one reality we know immediately and indubitably, I do not call myself a dualist, for I maintain that there is no mind without objective existence (embodiment) and no objective existence without intelligence, and that only the whole is real. The emphasis I lay on mind is, we may say, moral and not metaphysical or epistemological. I emphasize the reality of mind since I hold that our whole worth and our whole diginity as human beings is in this inner luminescence, this inwardness, this inner sanctuary, that Socrates habitually referred to as that in us which thrives by doing what is right and suffers by doing what is wrong.
I have no intention to legislate for the linguistic usage of these terms. It is enough for me to say that there is a dualism that I find unacceptable and a monism that I find equally objectionable and that while in principle I resent all isms and all labels, I would rather be called a monist than a dualist, but insist that the monism I favour is not the monism of materialists. My position is more in harmony with Spinoza’s Pantheism, where God-or-Nature is a single reality, where the one Substance is natura naturans and natura naturata at once.

PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE

2007-02-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE

“… the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another …” – Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, XV.

Philosophers have to cconvey their thought (or, their insights, as I prefer to put it) in language, and language is, notoriously, a blunt tool. The more philosophers seek to sharpen that tool by creating special terminologies; the more finely defining and redefining their terms; the more artificial and unlifelike their language becomes; the more removed they find themselves from the core of the original inspiration they meant to convey; the more untrue to the throbbing heart of the living experience they intended to convey. And the predicament does not end there. With the multiplication of terminologies and the refinement of distinctions, the controversies and misunderstandings between different thinkers become more and more confounded. For we delude ourselves if we think that the ‘scholastic quibbling with words’ is behind us; it is as much with us today as it ever was.
The inherent fluidity of language has always been to me an indomitable challenge. In Let Us Philosophize I found myself obliged to include a “Note on Terminology” to prepare the reader for the shock of my special usage, or rather usages, of the particularly troublesome words ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’. I began the Note with the words, “If my contentions concerning the nature of philosophical thinking have any validity, then it would follow that philosophical terminology can never attain absolute uniformity.” Somewhere in that book I wrote: “Words are treacherous. Words, creatures of the mind, jump at every opportunity to lord it over the mind. There is not a single word that one may use unguardedly. Every word holds out a snare, and one must beware of falling into the snares of words. The mind must constantly assert its mastery over words by re-thinking, re-creating all its terms, all its formulations. Otherwise it soon finds itself a slave to the creatures it created to sing its hymns of glory.”
A word has to be understood – and can only be understood – in its proper universe of discourse. An original thinker’s language will inevitably be peculiar to that thinker, being the embodiment of a unique universe of discourse, and can only be understood in a sympathetically imaginative assimilation of that special universe of discourse.
I am currently reading Schleiermacher’s On Religion (in the English translation of Richard Crouter, CUP, 1988, 1996: I believe this does not negate the relevance of the following remarks). Schleiermacher finds the seat, the ground, of religion (for me, spirituality) in sense and intuition. In my own writings I shy away from the term ‘intuition’ because it has become encumbered with many conflicting constructions. What Schleiermacher means by sense and intuition corresponds to what I mean by understanding. On the other hand, for Schleiermacher understanding is the death of sense and intuition, and hence of true religion. In my usage that would be not understanding but knowledge as opposed to understanding. Thus going by the letter, Schleiermacher’s position seems to be radically opposed to mine, but in truth I find Schleiermacher’s outlook completely harmonious with my own. The discrepancy in terminology is partly contingent and could with some effort be made less glaring if I were to re-write my own text using Schleiermacher’s terminology. But that would not eradicate the basic peculiarity inherent in each writer’s language. Indeed, if I were to dress my thought in Schleiermacher’s or Kant’s or Whitehead’s language (to name only thinkers with whom I have much affinity), that would be more confusing than helpful, because it would blur the specificity of my concepts and thus falsify my special meaning.
Socrates in his trial asks his judges to bear with him if he spoke in his accustomed manner as they would excuse a foreigner who spoke in his native tongue and dialect. As with eveything in Plato, we can find here multiple layers of meaning beneath the surface. If we are to understand a thinker – indeed if we are to understand any of our fellow human beings even on the humdrum level of everyday life – we have, in generous open-mindedness, to allow them to speak not merely their own language but indeed their own ‘dialect’, their peculiar jargon. Else we shut ourselves to the truer communion of soul with soul that is akin to the understanding a mother drinks from the eyes of her baby. Alas! Most of the time in reading a philosopher we deny ourselves this deeper understanding and are content with collecting the empty husks of dead words.
