I first heard the phrase “causal closure” from online discussions, where I gathered it involved the standard model of physics, energy conservation laws, neurons firing in a brain, and an omniscient demon capable of predicting everything there is to know from “fundamental physics”, whatever that is. To me that’s like saying, “Everything there is to know about the Mona Lisa can be discovered just by doing a chemical analysis of its paint.” It seems like something would be missing, though. Something like…the Mona Lisa. As pointed out in a recent post:

“…the question of whether the laws of physics are deterministic has no bearing on the question of whether the universe as a whole is deterministic, and hence no bearing on the question of whether or not we have free will.”

Exactly. Physics isn’t the study of everything, so it can’t tell us everything there is to know. Why isn’t this just obvious to everyone, though? Well, maybe I should try putting on my physicalist hat. Hang on, it’ll take me a minute to dig it out of the basement of my soul…

Okay I’m back. A physicalist might say: “Physics, by dealing with the fundamental constituents of reality, gives us a predictable, unified picture of what’s out there. If you have everything you need to build a car, you can build a car. If you have all the universe parts, you have a universe, at least in principle. Nothing more is needed.” And so we have causal completeness:

When you trace the causal history of any physical effect—that is, of anything physical that has a cause—you will never need to appeal to anything non-physical.

If after putting the universe together we found some extra screws lying around, I can see why that wouldn’t be too good. But does physics have all the universe parts (in principle)—and if so, does that mean the special sciences are just extra screws lying around? More importantly, do the purely physical parts add up to complete knowledge of the universe?

From here on out I’ll just assume causal closure pertains to fundamental physics, since that seems to be what most people mean.

The causal closure argument

Some try to use causal closure as an argument against all non-physicalist positions. I would advise against it. Here’s a distillation: “If the nonphysical can be causally efficacious, then there should be physical effects that can’t be explained by physics, some violation of physical laws or energy conservation. Since science observes no such violations, the nonphysical must be epiphenomenal (and so might as well not exist).”

This seems to assume the nonphysical must show up supernaturally to disrupt a purely physical chain of events. Leaving aside the fact that I reject causal closure, it’s hard to see how miraculous or supernatural phenomena, if such were to exist, could possibly show up in mathematical equations or physical laws. What if Kant was right that our experience of the objective world must be causally law abiding? Or to put it in a less subjective way, what if being causally law abiding lies at the very heart of what it means for something to belong to objective reality? I find this plausible. If this is the case and if nonphysical means “not law abiding”, then by definition the nonphysical could never enter into a unified, objective world, and so science would never detect it.1

But if we take “nonphysical” to mean immaterial, not spatially located, then science has already detected the nonphysical. Once upon a time materialists considered immaterial entities to be either ideas in our heads or supernatural, but now much of what is considered physical is immaterial. Gravity, forces, fields, photons2—these intangibles, which once seemed pretty spooky, are now longstanding members of Club Physics. Science has no problem with the immaterial interacting with the material—why is there so little fanfare over this? No longer having to worry about incompatible substances might’ve given philosophers license to return to interaction dualism, one would think, but the majority continue to find the position repugnant. Why?

Because causal closure.

Today’s philosophers are by and large impressively scientifically informed, but they have yet to let go of 17th century mechanistic causation. The analytic philosophy of mind mainstream has so thoroughly internalized the belief that being scientific means eliminating teleological explanations, along with formal and final causes, that efficient “dominoes falling in a line” causation is the only kind they think of. But the reduction to efficient causation depended on a materialistic conception of nature which no longer applies.

What sort of causation is scientific?

This narrow conception of causation is so pervasive in philosophy of mind, even the “anti-physicalist” is expected to swallow causal closure like a champ, never mind that it’s intended to be an argument in favor of physicalism. Rejecting closure gets a rather breezy dismissal from the SEP page on physicalism:

“A more searching response is to reject the very idea of causal closure on the grounds, perhaps, that (as Bertrand Russell (1917) famously argued) causation plays no role in a mature portrayal of the world. Once again, however, the promise of this response is more imagined than real. While it is true that many sciences do not explicitly use the notion of causation, it is extremely unlikely that they do not imply that various causal claims are true.”

But wait a minute. Physicist Sean Carroll has argued that at the level of fundamental physics, there are no causes and effects, only events conforming to time-symmetric laws. If the direction of time doesn’t matter for the laws of physics, then efficient causation simply has no bearing on fundamental reality.

Supernatural phenomena DO NOT break the laws of physics!

He also thinks the laws don’t govern the way events unfold; we invented the laws to describe nature, but they don’t hold with necessity. This suggests there’s no causal glue, not even necessary laws, linking events from one moment to the next, and so no causal closure being described by science at the level of fundamental physics. If he’s right that physics doesn’t deal with causes, it wouldn’t be “extremely unlikely” that physics doesn’t imply anything about causality. (And yet, inexplicably, Carroll himself frequently deploys the causal closure argument against anti-physicalists.)

Maybe Carroll’s wrong. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t speak to the issue of whether physics deals with causes. But I can say causal closure is a metaphysical thesis, not a scientific one. No science experiment could establish causal closure. Scientists might use closure as a methodological assumption, but it’s an assumption, not an independently established truth.

But is causal closure worth believing in? I don’t think so. I don’t think functionalists should either.

Can functionalism function in a causally closed physics?

It’s clear why non-physicalists would reject causal closure, but closure creates serious problems for certain physicalists as well; in particular, non-reductive physicalists and functionalists.

The core of functionalism is multiple realizability, the idea that it’s the functional role that matters, not necessarily what something is made of. A mind processes information whether it’s implemented in neurons or silicon. A mousetrap’s function is catching mice; it doesn’t matter whether the trap is made out of gold or steel, so long as it works. The functional role is supposed to be both real and causal.

This simplified version of Jaegwon Kim’s popular exclusion argument explains the problem:

Causal closure: Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause.

Exclusion: A single physical event cannot have more than one complete, sufficient cause at the same time.3

Conclusion: Nonphysical events can only cause physical events if nonphysical events are themselves physical.

Sufficient causation is efficient causation, it seems to me, given the importance of time. Functionalists will want to avoid both:

epiphenomenalism: the mental is completely dependent for its existence on the physical, but doesn’t influence the physical

AND

overdetermination: a violation of “exclusion” (see above), where a single physical event has more than one sufficient cause at the same time.4

Given the exclusion argument, the possibilities for functionalists aren’t exactly endless. One option is to identify functions straightforwardly with their physical components, the way water just is H2O. But then multiple realizability collapses and it’s not clear what the functions, qua functions, are doing. If we say wetness is H20, wetness can’t be realized in H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide)…but surely other substances besides water can be wet.

Kim’s solution is to reduce the higher levels to fundamental physics. He supports local reductionism where you get a different reduction for every particular, and maybe even for every moment in time for the same particular. But again, this leaves me wondering what it is that’s being multiply realized.

Another solution is the causal inheritance principle: mental properties “borrow” or “inherit” their causal powers from the physical states that realize them.

“On some versions of the inheritance solution, what the higher-level mental property derives from its physical realizer is some weaker or “lower-grade” form of causal relevance…Now in general we don’t think that wholes causally compete with, or are excluded by, their parts. When Gus steps on Lilian’s toe, his foot’s causing Lilian discomfort doesn’t exclude Gus’s causing her discomfort. Both Gus and his foot coexist as causes, without competition and, we might add, without overdetermination….An advantage of such a view is that it accords a derived form of relevance to mental properties, but in a way that respects both the priority of physical causation embodied in Completeness as well as the principle of No Overdetermination.”5

If the function “inherits” causal powers from the level of fundamental physics, maybe this is like saying wetness “inherits” the powers of H2O. We no longer need to say wetness is H2O; H2O2 can be wet too.

But it seems to me if Gus’ toe is the kind of thing that can be explained by fundamental physics while the rest of him isn’t, his toe does all the work. If not, not. Stipulating a whole-part relationship doesn’t change the causal situation by making it sound weird.

If we have a golden mousetrap and a steel mousetrap, then what carries the causal load has nothing to do with the function of catching mice and everything to do with what the mousetraps are made of.6 If reduction is to be taken seriously, functions—and multiple realizability—can only be poetry.7 If you take causal efficacy to be what makes something real, you should be suspicious of what reductionism implies. If physical causation is always sufficient, why do functions have to reduce rather than simply disappear?

Philosophers have tried various escapes, but I'm not convinced they work. Austere physicalist, Liam Graham, gives us a clearer picture of what causal closure entails:

“Reductionism preserves the reality of high-level features. It seems to let you keep your intuitions about the reality of the things that compose your world. There’s an immediate problem with this. The most convincing definition of reality is having causal power. Yet if you are a reductionist, you accept physical causal closure. If higher levels have no causal power, they cannot be real. We are back to eliminativism.”

“A reductionist cannot avoid being an eliminativist. You can’t stop everything slipping down to the lowest level. You can’t avoid seeing that only the lowest level is real. This means that the only possible physicalism is an austere physicalism. It is either that or a belief in the supernatural…Everything is fully described by fundamental physics or whatever future theory may supersede it… Other ways of describing the world are artefacts of our cognitive limitations. This includes the special sciences, commonsense models of the world, ordinary objects, ourselves and other creatures. They may be useful approximations. They may be unavoidable given our cognitive structure. But they are illusions in the sense they have no causal power.”8

On Boltzmanns Brain blog, he says:

“Life emerging from lifeless stuff already has a whiff of magic. I’d tell this story firstly by pointing out that “life” is an arbitrary conceptual distinction which only exists in the minds of humans.”

I have to admire Liam Graham for his courage. I almost kind of like austere physicalism for its brutal boldness. I find myself drawn to it in the same way I’m drawn to a photo negative. But in the end, I think values are real, not mere shadows in my mind.

But it’s not just “mental properties” that closure collapses. If nothing can do anything outside of fundamental physics and doing stuff is what makes something real, there’s no room for functional roles. If you want functions to actually play a causal role, I think you’ll have to reject causal closure—or weaken or expand closure to the point that it’s not doing much of anything. It seems worth asking whether the thesis is doing functionalism any favors.

What’s causal closure trying to do?

Here’s what I think proponents of the closure thesis want it to mean.

To say we never need to appeal to the non-physical is to say of Socrates’s death that it’s sufficiently explained by his drinking hemlock poison. We don’t need to hear about Socrates’ reasons for deciding to stay in prison rather than escaping when he had the chance. We don’t need to consider what would have been the case had Socrates decided to escape.

“When a counterfactual is true, there should be something in the world that makes it true…the worry is that once we look at the truthmakers in the mental case, the threat of epiphenomenalism crops up again. Although the effect counterfactually depends on the mental property, this is only because the mental property depends on a physical property doing the real work. The mental property looks like a freeloader.” 2

I’ll repeat the above in ordinary language: Reasons are just ideas in our heads, not things out in the world doing real causal work. Reasons, ideas, values, beliefs, all of these are freeloaders.

If so, then what about math? The laws of physics? Are they freeloaders too? The laws aren’t physical objects pushing things around…so they must be freeloading ‘mental properties’ too. But if they’re not real and causal, then what could physics explain except the insides of our minds?

Functions are Forms

Recently and I nearly broke the Substack comments feature while discussing these topics. I found it interesting that he openly endorses mathematical Platonism, since I hardly ever hear of it. I suppose people don’t like that dirty word—Plato. God forbid.

The funny thing is, for Plato, mathematical entities were most definitely causally efficacious. Whereas mathematical Platonism sees ideas as causally impotent, even if they’re not solely in the human mind. If what makes something real is having causal power, I think something like Plato’s more robust formal causation will be necessary to bring organization, structure, patterns, and certainly information,9 back to life.

Heisenberg, in a remarkable essay on Plato and modern physics, argued that the revolution of 20th century physics, which awakened to fields, forces, and quantum states, actually brought science closer to Platonic formalism than to Democritean materialism.

“For Plato, in contrast to Democritus, the smallest particles were not unchangeable or indestructible; they could be reduced to triangles, and out of triangles built up again. The triangles themselves would no longer be matter, for they would have no spatial extension. Thus, at the end of this series of material concepts we encounter something which is no longer material but simply a mathematical form—or, if you prefer, an intellectual construction. The ultimate root concept capable of rendering the world intelligible was for Plato the mathematical pattern, the picture, the idea.”

I have to wonder whether the Timaeus, with its purely mathematical vision of physical reality bottoming out in an almost unthinkable matrix of “errant” causation, influenced Heisenberg’s scientific thinking.

The standard story is that modern science rejected teleology, that it swept away Aristotle's formal and final causes in favor of clean, mechanistic efficient causation. But I think it’s better to say science presupposes teleology, otherwise it wouldn’t get off the ground. Evolutionary biology is incomprehensible without some notion of survival as the end game of natural selection. Medicine literally couldn't function—diagnose diseases or direct treatment—without health as its target, without understanding of how organs function relative to the whole organism. The cardiologist knows not only how the heart pumps blood, but what pumping blood is for, and that the patient's flourishing is the context that makes the heart’s work intelligible. Purpose, function, ideas—these are keeping everything running like mechanistic clockwork. Causal closure, stated carefully, may be methodologically useful, even true in a narrow domain. But as a complete picture of reality, and as an argument against any form of non-physicalism, it reaches too far.

We rejected purposes in nature only when we thought they might lead to supernatural religious implications, but teleology need not be supernatural. We think purposes are clouds inside our heads, but they have a way of putting on funny disguises and escaping into the world. Anyway, we’d sure as hell miss them if they were gone. That’s causal power if you ask me.

Functionalism seeks a general structure or Real Pattern under which various physical instantiations can be united, but it remains under the thumb of a restrictive causal structure imposed on it by bizarre notions of what makes physicalism physicalism, notions that reflect outdated materialism. Functionalists who are looking for functioning functions might consider opening their minds to the more realistic causal realities that science supposedly left behind. Plato called these forms.10

And of course there’s always Aristotle. You’ll have to talk to about that.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Am I missing something? What do you think about causal closure? Are you a functionalist with a non-word-salad solution to the exclusion problem? Leave a comment!

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Further Reading

• Heisenberg, FROM PLATO TO MAX PLANCK ←READ THIS.

• .Hilary Putnam and the mind of Aristotle

• An interesting Aristotelian:

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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HESIOD’S (c. 750 BC) Theogony is a muthos (myth) that recounts the genealogy of the gods and the beginning of the world, but nobody cares about gods begatting each other so I’ll skip that part.

A primordial Chaos (some random abyss) gives birth to Earth, Tartarus (the region below), and Eros (also the region below). From the random abyss of Chaos comes the ordered world of our ordinary experience, which we can now measure and predict with science. But since Hesiod lived back in the day when people didn’t know very much, he thought the world was run by petty gods who didn’t care about us except when we gave them bones and scraps of meat, the stuff we normally throw out after dinner. They liked the smell or something, the gods did.

THALES of Miletus (c. 624 BC) rejected muthos in favor of logos—this is how those who don’t “get” poetry came to be known as “philosophers”. For Thales, the archē (origin) couldn’t be an abyss. How can everything come from an abyss? Isn’t that like everything coming from nothing? Everything had to come from…everything. What was everything, deep down?

Water. Even things that aren’t water are water. You, your computer, the Sahara desert—all of it, he thought, was really just water.

One day he jumped into a well so he could splash around in Being Itself. No, he did not fall into the well while looking up at the stars! Anyway, so what if he did? He got the last laugh by buying up all the olive presses dirt cheap and renting them out during the olive harvest. He made every one of those yahoos who’d laughed at him pay through the nose.

His belief that all our knowledge comes from seeing and touching things like water is called “empiricism”. This kicked off the long verbal dispute known today as “Western philosophy”.

ANAXIMANDER (c. 610 BC) didn’t think the first principle could be water. Water is too definite. Being had to be indefinite. So he called Being “The Indefinite”. Because he believed knowledge comes from imaginary ideas, we call him a “rationalist”. He said, “The indefinite is that from which beings come to be, and into which they come to perish according to necessity. For they pay a penalty and reparation to each other for their injustice and according to the order of time.”

In other words, you have to pay a penalty for being alive for any length of time. That punishment is the death sentence, which dissolves you in the indefinite soup of Being.

ANAXIMENES (c. 586 BC, empiricist) thought “The Indefinite” just seemed too…poetic. He wanted his archē to be something substantial. Something tangible, touchable. Air seemed to fit the bill.

XENOPHANES (c. 570 BC, rationalist) criticized the Greek gods for being too much like us. God, he thought, must have telekinetic powers. “But without labor he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.” But God’s powers were limited, since he couldn’t move himself just by thinking about it. “Always in the same place (God) remains, moving not at all.”

Later on, Aristotle changed God’s name to “The Unmoved Mover” to disguise the fact that he stole Xenophanes’ ideas.

PYTHAGORAS (c. 570 BC, rationalist) never wrote anything, preferring instead to let his followers do that for him. They said he said “All is number” and called the first principle “The One”. But for some reason he didn’t think “one” was a number. So he believed the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, but his went: “In the beginning there was two, three, four…”

The Pythagoreans were a mystery cult. They banned the eating of beings, including reincarnated beings like beans. And if you spilled the beans about irrational numbers, the math mafia would drown you at sea.

Subsequent philosophers wondered: How can Being be reconciled with Becoming if Being always is, and Becoming is always waiting to be Being?

HERACLITUS (c. 535 BC, empiricist) eliminated Being, so Nietzsche liked him. Heraclitus believed everything is always disappearing super fast. The reason you don’t notice anything amiss is because every time something pops out of existence, at that very moment an almost-identical thing pops into existence to take its place. That’s why he said, “Into the same river it is not possible to step twice.”

PARMENIDES (c. 515 BC, rationalist) argued that Being must be eternal, changeless, and one. Nietzsche didn’t like him at all, which is why thinking about Being fell out of favor and remains unpopular today. With the notable exception of the 42nd President of the United States, hardly anyone asks what the meaning of the word “is” is anymore.

For Parmenides, Being is an unimaginable idea in your mind, and only It is real; everything you see and touch is an illusion. Not because things like rivers are always popping in and out of existence, as Heraclitus had claimed, but because time itself is always popping in and out of existence.

He also said Nonbeing doesn’t exist, not even as an unimaginable idea in your mind. That’s because you can’t say “Nonbeing exists” without contradicting yourself. He was pretty serious about following the law of non-contradiction, even though, strictly speaking, the law of non-contradiction doesn’t really exist. Only Being exists!

Now come the Materialists who try to correct Heraclitus and Parmenides by mixing up Being and NonBeing (even though it doesn’t exist).

ANAXAGORAS (c. 500 BC, materialist pretending to be a rationalist) said, “The Greeks incorrectly believe that there is coming to be and perishing, for nothing comes to be, nor does it perish, but from things that are they are mixed together and are separated apart. Thus it would be correct to call coming to be “being mixed together”, and perishing “being separated apart”. When Socrates heard this he was like, “I thought you said you were gonna tell me how everything’s caused by Mind!”

DEMOCRITUS (c. 460 BC, materialist-atomist) thought Being was made up of uncuttable stuff too small to see called “atoms”. To believe in atoms, you must throw all your doxa, the Greek word for “folk psychology”, out the window. Basically he was an eliminative materialist, or someone who thinks the mind isn’t real because “its power of producing movement is due to the smallness of its parts.” He thought atoms move through a void, and that’s all anything really is. As for ethics, he was a hedonist, meaning you should just do whatever you want. But then he said you should pursue the intellectual life, so he contradicted himself.

EMPEDOCLES (c. 494, evolutionist) divided Being into earth, air, water, and fire, which combine randomly to form “many neckless faces” and “arms wandering naked, bereft of shoulders” and “eyes roaming alone, in need of foreheads”, which combine randomly to make up…us! Well, eventually. First evolution had to make a lot of useless creatures “partly from men and partly from women, fitted with shadowy genitals” or with ‘faces and chests of both sides”.

Empedocles was way ahead of his time in figuring out how natural selection kills off “man-faced ox-progeny” so we don’t have to look at them.

OTHER NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS: There were others, but most were just students stealing their teacher’s ideas. I left Zeno off for being too paradoxical.

The End of Natural Philosophy!

SOCRATES (c. 470 BC, The Gadfly) was jealous of his predecessors. He wanted to be a famous philosopher so bad, but writing didn’t come naturally to him. What little he managed to come up with just sounded so…contrived. Most of the time he found himself staring blankly into an empty sandbox.

One day he said enough is enough. He kicked off his overpriced Birkenstocks, slapped some dirt on his toga, and went over to the agora to do the “dialectic” with passersby. Day after day he used his new arguing method to get the hardworking citizens of Athens to fork over their pocket change as quickly as possible. Over the years he made quite a lot of money, but rather than using it to buy boring necessities for his wife and children, he spent every last obol on papyrus scrolls, as many as he could get his hands on.

At first he scratched out everyone’s names and replaced them with his own (unless all they said was “yes, certainly” or “no, of course not”), but when that proved too cumbersome he decided to tear these works into itty bitty pieces, which he then tossed into the wind thinking that was that.

Some of the scraps got picked up by scholars and are what we today call “Pre-Socratic fragments”. Some flew into the Mediterranean Sea, never to be heard from again. But those that survived longed to be reunited with each other. After many years of blindly flapping about Athens, they slowly came together, scrap by scrap, and after many, many years of gluing themselves together into various meaningless configurations they eventually formed what we now call Plato’s Republic, Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Timaeus…

“Plato” is just what scholars agreed to put in the place where the author’s name usually goes.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Did Tina have too much fun on Canva?

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Once I outgrew the hunt for plastic eggs with candy inside and man-in-the-bunny-suit photo ops, I never thought much about this holiday. Hardly surprising for a non-Christian.

