Philosophy: Its Second-Stage Rise and Third-Stage Retreat

Author & physicist Freeman Dyson has penned this review of a book entitled Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (Liveright, 2012) by Jim Holt. Dysan examine's Holt's foray into the views of a handful of philosophy professors, based on interviews the author conducted, whom he divides conveniently into "materialists" who would give ontological priority to the physical universe discovered by science, and the "Platonists" who would give ontological priority to a realm of ideas (Plato's Forms being, of course, the earliest known exemplar of this kind of stance).

This kind of division is simplistic, of course, but I don't wish to dwell on that here. Holt sees Wittgenstein and Heidegger as the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Whether this is true I also won't get into, but I think we would have to include them in the top five. What makes Dyson's comments worth thinking about is his observation, late in the review, that philosophy basically disappeared from Western civilization as an efficacious endeavor, one might say, in the latter half of the 1800s. At this point Dyson enters the purview of these meditations. Major philosophers of the past (John Locke is an example--especially in Two Treatises of Government) spoke to major issues, and was read and taken seriously by those in the political establishment of the time. Locke moreover, saw a man such as Isaac Newton as a colleague with whom he could speak & work closely, and the feeling was mutual. In the late 1600s scientists characterized themselves as natural philosophers as the term scientist hadn't been coined. What we call science today was then considered as a branch of philosophy.

In the 1800s, however, everything changed. It wasn't the rise of the modern university, for philosophy had risen to prominence in the modern university by the time of Kant and Hegel; after this era, philosophy began its retreat into oblivion. By the middle of the 1900s, and continuing as we inch into the 2000s, there is an abundance of philosophy professors--perhaps more than ever before!--almost all without influence outside their immediate academic enclaves. They may know the names of leading scientists, but with very rare exceptions leading scientists don't know their names. Why and how philosophy lost its importance is itself an important topic--at least in this author's view. Dyson mentions William Whewell who finally coined the term scientist in 1833 as part of his struggle to free science from philosophy as having its own identity. Whewell was hardly laboring in isolation. He was one of the harbingers of the turning point.

This all ties in with why I find Auguste Comte's "Law of the Three Stages" so inviting--not, again, because I agree with Comte but because I see him as having touched on something very important about modern civilization. The historically important philosophers of the past--the Platos, the Aquinases, the John Lockes, the Adam Smiths, the Immanuel Kants, etc.--were Stage Two thinkers, in our terminology: "metaphysical and abstract." Once civilization begins to enter Stage Three--"scientific and positive"--it appears to have very little use for philosophy which is thereby consigned to the oblivion of academic microspecialization. The standard explanation for this is that the sciences obtain measurable, testable, reproducible results while philosophy does not. Science clearly advances in the sense that more recent theories are objectively superior to older ones; to question this is to invite some strange looks, at least in polite company.* Technology, moreover, increases convenience & makes the lives of everyone better via mastery over one's environment--come to think of it, what was life was like before the Internet?! Commerce (speaking very generally) produces & distributes the products of technologists along with myriad other goods people want and are willing to pay for. In the Secular City**, these aren't seen as needing "justification." The results speak for themselves. Thus a civilization based on science, technology & commerce has "outgrown" philosophy which thereby becomes the province of impractical dreamers. Could this be true? Few professional philosophers could run a business, of course (although the younger ones are reasonably tech savvy). Suffice it to say, characterizing a John Locke or an Adam Smith as an "impractical dreamer" would hardly be accurate or fair.

To be sure, there is a sense in which philosophy brought about its own near-disappearance via Comte's positivistic model & its close relatives who followed Whewell and physicists such as Ernst Mach who sought to eliminate the "metaphysical" elements from physics. The ideal of the "scientific philosopher" caught on within the discipline by the early 1900s, and it became assumed that acquiring knowledge about the world was the province of science alone; philosophy was just not suited to "compete" with the sciences in any way. (There were first rate philosophers such as Frederic B. Fitch and Brand Blanshard who disagreed and followed their own muses, but by and large the profession simply ignored their work.)

