The Road to Postmodern Hell

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, seems to state the postmodernist position plainly.

It is impossible, he says, to imagine what we have not experienced.

“We – generally speaking -- cannot imagine what we haven’t experienced, even indirectly.”

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?

Or, in a human context, can a dweller of the steamy Amazon imagine life in the frozen Arctic? Or vice versa?”

Then he goes further:

“Of course, arguments based on reason and logic don’t prove anything either. If they could, science and philosophy would both have ground to a standstill centuries ago.”

The postmodern position is usually given as: “there is no truth.”

Xerxes is stating it etymologically: “we cannot know truth.”

Either way, the claim is self-refuting. If there is no truth, then the claim “there is no truth” also cannot be true. Or, if we cannot know truth, we cannot know that it is true that we cannot know truth.

There are actually many truths that we can know, and irrefutably. We know our own thoughts and perceptions. Descartes was able not only to prove that “I think, therefore I am,” but that he was unquestionably thinking all the thoughts that he was thinking. That gives us a mental universe to work with. 

Cartesian dualism.

Descartes took as model the truths of mathematics. All of math is proofs; all of math is proven. Yet mathematics has not ground to a halt as a result, as Xerxes suggests should happen. We cannot seriously or legitimately doubt that 2 + 2 = 4, nor the Pythagorean theorem.

Science is a bit more complicated. It is true that science can’t prove anything, and does not claim to. But it can disprove things. You propose a theory: say, that disease is spread by perfume smells. Then you devise an experiment to test the theory. If the experiment is well-designed, it can then positively disprove the thesis. This is what Popper calls “falsifiability.” It is the entire business of science.

This gives us real and certain knowledge, of a negative sort. Disproving, by the way, the common claim that “you cannot prove a negative.”

Over time, as a result, the probability of our positive knowledge increases parabolically as well. You can quibble that things like the law of inertia or gravity are not proven, but for all practical purposes, so what? That is as meaningful as insisting that because a cup is not full if it is not filled precisely to the brim, all cups are empty. This is simply an issue of living in a real rather than an ideal world.

On to philosophy. Philosophy can disprove things yet more efficiently than can science—by showing a claim is internally inconsistent, logically fallacious, or self-contradictory. Like the claim that “there is no truth.” It can also efficiently prove things positively: this is what a syllogism does. It is a formal proof.

I have certainly heard it argued that philosophy has in the end proven nothing. It has been argued often by philosophers themselves: Hume, or Nietzsche, or Hobbes. 

To Hume it may concern...

Whenever philosophers do this, however, they are immediately self-contradictory, in just the same way as is postmodernism saying “we cannot know truth.” Were this true, their own writings are of no more value than random grunts. It is easy to refute them.

Having studied philosophies both East and West, it seems clear to me that there are certain inevitable philosophical conclusions, that have emerged clearly and independently in Europe, India, and China. It seems that everyone who is intelligent enough and who makes the effort to think the matter through will arrive at the same set of conclusions about life, the universe, and everything. These are matters of certain knowledge.

One of the great benefits of cross-cultural studies is that it helps throw these basic universal truths into relief.

Among them are the categorical imperative, the foundation of morality: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The purpose of life being the quest for the moral good, for truth, and for beauty. The intrinsic desirability of these qualities. The truth that the soul is beyond its own comprehension. The necessary existence of a divine intelligence. That justice undergirds the cosmos and will not ultimately be denied. And so on.

Xerxes is also wrong to suppose we are unable to empathize with what we have not experienced. This error is surely behind all the current talk of “cultural appropriation” being illegitimate. And the common assertion that “white people cannot possibly imagine what it is really like being black”; or “men cannot possibly imagine what it is like being a woman.”

These claims are, of course, also automatically self-contradictory. For if a white man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being black, it must be equally true that a black man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being white, and so he cannot possibly imagine what a white man can or cannot possibly imagine. And so with the sexes.

Silly wabbit.

But this kind of thinking leads to nasty racist notions too: that other humans are forever alien to us.

If it were true; but of course it is not true. Of course, we all can imagine. This is what imagination means.

I only the other day heard a fascinating scientific datum. For years, scientists here and there have been working with chimps and gorillas, teaching them sign language. We used to think that language was what divided us from the animals. It turns out this is not so: other higher primates can learn to talk. So can some birds, and maybe dolphins.

Yet in the years this has been done, in the years this has been studied, apparently no ape has yet ever asked a question.

It may be, then, that the imagination is what makes us immortal souls: we are able to think of what is not, and so can ask why.

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?”

No; but that question is missing something, isn’t it? They cannot, because they are not human. But a human certainly can imagine being a butterfly, or an eagle.

If we were indeed unable to imagine experiences we did not personally have, we could have no interest in reading fiction, or watching movies, or listening to stories. And yet they enthrall us. While engaged with them, we all can, and do, to a greater or lesser degree, but often to a very great degree, fully imagine being someone else. Perhaps animals cannot.

Given that it is close to being self-evidently wrong, why is this idea that there is no truth, or that we cannot know any truth, so popular and persistent?

I think because it seems empowering, liberating. If there is no truth, and no right or wrong, we get to do whatever we want. We become as gods. This is pretty obvious, for example, in Nietzsche. He says as much. 

Nietzsche gone mad.

But this makes life only and all about the lunge for power. It makes it bestial. It looks to me as though all these philosophers who pushed the “no truth” gambit led totalitarian places politically. And that is no mistake. Nietzsche was the philosophical underpinning for the Nazis. Many are eager to insist that he was not himself a Nazi, but that is not the point. Perhaps he had not yet thought it through. He was too preoccupied going mad. Which is itself not a good sign. Hobbes argued for the absolute right of kings over the populace, whose only option if they did not like their government was suicide. Hume looks harmless enough, but I think the argument can be made that he bred Rousseau, and Rousseau’s pulling up the tent peg of reality and morality led to the totalitarian aspects of the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror and Bonaparte. Edmund Burke thought so. 

