Writing and permanence

1. The flesh was made word

In Karen Blixen's book Out of Africa she tells of an occasion when a local man, Jogona Kanyagga, needed a written account of some events in his life for a legal case. She says that she wrote down what he wanted and read it back to him. She then explains how he saw the status of the document at the point where she got to his name:

"I had created him and shown him himself: Jogona Kanyagga of life everlasting. ... Here was something which Jogona Kanyagga had performed, and which would preserve his name for ever: the flesh was made word and dwelt among us full of grace and truth."

Blixen goes on to say that this is what happened with the gradual introduction of writing as a routine act performed by people generally, and not just by professional letter writers. She adds that it appeared to have been much the same when writing spread in Denmark a century earlier. She identifies a phenomenon shared across humanity, not one specific to Africa or to colonies.

2. How is permanence possible?

The occurrence of natural events, the existence of people, and the performance of deliberate actions, will leave traces. By "traces" we shall mean not merely consequences, but consequences from which facts about the past might be discerned.

These traces will decay in time, lapsing into mere consequences from which facts about the past can no longer be discerned. Detail is lost, connections with other traces that provided important context are broken, and so on. Sometimes the time is very long. Witness how far back geologists and palaeontologists can go. But their accounts of the distant past are sketchy. They cover some major events, which is not surprising because such events are more likely to leave substantial traces. (This is however not to equate being major with leaving substantial traces long after the event.) But most minor events, and some major ones, will be omitted from accounts written now. And any given trace is bound to decay eventually.

Writing, on the other hand, can preserve traces for as long as there are intelligent beings. The materials used will decay, like everything else physical, but recopying is in principle always an option. The option may not be exercised. Plenty that has been written down has been lost for ever. But the option is there.

Writing is special in this respect because the significance of marks on a medium is given by rules of syntax and semantics that are abstract, that latch on to a limited range of features of marks on media, and that are separate from the documents that rely on them. Moreover, while the rules are written down in various places, their content is not only in practice accessible independently of any particular instantiation but logically independent of all extant instantiations.

It is a tricky question whether the rules would be accessible in practice without any instantiations. It has been possible to recover at least some of the rules for writing in lost languages, but there is likely to be some connection with preserved languages, as when Linear B was decoded on the basis that it was a form of Greek. And what is recovered is unlikely to be a comprehensive set of rules.

We do not claim that even a comprehensive set of rules would suffice to pin down the precise meaning of every text. (Pinning down might for example be defined operationally by an ability to translate faultlessly from one language to another, or at least faultlessly to the extent not prevented by a lack of perfect synonymy between expressions in the two languages.) But that is not what matters for the purpose of the mere endurance of texts. What matters is that the rules are applied to a limited range of features of texts, and other features would not need to be copied. A copy will be an exact copy, so far as the meaningful content goes, because the features that need to be the same in order for a copy to be exact are for a given language limited in advance by a finite upper bound on their number. (One would not need to establish a least upper bound for this to hold, although one might happen to do so.) Typically what matters is the selection made of letters drawn from a finite alphabet. The font and the spacing may change when copies are made, but such changes are in many languages irrelevant to the meaning. And in languages where they do matter, one can define the artistic features that matter and take care not to change them, while being free to change other artistic features.

What about visual art, such as paintings? It would certainly be possible to make copies indistinguishable to the human eye. But there might be changes indistinguishable from one copy to the next in a chain which led to an example late in the chain being easily distinguishable from one early in the chain.

Writing also differs from visual art in the clarity and the stability of conventions of interpretation. Syntax and semantics are much better defined, and much more stable, than the conventions by which messages may be conveyed by works of art. So even exact copies of works of art could come to convey different messages over time much more easily than would be the norm for writing.

As we have just noted, even a comprehensive set of rules might not suffice to pin down the precise meaning of every text. Conventions of interpretation of writing are not guaranteed to be perfectly stable. Even if the rules of syntax and semantics are recorded in exactly the same form over time, the interpretation of those very rules could change. If the interpretation of the rules never changed, nor would interpretation of records of the rules because it would be under those very rules. But such a self-supporting circle would be no guarantee that there would never be change.

Moreover, sometimes one would make mistakes by interpreting a single sentence in isolation. Knowledge of context, including the rest of a relevant piece of writing, a wider corpus of writing, and the nature and history of the relevant society, may be required in order to get the semantics right. Hermeneutics is not an easy task.

Having said that, one may have a degree of confidence in permanence of meaning alongside permanence of the catalogue of features that matter to the preservation of meaning, typically the sequence of letters but not the font or the spacing. Straightforward descriptions of a person's ancestry, place of upbringing, and everyday actions would only change their meaning if syntax and semantics changed fairly radically, something that would not be likely to happen over the kinds of period of endurance from event to reading of the document about which human beings would care in any more than an academic sense of caring. And the period of endurance would often also suffice for the academic purposes of reading unvarnished reports of actions and events which did not engage in significant interpretation.

Would such limited permanence of meaning, without any guarantee of immortality, be enough to sustain the magic of writing that Karen Blixen describes? It could be. After all, while the duration would be limited, it would still be likely to be a good deal longer than that of interesting and complex natural phenomena (the phenomena themselves rather than traces of them) such as people, because of the difficulty of sustaining any complex entity in the face of entropy. So Jogona Kanyagga could be confident that he had achieved the permanence he required for practical purposes, including any practical purposes of the next couple of generations of his descendants.

3. Truth and permanence

There is a tendency to believe that which is written, unless there is reason to suspect deceit. After all, would someone have committed to a permanent statement on some perhaps uncertain or contentious matter without having full confidence in what he or she wrote? Writing is a more solemn and serious act than speaking, so one might expect people to be more careful about it.

Belief of even a single written source may carry a low risk of error when text concerns scientific matters, the author is an expert, and the specific area of the relevant science is free of scope for reasonable contention (for example nearly all of those parts of physics and chemistry that are far from the cutting edge of research and most of those parts of biology that are likewise distant from the cutting edge, but rather less of environmental sciences or psychology). Economic and political matters are however different. And while it may be safe to believe historical accounts that stick to chronicling events, texts that interpret are a different matter, especially when the history of the relevant time and place remains a matter of political controversy. Texts that merely chronicled events in an individual's life, such as the document that Karen Blixen wrote for Jogona Kanyagga, might likewise be reasonably safe. But when reading texts commissioned by individuals that are about themselves, one would have to be wary of the risk of deception to suit the purposes of the individual concerned.

None of this is to say that texts should be disbelieved by default. But belief without at least a little prior thought would also be unwise. Maybe the written word is on the whole more reliable than the spoken word. But that would not be enough to justify automatic belief.

This is not a serious issue for sensible people. It is easy to avoid being gullible in relation to individual texts. But there is another danger. Suppose that one has an inclination to believe unless stopped by something that comes up in the course of prior thought. And suppose that this prior thought leads one not to disbelieve a statement made in a particular text, but only to hesitate. Then some closely related statement which could give support to and receive support from the first statement comes up in a second text. Again one stops and thinks, but only hesitates. More related statements are found in a few more texts. An easy conclusion would be that while one or two of the different texts might mislead, it is unlikely that they all would, so the gist of the collection of statements as a whole should be believed. The fact that the statements were in writing would facilitate reaching such a conclusion for two reasons. The first would be a general belief that people think carefully before they write. The second would be that one could go back and forth over the statements, in a way that would not be possible with spoken statements, and notice the relations of mutual support.

The easy conclusion that the collective gist should be believed might however be unwise. Especially in political and economic matters, people tend to gather together in echo chambers. Then the different statements would not be independent. Their mutual support might well derive not from the authors having studied the world independently and in slightly different ways, but from a disposition of the authors to consult one another's work.

4. The benefits of permanence

Once thoughts are in an enduring form, some obvious benefits follow. The thoughts are available as starting points for the thoughts of other people, so intellectual progress can be cumulative. The comparison of thoughts is easier if they are recorded in permanent form. This facilitates the formation and application of general concepts. And commerce is greatly facilitated once orders for goods can be sent over long distances and accounts can be kept. Without writing, civilization would not have advanced anywhere near as far as it has.

There is another benefit in relation to records of human actions and their consequences. A written record that has been copied widely is hard to expunge, making it difficult to amend records of the past for political purposes in the way that is portrayed in George Orwell's novel 1984. This benefit is lost when records exist only in a centralised electronic database. But the existence of copies of files in many places, or of archives that record the original versions of pages which might get edited or deleted on the servers that first held them, may give some protection.

5. Plato and the disadvantages of permanence

The benefits of the permanence of writing far outweigh the disadvantages. But there are some disadvantages. Plato identifies two of them in the Phaedrus (274c-277a). He first uses a tale of Egyptian gods to argue that writing undermines memory. Then he contrasts the silent written word, which will not respond to questions, with the living word of speech which can adapt itself to the listener and enter into dialogue.