But that changed in 2015, when on Easter day my recently-adopted Geordie Bear was bitten by a rattlesnake, died in my arms, and was brought back to life by the fine staff at the 24-hour animal hospital we ran several red lights to get to. From then on Easter came to symbolize the death and the miraculous resurrection not of Jesus, but of my own little honey bear. But since his passing in March of last year, now I’m not sure how I feel about this day. A part of me wants to go back to not thinking of it at all.

Last night I happened to glance at my friend’s book sitting on the dresser. What caught my eye was the resigned bunny on the cover. Yup. That’s about the size of it.

I flipped it open and found myself caught up in it again, the very book I was reading this time last year, soon after Geordie’s passing. I realized today would be a perfect time to share some excerpts about the more prominent role animals once played in our spiritual understanding. As Ptolemy puts it:

“The great majority of the rites and rituals of primitive societies—both those we intuitively understand and those that seem completely incomprehensible and even abhorrent to us—are all designed to address in one way or another the basic intuition that both people and animals are spirits living momentarily in a world of flesh and blood and bone: a dog-eat-dog world where, in order to keep existing, one creature must seek out and prey upon another…”

That state of affairs isn’t altogether obvious to us anymore. It’s not just that most of us don’t have to kill the food we eat, it’s that we don’t even think about worrying about being eaten ourselves. We’re so far up the food chain we’ve lost touch with the ceaseless murder that lies at the heart of things here on earth, and with that loss comes a loss of affinity with our fellow creatures. We try not to think of what fills our bellies, and we’re largely successful at this. If we do have to think of them as them, they can’t be anything like us. Just one more “furry robot” on the conveyor belt moving through the assembly line. By the time we get our grocery store hamburger and bacon, shrink-wrapped in tidy, nondescript portions, their names have changed to protect our innocence. We wouldn’t want it any other way. Even Nazis had to come up with ingenious ways to shield their eyes.

Now, this isn’t an argument for vegetarianism or anything like that. Our environmental and animal activism turns out to be an even more sophisticated expression of our dominion over other creatures, one that doesn’t diminish, but instead underscores, our failure to participate in nature. Again, we wouldn’t want it any other way.

Imagine going way back to a time when we had to kill to eat and in doing so could end up in someone else’s belly instead of them in ours. That would certainly change the way we thought about our food. As Ptolemy explains, our primitive ancestors began as scavengers. What would we have to understand about them to move up the totem pole? More than our “love of animals”, surely. If we squint hard enough, even we might recognize what makes their knowledge special, each in their own particular way:

Primitives saw animals in something like the way we see sports teams. Each species of animal not only had its own uniform (the stripes or spots or horns it sported while down here on earth) but its own coach as well: a guardian spirit that was in charge of directing all the individual members of that species while they were alive, and welcoming them back to the spirit world at the time of their deaths. It was in large part because of this guardian spirit that animals were so uncannily sure of how to act. How is a mother sea turtle that is ready to lay her eggs able to find, out of thousands of miles of coastline, the exact beach where she herself was hatched? How does a beaver know how to build a dam, or a swallow how to build a nest in the eave of a barn?

“Instinct,” we answer once again, confidently yet vaguely. Once again, the primitive answered differently. For the world’s first peoples, the everywhere-apparent fact that animals just simply knew things that no one on earth had taught them was the result not just of their still-retained connection to heaven, but more specifically of their contact with the various species spirits, each one of which whispered in the ear of every single ox or caribou or wildebeest under its charge: telling it what to do, making sure it didn’t ever get lost or confused, keeping it ever in touch with the invisible world above.

But the chain of command did not end with the species spirits—the head caribou, bison, wildebeest, and lion that watched the earthly adventures of the animals in their charge like mothers on the edge of a playground. Beyond those species spirits stood yet another figure: one even more ancient and mysterious…

The Original God-Man

The Master of Animals is the oldest, most consistently identifiable spiritual or supernatural figure in human history—much older than the distinctions between East and West we use to couch so much of our discussions of religion today…

I’ve left off many interesting examples here for the sake of blog post brevity.

Perhaps most surprisingly, he is present in the New Testament. When the Gospel of Mark tells us, cryptically, that Jesus was “with the wild beasts” during his forty days in the wilderness, a memory of the Master of Animals stands in the background of this statement. He is also there when we are told that God the Father gave his only begotten son to suffer and die here on earth for the good of humankind. And he is in evidence as well in the notion that once he was dead, this man-god returned to the side of his father in heaven while those below would remember him in a meal in which his flesh and blood were ritually consumed, and through which he would become mystically present to them.

This story of a god sympathetic to the forces of both spirit and nature, a god who dies and yet dies not, began in the furthest reaches of prehistory and originally featured an animal rather than a human hero. In the first, immeasurably ancient, versions of this story, the Master of Animals was a god of animals and hunters both: one who allowed an animal to die at the hands of humans and be eaten by them, provided that those humans atoned for their act by venerating the spirit of the animal—and the Master who sent it—once the animal was gone…

If we live in a sundered world, a world where heaven and earth have fallen into a state of tragic alienation, the Master of Animals is the one figure that can right this situation. He is the living bridge between the two worlds of matter and spirit—the sole figure on heaven or on earth that can make those two regions one once again. And he can do this precisely because he exists neither completely in the world of humans or in the world of animals, but in the space between them: the space that first appeared in the Fall, when human consciousness parted ways with animal consciousness. Through that dual identity, he kept the two worlds one.

Some readers may, at this point, be starting to feel a certain number of reservations: God as an animal-like figure with a tail and horns?1 Am I not, perhaps, confusing God with someone else? But that, of course, is precisely the point. Before God and the Devil divided themselves up into two separate beings, there was only this single, most ancient of religious figures—this animal-man who was neither completely man nor completely animal, yet somehow more than either.

The Master of Animals is so old a figure that he transcends not just the traditional antithesis between the divine and the demonic, but between male and female as well…

The Master and the Mistress of Animals share a large number of features, and it seems very likely that originally the Master of Animals was neither male nor female, but both at once. Before God and the Devil separated, before all the long battles and arguments over matriarchies and patriarchies, before Krishna or Moses or Jesus or Muhammad, there was this sole, singular, and immeasurably consequential figure: a supernatural, animal-like human surrounded by, and at peace with, the human and nonhuman worlds.

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Divine Life of Animals

The Garden of Eden lives right here “alongside” the Garden of Eatin’. That’s how all these animals got here.

Happy Easter! Enjoy your ham. :)

BTW, there are two book covers for Ptolemy’s book. The other looks like the kind of Christian book that I wouldn’t think of buying…not that I don’t like the beautiful dog, but you know…I promise you, the book is not what the cover suggests!

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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Included in the introduction is some content from our email correspondence where I was trying to explain why I thought Plato probably was a mystic…and why I couldn’t prove it…and why my not being able to prove it was part of my reason for my thinking him a mystic…

I interpret the dialogue as a teleological response to two Pre-Socratic philosophers whose views are still alive today: Democritus’ eliminative materialism and Empedocles’ poetic account of evolution with natural selection. (It’s so flipping awesome!)

I couldn’t figure out how to “reblog” the post, but you can read it here. (Or click the image below if that’s more your vibe).

My next post will be an unserious survey of Pre-Socratic philosophy.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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“Heretical Christian” wrote he believes God has limited power on the basis of suffering. I come to that conclusion from a different path, since I think any being must be limited. (I guess that would make me no less a heretic if I were a Christian.) So what is God? A being? Beyond being?

differentiates the “demiurgic god of Deism” from God:

God is not, in any of the great theistic traditions, merely some rational agent, external to the order of the physical universe, who imposes some kind of design upon an otherwise inert and mindless material order. He is not some discrete being somewhere out there, floating in the great beyond, who fashions nature in accordance with rational laws upon which he is dependent.1

But that’s what I think God is. Rather, that would be my most generous interpretation after beating down the first image to come to my mind—a mob boss vaguely resembling a mall Santa who insists we prove our loyalty to him by murdering our own children. The Bible Belt God I grew up with doesn’t follow rational laws—he’s a supernatural power who makes His presence known by breaking nature.

And yet when DBH says, “God is the infinite ‘ocean of being’ while creatures are finite vessels containing existence only in limited measure”2, I recognize that we’re essentially in agreement about what matters, so I don’t want to quibble over semantics. It’s just when I’m looking down at my cosmological plate, I don’t like seeing my first principles touching my divine beings, even if they’re in some sense ultimately mixed together. Besides, keeping things apart makes the Euthyphro dilemma a lot easier to deal with.

So I “cast my vote” for a limited god, though I prefer the original demiurge.

A god of the people

THE WORD ‘DEMIURGE’ comes from the Greek dēmos, meaning people or public, and ergon, meaning work. Originally it just meant craftsman, but in Plato’s Timaeus, the humble artisan gets promoted to a powerful—but not all-powerful—cosmic position.

As a mirror reflection of the first principle, the “ungrudging” demiurge creates the world in his likeness or image.3 This detail might seem a quaint irrelevancy, but in one stroke it establishes the fundamental intelligibility of the universe, all without making a mystery of how we might fail to understand it.

The first principle-demiurge distinction establishes the relation of transcendence within immanence. The first principle is the transcendent whole, and the demiurge represents its “becoming immanent”. Of course, first principles aren’t beings. The ground of being can’t be a being. It’s just that stories unfold in time and tend to be more interesting when they have a protagonist.

Some may wrinkle their noses at the word transcendence. But this transcendence is no more woo than believing nature obeys the laws of physics. The laws of physics aren’t physical objects, nor are they empirically derived, so if they aren’t just in our heads, then where are they? If they exist nowhere, does that make them nothing?

Maybe you’d rather talk about nature’s “habits” or “the Humean mosaic” instead? Fair enough. Still, it’s interesting that when the demiurge whispers in our ears—”Nature obeys the laws, the laws govern nature”—we can’t help but echo his charming words.

Sean Carroll, Can science explain everything? 4

But the demiurge doesn’t just deliver the laws of physics and walk away. He is nature obeying the laws of physics...and much more. If we’re nice, he might stick around to help us solve a conceptual hurdle in philosophy of mind.

A Box of Nature

ONCE UPON A TIME we believed in two kinds of substance: Soul Stuff (thoughts, feelings, agency) and Material Stuff. We abandoned Soul Stuff and set our sights on finding the Atom, because we believed fundamental Matter would give us the god-like power to predict everything.

But we never found Matter—just Not-Stuff. So we replaced Matter with “Efficient Causes” and Not-Stuff with “Fundamental Physics” and placed them in a box we called “Nature” which we declared “causally closed”—nothing gets in or out.5

Meanwhile, in physics our predictions proved astounding, but they lacked precision and consensus the further we moved up the hierarchy of complexity through biology up to the social sciences. No big deal, many thought. Everything reduces to what’s in the box, at least in principle, so science will figure it all out…someday.6

But others thought the box was too small. Agency, desires, moral responsibility, life, minds, not to mention the rational basis on which science rests, all of it was outside the box. How could we put what’s outside the box inside the box without breaking the laws of physics and violating causal closure?7 That would amount to a supernatural intervention!

We wrung Our hands wrung themselves in despair.

Demiurge to the rescue!

THE DEMIURGE SAID: “No need to worry, kids. It’s all good! Check it out, the box you call “Nature” only contains Efficient Causes and Fundamental Physics. Fundamental Physics isn’t really physics, it’s an idealized physics which we have no reason to believe is even possible. Plus, reductionism makes the other sciences seem like they should really just be physics. Not everything has to be physics! And causes aren’t billiard balls knocking about in a closed box—they’re reasons, explanations. We can have many explanations for any event without thereby producing miracles. Physics is a science that systematically excludes minds, agency, purpose, and intention from its models for methodological purposes, only describing mass, charge, spin, fields and such; what it doesn’t take into account couldn’t possibly break its equations. Anyway, physics doesn’t describe ‘nature in-itself’—it describes nature as if mind, agency, and purpose don’t exist. ‘Nature in-itself’ is a metaphysician’s dream, but it has only ever been Mind’s shadow.”

“But if that’s the case,” we asked, “how can we know Nature?”

“Maybe the better question is, how can you not?” the demiurge replied.

Mind in Nature

LIKE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, the first principles in Platonic cosmology transcend the world and so can’t be empirically verified, they can only be “seen” through their effects in the world (remember the sun analogy?) and judged by their explanatory value.

So rather than demonstrate the existence of God, Timaeus hypothesizes on the basis of first principles to explain why the universe is the way it is. No ontological argument required.8 For once, Socrates stops his relentless interrogations and takes a backseat.

Timaeus explains if his speeches prove incoherent or imprecise “we should be well-pleased with them…remembering that I who speak as well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it’s fitting for us to be receptive to the likely story about these things.”9 He’s reminding himself and his audience to be receptive to an eikon muthos. The meaning of this phrase is complicated. I’ll just go with the translator in calling it a likely story.

In this likely story we see three basic principles at work, which aren’t super neat and tidy (nothing is in Plato), but I’ll call them:

• The Good10

• Becoming

• Necessity11

The Good makes love to Necessity, and the result of this ongoing cosmic copulation is Becoming—the universe as we know it, along with its variety of forms.

For God so loved the world he made it eat its own poop.

THE DEMIURGE’S FIRST ACT is not to create a mindless material world, but an Animal, a Cosmic Soul (ψυχὴ κόσμου).12 Anyway, Timaeus speculates the Animal must be spherical, revolve in place, and contain a great variety of lesser animals inside itself. It won’t need sensory organs because the uni-verse must be self-contained (presumably by definition):

“…for the animal was artfully born so as to provide its own waste as food for itself, since he who put it together considered that the animal would be much better if it were self-sufficient than in need of other things.”13

Consider this a colorful way of expressing the conservation of energy, but here “energy” means both power and vitality.

We, however, are far from self-sufficient. We might think ourselves lucky for getting to enjoy In-and-Out Burgers, but our lack of self-sufficiency comes at a price. To explain our creation, which gets handed off to an ambiguous pantheon of lesser gods,14 Timaeus speaks for the demiurge in the first person:

“Gods of gods…you are to go about fashioning and begetting animals by interweaving mortal with immortal; and make them grow by giving them nourishment, and, when they’ve withered away, receive them back again.”15

Over time we weaken from our constant battle to maintain our forms, eventually succumbing to the external environment, whose triangles will one day overpower our own.16 Death isn’t evil, however, but a process of return in which “the whole nature of the body flows backwards by necessity”.17 We live somewhere in the middle of nature’s continuum within the process of the Good descending into its shadowy opposite.18 This means we’re not glued together quite as well as the Cosmic Soul—call it planned obsolescence if you like.

But why do we have to die? Just as our “triangles”19 wear out and continuously get replaced for the sake of maintaining our lives, perhaps our deaths sustain the Animal and enable the widest variety of life forms.

We must remember, nature isn’t outside us, we’re inside it. In the lingo of Michael Levin, we’re the “agential material” of the cosmos. But we have our own agential material which has their own agential material…each echoes of the ultimate form.

We are microcosms in the macrocosmic soul. Each of us has an instinct or intuition of the whole within us. By coming to know ourselves, we can come to know nature. By coming to know nature, we can come to know ourselves. We are physical, constrained by Necessity, but Necessity exists only in relation to the Good.

Cosmopsychism?

IT’S HARD TO CLASSIFY Platonic cosmology with a tidy ism. Clearly this isn’t physicalism, not even non-reductive physicalism. It isn't substance dualism, and calling it 'substance monism' doesn't work, since substances play no role. Idealism doesn’t capture the dualistic interplay of The Good and Necessity. The closest fit is cosmopsychism, but there’s more going on here. Let's compare this to other options:

Bottom-up panpsychism: Mind was always in the box at the micro-level. Consciousness is fundamental, present even in elementary particles. Build macro-consciousness from micro-consciousness.

Top-down cosmopsychism: The universe itself is fundamentally conscious. Individual minds are differentiated aspects of this larger mind, like waves in an ocean.

A Platonic synthesis: The universe is the ongoing self-reflection of The Good through Necessity. Mind manifests at every scale to various degrees or levels of expression. We’re neither building consciousness up from particles nor dissolving into an undifferentiated cosmic soup—we’re individuated centers of agency within a larger Cosmic Soul. We might think of the universe as suspended between two causal poles, suggesting neither pure bottom-up nor pure top-down causation. This fits our lived experience—sometimes physical, sometimes mental, sometimes both, sometimes who the hell knows.

For an Eastern-Western evolutionary version of dual causation, check out what has written about Sri Aurobindo’s cosmology, (Plato meets Teilhard de Chardin, but with more bells and whistles).

For those who prefer to stick to scientific naturalism, ’s causal emergence dovetails very nicely with this structure.

But you might be wondering, what, exactly, is interacting with what?

Non-dualistic interactionism

IN MANY RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS the divine craftsman forms inanimate matter (clay, dust, dirt, mud) into animate beings. The demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, however, does things differently. He doesn’t use material substance to create the world, only abstract models and biological processes.20 The Platonic solids aren’t solid—they’re mathematical structures, geometric forms that are supposed to make possible the visible phases of matter.21 These “solids” are an idea of a rock, but no rock in itself.22

We might imagine Timaeus making use of the Pythagorean Tetractys, where qualitative forms like “oneness” and “twoness” become countable numbers in the quantitative mathematical realm.

The opening lines of the Timaeus are revealing: “One, two, three . . . but now where’s our fourth…?” The fourth could refer to motion, the fourth dimension.

But surely the divine craftsman requires some kind of medium?

Necessity, or physicality, deals with what I think of as “instantial” or derivative conceptions of time and space.23 This time is a science-y time which is tied to the orderly motion of the planets. Instantiated space is called, well, Space (Khora). Timaeus describes it as “a third kind”—almost free of all forms:

“graspable by some bastard reasoning with the aid of insensibility, hardly to be trusted, the very thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it’s somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor somewhere in heaven is nothing.” 24

The primordial Receptacle, with her scattered pieces of fire, air, water, and earth, is likened to a passive womb who gives birth to the universe. But she’s not as passive as Timaeus at first leads us to believe, since she “sways irregularly in every direction, she herself is shaken by those kinds and, being moved, in turn shakes them back…”25 The translator likens Khora to an electromagnetic field.26 The descriptions of her are as contradictory and baffling as quantum physics.27

Whatever she is, the Platonic conception of physicality is too integrated within the divine cosmic order to be considered incompatible.28 The Good and Necessity both have genuine causal efficacy. But it's non-dualistic because they're not two separate substances in the Cartesian sense. They're interpenetrating principles of one reality, like concave and convex aspects of a single curve. The Good can't act except through Necessity, and Necessity has no determinate form except as shaped by The Good.

An aesthetic principle?

MORAL AND LOGICAL PRINCIPLES might explain why there’s something rather than nothing, but they fall short of explaining why there’s all this, the universe as it is.

Panpsychists and cosmopsychists struggle to explain how micro-experiences combine or de-combine—but why should they combine or de-combine? Why isn’t there just one cosmic consciousness or lots of little conscious particles?

The Platonic dialogues suggest an answer in the form of an aesthetic principle: The Beautiful. The Beautiful isn't just a property of The Good but perhaps equal to it—or rather, The Good's nature just is beautiful, and beauty requires self-expression through the harmonious diversity of individuated minds that reflect the whole. We experience ourselves as separate because that’s required for cosmic harmony—the greatest possible unity of the greatest possible diversity.

And maybe the aesthetic principle can be leveraged to explain suffering as well. After all, it’s hard to see why suffering should be logically or morally necessary, but it’s not quite so hard to see why it might be aesthetically necessary.

Beauty is pain. Pain is beauty.

Art requires strife, suffering, drama—or at least a multiplicity unified into harmony. Decorating the cosmos with a single form of consciousness would be like composing a symphony with one note or a painting with one color. A beautiful cosmos might require conflict resolving into harmony.

If we imagine what it would take to achieve the greatest possible cosmic harmony, it’s easier to make sense of why suffering might be required. Beauty is often thought trivial, senseless, extravagant. Not necessary. Still, there’s reason to think Plato had such a principle in mind, like when he calls the warmongering “fevered” state in the Republic the Beautiful City. And it’s no secret that giving birth is painful. The universe might be thought of as The Good continuously suffering its own birth, of generating ever-new forms for the sake of beauty.

In that case, it would be strange to say the demiurge lacks the power to stop suffering. That would be like saying a potter lacks the power to stop his own hands from transforming clay into a work of art.

Perhaps the demiurge helps to animate these principles in our imagination, illustrating how the Good evolves through nature’s teleological processes to achieve this spectacle we call the universe.

As Plato’s Timaeus puts it: “...necessarily everything brought to a finish in this way is beautiful.”29

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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Related posts

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• 1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.

• 2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.

• 3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.

• 4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• 5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

Further Reading

• The Timaeus, Translated by Peter Kalkavage

• The Medium Reimagined: From Matter to Risk

• Marco Masi, Spirit Calls Nature.

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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19

The Platonic solids are made up of exactly two kinds of triangle.

The big news: I’ve decided to step down as the manager for After Dinner Conversation’s Substack. It has been an amazing learning experience for me, working with editor, , and podcast narrators & , with whom I narrated my ADC story—my first time recording with someone else.

Unfortunately, though, my husband ended up in the hospital over Christmas—he’s at home now and doing okay—but I’m afraid I’m too distracted these days to run a professional newsletter. I’ll continue chugging along right here on my own little Substack, though, whenever I can.

