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4. PhilosophyasMetaphysicalDemythologizing
by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)
Having
seen in Week I that philosophy is born out of myth, we must now
acknowledge that myth as such is not philosophy. On the contrary, the path
that leads from myth to science, through poetry and philosophy, could be
called the path of "demythologizing". This term refers to the process of
taking the "myth" (in the modern sense of "false beliefs") out of myth-i.e.,
questioning our unquestioned beliefs in hopes of transforming them into a
more reliable expression of the truth. Thus, for example, when I suggested
in the previous lecture that we all regard "the tree of philosophy" as the
myth for this course, I was not really doing philosophy. Rather, I was
preparing the ground in which the tree itself will be planted. After you
finish this course, I hope you will take the time to question seriously not
only the myth, but also the (poetic) analogy that "philosophy is like a tree".
But if you question this presupposition here at the beginning, you may find
that the ground of your mind will be too hard to receive the insights this
myth can inspire.
One such
insight is that, just as a tree is an organic whole consisting of four main
parts (the roots, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves), so also many, if not
most, sets of philosophical ideas are organized according to such a pattern.
We have already seen several such patterns in the first two sessions. But
before we look at some examples of how demythologization worked in
ancient Greece, I would like to point out several other interesting fourfold
patterns.
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If the
"myth, poetry, philosophy, science" pattern is regarded as a description of
the way human thinking develops on a macrocosmic scale (i.e., in human
cultures), then we should not be surprised to find a similar pattern
operating on a microcosmic scale (i.e., in human individuals). One of the
most common ways of describing the stages of an individual's development
is to refer to a person's birth, youth, maturity, and old age. By correlating
each of these with a progressively higher level of consciousness, the pattern
shown in Figure II.1 emerges. Just as the progression from birth to youth
coincides with the awakening of a child's unconscious mind, so also the
progression from youth to maturity requires the gradual sharpening of
consciousness, until a distinct awareness of one's own self arises. And the
self-conscious person whose natural development is not interrupted
eventually enters into a new stage which, for want of a better term, we can
call super-consciousness. The elderly
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The wisdom that results for those in their "golden years" bears a
striking resemblance to the way we imagine people living in the
so-called
"golden age" that many cultures look back to (see Lecture 3). Yet the latter
corresponds not to old age but to the pre-natal experiences of the baby in its
mother's womb. Mapping these relations onto a circle appropriately
suggests the cyclical character of the development we are here considering:
super-consciousness may well involve a recapturing of something a person
loses at birth-an idea we will see Plato defending in
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Figure II.2:
The Four Powers of the Mind
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Lecture 5.
Each of these
four stages can also be correlated
with a particular "faculty", or
power, of the human mind, as
shown in Figure II.2. Imagination
is the power governing the earliest
years of our life, just as myth
governs the thinking of those who
live in primitive cultures. As
everyone knows, the difference between fantasy and reality is not
distinct in the mind of a true child.
In youth, how-
Determining what each of these powers aims to express will give us a more
complete understanding of the interrelationships between these ideas.
Myth uses imagination to express beliefs. Poetry uses passion to express
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point to take a brief look at the origins of logic itself, since the proper
employment of logic is necessary in order for demythologization to take
place.
The
English word "logic" comes from the Greek word logos, meaning "word"including the spoken word ("speech"), the written word ("book"), and the
thought word ("reason"). But in Ancient Greece logos was also sometimes
used to refer to what we can call the hidden meaning in a myth. In this
sense, the logos of a thing is its final purpose or ultimate nature. This is how
the Bible uses the word when, for example, St. John's Gospel begins by
exclaiming: "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and
the logos was God." The person who lives in a myth experiences this logos
firsthand, and so has no need to explain it. The poet is the first to recognize
the need to use words to express the passion with which an experience of
the logos fills a person. The philosopher tries to understand the logos in
such a way as to separate truth from fiction. And the scientist forgets the
logos altogether in search of concrete facts that can be manipulated. This
"forgetting" is the source of the modern problem of meaninglessness or
"alienation" and will occupy our attention at several points later on (see e.g.,
Lecture 18).
The
process of moving from an intimate experience of the logos to a state
wherein its presence is forgotten is the process of demythologization.
Forgetting the logos is in a sense a catastrophe for mankind, and yet in
another sense, as we shall see in Lecture 9, such forgetting (or at least,
ignoring) is a necessary requirement in order for knowledge to arise.
Science requires us to forget the hidden logos because factual knowledge
admits only what is openly revealed. Indeed, the difficulties we all have in
thinking in terms of this logos arise as a direct result of the fact that we live
in an age dominated by the scientific world view, which finds no proper
place for the logos. Yet it is always possible for a person to recapture the
meaning of myth, even after forgetting it in the process of attaining
knowledge. Nurturing the tree of philosophy within ourselves is one of the
best ways to revive the memory of that forgotten reality.