Hobbes' goblin.

And that is the path down which we, or at least those on the left, currently trundle, pushing or in our handcarts.

Fast Notes on a Few Philosophers

Confucius

Confucius is probably the most influential philosopher who ever lived. But he did not really leave us a philosophy. Rather than carefully reasoned argument, he left aphorisms, short pieces of advice on how to live, without explanation or justification.

How can this have been so influential? Why should we take Confucius’s word for it?

This, I think, is because rather than appealing to reason, he appealed to conscience. Given a conscience, if the moral right is simply demonstrated or pointed out, it is undeniable. Resorting to reason, by contrast, might just rationalize wrong. This illustrates Confucius’s most important point: that people are best governed by example, not by laws. If the ruler is visibly virtuous, the people will be virtuous. If the ruler is visibly dishonest, the people will not care about virtue.

A moral and social philosopher, Confucius analysed all human relationships as of five types: parent-child, sibling-sibling, husband-wife, friend-friend, ruler-subject. Each implied specific obligations, and if everyone followed their proper role, society would always function well. Some object that this implied a rigidly hierarchical society, always with superiors and inferiors. This is wrong: it is like the game of rock-paper-scissors. If you must play the subordinate in relationship A, you are going to be the superior in some other relationship.

It worked very well for China and East Asia for thousands of years. If there is a problem here, however, it is that the reliance on direct appeals to conscience instead of general principles can leave gaps. For example, since a foreigner or a stranger does not obviously fit into one of the five relationships, he or she can become a ghost, of no account. Consider the story of the Good Samaritan for comparison. If violence or injustice is done outside your sight, similarly, it may be felt to be less troublesome.

There is this example from Confucius’s follower Mencius:

The King was sitting up on the pavilion. There was an ox being led past the pavilion. The King saw it and said, "Where is the ox going?" Someone responded, "We are about to consecrate a bell [with its blood]." The King said, "Spare it. I cannot bear its frightened appearance, like an innocent going to the execution ground." Someone responded, "So should we abandon the consecrating of the bell?" [The King] said, "How can that be abandoned? Exchange [the ox] for a sheep."

Mencius commends the king for doing right, and says “This is just the way benevolence works.[4] You saw the ox but had not seen the sheep.”

To my mind, however, this is unjust. One ought to care as much for those one does not see. This is why codes of law like the Ten Commandments are, in the end, useful. Even though St. Augustine says, in the spirit of Confucius, “Love, and do what you will.”

Descartes

Descartes set out to doubt everything he could doubt, and came up with one certainty: “I think—even if I doubt—therefore I am.” He could not doubt that he was doubting. So the self exists, “I,” if nothing else. He goes on, then, to point out that at least some of the thoughts do not come from him, nor did he create himself, and so at a minimum God too exists. The existence of God, in turn, is a warrant that anything we perceive clearly and distinctly is likely to be real and true. A good God would not deceive us.

Ironically, Buddhism is based on what seems to be the opposite premise: its core doctrine is anatman, “There is no self.” Does this disprove Descartes? I don’t think so. Both assertions, I think, can be true. We cannot doubt the existence of the perceiving subject, but the point Buddhism is making is that this subject, this “I,” has no content. Or if it does, we cannot know what it is. We cannot perceive it directly--”I” cannot be both subject and object. A mirror cannot reflect itself. We do not really know what it is, we cannot say anything about it.

The second common criticism of Descartes is for “Cartesian dualism.” He posits two distinct realms of existence, the mental or spiritual and the physical. Many have argued that it seems logically impossible for two separate realms like this to have any influence on one another. Like parallel lines, they should never meet. How does that physical cat out there somehow get into our mind? How does our thought make our arm rise up? I do not really see any problem here, however. On the analogy of hardware and software, it seems perfectly reasonable: they are two separate realms, in just the same way, but they do interact. The other solution is more radical: why assume there is a physical world? Maybe everything is spirit!

Rousseau

Rousseau is best known as a social philosopher, although he said important things about education as well. I think his basic premise can be stated in this way:

God exists. God is perfectly good. God created all things. Therefore, all things must have been created perfectly good. “Nature” is a model of perfect goodness. All evil in the world must come from change over time to the original, natural pattern God set. All change from what is original and natural is a falling away.

I see an immediate problem here. It means anything men try to do is a bad thing. Rousseau believes that all art and all science is in error, is a result of human “pride,” like the Tower of Babel. Do we presume we can do better than God?

I think that the Biblical advice “by their fruits ye shall know them” disproves Rousseau in practical terms. To follow his philosophy, nobody would ever try to make the world better. Everyone would just do what they first wanted to do, because that is what is “natural” to them: sex, drugs, stealing, laying about, and so forth. As a result, trying to put Rousseau’s ideas into practice, as in the French Revolution, seems to have always ended badly.

The response to Rousseau, I think, is the idea of original sin; his philosophy is sensible only because he rejects original sin. If there was indeed an original sin, human nature cannot be assumed to be spontaneously good; nor can nature be trusted as a model of the way things ought to be. Both, as we know them now, are in a fallen state.

I think Rousseau’s assumptions also do not work well on his own initial premise, that God is supremely good. If God is supremely good, would he have created a world that must inevitably decay over time? Would he have created man with nothing useful to do? By contrast, the idea that God created an essentially good world, with free will, which is also good, but original sin caused it to fall, leaves the possibility of a process leading to a more perfect world. Therefore, this is the world God would have created.