Aristotle’s thought moves in a totally different universe of discourse from that of Plato’s. A Platonist finds it difficult to identify with Aristotle’s outlook, and the reverse is equally true. But that does not justify either a Platonist or an Aristotelist in thinking the other wrong. Either philosopher (any original philosopher for that matter) presents a panoramic landscape of reality which, to the extent that it has intrinsic coherence, enjoys its own rationality and reveals its proper truth. I as a Platonist have repeatedly spoken harshly of Aristotle, but only when considering Aristotle’s negative and unsympathetic evaluations of Plato’s positions.
A. N. Whitehead says, “The dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind. In exactly the same way the dogmas of physical science are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the sense-perception of mankind” (Religion in the Making, II.ii). In this plain, simple, straightforward explanation of the nature of both religious and scientific dogma Whitehead was not introducing a novel discovery or an abstruse theory, but was affirming something that should have long been part of the intellectual furniture of every civilized human being. Sadly, even today neither the adherents of religious creeds nor those engaged in scientific activity have yet absorbed this simple truth. (Every time I am compelled to use the word ‘truth’ I shudder at the layers upon layers of conflicting meanings and presuppositions hidden under its deceptive transparency.) Religions assume that their fictions report objective actualities and scientisits vainly seek to instal their fictions in place of the actual things they faintly shadow. Scientists and theologians alike endue their words with a sanctity and a finality they are not entitled to assume. They fail to realize that the only reality we know is the reality of the creative mind that produces both the religious metaphor and the scientific abstraction.
Let me seek an illustration in another quarter. Personally I am not comfortable with the current use of the terms ‘dualism’ and ‘monism’. Today monism is equated with materialism or physicalism, while any affirmation of spiritual reality is described as dualism. To me dualism indicates something like the dualism of Descartes who sorted out all reality into two distinct and completely separate substances, or like the dualism implied in the widely accepted and to my mind quite erroneous interpretation of Plato’s so-called ‘Theory of Forms’. When Spinoza revived the integral unity of mind and body in the one ultimate Substance, I would call that monism rather than dualism. In the same way, Socrates’ radical distinction between the intelligible and the sensible which emphasizes and brings into prominence the reality of the intelligible realm is, in my view, consistent with true monism, since, at any rate in my interpretation, the sensible has no reality except under the forms of intelligence, and the intelligible has no actuality except in some perceived instance. — I say all this not to dispute or criticize or seek to reverse the current usage of the terms monism and dualism, but to further illustrate my contention that philosophical terms should always only be understood in the context of the system of thought, of the universe of discourse, of the individual philospher using the terms.
Why are analytical philosophers continually at each other’s throats? It is because they cannot rid themselves of the delusion that words have fixed, inalienable, meanings, and that consequently they are speaking the same language. No two persons ever speak the same language. Except for purely abstract tokens drained of all content, every word has for each individual user associations, nuances, reverberations distinct from those it has for any other user. Albert Einstein has somewhere said, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are uncertain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” I interpret this as meaning that only purely abstract equations can be precise and formally true. Any statement with some content, with some relation to actuality, is necessarily ambiguous.
Whitehead, one of the most penetrating minds of the first half of the twentieth century, when expressing the profoundest thoughts on ultimate principles, writes as obscurely as Heraclitus. In illustration let me quote a paragraph taken at random from Reilgion in the Making:
“The actual world, the world of experiencing and of thinking, and of physical activity, is a community of many diverse entities; and these entities contribute to, or derogate from, the common value of the total community. At the same time, these actual entities are, for themselves, their own value, individual and separable. They add to the common stock and yet they suffer alone. The world is a scene of solitariness in community.” (p.88.)
The statement has the darkness of the deep. Why is this so? It is because he is trying to give expression to insights of the highest generality in original terms. We can only glimpse the meaning underlying such an expression if we enter into sympathetic communion with the whole web of ideas constituting his special universe of discourse.
Cratylus and Antisthenes in olden times, the early Wittgenstein in modern times, divined the truth that to use language is to falsify reality. The three of them were similarly nonplussed. They lacked the audacity of creative intelligence. The dilemma is real but there is a way out for them that dare defy the impossible. We, being imperfect, can only speak half-truths; but if we acknowledge our half-truths to be nothing but half-truths, they cease to be falsehoods: they become strivings towards the truth.
Someone might ask, “What’s the upshot of your argument?” In the first place, I would not call it an argument, but an appeal. An appeal for more generosity in dealing with the thought of anyone who seeks to give expression to a point of view. Plato in his dialogues repeatedly draws attention to the difference between genuine discussion aiming at understanding and disputation whose sole purpose is victory in debate. Unfortunately, most philosophical controversy is more akin to the latter. To enrich our philosophical understanding, we need less of critical acumen and more of sympathetic insight.