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The
earliest demythologizers in ancient Greece were the philosophers who lived
during the period of time from Thales to Aristotle (see Figure I.5). With two
important exceptions (to be discussed in the next lecture), these
philosophers are referred to as "presocratic" philosophers, because they
lived before a very influential philosopher named Socrates. One of the main
concerns of the presocratics was to describe the nature of "ultimate
reality". And this, as I mentioned in Lecture 1, is the main task of the branch
of philosophy we now call "metaphysics". Several of these early
demythologizers regarded one of the four traditional "elements" (or
something like it) as constituting ultimate reality. Thales himself argued
that everything can ultimately be reduced to water. Anaximenes (c.585c.528) disagreed, claiming the most basic element is actually air. Not long
afterwards, Heraclitus (fl.500-480), who had some interesting ideas about
the logic of opposites (see Lecture 12), suggested that fire is the best
candidate for a basic metaphysical building-block. Democritus (c.460c.371) then defended the earliest form of "atomism", viewing the
fundamental element as "being", or simply what is. By this he meant
something similar to what we mean by "matter", thus suggesting at least a
rough correspondence to the earth element, since the latter clearly refers
not merely to soil, but to all solid matter. These four early metaphysical
positions can be mapped onto a cross, as follows:
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ends (42a) with Socrates exclaiming: "Now it is time that we were going, I to
die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to
anyone but God."
Socrates'
prediction concerning the growth of philosophy turned out to be accurate.
For in the wake of Socrates' death, Plato's writings preserved many of
Socrates' key insights. Unfortunately, "postsocratic" philosophers have all
too often not been so willing to question those who wield the power in
society. This is partly because the relationship between philosophers and
the "city" has changed radically since Socrates' time. Philosophy now tends
to be accepted as part of the status quo, a subject among other subjects to be
studied in pursuit of a "whole person" education. And this change began,
rather ironically, with Plato himself.
Plato
presented his philosophical ideas in the form of Dialogues. These books
transform Socrates' habit of persistent questioning into a specific
philosophical method. On one level, a Dialogue is simply a book that records
a conversation between a main speaker-usually Socrates in Plato's
Dialogues-and one or more secondary characters. In the course of this
conversation the main character acts as a "midwife" for the potential
insights waiting to be "born" in the minds of the secondary characters.
(Socrates' mother, incidentally, was a midwife by profession.) In other
words, just as a good midwife coaches the pregnant mother so that the
mother can give birth to her baby (rather than the midwife having to take
the baby out by force), so also Socrates asks questions and offers
suggestions in order, as it were, to "coach" the secondary characters into
discovering the desired conclusion without having to be told what it is. But
on a deeper level, the significance of this new method lies in its appeal
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Figure II.6:
The Method of Dialogue
edly going beyond them in certain respects), the first thoroughgoing system
of metaphysics with a modern ring. His philosophy, which provides the
archetype of all "idealist" metaphysical systems, is far too complex to study
in any depth in an introductory course. However, looking briefly into his
theories of knowledge and of human nature should provide us with a good
sampling of how his idealism works.
The
branch of philosophy concerned with answering questions about the nature
and origin of human knowledge is called "Epistemology" (from the Greek
words epistemos, meaning "knowledge", and logos, here best taken to mean
"the study of"). Metaphysics and epistemology are always intimately related
to each other, because a philosopher's understanding of what reality
ultimately is will inevitably influence his or her account of how we know
what is real, and vice versa. So for the remainder of our study of
metaphysics, I shall include in my account of each major philosopher a
description of his epistemology.
Plato's
epistemology is based on the metaphysical assumption that "universals" (or
what he sometimes calls "forms" or "ideas") are the only true reality,
whereas "particulars" (i.e., "matter" or "things") are only appearances of
this reality. In much of our everyday experience we therefore suffer from
the illusion that the things and objects around us in the physical world
constitute the ultimate reality. But the actual situation for human beings,
according to Plato, is that our ideas reveal to us not merely subjective inner
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states, but the true nature of reality itself. The philosopher's ultimate task,
therefore, is to look beyond the mere appearances of things in order to come
to know these ideas.
In Book
VII of his greatest dialogue, Republic, Plato portrays Socrates as comparing
the human situation to a group of people who have
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The
analogy, at least in this simplified form, is quite straightforward. The cave
represents the world we live in and the prisoners in chains represent those
who have not yet learned to philosophize. The shadows are the material
objects ("appearances") we normally treat as real. And the objects casting
the shadows are the true "forms" of these appearances, whose nature can be
revealed to us through philosophical reflection. The philosopher's task,
therefore, is to become aware of these true forms by breaking the chains
that bind us to the illusory reality of the material world; this is done by
reflecting upon our ideas, and learning to treat them as the ultimate reality.
