Having followed your link to McGinn's review of Kurzweil's book, "How to Create a Mind," it seems to me that there's something McGinn is missing that weakens his critique. Mind you, I agree that Kurzweil is mistaken; but there's a piece of Kurzweil's view of things that McGinn doesn't see (or discounts) that is is crucial to understanding him.
I don't pretend to be an expert on Kurzweil; but I've been a software engineer for over two decades where McGinn has not, and there are some habits of thought common to the computer science community. For example, computer software and hardware are often designed as networks of cooperating subsystems, each of which has its own responsibility, and so we fall naturally into a homunculistic manner of speaking when working out designs. And this is practically useful: it aids communication among designers, even if it is philosophically perilous.
Anyway, here's the point that I would make back to McGinn if I were Kurzweil: patterns outside the brain lead to patterns inside the brain. A digital camera sees a scene in the world through a lens, and uses hardware and software to turn it into a pattern of bits. Other programs can then operate on that pattern of bits, doing (for example) pattern recognition; others can turn the bits back into something visible (e.g., a web browser).
REPLY: McGinn needn't disagree with any of this, though he would bid you be very careful about 'see' and 'recognition.' A digital camera does not literally see anything any more than my eye glasses literally see things. Light bouncing off external objects causes certain changes in the camera which are then encoded in a pattern of binary digits. (I take it that your 'bit' is short for 'binary digit.') And because the camera does not literally see anything, it cannot literally remember what it has (figuratively) 'seen.' The same goes for pattern recognition. Speaking literally, there is no recognition taking place. All that is going on is a mechanical simulation of recognition.
To the extent, then, that sensory images are encoded and stored as data in the brain, the notion that memories (even remembering to buy cat food) might be regarded as patterns and processed by the brain as patterns is quite reasonable.
REPLY: This is precisely what I deny. Memories are intentional experiences: they are of or about something; they are object-directed; they have content. One cannot just remember; in every case to remember is to remember something, e.g., that I must buy cat food. No physical state, and thus no brain state, is object-directed or content-laden. Therefore, memories are not identical to states of the brain such as patterns of neuron firings. Correlated perhaps, but not identical to.
Of course, as you've noted fairly often recently, a pattern of marks on a piece of paper has no meaning by itself, and a pattern of marks, however encoded in the brain, doesn't either. But Kurzweil, like most people these days, seems to have no notion of the distinction between the Sense and the Intellect; he thinks that only the Sense exists, and he, like Thomas Aquinas, puts memories and similar purely internal phenomena in the Sense. I don't think that's unreasonable. The problem is that he doesn't understand that the Intellect is different.
In short, Kurzweil is certainly too optimistic, but he might have a handle on the part of the problem that computers can actually do. He won't be able to program up a thinking mind; but perhaps he might do a decent lower animal of sorts.
REPLY: Again, I must disagree. You want to distinguish between sensing and thinking, and say that while there cannot be mechanical thinkers, there can be mechanical sensors, using 'thinking' and 'sensing' literally. I deny it. Talk of mechanical sensors is figurative only. I have a device under my kitchen sink that 'detects' water leaks. Two points. First, it does not literally sense anything. There is no mentality involved at all. It is a purely mechanical system. When water contacts one part of it, another part of it emits a beeping sound. That is just natural causation below the level of mind. I sense using it as an instrument, just as I see using my glasses as an instrument. I sense — I come to acquire sensory knowledge — that there is water where there ought not be using this contraption as an instrumental extension of my tactile and visual senses. Suppose I hired a little man to live under my sink to report leaks. That dude, if he did his job, would literally sense leaks. But the mechanical device does not literally sense anything. I interpret the beeping as indicating a leak.
The second point is that sensing is intentional: one senses that such-and-such. For example, one senses that water is present. But no mechanical system has states that exhibit original (as opposed to derivative) intentionality. So there can't be a purely mechanical sensor or thinker.
As for homunculus-talk, it is undoubtedly useful for engineering purposes, but one can be easily misled if one takes it literally. McGinn nails it:
Contemporary brain science is thus rife with unwarranted homunculus talk, presented as if it were sober established science. We have discovered that nerve fibers transmit electricity. We have not, in the same way, discovered that they transmit information. We have simply postulated this conclusion by falsely modeling neurons on persons. To put the point a little more formally: states of neurons do not have propositional content in the way states of mind have propositional content. The belief that London is rainy intrinsically and literally contains the propositional content that London is rainy, but no state of neurons contains that content in that way—as opposed to metaphorically or derivatively (this kind of point has been forcibly urged by John Searle for a long time).
