Jan Olof Bengtsson

Keith Ward on Materialism, 7     1  2  3  4  5  6

But philosophy is “still a very diverse discipline”, Ward notes, and he proceeds to give an overview of the academic discipline of philosophy today, in order to show how very few the materialist philosophers actually are: “Idealism, the view that mind or Spirit is the only ultimate reality, is far from dead, and many American university philosophy departments have a representative Process philosopher or Personalist – both variant forms of Idealism.”

It can be added that European university philosophy departments also have representative idealist philosophers. They include Oxford’s, where my second D.Phil. supervisor was one – even, as a Bradleyan, in the specific, Victorian Oxford tradition of idealism, focusing, like most contemporary idealists both of necessity and by inclination, on the history of philosophy. Idealists are also found on the European continent, although philosophers working with the historical tradition of German idealism focus on other aspect of it than idealism in the general sense in which Ward understands it.

But Ward is right to establish here that idealism and personalism are living philosophical positions and traditions, represented in academic philosophy today. And, of course, “Phenomenology, the general view that analysis of existential, lived experience should be the basis of an analysis of reality, remains strong in European philosophy.” Phenomenology was from the beginning (in Husserl) opposed to the nineteenth-century tradition of idealism, yet its approach is not only in some central respects congruent with it, but something similar was part of idealism in some forms, as a point of departure. The term phenomenology was of course introduced and frequently used precisely by the idealists. In some respects, phenomenology is part of the broad current of irrationalism and subjectivism in modern German philosophy, and consequently its rejection of idealism in the broad sense is untenable. A revised version of Hegelian dialectics, for instance, provides the means through which precisely the irrationalism and subjectivism can be overcome.

Irrationalism and subjectivism are also found in positivism. Ward writes: “Positivists also make experience primary, though they apparently have few feelings or existential crises, and prefer to have clear, distinct and unemotional experiences (which they call sense-data). Positivists have tended to think that their sense-observations are the basic data of rigorous science, and so they place a premium on sense-verification and the provision of sense-based evidence for all assertions. But positivism actually undermines the possibility of public verification (since we cannot even verify that other minds exist), and it also undermines the claim of much modern physics that the ultimate structure of matter lies in unobservable but mathematically postulated entities.”

This is rather a comment on the primacy of experience à propos of phenomenology, not part of the overview of contemporary philosophy. But the positivists’ theory of sense-data, phenomenalism, is, like parts of the approach of the phenomenologists, in some respects and with a certain interpretation compatible with idealism, if only, of course, with the further development and not least supplementation. that idealism provides. Sense-data are not all the data and they certainly do not have the significance in philosophy that positivists ascribed to them (“evidence for all assertions”).

Yet Ward’s main point is that logical positivism was not materialism. That is also true of general common-sense pragmatism. “Common-sense pragmatism, often in a Wittgensteinian guise, sceptical of all grand general statements about ultimate reality, and refusing to accept that philosophers are in any better position to say what reality is like than anyone else, is widespread. Such philosophers are fond of saying, ‘Reality is in order as it is’, without the help of philosophy. So their arguments are often devoted to proving that philosophical arguments in general are superfluous and misleading. The problem is that, when readers begin to believe them, they stop reading philosophy any more. This has regrettably caused a number of philosophy departments in Britain to close.” Common-sense pragmatism, as paradoxically claiming to be a philosophical position, is also regrettable in itself, on many counts, and, I think, refutable (like materialism), in the sense in which things are at all refutable by philosophy. But again, Ward’s main point is that it is not materialism.

Then, “Scepticism, too, is far from dead, and resembles common-sense, except that it even doubts whether common-sense can be trusted. Some forms of post-modernism are sceptical views, insofar as they doubt whether there is any objective truth to be found.” Ward adds that sceptics tend to get very depressed and that they too tend to give up philosophy. This position too is thus bad for philosophy. Like materialism and common-sense pragmatism, it too seems to me philosophically refutable.

Then there is critical realism, which is “quite popular. An intellectual descendent of John Locke, such realism maintains that perception and intellect do give us knowledge of objective reality, but show reality to be rather different from how things appear to the senses. Proponents disagree on just how different. For Locke a set of primary qualities – roughly, mass, position and velocity – are objectively real, while secondary qualities like smell, colour and taste are contributed by the mind. In modern physics those primary qualities have disappeared, and we have to talk of force-fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time. So sometimes critical realists are reduced to saying that there is definitely some objective reality which the mathematics of quantum theory describes. But exactly what it is we cannot be sure. It is what quantum theorist Bernard d’Espagnat calls a ‘veiled reality’, since we cannot know exactly what concepts like ‘imaginary time’ or ‘waves of probability’ correspond to, if correspondence is even an appropriate term any more. As one critical realist has said, ‘I cannot be sure just what objective reality is. But whatever it is, I most certainly believe in it.'”

Critical realists of this kind may not be far from idealism. One problem here is that few of them understand what idealism is, and what it means, and that it is possible to enter upon the intellectual path that takes them there. Critical realism is certainly not materialism: “The dogmatism of materialism is very apparent when placed alongside these other more or less widely held philosophical theses. Materialists are metaphysicians in the grand manner. They claim to know what reality is, and that their description of it is, they think, obvious, accurate and rationally undeniable. Since that claim is doubted by most of their colleagues, it can hardly be quite as obvious as they say.”

Some idealists too would clearly be described by many as metaphysicians in the grand manner. But I do not think their claim to know what reality is and their description of reality have to be set forth in a particularly dogmatic manner, or, for that matter, an arrogant or aggressive manner. Organized theistic religion, as sharing the idealist worldview in the broad sense, and certainly understood as such by Ward, of course sometimes does present it in this way, since it, or at least much of it, articulates its beliefs and teachings in the form of dogma. But not even the way in which idealism in this broad sense is taught in the partly extra-philosophical traditions, like the esoteric tradition in the West or the Vedantic tradition, need to be dogmatic in its modality, in the sense Ward has in mind here when speaking of the materialists. It can be polemical and sometimes perhaps has to, but this is not at all primary. It just sets forth the traditional truths and principles in its own modality of utterance, sometimes adjusted to time and circumstance. And within philosophy, the traditional intellectual and discursive practices of that specific Western discipline in themselves counteract and discourage dogmatism (I am not talking here about dogmatism in the specifically Kantian sense, which can be non-dogmatic in the sense in which I here use the term).

It is significant that the materialists that most influence the popular debate are not philosophers, but modern scientists writing for the general reading public. As modern scientists, they are products of the historical separation of science from philosophy, they do not have a philosophical education, and they do not fully understand philosophy and what philosophy really is. This is what produces much of their dogmatism, and lands them in hopeless contradictions and other intellectual absurdities when they try to defend their materialism against philosophers. It seems that, without the proper perspective on what they themselves are doing, they also do not quite understand what science is.

In reviewing contemporary philosophy, Ward also, in the paragraphs cited, anticipates the discussion of some main parts of the contemporary case for idealism. He has spoken of “the claim of much modern physics that the ultimate structure of matter lies in unobservable but mathematically postulated entities.” He has said that “In modern physics [Locke’s] primary qualities have disappeared, and we have to talk of force-fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time.” He has mentioned “some objective reality which the mathematics of quantum theory describes”. These parts of the case are what he will next focus on in this summary statement.