Category: Philosophy

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”.

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.

It seems there are problems viewing the video here below in this post, so go to Vimeo instead (there are some disturbing sounds the first few minutes). I wish to draw the reader’s/viewer’s attention to my general discussion, in the post ‘The Case for Idealism and Personalism’, about the kind of case Ward makes.

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“It is easy to forget how very recent and meteoric the rise of materialism has been in philosophy”, Ward further explains. “How could it get from being a joke to being a claimant to obvious truth in forty years? I think there have been two major factors at work. One is the rise of cynicism about any sort of idealistic approach to life, about all human institutions, including religious ones, and about the failures of religious people to prevent violence and hatred, and indeed their tendency to increase violence and hatred in the world.”

Here it seems important to make a distinction with regard to the “idealistic approach to life”. It is true to say that there has been a rise of cynicism about “any sort of” such approach. But I think there are nonetheless two basically different sorts that must be kept apart.

One is the strictly philosophical, metaphysical, religious and traditionalist, which may or may not express itself in moral and social concerns, but which, when it does, is allied to a proper, classical and indeed classicist humanistic view of man, based on ethical dualism and realistic discernment with regard to the nature of man, society and the world (something which does not preclude the acceptance and incorporation of the important partial truths of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, or modernity in general, which can contribute to creative renewal of tradition and beneficent change). This is the idealistic approach to life which I am inclined to defend.

The other is the modern romantic and rationalist one which Irving Babbitt calls humanitarian, an undiscerning, illusorily progressivist pseudo-idealism based on a facile, immanentizing modern pantheism and monism in its view of both man and the world. Such idealism often had no problems accepting, in practice at least, materialism as sound, and to affirm it as part of an expression of honest, emancipated, sensual life-affirmation against the bigoted metaphysical idealism and religion of the reactionaries. There is certainly cynicism today about this form of idealism too; the liberals and leftists who used to believe in it are indeed often cynics and rather nihilists in both theory and practice. (There is a third sense of idealism, namely unselfish commitment to things believed in, and various associated qualities. This sense is not really determined by what those things are, but it often merges with the second sense by the addition of the characteristics of humanitarianism.)

This disillusion is made inevitable by the illusoriness of this kind of idealism itself; it was prefigured already in the nineteenth century and has been thoroughly analysed and explained by Babbitt and others. The problem is that it affects also the understanding of and attitude towards the first, genuine form of idealism.

Ward observes that the cynicism “has been largely motivated by the Marxist ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, the accusation that all religious and moral systems are in fact ideologies, no more than sophisticated disguises for egoistic self-seeking on the part of their proponents”. Ward rightly uses the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” about Marxism, but it should be pointed out that this is not an exclusively Marxist phenomenon. As I remember it, it was introduced by Ricoeur for the purpose of describing a wider range of such hermeneutics, including those of Nietzsche and Freud. The reason Ward does not mention this is perhaps that he does not regard Nietzsche as a materialist, and it is certainly true that those other forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion are more relevant for the understanding of general non- and anti-idealism rather than for materialism specifically.

But classical philosophy “can thus be seen as a disguise for elitist social systems that privilege the sort of cultivated discussion that only leisure and wealth can bring. The realities of life lie further down, in work and physical effort. The material is the real, while the spiritual is a fictitious construct to delude the oppressed and keep them in their place.” Ward enters into the kind of extra-philosophical explanation in terms of an analysis of political and cultural history, psychology etc. which I mentioned as required. He does so both because the extra-philosophical agenda and motivation are obvious, but also because the weakness of materialism as philosophy proper calls for such explanation.

The philosophical arguments of materialism should of course not simply be reduced to and explained in terms of something else, but considered in themselves. But on the condition that they are also considered as such, other explanation is legitimate in the case where other motivation than the purely philosophical is obviously at work. Such explanation of idealism is of course attempted by materialists when they perceive other forces and interests as being involved. The problem is that they do so often inadmissibly reduce and explain away the arguments in terms of those other factors.

As we see, Ward immediately identifies the relation between the growth of materialism and its becoming part of a political ideology as central to the needed explanation: “When Karl Marx boasted that he had taken the philosophy of Hegel, and stood it on its head, so that the world is not the self-expression of Absolute Spirit, as in Hegel, but a purposeless and violent by-product of blind material forces, he described the dethronement of Spiritual reality exactly. The irony is that Capitalists as well as Marxists fell under this revolutionary spell. Capitalists may have resisted the idea of a centralised State-run economy, but they often fell completely for the idea that ‘realism’ requires that the profit-motive (the morally neutral capacity to satisfy any or all desires) is the real driving force of history, and that spiritual ideals are artificial stimulants to distract the attention of the toiling masses.”

