“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 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

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• 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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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.

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

—Tina Lee Forsee

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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.

Leave a comment

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

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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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?

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 by Nick Herman. Purchase the full album on Bandcamp. Support indie artists!

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

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!

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—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? ;)

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

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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

The inference by analogy theory says I infer that your experience is similar to mine from your behavior.

My behavior x —> My experience y.

Your behavior x —>Your experience ???

I can't directly experience what you're experiencing, after all, at least not in the same way you experience it, from your perspective. So whatever I know of your mind must be filtered through my own.

But is this how we actually experience other minds? When I think about my interactions with others, I don’t do any of this inferring or analogizing. If logical inference is the only way to make sense of how I come to know other minds, then this must be going on well under the radar, because I’m not aware of doing it.

Must the inference by analogy theory be true? What would it take for this theory to make sense of how we come to know other minds?

What is behavior?

“We know about other minds by knowing about other behaviour, at least in part. The nature of the inference is a matter of some controversy, but it is not a matter of controversy that it proceeds from behaviour.”

Frank Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia

DISTINGUISHING ROCKS FROM MINDED CREATURES

We might theorize a process of discerning ‘behavior’ at the level of sensory perception in order to explain how I can come to know you’re human and not, say, a rock. Interpreting external appearances for the purposes of classification isn’t usually what we think of when we discuss behavior and the problem of other minds, but it does seem important to be able to identify and differentiate living things from non living things and such. It’s not like I have to talk to rocks and sunglasses to see if they talk back. Even so, whatever this process is, if there is an inference by analogy going on at this level, it would only establish whether there might be another mind, but it wouldn’t tell us much about it. I would call this a prerequisite to understanding other minds.

That’s not to say I believe we do make an inference by analogy to identify other minds.

INTERPRETING FACIAL EXPRESSIONS AND BODY LANGUAGE

“You can, of course, learn about your own mind in the same way you learn about others’ minds—by reading psychology texts, by observing facial expressions (in a mirror), by examining readouts of brain activity, by noting patterns of past behavior—but it’s generally thought that you can also learn about your mind introspectively, in a way that no one else can.”

Eric Schwitzgebel, "Introspection", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

But we don’t need to read psychology texts, and we definitely don’t read brain activity, to learn about other minds. The former is evidenced by the fact some have never read a psychology text and still do fine, and the latter by the fact that it’s not even possible to read brain activity in order to find out what’s going on inside someone mind—this has things exactly backwards. We can only begin to correlate brain activity by first learning what’s going on inside someone’s mind.1 This leaves us with observing expressions and noting patterns in behavior—the classic inference by analogy theory. But is it true that I extrapolate observed expressions and note patterns in my behavior to understand your mind?

I see you smile, I think you’re happy. Why? Because that’s what I do when I’m happy. I see you cry, I think you’re upset because that’s what I do when I’m upset. But let’s draw out the analogy a bit more. To know crying means I’m upset involves first correlating my being upset with my external appearance, which involves seeing myself as I appear to others. From the similarity of our external appearances I infer that you must be experiencing a similar “mental state” to my own. Sounds fair enough.

On the other hand, I don’t recall ever looking in the mirror to study what Tina being upset looks like. I’m not sure I’m even capable of authentically witnessing what Tina being upset looks like…since…why would I look in a mirror at that particular moment? What I look like in this horrid “mental state”2 would be the last thing on my mind when I’m in that state. And why should I think what I look like has anything to do with what I and others feel? But this would be the sort of sizing up that inference by analogy presumably requires.

It’s hard to see how the inference by analogy theory could stack up in everyday life. It’s not enough to know what I look like when I’m generically upset, if there even is such a thing. For such a theory to work I would have to clearly recognize my own subtle emotions as they ebb and flow through my psyche, then correlate these innumerable shades of feeling to any external behaviors that can be said to be an expression of them…and that’s before I even begin looking at you. But how on earth can I know what I look like when I’m pissed off and not wishing to show it? Or not acknowledging it to myself? I could stand in front of the mirror and play act, but that’s not the same thing; the mirror makes me self conscious or at least adds an extra layer of meaning, thereby thwarting any attempt to get at the real deal. For inference by analogy to work I need to correlate the authentic experience to the authentic expression of it. Do I need to ask someone else to set up a spy camera for me without telling me where or when? Obviously not. I do witness immensely complex emotions and thought processes in others, even if I don’t always interpret these correctly. Inference by analogy doesn’t explain how I can even think understanding of other minds to be possible since most of the time I have no idea what I look like or even what I feel like. And what about animals? Surely we don’t want to say creatures living in environments without reflective surfaces have no inner lives.

Inference by analogy requires we attribute behavior to each internal mental state in a reliable way, if not on a one-to-one basis, but we can and do accommodate differences in the way others look and behave, and we do this on the fly like it’s nothing.

Simulation Theory

Maybe we know other minds by imaginatively walking in the other’s shoes. To do this, we simulate in our own minds what it’s like to be them in their situation. This theory helps us explain other minds in a more flexible way. For example, if I want to account for why dogs sniff each other’s asses, the inference by analogy theory doesn’t work too well. To explain behavior we can’t quite get on board with, we need the ability to understand minds that may be quite different from our own. But there’s a limit to this difference. To simulate another mind in my own, I must rely on something like the principle of generosity, which is an extending of our own fundamental beliefs or meta beliefs to others—a minimal anthropomorphism.3 For example, it’s interpretive generosity that allows us to assume dogs act according to their own intentions and desires, rather than acting without purpose. If someone said, “Dogs find sniffing buttholes just as repugnant as we do and yet do it with gusto”, that wouldn’t even count as an explanation. Instead we think: “If I were a dog, I wouldn’t find sniffing buttholes disgusting.”

Simulation seems to be a more sophisticated version of inference by analogy. And again, I’m only aware of taking it out of the toolbox in unusual situations. Contrasted to phenomenological empathy, simulation points to a psychic distance between minds. In other words, simulation is needed only when minds stand in a problematic relationship to the other. Here we use rational processes to understand the other, but with this there’s a sense we may not get it right and may never know the answer.

In a future post I’d like to explore how we come to know our own boundaries of selfhood to see whether this clarifies our understanding of other minds.

What do YOU think?

Do we access other minds through behavior?

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.

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—Tina

But in what sense? That is very hard to figure out.

A little while back I came across an article published in Psyche in which the author talks about what he learned about the mind and self from his experience as a neurosurgeon. It’s just the latest example of a popular science article that left me thinking I was presented with a conclusion that didn’t match the evidence provided. It makes me wonder if consciousness studies reveal more about our philosophical commitments than what’s being investigated. Let’s see what you think.

WHERE IS MY SELF?

THE AUTHOR BEGINS with the oft-cited case of a patient whose brain hemispheres are cut off from one another. The patient experiences himself as one undivided self, and yet, the author of the article thinks this demonstrates that the self is an illusion. I’ve talked about illusions before.:

“In a sense, the surgery had created two separate selves. In some of these patients, one side of their body (controlled by one hemisphere) would do one thing, while the other half (controlled by the other hemisphere) would do the opposite. For example, one hand would button their shirt while the other hand would unbutton it.

“So why didn’t these split-brain patients, post-surgery, feel like they had two selves? The answer is that their brains fooled them into thinking that only one self existed and that it was in charge. When one of their hands did something unexpected, they made up a story to explain why. I changed my mind. I didn’t like the way that shirt looked. These stories or confabulations show the power of the illusion of selfhood…”

So if I trip over my own foot and make up a dumb excuse for doing so, am I really two selves? Or do I also have to have my brain split in two? Whatever the case, when he asks why the patients didn’t feel like they had two selves, he ignores the simple answer—because they aren’t two selves—preferring instead to let his own perplexing assumptions override the experience of a unified self.

