Marx’s contribution had already suggested a similar deflation, for as Freud revealed the personal unconscious, Marx exposed the social unconscious. The philosophical, religious, and moral values of each age could be plausibly comprehended as determined by economic and political variables, whereby control over the means of production was maintained by the most powerful class. The entire superstructure of human belief could be seen as reflecting the more basic struggle for material power. The elite of Western civilization, for all its sense of cultural achievement, might recognize itself in Marx’s dark portrait as a self-deceiving bourgeois imperialist oppressor. Class struggle, not civilized progress, was the program of the foreseeable future—and again, contemporary historical developments appeared to bear out that analysis. Between Marx and Freud, with Darwin behind them, the modern intelligentsia increasingly perceived man’s cultural values, psychological motivations, and conscious awareness as historically relative phenomena derived from unconscious political, economic, and instinctual impulses of an entirely naturalistic quality. The principles and directives of the Scientific Revolution—the search for material, impersonal, secular explanations for all phenomena—had found new and illuminating applications in the psychological and social dimensions of human experience. Yet in that process, modern man’s optimistic self-estimate from the Enlightenment was subject to repeated contradiction and diminution by his own advancing intellectual horizons.
These horizons were also radically expanded under the force of scientific discoveries that, like the views of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, applied a historical and evolutionary model of change to an increasing array of phenomena. That model had first emerged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment when European man’s recently unbound intellectual curiosity was combined with a new and emphatic sense of his dynamic progress. From these grew a heightened interest in the classical and ancient past from which he had developed, and enhanced standards of scholarship and historical investigation. From Valla and Machiavelli to Voltaire and Gibbon, from Vico and Herder to Hegel and Ranke, attention to history increased, as did awareness of historical change and recognition of developmental principles by which historical change could be comprehended. The global explorers had similarly expanded Europeans’ geographical knowledge, and with it their exposure to other cultures and other histories. With the continuous growth of information in these areas, it gradually became evident that human history extended back in time far longer than had been assumed, that there existed many other significant cultures past and present, that these possessed views of the world widely divergent from the European, and that there was nothing absolute, immemorial, or secure about modern Western man’s present status or values. For a culture long accustomed to a relatively static, abbreviated, and Eurocentric conception of human history—indeed, of universal history (as in Archbishop Ussher’s famous dating of the year of Creation in Genesis as 4004 B.C.)—the new perspectives were disorienting in both scope and character. Yet subsequent work by archaeologists pressed the horizon back still further, uncovering ever more ancient civilizations whose entire rise and fall had occurred before Greece and Rome were born. Unending development and variety, decay and transformation, were the law of history, and history’s trajectory was disconcertingly long.
When the developmental and historical perspective was applied to nature, as with Hutton and Lyell in geology, and Lamarck and Darwin in biology, the time spans within which organic life and the Earth were known to have existed were exponentially expanded to thousands of millions of years, in comparison with which all of human history had taken place within a startlingly brief period. Yet this was only the beginning, for then astronomers, empowered by increasingly advanced technical tools, applied similar principles toward understanding the cosmos itself, resulting in its unprecedented temporal and spatial expansion. By the twentieth century, the resulting cosmology had posited the solar system as a vanishingly small part of a gigantic galaxy containing a hundred billion other stars, each comparable to the Sun, with the observable universe containing a hundred billion other galaxies, each comparable to the Milky Way. These individual galaxies were, in turn, members of much larger galactic clusters, themselves seemingly parts of even vaster galactic superclusters, with celestial space conveniently measurable only in terms of distances traveled in years at the speed of light, and with the distances between galactic clusters calculated in hundreds of millions of light-years. All these stars and galaxies were presumed to be involved in enormously long processes of formation and decay, with the universe itself born in a scarcely conceivable, let alone explicable, primordial explosion some ten or twenty billion years past.
Such macrocosmic dimensions forced upon man’s awareness a disturbingly humble sense of his own relative minuteness in both time and space, dwarfing the entire human enterprise, not to mention individual human lives, to shockingly minuscule proportions. Superseded by such immensities, the earlier expansions of man’s world effected by Columbus, Galileo, and even Darwin seemed comparatively intimate. Thus did the combined efforts of explorers, geographers, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, biologists, physicists, and astronomers serve to expand man’s knowledge and diminish his cosmic stature. The distant origins of mankind among the primates and primitives, and yet, relative to the age of the Earth, their comparative proximity; the great size of the Earth and the solar system, and yet, relative to the galaxy, their extreme minuteness; the stupendous expanse of the heavens in which the Earth’s nearest neighboring galaxies were so unimaginably remote that their light now visible on Earth had left its source over a hundred thousand years earlier, when Homo sapiens was still in the Old Stone Age—faced with such vistas, thoughtful persons had good cause to ponder the apparent insignificance of human existence in the greater scheme of things.
