Professional Amateurs
Bryan Magee.
Have you heard of him? You
haven’t? You should. Broadcaster, Labour MP, Social
Democrat, professor, music critic and writer; he has many insightful things to
say across a range of topics: politics, music, literature, and his core
interest philosophy. His book, Confessions
of a Philosopher, is a classic, with
many acute comments about the British intellectual scene, the cold war, academics
and the arts. It includes two
wonderful portraits: of Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell. Both are unforgettable, once you have
read them. And yet Magee isn’t
regarded as a serious philosopher; for he is not an academic, in the purest
sense; he is not part of the profession, using its language and codes, the
always-fashionable jargon, those glass-topped walls that keep the amateurs
away. Only the professionals
count! Christopher Janaway in the
bibliography to his short book on Schopenhauer calls Magee’s own monograph
on the same philosopher a “sometimes idiosyncratic account of [his place] in
the history of ideas”. Personally
I would take that as a compliment.
I don’t think this is what professor Janaway intends. It is more a warning about a dangerous
minefield than an invitation to explore new territories. This guy is odd. He is not one of us…. A bureaucrat doesn’t like an outsider
mucking about with his files…[i]
In his Schopenhauer book Magee notes that modern philosophers tend to concentrate on a thinker’s arguments, believing these are the most important, indeed sometimes the only, elements of their work. This assertion was strangely confirmed when he later interviewed Frederick Coppleston about Schopenhauer for his TV series the Great Philosophers. Coppleston actually criticised this thinker because his ideas went beyond his mentor’s original premises...[ii] The logical consistency of the arguments is all that matters, it seems. He thus ignores the very stuff that in Magee’s view produces a great philosopher: the original insights that create their immortality. Arguments are important but they are secondary phenomena; buttresses to support the original idea, the core of a philosopher’s worth. For great thinkers, he argues, and I think correctly, are creative artists, deep sea diving in the unknown waters of hard thought and reasoned speculation. They are also highly intelligent and usually academic; these latter qualities hiding their real value and originality.
In his Schopenhauer book Magee notes that modern philosophers tend to concentrate on a thinker’s arguments, believing these are the most important, indeed sometimes the only, elements of their work. This assertion was strangely confirmed when he later interviewed Frederick Coppleston about Schopenhauer for his TV series the Great Philosophers. Coppleston actually criticised this thinker because his ideas went beyond his mentor’s original premises...[ii] The logical consistency of the arguments is all that matters, it seems. He thus ignores the very stuff that in Magee’s view produces a great philosopher: the original insights that create their immortality. Arguments are important but they are secondary phenomena; buttresses to support the original idea, the core of a philosopher’s worth. For great thinkers, he argues, and I think correctly, are creative artists, deep sea diving in the unknown waters of hard thought and reasoned speculation. They are also highly intelligent and usually academic; these latter qualities hiding their real value and originality.
It is not surprising that unsophisticated academics will
gravitate to those qualities they recognise, and for which they have sympathy,
and ignore what they cannot see; in this case the very essence of a person’s greatness
and value. In the process they
reduce thought to reason, art to exposition; and Schopenhauer to a filing
cabinet of premises and conclusions.[iii]
A collection of essays on David Hume illustrates Magee’s
point rather too well.[iv] In this essay Hume on Religion J.C.A Gaskin looks at a number of Hume’s arguments
against miracles; and raises some questions about them.
What is meant by a law of nature, and how can one
distinguish between an event that falsifies a law (shows that it is an
inaccurate description of the way things are in the natural world) and an event
that results from a suspension of the law or an intrusion into the natural
world by a supernatural agent such as a god or other invisible spirit?
He has read Hume, but he has not understood him. We can guess at why this is so: he has
received too good an education, which has turned experience into knowledge; and
hidden the outside world behind a row of bookcases.
Hume believed our intellectual task is to understand
reality;[v] and to achieve this we have to accept we know very little about it. This was
the foundation of his thought: we are ignorant! We live in a dark room and the only light is from the cracks
in a boarded-up window. Our one
hope is to force those cracks a little wider through prolonged investigation…[vi] Like Locke before him this was a
revolutionary idea. For in
accepting there were many things we didn’t know it undermined the existing
theories of knowledge, and the theologies on which they rested. And what a liberating view it was! We must look at the world afresh;
opening it up each morning with new questions. Every morning uncovering another
hidden element, exposing a different perspective… The result is a world of human creation, which we
inhabit as naturally as the woods and the valley floor. So natural is it we take it for granted
and do not realise how much our fellow humans have constructed it; especially
over the last four hundred years.