This is Plato's version of the recognition of ignorance: our ignorance
remains only as long as we continue to make the mistake of treating the
material world as ultimately real. For this happens whenever we turn our
backs on the sun, which represents the highest of all ideas in Plato's system,
the idea of "the good". Goodness is the reality from which the light of reason
and truth shines forth, thus enabling us to see all the other eternal forms.
Plato
constructed a hierarchical system of ideas, ranging from those that are
more closely connected to the material world (e.g., ideas relating to human
desires) to those that can take us virtually all the way out of the cave. Of the
latter, truth and beauty join goodness to constitute the three highest ideas.
Although we sometimes find approximations to them in the material world,
these ideas can never in themselves be perfectly manifested in the world of
appearances. We can never point to something in the world and say "there it
is; that is the thing we call truth". This is because truth is an eternally
existing form that never changes or passes away. Plato advised young
philosophers to begin by coming to know the lower forms, working their
way up to a universal vision of ultimate reality, which (like the "superconscious" state discussed in Lecture 4) is likely to occur only rather late in
life. The form of knowledge that serves as the most reliable guide along the
way, he argued, is mathematics, and within mathematics, geometry.
Perhaps this is one good reason why the use of diagrams can be helpful in
understanding difficult philosophical ideas.
Those
who succeed in attaining the goal of a universal vision, Plato believed, are
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the best qualified to govern the ideal state (the "republic"). The policies
Plato thought such "philosopher-kings" should enforce have often been
harshly criticized for various reasons. We will look more closely at political
philosophy in Week IX. At this point it will suffice to point out that Plato's
theory of the philosopher-king deserves to be seriously considered: for who
is more capable of ruling in a just and benevolent way, a person who is
hungry to possess power and authority, or one who has seen and understood
the ideas of power and authority as they truly are?
In
working out his theory of forms Plato, like most great philosophers,
regarded the question of the ultimate reality of mankind as one of the most
significant aspects of his metaphysical theory. So let's conclude our
discussion of Plato's idealism by looking briefly at its implications for
human nature. If the material world is an illusion, then the human body is
obviously not the defining reality of human nature. On the contrary, the
body, according to Plato, is what chains us to the cave, limiting our vision to
the shadows of reality. Our true reality lies in the idea, or form, of
"humanness" and is best expressed in terms of the idea of a "soul" (psyche).
The soul is the eternal reality that is, as it
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existed in its eternal form in the realm of ideas, to which it will return after
we die. In this realm the soul has easy access to all knowledge, because the
eternal forms are not obscured by the darkness and limitations of the cave.
The experience of birth causes us to forget what we used to know. Hence,
Plato's metaphysics provides the basis for his solution to one of the most
difficult questions in epistemology: "How do we come to know what we do
not already know?" The answer offered by Plato's idealism is, quite simply,
that all learning on this earth is actually remembering what we knew before
we were born.
Today I
have had time only to skim the surface of the ideas put forward by Plato
(and Socrates). We could spend the rest of this course examining the
intricacies of his idealism, and even then we would have just begun to
understand the depths of his thought. Plato himself believed his system of
eternal forms was capable of transforming philosophy into a science, a body
of well-established knowledge-a goal shared by many philosophers ever
since. And yet, how this is to be accomplished has been a matter of
continuous controversy. Indeed, in the next lecture we will examine the
ideas of a pupil of Plato's who believed a scientific philosophy can be
established only by following a radically different path.
6.Philosophy as Teleological Science
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In the
previous lecture we looked at the ideas of Socrates and his follower, Plato.
Socrates' appeal to universal reason and Plato's use of dialogue to construct
a system of idealism, based on Socrates' teachings, revolutionized the
development of philosophy in ancient Greece. I concluded by mentioning
Plato's notion that idealism can lead to the construction of a universal
science. The fact that virtually no scientists today would look back to Plato's
ideas as the source of modern science suggests that Plato failed in this task
(at least, given modern notions of what science is). However, as we shall see
today, the very different system proposed by Plato's most influential pupil
was to succeed in this goal in a way his teacher's ideas never would.
Having
studied at the famous school Plato had founded, called the "Academy",
Aristotle taught there until after Plato's death. During those twenty years
he obviously must have become thoroughly familiar with Plato's ideas. He
then left the Academy, however, and served for about three years as the
private tutor for Alexander the Great. Upon his return to Athens, he set up
his own school, where he developed and taught a system of philosophy that
many regard as being diametrically opposed to Plato's. Unfortunately, all
that survives of Aristotle's writings are his lecture notes and textbooks
intended for use by his students. As a result much of his writing is dry and
considerably less entertaining than Plato's lively Dialogues. Whereas
Plato's writing style sometimes obscures his meaning by being too loose,
Aristotle's meaning is often obscured by his rigidity. Something in between
would, no doubt, make for a more suitable style for presenting philosophical
insights.