I’m beginning to dread years that end in 0 and 5. My father passed away in 2010, my mother in 2015, and this year it was my sweet Geordie Bear back in March. (I haven’t had the heart to take down the photo you see on each of my posts.) Christmastime was really Geordie-time as far as I’m concerned, since he loved everything about it. Not just the bounty of presents Santa always left under the tree for him, but also the tree itself, the decorating, the baking, and especially the Christmas lights dog walk—a neighborhood tradition he started and which continues to this day.

Anyway…I hope your holidays were waaaaay better than mine. :)

Happy New Year! May 2026 be…relatively boring.

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…The Father of All Spirits said to the Sun Mother, “Mother, I have work for you. Go down to the Earth and awake the sleeping spirits. Give them forms.”

Australian Aborigine Creation Myth

We would never interrogate Plato’s cave allegory the way we do our modern thought experiments like Mary’s room. We don’t ask how the prisoners could attribute their sensations to their shadows, or how they could be fooled into thinking their own speech was coming from the wall in front of them.1 We don’t wonder how they eat, sleep, or do numbers one and two. It all works out somehow in the dream logic of the cave. Plato manages to keep us under his spell, even as he pulls back the curtain on his own myth-making machinery.

“A strange image you speak of…and strange prisoners,” Glaucon remarks.

“They’re like us,” Socrates replies.

Really? The prisoners don’t even seem human. Their “higher reality” is merely our everyday world. We have “seen” the sun. We are the enlightened ones! So what does the allegory reveal about us? How are we like them?

• the Good : the sun

• pure forms : natural objects

• abstract particulars : shadows and reflections of natural objects

• sensible particulars : manmade replicas of natural objects

• images (eikasia) : shadows and reflections ?

I tried to map the cave allegory onto the divided line to see if doing so would reveal anything about the lowest section, eikasia. Oddly, the cave only reiterates that eikasia stands for the “shadows and reflections” we mistake for reality.

But this is hard to make sense of. Surely Plato doesn’t think we get confused about shadows? I doubt even bugs are that stupid.

The standard interpretation places the “imitative arts”—those dangerous artistic influences so ruthlessly eradicated from the Beautiful City—in eikasia. Replacing shadows with cultural images makes this section a sort of “ethical eikasia” rather than a “sensory eikasia.”2 A key passage supports this. The freed prisoner returning to the cave “is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice” (517d). In this view, eikasia is the uncritical acceptance of traditional and cultural beliefs.

While I think this interpretation is basically right, it’s confusing. Once the phrase “shadows of justice” appears in the text, the descriptions start sounding like life outside the cave, not inside. The cave allegory makes everything go wonky with the divided line, and we still don’t have a clear idea of what goes on at the lowest level. What is eikasia?

If “in the course of nature” we left the cave…

Where were we? Where did we come from?

Did we wake up? Return to the past? The future? Come back to the present? Recollect something? Come to life? Come back to life? All of the above?

I vote for all of the above. That said, the connection to dreaming and the afterlife seems especially strong. To those who have seen the Good, Socrates gives this speech:

“Down you must go then, each in his turn, to the habitation of the others and accustom yourselves to the observation of the obscure things there. …our city will be governed by us and you with waking minds, and not, as most cities now which are inhabited and ruled darkly as in a dream by men who fight one another for shadows and wrangle for office as if that were a great good…”

These references to dreaming take place during a pivotal moment in the Republic, marking the beginning of the end for the Beautiful City. Philosophers are told to go down and rule—just as Socrates goes down to the port of Athens at the opening of the dialogue, the significance of which has been pointed out—but they can’t do so without breaking the “mind your own business” rule, the city’s founding principle. Insisting that justice can only be brought about when philosophers rule is like insisting that dreams follow the rules of waking life, or that the subconscious become aware of itself, in which case the subconscious would no longer be subconscious and dreams would no longer be like dreaming.

Dreams only seem spurious, unreal, once we’re awake. While dreaming, we uncritically accept whatever happens, however absurd, however impossible. And we often forget our dreams the moment we wake up, at least I do. It’s as if we’ve had too much to drink…from the River of Forgetfulness.

But I get the sense Plato intended the cave to represent more than dreaming—or dreaming involves more than we think. Perhaps he thought dreaming connected to the subconscious, imagination and the Muses, recollection, and, perhaps, reincarnation in the afterlife. All of these point to an underworld below our wakeful awareness, an underworld of a previous existence from which we now re-collect forms3—or, if you want to be prosaic about it, a “place” where a priori knowledge lives.

A passage in the cave allegory cautions us not to laugh at someone with trouble seeing, since that soul might not be coming from a darker world below, but a brighter world above.4 We find another underworld scenario at the end of the Phaedo which has us living underwater, but believing we’re above the surface. And then there’s the Ring of Gyges in which a ring of invisibility is found within a chasm, and then there’s the noble lie or myth of the metals about how different natures are sprung from the earth, and above all there’s the conclusion to the Republic, the Myth of Er, which describes souls descending through openings in the earth and ascending through openings in heaven, each bearing symbols of their deeds. Maybe when the prisoners in the cave give prizes to “the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences, and coexistences”, this is an attempt to “read” their deeds, to predict who’s going where and why. This might explain why echoes—sounds, speech—are included in a metaphor that is otherwise entirely visual. The shadows could be for them (or us) a shared story, a mythic tradition about souls ascending and descending into brighter and darker regions (516c-d).

Recollecting forms isn’t all that different from receiving opinions handed down through tradition. Uncritical acceptance of tradition falls far short of knowledge, yet the beliefs of countless souls, beliefs that have stood the test of time, must get some things right.

I think the first stage of the divided line is a purgatory-like “space-place” which is difficult to talk about in ordinary terms.5 We almost have to tell stories about a realm of souls exiting the cave and either waking up or falling into this dream of becoming we call reality, since if it is a realm, it’s one we can only get a sideways glimpse of from time to time. This interpretation tells us, somewhat, the where. But the what, the shadows, still seem…blurry.

What do the shadows represent?

From the Divided Line:

“In the category of the seen the first section is images, by which I mean in the first place shadows, and in the second place reflections in water, or any dense, smooth, shiny surface. Everything of that sort, if you see what I mean.” (509d–510a)

This language appears again in the cave allegory. When the freed prisoner emerges:

“And at first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likenesses or reflections in water of men and other things.” (516a-c)

I find the addition of “in water” strange. At first I thought Plato just meant “mirror reflections”, but after doing some research I realized if that were the case, he could have just said so, since mirrors existed during his time. In fact, in Book X he uses the word mirror (𝑘𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑝𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑛) in a famous passage about artists creating the world by holding a mirror to it (596d-e). Here, however, it’s houdasi phantasmata, phantasms in water. WTF?

But it gets even weirder.

Later, when Socrates talks about using visual aids such as diagrams for thinking about invisible mathematical entities, he slips in, “of which there are shadows and reflections in waters” (510e). But that makes no sense! What sort of mathematical diagram creates a shadow? Okay, so maybe lines drawn in the sand make shadows. Sort of. But how do they create reflections in water?6 For some reason Glaucon doesn’t question this. Which makes me think shadows and reflections in water must symbolize something specific, something Glaucon, a member of the inner circle, is privy to.7 But we are not.

Maybe I’m making too much of this. But still, why subdivide the category of images into shadows and reflections in water in the first place? All accounts I’ve read lump them together, treating them as problematic in the same way. But knowing Plato’s careful use of imagery, I’m suspicious of this apparent excess of symbolism. I’m not sure it’s possible to get to the bottom of this, but that never stopped me from speculating!

With this goal in mind, I thought it might be fun to explore what shadows and reflections are and what they tell us.

How well can we know a shadow?

Shadows can be highly misleading about their objects. This figure from Marco Masi’s Spirit Calls Nature8 illustrates how three different 3D objects—a cylinder, cone, and sphere—all cast identical circular shadows. If you had nothing to go by but the shadows, you might mistakenly believe their objects were identical.

Shadows are the negation of light. This entails more than the absence of light, since they depend on an object actively blocking light—they thrive on contrast and opposition. Perhaps they can be thought of symbolically as the visible counterpart to invisible forms. Both forms and shadows are generic, but shadows are visibly so; they reveal basic shapes like a cookie cutter or outline. Perhaps shadows, being visible, form-like negations of light makes them symbolic of missing forms.

How well can we know a reflection?

Reflections aren’t caused by the obstruction or negation of light; they’re more like replicas or copies of what they reflect, like the statues and imitations of natural objects being paraded before the fire in the cave. Detail and specificity make reflections capable of being clearer than shadows, despite being reversed or upside down. Even when distorted, they’re qualitatively truer to their originals (shadows are colorless, for instance), but with that fidelity comes a greater capacity to trick us.

Echoes might be thought of as sound reflections that can be more or less clear, despite being located away from their source. In the cave, echoes confuse the prisoners because they seem to come from the shadows, though they’re really coming from unseen actors. Later, Socrates notes that the freed prisoner sees the sun where it’s really located, not as a reflection in water. To the attentive prisoner, echoes might be the first clue things are not what they seem, even before the prisoner is freed. Causal connection is what’s at issue.

Shadows only reveal silhouettes, never much detail. Echoes and visible reflections, on the other hand, can be qualitatively close to their originals, at least under ideal conditions. But what do these different kinds of image represent?

My speculative interpretation of shadows & reflections

I’ll go way out on a limb and propose, without any solid textual evidence, that shadows and reflections are symbolic of true and false opinion respectively. But with qualifications.

• Shadows gain power when taken as icons : shadow-icons point away from themselves, giving us a paradigm, opening the path for our natural desire to obtain knowledge of the Good. Shadows represent missing forms, giving us vague intuitions of what we’re missing and what to seek.

• Reflections in water lose power when taken as idols : reflection-idols deceive us by virtue of their qualitative clarity, especially when they’re used improperly and don’t compel us to keep up the search for wisdom. They have a lot of persuasive power which can lead us to accept false opinions that arrest our movement toward the Good. They place the soul in a danger zone of stagnation where it easily becomes smugly satisfied with half truths.

My interpretation may seem to contradict the divided line’s instructions to order things in ascending clarity and truth. Maybe it does, maybe not. Shadows can be qualitatively unclear and lacking truth (missing forms) while also being symbols of what’s missing.

The old man we meet at the beginning of the dialogue is a shadow watcher par excellence, but he seems like a good guy! A bit shallow, sure, but overall he’s got his head on straight. And when he ducks out of the philosophical discussion early on to attend the religious rites, he’s laughing. He embodies the conclusion about justice that Socrates attempts to arrive at through dialectic, that being just leads to happiness.9 Of course, the old man’s goodness comes from sheer luck, so it’s not secure. His cushy life might’ve made his soul flabby and ill-prepared for choosing the next one. Only knowledge is reliable. But we can’t deny what moderate wealth and time-tested hand-me-down beliefs can do for an already-decent soul.

Shadow watching might be an embryonic period, an incubation in which the prisoners get in the habit of preferring the general over the particular. Of course the prisoners wouldn’t be aware of the difference until after turning around and being inundated with particular qualities they’ve never experienced before. What do they want after experiencing that barrage of details and depth? They would be confused by them and forced to compare them to what they believed was real before—those generic, 2D shapes dancing, perhaps harmoniously, across the cave wall. Assuming the statues have details and aren’t mere blocks of wood whittled into rough shapes, they might reveal the difference between men and women for starters (a difference Socrates neutralizes in his construction of the city in speech). They might even show each human as possessing unique features; no more cookiecutter shadows, these statues show people not the same as each other.

The freed prisoners would have to choose which type of image to consider most real. Is there a reason to prefer the general over the specific? I imagine a third kind of image or criterion will need to tip the balance. But there is no third kind in the cave. They must be dragged out by force.

Outside the cave they see yet another type of image, the natural kind, and these must be compared to the stylized imitations inside the cave. This level involves more than a simple comparison of two kinds of object—it’s a triangulation of generic shadows and detailed statues to even more detailed natural things that move themselves, just as the prisoners do. The prisoners see themselves for the first time in “reflections in water” and maybe then they realize, wow, we’re like the statues, we don’t look the same as each other! And: wow, we’re not like the statues, we move ourselves!

Out here in the natural world, shadows turn out to be boring as hell. All they do is follow their objects around like lap dogs.

Again, a choice must be made: Which is the paradigm for reality? The shadows in the cave or the living things above? If the answer seems obvious to you, by what criterion do you judge? What makes yours the right criterion?

Try it on this way: Is justice invisible? What will the freed prisoners think? If they’ve chosen specificity over generality—and they likely have, since qualities and colors are certainly more compelling than shadows!—they might mistakenly believe their mythical shadows were lies, falsehoods, and justice doesn’t exist. They might try to prove this by pointing out the absence of justice in the so-called real world. And yet some of the prisoners might miss those shadow fictions. It was, after all, a tidy world down there, a world where good always triumphs over evil. Whereas out in the sensible world, good and evil can’t even be identified. It’s a confusing mess! Out here, heavenly objects don’t keep time the way the shadows said they would!10

Every soul must decide what’s real and true. But how?

By what lights we’ve got, that’s how.

Idols vs. Icons

Suppose our moral intuitions always told the truth. In that case they would always lead us down the right path. We could even wrongly believe we possessed knowledge and the world would throw up no evidence to the contrary. We would lead just lives, happy lives, but only by accident. But so what if it’s by accident? In that case knowledge really wouldn’t matter!

In such a world, idols and icons would be the same.

Unfortunately for us, we’ve been cut loose from the shadowy womb, and out here, our intuitions no longer have the power to make impossible things happen. Some of our moral intuitions command us to obey them, regardless of whether we know they’re true. Others seem clear enough at first, but then on reflection they become uncertain and confusing, and we hesitate. Out here, our intuitions can no longer be relied on. This is a dangerous situation. Being exposed to a higher degree of clarity and truth can give us confidence without protecting us against falsehood. Out here, images threaten to arrest the soul’s development and desire for the Good. Whereas shadows have very little power out here, especially when compared to idol images. But when thrown into a new light and taken as symbols, shadow-icons might point away from themselves, driving us to search for what’s missing, what we lack, what we desire.

Which kind of image is most iconic?

Reflections in water:

Or shadows?:

Shadowy intuitions

Knowing our intuitions are unreliable should lower our confidence in them—notice the parallel to the Socratic saying?—and yet, some intuitions are so strong, we can’t help but follow them. These tend to be negative, telling us, No, don’t do that!—again, notice the parallel? We don’t know justice or injustice. But we do feel we know the latter a bit better, don’t we? Even when it’s just a feeling or intuition, does it not sometimes feel less like a true belief and more like a command? Can you prove murdering babies for shits and giggles is wrong? Yet presumably you have no serious doubts about the matter.11

Rather than claiming to possess knowledge, Socrates attributes moral commands to his personal daimon. Whereas we attribute ours to a moral conscience. Well, what is that? Whatever it is, it isn’t knowledge. Or if it is, it isn’t ours. That’s what the journey out of the cave is about—the desire to make divine knowledge our own.

By the same token, the Good must come to “know itself” through its descent into its opposing indefiniteness, like light penetrating into darkness12. Everything comes around in a circle.

“They’re like us, I said. For, to begin with, tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows…? (515a)

Taken literally, this is a strange thing to say. Socrates has just told us that the prisoners can’t see anything but shadows on the wall, so why’s he asking? We catch a bit of this tone in Glaucon’s reply:

“How could they, he said, if they were compelled to hold their heads unmoved through life?”

Like Glaucon, we probably missed the foreshadowing, at least on the first read. But from a distance we can see that the sun analogy, the cave allegory, and the divided line all throw into contrast the physical world we think we see with our eyes against the light of intelligibility within which illuminates all. Kant was not the first to propose “the inward turn”; the Copernican Revolution had started long before.

Related posts

• Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• Mechanism vs. Teleology Is reconciliation possible?

• No one knows what they want, yet everyone wants the same thing... Is the object of our desire within reach?

• Constructing the divided line in the Republic…if you teach Plato, this one’s for you.

• Why your big toe is a Platonic form…and other surprise discoveries on our journey through the continuum of becoming.

References and further reading

• Andrew Payne, Vision and Eikasia in Plato’s Divided Line

• Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At Part 2: Its Implications for Theories of Vision

• Charles G. Gross, The Fire that Comes from the Eye

• The Timaeus, translated by Peter Kalkavage

• David Roochnik, The Political Drama of Plato’s Republic

• Marco Masi, Spirit Calls Nature.

• Fred Cummins, Frames and Tubes

• John Niemeyer Findlay, Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic of the One and the Great and Small

• James Leon Holmes, In Defense of Cephalus

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Leave a comment

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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“Anyone who is acquainted with the works of Plato is aware that in spite of the precision and consistency of his thinking he is not at all careful about what we may call terminology.”1

H.J. Paton’s remark says a lot about what philosophers think the written word is capable of, but Plato was far more skeptical. For him, carefulness meant avoiding fixed terminology. Meaning lives in souls, not in marks on a page. Perhaps this is what the divided line analogy is meant to teach us: Static signs, no matter how mathematically precise, are but shadowy images that only appear to pin down the truth. Because the soul’s shapeshifting process cannot be captured by word math, Plato wrote holistically, with an eye to the living organism as his model.2

Of course, this makes Plato especially hard to write about in the usual way. He didn’t make arguments. He made cunning creatures that play dead while planning their escape. As one scholar puts it:

“…in the past I found it impossible to comment in a satisfying way on any single part of the Republic—say the divided-line passage of book 6—without factoring in, and then losing myself in, the surrounding whole in which it is embedded. This was a sobering, even frustrating experience, and it caused me to write little on the work that I believe is the most philosophically rich of them all.”3

Boy, can I relate. Consider the Greek word, pistis, for example, which refers to the least controversial segment of the line. It has been called belief, faith, confidence, trust, common sense, sense-belief, conviction, sensory inspection, empirical observation, to name a few. Unfortunately, none of these terms come close to capturing Plato’s meaning, not even the Greek pistis comes close. But who can resist a clearly-labeled stairway to heaven?

Still, however cartoonish they may be, images can be useful. We just have to be careful not to take them as definitive. We’ll keep in mind that these diagrams distort the liquid reality by presenting it as a frozen declaration. Here’s my take, for now, on What Plato Meant:

1. D: FORMS, noesis : SOCRATES

2. C: PERFECT PARTICULARS, dianoia : GLAUCON (Adeimantus below)

3. B: SENSIBLE PARTICULARS, pistis : THRASYMACHUS (Polymarchus below)

4. A: ?, eikasia : CEPHALUS, the old man who values religious tradition

I’ll start at the top and work my way down, saving the last and the most difficult section for next time.

D) FORMS

Nobody can say for sure what forms are, but I suspect at the highest level they’re functions defined by their relationships to each other and to the whole.

CONSIDER A CAR ENGINE. Pistons produce the power to make the car move, but the pistons rely on spark plugs which ignite gas to keep the pistons moving. Spark plugs rely on the distributor to distribute spark at the right time. Each part relies on something else—the engine won’t work if any of its parts is missing. But to know how any part functions, we need to know what an engine does, which means knowing what a car is good for.

Maybe the Good is like a functioning car and the forms are its engine parts. Each form has a function that relies on all the others such that they’re completely interconnected in organic unity, and no part can be removed without destroying the whole.

If this interpretation is correct, each form comes to light only after grasping the Good—the purpose of the whole.

Blindly groping through the dialectic

THERE ARE CERTAIN ASSUMPTIONS AND AXIOMS that mathematicians and scientists take for granted, without questioning their foundations. Throwing these into question marks a conversion to philosophy, one that stands in direct opposition to scientific-mathematical certainty. It might even be thought of as the birth of metaphysics. We’re told the dialectician “destroys hypotheses” (533c), but not by discarding them. Instead a transformation takes place that allows the philosopher to see unfounded assumptions for what they are. The attempt to delineate each form’s relationship to all other forms then begins in earnest, but this time with the awareness that no knowledge is possible without knowledge of the whole.

Now it’s one thing to talk about the purpose of a car and quite another to talk about the purpose of the universe. If we’re basically in the position of ants trying to comprehend a spark plug, then knowledge of our own ignorance starts to look like real wisdom, the possession of which Socrates would have had every right to boast about.

Which is why the dialectic must, above all, begin in humility…

“…by treating its assumptions not as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, footings, and springboards so to speak, to enable it to rise to that which requires no assumption and is the starting point of all.”

Humility may be called the starting point of philosophy, but that word fails us in some respect, since the philosopher’s humility is nothing like pious incuriosity or smug stagnation. On the contrary, having a flaming big ego is a prerequisite to becoming a philosopher, so for the philosophical type, humility has got to hurt like hell.4 This humility, let’s not forget, must come from being intellectually humiliated—the philosopher’s worst nightmare. One must have a great deal of self-respect to feel its loss so acutely.5 Some people can suffer a blow to the ego and just shrug it off, but for the philosophical soul, the pain must be intolerable if it is to fuel the quest to find the cure for not knowing.

Having attained insight into the first principle, the Good, the now-wise philosopher is presumably equipped to answer everything that came before, but purely through forms. Assuming insight into the Good is possible.

C) PERFECT PARTICULARS

WHO KNOWS IF THIS SECTION EVEN HAS OBJECTS. Some think not. Others think these objects are mathematical intermediates, but WTF is a mathematical intermediate? It’s hard to get a clear account. It sounds like what we call math: triangles and numbers and stuff like that. But in that case, mathematical objects must be somehow mixed up in the defective world of becoming.6 But wouldn’t that make Plato not a Mathematical Platonist!?

