Category: Philosophy (other)

Literary Licensing, 2011 (1953)     Amazon.com

Blurb:

Weaver’s Ethics of Rhetoric, originally published in 1953, has been called his most important statement on the ethical and cultural role of rhetoric. A strong advocate of cultural conservatism, Weaver (1910-1953) argued strongly for the role of liberal studies in the face of what he saw as the encroachments of modern scientific and technological forces in society. He was particularly opposed to sociology. In rhetoric he drew many of his ideas from Plato, especially his Phaedrus. As a result, all the main strands of Weaver’s thought can be seen in this volume, beginning with his essay on the Phaedrus and proceeding through his discussion of evolution in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In addition, this book includes studies of Lincoln, Burke, and Milton, and remarks about sociology and some proposals for modern rhetoric. Each essay poses issues still under discussion today. 

Keith Ward on Materialism, 12     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11

Ward continues his explanation of the terms: “The universe is open, because the principle of indeterminacy rules out the possibility of precise prediction of the future. It establishes probability as more fundamental than definite determinism, and sees the future as open to many creative possibilities, rather than as predestined to run along unavoidable tram-lines.” This is so regardless of how we understand the mathematical structure of contemporary physics. Determinism is no longer supported by physics, the openness of the universe means that freedom is, from its perspective, possible. This of course has many implications, and speaks in favour of personalism especially. I feel no strong need to add anything further to this point at the moment.

“The universe is emergent, in that it develops new properties – like conscious awareness or intentional action – that are not wholly explicable in terms of prior physical states, though such properties seem to develop in natural ways from previous physical states.” This is how it seems from the perspective of science. But given the description of the current state of physics, it is of course not particularly clear what a “physical state” is.

“The universe is intelligible and mathematically beautiful to a degree that could not have been envisaged even a hundred years ago. As Eugene Wigner has said, it is an unexpected gift that the mathematical structure of the universe should be as elegant and rationally comprehensible as it is.” This seems to imply the Platonic understanding of the mathematical structure. “Finally, the universe is semiotic, in that it does not simply rearrange its basic elements in different combinations. Many of those combinations are semiotic – they carry information. DNA molecules, for example, carry the codes for arranging proteins to build organic bodies. And perhaps the basic laws of the universe are computational, coding instructions for assembling new structures. As Paul Davies and John Gribbin put it, ‘In place of clod-like particles of matter in a lumbering Newtonian machine we have an interlocking network of information exchange – a holistic, indeterministic and open system – vibrant with potentialities and bestowed with infinite richness.'”

I am not sure how common this usage of “semiotic” is. But the passage is perhaps as clear as at present it can be with regard to “information exchange” as far as this can be understood from the particular perspective of science. At the same time it of course cries out for the supplementation of philosophical reflection even for a basic understanding of its real meaning. Of course, Ward will soon provide precisely this.

“If this is materialism, it is materialism in a new key. The physical basis of the universe seems to have an inner propensity towards information-processing and retrieval, that is, towards intelligent consciousness.” The “physical basis” seems by now to be a problematic postulate, a misleading conceptual residue. But “materialism in a new key”, insofar as it is the position of physics qua physics, is not intended here to be understood as in itself tantamount to idealism. The account shows only that classical materialism is regarded as obsolete in physics.

Ken Wilber writes in the preface to his important anthology Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists (1984): “The theme of this book, if I may briefly summarize the argument of the physicists presented herein, is that modern physics offers no positive support (let alone proof) for a mystical worldview. Nevertheless, every one of the physicists in this volume was a mystic. They simply believed, to a man, that if modern physics no longer objects to a religious worldview, it offers no positive support either; properly speaking, it is indifferent to all that. The very compelling reasons why these pioneering physicists did not believe that physics and mysticism shared similar worldviews, and the very compelling reasons that they nevertheless all became mystics – just that is the dual theme of this anthology. If they did not get their mysticism from a study of modern physics, where did they get it? And why?”

I think a major part of the answer to these questions is simply: philosophy. It should of course be noted that idealistic philosophy does not necessarily involve mysticism. But mysticism could be regarded not only as something more that is not covered by such philosophy, but also as something that is in principle accounted for but not necessarily in itself explored by it. It is significant that Wilber, and the physicists whose texts he collects – Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Einstein, De Broglie, Jeans, Planck, Pauli, and Eddington – do in fact speak in terms of mysticism. Yet it seems the reason they became mystics is not just their new physics itself, and also not just mystic experience, but inevitable philosophical reflection as partly but not entirely separable either from science or mysticism.

For the real idealist conclusion, philosophy must be added to contemporary physics. But the same was the case with classical materialism. The classical materialism of physics itself necessarily involved a degree of philosophical reflection, as does the current conclusion regarding its obsolescence. With the recognition of these facts, with the help of philosophy, as well as of philosophy’s general unavoidability, it is of course quite possible that physics will be more generally pursued (as it already seems to be by some) on the basis of a philosophical affirmation of idealism, as in the past it was implicitly or explicitly based on the philosophical presuppositions of classical materialism.

But the support science lends to the case for idealism remains incomplete, as Ward is aware, although it does go beyond the mere negative sub-case against materialism. My concern is the truth of idealism in itself, as philosophy. As I have explained, the part of the case for it that makes reference to science or physics and their relation to materialism is included here, in the form of this commentary on Ward, merely for the sake of the kind of completeness of the representation of idealism that might rightly be expected.

Finding the Old Way Forward    

Bloomsbury, 1999     Amazon.co.uk

Book Description:

As we stand on the brink of the third millennium, a large part of the human race may feel justified in a certain complacency. We are very much in thrall to the idea that history is moving forward in a desirable – or progressive – direction, and that overall in the world things are getting better. In After Progress, the philosopher Anthony O’Hear argues that we need to temper our optimism and self-assurance: that progress is not inevitable in any field, let alone over the whole canvas of human life and experience. He questions whether we are now on the brink of anything remarkable or worthy of comparison with the achievements of earlier ages, and suggests that in certain fields – religion, art, music, literature – we are clearly not.

O’Hear believes that our era is one of technological progress and of individual rights and needs, and that our institutions and economies are largely geared to promoting these. After Progress examines the implications of this state of affairs: that for most of us there is nothing worth striving for beyond individual comfort and happiness, the latter of which increasingly eludes most of us; that there is little in our common culture to sustain ideas of excellence in serious pursuits. It addresses the question of real happiness and satisfaction – of rediscovering truth ad transcendence – and probes the dimensions that cannot be accounted for in scientific terms: love and beauty, the sense of moral obligation and reason itself. After Progress is a potent examination of our position at the end of the millennium, and could change the way we approach the future.

About the Author:

Anthony O’Hear is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford and Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He has contributed to many national publications, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and is the author of a number of books on philosophy, including What Philosophy Is and Beyond Evolution.