We may disregard concern over the weakening of memory. It is not that memory has ceased to matter in a world of libraries and web servers. We still need to hold in our heads enough to know where to look for information, and the more we hold in our heads, the more creatively we are likely to think. Rather, the wide availability of a huge range of information stored in books and online means that it is easy to build up the contents of our minds in whatever ways we please, filling in gaps as we notice them. This will in turn assist memory. When we have more information in our heads, we have more ways to connect new information to what we already know. That will aid retention. The written word has turned from being a threat to memory to being an improver of it.

The point about the living word is more serious. There would be a serious loss to humanity if all communications were both in writing and one-way (rather than a dialogue by instant messenger service), so that ideas did not evolve rapidly through interaction and those who sought merely to learn could not quickly clear up their points of doubt or confusion.

6. The moving finger writes

Among the best-known words in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám are these:

The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,  
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit                                                 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,                                                
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

(Quatrain 51, the Edward FitzGerald translation)

The topic is not the permanence of writing but the immutability of the past. And a piece of writing can be washed out, so long as one can track down and destroy all of the copies.

Writing that survives is however always traceable. Documents may be mislaid in archives, but it would be possible to search archives thoroughly so as to find them. The content of a document is preserved on a specific sheet of paper or in a specific computer file, and it is all there unless it has been edited. The physical past, by contrast, cannot cease to exist but may still disappear from view irrevocably. It cannot be changed, and it will have effects that will endure, but it may become impossible to reconstruct past events from their long-term effects or attribute any specific effects to any particular past events.

So the past endures longer than pieces of writing are guaranteed to do. But the past may fade from view in a way that a piece of writing will not, save when all copies are destroyed or the writing becomes unintelligible because the relevant language is lost. What lies behind this contrast?

The endurance of the past, in the sense of its immutability, is given by nature. The progressive inaccessibility of the past is given by a combination of nature as it works between the past and the present, and the powers of discernment we have (another aspect of nature, although this includes nature as it determines the capacities of our scientific instruments). The continued accessibility of that which is written is given by human conventions. And it is very much in our interests to keep those conventions stable, so that information can be kept accessible.

And yet, there is a cost. Data last longer than the timespan over which they should dictate value judgements. We have seen in recent times how people can be attacked, be denied new employment, and even lose their current jobs, for things they wrote years earlier. The mob may attack even if what was written was entirely unobjectionable at time of writing. It is the modern equivalent of a charge of heresy, with punishments that are lighter than in the past but are still severe.

The solution to this problem is for people not to take other people to task for views they expressed in the past. One might take people to task for their past actions. And sometimes expressions of views may count as acts of aggression against specific people, for which it may be reasonable to take people to task. But apart from such cases, a simple renunciation of views should suffice to put a stop to attacks on those who have expressed them, even if there is no tearful apology. And if the views are not renounced, one should stop to ask whether there may actually be something in the views.

If such a solution is adopted, there should be no difficulty in honouring the permanence of writing by acknowledging that the views in question were once expressed, perhaps without that giving rise to any difficulty at the time, and no need to distort our appreciation of intellectual history by seeing aspects of the past through the lens of current objections.

Nor should there by any urge to distort current debate on the relevant issues by identifying views, past or current, which are to be denied dissemination by refusal to publish them or by making them hard to find in online fora. Such denials of dissemination attack the integrity of the corpus of written words, and thereby strike at one of the sources of writing's magical power. Its power rests not just in the permanence of individual pieces of writing, but in the permanence of the corpus. This permanence will never be perfect because there will be continual losses of individual pieces, but it is nonetheless important. One piece of writing can lead the reader on to other pieces, greatly enhancing the benefit of access to the first piece. And when the function of writing is to preserve and pass on knowledge, a stable corpus is clearly vital. One academic paper will mean little in isolation, but the value of a corpus can be immense.

Informal philosophy

1. Introduction

Public philosophy comes in many forms. This post is about discussion groups with topics set in advance. It is based on experience with one such group in Cambridge in England, which I have been involved in running for a few years. The hope is that others who would like similar groups in their areas will take the initiative and set them up.

2. Format

The group meets for two hours each Sunday morning, in a café in winter and by the river in summer. We normally get about 20 people, and we limit the group to this number when we are in the café. We arrange meetings on the Meetup website. That site charges group organisers about £200 ($250) a year. We invite optional small contributions to this cost from members, but otherwise make a point of not charging members at all.

Each week there is a topic announced online in advance, with a short description that may identify specific aspects and include links to other material.

We divide into two or three groups of about 10 people each, so that each group is small enough for everyone to have their say and for everyone to hear what others say.

One person in each group will speak for a couple of minutes to introduce the topic, and then open up the discussion. The format is thus almost entirely discussion, not a lecture followed by discussion. The person who introduces the topic may do some light moderation, and may deliberately introduce new aspects of the topic at various stages in order to move the discussion forward, but otherwise will simply be an ordinary participant. And the aim is to discuss and discover, rather than to win an argument for a particular point of view.

3. Members

The people who attend come from many professions and educational backgrounds.

Few have made any formal study of philosophy, although some rapidly acquire knowledge in specific areas by making online searches for things to read and joining online discussion groups. Their knowledge can be both substantial and sound. At least at the student level, although perhaps not at the professorial level, philosophy is not a discipline in which someone needs a wide area of competence in order to have a narrow area of specialization. And in many areas of philosophy people can say novel and useful things early in their involvement, in marked contrast to the natural sciences and even some of the humanities. This should not surprise us. Much of philosophy, especially ethics and political philosophy but also some of epistemology and even metaphysics, is close enough to everyday life that understanding derived from living, or at least from living in a way that involves reflective thinking, is a large proportion of the understanding one needs. Philosophical concepts and styles of argument are needed too, but only in the immediate area of concern.

The format of meetings, a brief introduction followed by open discussion, means that there is no hierarchy of expert and students. Some members of a group will have expertise in the relevant area of philosophy and knowledge of the literature. The person who proposed the topic and wrote the online introduction may well be in this position. But the expertise of others, derived not from the study of philosophy but from their own professions, can be just as significant in taking the discussion forward. In philosophical questions that concern the legal system, we need to hear from lawyers. In questions of aesthetics, we need to hear from art historians. And so on.

4. Topics

All members are invited to propose topics, reflecting their own expertise or interests. We have for example had "What could unite humanity for the common good?" from someone who had had a career at the United Nations, and "Could we tell if we were characters in a video game?" from a computer games developer. Anyone who proposes a topic is encouraged, although not required, to write the online introduction and to look after one of the groups of ten people, introducing the topic and gently steering the discussion.

While all members are invited to propose topics, much of that work is in practice done by two regular organisers who commit to ensuring that there is a topic every week. But a request to members can yield good results. Six people came forward with topics the last time we asked.

There is a preference for topics to which all can contribute. Ethical and political topics are among the most popular. But many topics in epistemology and metaphysics can work, and even moderately technical topics in the philosophy of science. One just has to think of how to define the topic in a way that will keep it open to contributions from a range of perspectives.

5. Results

What do we get out of our meetings, aside from a pleasant couple of hours on a Sunday?

As so often in philosophical discussions, we do not get a single agreed conclusion. A topic may well be put in the form of a question, so there would be such things as specific answers. But not only do we not progress smoothly towards any particular answer. We treat the question as a way into the topic, a trigger for thought rather than a task for the day.

We can stray off the topic, although we need not always be fearful of that. Sometimes what looks like a diversion turns out to open up a new aspect of the topic. But when a diversion leads to a debate between two or three participants on some narrow issue that is far from the topic, it can be necessary for other members of the group to step in and bring us back to the topic.

What we certainly do get from discussions is a better sense of the shape of the topic, how far it reaches, the issues involved, and how the topic connects to other things in our intellectual lives. The ethics of wealth distribution will link to economics, the epistemology of testimony will link to how web searches are developing, and so on. And we also get plenty to think about individually afterwards.

I mentioned above the contributions of expertise from different backgrounds. Combine the role of those contributions with the fact that we are largely exploring in a spirit of adventure rather than being driven by a desire to find agreed answers, and we find that there is not much sense that philosophy is in charge, with other expertise being brought in merely in its service. The aspiration is to make progress on the topic, in whatever ways may work. We discuss topics in a philosophical style, putting forward examples, making deductions, and considering the use of alternative ways to look at questions. But we do not exclude any contribution on the ground that it is not really philosophy.

6. Practical conclusions

The main message I can give to anyone interested in doing something similar is, just do it! It does require a modest amount of work, but it is quite straightforward and it will be popular.

Those who come from a university context should not expect the technicality that may be found in academic seminars. But that does not render the philosophy that is done inferior. It remains intellectually robust, and does not descend into mysticism.

It should be a great relief to those who have to spend time chasing grants that no funding at all is needed. Even if one uses a service like Meetup,  the annual fee is low enough that it can easily be covered by asking members for minimal contributions. On the other side, this is not a way to make any money. Some people have tried to make such groups into business ventures, either by charging for their services as organisers or by arranging meetings at restaurants which then pay them a commission for the customers brought in. But that really would change the ethos of a group.

There are only two challenges to be faced, and they are both small and manageable.