He goes on to list various regions of the brain he has removed over the years, including the parietal lobe, and explains that after these surgeries, “the patient emerges feeling whole, as if none of them was missing.” Later in the article, however, he locates our sense of self primarily in the parietal lobe:

“There are places in the brain where this multisensory integration occurs, mostly in the parietal lobe. If a neurosurgeon stimulates these areas with an electrode in an awake patient in the operating room, we can cause the sense of self to dissolve.”

The parietal lobe, then, should be necessary to our sense of self or not. If it is, then removing this part of the brain should cause that person to feel some loss of self, right? Isn’t that the way this is supposed to go? But according to him, removing this part of the brain doesn’t cause a loss of sense of self. Why should the sense of self—illusory or not—only correlate to the brain in one case when we would expect it to correlate in both cases? Yet he comes to the nonsensical conclusion that your mind, your free will, and your sense of self are illusions:

“I’ve thought about the implications of this for decades and I’ve come to realise that the only way forward is to accept the unnerving counterintuitive conclusion that the mind and the self do not physically exist. Which is not to say that they don’t exist at all. They are fictional mental constructs, akin to the concepts of love, justice or freedom.”

In other words, if your mind turns out not to be physical, then it must be a fiction.1 But, he insists, fiction exists! Fiction is real!

Of course fiction exists. And so does this Valentine’s Day card, for that special mental construct in your life:

Those of us who don’t have his theoretical commitments are more apt to see the evidence as pointing in exactly the opposite direction: The mind-self is not the brain.2 As one commenter put it:

“With regards to corpus callosotomy patients and the like, all that demonstrates to me is that the ‘self’ and ‘locus of volition’ aren’t bound within the cranium.”

Exactly. But maybe this only seems obvious to those of us who aren’t concerned about saving the paradigm? Whatever the case, I think it takes some serious balls to prop up findings such as these in support of a nonsensical interpretation that, by physicalist decree, must be true.

When you take lived experience rather than physicalism as your starting point for understanding consciousness (I talked about this in my last post), it becomes clear that the mind-self can’t be the brain. The brain is a thing experienced, a thing amongst other things, like tables and bacteria. I think most of us get this intuitively. When we try to equate an object of experience with experience itself, it’s like an error message springs up in the back of our minds. Perhaps this explains why even strict reductive materialists can’t seem to avoid talking about consciousness emerging from the brain. Imagine if you heard someone talking about unmarried men emerging from bachelors. That would be pretty weird.

EXPERIENCE IS LIKE A WINDOW

(But there’s no danger of flying into it!)

WE EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING. There is nothing we don’t experience. If you think of something you don’t experience, you’ll soon realize you really do experience it, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to think of it.

(Bear with me now.)

Experience is often associated with qualia and sensory perception, but I take experience to be much bigger than that. Strictly speaking, we don’t experience raw sensory data except as a theory. That’s not to say I don’t want to include theories. We experience theories too!

Experience, taken in the broadest sense, is the basis on which we can know anything at all about the world or the self or even the brain. Experience is like a very clean window in that most of the time we don’t see it—which makes it all too easy for us to suppose it’s not here. But it’s always here and has been all along.

But there’s no seeing it. It is not a thing. We can’t look at experience ‘as it is in itself’. It’s almost as if we can only look ‘through’ it, but experience is not an it to look through.

Experience may be layers and layers with no rock bottom. There is no reason to think we can know experience indubitably or infallibly or even with any great certainty, but there’s only one way to know we’re wrong—more experience!

Not even science has the power to transcend experience. Science is conducted by scientists—science is ‘nothing over and above’ the work done by scientists—and scientists have experiences that don’t shut off while they’re coming up with theories about the supposedly illusory nature of consciousness.3 All science takes place within the experiences of scientists. If it really is the case that all experience is illusory, so too are all scientific findings, as well as knowledge of anything whatsoever. It makes no sense to leverage a perspective we have no access to, an out-of-experience view from nowhere, in order to throw all experience out the door. Not even science can rip the rug out from under its own feet.

Experience can’t be entirely illusory, as some would have us believe. It can’t even be mostly illusory. Just as lies are only possible in a larger environment of truth-telling (if everyone lied all the time, language would break down), errors and illusions can only be brought to light against a larger background of genuine reality.

Veridicality makes illusions possible.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Can the mind-brain identity theory be saved? Do consciousness studies support your views? Can experience be massively wrong?

Do you believe YOU are an illusion?

Leave a comment

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THE WORD CONSCIOUSNESS HAS MANY MEANINGS. That’s just language for you. Language makes a mockery of the philosopher’s attempts at technical tidiness, and yet in our everyday lives we handle its messiness and ambiguity like it’s nothing. We don’t even think about it. Even the most small-minded SOB turns out to be generous when it comes to language. That’s because the generosity I’m talking about is less like a moral virtue and more like an instinct. Some say generosity makes language possible.

But when it comes to the word consciousness, suddenly it’s nothing but trouble. Words have a superhuman ability to slip the definitional leash, and this makes it easy for those with pet theories to swap one meaning out for another when it suits them. Too many academic papers and articles have abused the reader’s generosity in this way. It has gotten to the point where some believe consciousness can’t be defined. I would agree, albeit for different reasons, but I also think we don’t need to define it. Strict definitions and precise terminology can’t force us to stop equivocating and loading unearned conclusions into the definition anyway. We have to deal with that problem ourselves.

In his book, The Weirdness of the World, defines consciousness by example, and while I have my quibbles with some of what he says there (who wouldn’t have a quibble?), I thought his overall approach earnest and fair-minded. Most of all I liked his “wonderfulness condition”:

“Consciousness, in the target sense that we care about, is this amazing thing that people reasonably wonder about! People can legitimately wonder, for example, how something as special as consciousness could possibly arise from the mere bumping of matter in motion, and whether it might be possible for consciousness to continue after the body dies, and whether jellyfish are conscious…If consciousness just is by definition reportability, for example—if “conscious” is just a short way of saying “available to be verbally reported”—it makes no sense to wonder whether jellyfish might be conscious. A definition of “consciousness” loses the target if it cuts wonder short by definitional razor.”

The Weirdness of the World: Consciousness, Innocent and Wonderful.

Yes!

Consciousness “from the inside”.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS SOMETIMES DEFINED AS EXPERIENCE, or ’what it’s like’, which seems reasonable enough, but some include contentious add-ons such as ineffable, infallible, irreducible…and other words beginning with ‘i’ that I can’t remember right now. A few of these i-word add-ons I might agree with, depending on how they’re elaborated, but I don’t think they’re essential to the meaning of consciousness.

Another version of consciousness from the inside (so to speak) is phenomenal consciousness. I use that phrase from time to time, but there are problems with it. First of all, phenomena implies its opposite, noumena, or things in themselves, so this might imply that reality is something altogether different from experience. This is, of course, what many philosophers and scientists actually think. I, along with maybe three others, do not. But I don’t have a problem with it so long as it’s not used to mean “non-veridical, exclusively sensory experiences.”

Eastern religion and philosophy has much to say about consciousness as well, of course, but I’m far from knowing what I’m talking about here, so I’ll leave it at that. From what I gather, the terminology doesn’t always align with the way it’s used these days in philosophy of mind, and this isn’t always obvious. Just something worth noting, especially when trend-chasing western philosophers align themselves with popular eastern ideas that are based in a metaphysics that has nothing to do with, or even conflicts with, their own ontological assumptions.

The word experience seems broad enough to indicate what we mean by consciousness, so long as we leave off those add-ons and keep the word experience open-ended. Yes, it’s vague. But so is consciousness, and so are we when it comes to understanding it. There are other ways we use the word, but for philosophical purposes, they all seem too narrow. Perfectly fine in some contexts, but not great substitutes for the broader meaning we’re aiming at in philosophy.

