CHAPTER 1
1.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 75.
2.
Ibid., 92.
3.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science, 16.
4.
This may have been the intuition behind Kant’s assigning the “categories of the understanding” such a fundamental place in our knowledge. He seems, however, to locate them at too fundamental level – something that becomes apparent, when he lists them. They look to be a rather raggle-taggle army drawn from an inchoate philosophical logic: Quantity (Totality, Plurality, Unity); Quality (Reality, Negation, Limitation); Relation (Inherence and Subsistence, Causal Dependency, Community or Reciprocity); Modality (Possibility, Actuality, Necessity).
5.
I am grateful to Tom McClelland for this point.
6.
Fodor, “Semantics, Wisconsin Style”, 232.
7.
The character of man as “the problematizing animal” is manifest not only in the serious business of endeavouring to advance understanding but in the delight we take in puzzles and problems, in solving riddles set not by nature but by our fellows; in competition as well as in cooperation in problem-solving.
8.
Such separation of personal interests from the direction of inquiry, and the results of inquiry from their practical application, is at odds with the views of certain sociologists of science. Strong sociology of science argues that physics and chemistry and the other natural sciences, just as much as theology, literary criticism, or politics, are activities whose outputs are dictated by the institutions within which they take place. They are cultural products determined by the power relations between people. Theories that become the dominant orthodoxy are those that are propounded by the dominant groups. This, of course, would account for a certain conservatism in scientific paradigms but not the extraordinary progress reflected in the predictive, explanatory, and practical power of the applications of science. Most importantly, it has nothing to say about the dissemination of useful sense from the individual scientist, institution, or discipline to the anyone, anywhere, or “anywhen” where it proves to have unique power to predict and manipulate the natural world which, being antecedent to humanity, is not impressed by public relations.
9.
Ernest Gellner, quoted in Merquior, Foucault, 150.
10.
Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127.
11.
This is discussed with exemplary clarity in Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates us from Other Animals.
12.
For a discussion of the world reduced in physical science to “a system of magnitudes”, see Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, especially §3.5 “Mathematics and Reality”.
13.
The idea of natural necessity or necessity within nature deserves a more careful and detailed treatment than it receives in this book. At its heart, it qualifies something – an event or a conclusion – as unavoidable but that heart has many chambers.
Physical events may be deemed necessary because they are the inevitable consequences of the preceding events, the inevitability being dictated by the laws of nature. As such, they may seem to have a post hoc rationality. They are what a reasonable, fully informed, person would expect. Given that the laws of nature cannot be bucked, their necessity seems to engulf agents, both as a limit to their freedom, and in the form of the necessities required to sustain their life.
In another chamber, we find logical necessity. Logical necessity not only shares the inescapability of material necessity but it, too, is reasonable – it “makes sense” and in a more direct sense. The tautology “If A, then A” does not owe its reasonableness to the laws of nature. “If the ball is dropped, it will fall downwards” – where downwards is defined as the direction in which gravity operates – has an impure necessity (even leaving aside the circumstances that must be specified to ensure that the laws of gravity can manifest themselves).
Thus, the braiding of necessity and reason. Inevitability of a material outcome or logical output, transformed into that which a reasonable person would expect, becomes itself reasonable and ineluctable. It is ripe to be transformed into Fate, even the wisdom of the Gods. There is no tragedy that remains indefensible. In the famous passage from Anaximander, even the fact that everything dies is seen as “justice”: “But where things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay the penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time” (as quoted in “The Anaximander Fragment”, in Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 32–3). Actuality, inevitability and rightness are as one. The best of all possible worlds is the only possible world.
14.
For one discussion of the confused – or multifaceted – notion of a cause, see Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, 510–27.
15.
Suddendorf, The Gap, 158. Suddendorf has an apt quote (272) from Carl Sagan: “The library connects us with the insights and the knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and all of history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species”.
CHAPTER 2
1.
I have been heavily dependent on many secondary and tertiary sources. The latter include: Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5; Hastings & Mason (eds), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought and Harvey, A Companion to the New Testament. The essay on “Logos” in volume 8 of Hastings, Seible & Gray (eds), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics has been particularly valuable. My copy is one of many gifts from the ever-generous Robert Jackson (vide infra).
2.
According to the standard account, He rose from the primal waters and saw the world through to its completion, and thence to its return to “watery chaos” at the end of time. In cooperation with the sun-god Ra he drove the sun through its cycle: the descent into darkness in the west and the resurrection into light in the east. Atum was also the bearer, the home, the realization of the conscious Word or Logos, the essence of life.
