The point is that global arguments of the kind advanced by Descartes set the world so far beyond our knowledge as to leave our concepts unaffected, including the concept of the world. If Descartes is right, then that which he is calling the world is not the thing that we know as world. The world for us is our world. It is identified within experience, by using methods intrinsic to human reason. Since these are the only methods we possess, it is futile to reject them. Besides, this rejection undermines the critical task, which is to define the areas in which the distinctions between appearance and reality, and objective and subjective, make sense.
This is very important when we come to moral thinking. Many people argue that moral judgements are subjective, perhaps even that they are ‘relative’ to the customs of a given community, or to the desires of its members. But it would be a very bad argument for this conclusion that all our judgements are subjective. From the philosophical point of view, what matters are the distinctions between moral judgements on the one hand, and scientific theories on the other. Even if morality and science are in the same boat, judged from the perspective of the evil demon, they are not in the same boat when judged from our perspective. We want to know whether we can make use of methods which will decide moral questions, in the way that we can decide scientific questions, without relying on unjustified prejudice.
The same goes for the interpretation of works of art. ‘Deconstruction’ tells us that there is no such thing as objective meaning, since meaning is the product of interpretation, and interpretation is always misinterpretation. Many critics seize on this global scepticism about meaning as a basis for denying that one work of literature can be more meaningful than another. There is no special reason to teach Shakespeare rather than Donald Duck or Barbara Cartland, when objective meaning attaches to none of them. Such a conclusion is quite unwarranted. Even if all our interpretations fall short of establishing an objective meaning - the meaning of a text in God’s perspective - we could not interpret texts at all, if we made no distinction between plausible and far-fetched readings, between expressive and inexpressive uses of words, between penetrating and shallow descriptions. The criteria that we use in making these distinctions are forced on us by the very enterprise of reading literature, and remain unaffected by the claim that there is no access to the ‘transcendental signified’ — to the meaning behind the text, which only God could know.
Can we rescue the world from the demon? Or must we renounce the hope of proving that the world is really there, independently of our thinking? The answer depends upon our view of philosophy. Just how far can philosophical argument reach? Could philosophy ascend to the absolute perspective, the perspective which transcends the limitations imposed by human experience? Could thinking reach beyond itself, so as to light on the ‘transcendental object’ or ‘thing in itself’? Those are the questions posed by Kant in his great Critique of Pure Reason. We have an image of what they mean - the image already offered to us, in Descartes’ fantasy of the evil demon. But is it any more than an image? Phrased thus abstractly, is the question whether our world is real a real question?
Before venturing on an answer, we should pause to consider the nature of philosophical, as opposed to scientific, truth. We divide truths into the contingent - those that might have been otherwise - and the necessary. It is contingently true that London is the capital of England, necessarily true that the capital of England is a town. Necessary truth is a difficult idea, but one fundamental to philosophy. Indeed, on one reading of the subject, philosophy deals in necessary truths. Contingent truths, it is said, are the province of science; they cannot be established by pure reasoning, but only by observation and experiment. But philosophy has no other method than pure reasoning at its disposal. So if it comes up with results, they will not be contingent, but necessary, like the truths of mathematics. How can this be so? Philosophers have suggested various answers to that question. One is to say that necessary truths are in some sense created by our thinking. For example, we use the word ‘capital’ in such a way that only towns can be capitals - not villages, houses, trees or people. This is a convention, a rule governing the use of a word. We could have chosen another rule; but given this one, we are compelled by our own decision to conclude that ‘The capital of England is a town’ must always be true. Necessary truth is what the American philosopher W.V. Quine has called ‘truth by convention’. Other theories have been developed along these lines. For example, it is sometimes argued that we ’construct’ mathematical truths in the course of proving them. The necessity of these truths stems from the fact that they arise automatically from the rules of proof, and refer to no independent reality.
Needless to say, such explanations are contentious at best, and are never more contested than when applied to the results of philosophy. Kant distinguished ‘analytic’ from ‘synthetic’ truths, the first being true by virtue of the meanings of words (for example, the truth that the capital of England is a town), the second being true by virtue of some independent reality. And synthetic propositions, he argued, are not all contingent. Some are also necessary. He added that necessary truths cannot be proved by observation or experience, which only tells us how things are, never how they must be. Necessary truths are known, if at all, a priori, in other words by pure reasoning. We can understand how there can be truths which are analytic and α priori. But can there be synthetic α priori truths? This, he said, is the fundamental question of philosophy. For it is only by a priori reasoning, that philosophy could reach beyond the confines of human thought, so as to prove that the world is real.