The Restoration of Order    

ISI Books, 2002

Book Description:

Voegelin’s philosophical project was to restore order in human souls and human societies in a century of civilizational catastrophe. For Voegelin, the “crisis of the West,” reflected in the horrific wars and social chaos of the twentieth century, was the result of the gradual detachment of the our theoretical language from the unique, historical encounters with transcendence that lay at the foundation of Western civilization. As Federici shows, Voegelin undertook two massive efforts to provide evidence for this thesis in his five-volume Order and History series and in his posthumously published multi-volume History of Political Ideas. The ultimate goal of Voegelin’s project, Federici argues, was to liberate modern men and women from the grasp of ideologies, which Voegelin characterized as simplified constructions of reality that always distorted and obscured the truth. Hence, Voegelin was especially critical of Nazism, Marxism, gnosticism, and scientism. But he was also a critic of doctrinal Christianity and conservatism, positions that Federici explains in detail. Federici also introduces the reader to Voegelin’s difficult but influential philosophy of consciousness, and he includes a helpful glossary of Voegelinian terms.Readers intimidated or puzzled by Voegelin’s often daunting prose will find Federici’s volume, the fourth entry in ISI’s Library of Modern Thinkers series, an invaluable guide to one of the twentieth century’s most imposing – and most impressive – philosophical minds.

Kluwer, 1998     Amazon.com

Book Description:

Analytic philosophy has been a dominant intellectual movement in the 20th century and a reflection of the cultural pre-eminence of scientism. In response to analytic philosophy’s peculiar reticence (and inability) to discuss itself, this book provides its first comprehensive history and critique. The central element in the analytic conversation has been the Enlightenment Project: the appeal to an autonomous human reason, freed of any higher authority and channeling itself through science as its privileged tool. This centrality is demonstrated by systematically examining its presence and development in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, language, psychology, social science, ethics, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. This journey highlights the internal logical disintegration of that project. Post-modern relativism is its natural offspring and not a viable alternative. The Enlightenment Project’s conception of physical science is defective; this defective conception of physical science renders the analytic conception of social science, philosophical psychology, and epistemology defective; and that defective conception of the human condition leads to defective conceptions of both moral and political philosophy, specifically the idea of social engineering or social technology. Throughout the book, an alternative conception of philosophy is presented as a way out of the abyss of analysis, an alternative that reconnects philosophy with the mainstream of Western civilization and initiates the process of providing a coherent cultural narrative. This book will be of particular interest to any sophisticated reader concerned about the lack of a coherent cultural narrative.

Images of the Divine in Five Religious Traditions

Oneworld 1998 (1987)    Amazon.co.uk

Book description:

Is there a universal concept of God? Do all the great faiths of the world share a vision of the same supreme reality? In an attempt to answer these questions, Keith Ward considers the doctrine of an ultimate reality within five world religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. He studies closely the works of definitive, orthodox writers from each tradition – Sankara, Ramanuja, Asvaghosa, Maimonides, Al-Ghazzali and Aquinas – to build up a series of ‘images’ of God, a common core of belief. Ward discovers that while the great religious traditions of the world retain their differences, there are convergences of thought at the deepest level, with a broad similarity of structure in concepts of God. He concludes that a recognition of these beliefs, as well as encouraging a clearer acceptance of the mystery of the divine, might also lead to an increase in understanding and tolerance of other faiths, to the enrichment of one’s own.

About the author:

Keith Ward [was] Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and a Canon of Christ Church. Among his influential books are God, Chance and Necessity, his exploration of the compatibility of a scientific worldview and the existence of a creator God, which was published to widespread critical acclaim in 1996. Also published by Oneworld are Ward’s God, Faith and the New Millennium and In Defence of the Soul.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 11     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

“Modern physics thus suggests a good deal of agnosticism about the hidden nature of the physical cosmos”, Ward concludes – about what is experienced by us and is called by us the physical cosmos. “It completely overturns the view of nature as a mechanical, deterministic and atomistic system – the ‘clockwork universe’ – and replaces it with a much more organic or holistic picture of an entangled, emergent, open, intelligible and semiotic universe.” He will now go on to give brief explanations of these terms – organic, holistic, entangled, emergent, open, intelligible, and semiotic – with regard to the universe as conceived by contemporary physics.

“The quantum universe is entangled, in that non-locality – the correlated behaviour of widely separated (‘non-local’) wave-particles – means that no physical event is truly ‘atomistic’ – isolatable from the rest of the universe. Niels Bohr spoke of the ‘inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe’. The universe is holistic, in that the nature of the whole helps to determine the behaviour of the parts. Larger systems constrain the behaviour of their constituent elements, and there are forms of ‘top-down’ causation that introduce causal influences that are not simply the result of the addition of many isolated causal factors. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

I want to point to the close relation in substance, of the terms entangled and holistic to philosophical idealism in a stricter and more specific sense than the one defended by Ward. Some philosophers and intellectuals, influenced by postmodernism, Adorno, Lévinas still complain that such idealistic holism lands us in a totalizing they find to be totalitarian. That is because of their particular understanding of 1) the true nature of idealism and in particular of personalistic idealism, and 2) the fact that the true whole, rightly understood (to the extent it can be understood), the whole that is truth and reality, is in fact the best protection against the totalitarianisms that seek falsely – and, of necessity, forcibly, by means of ideology and propaganda – to elevate relative wholes to the status of the absolute whole or at least the highest relevant whole, by reference to which they can then justify their oppressive action.

Holism of course exists in many different forms, not just in philosophy, but in theology, psychology, education, anthropology, sociology,  political philosophy, economics, systems theory, ecology, New Age spirituality, alternative medicine. Philosophers distinguish between different kinds of holism and use many terms to specify them, such as semantic holism, mental holism, content holism, property holism, relational holism, epistemological holism, metaphysical holism, confirmation holism, nomological holism. Some but not all of them are related to or exclusively related to the developments in physics discussed by Ward. I am not familiar with all of these developments, but from what I have seen, it is striking how few of their representatives relate them to or are even aware of the resemblance in important respects with the holism of modern idealism.

New Age thinkers persist, without exception, in speaking of their new, holistic paradigm as replacing the crude materialism of the past centuries of the West. They neglect entirely not just the presence and sometimes even dominance of philosophical idealism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but often also the renewal of the esoteric tradition ever since the Renaissance and not least in the nineteenth century. In reality, the New Age movement is just a late variation of this esoteric renewal in the West, which already in the nineteenth-century considered itself to be bringing a new age of spiritual enlightenment.

I have written about these things at greater length on several occasions. I have tried to point out that there are problems with modern Western esotericism inasmuch as it is mixed up with distinct secular ideologies and cultural currents as well as with certain interpretations of the Biblical eschatology. But there are other forms, which avoid such pitfalls and manage instead to reconnect more rigorously with the more authentic tradition of Platonism and Biblical esotericism, as well as the traditions of the East.

In both forms, it sometimes influenced philosophical idealism, and in the latter, rigorous forms, it is still, I think, of some importance for it, not least since it points to the need for, indeed makes inevitable, a creative rethinking of the relation between the specifically Western discipline of philosophy and those other traditions of human thought that we find in the East. René Guénon, it should be remembered, was reluctant to call himself a philosopher because of the constitutive limitations of this Western discipline, which he found in its entirety to be non-traditional in a way other traditions of thought, or rather, the genuine traditions, the ones he favoured, were not. He went too far here, and is counterbalanced within the traditionalist school by Coomaraswamy and others, who saw more clearly the other dimensions of classical philosophy. We have to use the term tradition in a weaker sense when we speak of Western philosophy, at least modern Western philosophy and some of the classical schools, but some schools, and preeminently Platonism (i.e., Neoplatonism) of course, did from the beginning assimilate and reformulate traditional elements in the Guénonian sense in response and as an alternative to the general sceptical and sophistic development of early Greek philosophy.