The later creation myth of Memphis – copied from an earlier text – identified Ptah as the god in whom all the divine forces were encoded. The gods were named and, in virtue of being named, given form and identity, by Ptah’s tongue. Ptah was the Word, the Logos. Like the God of Judaeo-Christian religions, Ptah created by means of uttering thoughts. In the Word was the beginning, a matter to which we shall return.
3.
The extent to which Egyptian thought directly influenced the early Greek philosophers is hotly debated. Jonathan Barnes has asserted that, notwithstanding echoes, and some evidence of intellectual contact, “it is difficult to find a single clear case of influence” (Early Greek Philosophy, 6).
4.
Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 32.
5.
There is controversy over how much Logos did mean in Heraclitus’ writing. Barnes translates it variously as “account”, as “explanation” and as “the human faculty which enables us to offer explanations or reasons for things” (Early Greek Philosophy, xxiii). Barnes justifies his deflationary interpretation of the philosopher’s fragments with a witty metaphor: “Heraclitus attracts exegetes as an empty jampot wasps; and each new wasp discerns traces of his own favourite flavour” (The Presocratic Philosophers, 57).
6.
Quoted in Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 148.
7.
F. M. Cornford has claimed that Heraclitus was arguing against the materialism of the Ionian philosophers for whom the world was identical with what was visible (From Religion to Philosophy, 184ff.)
8.
Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, 51.
9.
The Demiurge makes his debut in Plato’s Timaeus although he retains hi
s importance in various guises in Neoplatonic and Gnostic thought. Logos also appears in the Meno as that which underwrites beliefs to make them qualify as true knowledge. Likewise in Theaetetus knowledge is true judgement with Logos. For a brief account of the importance to Plato of Logos as a marker of knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, see Welbourne, Knowledge, 34–5.
10.
Harvey, A Companion to the New Testament, 191–2. In what follows, I am especially indebted to Hillar, “Philo of Alexandria”. It is extraordinary to think that we Europeans and those influenced by European thought are the intellectual children of a man of whom few of us have heard. Central to the Jewish tradition from which Philo drew part of his inspiration was the notion of “Memra” – the creative or directive word or speech of God, manifesting his power in a world of matter. Its meaning encompassed speech addressed to a patriarch or prophet – a piece of the mind of God – and that in virtue of which the world was created – “For he spake and it was done”. Memra, however, was not the word made flesh and “in recent times the differences between the Christian and Philonic conception [of the Logos] have been widely admitted” (“Philo” in Cross & Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Thought, 1279).
11.
Hillar, “Philo of Alexandria”, 15.
12.
Hillar also lists: the utterance(s) of God; the Divine Mind; God’s transcendent power; the body holding together all the parts of the world; the immanent reason of the universe, reflected in the reasoning capacity of the human mind; the harmony between the parts of the universe; the first-born and chief of the angels, the revealer of God; soul-nourishing manna; intermediary power, messenger and mediator between God and the world; and even (though tentatively) God Himself. The breadth of the list is testament to the capaciousness, richness – and vagueness – of the concept.
13.
Ibid., 17.
14.
Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 5, 818.
15.
Diarmaid MacCulloch expresses this more domesticated version beautifully: “The Logos was seen finally and completely in Jesus Christ, a being other than the Father, but derived from him with all the fullness and intimacy of a flame which lights one torch from another: torchlight from torchlight, in a phrase which was embedded in the fourth century in the doctrinal statement which is now called the Nicene Creed” (A History of Christianity, 143). The metaphor of the fire being lit from another fire originates from Justin Martyr (100–165 ce).
16.
In his book On First Principles, the early Christian writer Origen explained the link between the necessity for a mediator between the intrinsic intelligibility of the world and the reason for God’s descent to earth in the form of Christ. As MacCulloch puts it: “[H]e grappled with the old Platonic problem of how a passionless, indivisible, changeless supreme God communicates with this transitory world. For Origen as for Justin, the bridge was Logos, and like Justin, Origen could be quite bold in terming the Logos ‘a second God’, even tending towards making this Logos-figure subordinate to or on a lower level than the supreme God whose creature he is. This doctrine was known as subordinationism” (History of Christianity, 153). “Subordinationism” – that made Christ ontologically inferior to God the Father – was a heresy that greatly exercised early Christians and had huge implications for the history of their religion.
17.
The extraordinary second-century Hellenic thinker Plotinus, however, warrants some mention. For him, Logos was an organizing principle or force which mediated between the divine intellect and forms in, or impressed on, matter. The term, however, was also a circumlocution: God’s name could not be uttered; and so divine action should be ascribed to intermediate agencies, including God’s Wisdom (Sophia) and his Word (Logos). The Good is the intelligible unity and Logos is the expression or representation of a higher reality in a lower one.
