Philosophy

A Beginner's Guide

Peter Cave

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780741161
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory of Philosophy

Philosophy, the "love of wisdom", is the product of our endless fascination and curiosity about the world – the child of wonder. Through it, we seek to answer the most fundamental of questions: How do we know what we know? Does God exist? What is beauty? How should we live our lives? What am I?In this exhilarating tour, Peter Cave navigates all the main topics of philosophy with verve and clarity. Using witty and whimsical examples, including stoical sofas and Reg, the "regular" human, who just happens to carry his brain in a rucksack, Cave provides a welcome antidote to the dry textbook while covering everything from political philosophy to points of logic. Interspersed with helpful textboxes and underlining the enduring relevance of philosophy to us all, there is no better introduction for the aspiring sage.

1

What is it to be human?

‘We should live just for experiences,’ say some. That strikes many as shallow for there is more to life than experiences; after all, we ought to be eager that the lives of others go well. ‘Yet surely,’ comes the response, ‘their lives going well is solely a matter of their having experiences as desired.’

Suppose you are being betrayed – so-called friends speak badly of you behind your back; your partner deceives you – yet you are totally unaware of what is really happening and will never find out. Your life strikes you as going well, so well. Your experiences are just as they would be, were you not being betrayed. Even though you will never find out, is your life really going well in the way that you would wish? Would you not prefer a life in which you were not deceived?

Such questions lead to philosophical reflections and troubling depths. True, human life would not count for much, to say the least, if it lacked all experience; but arguably it needs more – and being human, we recognize and value the more. Being human, we are capable of reflection on the distinction between appearance and reality, between how things strike us – experiences of friendly, smiling faces; declarations of love and fidelity – and how things really are, such as undiscovered betrayal.

The above musings will lead us into philosophical arguments on the values and nature of human beings – on our ‘selves’ – via a much discussed ‘experience machine’ example, and the famous, nay infamous, Monsieur Descartes, the so-called ‘father of modern philosophy’. They set the scene for later chapters, where those and related problems are further explored. ‘Modern’ for philosophers, by the way, curiously commences in the early seventeenth century, when, at least superficially, Descartes focused on understanding the world solely through reason, without reliance on classical, Aristotelian or biblical authority and when, a little earlier, Francis Bacon encouraged scientific experimentation for grasping the world’s workings.

The experience machine – and what matters

Suppose you would love to sail, single-handedly, round the world, but you are lazy, lack the stamina and, for that matter, easily fall prey to seasickness. Suppose too that there is a machine, a virtual reality machine, a dream machine – an experience machine – that will provide you with any experiences ordered. Once plugged into the machine, you are unable to tell that you are on the machine, unable to remember that you requested the machine; instead you undergo all the required experiences, feelings, beliefs, indistinguishable from the real thing. Would you be getting what you wanted?

From ‘within’, from your experiences, all appears just as if actually travelling the oceans. You have the experiences, it seems to you, of the ocean’s swell, the distant lands and some seasickness (though mildly presented, according to your pre-plugging requests) – experiences of beautiful maidens or handsome gentlemen welcoming you at ports, of media quayside interviews – yet all the time you are stretched out, let us suppose, in some grubby basement quarter, be it in London, New York or Delhi, plugged into the machine.

To date, such machines are technologically impossible; but there is nothing impossible – no contradiction – in the supposition of electrodes plugged into your brain, feeding you appropriate electro-chemical impulses and thereby the experiences mentioned. Such suppositions are now common fare in certain popular films – The Matrix is a typical example – with tales of virtual realities. What is the philosophical value of such thought-experiments? Well, one value is that they aid focus on what is distinctive about, and important in, human life.

Suppose that you could have access to such a machine, one that would deliver all the experiences that you sought, without your even needing to crawl out of bed. Would you be getting what you wanted, if suitably plugged? Are the important and valuable things in life solely matters of experiences?

The answer, for many, is ‘no’ – an answer encouraged by the betrayal example above. True, we can be eager just for certain experiences – we may enjoy tingles of pleasure – whatever the source. We sometimes desire certain distinctive contents to experiences – sounds of a flute or scents of freshly mown grass – without regard to whether they are actually caused by a flute or grass, or by some electronic machine. Most of the time, though, we have an interest in ‘outreach’, in touching what is real, in our experiences being of the real thing. The experience machine fails to deliver on that score: the experiences are real enough, but what they are of is not the real world.

