2. Now, it is important to recognise that many sources of authority are at play when a thesis is being researched and written. Each of these, with varying degrees of legitimacy, will claim to certify what counts as acceptable knowledge (Garman, 2006). But, as will be seen, one of the necessary, though often difficult tasks is to draw a distinction between institutional sources of authority and those that lie largely within an individual’s own control. It is acknowledged that non-theorising is an impenetrable act ‘so fighting it requires fighting one’s own self’ (Taleb, 2007, p.64): to apply a noun without a subconscious accompanying adjective is very difficult. But one’s conscious theoretic perspective, one’s assumptions (in so far as they can be accessed), should fall into the category of individual control for they ought not to be a consequence of having merely been learned from others. They should,
instead, be a consequence of grappling, in concert with others, with one’s own preconceptions and assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge (Garman & Piantanida, 2006). Fortunately, the wheel does not need to be reinvented, others have been there before; for over two millennia in fact.
plato
3. In the West the need for philosophy arose from the attempt by Socrates in the fifth century BCE to establish a way of thinking that could establish truly universal claims everyone would intuitively accept as both moral and truthful.
On the assumption we all share an inborn faculty of reason the practice of dialectic he believed would support this and, in doing so, make us both virtuous and knowledgeable (Rorty, 1999). Socrates was not, thus, a dogmatist. Showing that one can admit the authority of truth without supposing that one possesses it he questioned and questioned but never dictated (Blackburn, 2005). It was, however, Plato (c427–c347 BCE) student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, who established the foundations of Western philosophy by attempting to relate the establishment of truth with the emerging certainties of mathematics expressed through geometry, music and poetry.
4. Plato was an idealist; his concern was not with the material but with ideas. The motivation for his concern was a question that, as yet, remains unresolved: how does consciousness emerge from matter? (Is life entirely explicable by the laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry?) Plato’s response was to argue that although matter obeys physical laws life, and thus consciousness, is a vital force (thus beyond human comprehension) infused into mere material (Lewin, 2001). This also means that Truth, because it is an idea, is also independent of us. This belief resulted in a set of philosophical distinctions, appearance-reality, which dominated Western philosophy until the mid-twentieth century. It was this distinction that allowed Plato to provide the Socratic project of establishing universal claims with philosophic structure. Decide where you position yourself on the issue of appearance-reality by providing, presuming it were possible to do so, a definition of a table, a definition that covers all possible tables. Which has the greater claim to reality, the essential, metaphysical table of the definition or the approximation perceived to be a table?
5. In support of the former contention Plato argued there are universal essences (a definition might be described as an essence) that we all apply to the particulars of what we see in order to recognise it as, in this case, an approximation of a table. Plato argued that these universals were Forms:
distinct but mind independent, immaterial, eternal entities that exist in an abstract realm. (An example is a number, any number. They appear to exist
objectively and independently of our thoughts but do not exist in space and time. If they are independent of us mathematics can be said to have been discovered rather than created [Stanford Encyclopedia].) Because Plato believed that life has a pre-bodily state where knowledge of the Forms is first acquired (what today is called innate knowledge) learning is a process of being brought to an awareness, of being reminded, of the Forms (Rowland, 2006). This explains the meaning of the Greek word for truth a-letheia, as unforgetting or disclosure (Crusius, 1991). (Reading dramatic texts, for example, can disclose tacit knowledge of the depth of our emotions.) In this context Forms, because of their role as referents or universal concepts, allow us by intellectual inference alone to recognise (to ‘instantiate’) ‘tableness’
as a table. Their function, in other words, is to make the phenomenal world intelligible. The process is what Plato called turning the soul around, so rather than being concerned with the body the ‘eye of the soul’ instead, would gaze upon the eidos, the immaterial Forms, the invisible world of universal truths(Fiumara, 1995).
