Art, Science and Philosophy

For every major intellectual epoch, one can find a succession of art, science and philosophy. Art is an imaginative expression, an expression which is not mediated by anything else, whose function is to express emotion, the mind’s own freedom in its immediate form. As such, it is quite logical that the first move toward an advancement or transformation of an intellectual epoch in history happens in the arts. In ancient times, the life of the mind of the new civilization of Greece was expressed by Homer’s epics. Homer’s characters, initially a fictional representation of the various gods imported from outside Greece, were the divine presentations of the deepest and most profound emotions felt by the Greek people. What it was to be a radiant woman was epitomized by Penelope and Helen, while what it was to be a radiant man was likewise epitomized in Odysseus and Achilles. Following the celestial narrative of the Homeric myths, we find Euclid and the Pythagoreans venturing forth into the realm of the abstract concept to build a pure, harmonious system of geometry, again by bringing in individual notions and propositions from the foreign sciences yet transforming them in a fundamental way by organizing them in the context of a fuller axiomatic system. Such movements in art and science paved the way to the philosophical teachings of Socrates. Plato’s dialogues distill the pure intellectual essences of the pantheon as well as geometry, further refining them into a dialectical movement. In this process, Plato the philosopher brings critical reflection and self-consciousness to his contemporaries. The transformation was so painful and earthshaking that Meletus, on behalf of the majority of the city of Athens, was compelled to sentence Socrates to death.

The pattern is repeated during the early decades of the modern era. The Dutch paintings of the 15th century exemplify a craving for grasping the world as it is, thus representing natural objects, traditionally thought as created beings and therefore worthy of a non-naturalistic representation, in a thoroughly, almost artificially, real manner. In literature, Shakespeare has again brought the sacred and the profane together, depicting the muddy human strife behind the facade of divinely ordained royalty. The enchantment with that which is supposed to be least enchanting, the mundane, has since then become the harbinger of novelty, until Odysseus becomes a middle-aged Irish-Jewish man and the hymns and symphonies melt away eventually into 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence in three acts.

On the side of the sciences, Galileo and Newton have spearheaded the idea of empiricism, the importance of being able to verify a hypothesis by experiments or observations. When we today say “science,” this is the method which we are usually referring to. Moreover, Descartes introduced the discipline of analytical geometry, and the figurative proofs of geometry has gradually been taken over by the non-figurative, purely discursive proofs of algebra. Since then, the presupposition that geometrical proof require pictorial representation has been rejected. From a theoretical standpoint, it was the consistency of the system itself which became the criterion of truth for an axiomatic system. We therefore have non-Euclidean geometry, which further provide the analytical tools for describing the curvature of spacetime in the general theory of relativity.

In the wake of the modern arts and sciences, it was Kant who truly brought to self-consciousness the philosophical fruits of this new spirit. The tensions between the idea of natural necessity and of human freedom have become the central focus in modern philosophy since, and even when Kant’s idea of natural necessity, based on a simplistic notion of causation, turned out to be more fictitious than real, the question “what is freedom” continues to be the wellspring from which philosophers have drawn new life.

Coupled with this enthusiasm for the newfound freedom of the mind, the fascination with the human world, or that which is within reach of our organs of sense and thought, also continues to this day. Yet, our art will one day no longer resonate with the emotions of a future age, and our scientific theories will, as scientists are fond of saying in jest, be completely refuted and discarded by posterity. This melancholy anticipation is another characteristic of our age, which is reflected in our calm disavowal of planetary crises such as global climate change and the risk of nuclear warfare.

Philosophy as Categorical Thinking (2)

To put it in the language of Kant's, in so far as the categories are concerned, an inquiry into their content as given (the metaphysical exposition) overlap to a significant extent with an inquiry into the grounds for their objective validity (the transcendental exposition). What this means is that the question "what is the nature or content of the category of x?" is virtually coextensive with the question "what are the presuppositions upon which the category of x gain objective reality?"

This was not Kant's position, at least not in his Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena. In these works, Kant treats geometry, physics, and the other exact and empirical sciences of his day as providing truths which are in some sense "given," that is, to a considerable degree independent of what the philosopher has to say about their presuppositions. In general, this is a very reliable policy for inquiry, and indeed when I wrote earlier that philosophy should respect empirical evidence, this was merely paraphrasing Kant's claim that concepts without intuition are blind.