Consciousness “from the outside”.

IN CERTAIN REAL LIFE SITUATIONS when we talk about consciousness, we’re simply referring to being responsive to one's surroundings, or being awake. This sense has little to do with experience or ‘what it’s like’, and is instead about the state of a person from the outside, the way someone appears. For instance, when someone gets a knock to the head and slumps to the ground, we might say the person has lost consciousness. It’s not as though a bystander can know what the unconscious person is experiencing, if anything, but that epistemic hurdle hardly matters here, since conscious just means responsive, or the appearance of being alert, fully awake, or sensible to the world.

There may be an implicit assumption that the inner state of the person in question corresponds, more or less, to the appearance. But it’s not as though doctors and nurses have to imagine what it’s like to be the unconscious person they’re about to operate on, or suppose the unconscious patient is having no experiences. Someone under anesthesia might be dreaming about puppies or having an out of body experience or talking to Jesus. Whatever! What’s relevant here is whether the patient experiences, or will later remember experiencing, the surgeon’s scalpel.

This narrow meaning of consciousness can play into the hands of those want to focus on the external ‘public’ markers of consciousness—including those who commit the further mereological fallacy of supposing the brain is all that matters, not the whole person—while reducing experience to a ‘subject report’, the experiential equivalent to a grunt or cave drawing. What can get overlooked here, however, is that the epistemic gap in the everyday situations described above really exists, it’s just that it’s perfectly reasonable to downplay or ignore it in those situations. The appearance of consciousness from the outside is simply not the same thing as consciousness itself. I hope you feel I’m stating the obvious.

Consciousness as parts of consciousness.

SOME DEFINE CONSCIOUSNESS AS ‘CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE’. At first glance, that seems redundant: are we to think consciousness is experience experience? What’s meant by the word conscious here is unclear. I think it probably means awareness, as in, “I am conscious of the hour”. But if so, then consciousness is experience you’re aware of seems, like the definition above, too narrow.

Awareness might better be thought of as a mode or feature of consciousness, in which case it can’t simply be consciousness. The very concept of awareness brings up its opposite, unawareness, and these sit at opposite ends of a continuum, the intermediate levels of which we must also experience in some sense, otherwise we wouldn’t know about them. How we experience these gradations or levels of awareness is worth considering, and I wouldn’t want to constrict the discussion at the outset.

Suppose one of my flip flops falls off my foot. I wasn’t aware of wearing flip flops, the feeling of them on my feet, before, but I become aware of the feeling after one falls off. How would I have even noticed the change had I not been experiencing wearing the flip flops before? Maybe you’ll say I was ever-so-slightly aware of them before. That won’t work here, since that would make me ever-so-slightly conscious overall. Experience on the whole needs to be accounted for, and it goes way beyond a simple sliding scale of awareness. It makes more sense to decouple experience from awareness to give us more flexibility in these discussions and to preserve the richness of lived experience. Awareness, attention, intention and other such terms are good for discussing how we pick out salient things in consciousness relative to other things in the background, but all that richness is lost if we equate awareness with consciousness. The part can’t be made to stand in for the whole.

ANOTHER WAY OF TAKING THE PART FOR THE WHOLE is by equating consciousness with ‘higher order’ cognition or representations of mental states. In other words, consciousness is defined as a kind of self-awareness or thinking about thought. To me this sounds a lot like good old-fashioned reason is being replaced by self-reflection or self-awareness, a view that goes back to a time when we supposed only humans feel pain, thanks to our superior reasoning capabilities. And that’s absurd. Please don’t make me explain why animals are conscious too.

You might think these theories are not trying to explain consciousness per se, and so I should just ease up. Chill out. But if that’s the case, and I don’t think it is, but if it is, it shouldn’t be too hard to make that point clearer. Maybe by not calling your not-really-about-consciousness theory a theory of consciousness. Seems like a good place to start.

TAKING A PART FOR THE WHOLE could prove hard to maintain, to be consistent about, in the long run. Even if you don’t mean to equivocate, you’re likely to end up doing so by inadvertently including more…simply because there is more. Of course, I might be being overly broad in my understanding of consciousness, and perhaps trying to explain what is not experience will be my particular challenge. I’ll have to tackle that some other day.

Here’s how screwed up things can get. Let’s say you define consciousness as awareness and you explain it by saying something like, “Experienced drivers are often unconscious (unaware) of driving.” If you later equate consciousness with being responsive or awake, we have every right to ask how it’s possible to drive while being in a coma or in a deep sleep.

I’ve never been a big fan of the word consciousness as a replacement for what philosophers used to call mind or psyche. Remember ‘the mind-body problem’? Those were the days!

But wait. Let’s not forget there once was a time when people talked about souls with a straight face. We dumped the word soul to get away from its religious implications, and yet we load the word consciousness with just as many unproven assumptions. Perhaps our preference for the latter is nothing more than a secular bias on our part.

As E.B. White once said…

“Soulwise, these are trying times.”

I’LL BE HONEST. WHEN I HEAR CONSCIOUSNESS, I THINK SOUL. I believe at the heart of our talk about consciousness in philosophy of mind, what we’re trying to define, describe, sneak past, is nothing less than what those outside of philosophy call the soul. I’m thinking of the core meaning of soul, the essence of soul, not all the grubby add-ons people have imposed on it throughout history.

I hear your objections. Yes, souls are indeed immaterial. But so what? Why should that bother you? Are computations material? Information? Laws? Math? Yet you believe those are real, don’t you? We’re so beyond materialism…or so we say.

Soul doesn’t necessarily mean immortal. Philosophers of the past would have had a tough time questioning the immortality of the soul if that were the case. And there’s no reason to assume the soul can exist apart from the body either. (See Aristotle).

We can’t pick apart the meaning of soul to discover whether rocks, plants, or animals have them. Yes, in the past some have thought only humans have souls. In my opinion they were definitely and obviously wrong, but my opinion has nothing to do with the meaning of the word soul either. Do rocks have souls? Plants? Who knows?

The soul isn’t necessarily a simple indivisible substance. It can have parts. Or not have parts. Same goes for uber-souls: ant colonies, the population of China, the universe. The Beautiful City of Plato’s Republic is a soul made up of souls. So why not. Who knows.

BUT WHAT IS THE SOUL?

I don’t know! All I can say is, I think it’s most keenly understood by its absence.

Recently I had to have my sweet Geordie Bear put down, and the hardest part came when I looked into his eyes and saw that he was gone. Unmistakably, irreversibly gone. My first thought was: Where did he go? Childish though this may seem to many of you, I think it makes sense to ask that question. Nothing in the world just disappears, so to speak, into thin air from one moment to the next—nothing, that is, except souls.

What’s left behind when someone dies is of so little importance by comparison to what is no longer there. During life the physical body seemed identical to the life, the personality, the individual soul, but in death it suddenly turns into this non-breathing, motionless thing that immediately begins the process of cooling, disintegrating, self destructing. When the body is no longer occupied we see its material nature most clearly, see it for what it truly is. What is the physical body? It’s nothing. Or almost nothing. Returning to nothingness.

You might object to this blatant dualism, but I assure you, no metaphysical commitments are intended here. It’s hard to avoid the language of dualism. I don’t care who you are or what you believe, death makes dualists of us all.

Maybe you’re thinking what I’m calling the soul is nothing more than life. But what is that? Life is no less mysterious! No one has figured out how life ‘emerges’ from dead matter. So go ahead and call it life, if you like. Either way captures the sense of wonder that’s too often missing from our discussions on ‘consciousness’ these days.