It could of course be argued that the capitalists had this orientation even before Marx, ever since the classical liberals and classical political economy, and that it was quite as much Marx who took it over from them, as well as from others. Yet Marxism in its many forms remains a major cause of the ascendancy of materialism, even though many who consider themselves materialists are not aware that to a considerable extent this is why they do so.

Despite the incessant insistence throughout the twentieth century that materialists are often good and morally upright people while religious and metaphysically idealist people are evil, oppressive hypocrites,  and indeed the obvious truth of this insistence in many cases, what we have long seen before us is a culture continuously declining under the impact of materialism, along with public and private morality. Materialism often has very real existential consequences, both for the materialists themselves, decisively shaping their lives, their personal development and their spiritual destinies, and for the lives of others who live together with them. Although theoretical and practical materialism are different things, and although theoretical idealists can be practical materialists and theoretical materialists can be practical idealists, they are nevertheless related things.

It was obvious from the beginning that the problem of materialism had a political dimension or a dimension of political philosophy and ideology, a dimension which had to be addressed as such. Opposing materialism had to involve opposing Marxism, or Marxism as materialism, as including the affirmation of matter as what Marx considered matter to be. Understandably, and in strict accordance with Marxist ideology, idealism, in a vague sense, was always a main enemy in the rhetoric of the communist regimes, and sometimes personalism too. But opposing materialism also had to involve opposing capitalism and the main forms of liberalism, for the reason Ward mentions.

Most materialist radicals were once idealists in the second sense described above. They opposed what they perceived to be the narrow-minded, egotistical and materialistic conservatives. Needless to say, there were such conservatives, conservatives who were certainly not idealists in the first sense. There were decisive partial truths in the radicals’ criticism, truths which of course need to be affirmed and assimilated by the creative traditionalist defender of an alternative modernity. Marxists opposed idealism because it was perceived to be only an obstacle to the spread of the truths of historical and dialectical materialism. They rejected personalism because it saw the person it defended as only the bourgeois individual that was the class enemy. They turned against Christianity and the churches because they were inextricable ideological parts of the oppressive power-structures of the remaining, semi-feudal class society. But it soon turned out the whole truth was different and much more complex than the radicals thought.

There are, of course, also other reasons for the ascendancy of materialism: “In addition to this sense that the material, not the spiritual, is the driving-force of history, the incredible progress of the natural sciences is the second major factor that has contributed to the rise of materialism.” Ward gives examples of this from cosmology, genetics, and brain and computer science, examples of how developments in those fields have made materialism seem more plausible. These examples, which I will not cite here, do not make it particularly clear to me why this should necessarily be so. And Ward will soon proceed to show how other developments in science have rather made materialism seem utterly implausible.

But, Ward says, “It can look as if our increasing knowledge of physical processes is at last revealing the secrets of consciousness and thought. It is not only ideas that are ideological constructs. Now minds themselves are often seen as illusions produced by physical processes in the brain.” I have to admit I have always found it impossible to understand how people can experience themselves and reality in this way. Is it really true that there are people who see their minds, consciousness and thought as illusions? Ward’s further description hardly makes it more comprehensible:

“Classical philosophers began from what was most evident to them – their own experiences and thoughts. But now science seems to some to show that experiences are by-products of brain-processes, and brains can function very well whether or not conscious experiences exist. Thoughts are the dimly perceived epiphenomena of computational sequences in the brain-computer, which are the really effective causes of all our apparently mental behaviour. Marxism dethroned Spirit from having a primary role in how the world is. Science has dethroned consciousness from having a primary role in our understanding of the world. Thus materialism pricks the bubble of our spiritual illusions, and reveals that we are in fact computational, inefficiently designed and largely malfunctioning, physical entities without any larger purpose or meaning within the blind, pointless, freak accident of a wholly physical universe.”

From the Vedantic perspective and that of similar traditions, materialism is of course accounted for in terms of an imperfect awareness of reality caused by ignorance and illusion and a low level of development of consciousness. This, clearly, must on this view be what on the deepest level explains the contemporary materialist view of reality described by Ward, although it has spread due to distinctive historical forces and agendas. As phenomenology too attests, for philosophers to ”begin from” a ”wholly physical universe” etc. and not from ”their own experiences and thoughts”, presupposing that the former and not the latter is ”most evident to them”, involves a strange and inadmissible speculative leap. It is based on illusion.

Despite all the historical developments that have, as it were, facilitated, reinforced and promoted this illusion, Ward still finds the materialist conclusion absurd. Yet the reason some of “the ablest contemporary philosophers” are materialists is, Ward thinks, “partly because it takes a huge amount of logical ingenuity to make the materialist programme seem plausible, so that it is an interesting challenge to good philosophers”. This explanation is revealing with regard to contemporary philosophy and the general cultural and intellectual climate in which it has developed. Later, he returns to the explanation of materialism on a more fundamental and timeless level.