6. This visual metaphor has played a determinative role in Western intellectual history. For example, Martin Luther in the sixteenth century admonished parishioners ‘to tear the eyes out of their reason’ if they wanted to be good Christians (Rumana, 2000, p.5). In contemporary terms we refer to ‘insight’
and we use the word theory that derives from the Greek verb teorein, to see (Fiumara, 1995). Plato knew that the world of the senses is stable enough for us to describe, but he also knew that we mistake what changes slowly for permanence: ‘as far as any rose could remember, no gardener had ever died’
(Blackburn, 2005, p.101). In contrast to the eternal world of the Forms sensory descriptions could only achieve the status of doxa, or opinions. This remains a contemporary issue: ‘universal change is hostile to stable understanding.
Science must proceed by finding the permanent among the impermanent’
(Blackburn, 2005, p.99). Plato did not, therefore, doubt the existence of a reality, but for him it was extrasensory.
Aristotle
7. Aristotle, however, strongly objected to Plato’s notion of Forms arguing that nothing can be both one thing and, at the same time, have things in common with every other individual thing it instantiated. Aristotle therefore revised the theory of Forms by eliminating their independence from perceived concrete entities. So, whereas for Plato particular physical objects are instantiated by abstract universals, Aristotle considered all objects, animate and inanimate, to be composed of both potential and form. A piece of wood, for example, has the potential to become a carving and a seed a tree. Potential,
because it is latent, lacks reality for it is both without shape or purpose. What activates potential is its essence: in the case of these examples, the ideas of a woodcarver or the blueprint within a seed. It is essence that allows potential to achieve form and, thus, reality.8 The fact that essence precedes reality explains Aristotle’s assumption of eternal goals towards which everything should aim. This means that individuals only become complete, most godlike, by actualising their innate purpose (Rumana, 2000). It is in this sense that Aristotle’s ideas are teleological.9
8. As in the case of Plato’s Forms, therefore, Aristotle’s potential and essence are both immaterial and abstract. But, unlike Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s essence uses potential to achieve concrete reality and, thus, provides material for empirical observation. Whereas Plato argued that only universal ideas could define specific realities Aristotle argued that it was specific, observed realities that could define universal ideas. While Plato, therefore, helped provide an explanation of how the universal features of particular things are established by being modelled after universal archetypes, Aristotle helped explain how universal concepts can be derived from the study of particular things. For this reason Aristotle, observational scientist as much as philosopher can be considered the founding figure of Western empiricism.
9. The differences between Plato and Aristotle had a significant impact on the intellectual history of the West. For two millennia, for example, a divide separated perceptions of the natural world. Aristotelian mechanists argued that living organisms are simply machines completely explicable by the laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry. Platonists, on the other hand, while agreeing that living organisms obeyed physical laws insisted that life was something extra, a vital force breathed into mere material. By its nature, therefore, life was beyond scientific analysis (Lewin, 2001).
Scholasticism
10. Nonetheless, the appeal of the ideas of both Plato and Aristotle to early Christianity lay in the theological struggle not only to establish the ontological status of Christ but also the relationship between mind, soul and body. Plato’s concept of pure and complete universals had obvious appeal in explaining the nature of the divine and of the relation between body and soul: the former as shadow and the latter as eternal. The influence of Plato’s metaphor of the ‘eye of the soul’ can be seen, for example, in St Paul’s words: ‘Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face’
(Blackburn, 2005, p.81). However, Plato’s argument that universals existed as independent entities obviously had less appeal. Later medieval theologians, St Thomas Aquinas among the most prominent, while retaining these aspects
of Plato’s universals adapted some of Aristotle’s ideas to make more explicit the link between body and soul. God’s plan for humanity was, they believed, accessible to reason (Rumana, 2000). As opposed to the fundamentalist concern with revealed theology and its emphasis on faith alone, their concern was with rational theology in order to make Christianity a greater force for social justice. Thus, while the soul continued to be seen as Form existing independently of the body, its potential, when activated by divine essence, could only be realised within the body. This fusion of Platonic, Aristotelian and eschatological (an end time: judgement day) Catholic thinking into Scholasticism enabled new ways of thinking about the world.