The first challenge is to find a venue that is free of charge, especially one indoors when the weather demands it. But plenty of café owners will be happy to see a larger number of customers than normal, especially if meetings are held during what would otherwise be slack times such as midweek evenings or Sunday mornings before the large shops open, and especially if one promises to limit numbers so as not to overwhelm the venue.

The second challenge is getting people to propose topics. Once there are enough regular members, volunteers should appear. But sometimes the burden can fall on a few regular organisers. Online philosophical discussion groups can be a good source. So can past examination papers from universities, some of which are freely available online.

That's all for now. I wish good fortune to all who create or join groups like this.

7. Links

Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/

The Cambridge group: https://www.meetup.com/think-and-drink-cambridge/

The sleep and the dream of reason

1. Introduction

In 1799, Goya published a set of 80 aquatints under the title Los caprichos. Number 43 was called El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters). It may be found in many places on the web, for example:

https://eeweems.com/goya/sleep_of_reason.html

As always with worthwhile art, the picture can be read in several ways. In this post we shall explore a few of the thoughts we might have, over 200 years after the picture's creation.

Our focus will be on what may be directly relevant to our current world. We shall therefore leave aside the acerbic comment on the state of politics and society in Goya's own time that is made by Los caprichos as a whole. We do so not because we have no such problems today, but because the problems and the targets of criticism would differ sufficiently to require different lines of attack. More generally we shall not try to deduce Goya's own intentions, nor elaborate on the artistic context. We shall cheerfully take the single picture that interests us out of context. And in our exploration of its messages, we shall reduce those messages to prosaic formulations. We must do so to discuss them, but in doing so we shall inevitably lose the artistic richness of the picture. Indeed, what we say will be based on the picture's title and some accompanying text. We shall not explore the visual detail of the picture itself, but only note that it makes the content of the title and the accompanying text vivid.

2. The title and the text

There is text to accompany the picture. There are some different versions in circulation. Here is one version:

La fantasía abandonada de la razón produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.

Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.

We shall allow this text to guide our thoughts. In particular, we shall use it to separate two different threads that are indicated by two meanings of the word "sueño". It can mean either sleep or dream.

If "sueño" is read as "sleep", the message of the picture's title (but not the only message of the picture itself) would be that it was dangerous to leave imagination to its own devices with no rational control. That reading will lead us to the thread of Enlightenment, which we shall follow in section 3.

If "sueño" is read as "dream", the title could well be read as saying that reason, active in its dream, would itself produce monsters. That reading will lead us to the thread of the perils of reason, which we shall follow in section 4.

If we were to be guided by the text, its reference to imagination's being abandoned by reason would rule out a reading of "sueño" as "dream", or at least require any such reading to involve the stilling, and not the activity, of reason. This would limit us to following the Enlightenment thread. But we need not be bound by the text. We therefore have scope to read  "sueño" as "dream". Specifically, the application of reason might have monstrous consequences when reasoners lacked the imagination to see the monstrosity.

3. The sleep reading

3.1 The need for reason

One reading of the text that accompanies the picture is that imagination can produce wonderful results if it works hand in hand with reason, but can lead us disastrously astray if it does not. That thought would be entirely in line with Enlightenment values, which vaunted reason but did not advocate a Puritan iconoclasm in which there would be only cold reason and no art.

The particular form of going astray that is most strongly suggested is that of being driven to unwise choices by having irrational fears or by the acceptance of superstition, things that could both stand in the way of social and intellectual progress. But there are other forms too. One might for example adopt some pseudo-scientific theory and be diverted from progress in that way. Pseudo-science is not a scary monster to the one who adopts it. It may even be very appealing, because it may offer an easy route to apparent knowledge. But it is still a monster by virtue of its standing in the way of human progress.

3.2 Which should be in charge?

The text speaks of uniting imagination and reason. It does not say whether either of them should be in charge. An Enlightenment approach would require reason to be the one in charge if either were to be. But it would also be open to a partnership in which neither would be in full control, imagination would bestir a reason too dull, and reason would discipline an imagination too wild.

There would still be asymmetry. Bestirring is not the same as disciplining, and only the latter is straightforward to see as a form of control. It is about restraint. In addition, we can see it as amounting to the giving of specific instructions about how far to go in imagination and which topics not to stir up with fantasies (for example because there is no scope for reasonable doubt about conclusions already reached). Bestirring, on the other hand, is about breaking restraints. It is also non-specific as to what may emerge from reason once it has digested some new fantasy. Having said that, to bestir is to reject complacency. In that respect, to bestir is to tell reason in general terms how to work. And in section 4 we shall give imagination a role in guiding reason away from certain avenues that might tempt it.

In order for a partnership of reason and imagination to be satisfactory, it would be important for reason not be be too controlling. Given that the objectives of an Enlightenment mindset include not only the elimination of superstition but also human advancement, imagination must be given scope to push thought forward in unpredicted ways. This is the only way to advance into intellectual territory that is currently unknown. Indeed, reason in a broad sense will see this and will restrain its own impulse to restrain.

Such a broad notion of reason is perfectly compatible with the Enlightenment message of Goya's title. His concern is with the danger of reason in general falling asleep. The sleep of the restraining aspect may be the source of the danger the title identifies, but that does not exclude there being other aspects which, for reasons not indicated by the title, it is important to keep awake.

3.3 How reason might exercise control

One way in which reason might exercise control would be to review the results of imagination's work, discarding some results, lauding others, and saying that yet others were worth further development to see where they might lead. Reason would sometimes make mistakes, closing down some avenues that would in fact have been productive and encouraging work on other avenues that were in fact dead ends. But it would be part of the improvement of reason to reduce the number of such mistakes.

Reason might also guide the development of promising lines in some detail, specifying which aspects needed attention and selecting between possible developments that imagination had so far only sketched.

This raises the question of what we should regard as the talents of reason. In order to fit in with the sleep reading of "sueño" and still to see reason's sleep as problematic for an Enlightenment agenda that seeks the minimisation of error, reason must have a role of criticism. But it might also have a creative role, not leaving all of that to a separate faculty of imagination. Then it could do more than merely select between possible developments. It could suggest some developments and sketch ways in which they could be carried forward, then hand the task of full development back to imagination.

This would blur the boundary between reason and imagination. That would in turn weaken the criticism of pure reason that we shall explore in section 4, the criticism that an absence of imagination would lead reason to make proposals which would have been detected as unacceptable had an imaginative appreciation of how things would be for people played a role. And the warning about uncontrolled imagination we are taking from Goya in this section would not apply to imagination generally, but only to the imagination that was outside reason. The message about the sleep of reason producing monsters would however still be appropriate, because it would apply to the part of imagination that was outside reason when reason was not awake to exercise control. And the part that was outside reason would still be the major part of imagination.

There is a good case for blurring the boundary and admitting some imaginative component to reason. We can see how things may be if we do not blur the boundary by looking at David Hume's comment that "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger" (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2, part 3, section 3, paragraph 6). This remark could only be made on the basis of an implausibly narrow concept of reason. Hume had good reason to use such a narrow concept. He wanted to separate out the role of the passions, and to show that reason with no tincture of passion would get us nowhere. But we can respond that his narrow concept of reason differs from our ordinary concept, which allows us to speak of rational desires and impulses, and to call at least some of them rational because they come from within reason rather than merely because they would pass reason's scrutiny.

4. The dream reading

4.1 The need for imagination in human affairs

Careful reasoning about the management of human affairs can have repugnant consequences, starting with an array of petty controls for the public good and ending with the horrors of communism. In between we have things like bringing up people to be organ donors because the benefits to the organ recipients will be very great, as in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and the film made of it. And at the end of the range that is superficially acceptable but on reflection ethically dubious, we have Condorcet's calculation of the acceptable probability of convicting innocent persons, a calculation that has been characterised as showing "everything that is at once attractive and repellent" about the Enlightenment (Daston, "Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment", page 113).

4.2 How things would be for people

4.2.1 The need for a form of empathy

One aspect of the problem of unbridled reason is that reason might calculate away, with no reality check that was grounded in an appreciation of how certain actions or events would be for individual human beings. Such an appreciation would be a form of empathy. And it would not be adequately characterised as an appreciation of someone's level of happiness such as a scientific utilitarian would like to measure. That would not be enough because how something would be for a person would not be a single measurable feature of his or her mind, and perhaps not even a function of several such features. Maybe it would be emergent from measurable features of the mind, and maybe it would be independent of such features. But in any case, it would not be something that the scientific manager of people or society could grasp without having the empathy that would come from reflection on the experience of human life from the inside. One would need an imaginative leap. It would not need to be fully into the heads of people, but it would have to go as far as grasping how things would be for people if certain changes were made.

Here we may locate one need for imagination to steer reason. In so doing, we read "sueño" as "dream". The rational and enlightened social reformer may be in a dream that reason suffices to give us all the answers. The reformer may be cut off from the human aspect of reality by the fact that the empathy that requires imagination is left outside the narrow compass of the dream, just as many of the practical constraints of reality are left out of actual human dreams.

4.2.2 How imagination might work

We are here asking imagination to draw attention to how things would be for people in general, or perhaps for people with the same cultural backgrounds as those who would be affected by a proposal. (In a mobile world it would be backgrounds in the plural, and one should also consider people from additional backgrounds who might come to be affected in the future.)

