Not Descartes’ method, but mine.

I’m writing about philosophy, but I want to make it clear that I’m not a philosopher; at best, I’m a student of philosophy.  (I suppose you could call me a philosophomore.)  I’ve given my reasons for rejecting the modern philosophy I’ve encountered, and my reasons for thinking that St. Thomas and Aristotle have something to teach me.  Consequently, I’m trying to learn from them; and in my recent posts I’m trying to share the things that I’ve learned.  I am in no way trying to argue rigorously for these positions; I’m simply trying to explain them as best I can.  In short, if you think I’ve asserted something without adequately supporting it, that’s quite likely the case; and if it bothers you, let me know.  I might be able to cast more light on it.

According to Aristotle, when you look at a thing, you see what it is. When you look at a dog, you see that it’s a dog. When you look at a cat, you see that it’s a cat. When you look at a table, you see that it’s a table. He calls this “apprehending the essence of the thing”. “Apprehend” is an interesting word; it means “to sieze”, as opposed to “comprehend”, which means “to grasp”.

So Aristotle isn’t saying that when you look at a dog, you understand fully and completely what it is that makes a dog a dog. He’s simply saying that when you look at a dog, you know it’s a dog, rather than, say, a cat. Even tiny children can tell the difference at a glance.

According to Aristotle, this is simply how our minds work. The dog has an essence, which is simply to say that there is a kind of thing called a dog, that has the nature of being a dog. Your senses perceive the dog, and from the images produced by your senses (which includes the smell of wet dog, the feel of fur, the sound of barking) your intellect abstracts the essence and presents it to you. You don’t need to analyze the appearance of the dog; you just look at it, and know, hey, that’s a dog!

In our modern world, where we tend to think of everything in terms of software and computation, we tend to think, “Oh, I see the dog, and then some pattern recognition software runs in my brain—and very quickly, too!—and it recognizes the pattern of characteristics that makes a dog a dog, and I say, ‘Oh, there’s a dog!'” But according to Aristotle, it’s really simpler than that. The dog has an essence, which is a metaphysical reality; and our intellects are equipped to apprehend that reality, to abstract Dogginess from the Dog that stands before us.

And our intellect saves that essence for later, so we can recognize the next dog we see. Essences are “intelligible”; we can know them directly.

I’ve been reading a book called The Structure of Objects, by Kathrin Koslicki; it’s an attempt, so far as I can tell, to pull some Aristotelian concepts into modern analytic philosophy, about which more later. But only some concepts. She can’t quite bring herself to believe that essences are real, so she resorts to the more modern conception of “natural kinds”; and “natural kinds” are defined, more or less, as clusters of properties that objects of the kind have. According to Koslicki, we recognize a dog because it has floppy ears and a waggy tail and an elongated furry body like a golden retriever or (ahem) a pit bull. Oh, wait, that doesn’t work.

Great Danes and Toy Poodles look rather different, and one could be excused for thinking of them as different species, based purely on surface features. And yet both are known to be dogs. One could appeal to genetics, to numbers of chromosomes and lineages to say, oh yes, these are both dogs; but then we are getting past characteristics that are easily apprehended. In short, appeals to science don’t explain how a two-year-old can look at a Great Dane and a Toy Poodle and recognize them both as fundamentally the same kind of thing.

To be fair to Koslicki, I’m seriously over-simplifying her position, but it doesn’t invalidate my point: essences are something that can be apprehended, seized in a moment without any deep analysis. Koslicki’s position requires a fair degree of comprehension before the objects around us can be grouped into kinds; and that’s nonsense.

And so, as Aristotle says, essences—universals, as they are sometimes called—have a real existence, and our minds are equipped to know them.

One of Aristotle’s chief strengths is also one of his weaknesses. His reliance on the World as We Know It as one of his chief premises is a very good thing, because it saves his philosophical world from being too small and absurdly limited. On the other hand, our understanding of the physical world—the understanding we call “science”, though Aristotle would have meant something much broader by that term—has improved significantly over the past two millenia. And that means that some of his works now seem laughably wrong. No one now reads Aristotle for a deep understanding of astronomy, for example. For Aristotle, the “heavenly bodies” traveled in perfect circular orbits, were incorruptible, and were in fact of a different order of being than the Earth on which we live. No amount of respect for Aristotle as a thinker and philosophy can get past the fact that he was woefully wrong on these points. Nevertheless, it was the best “science” available in his day.

The problem extends to his purely philosophical works (in which category I include his Physics), and by extension to the works of Aquinas, because both of them use examples from astronomy, medicine, and other sciences to illustrate their arguments. Many of these examples consequently sound absurd to us today, which gives the impression that the arguments in which they appear are likewise absurd.

It’s often the case, though, that the example is simply an illustration of a general principle. The example might be obsolete, but that doesn’t invalidate the principle, at least not necessarily. In other cases, the problem is one of terminology rather than of sense. Aquinas, for example, knew nothing of genetics or heredity as we now understand it; but he knew perfectly well that some characteristics are passed by fathers to their children. Some of these examples make perfect sense, if you can get past the language.