Whatever. I think the mathematical intermediates interpretation makes some sense, especially when we compare our understanding of numbers as units to the quasi-qualitative mathematical entities the Pythagoreans are said to have believed in, like oneness, twoness, triangle-ness, and so on, which seem more like quintessential Platonic forms. And let’s not forget how the Pythagoreans lost their shit when they discovered the diagonal and side of a square can’t be measured by a common whole number—revealing this incommensurability to the public could get you drowned at sea, or so the legend goes. Perhaps Plato drew something more positive from their observations when he took there to be something deeply screwy embedded in the universe, even at the level of mathematics. (He gives a very interesting account in the Timaeus, though there are indications of this in the Republic as well.)

Still, I think there’s more than math going on here, which is why I’m going with the more general Abstract Particulars or Perfect Particulars. In this section I would include all the standard examples of Platonic forms that you hear about in Intro to Philosophy—tree-ness, chair-ness, etc. But these aren’t pure or eternal; they’re as mixed up with the sensible world as a form can be. To see why, consider the process by which we comprehend them as forms. We begin by picking some particular thing and we ask of it, “What is the general idea behind all such things that makes this thing what it is?” Maybe your professor even spoke of “abstract ideas”. But if this is Plato’s theory of forms, it’s no wonder people think its stupid.

I remember the first time I encountered an e-cigarette; a “cigalike” fooled me into thinking someone just lit one up inside a shopping mall. Recalling lessons from Philosophy 101, we might question the tenability of a theory that would have these and all such nicotine-delivery devices, which popped into the sensible world at some point during the mid-2000s, derive their existence from an eternal form. We might even wonder whether there exists a Platonic idea of a cigalike and another of a vape pen and another of…whatever you call those ginormous tank-like monster-cloud producing devices, and so on.

Something doesn’t sit right.

And it gets worse. Is there a form of me? An eternal Tina Form or Tina-ness hanging out invisibly in some parallel Platonic universe? Does that make me-me a defective copy of some blandly generic version of me? And if so, doesn’t that mean there needs to be an even more boring form of both me-me and virtual-me that unites both of us? And so on to infinity?7

Fishy stuff going on here. But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong.

Perfect particulars “seen” through abstraction

BRIGHT-EYED GLAUCON8, whom Socrates addresses in the divided line section, is an upward-looking scientific-mathematical thinker. When he summarizes this section, he “most adequately” echoes what Socrates says and understands it as being between opinion and knowledge. But he must realize the implications for him. It’s as if Socrates had said: You, Glaucon, are in the halfway house. Yet unlike Thrasymachus, Glaucon’s pride doesn’t appear to be in the least bit injured, and it’s not because he’s dense. He does an admirable job of rescuing Thrasymachus’ definition of justice, which did, after all, launch the The Lord of the Rings multimedia franchise.9 On the other hand, he only props up anti-justice because he wants to see Socrates demolish it; he knows better than to think he can do so himself. Which is to say the second-best critical thinker in the dialogue exhibits humility, and precisely the kind we’d expect at this level. Throughout their conversation Socrates inundates him with battle imagery and seemingly irrelevant remarks about bravery and courage, all of which is meant to evoke the thumos-ego part of the tripartite soul and to clue us in to Glaucon’s placement on the divided line: he’s teetering on the precipice of conversion, though not quite ready for it.10 Recognizing this, Socrates shies away from disclosing the full splendor of the dialectic, humbly apologizing that he would if he could, but he hasn’t got it all worked out just yet. He nevertheless continues to play the role of Glaucon’s luring, daimonic force until the training wheels can come off and his student can become his own daimon, a philosopher. Until then, Socrates coaxes him on:

“Those who pursue geometry and the allied arts apprehend reality to some degree, as we have seen. But mostly they dream.” (533b)

While the dialectic may not deliver the Good right away, if ever, there’s always something of the form in every particular, always a reason to hope the dream will end with an awakening.

B) SENSIBLE PARTICULARS

FINALLY, WE’RE ON FIRMER GROUND:

‘The second section you must regard as what the first section is an image of, the animals we see every day, the entire plant world, and the whole class of human artefacts.’

We can (for now) take this section to refer to sensible particulars—this computer or this phone in front of you. Common sense takes these to be as real as it gets.

Sensible particulars seen with…?

THRASYMACHUS ONLY BELIEVES IN WHAT HE SEES. Since justice is not instantiated, he takes it to be the “interest of the stronger”. Notice, he doesn’t pull this shocking conclusion from thin air; his definition of justice comes suspiciously close to being the opposite of justice. Clearly he arrives at it by reducing a conventional image of justice to what he takes to be really real—the concrete world of sensible particulars. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” To this worldview, justice looks as fluffy as the Easter bunny, a human-invented epic lie to keep the masses in their place.

But why should we believe our knowledge is no better than an ant’s? Thrasymachus might say today. Look at all that we have achieved! Look at your iPhone, you’ve got the world at your fingertips! We’ve been to the moon and back! Who’s to say we’re so ignorant of The Way Things Really Are?

There can be no impetus to seek higher knowledge without destroying the materialistic assumptions of this nothing-but worldview, and yet the cave allegory reveals how difficult this conversion will be. Turning the entire soul away from what it takes to be the whole of reality will be extraordinarily painful, almost impossible—like trying to see behind your eyes. Of course, the search for the first principle will require conversions at each “level”, but the hardest conversion seems to be here at the first cut in the divided line separating the visible from the intelligible. And if we were somehow able to climb through the mirrored ceiling of pistis to the epistemic regions beyond, we might glance over our shoulder and realize we haven’t really left the region we came from, it’s just that everything looks different. That’s why the two middle sections of the divided line are equal.

Why the equality? Here’s my guess…

(Tomorrow I may change my mind.)

FORMS OF SOME SORT OR OTHER MUST EXIST at all “levels” along the divided line if we are to have a passageway out of the cave. If we think reality only exists at the very top, then the objects below it aren’t even pseudo-realities, but nothing at all. The whole is not at the top, but consists of the entire line. So the Good must exist everywhere, at least to some degree.

It may be that everyone’s life (or lives) passes through all levels of the line at various times—how else could we make sense of the Republic’s ending with an elaborate near-death experience containing a reincarnation myth?—so that what we experience at one “level” transforms into a new meaning or theme at other stages.

“Education is not what some professors say it is. They claim they can transplant the power of knowledge into a soul that has none, as if they were engrafting vision into blind eyes…but our reasoning goes quite to the contrary. We assert that this power is already in the soul of everyone.” (518b-c)

Just as there’s a latent philosopher king in all of us, and an infinite regress of many-headed beastly tyrants too, the Good must not turn its back on the incoherent, otherwise there would be no ladder, no desire, no motion or self-motion anywhere whatsoever. The inward journey begins in humility and ends, if it ends, in discovery, in bringing to light what has been forgotten, but intuited, all along—even in some way by downward-looking Thrasymachus. And so the cosmic must take a cosmic journey as well, one in which the darkest shadows and recesses of the cave are lured into sunlight.

I’ll suggest, ever so tentatively, that the middle sections point not to two different objects, but to two different attitudes toward the same object—all objects turn out to be forms in the end, after all. Those who think they see sensible particulars with their eyes are really seeing forms, they just don’t realize it.

Both Thrasymachus and Glaucon refer to the same object in the flux of becoming, but the latter recognizes the form as real whereas the former refuses to acknowledge the form, even though he must implicitly recognize it too, otherwise he would not be so quick to identify its opposite.11

“Supposing, I say, he [the downward-looking philosophical type] were freed from all these kinds of things that draw the soul’s vision downward. If he were then turned and converted to the contemplation of real things, he would be using the very same faculties of vision and be seeing them just as keenly as he now sees their opposites.” 519a-b

What we think we see with our eyes are actually forms seen by the mind’s eye. It’s not clear we ever see solely with our eyes. Isn’t this, after all, the takeaway of the sun analogy? By itself, the eye sees nothing at all. The eye’s vision is a relationship with sunlight as well as the light of intelligibility. Ditto for all sense perception.12

This would suggest the artist is capable of reproducing the mind’s image, not some thing in-itself out there in the so-called real world. How can the artist turn our private mental objects into public images we all recognize? If that’s what the artist does, where does this skill come from? The artist can’t give a clear account, so Socrates declares them touched by the divine. The rest of us are just plain ignorant.

On the other hand, perhaps we’re all artists in some sense, given that we all possess the skill of “seeing” forms, as Edmund Husserl’s eidetic (“seeing”) phenomenology makes clear. For example, your big toe—the left one, if you really want to get specific—can be thought of as a Platonic form, though perhaps not an eternal form. Even so, your left toe does nevertheless achieve some form-like status, and we might even say it “participates” in some higher, more generic toe-ness. Or some other category. If we want to go there.

Why is your left toe a form at all? Simply because it exhibits a salient unity, a selfsameness we can all mysteriously identify, even if its selfsameness is relatively momentary. Whatever it is, it is capable of rising into the foreground of our awareness against the blurry background we call the world. When we direct our attention to an object like a toe, in one sense we see it partially and from our own limited perspective; this is what we call (perhaps erroneously) “seeing with our eyes”. Yet in that very act of perspectival eye-like seeing, we simultaneously see with the mind all of the toe’s other sides, an infinite number of possible perspectives, all joined together in one object. This unification is what makes the object an object. Somehow unified wholes transcend our ever-incomplete streams of experience, and they do so on a regular basis. How is this possible? Mystery lurks even in the mundane. And the magic trick doesn’t end there, since the unified wholes we each individually experience on a daily basis are for the most part the same unified wholes others experience. Somehow our transcendental objects are largely the same, as is evidenced in our coherent communications about them with each other. Transcendence within immanence mirrors itself on a social scale…and perhaps on the grand scale as well.

On the other hand, someone might object, do we really experience infinity? This is a fair point. Personally, I can’t wrap my mind around it. To me infinity is just an uncountably high or unthinkably long something or other, though Husserl probably had a firmer grasp of it than I. In any case, if we’re gonna have terms, I think the Pythagoreans were more experientially accurate in calling the stream-flux13 the Indefinite Dyad. Plato is said to have renamed this cosmic generative principle The Great and The Small. But we’ll forgive him for that. Everyone makes mistakes.

TO RECAP…

THE MOVEMENT UP the divided line is a progression towards the first principle, the Good. This movement takes place when the philosopher recasts the assumptions and axioms of the sciences into humble hypotheses and uses them as trampolines in an upward-bouncing dialectical inquiry into the nature of the Good. Then, after attaining some extra-rational insight into the first principle, we’re told that the wise (which is basically no one, not even Socrates) must come back down through the continuum of epistemic “realms”, enlightening each form with a form with a form...

All knowledge is shaped like a pyramid. We begin our journey at the indefinite bottom and move our way up the continuum of becoming to the unity of everything. Then back down. And so on.

The Good turns out to be the transcendent unity of the best of all possible worlds, which is ours. Even if it’s but a dream.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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A MORE BECOMING DIVIDED LINE DIAGRAM

There’s no sound.

Previous posts in this Platonic series, in order:

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• Mechanism vs. Teleology Is reconciliation possible?

• No one knows what they want, yet everyone wants the same thing... is the object of our desire within reach?

• Constructing the divided line in the Republic with simple geometry…if you teach Plato, this one’s for you.

To get full access to my published books and posts, upgrade your subscription. Find out more. You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my niche literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina Lee Forsee

Subscribe now

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• Mechanism vs. Teleology Is reconciliation possible?

• No one knows what they want, yet everyone wants the same thing... is the object of our desire within reach?

The Divided Line Analogy

IN A MUCH-DISCUSSED PASSAGE in the Republic, not the famous cave allegory, but a more technical explanation of the same called the divided line analogy, we learn how the pathemata or conditions of the soul relate to their objects.

It’s a brief passage, no bells and whistles. I didn’t even notice it the first time I read it, overshadowed as it is by the rich imagery in the cave allegory, and yet it may be the key to unlocking buried structures and hidden meanings scattered throughout the Platonic corpus. In this post I’ll focus on constructing the line and get into its meaning in the next post.

Constructing the line

From the Republic, Book VI, 509, (Tom Griffith translation):

‘Imagine taking a line which has been divided into two unequal sections and dividing each section—the one representing the category of the seen [visible] and the one representing the category of the understood [intelligible]—again in the same proportion.’

Socrates doesn’t tell us where to make the first cut, so we’re free to do it anywhere except the middle.

But how do we further divide the two sections in the same proportions? Does this mean we have to do math? Like hell! Can’t we just skip it? The purpose of the line seems clear enough:

‘…there are four conditions arising in the soul, corresponding to the four sections of the line. Understanding corresponds to the highest section, thinking to the second, belief to the third, and conjecture to the last. Classify them accordingly, believing that the degree of clarity they possess is proportional to the truth possessed by their objects.’

So a hierarchy of knowledge corresponding to things known. Why bother with diagrams, right?

Of course if you’re a teaching the divided line you’ll probably want to draw it on the board, since that’s what teachers do. But will you bust out your geometry skills like this guy?

Nah, you’ll eyeball that sucker, right?

Your students didn’t sign up for a math class, and you didn’t sign up to teach it either!

But while you’re eyeballing the proportions and trying to make the sections progressively longer (or shorter, depending on the orientation you prefer)1, you realize the line is more difficult than it seems. The damned thing never looks right. The middle sections keep coming out equal-looking:

You might decide to just assign units to each section to preserve the hierarchy of clarity and truth which Socrates seems to imply:

“For us, it is straightforward, quick—not to mention pedagogically attractive—to illustrate the line as 4–3–2–1: four units for forms, three for hypotheticals, two for objects, and one unit for shadows. But it would be wrong.”2

Of course, if you teach Plato, you probably already know the secret: The divided line’s mathematical proportions are: [A:B::C:D]::A+B:C+D. As a result sections B and C must be equal. Which seems to contradict the implication of a clear epistemological-ontological hierarchy. And of course scholars debate what this means.3

One thing they don’t debate is the equality itself. I often hear them say it’s so obvious even a Greek schoolboy would get it. Well, Greek schoolboys must be precocious, then, because it took thousands of years for any of us to even notice it and a bit longer for someone to prove it—algebraically. Which raises the question: Plato didn’t have algebra at his disposal, so how could he have known about it? Many thought he didn’t intend it. Rather than blame their own interpretational shortcomings, they assumed he just screwed up. But that would mean he made a mathematical mistake in a section of the Republic which is specifically about the educational importance of mathematical paradox!

“The specific study to effect this turning around [of the soul] is calculation and counting (logizesthai te kai arithmein: 522e). In explaining why, Socrates offers a gloss on the divided line and, even more important, a fuller account of the intermediary status of the arithmetical. Some sensations, he says, are well suited to ‘summon’, to call into play, the intellect. These are ones appearing to be self-contradictory.”4

The professor in the video below has wonderfully bad drawing skills that contrast nicely with the doubling the square problem in the Meno to demonstrate how the visible comes into conflict with what the mind’s eye sees:

Placing the blunder at Plato’s feet is no longer the thing, thankfully, but many continue to reference the algebraic proof5 or Jacob Klein’s demonstration “in the Greek manner”.6 Until very recently hardly anyone thought to construct the diagram geometrically, in the truly Greek manner.

“…the importance of Glaucon’s construction has been overlooked by commentators. No geometric reenactment of Glaucon’s exercise is to be found anywhere in two millennia of extant scholarly literature.”7

The paper cited above was published just this year, a bit too late for me. When I looked for a diagram to use in my novel (published 2023), I couldn’t find much of anything. So I turned to fellow blogger, Chris Sonnack, who came up with this geometric construction. What’s of philosophical interest here is that it’s the movement from one dimension to two that makes constructing the line in proportion possible.

I like that the process involves “mirrors” and “reflections”. I’ll have more to say about this later when I discuss the meaning of the divided line.

Here’s my ugly hand-drawn construction that simplifies the video above. I’m including this here so professors can see how quick and easy it is to draw—and to show it doesn’t have to be perfect!

As for the equality of the middle sections, I don’t know what to make of that, but I’m pretty sure Plato intended it. It is, after all, so Plato. I wouldn’t be surprised if some secret mental origami collapses the four-or-three-fold structure of the divided line into two, which turns out to be the One and the Many expanding and contracting like an accordion for all of time. Or maybe the mysterious equality is meant to be a way of revealing the hidden irrational force inherent in all logic and calculation, like the slippery seed of destruction that caused the devolution of the Beautiful City, some divine error embedded in the very fabric of nature. But who knows.

I think it’s likely that much of Socrates’ discussion with Glaucon points to unwritten doctrines which we, sadly, are not privy to. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hypothesize. I admire J.N. Findlay’s boldness in going beyond what can be textually proven.

“Plato…recognized the necessary presence of the element of the inexact, approximate, indefinite, continuous, ever burgeoning and ever shrinking element, in thought and reality, so that the mathematization of all eidetic thought-patterns does not mean that exactness and arithmetical simplicity will carry the day in all cases, and that all deviations from this will be signs of depravity. For Platonism believes that, not only all instantial existence, but also the eidetic paradigms that they copy or share in, involve an element of the indefinite and inexact on which the limits of goodness and precise measure are imposed.”

Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic of the One and the Great and Small

If we grope beyond the limits of the problem set in front of us, however imperfectly, we might reach a greater vision that will inform the smaller by encompassing it.

Next time, we’ll reflect on the meaning of shadows.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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Further Reading

• A Geometric Construction of the Divided Line by Chris Sonnack.

• Terence Echterling, What Did Glaucon Draw?: A Diagrammatic Proof for Plato’s Divided Line.

• Darrell Dobbs, “Figuring Out Plato’s Divided Line”.

• David Roochnik, Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic .

• Mark Faller, Plato’s Geometrical Logic

• Nicholas Smith, Unclarity and the Intermediates in Plato’s Discussions of Clarity in the Republic

• John Niemeyer Findlay, Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic of the One and the Great and Small

• Bernard Suzanne, Lexicon of Greek words important for understanding Plato

If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing for more off-beat philosophical deep dives. You can customize what you get in your inbox anytime. Thanks for supporting my work!

—Tina Lee Forsee

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5

Arithmetic proof from Plato’s Fractal Line: A Solution to the Overdetermination Problem

6

Jacob Klein’s demonstration:

“Nowadays, we might compare the Form of the Good to laws of nature, though this is not fully satisfying, since the Form of the Good is not particular laws of nature, but the reason why there are laws at all.”

Ryan Jenkins, “Plato’s Form of the Good”, 1000-Word Philosophy

AT THE HEART OF THE SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR lies the presupposition of the intelligibility of the world. But it’s not enough to say the universe obeys laws. It must do so for a reason. What is that reason?

In this series I explore the reason for the universe’s intelligibility. Here I’ll focus on how our desires may ultimately guide us to Plato’s elusive form of the good.

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• Mechanism vs. Teleology Is reconciliation possible?

What is the good?

RATHER THAN EXPLAIN WHAT THE GOOD IS and how it guides and orders the universe, Plato’s Socrates talks as if he were ignorant of the good:

“For they say it is the knowledge of the good, as if we understood their meaning when they utter the word ‘good.’”1

But he then he says the good is:

“that, then, which every soul pursues and for its sake does all that it does, with an intuition of its reality, but yet baffled and unable to apprehend its nature adequately.”2

We all want the good, even though we only have a fuzzy idea of what is. Fair enough. But we get the sense that he knows more than he’s letting on. When Glaucon asks for an explanation, Socrates doesn’t deny he knows more, even while he dodges the question:

“Nay, my beloved, let us dismiss for the time being the nature of the good in itself…But of what seems to be the offspring of the good and most nearly made in its likeness I am willing to speak…”3

For whatever reason, Socrates wants to keep the good to himself. But does Glaucon say, “DUDE! What the hell, man? Just tell me!”?

No. No, he doesn’t.

So we must do our own detective work. Can we reason backward from the “offspring” of the good to the good itself? Well, it seems we need to know something about the good in the first place. For instance, if I say someone looks like Jean-Paul Sartre, I would have to know what Jean-Paul Sartre looks like, presumably.

Here’s the real Jean-Paul Sartre:

Here’s AI’s Jean-Paul Sartre lookalike:

I feel pretty confident I wouldn’t confuse “Jean Sarte Funtion Paul Sarte” for the real deal if I saw him on the street. Unfortunately, Plato’s asking us figure things out from the other way around—from the likeness of the good to the good itself. Which is kind of cockamamie. To see why, I’ll give you an example.

Let’s assume you’ve never seen a javelina and you’re told the AI depiction below is “javelina-ish”. Can you guess from it alone what real javelinas look like?

Maybe a javelina is a cross between a hedgehog and a rhino? A warthog-rodent? It’s hard to say without knowing how close the likeness is to the real thing. A multitude of possibilities seem equally plausible.

Notice the epistemic position this situation put us in—we can only be humble when faced with such uncertainty. For all we know, javelinas might not even exist!4

On the other hand, maybe we think we’ve seen a javelina before…maybe, or was that something else?…Perhaps we’ll know it when we see it.

(See my home footage of real javelinas at the end of this post.)

The Sun Analogy

THE LIKENESS OF THE GOOD is explained by an analogy:

“Though vision may be in the eyes and its possessor may try to use it, and though color be present, yet without the presence of a third thing specifically and naturally adapted to this purpose, you are aware that vision will see nothing and the colors will remain invisible…Neither vision itself nor its vehicle, which we call the eye, is identical with the sun…5

• The eye represents the soul,

• light represents truth,

• and the sun represents the good, which gives the light of truth to the soul.

• The result is vision, or knowledge.

Just as vision is brought about by the natural affinity between (healthy) eyes and light, so too does knowledge arise in the (healthy) soul’s natural affinity to truth. Like the sun, the good exists neither solely in the soul nor in the truth, but unlike the sun, it can only be “seen” by “the mind’s eye”. Perhaps this is Plato’s delightfully dodgy way of saying the good can only be “seen” by its effects—and like the sun, we should not expect to be able to gaze upon it directly.

