Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
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Bill you write:
“ The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don’t. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer.”
Why do you need the “Obviously they don’t.”?
EG,
I don’t strictly need it, but it helps nail down the point.
I seem to recall a stylistic injunction in Strunk and White expressed in the form of an exaggeration: Go through your text and delete every other word. Something like that.
In a hyperkinetic age, a style spare and lean is probably preferable.
I could have said the same thing with fewer words. But I like the cadence and flow of what I wrote. Stylistically, I strive for what i call ‘muscular elegance.’
“Style is the physiognomy of the mind.” (Schopenhauer) Minds are different, and there is little point in disputing taste or style or sensibility.
The diversity of minds is a diversity worth celebrating. Up to a point.
I would say that many if not most young people today, including journalists, can’t write worth a damn.
Bill,
I am not qualified to delve deeply into the philosophical issues that you raise in this insightful post, which encouraged me to reread sections of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos last night and this morning, but I find that his powerful and well-articulated arguments against “reductive naturalism” and much weaker ones against theism (pp. 22-26) require us to take on faith that someday, somehow we will discover that “the intelligibility of the world, as described by the laws that science has uncovered, is itself part of the deepest explanation of why they are as they are.” Why should I be more confident that this assertion, one based on the presumed existence of a hidden theology and intelligibility in matter, is more worthy of belief than those of, say, reductive materialism that asks me to believe that science will one day explain consciousness through the study of brain matter? I know that Nagel is a very skilled philosopher, but there is an underlying desperation at work here, an emotive rather than reasoned rejection of theism, the rational belief in which is certainly strengthened by the very real problems that materialism has encountered in presenting a compressive picture of reality. This is reflected in Nagel’s cavalier rejection of theism in no more than several pages, which include highly questionable arguments such as “theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order by a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.” Why must God be “part” of the natural order in a sort of pantheistic way? If God not only creates this natural order but sustains it at every moment, his omnipotence allowing for its continual movement and direction, why must we insist on the requirement that he “be governed by natural laws,” rather than the source and sustainer of these laws?
None of this may be worth your time, since I am a amateur in these matters, but I wanted to set my reaction down in writing.
Vito
Vito,
You touch on an important point when you write: >> I know that Nagel is a very skilled philosopher, but there is an underlying desperation at work here, an emotive rather than reasoned rejection of theism, the rational belief in which is certainly strengthened by the very real problems that materialism has encountered in presenting a compressive picture of reality.<<
In another of his works, he admits to a fear of religion. I now quote from a Substack article of mine:
Nagel makes it clear that he is talking about the fear of religion as such, and not merely fear of certain of its excesses and aberrations, and confesses that he himself is subject to this fear:
I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. (130, emphasis added)
Nagel admits that he may just have a "cosmic authority problem." But then he says something very perceptive in a passage that may be directed against Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett:
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. (131)
https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/nagel-on-evolutionary-naturalism?r=f3tzc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
So, Vito, I agree with you that Nagel’s rejection of religion is more emotive than reasoned. But the second half of the sentence of yours that I quoted also touches on something interesting. You say that the case for religion (specifically, the type of theism you and I incline toward) is strengthened by the problems of materialism/naturalism I agree.
What’s interesting is that Nagel’s exposure of the problems of reductive naturalism in *Mind and Cosmos* brought down upon his head a crapstorm of contumely from the academic guardians of naturalistic-scientistic orthodoxy! For what he was doing by questioning reductive naturalism was giving aid and comfort to the ideological enemy, theists and ‘Christers’! How could you, Tom? Which side are you on, man?? Dennett, as I recall, said “We’ve lost Tom.” Now this sort of thing is common in politics, as you know better than I do, but philosophy is, or ought to be, the calm and sober and unemotional attempt to get at the truth, whatever it is. (This is true also for political philosophy which is obviously different from politics.)
I dilate on this in a Substack upload, entitled: “Dershowitz, Nagel, Benatar: what do they have in common.” https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/alan-dershowitz-thomas-nagel-david?utm_source=publication-search
Finally, Vito, you say: >>Nagel’s cavalier rejection of theism in no more than several pages, which include highly questionable arguments such as “theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. If God exists, he is not part of the natural order by [BUT, not BY] a free agent not governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.” Why must God be “part” of the natural order in a sort of pantheistic way? If God not only creates this natural order but sustains it at every moment, his omnipotence allowing for its continual movement and direction, why must we insist on the requirement that he “be governed by natural laws,” rather than the source and sustainer of these laws?<< What you quote Nagel as saying strikes me as plainly true of classical theism (CT): 1) On CT, the source of the intelligibility of the natural order is outside that order, not immanent in it, as TN wants to maintain. 2) God is a free agent, not governed by natural laws. 3) Part of what God does is create the natural order. 4) God's creating of the natural order is not itself part of that order. Each of these propositions in true in CT. But that foursome is not TN's argument against CT but merely a characterization of what he is arguing against.
