(13) The Character of philosophy

Let us back-track a little because the above discussion of science, theory and abstraction leads us to an important argument.  The kind of sciences we have so far been talking about are specialized sciences because they investigate reality through the lens of one distinguishable sphere of properties and laws that acts as a unified principle of explanation. But notice this: we can only identify such a principle of explanation by simultaneously seeing how it is different from other possible principles of explanation.  We can focus on number as number only if we are able to distinguish it from other types of property such as motion, energy, life etc.  If reality contained only one kind of property then these special sciences would be impossible.  This undermines all claims to reduce reality to one type of thing.  The reductionist approach is inherently circular since the choice of principle for explaining everything else already presupposes a given diversity from which it makes it choice.  For example: materialism claims that all of reality can be reduced to matter. However, we can only understand this claim if we can identify matter as a distinctive kind of property in the world set off from other properties.  This in turn can only be accomplished if other properties distinct from matter really exist, and so strict materialism cannot possible be true.  

There is another conclusion to be drawn from this line of thought.  Since any special science is limited to the angle of approach of one dimension of reality, a view of how that dimension relates to the whole of reality (or to other dimensions or aspects) must require a more-than-special-scientific viewpoint.  This means that any definition of a special science must take a view outside of its specific modal viewpoint.  For example, to claim that “mathematics is the discipline encompassing algebra and topology” is to give a definition that is not mathematical in character since it is not itself an axiom, theorem or deduction either in algebra or topology.  It is a claim about mathematics and not a claim of mathematics.  This suggests that specialised sciences can only account for what they are doing by moving beyond their natural domain and so it points us towards the need for theoretical reflection that has as its focus such boundary-transcending issues.  Theoretical thinking requires a discipline that deals with the interrelation between different facets of our world.    Since every science and human task has set limits, philosophy must give itself to the service of others by listening to and learning from these disciplines and making conceptually clear the nature, limits, inter-relational meaning and potential for blessing/curse of things, events and human activities.  

It may help to develop an example (borrowed and adapted from Martin Rice).  If you are developing a psychological theory, then you will presume the existence of psychological phenomena, including certain psychological laws and properties which characterise psychological functioning.  Here we meet with a very basic kind of philosophical question which asks what is the nature of these phenomena and how they relate to other acknowledged realities.  It is true that some may wish to deny the existence of such realities and may advocate that we eliminate all talk of psychological laws and properties in a mature science.  Such a view would not even want to offer an explanation of psychological phenomena, but will instead propose an explanation of why we are mistaken in our belief that there are such. Either way, whether we accept or deny their existence we will be advancing a philosophical position.

Let us suppose that psychological properties and laws do constitute a genuine sphere of functioning in the reality we meet with in our experience of events and objects. The question now arises how these properties relate, connect with, or depend upon other, non-psychological phenomena. Here we have a choice: either psychological phenomena have independent existence with the other aspects of reality dependent on them, or they do not. Let’s take the first option where psychological properties exist independently of the remaining aspects.  We see a version of this in the (radical) empiricist position in philosophy where our sensory experience, sometimes called sense data, is seen as having a distinct existence and providing our only guide to true reality.  This is clearly a philosophical view.  To the extent that our sensory experience is taken as basic and independent it is also a religious view since psychological properties are given the role of a divinity.

In the second case, we assume there is a relationship of some sort between the psychological aspect of reality and the remaining aspects. How can this be conceived, or explained? That is, what kind of relationship are we dealing with? It could be that one of the remaining aspects explains or accounts for the relationship between the psychological aspect of reality and the remaining aspects to which it is related. This would have to be done by either a non-eliminative reduction to the relating aspect, or by a supervenience relation upon the aspect that does the relating. In either case we are involved in a substantive philosophical theory, since we are making a theory that comments, in whole or in part, on the number of, and interrelations between, the basic aspects of reality.

Of course, the kind of connection that exists between the psychological aspect and the remaining aspects of reality may not be characterized by one of the aspects at all. We may have a non-reductive relationship between the psychological aspect and the remainder. It is precisely such a philosophical view that is developed by reformational philosophy.

The point of the above example is that, as a special science develops, it is forced to take a philosophical stance on the limits of its field and how its conceptual results relate to other universes of discourse and knowledge.