The good is what we desire.

IT’S WHAT EVERYONE, maybe even everything, desires, even if we don’t know what it is. And despite not knowing what it is, we could never be satisfied with the artificial or fake good:

“And again, is it not apparent that…when it comes to the good nobody is content with the possession of the appearance but all men seek the reality, and the semblance satisfies nobody here?”6

We have to keep in mind the proper meaning of the word ‘good’ in order to understand this point. Goodness as a quality or idea has to be the object of desire in all cases and pursued for its own sake. We could never rationally say we don’t want what’s good, or even that we would be satisfied with kinda sorta good, since to say kinda sorta is to admit there’s some desired quality that’s missing.

We can’t want anything “bad” either, since whatever supposedly bad thing we claim to want will just get churned through the Platonic Logic Machine and spit out the other end in a shiny new package, rebranded as a funny way of talking about what we really think is good.

TAKE A MOMENT. Give that some thought. Think about your current desires and what that means about your idea of the good. Think about what you’ve wanted at various points in your life and whether you still want those things. Think about the most fucked up people you know and what that means about their idea of the good. How can we all pursue the good? What in the hell was Plato smoking?

And yet, it’s hard to deny we want what’s good, even if this turns out to be no specific thing. Indeed, it can’t be any thing or group of things, as particular ‘goods’ can never be ends in themselves. It can’t even be knowledge since the highest knowledge must be knowledge of something—and that something is The Good (so I'll start capitalizing it now):

But, furthermore, you know this too, that the multitude believe pleasure to be the good, and the finer sprits intelligence or knowledge.

Certainly.

And you are also aware, my friend, that those who hold this latter view are not able to point out what knowledge is but are finally compelled to say that it is the knowledge of the good.

Most absurdly, he said.7

The Good lies at the uppermost limit of an ontological continuum along which objects of knowledge “partake” in higher levels of reality in proportion to their proximity to it.

This reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and of truth in so far as known.8

As a consequence, you can’t really know anything unless you know The Good. To make matters worse, you can’t even know The Good, at least not rationally.

How else can we “know” The Good, then?

SOCRATES TELLS A STORY in the Symposium about a wise woman named Diotima whom he’d met when he was but a wee philosopher-to-be. As she schools him on the nature of love in the passage below, notice the language she uses to describe the highest form of knowledge:

“When a man has reached this point in his education in love, studying the different types of beauty in correct order, he will come to the final end and goal of this education. Then suddenly he will see a beauty of a breathtaking nature, Socrates, the beauty which is the justification of all his efforts so far…

All other forms of beauty derive from it, but in such a way that their creation or destruction does not strengthen or weaken it, or affect it in any way at all. If a man progresses…and begins to catch sight of this beauty, then he is within reach of the final revelation…

He uses them [particular examples of beauty] like a ladder, climbing from the love of one person to love of two; from two to love of all physical beauty; from physical beauty to beauty in human behavior; thence to beauty in subjects of study; from them he arrives finally at that branch of knowledge which studies nothing but ultimate beauty. Then at last he understands what true beauty is.9

Diotima’s Ladder echoes a very similar ascent in the Republic known as the divided line analogy, which also culminates in what can only be called a vision in the metaphorical sense of the word. Whatever awaits us at the top of the ladder, it can only be attained super-rationally. Beauty or The Good (they’re the same) are “beyond being, superior to it in rank and power”, shining light on everything experienced before, revealing things as they truly are.

FOR PLATO, REALITY IS FAR FROM the all-or-nothing ontology we take for granted. This can take some getting used to. We tend to think reality is captured by science, with its abstract relations laid out omnisciently along an invisible, deterministic reel. Perhaps this reel is where the sound of one hand clapping does its thing. Who knows. Or maybe I’m confusing reality’s reel with Instagram’s.

Whereas the sun metaphor suggests a more dynamic reality that has a way of fleeing to a “dimension” hiding in plain sight. This doesn’t mean objects10 are real only insofar as we know them, but instead that they approach reality by “participating” in The Good. We and the universe are in the same boat, so to speak.

Whatever The Good is, even if it’s nothing more than a mere placeholder11, positing it gives us a target, as well as footholds in memories and springboards in likenesses, even though we’re groping in a hazy world of flux. The resulting structure leaves plenty of room for basic human error, perceptual misfires, and user illusions, but it also reveals why we can expect certain kinds of inquiry to stall out. Platonic ontology involves a strange kind of “error” that exists in objects, with varying levels of defectiveness depending on the object. This in turn means we face epistemological limits at different levels of reality. Paradoxes to solve.

And yet, universal “participation” makes progress towards wisdom possible at each level, no matter how far down the ladder of love we are. Everything “partakes” in The Good to some extent, including the most unimaginable pseudo-realities, the kind we can only barely think about, much less talk about. The knower-known continuum is all-encompassing, more open and expansive than our austere science-based ontology. It’s not limited to boring form-types that live aloofly in Platonic heaven either, despite what you may have been taught in Philosophy 10112, but instead embraces even the fleeting stuff of life that won’t fit into logic’s tidy propositions.

In short, there is nothing that isn’t at least sort of real. (Isn’t that ridiculously true!)

We’ll see what this structure looks like next time.

Oh yeah, javelinas:

What do YOU think?

• Can something be more real than something else?

• Can anything exist beyond words?

• What role does intuition play in knowledge? Does it only kick in when reason falls short?

• Can you clap with one hand? Did you try after watching that video? (I did, but my hands are too small or my fingers not long enough or something. 🙁)

Leave a comment

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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We have been going on about this for thousands of years. Seriously.

Consider Socrates. While he’s sitting in his prison cell awaiting his hemlock, he decides to spend his final day of existence complaining about materialist reductionism. (This stuff was going on long before Galileo!1) He recounts how he once had “an extraordinary passion for that branch of learning which is called natural science”, but then became disenchanted. In the following passage his complaint sounds all-too-familiar2:

“I discovered that the fellow [Anaxagoras]3 made no use of mind and assigned to it no causality for the order of the world, but adduced causes like air and aether and water and many other absurdities. It seemed to me that he was just about as inconsistent as if someone were to say, The cause of everything that Socrates does is mind—and then, in trying to account for my several actions, said first that the reason why I am lying here now is that my body is composed of bones and sinews, and that the bones are rigid and separated at the joints…and that is the cause of my sitting here in a bent position.”4

It’s not that there’s something inherently wrong with a mechanistic explanation, or that the particular construction of the limbs and joints don’t enable Socrates to sit in the prison cell. It’s that his physical capacity to sit is not the appropriate kind of explanation for his moral behavior.

“Or again, he tried to account in the same way for my conversing with you, adducing causes such as sound and air and hearing and a thousand others, and never troubled to mention the real reasons, which are that since Athens has thought it better to condemn me, therefore I for my part have thought it better to sit here, and more right to stay and submit to whatever penalty she orders. Because, by dog, I fancy that these sinews and bones would have been in the neighborhood of Megara or Boeotia long ago—impelled by a conviction of what is best!...But to call things like that causes is too absurd. If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true. But to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best—although my actions are controlled by mind—would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression.”5

By dog, if someone asked us, “Why did Socrates choose to stay in prison?”, no one today would say it’s because of the way his bones and sinews are positioned, but it’s not uncommon to hear we are “nothing but” the sum of our biology and its interactions with the environment. Which comes to the same thing. Both ancient and modern versions explain away the mental-moral cause.

If believing is putting our money where our mouth is, then hardly anyone believes in nothing-but-ism. We do hold ourselves and others like us to some moral standard because we believe in shared values, even if we can’t articulate what they are. Perhaps this is why those who try to reduce morality to scientific explanation pretty much always inadvertently sneak some non-scientifically-derived value they happen to possess through the back door.6

In my last post I asked whether the universe possesses the same values we possess, driven, perhaps, by something like the idea of the Good. I also asked why the values that drive our behavior wouldn’t be the same values drive the universe as well, and on what grounds we stand outside of Nature. Of course, it’s possible to adopt a conservative position and just say: “We don’t know the universe is intelligent, but we do know the natural world in so far as we can describe it with physics, with which we’re able to achieve accurate results. There’s no reason to think the universe is intelligent or morally ordered. Science is all we need.”

There’s some truth to this. Many investigations into the natural world don’t require teleological accounts; it depends on the question. And maybe this bifurcation of human nature from nature is fine. As I and many others have said before, science is not metaphysics. I’m okay with this separation of disciplines so long as reductionist-mechanistic causality is not thought to explain everything there is to explain. But when mind becomes superfluous in the grand scheme of things, there’s a flip side—science becomes superfluous when it comes to explaining our values. At this point we have to figure out how to reconnect these two seemingly-disparate realms. The problem is, when we take mind out of nature, it’s much harder to put the whole picture back together again.

I don’t know whether we can hold the two realms apart much longer. I suspect not. We want integration. Whether this is ultimately possible, I don’t know. But what if a teleological framework must be presupposed if we’re ever to recognize intelligence at work in nature? How can we ever hope to find purpose in nature if we refuse to look for it or even to acknowledge its possibility? Our limited preconceptions have misled us in the past, blinding us to the intelligence of animals. Paradigms matter.

Taking the intelligence of the universe as our starting point…

“I assumed he would begin by informing us whether the earth is flat or round, and would then proceed to explain in detail the reason and logical necessity for this by stating how and why it was better that it should be so. I thought that if he asserted that the earth was in the center, he would explain in detail that it was better for it to be there; and if he made this clear, I was prepared to give up hankering after any other kind of cause…it never entered into my head that a man who asserted that the ordering of things is due to mind would offer any other explanation for them that it is best for them to be as they are.”7

Socrates wants an account of the physical universe guided by purpose. While this probably seems strange to us, it shouldn’t seem strange by virtue of being a presupposition. The mechanist-reductionist framework is a presupposition too, but at least the teleological one has the advantage of allowing us to take in a wider landscape—a landscape that doesn’t leave us behind.

Plato holds that the idea of the good drives both human behavior and the physical universe. The intelligence behind the world, he thought, was a macrocosmic likeness to our own such that the best account of this relationship would deduce everything from nous or Mind. Of course, this leap from human behavior to the entire universe is one that very few contemporaries would take. But consider going in the other direction, from the world to us. If we are in an important sense driven by the same principles as the world we live in, then a teleological understanding should be welcome, especially since it’s neither unscientific nor antagonistic to mechanistic scientific explanation. I’ll try to show how Plato bridged the apparent gap between the two frameworks in future posts.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Modern physics describes natural laws but doesn't typically ask "why" these particular laws exist or whether they serve any purpose. Should it? What would physics look like if it (re-) incorporated teleological thinking? Would this be desirable?

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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SOME OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CURRENTS which strain to comprehend one another in our times can be found holding hands and singing kumbaya in (my interpretation of) Platonic thought. For Plato, there was no phenomenal realm of psychology in here with the natural world out there. For this reason alone it seems we could learn a thing or two from our philosophical past, even if we don’t accept all of it.

But generally speaking, most aren’t interested. I blame our faith in progress, which can lead us to think: Nothing written thousands of years ago can be worthwhile. Maybe we can forgive Plato for living a long time ago when people just didn’t know a hell of a lot and couldn’t tell the difference between their own wishful thinking and the way things really are, but the chances of our taking him seriously are pretty much nil.

To a degree this is understandable. But it’s not just that he wrote thousands of years ago—his ideas were strange even to his contemporaries, and for many of the same reasons they’re strange to us1. Add to that he wrote fictional dialogues that can’t be taken at face value, and it’s no wonder the words that travel through the millennia land in our ears with a quaint but nonsensical thud. It’s not so much that we misunderstand him (though that too), it’s that we don’t think he’s saying anything even remotely relevant. Let me give you an example.

“Now, all these are contributory causes which the god employs as servants in perfecting the most excellent form that is possible. But they are regarded by most people not as contributory causes, but as the cause of everything – cooling and heating, solidifying and melting, and all such processes. Yet these are unable to think or reason to any end. For we must declare that among things that are, it belongs to soul alone to acquire nous, and this is invisible, while fire, water, earth, and air are all visible bodies. And the lover of nous and knowledge first needs to investigate the causes which belong to the intelligent nature, and secondly, those causes which are moved by others, and of necessity become a source of motion to other objects. We too should act in accordance with these principles. We must, indeed, describe both types of causes, yet distinguish those which, in consort with nous, are artificers of beauty and good from those which, being bereft of intelligence, consistently bring about randomness and disorder.” Timaeus 46d-e

I’ll pretend you read the above. ;)

Leaving some details aside which I’ll return to in future posts, Plato-Timaeus seems to be saying there is another type of causality than the kind we typically recognize, a causality that deals with intelligences. We “lovers of knowledge” should presume the world is intelligent insofar as possible even though “most people” presume it to be devoid of intelligence. Why? Because insofar as we presume the world lacks intelligence and is mere matter in motion, it will produce “haphazard and disorderly effects every time”. In other words, an unintelligent world can be expected to behave unlawfully and unintelligibly. If we want an intelligible, lawful account, we should assume the world is itself intelligent.

Let’s see if I can guess what you’re thinking: Why does the world have to be intelligent to be intelligible? That’s nonsense!

I’ll try to translate this bizarre position into modern terms.

Many aspects of Platonic thought reveal he understood the indeterminacy of interpretation, and his response to this problem might anticipate something like Davidson’s principle of charity, except unlike Davidson, Plato pushes beyond the intersubjective linguistic sphere to the translatability of the universe and everything in it. To hypothesize the world’s intelligibility is to expect it to be intelligent, to have values we can recognize as being sufficiently like ours, if it is to be understood.

I’ll explain this in more detail in upcoming posts, but for now my goal is simply to preempt eye rolling (I know with some of you I won’t succeed, but c’est la vie). If Plato’s application of epistemological principles to reality seems naive to us, it’s worth pausing to consider why we conceive of the subjective and the objective as sharply distinct, if not incommensurable, realms. If we insist the basic underlying principles that make human interactions and values intelligible don’t apply to the universe, on what grounds do we defend that position? It seems to me we can only draw arbitrary lines in the giant sandbox we erroneously imagine ourselves to be playing outside of.

The truth is, we decide in advance that nature must “obey” laws, and that’s already a far cry from valuelessness. If we were really serious about not wanting to impose our values on the world, we would have to admit the world itself could be completely lawless…or not…who knows. Whatever the world is like once we have completely removed ourselves from it, we can never know—few are willing to take objectivity to this extreme. So while we might accuse Plato of anthropomorphizing the universe with all his talk of nous and the Good, we don’t exactly escape the charge either. It turns out our scientific ideal is itself none other than a human value, austere, perhaps, but one that nevertheless expresses faith that our collective knowledge will continuously make progress toward reaching a transcendent vision of Nature Itself, even if we can only ever approach it.

I’M BEGINNING A SERIES OF POSTS that will explore Platonic philosophy in a way that will hopefully go deeper (or at least weirder) than what you’ll typically find on the internet.

READING ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY is a bit like peering into a parallel universe where everything’s kind of wonky, but also weirdly familiar. We’re wrestling with questions that seem new to us, but they’re actually thousands of years old…maybe older. Like…

• Does the universe have a purpose? Is it driven by intelligence and values like ours? Or is it in truth “nothing but…”?

• Is a reductionist-materialist causal explanation sufficient for understanding everything there is to know?

• Is determinism true? What does that even mean? What about morality, ethics, values?

• Are teleological accounts antagonistic to mechanistic-reductive causal explanations? Or can these ways of seeing be reconciled?

• Is the quantitative opposed to the qualitative? Can quantities have qualities? (Actually, I don’t hear many people asking this question. But I am!)

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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Related posts

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• 1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.

• 2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.

• 3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.

• 4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• 5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

• 6) What the demiurge has to say about causal closure... A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.

To get full access to my published books and posts, upgrade your subscription. Find out more. You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my niche literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina Lee Forsee

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I’m always on the lookout for interesting thinkers to share with you. Recently I happened upon Pedro Brea’s Substack and read his recent essay on the limitation of “instrumental reasoning” in contrast to “authentic reasoning” which “necessarily involves a moral transformation of one’s being”. In that post he does a fabulous job of synthesizing the ideas of Henri Bergson, Pierre Hadot, Karl Jaspers, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Plato. I was so impressed I thought I’d introduce him to all y’all.

Enjoy!

~Tina

Q&A

Have you ever abandoned a position that you strongly believed in? What made you change your mind?

PEDRO BREA: I majored in physics as an undergraduate and my education tacitly taught me to look at the world from a materialist point of view. I can’t say it was a very sophisticated form of materialism though (the reductive kind) since, having not taken any philosophy courses until my senior year of undergrad, I was unaware of any alternative metaphysical frameworks—I didn’t even know what metaphysics was! This made it so I couldn’t even fathom accepting any other point of view: I was like a fish and physics was my water. I began to question this perspective over the course of a crippling spell of depression in the second half of my undergraduate education.

I didn’t know it then, but reading Nietzsche would allow me to see that my metaphysical commitment to materialism also implicitly committed me to nihilism. There was no place for values or meaning within my original materialist commitments, so I had implicitly chosen to deny them outright as subjective fictions. Reading Nietzsche did two things for me: 1) his work was my first exposure to a philosophical critique of materialism; and 2) his critique of science as a form of the “ascetic ideal” showed me that the nihilist can deny the existence of all values except one: truth. I will never forget the day and the feeling of reading the last sentence of the Genealogy of Morals for the first time: “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” These words hit me like a freight train. I realized that my commitment to the “truth” of materialism committed me to nihilism, and that nihilism is a philosophically confused position because it lies to itself about its commitment to truth—I think this is an example of what Sartre called “bad faith”?

Although I no longer identify as much as I used to with Nietzsche’s ethics, when I needed it most his work helped pull me out of my depression by showing me that there are other philosophically compelling ways to understand the world, and that I would only find value in life once I stopped looking for meaning outside of myself and started being the creator of my own values. (Lately, I’ve been undergoing another major transformation in how I understand ethics and values, which I have recently written about, but that’s a subject for another time.) This isn’t to say that I moved away from physics just so I could feel better. I have always been aware of the danger of choosing a truth that is comfortable instead of what I honestly think to be the case given the evidence, but I finally felt like I had the tools and permission to set about exploring other metaphysical frameworks. I currently think process philosophy offers the most compelling picture of reality I have ever encountered, and it has been a joy to learn more about it and compare it to other philosophies.

What question initially seems trivial but reveals unexpected depths when seriously examined?

The question “what is goodness?” sounds extremely trivial but might be the most profound question there is. I have often been dissatisfied with how the philosophers and other scholars I have interacted with just take this question for granted. An example might help here. I once attended a critical theory workshop where one of the speakers was a Marxist historian. After his presentation, I basically asked what his metaethical basis was for thinking it was more just to write history from the perspective of the proletariat and the oppressed? Now, I personally have no qualms with this and recognize the importance of resisting the weaponization of historical narratives that serve oppressive power structures, but I wasn’t satisfied with philosophically taking ideas of goodness and justice for granted. I was very disappointed, however, when the question seemed to fly right over his head—maybe it was unfair to ask this of a historian—but no one else at the workshop seemed to care about my question. Most people seemed to take their ideas of social justice for granted without thinking too hard about what basis there was in reality for believing in their values in the first place. But I could not help but wonder: what metaphysical grounds did we have for believing in these values?

I must emphasize that this wasn’t just an issue I had with critical theory folk, but feels common in many academic and non-academic circles. The feeling I get is that many people behave as if they have pretty strong commitments to objective ideals of goodness and justice, but speak as if they were moral relativists when asked about the objectivity of their values (by objective here I just mean the idea that some answers to ethical questions really are better than others.) Yes, it seems like most people generally have some sense of what it means to be a decent person, but that doesn’t reflect how deep the question of goodness runs. Once you start really thinking about it, you’ll find that pursuing this question is inherently tied up with how we understand the meaning of life, the mind, intersubjectivity, and their relation to the cosmos. I don’t think we can ever fully exhaust this question, but thinking deeply about what the good is can only enrich our moral life and provide an intellectually rigorous framework for articulating what it means to be a good person.

What's the most dangerous idea in philosophy (or your discipline) today?

Having experienced depression and nihilism as a direct result of a reductive materialist worldview, and seeing the same tendency in some of my students and other people, I have to agree with who you interviewed before me that, not simply materialism, but the idea that consciousness is just in our heads, that we are essentially our brains, is perhaps the most dangerous idea in both academic and popular philosophy. It seems to come from a good place of wanting to uphold the credibility of science and a desire to attain an objective worldview, but, ironically, I think that commitment often goes too far and becomes dogmatic. Philosophically, I just haven’t found any attempt to reduce mental states to physical states convincing, and I think there are excellent grounds for doubting this; I’m thinking specifically about contemporary physics, embodied phenomenology, the enactivist approach to cognitive science, and radical behaviorism.

However, the real concern for me with this belief is an ethical one. The solipsistic idea that we are stuck in our heads and that consciousness is some sort of epiphenomenon often does lead to nihilism and depression, as it did for me. Seeing ourselves as cut off from the life around us, perhaps not even really living at all, is psychologically harmful and predisposes one to cynicism, apathy, and hedonism of the worst kind. I think many people are craving a greater sense of meaning and cosmic belonging but are held back by the idea that there is a categorical abyss between their experience and the world. One of my goals as a philosopher is to give people the tools to escape this solipsism in an intellectually honest way. Once we no longer see ourselves as cut off from the whole and not reducible to our physical parts, we can begin to take more seriously the idea that ethics has everything to do with the quality of our participation in the world and how we relate to other living beings, and that spending our lives learning to love is our highest ethical calling. It’s really commonsensical when you think about it, but such is the intellectual knot that this dangerous idea has left many of us with.