Hello Bill,
Much depends on how we understand ‘accident’. Darwinists accept that genetic mutations are part of the evolutionary process and that they occur randomly. But they also say that mutations that do not promote reproductive success tend to disappear from the gene pool. This natural selection is also a stochastic process but it almost certainly leads to organisms with better fit to their environment. So something that is almost certain arises accidentally. Is this a contradiction within Darwinism or confusion about the meaning of ‘accident’? Second, we might deny that the senses ‘reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves’, for this would seem to demand some intervention transcendent of ourselves. We could say that the deliverances of the senses constitute our world and that we have no means of ‘getting behind them’ in order to judge their truthfulness*. Even when the senses seem to deliver a falsehood—tree root as snake, etc—the falsehood is couched in the standard terms (like ‘snake’) of the senses. What is irrational, it seems to me, is to indulge ourselves with the idiocies of a Pyrrho.
* We might say that well-confirmed scientific hypotheses are a way of getting behind the sense-world, but I’m not happy counting these as truths, even though it seems rational enough to accept them, if temporarily.
All this reasoning makes me think of what God asked Job in a challenge: ” Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind?” (Job 38:36)
The philosopher’s question is answered by God The opposite of doubt is not certainty, but trust. That’s all we have; trust in one answer or the other. Straddling the fence must be uncomfortable.
Thanks for your characteristically challenging comments, David. Your first comment is directed against this portion of my article:
“But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by an unguided or ‘blind’ process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents. (See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Norton, 1987).
But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.”
I take it that your point is that, despite the randomness of the genetic mutations upon which nat’l selection operates, the evolutionary process leads to organisms with better and better adaptations to their environments, and that this adaptation is not accidental or random in the same way that the genetic mutations are accidental or random. And so, while the process of adaptation of organisms with sense organs is stochastic and not deterministic, a definite outcome is achieved. What you are suggesting is that this definite or “certain” adaptation suffices to justify our reliance on our sense organs to give us accurate information about the external world.
I asked:
“How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its materialistic (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes? It cannot be rational.”
Your point, David, is that it is rational (reasonable) to rely on our sensory faculties because the accidentality involved in their evolution — the random mutations — is only part of the story. The sensory faculties are not wholly accidental products of unguided processes. And so there is no need for anything like a divine mind (an irreducibly spiritual/mental mind) either transcendent of nature (as on classical theism) or immanent in nature (as on pantheism or panpsychism) to guide the process.
If that is your point, it is a solid objection, one not easily answered. But of course it needn’t budge the classical theist who will ask a number of further questions, such as Where did the biological mat’l come from that is randomly mutating? How did the biotic arise from the abiotic? And what about the abiotic? Where did it come from? And what about the principles of probability? Did they evolve? Etc.
David,
Your second point is: >>We could say that the deliverances of the senses constitute our world and that we have no means of ‘getting behind them’ in order to judge their truthfulness*. <<
Now you seem headed in an idealistic/phenomenalistic/coherentist direction that is open to powerful objections.
On your naturalistic approach, we are just highly evolved organisms in nature. But doesn't this presuppose that nature exists in itself and not merely for us as a coherent interplay of phenomena?
If we are just material parts of a material world, then this material world cannot be just *unsere Vorstellung,* our (re)presentation as Schopenhauer said.
Turning it around the other way, if the world is our representation, then surely we cannot be mere representations.
It would be viciously circular to maintain that the world is nothing apart from us cognizers AND we cognizers are nothing apart from the world.
Hi Bill,
You’ve got my first point about ‘accidental’ as applied to the processes and products of natural selection very well. On further reflection I think my second point is analogous, and concerns the application of ‘reliable’ to the senses or their deliverances. The argument from the accidentality of the genealogy of the senses pushes us towards the thought that the senses must be uncorrelated with reality, that is, maximally unreliable, as it were. But this strikes me as an incoherent thought because it assumes we can stand outside the senses to judge how their deliverences compare with reality ‘in itself’. I can make sense of a ‘local’ unreliability of the senses—tree roots appearing as snakes, for example—but not their ‘global’ unreliability. This is not to fall into idealism, etc, I hope.
David,
One quick point and then a question.
There are well-known problems with the notion of correspondence as a criterion of truth. But it doesn’t follow that correspondence cannot be the nature of truth.
Do you hold that the physical universe is a representation in our brains? And if anyone were to hold that, would it not be absurd? Would it not be either viciously circular or generative of a vicious infinite regress?
Hello Bill,
Do I hold that the physical universe is a representation in our brains? No. I agree that that would be absurd for the reasons you give.
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