And there is theoretical danger in such loose talk, because it fosters the illusion that we understand how the brain can give rise to the mind. One of the central attributes of mind is information (propositional content) and there is a difficult question about how informational states can come to exist in physical organisms. We are deluded if we think we can make progress on this question by attributing informational states to the brain. To be sure, if the brain were to process information, in the full-blooded sense, then it would be apt for producing states like belief; but it is simply not literally true that it processes information. We are accordingly left wondering how electrochemical activity can give rise to genuine informational states like knowledge, memory, and perception. As so often, surreptitious homunculus talk generates an illusion of theoretical understanding.
Makes sense, right? Certain conservative individuals and groups have been harassed by the Internal Revenue Service for their political views. The IRS is a a branch of the U. S. government whose president is Barack Obama, a man who is half-black and half-white, and therefore black. Those who criticize the targeting of conservatives by the IRS are criticizing the president. But to criticize a black president for anything is racist. It is the equivalent of applying 'nigger' to him. Therefore 'IRS' is a conservative 'dog whistle' for 'nigger.'
Thus 'reasons' the liberal.
Am I using 'nigger' or mentioning it? The latter. It is an important distinction. Philosophers are careful to observe it. It is one thing to use a word to refer to someone or something, and quite another to talk about, or mention, the word. Boston is a city; 'Boston' is not: no word is a city. 'Boston' is disyllabic; Boston is not: no city is composed of two syllables. Same with 'nigger.' It's a disyllabic word, an offensive word, a word that a decent person does not use. I am not using it; I am mentioning it, talking about it to make a serious point.
Those who refuse to write out 'nigger' but have no qualms about other such offensive epithets as 'kike' employ a double standard. It is also ironic that one should be squeamish about writing out 'nigger' when one has no qualms about slandering conservatives in the most malevolent and scurrilous ways.
A good translator must not only know the language from which he is translating, but also the subject matter. Indeed, expertise in the latter is the more important of the two.
I have been re-reading Jean Piaget's Psychology and Epistemology: Toward a Theory of Knowledge (Viking, 1971, tr. Arnold Rosin). As a marginalium of mine from the autumn of 1972 indicates, the following sentence involves a mis-translation: "In the case of a priori forms, the analysis of facts is more delicate, for it is not enought to analyze the subjects' consciences but also their previous conditions." (p. 5, emphasis added)
In some languages, French being one of them, the word for conscience and the word for consciousness is the same: conscience (in French) Someone versed in philosophy or psychology would know from the context that Piaget is talking about consciousness, not conscience. A competent translator translates the sense, not the word. The sense, however, depends on the context: first the sentence, then the wider contexts (paragraph, etc.)
Translation requires understanding. The notion that translating machines understand anything is preposterous.
I just now came across an excellent post by D. G. Myers in defense of the harsh style. Excerpts:
. . . the harsh style is first cousin to the plain style. They share a genetic predisposition, inherited from their ancestors the anti-Ciceronians and anti-Petrarchans, for clarity and exact statement (which are, of course, the same thing). The harsh style demands clarification, and knows there is a critical difference between clearing the air and freshening it. Where the plain stylist is content to speak definitively and to the point, the harsh stylist goes further, excoriating amiable blandness and sumptuous qualification. He is the sworn enemy of anything that menaces clarity and exact statement, whether it be accredited confusion, folk mythology, self-satisfied blunder, or political ideology.
[. . .]
It is no accident that so many harsh stylists are Jews. Judaism is a religion without catechism or dogma, and as a consequence, the Jewish tradition places great value upon loud-voiced and teeth-baring debate—as long as it is a makhlokhet leshem shamayim (“a dispute for the sake of heaven”). As long as a dispute is for the sake of heaven, there are no restrictions on “tone,” no code of manners, because how is it possible to be too aggressive and discourteous for the sake of heaven?
[Here I must digress to address a pet peeve. Something called “Feser’s tone” is the subject of occasional handwringing, not only among some of my secularist critics, but also among a handful of bed-wetters in the Christian blogosphere. But there is no such thing as “Feser’s tone,” if that is meant to refer to some vituperative modus operandi of mine. Sometimes my writing is polemical; usually it is not. I have written five books and edited two others. Exactly one of them — The Last Superstition — is polemical. Of course, some of my non-academic articles and blog posts are also polemical. But that is an approach I take only to a certain category of opponent, and typically toward people who have themselves been polemical and are merely getting a well-earned taste of their own medicine. Complaining about this is like complaining about police who shoot back at bank robbers. I’ve addressed the question of why and under what circumstances polemics are justified in this post and in other posts you’ll find linked to within it. End of digression.]