"Third Stage" civilization, however, has been characterized not just by the rise of science, technology & commerce but also of concentrations of power. While the Secular City has far more creature comforts than its ancestor villages, it has its underside. Elsewhere I (along with many others) have charted the rise of the Western power elite alongside science, technology and commerce, which they bent to suit their desires. These powers, emanating from (but hardly limited to) extremely wealthy cartels of private international bankers and financiers, also used their wealth to shape education, including universities, to produce a certain kind of work force in a certain kind of environment--one for which the term capitalism continued to be used despite the growing consonance of interests between big business and big government. To the extent the elite considered the matter at all (and I am not saying they did), they would have found very useful for their purposes a species of "philosophy" that confined itself to classrooms, academic offices and library cubicles. Positivistic philosophy (and its descendents in the "analytic" schools) fit very nicely into the kind of university the elite wanted.

Stage Three philosophy, after all, never addressed such questions as, What is the best form of government? or Should government be limited to a few easily delineated functions? Twentieth century logical positivism confined itself to the analysis of language and of scientific knowledge which it took for granted. Thus it would never get to the "big questions" taken on by its ancestor. Absent any anchor or grounding for doing so, it would never question or challenge the structures of power in any efficacious way--not even the powers shaping the universities. While there have been exceptions to this--there have been philosophers who tried to address the major problems of modern civilization (the quite different philosophers Peter Singer and Richard Rorty come to mind), by and large philosophy is moving into the twenty first century as an endeavor without influence.

Moreover--as discussed in earlier posts--Western civilization has moved from Stage Three to what I characterize as Stage Four, a stage not "scientific and positive" but in many (not all) respects as "postmodern and negative"--negative, that is, about the capabilities of the human mind to reach "objective truth" in some sense of that term. Think of Rorty again. Rorty began essentially in the linguistic school, began working out the dynamic of mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy in a new and highly original way, and ended up with a stance where "professional philosophy" has little left to do--except meditate on the futility of its past and how little it has to do in the present! I would argue that the relative disappearance of philosophy has left Western civilization philosophically adrift, unable to articulate much less defend Western core values, and thus vulnerable to those who would undermine those values. One of the core values John Locke clearly articulated and defended, for example, was private property rights. Today, private property rights are everywhere under attack. They are, one might say, conditional rather than given: conditional in the sense that the property owner retains his property if he pays the correct amount of taxes to his government. The average person, who never thinks about such things, takes this stage of affairs for granted unless caught up in a dialogue such as the following:

"Do you own your house?"

"Yes, of course."

"How do you know you own your house?"

"I have the deed right here."

"The deed says you own your house?"

[Impatiently] "Of course it does! It's a deed, and it has my name on it!"

"Do you pay property taxes?"

"Yes."

"What happens if you don't pay your property taxes."

[A tad more thoughtfully now] "The government will eventually come and take my house."

"In that case, who really owns your house?"

Unfortunately, absent philosophical reflection on any large scale, we have come to inhabit a world where those with enormous wealth and in power (they are frequently one and the same) simply assume that power gets the last word, and in the Secular City, it essentially does. Why, since the idea is so seldom articulated much less challenged, would the elites make any other assumption? And if the body of ideas that led up to and were incorporated into private property rights are no longer articulated, then how long can such an institution survive when it gets in the way of those who want to enlarge the scope of their wealth and power?

To bring the discussion completely down to Earth, does anyone really believe Barack Obama has read any recent works of philosophy (except perhaps Fabian socialist Saul Alinsky)? Does anyone think Mitt Romney has studied John Locke or Adam Smith?

Fourth Stage philosophy has, by and large (and unfortunately), continued with the errors of Third Stage philosophy--institutional as well as intellectual. As a discipline it continues the near-invisibility which fell across the field as Third Stage thinking and living came to dominate the Secular City. Particularly embarrassing are the so-called "tenured radicals" who see themselves as "speaking truth to power" because they are oh-so-politically correct in bringing about a more "diverse" campus & badmouthing George W. Bush. Their writings are more microspecialized and less readable than even logical positivism. Most "professional philosophers," of course, don't fall into this category but still take this state of affairs for granted as they teach their service courses, and for pay that even for tenured status is significantly less than what is afforded professors in, say, the department of management over in the business school. They resent it, but don't see themselves as in any position to do anything about it, so in the end they just accept it.