Why should we not be filled with wonder? It’s not like neuroscience has it all figured out. Far from it! The mind-brain identity theory didn’t stack up the way many assumed it would (check out this paper by physicist, , if you don’t believe me). The neural correlates of consciousness? We’re jumping ship. Well, there are holdouts. There always are. Some conclude the mind or self is an illusion, but that’s neither here nor there. I suspect most people, people who don’t have axe to grind, ordinary people, would say the evidence points in the opposite direction. It’s the brain that comes under suspicion here. Not the mind. Not the self. Not the soul.

And yet, I sense a distinctly materialistic tone still hanging in the air. Why?

I suppose these things take time.

No, I don’t think we’ll ever say soul with a straight face. There’s no going back. That’s how it goes.

Fine. Okay. I guess.

Well, I think IT is more than the brain, more than the body, more than the sum of its parts, even if IT doesn’t survive death. But what is this more? I don’t know. Just that IT—whatever you want to call it—is more.

What do YOU think?

In my last post we discussed the first two Meditations from Descartes’ work, Meditations on First Philosophy, and here we’ll finish up. Here’s another site with audio readings of the Meditations. Feel free to follow along!

THIRD MEDITATION

At the beginning of the Third Meditation, Descartes reaffirms the measure of truth must be contained within himself: “I am certain that I am a thinking thing; but do I not therefore know what is required to render me certain of anything?” But even while saying “I am certain that I am a thinking thing,” Descartes again finds a way to doubt his previous discoveries:

“And certainly, since I have no reason to believe that there is some deceiving God, and since I haven’t yet considered the proofs for the existence of any God whatsoever, the ground of doubt that rests only on this supposition is very slight, and, so to speak, metaphysical. But in order to be able to completely remove it, I should inquire as to whether there is a God as soon as the opportunity presents itself; and, if I find that there is one, I should also find out if he can be a deceiver, for without the knowledge of these two truths, I don’t see how I can ever be certain of anything.”1

According to Descartes, the only way to discount the evil genius is by showing that God exists and could not be a deceiver—otherwise he can’t be certain of anything. Which means even clear and distinct ideas, i.e., the cogito and mathematical propositions, ultimately depend on the existence of a non-deceiving God.

He begins not with the famous ontological argument, but with this:

“Now it is manifest by the natural light that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient cause and total cause as in its effect; for from whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause?”

The cause of my idea of a perfect God must come from a real perfect God. Descartes explains why his skepticism towards sensible objects doesn’t apply to his idea of God:

“Although I have many thoughts of things outside of myself, like the sky, the earth, light, heat and a thousand others, I did not struggle at all to know where they came from, but because I saw nothing in them which would render them superior to me, I could believe that, if they were true, they were dependent on my nature…”2

I know I’m not perfect, yet I have an idea of a perfect being. This perfect being must exist and be the cause of my idea of it, because perfection cannot be born from imperfection. On the other hand, I can doubt that my ideas derived from sense perception derive from external reality because sensible objects are less perfect than me.3

FOUTH MEDITATION

Now that we know God is perfect and exists, we can also deduce that God would not deceive us, for deception is a sign of imperfection. Whoopie! Reality really is real!

Not so fast. Descartes has some explaining to: How can we ever be wrong if God is perfect and doesn’t deceive us? Descartes responds to this problem in two ways:

First of all, God can only assure us of our clear and distinct ideas. Any idea that is not clear and distinct is still prone to error.

Secondly, we make mistakes because we have the freedom to affirm or deny the truth. The will is in essence different from the understanding; it is unlimited, whereas the understanding is limited. I can be mistaken when I will or affirm something beyond the bounds of my understanding:

“Then where do my errors come from? They can only come from the will covering a much wider range than the understanding because I don’t contain it within the same limits, but I extend it even to things that I don’t understand. And as the will is itself indifferent, it easily chooses the bad instead of the good or the false instead of the true.”4

The will is the cause of error, but only when it goes beyond the understanding. Now we see the purpose behind his method of doubt. While doubting, the will places a check on itself, preventing itself from going beyond the understanding and preventing us from falling into error. But my will can no longer place a check on itself when I doubt clear and distinct ideas such as the cogito, for as we have seen, the cogito cannot be doubted without engendering contradiction.

There can be no way of falling into error once I know that God exists and is not a deceiver AND that my will has not affirmed anything beyond my understanding. Knowledge of God’s existence can only secure our knowledge of clear and distinct ideas.

FIFTH MEDITATION

The next argument for the existence of God is often referred to as the ontological argument. Its placement in the fifth Meditation seems strange since Descartes has already provided a proof for the existence of God; there seems to be no reason for a further proof. But there it is. Anyway, let’s be generous and just assume all his arguments for the existence of God are both valid and sound. According to Descartes, the idea of God implies the existence of God, by definition:

“For, being accustomed to distinguish between existence and essence in all other matters, I easily persuaded myself that existence can be separated from the essence of God, and that therefore one can conceive of God as not actually existing. But nevertheless, when I think of it more attentively, I clearly find that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the equality of three angles to two rights angles from the essence of a rectilinear triangle, or even the idea of a valley from the idea of a mountain; in such a way, there is no less repugnance in thinking of a God (or in other words, a perfect being) to which existence is lacking than to conceive of a mountain with no valley at all.”5

Absolute perfection necessitates existence; an absolutely perfect thing could not at the same time be a mere fiction of my mind and yet retain its perfection. God cannot be anything but absolute perfection, for God would not be God without at the same time being perfect (all-powerful, non-deceiving, etc). In other words, God’s essence entails existence. Therefore, God exists by definition, just as geometrical demonstrations contain within themselves their proofs.

SIXTH MEDITATION

Proof of the existence of a non-deceiving God was necessary to show that clear and distinct ideas are true, and to ensure that I can properly deduce other knowledge from these without being deceived. Now that Descartes has proven that a non-deceiving God exists (and, as I have said previously, I will not dispute these proofs), here in the last Meditation he tries to show how we can know external reality:

“The only thing left for me to examine is the existence of material things: Certainly at the very least I already know that they exist in so far as they are objects of geometrical demonstrations, seeing that in this way I conceive of them very clearly and very distinctly.”6

Material things are known “clearly and distinctly” by the intellect, through geometrical demonstrations. We can know reality, but only mathematically.

Returning to the wax example in the second Meditation, we see that Descartes had already assumed as much—that material things can be known clearly and distinctly only insofar as they are known mathematically—and only needed to verify that God is not a deceiver. The piece of wax could not be known by the properties that we would normally associate with it, such as hardness, color, smell, and other sensible qualities, but only by the idea of extension in general—extension as it is applied to all objects, or any object whatsoever. The proper way to know material objects is, according to Descartes, through mathematical concepts involved in the idea of extension in general.

Now we know in what way material objects are to be known, if they are to be known, but we have yet to see Descartes prove that they exist. He argues that because a perfect, non-deceiving God exists, it is highly unlikely we would be deceived in believing material objects exist as well:

“Because he [God] has not given me any faculty for knowing this is the case, but on the contrary, a very strong inclination to believe that they have been given to me or that they come from corporeal objects, I don’t see how we can excuse him of deception if, in fact, the ideas came from or were produced by causes other than corporeal things; therefore, we must admit that corporeal things exist.”7

So Descartes fails to prove that material objects exist, strictly speaking. He finds that, while he has not been given the “faculty for knowing this is the case,” he must believe that material objects exist. God would have to be a deceiver if material objects didn’t really exist, for God has given him a “strong inclination to believe” in corporeal objects; therefore “we must admit that corporeal things exist.” After a rigorous application of extreme doubt, Descartes seems to permit one belief—or rather, one God-given “strong inclination”.

But he doesn’t say material objects exist in just the way that we perceive them. External objects are known in so far as they can be understood mathematically as extension.