Here a problem arises. Imagination would need to range very widely even to identify candidate pictures of how things would be for people of all relevant cultural backgrounds. And a long list of candidate pictures would not suffice. For imagination to keep reason grounded in a useful way, it would have to identify how things would actually be for people and not random ways in which things might be for them. That would be difficult. Even people with the same cultural background as oneself can differ enough for it to be hard to be confident of how something would be for them. But a long list of random ways in which things might be for other people would mean that almost every proposal would be identified as possibly problematic for someone. Then nothing would ever get done.

Fortunately, a goodly proportion of the benefit of imaginative control over coldly calculating reason might be obtained more easily. Simply asking how things would be for oneself would be a way of detecting some dangerous proposals. This would not however be enough if one had an odd personality, or if the proposal would be of benefit to oneself and of detriment to others. Then it would be vital to consider how things would be for other people. But much of the benefit might still be obtained from consideration of how things would be for people with one's own cultural background. This would not always be enough. Some proposals would play out very differently in different cultures. But it would sometimes be enough, because while our cultures differ, we have a great deal in common simply by virtue of being human.

The significance of human commonality can be brought out in another way, arguing it to be necessary rather than sufficient. Martians, with a complete grasp of our neurons but no experience of human life from the inside, would not be able to use imagination in the way we require to keep calculating reason in check. This is a bold claim to make when one is not oneself a Martian, but it is a plausible one.

Although we ask imagination to draw reason's attention to important considerations, and it would have to do so by formulating concerns explicitly, we have also proposed that how things would be for people is not to be computed from measurable characteristics of their minds. If that is so, an appreciation of how things would be is not to be derived solely from a theory of other people's minds. To borrow from the philosophy of mind, a form of simulationism rather than theory theory would be the appropriate conceptualisation of what went on when someone's imagination was discovering how things would be for people. It would however be simulation of feelings rather than of deciding how to act. And there is the proviso that simulation, whether of others or of one's own future self, would not need to do all the work. Theorizing that was grounded in simulation might do the job.

4.3 The acknowledgement of possible error

Another vital element in sensible thought that may get left out of reason's dream world is awareness that one might be mistaken. This omission may well be linked to the omission of imagination, because the thinker may fail to imagine specific ways in which he or she might be mistaken. Such specific ways convey awareness of the risk of mistake powerfully. If someone only has a non-specific general recognition that mistakes could be made, the risk may well be overlooked.

The result of a failure of awareness that one might be mistaken can be a disastrous dogmatism, with counter-arguments to the recommendations reached by narrow reason being dismissed simply because it is thought that the recommendations cannot be mistaken. Dismissal may be effected by using inadequate arguments which are thought to be adequate, or simply by ignoring the counter-arguments.

A rational faculty of the highest quality would not fall into this trap. It would be clear that error was always possible and that dogmatism was therefore inappropriate. But our intellectual capacities are limited. We may be so busy making sense of all the complex data that the world offers us that we fail to explore the scope for error, or even forget it entirely.

For imagination to be effective in drawing attention to specific ways in which reason's conclusions might be mistaken, it would need to be subject to its own form of rationality. It is easy to invent random possibilities for error, but many of them would lack plausibility. Implausible possibilities would easily and rightly be dismissed by defensive reason. It is harder to concentrate on plausible possibilities. Nor would it be enough to generate a vast number of possibilities and rely on the expectation that some would be plausible. Reason would not have the patience to sift through them all.

Here, as in section 3.3, we blur the boundary between reason and imagination. But here it is for a different reason, and the blurring is to build a bit of reason, the bit that identifies plausible possibilities for error, into imagination, rather than as in section 3.3 build a bit of imagination into reason.

4.4 Arts and sciences

So far in this section we have been concerned with the need for imagination in order to provide a reality check on rational social reform. Now we shall turn our attention to the danger of reason's dreaming that it suffices in the arts and the sciences.

There is little danger of reason's dreaming that everything is solved, and that no further progress is necessary. There is greater danger that reason will become set in its ways and will believe that these are the only useful ways. Work in the natural sciences must be conducted like this. In the social sciences and the humanities, the following concepts should be deployed. In the production of art and music, these are the norms of composition to be followed. If reason dreams that it knows how people must work, it may miss out on opportunities to make significant progress. It is imagination that can shake reason out of such a complacency of approach.

The danger is present in all areas of work. But it is not great where it is of the essence of the area of work to define problems and then solve them. The natural sciences, and to a lesser extent the social sciences and the humanities, are like this. The insistence that solutions be found creates its own pressure to consider new ways of working. Imagination is needed to devise such ways, but reason of any sort that would be satisfactory for these areas of work could not get itself into so deep a dream as to ignore the need to consider new ways of working.

The danger of not introducing new ways of working is greater in the creative arts. To take an example from painting, it could have stayed representational. Then it would have missed out both on quasi-representational approaches such as Cubism and Expressionism and on the purely abstract. Its advance would have been sharply slowed, even though it could for example still have progressed into Impressionism, a way of working which in at least some of its forms continued to give priority to accurate, although not precise, representation.

Without occasional doses of inspiration to work in new ways, reason that dreamt it had the right approaches all worked out would move the arts slowly towards producing not living monsters, but fossils. Then the arts might become monstrous caricatures of the glorious enterprises they once had been.

We may also make a connection between the role of imagination in the creative arts and the role of imagination in keeping the work of reason in managing human affairs from straying into monstrous proposals. There, imagination was needed to give a role to an appreciation of how things would be for people. In the creative arts, quality is not correctness in any scientific sense. Rather, it is an ability to speak to people, to bring out and develop what they see in themselves and in others. A non-human artist, one who did not know human life from the inside, would be unlikely to produce much work that would speak to us, although they might occasionally have the good fortune to do so. A human artist who can imagine the responses of people to his or her work has a far better prospect of success. We may add that how something might strike the artist himself or herself is likely to be an inadequate guide. An artist who knows what messages he or she intended to convey will be more likely than others to see those messages in his or her own works. He or she may then fail to see that some of those works will not speak to others.

5. In praise of imagination

One theme we have not discussed so far is the intellectual glory that imagination may allow us to achieve. The text accompanying the picture tells us that imagination united with reason "is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels".

This is plainly true. And sometimes reason should fall asleep and give imagination free rein, before of course waking up and reviewing the results carefully.

Here is a short poem on Goya's picture that I wrote several years ago.

The sleep of reason tempts away from thought
It opens up the doors to let perceive
Such spectres new, in net of fancy caught
That we, in sensing, take of senses leave.
The reason for this sleep we thus behold
It lifts us up from bed to heaven's light
If we knew only that which reason told
Our vision would be empty as the night.

6. References

Daston, Lorraine. "Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment". Proceedings of the British Academy, volume 151, 2007, pages 113-134.

Goya, Francisco de. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. https://eeweems.com/goya/sleep_of_reason.html

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Available in several editions.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London, Faber and Faber, 2005. (A film directed by Mark Romanek was released in 2010.)

The hermetic tradition

1. Introduction

 

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of visiting a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to hermetic philosophy. It is called the Embassy of the Free Mind:

https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/

The history of the hermetic tradition is clearly an intellectually respectable activity. Indeed, the Universiteit van Amsterdam has a centre dedicated to it:

https://www.amsterdamhermetica.nl/

But what about the tradition itself? What should we make of claims made within hermetic philosophy ("hermetic claims" for short)?

We cannot see hermetic claims as on a par with modern knowledge of the sort that gets tested against evidence. The tradition has an important place in the history of the natural sciences, but its claims would be dismissed in any modern laboratory or scientific journal. The people who made hermetic claims of a scientific or quasi-scientific nature were not foolish, but it has turned out that they were mistaken.

In philosophy, the hermetic tradition again has an important place in history. And its influence reached out beyond the tradition to mainstream philosophy, giving the tradition an enduring role such as it has not had in the sciences. Connections can for example be seen between hermetic thought and the work of two mainstream philosophers whose work is of more than historical significance, Spinoza and Leibniz.

To start with Spinoza, while some distinguished interpreters have regarded him as a mystic, the case is far from proven. (Nadler, "Spinoza and Philo: The Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics", gives references to interpreters who see mysticism and argues that this is a mistake. For a different view see Stooshinoff, "Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart: On the Possible Mysticism in Spinoza's Ethical Theory".) Nonetheless some elements in Spinoza's thought, particularly his unification of God and nature and thoughts associated with that unification, are congenial to the hermetic mindset. It is no surprise to find his portrait displayed in the Embassy of the Free Mind.

Turning to Leibniz, it is pretty clear that he allowed his thought to be influenced by the Kabbalistic tradition (Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah). That tradition was at his time and place well entwined with the hermetic tradition.

Having said that, this is a perpetuation of influence and not a preservation of the content of the hermetic tradition. Analytic philosophers are likely to dismiss any supposedly factual content of hermetic claims either as obviously false if made precise enough to be assessed for truth, or as "not even wrong" if not made that precise. They are also likely to dismiss any suggestion that hermetic claims could be used to support conclusions reached outside the hermetic tradition, even if the hermetic claims inspired those conclusions.