First the good news: Homunculism, McGinn's NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.
McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token. The devastation of the demolition job is commensurate with the chutzpah of Kurzweil's subtitle. It is not that McGinn has said anything really new, at least not in this review. The key points have been made before by Searle and Nagel and so many of us, but McGinn does the critical job with great clarity and great skill and gives it a (to me) slightly new slant: the ubiquity of the homuncular fallacy. (I won't explain what I mean; you'll catch my drift by carefully reading the review.)
I don't understand how anyone who is intelligent and informed could read with comprehension McGinn's piece and still take seriously the sort of neuroscientistic nonsense of Kurzweil and Company.
And please note that McGinn has no religious agenda: he is not out to resurrect the immortal soul or find a back door to the divine milieu. The man is an atheist, a mortalist and a (damned) liberal too. Just like Nagel. Neither of these gentlemen are looking for a way back to substance dualism. The former goes the mysterian route, the latter the panpsychist. Both are naturalists. More importantly, both are dispassionate truth-seekers.
But Jean Piaget, the psychologist, wrote a little book (Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie, 1965) in which he suggested that premature exposure to philosophy could be detrimental to good thinking. According to him, adequate philosophizing presupposes the mastery of a science, and young students in France are encouraged to vaticinate in a void.
Piaget was guilty of scientism, to be sure, but his view has some merit. Bad bad students, or bad good students (i.e. "bright" students who have learned rhetoric but don't really care about thinking), can get intoxicated with words.
That may account in part for French philosophical bullshitting of the Derrida type.
Professor Boisson is on to something. But permit me a quibble. While "vaticinate in a void" has a nice alliterative ring to it, it is not so much that young students in France are encouraged to prophesy but to think in ways that are excessively abstract and verbal and insufficiently attentive to empirical data and scientific method. So I suggest 'ratiocinate in a void.'
The underlying problem, and it is not merely a problem for the French, is that of the "two cultures" to borrow a phrase from a lecture and a book by C. P. Snow, now over 50 years past. There is literary culture and scientific culture and tension between them. Jean Piaget sounds the same theme in his Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (World Publishing, 1971, tr. Wolfe Mays). This is the book whose French title Boisson supplies above. I read it in 1972 but it didn't dissuade me from graduate work in philosophy the next year. I began re-reading it this morning at the considerable temporal distance of 41 years. I hope to dig into and 'blog' some of its details later or perhaps in this very entry.
One of the curious things about the denigrators and opponents of philosophy is that they never hesitate to philosophize themselves when it suits their purposes. But somehow, when they do it, it is not philosophy. It is something worthwhile and important and true! These scientistic denigrators never just stick to their laboratories and empirical research. For example, Piaget's second chapter bears the bold and sweeping title, "Science and Philosophy." He makes all sorts of interesting arm-chair claims and bold assertions about the respective natures of science and philosophy and the relations between them. One wonders how careful, plodding empirical research bears upon these Piagetian pronunciamentos from the arm chair. They are obviously not scientific assertions, though they are the assertions of a scientist.
In doing what he is doing Piaget must presuppose the validity of at least some philosophical thinking, his own. What is annoying is when people like him fail to own up to what they are doing and refuse to admit that it is philosophy. In an unbearably tendentious manner, they use 'philosophy' to refer to something cognitively worthless while posturing as if what they are doing is cognitively worthwhile and so can't be philosophy! Richard Dawkins plays this game in a discussion with Stephen Law. Law made a non-empirical, wholly conceptual point with which Dawkins agreed, but Dawkins refused to take it as evidence of the cognitive value of some philosophy. Does Dawkins think that philosophy is by definition cognitively worthless? If so, then I say that Dawkins is by definition an idiot.
But I digress.
Returning to the "Science and Philosophy" chapter of Insights and Illusions, we observe that Piaget makes bold to speak of the meaning of life, a question his positivist colleagues, wielding their version of Hume's Fork, the dreaded Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance, had consigned to the dustbin of cognitive meaninglessness. He calls it "the most central problem motivating all philosophy . . . the problem of the 'finality' of existence." (Insights and Illusions, p. 42) But then he goes on to say this: "To begin with finality [teleology], this concept is the prototype of those concepts that positivism considers to be metaphysical and nonscientific, and rightly so, since it concerns an anthropocentric idea, originating in a confusion between conscious subjective data and the causal mechanism of action, and involving, under the form of 'final causes,' a determination of the present by the future." (Ibid.)