On the other hand, modern students of philosophy cannot possibly be content with the rule that they should take the entire body of theoretical knowledge established in their contemporary sciences as given. The great paradigm shifts in the history of science described by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that there is a clear historical element to what is taken to be true in a science. Especially at the level of subjective concepts, scientists may be very much off the mark, although whether a philosopher is in a position to ever identify those errors accurately, let alone introduce the right corrections, is dubious, to say the least.

This is why a transcendental deduction of the categories is an essential task for philosophy. On the one hand, the description of the contents of the categories will have to agree with how they are treated and introduced into the various exact and empirical sciences. On the other hand, whether such concepts have an objective validity is a question which needs to be settled in an independent philosophical inquiry.

From the outside, perhaps such a definition of the aim of philosophy may sound too ambitious. We tend to think that anything to do with our own thoughts are historically determined through and through, and that the ambition to transcend history and gain an absolute conception of the world may seem unreasonable if not inconsistent. Yet there is a crucial difference between being open to correction and presupposing that an absolute conception is impossible. The former is perfectly consistent with a sincere and wholehearted attempt to arrive at the true system of the categories. The latter is in fact inconsistent with itself, for the impossibility of the absolute conception is itself taken as an absolute presupposition.

The mind coming to a richer understanding and knowledge of the categories coincides with the world itself coming to a self-consciousness of its own essence. Whether it be human or not, the mind is the purest and most intense natural instantiation of what otherwise exists only as a non-spatio-temporal reality, yet is at the same time the richest and most absolute form of reality, the categories. Just as the categories are logically prior and independent to space and time, and indeed space and time presuppose the logical qualities - including the categories of quality and reality themselves - for their reality, so is the mind endowed with the remarkable capacity to imagine a land of shadows existing even prior to space and time.

Kant wrote, in his characteristically yet wonderfully ambiguous style, that pure reason has the tendency to ask questions which goes beyond the mind's capacity to know. As long as the rigid distinction between intuitions and concepts is treated as a premise for defining the distinction between knowledge and illusion, Kant's statement may be interpreted as a warning as well as a call for the disciplining of pure reason to conform to a narrow definition of knowledge according to which only that which can be found in intuition can have objective validity. On the other hand, we may instead choose to see the nature of pure reason itself from an objective standpoint and ask why the world has a being, which we call the mind, which by its very nature goes beyond the merely spatio-temporal phenomena given in intuition. Thought has a place in the world yet does not require the world for its existence. From this standpoint, then, self-consciousness of the nature of pure reason is a kind of invitation to extend our knowledge beyond the boundaries of intuition.

Philosophy as Categorical Thinking (1)

The title of this post is borrowed from a chapter title in Robin Collingwood's Essay on Philosophical Method. In this tour de force of logic, Collingwood argues that philosophy deals with abstract entities which exist categorically (as opposed to hypothetical entities in the exact and empirical sciences). Slightly modifying the original meaning of the word, these categorically existing abstract entities may be called simply the categories.

The categories are "thoughts" existing in an objective way. In ordinary language, "objective" means "outside of the mind." However, here, categories are both objective and subjective. Again, common sense would interpret this proposition as saying that there is an objective category "out there" which is "represented" by the mind and turned into a subjective thought, or, conversely, that a subjective thought is "projected" onto the external world and thus turned into an objective category. This is a rather misleading way of describing the matter, since the categories are both subjective and objective at the same time as one unified entity. Whether it is expressed in the form "I think x" or in the form "there is x" the category, designated by "x," is one and the same category.

An important qualification here is that categories are abstract entities, things which in ordinary language we call "thought." Therefore, the usual objections do not apply here. For example, one might object that "I think a unicorn" and "there is a unicorn" cannot always have the same truth value. This is true, but that is because a unicorn is thought of as a spatio-temporal object. If "unicorn" is taken to be "a thought of a unicorn," then "I think a unicorn" and "there is a (thought of a) unicorn" always agree in their truth value.

Moreover, what is remarkable is that a thought of a unicorn exists in the world. This is remarkable not because the thought is about an object which does not exist in nature, but rather because that which is existing in the world is thought itself. How is it that an abstract entity, without spatio-temporal being, nonetheless instantiates itself at a particular point in space and time? One motivation behind beginning philosophy from the very beginning, i.e. from the study of the categories themselves, is to come to a richer and truer theory of what it means for abstract entities to be localized in space and time.