Ward’s use of the terms entangled and holistic is descriptive of a main feature of much of both the nineteenth-century tradition of idealism and, mutatis mutandis, of the Platonic tradition. What should be especially noted here is that those traditions were entangled and holistic in Ward’s broad sense without – or, in the case of nineteenth-century idealism, not primarily with – regard to scientific knowledge. Their avant-la-lettre holism was a general metaphysical and epistemological one closer to some strands of holism in contemporary philosophy, and applied equally to other branches of knowledge, like history, the arts, the humanities in general, the social sciences properly conceived.

I normally discuss idealism in such terms, and a clear example of this will be the series ‘Idealism and the Renewal of Humanistic Philsophy’ of which I have as yet published only the first part. I have not used the term “holism”, but kept to the terms used by the historical idealists to whom I feel closest. I could consider doing so, but if so, it would be if not necessary so at least desirable first of all to relate systematically the truths of at least some of the contemporary forms of philosophical holism to idealism: to holistically relate, as it were, their partial truths to the holistic whole of idealism. For that purpose it would be possible to draw on the work of some contemporary idealist philosophers. But there are countless thinkers, on various levels, all over the world who already do precisely this.

It would also be necessary to do something that is less common and more urgent, namely to make clearer what distinguishes a proper and disciplined form of holism from loose and overly romantic ones of the kind that flourish in much of contemporary pop-psychology and – spirituality, and which did so also to some extent in speculatively or otherwise excessive forms of nineteenth-century idealism as well as, and not least, in their wider reception and interpretation.

The criticism of idealism on the grounds of the alleged vagueness of its holism was misconceived in principle as set forth by the early analytical philosophers. But as part of the broader analysis of what I call the “pantheistic revolution” in its romantic version, an analysis to which both some Christian theologians and some broadly classicist thinkers in the tradition that was primarily French but in some respects culminated with Irving Babbitt and the New Humanism, the criticism is of central and lasting importance.

The common formulation “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” I find to be true in the sense that the whole qua whole is not constituted exclusively by its parts. But it seems it could be misleading if it is taken to mean that the result of the mere addition of the parts is something that is more than their sum – precisely the position Ward himself here rejects. On an epistemological level of holism which does not take – or have to take – into account the part-transcending, non-part, non-composite nature of the whole qua whole, it seems quite meaningful to say merely that the sum of the parts is not the parts qua parts. For this, properly understood, and given the accessibility of that sum, or rather, the mere approximation of it that is all that is available to and attainable by finite beings, makes all the difference with regard to the understanding of the parts, i.e. of the parts qua parts of the relative whole that is their sum, the totality of parts. We need not go beyond this to see how “the nature of the whole helps to determine the behaviour of the parts”, how “larger systems constrain the behaviour of their constituent elements”, that “there are forms of ‘top-down’ causation” (we of course have to change some of these terms when we move beyond physics).

On the other hand, I would suggest that the aspect or dimension (both are of course somewhat inexact terms) of the whole that is indeed more than the sum of the parts is also manifest to some extent even in our finite perspective in the very process of our cumulative addition of parts and our approximation to the relative whole that is their sum as well as to the absolute whole that is constituted also by that dimension. It is, as it were, represented and in further dimensions implied by the unity that allows us to add parts at all and to progressively approximate their sum and ascend towards the whole.

In one sense, it can also be said that no matter how limited and partial our perspective is, it is always “the whole” that we perceive. For there is nothing else to perceive. The parts never exist qua parts, they are always parts-of-the-whole, or they are the whole in various perceptual modifications. These modifications it is often important to analyse as such. Philosophy must always be both analysis and synthesis. But reality is always an experiential whole. The process of knowledge is merely one of clarifying what it is we perceive, that what we perceive is actually this whole. The increasing comprehensiveness of our “addition of parts” when properly conceived and pursued, with all of its consequences for our understanding, is one moment in this process.

But I cannot go deeper into these issues now. The important point here is just that Ward notes that the holistic understanding of the universe, even as developed in physics alone (although this development has general philosophical implications and supports certain philosophical positions), overturns materialism’s atomistic and mechanistic understanding.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 10     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9

“Whatever all this means, it has left old-fashioned classical materialism far behind.” It is important to keep in mind that the whole of the argument this far is that science no longer believes in such materialism and that it “has become increasingly hard to say just what ‘matter’ is”. When Ward goes on to say that “The ultimate reality is beyond space-time as we know it, has a deep and complex mathematical structure, and is nothing like the world we see and touch and feel”, this is, on the other hand, a conclusion from the scientific theories cited that, as far as it goes, not only coincides entirely with idealism but represents a positive formulation of idealism as opposite to materialism. Ward does not discuss the meaning of the addition “as we know it”, which perhaps implies the possibility of space-time as we do not know it, space-time of a kind other than what we know or experience as such.

Idealism as I suggest it could be defended says more than this. By the world we see and touch and feel, Ward here, I think, means primarily what I called the world of common-sense materialism, but which he is disinclined to designate in this way since he wants to retain a common-sense position and defend the common-sense tradition with regard to the question of God and belief in God. Ultimate reality is certainly nothing like that. But neither is it the mere hypostasized abstraction that is the deep and complex mathematical structure. A mathematical structure is certainly part of it, or an aspect of it, as understood by idealism, but if it were only that, is it obvious that its reality would be ultimate, that it would be more real than the world we see and touch and feel in terms of concrete experience and content of consciousness? How could the mere mathematical structure as ultimate reality account for the appearance or phenomenon of that world? But again, although he states the conclusion in terms that overlap with those of philosophical idealism, Ward is here discussing only the aspect of ultimate reality that seems to be affirmed by contemporary physics.

“It is certainly not made of matter, in the sense of solid bits of stuff, precisely located in three dimensional space. Questions like, ‘Where are the fundamental laws of nature located?’, or ‘How much time do quantum fluctuations in a vacuum take?’ will be met with pitying looks by mathematical physicists. They (the laws and fluctuations, not the physicists) are not anywhere in our space, or at any point in what we ordinarily think of as time.” Ward again uses qualifications like “our” space and “what we ordinarily think of “ as time. As we shall see, he does not really develop their implications.

“This meas that the simple-minded materialism that insists that everything that exists must be somewhere, or that everything that exists must exist at some time, is just woefully ignorant of modern physics. There are supra-spatial and supra-temporal realities, realities beyond any and all spaces and times, and mathematical physics talks about them with an immense degree of sophistication and precision.” This paragraph could seem to contradict the preceding qualifications, inasmuch as the supra-spatial and supra-temporal realities are not just beyond space-time “as we know it”, “our” space and “what we ordinarily think of” as time, but “beyond any and all spaces and times”. If the latter formulation is true, possible other spaces and times cannot be the ultimate reality or “parts” or aspects of it.

But if we distinguish between the first formulation above about ultimate “reality” and this formulation about supra-spatial and supra-temporal “realities”, it is possible that ultimate reality could be conceived by Ward as including both the realities that are beyond also the space and time that is other than space and time as experienced by us, and that possible other space-time. If the supra-spatial and supra-temporal realities spoken of here are, in such an ultimate reality, considered superior to or “more ultimate” than the space-time that is not as we know it, it is of course not an ultimate reality; the other space-time aspect of it is not really an ultimate reality.