1.4 REASON
1. The logical consequence during the sixteenth and seventeenth century when these new ways of thinking were applied outside the authoritarian framework of the church was Humanism: a belief that Christian faith required a commitment to the search for truth and morality not through tradition or authority but through the application of reason alone. In this sense reason was liberating for its application could free humanity from its passions and its history. The logical consequence was individualism: ‘man [sic] in the image of God’ (Smith & Jenks, 2006, p.59). There was also a less logical consequence: Realism. Reflecting their historical legacy of opposition to an absolutist theology, Realists sought with Foundationalism, the idea that knowledge must be founded on concrete certainty, to establish a new science which would permit the same level of confidence which medieval theologians had expressed in their belief in a reality ontologically independent of the senses.
Descartes
2. Most expressive of the ‘foundation’ metaphor is René Descartes’ rationalist treatise Meditations. In it he made what, in terms of contemporary philosophy, was a daring move (Rumana, 2000). Although implicitly reliant on Plato’s dualism of mind and body he explicitly rejected the methods of earlier philosophers when he applied reason to doubt his own thoughts until he could find one about which he could absolutely be certain:
…judging that I was liable to error as anyone else, I rejected as being false all the reasonings I had hitherto accepted as proofs…But immediately afterwards I became aware that, while I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all
the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
(Cited in Schostak, 2006, p.37)
Unfortunately for Descartes his concept cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) was firmly shaken by sceptics primarily because it relied upon the postulation of God to prove the existence of other consciousnesses (Schostak, 2006) and because it could not explain how mind and body (which, like Plato, he considered ontologically discrete entities), interact.
Nonetheless, the application of reason, an essence fundamentally detached from its surroundings (Linn, 1996), to establish objective facts upon which incontrovertible knowledge could be built proved extraordinarily seductive for most of the next three centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, Bertrand Russell began his Problems of Philosophy with the question: ‘Is there any knowledge which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?’ Despite his conclusion once again that the answer is ‘no’ (Linn, 1996, p.12) the survival of the idea of mind and body as separate entities is implicit in the criteria that some universities apply to measure standards attained by research students. ‘They should, for example, demonstrate ability to…as though ability to demonstrate and knowledge of how to apply that ability are distinct from each other’ (Rowland, 2006, p.48).
Newton
3. Perhaps the primary reason for the allure of the power of reason is the attraction of the concept of an ordered universe. One without the other would, in fact, make little sense(Linn, 1996). Mathematics is a language apparently capable of precise definition in a way not possible in a language of words and it was in this sense that Galileo spoke of mathematics as the language of the universe:
phenomena can be decomposed analytically and treated mathematically as though the sum of their parts (Smith & Jenks, 2006).
Numbers go about as far as we can go in shearing away detail. When we talk of numbers, nothing is left of shape, or color, or mass, or anything else that identifies an object, except the very fact of its existence.
(Holland, 1998, p.23)
It was Newton who through the powers of mathematical calculation and empirical observation, appeared in his 1687 work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy to have deciphered God’s ultimate laws explaining how the universe functioned (Lakatos, 1978, p.3).
For Newton, the universe was rationalistic, deterministic and of clockwork order; effects were functions of causes, small causes (minimal initial conditions) produced small effects (minimal and predictable) and large causes produced large effects. Predictability, causality, patterning, control, universality, linearity, continuity, stability, objectivity, all contributed to the view of the universe as an ordered mechanism in an albeit complicated equilibrium, a rational, closed, con-trollable and deterministic system susceptible to comparatively straightforward scientific discovery and laws.