We can however continue to see hermetic claims as providing current inspiration, in addition to any inspirational role they might have had in the past. There are two ways in which inspiration might be provided.

The first way is at a high level. Hermetic claims might make people feel more at ease in the Universe. Take for example the doctrine in the Emerald Tablet that is commonly summarised in the phrase "As above, so below". While it is open to many interpretations, it at least emphasises the tight integration of superior powers with the everyday world. And that could be found reassuring, for example by dispelling any feeling that the everyday world was a mere jumble of atoms acting without purpose or direction. (The text of the Emerald Tablet exists in several variants. For one early version see Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, pages 31-32.)

The work of making people feel more at ease in the universe could however be done by any of a wide range of claims, from a wide range of traditions. So there would be nothing special about the specific claims made.

The second way in which hermetic claims might provide current inspiration is at a lower level. Hermetic claims might be used as triggers of thought. Then the specific claims made might matter quite a lot, with other claims not able to lead one down the same paths of thought even though they could lead one down other and equally interesting paths.

One example of claims that might be important in this way is given by Robert Fludd's claims as to how the mind is structured and how we may reach the sensible, imaginable and intellectual worlds, claims that are set out in the diagram commonly known as "the spiritual brain". Such claims could inspire a good deal of thought about our mental faculties, how they related to one another, and what different types of knowledge we might obtain. (The diagram is in Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, volume 2, tractatus 1, section 1, book 10, page 217 in the original 1619 edition. It is conveniently available in many places, for example in Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds, page 70.)

It can be perfectly rational to allow hermetic philosophy the role of inspiring thought. But are there any roles that could rationally be given to hermetic claims which went beyond the provision of inspiration but which did not go so far as to treat the hermetic claims as factual claims that we would have to regard as mistaken? Could there be thoughts that incorporated some of the distinctive content of hermetic philosophy and that had a useful role in reaching or supporting non-hermetic conclusions about humanity or the world?

2. Distinctive content

 

Distinctive content shall mean content of hermetic claims that is not also supported in ways the epistemic respectability of which could not reasonably be contested. (Such ways would include most of the methods accepted in the natural sciences.)

There is for example no support in such other ways for the claim that there is a fundamental agent of creation and change appropriately referred to as "the good", an understanding of which can make sense of a great deal. This claim is, in various and sometimes less explicit forms, conspicuous in the Corpus Hermeticum (Copenhaver, Hermetica; see for example Corpus Hermeticum part VI, pages 21-23).

Logical positivists would dismiss claims like that as having no content, as not being claims at all, whenever there were no empirical means either to verify or to falsify them. But we shall take them to be genuine claims, and see where we can go.

3. Roles in reaching and supporting non-hermetic conclusions

 

Hermetic claims may have various roles in reaching, and perhaps in supporting, non-hermetic conclusions.

3.1 Psychological inspiration

 

Claims may be psychologically important, in that they may be the most effective prompts to reach conclusions. So long as claims played that role only at stages before we arrived at conclusions that were supposed to set out the actual state of the world, there would be no need to regard the claims as correct, and therefore no danger that support for our conclusions would be undermined by the thought that the claims were or might be mistaken.

Even the virtue epistemologist or the reliabilist could allow this much, so long as there was a point before reaching conclusions at which any influence of hermetic thought was washed out so that support for the conclusions had no dependence on the acceptability of hermetic claims.

Having said that, the condition that influence be washed out would be quite a demanding one if we were to base our measure of support for conclusions on factors of the sort to which reliabilists or virtue epistemologists would accord importance. Even the most staunchly externalist reliabilist would not be happy to allow that making use of doubtful claims could be a reliable route to truth. And both virtue reliabilists and virtue responsibilists would deplore the knowing use of doubtful claims, albeit for reasons which would be related but would need to be characterised differently. The psychological role of hermetic claims would need to be circumscribed in order to avoid such objections.

3.2 Implication from hermetic claims to non-hermetic conclusions

 

It would theoretically be possible for hermetic claims to imply non-hermetic conclusions, at least when combined with some other non-hermetic claims. The implication might be as strong as logical entailment, or it might be some weaker relationship under which the correctness of the claims would make it more likely that the conclusions were correct.

This would be a very direct form of support. And if any reliance were placed on it in accepting a conclusion, it would be important that the hermetic claims were at the very least acceptable.

Having said that, no examples of implication that would be robust enough to be of interest come to mind. This is not surprising. The language of hermetic claims is not well adapted to the derivation of specific empirical conclusions.

3.3 Implication from non-hermetic conclusions to hermetic claims

 

A non-hermetic conclusion might imply certain hermetic claims. If the claims were independently appealing, that could give support to the conclusion in two ways. It would show that the conclusion cohered with the claims. And if the implication could be set out by reference to some mechanism in the world which showed how the correctness of the conclusion would give rise to the correctness of the claims, it would enhance the status of the conclusion by increasing the range of things that it explained. All of this would would be so whether or not the implication was as strong as logical entailment, although stronger forms of implication would be at least as good as weaker forms and probably better.

One example of an implied hermetic claim would be the dissolution and re-assembly parts of the claim that composite beings do not die, but are only dissolved into components which are re-assembled into new beings (Copenhaver, Hermetica, Corpus Hermeticum part XII, section 16, pages 46-47). To modern ears this claim, excluding the denial of death, sounds like an obvious implication of well-established atomic theory. What gives it distinctively hermetic content is its place within a wider discourse about the mind and its relationship to God, much of which is far from having any scientific worth.

Alas, it is unlikely that implications to hermetic claims could reliably lend support to non-hermetic conclusions. Hermetic claims are, in respect of their distinctively hermetic content, only likely to be independently appealing if one is already immersed in hermetic thought. There is nothing to draw in the uninterested, who can ignore hermetic thought without any intellectual discomfort or even an unrecognised failure of rationality. For the uninterested, implications to hermetic claims will be of no use as a source of support for non-hermetic conclusions because they will be implications to claims which are not independently appealing.

We should perhaps be glad of this. Suppose that a non-hermetic conclusion did imply some hermetic claim. If that claim were unacceptable, the conclusion would have to be discarded if the implication were a logical one. The conclusion would also be placed at risk if the implication were of some weaker form. But if it is legitimate simply to disregard hermetic thought, taking the view that whatever a hermetic claim may appear to say, it does not really say anything hermetic about the world, such risks would not arise. This move could be made because if hermetic thought were disregarded, the hermetic content of claims would evaporate. Only any non-hermetic content would be left, and that could be handled like any other implication of a non-hermetic conclusion.

3.4 Psychological satisfaction

 

If some hermetic claims were at least appealing, and they fitted together with some non-hermetic conclusion, one might favour both the hermetic claims and the non-hermetic conclusion on the ground of goodness of fit. We have in mind not a defined measure of coherence, but a general feeling of fit.

(For examples of defined measures of coherence see BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, section 5.3; Douven and Meijs, "Measuring Coherence".)

Such fitting together would not provide support in the sense that thinking some propositions to be true may give reason to regard other propositions as true. Rather, connections between hermetic claims and non-hermetic conclusions would go through a human feeling of things making sense which, by virtue of being at a psychological level and the conditions for its arising being dependent on the psychological nature of human beings, would not be probative at the level of the world, truths about which (aside from psychological truths) should have no dependence on human psychology.

To take an example that illustrates the limits of what might be achieved, there are hermetic claims which have been linked to broad-brush versions of conclusions in quantum mechanics. (See for example Powell, "Entangled Minds: How Quantum Theory Echoes Hermetic Thought", an example which also makes connections with chaos theory).

The conclusions of quantum mechanics do not derive any support from hermetic claims, nor do they need any such support. And the hermetic claims do not derive any support from apparently supporting quantum mechanics, since they do not in fact do so in any form of support that would have scientific respectability. Nor are the hermetic claims shown by quantum mechanics to be correct. They are at most shown to be ones that should be accepted, and even that is only achieved if one also accepts that the hermetic way of thinking about the world is appropriate.

While support would not normally be on offer, psychological satisfaction in accepting hermetic claims could be derived from finding a fit between claims and some non-hermetic conclusions. That would suffice to support a positive attitude to the hermetic claims, a willingness to make them parts of one's mental furniture.

To complete the picture, we need to fill out the idea of claims being parts of one's mental furniture. We must not limit it to the acceptance of the claims as factual, because there are many hermetic claims that could not be so regarded, or not with sufficient confidence. But if it were merely the idle entertainment of claims that were never put to work, the claims would have only a trivial role.

Fortunately, there is a third possibility. People can have claims in mind and can use them freely as ways of looking at the world or as analogies. Such things do not explain scientific facts, but they can help to make scientific facts intelligible. It is common for those who explain complicated things to non-experts to say "Try looking at it like this", or to use analogies. Everybody knows that such moves are imperfect, and that if they were taken too far they would lead to the attribution to reality of properties which it did not actually have. But the method is harmless so long as its limits are understood. And it is distinct from the method known as lies to children, in which it is asserted that reality actually does have some simplified form, although that too can be harmless so long as clear warning is given to the students.