HYPATIA'S LOVER

2007-01-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

JUST PUBLISHED

My latest book, Hypatia's Lover, has just been published.
http://www.virtualbookworm.com/store/search.php?mode=search&page=1

This is a fictionalized account of the last days in the life of Hypatia, the Alexandrian philosopher who was brutally murdered by a Christian mob in 415 AD. The fictional love story is treated allusively, in very light touches, mostly through fleeting recollections evoked by incidents in the sad love stories of two of her students. In the story line the I have not tampered with any known facts.

The tragic tale is followed by a collection of imaginary excerpts from lectures and speeches of Hypatia. The philosophy presented in the imaginary lectures and speeches is confessedly my own. This is rendered pardonable and necessary by the fact that, thanks to the Church, Hypatia’s philosophical works have been completely lost to us.

If the moving portrayal of Hypatia’s tragedy is met with ire in some quarters, I offer no apology and have no regret. Hypatia’s atrocious slaughter is a sore wound in the human conscience that must be kept smarting if it is not to fester and poison the whole human body.

Philosophy: Who Needs It?

2006-12-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

This is something I wrote years ago. I had forgotten all about it until I recently twice chanced upon it on the internet. I thought I might as well put it here.

Philosophy: Who Needs It?
D. R. Khashaba

First appeared in: http://www.newphilsoc.org.uk/cafe%20philosophique/2003/let_us_philosophize.htm

The discusssion launched by David Large and Keith Parker raises a vital if, in a way, deeply disturbing issue, for it should make everyone engaged in philosophizing stop and ask oneself: Why do I do it? But - to anticipate myself - what is philosophy good for if not to be a Socratic gadfly?

So, instead of trying to answer directly David Large's question: 'Philosophy: who needs it?' I will begin by trying to answer, in the first place for myself, the question: Why do I philosophize? I think the honest, factual, answer is: I can't help it. It's a bug that has taken hold of me without asking my permission. In the Preface to my Let Us Philosophize (1998) I confessed that the book was a personal testimony of a seventy-year-old man who throughout his life "has had one overriding and abiding passion — call it addiction if you will: the urge to find answers to questions that most sane people raise at an early stage of their lives then throw behind their backs to attend to the business of living."

Has my philosophizing made me wise or good? At this point let me step out of the confessional and re-word the question thus: Does philosophy make people wise or good (keeping back for the moment the question whether these are two things or, as Socrates would tell us, one and the same thing)?

The metaphor of exploration, favoured by Keith Parker, is good provided we note that philosophy is inward not outward exploration. If wisdom or goodness were a mountain or a forest out there somewhere, then we could have settled the question empirically. But wisdom and goodness are not 'out there' but 'in here'. (How to interpret this 'in here' is another question we have to put aside for the moment.) And when we ask for the testimony of those who claim they have something to say about wisdom and goodness, they give us widely differing accounts. That is, even if wisdom and goodness are admitted to be goals sought by all, they turn out to be not the same for all people.

But this, to my mind, is not as negative a result as it seems to be. Different philosophers give us different visions of the good life and different pictures of the world; but they do, each of them separately, give us a unitary picture. What is the good of this? In my opinion, two all-important things (which in the end may not really be two but one thing). First, it gives some satisfaction to that terrible urge to ask questions and seek understanding. Many of us would agree that when that urge is denied satisfaction the result is either torment or torpor. Secondly, it is this life in the light of a unified Weltanshauung that is the distinguishing mark of a human being and sets humans apart from other living beings; and who wants to lose that birthright? (How to reconcile or choose between those different ideals and world-pictures is too large a question to go into in the present context.)