What truth do you believe in that society is not ready to accept?

I basically answered this in the previous question, but I do not believe that our minds are reducible to our brains. Henri Bergson argued that perception is not an inner faculty of representation, but “in the things themselves,” and that perception reflects our body’s capacity for action over its environment. This is a radical idea that I am still wrestling with, but I think Bergson was right to point us to the fact that perception is the temporal/relational nexus where our body and mind meet the world—it’s somewhere (when?) in between. If our bodies allow us to experience space, then consciousness allows us to experience time. Consciousness is always embodied and always comes with its world. It is misguided to treat consciousness as if it were like any other object of empirical investigation, or something that could be reduced to a particular physical process. I’m still thinking this through and finding the words to express it, but consciousness seems more like a temporal and relational phenomenon that, while surely being intricately tied to the physical behavioral circuits that exist between the body and its environment, cannot be studied like the spatial entities normally studied by natural scientists. The idea that our bodies and minds are utterly inseparable from our environment is so unorthodox that I think it will be a very long time before it really gains traction in popular consciousness.

If you had to compress your worldview into a single provocative statement, what would it be?

I usually don’t like one-liners because they are almost always gross-simplifications. This one is no exception, but I do like it: “Time is everything.” More than anything, I think that developments in contemporary physics have taught us that change is the rule of the cosmos. Relativity teaches us that space itself is dynamic; quantum mechanics has shown us that ambiguity and creativity reign supreme at the tiniest levels of reality; and consciousness is nothing if not a form of temporal extension that prolongs the past into the present and anticipates the future. The idea that the world is made up of solid physical particles that occupy absolute spatial coordinates in space has long been debunked, but our habits of thought sometimes seem like they haven’t caught up. It is a real intellectual effort to look at the world in terms of time instead of “stuff,” but I have found it to be the most worthwhile philosophical exercise for my understanding of reality.

What do YOU think?

• Do you find believing “we are simply our brains” depressing? Does a world without values lead to nihilism?

• Has a particular philosopher or philosophy helped you navigate tough times?

• What is goodness?

• “Henri Bergson argued that perception is not an inner faculty of representation, but “in the things themselves…” What do you think this means? Do you agree?

• What are your thoughts on time and its connection to consciousness?

Leave a comment

PEDRO BREA, PhD, is a Lecturer at the University of Colorado (Boulder and Denver) working on the metaphysics and metaethics of process-relational thought. His doctoral dissertation and recent publications have attempted to reframe our understanding of the relationship between energy and time in light of developments in contemporary physics and process philosophy.

PhilPeople

• The Birth of Energy from the Spirit of Revenge: On the Genealogy of the Concept of "Energy" and its Relation to Time

• Critique of the Concept of Energy in Light of Bergson's Philosophy of Duration

New Anima

Tracing the paths of spirit through matter. On philosophy, science, and religion.

By Pedro Brea

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IN THE LAST POST we grappled with a bizarre consequence of the city-soul analogy in Plato’s Republic—it seemed the “justice” of the soul only comes at the expense of that of the city and likewise the other way around. Rubbing these seemingly logically incompatible scales together like fire-starting sticks created a dialectical friction which lit up an image of justice: the parts of the soul must be harmoniously arranged such that they act as one unified mind, and only after “getting one’s own house in order” can justice be achieved at larger scales. But this doesn’t speak to the possibility of justice at either scale. Is justice even possible?

What is human nature?

ARE WE SELFISH OR ALTRUISTIC? When presented with this binary choice, the answer seems clear: Pure altruism is a fantasy. Don’t get me wrong, altruism is real, but it’s never pure. Philanthropists get a tax break. Volunteers get warm and fuzzy feelings, a social outlet, and a bit of do-gooder superiority. Even saints have the salvation of their souls dangling like a carrot at the end of the stick, though hardly anyone would say this detracts from their saintliness. Consider it this way.

If someone approached you on the street and tried to hand you a twenty dollar bill claiming “no strings attached”, would you take it?

I hope not, because I think you’ll find that what from a distance appeared to be a twenty dollar bill is actually a flyer with the word Jesus written on it and by the time you realize this, it’s too late for you. A pack of child thieves has already made off with your wallet, emptied it of its contents, and tossed it into highway traffic where it is currently being flattened beyond recognition. Better luck next time.

Maybe I’m just being cynical. But it’s not unreasonable to be suspicious when there’s no apparent motive for such behavior. To have absolutely no self-interest motivating our actions is, well, inhuman. It’s almost unthinkable. Everyone is self-interested, and we would think anyone who claimed otherwise was either lying or seriously deluded. An infamous character in the Republic, Thrasymachus, would agree. But he’d take it a bit further. As he puts it:

Justice is the interest of the stronger.

Those who know better can see that what we call justice amounts to BS or lies disseminated by those in power to keep the mob in check. Justice doesn’t really exist, and those who believe in it are suckers.

Now that’s cynical.

And incoherent. Plato’s brother, Glaucon, offers an improvement: Justice is not its own reward, but a social contract we should all be thankful for. Yes, each of us wants to rule the world, but since no individual has the power to pull it off, we agree not to commit crimes against each other and in exchange we get to live in a world that is not quite so brutish, nasty, and short. Of course, crime would pay if we could get away with it, but we can’t. However, if an individual had the kind of power the Ring of Gyges bestows on its bearer, we would witness the dark truth about human nature. (If you haven’t read The Republic, think: Lord of the Rings.) Defend justice against that, Socrates!

But can’t we say we’re partially altruistic? C’mon now…

Surely this is true, but Plato isn’t one to snatch low hanging fruit. Instead he forces Socrates to take pure selfishness as given. However plausible it may be to think our natures neither wholly selfish nor wholly altruistic, this is nevertheless a weak position to argue from. Better to grant selfishness unlimited power and then prove, despite this, justice is real.

Not an easy task. It seems he would have to figure out how social justice could be entailed by the self-interest of its constituents. We would have to be social creatures such that it would simply be in our best interest to seek the common good. We would be like, “Altruism? Selfishness? What’re those?” These would never enter into our vocabulary. Altruism and self-interest would negate each other and disappear into the aether.

Well, Aristotle may have called us the social animal, but we aren’t that social!

And we face another problem like the one we grappled with in the last post. If agents align their self-interests in perfect harmony with the common good, they’re no longer agents but instead cogs in a machine driven by the society as a whole. But the very meaning of society necessarily entails a many-and-one structure—society can’t collapse into a simple unity without losing its social character. Social justice can’t be entailed by agents acting solely for the common good because then agents lose their status as agents, and society loses its group status and becomes the sole agent.

The many become one.

It appears self-interest must be maintained in at least two agents for social justice to exist at all.1

Sensational Organic Harmony

‘Take the example of someone hurting his finger. It is the whole community extending through the body and connecting with the soul, the soul being the ruling element that organizes the community into a single system - this entire community notices the hurt and together feels the pain of the part that hurts, which is why we say “the man has a pain in his finger.” The same applies to any other part of the human body, to the pain felt when a part of it is hurt or the pleasure felt when the part gets better.’

‘Certainly.’2

‘…When anything at all — good or bad — happens to one of its citizens, a city of this kind will be most inclined to say that what is affected is a part of itself. The whole city will rejoice together or grieve together.

‘…we also agreed that this is the greatest good for a city. We said a well-regulated city was like a body in the way it relates to the pain or pleasure of one of its parts.’ (464b)

IF YOU WANT ME TO CARE ABOUT YOU the way I care about myself, I had better literally feel your pain. The organism’s “social” glue is its collective experience of pain—the sensation is what motivates and unites the part to the functioning of the whole. The peculiar thing is, the sensation of pain belongs to the finger—it’s not nonsensical, after all, for your doctor to ask you where it hurts—even while being shared in equal measure with the whole organism.3

Already we can see that the brain’s activity can only be a part of the bigger picture.4 But we shouldn’t conclude from this that the organic whole amounts to the rational mind either. It’s not as though the mind can simply decide to disconnect from its body (though this might give us an idea of the difficulty involved in the philosopher’s exiting the cave and sheds light on why Socrates called philosophy a preparation for death). Even a pain as minor as a paper cut must be felt by the organic whole, and the mind is no exception. Not even a Super Spartan warrior wannabe like Socrates can will himself to stop feeling pain (and anyway macho-ness depends on it; no pain, no gain). To the degree the unhappy part is unhappy, the whole is unhappy. Try reasoning through some difficult problem while some part of you is in intense pain. No mind can escape the predicament of its organic whole. The mind has a role to play and can’t simply refuse to work.5

The functioning of the whole takes priority over its parts—everything depends on the soul.6

It appears we’ve come upon a living organization that unites the physical through the phenomenological. It’s hard to imagine a better social glue than the shared pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding sensations of the biological organism, since this explains the part’s motivation to achieve the common good. It seems we’ve edged closer to our outline of social justice. But.

Can we realize social harmony?

“…an individual human being is happy only if he lives in such a way as to further the happiness of his fellows.

It is worth pausing over this thesis, because it might be taken to suggest that justice is the sum of prudence and charity. But prudence aims at one’s own good as distinct from that of another, and charity aims at the good of another as distinct from one’s own. These virtues are the stock and trade of modern individualism: given the premise that a human being’s nature is to be understood individually, one is forced to interpret all ethical and political phenomena in terms of selfishness, egoism and altruism, greed and “brotherly love.” But this whole way of thinking is alien to Socrates. The good at which justice aims is essentially a shared good, as the end of cooperative activity is essentially a shared end. If we are the partners and helpers that Socrates describes, then the good of each of us is inseparable from the good of the others: this principle of cooperative activity is, he thinks, a principle of our nature.”

Anton Ford and Benjamin Laurence, The Parts and Whole of Plato’s Republic

CAN A HUMAN SOCIETY WORK THIS WAY? We do sacrifice ourselves for the collective at times, but we don’t literally feel each other’s pain. What about insect societies such as ants and bees? The Kallipolis, or Beautiful City, does seem eerily entomological with its functional specialization, communal parenting, state-sanctioned mating, and infanticide.7 Bug colonies exhibit a shocking level of cooperation; they’re stupid good at minding their own business. And yet, while I don’t doubt that ants feel pain, do they feel each other’s pain? It’s hard to believe they do. They don’t seem to give two farts about one of their own. Our auntie just got stepped on? I guess that answers the question of what’s for dinner. You, you, and you, help me grab Auntie Ant, the rest of y’all, back to work!

Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans

“What is the source of such differences? An ant’s simplicity prevents her from solving the puzzle on her own but facilitates effective cooperation with nest-mates. A single person is cognitively sophisticated and solves the problem efficiently but this leads to interpersonal variation that stands in the way of efficient group performance.”

BUT WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT THE FEELINGS OF ANTS? All I can say is, from some faraway place in outer space, maybe we don’t seem too different from them. We sacrifice ourselves for our own, and some of us might even come to the aid of a nearby stranger if called upon to do so, but when individuals in distant regions of society are hurt, we don’t feel much of anything. Maybe empathy or sympathy, if that. We certainly don’t share sensations in such a way as to unite our interests to each other and to the whole. That’s hard to imagine.

And it turns out even organic harmony falls short of the mark.

The problem is, we live in fluctuating world which only allows us to catch glimpses of realities neither here nor there. The flip side of this state of affairs is that each definition of justice in the Republic contains some partial truth, even if Socrates shoots them all down with equal force. Which means not even Thrasymachus’ perversion of justice can be entirely wrong. At the very least it tells us what justice might look like in a world that fails to fully instantiate it.

Platonic Entropy

“It is no easy matter for a city founded in this way to be altered. But since destruction awaits everything that has come to be, even a foundation of this kind will not survive for the whole of time.” 8

WE, TOO, MUST DIE. Insofar as the Republic is about political justice, it “draws its strength from a sense of loss.”9 The Beautiful City is in some ways like an organism since it carries within itself the seed of its own destruction. Generative expansion requires devolving into death. Corruption is planted in its very foundations, the clock set ticking. Conversely, what causes the breakdown of justice may be connected to the same natural force that drives its flourishing.

For us at least, that principle is excess. We want more. We always want more. It’s our seemingly trivial craving for better food and comfy couches that forces Socrates to hit the reset button on his restrained initial proposal. From then on, the Kallipolis unleashes itself into a fevered state of civil war. Throughout much of the Republic we get to watch the spectacle of ourselves blowing ourselves up from the inside.

But let’s not forget the first proposal for the just city (as many are wont to do).10 Socrates’ preferred peaceful commune, or the City of Pigs, gets discussed so briefly it’s easy to overlook, but it’s hugely important in throwing light on the Beautiful City. (Remember the fire-starting sticks!) Of course Socrates would prefer the vaguely Spartan Pig City life, but he does have his reasons. In the last post I quoted him responding to the complaint that the guardians weren’t getting any more than what they needed to survive:

“We shall say that we wouldn’t be at all surprised if even our guardians were best off like this…”

Why doesn’t he warn us that any excess beyond necessity will lead to disaster?! Why does he let Glaucon’s petty complaint derail the whole project? Well, clearly this is no accident. Plato veers us off course with an “accidental” sharp turn precisely to ensure the Beautiful City comes into view, knowing full well once we catch a glimpse of ourselves, there’s no going back.

If the Beautiful City is thought to be an ideal model of justice, it nevertheless falls short of a Platonic form. The City of Pigs comes closer, and the biological organism closer still, but presumably even these can only approximate the real deal. And yet somehow we can judge these models better or worse by what they fall short of, even if we don’t quite know what that is, even if what they approximate has yet to be clearly discerned.

The old charge of totalitarianism against the “Platonic ideal” continues to this day and is a complaint characteristic of the literal-minded who fail to notice the utopian nature of the Beautiful City—that its “good” lives no place. Utopias express a tainted or lost perfection: Things “could” (hypothetically) be good, but only if we could revert to a state “before” humanity got itself booted from the natural order. Animals almost have to juxtapose us in such scenarios. When Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, there is no mention of the animals, not even the serpent, being cast out in their wake. Animals remain forever suspended in a kind of Neverland paradise. Why is that? Well, make no mistake, animals must have followed us out beyond the garden walls because here they are, forced to eat each other to survive. Notice, however, that they don’t slaughter each other by the millions or spread like a cancer over the entire globe like we do. And while they sometimes form groups which we might by some stretch of the imagination call “societies”, these tend to be simple family units that can’t even aspire to the complexity of our rustic City of Pigs. Unlike us, they take from the earth only what they need, and for that they get to stay, in some sense of that word, in the utopian garden of paradise. Whereas we spread like an all-consuming fire, hell bent on burning everything down with us. And yet, while we can admire animal moderation in a distant, abstract way, we will never give up our warmongering ways for their simpler lives.

On the other hand, if we’re so bad, why does Plato call this cancer upon the earth that is humanity “beautiful”? Perhaps it’s his way of pointing out that our excess, along with its disastrous results, is an expression of Nature too.

After all, a similar story is echoed even in our best model, the biological organism. We begin as almost nothing, but this nothing which becomes something grows bigger and drives to expand itself—at some point a harmonious order of scale is fleetingly achieved—but all the while a process of decline has been running in the background. Parts that have stopped minding their own business have been quietly sacrificed all along, a process we only notice when it reaches a fevered pitch and the disease gets its diagnosis.

Organic unity comes apart at the seams from the moment it gets set in motion.

Nothing in Nature escapes it, whatever it is. Inside us there lives the beginning of a kind of anarchy wherein for some reason a part chooses its own ‘self-interest’ over the common good and strikes out on its own, even if doing so leads to its own demise. Socrates might have been thinking of this degenerative process when he refused to flee prison to escape his death sentence. If Athens pronounced him a cancer to society, who was he to argue? He proclaimed that life outside her city walls would be for him no different from death and even went so far as to heroically hasten his own demise for her sake…but it was too late. Athens could not be saved.

This aspect of Nature can’t be ignored. The fact that Plato spends so much of the Republic elaborating the vainglorious City of Us suggests he thinks even death has a purpose. Perhaps Beauty requires a battle between excess and entropy—the greatest possible unity of the greatest possible diversity is a well-known aesthetic principle.11 Perhaps Justice bursts forth as Luminosity Itself from fevered dreams and reckless creativity playing itself against Time’s irreversibility. Does raging complexity spark a fire that continues burning long after everything is destroyed? Who knows.

If we were truly harmonized within ourselves and with the world, we would be social creatures.

Maybe justice really is a healthy organism, what’s good for its own sake is good for all. But as we saw earlier, it appears that the perfect dissolution of self-interest into altruism wipes out the many-and-one structure of societal composition. At the extreme limit of justice, there is no society. The many become one.

If that’s the case, what is justice? Or perhaps more importantly, what is the Organism?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Related posts

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• 1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.

• 2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.

• 3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.

• 4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• 5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

• 6) What the demiurge has to say about causal closure... A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.

Timaeus Translations:

• Peter Kalkavage: (FREE PDF. Full disclosure, he’s my husband’s friend, but that’s not why I recommend this translation). This is a great translation if you don’t mind sticking closely to the Greek and you’re concerned about accurately capturing Plato’s thought. The introductory essay and commentary throughout make this especially valuable. But it is a bit awkward and hard to read if you’re new to Plato.

• Donald Zeyl: Super smooth. Introduction a bit uninspired. Some aspects are probably a bit wrong, but oh my, it’s so much easier than the translation I read in college. Get this one if you’re worried you won’t make it through.

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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IN A PREVIOUS POST I speculated that selfhood could be the result of a partial failure to participate in a primordial unity. Consider this an hypothesis (from the Greek ὑπόθεσις, meaning under placing or foundation), a mythological account, or a “likely story”.

I realize it might seem strange to begin with grandiose cosmic speculations. Most people start with, well, us. With our consciousness, our mind, our “phenomenal” experience, as they say, since this is what we know most intimately. While I basically agree with the phenomenal holists about this and the unitary nature of experience, I don’t think that necessarily means we’re metaphysically simple subjects either.

Physicalists often attempt to undermine unity by attacking self knowledge through introspection—you may feel like a unified self, but you can be mistaken! Since the physical is by nature composite, it makes sense that they would want consciousness to be composite too. Still, it’s not like they’re arguing for constitutive panpsychism or some ancient form of idealism. No, they wouldn’t like that at all. But…

Why not? As Eric Schwitzgebel argues in The Weirdness of the World, “if materialism is true, the most natural thing to conclude is that the United States is conscious.” I think he’s got a point. Anyway, if you bite the bullet, you’ll be in good company because you know who thinks the United States is conscious? Plato! Okay so maybe not the United States, exactly, since, well, you know. And maybe not conscious in our phenomenal-what-it’s-like sense of that word—but alive! 1

I find it strange that Plato almost never gets brought up in these mereological discussions given that he was obsessed with conundrums involving whole-parts relations. If we want to find out whether nested minds are possible without destroying the unity of the self, well, that question lies at the heart of the Republic.

Get ready to be tossed about, my friends, for we are voyaging into the open seas!

An ever-changing, many-headed beast

‘Start with a single species, then. A complex, many-headed beast, with a ring of animal heads—some gentle, some fierce—which it can vary and produce out of itself.’

‘It sounds like a job for a skilled sculptor,’ he said. ‘Still, words are easier to shape than wax and things like that, so consider the model made.’

‘For your second single species, make a lion. And for your third, a man. And let the first creature be much the biggest, followed by the second.’

‘That’s easier,’ he said. ‘Look, they are made.’

‘Now join the three of them into one, so that they’ve grown into one another in some way.’

‘There they are,’ he said. ‘Joined.’

‘Enclose them in the external appearance of one of the creatures—that of the human being—so that to those who see only the outer shell, and can’t see the inside, it looks like a single living creature. Like a human being, in fact.’ (588 c-e.)

THIS IS WHAT A TYRANT’S SOUL looks like, according to Socrates. A tyrant has a deceptively normal human exterior, but an ever-changing, multi-headed beast inside it which is itself conjoined to both a lion and a human. Now don’t get distracted by the many-headed beast. Focus on the little human. Does that also have a beast, a lion, and another human inside it? And so on? Do we face an infinite regress? Probably so, since Socrates is trying to show that, despite the external appearance of a coherent unified human, the tyrant hides a deeply fractured and incoherent nature within.

On the other hand, it’s not clear that any configuration of the tripartite soul2 described in the Republic, not even the supposedly stable soul of the philosopher king, can escape serious structural problems. Perhaps all souls require “a skilled sculptor”.

Can the contained contain the container?

THE CITY-SOUL ANALOGY, the main project of the Republic, has us compare the three parts of a single human soul—reason, spiritedness, and desire3—to the classes within a city which are characterized in the same way. But this analogy seems to face problems that go beyond an infinite regress of mini mes. Beyond the elitism of philosopher king totalitarianism too.

Everything hinges on a simple definition of justice: Mind your own business.4 The general rule for the three classes of society and the three parts of the soul is that each part should do its own thing and avoid interfering with the functioning of the other parts. Fair enough. We’ll call this the mind your own business rule. After proposing the city-soul analogy Socrates asks:

‘Do we have no choice but to agree that in each of us are found the same elements and characteristics as are found in the city? After all, where else could the city have got them from? It would be ludicrous to imagine that the spirited element in cities has come into being from anywhere other than the individual citizens…(435e-436a).

Not terribly controversial. Individual citizens add up to make the whole city. It’s not like the individuals could derive their character from the city, since the city wouldn’t exist without the citizens that make it up. If the citizens are rational individuals, the city as a whole would have a rational character. This seems fairly obvious, right?