4. Humanistic discovery

 

4.1 The nature of the discovery

 

There is something in between psychological satisfaction and learning about the world. This is learning about the human condition in a humanistic rather than a scientific way. What we may say in this area would make sense to other human beings, but there would be no expectation that it would make sense to, for example, a Martian scientist who knew all about our neurons but who had never experienced human life from the inside. What we said would be perspectival. It would not amount to objective facts. And when someone said something on these lines and got the response "Yes, that is how we are", the response would include an element of "That resonates with me" as well as an element of "We agree on the facts".

In this area both classical and Renaissance hermetic thought are likely to fall short of doing much for the modern reader. They are more concerned with the supposed origin and nature of the world at large than with the human condition. One might get round this obstacle by reading what they said about the cosmos as really being about the inner workings of the human psyche, but that would be an ambitious interpretive step.

We can however see a good deal of the sort of thing we have in mind in poetry from several traditions. One leading example is the metaphysical poets of seventeenth century England. And it makes sense to discuss poetic claims alongside hermetic claims. Like hermetic claims, poetic claims can be inspirational both at the level of general attitude and at the level of specific ideas. They can give psychological satisfaction. And they can convey thoughts which we cannot regard as scientific knowledge but which are significant enough to join the furniture of our minds.

(We use "poetic claims" in the same way as we have used "hermetic claims", with a focus on the distinctively poetic content, content that would evaporate if the messages were put into dull prose. And as indicated, we are willing to take poetry from any tradition. There is a twentieth century Italian tradition known as hermetic poetry, but the ways in which it draws on the hermetic tradition do not give us reason to focus on it in particular.)

4.2 Knowledge

 

Might acceptance of some poetic claim about the human condition amount to knowledge? We would need to establish both that there was some well-defined content, and that the subject had or could have had good grounds for believing in the correctness of the content.

4.2.1 Content

 

When we supply information to another human being, we leave out a great deal. If someone asks us the way to the railway station, we may point out the initial direction and ask him or her to take the first turning on the left then the second turning on the right. We do not explain how to recognise a side road, the difference between left and right, or how to decide whether a building in view is the railway station. All that is background understanding which is taken for granted. Likewise, when a chemist describes some novel reaction in a scientific paper, background knowledge of how atoms behave is omitted unless the behaviour is unusual in some relevant way. The author can rely on the expertise of the likely readers of the paper.

How far could something similar be extended to the sort of understanding of the human condition that might be gained by contemplating some poetic claim? The argument would be that our experience of human life filled in enough for the claim to set out something contentful.

The evidence that something contentful was conveyed would be that when someone put forward a poetic claim, the response could easily go beyond "Yes, that is how we are". It could include some development of what had been said, or some qualification of it, or the making of explicit connections with other poetic or non-poetic claims. And the person who first offered the claim could likewise respond to what the second person said. In that way, what the claim conveyed could have a place in a coherent dialogue rather than standing in isolation.

If poetic claims could be placed in dialogues, that would indicate that they had content. We may compare the Frege-Geach problem, in which the ability to use ethical claims in arguments is seen as reason to regard them as having content. The actual content would then be disclosed by a combination of the ordinary meanings of the words used, the things that were said in the claims, and how the claims related to one another and to additional poetic and non-poetic claims.

There would often be some uncertainty about the precise content. What for example should we regard as the content of John Donne's line "No man is an island" (in the poem of that name), or of Goethe's "Im Anfang war die Tat!" (Faust, part 1, line 1237)? Such uncertainty could however be reduced, if never eliminated, partly by continuing a dialogue that remained centred on the poetic claim and partly by going round and round a hermeneutic circle between on the one hand the totality of the poetic tradition and its historical context, and on the other hand what was claimed on a particular occasion.

4.2.2 Grounds for belief

 

The existence of extensive dialogues in which claims fitted together could establish content, but it is very doubtful whether it would give sufficient grounds to believe in the correctness of any of the claims. As opponents of coherentist approaches to truth or knowledge like to point out, it is perfectly possible for all or some of a large and coherent set of propositions to be mistaken together. The prospect of this happening decreases as the amount of contact between members of the set and empirical observation increases, but it does not go away.

Contact between poetic claims and the empirically observed world might be wide in scope, in that the claims could be read as being about all sorts of things, but it would not be at all forceful. In the natural sciences, observations rule. They have the power to demolish theories, because the theories have specific empirical implications. Observations and their interpretation may be to some degree theory-laden, but this does not stop them having very blunt encounters with theories. By contrast, poetic (and hermetic) claims are not nearly so exposed to the risk of falsification by observation. They do not have precise and unambiguous empirical implications. So while the breadth of their scope of contact with empirical observation might help a bit, the lack of force in the contacts would mean that little would be done to reduce the risk of poetic claims forming a coherent but mistaken set. (The same would be true of hermetic claims, and for the same reason.) Coherence would therefore not be worth much as a ground for belief. We would need to look for some other way to justify poetic (or hermetic) claims.

If a claim merely resonated with us, that would not provide sufficient justification to support an attribution of knowledge. Human mindsets are too flexible to provide testing grounds for claims. Indeed, a claim that happens to be in some way appealing may encourage someone to change his or her mindset so that the claim can resonate without conflict.

If however a claim were found to be useful in living, causing us to notice things that we would otherwise not have noticed and to make wise choices when foolish choices had been available, that could help. It could do so because our own lives and our interactions with other people and with the world are only likely to be successful if we get some things right.

Having said that, support given in this way would only suffice to sustain attributions of knowledge if the claims were read in a non-realist way, as claims that it was appropriate to make. If claims were read in a realist way, as saying that the human condition or the world actually was as described in the claims, with nouns in the claims having actual referents which were indeed of the nature indicated by the claims, better support than one could expect to obtain from claims being useful would be needed in order to sustain attributions of knowledge.

The reason is that the usefulness of claims requires only success in understanding oneself at a level which may give rise to effectiveness or contentment, or success in interactions with people and with the world in the narrow field of practical life. That may be good enough to reach a view that it is useful to make the claims, although even then, reliance on usefulness to justify the attribution of knowledge would require a fairly weak reading of "useful", and a correspondingly weak sense of non-realist correctness. It would not have been established that the claims would be useful in the full range of potential interactions with people and with the world, including interactions with which human beings would not normally bother. And it would certainly not suffice to sustain attributions of knowledge on realist readings of the claims. Such attributions would require the actual conduct of all sorts of test which went well beyond the practical concerns of human beings in understanding themselves and in interacting with other people and with the world.

There is another possibility, in which one would not find oneself left with support for a claim to knowledge that was limited to a non-realist reading of the claims known. This additional possibility would arise when claims provided a perspective on humanity or on the world, a Weltanschauung, rather than providing a set of purported facts. If the claims were supported by the usefulness of the perspective in making sense of oneself and in interacting with other people and with the world, that would be ample support for the claims, at least so long as one accepted that it was not established that the perspective would be useful across a wider area than practical concerns with how to live. (There would for example be no support from usefulness in life for the idea that the perspective would be useful in doing physics.) However, neither the claims nor the perspective would be a source of specific propositions that could be regarded as known.

5. References

 

BonJour, Laurence. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1985.

Copenhaver, Brian P. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Coudert, Allison P. Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1995.

Donne, John. No man is an Island. Poem, widely reproduced.

Douven, Igor, and Wouter Meijs. "Measuring Coherence". Synthese, volume 156, number 3, 2007, pages 405-425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9131-z

Fludd, Robert. Utriusque Cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, volume 2. Oppenheim, Johann Theodor de Bry, 1619.

Godwin, Joscelyn. Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds. London, Thames and Hudson, 1979.

Goethe, Johann Wilhelm von. Faust. Verse play, many editions.

Nadler, Steven. "Spinoza and Philo: The Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics". Chapter 9 of Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (eds.), Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Powell, Jordon. "Entangled Minds: How Quantum Theory Echoes Hermetic Thought". Blog post, 25 January 2024. https://hermeticchaos.com/entangled-minds-how-quantum-theory-echoes-hermetic-thought

Principe, Lawrence M. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Stooshinoff, Alexander J. "Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart: On the Possible Mysticism in Spinoza's Ethical Theory". Episteme, volume 29, article 1, 2018, pages 7-20.https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/episteme/vol29/iss1/1/

Thinking this, thinking that

 Introduction

We usually present our knowledge in fragments. We can identify the capital of France, or state the number of quarks in a proton. Sometimes the fragments will be more complex than single sentences. We can for example set out the IS-LM model of an economy, or the replication mechanism of DNA, or the progress through Parliament of a particular piece of legislation. But even a large fragment will have context that is omitted when the fragment is presented in isolation.

Full understanding, sufficient to make intelligent use of a fragment, may require awareness of a substantial context. In our examples this may be awareness that France is a country and that countries have capital cities which are important political or economic centres, awareness of what particle physics is all about, awareness of supply, demand, investment, output and interest rates, awareness of how molecules interact, or awareness of the relevant political system. It is reasonable to present our knowledge in fragments because we can take it that our audience will know enough context, or at least (if we are teaching them) will steadily build it up as the pieces of knowledge we supply accumulate in their heads and are woven together.