So to the question: Why philosophize?, the answer seems to be that some people are just born that way. There are those who are impelled by their nature to sing or paint or invent tales, and there are those who are impelled by their nature to ask themselves questions. And it so happens that all of these, when they each obey their peculiar imperative urge, render inestimable service to the society in which they live. The lyricist, the painter, the story-teller, add to our life beauty and joy and wisdom — yes, I credit poetry and art, rather than philosophy, with giving wisdom. The questioner, on the other hand, in subjecting our accepted notions and theories and beliefs to examination, spares us the fate of turning into fossils: for a species whose most effective tools in the struggle for survival are mental tools is inevitably doomed when those tools remain unchanged in an ever-changing world.

This brings us back to the Socratic gadfly, and so to the question: Who needs philosophy?, my answer is: The whole of humanity is in very bad need of philosophy, perhaps today, when we have so much of knowledge and so much of power but so little of understanding, more than ever.

EXPLAINING EXPLANATION

2006-10-15T03:14:00.000-07:00

EXPLAINING EXPLANATION

The ambiguity of the notion of explanation is responsible for much of the failure of understanding characterizing controversies between scientists and philosophers. Distinguishing clearly the various senses in which the verb ‘to explain’ and the noun ‘explanation’ are used or could be used goes a long way if not towards settlement then at least towards a clearer understandinmg of the issues involved in many such controversies. In this note I will try to do something in that direction.
In what ways do we seek explanation or speak of explanation? Leaving aside the case of ‘explaining’ a difficult piece of writing, where we may more properly speak of elucidating, clarifying, or simplifying, we can separate the other instances into two distinct classes: the class of cases where we seek to explain how and the class of cases where we seek to explain why. In my opinion, these are radically different and it is vitally important to be clear in our minds about the distinction since confusion between the two different meanings of explanation is responsible for much of the misunderstandings we encounter in dealing with scientific and philosophical questions and in discussing the relation between science and philosophy.
Let us look at some examples of questions leading to ‘how-explanations’ on the one hand and to ‘why-explanations’ on the other hand and try to see what kind of ‘understanding’ each of these classes yields: for the same ambiguity that envelops the term ‘explanation’ also envelops the term ‘understanding’ with similarly unfortunate consequences.
Recently physicists have been fighting among themselves about string theory(1). For some two decades now prominent physicians have been promising to explain the universe in a limited number of complex equations. Some of them are now saying that all efforts in that direction have ended in a cul-de-sac. But I don’t think that these any more than the ones who remain sanguine about the prospects of the theory have realized in what way the idea is basically flawed. (I am not qualified to discuss the debate between the two parties. I speak as a complete outsider.) They have not rid themselves of the illusion that it is theoretically possible to discover a single formula or group of formulae that will ‘explain’ everything. This is basically the same old dream of the Pythagoreans who, having discovered that the musical scale could be expressed in a mathematical formula, thought that numbers could yield the final explanation of everything.
Both Newton and Einstein were wiser than to think that they had explained anything by their wonderful equations. They knew that their equations were tools for managing the phenomena of the natural world but could explain nothing.
In the Principia Newton wrote: “Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses.” Again, in a letter to Bentley he wrote: “That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum … seems to me a great absurdity.”(2)
It is the same story with neuroscientists and psychologists and pundits of the new-fangled theory of mind. They can (a) give descriptions of observed phenomena and processes and (b) produce theories that range observed phenomena in patterns that have intrinsic intelligibility. That is all objective science and all theory can do. The mystery, the reality, underlying the phenomenal processes and happenings, can only be grasped in the immediacy of living experience. Mind is just my inner reality; irreducible, unexplainable — it cannot be spirited away.
Professor Pluhar, in the Introduction to his translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (3) writes, “John Locke [1632-1704] argued for the existence of a perfect God on the ground that the self-evident existence of oneself, as a mind capable of perception and knowledge (which cannot arise from mere matter), presupposes such a God. For 'whatever is first of all things must necessarily contain in it, and actually have, at least, all the perfections that can ever after exist …'.”
This is an aspect of Locke’s thought that seems to have been overlooked, forgotten, wilfully dumped away, or ‘generously’ excused by Empiricists, who make Locke the dean of their materialism. Nowadays evolution is seen as suficient to explain all novelty. Nobody stops to consider that evolution may tell us in what manner, by what steps, things have come about, but it does not tell us how that was possible. They do not consider that the scientific study of evolution may give us information but cannot give us intelligibility.