(Morrison, 2008, p.19)
Together with John Locke’s argument that the human mind was not contaminated by original sin but is a tabula rasa upon which external reality is the most formative influence, Newton’s work vindicated the belief that there is one science about one determinate10 world and that an individual is capable of objectively seeing that one world as it ‘really’ is. Objectivism is an epistemological notion that meaning exists apart from consciousness:
A tree in a forest exists objectively, regardless of its being seen and categorized.
Its ‘tree-ness’ is intrinsic to it as an object. When seen by humans its tree-ness is available for them to see empirically, categorize as such and take to be a tree.
(Hart, 2005, p.409)
positivism
4. The guiding principle of a tightly deductive science with precise concepts and rules, together with the discovery and elaboration of further empirically established scientific laws during the course of the nineteenth century, appeared to make the power of Realist science unassailable for, with its unparalleled achievements, only it could claim to have successfully characterised reality (Sharrock & Read, 2002, p.16). Positivism, a philosophy most clearly enunciated by Auguste Comte in the eighteen fifties, appeared to crown this achievement for it extended the methods and attitudes of Realist science to all fields of human knowledge: rationality and objectivity in both the sciences and the humanities are both desirable and achievable, cumulative facts are therefore what count as knowledge and the history of civilisation is a history of progress.
Modernism had been born, its claim to superior knowledge a function of its discourse of representation.
5. Ironically, though, the ideas of a number of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century were to prove disruptive of this perception of Modernism and sent it in an unexpected direction. This should not have come as a surprise for Romanticism’s emphasis on subjective experience,
Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, Charles Darwin’s blurring of the distinction between animal and human, and Karl Marx’s revolutionary socialism which replaced human rationality as the driving force of history with the rationality of economics, made it apparent that an assault upon Realism had been running as an undercurrent to its most dramatic scientific and engineering achievements. This was also reflected in the fine arts with impressionism’s and later abstract expressionism’s rejection of objective assessment in favour of subjective response. It was also reflected in the cultural movements irrationalism and aestheticism which, though embracing the progressive potential of modernism, de-emphasised rationality and considered disruption a necessary means to undermine traditional class and gender relations in Europe.
6. The dawn of the twentieth century provided additional impetus to these trends. On the one hand Freud, Adler and Jung showed that objectivity was not a personal attribute to be set aside by choice: perception, instead, was unavoidably filtered by experience. As Nietzsche had argued drawing a distinction between facts and values was, therefore, a fallacious dichotomy.
On the other hand, Einstein’s e=mc² undermined Newtonian certainties: time was now relative and reality a function of the interaction of energy, mass and velocity. These new insights and exposure to the cataclysmic consequences of primal nationalism in two world wars undermined what little faith remained in humans as rational beings. It also exposed the fundamental contradiction that had, from the outset, confounded Realism: if history is progressive and experience an open-ended process, what we know today is less than we will know tomorrow and much less than we (individually and collectively) will know in the distant future. Yet Realists claimed that on the basis of present experience they were capable of recognising laws of nature that would apply not only in the face of experience gained in the distant future but also for all eternity. Their claim to have been lifted above the flow of history proved to be unsustainable.
7. Clearly Realism produced extraordinary results: the problem was overconfidence in what could be represented and analysed (Richardson, 2005). Gone, therefore, were the foundations of Realism: an objective external world, a progress-driven cybernetic and, perhaps most important of all, Humanism. Positing the centrality of the human subject Humanism privileged humanity, isolated it and made it unique; a prime characteristic of the ‘humanities’ (Smith & Jenks, 2006). This, though, is a perception uninformed by Darwin. When so informed the replacement in importance of agency by structure11 led to the disappearance of Humanism’s central concept of the unitary-autonomous person (Craig, 2003). Such has been the change that a contemporary hypothesis proposes that humanity both uses
and is used by cognition. Far from cognition making us the independent agents of modernism, cognition as a self-organising agent might, therefore, merely be parasitical on us (Smith & Jenks, 2006).