“However, perhaps they [external objects] are not entirely such as we perceive them by our senses, for sense perception is very obscure and confused in many cases; but at least it is necessary to admit that all the things which I conceive clearly and distinctly, or in other words, everything that is included as an object of speculative geometry, is, generally speaking, truly external to me.”8

God doesn’t guarantee anything derived from sense perception—only clear and distinct ideas and the existence of external objects in general.

ALL WE CAN KNOW FOR CERTAIN (according to Descartes):

• God exists.

• God is no deceiver.

• Because of the above, our clear and distinct ideas are true. Clear and distinct ideas include:

  • the cogito

  • the mathematical, geometrical (extension)

  • God’s essence entails existence (let’s ignore the circularity of this argument)

The cogito doesn’t help us know reality, and neither do the proofs for the existence of God. Therefore, we can know reality only through mathematics.

Now that we have a basic understanding of Descartes’ arguments, as well as what he concluded from them, we can see what has been excluded from the realm of certain knowledge—morality and aesthetics, for sure, but also all the qualities that make up the vast majority of our experiences.

In a previous post I criticized those who mischaracterize Cartesian introspection as being infallible. We’ve seen why that characterization leaves much to be desired, especially given that Descartes casts doubt on our ability to be certain of anything at all. Plus, by leveraging the will to explain how we can be wrong if God is not a deceiver, he makes it clear that we can be gravely mistaken about most things in life such as the qualities we experience through sensory perception, as well as ourselves. Only “clear and distinct” ideas pass the stress test; math is our only passage to reality.

What do YOU think?

Do you think Descartes is right about mathematical reality, that it’s more reliable than other ways of knowing? Does reliability make for a better kind of knowledge? Can everything be fruitfully mathematized? Art? Morality? Consciousness?

Hume once pointed out that even deductive reasoning relies on our memory—I can’t add numbers together if I can’t remember all the numbers. Hume’s skepticism would seem to cause trouble for Cartesian rationalism. Do you think Descartes can defend his ‘clear and distinct’ ideas from memory failure?

Related posts

• 1. Did Descartes say, “Introspection is infallible”? Hint: No.

• 2. How do you know what’s really real? A tour through the Cartesian Meditations.

• 3. This post.

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

PODCAST LISTENERS…WATCH OUT FOR THE EVIL DEMON!

BWAH HA HA…

A Somewhat Neutral Summary

FIRST MEDITATION

In order to establish a secure foundation for a system of knowledge, Descartes proposes we start from scratch and rid ourselves of all our hand-me-down opinions:

“For quite some time I’ve been aware that, starting from youth, I had received many false opinions as true, and that everything which I had founded upon these principles was so dubious and uncertain that it became necessary for me seriously to undertake, once in my life, to undo all of the opinions which I had received from birth, and to start all over from the foundations if I wanted to establish a firm and stable structure in the sciences.”1

He’s putting knowledge through the ultimate stress test, but this is simply a matter of method, a kind of thought experiment we engage in temporarily, not a skeptical philosophy or worldview. In detaching ourselves from ordinary life we’re engaging in a philosophical activity which is necessarily unsocial. Thus, sitting in a stove-heated room away from all disturbances and passions, Descartes strips himself of his dubious opinions and beliefs in order to begin anew from a solid foundation built on certainty—this is the goal.

He starts by doubting all information derived from the senses (through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste). To him, sense perception is often misleading, not just sometimes misleading. He goes so far as to doubt that the hands he sees before him, his feet, and the other bodily parts which he had formerly thought himself to possess are really such as he perceives them. When he claims his sense perceptions can be doubted, he at first assumes there must be external realities of some sort which cause his perceptions. In the following passage he likens perceptions to dreams, and the realities causing these perceptions to being awake:

“However, we must at least admit that the objects which appear to us in sleep are like pictures or paintings which can only be formed as likenesses to something real and true; and so at the very least these general things such as eyes, a head, hands, and all the rest of the body, are not just imaginary objects, but real and existent…And for the same reason, even if these general things such as eyes, a head, hands, and the like were imaginary, we must admit real, existing things that are even more simple and more universal than these, and all of the images of things which reside in our thought, whether they be true and real or false and fantastic, are neither more nor less formed from the mixture of certain real colors. In this sort of thing lies corporeal nature in general, and its extension…”2

For instance, unicorns aren’t natural, living creatures—this is what we normally mean when we say “unicorns don’t exist” or “unicorns aren’t real”. But of course unicorns are real! Where did this idea ‘unicorn’ come from, then? Descartes thinks such ideas must be constructed out of elements from reality, such as horn, horse, white. When I’m dreaming or imagining, I don’t invent something entirely new from nothing. What seems new isn’t invented from scratch; it turns out to derive its components from waking life. Dreams consist of perceptual elements that appear to me when I am awake, just discombobulated.

For now Descartes assumes these perceptual elements such as colors must correspond to some kind of reality. But then he realizes he can’t know beyond a doubt that reality is as he perceives it. This means the observation-based sciences such as physics and astronomy, which rely on sensory perception, are useless in the search for indubitable truths. On the other hand, it seems at first glance as though math and geometry escape unscathed, “for whether I am awake or dreaming, it remains true that two plus three equals five, and that a square never has more than four sides.”3 Mathematical propositions are not empirical, which means that they’re not derived from sensory perception. Even if we rely on diagrams and visual aids while doing math, these visual aids are mere symbols representing ideas which are not empirical. For example, a perfect circle doesn’t exist in nature—a perfect circle is necessarily invisible—but the idea of it as a 360 degree figure exists in our minds, even if we can’t ‘picture’ it. It’s the perfect circle, not the various circles that we perceive in the world, that’s the proper object of mathematics. So math and geometry are untouched by the act of doubting sense perception.

BUT WAIT! Can we trust mathematical truths beyond doubt? What if there’s an all-powerful evil genius who thwarts my every thought such that even when I believe I’ve obtained the most certain of truths, I’m still deceived? Descartes ponders this terrible possibility:

“It could be that he had wanted me to be mistaken every time I add together two and three, or count the sides of a square, or form some judgment still more simple, if indeed a simpler judgment could be imagined.”4

This leads Descartes to doubt the existence of the external world altogether, for an all-powerful evil genius could have “arranged that there should be neither earth, nor sky, nor any extended thing.”5 At the end of the first Meditation, Descartes leaves us suspended in doubt, uncertain as to whether we can know anything at all.

SECOND MEDITATION

Descartes seems to get himself out of the evil genius problem by finding a foundational truth that at first appears to pass the stress test of extreme doubt. I will refer to it as the cogito, which is a term that means “I think” in Latin but is here used to describe the entire phrase “I think; therefore, I am”, or cogito ergo sum.

In doubting of all sensible things, even of my own body, and despite the possibility that an evil genius may be thwarting my every thought and making them all false, it can never be possible that while I doubt, I am not thinking, or that while I am thinking, I do not exist:

“There is no doubt at all that I exist, even if he deceives me. Let him deceive me as much as he wishes, for he can never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I shall be conscious that I am something.”6

If I inquire as to what I am, I can safely conclude, “I am a thinking thing.” Thinking is my essence, regardless of what may be the object of my thought, for doubting that I am thinking is impossible and produces a manifest contradiction. The cogito seems to provide a way out of the evil genius problem, yet we will see that Descartes later finds a reason to doubt even this. Take note here that Descartes thinks that the cogito is indubitably true while it is conceived: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true, all the times that I pronounce it, or when I conceive it in my mind.”7 For now, it seems to be enough that the cogito cannot be reasonably doubted, for in the act of conceiving of it, it is impossible to doubt.

Descartes pushes on to see what else he can discover, turning immediately to something outside himself: a piece of wax. Wax changes as it melts; it grows in size, and its color and figure alter. If every property I would normally associate with the wax admits of change, how do I know it’s the same, self-subsisting wax? In other words, what’s left over from these various changes that allows me to know that it’s still the same object of perception, rather than a stream of incoherent perceptions? The property of extension, it turns out, is what unites my experience of the wax, revealing the same persistent object despite its various changes.