For instance, evolutionists have attempted to ‘explain’ the beauty of bird-song as an evolutionary trait that helps survival.(4) Granted that the beauty of the song of the male bird attracts the female and so helps reproduction. But what makes the female bird respond to the beauty in the song of the male? Let us say that the female’s response to the more appealing song ensures mating and consequently the survival of the species. The question remains: What makes the song appealing? Perhaps we have to rest with the answer that the female bird just loves the melodious sound. But even if we say that the sounds of the song produce physical vibrations in the female that trigger certain chemical processes, etc., etc., we can still ask, what makes the song beautiful to us? What is the attraction of the skylark to a Shelley or of the nightingale to a Keats? The song is beautiful and that’s that. We cannot go beyond Socrates’ ‘foolish’ “It is by Beauty that all beautiful things are beautiful.” This is no answer and yet it is the only answer that gives us understanding since it is the answer that puts us face to face with the idea of Beauty as an ultimate mystery.
Further in the Introduction to Kant’s third Critique, Professor Pluhar writes that Kant said that “it is inconsistent for Locke, as an empiricist, to argue to the existence of something beyond the bounds of all experience.” I think that Kant’s criticism, though right in principle, does not do Locke full justice. Locke may have been guilty of thinking that his reasoning related to an existence “beyond the bounds of all experience”, but his reasoning had a profounder significance as the postulation of a ground for the intelligibility of experience. Hume’s radicalization of Locke’s position, by revealing the inadequacy of empiricism when taken as a complete theory of knowledge, called forth Kant’s critical solution. But Locke’s ‘inconsistent’ position was richer in insight.
It’s the same with the ultimate mystery of the universe. The Big Bang may be described, may perhaps be captured in reflections of the remotest constellations or whatever, but all that will not tell us what it was that banged in the first place; and even if the Bang is reduced to an insubstantial equation, as all matter seems to have been reduced, that will only put us face to face with the ultimate mystery of Being, quizzing us with the ultimate question: Why should there have been anything rather than nothing?
At this point I have to address a possible perversion of my position. When I seek to limit the jurisdiction of science, it is not in the interest of theology or religion. Theologians can vie with the best of scientists in rationality and consistency of thought. Their sin is the hubris of believing that they possess the truth. It is a sin that many scientists share with them; but scientistis are more fortunate in that their object of study, the observable world, has a habit of reminding the scientists that she is greater than their theories, while the hidden object of the theologians does not show any interest in correcting their errors.
Science, dealing with the world as objective, as external to the mind, as given, can work on nature, but cannot – in Kantian language – approach the noumenal. The mind, in itself and by itself, can examine its own ideas, disentangle them, clarify them: that is the realm of philosophy proper; it cannot yield facts of the objective world that can be discovered, observed, or verified. As I have been repeatedly affirming in my writings: Philosophy does not give us truth but gives us meaningfulness. On the other hand, science gives us facts, gives us truth, but no understanding.
Science and philosophy came into the world as Siamese twins, but they have to be separated if either is not to hinder and corrupt the other. It is in the best interest of both science and philosophy for scientists and philosophers to realize that theirs are two domains that are radically distinct, and that just as philosophy, by reasoning alone, cannot answer questions that are proper to science – questions that relate to the actual world – so also science, by the methods of science, cannot find answers to questions proper to philosophy, questions relating to meaning and value and the ultimate why.
Philosophical understanding proper can only be defined by Socrates’ principle of philosophical ignorance: philosophical understanding is radically distinct from knowledge: we can only have philosophical understanding when, in relation to the question for which we seek philosophical understanding, we renounce any claim to knowledge. This does not mean that in philosophical understanding we are condemned to wander in a haze of mystic obscurity. What it means is that to enjoy a life endowed with meaningfulness, we have to seek that meaningfulness in ideas creatively engendered by the mind, within the mind. These ideas shed meaning on the objective givennesses of experience, but they do not have their existence in the objective world.
So, if we are to speak of explanation in connection with both science and philosophy, let us say that science explains how while philosophy explains why. Let us further say that only science gives us knowledge: scientists will love that, but let them then accept also the rejoinder: only philosophy gives us understanding.