But again, this view requires that the mere mathematical structure can, as such, account for that as well as this (our) space-time as such. And if space-time as such, in itself, ours as well as other possible ones, cannot be apprehended at all, but is always apprehended along with the concrete experience which in turn requires or is defined in terms of content of consciousness, this requires that the mathematical structure can account for all of this content too.

Now, it does seem some mathematical physicists do indeed think it is able to do that, and this is certainly what Ward has in mind here. But at least until some mathematician has explained – and here, I think, we find a clear instance of the inevitability of philosophy for science – the nature of mathematics as being in principle and essence something quite different from what it has heretofore been considered to be, this seems to me philosophically untenable. It presupposes a new conception of mathematics which must be developed in philosophical terms.

The supra-temporal and supra-spatial realities of the mathematical model Ward speaks of, must be co-ultimate with other aspects of ultimate reality, which must perforce include that which accounts for phenomenal reality as experienced by us, and may or may not include alternate time-space. Since ultimate reality must account for all of reality, all degrees and levels of reality, it seems obvious that space-time as we know it as well as possible other space-time must somehow be accommodated in the ultimacy of the reality which, in the case of the former space-time, is experientially ascertainable as phenomenal appearance even by us as finite beings.

But there is also another problem here which I briefly pointed to above. When Ward referred to the findings regarding sub-atomic particles, waves, energy, probability-waves, virtual particles, a vacuum (lowest-energy) state, and quantum foam, he was not speaking exclusively of a deep and complex mathematical structure, as such. He was speaking of other entities described in mathematical terms but not in themselves exhaustively reducible to and identical with mathematics. The point was well taken that these entities did not correspond to matter as conceived by “old-fashioned materialists”, and this certainly confirmed the one basic claim Ward has this far made, namely that it has become increasingly difficult to say what “matter” is.

He also said that ultimate reality has a deep and complex mathematical structure. But when he spoke of reformulating the theory of forms as a theory of objective mathematical axioms, he did not just assert that ultimate reality has but that it is such a structure. But since the reference here is not to Plato’s mystic conception of real mathematical entities, but to the reformulation of the theory of forms in terms of the mathematical models of contemporary physics, it could, I think, be asked if a hypostasization is not involved which transforms what is in reality a mere pragmatic conception into something equivalent to the truly absolute conception of mathematics that we find in Plato.

I have suggested that the conception of the reducibility of ultimate reality to mathematics is problematic in general (and, I think, including mathematics as conceived by the later Plato), but the problem seems to be compounded when mathematics is conceived in the manner of contemporary physics, i.e. as defining a thoroughgoingly pragmatic science. Is this really what the majority of mathematical physicists claim? Don’t they rather conceive of their mathematics in terms similar to those described by Evola, “a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends” – something, whatever it is, at least not being mathematics itself?

“In the light of these considerations”, Ward says, “it may seem that “matter” is just a sort of thin and abstract skeleton, a desiccated substructure, of the richly observed world of human perceptions.” The “richly observed world of human perceptions” is what I want to regard here as having its counterpart in ultimate reality, in accordance with Plotinus’ conception of Platonic logic in contradistinction to the Aristotelian, and with the version of idealism in general that I have discussed at length in other publications.

Although this richly observed world is phenomenal and appearance, it does not mean it is unreal. And although the degree of its reality is lower than that of ultimate reality, the reality is such that it must be matched by something in ultimate reality of which it is a phenomenon and appearance, and that this something cannot be a mathematical model only as such. The mere mathematical model of the kind that is discussed here by Ward as the opposite of matter as conceived by “old-fashioned classical materialism”, is described here as that which has replaced that conception of matter, namely “a sort of thin and abstract skeleton, a desiccated substructure”. But can such a substructure be rationally conceived as having by itself in any way produced “the richly observed world of human perceptions”? The latter, the apperarance, would be more than that of which it is the appearance.

But it seems the reason why “matter”, or the appearance of matter, has thus been reduced to a thin and abstract skeleton, a dessicated substructure, is simply the pragmatic nature of science, not any philosophical consideration. Bergson, Leroy, Poincaré, Meyerson, Brunschvicg and many others have, Evola writes, “brought to light the altogether practical and pragmatic character of scientific methods. The more ‘comfortable’ ideas and theories become ‘true’, in regard to the organization of the data of sensorial experience. A choice between such data is made consciously or instinctively, excluding systematically those that do not lend themselves to being controlled; thus also everything qualitative and unrepeatable that is not susceptible to being mathematized….Scientific ‘objectivity’ consists solely in being ready at any moment to abandon existing theories of hypotheses, as soon as the chance appears for the better control of reality.” Such science cannot yield as a result a philosophic conception of the substructure comparable to the Platonic forms even as conceived by Plato in his late, mathematical phase. Ward is right, for all I know, with regard to Penrose. But how representative is he?

Evola does hold that Einstein’s theory of relativity “has brought us…closer to absolute certainties”. “Only the profane”, he writes, “in hearing talk of relativity, could believe that the new theory had destroyed every certainty and almost sanctioned a kind of Pirandellian ‘thus it is, if you think so’.” “A coherent system of physics has been constructed to keep all relativity in check, to take every change and variation into account, with the greatest independence from points of reference and from everything bound to observations, to the evidence of direct experience, and to current perceptions of space, time, and speed.” However, the system is, first of all, “of a purely formal character“. And second of all, it “is ‘absolute'” only “through the flexibility granted to it by its exclusively mathematical and algebraic nature”.

Its pure formality in itself disqualifies the system as ultimate reality, and its pragmatic use implies that there is no aspiration on its behalf to that status. “This theory”, Evola continues, “though far from common or philosophical relativism, is willing to admit the most unlikely relativities, but arms itself against them, so to speak, from the start. It intends to supply certainties that either leave out or anticipate them, and thus from the formal point of view are almost absolute. And if reality should ever revolt against them, a suitable readjustment of dimensions will restore these certainties.” Again, how can such a purely formal system, put to exclusively pragmatic use, be ultimate reality? How can the Platonic forms be reformulated in its terms?

“This”, Ward writes, “is roughly what Niels Bohr, one of the great founding fathers of quantum theory, thought. Bishop Berkeley was not so far wrong when he claimed that Locke’s ‘primary qualities’ were in fact no more objectively real than the ‘secondary qualities’ that were admitted to be mental constructs, or appearances to human forms of sensibility. Primary qualities are a sort of abstracted and idealised mathematical ground-plan of the rich sensory world of experience.” The primary qualities being reconceived in terms of “a sort of abstracted and idealised mathematical ground-plan”, they seem to be identified with the ultimate reality as here considered to be conceived by contemporary physicists. But if they are “no more objectively real” than the secondary qualities, if they too are “mental constructs, or appearances to human forms of sensibility”, their ultimacy is of course problematic. The assertion that the mathematical ground-plan is the ultimate reality is a claim that it is precisely more objectively real than the world of secondary qualities.

How can such a structure, which Ward here himself describes as “abstracted” and “idealised”, as such explain “the rich sensory world of experience”? If the structure is abstracted, it must be abstracted from something or exist in relation to something non-abstract, and that something is, from the perspective of our knowledge as finite beings, the world of primary qualities, the rich sensory world of experience. Ward therefore in this passage seems in reality to make the case for more than he explicitly intends. The fact that the mathematical ground-plan is, for us, abstracted, would seem to indicate that in itself, it is not ultimate in the sense of primary in relation to that which constitutes the ultimate ground of the experience of the secondary qualities.