But we don’t receive the idea of extension from the perceived object itself; we say instead that the object belongs to the category of extension in general: “I would not conceive of the wax as it is clearly and truthfully, if I did not think that it was capable of receiving even a wider variety of extension than I ever imagined.” Descartes seems to be saying here that although the wax appears to be able to take on different shapes and sizes and I can’t determine the extent to which it can extend, it must belong to the general category of extension in order for me to recognize it as a substance at all. This can be better explained when we think of water. Water is extended to some degree, and though it may evaporate and expand beyond our abilities to see it any longer (just as we can’t see the air), we’d still be inclined to admit the evaporated water remains, in some form or another, an extended substance. Extension, then, doesn’t belong to a particular object, but only to objects in general. If this is true, then extension can’t derive from sensory perception; I don’t perceive extension in general through my five senses like I do odor, color, or hardness.

Descartes says this understanding of extension, extension as a general category to which all substances belong, is a clear and distinct idea:

“But what is this wax which can only be conceived by the understanding of the mind? Certainly it is the same that I see, touch, and imagine—the same that I thought it was from the beginning. But notice, perception is not an act of seeing, touching or imagining, and never was, although it seemed that way previously, but only an inspection of the mind, which can be imperfect and confused, as it was previously, or clear and distinct, as it is now, according to how attentive I am to the things that are in it, and of which it is composed.”8

Descartes claims that the piece of wax can be known clearly and distinctly by the mind, but only as an extended substance in general. Because Descartes can only know about the self-subsistence of objects through this clear and distinct inspection of his mind, he concludes that “there is evidently nothing easier for me to know than my own mind.”9 What he means is objects of sense perception are not properly known through sensory perception, but through the intellect. I can know my mind as intellect more clearly than I can the objects of my sense perception, and in so far as I can know objects of sense perception at all, they can only be clearly and distinctly known through intellection where I discover them to be united by the general property of extension.

What do YOU think?

Descartes doesn’t trust sensory perception. Do you agree that it ought not to be trusted? Why or why not?

Related Posts

• 1. Did Descartes say, “Introspection is infallible”? Hint: No.

• 2. This post.

• 3. How science lost its qualities... through a distinction that is neither clear nor distinct.

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

“RNA Reel”:

Contemporary discussions on introspective knowledge in philosophy of mind concern whether we can ‘look into’ ourselves and know our own experiences. In these discussions ‘experience’ tends to get reduced to qualia—basic qualitative experiences such as the scent of a rose. One side claims our own qualia experiences are what we can know best, while the other side tries to show we don’t know these as well as we think we do, if at all. So we end up with qualia is knowable on one side and no qualia or self-knowledge at the other extreme.

Full disclosure: I can’t cheer wholeheartedly for either team; I think both sides are too Cartesian, even while they criticize Cartesianism. But this post isn’t about introspection. It’s a criticism of their criticism, because they don’t always get Descartes right. For instance:

“There’s a long tradition in philosophy, of course, of thinking that we actually know ourselves quite well. Descartes, who has a reasonable claim to be the founder of this tradition, apparently thought that we had infallible and complete knowledge of everything going on in our minds. And he is certainly not the only philosopher to think that. Moreover, commonsense seems to agree with Descartes too. Suppose I want to know what I think or feel or plan to do. I don’t have to consult some fancy expert or do some elaborate experiment. I don't have to consult some third party. I just need to do a little reflection and introspection.” The Limits of Self-Knowledge.

Suffice it to say, if Descartes did claim we have “infallible and complete knowledge of everything going on in our minds,” he then conjured an evil deceiver to derail us every time we add two and two. As usual, the full picture is a lot more complicated.

It’s not just one instance. Here’s another, and another, and another. Even the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy blunders down this path before swerving at the last second with the clever phrase “takes its inspiration”:

“A view which takes its inspiration from Descartes holds that introspection provides us with infallible and complete access to our states of mind.” (Epistemology of Introspection, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

But I doubt very many readers would recognize “takes its inspiration” as meaning, “There might be a few lines you can pull from the Meditations to make it look like Descartes centered his philosophy around the idea that introspection is infallible, even though Cartesian introspecting looks a lot more like, Can’t wait to get back to outrospecting!” Not wrong, exactly, but still misleading.

Google’s AI Overview reveals how widespread this mischaracterization is (in its usual insipid way):

This reminds me of an incident in a high school chemistry class when I let someone from another group copy my lab results (I had no qualms about “sharing” my work). I told this person to make some changes, but of course that never happened. The story ends with the entire class mysteriously coming up with the exact same lab results—a scientific miracle! Could something like this be what’s going on out there in internet-land? I don’t know, but it sure seems like it.

On the other hand, seeing the same weird mistake over and over makes me wonder whether I’m the one who’s wrong. I’m not an expert on Descartes, after all. I’m not even a philosophy professor. I admit, I haven’t read everything Descartes wrote, and what I have read, I read a long time ago. It’s possible there’s some passage in The Passions of The Soul that lends support to the ‘self-transparency’ view philosophers attribute to him. Still, it would be nice to hear an explanation as to why something he said in a less popular work should override the general thrust of his more well-known works. A bit of supporting evidence would be nice.

DESCARTES GETS CRAPPED ON by nearly everyone these days, myself included, but he wasn’t the complete doofus philosophers sometimes make him out to be, so we should at least be suspicious of attributions that make him seem thoughtless or stupid. (Unless they’re funny, in which case they must be true.)

Whatever your stance on the subject of knowledge through introspection, we should at least be able to agree on this: Descartes was no qualia freak. Throughout his inward contemplations he took almost no interest in qualitative experience as such; his sights were set on securing a foundation for knowledge—which turned out to be a certain kind of knowledge, or what we now call science. And yet, here’s how Daniel Dennett characterizes Cartesian introspection. But before I go there, let it be known I’m picking this example because it gets at the heart of my complaint, not out of any sort of animosity for Dennett, whose overall views I can’t properly disagree with because I have only barely read them:

“Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them.” (Daniel Dennett “Quining Qualia”)

Of course, the word ‘qualia’ doesn’t come into use until long after Descartes, but more to the point, this passage might leave the unwitting reader with the impression that Descartes filled page after page with baroque arguments about how we can know our qualitative experiences without the slightest bit of trouble—all we have to do is introspect! What’s worse, if you take into account what Dennett himself means by ‘qualia’—as being among other things “intrinsic” or non-relational1—his characterization strikes me as doubly dubious. Now I could take a snippet from Descartes’ second Meditation and arrive at this:

“I can perceive my own mind more easily and clearly than I can anything else.”

Voila. That seems decisive, does it not? Booyah, Tina! But look what happens when we fill that out with its context:

“See! With no effort I have reached the place where I wanted to be! I now know that even bodies are perceived not by the senses or by imagination but by the intellect alone, not through their being touched or seen but through their being understood; and this helps me to understand that I can perceive my own mind more easily and clearly than I can anything else. Since the grip of old opinions is hard to shake off, however, I want to pause and meditate for a while on this new knowledge of mine, fixing it more deeply in my memory.”

Already this should seem quite different from “but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia”. The mind—whatever Descartes means by that word—is what he claims he knows most clearly, but whatever it is that’s indubitable about this supposedly self-transparent mind, it ain’t ‘qualia’ or anything even remotely qualitative. Here’s what he says about qualities:

Strictly speaking, only judgments can be true or false; but we can also speak of an idea as ‘false’ in a certain sense – we call it ‘materially false’ – if it represents a non-thing as a thing. For example, my ideas of heat and cold have so little clarity and distinctness that they don’t enable me to know whether cold is merely the absence of heat, or heat is merely the absence of cold, or heat and cold are both real positive qualities, or neither heat nor cold is a real positive quality. (Rene Descartes, Third Meditation, Meditations on First Philosophy)2

Descartes expresses uncertainty as to whether there even is such a thing as a “real, positive quality” precisely because these are known with “so little clarity and distinctness”—a key phrase to remember for next time.