I have written above that the propositions "I think x" and "there is x" have the same truth value when it comes to the categories. This is not to say that an account of the categories needs to be indubitable. A very plausible interpretation of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, presented by Bernard Williams in his Descartes and the Project of Pure Enquiry, would suggest that arriving at the indubitable is the epistemological ambition of modern philosophy. However, Kant has restored the role of empirical intuition into philosophy in a major way, and Collingwood has completed what Kant has begun by stating clearly that for a philosophical theory to be true, it needs to be consistent with empirical facts.

Empirical facts play a key role in the method of philosophy, which, following Kant, we can call the metaphysical method. Descartes already had an idea of the method, as Collingwood points out in the Essay. For Kant, empirical facts are "given." Philosophy then asks what must be the case for such empirical facts to be possible and, perhaps more profoundly, for such empirical facts to be knowable. For example, it is an empirical fact that blood cells transport oxygen and collects carbon dioxide in the human body during respiration. For this fact to obtain, categories such as relation, subsistence and causation must exist. These categories in turn presuppose other categories such as thinghood, unity, multiplicity, repetition, identity, difference, reality, negation, being and nothing. These and many other categories are instantiated locally in the case of respiration in the human body.

Hegel's Science of Logic takes this method a step further. Empirical facts undoubtedly play a role in verifying the truth of a theory of the categories. However, not all empirical facts instantiate the same categories. It is an empirical fact that a book can be stacked on top of another book. This fact does not presuppose many of the richer categories which we saw earlier in the case of respiration. Causation, for example, is absent. What this shows is that starting from empirical facts limits the theory within a boundary which is arbitrarily drawn due to the arbitrariness in the choice of the empirical facts. Hegel tried to remove this arbitrariness by trying the begin the inquiry from a description of the categories themselves. That is, Hegel argued that an argument taking a metaphysical form is possible not only from objects to concepts but also from one concept to another.

There is still much to be said about the method for the study of the categories. In particular, I would like to focus more on the transcendental part of the inquiry in order to explain why it is important that the categories have to be subjective as well as objective, and how, despite this, and despite Kant's own definition of the transcendental, the categories must nonetheless be "out there" or be "mind-independent" too.

Philosophy and the Sciences

Some think that philosophy, in relation to the sciences, can and should conduct a "conceptual analysis" of the concepts which "found" the sciences. In a different way, Collingwood has argued that metaphysics is the study of the "presuppositions" of the sciences. The common thread that runs through this school of thought is the implicit or explicit assumption that the "concepts" or "presuppositions" are "ours," that is, are merely subjective.

Thus, even such elementary "concepts" as space and time -- which in modern physics is just treated as one "concept," space-time -- become something external to reality as a whole or the absolute. This of course has been defended forcefully by Kant. In his own vivacious language, Kant argued that space and time are merely our forms of intuition, i.e. forms of receiving representations, and not the properties of things in themselves. According to Kant, if we assumed that these were the properties of things in themselves, there will have to be a theory of how our subjective thought might successfully "correspond" or represent these forms. Here, the problem of skepticism arises.

From Kant's point of view, it was impossible, or at least impractical, to establish a definitive theory of how space and time could be accurately "represented" by our consciousness. One problem to be investigated further is whether such a theory is indeed impossible. Could the impossibility of such a theory be proven?

On the other hand, if such a theory could be successfully established, then it becomes possible to discover the truth not only of the subject-matter of a science but also of the relation between this subject-matter and that science qua conscious activity. It might even be true that such an activity just is this relation.

Based on this thought, the task of philosophy in relation to the sciences becomes something other than "conceptual analysis." Rather, it is to map out the relations between the activity of science and the subject-matter of science in a theory which is true. To put it another way, philosophy discovers the concepts of science as being part of the "world" which the sciences describe objectively.