The only way I see to change this state of affairs is for philosophy to change itself from within. This is admittedly a tall order. Philosophy must recover that portion of Stage Two thinking that identified and evaluated worldviews within civilization: identifying the kinds of assumptions made in the contexts of science, technology and commerce that constitute a worldview, and then evaluating them by whether they are helpful or harmful either to civilization at large or some part of it. For example, whether human beings ought to live lives governed by hedonistic values ("the good is pleasure") or whether their lives should be governed by transcendent ones is surely an issue that could affect the course of affairs in commerce: a citizenry steeped in hedonism will choose to spend money on a rather different range of products than a more ascetic citizenry. A society of short-term thinkers will make different aggregate choices than a society of long-term thinkers. The former set of choices are more likely to be harmful in the long run than the latter set of choices; I would submit that this is open to direct observation and so is objectively knowable in any reasonable sense of that phrase.

Lest there be any doubt, the kind of work I am talking about is getting done, and sometimes it is getting done very well. Consider Niall Ferguson's new book Civilization (2012); or Jared Diamond's major works Guns, Germs and Steel (1999) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail (2005), or Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (1999) or his more recent Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto (2009). Stephen Hawking's latest book The Grand Design (2010), moreover, surely addresses some of the major philosophical issues of the entirety of Western civilization with its pronouncement that modern theoretical physics can explain the origins and workings of the physical universe without referencing a Supreme Being.

The work, in other words, is getting done; just not by philosophers. Do philosophers wish to contribute to these dialogues, or don't they. (Will they be allowed by their circumstances to contribute? is a separate and no less interesting question.)

Perhaps a species of philosophy that embraces this kind of self-description--combined, of course, with what is necessary to bring forward from the earlier stages--will be a species of philosophy capable of advancing to consciousness of itself as Fifth Stage, and worthy of a position of influence in the Fifth Stage of Civilization. Perhaps we can one day have a post-Secular City!

_______________________________________________

*The so-called social sciences might constitute exceptions, of course. Within disciplines from economics to psychology are multiple "schools" of thought (or, to use Kuhn's term, paradigms) whose adherents don't consider the adherents of the others to be doing "sound economics" or "scientific psychology."

**I hope it is obvious that by Secular City I am not referring to any particular city. The phrase's scope of reference is any or all of the major modern cities in the Western world that are essentially elite-managed, where such practices as "scientific management" prevail, and where the discussion of fundamental ideas is mostly relegated to classrooms and the coffeehouses prevalent in university districts. The phrase comes from Harvey Cox's 1966 book of that title.

_______________________________________________

Do you believe these ideas have merit, and that such discussions deserve to be supported financially? Consider making a donation via PayPal.

A "Bare Bones" General Case For Liberty

We return. In this post I will outline, in basic form, a "bare bones" General Case for Liberty, I call it. I will leave aside for now its connection to the material from two weeks ago on the Five Stages. This material falls more in line with the projected Liberty and Its Two Enemies.

Probably the majority of the ideas here are hardly original with me, but with any luck they've been assembled (or have assembled themselves) in a way that is fresh and somewhat different. I've isolated ten fundamental principles here, not all of them immediately associated with liberty but with the philosophy behind it--principles in metaphysics and epistemology that, in this writer's judgment, need to be in place before the case for liberty makes sense. Libertarians will probably accede to the first eight right away; some will hesitate over (9) and (10) (those leaning toward theoretical anarchism or anarcho-capitalism will not like (9) at all!). I hope I can eventually convince reasonable people, aware of human nature and human failings, that such principles are necessary for liberty--they are not mere addenda and do not contradict it. On the contrary, without such principles to counter weaknesses inherent in human nature, liberty will eventually self-destruct no less than any other system. Maintaining a free society means maintaining a society which sees liberty as a social and civilizational value, and does not promote this as total, unregulated freedom for the individual to do just anything he sees fit. That is, it distinguishes liberty from license. Free markets mean that prices, etc., respond to supply and demand. It does not mean there are no checks on human behavior. This is an idea implicit in (7) and (8).

In any event, here are the principles. Feel free to post a comment at the end, whether by agreement, disagreement with one or more, or to elaborate if you want.

A "Bare Bones" General Case for Liberty (in Ten Principles).