An authentic Christian philosophy should seek to combat the tendency to reduce reality to one or two basic realities on which all else depends or through which all else can be explained.  It also has the task of exploring the richness of God’s world as uncovered by the many fields of scholarship by giving a theoretical overview that remains open to further surprises, and as with all cultural tasks this should be done in obedience to the two great commandments: to love God and serve one’s neighbour with the expectation of the redemption of the whole of creation.

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(12) No Archimedean point

Now we recall that theoretical thought, often under the name “reason”, was linked to the divine and seen as capable of revealing the whole meaning of reality to us.  Here, many a philosopher has thought, is our true Archimedean point, a watch tower we can ascend and overcome the limitations of our body and senses to survey reality from a “Gods-eye-view”.  Rene Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, put it like this: “Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakeable.”.  Famously he proposed the cogito, the self as a thinking thing, to be his Archimedean point.  Reason then becomes a form of pseudo-revelation; it takes upon itself the role of revealing to us what is divine.

Right from the beginning of philosophy there was a faith in theoretical thought that it would lead us to the true picture of reality, a picture that sets itself against the changing diversity (and richness) of everyday experience.  This meant that the result of theoretical thinking was identified with true reality.  Put in another way, the fallible and limited outcome of human thinking became the standard for what is truly real and important.  Given that theoretical thinking involves isolating and focusing on a specific feature of the world, the identification of the result of our theoretical thinking with true reality has led philosophers to take what they had isolated in thought to be the independent and fundamental basis of all reality.  This shows a kind of forgetfulness because what is isolated in thought is isolated only as a result of our activity of separating it from its everyday context and not because it really is isolated and independent. We forget, at our peril, that what our thinking gives us is just a small focused part of reality and not its true, underlying nature: what philosophers often call essence or substance.

Now, to take something in reality as the independent and fundamental basis of all reality, is to take that part of creation and give it a divine like status.  By seeking the answer to the boundary question of unity and diversity within the confines of what reason reveals to us leads to a form of intellectual idolatry.  Not only that, it also fails to solve the problem.  Let’s see why that is.  Philosophers have tended to identity one or two features as basic to reality. If just one feature (monism), then there remains the problem of how we can get from this one feature all the diversity we experience.  For example, how from matter we can get life, consciousness, morality and so on.  If two features are made fundamental then the unity of what we experience, and the way things in God’s world seem to fit together become problematic because we are now required work out how these two very different features can interact with each other.  For example, in addition to matter Rene Descartes added mind, but then had great difficulty in explaining how the mind can affect the body and how the body can affect the mind.

A further problem is that since created reality is not absolute, and since the feature that our thinking has isolated for investigation is not truly isolated and independent but in actual fact intertwined with the rest of reality, then taking it to be the key to reality leads to irresolvable problems.  These can be seen in the various paradoxes and antinomies that crop up throughout the history of philosophy, perhaps none as famous as those identified by Zeno of Elea.  He developed a number of arguments to support his view that motion was not real.  The most famous is known as the Achilles paradox (after the famous Greek hero), or sometimes as the ‘tortoise and the hare’.  Here we are to imagine a race between a tortoise and Achilles (or a hare).  Achilles being a good sport allows the tortoise a head-start but doesn’t realise that in order to overtake the tortoise he must first reach the place where the tortoise started from, by which point the tortoise has moved on.  Now Achilles must cross an admittedly short distance to arrive at the position the tortoise has now got to.  Unfortunately, by the time Achilles has got there the wily tortoise has kept going on to a further point and so it seems the same will happen ad infinitum (to infinity) meaning that Achilles will never be able to overtake the tortoise!  This paradoxical conclusion, that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise when we know that in reality he will, is a result of Zeno’s attempt to explain everything in terms of space.  Since motion is different from space, it cannot be explained on its basis and so a consistent reduction of all of reality to space will end up denying the reality of motion.

