A Sense of Divinity - Descartes and Kant

The fourth programme of Adrian Moore's 'A History of the Infinite' (BBC R4, 2016) discusses the views of Rene Descartes in the sixteenth century, and also the views of philosophers from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. I haven’t added up the number of centuries of thought which have not been discussed at all, but so far argument has been drawn from the sixth century B.C.E. (Pythagoras) fourth century B.C.E. (Aristotle, Zeno), the third century C.E. (Plotinus), the 13^th century C.E. (Aquinas), and the 16^th century C.E. (Bruno). Which is a journey of around twenty centuries. 

It isn’t that there is nothing to say about the idea of infinity during those long centuries, but that where Moore is going determined his selection of evidence and argument. He wants to talk mainly about the role and history of infinity in mathematics and in physics, and the fascinating paradoxes and problems which later investigation has thrown up. And a little about religious faith and the infinite. The first episodes are therefore a necessary introduction to set the scene.  

As he puts it in the text introduction to this episode, 'we have arrived at a time where people think about these things as we now do.' A telling statement, which hints at the richness and strangeness of the unexplored territory between the sixth century B.C.E. and the sixteenth century C.E., and that most of it is best skipped over as quickly as possible. It also lets us know that he has a normative view of human thought, and that what he thinks is rational and reasonable is mostly to be found in modern times. His is the Enlightenment agenda, which he mentions during this episode. 

Descartes famous ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ (‘I think therefore I am’) is mentioned in the context of Descartes massive reduction of all the ideas and beliefs which he could accept unequivocally as true. He engaged in this reduction in order not to rely on tradition and authority, but on the intellectual resources available to the finite human mind. The question of whether the infinite can be grasped at all by the human mind is discussed, since we cannot see it or touch it. It is hard for us to know it, because it is the infinite. Descartes is quoted as saying that you cannot put your arms around a mountain as you can around a tree. So our knowledge of the infinite is necessarily less intimate than our knowledge of finite things.  

In the next part, the relationship between Descartes confidence in his own existence and capacity to think (expressed in the ‘cogito’) and his understanding of the infinite nature of God, is less than clear. It is true that Descartes suggested that he might have an idea of an infinitely perfect, infinitely powerful God because God put that idea into his mind. That might be the case. Alternatively, it may be that you as a finite being do not have to have an intimate acquaintance with the infinite in order to understand what you are talking about.  

Moore does not use the expression which Descartes employed to explain why it was not necessary to have intimate knowledge of something in order to have a useful and intelligible idea of what it is. He used ‘clear and distinct’ idea to indicate when he had such a useful and intelligible notion of what he was talking about. Later, Bertrand Russell would reformulate the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (in his Problems of Philosophy). So, by ‘clear and distinct ideas’ about God Descartes is relying on a description of what is, which means that he could be sure what he meant, and that his idea of God was a rational idea.  

In fact, Descartes idea of his own finite reality was dependent on his certainty of the reality of an infinite God. If he could conceive of such a God clearly and distinctly, then it was likely that such a God was real. 

Moore skips on to the second half of the eighteenth century, mentioning Berkeley (‘there is no such thing as the 10,000 part of an inch’ is all that is said), and Hume also, in connection with the indivisibility of reality (the disappearing inkspot when seen from sufficient distance, which is a matter of perception and experience rather than indivisibility per se). Berkeley was an idealist philosopher, who held that the only reason the world is perceptible is because it is held in the mind of God. He also denied materiality, at least as a metaphysical concept. 

Finally Moore discusses a narrow aspect of Kant’s understanding of the idea of infinity. This final part of the episode represents a highly misleading understanding of Kant. 

Moore argues that Kant agreed with Descartes that we have a clear idea of the infinite (the nearest he gets to the Cartesian formulation ‘things which are clear and distinct’). But that our idea is limited to what we can experience and perhaps what we can invest faith in. Really? I don’t think it is.  Did Kant say that knowledge is confined to the five senses? And if we don’t understand knowledge this way, we leave solid ground and end up in metaphysics? That is what seems to be suggested at this point in the series. 

One of Kant’s principal interests was metaphysics, and how we apprehend things and have knowledge of them. Hume’s empiricism was one of the things which impelled Kant to write some of his most important works (The Critique of Pure Reason, and The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics which may Present itself as a Science). It isn’t the case that Kant thought our ideas are limited to what we can experience in terms of the senses, but instead what is intelligible to us is interpreted through the categories of our understanding. He sought to understand shape and form without these things being associated with form possessing scalar values and spatial angles, which are matters of experience. In that he was very close indeed to Plato’s understanding of the Platonic forms. 