(1) The Determinacy Principle. We inhabit a determinate universe—or, at least, we inhabit a world where our surroundings behave in a fashion that appears determinate. We think in terms of causes and effects, in which the world around us is predictable. Thus we can establish goals (or subsidiary objectives), take action to achieve them, and sometimes succeed. If our surroundings behaved randomly, or if the general scientifically-discoverable laws changed unpredictably, or even if we believed they might do so, human action would be impossible.

(2) The Indifference Principle. The universe, because of its law-governed nature, is indifferent to human needs, wants, or other interests. However we explain this (Christians can turn to Genesis 3; naturalists will speak of the absence of evidence for divine providence), we reach the same result: if a person simply sits and takes no actions whatsoever, he/she will eventually die of thirst, starvation, or exposure. Think of Robinson Crusoe, stranded on his desert island. He must get up off his duff and do something. Interaction with one’s surroundings (voluntary or otherwise) appears to be a necessary condition for the survival of any organism.

(3) The Intelligibility Principle. This idea is implicit in (1) and (2). That the workings of the universe are intelligible to the human mind is a presupposition of all science. The working out of events in our surroundings is intelligible to us; this is a presupposition of life itself: again otherwise, whatever successes the sciences have achieved, and those of technology, would be utterly mysterious. Of course, theories of the specific ways in which various domains of reality are intelligible have changed considerably over time, but the general thesis that the universe is intelligible to the human mind, at least in part*, has remained a constant.

(4) The Action Principle. Successful action in the world is both possible (because of (1) and (3)) and necessary (because of (2)). I am using the term action essentially as Mises used it: the employment of specific means to achieve specific prior-imagined ends or goals, understood as embedded in the deeper metaphysics and epistemology of a determinate if indifferent universe (our proximate environment) we can both understand and bring under our conscious control, at least somewhat. Mises, of course, saw action as axiomatic: the denial of action would itself be an action; and so the denial of the reality of human action by a person is self-invalidating.

(5) The Individuality Principle. Complex systems respond to specific problems in their proximate environment individually because of how they are structured, and this includes human beings. Brains, nervous system, senses, are possessions of the individual, not a collective. Perception, cogitation, and therefore action are therefore fundamentally individual events. There are no such things as “collective thought” or “collective action,” except as metaphors. Now of course, human beings—like other systems—can collaborate and cooperate in their endeavors. They can share information, divide their resources and labor, and frequently come up with better and more efficient solutions to problems through complex sequences and combinations of actions. What results are various human institutions and organizations.

(6) The Production / Property Principles. Successful collaborative actions as understood within the framework of (5) will transform something incapable of being used by human beings into something capable of being so used (example: the conversion of crude oil into gasoline; or of stone, lumber, and glass into a skyscraper). This process was identified clearly by John Locke, in his Second Treatise Of Government, roughly 80 years before Adam Smith placed it in the context of economics. Locke spoke of property—that which you produce, you own; no one else can rightly step onto it without invitation if it is land or make use of it without permission if it is some good. Acknowledging this right to property, this right to ownership, as a moral claim on space not to be trespassed against by others, is a necessary condition for stable life in a civilization whose members expect to prosper.

(7) The Trade Principle. Persons or collaborations of persons may produce surpluses of specific goods which can then be traded for surpluses produced by other persons or collaborations of persons. These trades—or exchanges—will occur when both parties perceive benefits from them, and not otherwise. (They may be wrong in their perception, but never mind this now.) As these states of affairs multiply, they create an economy—economic space, one might call it—in which trade can take place freely and openly: unhampered (as Mises would say). As some will prove to be leaders and others will be better as foot soldiers, divisions of labor will develop and multiple as the economy grows and begins to flourish. Money becomes a medium of exchange against which the perceived value of various goods and necessities (food, clothing, etc.) is measured, replacing the inefficiency of, e.g., barter.

(8) The Duty Principle. The state of affairs described in (7) works under the assumption that its participants recognize a fundamental negative duty or negative obligation which follows directly from the moral claim identified in (6): do not interfere either with the property of others or their decision to enter into a trade. In other words: unless there are very good reasons for doing otherwise, allow all persons to make their own choices, rather than forcing them down paths not of their own choosing to obtain a specific outcome dictated by someone else. (What these "very good reasons" might be is an issue we now take up.)