This is a way out of what Williams calls the "egocentric predicament" of Descartes's cogito and, to a considerable extent, those theories which stem from the Cartesian standpoint. (As a largely unrelated point, it might also be fruitful here to imagine a project where a philosopher interviews the scientists and "maps out" the sciences in a series of dialogues without fully comprehending the finer details of what each science claims. The philosopher, along with the common reader, would be "alienated" from the majority of the thoughts in such a work, but nonetheless that objective body of text would be closer to a true theory of the activity and subject-matter of the sciences than a schematic account given within the severe limits of an individual thinker's capacity of knowledge.) One hypothesis worth exploring further is the idea that our brain-mind has a universal capacity for scientific knowledge in general, and that such a capacity reflects, in some way yet to be specified, the laws and concepts which objectively exist in the world and in the subject-matter which the sciences treat.

Such a standpoint is no longer that of trying to give a "conceptual analysis" which is external to what the scientists actually think when they comprehend their scientific theories. To return to the example, if space and time are treated as space-time, a single concept whose content is rigorously defined in a way alien to what a non-physicist or a philosopher might intuitively imagine it to be, then it is the non-intuitive rigorous definition of space-time which needs to be grasped in philosophy. This is why it is vitally important for philosophers to "listen" to the scientists as closely as possible, even when such a willingness to listen might not necessarily be accompanied by an equal measure of comprehension.

Anonymity and Philosophy

It is customary to begin a philosophical essay by citing the traditional authorities. The purpose of these citations is to signal to the reader that the author has the authority to speak on the subject, and that the reader should respect this authority.

This is, however, the antithesis of what philosophical thinking is about. Philosophy does not accept authority as a ground of knowledge. That Plato or Aristotle said such-and-such does not add anything to the truth of a claim. Now of course if one were to study the history of philosophy, one must give the highest reverence and respect to all past philosophers, where "reverence and respect" mean a maximally detailed and careful interpretation of the texts and an empathetic reading which is both charitable and critical at the same time. After all, Plato cared about the truth, and caring about the truth implies doubting the truth of one's thoughts every step of the way. The historian of philosophy participates in this process of doubt and re-lives the struggle of these past thinkers.

(Still, there is the question of whether a "canon" of philosophical works is possible. Traditionally, one always began with Plato and Aristotle. However, in the modern age, every educated person has access to the tools of writing. An unknown writer's unpublished works may express the truth in a much more clarifying and piercing manner than Plato's or Aristotle's works, or even than Kant's. The discovery of such works is part of the mission of the historian of philosophy.)

With pure philosophical thinking, the idea of history itself must first be arrived at. No doubt many of the conclusions - especially the earlier conclusions - will be very similar or even identical to what the past thinkers have established themselves. This would be because the earlier thoughts tend to be simpler and hence less ambiguous. Obscurantism, esotericism, and mysticism are not what philosophical thinking accepts. Clarity of thought should be reflected in the clarity of its expression.

The subject-matter of philosophy, nonetheless, is something which is at once extremely familiar and extremely obscure for us: thought itself. We do not need a precise language to grasp the true nature of thought in order to get by our daily lives. We eat, drink, defecate, move, talk, sleep, and wake up. Our bodies grow and our minds wander. In all this, there is absolutely no natural necessity to grasp the nature of thought, anymore than there is a need to grasp intellectually the nature of digestion before digesting food. But philosophy is of such a kind that grasping the nature of thought and thinking well means the same thing.

In order to grasp the nature of thought, it is only one's own thoughts, or the thoughts of the individual thinker, that supply the material for the inquiry. But thought is of such a kind that in its very essence it is at once individual and universal: one's thoughts can be pure thoughts. This is why maintaining anonymity in philosophy is very important, for it helps to focus one's attention on the merit of the thoughts considered by themselves.

Electronic Notebook

I travel a lot. That is why it is not convenient for me to accumulate my notes in paper.

I could choose to type my notes using a word application. This is what I have been doing. But then, the text still needs to be stored somewhere. If it is stored on the device, it is at risk of getting lost if the hard drive somehow breaks. Therefore, it is securer to have it on the cloud.

But if saving the document file on a cloud is what I want to do, I might as well put it up on a blog. That is the reason why I am resuming the notebooks.

2010-12 is my most immature, adolescent notebook. Following this, 2013-15 is an interesting series. It does represent a certain maturity, but there is as yet nothing original there. 2016-17 is a more passionate, albeit less populated, series. There is more "creativity" there and a kind of style is budding forth, although the prose is still caught up within the confines of uncritically accepted conventions.

The present series should hopefully be a much more unified and coherent body of notes.