My question to Piaget: one the basis of which empirical science do you know this to be the case? Or is this just another ex cathedra (literally: 'from the chair') asseveration?
I thank old blogger buddy Keith Burgess-Jackson for sending me a pdf of Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," Social Research, Vol. 15, No. 4 (December 1948), pp. 462-494. Voegelin speaks of
. . . the scientistic creed which is characterized by three principal dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary.
Compare Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):
. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . .
Putnam does not need the MavPhil's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular, Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?" in Reviewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).
Here is my characterization of scientism:
Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science. The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary. Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.
What is wrong with scientism?
One problem with strong scientism is that it is self-vitiating, as the following argument demonstrates: (a)The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge; ergo, (b) If all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, then the philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of genuine knowledge.
Hence one cannot claim to know that strong scientism is true if it is true. For if it is true, then the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge. But strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge. So scientism, if true, is not knowable as true by the only methods of knowledge there are. How then could the proponent of strong scientism render rational his acceptance of strong scientism? Apparently, he can't, in which case his commitment to it is a matter of irrational ideology.
After all, he cannot appeal to rational insight as a source of knowledge. For that is precisely ruled out as a source of knowledge by scientism.
Scientism falls short of the very standard it enshrines. It is at most an optional philosophical belief unsupported by science. It also has unpalatable consequences which for many of us have the force of counterexamples. Here are some positive considerations against it.
If scientism is true, then none of the following can count as items of knowledge: That torturing children for fun is morally wrong; that setting afire a sleeping bum is morally worse than picking his pockets; that raping a woman is morally worse than merely threatening to rape her; that verbally threatening to commit rape is morally worse than entertaining (with pleasure) the thought of committing rape; that 'ought' implies 'can'; that moral goodness is a higher value than physical strength; that might does not make right; that the punishment must fit the crime; that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true; that what is past was once present; that if A remembers B's experience, then A = B; and so on.
In sum: if there are any purely rational insights into aesthetic, moral, logical, or metaphysical states of affairs, then scientism is false. For the knowledge I get when I see (with the eye of the mind) that the punishment must fit the crime or that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true is not an item of scientific knowledge.
According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God. Now God, to be divine, must be a necessary being, indeed a necessary concretum. (God cannot be an abstract entity.) Therefore, even a necessary being such as God is conceivable or thinkable as nonexistent.
Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.
Note the ambiguity of 'conceivable.' It could mean thinkable, or it could mean thinkable without (internal) logical contradiction. Round squares are conceivable in the first sense but not in the second. If round squares were in no sense conceivable, how could we think about them and pronounce them broadly logically impossible? Think about it!
Now try the experiment with an abstract necessary being such as the number 7 or the proposition *7 is prime.* Nominalists have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of such Platonica, and surely we who are not nominalists can understand their point of view. In short, absolutely everything can be thought of, without logical contradiction, as not existing.
Humius vindicatus est.
But doesn't the bolded sentence contradict what I said in earlier posts about the impossibility of there being nothing at all, that there must be something or other, and that this can be known a priori by pure thought?
On the one hand, I tend to think that I can attain positive rational insight into the necessity of there being something or other, and thus the impossibility of there being nothing at all. On the other hand, I tend to think that everything is conceivably nonexistent, which implies that no such positive rational insight is possible.
Consider the following reasoning.
It is actually the case that something exists. The question is whether there might have been nothing at all. If the answer is in the negative, then it is necessarily the case that something exists. But don't confuse the following two propositions:
Necessarily (Something exists)
Something (necessarily exists).
The first says that every possible world is such that there is something or other in it; the second says that some one thing is such that it exists in every possible world. The second entails the first, but the first does not entail the second. I need only show that the first proposition is true, though I may end up showing that the second is true as well.
Moreover, I am concerned to show that we can attain positive rational insight into the first proposition's truth by sheer thinking. But now it appears that the tension in my thinking is a bare-faced contradiction. For the following cannot both be true:
(H) Everything is conceivably nonexistent. (P) There is something the nonexistence of which is inconceivable.
And what is that thing whose nonexistence is inconceivable? What is the case. For if something exists, then that is the case. And if nothing exists, then that is the case. Either way, there is what is the case. Either way, there is the way things are. The way things are is not nothing, but something: a definite state of affairs.