Kant, a figure so important to the concept of reason, is quoted as saying that ‘I go beyond knowledge to make room for faith’. It is true that Kant had the idea that rational thought and reason did not have to exclude a life of faith. It had space in which to exist. But it does not mean that Kant thought that faith was important to the life of reason. For Kant, like Pythagoras and Plato, knowledge is not gained through knowledge of sensible things, but is acquired by the contemplation of things which have a transcendent reality. This isn’t something which everyone can do, or will ever be able to do. Since there is an equation between the Divine and the Infinite, what Kant is doing is leaving space for some sort of understanding of the Divine for those who will never have a genuine understanding of transcendental reality and the Infinite. He is not arguing that faith creates a functional connection with the Infinite.

Karl Lōwith wrote that, in his book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant had

interpreted the whole history of Christianity as a gradual advance from a religion of revelation to a religion of reason…. It is the most advanced expression of the Christian faith for the very reason that it eliminates the irrational presupposition of faith and grace.    

Moore then turns to Kant’s conception of the moral law. Aspects of the life of the mind which put us in contact with the infinite are about our reason, our rationality. Our reason enables us to grasp the moral law, which gives us infinite dignity (since we are rational beings). He says that “the moral law is what ought to direct us in all we do, with infinite respect granted to fellow rational beings”.

Which explains little. The origin of Kant’s moral law may be the idea that the life of reason, and rationality itself (as he defined it) is about connecting with the infinite. If man is truly rational, then he is connected with the Infinite (the ancient concept of the soul, as discussed by Plato, is related to this idea). But we need to accept Kant’s understanding of what reason is, and not distort it by saying knowledge is obtained through the five senses. Through this distortion, what Moore is left with is the Calvinist notion of a ‘sensus divinitatis’ (sense of divinity).  Which is a poor substitute for the kind of engagement with divinity which was understood to be possible in the ancient world. Such engagement was not achieved through knowledge of the world of the five senses or space and time.

Rewriting the History of the Human Mind: J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being

(Notes on J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being)

The argument of the book is quite technical, but it is easy to explain the nature of the argument, and why I came to write it. 

I studied ancient history and languages at UCL as a mature student in the early 1990s. Before deciding to study ancient history, I had a long standing interest in both art and philosophy, and in the art and thought of the European renaissance. I read the two volume edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough in 1987, and was struck by the fact that the idea of ‘Being’, which connects ideas of magic and religion in the European renaissance, principally among the platonists (Ficino, etc), was not discussed. At all. Not even to dismiss any notion of its importance as an idea.

I found this omission to be very strange. Being and its close partner ‘plenitude’ was important enough a cultural idea for A. O. Lovejoy later to later write about its extensive history in the west through two and a half millennia (The Great Chain of Being, 1936).

Frazer was extremely well read, and it seemed impossible that he did not know or understand the importance of the idea of Being in the history of civilisation.

Most readers of Frazer read The Golden Bough, and none of his other writings. At the time I knew of no other works. I wondered what else he had written, and if he had perhaps discussed the idea in another book. In which case the omission of a discussion of Being in the Golden Bough might be explained. Since I’m discussing thoughts about Frazer which occurred to me in 1987, there was no internet to search, so I did a trawl through his publications in the catalogue of the National Library of Scotland (I was living in Edinburgh at the time).

And there it was in the catalogue: ‘The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory’. A slim book emerged shortly afterwards from the stacks, first published in 1930, close to the end of his long career.

Frazer wrote this text as an essay in 1879, to compete for a fellowship at Cambridge. He won, and it is not surprising that he did. The essay is an extraordinary piece of work, and a tour-de-force by a twenty-four year old. It was clear from a cursory study of it that he knew the work of Plato inside out.

Plato of course represents the nominal beginning of the articulate discussion of Being in the western tradition. So Frazer certainly did know something of the history of the idea of Being, and the importance it formerly had in the ancient world. And long before he began to write The Golden Bough.

So the mystery had deepened. He knew Plato’s arguments about Being and the importance of these for a philosophical understanding of the world. And he also knew, or should have known, that Plato had defined two different kinds of magic in the Laws, one of which was explicitly drawn from the idea of Being itself (the passage is quoted in the book).