But we are humans still. That has never changed. Still exposed to the danger that yesterday’s questions
become today’s answers, explaining tomorrow’s discoveries. Scholasticism, that symbol of arid
academicism, arose out of the fruitful breakdown of a previous worldview; but
later, although intellectually sophisticated, it hardened into dogma and
academic ritual. It is too easy,
because it is very natural, to think that our present knowledge is sufficient
to explain the world. It is an odd person that doesn’t suffer this delusion. It is probably a sign of our maturity;
that moment we think we have enough information and insight to understand the
world and our place in it. It isn’t long before that
knowledge becomes an obstacle to our understanding.[vii]
For Hume, as we investigate the universe we should be aware there
are huge territories we know nothing about; that our current understanding, and
ongoing inquiries, coexist with vast ignorance even within the subject areas we
are studying. Much will have to be
left unexamined; mysteries for future generations to solve. Such self-conscious clarity rarely
occurs. Instead we jump to
conclusions too readily, are too quick to accept the easy answer; and are wary
of questions that return us to our ignorance. We have strived for years to gain this knowledge, so it must
be the truth! Too often we satisfy
ourselves with too little; keeping to what we already know. This is quite natural and arises from a
particular propensity of the human mind; it is what Noam Chomsky has called
Plato’s problem: we know so much from so little evidence.
To the great Empiricists past thinkers too often created
theories and expounded arguments about things they knew absolutely nothing
about; they had whole systems of thought that were based on no empirical
foundation at all. It was all mind
generated; huge pyramids built of out words. This was Locke’s insight. We have to explain the world, and in
order to do so we must limit our understanding to what we can actually know;
our experiences and the solid achievements of experimental science (and the
recent discoveries of Newton which seemed to provide the “natural laws” of the
universe). Experience trumps
knowledge, which must be dependent upon it. We can explain away reality, which is very easy according to
Hume, that is why he rejected the sceptics, but ultimately if there is a
conflict between reason and experience we must succumb to our natural instincts
and reject our reasonings. Thus
his famous remarks about leaving his desk behind, his agonizing over personal
identity, to join friends for dinner and social repartee.[viii]
Gaskin has reduced Hume’s insight to a mere argument, which
he can then undermine by simple academic means. This is something trivial and completely beside the
point. Because for Hume the first
and only question is: where in our world do we see a “suspension of the law”;
where in the universe can we witness the effects of a “supernatural
agent”? These questions defined
empirically through experience and scientific observation. To be quite blunt: where in Edinburgh
in the 1770s could someone show him a Christ raising a Lazarus from the grave?
Can Hume, on the basis of what he says elsewhere in the
Treatise and first Enquiry, formulate any concept of natural causation strong
enough to give content to the notion of its violation?
For Hume causation comes from experience: through custom and
habit we acquire the idea of cause and effect. By demanding such a “strong concept” of natural causation is
to ignore the rest of Hume’s theory, and to misunderstand it, almost completely. Because the brilliance of Hume was this
insight: our sense of an inviolable link between cause and effect is a
fundamental error. We assume there
is such a thing as causality, but when we investigate it we find it is an utter
mystery. It is really only a
belief, acquired through our experiences, a habit we have not thought
about.
Particular beliefs can be wrong. We can mistake individual causes and see effects that are
merely coincidences; while a whole world of thought that we think is a given,
and quite natural, is actually a construct, something our minds make up, and
which is mostly acquired through customs and habits of the countries and
centuries in which we live. If we
want to understand the world all this knowledge has to be tested against our
individual experiences, on which our minds then reflect.
The other scientific method, where a general abstract
principle is first established, and is afterwards branched out into a variety
of inferences and conclusions, may be more perfect in itself, but suits less
the imperfection of human nature, and is a common source of illusion and
mistake in this as well as in other subjects. Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and
systems in natural philosophy, and will hearken to no arguments but those which
are derived from experience…. They should… reject… every system of ethics…
which is not founded on fact and observation. (David Hume, Enquiries)
In Gaskin’s essay there is a lot of special pleading, or at
least it seems so to me:
Is Hume’s definition of a miracle (which is entirely
reportive) in need of supplementation, particularly by the qualification “of
religious significance” so that mere inexplicable freaks of nature do not get
counted as miracles?
A sly rhetorical device to muddy the waters. Curious in a book that is supposed to
explicate a great thinker, not argue against him. Hume takes it for granted that miracles cannot occur – “a
miracle is a violation of the laws of nature”,
which is proven by fact and observation.