And again, the abstract, purely formal models of contemporary physics do not normally seem to be conceived of as an ultimately real ground-plan, but merely as a pragmatic tool. As I have already stressed, the pragmatic nature of modern science as such is what accounts for its abstract formalism in the first place; Evola points out that there is nothing new in “the type of ‘certainty’ and knowledge to which Einstein’s theory leads”, that “his theory represents only the latest and most accessible manifestation of the characteristic orientation of all modern science”. Only it is taken to extraordinary extremes:

“The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imagines speed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers and symbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, without accepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request. Everything that in recent physics proceeds from that stronghold participates rigorously in its nature: physics is completely algebraized. With the introduction of the concept of a ‘multidimensional continuum’ even that final sensible intuitive basis that survived in yesterday’s physics in the pure, schematic categories of geometrical space is reduced to mathematical formulae. Space and time here are one and the same; they form a ‘continuum’, itself expressed by algebraic functions. Together with the current, intuitive notion of space and time, that of force, energy, and movement also disappears…As in this algebraic scheme nothing remains of the concrete idea of force, even less so can there be room for cause.”

The mathematical structure, being purely formal and pragmatically used, does not support the “‘spiritualization’ alleged by the popularizers…due to the disappearance of the idea of matter and the reduction of the concept of mass to that of energy”. This is “an absurdity, because mass and energy are made interchangeable values by an abstract formula. The only result of all this is a practical one: the application of the formula in order to control atomic forces. Apart from that, everything is consumed by the fire of algebraic abstraction associated with a radical experimentalism, that is, with a recording of simple phenomena.”

What Evola says here is that the Platonic interpretation is invalidated not just by the conception and use of the mathematical structure as a mere pragmatic instrument, but already by its abstract formality. Classical materialism’s idea of matter has indeed disappeared, and, as we have seen, there is more to the pragmatic concepts of contemporary physics than pure mathematics. But if the further, non-pragmatic, Platonic interpretation of the mathematization is to be legitimate, it would seem to follow from Evola’s analysis that something even more than the Penrosian interpretation would be required.

“[Q]uantum physics”, Ward continues, “seems to show that all that we really know of [a real physical world in existence long before any human consciousness came into being] is how it appears to human consciousness, whether in perception or in mathematics or in some combination of both.” The “something” that, as Evola explained, is incomprehensible in itself and which science intends to subdue for practical ends – a “something” that is not matter as conceived by classical materialism – is still clearly in evidence in the last passage I cited from him (“atomic forces”, “simple phenomena”), alongside the pragmatically instrumentalized mathematical structure. Its being there must mean that this structure cannot in itself be the ultimate reality. “According to the most recent theory”, Evola writes, “purely mathematical entities that on the one hand magically spring forth in full irrationality, but on the other are ordered in a completely formal system of algebraic ‘production’, exhaustively account for everything that can be positively checked and formularized regarding the ultimate basis of sensible reality.” The ultimate basis is there, distinct from the (non-Platonic) “mathematical entities” which cannot really reach it, only “formularize”.

On Evola’s interpretation, with its particular evaluation of pragmatic science, we stand before the “definitive liquidation of all knowledge in the proper sense“, and Heisenberg “explicitly admitted this”: it is all “about a formal knowledge enclosed in itself, extremely precise in its practical consequences, in which, however, one cannot speak of knowledge of the real. For modern science, he says, ‘the object of research is no longer the object in itself, but nature as a function of the problems that man sets himself’; the logical conclusion in such science being that ‘henceforth man only meets himself’.”

As I remember it, Einstein too made statements to the same effect with regard to the relation between formal knowledge and reality. But again, the latter, the “something”, remains, on Evola’s own account, even as in the physics discussed by him man only meets himself. And Ward returns to it in terms of “perception” alongside or in combination with mathematics. But he also makes the important idealistic point, not discussed by Evola, about the appearance in human consciousness which he finds confirmed by the recent developments in physics. Properly understood, what this implies is not that man only meets himself. It remains true in forms of idealism that go far beyond such limited, albeit at least methodologically collectivized (as it were) subjectivism and relativism.

And my general interpretation seems confirmed. The perspective of human experience and knowledge does not provide any grounds for conceiving the mathematical, abstracted, at least originally, from rich, sensory perception, as alone representing ultimate reality and being a sufficient ground of it, of what Ward calls the “real”, “physical” world. If it is a “ground-plan” in some respects, as I doubt that the majority of physicists affirm it must be, something must yet be added to it in order to account for concrete experience, and that something must be such as to make it inadmissible to conceive of it as less of a ground than that part of the plan to which it is added. It seems it must, as I put it, be co-ultimate.

Ward’s argument points in the direction of the more complete idealistic case that he does not himself make. What we know of what Ward calls the “real”, “physical” world is certainly how it appears to human consciousness. Or rather, how that which appears appears to human consciousness, that which appears not in reality being the non-ultimately real, “physical” world, which is precisely the phenomenon-for-us alone, but ultimate reality itself. And that ultimate reality, conceived by us both through our reflection on perception (including the kind of inner perception that Ward does not consider here) and mathematics, must certainly be “more objectively real” than this phenomenal world; its very ultimacy is of course defined by its not being our “mental constructs” or “appearances to our forms of sensibility”. It cannot in itself be “abstracted and idealised”, but must be concretely ideal.

“We apprehend what our human faculties of sense and mathematical creativity allow us to apprehend. And we have strong reason to think that things as they are in themselves do not correspond neatly to things as we apprehend them.” What we have “strong reason to think that tings as they are in themselves do not correspond neatly to” is matter as conceived by “old-fashioned classical materialism”. But things being appearances to our finite consciousness (“mental constructs” has misleading connotations unless it is defined in terms of an adequately understood larger metaphysical position with regard to who does the constructing and how) does not entail that they are merely subjective and relative, although objectivity or gradually increased objectivity with regard to them, which is in reality an approximation to the absolute perspective, is an achievement of human thought in the process of knowledge.

“Things as we apprehend them” are real but not ultimately real. In one sense or on one level, they are in fact in reality as we apprehend them, once we have freed the apprehension from the illusion of common-sense materialism. The “rich sensory world” is not illusion, but real. But when we move beyond the Lockean meaning, “things as they are in themselves” can be understood to refer to their ideal ground, the ground of which they are, for us, an appearance. That ground, however, that ideal reality, must “correspond neatly” to the way we apprehend them inasmuch as it has to contain that which can account for the concrete richness that even the mere appearance possesses. Only thus do we reach the requisite completeness of our conception of the ideal ground-plan or ontic logos of reality. And that ground-plan or ontic logos must be conceived in strictly Platonic terms. Contemporary mathematical physicists who do accept that of course thereby support more of the case for idealism than the part of it that deals merely with contemporary physics’ abandonmet of classical materialism’s concept of matter. But the ground-plan or ontic logos cannot be confused with the merely pragmatically used mathematical models of other such physicists. Evola ends his chapter on modern physics by clearly bringing out the difference between it’s position and that of what I summarize as the Platonic one:

“There is an aspect in which this latest natural science represents a type of inversion or counterfeit of that concept of catharsis, or purification, that in the traditional world was extended from the moral and ritual field to the intellectual; it referred to an intellectual discipline that, through overcoming the perceptions furnished by the animal senses and more or less mixed with the reactions of the I, would lead to a higher knowledge, to true knowledge. In effect, we have something similar in modern algebraized physics. Not only has it gradually freed itself from any immediate data of sense experience and common sense, but even from all that which imagination could offer as support…Everything that can be suggested by the direct and living relationship of the observer to the observed is made unreal, irrelevant, and negligible. It is then like the catharsis that consumes every residue of the sensory, not in order to lead to a higher world, the ‘intelligible world’ or a ‘world of ideas’, as in the ancient schools of wisdom, but rather to the realm of pure mathematical thought, of number, of undifferentiated quantity, as opposed to the realm of quality, of meaningful forms and living forces: a spectral…world, an extreme intensification of the abstract intellect, where it is no longer a matter of things or phenomena, but almost of their shadows reduced to their common denominator, gray and indistinguishable. One may well speak of a falsification of the elevation of the mind above human sense-experience, which in the traditional world had as its effect not the destruction of the evidences of that experience, but their integration: the potentizing of the ordinary, concrete perception of natural phenomena by also experiencing their symbolic and intelligible aspects.”

The analysis of the basic character of contemporary physics here set forth is the basis of my questioning – for instance in an essay on Roger Kimball in Humanitas in 2001 – of the accounts of some philosophers of science as representing the truth and the “deep” perspective on reality. We find the acceptance of that view of science also in philosophers whose work aims primarily at saving the world of of human experience from the effects of the scientific worldview, like Roger Scruton. There is certainly a deeper structure, but the one conceived of by contemporary physics is not it. Both because of its pure formality and because of its pragmatic instrumentality, that mathematical structure simply does not represent a deeper truth than even ordinary human experience. But this does not mean that it has no value,  and that it cannot be reinterpreted and reformulated, as it perhaps is by Penrose, in strictly Platonic terms and thereby come to represent one side of a real theory of forms or ontic logos.

Mathematical physics does at present certainly support the part of the case against materialism that is Ward’s main point this far. I have found it necessary also to point out that mathematical physics does not in itself represent an adequate and complete idealist position. But that was of course not at all to be expected. Physics cannot take the place of metaphysics.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 9     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

“For good old-fashioned materialists”, Ward says, “everything that exists, or the one and only stuff out of which everything is made, is matter – solid particles located in three-dimensional space, with definite masses and velocities.” This old-fashioned materialism was basically the same from Democritus to the nineteenth century, built on the atomic theory that Ward here describes. Ward speaks as a philosopher about philosophy, although philosophy at a time when it was not clearly distinct from science. At the time of Democritus, philosophy and science were rising not together, but as an undifferentiated unity, and this unity was also very much real in the case of revived classical philosophy and emergent classical physics during the Renaissance or the “early modern” period.

I mention this because one of the importance of the question of the legitimacy of drawing, as a philosopher, on natural science, now that philosophy and science are considered separate in principle, not just institutionally but theoretically or conceptually. I would like to broaden the dicsussion here to address this more general issue of philosophy and science. Is the appeal of philosophy to contemporary science and some of its representatives against other representatives who defend materialism on scientific and not philosophical grounds admissible and recommendable?

I suggest it is. Not that it is sufficient, and not even that it is necessary. But that it is legitimate and natural as part of and for some clearly delimited purposes of the larger case I am discussing. Clearly, philosophy must on one level or within some of its sub-disciplines relate to and deal with science too. This is not the same as relying on it or becoming dependent on it, or being committed to certain current theories that will soon be obsolete. It is a question of a quite natural relation, indeed a factual necessity determined by the nature of philosophy itself.

Moreover, science needs philosophy for its own self-understanding, if only in a very different sense than the one intended by the original and main tradition of misconceived scientism within analytic philosophy.  Agreeing to some extent with the perennialist so-called traditionalist school, I will now cite the controversial Italian thinker Julius Evola, whom I too find problematic, although I reject his dismissal as simply a fascist. In Ride the Tiger, he gave a radical description of the “commonplace” understanding of science as pragmatic:

“None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather, it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense. The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practical necessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on things and on nature. I do not mean its technical and industrial applications, even though the masses attribute the prestige of modern science above all to them, because there they see irrefutable proof of its validity. It is a matter of the very nature of scientific methods even before their technical applications, in the phase known as ‘pure research’. In fact, the concept of ‘truth’ in the traditional sense is already alien to modern science, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae that can predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena and relate them to a certain unity. And as it is not a question of ‘truth’, but a matter less of seeing than touching, the concept of certainty in modern science is reduced to the ‘maximum probability’. That all scientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openly recognized by every scientist, and more categorically than even in recent subatomic physics. The system of science resembles a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.”

And: “These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs to pure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageable way. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri (simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method that exchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical, purely human need of the intellect. In the final analysis, the impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to a scientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world.”

We need not discuss here Evola’s particular evaluation of pragmatic science and his general perspective on it; I would just add that within a larger whole, represented by philosophy as well as the broader culture, pragmatic science can be perfectly legitimate, as a limited discipline. The pragmatic nature of scientific concepts is also discussed by Folke Leander and Claes Ryn, whose thought – in this area a partial, Crocean Hegelianism – I have often referred to. Concluding as they do that scientific concepts are largely pragmatic is, they point out, a conclusion reached by means of philosophy, a conclusion which goes beyond science itself. For contrary to the pragmatic concepts of science, the concept of a pragmatic concept itself is not a pragmatic concept, but a “categorial”, philosophical one.

This does not mean that scientists do not, within science, sometimes go beyond pragmatic concepts, develop theories of a kind that involves speculation in a manner that overlaps with and makes use of philosophy, whether or not they are themselves aware of it, and quite regardless of pragmatic applicability in science or technology. Distinctly philosophical issues that are not adequately dealt with by science itself inevitably arise all the time in science and its linguistic communication. One of the problems with some of the speculative scientists who address the question of God is that they do not see this. But basically, science, and contemporary physics, do not seem to go beyond pragmatic concepts. The fact that this includes their use of mathematics seems to raise some fundamental questions, as we will see.

“When, around 1911, Rutherford bombarded atoms with alpha particles, the indivisibility and solidity of the atom was shattered”, Ward continues. Here it could perhaps be argued that Ward is already talking about something beyond the scope of philosophy. But is it not arbitrary to allow him to speak of Democritus simply because he is considered a philosopher, or about Marx, but not of Rutherford, when Rutherford too speaks about atoms? If philosophers can speak about atoms, it would seem they could also speak about divided atoms and use such concepts in their philosophizing. If Ward’s account of Rutherford is not wrong and misleading, it seems this is something that it is legitimate do discuss among philosophers. If it is not, philosophers should perhaps not deal with Democritus’ and Marx’s materialism either, but leave that too to the scientists alone? Where precisely does philosophy turn into science of a kind that philosophers should no longer make use of in their philosophizing? How could philosophers possibly avoid dealing with and refering also to such science?

Again, in the earliest period, when philosophy and science were a new, unitary, speculative enterprise, Democritus argued that reality consisted of atoms falling through space and combining in different ways. Although the atomic theory remained well-known, and was revived during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, very few, indeed hardly anyone, reasserted the full metaphysical position of the materialism which it constituted in Democritus, namely that atoms (and space) were the whole of reality. Atoms were of course accepted by some and matter by most, but not materialism.