But if we follow the mind your own business rule at the scale of the city, doing so inevitably breaks the rule at the scale of the individual and vice versa.5 Reason must rule over the city as wise philosopher kings to achieve justice, but this necessitates that no individual member of the warrior or working class can, as individuals, be ruled by their own reason. The warriors must be ruled by their own spiritedness and the workers must be ruled by their appetitive desires—this is what the mind your own business rule demands. So it turns out that justice fails at one scale the moment it’s achieved at the other; they’re mutually exclusive.

At the beginning of Book 4, Adeimantus seems to catch a whiff of this problem, or at least something like it, when he lodges a complaint on behalf of the guardians of the city, who “unlike the others, receive no pay over and above their food”. In response to this, Socrates reiterates the point that we are only concerned with the whole, not the parts:

“We shall say that we wouldn’t be at all surprised if even our guardians were best off like this,6 but that in any case our aim in founding the city is not to make one group outstandingly happy, but to make the whole city as happy as possible.”

But then what’s the analogy supposed to show? We might suppose the lower and middle classes can be ruled by reason too, just to a lesser degree than the philosopher kings. But this doesn’t seem to help much since it’s still true that insofar as one scale is ruled by reason, the other scale is not. The two scales just don’t get along. It appears as though the analogy collapses under its own weight.

Maybe so. But consider the method of inquiry Socrates lays out in the beginning:

‘The enquiry we are undertaking is not a simple matter. If you ask me, it requires sharp eyesight. And since we are not clever people, I think we should conduct our search in the same sort of way as we would if our eyesight were not very good, and we were told to read some small writing from a bit of a distance away, and then one of us realised that a larger copy of the same writing, apparently, was to be found somewhere else, on some larger surface. We would regard it as a stroke of luck, I think, to be able to read the large letters first, and then turn our attention to the small ones, to see if they really did say the same thing.’ … ‘We say that there is justice in an individual; but also, I take it, justice in a whole city?’ (368 c- d)

Socrates compares the city-soul analogy to reading different sizes of print. But it’s not clear from this description how the larger writing could help us make out the smaller since we’d have to know what the smaller writing says in advance to know it was saying the same thing as the larger. Maybe he meant we’re supposed to read some part of the smaller writing and if we see the same passage in the larger writing, we can then assume the larger says the same thing as the smaller.

Problems involving partial knowledge are another of Plato’s obsessions. Here he seems to be signaling that we need to make room for half truths and stop thinking in black and white, either/or terms. We can’t come at this problem with the blunt tool of static logic. The law of non-contradiction won’t do.7 We must rely on what we have at our disposal, our blurry instincts, unreliable intuitions, and partial insights—perhaps even recollections of what we may have once known, recollections that come from who knows where—rather than trying to analyze everything to death. Once we allow for a more fluid and dynamic mode of thought, we might take a step back from scales and sizes to consider the comparison of the soul to writing. In what way is a soul similar to the written word? On the face of it, they don’t seem alike at all. The written word is visible and stationary, whereas souls are invisible and dynamic. But we’ve seen this kind of comparison before. It’s reminiscent of the allegory of the cave, where the sunlight outside the cave visually represents an invisible “light” emanating from the Good. What’s interesting about the written word is not the physical marks themselves, but the invisible message those marks point to.

When Socrates later reminds us of the method of comparison we started with, he adds something interesting:

‘We thought if we started with some large object which had justice in it, and tried to observe justice there, that would make it easier to see what justice was like in the individual. We chose a city as this large object, and that’s why we founded the best city we could, in the confident belief that it is in the good city that justice is to be found. Now let us apply our findings there to the individual. If they agree, well and good. If we come to some other conclusion about the individual, then we shall go back to the city again, and test it on that. If we look at the two side by side, perhaps we can get a spark from them. Like rubbing dry sticks together. If that makes justice appear, we shall have confirmed it to our satisfaction.’ (434 d-435a)

He proposes we first look at the city, then the soul. If all goes well, fine. If not, back to the city. Maybe in this directive we find an acknowledgement of the temporal nature of our mental processes. Just as we can’t focus on both a forest and its trees at the same time, there’s an intentionality or directed-ness to our experience that makes it impossible to take in both scales at once. At any given moment we can only focus on one to the exclusion of the other, even though, presumably, we’re always considering the same thing.

Presumably. While all of this is suggestive, it doesn’t quite resolve the problem. The justice of the city and that of the soul remain mutually exclusive. And in the last part of the quote above, Socrates says we are to look at the city and the soul side by side, which seems to go against the idea that looking at them exclusively to one another will give us some idea of justice that pertains to both.

But notice, he also says looking at them side by side is like rubbing dry sticks together. What happens when you rub sticks together? You create friction, and friction may generate sparks. There’s another kind of back and forth that does the same thing—a dialectical exchange. And if we know anything about Platonic dialogues, they almost always end in aporia, or puzzlement. So maybe this is Plato’s way of hinting to us that the city-soul analogy is not supposed to hold up! Maybe it’s supposed to reveal a deep “unfriendliness” between scales, demonstrating that justice only applies to one scale or another, not both. Socrates once said, The true champion of justice would do well to stay away from politics. Could he have meant that justice is possible only in individuals, and that social life destroys the harmony of the soul?8

I doubt it. Socrates famously refused to escape prison, claiming he owed his life to Athens. That’s typical Socrates for you. He would never say justice is antisocial! He’s the most social dude of all! And bit of a busybody too, a gadfly always buzzing about in public spaces looking for someone to annoy. But maybe it was Plato who believed the political life destroys the soul. Given the political turmoil and violence he witnessed during his life, that would make sense. On the other hand, he did spend a lot of time trying to persuade us to believe that social justice is good for its own sake. So it’s hard to believe antisocial individualism is the takeaway message here. Which means the city-soul analogy can’t just cause friction. Friction must generate sparks for a reason…

All is quiet when you’re ruled by philosopher kings

FIRE IS A POTENT IMAGE throughout the Republic—everyone remembers the allegory of the cave, after all. The light from the fire inside the cave9 gives being to the shadows on the wall and makes them known. Which is to say, fire exhibits a potency over and above that which it illuminates. Let us suppose, then, that the friction generated by the analogy is meant to spark an insight into justice ‘over and above’ in some other way.

‘So this principle, Glaucon — that if you are a shoemaker by nature, you should confine yourself to making shoes, if you are a carpenter you should confine yourself to carpentry, and so on - really was a kind of image of justice. Which is why it was so useful to us.’

‘Apparently so.’

‘But the truth is that although justice apparently was something of this kind, it was not concerned with the external performance of a man’s own function, but with the internal performance of it, with his true self and his own true function, forbidding each of the elements within him to perform tasks other than its own, and not allowing the classes of thing within his soul to interfere with one another. He has, quite literally, to put his own house in order, being himself his own ruler, mentor and friend, and tuning the three elements just like three fixed points in a musical scale, top, bottom and intermediate. And if there turn out to be any intervening elements, he must combine them all, and emerge as a perfect unity of diverse elements, self-disciplined and in harmony with himself. Only then does he act, whether it is a question of making money, or taking care of his body, or some political action, or contractual agreements with private individuals. In all these situations he believes and declares that a just and good action is one which preserves or brings about this state of mind, and that wisdom is the knowledge which directs the action. That an unjust action, in its turn, is any action which tends to destroy this state of mind, and that ignorance is the opinion which directs the unjust action.’ (443-444)

While the Republic can be seen as both a political and psychological work, here we’re reminded of the scope of its initial project, which was to illustrate justice within the soul. As Socrates explains it, we have drawn a larger image of justice—just as writing is an image pointing to some meaning outside itself—and this image reflects on the inner workings of the soul, not on its outer functional performance. When reason leads the soul, all its parts act with one purpose, one mind. Then and only then should the individual seek social justice—what this looks like is left open.

Let’s go back to our original question of whether nested minds are possible without destroying unity.

Plato’s harmony of the soul is significantly different from the Kantian transcendental unity I talked about in a previous post. Transcendental unity only takes account of itself at a given instant. From the self-reflected instant we extrapolate the necessity of its operation throughout all instances of time. But this is a rather sparse account of ‘what it’s like’. Plato’s “state of mind”10 is similarly static, but like a sign pointing away from itself, he invites us to explore hidden layers lurking beneath the philosopher’s austere deductions. A philosopher does not like to speculate, but a poet has no such qualms. Luckily for us, Plato is both. With the philosopher-poet, we are free to wander and wonder.

When the parts of you harmonize, they act as though they were a single state of mind. For instance, let’s say you’ve just come back from a lovely walk, had a healthy but decidedly yummy lunch, and now your appetite (lower desires) is moderately satiated and thinking about taking a nap and you’re working on a project you love, you’re immersed in it, you’re in a state of flow and your thumos is feeling fairly good about the moderate praise it will receive from you for keeping quiet and letting you work in peace—maybe in such moments you get a glimpse of ‘what it’s like’ to be ruled by philosopher kings. It’s hard to say what it’s like, though, isn’t it? All you know, you know in retrospect. When it ended, you couldn’t believe how much time had passed. Of course the transcendental unity of apperception was there all along, but only in theory. In an experiential sense, it was nowhere to be found.

All is quiet when you’re ruled by philosopher kings. Maybe when the collective “you” goes to bed at night, the various parts within your soul scatter and talk amongst themselves and hold secret meetings behind closed doors. If you listen hard, you might overhear them in your dreams from time to time. Who knows? Maybe they’re praising your wise and benevolent leadership…but no. In that case you won’t hear a thing! Your mini mes are cranky bastards and you’ll only hear them if they’re talking smack about what a fascist pig you are.

A dreamless sleep is nothing to be afraid of!

BUT WAIT A MINUTE. So far we have only seen one side of the equation, the harmony of the soul. Plato seems to suggest that social justice can be found only after this harmony is achieved, but that it’s not logically incoherent to go looking for justice on a larger scale. So suppose a soul succeeds in being ruled by the philosopher kings within, what sort of social justice can this rational soul expect? Does it have to wait around for everyone else to get their houses in order? Is social justice even possible?

We’ll look at these issues in the next post.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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Related posts

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• 1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.

• 2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.

• 3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.

• 4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• 5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

• 6) What the demiurge has to say about causal closure... A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.

The music in this podcast episode by Nick Herman. Purchase the full album on Bandcamp. Support indie artists!

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—Tina Lee Forsee

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“Why should I want to be moral?” Dr. Fischelson asked. “What’s in it for me? Social scorn? Death by hemlock?”

Uri scoffed. “It not a matter of what’s in it for you.”

“Yes, it is,” Joshua objected. “You can’t just say, be moral. You have to say why.”

This excerpt from my novel is about as much as I’ve written on consequentialism vs. deontology…let’s just say I’ll take the hard problem of consciousness over such ethical conundrums any day of the week. I may not be brave enough to tackle the big questions in contemporary moral philosophy, but I’m pleased to introduce you to a philosopher who is.

“What is fundamentally worth caring about? What should we do about it?”

These are the questions Richard Yetter Chappell faces head on.

What question initially seems trivial but reveals unexpected depths when seriously examined?

RICHARD YETTER CHAPPELL: Should we want others to act rightly?

You might initially assume that of course we should. But this is only obvious if rightness is determined by what philosophers call "agent-neutral" reasons—reasons that serve impartial goals, like promoting the common good, that are the same for everyone.

Many deontologists instead believe that rightness is "agent-relative", giving the agent in the situation special reasons or goals (e.g. to keep their own hands clean) that others needn't share. (Maybe we should each care about our own clean hands, but not those of that other agent.) If ethics is agent-relative, then impartial bystanders should want others to act wrongly whenever that would better serve agent-neutral goals, such as the common good.

I call this "the curse of deontology", and I think it provides us with strong reasons to doubt that ethics is agent-relative. If instead, as consequentialists believe, it's right to do what best promotes the common good, then we can all reasonably hope that others successfully act rightly.

Do you hold views that contradict the mainstream in your field? What are they, and why is the mainstream wrong?

RYC: Most philosophers think that utilitarianism is a deeply "counterintuitive" view, and that common sense better supports some form of deontology. I believe the opposite. My explanation of where others go wrong is that (i) they focus on assessing superficial deontic verdicts about what agents ought to do in hypothetical situations, rather than deeper telic verdicts about what we ought to prefer or hope to see happen; and (ii) they don't understand that deontic verdicts are decomposable into telic and decision-theoretic components.

Utilitarianism's distinctive claims are telic in nature, and those claims are all entirely commonsensical: of course we should prefer better outcomes! (And as the curse of deontology brings out, other views sound bizarre when they deny this.) Counterintuitive deontic verdicts emerge when you combine utilitarianism with naive instrumentalism: the view that agents should make decisions by doing whatever seems superficially likely to achieve their goals (no matter how machiavellian). But we should reject that view of instrumental rationality as clearly incompatible with what we know about human fallibility, bias, etc. As a result, I think the "mainstream" objections to utilitarianism aren't just unconvincing; they're fundamentally confused and targeting the wrong theory.

If you had to compress your worldview into a single provocative statement, what would it be?

RYC: Vibes are no substitute for systematic thought.

If I'm allowed a more substantive follow-up, I'd add: Moral reflection should proceed via two steps. First, think about what outcomes we morally ought to prefer. Then consider what norms and ways of thinking will best serve to help bring about a future that's more rather than less morally preferable. Afterwards, put these reflections into practice. (I like effective altruism as a serious explicit effort to implement that post-reflection step. But readers should, of course, use their own judgment.)

Are there any philosophical questions that will never be resolved? Why?

It depends what you mean by "resolved". I don't expect any of the really "big" questions to ever secure universal consensus, because there are multiple internally coherent philosophical "worldviews", and rational argument proceeds by way of identifying internal inconsistencies (premises you expect your interlocutor to accept that entail a conclusion that they currently deny). This means that once they've ironed out all their internal inconsistencies, there's no way to rationally persuade them to change worldviews.

That said, I expect any philosophical question is "resolvable" in the sense that some people can come to know the truth of the matter. They just won't be able to persuade everyone else. (I imagine most philosophers often feel themselves to be in this position! Alas, there's no externally valid test to determine whether the feeling is accurate or not in any given case…)

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

• Is it right to do what best promotes the common good? Or do you have a duty to do what’s moral, regardless of the consequences? Or is there another moral framework you prefer?

• Is utilitarianism is a deeply "counterintuitive" view?

• Are “vibes are no substitute for systematic thought”?

Leave a comment

RICHARD YETTER CHAPPELL is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of three books including Parfit's Ethics (Cambridge University Press), and is currently working on a fourth, Beyond Right and Wrong. His Substack, Good Thoughts, tries to put his methodology for moral reflection into practice.

To get full access to my published books and posts, upgrade your subscription. Find out more. You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my niche literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina Lee Forsee

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WHAT ARE QUALIA?

“IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience…Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels". A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition.”2

But I don’t experience qualitative instances, if that’s what “raw feels” are. Free-floating phenomena don’t reflect “what it’s like” to be me. To characterize experience as ‘raw feels’ reduces it to isolated bits of sensory perception. Indeed, it turns out the word qualia does originate in sense data theory.3 But many philosophers have pointed out the problems with this conception of experience long ago. So why are we still talking about sensory data?!

To talk of ‘raw feels’ in isolation from behavior betrays a Cartesian outlook which all sides of the qualia debate claim to deny. But it’s too late. They’ve already set the foundation—behavior vs. experience casts everything in terms of inside vs. outside.

AN IMPASSABLE CHASM

TO EVOKE QUALIA is to presuppose a fundamental divide between what we experience and the way things really are, ‘out there’. This run in the pantyhose of our lived reality began with the sense data theories of the traditional rationalist-empiricist divide. We can see this exemplified in the philosophy of David Hume, who thought the external world stamped itself on our minds. Sensory impressions were, for him, the source of all knowledge. Whereas ideas were but ‘faint images’ or copies of these sensory impressions.

Immanuel Kant took Hume’s sense-data theory a step further. Rather than imagining our minds are like blocks of wax on which reality stamps itself, our minds actively organize and structure the manifold of reality. But because our minds are always structuring reality, we can’t separate what our minds do to reality from reality as it is in itself, apart from our minds. This means not even sense perception can tell us what reality itself is really like. In fact, nothing can. Our minds are always already there, getting in the way of the underlying reality we try to access. Which means we can never know reality itself. It’s not that we never completely know it. It’s that we can’t know it at all. Not even the most rigorous science or the purest mathematics can cross over to the realm of things in themselves. To even suppose such a realm exists is a matter of faith. Kant puts reality forever out of reason’s reach.4

But if we can’t know what minds organize, why assume our minds organize anything at all? In other words, what makes him so sure our minds are representational? Doesn’t the very meaning of ‘representation’ require that something be represented? On this issue, Kant waffles and contradicts himself. Without quite crossing over to the realm of things in themselves, he nevertheless reintroduces sense data theory in a strange, quasi-phenomenal form, reflected in his famous dictum, “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” As (whom I interviewed in my last post) puts it:

“Whitehead laments Kant’s partial adoption of Hume’s over-intellectualized account of perception, an account Whitehead refers to as the “sensationalist doctrine”. According to this doctrine, the human sensory organs initially encounter reality as a patchwork of disconnected and unruly sensory impressions. ‘My senses convey to me only the impressions of colored points,’ says Hume, ‘If the eye is sensible of anything further, I desire that it may be pointed out to me.’ For Kant, the raw immediacy of these sensa must be mediated by the formal structure of reflective consciousness in order to mean anything…Prior to the mind’s imposition of its transcendental order onto our otherwise chaotic sensorial encounter with reality, there simply is no perceivable “Nature”, no conceivable “Cosmos” or world-system, there is only a disjoint manifold of unprocessed sense atoms (disconnected colors, sounds, etc.).”5

The Hume quote is revealing: “My senses convey to me only the impressions of colored points.”

Really? Because the only time I see colored points is when I rub my eyes or stand too close to a pointillist painting. Indeed, I’m grateful that the vast majority of my experiences don’t involve colored points or dots or spots! Hume seems to be confusing his abstract theory about experience with lived experience, which is to commit what Whitehead would call the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But we shouldn’t be too hard on Hume. It is immensely difficult, if not impossible, to describe lived experience in a pre-theoretical way.

It might help to explicitly acknowledge the theoretical nature of qualia.6 A quale is an abstract sense object that “somehow mediates the subject’s perception of mind-independent physical objects”.7 Qualia theory reflects the residual belief that our minds represent a discombobulated reality of disparate entities. We’re back to a rather dubious division between primary and secondary qualities, back to a time when a materialistic conception of the world reigned supreme, a view that sees the world as the sum of its little bits of stuff. Sense data are like that—atomic phenomena.

IS KNOWLEDGE OF EXPERIENCE EVEN POSSIBLE?

MAYBE WHAT KANT SAID about the impossibility of knowing the self in itself is true for lived experience as well. Maybe all attempts at describing experience are colored by our theoretical assumptions. Or…maybe this theory vs. experience dichotomy is itself another theory that needs to be questioned?

Before we go down this road, we should consider whether it’s really experience that’s hidden from us or whether it’s our description of it that comes up short. I suspect the latter. Dammit, I know experience—I’m swimming in it, all right? I’m up to my eyeballs in it! Geez!—even though I can’t accurately or objectively describe it.

I think this is what all the qualia freaks are trying to say, but can’t.

This is what qualia skeptics are trying to deny, but can’t.

Qualia is a theoretical assumption about experience, and it’s a fairly flimsy and confusing one at that. Not everyone who talks of qualia has the same assumption in mind, since “ineffable, private, etc.” is not necessarily “what it’s like” (a phrase which seems to me more accurate because of its broadness and vagueness). This state of affairs is convenient for those who wish to talk past one another—and let’s face it, talking past one another is sometimes the point. Which is why we end up with a lot of ink spilled over what it means to “know” something. What pettiness of mind to revel in such technicalities! Call it another name then, if it makes you feel better! But to think we can pin down a moving thought with our feeble words in the absence of any genuine interest in understanding one another is a waste of everyone’s time. If this is merely a technical problem, it shouldn’t be that hard to resolve, not when both parties are being genuinely generous with one another. But if you insist on a narrow understanding of what knowledge is—that it must be mathematical or scientific, 3rd person or predictive, logically formal or verbally explicit—well, I don’t believe you. I think you “know” better. But I guess I have to take you at your word.

Anyone with a modicum of sense would do well to run screaming from such philosophical debates. And I can’t blame them for running away from philosophy altogether, if this is “what it’s like” to be a philosopher these days. What has happened to philosophy? Where is our love of wisdom?

IS EXPERIENCE PRIVATE?

WHILE IT’S TRUE no one can experience the world from my perspective (they would have to be me!), it would be a huge mistake to characterize experience as fundamentally private. Skepticism is the current on which private qualia float. Oddly, both sides of the qualia debate seem not to realize this current is sweeping them toward an epistemological cliff.

One side sees experience as blind representations, free-floating phenomena, a hard problem. This side accepts the reductive-mechanistic-deterministic tenets of physicalism, and for this reason their view of qualitative experience must be extremely limited, causally inefficacious. Experience takes a big blow in order to accommodate the physicalist framework, and epiphenomenalism is the byproduct (haha). But this is an olive branch. It may not be pretty, but it’s an attempt at compromise.

The other side slaps away the olive branch.

Both sides place reality outside our reach altogether—without realizing this is what they’re doing. As Kant and many others have made clear, there is no access to a mind-independent reality. You want objectivity? You can only get that through “subjective” experience, which is glued to your face. Take it or…take it.

