Remarks on the Telos (and other lost ideas)

There are many ideas from both the ancient world and from much more recent times which have died a death, so that it is virtually impossible for us to understand these concepts, even within their original contexts. Not all of these ideas are of equal value – some reflect only minor aspects of the world view of their time, or illustrate some particular application of a way of thinking in a single culture or place. Others however are of vital importance, not only for an understanding of the functioning of a culture in its own context, but also in establishing something of our own intellectual ancestry, and relation to our antecedents.

An example of one of the more important ideas which became lost, but mercifully has been recovered in modern times, is the neo-platonism which underpinned much of the thought of the  English renaissance. This was recovered largely by a single scholar in the 1920s (H Grierson), who rescued the metaphysical poets from the category of writers for whom (according to Dr Johnson’s understanding) ‘metaphor’ was the principal obsession. This discovery and re-evaluation stands behind the work of the Warburg Institute in London, between the immediate pre-war years, and the late 1950s, when the full extent of the importance of neo-platonism in the English renaissance was revealed by a number of scholars, including D. P. Walker and Frances Yates. Eventually the detailed understanding of these ideas resulted in the rediscovery of the importance of other related and interacting ideas in circulation within the same intellectual communities, including Hermeticism, pan-sophism, etc.

One of the reasons why ideas become lost is that they are so pervasive within a society that they remain largely unspoken, unarticulated, and undebated. It is not only the complextity of ideas, or their controversial nature, which may consign them to oblivion, but it might also be as a consequence of their success. At the point where an idea is no longer articulated, it is in grave danger of being forgotten, misunderstood, or translated into something quite other than its original shape and meaning.

An example of the latter, where a word undergoes a radical change of meaning, is the word ‘rational’. For us this word connotes thought free from an overarching body of institutional or religious ideas, yoked only to logical and methodical processes based at root on common sense and commonly agreed values which conform to a vaguely understood humanist agenda, which (it is believed) all reasonable human beings can agree on. 

But in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word retained a quite different meaning. It meant that an idea or argument had a proper place within a philosophical or religious picture of the world (a notion at the core of the adoption of neo-platonist ideas by writers and artists in the English renaissance). Because it had its logical place, it could be considered rational, in a manner similar to the understanding of the rationality of a sequence of notes configured to belong correctly within the overall structure of a musical composition. 

In that sense Descartes picture of the world is a rationalist picture, in that it places its details within an overarching framework.  His principal innovation from the point of view of posterity is that he placed the idea of what is rational in a purely philosophical model of the world, rather than a religious one: God was effectively banished into a sphere of his own. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century the term ‘rationalist’ came to mean something quite different - it meant free-thinking, and required to be outside the confines of an essentially religious framework of ideas and preconceptions, relying on nothing more than the human capacity to think clearly, and to build on the work of other thinkers similarly untrammelled by what was now considered to be a wholly irrational pattern of thought. The mathematician Edmund Halley, for example, is reported to have said that the doctrines of Religion were unintelligible, and that Christianity itself was an 'imposture'. 

We can see the meaning of words and technical terms shifting around us all the time, if we take the trouble to notice. Sometimes these changes can cause real difficulties for our understanding when we find them in an unfamiliar context. We now find ourselves in a quandary when we are thinking about ancient Greek religion, which the scholar E.R. Dodds thought contained many expressions of the irrational (his most famous book is 'The Greeks and the Irrational’), since to the Greeks it is likely that the ‘irrational’ components of their religion were regarded as properly ordered, and in their proper place. The sacrifice of animals (for example) is clearly irrational within the context of a modern city-bound existence in which secular humanist values seem unquestionable. But I do not think it helps us to understand ancient Greek religion, or indeed any part of ancient Greek civilisation, to look at these in terms of a modern model of irrational and deviant psychology.

Again, the concept of humanism has undergone a certain amount of shape-shifting over the centuries. In the renaissance it indicated a complex of ideas opposed (to some extent, though not entirely so) to religious ideas of man and his place in the world, and a tendency to put the human (and the human experience) in the centre of things. However, this did not at the time imply any kind of normative agenda about what was truly human and what was not, or a rejection of a rational picture of the world.

This requires some explanation. In some spheres ‘humanism’ referred principally to a way of living and understanding, and belonging to the civilised tradition, rather than to any particular body of ideas which a humanist might hold. A humanist might therefore (for example) study the outward form of speeches of Cicero in order to take on the values and attributes of the great Roman lawyer and orator, on the principle that acquisition of the outward form of a thing has as its corollary the acquisition of its inner core. This procedure is in stark contrast to someone working within the expressly intellectual tradition which Cicero also belonged to, who would study the ideas in his works, rather than focus on the outer form in which they were expressed.

Other important concepts have changed radically over the centuries. The concept of the ‘soul’ is now almost unintelligible to almost all, except as a vague notion of ‘essence’. Whereas it used to be a term used with technical precision. (Plotinus is of course unread these days, except by a small band of specialists and some interested lay readers). The Egyptian idea of the Ka clearly bears some conceptual relation to the idea of the soul among the Greek writers, but it has been difficult for scholarship to draw out parallels between the two, since neither of the concepts is properly understood.

Mathematics and Geometry too, had, to the Greeks and others, a strangely intimate relationship with religion and theology, of which we have only the slightest glimmer of an  understanding. Worse, we are generally unable to tackle the problem, since we cannot easily bring ourselves to consider theology as something which has technical aspects. 

We might, for the purposes of scholarship, investigate some pointless minutiae of ancient cultic life, created and maintained by a priesthood with time on its hands, and little capacity for logical and practical patterns of thought (the Sumerians and the Babylonians sometimes referred to the Gods in their documents in terms of numbers, so that such and such a god would be ‘6’, another would be ‘9’ etc, which suggests a very practical relationship with their divinities). But we would not expect it to make any kind of sense to us. 

Yet another idea which we now understand only vaguely, denuded of its former technical importance, is the concept of ‘completion’. There has been very little study of this concept across cultures in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean during the past 150 years of scholarship, which is perhaps a little odd. This is because it is an idea which is found as part of a complex of related concepts in all of these cultures, and might therefore reasonably be considered as part of a framework for useful comparison between these cultures.

Another related idea, of equal importance, which has been completely passed over as a means by which the significance of ancient cultural ideas might be understood, is that of the ‘telos’. Like ‘completion’, the concept of the ‘telos’ is shared across cultures in antiquity, and should allow useful comparisons to be made between disparate cultures. However it too is hardly understood. In fact It is fair to say that it is not at all understood, except as a term deprecated by the sciences ever since the end of the seventeenth century.

But this idea of the telos too has undergone subtle and far-reaching changes in its long history. The concept of the ‘telos’ or final cause in science from the seventeenth century onwards is quite different from that understood in antiquity. In order to illustrate the pervasive and often unspoken influence of this idea in the ancient world, it is necessary first of all to explain what it meant to the ancients, rather than to nineteenth century zoologists keen to avoid (among other things) the final cause as part of the explanation for the variety of animal forms in the world.