Certainly no amount of science, and no amount of observation, will rescue us from the demon. Only an α priori argument will suffice; and it must have the ‘transcendental’ character suggested by Kant. It must examine what is presupposed by scepticism itself, in order to show that scepticism is refuted by its premises. Does such an argument exist?
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SUBJECT AND OBJECT
Descartes’ argument about the demon is a splendid example of a device much used in modern philosophy - the ‘thought experiment’, in which a hypothetical state of affairs is invented in order to cast light on the nature and limits of human knowledge. At the heart of the argument is the distinction between myself and the ‘external’ world. My experiences, perceptions and sensations belong to the ‘inner’ realm; and they serve for me as signs of an ‘outer’ realm whence, I suppose, they originate. I know them as mine, and they belong with the things that I cannot doubt, not even if the demon hypothesis is true. For example, I cannot doubt that I exist; nor can I doubt that this perception, this sensation and this thought are occurring now in me. All ‘external’ things are dubitable, but not those things which are the present contents of consciousness, and which I know immediately as mine. It is as though the world were divided in two: the closed, illuminated world of the self; and the undiscovered country which lies in darkness all around.
This picture has played a central role in modern philosophy, but took on a ‘modernist’ character after Kant, becoming the central icon in a new religion - the religion of ‘German classical philosophy‘, as it is called, for which ’German romantic philosophy’ would be a more fitting name. The founder of this religion was J.G. Fichte (1762-1814), though his immediate followers, Schelling and Hegel, were quick to take the credit. Fichte’s way of arguing looks, in retrospect, very strange and is radically misrepresented by any attempt to provide a lucid summary, lucidity being the enemy of religion. Nevertheless, here is - very roughly - what Fichte said.
Philosophy must discover the ‘absolutely unconditioned first principle of human knowledge’ - i.e. the principle on which all knowledge can rest, but which itself rests on nothing. Logicians offer us an instance of necessary truth in the law of identity: A = A. But even that law presupposes something that we have yet to justify, namely the existence of A. I can advance to the truth that A = A, only when A has been ‘posited’ as an object of thought. But what justifies m
e in positing A? There is no answer. Only if we can find something that is posited in the act of thinking itself will we arrive at a self-justifying basis for our claims to knowledge. This thing that is posited ‘absolutely’ is the I; for when the self is the object of its own thinking, that which is ‘posited’ is identical with that which ‘posits’. In the statement that I = I we have reached bedrock. Here is a necessary truth that presupposes nothing. The self-positing of the self is the true ground of knowledge. All knowledge begins from self-knowledge, and the self is the centre of its world.
Here begins the peculiar twist to Fichte’s argument. What I ‘posit’, he argues, is an object of knowledge, and an object is not a subject. To have determinate knowledge of the subject is impossible: the self knows itself as subject only ‘immediately’ — that is to say, without concepts, so that nothing can be said about what is known. To have determinate knowledge of the self as subject would be like seeing the point of view from which you see the world. The subject is ‘transcendental’: it lies at the perimeter of the world, observing but unobservable. Hence that which comes before me in determinate self-knowledge is understood as not-self. The self is known in two ways - immediately, as self; and ‘determinately’, as not-self. However, whatever lies in the not-self is posited by the self — it has been translated from subject to object, so as to make itself known. It is as though self-consciousness were traversed by a movable barrier: whatever lies in the not-self has been transferred there from the self. But since the origin of both self and not-self is the act of self-positing, nothing on either side of the barrier is anything, in the last analysis, but self. In the not-self, however, the self is passive. As such it can be organized by concepts of space, time and causality, so as to constitute the order of nature. As subject, however, the self is active and also free, since concepts do not apply to it, and nothing that it does can be described as the effect of some cause.
The transference from self to not-self is also an ‘alienation’ of the self in the not-self, and leads to a ‘determination’ of the self by the not-self. This ‘self-determination’ (Selbstbestimmung) is the highest form of self-knowledge, achieved through alienation, but leading at last to a supreme act of ‘self-realization’, in which subjective freedom becomes an objective fact.
Self, self, self - you can sympathize with Schopenhauer, who dismissed Fichte as the ‘father of sham philosophy, of the underhand method ...’. Nevertheless, Fichte bequeathed to German philosophy a powerful drama, which runs as follows: Underlying knowledge, yet outside its purview, is the free and self-producing subject. The destiny of the subject is to know itself by ‘determining’ itself, and thereby to realize its freedom in an objective world. This great adventure is possible only through the object, which the subject posits, but to which it stands opposed as its negation. The relation between subject and object is one of opposition: thesis meets antithesis, and from their clash a synthesis (knowledge) emerges. Every venture outwards is also an alienation of the self, which achieves freedom and self-knowledge only after a long toil of self-sundering.