The thought that there might have been nothing at all is the thought that it might have been the case that there is nothing at all. But if that had been the case, then something would have existed, namely, what is the case. Therefore, the thought that there might have been nothing at all refutes itself. By sheer thinking I can know something about reality, namely, that necessarily something exists. By pure thought I can arrive at a certain conclusion about real existence.
The argument can be couched in terms of possible worlds. A merely possible world is a total way things might have been. There cannot be a possible world in which nothing exists, for a possible world is not nothing, but something. Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition. Could there be a maximal proposition that entails that nothing exists? No, for that very proposition is something that exists.
So there has to be at least one thing, the proposition that nothing exists. And it has to be that that proposition is necessarily false, in which case its negation is necessarily true. So it is necessarily true that something exists.
Or one can argue as follows.
We have the concept true proposition. This concept is either instantiated, or it is not. If it is not instantiated, then it is true that it is not instantiated, which implies that the concept true proposition is instantiated. If, on the other hand, the concept in question is instantiated, then of course it is instantiated. Therefore, necessarily, the concept true proposition is instantiated, and there necessarily exists at least one truth, namely, the truth that the concept true proposition is instantiated.
This is a sound ontological argument for the existence of at least one truth using only the concept true proposition, the law of excluded middle, and the unproblematic principle that, for any proposition p, p entails that p is true. By 'proposition' here I simply mean whatever can be appropriately characterized as either true or false. That there are propositions in this innocuous sense cannot be reasonably denied.
So here too we have a seemingly knock-down proof of the necessary existence of something by sheer thinking. Thought makes contact with reality 'by its own power' without the mediation of the senses. (For future rumination: Does this refute the Thomist principle that nothing is in the intelect that is not first in the senses?)
(H) Nothing is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.
(P) Something is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.
I don't know how to resolve this. I am of two minds. Parmenides and Hume are battling for hegemony in my shallow pate.
Can I conceive (think without internal logical contradiction) the nonexistence of what is the case, or the way things are? The Humean part of my mind says Yes: you are conceiving an absolute Other to discursive thought, a realm in which the laws of logic do not hold. You are conceiving the Transdiscursive!
The Parmenidean part of my mind says No: there is no Transdiscursive; Thought and Being are 'the same.'
A president presides over something. To preside over it, however, he must know something about it. But 'President' Obama seems to know little or nothing about what is going on in his government. He puts me in mind of Sgt. Schulz of Hogan's Heroes: "I know nothing!" Check out this clip.
People come to philosophy from various 'places.' Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts. There are other termini a quis as well. In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy. What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy? I count five main types of motive.
1. The Apologetic Motive. Some look to philosophy for apologetic tools. Their concern is to clarify and defend the tenets of their religious faith, tenets they do not question, or do not question in the main, against those who do question them, or even attack them. For someone whose central motive is apologetic, the aim is not to seek a truth they do not possess, but to articulate and defend a truth, the "deposit of faith," that they already possess, if not in fullness, at least in outline.
2. The Critical Motive. Someone who is animated by the Critical Motive seeks to understand religion and evaluate its claim to truth, while taking it seriously. To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, evaluate, assay, separate the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable. The critic is not out to defend or attack but to understand and evaluate. Open to the claims of religion, his question is: But is it true?
3. The Debunking Motive. If the apologist presupposes the truth of his religion, or some religion, the debunker presupposes the falsehood of a particular religion or of every religion. He takes the doctrines and institutions of religion seriously as things worth attacking, exposing, debunking, unmasking, refuting.
The apologist, the critic, and the debunker all take religion seriously as something worth defending, worth evaluating, or worth attacking using the tools of philosophy. For all three, philosophy is a tool, not an end in itself.
The apologist moves to philosophy without leaving religion. If he succeeds in defending his faith with the weapons of philosophy, well and good; if he fails, it doesn't really matter. He has all the essential truth he needs from his religion. His inability to mount an intellectually respectable defense of it is a secondary matter.
The critic moves to philosophy with the option of leaving religion behind. Whether or not he leaves it behind depends on the outcome of his critique. Neither staying nor leaving is a foregone cnclusion.
The debunker either never had a living faith, or else he had one but lost it. As a debunker, his decision has been made and his Rubicon crossed: religion is buncombe from start to finish, dangerous buncombe that needs to be unmasked and opposed. Strictly speaking, only the debunker who once had a living faith moves from it to philosophy. You cannot move away from a place where you never were.