I engaged with the argument of his essay very closely. And it became clear what he was doing. There are three major themes in the essay. The first of these themes is how the human mind understands objects and ideas which are presented to it. As a disciple of John Locke, he understood human thought in terms of the association of ideas, which was one of Locke’s major contributions to philosophy. So when Plato spoke of ‘Being’ and related concepts, Frazer understood him to be falsely imagining that, what he could conceive of, therefore had some kind of objective reality. As a result, he was converting a discursive epistemology into a false ontology. Plato made this ‘mistake’ over and over again.

A second major theme of Frazer’s essay is the notion that Plato did not have a logically coherent and doctrinal definition of Being at the time he was writing his dialogues. Hence, the apparent changes in Plato’s point of view when dealing with questions concerning ultimate reality, can be explained in terms of a process of development. In short, he changed his mind, according to where he was in terms of his intellectual progress. As a result, much of Frazer’s essay is critically concerned with the contemporary discussion of the order in which the dialogues were composed. This order was supposed to be established on the basis of style, and the sequence in which various questions in the dialogues were discussed and apparently dismissed. One of these questions involved the plausibility or otherwise of what Frazer called ‘Plato’s Ideal Theory’ (his theory of the Forms). Then as now this procedure was inconclusive, and the order of dialogues proposed by Frazer is as problematic and unconvincing as any other which has been proposed.

The third theme does not occupy much space in his essay, since his conclusion is that the whole subject of the idea of Being is not worth discussing, since, as he says, ‘nothing can be predicated of Being’.

This is a staggering assertion, given the amount of words which have been written on the idea of Being over the past two and a half thousand years. Frazer takes his cue for this both from Locke’s doctrine of the association of ideas, and from the apparently unresolved questions about Being which appear in the Platonic dialogues. For Frazer, there is simply nothing to say on the question of the reality of Being.

This nearly clears up the mystery. But it leaves us with another mystery. It is one thing to come to the conclusion that nothing sensible can be said about the nature of Being; it is another to then entirely ignore the discussions about Being which had been taking place across the entire period of time covered by The Golden Bough, and also to ignore the fact that the nature of Being had in the past been understood to underpin ideas about magic and religion.

Not only did he not engage with these ideas, he wrote about the human race as if there never had been an idea of Being in support of the phenomenal aspects of human culture.

The consequence of this is that, for more than forty years, what Frazer was writing was a species of literary fiction, resulting from a Lockean reinterpretation of the evidence. Thus, The Golden Bough is essentially a study of human culture, with one of its most important and perennial features written out, and replaced with another understanding of how things came to have meaning: the idea that the vastness of human experience was, for the most part, built on mistaken notions of sympathy and contagion.

***

An early samizdat-style text of Thomas Yaeger’s J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being was available on the web for about six years as a series of linked HTML files, from January 1999 to 2005. This is the first time it has been formatted as an eBook, and given a formal commercial distribution.

Title: J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being

Author: Thomas Yaeger

ISBN: 9781310105470

Published by the Anshar Press, April 4, 2016

Format: ePub format eBook

Size: 23 thousand words. 

Title of this article amended Jan 24 2017, to more clearly distinguish it from another more concerned with the philosophical background to The Golden Bough. TY.

Destroy Nineveh! Wiping Out the Past

A dialogue concerning the writing of history, the study of ideas and cultural patterns through time, and the role of religion, ideology, politics, philosophy, and the human psyche, in our changing understanding of the past. The discussion is set mainly in Berlin between 2001 and 2016. Two extracts from this dialogue in six parts (parts two and three) were posted in September 2016 under the title 'A Berlin Conversation'. A third extract was posted on October 21, 2016.

Below are links to extracts from the book.


Part One Paradigms, History, and Interpretation

Part Two Facts, Knowledge, and Rationality

Part Three Philosophy, Divinity, Normalisation

Part Four Esoteric Knowledge

Part Five Scholars and the fabrication of the past

Part Six Burning Books, Burning people: Ideology and Power

No publication date has been assigned for the formal publication of this book. Information about the publication details will be posted on this page when available.

Is Plato's Ontology False?

An extract from the book J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, which was published as an eBook on April 4, 2016. Available from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Inktera etc. Not currently available from Amazon. The extract is presented here without the footnotes:




Section Eleven

11.1. We now turn to examine what can be inferred of the nature of the ultimate reality (Being) as conceived by Plato, given the limitations of our intellectual tools.