Notes:

(1) Here are a few links to recent discussions: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825305.800.html - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,23114-2214707,00.html - http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/18638 -
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1890366,00.html
(2) I quote from Preserved Smith, The Enlightenment 1687-1776, 1934, ch. 2, “Newtonian Science”, p.47.
(3) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated, with an Introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar, 1987, p. lxxiv.
(4) I am sorry I have lost the source and failed to track back to it.

THE TRUTH CRAZE

2006-07-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

THE TRUTH CRAZE
D. R. Khashaba
[Firts published in Philosophy Pathways Issue No. 119]

There has recently been a craze for Truth. Books, articles, websites, weblogs, have been preaching the importance or necessity of 'truth'. The advocacy has been carried out with something like religious fanaticism — excusably, because its main incentive has been to counter an opposed religious position that seeks to bypass or transcend the claim of science to be the sole arbiter in deciding factual questions. Since, under the circumstances, any attempt to examine the claims of the friends of 'truth' exposes the daredevil who makes the attempt to the charge of standing in the camp of the religionists, I have to make clear at the ouset that I am as opposed to the religious camp as any empirical materialist. Kant put an end to theological pretences when he explained that theological claims can neither be validated by empirical methods nor justified by pure reasoning.

Permit me also to put forward two other preliminary remarks. The first is that I am not here dealing with the flurry of academic interest in the Theory of Truth. This is a subject I hope to come back to some other time. I expect that most of the advocates of 'truth' I mean to address in the present paper would lump the academic controversies raging about the definition of Truth with theological controversies and apologetics. My second preliminary remark is that while questioning the universal relevance of 'truth' I would emphasize the absolute importance and necessity of truthfulness and rationality, by which I mean sincerity, rejection of deception, above all self-deception, and unqualified submission to the jurisdiction of reason.

Well, then, what issue do I take with the advocates of Truth? It is, first, that they speak as if there were one clearly defined concept of 'truth', and, secondly, that they maintain or imply that that concept is equally relevant in all fields of human thought.

Suppose we take truth to be that quality which attaches to acceptable answers to meaningful questions. A trial jury, a historian, a doctor, a medical researcher, a physicist, a biologist, an economist, would seek answers to questions that are unlike to each other. The acceptable answers in each category are to be sought by applying distinct methodologies and have to satisfy different criteria. But they share one common character: they all relate to objective fact. And in all of these cases we can sensibly speak of truth, approximation to truth, or probability.

But let us look at other areas where I say the concept of truth is not only inapplicable but may be positively injurious. I will give three samples.

ONE: Debates surrounding such issues as euthanasia, abortion, security versus civil/human rights, etc., are being interminably conducted with crusading vehemence, to no avail. Why? To my mind the reason is that the opposing sides to such controversies believe that their position is susceptible of logical demonstration and rests on true propositions. If we realize that in such issues we deal with values that are only absolute and inviolable in the intelligible realm (the Platonic celestial sphere of Ideas) but which in our actual imperfect world will often clash, then we see that such issues cannot be resolved by pure logic, but only by a spirit of toleration, by giving due weight and consideration to the opposed values involved, by moving tentatively, by trial and error, towards a balance, shifting and adjustable. The adversaries in such controversies err gravely when each tries to prove one side right and the other side wrong. What each side should do is to make sure the values they defend are not overlooked or neglected while at the same time acknowledging the importance and necessity of the values on the other side. There is no call for Truth here, for in an imperfect world there can be no 'true' solutions to practical problems. What we need is sympathy and understanding and reasonableness.

TWO: When Socrates says that it is better to suffer injury than to perpetrate injury, this statement can neither be proved nor disproved; it cannot therefore be said to be true. Is it therefore meaningless? Is it mere rhetoric? My answer is a most decided No. It is meaningful because it expresses an attitude that generates in us a fuller life. Since this view has been central to all my writings, I do not find it necessary to expand on it here.