4. The Transcensive Motive. The transcender aims to find in philosophy something that completes and transcends religion while preserving its truth. One way to flesh this out would be in Hegelian terms: religion and philosophy both aim to express the Absolute, but only philosophy does so adequately. Religion is an inadequate 'pictorial' (vortstellende) representation of the Absolute. On this sort of approach all that is good in religion is aufgehoben in philosophy, simultaneously cancelled and preserved, roughly in the way the bud is both cancelled and preserved in the flower.
5. The Substitutional Motive. The substitutionalist aims to find in philosophy a substitute for religion. Religion, when taken seriously, makes a total claim on its adherents' higher energies. A person who, for any reason, becomes disenchanted with religion, but is not prepared to allow himself to degenerate to the level of the worldling, may look to invest his energies elsewhere in some other lofty pursuit. Some will turn to social or political activism. And of course there are other termini ad quos on the road from religion. The substitutionalist abandons religion for philosophy. In a sense, philosophy becomes his religion. It is in her precincts that he seeks his highest meaning and an outlet for his noblest impulses.
Some Questions
A. What is my motive? (2). Certainly not (1): I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking the religion of my upbringing , or any religion, as simply true without examination. I can't suppress the questions that naturally arise. We have it on high authority that "The unexamined life is not worth living." That examination, of course, extends to everything, including religion, and indeed also to this very examining. Note that I am not appealing to the authority of Socrates/Plato since their authority can be validated rationally and autonomously.
Certainly not (3): I am not a debunker. Not (4) or (5) either. Hegel is right: both religion and philosophy treat of the Absolute. Hegel is wrong, however, in thinking that religion is somehow completed by or culminates in philosophy. I incline to the view that Athens and Jersualem are at odds with each other, that there is a tension between them, indeed a fruitful, productive tension, one that accounts in part for the vitality of the West as over against the inanition of the Islamic world. To put it starkly, it it is the tension between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith (cf. Leo Strauss). Jerusalem is not a suburb of Athens.
Nor do I aim to substitute philosophy for religion. Philosophy, with its "bloodless ballet of categories," is not my religion. Man does not live by the discursive intellect alone.
My view is that there are four main paths to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality. They are separate and somehow all must be trod. No one of them has proprietary rights in the Absolute. How integrate them? Integration may not be possible here below. The best we can do is tack back and forth among them. So we think, we pray, we meditate and we live under the aegis of moral demands taken as absolute.
I wouldn't call him "America's greatest living poet" (Bob Dylan), but Smokey Robinson is a great writer of popular songs. Moody, soulful, unusual intros. Here are my favorites.
In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin.
Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of a willful fabrication of a 'quotation' in pseudo-Latin:
An anecdote on pseudo-Latin + French bullshit rolled into one.
A rather infamous but self-satisfied French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli (yes, some of our sociologists are as bad as some of our philosophers), recently gave an interview in one of the major weeklies, L'Express, in which he said "Everybody knows the Cartesian sentence Cogito ergo sum, but we tend to forget the rest: Cogito ergo sum in arcem meum."
[I think therefore I am in my castle.]
I ferociously answered that in an article of his, available on line, he had already committed the same sin, unforgettable for a university professor, of forging a quotation ("the Latin formula in its entirety is more interesting" he had stated). And this was in a development supposed to prove that the concept of the individual is ascribable to "the beginning of modernity", since, only "collective thought" was known to the benighted thinkers of the Dark Ages.
I then told him
(1) that the Discours de la méthode was written in French, and was translated into Latin seven years later by Etienne de Courcelles, so there was no real need for showing off Latin (Je pense donc je suis being the original Cartesian French);
(2) that the invention in arcem meum is, alas!, doubly mistaken since it piles a syntactic error ("in" with a local meaning must be followed by an ablative) onto a morphological error (the name "arx" is feminine), so the real Latin should read in arce mea; no scholar would have been guilty of these atrocious mistakes in Descartes' day;
(3) that the metaphor of the "citadel of the soul" was known to such people as John of Salisbury (who duly wrote in arce animae) in the 12th century, and long before him to the Stoics, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius;
(4) that for anybody desirous to meditate on "modernity", Saul Steinberg's jocular Cogito ergo Cartesius sum was perhaps of more interest than a forged quotation.
All this is easily accessible on the Internet.
Disgusting! Another example of the destruction of the universities and the decline of the humanities 'thanks' to leftism, post-modernism, and scientism.