Almost all modern discussions of the telos (where these exist) derive ultimately from Aristotle’s consideration of the subject. The telos and the final cause he discussed as part of a suite of explanation for why things are the way they are. So the final cause, the end to which something is moving, or what it is that has caused it to begin to move, is part of the explanation of why it is the way it is, why it is composed of the elements it has, why it is configured as it is, why it is functioning in the manner in which it does, why it has certain inclinations and appetites, and so on. The other components of the suite are the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the material cause. These should not be regarded as wholly distinct in character from the final cause as modes of explanation, since they depend on the same underlying idea. Understanding the other kinds of cause actually helps to understand the idea of the final cause, and so these causes will be discussed also.

Aristotle used the image of the house (oikos) to help illustrate the idea of the telos, though it is not a particularly good example with which to discuss this philosophical idea. The house is something which is built in order to achieve certain things: it has a final form, which, when reached, allows it to be called a house. It is composed of certain things, and when these are assembled and arranged in the proper order, the house is complete. Before it is assembled and its elements are arranged in the proper order, the house has only a potential existence. It might come to be, and will only make sense when it does come to be, but unassembled it has no existence.

In modern times the only cause we allow (at least in terms of ‘cause’) is the efficient cause. In other words the direct action of constructing the house and its elements – the labour of making the bricks, cutting the timbers, erecting the frame, putting on the roof tiles, etc. It is about work and energy: the kilojoules of effort necessary to complete the task

The other causes make more difficulties for the moderns. The formal cause seems to be drawn from another realm of explanation altogether, since it seems to imply that like gives rise to like. Thus a human being gives birth to a human being, and a lion gives birth to lions. This is probably the origin of the idea of formal cause. In the context of the construction of a house, this mode of explanation has to be reshaped considerably. Thus, a brick-maker is the creator and formal cause of the bricks which go to make up most of the fabric of the house. And likewise, the baker is the formal cause of bread. In both these examples, it is obvious that the craftsmen are also the source of the work involved in the making of bricks and bread. 

It is interesting to speculate that this very simple mode of explanation lies behind the creation of a large number of craft gods – when the human race began to engage in the creation of things other than offspring, this simple rule would necessarily be augmented to include human handiwork. The augmented explanation requires that the brick-maker, the baker, the weaver, be agents or vessels of the formal cause of each of the crafts. And so they become emblematic of their crafts in the abstract. In ancient Assyria, a number of religious officials had titles which were craft related, and the training of the crown prince for his future kingship involved the development of skills in various crafts ('with the bakers he did the baking' which we find in the annals of Ashurbanipal, who became king of Assyria in the late 7th century BCE).

Before the Classical period in Greece,  we have no evidence for the discussion of the four causes as causes. This absence of evidence however is not evidence for the absence of the causes as explanatory modes. For example, the four causes underpin the scene in Book xviii of the Iliad, where Hephaestus is working metal to create statues animated by the gods. He is a craftsman, and is depicted as highly energetic in the practice of his craft. Some of the objects he makes are by the very nature of their design able to enter the councils of the gods, and to return of their own accord. So the final cause (the telos), efficient cause, material cause, and the formal cause are all implicit in this scene.

Three of the four causes which refer to processes (the telos, the efficient and the formal cause) are implicitly attested often in the cultural record. The telos or the end is a common concept in ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, most often expressed in the context of mythological, religious and theological texts ('the King is in his Horizon' is a not uncommon trope in Ancient Egypt). Both the material and efficient causes are ideas which have to be clearly known to any culture which has to muster, organise and calculate manpower and effort, and material resources. Also the organisation of agriculture, metalwork, glassmaking, breadmaking, weaving, and the other crafts. The fourth, the material cause, is also implicitly present in ancient writings, since the function of a thing is largely co-terminous with both the material with which it is made, and the form after which it is modelled.. All these things were part of the responsibility of kings in the ancient Near East and Egypt, and elsewhere. 

Since  much of the activity in the ancient world is about the amassing of materials, the creation of precious and sacred objects, the organisation of work, and the ritualised association of things created by means of the first three of the causes, with the fourth, the telos, or what is divine, we can see the material, the formal, the efficient and the final cause in nearly all aspects of ancient civilisation. 

These causes were understood, in essence as outlined by Aristotle, long before his time. We do not need to find texts in Assyria or Egypt which discuss these causes in the way that Aristotle did. We will not find them, because the structure of society was different in those places, with a much more stratified nature, with knowledge and esoteric thought at the top of the structure. Explanation was rarely written down (though ritual and liturgy sometimes were).  Instead, we need to interpret the evidence which is presented to us in order to understand what is actually there to be seen. 

Of the four causes, only the final cause absolutely requires philosophical insight for its understanding. Hence the idea of the final cause is the most interesting from the point of view of developing an understanding of the world of ideas in antiquity: if the idea of the telos is present, then philosophical discussion of the nature of reality is also present. The idea of the telos makes no sense unless it is understood, and it presents a number of problems for anyone attempting to understand the concept. Gaining understanding, and the solving of logical problems, is what philosophy was all about. 

A Berlin Conversation (Part Two)

An extract from a dialogue between Dr. Ralf Ganz, and Dr. Sadiq Kishati, on questions which might might be asked about the history of ideas, and cultic life in the ancient world. The dramatic date of the discussion is March 2003. The location is a university office, next to the Unter den Linden in Berlin, within sight of the famous equestrian statue of Frederick II, King of Prussia.

Sadiq: The thing which is really difficult for us to understand, is that we do not want to understand the past, and the way it was constructed in the ancient mind. And that our perceptions of what is real are based on the categories which are in mind.

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Ralf: Really? You think so? So much effort has been expended on the understanding of the ancient world! The universities of the world have departments devoted to the subject! Do you think that those who work in those departments do not want to know their subject in detail? Do you think that they do not know their subjects in detail? I am surprised at you, since most of the classicists and ancient historians I have met are honestly interested in their subject, and would not be remotely interested in working within a framework which was essentially a fabrication.

Sadiq: I agree with you about those who work within university departments focussed on classics and ancient history. There is a great deal of ambition on display, but they would not be likely to endorse a fabrication, if they understood that was what they were dealing with. They are not dishonest.

Ralf: But you say that we do not want to understand the past, and the way things were constructed in the ancient mind. If they are honest scholars, they will not endorse fabrication, as you say. So I am at a loss to understand how you can maintain we are disinterested in the actual shape of the ancient world.

Sadiq: That’s because you imagine that what is in their minds is the consequence of an engagement with the evidence.

Ralf: Of course it is. It must be. When they come into the subject, it is because they love the subject, and the pursuit of further detail and understanding.

Sadiq: So no-one ever denigrated or destroyed evidence which didn’t fit what they thought they already understood? Or falsified evidence to support what they thought they knew to be true? We are watching these processes going on around us right now. Not all of these processes are visibly happening within university departments, but we are talking about a spectrum of attitudes and behaviours, which can become prevalent at certain times. Sometimes these things happen, usually because there is a contemporary consensus that the evidence needs to be reconsidered and re-evaluated. All evidence is subject to reconsideration and re-evaluation. As Nietzsche said, there are no such things as facts, only interpretations.

Ralf: I’m inclined to disagree with Nietzsche. Some facts are just plain facts.

Sadiq: If only. But I am afraid it is not true. There are many ways to look at facts. Sometimes facts tell a different story from the one they were once believed to tell. Remind me of facts which are just plain facts. I know about facts such as the inverse square law, and the law of gravity, which appear to be incontrovertible. But tell me about facts in ancient history which have no possible alternative interpretation, to the one which is current.