There is another kind of context. This is the context of a field of possibilities. It is the context of an indefinite and ill-defined range of things that are not asserted. And it is the context that will interest us here.

This context can be important in different ways, which we shall explore through the thought of four different thinkers. We shall start with Gareth Evans, whose work shows that the ability to have alternative thoughts is required for us to have the thoughts we in fact have. Then we shall move on to Robert Musil, who takes the view that we need to appreciate the existence of a field of possibilities in order to see the actuality of what is the case. Our third thinker will be Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, with a comment on the importance of knowledge of other languages. Lastly, Ludwig Wittgenstein will provide an additional perspective on knowledge of languages.

Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans, in The Varieties of Reference, section 4.3, focused on how a grasp of some propositions required an ability to grasp other propositions of the same nature, rather than focusing on awareness of a context of propositions of any different nature. He pointed out that someone who can have the thought that some object a is F, for example that John is happy, can also have the thought that some other object b is F, for example that Harry is happy, and the thought that the original object a is G, for example that John is sad. (We shall abbreviate the contents of these thoughts in the conventional way as Fa, Fb, and Ga.)

We can detach this idea from Evans's larger project, and make use of it for our purposes. Taking the contrapositive, we can say that if someone could not think that Fb or that Ga, he or she could not think that Fa. He or she could not do so given that the thought that Fa has to be a structured thought in order for it to be the thought that it is. Thinking that Fa involves recognising that an object a and a property F are to be linked. It is not a mere trigger for some automatic response to the presence of F-ness, or even to the presence of F-ness in some form that makes the instance of particular concern to the thinker. The object itself has to be identified and a particular property has to be attributed, casting the object in the role of a carrier of F-ness without reducing it to being nothing more than a carrier of F-ness. To put it another way, "a" in "Fa" is a name, and the use of a name in a thought of the type at issue here involves picking out an object and then attributing some property to that object. The structured nature of the thought is inevitable, and then the contrapositive goes through.

The required context for fragments that is implied by Evans's claim and its contrapositive is at first sight a narrow one. It extends only to alternative combinations of objects and properties. And it seems to be about conditions for the proper use of language in pretty basic ways, rather than being about any rich fabric of knowledge in which a human being might revel.

Evans's implied context does however have the potential to be of broader significance. An ability to pick out different objects implies an understanding of the nature of objects in the relevant field. Having such an understanding is for example easy with individual animals but a bit harder with genera and species of animal. And in some fields, for example particle physics, it requires an ability to think in ways that most of us find counter-intuitive. Moreover, an ability to attribute various properties implies an acquaintance with at least some of the conceptual map for the relevant field.

Robert Musil

At the start of chapter 4 of Robert Musil's novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), we find this: 

Wenn es aber Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, und niemand wird bezweifeln, daß er seine Daseinsberechtigung hat, dann muß es auch etwas geben, das man Möglichkeitssinn nennen kann.

But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Here we have something, the broad significance of which is more obvious than that of what we may extract from the portion of Gareth Evans's work we have highlighted.

We are also moved up a level, from pieces of knowledge to the framework within which one may locate alternatives like those which Evans required (Fb and Ga, to go alongside Fa). At least, we are moved up a level if we take ein Möglichkeitssinn, a sense of possibility, to be not merely an ability to imagine what we do not observe but also an awareness that we are exploring possibilities as possibilities. And we should take the sense of possibility of which Musil wrote in that way. We must do so if the Wirklichkeitssinn, the sense of reality, with which it is paired is to be an awareness that things are in a certain way, and not merely an awareness of some facts that happen to obtain.

In what follows we shall generally substitute "a sense of actuality" for "a sense of reality". This is so as to emphasise the sense that things are in a certain way as awareness of a single second-order fact about the world which we must face if we are not to delude ourselves.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe commented on our grasp of languages:

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. (Maximen und Reflexionen, 91)

He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

This comment takes our discussion in a new direction. Knowledge of a language is primarily a skill rather than a body of factual information. And if other languages were to be context, a fragment of knowledge in the terms of our discussion would be competence in the whole of a single language. Such a competence can be free-standing. Many people are competent monoglots.

While all this is so, there is an aspect of knowing one's own language that brings such knowledge within the scope of the topic that is indicated by our discussion of Evans and Musil. This is knowledge of the language's expressive powers, of its limits, of why it has those powers and limits, and of its existence as a living entity with its own history and potential for future development. Such knowledge may be acquired most easily by seeing how other languages do things differently.

Knowledge of this sort is far less important for everyday purposes than competence. Indeed, outside the scope of poetry or richly evocative prose, its possession may be of little practical use. It is not the knowledge that has been analysed by Michael Dummett in his paper "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?", and by other authors in response to that paper. It is however knowledge that can be valued for its own sake, as well as being useful in relation to some special forms of writing and oratory.

Could one have such knowledge of one's own language other than through knowing other languages? We can imagine a book about a single language that would set out the relevant information without reference to other languages. But while it might cover the ground systematically, it would be a long and laborious read. It would be far more efficient to make use of another language inside one's head and in that way get a feel for points of similarity and difference so as to become a finer user of one's own language. Moreover, picking up points in that way would keep one closer to the activity of using a language that would for most people be the main reason to learn about its powers, limits, workings, history, and potential. Knowledge that is picked up in action has a different flavour to knowledge that is picked up abstractly, even if it would be risky to go so far as to say that it had different content.

We may compare Goethe's remark with what Gareth Evans said. To go on from thinking and saying that Fa to thinking and saying that Fb and that Ga is to discover that one can think and say different things. Doing so brings a fuller realisation of the content of the thought that Fa. One comes to realise that it is a structured thought. Likewise, when ability in a second language allows one to have and utter thoughts in ways that would not come naturally in one's first language, that will confer a fuller grasp of the things one thinks and expresses in that first language. It will do so by disclosing things that expressions in the first language do not in any direct way say or suggest. One becomes aware of what one is steered to think and say in one's first language by seeing what the second language could have done.

(We have here run together thinking and saying. There are arguments that thought is to some extent independent of all language, or alternatively that it is conducted in its own language, a language of thought, which is separate from the language in which the thinker speaks. We do not wish to get into that debate, and our discussion could be conducted even if we were to regard some underlying practice of thought as detached from the thinker's language of speech. Our concern is with the need to be able to have a range of thoughts in order fully to grasp some of them. That case could be made whether or not thoughts were somehow detached from languages of speech. The only proviso is that if a single individual's language of thought or some other mechanism of thought could facilitate all possible thoughts, with no support from particular languages of speech, we could not make Goethe relevant in the way that we do. But that would be a very strong and contentious hypothesis about a language of thought or about some other mechanism of thought.)

We can also apply Musil's thought to languages. Another language is a possibility for oneself, giving a sense of the actuality of one's own language. One can come to see the fact that one's own language does certain things and does them in a certain way as a second-order fact about the language's actuality, rather than merely a collection of first-order facts about the methods used within the language. One can do so when one comes to see that the other language does some additional things, does some of the things that one's own language does differently, and does not do some things that one's own language does.

Mere awareness of other languages, filled out with a few examples of their alternative vocabularies and sentence structures but falling far short of competence, could be enough here. So we would at this point only require a very minimal type of knowledge of other languages, even though Goethe for his purposes envisaged competence. And if the languages of which one were aware did not differ very much from one's own language, all being within some small group such as the West Germanic languages, one could rely on the known existence of similar languages to extrapolate to the possibility of more radically different languages. Thus from a minimal basis one could acquire a sense of the actuality of one's own language. But the minimal basis would have to include the idea of the possibility of other languages, and it might not be reducible to that mere idea without at least some fragmentary examples drawn from other languages.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

An additional perspective on knowledge of languages is provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He made this remark:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 5.6)

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What Wittgenstein meant is much debated, but we can still make use of the thought in ways of which he might or might not have approved.

We should join the thought with something Wittgenstein said in the foreword to the Tractatus:

Das Buch will also dem Denken eine Grenze ziehen, oder vielmehr - nicht dem Den­ken, sondern dem Ausdruck der Gedanken: Denn um dem Denken eine Grenze zu ziehen, müßten wir beide Seiten dieser Grenze denken können (wir müßten also denken können, was sich nicht denken läßt).

The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather - not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

Knowing extra languages would not remove all limits of language that might limit thought or its expression. (This is another point at which we deliberately disregard the question of whether there is thought independent of all language, or thought independent of public languages but conducted in a language of thought, or only thought conducted in public languages, even though Wittgenstein's distinction between thought and its expression presses the question.) But additional languages might remove some limits of one's first language, while perhaps imposing other limits not imposed by one's first language.

More significantly for our purposes, knowledge of extra languages might give a greater sense of what some of the limits imposed by one's first language were. Then one might be able to think both sides of any limits imposed by one's first language which were not imposed by some other language one knew. This could be so even if there were no collection of languages, knowledge of all of which would allow one to think both sides of all limits.