THREE: Spinoza in his great posthumous Ethics gives us a majestic system of interwoven concepts, forming an internally coherent ideal whole, an intelligible world in its own right. Spinoza, the mathematician, who came of age under the shadow of Descartes, prided himself on presenting his system ordine geometrico demonstrata. But nobody has ever believed that Spinoza's towering system has been proved true or could ever be proved true. I could have taken for my example Berkeley or Schopenhauer or Bradley or A. N. Whitehead — to pick up names at random. Are such metaphysical systems therefore valueless? Such philosophers wrong themselves and wrong their philosophies by making a claim to truth and by making a show of demonstration and proof. Indeed they have given the whole of philosophy a bad name by so doing. The value of such metaphysical systems resides in their creating imaginative conceptual worlds in which the givennesses of our experience and the mysteries of human life find meaning: not 'true' meaning but vital meaning or spiritual meaning if you will, the meaning we find in a sonata, a landscape painting, a poem. Hence I maintain that the truth-claim is as pernicious in what I term philosophy proper as it is in religion.

It is true that science also, especially in its highest reaches, creates imaginative conceptual systems that give intelligibility to phenomena, but there is an important difference. It is always with timidity that I even make mention of science because I claim no scientific knowledge. But let me venture to say that science is concerned with the objective: objectivity is the sine qua non of science. Hence I say that science has for its province the actual or, to use a phrase dear to empiricists, what is the case. There the value of Truth reigns supreme. Philosophy and poetry and art are concerned with our inner reality, and there, if we speak of truth, it is only in the sense of Shakespeare's 'to thine own self be true'.

So it seems that I have no quarrel with the Truth Party after all. My complaint is that in our enthusiasm for a Truth which is the hallmark of empirical knowledge we tend to overlook realities, experiences, and values which will not submit to the empirical tests required for obtaining the Truth Licence, while I, foolishly no doubt, believe that these unlicensed realities and values are what our ailing and suffering humanity most needs.

D. R. Khashaba
July 2006

A NOTE

2006-06-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Comment on "Introducing Follies of the Wise" by Frederick Crews, posted on www.butterfliesandwheels.com on 16th June 2006.

Whenever I try to comment on any of the varied forms of the science vs. religion controversy, I find myself in a very awkward position. Since I stand outside all of the contending camps, every one of the opponents assumes that I am aligned with the opposite side and I end up falling with bad company. Let me therefore state at the outset that I am radically opposed to all theology, supernaturalism, and otherworldliness. Hence I side with Professor Crews when he attacks all varieties of pseudo-science; and yet I find that I have a quarrel with his general stance or perhaps with his emphasis.

Professor Crews writes, “We chronically strain against our animality by inhabiting self-fashioned webs of significance – myths, theologies, theories – that are more likely than not to generate illusory and often murderous ‘wisdom’.” I love this. In fact I have been saying it in almost the selfsame phrasing in all of my published books and in many of my published articles. But I suspect there is an important difference of attitude between us here. I glory in the web of myths and theories I inhabit and see that as what constitutes my humanity. As a human being I live in a dream world of our own making, including the E=mc² which you can never locate anywhere out there in the objective world but is a formula created by Einstein’s mind, with which we can work wonders with the phenomena of the world. The “illusory and often murderous ‘wisdom’” that our myths generate are, in my view, a necessary danger which we must be prepared to face and for which there is a remedy. The remedy is to acknowledge that our myths are myths, that our theologies are fables and fairy tales – some beautiful, some atrocious –, and our theories .. well, ‘theory’ is too flabby a terms: theories of physics, theories of economics, theories of education, theories of medicine differ widely, but in the end they are all conceptual schemes that enable us to deal with natural phenomena.

In my view, those who oppose or try to curb the claim of scientific empiricism to have sole jurisdiction over factual questions – both the theologians with whom I have no sympathy and the idealists with whom I sympathize – defeat themselves on two counts: first by making truth-claims and secondly by venturing into the perilous arena of causation. Both ‘truth’ and ‘causation’ are slippery, much entangled themes surrounded by much confusion. Fortunately (for me), I do not have to touch these hornet nests. I surrender both fields unconditionally to empirical science.