There is a third option, but one must swim against the current to get to its shore. Here, experience is not fundamentally private. Experience is not a roadblock to itself as a thing in itself. Experience is not a conjecture, but a trampoline with plenty of room for all of us to jump and play. And if we knock into each other, so what. That’s the point.

What is the smell of a rose? I don't normally experience the smell of a rose apart from an actual rose or rosy perfume, nor do I experience it as mine. Without giving it a second thought, I might hold out a rose to a friend (who is not allergic) and say, "Smell that. Isn’t that amazing?" I have two varieties growing in my garden. Both have the delicate scent of all roses—the Platonic scent of a rose—and yet each rose is distinct from others. Interesting! Their scents might even change from day to day, moment to moment. Still, I can talk about those differences with my friend, even if only vaguely. We might both struggle to articulate “what it’s like”. We might fail with our words and laugh about it. But at no point do I feel the need to crawl outside of the vat of my brain or the shell of my skin, nor do I have to figure out the chemical makeup of roses, in order to share a meaningful appreciation of their poignant particularities with my friend.

A great fuss is made over whether we can describe a quale to someone who has never experienced it before. But that’s looking at things from the wrong end. Meaning lives in the air we breathe and in the experiences we share—that’s what makes any discussion (of our differences or otherwise) possible.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

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The music in this podcast episode, “Inward Oval Eel”, by Nick Herman. Listen to the song or full album on Bandcamp. Support indie artists!

You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina

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The quote above may sound like something straight out of Plato, but these are actually the words of contemporary philosopher, Matthew David Segall, whose responses throughout this interview remind me of the wise poet. Which is not surprising given that Matthew’s work centers on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (you know the guy, the one who said that thing about Western philosophy being a series of footnotes to Plato. Sound familiar? 😉):

Footnotes2Plato

For the love of wisdom.

By Matthew David Segall

I have just ordered Crossing the Threshold. After reading this interview, I get the feeling you’ll want to do the same!

~Tina

• Physics of the World-Soul

• Crossing the Threshold

Are there any philosophical questions that will never be resolved? Why?

MATTHEW DAVID SEGALL: There are many philosophical questions that I would suggest are destined to remain unresolved, not for lack of attention or probing, but because they point to realities that overflow the limits of conceptual containment. The question “What is the human being?” comes to mind as perpetually open due to the protean essence (or, indeed, anti-essence) of its subject. The human being is the creature without a fixed archetype, the self-shaping questioner who is always more than any answer we might offer. Our essence, if such a term still applies, lies not in what we are but in what we may become. This becoming is what might be called our freedom, which may at first appear like a blessing, though it may just as easily be felt as a curse. We are haunted by a void of indeterminacy—an abyss at once fertile and frightful.

Drawing on my process-relational philosophical orientation, I would say that the human is not a substance with properties but an unspooling thread of occasions of experience, an ongoing weaving of concrescing feelings drawn from the perished past and fraying into the open future. We are the construction site where cosmic evolution becomes conscious of itself, not as a finished product but as an infinite creative lure longing for ever-deeper communion. Our capacity for suffering—unique in its reflective, narrative, and moral dimensions—arises from our freedom: the power to imagine otherwise, to contrast pain with joy, guilt with innocence, being with not-being. Such contrasts emerge from the inner texture of our aesthetic experience, where feeling becomes meaning and meaning becomes a call to transform, and transform again.

If you had to compress your worldview into a single provocative statement, what would it be?

MATTHEW: There is no final theory, only the cosmos imagining itself through us in ceaseless becoming. There is no self-conscious ego who might understand the explanation, anyway. The knower is of the flux, not above it. We are known before we are knowers, and every knowing makes a new knower. What seems fixed is a wave crest of creativity, where forms ingress into fact and potential perpetually presences, and recedes. To know this is to awaken not to an abstract truth, but to the Goodness implicit in the world’s self-surpassing Beauty. This is not passive perceiving, but an act of imagination—an intentional entrance into the sacred swirling of the World-Soul. Truth is not the conformity of thought to object but the fidelity of our heart’s imagination to Her, to Momma Mundi. Truth is a decision to be moved by Love. We become Good by giving ourselves wholly to participation in the world’s becoming. In the death of our ego-image is the beginningless birth of our Self, made Imago Dei. Science, religion, and philosophy thus cease to be different ways of mapping and mastering an abstract order and become a celebratory expression of the triune depths of relational experience, a means of integrating cosmos (the world’s Truth), theos (divine Goodness), and anthropos (our love of Beauty) in the logos of a living Earth.

What's the most dangerous idea in philosophy today?

MATTHEW: I agree with that materialism, particularly the more reductive and eliminative version, is very bad for our mental health. When perceived scientific authorities tell people that their entire reality is confined to the goings-on inside their skull, they are contributing to the death of the human spirit. Without a celestial sense or intimate relation to the whole we become as nothing, nihil. Souls are made out of the ideas we take to be true. Materialism unmakes souls. No glut of pleasure or scramble for status can fill the hole left by being severed from the whole. Materialism is dangerous because it confuses us into believing that personhood and freedom are fables. In fact it is only because of the value realized by free persons that knowledge is possible.

What do YOU think?

• Are you intrigued by the idea that “we are the construction site where cosmic evolution becomes conscious of itself”?

• Do you think : “Truth is not the conformity of thought to object but the fidelity of our heart’s imagination to Her, to Momma Mundi”?

• Are souls “made out of the ideas we take to be true”?

• “When perceived scientific authorities tell people that their entire reality is confined to the goings-on inside their skull, they are contributing to the death of the human spirit.” Do you agree?

Leave a comment

MATTHEW DAVID SEGALL, PhD, is a transdisciplinary researcher, integral philosopher, and teacher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences. He is an associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies. He is author of several books, including Crossing the Threshold (2023) and Physics of the World-Soul (2021).

You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina

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Beginning with the whole picture.

It’s pretty hard to assemble a bunch of strange-looking pieces with no knowledge of what they’re supposed to be.

Imagine trying to put together a puzzle without getting to see the picture on the box. Or without even knowing what a puzzle is. In everyday life, we grasp the big picture so readily we don’t even think about it. The big picture is: We live with others in the world. We don’t go about wondering, “Where do I end and you begin? How do I know you have a mind?” Most people will live their entire lives and never ask these questions. These are questions for people who have too much time on their hands.

What problem of other minds?

That the problem of other minds isn’t a problem in everyday life suggests something—maybe insofar as we know much of anything, we already know other minds. But how can that be?

Let’s try beginning at the beginning.

It seems unlikely we start out by knowing ourselves, then the world. We begin by feeling the world around us, and what we feel most poignantly are other beings. It would be ridiculous to suppose we came screaming and kicking out of the womb with an attitude of Cartesian skepticism toward our own mother. But I wonder, do we even have a sense of self at that point? We exist, of course, so someone must be experiencing something. But consider this: most of us can’t remember the moment we were born, not to mention the first few years or so of our lives. Why is that? How could we forget something as important as the beginning of our own story? Maybe memory requires a certain amount of experience to ground our sense of self in the world? Who knows. This is wild speculation.

Whatever the case, inference by analogy can’t be what’s going on at the very beginning since newborns can’t even hold up their heads up to see what they look like in a mirror. It seems more plausible that we learn about ourselves in such a way that no comparison to our own external appearance is needed.

A baby begins crying in the nursery; before long the entire room is drowning in tears. We might assume babies parrot others to learn social behavior. But it’s hard to imagine what their motivation would be in this case. Another problem is, if I want to copy you sticking out your tongue, that would involve knowing that I have a tongue too, where it is, and what it feels like when I’ve got my tongue outside my mouth the way you do. Which seems like a mirror would be required.

Besides, how do they know what to parrot? They don’t try to sound like the dishwasher running or the toilet flushing. And they would also have to know that crying means something, but why should behaviors mean anything at all? How did we come to know that Waah Waah + salty liquid oozing out of human eyeballs = "sad"? Or that upturned corners of the mouth, which may or may not reveal teeth, and a certain gleam in the eye means "happy"? Many behaviors seem completely disconnected from their meaning when you think about them from a removed perspective. Sure, when I reach for something, there’s a pretty good chance I want the thing I’m reaching for, but the meaning of most behavior isn’t self-evident, and not all behavior means something. You might think we know what’s meaningful by studying the intentional acts of living beings, but how do we distinguish intentional acts from non-intentional acts? What is it about the actions of other beings that’s relevant? Why should some things like faces, especially eyes, stand out to us, even as infants? How do we distinguish other beings such as ourselves from inanimate objects from features of the environment in the first place?

Hm.

Maybe emotional contagion is a sign of empathy, then? But empathy presupposes a rather sophisticated theory of mind that involves understanding the other’s situation and what they might be feeling. And yet crying can go viral even when the other babies couldn’t possibly have a clue what the first baby is crying about. Besides, you know how babies are—they think the world revolves around them! When they cry, they’re crying for themselves. Which makes it a bit far-fetched to say they’re empathizing, given the usual sense of that word.1

It could be that the loud noise upsets them. Few things in life are as annoying as the sound of crying babies, so why not? But there are not-annoying contagious behaviors as well, so the annoying-ness of the noise might explain some of it, but not the full story.2

You might be tempted to say we evolved this way, but when do we not? If we had teeth growing out of our eyebrows, you can bet your sweet honey buns someone would come up with a plausible evolutionary explanation for it. Labeling emotional contagion an instinct doesn’t explain much either. I think it’s better to say: Who knows? Somehow we pop into this world not feeling the need to sound like air conditioners, and we’re all pretty much in broad agreement about what’s meaningful.

This state of affairs is pretty wonderful when you think about it. It seems infants somehow pick out meaning in the world and take it into themselves so completely it’s as if they feel another baby’s crying as their own, and this without an obvious theory of mind or rational mediation, before distinguishing another’s interests from their own. Which would imply the moment we’re born, our sense of self must be minimal or poorly-defined, closer to Kant’s container Self than to a Cartesian Self.3 Perhaps our individuality precipitates out from the whole as time goes on, but in the very beginning, our experience is undifferentiated, we are the same as everything, there is no 'external' world and no ‘other minds’. Everything is fused together in an inherently meaningful experience.

But how do babbling blubbery beings blended into everyone and everything understand meaning with almost no theory of mind while also being completely selfish? By incorporating theories from the last post into a holistic primordial experience, we might “find our selves”. But we’ll have to open our minds to let in the full picture, since what follows can only be a “likely story”.4

Falling out of an impossible dream.

If you think about it, our agency would never become clear to us if we lived in an impossible dream where everyone gets everything they want, where every need is perfectly satisfied. But alas, we don’t always get what we want. In this world, the real world, our desires find resistance. Resistance from the world of physical bodies teaches us that, despite what Michael Jackson has to say on the matter, we are not the world.

Resistance teaches us what belongs to us and where our power ends. We notice that we seem to have quite a bit more control over our own bodies than other bodies. Which brings me to that boundary blurriness problem I talked about in the previous post. If we’re starting from the impossible dream, we have to say that when I’m driving a car, the car is me. The question is really: how can it not be me? It’s not me only insofar as it works against me rather than for me, and the same would be true of all physical things. We also get pushbacks from beings whose desires come into conflict with our own. Does my influence over others make them me? Given our starting point, I see no reason why not. Insofar as two beings have the same desires, they are, as we say, “of one mind”.

In the primordial experience, we mirror the universe while constituting it. Primordially, there is no disharmony, and just about every Beatles song is literally true. The moment of birth is a rude awakening from the impossible dream. Suddenly we find ourselves thrown into a terrifying fun house of jumbled, distorted images—a world of broken mirrors. Things no longer move to our rhythm. Indeed, it feels like a miracle when anything cooperates. Miracles do happen sometimes. But miracles, we soon learn, are unreliable. And they become less reliable as time goes on.

What’s worse, the disharmony we find in the world is irreversible. A broken mirror stays broken, and pretty much everything will end up like the broken mirror sooner or later. Eventually we learn even the broken mirrors will turn to dust. Nothing lasts forever. And we tend to think anything that’s not forever is not real at all.5 Because you are not me forever, you’re not me at all! Things break or fail me, so they are not me at all. My body will one day turn into dust, so it’s not me at all! I can see how a physical theory of self might arise from this situation, since matter, worthless though it is, seems to be the only stuff that lasts forever. I can also see how a theory of soul might arise from this situation, because to think we are nothing more than dust is unthinkable. There must be another kind of Substance, a not-dust Substance that lasts forever, even after the body turns to dust.

Plato said: “Love is the desire for permanent possession of the good.”6

Welcome to your Self.

Hey. What do you know. We may have stumbled upon a Kantian transcendental argument: The primordial experience is the condition for the possibility of selfhood. Maybe? Okay, never mind. We won’t aspire to Kantian transcendence. Let’s just say my agency is a fallenness from the primordial state brought about by your agency, which is also a fallenness from the primordial state brought about by my agency... You make my self possible and I make your self possible. But hold the kumbaya, ‘cause we are not in this thing together. Selfhood is the result of our not being in perfect agreement with each other. The slightest difference in our desires is all it takes to distort our reflections, and even the slightest distortion destroys the impossible dream altogether. We hang on to our idea of the impossible dream as long as possible. But the “real world” cannot be ignored. It barges in. You barge in. I barge in. Crash. Bang. Ka-pow. Only matter gets to remain above the fray, aloof, distant…meaningless.

Still, we never completely forget the idea of the primordial experience. Although we tend to express this distant memory through the warped medium of language, from time to time we can catch ourselves reverting back to that impossible dream, like when someone else’s laugh makes us laugh, even before we know why. It’s a bit embarrassing when you realize you’re doing this, isn’t it? Nobody wants to see themselves grinning like a moron long before the punchline lands. But maybe we shouldn’t be too embarrassed. During those moments your smile just IS my happiness, because in the primordial experience, it doesn’t matter who is doing the smiling or why.

Maybe the conceptual rift we imagine to be The Way Things Are, where it’s me over here and you over there, isn’t this broken mirror world, this not-very-funhouse we currently find ourselves in, but misguided theories about it that try to wrangle it into permanence. By supposing meaningless Matter is all there is, we try to grind our mirror fragments into immortal dust, and yet somehow we always end up with glitter, glimmers we re-collect. Recollections so subtly pervasive, removing ourselves from them requires college-level instruction (and a stove-heated room) which has us each pretending meaning exists only inside my own private dustbin.

Whereas those who don’t have too much time on their hands don’t even realize they might be recalling what it was like before we all fell apart into you and me and the world. They just smile without knowing why.

What do YOU WE think? ;)

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Related posts

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• 1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.

• 2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.

• 3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.

• 4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• 5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

• 6) What the demiurge has to say about causal closure... A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.

The music in this podcast episode is by Nick Herman. Discover his music on Bandcamp. Support indie artists!

You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina

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Where do I end and you begin?

PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES

Maybe we can define the boundaries of self as something extended in space and time. I’m located here and you’re over there. You can’t be me because you aren’t located when and where I am.

Unfortunately, this presupposes the boundaries it purports to pick out. What, exactly, is located here vs. there? You might have decided your self is your brain or your body, but then why? Physical location requires knowing what we’re locating. Which means we’ve gone in a circle.

You might think there’s no need to locate a self, since there is no such thing:

"There's no reason to suppose that we have real continuity. Because if you look at what a body and a brain are, there's no room for a thing called a 'self' that sort of sits in there and has experiences…The illusion of continuity is created only when you look for it. Though all things about us change from moment to moment, when we connect all of our experiential dots, we conjure up our inner sense of self. …This so-called 'me' is really just another reconstruction. There was an earlier one 30 minutes ago, and there will be others in the future. But they're really not the same person; they're just stuff happening in the universe."

Susan Blackmore, Is Your 'Self' Just an Illusion?

From a purely physical point of view, she’s right; the self can only be “just stuff happening in the universe”. The same is true of life, though, when you think about it. We presuppose our intuitions of what life is when we say life “emerges” out of its parts. If we didn’t have a prior conception of life, we wouldn’t see anything emerging.1

“Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience—that we are living—is nonexistent when you look at our parts. If life is not a property of matter, and material things are what exist, then life does not exist.”

“Life does not exist”: The deceptively tricky task of defining life

From a strictly physical reductive perspective, there is no such thing as life. To differentiate living things from non-living things, a different kind of explanation is needed. The same is true for the self, although selfhood could prove even more elusive and difficult to identify.

SUBJECTIVE BOUNDARIES

AGENCY: Agency is probably the most powerful theory of self. Not only is it intuitive, it also picks out what it is that makes me me in the physical world as well. I can literally see my agency at work every time I will my finger to move. But I can't move your body just by willing it; I can only move my own (to some degree). What makes my body mine might be discovered by my agency realizing its own powers and limitations. Just as I can’t control your body, I can’t control your thoughts, only my own (to some degree). Where my agency ends, my self ends. That’s where you or the physical world begin.

Our motives and intentions go beyond arbitrarily coinciding with our physical bodies or emerging from it like a mist. We cause our own behavior. Limits to our range of agency define our selfhood boundaries. Pushbacks against the agent’s power come from the world with its physical laws as well as other agents with their own ranges of power over their own bodies.

One problem with the agency theory is that the boundaries that make me me are not as sharp as we tend to think. If I can successfully drive a car, does that mean the car is part of me? If I get you to sign my petition, did my influence over your behavior mean you are in some sense under my control and therefore…me? Maybe we can dispense with this problem by saying agents don’t always drive machines or exert total influence over others, so these are not essential to the agent. But what is essential? If selfhood requires permanent control, that’s a problem too, since it’s not clear that I permanently control much of anything. It seems to me agency alone leaves our selfhood boundaries fuzzy. Maybe that’s okay.

UNITY: Immanuel Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception is one of the more sophisticated theories of self. This will take some explaining.

Apperception means something like self-reflection or self-consciousness. Transcendental here refers to a kind of argument for which Kant is well known which goes: ‘x is a condition for the possibility of y’. Putting those two together, we get: the transcendental unity of apperception is a deductively necessary2 condition for the possibility of experience.

I know this is a lot to take in. I’ll try to explain Kant’s theory by bouncing it against Susan Blackmore’s view quoted at the beginning:

“There's no reason to suppose that we have real continuity. Because if you look at what a body and a brain are, there's no room for a thing called a 'self' that sort of sits in there and has experiences…”

She takes the real self to be the self as it is in itself; in other words, the self is nothing more than its objective physical manifestation, which she assumes to be the brain and body. Whereas Kant is far more minimalist; he says we can’t even know that much. The Kantian self is an “I” that unifies all of my representations—and nothing more. We can’t know its properties. We can’t know whether it’s a physical substance like a brain or spiritual substance like a soul. These claims, according to Kant, go beyond the limits of reason because they take the self to be a thing in itself. Things in themselves are entirely beyond our reach.

Blackmore goes on to say:

“The illusion of continuity is created only when you look for it. Though all things about us change from moment to moment, when we connect all of our experiential dots, we conjure up our inner sense of self. …This so-called 'me' is really just another reconstruction. There was an earlier one 30 minutes ago, and there will be others in the future.”

Perhaps Kant would say that Blackmore’s missing an important point: even if we do merely “conjure up” an inner sense of self, this act necessitates standing outside all of those disconnected experiences to judge them all at once as a unity. Any attempt to stand apart from experiences to judge them to be discontinuous thereby unifies them, which precludes their really being discontinuous. Some minimal unifying “I” must always be there even if it’s nothing more than a container, even if its contents are a mere jumble of snapshot reconstructions.

The truth is, we don’t experience some buzzing swirling jumble of qualities locked up inside an empty “I” either. We experience things united in selfsame objects, even if they have many different qualities and change over time. So in a sense, everything we experience is a pre-construction. This speaks to Blackmore’s point that you only find unity when you go looking for it; Kant argues you must find unity every single time you go looking for it because it is the very thing makes experience possible. And anything that makes experience possible cannot be dispensed with by reason.

Blackmore’s points aren’t too different from arguments involving split brains and multiple personalities which are meant to prove the disunity or illusory nature of the self. These arguments, which are far from conclusive on other grounds, don’t speak to the Kantian theory of self at all. They confuse the particular contents of experience with the container—or to put this in Kantian terms, they go beyond the limits of our understanding—and then erroneously conclude the self doesn’t exist or it’s just a convention. In doing so, they forget to take their own judgment into account. Whatever stands back from the various reconstructions to judge the self to be illusory must itself be an illusory reconstruction, which makes the position self-undermining. By contrast, Kant’s argument for the transcendental unity of self takes whatever it is that’s standing back into account, and does so without making metaphysical claims about the self. It’s a svelte theory, and it’s about as hard to deny as Descartes’ cogito.

Both phenomenological conceptions of the self ring true to me on some level. Agency for its experiential obviousness and explanatory power and Kant’s for its minimalism and logical rigor. Yet I’m noticing that both theories begin by taking the isolated subject as the starting point. Agency begins with me first, and Kant insists we can only know the way things seem, not the way they are independent of our minds…not even our selves (much less other minds!)

I’d like to take a more relaxed approach by examining lived experience. “The real world” is, after all, where Cartesianism goes to die, and that seems promising. I’m sure our sloppy, everyday intuitions will fall far short of Kant’s brilliant transcendental deductions, but we’ll just have to make do. This is what I’ll talk about next time.

What do YOU think?

Leave a comment

Related posts

• Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.

• 1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.

• 2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.

• 3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.

• 4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?

• 5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.

• 6) What the demiurge has to say about causal closure... A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.

The music in this podcast episode is by Nick Herman. Discover his music on Bandcamp. Support indie artists!

You can customize which bits of this newsletter you receive by visiting your account.

Thanks for supporting my literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina

Subscribe now