(31) What’s wrong with substance?

The notion of a substance found in ancient Greek philosophy and later in scholastic thought in the middle ages, is based on the idea of substantia, that is some essence that exists on its own, independent of other things, and unchangeable. A substance is the underlying reality that gives support to attributes or qualities and unifies them into a single thing.  The idea is that reality has an objective quality, something robust, independent and stable in spite of the variety and change we experience.  Attributes are changeable whereas substances are that which is constant through change, this helps us explain how the tree outside remains the same tree through the changing seasons and its growth to maturity.  Also attributes are not fixed to a spatio-temporal location, the same attribute can crop up in many places at once so that comparisons can be made between different, but similar objects.  Since attributes can be in many places at once there is a need for a centre around which attributes can be unified into a single object.  Thus substance provides an answer to the question why properties do not just fall off and scatter, but are instead collected into the unity of an object.  A final consideration that invites the idea of substance is that there are centres of force which have the active power to initiate change in itself or in others.

First we should say that notions of centres of force have been superseded by modern physics so that substance no longer plays a role in the natural sciences. Nevertheless we can still see that philosophy needs to account for constancy amidst change and unity amidst diversity, why not here appeal to the notion of substance? It seems that christian philosophers are often attracted to the notion of substance and we will deal later with the main application of this concept in Christian thought to the problem of body-soul dualism. For now we make three brief criticisms.  First the notion of substance is a reification, that is it takes a theoretical abstraction to be a real thing. Second it cannot do justice to the relational and temporal character of reality. Thirdly the notion of substance relativises the religious relation of dependence on God.  We explain each in turn.

We can only arrive at the notion of substance, as an underlying reality (substantia) behind the changeable phenomena of the world (accidentia), through theoretical abstraction.  While in experience we are familiar with both constancy and change, we never experience one without the other, so we cannot say that we experience some entity that is distinct from all change and that lies behind it. This abstraction only exists as an artefact of our logical thinking about cosmic reality. The problem is that this theoretical concept is projected back onto reality, as if this abstraction – this distinction between substantia and accidentia – did not exist as a result of our thinking but also in cosmic reality as such. 

Whereas the first criticism focuses on the role of our thinking in arriving at the notion of a substance before projecting this back on reality the second comes from the side of the reality being abstracted.  What we have with substance, or the closely related idea of essence, is an entity that is cut off from the full, immanent relationships and coherences in which we experience things (see §§21-23).  Since only some qualities of the thing, be it an apple, a flower or a human person, will be considered essential the result is a loss of reality.  This is even more the case when substance is taken as a bare support or substratum for all of a thing’s qualities as in John Locke’s famous phrase “substance or something-I-know-not-what”. Reality is lost because it is thoroughly relational, nothing exists in and of itself except God, all else depends on their creator, to cut a thing off from this relationality is to denude it. 

So thirdly the notion of substance can be opposed on the basis of the Christian confession that reality, that is creation, only exists within the power of God in Christ, who “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3) and in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). A consequence of this is that there is nothing in creation that can be found to be what all else in creation depends on for existence. To this line of thought it may be objected that by emphasising the complete dependence of all things on God we end up seriously threatening the integrity and goodness of creation. This could not be further from the truth! As we have just been indicating it is the notion of substance that cuts off things from their full interconnected reality, it is reformational philosophy that begins always with the affirmation of the goodness of creation. The issue at stake in this third criticism is the rejection of any hierarchy of being, or any reductionist strategy that assigns a semi-absolutised position to some element of creaturely reality. Reformational philosophy wishes to speak up here for an equality of being, and join with Gregory Palamas in claiming “The Christian can tolerate no mediating substance between God and creatures…”

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(30) Example: the limits of neuroscience

Staying with the themes of the philosophy of mind we can extend these points in relation to neuroscience which as a fast-developing field of scientific inquiry has created significant excitement within philosophy.  It is no surprise that philosophers are interested in the relevance of the results of neuroscience for topics like the nature of consciousness, freedom and determinism, and ethics.  However we should be cautious about how these results are used.  The first point to make is that the relevance of empirical inquiry for philosophy requires care over the use and application of concepts.  For empirical enquiry to make a philosophical difference a prerequisite is conceptual clarity.  Experimental results that claim to have profound consequences for the way we think about consciousness or freedom, will prove nothing if they are based on a confused or dubious use of the relevant concepts.   So for example if you want to run a test to see if someone is lying, you need to know what it is to lie. This may seem obvious, but there are important related concepts such as deception, role playing and joking which need to be distinguished.