There are two important things to remember. The first is that philosophical arguments are logical demonstrations based on sound arguments from general principles. The examples are not intended to be evidence driving a probable conclusion; rather they are intended to illustrate the workings of the general principles and hence to cast light on them and on the argument as a whole. What we here is metaphysical deduction, not scientific induction, but many, especially the scientistically minded, tend to read it as the latter and thus discount it.

The second is that Aristotle really was trying to incorporate the best scientific knowledge of the day. If he could have been brought forward to the 17th century and the “Age of Reason”, he (unlike some of his supporters of that era) would have been thrilled to update his scientific knowledge. His metaphysical principles, however, need not have changed.

A few days ago I wrote this post, in which I suggested that the Aristotelian/Thomist view of philosophy was abandoned by Descartes and his successors because it was “too Catholic, too hard, and too high-minded.” In a comment on that post, Karrde described the change in paradigm as a change in philosophical fashion, and that it was perhaps too facile to say that one side was right and the other side was wrong.

He’s right on both counts, and if I gave the impression that I thought that Descartes was wholly wrong, I misspoke.

Descartes was clearly one smart cookie, and it would be hard to overstate his importance to the development of modern science. Mathematical physics, just to give one example, is rooted in analytic geometry and the “Cartesian” plane. Nor do I wish to understate the importance of the scientific method in learning new things about the world we live in. There are really two points I wanted to make.

First, Aristotelian/Thomist thought wasn’t abandoned because it was wrong; it was abandoned because Descartes and his successors were interested in different problems which it didn’t directly address—and then it was said to be wrong because it didn’t address problems it had never claimed to address. It part, this was due to confusions over terminology; when Aristotle or Thomas uses the word “motion” he has something rather different in mind than Isaac Newton. And all the while, there were non-philosophical reasons for wanting to reject it. Many of the modern thinkers weren’t Catholic, and rejected it on those grounds; and in Descartes’ case, he lived in a time and place where I gather it was easy to get in trouble with the Church on intellectual grounds. Peter Kreeft’s book Socrates Meets Descartes points out lots of places in Descartes’ Discourse on Method where Descartes had to step carefully. But the fact remains: AT thought was abandoned, not refuted.

Second, Descartes proceeded by cutting the Gordian Knot; and this, in my reading of history, is usually a bad idea.

The story goes that whilst campaigning in Phyrgia, Alexander the Great was confronted with an oxcart that had belonge to the first king of Phyrgia (Gordias, the father of Midas of the Golden Touch) which had been tied to a post with an ornate knot. It is said that there was a prophecy associated with the knot, that he who untied it would become King of Asia, though this may have been put about by Alexander’s men after the fact. As everyone knows, instead of trying to untie the knot, Alexadner cut it with his sword. In a sense, he recast the problem: rather than thinking about as untying the knot, he thought about it as freeing the oxcart from the post, and then devised the most efficient solution to the new problem. Thus, “cutting the Gordian Knot” is sometimes used to mean “thinking outside the box.”

Descartes was “thinking outside the box” in a very particular way: because the kind of thinking he wished to do was hard to do in the context of AT philosophy (and because its contemporary practicioners were hard to deal with), he didn’t just cut the Gordian Knot; he kicked over the entire oxcart. (Perhaps it contained apples.) And then he started over from scratch.

I certainly understand the temptation. Every software developer, when faced with an old, crufty, hard-to-understand software system, longs to start over from scratch, and rewrite it from the ground up with new, clean, easy-to-understand code. Every social reformer longs to overthrow the old, corrupt establishment, and build a new, fair, utopian society based on the principles he find obvious and unassailable. And Descartes and Hume and Kant longed to do the same thing in philosophy.

But there’s another name for cutting the Gordian Knot in this way; we call it “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” It’s a way of getting rid of the consequences of old decisions, but the difficulty is that many of those old decisions came about because of real problems—and successfully addressed those problems to the extent that they are now forgotten. When you start over, you’re going to run into all of those problems again, and your new solution is going to have to be adjusted to deal with them.

When this happens in the software arena, you get bugs, delays, and cost-overruns…and sometimes, you get software death-marches. When you do this in the social/political arena, you can get a whole range of problems, up to and including events like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward in China, where millions died. When you do it in philosophy, as Descartes did, you lose tools of thought that had been devised and sharpened over the course of centuries; and then, of course, you begin to make the mistakes those tools were devised to resolve.

And the tragedy is, it shouldn’t have been necessary.

Somewhat apropos of what I’ve been writing about for the past week, David T. at Life’s Private Book has a post on Jerry Coyne, free will, and René Descartes. Coyne is the fellow I mentioned some while back who claims that free will and consciousness are illusions. His absurd claims have been getting a fair amount of play in the philososphere, and David T.’s contribution is a discussion on practicality of Philosophy.

For Coyne, philosophy is “arcane” and “academic”; it has nothing to say about practical matters like morality. For Socrates and his immediate successors, philosophy is eminently practical—it’s how to lead an examined life, a good and happy life. David T. traces the change to Descartes, who intended to use his new “method” to produce a detailed and unassailable morality on purely rational principles, but who in the meantime made do with a “provisional morality”. But Descartes never completed his project (nor has anyone else); and it is from him, so sayeth the blogger, that we get the notion that our ideas of morality are somehow provisional, open to question, and always subject to revision.

He makes some very good points; go take a look.