Only with Marx, whose doctoral dissertation dealt with the relation between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ versions of materialism, did materialism in the strict philosophical sense that is what Ward is concerned with become a significant force in Western thought – i.e., only when it became part of a political ideology, and politically organized. Even so, it was still not a common position in philosophy. In recent decades, it has, as Ward has described, become more common in philosophy. Still, it is not philosophers who are its main protagonists in the general public debate, but speculative scientists and journalists who insist on its truth in popular books aimed at the reading public. If a philosopher asserts, as almost all philosophers have done between Democritus and Marx, that reality is not such as Democritus or any later version of materialism describes it, or even that matter as described by materialism does not exist at all, he must of course address the arguments of those scientists and journalists. And if other speculative scientists say things about matter that correspond to what he himself claims, is it not perfectly natural and obvious that he should mention this as part of his case in a debate about the nature of reality started precisely by the materialist scientists and journalists?

In no way does such an appeal to science imply that the philosopher has made himself dependent on science or committed himself to its current hypotheses. Rather it is a legitimate consequence of a relation and dialogue that is both inevitable and desirable. Science can of course never be a replacement and substitute for philosophy, which goes far beyond it and includes areas of thought which science can never adequately deal with at all within the necessary confines of its constitutive framework.

Some speak of the poor self-confidence of philosophy or of philosophers in the face of the success of modern science and its technological application as well as its influence on public discussion, but I have never been able to understand this. It must be something found only among philosophers in the misconceived and failed scientistic tradition within analytic philosophy, which sought to prove the relevance and necessity of philosophy by making it the theoretical ancilla of science, but was rejected by science itself and its own intrinsic development. If other philosophers too suffer from it, it can only be because they have not really understood the true nature of philosophy at all.

It is evident that Ward does not belong to those philosophers, but is perfectly well aware of the distinctiveness of philosophy, and indeed that it is not just necessary but sufficient within the areas in which, by its own nature, it transcends other disciplines of human thought and research. Nicholas Capaldi’s The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation, is an excellent analysis of the relationship between misconceived modern philosophy and science.

But while science is thus neither sufficient in itself as a replacement of and successor to philosophy, nor necessary for philosophy, it is of course one of the most important cultural achievements of Western civilization (although certainly not exclusively of Western civilization). And it is a fragile one which is in the long perspective threatened, as so much else, by the decline of this civilization. It is something philosophers should certainly ever continue to take an interest in, and take into account in their own thinking. And vice versa: in the past, when the living cultural tradition still shaped and set the tone of society, scientists often had a good philosophical and humanistic education. This they should again acquire.

Ward gives more relevant examples for the fate of materialism of the development of science: “In 1924, de Broglie…argued that sub-atomic particles could be treated as waves. In 1925 the first formalism for quantum theory was produced. From that point on, matter itself was subsumed under the wider concept of ‘energy’, which could take many forms. Electrons, from being tiny precisely locatable particles, were seen as probability-waves in Hilbert space, only collapsing into particles under specific conditions of measurement. Even then, only the probability of finding them at a specific location could be predicted, and Heisenberg proved that such waves/particles could not be assigned both a determinate position and momentum at the same time.”

Is a line crossed somewhere in this paragraph, where the philosopher should have stopped talking about this development in physics and left it all to the physicists alone? If so, where precisely is it, and why is it drawn there and not somewhere else?

“In modern quantum cosmology, virtual particles of indefinitely many different sorts flash in and out of existence in accordance with quantum laws, from a vacuum (lowest-energy) state of precisely balanced, but fluctuating, energies. Time and space are only four or ten or eleven dimensions that emerge from such a vacuum state, and there may be many space-time universes (of which ours is only one) that fluctuate in and out of existence from a more primal quantum foam, far beyond the forms of space-time with which we are familiar in experience.”

Is Ward now, as a philosopher, far beyond the pale? Is the account even roughly adequate? Is this misleading popularization and distortion? Have New Age dreamers taken the place of the leading physicists in Oxford colleges? If it is admitted that it is at all legitimate and relevant for Ward to refer as a philosopher to these developments in science and to discuss them as parts of his case, then those who reject the truth of the account must point out where and why it is false.

“Things have proceeded so far in quantum cosmology that physicists like Chris Isham, of Imperial College, and Stephen Hawking, of Cambridge, tend to say that ‘imaginary time’ is more real than real time, that the human belief that time passes (or that we pass through time) is an illusion of consciousness, and that human consciousness of three-dimensional space is a narrow subjective selection out of a multi-dimensional reality that we are unable to perceive.”

It is inevitable that a simplified account must be given, although that does not really make all the pragmatic concepts in the cited passages very much more comprehensible to the non-physicist. Nonetheless, it seems to me the account does succeed in communicating what it is intended to communicate, namely that in science, “it has become increasingly hard to say just what ‘matter’ is”. Whatever it is said today that matter is, it is not that “everything that exists, or the one and only stuff out of which everything is made, is matter – solid particles located in three-dimensional space, with definite masses and velocities”. In other words, contemporary physics does not accept “old-fashioned materialism”.

And what it does say that matter is, is not, it seems to me, something that can easily be described in terms of some other materialism, in terms of materialism at all. Contemporary physics – which is neither more nor less than that, not physics as such, not future physics, not categorial concepts, not the absolute truth, but also not the physics of the past and not some insignificant, marginal and arbitrary theoretical speculation – thus says something about how matter is conceived today, something that is of relevance for the case against materialism and thus also for the case for idealism and personalism.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 8     1  2  3  4  5  6  7

We now come to a number of formulations in which the differences between Ward’s case for idealism and personalism on the one hand and the more specific and complete idealism that I am inclined to think could be defended can be noticed. I do not wish to dwell overmuch on this and will focus rather on the parts of his case that I wholly accept, but a little should perhaps be said. This could at least serve the purpose of pointing to the larger idealist argument and position.

“If modern philosophy is the application of reason to the widest possible set of known data, in order to obtain an informed judgement about what sorts of things are real, what sorts of things can be known, and what ways of life are most appropriate to the facts, it seems that we have to begin with the admission that there are many possible philosophical views, and none of them is theoretically certain, or even overwhelmingly probable.” Here a definition of ”data” and ”known data” should, from the perspective of such idealism, be added. It could also perhaps be pointed out that classical philosophy too was the application of reason to at least a wide set of ”known data”, like those of the beginnings of science, which was at this time not separate from philosophy. Nor was it separate from philosophy in the early modern period, when the classical agenda was in some sense resumed after the dominance of Christian theology.

Analytic philosophy, as originally conceived, and the continued ”Enlightenment project” (as Nicholas Capaldi calls it) within it, went too far, however, when it wanted to make itself the servant of science instead of theology. Today, as I discussed earlier, analytic philosophy is often used as a formal apparatus of theoretical instruments in the defence of entirely different positions in the various fields of philosophy.

Science ignored and soon outgrow the absurdly reductionistic positions and theoretical instruments the early analyticists offered, but at the same time sought an independence from philosophy as such which was equally untenable. The effects of this are normally immediately seen when the theories and results of science are stated and communicated in concepts and language, as they of course inevitably must be.