A condition for lying is that a speaker states something that they believe to be false, but this in itself is not enough since in the context of tell ing a joke or reporting someone else’s words, a false assertion is not a lie. When in the context of a scientific experiment someone is told to assert false statements it is far from clear whether they can be said to lie.  As such any link between the observed neural activity and lying is far from being established.  

Another, more complex, example is that of freedom. This concept must face apparently serious challenges coming from the empirical findings of various sciences.  In particular the experiments by Libet and Walter where brain activity was measured using an EEG machine found that conscious awareness of decision making is preceded by activity in the brain.  Also the social sciences often focus on social factors that determine human choices thus giving the impression that human freedom may turn out to be nothing more than a comforting illusion.  What is clear is that here we have another example of the modern problem of how to deal with the apparent tension between theoretical or scientific accounts of human actions and our concrete experience of the same. 

The main argument in defence of the reality of freedom is based on our self-experience as an individual who is a free agent and not just an element in a chain of cause and effect.  We find it necessary in our social life to assume that people can be held responsible for their actions, whether in the legal sphere or in the context of institutions such as family life, schools, businesses and so on.  In each it is necessary to understand human behaviour in terms that are not reducible to cause and effect. However there is an additional issue raised by the kind of experiments done by Libet and Walter which is the actual concept of freedom being assumed.  Here, as in many discussions about the freedom of the will, freedom is understood in terms of a decision made at a specific moment in time. The agent who makes the decision is then thought of as somehow being outside the situation controlling what is happening, and so making a free decision which then gets relayed to the body that obeys. While some decisions may be understood in these kinds of terms they are not typical. For example the decision to raise my hand just to demonstrate this kind of freedom can hardly be thought of as a typical expression of human freedom. In most cases my free acts are part of a practice, which itself has been taken up in the light of longer term goals and values, as such they are not isolated events. So freedom is implied in the overall practice and in the overall conduct of my life, and is not only to be located in specific, let alone isolated choices.

These problems are perhaps not insurmountable.  Once careful attention is made to the relevant concepts better experiments can be devised.  However here a second problem arises.  Many of the concepts under discussion involve normative characteristics which in part constitute their meaning. Human actions are normed and so gain their meaning through their response to these norms.  A thought can be lucid or equivocal, it could be consistent with or contradicted by other thoughts; brain processes like neurons firing, as viewed from the abstract perspective of neuroscience, cannot have these features.  Given that there is this disconnect between the abstract view of brain processes and the normative character of human actions we might conclude that neuro-scientific experiments have no relevance at all to these philosophical questions.  To help think about this we can consider an example of what Selim Berker describes as the best-case scenario: “We notice that a portion of the brain which lights up whenever we make a certain sort of obvious, egregious error in mathematical or logical reasoning also lights up whenever we have a certain moral intuition.”  Now what should we conclude from this?  Do we automatically question the moral intuition?  This must depend on the case itself, in the situation where we can see no connection between the moral intuition and the mistaken bit of mathematical reasoning the neurological result can only make us stop and think.  We look again at the moral reasoning and see if we can find anything untoward about it, or if we can see an analogy with the mathematical reasoning.  In and of itself the neuro-scientific experiment cannot be decisive. 

In the absence of any normative connection we are best advised to continue trusting the moral intuition and wait to see if later neuroscientific results are able to make finer distinctions that throw light on the connection between the faulty mathematical reasoning and the moral intuition.  To take this further we can give a more specific example, again borrowing from Selim Berker, “Suppose the same part of the brain that lights up whenever we affirm the consequent also lights up whenever we have an intuition that infanticide is impermissible; would you be willing to start killing babies on those grounds?” The point of the rhetorical question is that our moral intuitions can have a strength and decisiveness that should rightly resist the alleged conclusion of complex empirical investigations.