That drama, give or take a few details, remains unchanged in Schelling and Hegel, and remnants of it survive through Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and Marx, right down to Heidegger. What it lacks in cogency it amply supplies in charm, and even today its mesmerizing imagery infects the language and the agenda of Continental philosophy. The journey of the self, from primitive subject to ‘realized’ object, becomes the recurring theme of all philosophy, which is useful to us first and foremost because it offers such striking proof of our own position, as sovereign creators of the world in which we live. Descartes shut the self in its inner prison, and Fichte made the place so comfortable, that the self decided to stay there, rejoicing in its sovereignty over a world that is in fact no larger than itself.
Hegel called the philosophy that he inherited from Fichte ‘objective idealism’. The world is ‘posited’ by the self, and is therefore entirely composed of ‘spirit’: hence the name ‘idealism’. But the self achieves self-knowledge as an object of its own awareness — by realizing itself in the objective world: hence the description ‘objective’. Is this an answer to Descartes’ demon? Surely not; the objective world has not been saved from the demon, but merely painted on the prison wall. The whole method and vocabulary of the Fichtean drama seems to bind us more firmly to the self, as the be-all and end-all of knowledge. There is nothing in this world save self, and the very act of reaching out to others is only an elaborate way of staying locked inside.
Words like ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are by no means self-explanatory. They suggest a picture, rather than a theory - a picture, however, which has dominated Western philosophy since Descartes. The mind, according to this picture, is essentially ‘inner’, revealed to itself alone, and connected only contingently with ‘outer’ circumstances. The subject (or ‘self’) has a peculiar privileged view of this inner realm. He knows his present mental states indubitably and immediately. He has no such privileged view of his physical states, or of the ‘outer’ world, in which his body moves as one object among others. Hence he can doubt the existence of the external world and all that is contained in it - including other bodies and other minds. In considering the relation between thought and reality he is considering not ‘our thought’ but ‘my thought’. Maybe there are no other people: maybe only I exist, and what I take for other people are no more than paintings on the wall.
This ‘Cartesian’ picture was assumed by Western philosophy for three centuries. Kant attempted to refute it; so did Hegel; but both produced another version, with the ‘transcendental subject’ at the place where the ‘Cartesian ego’ had been. The decisive refutation came with Wittgenstein, whose argument against the possibility of a ‘private language‘, published in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1951), changed the course of modern philosophy. The Cartesian ego fortifies itself against the demon with the famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’ — ‘I think therefore I am’. The Fichtean self muscles its way into existence by ‘positing’ the object of thought, and the division between self and not-self. Both believe they are thinking, and that they know what they mean by ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, ‘subject’ and ‘object‘, ’self’ and ‘other’. But whence did this knowledge of meanings arise? Did they invent a private language in which to pass on to themselves the rumour of their own existence? Or did they borrow their concepts from some other source?
Wittgenstein imagines the following case:Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language. If so, it would not be used as a name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
The Cartesian picture envisages the mind and mental processes as private to the person who possesses them: only he can really know of their existence and nature; others have to guess from his words and behaviour, which are at best the effects of mental processes, and not the things themselves. But if that is so, Wittgenstein suggests, we could not use the terms of our public language in order to identify and refer to the mind. Someone may use the term ‘beetle’ just as I do, even though there is, in his case, nothing in the box. Yet we both agree that he has a beetle, that ‘beetle’ is the correct description of what he has, and that in this respect, as in any other that can be expressed in our common language, he is just like me! So it cannot be the ‘inner object’, the ‘Cartesian mental process’, that we refer to in our language: it drops out of consideration as irrelevant, since its presence or absence makes no conceiv
able difference to anything we say.
The following reply might be made: maybe each of us has his own private language, in which he refers to the ‘inner processes’ which elude the public ‘language-game’. This private language is one that only the speaker understands, since no one else can know the objects to which he refers in it. The speaker can always be sure that he is using the words of his language correctly, since he knows, without checking on the matter, whenever an ‘inner process’ occurs.
But is this so? How does he know that the ‘inner process’ which he now calls ‘grodge’ is the same as the one which occurred when last he used that word? What criterion does he use - what criterion can he use - to attach his words to the things described by them? Indeed, how does he know that this thing called ‘grodge’ is an inner process? Perhaps it is a sensation — where the word ‘sensation’ is used with its ordinary meaning? If so, grodge is not an ‘inner process’, since no word in the public language (including the word ‘sensation’) could conceivably refer to such a thing.
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy Page 4