If a poet were to say that poetry is a vehicle of truth, I would fully sympathize with her/his claim but say that s/he is foolish in using the term ‘truth’. Let us assign truth to objectively observable facts. Poetry is not concerned with facts. Poetry discovers reality, or rather, creates reality. (Don’t jump to my neck yet; hear me out.) I maintain that the same holds true of philosophy. Philosophy mistakes its proper character when it seeks or claims to lead to discoverable or demonstrable truth. Poets have the advantage over philosophers here in that poets are free of the error of most philosophers in confounding the role of philosophy with that of science.

At this point the scientific empiricist/materialist might say, “Well, if you reject entirely the claims of theology and even of metaphysics to objective truth, I have no problem with conceding you your poetical truth.” I wish it were as simple as that. For my main concern is to emphasize that our subjective life, that the myths we create, that the ideas, ideals and dreams we breed, are what constitute our distinctive character as human beings and our proper worth; that our ideas, ideals, and dreams are our reality and the sole locus of reality .. aye, there’s the rub! For just as I conceded to science all truth I want science to concede to poetry and philosophy all reality.

This is not to contend about a word. Humanity badly needs to sift its values. As much as we need rationalism and freedom from superstition, supernatural illusions, and otherworldliness, we also need release from the false values of the materialist and worldly ideology and values that reign supreme even in putatively religious societies. Today, religion claims to be the sole custodian of spiritual values. We need a purely human spirituality. Science is not in essence or in principle opposed to that. But science in campaigning against the false claims of theologians and metaphysicians to objective knowledge, unwittingly shoves spiritual values into obscurity. We have to draw a clear line between the realm of objective fact, the domain of science, and the realm of ideals and values, the domain of philosophy, a philosophy that lays claim to no discoverable or demonstrable truth.

D. R. Khashaba
Website: http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
Weblog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com

SOCRATES' PRISON JOURNAL

2006-04-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

My latest book, a fictional Socrates' Prison Journal, has just been published (Print On Demand) by Virtualbookworm.com.

I reproduce below the brief Preface:

The idea of this little book had been luring me for decades. I kept putting it off because I did not feel sure about where to draw the line between representing Socrates' thought and presenting my own. After having published Let Us Philosophize (1998) and Plato: An Interpretation (2005), as well as numerous articles, where I gave my reading of Socrates/Plato, I felt I could give myself free rein without worrying about fencing apart what might be read into Socrates/Plato and what is an accretion, provided always that the accretion be harmonious, in the writer's judgement, with the rest.
Beside the basic fiction of the prison journal, I have, from the start and throughout, introduced anachronistic citations, fictional situations, dreams and divine intimations, to emphasize the non-historic intent of this work. Nontheless, I maintain that my reading is truer to the genuine spirit of the Socratic-Platonic philosophy than much that goes as scholarly and erudite analysis and exposition.
I am aware that there is much reiteration in the following pages. I go back again and again to the same subject and repeat again and again the same thoughts in various forms of expression. I feel that this is necessary, since one of my main concerns in this as in my other writings is to correct what I see as grave misunderstandings and distortions that have become firmly established within mainstream philosophical thought; I am also trying to introduce and clarify concepts and views which I claim to be original and important. Both these tasks call for and justify much reiteration and much insistence.
The notes appended to the journal are of a dual nature. The biographical and historical notes are for the the benefit of the lay reader or the novice. These notes, when not drawn directly from the dialogues of Plato, are derived from sources that are readily accessible. With respect to these, I claim no originality and make no pretence of erudition. They are bits of common knowledge which I collect here simply for convenience. In the remaining notes I expand somewhat, for the purpose of clarification or emphasis, on certain ideas and views presented in the journal.
Following the notes I have reproduced in an Appendix an article which first appeared in Philosophy Pathways Issue 69, 19 October, 2003, in which I summarized a brilliant paper by Professor Enid Bloch on Plato's description of Socrates' last moments. Professor Bloch's paper deserves to be widely known as it corrects a mistaken objection to Plato's immortal portrayal of one of the most touching and inspiring scenes in human history.

For a further brief description of the contents of the book, go to: http://www.virtualbookworm.com/socratesprisonjournal.html