Ralf: Most of what I know is built on the facts which I understand! They fit within their context, and illuminate our understanding of the ancient world.

Sadiq: So you cannot imagine them being turned upside down, and being used to tell a different story?

Ralf: That would be hard to imagine. Though I accept of course that the process of re-evaluation of our interpretations is an important part of the study of antiquity.

Sadiq: So we are talking about a question of degree in the certainty or uncertainty of the meaning of facts.

Ralf: Agreed. But the overall frame in which these facts are understood limits the degree to which they may be uncertain.

Sadiq: That may be so. But how did the classicists and the ancient historians come by this frame? Was this frame built exclusively on the basis of incontrovertible facts, or in some other way? If the frame was not built on incontrovertible facts, then both the evidence and the overall frame are open to question.

Ralf: Well it is clear that the overall frame of our understanding was not based entirely on the archaeological and literary evidence which has been dug out of the ground over the past hundred and fifty years or so. We already had a frame of understanding from sources which were always accessible, such as historical, philosophical and literary writing from Greece, and from Rome, and the literature of the Old and New Testaments.

Sadiq: Granted. But that frame is one which was built by looking backwards. We see the ancient world through those conflicting models of the world. We make what sense we can of the ancient world from these different accounts and understandings. It is hard to stand aside from these. You are acknowledging that our understanding is not based on the material and the literary evidence alone, but the accumulated and agreed understanding which has been developed since the fall of the ancient world. So it isn’t just about the evidence, and the physical and the literary remains, but about the state of the human mind in the centuries following.

Ralf: Alright. So tell me what is missing from our understanding of the ancient world. I might also ask why it is missing, and why we are so determined not to see it, as you are suggesting.

Sadiq: It might be fairer to say that we see what we expect and want to see in antiquity. It is not that we are consciously determined not to see certain things, but that we simply do not see them, since they are not what we expect to be there. The matter is complicated by the fact that the ancient model of reality has no counterpart in the modern world, so, unless the scholar is aware of this fact, and much of its detail, what was important to the ancients makes no sense at all.

Ralf: You think so? You think they were essentially different from us in terms of their response to the world?

 Sadiq: The human capacity to denotice what should not be there, or to reinterpret what should not be there as something else, is something which has not been the subject of a great deal of study. Physically we are the same, with the same brains, but we do not all have the same kind of brain. The brains which prosper now, are not those that prospered in the past. Over the past two thousand years there has been a selection process, which can be seen in the development of what we understand to be rational. What is rational to us now would not have seemed rational in classical Greece, or in Egypt or Babylonia.

Ralf: That is a strange assertion to make. Surely the rational is always rational. It can’t be at one time itself, and at another time the opposite of itself!

Sadiq: Do words always mean the same thing?

Ralf: It is true meanings change. But it is hard to imagine such an enormous change in the meaning of ‘rational’

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Sadiq: It is easy to explain. We use the word ‘rational’ as a synonym for what is reasonable. We think of ourselves as creatures of reason, who use reason to understand the world, and to enable us to act reasonably in it. What we mean by this understanding is that we respond to experience with logic, so that our actions can be explained and defended as reasonable.

Ralf: Which is what I understand as ‘rational’ behaviour. To respond illogically to experience would be to behave unreasonably, which is to be irrational.

Sadiq: That is how we use these words. There are several ways in which we can explore this confusion of concepts. One is to look at our history. We imagine that the European Enlightenment, which occurred in the late eighteenth century,  ushered in the life of reason. Those who were part of that most significant of cultural developments imagined that as well as recasting the world as something which could be shaped and understood in terms of human understanding, also thought that this was a process which was happening for the first time in human history, and that all earlier models of reality, all prior human thought and behaviour, was sunk in unreasonableness and folly, and was for the most part incompatible with any kind of logical understanding.

Ralf: And they understood that what was happening was a form of liberation from falsehood for mankind.

Sadiq: Indeed, that is how it was understood.  But what were the falsehoods? What was unreasonable about the past, and about the contemporary cultures beyond the reach of the enlightenment?

Ralf: That is not hard to answer. The whole range of religious belief in the world, unsubstantiated by any critical understanding of the concept of what might constitute a god, or a multitude of gods, or any understanding that the very idea of divine beings, singular or plural, might be a fiction, entirely unsupported by argument based on sound logic.  Also the vast expanse of human credulity, invested in ideas of magic and ritual, false associations, unsupported notions, and general ignorance about the nature of the workings of the world.

Sadiq: Indeed. That is a good answer. And it was the enlightenment plan to change all of that. The world could be understood in terms of human reason, and it could also be reshaped by human reason. That is still where we are, though the agenda does not closely resemble what it was when the life of reason began sometime before the French Revolution.

Ralf: And you say that this agenda is not rational?

Sadiq: We should distinguish between the meaning of the term, and the cultural and philosophical agenda with which it is now associated.

Ralf: I understand.

Sadiq: The enlightenment agenda may be a reasonable one, or it may not. We will come to that question later. But it is worth noticing that at its heart, the agenda enshrines an assumption, which is that the world and reality can be understood in terms of reason. The task of reforming human thought follows on from this as naturally as night follows day.

Ralf: If the life of reason is based on the power of logical analysis, then it is hard to imagine how that assumption is false. Logic is something which was developed in the ancient world in order to enable us to understand experience. It is based on experience and observation.

Sadiq: Indeed, and codified by Aristotle. But there is no a priori and unquestionable reason why the world should necessarily make sense to us, as human beings, even if we are equipped with an ability to understand much of what we experience with the aid of the tools of logical thought.

Ralf: I would argue that since the use of the tools of logic has enabled our current understanding of the world, and enabled us to build on that understanding, it is reasonable to assume that the assumption at the core of the enlightenment agenda is axiomatically true. The world can be understood by the human mind.

Sadiq: There are few patterns of ideas for which the natural world and the human mind cannot find sufficient degree of evidential and logical support to ensure some level of cultural survival. Which is why the range of ideas loose in the world is so great. Some of the beliefs which men entertain exist and prosper only because the degree of critical thought which is brought to bear on them is wanting. But that is not true for all patterns of understanding which we might consider not to be intelligible in terms of Aristotle’s formulation of logical thought. Some of the finest minds have entertained these ideas in the past. And that requires explanation.

Ralf: Some ideas are irrational, as you suggest. Either the ‘finest minds’ you mentioned were insufficiently critical of these ideas, or they disrespected logical thought.

Sadiq: Possibly. But it is a leap to suggest that they were bereft of the power of reason, and irrational. What you are saying is that you are firmly convinced that the way to understand reality and the physical world is through the use of logical thought.

Ralf: I suppose that I am. Other patterns of thought are bereft of any credible logic. Someone who believes that a lock of hair establishes contact with the original owner, and believes in the possibility of having some degree of influence of that person, is not thinking logically, as we would understand it. Likewise, a collector of nail parings for the same purpose is similarly deluded.

Sadiq: I would not disagree with you for a moment about that. Such people are not thinking logically. Though they are thinking.

Ralf: They are, but both their assumptions about how things relate to other things, and how those connections can be manipulated, are without reason.

Sadiq: Are they without reason? What they think are logical connections are clearly illogical to the critical mind, but the idea of such connections have been reasoned in some way.

