Can we still be optimistic Hegelians without accepting Hegel’s final stages for the achievement of spirit? There were terrible wars fought over that issue. Theories that pretend to such powers of explanation, have a way of insisting that you heed and do what they say they are right about. Everything that does not fit is irrelevant, unknowable, or unaskable—good grounds for dismissing criticism or denying citizenship.
But contrasting theories—those that attack the desire for certainty have had their own shot at being duly considered, and were also found wanting. To resolve this impasse is not a matter of theoretic equalization—but of contextual autonomy—agreement that accepting a theory requires understanding the language through which it is expressed. Realizing such latitude in present theorizing is a chimera, to be sure—but even chimeras have power.
To exercise this power, they need to probe the different logics of square and crooked dancing, and demonstrate the competing correspondences between the still of painted images and the rhythms of the moving world; they must empower the architecture of music heard from out a neighbors’s window, and appreciate the scribblings on bathroom walls and subway cars that celebrate repressed or repressive longings. And, with non-sequential gloom or glee (depending on the place they’re at) must undertake the task of writing both prose and poetry about all that.
HARD AND SOFT PHILOSOPHY
“Hard Philosophy” and “Soft Philosophy” is not a division between truth and error—nor between rigorous and sloppy thinking.
It would not suit the ambi-valent nature of my thesis to divide its principals as neatly as is offered in the academic distinction between Rationalists and Empiricists—endemic to curricular clarity from which few students emerge without puzzlement. There are, of course, the ideological prejudices—philosophical camps with which to ally one’s self in the ongoing search for (warranted) “true belief.” Clear oppositions also make it easier to teach undergraduates the subject. But which belief actually satisfies the wanted distinction, and which does not? What historical figures (without waffling) fully occupy the competing sides? To what purposes does one put this distinction now?
I have the same difficulties with “Rationalism and Empiricism” that I have with “Mind and Brain:” Each evokes a polemical procrustian bed upon which no event or observation fits without due stretching or chopping.
Here is my sense of the standard distinction: Rationalism views reality as a logical completeness theoretically but not actually attainable—except as a hope that the human mind will successively approximate the mind of God (the universal seat of logic). This, admittedly, is an infinite task. But the attempt is justifiable as a wordly search—a progressive capacity to explain the world’s unity and latent perfectibility—and so, correct its behavior.
Empiricism, in contrast, finds reality in the organization of sensory experience, but variously locates that reality in the nature of perceiving, or—a dangerous move—in the object itself, independent of any given perception. This leads to a disjunction wherein the world has qualities that are not (perhaps cannot be) perceived, and other qualities that are dependent on (perhaps donated by) perception. How then, can we “know” the world?
I suggest that the opposing members in these contrasting schools of philosophy often find surprising agreement in the doctines of their antagonists. This depends largely on what one takes as the prime issues of disagreement and what other (sometimes compatible) beliefs are not, at a given time, seen as important. Philosophers have a plethora of belief objects that elude specification—especially those that are peripheral to their major theses: Those philosophers concerned with, e.g., value, soul, totality—will not focus on, e.g., sense data, empirical proof, linguistic accuracy. These peripheral issues, if seriously attended to by both sides, might go a ways toward developing a “unified” theory (on some modest level) of reality and its perception—but remember, this is still war!
My point is that reciprocities between these views, while not easily forthcoming, are needed for a larger intelligibility (if such is what we want). The undecidables in each school—the fact-value points of impasse—require language and curiosity from both sides for mutual accomodation. This is a salient point in my dissatisfaction with “mind-brain,” “body-soul”—and other such dichotomies.
To briefly show this, I offer some examples from philosophers who have been traditionally assigned to the opposing schools noted here:
Rene Descartes, a Rationalist, argues that examining the coherence between ideas in the mind can be transformed into a correspondence theory between mental perceptions and the actuality of the world: If perceptions are not misleading—if no evil demon can totally deceive us (the irrefutability of “cogito ergo sum”) then the world actually is as we experience it. Taking this further, Decartes holds that while sensory perception is not misleading, it is always incomplete in regard to the immensity of its (universal) subject. This incompleteness however, comes to light through an examination of mental function—that we can contrast the limitations of our knowledge of the world with our held idea of perfection—God’s knowledge of totality. Required here, however, is the further belief that mind is up to veridical self-examination—that it knows it knows (the evil demon notwithstanding) that, as a thinking thing, it is not deceived that it thinks, and accordingly, that it exists. Such belief is based on the equating of a humanly conceived perfection (the reality of “clear and distinct ideas”) with the actuality of God’s and the world’s existence.
Descartes’ observation—that our having the idea of unlimited perfection even when in all other respects we remain imperfect, must have its source in a perfect being—and therefore may be taken as a proof of God’s existence. But this suggests a regress—from a (hypothetically) enabling God back to a created mind that mirrors Him—and then forward—to that mind’s (God-given) capacity for such mirroring as a guarantee of God’s existence. Given that God’s perfection is incompatible with deceit, the argument continues into its wordly consequence—the verifiability of actual existence.
Both the idea of perfection and, thus, of God—are based on a logical (mental) coherence between them—for neither is a sense datum. Descartes, however, justifies this further reach between the idea of perfection and other ideas—those of actuality and their subject—the physical world, within one theory. But this second pairing is between (mental) ideas and (sensate) experiences, and so requires, not coherence, but a theory of correspondence (as in mind-brain). Descartes does not see a tension between these uses; the intersection between speculative and empirical thinking is not a problem for his philosophy. Further, he does not posit a first, unifying idea through which the pairing above (if he would admit it as such) could be derived. Some later critics—notably Kierkegaard—consider the “Cogito Ergo Sum” to be a tautology: There is nothing, i.e., added to the “I am” by the “I think”—hence, no “therefore.” Here again, a more fundamental proposition is needed to give a prior credence to the “I” which occurs in both parts of the equation. But Descartes does not give us this.
John Locke, an empiricist, begins—not with mind, but with sense perceptions which he calls “simple ideas.” They are simple because of their limitations—in time, place, and scope. These ideas are the bases upon which our knowledge is built. The process requires an examination of these ideas to ascertain their origins. One set of ideas is determined by sensory experience which can be imputed to the characteristics of the objects “themselves,” e.g., density, measurement, position. This echo’s the Platonic notion of the underlying reality of such qualities: They are the qualities whose accuracy can be verified by rational agreement bolstered by mathematics—the enduring “form” of the object—which exists (as Plato has it) in “that place beyond the heavens.”
Then there are other qualities that cannot be so measured—but derive their reality from the emotional subjectivities of mind—the unruly steed (as in the Phaedrus) which feasts on the changing grasses of desire