Plato Etc

Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution

Roy Bhaskar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415454926
• eBook ISBN: 9781135280994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In this concise text, Roy Bhaskar sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the "problems of philosophy". Plato Etc. reviews all the main areas of the subject: the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy.

Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger's "scandal of philosophy" (the search for a proof of the reality of the external world), the nature of moral truth and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism.

Plato Etc. seeks to revindicate the philosophical project, and to demonstrate that the author's "dialectical critical realism" has the categorical power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. The book serves both as a critical introduction to philosophy and as an invaluable resource for the scholar.

1
Is Philosophy Worth It?

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato

WHITEHEAD (1929)

§ 1 The Life-and-Death Struggle

Western philosophy did not begin with Plato. Moreover, in the ancient Greek world there were probably thinkers of equal philosophical genius—the dialectician Heraclitus, the mathematician Pythagoras, the atomist Democritus and the stoic Chrysippus. But we know them only in fragments and by second hand; whereas Plato’s dialogues have come down to us intact, as have the most important works of those of his prodigious pupil and critic, Aristotle, thanks, in the latter’s case, to their preservation in the Islamic world. Together they initiated a recognizable practice—of philosophy.

In this chapter I want to explain why philosophy matters. In due course I shall come on to Socrates, Plato’s teacher, and Plato. But I start with a much more recent figure, Hegel. For Hegel, like Socrates, philosophy was literally a matter of life and death. He wrote about it as such in probably his greatest work, The Phenomenology of Mind, completed on the eve of Napoleon’s victory in the battle of Jena (1806). We shall see how, at the very least, his chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’ casts light on contemporaneously existing attitudes to discursively moralized power relations in society.

There are three decisive influences underpinning the story unfolded in Hegel’s chapter. The first was the sundered world at the dawn of modernity. Hegel’s generation yearned for the restoration of a Greek-like, as they imagined, expressive unity, but one which, especially in the context of German socio-economic-political backwardness, would not sacrifice what they took to be the gains of the Enlightenment, especially differentiation and freedom. ‘Have courage to use your own reason’, Kant had enjoined. But Kant’s own philosophy was dichotomous in the extreme: subject was opposed to object, form to content, duty to desire, theory to reason. Hegel’s main philosophical motive in the Phenomenology was to overcome these oppositions, and in particular in the chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’ to show how sentient socialized self-awareness seeks to remove the external character of the world. It first attempts to do this alone by grasping it in desire, but in so doing it remains dependent on it. It then seeks its satisfaction in another self-consciousness, and this takes me to the third formative influence on the chapter. For years in the 1790s, ruminating on Christianity, Hegel had experienced a self-diagnosed ‘hypochondria’, recapitulating the fate of Jesus in his early unpublished writings, alienated from his peers and the community in which he lived, suffering the fate of the ‘Beautiful Soul’. In the Phenomenology Hegel was out to overcome this. It broke with all philosophical conventions (his more famous friend Schelling was not even mentioned by name), yet claimed in the end to attain absolute truth. This was Hegel’s own life-and-death struggle. And throughout his career he seems to have felt that risking one’s life was a necessary condition for attaining true self-consciousness, and hence humanity.

The two self-consciousnesses want at once recognition from and negation of the other. They fight, but the winner cannot achieve recognition from a corpse and so enslaves rather than kills the loser. The master, it seems, has freedom and recognition; while the slave experiences only work and discipline. But the slave, by objectifying, recognizes himself in the object of his labour and so actually succeeds better than the idle master in removing the externality of the world. We now pass to a series of attitudes to reality, which can be extended to include the persistence of the master—slave relationship or any structure or relation of domination, exploitation, subjugation or control such as between men and women, classes, nations or individuals. I shall call these generalized master-slave-type relations, power₂ relations—with the subscript differentiating it from power in the sense of the transformative capacity inherent in action as such (power₁). The first attitude Hegel considers is that of the Stoic, who purports to be indifferent to the reality of the world. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor, and his slave, Epictetus, are on a par. But although the Stoic is engaged in pure thought (Denken), he remains dependent for the contents of the conceptualized forms he produces on the outside world; that is to say, he remains heteronomous rather than autonomous. What the Stoic would ignore, the Sceptic attempts to deny. Yet however much the Sceptic denies the reality of the world in theory, this is not his stance in practice. He leaves the seminar room by the door, not by the second-floor window. Hegel now makes explicit the theory/practice inconsistency implicit in scepticism in the figure of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’, who seeks refuge in other-worldly asceticism or solace in the projective duplication of another world, an after-life or beyond (Jenseits) where, for instance, happiness will be in accord with virtue (as Kant had believed).

A feminist might question much in the chapter’s topography. Why should we assume that agonistic struggle rather than mutual trust or nurturing care is our basic existential or mode of being in the world? And is not the last, in the context of the primary polyadization involved in childcare and the individuation of a self, a necessary condition of the first? Hegel gives no explanation for the appearance of the second self-consciousness. And the idea that we are social and mutually inter-dependent ab initio chimes in with the critique of the monologicality, or tacit individualism, of the post-Cartesian philosophy of consciousness essayed by the contemporary writer Jürgen Habermas.¹ Yet, even granting these objections, it is not difficult to find the attitudes Hegel describes as of continuing relevance. The Stoic affects in-difference to the reality of the difference intrinsic to the power₂ relation in which she is held. The Sceptic even denies that it exists. The Unhappy Consciousness either (a) accepts the master’s ideology and/or (b) compensates in a fantasy world of, for example, sport, soap or nostalgia.