Ralf: I see you are now trying to divorce the idea of reason from logic.

Sadiq: I am. The point is, that reason pertains to thinking, and not all thinking is reasonable. Logical thought is reasonable, but that is just one kind of thought.

Ralf: So you say that even the idea of reasoning itself isn’t naturally and necessarily about logical thought.

Sadiq: That is what I’m saying. I’m not differentiating them just because it is possible to do this, but because the difference may be of some importance in establishing how we understand the world.

Ralf: Let me see if I can summarise where we are. You have differentiated Rationality and Reason, saying that what is rational is not what we habitually think of as rationality, but is something which differs from it. And you have said that the meaning of the term ‘rational’ in the phrase ‘rational thought’ has changed over the centuries - particularly since the rise of the enlightenment. So, though we describe ourselves as being rational beings, we are not necessarily rational beings in the sense which was understood before the enlightenment. By which I think you mean from the renaissance onwards.

Sadiq: I do.

Ralf: So we need to discuss that later. What we mean by describing ourselves as rational beings is that we use the faculty and power of reason, which is something quite different from what used to be understood as ‘rational thought’.

Sadiq: In essence, yes.

Ralf: You made this distinction on the basis that reasoning is a species of thinking, but not all thinking involves proper reasoning, as in the cases you mentioned - collecting locks of hair and nail parings. So you regard proper reasoning as the species of thinking which is based on logical thought.

 Sadiq:  Yes.

Ralf: So is rational thought the same as the species of thought which is based on sound logical principles?

Sadiq: Yes it is. But not necessarily on the same logical principles.

Ralf: That is too much! How can there be more than one pattern of logic? It is either logical or it isn’t!

Sadiq: The two are connected. Meaning that the full array of how things may be logically related to one another is bigger than what we find outlined in descriptions of formal logic. Not everything in reality is subject to the same rules. Though everything everywhere is subject to rules. The science of logic should embrace how things relate to one another in any part of reality which may be the subject of discussion.

Ralf: So you are saying that rational thought is reasoning based on logical principles, but not necessarily the same logical principles which were defined by Aristotle?

Sadiq: Or on a different branch of logical principles, which have not been properly explored, either in the study of antiquity, or in modern times.

Ralf: We need to be very clear here what you mean. It must be the case, if your argument is to make sense, that there was an understanding of this different branch of logical principles in antiquity. But we know nothing about them. How can we know nothing about them if they are present, and as important as you seem to think them to be? Where are they mentioned and discussed?

Sadiq: There are several ways in which we can know that these ideas must have been present. As I have said, we do not want to understand the past, and actively denotice what is present which we would rather was absent.  So that is what we do about the whole of ancient civilisation – we denotice what cannot be explained by the model of reality in which we frame it. Ancient civilisation screams its difference across the centuries.

What is the logic of sacrifice? The presence of the gods in divine images, and the worship of these images? What is the basis of divinatory practice? How could they imagine that they could have contact and conversation with the divine, or even know the mind of the divine? Yet these practices were common across the whole of the ancient world and beyond. We see these things, and acknowledge that they were genuine phenomena at the time. But they do not make any sense to us. Not at all. Until they are reframed in terms of things which we understand, such as social dynamics, economics, propaganda, the ostentatious display of power, and so on. Which is not to say that these interpretations tell us nothing. But we do not sacrifice to the gods now, or worship their images, or converse with the gods. And someone who claims to have conversation with a god or gods is likely to to be locked up for his trouble. So why then, and not now?

Ralf: The answer is surely that the strange behaviour of the ancients was the type of derangement of sense which was the derangement of the time.

Sadiq: You don’t really think that. To us it may look like that, and it is convenient for us to treat the ancient world as a place of near universal derangement, or even stupidity. But there is clearly so much in the ancient world which is not deranged – philosophy, art, poetry, literature, architecture, mathematics, etc. The idea of a general derangement of the faculty of reason will not do.

There is also the fact that many of these things which are not in any sense derangements of sense are connected with those which, according to such a point of view, are born of unreason.  We treat the sculptures created by Greek sculptors as works of art, which indeed they are. But we isolate them from any function they may have had, except in sociological or ideological terms. An art historian does not write about them in terms of their cultural and cultic function, which is of no interest.  The art of the Greeks, in so far as it survives, is also treated partly in terms of aesthetics, and, as their art mostly appears on widely distributed black and red figure vases, which is why those images have survived, partly as material which illustrates mythological themes, and incidents which appear in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Poetry, liturgies associated with the gods, and their literature is surveyed in terms of social and ideological function (in other words shorn of the connection with the world of the divine, which was of great importance); we do not attempt to understand their architecture in terms of divine function, but instead in terms of aesthetics, and the contrast in the uses of space. 

Philosophy too has been entirely removed from its original cultic context, to the point where this is not understood or even recognised, though a number of authors have drawn attention to this, sometimes obscurely, sometimes with a more or less explicit reference. Arithmetic and mathematics has suffered the same fate, though it is clear that it represented another discipline which served the purpose of understanding the nature of reality, and the mind of God.

We don’t need to know any of that, even if that was what they really believed. Why do we not need to know that? Because the divine and the world of the divine was not the main driver of the nature and development of ancient civilisation, whether in Greece or Rome, or in Mesopotamia.

Ralf: That may be the correct response to what you are saying. The Greeks and the others may not have understood the true forces underpinning their civilisation.

Sadiq: It is certainly what the academy thinks now. But the academic institutions were not set up to enable the understanding of ancient civilisation. They were set up to enable ancient civilisation, and in particular the Greek instance of it, to serve a useful function.

Ralf: You are referring to the development of critical scholarship at Gottingen. At least in part.

Sadiq: The University of Gottingen has a lot to answer for.  I think it is clear that there was a logic underpinning the variety of the patterns of understanding in the ancient world, and that this understanding was built on a coherent picture of the nature of reality. But in effect, we avoid the nature of that understanding, and instead impose one of our own devising. So the ancient world is a place in which, whatever logical and cultural consistency it may have had, is a place full of deluded souls, dreaming of something which was false and unreal at the heart of their civilisation.

Ralf: I am not out of sympathy with the idea that the ancient civilisations lived in a world of dreams and chimaerical realities. Even if it seemed to make coherent sense to them, it makes very little sense to us. And I am still at a loss to understand why you think that there was a coherence, a logical basis to the ancient world. Mainly because you have suggested that their logical model, their logical apparatus, was in some significant way different from ours. In which case it is hardly surprising that we not only find it hard to understand, but also find it hard to believe that such a coherent thing existed.

Sadiq: The scholars at Gottingen were not ever concerned about the coherence of ideas which might have existed in the ancient world. They were concerned with an understanding of the ancient world which was possible and credible in the middle and late years of the eighteenth century. The main focus at the time was not the study of Greek philosophy and Greek cult and religion, but on history. The development of source criticism was the result of noticing that a number of historical accounts written by Greek historians and authors differed, in both detail, assumptions, and approach. That is not surprising. Writers in any age are as prone to partisan views as in any other. They also have available to them one or more differing information sources, some of which may be less reliable than others. Sometimes they may have both, and either have to make a choice between them as sources, or somehow reconcile the accounts. They also have their own intellectual and societal baggage, which inevitably has a bearing on what they write.