This passage, however, only reflects a passing thought in the overall work. Throughout the Meditations he takes you on a rollercoaster ride with peaks of optimism that plummet to wholesale skepticism, and yet, throughout his tumultuous “inward” journey, Descartes rarely ponders qualitative experiences as such. He does occasionally notice that he can’t doubt that he imagines he’s experiencing whatever it is he thinks he’s experiencing while he’s experiencing it, but his overall attitude toward such observations seem to amount to: So what?3 The truth is, he didn’t give a fig about qualitative experiences! His focus was almost entirely on which of his experiences corresponded to an external reality.

“Perhaps, though, there is another way of investigating whether some of the things of which I have ideas really do exist outside me. Considered simply as mental events, my ideas seem to be all on a par: they all appear to come from inside me in the same way. But considered as images representing things other than themselves, it is clear that they differ widely. Undoubtedly, the ideas that represent substances amount to something more – they contain within themselves more representative reality – than do the ideas that merely represent qualities.” Third Meditation.

Mere qualities. Pah!

In the end, Cartesian doubt left behind an eviscerated landscape entirely devoid of the aesthetic, spiritual, qualitative, and ethical lives of everyday experience, a world in which the only way we can truly know anything is to mathematize it. The rest—all that quality stuff—is fluff and cotton candy.

In my next post, let’s explore what Descartes actually said. I’ll walk you through "Meditations on First Philosophy” (Méditations Métaphysiques) so at the very least you can correct the next philosophy professor who fumbles the non-spatially-extended ball. Bonus points if you read Descartes yourself. (It’s short, and he’s pretty easy to read as philosophers go.)

What do YOU think?

Did I make you worry about relying on the internet for even basic information? (I hope so!) Will you rely on what I said here? (I hope not!)

Related Posts

• 1. This post.

• 2. How do you know what’s really real? A tour through the Cartesian Meditations.

• 3. How science lost its qualities... through a distinction that is neither clear nor distinct.

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

“RNA Reel”:

What is an illusion?

I realize this question seems stupid, even childish. All I can say is, it can’t hurt to ask! Here’s what the Cambridge dictionary says:

1. An idea or belief that is not true. We have no illusions about how difficult the job will be.

2. Something that is not what it seems to be. They managed to create the illusion of space in a tiny apartment.

The second seems more pertinent:

My initial impression of a stick in water—the stick is bent—is illusory, because the stick turns out not to be bent when I pull it out of the water. That was easy, right?

Is a rainbow an illusion?

Some think it’s obvious that rainbows are illusions. I noticed this intriguing comment on Frankish’s blog post:

“One thing that’s interesting about rainbows is that people don’t seem to call them illusions very often. Perhaps that’s because no one is fooled for a moment that there are really arcs in the sky. They are so obviously illusions and so common, no one has to call them out for not being real.”

But what, exactly, is not real? Try to get an explanation as to why a rainbow is an illusion and you get some strange responses.

RAINBOWS AREN’T SOLID!

“Regardless of how substantial a rainbow looks, it’s only an optical illusion.” Mental Floss

How substantial a rainbow looks? They look pretty insubstantial to me! I’ve never been fooled into think a rainbow was a solid or tangible object. Have you?

RAINBOW PHOTONS CAN’T BE SHARED!

“When you talk about seeing a rainbow, it’s worth pointing out that the operative word there is “you”. Your eye perceives a rainbow thanks to the refraction, reflection and dispersion of light, but more precisely, thanks to the refraction, reflection and dispersion of the specific photons of light that have made it all the way from the Sun to your retina. Your friend standing next to you has a completely different set of photons hitting his/her/their retinas. So while you both may see a rainbow, you won’t see the same one: no two people on Earth ever have, or ever will!

Similarly, this is why rainbows don't actually touch the ground, and why you can't find the end of a rainbow: they're optical illusions caused by light being refracted by water.” BBC Sky at Night Magazine

So… rainbows are illusions because two viewers can’t share photons—and this is why we perceive separate, private rainbows. But what about when my friend and I are looking at, say, a bowl of potato salad? Oops. I meant two bowls of potato salad! No two people on Earth have ever seen the same bowl of potato salad, and never will! For that to happen, the photons of light that come all the way down from the sun and bounce off the potato salad and enter my eye would have to be the same photons that enter my friend's eye. Argh, get your potato salad photons out of my eye! Gross! If rainbows are illusory because we can’t share photons, then rainbows are no more illusory than potato salad.

RAINBOWS DON’T TOUCH THE GROUND!

Or maybe rainbows are illusory because they don’t really touch the ground. Who knew? Calling all leprechauns, you can stop looking for that pot of gold now!

RAINBOWS MOVE WITH YOU!

Here’s one I came up with (all by myself!) It’s possible someone out there might mistakenly think rainbows are stationary. I think I was something like four years old when I first noticed that when you’re moving, rainbows move with you—though I’ll grant that this might not be obvious unless you’re riding in a car and looking out at a rainbow off to the side:

But if this is what the illusion is about, you wouldn’t say rainbows are illusory. You’d say they don’t really stay put; they move with you.

This is interesting since it goes beyond being observer-dependent—after all, pretty much everything worth talking about is observer dependent (think about it). Rainbows are different, though, because they’re obviously observer dependent! What could be more transparent than a rainbow?

RAINBOWS DEPEND ON CERTAIN ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS.

“A rainbow is an optical illusion—it does not actually exist in a specific spot in the sky. The appearance of a rainbow depends on where you're standing and where the sun (or other source of light) is shining. The sun or other source of light is usually behind the person seeing the rainbow.” Rainbow, National Geographic.

Rainbows appear to me only under certain specific environmental conditions—so maybe it’s their dependence on these relations that makes them illusory. But a sunset appears to me only under certain specific environmental conditions too, yet we don’t call sunsets illusions. Perhaps it’s because rainbows are more strict about these conditions; they have a just so environmental dependency—when the angle from the sun to the raindrop to my eye is 42 degrees—and that’s what makes them illusory. Perhaps somewhere between sunsets and rainbows we’ve stepped over the line from normal ephemeral phenomena to illusions.

But then what would we say about the movie above? None of this extraordinary relational dependency is true for anyone witnessing the rainbow in the movie, which means we end up with the bizarre consequence that images of rainbows are not illusory, but real life rainbows are. I don’t know about you, but my mind’s exploding into Skittles right about now.

At any rate, recall what we said earlier: illusions involve something appearing to be other than what it is. Yet, I’m never surprised by the just so environmental dependency of rainbows. After all, it’s only when I hold the garden hose at a certain angle to the sun and stick my thumb into the hose in just the right way to create just the right kind of spray that a rainbow appears. Rainbows seem especially dependent on specific environmental conditions. So where’s the mistake?

RAINBOWS AREN’T REALLY MULTICOLORED ARCS.

This is what philosopher, Keith Frankish, believes:

“Rainbows are real, aren’t they? You can see them with your own eyes — though you have to be in the right position, with the sun behind you. You can point them out to other people — provided they take up a similar position to you. Heck, you can even photograph them.

But what exactly is it that’s real? It seems as if there’s an actual gauzy, multi-coloured arc stretching across the sky and curving down to meet the ground at a point to which you could walk. Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there.” [my emphasis] Like a rainbow.

This cracks me up: “Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course.”