Yet it was not just the radical temporal and spatial diminution of human life effected by science’s advance that threatened modern man’s self-image, but also science’s qualitative devaluation of his essential character. For as reductionism was successfully employed to analyze nature, and then human nature as well, man himself was reduced. With science’s increasing sophistication, it seemed likely, perhaps even necessary, that the laws of physics were in some sense at the bottom of everything. The phenomena of chemistry could be reduced to principles of physics, those of biology to chemistry and physics, and, for many scientists, those of human behavior and awareness to biology and biochemistry. Hence consciousness itself became a mere epiphenomenon of matter, a secretion of the brain, a function of electrochemical circuitry serving biological imperatives. The Cartesian program of mechanistic analysis thereby began to overcome even the division between res cogitans and res extensa, thinking subject and material world, as La Mettrie, Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, and others argued that as the universe as a whole could be best comprehended as a machine, so too could man. Human behavior and mental functioning were perhaps only reflex activities based on mechanistic principles of stimulus and response, compounded by genetic factors that were themselves increasingly susceptible to scientific manipulations. Ruled by statistical determinisms, man was an appropriate subject for the domain of probability theory. Man’s future, his very essence, appeared to be as contingent and unmysterious as an engineering problem. Although it was, strictly speaking, only a regulatory assumption, the widespread hypothesis that all the complexities of human experience, and of the world in general, would ultimately be explicable in terms of natural scientific principles increasingly, if often unconsciously, took on the character of a well-substantiated scientific principle itself, with profound metaphysical entailments.
The more modern man strove to control nature by understanding its principles, to free himself from nature’s power, to separate himself from nature’s necessity and rise above it, the more completely his science metaphysically submerged man into nature, and thus into its mechanistic and impersonal character as well. For if man lived in an impersonal universe, and i
f his existence was entirely grounded in and subsumed by that universe, then man too was essentially impersonal, his private experience of personhood a psychological fiction. In such a light, man was becoming little more than a genetic strategy for the continuance of his species, and as the twentieth century progressed that strategy’s success was becoming yearly more uncertain. Thus it was the irony of modern intellectual progress that man’s genius discovered successive principles of determinism—Cartesian, Newtonian, Darwinian, Marxist, Freudian, behaviorist, genetic, neurophysiological, sociobiological—that steadily attenuated belief in his own rational and volitional freedom, while eliminating his sense of being anything more than a peripheral and transient accident of material evolution.
The Self-Critique of the Modern Mind
These paradoxical developments were paralleled by the simultaneous progress of modern philosophy as it analyzed the nature and extent of human knowledge with ever-increasing rigor, subtlety, and insight. For at the same time that modern man was vastly extending his effective knowledge of the world, his critical epistemology inexorably revealed the disquieting limits beyond which his knowledge could not claim to penetrate.
From Locke to Hume
With Newton’s synthesis, the Enlightenment began with an unprecedented confidence in human reason, and the new science’s success in explicating the natural world affected the efforts of philosophy in two ways: first, by locating the basis of human knowledge in the human mind and its encounter with the physical world; and second, by directing philosophy’s attention to an analysis of the mind that was capable of such cognitive success.
It was above all John Locke, Newton’s contemporary and Bacon’s heir, who set the tone for the Enlightenment by affirming the foundational principle of empiricism: There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses (Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu). Stimulated to philosophy by reading Descartes, yet also influenced by the contemporary empirical science of Newton, Boyle, and the Royal Society, and affected as well by Gassendi’s atomistic empiricism, Locke could not accept the Cartesian rationalist belief in innate ideas. In Locke’s analysis, all knowledge of the world must rest finally on man’s sensory experience. Through the combining and compounding of simple sensory impressions or “ideas” (defined as mental contents) into more complex concepts, through reflection after sensation, the mind can arrive at sound conclusions. Sense impressions and inner reflection on these impressions: “These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.” The mind is at first a blank tablet, upon which experience writes. It is intrinsically a passive receptor of its experience, and receives atomistic sensory impressions that represent the external material objects causing them. From those impressions, the mind can build its conceptual understanding by means of its own introspective and compounding operations. The mind possesses innate powers, but not innate ideas. Cognition begins with sensation.