Drawing the threads together

On reviewing the authors we have discussed, we see that there are disparate ways in which a context of thinking within a field of possibilities can be important.

Gareth Evans highlighted a consequence of the structured nature of our thought and language. There are objects and properties which we identify separately, and we can then combine them. In order to have the thoughts we do, we must be able to pull the components of those thoughts apart and put them back together in different combinations. Someone who only used a language in which each expression was a single whole sentence that could not, within the language, be analysed into components would not have the same thoughts.

This looks like a narrow point about human thought and language. But it is an instance of something wider. Our languages have considerable reach. We cannot set a precise limit to the number of possible thoughts, or the number of possible sentences, although we might be able to set some upper bound based on the capacities of human brains which would be far above any hypothetical least upper bound. The particular form of reach that is given by a scope to recombine objects and properties can be seen even without recourse to the sophisticated analyses that are given under the rubric of transformational grammar. And it was straightforward for Evans to show that this simple form of reach followed naturally and that its availability was necessary for us to have the thoughts we have.

It would be less straightforward to show that the availability of wider forms of reach, for example the reach that was conferred by the scope to use elaborate recursive structures, was necessary in order for us to have the thoughts we had rather than some deceptively similar thoughts. But the potential is there. When someone thinks something, part of the significance of the thought is that he or she could have thought something which differed from the actual thought in some way that would place the actual thought and the potential thought in some meaningful relation. Perhaps the two thoughts would pick out different objects, or attribute different properties, or refer to different times, or imply different directions of causation, or different degrees of confidence in what was being thought.

Thus the idea we take from Evans is that it is part and parcel of our thought to be able to open up possibilities by exploiting the resources of our language. This ability facilitates our noticing facts about the world (for example, instances of Fx or of Gy). The idea we take from Robert Musil involves extending our grasp of the world in another way. The extension is not an increased grasp of first-order facts, a greater understanding of how things are. It is a second-order grasp, a grasp of the actuality of how things are which is conferred by an understanding that there are unactualized possibilities.

This understanding that there are unactualized possibilities could be obtained without thinking of any specific possibilities, simply by putting free variables in place of names of objects and properties in sentences true of the actual world and observing that unspecified other names of objects and properties could be substituted for those variables. But it would be psychologically easier to imagine particular unactualized possibilities, and then to note that they were unactualized and that at least some of them were obvious variations on the facts. For example, if as a matter of fact Fa, then Fb and Ga would be obvious variations, although Fb might be slightly more obvious because the identification of objects does not require thought that is as abstract as is required for the identification of properties.

Entertaining the thoughts that Evans says we need to be able to have, Fb and Ga, is therefore a basis for having the sense of possibility that Musil requires us to have in order to have a sense of actuality, although one would then need to think beyond that basis in order to achieve the required second-order grasp.

Goethe's maxim has a different primary focus. Knowledge of other languages gives us a sense of alternatives to our own language, and therefore a sense of the actuality of our own language. Attention is directed inward to our minds, and outward only to our linguistic interactions rather than to the world in general.

Nonetheless, knowledge of other languages can contribute to our sense of possibilities in the world. (We here require the competence in other languages that Goethe had in mind, rather than the mere awareness that there could be other languages to which we alluded above.) Such knowledge can show us how to look at the world differently, and identify different features. With that additional awareness will come new options to vary in imagination how the world is, allowing us to entertain new possibilities. This would not be needed in order to have a sense of possibility in general, and therefore of the actuality of the world in general. That sense could already be possessed by monoglots. But what it may give is a sense of possibilities in particular areas, and therefore of the actuality of the world in those respects.

The most obvious examples come from knowledge of the language of mathematics. For example, once one starts to talk in terms of derivatives, that is, in terms of rates of change, rates of change of rates of change, and so on, one sees concretely that any such rate could have been different. That confers a sense of the actuality of the rates there are. And the sense of actuality that is achieved is much stronger than it would be if rates could only be seen as what they happened to be, so that they were mere immobile facts about the world.

Other examples can be found in the languages of various natural sciences. In physics, knowledge of the languages of fields and of unified spacetime allows one to identify specific ways in which things could have been different, creating a sense of the actuality of how things are. And in biology, knowledge of the language of metabolic cycles, including concepts such as those of metabolic pathways, anabolism, catabolism, and catalysis, gives a concrete grasp of how the mechanisms of life could have been different (and how in certain respects they could not plausibly have been different while still being close enough to the actual mechanisms to count as variations on them).

Moving on to the social sciences, similar things could be said about economics. In particular, the language that is used when modelling whole economies is very much designed to handle variations in economies and how changes in the values of some variables may lead to changes in the values of others. The sense of possibility conferred is much more concrete than a general sense that things could have been different in some way or other.

Technical languages of some of the other social sciences may also be able to perform the same task of giving a concrete sense of possibilities, although it may be less obvious that they can perform that task because values of quantitative variables are typically less central. Examples are given by the concepts used to characterise and explain instances of social stratification, concepts such as those of class, status, cultural capital, and openness of a given stratification to mobility.

All of these examples might be thought of as vocabulary and (particularly in mathematical disciplines) grammatical rules in mere sub-languages, constructed within natural languages. The extent to which we should see sub-languages and the extent to which we should see new languages that have broken free from the natural languages of their originators could be debated, although the more abstract, and in particular the more mathematical, the greater would be the reason to see new languages.

Examples based on people with one natural language that is unenhanced by scientific knowledge learning another unenhanced language, the sort of thing Goethe actually had in mind, may be harder to find. Some natural languages may be restricted in their grasp of number, or may not have words for some things, or may have unusual grammatical constructions that allow special forms of comparison or ways to capture our relationship to the future or to the otherwise unknown. But the fact that natural languages serve the purposes of human life, which are largely although not entirely the same in all societies, means that acquaintance with new natural languages is less likely than acquaintance with their artificial (and mostly scientific) daughters to open up a grasp of new possibilities and hence a grasp of the actuality of specific things along the lines that Musil's words suggest.

This is no criticism of Goethe. As we have noted, his concern was with knowing one's own language rather than with grasping the actuality of the world in general. But thoughts derived from Goethe can make a connection between languages and Musil's claim, in that knowledge of new languages can open up new possibilities for our consideration. On the other side of Musil, Evans's work gives particular and carefully specified examples of thoughts that would allow someone to gain the sense of possibility that Musil's claim requires us to have in order to have a sense of actuality. Thus Musil emerges as the central figure in our enquiry. But why should having a sense of actuality and a sense of possibility matter?

The importance of senses of actuality and possibility

It is vital to know how things actually are. And it is part of the process of discovery to consider how things might be, both in order to work out how to discover which possibilities are realised and in order to devise new theories and new technologies. But all of that is at the first-order level of facts and putative facts. It is not obvious that there would be much benefit in ascending from awareness of specific facts and possibilities to a general sense of actuality and one of possibility. We can see the enormous benefits of making the comparable ascent from first-order logic to second-order logic. But what about the senses of actuality and possibility we discuss here?

The benefits are primarily psychological. They may arise both in the area of theory, and in the area of practice.

In the area of theory, a sense of actuality gives us a sense that some statements are true and others are false. And it gives us that sense prior to any determination of which statements are true. So we understand in advance of any research that there will be correct answers and incorrect answers to our questions. It would be a bold leap to say that a sense of actuality would in itself suffice to turn us away from the kind of relativism that does not allow for a boundary between the correct and the incorrect which is independent of our thought. But the leap might be made, and it would be a great benefit of a sense of actuality if it did suffice to see off such deplorable relativism.

Staying in the area of theory, a sense of possibility reminds us that things might have been different. It also reminds us that things might in fact be different from how we think them to be, so we should continue our research and never assume that matters are finally settled. And it reminds us that in at least some areas in which we lack knowledge, we do not merely draw a blank. Instead we have a range of plausible possibilities, a grasp of which can help us to design our research.

In the area of practice, a sense of actuality confronts us with the need to face the world as it is. We see that we must work if we would like the world to be different. A sense of possibility encourages us to explore options for change, knowing that there may be scope to make changes which would bring actuality into line with the more attractive possibilities.

In both areas, theory and practice, a general sense of actuality that is not tied to particular current facts or factual beliefs has the advantage that the same sense can continue to perform its functions while facts or our beliefs as to the facts change. Likewise a general sense of possibility can remain the same sense, able to do its work, regardless of what possibilities are or are believed to be available.

References

Dummett, Michael A. E. "What Do I Know When I Know a Language?". Chapter 3 of Dummett, The Seas of Language. Clarendon Press, 1993. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198236212.003.0003

Evans, Gareth. The Varieties of Reference. Clarendon Press, 1982.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Maximen und Reflexionen. In Goethes Werke XII: Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen. Christian Wegner, 1955.

Musil, Robert. Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, herausgegeben von Adolf Frisé. Rowohlt, 1999. 

Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities, translated by Sophie Wilkins. Picador, 1997.

Wittgenstein. Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Suhrkamp, 1963

Wittgenstein. Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, translated by C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922.