An example of this is the biographies of Plutarch, most of which are regarded as hagiographical, in that he was concerned to show each subject in terms of an anabasis of their character and soul – in other words, in terms of their moral and intellectual improvement. We might speak of his writing now as a species of edifying literature. He was writing to appeal to audiences in both Greece and in Rome, and paired his biographies, to compare and contrast character in the civilisations of Greece and Rome. That is the structure of his work. And that tells us a lot about how he understood the world, and the way he chose to write about it.

But having such a model is to invite distortion. At least as a modern historian would understand it. Human lives are messy, and do not easily fit the literary model of moral and intellectual improvement. That is not good historical writing by modern standards – though there was plenty of this hagiographical literature around in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often aimed at the young and the credulous.

Eight Books

(A response to Neil deGrasse Tyson's list of eight great books). 


In December 2014 Maria Popova's excellent site Brainpickings published a list of Neil deGrasse Tysons 'Eight books that every intelligent person should read'.  Tyson suggests that: 'if you read all of [these] works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world'. The list is an interesting one, and he is right up to a point. But his list is based on a reading of the world founded on a number of assumptions, some of which emerge in his comments on the books he recommends. I give his list (and his comments) here:

1. The Bible (public library; free ebook), to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself
2. The System of the World (public library; free ebook) by Isaac Newton, to learn that the universe is a knowable place
3. On the Origin of Species (public library; free ebook) by Charles Darwin, to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth
4. Gulliver’s Travels (public library; free ebook) by Jonathan Swift, to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos
5. The Age of Reason (public library; free ebook) by Thomas Paine, to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world
6. The Wealth of Nations (public library; free ebook) by Adam Smith, to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself
7. The Art of War (public library; free ebook) by Sun Tzu, to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art
8. The Prince (public library; free ebook) by Machiavelli, to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.

I focus here on Tyson's principal assumption. His second choice, Newton's The System of the World, is chosen because it teaches us that the universe is 'a knowable place'. Up to a point this is true. Aspects of it have some kind of intelligibility for us - we can treat it as an objectively real thing which can be measured and described by mathematics (which is what he means). But it isn't the case that it is actually known by us. We know its regularities, and we can define these (and we have). And that capacity to understand its regularities and uniformities is indeed crucial to the development of the Western world in the centuries since Newton. The efficient cause has become so important to us that the other causes which were recognised in the ancient world are now seen to have no explanatory power at all, and consequently are ignored.   

All of Tyson's choices are about force and struggle, which is what  the real nature of the world becomes when you are confined only to an understanding which is based on the efficient cause. It doesn't matter if it is understood in terms of money, political power, military power, or even reason itself - the efficient cause is the underlying explanation. So his list is probably a wise one, given the universe in which he understands himself to live. 

The power of Newton's approach was such that even seventeenth and eighteenth century divines felt compelled to embrace something of this new way of looking at the world. The uniformitarian outlook was the result. Science could explain and describe the orderliness of the cosmos, as it presents itself to us, and this orderliness became the proof of the role of God in the world. This was nonsense then, and is nonsense now.

The orderliness is the consequence of the force of gravity, which Newton managed to describe so precisely, that he was able to deduce that it was a universal force, as capable of determining the motions of the planets in the heavens, as it was in determining the behaviour.of objects in motion on the earth.

But, we know nothing of what gravity is. We know what it does, and understand (in terms of mathematical description) its association with matter. But we don't know why it is there (though clearly if it wasn't there, we wouldn't be in a position to discuss it). We don't know why any of the apparently objective world is there, rather than not. Such questions of course are beyond the remit of the modern mathematical approach to physical reality that Newton inaugurated, and so are questions which are rarely addressed. This reluctance is probably wise, but it does represent an implicit admission that the universe is not a knowable place. No matter how far we press the efficient cause as an explanatory mechanism for what goes on, and no matter how far we explore it with the power of mathematics and physics, the universe will not actually be made known to us. We can have knowledge of it, but not actually know what it is. Not as long as we remain confined to an approach based on the efficient cause. 

These questions of knowability are however addressable from a different point of view, and were so addressed in the ancient world. How these questions were addressed in antiquity, and the evidence for the age of such questions, is a major component of The Sacred History of Being. 

The list which follows (my alternative to the Tyson list) contains books which can be profitably read by those who want to know the wider scope of the questions we can ask about the universe, and its knowability, as well as something of the intellectual history of the world: 

1. Plato's The Sophist. To gain an insight into the absolute unfathomability of some aspects of Reality
2 Carl Jung's On the Nature of the Psyche, for an understanding of the apparatus which has a key role in making the unfathomable real.
3. Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. To have some understanding of the importance and scope of abstract concepts in our apprehension of Reality.
4. Robert Temple's Conversations with Eternity. One of those rare modern books that make it possible to gain insight into the meaning of ancient cultic life. On the practice of Divination, east and west.
5. Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. Our connection with the world through Knowledge by Description, and Knowledge by Acquaintance.
6. Machiavelli's Discourses upon Livy. Machiavelli's Prince is based on his study of ancient life and politics through Livy's writings, and one is the mirror of the other. But the Discourses is the better book.
7. Richard Onians The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate. One of the great unexploded scholarly bombs of the twentieth century. Discusses in great detail the other way of seeing, now lost to us, which runs all through the fabric of the ancient world.
8. Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Where Hellenism went in Europe after the fall of Rome, and what it did.

If you need my choice number 9, anything by Mark Twain.

Thomas Yaeger, 24 June 2015

Locke, Newton, and the Rejection of Reality

This is a post from the middle of 2015, some five or six months before the publication of The Sacred History of Being by the Anshar Press. 

***

The text of The Sacred History of Being is now being proofed for publication, chapter by chapter. Seven of the chapters are available on this blog. Recently I’ve been exchanging mail with a friend in the US who knows something of the wider implications of the arguments in the book.

Sometimes unexpected things happen as the result of such conversations. I received an email from her a few days ago telling me that at an open house event for the Philosophy Faculty at Baudouin College in Maine, in connection with her nephew’s graduation, she had described my work to the Head of the Faculty (the "Chair"), partly in connection with some remarks I’d made concerning John Locke and his rejection of the idea that something might arise out of nothing, since that defied common sense  (a common view in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). The Chair of the Faculty is a specialist in John Locke.

My! The Sacred History of Being isn’t yet published, yet it is out there already, engaging people in argument!

She wrote to me a few weeks ago in response to a case I’d made concerning the western rejection of paradoxical ideas:

Interesting points about the east-west division being the consequence of something more profound than colonial bias, i.e. a division between philosophy which embraces paradox and "common sense" understanding/rationalism (I take it that you don't consider Locke's ideas to be true philosophy, that the only true philosophy is one that embraces paradox). I agree that reality is beyond human understanding. It seems to me that accepting that fact threatens a lot of people, especially Westerners, making them feel frightened, powerless, and lacking in control, but that Eastern cultures found ways to deal with it, including as you said, embracing paradox (doing a paper on "Siddhartha" in high school opened my mind to this way of thinking). The West's prioritization of doing business, commercial utilitarianism, is an interesting way to frame it. It seems to me that the West has been drunk for a long time on our seeming power to control the world, most recently via technology, destroying the environment and civilizations in the process, and that we haven't wanted to acknowledge or accept our limits. Unfortunately, the rest of the world seems to be following our lead.