Aristotle
based his system on a metaphysics that virtually stands Plato's idealism on
its head by arguing that particulars, not universals, are ultimately real. He
connected particulars with a special term, "ousia", which itself means
"reality", though it is usually translated as "substance". The basic question
in his "first philosophy" (as he referred to metaphysics) is therefore "What
is substance?" He answered this question by defining a substance as an
individual, existing thing (see AC 1b-4b). Such a "thing" is not merely a
form, nor is it a hunk of matter. Instead, it must always combine matter and
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form within itself. Substance combines form and matter in such a way that
the matter fulfills a necessary function, rather than being just an accident
or an illusion. For the material of a substance gives it its "distinctive mark",
which is that, "while remaining numerically one and the same, it is capable
of admitting contrary qualities" through a material change. For example, the
chalk I am now holding in my hand would still be an example of the
substance "chalk" even if it changed from having the quality of white chalk
into having the quality of red chalk. This way of looking at the nature of
reality is typically called "realism".
Aristotle
further developed his realism by distinguishing between "primary" and
"secondary" substances. Whereas "primary substances ... are the entities
which underlie everything else", secondary substances are the
characteristics that can be "predicated" of that individual thing, especially
if they are part of the definition of what it is (AC 2a-b). Strictly speaking, the
latter should be limited to the "genus" and "species" to which the individual
thing belongs. For instance, I as an individual human being am a primary
substance. The fact that I am a man (species) and an animal (genus) are
therefore secondary substances, describing what kind of substance I am. In
a looser sense, however, anything that is "either predicated of [primary
substances] or present in them" can be regarded as a secondary substance.
Thus, primary substances usually appear in the subject of sentences,
whereas secondary substances usually appear in the predicate.
Aristotle
developed his theory of substance at the beginning of his book, Categories,
where "category" is defined as a "most general kind of thing". The word
"form" can itself be regarded as meaning "of such a kind", so a category is a
very generalized form. In Categories Aristotle collected a list of the ten
most general kinds of form, the first being substance itself (i.e., the kind of
form that is made real by participating in matter). The other nine are
characteristics that help us understand what a particular substance is like.
There is no need for us to go into detail here about the nature and function
of these categories. It will be enough simply to list the other nine in the
order Aristotle presented them: quantity, quality, relation, place, time,
position, state, action, and affection (AC 1b). Much of Aristotle's discussion
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of these categories concerned the way we use such terms in language (thus
foreshadowing today's emphasis on linguistic analysis, to be discussed
further in Lecture 16). But he also clearly regarded them as providing an
orderly and systematic way of understanding reality itself (i.e., substances).
In
applying his realism to particular cases Aristotle used a teleological method.
That is, he argued that a thing's form can best be discovered by inquiring
about its purpose. The Greek word telos ("purpose") also refers to the end or
goal of a thing or event. Why does it exist? What is it used for? Such
questions can help us explain why a specific piece of matter has the
particular form it does. Aristotle used his teleological method as an integral
part of his task of classifying numerous natural and intellectual objects. For
his philosophical method had a dual emphasis on logical (linguistic)
classification and teleological (empirical) observation. This dual emphasis
has had a profound influence on those who have since followed what is
often called the "empiricist" tradition.
Modern
science is, of course, one of the fruits of the empiricist tradition. So it
should come as no surprise to find that many of the names we now give to
the different branches of the sciences, as well as other academic disciples,
were first established as such by Aristotle's teleological classifications.
Many of his books were devoted to naming and providing a basic grounding
for disciplines such as "psychology", "zoology", and even "metaphysics"
itself. Thus, for instance, he distinguished between mathematics, physics,
and theology by saying they deal with formal, material, and divine causes,
respectively (AM 1026a). Moreover, he established many distinctions we
now take for granted, not only in philosophy (such as essence-existence and
cause-effect), but also in empirical science (such as genus-species and
plant-animal-human). This certainly justifies the view that Aristotle was a
"grandfather" of modern science, even though his own teleological
methodology is now discredited by most scientists. (Most, but not all. The
Anthropic Cosmological Principle is a significant example of a recent book
written by scientists who do recognize the value of the teleological method.)
Let me
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Plato's Idealism
form = reality
matter = illusion
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Aristotle's Realism
form + matter =
substance (reality)
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Many
other aspects of Aristotle's philosophy would be interesting for us to
discuss here if we had more time. I'll conclude by simply mentioning his
idea that all movement in the world originates in a "prime mover" that is
itself "unmoved". This Being is also the "final cause" (i.e., the ultimate
purpose) of all movement. In other words, all changes in the world around
us are driving toward a final point of rest, where they will return to their
source in the unmoved mover, as depicted in Figure II.10.
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Original URL:
http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/tp4/top02.html
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