Philosophy, conceived as part of the same distinctive Western intellectual development and project as science, should not withdraw the application of reason from the central class of ”data” and ”known data” that science provides, if the need for definition of the latter terms is kept in mind and scientific theories are included as also being data. But neither should science and scientific theory exist without philosophy. Indeed, science cannot really do without philosophy. It can obviously think this is possible, but what we find then is nonetheless philosophy, as inextricably intervolved in the enterprise as ever. Only now it is inevitably poor speculative philosophy, not knowing and recognizing itself as philosophy, having deliberately relinquished its full theoretical resources and their conscious and systematic use.

I have doubts about the statement that no philosophical view is overwhelmingly probable. It is certainly possible to hold many different philosophical views. The questions of theoretical certainty and probability depend on how philosophy is defined. Some ”theoretical certainties” are not only involved in the very possibility and fact of doing philosophy, they also remain central to its continued pursuit and systematic development. In other respects, theoretical certainty has the specific limits that are intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy as such and the range of its use of reason. In those respects, we rightly speak of probability. But in some of those respects we have to supplement the observation that philosophy can point beyond itself, in the direction of forms of spiritual practice which can yield their own certainty.

But Ward must of course rightly add that “It does not follow that they are equally plausible.” Still, “it does follow that reason alone cannot make final decisions between a fairly wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging from the supremacy of Spirit to the supremacy of matter”. Here, I suggest, is one point in the argument where one must focus on the more precise definition of matter: such definition seems necessary for the meaningfulness of the statement about the spectrum of possibilities including the supremacy of matter. ”Reason alone” also calls for definition. These are questions which idealism in a more specific sense than Ward’s very inclusive one often does ask. I could perhaps later try to develop the case by adding the dimensions of such idealism.

But “What reason can do remains important. It can clarify basic axioms and aim to make them consistent with one another, analyse the strength and validity of inferences from those axioms, lay out a range of competing alternative axioms, test the consistency of an axiomatic system against the best available knowledge, and assess the strong and weak points of the general interpretation of the world that a rational system aims to provide. A rational philosophy is one that scores well on these criteria.” This, one must say, is still quite impressive. Philosophy is, among other things, a general culture of the intellect that is central to civilization. But then, again, “no philosophical view comes out as a clear winner”. Again I have to admit I have always had doubts about this. It seems to me idealism and personalism do come out as clear winners.

Indeed, “It may be thought that at least some views – perhaps that of Plato or Descartes or Bishop Berkeley – have been decisively refuted in the course of the history of philosophy. But I have sought to rescue all three from their critics, and show that their views can be reformulated in entirely plausible ways.” There are still some problematic aspects not lest of Descartes, but yes, both the possibility and reality of plausible reformulation is real, and also for the more specifically personal idealist views. “Of course, reformulation is necessary.”

There are of course many specific points to discuss in the various reformulations. “The Theory of Forms, for instance, needs to be re-stated as a theory of objective mathematical axioms, and related more closely to experimental observation. But it then survives very well in some versions of modern quantum theory, and mathematicians like Roger Penrose can describe themselves as Platonists without embarrassment.” The theory of forms exists in very different versions in Plato himself. One of them, developed in his later years, tends towards a reformulation in mathematical terms. Obviously mathematics is important here, important in idealism, as Plato himself insisted. But understood not least in a comparative perspective of the kind I have tried to introduce in several texts on idealism, it is not clear to me that other aspects of the theory of forms, the paradigmatic model or ontic logos (as Charles Taylor calls it) according to which the phenomenal world is ordered, most obviously with regard to ethics, aesthetics, and society, should or could be simply replaced in a complete re-statement in terms of objective mathematical axioms. Inevitable questions must, I think, arise, pace Penrose, about the relation between the structure of mathematical axioms of contemporary physics and the theory of forms. Does not the comparison, indeed identification, overlook the still pragmatic use of mathematics in physics? Is mathematics understood by the physicists in the way Plato understood it?

Ward thinks it is “not to be expected…that materialism is susceptible to a knock-down refutation”. “Knock-down” may not be the right way of putting it. Of course, “There will always be a possible reformulation of the view that mental phenomena are by-products of non-purposive and unconscious physical processes, and that our common-sense beliefs about the world do not represent the true nature of objective reality.” Yes, and it is always possible also to reformulate the materialist position. It is, as noted above, quite obviously possible to hold many different philosophical views – quite regardless of their own probability and possibility.

Ward’s stress on common sense sets his case apart from that of idealism in a stricter sense. It is valid with regard to many of his points. But there is also something that could be called common-sense materialism (not just common-sense realism), common-sense of the Johnsonian variety. Stones feel so hard and heavy when people kick them that their common sense tells them there must be lumps of matter floating about out there in objective space and time, quite independently of mind. Materialism certainly holds that the common-sense beliefs about “a God”, which Ward seizes on, do not represent the true nature of objective reality. But it is idealism of Berkeley’s kind that says Johnsonian common-sense beliefs with regard to stones etc. do not represent the true nature of that other part of reality and the way it can and cannot be said to be objective.

Leaving common sense, Ward says the “very grave problems” materialism faces are “largely raised by quantum physics. This is particularly annoying for materialists, since science tends to be a major plank on which materialism is based.” Ward still belongs to the broadly analytic tradition, although he is one of the many who now use its intellectual instruments for completely different purposes than the ones intended by the founders of it as a school. One can hardly speak of a set of theoretical instruments, of modal logic etc., or, more generally, of a mere formal method, as a philosophical school. I think it must be said that when analyticism relinquished its original programme which included substantial positions in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics etc., it ceased to be a school in any sense comparable with the one used for other philosophical schools.

Even analyticists who have completely rejected the original substantial programme of the logical empiricists and positivists, which included the self-identification of philosophy as the ancilla of science, have often remained preoccupied to a greater extent than philosophers of other schools with science and the theoretical issues of science. Ward is one of them. I see no problem with this but find it rather to be a natural and obvious part of what philosophy should do. But for idealists in the stricter sense, it is not quite as large a part as for mosts formal analyticists, even such formal analyticists as Ward who takes distinctly idealistic and theistic positions.

The early analyticists were not all materialists, as Ward has already discussed; some were phenomenalists and believed in experienced reality as a construct of sense-data. But they did see science as a major plank on which to base their rejection of idealism, religion, traditional morality, the great tradition in the arts etc. And the original programme was in any case such that the step to materialism was always a comparatively short one, at least for the philosophically interested public to which the programme was communicated in popularized form and which noticed rather the campaign against idealism than the subtleties of a certain branch of empiricist epistemology.

If the early non-materialist analyticists relied on science for this campaign, today’s materialist scientists and journalists do so to an even greater extent. Meanwhile, science in general or as a whole disappointed the early analyticists by not lending support to their programme, and the same often seems to be the case with their relation to the materialist scientists and journalists today. This is what Ward seizes on, in a part of the case that is legitimate and meaningful, albeit limited in what seems to me some important and precisely identifiable ways.

“The gravest objection”, Ward rightly observes, “is that it has become increasingly hard to say just what “matter” is. If your philosophical theory is that everything that exists is composed of matter, it is frustrating to admit that you do not know what matter is.” As indicated above, this, along with the question of the nature of reason, must be taken into account in any discussion about decisions, final and other, between a spectrum of positions ranging from the supremacy of spirit to the supremacy of this ”matter”.