Can we continue this updated version of Hegel’s chapter? What of the agent’s attitude to herself? On the first line, it is but a short hop (a) to treating herself as a mere thing—reification; on the second (b), to effectively disembodying herself or her attitudes, regarding them as pure spirit. This—or something like it—is in fact what happens, according to Karl Marx, under capitalism, commodification and fetishism (indissolubly linked) respectively. But it also portends the most common attitudes to the ‘mind—body’ problem (to be discussed in Chapter 5)—physicalistic reductionism and dualistic disembodiment. This connects to the question of whether we are machines driven by causes or creatures acting on reasons. And that relates to the issue that dominated the reflections of Hegel’s predecessor, Kant. How could Kant accept, as his intelligence impelled him to, Newton’s seemingly deterministic conclusions and remain sincerely committed to Pietist morality on which, as he put it, ‘every being that cannot act otherwise than under the Idea of freedom, is therefore from a practical point of view, really free’. The conundrum of free-will and determinism.

Kant’s solution, first published in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), was to accept both; but to locate them in different worlds. Determinism reigns in the world as apprehended by sense-experience and categorized by the intellect, the ‘phenomenal’ world described by physical laws; free-will (Willkür) is sovereign in the ‘noumenal’ realm under which we must act. This solution has been immensely influential. In the twentieth century, the physicist Pierre Duhem, the linguistic philosopher F.Waisemann and the contemporary pragmatist Richard Rorty are all committed to forms of it (although nowadays it is more heavily mediated by an emphasis on the language frames in, or aspects—e.g. third and first person respectively—from, which we must view things). Moreover, it continues to underpin, albeit in more or less diffracted forms, the opposition between the leading tendencies in the social sciences— positivistic hypernaturalism (especially of a reductionist bent) and anti-naturalistic hyper-hermeneutics or discourse theory. It has, however, one enormous defect: it makes embodied intentional causal agency impossible. Noumenally, however free we conceive ourselves to be, we are in fact unable (as far as we can know) to affect the course of events that would otherwise have prevailed. And with this, morality and the attribution of responsibility, scientific experimentation (which entails interference and control) and day-to-day life alike become impossible…. The shipwreck of a theory.

But was Kant right to believe that Newtonian physics implied determinism? The form of determinism he accepted was the regularity determinism implicit in David Hume’s (1711–76) theory of causal laws. (It was Hume who, Kant averred, had awoken him from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’.) Hume had denied that the necessity we impute to causal laws was anything other than a projection of mind, the legacy of constant conjunctions of perceptions, accumulated in our experience. This left a gaping problem: the problem of induction. For no number of conjunctions could gainsay the supposition that apples might start rising like balloons rather than fall to the earth. So long as the grounds for a universal principle are restricted to its instances, a sceptic can always deny it. It is also worth pointing out that the problem of induction that Hume himself isolated, and to which, in sceptical frame of mind, he saw no remedy but ‘carelessness and inattention’, opens the door to belief in the existence of miracles, and thence to the dogmas of religion, that it was one of the express intentions of his A Treatise of Human Nature to shut.

Now Kant had thought that if he could establish the principle that every cause must have an effect, inductive scepticism could be ruled out. But the trouble with this is that for any description of a finite system there are in general an infinite number of descriptions consistent with it. (Compare the fate of the turkey who has been fed for 364 days….) Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) theory of knowledge also relied crucially on induction. But in his case the missing element that converted an empirical regularity into something universal-and-necessarily-certain was furnished by nous or intellectual intuition rather than ‘synthetic a priori’ principles of mind. For Plato (427–347 BC) defining ‘knowledge’ as of ‘what is’ had distinguished it (epist

m

) firmly from mere belief (doxa). Knowledge had to be of what was universal and necessary. And he had brought out this distinction most vividly in his contrast between an unchanging world of Forms or Ideas, aligned under the Form of the Good, and the transient sensate material world of flux. Why, Plato had asked, ‘is a man a man?’ Because he participates in the form or, one feels like saying for him, essence of man. But why, Aristotle had charged, ‘is the Form of man a man (albeit an ideal one)?’ Surely, on Plato’s theory, only because it participated in a Form of the Form—in effect, a Third Man with which we are mired into a vicious regress, as the later Plato himself appreciated.

For the prima facie more materialistically inclined Aristotle (‘if the eye were an animal, then sight would be its soul’, he had declared) the Forms were a myth. Knowledge was of this world, which was admittedly ultimately sustained by the self-thinking thought of God. And it was attained largely by induction supplemented by nous or intellectual intuition. Together they led to knowledge conforming to the rationalist credentials laid down by Plato and subject to the deductive syllogistic reasoning brilliantly codified by Aristotle in his logic. But what exactly was intellectual intuition? A modern interpretation might hold it to be something like a Popperian ‘conjecture’.² However, for Aristotle, it involved a procedure whereby an identity was achieved between the essence actualized in the object of knowledge and that actualized in the mind of the knower, which acted as matter to the form impressed. Having established explanatory principles, the necessity of particular matters of fact could then be demonstrated by deduction in a valid syllogism; and the upshot of any process of knowledge was a form expressing the essence of a thing susceptible to non-equivocal statement ...

Table of contents

• Classical Texts in Critical Realism
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• 1 Is Philosophy Worth It?
• 2 Explanation and the Laws of Nature
• 3 Reference, Truth and Meaning
• 4 Causality, Change and Emergence
• 5 Making It Happen (Social Agency)
• 6 Dialectic
• 7 Living Well
• 8 Dialectical Critical Realism
• 9 Socrates and So On?
• 10 Philosophy and the Dialectic of Emancipation
• Appendix: Explaining Philosophies
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index