One more problem we mention now is that due to the great diversity exhibited in creation there are many modes of reality that can be isolated and made into the fundamental starting point of our explanations.  This variety means that it becomes quite arbitrary what choice is made as regards what is taken to be ultimately real.  This is revealed in the changing fashions of -isms that one encounters in the different fields of scholarship, such as rationalism, behaviourism, psychologism, organicism, historicism, economism, physicalism etc.  Each of these has been equally successful (and unsuccessful) at organising its explanation of all reality around just one dimension of reality.  Later we shall see why reductionism can meet with a certain degree of success.  For now, to give a sense of how arbitrary the choice is, compare the following positions of Rene Descartes and David Hume.  First Descartes:

Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed.  This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.  (Descartes Meditations II)

Now compare with Hume:

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive. (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part II, sec. vi)

Descartes reduces all the phenomena of human experience to thinking, while Hume reduces the same realities to perception.  While the consequences are significant, it is difficult to know why one form of reduction should be favoured over the other.  Both in their own way are expressions of faith. Both reductions rely on the abstractive and isolating activities of thought. Now, since theory focuses on elements and cannot comprehend the whole, it is itself one element of the whole.  This means that the answer to the problem of unity and diversity must be found prior to theory, including philosophical theory.  A vision of the whole, as a vision of ‘life, the universe and everything’, is a vision of faith whether one is “religious” or not.  The conclusion is that philosophy cannot give us an Archimedean point.

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(11) Theory and abstraction

Based on our first approximation in defining philosophy (§9) we should look for what makes theoretical thought a distinctive part of our cultivation of God’s creation.  If we go back to the earliest philosophers we notice that theoretical thinking helped them to take ordinary features of our world such as water, fire and air, or certain pervasive realities such as change and constancy and turn them into fundamental ordering principles of the whole cosmos.  By claiming that the whole of reality could be explained by, or reduced to certain basic elements, these elements are given godlike status as being the independent basis of all the rest of reality.

Theoretical thinking is a feature of science and there are today many sciences.  At school we typically study physics, chemistry and biology; then there are also subjects such as psychology and mathematics.  Each of them investigates its own irreducible terrain of reality in which certain properties and laws that form a basic kind of functioning of the objects and events in our experience are grouped together.  Mathematicians, for example, focus on numbers themselves, not on counting particular objects, but investigating numerical properties as they can be understood in isolation from the objects of ordinary experience.  In biology we investigate generative (living) systems that reproduce and go through cycles of development.  In physics the focus is on the interactions of energy that are presupposed in living organisms, but also on physical forces such as gravity and electromagnetism. We can see that theory works by isolating aspects of the world in order to produce explanations [add examples]. This characterises science and cuts across the division of so-called ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences.[1]  We can also see that the explanations produced give us a model of the world that is different from what we directly perceive.  From this we conclude that theoretical thinking has the character of analysis, of identifying and distinguishing things, of taking things apart in thought.  In theory we view reality from an abstract perspective such as that of physics; we may start with the fullness of our experience of reality but we find a point of entry that directs us to certain features that are of specific interest.  So we might have a flower in front of us and our point of interest is in the psychological benefits of having flowers in a hospital environment, or our point of interest may be in its economic value and role in a particular economy, or we may be interested in the flower from a more strictly biological perspective its processes of growth, maturation, reproduction etc.  In each approach there is a human busy in the activity of selecting particular features of an object for further investigation.  In this act of thought we leave behind, though only in our thinking and explaining, the fullness of reality as we usually experience it and investigate an isolated part of it.

It takes considerable training to achieve this ability to select a relevant viewpoint to guide our investigation into some matter or other, and yet as a learnt human skill it becomes part of the scientist’s second nature and so easily passes unnoticed.  However, if we step back from this activity and ask ourselves how the resulting analysis and explanation relates to the results of other sciences with their different points of interest, and how these in turn relate to the original fullness of reality that we confront in our everyday experience then we face a perplexing philosophical problem of unity and diversity. We can unpack this by asking two distinct questions: How do all these perspectives relate to each other? And then: Can they all be united into a single understanding of reality?  But these questions cannot be answered by theoretical thought alone even though it is awakened by them. They are questions that sit on the very boundary of theoretical thought, or we could say at its limits.  Here it is appropriate to say that philosophy should proceed with a sense of wonder.

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[1]I say so-called ‘natural’ because social sciences such as sociology, economics, history and so on can hardly be said to investigate non-natural aspects of reality.  These sciences investigate properties and processes that are just as much part of our world as those studied by the ‘natural’ sciences.  It is only a certain kind of philosophical prejudice that elevates the ‘natural’ sciences to a level of ‘real’ or ‘hard’ science as opposed to ‘soft’ sciences.  This is another result of reductionist thinking.