(9) The Encoding-of-the-Rules Principle. Consider this question: will all of civilization's members play by the rules, as it were? If the answer is Yes, then we could have a possible world where there is no need to encode the rules, or arrange for mechanisms of enforcement or punishment for those who break the rules, and in that world there would be no need for specific brands or bodies of governance. No one, of course, really believes we live in this world, although some envision building it. In the real world, some do look for opportunities to circumvent the rules, or will use force when it is more convenient than voluntary trade. Some will steal from others if they believe they can get away with it. They will also attempt to defraud others. Will some producers even join other producers in an effort to seek unearned advantages? If the answers to this is Yes, then if governing bodies are not created by specific measures by representatives of the people they will be created by those who simply want to create and sustain a legal empowerment over the people that would effectively end their freedom to act according to their own choices in any meaningful way. Thus, it is best if some are entrusted to encode a set of rules and create institutions of enforcement. There is a need for government as rule-encoder and enforcer, provided it can be bound by specific limits on its authority (to encode the rules and serve as the agency of punishing rule-breakers according to a specific set of rules or civil laws applying the same to all). This is not to minimize the difficulties in doing so that have been well known for over 2,000 years when Plato first wrestled with them (and came to the unfortunate conclusion that only central planning could solve the problems of civilization). Nor is it to suggest that there is an ideal resolution to these difficulties. Addressing them is, given human nature, an ongoing problem rather than a permanently solvable one.

(10) The Worldview Principle. Paragraphs (1) through (9) offer an outline of the basic tenets of classical liberal political philosophy with sideways glances into Austrian-school economics, systems theory and (perhaps) a deontological ethic (though not exactly in Kant’s sense). Yet what we have is clearly incomplete. It makes one of its fundamental priorities protection of the individual person’s right to act according to his/her own choices—conjoined with the duty to allow this same right to all others. It makes another fundamental priority respect for the right of each person to the fruits of his/her successful actions. Yet again, how much trust can we place in persons to honor these values voluntarily? Can one trust the large organizations not to collaborate in ways that would thwart the choices of others by controlling markets? Are we to believe that governing institutions can be compelled to answer to the desires of the people? Can one trust the perceptions of the common people that their choices reflect awareness of the difference between real needs and mere wants. Will their choices bring about actual benefits, as opposed to long-term problems that if continued long enough will spread and render their society dysfunctional (examples: familiar vices ranging from smoking cigarettes and eating unhealthy food to trades involving drug use/abuse, prostitution, gambling, and so on—activities which even the libertarian ought to concede damage both the individuals engaging in them and the surrounding society to the extent they are engaged in). How are large numbers of people to be educated in such a way, having been taught critical and long-term thinking, that they voluntarily refrain from making such choices? One of the primary jobs of philosophy should be to identify, articulate, and evaluate the worldview presupposed by the various activities and institutions which make up the warp and woof of civilization—challenging them when necessary, and constructing new ones when possible. Liberty clearly requires moral principles that have teeth: while if they are not chosen they are not truly moral principles, as principles they can be taught and they can be enforced; and there are long-term consequences associated with their violation. Liberty thus requires a worldview embodying a moral view of the universe and ethical standards for human conduct. These are not products either of culture itself or the marketplace. Moral principles do not describe our actions; they prescribe and proscribe. They supply a set of “oughts” and “ought-nots.” From where does morality come. Not from physical reality, which as we said (2) is indifferent and within which only descriptions can be given; and in which actions are described only in terms of their efficiency or lack of. Nor can they come from the marketplace, which left to its own devices will supply what people want and need without moral comment. If enough people want harmful drugs, that is, or want to engage in gambling, that is what the marketplace will supply, and civilization will pay the long-term consequences. You can have, in David Kupelian's phraseology, a "marketing of evil" that obeys the same economic laws as any good. A healthy civilization needs a transcendent moral order to make sense of this distinction. As Hayek recognized (chs. 4 and 6 of The Constitution of Liberty) there may be circumstances in which, e.g., the Trade Principle, is defeasible. The most obvious is if specific trades, however voluntary, are bringing about (or threatening to bring about) massive social dysfunction.

Going beyond (10): some of us have concluded quietly that only a Christian worldview can rise to the occasion of supplying an adequate transcendent moral order and compass to guide individual action beyond an efficiency that can describe on equal terms building skyscrapers or creating weapons of mass destruction. But a full accounting of our conclusion will have to wait for a future weekend.