Plotinus’ view that each level of reality is represented at a lower level and that the Logos is the connexion between levels of reality seems to anticipate the later philosophy of science in which lower-level laws are localized expressions of higher-level ones. Equally, his claim that reality becomes less real with every descent from unity to greater multiplicity certainly reflects the common contemporary view that the more general the laws, the more fundamental they are, and the more fundamental they are, the more real the things of which they speak and the closer they are to truth. This is consistent with the perhaps not entirely serious claim that the Theory of Everything – unifying all things in a handful of abstractions – would reveal “the mind of God”, and thus be the Logos coming to know itself.
For Plotinus, the multiplicity of objects that can be directly experienced by the senses corresponds to the ground floor. There is no subsequent representation in Logos upon a still lower level. The deliverance of the senses is empty of intelligence: the physical is the level of being at which there is no form. The greatest multiplicity corresponds to the lowest level of reality. Ultimate Reality is One. We hear perhaps a distant echo of Heraclitus 700 or more years before: “Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one” (Diels-Kranz 22B50; McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates).
18.
Paul Valéry had the ambition of writing an Intellectual Comedy to complement Dante’s Divine Comedy and Balzac’s secular Human Comedy of a world driven by material aspirations. The intellectual comedy would transcend or at least synthesize the divine/religious understanding of the world with the secular/human take. Unsurprisingly, it never got written, although it remained a regulative idea that motivated him. And perhaps this writer, too.
19.
MacCulloch, History of Christianity, 19.
20.
There are many strands in the history of Logos that I have bypassed. Avicenna’s belief that the human mind in its greatest attainment is open to reason and the latter is a divine principle permeating all that there is, so that it is intelligible, and Leibniz’s advocacy of the principle of sufficient reason, are just a couple of threads from a very complex and rich fabric of vision, insight and argument.
21.
The source of the assertion ascribed to Galileo that the Bible taught us how to go to heaven not how the heavens go, is unclear. It is often claimed that he was quoting a priest Cesare Baronio. It is difficult not to suspect that Galileo thought the latter more interesting.
22.
For an entirely sceptical view of this claim, the reader might like to consult Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation.
23.
It is worth remembering why this might be welcomed as well as mourned. I have said nothing about the conflict between theological beliefs or of the power politics of the interactions between believers and unbelievers and the institutions that support both parties. From superior head-shaking and tut-tutting to domestic tyranny and petty prejudice and to mass murder, the record of the treatment of dissent and the consequences of disagreement is not edifying. The thirteenth-century genocide of the Cathars – “purists” who believed in the inherent evil of the physical world and hence denied the Incarnation of Logos, the word made flesh in the person of Christ – initiated by Pope Innocent (!) III was just one example of the horror inflicted on their fellow Christians by those who also embraced the religion of the God of Peace and Love.
And it is a bitter irony that Philo of Alexandria’s synthesis of Greek and Hebrew notions of Logos would have led to the relentless persecution over the next 2,000 years of those who followed Philo’s own Jewish faith. The ubiquitous antisemitism given transcendental justification by the crucifixion of the God of Love and Peace, and by the refusal of Jews to accept the divine nature of Christ, eased the path to Auschwitz.
24.
Of course, the very idea of God is a block to sense-making: the Uncaused Cause is the Unexplained Explanation. And any properties that God has – including his ability to create a definite world at a definite time – must go
beyond any necessary existence delivered by the ontological argument – even if “That which is perfect must necessarily exist” delivers anything. Necessity granted to an existent cannot be extended to any predicates, which must always be one out of a range. The arguments that prove that God is, do not deliver any What that God might be – even less accommodate His specific interventions in the world and human affairs.
25.
Our attitude of superiority towards myths is exemplified in the opening paragraph of the Introduction to Hope-Moncrieff’s Classic Myths and Legends: “In the childhood of our world the myth-making faculty seems so much a matter of course that the Greek word mythos, primarily meaning a word or speech, took on its special sense as a work of fancy.” Equally patronizing is the assumption – central to psychoanalysis – that myths are an unconscious expression of unresolved, unconscious inner conflicts and desires.
26.
For a critique, see Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation.
27.
Augustine, City of God, Bk XII, Chp 20, final sentence.
28.
Gospel According to St John 8:12: “Then spake Jesus again unto them: ‘I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life’”. And this is echoed in The Festal Menaion: “Where indeed should Thy light have shone save upon those that sit in darkness? Glory to Thee” (343).
29.
Logos Page 30