In his chapter on miracles he is actually writing about the revelations
on which Christianity is built: the reports of miracles in the Bible, and which
have a very particular meaning for believers. It is that testimony that he questions, while he takes it for
granted that miracles cannot occur:
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a
firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a
miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as an entire as any argument from
experience can possibly be imagined…
…And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is
here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the
existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle
rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.
Hume deals at length between supposedly “freaks of nature”
and miracles. Any factual claim
must be based on our knowledge and experience, on the probability of the event,
and if there are witnesses, their wisdom, and circumstances (are they in the
midst of a revivalist meeting?).
The point Hume would make is that a “freak of nature” isn’t a miracle,
but something we have yet to find the cause of:
It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health,
should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than
any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man
should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age of
country.[ix]
Hume was anchored in the real world: this is what he wanted
to understand, and to explain to others.
He wasn’t interested in mere arguments, which he knew can live a life of
their own. Any fool can deny that
the world exists. Gaskin seems
unable to understand this, and reduces Hume to mere academic play:
Is Hume correct in implying that in order for something to
be a miracle it must not happen more than once? And if, as in biblical reports would seem to suggest, he is
not correct, at what stage will repeated “miracles” become clusters of
“para-normal” phenomena in need of explanation within the natural world?
Does Gaskin really believe that the Bible is a factual
document and that its reports of supernatural events are unimpeachable? To accept this argument would be to
accept that the metamorphoses of Ovid and the fairy stories of the Brothers
Grimm are in fact true. They are
stories and they make factual claims, and extraordinary things are described
that often happen more than once; and yet few would assume their historical
verity. Gaskin has made what seems
a very common kind of academic mistake: he has conflated two different kinds of
evidence, giving them the same value status.[x] Hume was far more profound: you have to
distinguish between testimony and experience; and you have to weigh up the
probability of an event with the quality of the witnesses; and you have to
accept that there are causes of which we are ignorant, though they operate on
natural laws, founded on fact and observation; and on science.
Can Hume, or anyone arguing on his behalf, or on behalf of
those who need such a concept in their definition of what is a miracle is, give
adequate content to the notion of a physically impossible event?
This is an extraordinary statement, for again it reduces Hume’s
thought to a simple intellectual argument, when his whole philosophy is based
on experience. Life as we live it,
through the senses and our direct engagement with the world, is the test of all
knowledge. This was an
epistemological revolution for the time, because it reversed the usual order of
things. Knowledge became the
servant, and experience the master.
And what a terrifying autocrat he was: we must reject everything that is
not based on fact and observation!
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles,
what havoc must we make? If we
take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance;
let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or
number? No. Does it contain any experimental
reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it
then to the flames: for it can
contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
What does this mean in the context of Gaskin’s
exposition? Hume is saying we
cannot experience a “physically impossible event”: it simply doesn’t exist for
us; although we can argue about it – to infinity. It is our body not our mind that is the final judge in these
matters; even if our arguments (“proofs”) are superior to our actual
experience. All the rest is
metaphysical talk, trivial and irrelevant.[xi]
[ii] See footnote xx in my Dropout
Boogie for discussion of a
particular case. The whole piece
puts one kind of academic under the microscope. Inevitably it shows up some
very interesting things.
In
the above case Coppleston argued that Schopenhauer’s thought was faulty because
it didn’t follow the logic of Kant’s original reasoning.
[iii] For a sideways look at this influence in poetry see
my The
Triumph of Literary Politics Over Honest Criticism.
[v] This may seem obvious, but is not so. It is arguable that the primary role of
intellectual practice is a religious one, to mould reality into the shape of
the local religion; in whatever form that may take: whether it is Shia Islam or
Western Neo-Liberalism. Richard
Dawkins’ Neo-Darwinism is an interesting variant: it is a religion that doesn’t
realise it is one. Over the years
his atheism has become somewhat fanatical; an evangelical strand of religious
fundamentalism.
[vi] In a fascinating discussion on the origins of
cognitive science Noam Chomsky reiterates this idea: to understand the world we
need to be puzzled by it. Too
often, and you see this particularly amongst a certain kind of highly
intelligent academic, this is not even recognised, let alone understood. We know it all already! All we need to do is extend our current
understanding just a little further; develop the theories just a little more,
and we will have found the secret of the human mind. The assumption here is that the big questions, the
fundamentals on which our understanding rests, have been established beyond
doubt. In this case, that the mind
can be reduced to a physical explanation, based on our contemporary
understanding of material reality.
It is a large, and probably incorrect, assumption, which Chomsky
questions in his important book New
Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. See the
footnotes of my Dropout Boogie for
quotations and further discussion.