I don’t know better! I think rainbows ARE those “gauzy, multicolored arcs stretching across the sky”, although I won’t go so far as to say they must reach the ground at some point I could walk to. It’s more common to see rainbows that don’t touch the ground. A full arc rainbow is special.

But don’t mind me, I’m still living in a cave with my stupendously unobservant ancestors. How quaint we are!

To be fair, at least Frankish is giving us a coherent reason to call rainbows illusions—I am mistaken in thinking rainbows are multicolored arcs because, according to him, that’s not what they really are. Is the illusion that we think rainbows exist, but they really don’t? That can’t be it, since Frankish explicitly states:

“Rainbows, whatever they are: real.”

What is a real rainbow, then?

We might suppose he thinks that real rainbows, as opposed to colorful arcs, simply are those certain specific atmospheric and light conditions that produce rainbows. Maybe every time we see a rainbow we can figure out what’s going on in the atmosphere and what’s going on with the light at that moment and then we can associate the colorful-but-illusory arc phenomenon with its “real” environmental conditions.

But it would be hard to justify calling these conditions a real rainbow. Here, Frankish seems to agree:

“There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s ‘atmospheric correlates’, as it were.”

And later he says:

“So trying to find the neural correlates of the qualia world is as sensible as trying to find an arc-shaped structure in the atmosphere after a rain shower.”

But if rainbows have no specific underlying physical correlates and they’re not colorful arcs in the sky, then how do we identify what Frankish calls a real rainbow? How is his real rainbow to be distinguished from any other moisture-filled mass of air reflecting sunlight? If real rainbows can’t be distinguished, it would seem whenever we talk about a real rainbow we’re not saying anything meaningful. Real rainbow kind of sounds like…nothing at all.

I doubt Frankish wanted to go in this direction with his notion of a real rainbow, but I have no idea what he means. I’m not sure he does either:

“Rainbows, whatever they are…”

How can he call our multicolored arcs illusory if he can’t say what a real rainbow is? Or maybe he does know and he’s not telling us. It could be his idea of what makes something real is entirely different from mine. Whatever the case, I’m not convinced rainbows are illusory. I’m gonna go on believing in rainbows—the real, colorful ones.

Consciousness is as real as a rainbow…

Indeed! On that we can agree.

But unlike Frankish, I think with a bit of reflection we see we aren’t ‘under any illusions’ about the reality of rainbows, and the same is true of consciousness. Sometimes we trick ourselves into an overreaching skepticism, one that tries to throw a wet blanket over all ‘mere phenomena’, but maybe it’s our skepticism that doesn’t make sense. If we empty reality of all possible experiences, what else is left?

Could it be that rainbows are exactly what they seem to be—those glorious ephemeral multicolored arcs that appear in the sky on special occasions, like after a monsoon rain?

Could it be that consciousness is exactly what it seems to be—the astounding variety of experiences we have of everyone and everything in our vibrant world? To call these experiences ‘qualitative’ diminishes them somehow. To call them ‘mine’ and reduce them to ‘qualia’ diminishes them beyond recognition. To call consciousness ‘consciousness’ diminishes what we already know it’s like, even if our words and theories fail us, even though the thing itself always seems to slip through our fingers.

What do YOU think?

Are rainbows illusions? What about consciousness? Why or why not?

Here’s time lapse video I made a while back which I called, “Rainbow Emerging”. The title is a lie—the video is really a reverse time lapse, meaning the rainbow I filmed was really fading away, but I reversed the footage to make it appear to be appearing—now there’s an illusion! (There’s no sound).

PODCAST MUSIC: “Geordie’s Rainbow Play Pen” by Geordie Bear.

Originally used in our little home video very deep art film:

Dear Metaphysicians of Woo,

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a philosopher in possession of a great idea must be in want of an entirely new way of expressing it. But is that really necessary? I mean, of course the subject-predicate classification artificially bifurcates thought! But clause after clause of hyphenated noun phrases with no linking verb in sight won’t do much to explain the true nature of reality if no one wants to read you.

Me, personally? I think you’re really and actually deep. But I’ll be honest, I don’t want to read you either! I have to force myself to read you. It hurts to read you. I read War and Peace to escape you—it was a beach read by comparison. That was my gateway drug. After partaking in fiction it became harder to choke down your tangle of terminology. I mean, god forbid you should give a concrete example. I know you think your opponent will turn them against you, but don’t forget, you have no opponent. It’s crickets out there.

You’re gonna have to do better.

I hear what you’re saying:“But there’s simply no other way to circumvent the dualistic paradigm that is ordinary language!”

Really? It sounds like you just did it.

“But analytic philosophers are guilty too. They confuse their technical trappings for clarity.”

Yeah, but most of them have the sense to confine their word math to academic papers. And at least that math is shared by a specific group of people; not no one. On top of that they do much better than you in explaining ideas to a general audience. Just take a look around the internet if you don’t believe me. Of course they would know better. Once upon a time they tried to tame natural language—any proposition that wasn’t empirically verifiable was meaningless (…except…this…one). Yeah. Since then they’ve moved on. Why haven’t you? Seriously! If analytic philosophers couldn’t bring common speech to its knees, what makes you think you’ll do better? You can barely get through a paragraph without contradicting yourself!

You know what? I’m beginning to wonder whether you’re the reason we’re still talking about ‘qualia’ and characterizing experience as fundamentally ineffable and private.

“How is that my fault?” you might reply, “I never said those things.”

Before all those whining existentialists and postmodernists sucked all the oxygen out of the room, you had a real shot at placing what’s these days called ‘phenomenal experience’ on an objective foundation. A shared qualitative reality. But you blew it.

Imagine if I wrote this post in, say, Morse code and handed you a decoder to turn this post back into ordinary English? You’d say no way I’m doing that. Life is short. But that’s what your asking your reader to do…and without decoder. You made up words or gave common words new meanings without bothering to explain yourself.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m exaggerating? I’ll pick a random sentence from one of your books. Oo…here’s an eye-catching title: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book. I’m cracking it open, closing my eyes, and dropping a finger down on any ‘ol passage.:

From the standpoint of the phenomenological science which we propose to establish, that signifies <considering> in addition which sciences it might draw from without violating its pure sense, which <sciences> it might and might not use as given beforehand, which, hence, need “parenthesizing.” (Chapter Four: The Phenomenological Reductions, Edmund Husserl).

Who’d bother to decode that? I guess I would, given that I did (I think?) But time was on my side then.

Alfred North Whitehead, I used your famous quote for the title of my novel, A Footnote to Plato, and yes, I did that before reading you…shame, shame, shame on me. Jim over at Staggering Implications recommended your book, Science and the Modern World, and I’ve recently started reading it. I dig. Your criticisms of the primary and secondary qualities distinction make my recent post feel a bit like plagiarism.1 At the same time, I’m all too aware that this is considered your easy book. Process and Reality is the one your known for, and it’s a real kick in the pants from what I’ve heard. I asked my Plato-scholar husband if he’d read it and he admitted that he tried to read it once but stopped when he realized “he didn’t have to.” Let me repeat that. A Plato scholar decided you weren’t worth reading. What a waste! You two could’ve hit it off! You could’ve been Best Friends For Ever! That’s something to think about right there.

So. Here we are, the last day of the year, 2024. Since everyone breaks their New Year’s resolutions anyway, let’s just go ahead and shoot for the impossible. Go big or go home, right? I propose that you come back to life and rewrite all your works so they sound like something a normal human being would consider reading. I promise to absorb all your deep insights the way I absorb holiday calories. Whaddya say. Have we got a deal?

Hello?

What do YOU think?

Which books do you wish to have read?

PODCAST MUSIC:

“Diogenes”, Subliminal Mind Pub, by Nick Herman. Check out his music, support indie artists!

Be sure to check out Nick’s Substack, Kaleidoscopic Mind.