I responded, mentioning that while a student at UCL I had taken the course on the History of Political Ideas,

 during which I had the opportunity to take a close look at John Locke (I may have written a paper). He argued that people are born as blank palimpsests, and that all knowledge is down to the association of ideas, since nothing pre-exists in our minds (Socrates spins!!). That’s the essential basis of  advertising, marketing and brands, and all efforts to seduce us into  accepting models of reality which serve the beguilers, not the beguiled.  He passes for one of the greats.

So, not true philosophy. But ‘true’ philosophy is hard to define.

This exchange has its roots in an earlier argument I’d made about the difficult relationship between east and west which has endured for centuries. Edward Said’s book Orientalism is the one which is the source of the idea that colonial attitudes and the imperatives of colonial power were responsible for negative western ideas about the east. This argument is a little thin, especially if you are looking at the detail of the relationship, over time, and in a number of cultural areas, including philosophy. Referencing Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, which sees the issue in terms of a developing eurocentric racism, I wrote that:

Bernal’s thesis, even to me in 1987, didn’t entirely seem to hold water. But he’d locked on to what had happened to the discipline of classics in  the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and he was spot on about that. Even if his research students didn’t understand the context of some of the details (they did a lot of the work).

 Where I was going at the time was that there was a problem with the interpretation of Plato’s arguments, which didn’t seem to have anything to do with their internal coherence. And it was classicists that were responsible.

I began to think around 1988 that there were characteristics of foreign and ancient philosophies which were the real problem. The west, particularly since Newton, has tended to avoid philosophy which embraces paradox, and instead prefers common sense understanding (John Locke in particular).

So this is a third explanatory framework, which may lie underneath both the colonial imperatives and the eurocentic racism, which might now be understood as expressions of a deep, though ill-defined cultural anxiety about where the west stands in the scheme of things, and how much sense it makes. I expanded on this theme:

Most eastern religions have a paradoxical core, because they understand reality to be beyond human understanding. I understood this when I was relatively young. But it doesn’t please everybody. It doesn’t suit the west.

Plato argues in the same way. But as far as the western tradition is concerned, Plato is the fountainhead of rational thought. And rational thought isn’t based on a paradoxical view of reality. So we have had a meaningless scholarly stand-off for nearly two centuries between those who argue Plato was doing research, and those who think he was expounding a doctrine (though they don’t know what it was).

What these scholars are actually doing is protecting us from Plato. As long as they are arguing within this irrelevant frame about his dialogues, Plato is as dangerous to the modern truths of the world as a stuffed Dodo.

If you put all that together with an antipathy to apparently illogical patterns of thought in the east (read as ethnic credulity and stupidity), and model yourself on the undisputed (and the only) creators of science, mathematics, art, architecture, and civilization itself, you have a heady brew. And of course the development of racist ideas on top, when scientists started to look for physical characteristics in populations that would allow them to place people on a scale of intelligence, or of civilisation. Typology looks scientific, but it always was about labelling and assigning value.

Where does that leave us? Effectively in a place where we have erected a physical and materialistic paradigm of reality which has no root. It does not mean anything, and cannot mean anything, since there is no way to understand how or why it might have come to be. We think we can say that it is here now, and that it wasn't here 14 or 15 billion years ago, so it seems to have exploded into existence out of whatever might have been there before, which we know nothing about. Or maybe it did come out of nothing, but we can't say anything about that at all, so we pass over the question in silence.

Such poverty. But we get on with things. I concluded with a description of the current cultural arc of the west:

We have inherited a number of axiomatic ways of approaching the world since Newton. We measure, we define, we control. What cannot be measured, defined, or controlled is dangerous and irrational. So we strive to get rid of these aspects of reality. What can be  measured, defined and controlled allows us to do business, and do it much better than anybody did it before.

I think that’s what it is about, in the end: doing business. The end point of this cultural arc is the complete destruction of all patterns of thought and belief which aren’t capable of what we define as rational analysis. They are useless at best, and dangerous at the worst. Knowledge will be what can be understood through measure, meaning will revolve around useful definition, and the edifice so created will be subjected to whatever kind of control is appropriate in the circumstances. A wholly commercial utilitarianism.

Like most cultural arcs, the process is unlikely to be completed, so I'm not despondent. How the process will be interrupted, I can't say. We can trace it back in the west as least as far as the Spanish conquest of the Americas. What they wanted was gold, and the souls of the indigenous population. Having custody of their souls through induction into the Catholic Church made it easier for the invaders to operate in strange and sometimes hostile territories. What happened to the social and material culture of the Americans was not a matter of importance; it was described by some of the priests, but it was not understood. As far as the Spanish were concerned, there was nothing to understand.

Since then our history has consisted largely of the struggles between competing empires and their pursuit of commercial gain. It is easier to engage in this struggle if the cultures being overrun and assimilated are thought to be irrational or of no worth.

Imperial struggle does not always result in the complete destruction of patterns of belief and material culture. But sometimes, as we can see happening now in the Near east, the absolute destruction of material culture, and all knowledge of what went before, is on the imperial agenda. The intention is that there will be one winner, and one model of reality. Isaac Newton did not start this process, but by making it possible (and profitable) to understand the objective world as real and a place to be understood through mathematics and calculation, he provided the tools.

The Nature of Reality (Berkeley)

I’ve chosen to look initially at the philosophical outlook of Berkeley through public criticism by Bertrand Russell.*¹ He was born in Ireland in 1685, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin when he was twenty-two years old. What was peculiar about his philosophy was that he denied the existence of matter, and in fact the reality of the objective world. He argued that material objects had existence only in so far as they are perceived by the viewer.

The obvious criticism of this theory is that if perception is the only thing which gives objects their reality, then when we are not looking at them, they should not exist.

‘To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no-one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his opinion, a weighty argument for the existence of God.

His principal philosophical concerns were expressed in a small number of works written before he was twenty-eight years old. These concerns resemble remarkably those of ancient priestly interest which is a focus of the middle chapters of this book. His works were ‘A New Theory of Vision’ (1709); ‘The Principles of Human Knowledge’ (1710); and ‘The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous’ (1713). The last of these is the one which presents the argument against matter. Russell considers that the first of these dialogues and the beginning of the second present the main aspects of the theory, and supplies a useful summary of the argument. This summary is reproduced here. Russell feels that Berkeley:

‘advances valid arguments in favour of a certain important conclusion, though not quite in favour of the conclusion he thinks he is proving. He thins he is proving that all reality is mental; what he is proving is that we perceive qualities, not things, and that qualities are relative to the percipient.’²

There are only two characters in the dialogue, Hylas and Philonous,*³ The former represents educated common sense, and Philonous, represents Berkeley himself. Shortly after the opening remarks,

‘Hylas says that he has heard strange reports of the opinions of Philonous, to the effect that he does not believe in material substance. ‘Can anything,’ he exclaims, ‘be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as matter?’ Philonous replies that he does not deny the reality of sensible things, i.e. of what is perceived immediately by the senses, but that we do not see the causes of colours or hear the causes of sounds. Both agree that the senses make no inferences. Philonous points out that by sight we perceive only light, colour, and figure; by hearing, only sounds; and so on. Consequently, apart from sensible qualities ther is nothing sensible, and sensible things are nothing but sensible qualities or combinations of sensible qualities.’