The British empiricist demand that sensory experience be the ultimate source of knowledge of the world set itself in opposition to the Continental rationalist orientation, epitomized in Descartes and variously elaborated by Spinoza and Leibniz, which held that the mind alone, through its recognition of clear, distinct, and self-evident truths, could achieve certain knowledge. For the empiricists, such empirically ungrounded rationalism was, as Bacon had said, akin to a spider’s producing cobwebs out of its own substance. The characteristic imperative of the Enlightenment (soon to be carried by Voltaire from England to the Continent and the French Encyclopedists) held that reason required sensory experience to know anything about the world other than its own concoctions. The best criterion of truth was henceforth its genetic basis—in sense experience—not just its apparent intrinsic rational validity, which could be spurious. In subsequent empiricist thought, rationalism was increasingly delimited in its legitimate claims: The mind without sensory evidence cannot possess knowledge of the world, but can only speculate, define terms, or perform mathematical and logical operations. Similarly, the rationalist belief that science could attain certain knowledge of general truths about the world was increasingly displaced by a less absolutist position, suggesting that science cannot make known the real structure of things but can only, on the basis of hypotheses concerning appearances, discover probable truths.
This nascent skepticism in the empiricist position was already visible in Locke’s own difficulties with his theory of knowledge. For Locke recognized there was no guarantee that all human ideas of things genuinely resembled the external objects they were supposed to represent. Nor was he able to reduce all complex ideas, such as the idea of substance, to simple ideas or sensations. There were three factors in the process of human knowledge: the mind, the physical object, and the perception or idea in the mind that represents that object. Man knows directly only the idea in the mind, not the object. He knows the object only mediately, through the idea. Outside man’s perception is simply a world of substances in motion; the various impressions of the external world that man experiences in cognition cannot be absolutely confirmed as belonging to the world in itself.
Locke, however, attempted a partial solution to such problems by making the distinction (following Galileo and Descartes) between primary and secondary qualities—between those qualities that inhere in all extended material objects as objectively measurable, like weight and shape and motion, and those that inhere only in the subjective human experience of those objects, like taste and odor and color. While primary qualities produce ideas in the mind that genuinely resemble the external object, secondary qualities produce ideas that are simply consequences of the subject’s perceptual apparatus. By focusing on the measurable primary qualities, science can gain reliable knowledge of the material world.
But Locke was followed by Bishop Berkeley, who pointed out that if the empiricist analysis of human knowledge is carried through rigorously, then it must be admitted that all qualities that the human mind registers, whether primary or secondary, are ultimately experienced as ideas in the mind, and there can be no conclusive inference whether or not some of those qualities “genuinely” represent or resemble an outside object. Indeed, there can be no conclusive inference concerning even the existence of a world of material objects outside the mind producing those ideas. For there is no justifiable means by which one can distinguish between objects and sensory impressions, and thus no idea in the mind can be said to be “like” a material thing so that the latter is “represented” to the mind. Since one can never get outside of the mind to compare the idea with the actual object, the whole notion of representation is groundless. The same arguments Locke used against the representational accuracy of secondary qualities were equally applicable to primary qualities, for in the end both types of qualities must be regarded as experiences of the mind.
Locke’s doctrine of representation was therefore untenable. In Berkeley’s analysis, all human experience is phenomenal, limited to appearances in the mind. Man’s perception of nature is his mental experience of nature, and consequently all sense data must finally be adjudged as “objects for the mind” and not representations of material substances. In effect, while Locke had reduced all mental contents to an ultimate basis in sensation, Berkeley now further reduced all sense data to mental contents.
The Lockean distinction between qualities that belong to the mind and qualities that belong to matter could not be sustained, and with this breakdown Berkeley, a bishop of the church, sought to overcome the contemporary tendency toward “atheistic Materialism” which he felt had unjustifiably arisen with modern science. The empiricist rightly affirms that all knowledge rests on experience. But in the end, Berkeley pointed out, all experience is nothing more than experience—all mental representations of supposed material substances are finally ideas in the mind—and therefore the existence of a material world external to the mind is an unwarranted assumption. All that can be known with certainty to exist is the m
ind and its ideas, including those ideas that seem to represent a material world. From a rigorously philosophical point of view, “to be” does not mean “to be a material substance”; rather, “to be” means “to be perceived by a mind” (esse est percipi).
Yet Berkeley held that the individual mind does not subjectively determine its experience of the world, as if the latter were a fantasy susceptible to any person’s whim of the moment. The reason that objectivity exists, that different individuals continually perceive a similar world, and that a reliable order inheres in that world, is that the world and its order depend on a mind that transcends individual minds and is universal—namely, God’s mind. That universal mind produces sensory ideas in individual minds according to certain regularities, the constant experience of which gradually reveals to man the “laws of nature.” It is this situation that allows the possibility of science. Science is not hampered by the recognition of sense data’s immaterial basis, for it can continue its analysis of objects just as well with the critical knowledge that they are objects for the mind—not external material substances but recurrent groups of sense qualities. The philosopher does not have to worry about the problems created by Locke’s representation of an external material reality that evaded certain corroboration, because the material world does not exist as such. The ideas in the mind are the final truth. Thus Berkeley strove to preserve the empiricist orientation and solve Locke’s representation problems, while also preserving a spiritual foundation for human experience and natural science.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 43