Yes, we may long to know how it feels from within to be sailing the world’s oceans; yet that is not actually to be sailing the world’s oceans. I may make do with imaginary experiences of being a world-class pianist, yet what I truly want is to be a pianist in reality, with audience appreciation and garlands. People typically yearn for love, for children – to watch sports with their teams winning. They are not yearning solely for experiences as if of love, children, and wins: they want the real un-faked thing – and here is the rub – even though they cannot tell the difference between the experience as if of X and an experience really of X. People typically want to achieve things: on the machine they receive mere illusions of achievement. They do not win the race; it merely appears to them as if they win.

Existing without the body – as a mind, self or soul?

Tales of betrayal and of experience machines encourage the thought that what is valuable to humans is not solely experiential. The tales, though, may lead us to wonder how we secure a grip, if we do, on anything existing beyond our experiences. Indeed, how do we know that we are not already on experience machines – maybe having made bad pre-plugging selections of experiences, such as reading philosophy? That latter question raises the intense pressure of scepticism, of doubting whether, for example, we can ever have knowledge of reality. That is an epistemic question, ‘epistemic’ from the Greek for knowledge. The sceptical problem is explored in a later chapter; here, we shall see how Descartes uses scepticism to uncover what human beings essentially are. Let us gently lead into an understanding of his argument.

In undergoing experiences and holding values, clearly we are conscious beings; but what are we, we who suffer the undergoing and holding? We each have a head and a heart (the latter at least literally), but what are we essentially? That is, what must we have – logically, necessarily – in order to exist? Reflect: millions of people believe in the possibility of survival after bodily death, even of survival without a body at all; but are those really logical possibilities, possibilities lacking contradiction? It is logically impossible for a triangle, Euclidean, to have four sides; such a triangle cannot exist without having three sides. Is it similarly logically impossible for you to exist without a human body? Might a human be essentially a soul without need of body?

‘THE FATHER OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY’

René Descartes (1596–1650) is deemed the father for he started afresh in trying to establish knowledge, what is certain and cannot be doubted, without appeal to ancient or religious authority. He encouraged reflective readers to take up the project, the order of discovery being shown in his six Meditations on First Philosophy.

Life: Descartes, as a young man, travelled – he joined an army for that purpose – and in 1619, in a stove-filled room, dreamt of constructing a wonderful new understanding of the world. He laid the foundations for analytical geometry – hence Cartesian coordinates – worked on optics and astronomy and sought to explain the physical world and the human body in mathematical mechanical terms. The mind – the soul – he saw as distinct from the body.

He was set to publish a work on the world, suggesting the Earth orbited the Sun, but, on hearing about Galileo’s condemnation by the Church, he withdrew. Although a Catholic believer, he was often attacked for his mechanistic philosophy; rumours were apparently sown concerning a mechanical doll he invented.

Demise: Descartes’ fame spread and Queen Christina of Sweden asked him to tutor her. One cannot decline royal ‘invitations’ and Descartes, in any case keen on patronage, ended up in a Stockholm winter. Tragically for one who would rise after noon, tutorials were at 5.00 am. Descartes soon died from pneumonia.

The experience machine shows how things may not be as they seem. Suggesting something far more radical than that thought experiment, Descartes argued that we can doubt the existence of all material items – of trees and turnips; of land and lakes; of marmalade… and machines. We may be dreaming that such things exist. For that matter, an all-powerful evil genius may be deceiving us. Who knows? That evil genius may also mislead us into believing that we have limbs, organs and brains. After all, there are real cases of ‘phantom limbs’: people awake after surgery, feeling pleased. ‘From within’ it feels as if their legs were not amputated – yet when they remove the sheets, they find themselves legless (literally so). They feel pains where their legs should have been; in fact their legs are miles away in an incinerator.

Scepticism about what really is so does not require the possibility of powerful cleverness and malignant motivation. Simply reflect: we assume an external physical world exists which causes our experiences. Perhaps, though, as with the experience machine, the cause of our experiences is something completely different from what we think. Perhaps our experiences are caused by nothing at all; they just happen. Those suggestions appear as logical possibilities, however unlikely in fact. Indeed, how could we even assess that likelihood?