Philonous now sets to work to prove that ‘the reality of sensible things consists in being perceived’, as against the opinion of Hylas, that ‘to exist is one thing, and to be perceived is another’. That sense-data are mental is a thesis which Philonous supports by a detailed examination of the various senses. He begins with heat and cold. Great heat, he says, is a pain, and must be in a mind. Therefore heat is mental; and a similar argument applies to cold. This is reinforced by the famous argument about the the lukewarm water. When one of your hands is hot and the other cold, you put both into lukewarm water, which feels cold to one hand and hot to the other; but the water cannot be at once hot and cold. This finishes Hylas, who acknowledges that ‘heat and cold are only sensations existing in our minds’. But he points out hopefully that other sensible qualities remain.

Philonous next takes up tastes. He points out that a sweet taste is a pleasure and a bitter taste is a pain, and that pleasure and pain are mental. The same argument applies to odours, since they are pleasant or unpleasant.

Hylas makes a vigourous effort to rescue sound, which, he says, is motion in air, as may be seen from the fact that are no sounds in a vacuum.*⁴ We must, he says, ‘distinguish between sound as it is perceived by us, and as it is in itself; or between the sound which we immediately perceive and that which exists without us’. Philonous points out that what Hylas calls ‘real’ sound, being a movement, might possibly be seen or felt, but can certainly not be heard; therefore it is not sound as we know it in perception. As to this, Hylas now concedes that ‘sounds too have no real being without the mind’.

They now come to colours, and here Hylas begins confidently: ‘Pardon me: the case of colours is very different. Can anything be plainer than that we see them on the objects?’ Substances existing without the mind, he maintains, have the colours we see on them. But Philonous has no difficulty in disposing of this view. He begins with the sunset clouds, which are red and golden, and points out that a cloud, when you are close to it, has no such colours. He goes on to the difference made by a microscope, and to the yellowness of everything to a man who has jaundice. And very small insects, he says, must be able to see much smaller objects than we can see. Hylas thereupon says that colour is not in the objects, but in the light; it is, he says, a thin fluid substance. Philonous points out, as in the case of sound, that, according to Hylas, ‘real’ colours are something different from the red and blue that we see, and that this won’t do.

Hereupon Hylas gives way about all secondary qualities, but continues to say that primary qualities, notable figure and motion, are inherent in external unthinking substances. To this Philonous replies that things look big when we are near them and small when we are far off, and that a movement may seem quick to one man and slow to another.

At this point Hylas attempts a new departure. He made a mistake, he says, in not distinguishing the object from the sensation; the act of perceiving he admits to be mental, but not what is perceived; colours, for example, ‘have a real existence without the mind, in some unthinking substance’. To this Philonous replies: ‘That any immediate object of the senses – that is, any idea or combination of ideas – should exist in an unthinking substance, or exterior to all minds, is in itself an evident contradiction.’

At this point Russell points out that the argument has become a logical one, and is no longer empirical in nature. Berkeley has moved on to a discussion involving ideas, as expressed by Philonous a few pages later, where he says, ‘whatever is immediately perceived is an idea; and can any idea exist out of the mind?’.

After a metaphysical discussion of substance, Hylas returns to the discussion of visual sensations, with the argument that he sees things at a distance. To this Philonous replies that this is equally true of things seen in dreams, which everyone admits to be mental; further, that distance is not perceived by sight, but judged as the result of experience, and that, to a man born blind but now for the first time able to see, visual objects would not appear distant.

At the beginning of the second Dialogue, Hylas urges that certain traces in the brain are the causes of sensations, but Philonous retorts that ‘the brain, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind’.

Russell ends his summary of the argument here, and divides Philonous’ argument into two parts. The first is the argument that we do not perceive material things, but only their secondary qualities, such as colours, sounds, etc. These secondary qualities exist in the mind, and are mental in nature. Russell thinks that Berkeley’s reasoning is ‘completely cogent as to the first point,’ but as to the second, ‘it suffers from the absence of any definition of the word ‘mental’. He relies… upon the received view that everything must be either material or mental, and that nothing is both’.

“When he says that we perceive qualities, not ‘things’ or ‘material substances’, and that there is no reason to suppose that the different qualities which common sense regards as all belonging to one ‘thing’ inhere in a substance distinct from each and all of them, his reasoning may be accepted. But when he goes on to say that sensible qualities – including primary qualities – are ‘mental’, the arguments are of very different kinds, and of very different degrees of validity. There are some attempting to prove logical necessity, while others are more empirical.” [p626]

Russell is not interested in Berkeley’s argument after this, as he explained. This is because he has exposed the same looseness of language which we saw employed by the most celebrated exponents of the ontological argument (and consequently the weakness of the argumentation), and the rest of Berkeley’s argument concerns a theological understanding of the world. We however shall press on, since Berkeley’s theological understanding is relevant to the subject of this book, and it also presents an alternative form of ontological argument, which Berkeley claims shows the reality of God.

The Second Dialogue opens with a discussion which functions to clarify whether the essentially skeptical view of Hylas is the correct response to Philonous’ argument. Philonous [p 166] asks to know ‘whether I rightly understand your hypothesis. You make certain traces in the brain to be the causes or occasions of our ideas. Pray tell me, whether by the brain you mean any sensible thing?’ Hylas confirms that this is his view, and that he cannot imagine what else Philonous thought he might mean. Philonous responds by defining that ‘sensible things are all immediately perceivable, are ideas; and these exist only in the mind.’ They both agree that Hylas has agreed to this much earlier in the argument.

Philonous then argues that, since the brain, being itself a sensible thing, ‘exists only in the mind’, and asks if Hylas would agree whether or not it is reasonable to suppose that ‘one idea or thing existing, occasions all other ideas.’ And that if this is his view, how does he account ‘for the origin of that primary idea of the brain itself?’ Hylas replies that he does not explain the origin of our ideas by a ‘brain which is perceptible to sense; rather he understands the brain being ‘only a combination of sensible ideas’, and that the explanation is by means of another brain which he imagines.

Philonous responds by suggesting that things imagined are as truly in the mind as things which are perceived. Hylas agrees. Philonous points out that Hylas has been ‘all this while accounting for ideas, by certain motions or impressions in the brain’ by means of ‘some alterations in an idea, whether sensible or imaginable,’ and that it does not matter which. Hylas is a little shaken by this, and says that he begins to suspect his own hypothesis.

A clue is presented as to where Philonous is going with this argument, since he says that ‘all we know or conceive are own ideas,’ with the exception of ‘spirits.’ And if we do not conceive it, then we ‘talk unintelligibly,’ instead of forming a reasonable hypothesis’. Hylas now crumbles, and says that he ‘now clearly see it was a mere dream’ to argue in terms of motions or impressions in the brain. Philonous responds by saying that ‘this way of explaining things… could never have satisfied any reasonable man’ since ‘what connexion is there between a motion in the nerves and the sensations of sound or colour in the mind?’ He agrees with Philonous that he is satisfied that no sensible things have a real existence. He also agrees the he is clearly a skeptic.

Philolaus then embarks on a long paean to the glories of the sensible world and its orderliness:

‘Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth, to all those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and situation of the planet, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes ever known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas around the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of Nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! How magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be scattered throughout the whole azure vault!’