Steven
Pinker, who acts as moderator of this discussion (The
Golden Age. A Look at the Original
Roots of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience), is a good example of this kind of personality. His introduction is a clear
illustration of his limitations.
For Pinker feels sorry for the old thinkers of the past. They didn’t have the conceptual tools
to understand the mind like we do.
Often they refer to outdated metaphors, like hydraulics, to explicate
how the mind works. How old
fashioned and cognitively weak they were!
Today we live in a much more enlightening period, we know the mind is
like a vastly complicated machine…
He
doesn’t seem to realise that he has replaced one metaphor with another, which
in time may come to seem equally misguided. Such a position is based on assumption that the current
wisdom is essentially correct, and that the fundamentals have been grasped – we
are really a species of machine - when in fact they may only be approximations
to an even more complicated and mysterious reality, that at present we cannot
even begin to comprehend. What
Pinker doesn’t seem to realise is just how time bound he is. What he takes to be the essential
nature of the mind is really a product of the cultural conditioning of modern
industrial society, where the machine both governs our lives, and provides its
mythic sub-structure. Adam Curtis
explored this brilliantly in his recent All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace (reviewed in my Strange
Comforts). Steven Rose in an interesting
discussion with Pinker makes essentially the same point:
“Now
we come to the issue of reverse engineering. He's quite wrong when he says that
physiology was studied by reverse engineering; when William Harvey likened the
workings of the heart to the workings of a pump, this wasn't reverse engineering,
he was drawing a metaphor as to how you could understand the mathematics of
heart function. It was a tremendously revealing and important metaphor. The
problem we have in science, particularly in biology, is to distinguish between
metaphor, like that, which gives you mechanical properties; analogy, when we
say that a brain is like a computer, which can be very misleading in a variety
of ways on which both he and I would agree; and strict homology, when we say
that a process is evolutionarily developed and depends on mechanisms that are
identical in our reptilian ancestors and ourselves. The mistake that
evolutionary psychology makes in this reverse engineering discussion is
constantly to mistake metaphor and analogy for homology, and draw what I regard
as both horrendous scientific and horrendous political conclusions from it.” (The Two Steves (Part
I))
Later in this debate
Rose returns to this idea of metaphor; this time arguing that Pinker’s ideas
are conditioned by the dominant economic theories of the time:
“Steve
has provided a neat cost benefit analysis of the merits of love, and it's
precisely the point that I was making before about metaphors which he was so
uneasy about. Here's a metaphor and a mode of thinking that he's taken over
lock stock and barrel from a particular set of economic theories, and applied
with enormous energy and ingenuity by evolutionary psychology. I happen to
think it's a very impoverished way of trying to describe much more complex
phenomena.”
[vii] And which may account for a certain dogmatism. Simon
Conway Morris writing about the attitudes and intellectual practices of the
ultra-Darwinists notes their:
“…almost
unbelievable self-assurance, their breezy self-confidence.”
To
support this opinion he quotes Philip Kitcher’s review of Matt Ridley’s Genome:
“Ridley
obviously has a fine time sharing his delight [of the genome]. Indeed, perhaps he has too good a
time. For the booming voice of
conviction that sounds through the chapters, from the initial discussion of the
origins of life to the philosophically limp conclusions about free will, is
utterly certain about everything.
Like the village squire to the Victorian parson with “doubts”, Ridley
prescribes fresh air and exercise.
He seems quite unworried by the thought that some of the scientific
claims he reports might be controversial or even unfounded, and even less
disconcerted by the possibility that… scientific truths might lead to social
harm.”
Interestingly
he echoes Steven Rose’s point in his discussion with Pinker:
“…a
sophistry and sleight of hand in the misuse of metaphor, and more importantly a
distortion of metaphysics in support of an evolutionary programme. Consider how ultra-Darwinists, having
erected a naturalistic system that cannot by itself possess any ultimate
purpose, still allow a sense of meaning mysteriously to slip back in.” (Life’s
Solution; Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe)
He
goes on to write about the religious aspect of their thinking, and their
simplistic and poor grasp of religious thought – they tend to attack
caricatures. The two are almost
certainly linked.
[ix] Of course someone may appear dead, and the causes that
brought him to life may be unknown – no miracle, but a limit to our
understanding. Gaskin’s inability
to see the difference between a freak of nature and a miracle is curious, to
say the least. For Hume, I would
imagine, a miracle is a freak of nature: the Christians have mistaken the
cause, and given it a supernatural explanation.
[xi] Of course I simplify. Both Locke and Hume recognised, and were quite explicit
about, how the mind operated on the sense data it received. Dropout Boogie has an analysis of Locke’s position. Found You! of Hume’s.
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