Now we can develop a second scenario where we do come to see that the moral intuition in question rests on the same sort of confusion present in the mistaken bit of mathematical/logical reasoning, then of course we would have good reason to look more critically on the moral intuition, but in that case the neuroscience isn’t playing a direct justificatory role. Further our moral judgement that infanticide is wrong may well rest on more than just the given moral intuition now cast under suspicion.  What is the role of the experiment?   We can notice that “we might not have thought to link the moral intuition to that sort of mathematical/logical blunder if we hadn’t known the neuroscientific results; but again, once we do link them, it seems that we do so from the comfort of an armchair, not from the confines of an experimental laboratory. It is as if, while trying to prove whether or not some mathematical claim is true, your mathematician friend had said to you, “Why don’t you try using the Brouwer fixed point theorem?” If you end up proving the claim to be true using that theorem, your justification for the claim in no way depends on your friend’s testimony. (After all, she didn’t give away whether she thinks the claim is true or false.) Nonetheless, your friend’s testimony gave you a hint for where to look when trying to prove or disprove the mathematical claim”

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(29) Limits of theory

The structure of a thing is not universal in the same way as the modal aspects, they are typical.  While this helps give a theoretical account of concrete things it does not get us to the uniqueness of things, this is beyond the grasp of theory.  What we understand naively as a whole in our experience becomes in analysis something far more complex.  Rarely do we meet with entities that can be analysed as a simple whole, instead they are built up in a typical interlacing of simple structures of atoms, molecules and cells for example (ESL, I 209).  We have seen that this requires us to look at complex wholes where simple structures are encapsulated in larger structural totalities.  Now we wish to emphasis again the character and limits of theoretical thinking.  The attempt to give a theoretical account of entities confronts us with the apparently insoluable problem of how we can arrive at the whole entity through analysis given that analysis necessarily breaks up what in reality is an indivisible whole.  Indeed the unity of an entity is something that transcends the boundaries of the modal aspects which provide the necessary entry-points of theoretical analysis.  This means that theoretical access to the individual whole is impossible, instead an analysis of the typical-structure of a thing must presuppose its unity.  We have already seen that the typical-structure or idionomy of an entity is expressed within the modal aspects which are accessible to theoretical analysis and so a theoretical account of idionomies is possible.  However if we forget the limits of theory and seek to discover the true nature of things through theory alone we will end with deep theoretical problems.  This is well exemplified in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.  Since he took theoretical analysis to be primary without any critical investigation into its character and limits he took the abstract view of perception (that is the psychical modal aspect understood by empiricism) as what we experience.  Once the aspects have been taken as the primary given in our experience, entities in their totality and unity fall away behind the abstracted aspects as mysterious “Ding ansich” (the “thing-in-itself”).  So an over-theorised view of our practical experience turns the concrete unity, identity and totality of things into a necessary but unprovable hypothesis.

The importance of this point, that you cannot reconstruct theoretically the unique character of concrete reality, can be shown in relation to the philosophy of mind.  This field is now dominated by anti-dualistic viewpoints and when speaking of a person the move is often made, without comment or reflection, from the personal ‘I’ to a mind.  This though crosses a boundary as you cannot identify the subjective ‘I’ with mental phenomenon (a functional approach).  Attempts to explain philosophically the nature of personal identity goes beyond the capability of theoretical thought.  When our everyday knowledge and experience of reality is replaced with concepts you lose the concrete.  This concreteness is a feature of reality and not merely a subjective colouring that we give to reality, and as such it cannot be replaced by scientific theories, which of necessity presuppose and abstract from this reality.

A second point of importance is that the analysis of reformational philosophy begins with the recognition of the diversity of things and so can account for the distinctive features of different entities in the world.  A functional approach easily misses the richness found in ordinary experience.  An example of this can be found in discussions in the philosophy of mind about artificial intelligence.  From a purely functional viewpoint it can be difficult to explain the difference between a human mind and a computer.  A reformational theory of entities shows up the vast difference between the two.  We begin to see clearly the role of human design and use of computers so that the objective-functioning of the computer can make sense only against the subjective functioning of human persons. This can explain the importance of language as an object function of the computer. 

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