Philonous is appealing here to the heavens as a representation of the divine, whose uniformities point to something beyond the appearance. He says to Hylas that he ‘must call imagination to his aid,’ since ‘the feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumberable worlds revolving round the central fires [the stars]; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in endless forms.’

This is not a metaphorical appeal. Berkeley has introduced the notion that reality as it is represented to us is not simply the more or less complex response of the human brain to sensory data, but is a series of representations which are associated with cosmic ‘all-perfect’ mind:

‘Neither sense nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art and force linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought!’

Both Philonous and Hylas by this point share the view that sensible things exist in mind only. Up to this point however, the view of Hylas has been a profound skepticism about reality, and our capacity to know it. By contrast, here Philonous shows, on the basis of the same evidence, that a quite different conclusion can be drawn, if the intellectual frame is changed. Philonous then attacks the skeptical position in general:

‘What treatment then do those philosophers deserve, who would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should those priciples be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this skepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of sense?’ Hylas is not impressed, and is not converted to Philonous’s outlook. He says that his comfort is that Philonous is ‘as much a sceptic as I am’. Philonous disagrees, which strikes Hylas as meaning that Philonous agreed all along to the premises of the argument, but is now denying the conclusion, leaving Hylas ‘to maintain those paradoxes’ which Philonous led him into.

Argument and evidence however do not by themselves lead to single and unambiguous conclusions. We arrive at conclusions only by the properties and processes of mind, and on the basis our notions and expectations. Philonous denies that he agreed with Hylas ‘in those notions that led to skepticism.’ He argues that Hylas ‘indeed said, the reality of sensible things consisted in an absolute existence out of the minds of spirits, or distinct from their being perceived.’ And, consequent to this vue, Hylas is ‘obliged deny sensible things any real existence’. And that, according to his own definition, he is therefore a professed sceptic. But Philonous says that he ‘neither said nor thought the reality of sensible things was to be defined after that manner.’ Instead he says that to him it is evident, for the reasons that Hylas allows, ‘that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit.’ And so he concludes that it is not the case that they have no real existence, ‘but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist’ [Berkeley’s emphasis]. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent spirit who contains and supports it.’

This is an interesting proof of the reality of divine Being, which differs from the other arguments we have looked at. Berkeley clarifies that this is not the Christian notion that God knows and comprehends all things. He argues (as Philonous) that ‘men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him.’[p 168]

Hylas objects that this is a footling distinction, saying ‘so long as we all believe the same thing, what matter is it how we come by that belief? To which Philonous replies that they don’t believe the same thing. ‘For philosophers, though they acknowledge all corporeal beings to be perceived by God, yet they attribute to them an absolute subsistence distinct from their being perceived by any mind whatever, which I do not.’ He asks, ‘is there no difference between saying, there is a God, therefore he perceives all things: and saying, sensible things do really exist; and if they really exist, they are necessarily perceived by an infinite mind: therefore there is an infinite mind, or God. This furnishes you with a direct and immediate demonstration, from a most evident principle, of the being of a God.’

Again Berkeley returns to the judgement that men make about sense data, which is not always the same, though the evidence is the same. As Philonous he says that ‘Divines and philosophers had proved beyond all controvery, from the beauty and usefulness of the several parts of the creation, that it was the workmanship of God. But that setting aside all help of astronomy and natural philosophy, all contemplation of the contrivance, order, and adjustment of things, and infinite mind should be necessarily inferred from the bare existence of the sensible world, is an advantage peculiar to them only who have made this easy reflexion: that the sensible world is that which we perceive by our several senses; and that nothing is perceived by the senses beside ideas; and that no idea or archetype of an idea can exist otherwise than in a mind.’

Berkeley regarded this as a powerful argument against atheism. Hylas says that ‘some eminent moderns’ entertain a notion of ‘seeing all things in God’, (a reference in particular to the French scholar Malebranche) and gives detail in response to questioning by Philonous. Hylas says that these men conceive that the soul being immaterial, ‘is incapable of being united with material things, so as to perceive them in themselves, but that she (the soul) by her union with the substance of God, which being spiritual is therefore purely intelligible, or capable of being the immediate object of a spirit’s thought. Besides, the divine essence contains in it perfections correspondent to each created being; and which are for that reason proper to exhibit or represent them to the mind.’

Philonous is not impressed with this argument, in that he argues it makes a created world ‘exist otherwise than in the mind of a spirit’. This is because, as he has said, ‘nothing is perceived by the senses besides ideas.’ He does not share the view with Malebranche that there is an absolute external world. According to Philonous, Malebranche ‘maintains that we are deceived by our senses, and know not the real natures or the true forms and figures of extended beings, of all which I hold the direct contrary.’ Hylas thinks however that what Philonous proposes comes near to ‘seeing all things in God’. The response of Philonous is that ‘few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them attentively’ [p169]. He says he is very remote from the view of Malebranche, because Malebranche builds on the most abstract general ideas…though he (Philonous) agrees with holy Scripture, in ‘that in God we live, and move, and have our being’. He explains briefly the difference between his view and that of Malebranche:

‘It is evident that the things I perceive are my own ideas, and that no idea can exist unless it be in a mind. Nor is it less plain that these ideas or things by me perceived, either themselves or their archetypes, exist independently of my mind, since I know myself not to be their author, it being out of my power to determine at pleasure, what particular idea I shall be effected with upon opening my eyes or ears. They must therefore exist in some other mind, whose will it is they should be exhibited to me. The things, I say, immediately perceived, are ideas or sensations, call them what you will. But how can any idea or sensation exist in, or be produced by, anything but a mind or spirit? This indeed is inconceivable; and to assert that which is inconceivable, is to talk nonsense….’

It may be that the objection to the notion put forward by Malebranche is that it depicts reality as something which is perceived as outside the human mind by the human mind, whereas Berkeley does not make this distinction. For Berkeley it is as if his mind is a subset of the divine cosmic mind, perceiving a subset of the ideas in that mind. If he perceives ideas, it is because the cosmic mind wills it.

The ideas which present themselves to Philonous, he argues, ‘it is very conceivable that they should exist in, and be produced by, a spirit; since this is no more than I daily experience in myself, inasmuch as I perceive numberless ideas; and by an act of my Will can form a great variety of them, and raise them up in my imagination: though it must be confessed, these creatures of the fancy are not altogether so distinct, so strong, vivid, and permanent, as those perceived by my senses, which latter are called real things. From all which I conclude, there is a mind which affects me every moment with all the sensible impressions I perceive. And from the variety, order, and manner of these, I conclude the Author of them to be wise, powerful, and good, beyond comprehension.

Philonous emphasizes here that he is not saying that he sees ‘things by perceiving that which represents in the intelligible substance of God. This I do not understand; but I say, the things by me perceived are known by the understanding, and produced by the will, of an infinite spirit.’ So his objection is as I suggested, and he is not simply seeing what is ‘in’ God.

Beyond this, the Second Dialogue deals with Malebranche’s occasionalism, which sees the physical world as a place where God has the occasion to create motion and change, and also deals with ideas of substance.

1 Russell, Bertrand, The History of Western Philosophy, Chapter XVI, p 623 ‘Berkeley’

2 Op cit. p624

3 ‘Philonous’ is a composite of two Greek words, meaning ‘lover of mind’.

4 This information must have come from experimental data.