I have spoken of Descartes and used ‘we’; but the discussion needs the first person – I – for just as I may doubt the existence of an external physical world, so I may doubt the existence of other people. That is the sceptical problem of ‘other minds’: even if other human bodies exist – something that may be doubted – there is a further level of doubt: namely, what justifies my belief that there are minds ‘behind’ such bodies? It is surely possible, or so it appears, that those others are nothing but bodies, lacking all consciousness. Maybe you are the sole conscious being in the universe, these words having been generated, printed and transported by mechanical robots or by creatures, ‘zombies’, without experiences; it is you who gives meaning to the words.

After his sceptical reflections, Descartes concludes that even if the external world, the physical world, does not exist – even if he is radically deceived – still he must exist. However hard an evil genius may deceive him, he, Descartes, would have to exist to be deceived. The underlying thought is that while he can feign – pretend, imagine – that the external world lacks existence, he cannot feign that he lacks existence. From this derives his famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ – ‘cogito ergo sum’ – abbreviated to the cogito. One argument lurking here – Descartes’ Feigning Argument – popped into the first person is the following:

Premiss 1: My body (including brain) can be feigned by me not to exist.

Premiss 2: I (whatever I am) cannot be feigned by me not to exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, my body is not identical with me (the ‘I’, whatever it is that I am).

Descartes’ conclusion leads to the possibility, but only the possibility, of his surviving after his body’s destruction. Descartes does, in fact, offer a quick argument for immortality, though with a caveat. An item, he claims, can be destroyed only either by being broken into parts or by annihilation courtesy of God, an omnipotent being. The mind – the I – is indivisible: the mind lacks parts. I can make no sense of my being simultaneously two distinct consciousnesses. Hence, eternal survival is guaranteed – so long as God sustains.

How are we to understand the Feigning Argument? Here is an approach. Suppose you have heard talk of Belle and of Tinkers. You are wondering whether they are one and the same person possessing two names. Well, one way of establishing that they are distinct is by discovering that Belle has a property that Tinkers lacks. If right now Belle is in New York and Tinkers in Calcutta, then they cannot be one and the same. We assume that one and the same single human being cannot be stretched miles across continents and oceans.

TERMS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL ART [I]

Arguments

Philosophers rarely physically fight, but they do argue: premisses are presented, reasoning occurs and conclusions are reached. Arguments are deductively valid when conclusions logically follow from premisses – when it is impossible for all premisses to be true and conclusions false. An argument is deductively sound, if it is valid and all the premisses are true. An argument may be deductively valid (but not sound) even if premisses are false – for example: All women wear hats; Bert is a woman; therefore Bert wears a hat.

Here is an invalid argument. If it rains, then the guests get wet; the guests are getting wet; therefore it is raining. It is invalid because even if the premisses are true, the conclusion could be false. Perhaps the guests are wet because the host is using a water pistol. There are good arguments that do not pretend to deductive validity, notably inductive ones (see Chapter Eight).

The Feigning Argument has a similarity to our Belle/Tinkers argument. One thing true of my body is that it ‘can be feigned by me not to exist’, yet that is not true, it seems, of me, of my self. It is not the case that I ‘can be feigned by me not to exist’. Hence, I and my body cannot be the identical item; so, it is logically possible that one can exist when the other does not – just as the different locations of Belle and Tinkers shows that it is logically possible that one can exist without the other. Logical possibility, though, does not ensure that something is naturally or practically possible. Maybe, in practice, Tinkers happens to exist only because of Belle’s existence: Belle may have given birth to Tinkers and may affect her in many ways. Here are further examples of the logical point. There is no contradiction in the supposition – it is logically possible – that a man runs a mile in two minutes; but it does not follow that in practice it can happen. There is, it seems, no contradiction in an experience machine existing, but it does not follow that technically one could ever be built.

Is the Feigning Argument any good? In more detail, first, does the conclusion follow from the premisses? That is, if – if, note – the premisses are true, then are we committed to the truth of the conclusion? If so, then the argument is valid: validity concerns solely the relationship between premisses and conclusion.

Even if an argument is valid, the conclusion may yet be false: a valid argument may validly transport you from false premisses to false conclusions. From the premisses ‘All philosophers are beautiful’ and ‘Socrates was a philosopher’ it validly follows that Socrates was beautiful; but that conclusion is false ...