11.2. Ultimately there must be a point of contact between the formal cause and the maker of the universe: this however, as is well known, is not an easy matter to disentangle in Plato. As he says at Tim 28c, "... to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed..." Elsewhere the ultimate root of reality is spoken of as the form of the Good. It is spoken of as fully knowable, capable of apprehension by the reason alone. The difficulty of knowing it appears to be a matter of intelligence, of discerning it as the universal among the particulars of the sensible world. It is the eternal and unchanging.

11.3. Yet it turns out that it cannot be fully known: reality is always beyond any description, any categorization we employ to define it. As we rise through the Forms it remains as far distant as ever, eluding any attempt to know it: when it turns out that the Real necessarily participates in the world of change, it is necessary to postulate that reality embraces both the changing and the changeless at the same time. It is thus a paradoxical matrix, for the Forms participate in Not-being as well as Being, and are all around us: the division between the realm of intelligibles and sensible form has broken down.

11.4. Is this a problem of epistemology only? Thus far the major distinction between the realms is that whereas we can conceive of a form of the Bad, such a notion is not given a formal reality by Plato since it is regarded as an absence of Good. Yet when it is shown that the intelligibles must be subject to change and to participate in Not-being, it cannot be argued that there is a clear distinction between the epistemological and ontological realms. Are we then to say that, after all, Plato confused epistemological and ontological categories? This however would be to presume that it is reasonable to make an absolute distinction between the epistemological and ontological worlds: to presume that they are not inextricably bound up with one another. Naturally if both the Forms and sensible objects possessed of souls and reason owe their "existence" to a single substrate of reality (whatever that might be), at some point they must be in contact with each other and to show formal resemblance. However, although in practice things said about the Real are drawn from the categories of our knowledge, we can only say that Plato projected one into the other if his final definition of the Real is apprehensible within the categories of knowledge. Since the Real is apparently beyond our capacity to know, though the argument is carried out with epistemological weapons, using subjective categories, Plato's ontology ought to be beyond a mere projection of the categories of knowledge.

11.5. The ultimate reality, whether it be termed the form of the Good or given another necessarily inadequate name does not reside in space - in fact the notion that things have a place is described as "a kind of bastard reasoning": we dimly dream and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place, and that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the Heaven is nothing*[76].

11.6. In the Phaedrus *[77] Socrates speaks of the region above heaven,

never worthily sung by any earthly poet:

It is, however, as I shall tell; for I must dare to speak the truth... the colourless, formless*[78], and intangible truly existing essence, with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this region and is visible only to the mind...*[79].

11.7. At Cratylus 424 we find that shape is not to be admitted. Frazer's remark that "it is impossible for us to accept the Platonic theory of causation, because it depends on Plato's fundamental error, the bestowal of objective existence on subjective abstractions"*[80] is thus virtually unfathomable. Whatever the nature of Plato's theory of causation might be, it is increasingly clear that his notion of reality bears no resemblance to that implicit in Frazer's critique. A reality which apparently admits of no qualities and quantities which might be apprehended through sense and known by intelligence, has no point of contact with a theory of knowledge except at the point where that theory breaks down: That is to say, it is a reality arrived at as the result of a theory of knowledge being extended to the point of the collapse of its integrity. It is not a reality established by an epistemology whose explanatory power is refined to the ultimate degree: the Platonic reality is known through the bankruptcy of the theory of knowledge*[81].

11.8. The implication of an ultimate reality beyond any human categorization except identity with itself*[82], which nevertheless cannot be spoken of as unchanging is that, for analytical and practical purposes, all the possible categories of knowing are contingent and relative; and likewise, all attempted descriptions of the nature of its Being. The nature of reality is forever beyond our capacity to know on the one hand, and on the other, it is itself beyond any possible self-definition, not because it does or does not change, but because it embraces the all of which both change and the unchanging are illusory substrates.

11.9. Reality, in short, if it is to be described at all, must be conceived of as an absolute collapse of all possible categories, both of knowing and of being. All space, all time, all possibility resides here, in no place, at no time, beyond all conception, all manifestation. It is simply whatever it is. If we knew it fully the knowledge would be meaningless to us. And what we can say we know of its nature isn't really knowledge*[83]

11.10. The idea of the Form of the Good therefore, is necessarily simply another device in Plato's armoury of likelihoods. Reality, as the ultimate categorical collapse (we have to give it some useful description), if it resembles anything at all within our experience, anything which supplies a concrete image to the conception, must closely resemble chaos - at the extreme of its nature it is forever beyond ordered interpretation.