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[Deleted chapter] Sometime around four hundred years ago the world changed. The great revival of learning we have come to know as the Renaissance culminated in the rise of a new approach to philosophy and the birth of a new scientific method. Not only as a result of this shift in perspective did our view of the world change—that shift changed the world, too. It changed human experience (at least in the Western world) from one of living in a cosmos alive with supernatural forces and in a natural world suffused with “sympathies” and “correspondences” to one where the cosmos was governed by inexorable, blind mechanical forces, where nature was nothing more than matter in motion, atoms colliding in the void. The world changed because mind, and along with it meaning, had been either shunted to one side, considered of no real consequence, or else explicitly dismissed as a mere phantasm, a “ghost in the machine.” Following this change of worldview, philosophers and scientists held out the promise of a “new world,” where individuals and their societies would be freed from the shackles of ecclesiastical subservience, liberated into a new sense of individuality, and empowered with a new way of controlling nature. That new power was science—the scientific method. In some ways, that promise has been fulfilled. We look around at the accomplishments of science in technology, agriculture, industry, medicine, and communications, and we cannot easily deny the power of modern science. But on deeper inspection and reflection we may ask “Has the promise of a ‘new world’ really been fulfilled? Are individual humans really much better off than their premodern counterparts?” We can point to the rising crises of poverty, violence and alienation in modern society and of increasing devastation to the natural environment, and wonder how to measure an overall gain. We can look at the lives of millions of men and women in civilized communities searching for meaning and purpose beyond the promise of a regular paycheck to cover the mortgage or rent and to feed their families. The high price of modernism appears to be a costly loss of soul. In an attempt to redress this situation, to bring about a new shift in worldview, new movements have arisen in various sectors of society, including grass-roots ecological “warriors,” transformation-oriented social activists, new spiritual communities and religious groups, as well as some visionary frontier thinkers in science and philosophy. Together, these pioneering advocates of a new worldview amount to what the popular discourse calls the “New Age” movement, and what more serious-minded intellectuals often refer to as the “new paradigm” or the “postmodern paradigm”—a “new renaissance.” But beyond glib and clichéd references to a “new paradigm,” just what is postmodernism? In this chapter, I will attempt to answer that question by looking at the roots of modernism as a reaction to the Scholasticism of the preceding medieval era, and by identifying the key elements that distinguish the “new world” ideal of modernism from the “new age” ideal of postmodernism. In this effort, I will be guided by the largely unacknowledged (in mainstream academia, anyway) speculative philosophy and metaphysical cosmology of one of the founders of postmodernism, Alfred North Whitehead. The Roots of ModernismConventionally, postmodernism is a term used to describe an approach to understanding the world beyond that adopted at the beginning of the modern era. To know postmodernism, therefore, we need to identify the main characteristics of modernity itself. The modern era is said to have begun in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe with the revolutionary philosophies of men such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in England, René Descartes (1596-1650) in France, and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) also in England. These men may be considered the “modernist triumvirate,” the founding fathers of modernism. Each may also be seen to be a progenitor of one of the three central components of modernism, the “modernist triad” of empiricism (Bacon), rationalism (Descartes), and mechanism (Newton). These three men were major players in a wider movement that included influential predecessors and contemporaries. Predecessors included, for example, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), and Copernicus (1473-1543); among contemporaries of Bacon and Descartes were Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and among Newton’s contemporaries were men such as Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), and the French philosophes Voltaire (1694-1778), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Denis Diderot (1713-1784). Combined, these men laid the foundations for modernism by breaking with the previous era dominated by the Scholasticism of medieval philosophy, theology, and cosmology. What distinguished the modern era from the premodern era? The premodern era is often characterized as the “Age of Faith” or the “Age of Superstition.” Its mode of knowledge was based on the authority of, on the one hand, scriptural revelation as interpreted by the Church, and on the other by the authority of the classical philosophy of Aristotle (384-322 BCE) rediscovered during the Renaissance, as interpreted by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). In contrast to this “Age of Faith” or “Age of Authority,” the modern era is characterized as the “Age of Reason” or the “Age of Science.” Given the importance of Bacon and Descartes in the birth of modern science, I will spend a little time looking at their contributions to modernism before moving on to examine the distinguishing elements of postmodernism, and their significance for the philosophy of mind. We may note in passing that whereas Descartes’ philosophical “revolution” of the split between mind and matter explicitly shaped subsequent developments in the philosophy of mind, Bacon’s philosophical innovations implicitly anticipated major developments in philosophical psychology. Although Bacon’s “new science” was aimed at providing a method for investigating external nature—and he is rarely, if ever, considered relevant to the history of psychology—we shall see that the “four idols” at the foundation of his philosophy foreshadowed developments in modernist attempts at a “science of mind.” The Baconian RevolutionFrancis Bacon, born 1561, published The Advancement of Learning in 1605, and Novum Organum in 1621, parts of his Great Instauration, a project intended to be a decisive “reconstruction” of natural philosophy. He set out to break with medieval Scholasticism and Aristotelian learning that relied on the force of authority and scripture as the standards for knowledge. Bacon proposed instead a different foundation for knowledge—the “new science”—and established a new method for extracting knowledge from nature. His new “scientific method” combined direct observation of nature—empiricism—with inductive logic. Since Bacon’s new method ran counter to the dogmatism of the Church, he could easily have incurred the ire of the Inquisition (as had happened not long previously to Giordano Bruno in Italy who was burned alive in 1600 for his heretical views). Bacon avoided this fate by explicitly stating that his new method was specifically intended for exploring nature—the domain of natural philosophy or science. Questions of God and religion remained the domain of the Church. In this way, Bacon co-opted and reworked an old Augustinian notion: the distinction between the “City of God” (the realm of the eternal) and the “City of Man” (the realm of the temporal). Essentially, Bacon urged natural philosophers not to take anything about nature for granted. The way to learn and discover nature’s secrets was to “put nature to the rack,” to observe, experiment with objects in the natural world, and to apply induction to the results. Since induction (the logic of deriving generalities from particulars) lacked the tautological circularity of deductive syllogisms, the new science would yield provisional knowledge—unlike the products of Aristotelian logic that, given the truth of the premises, yielded certainties. Even though Bacon acknowledged the tentative nature of scientific empirico-inductive knowledge, he expected that rigorous application of his method would eventually lead to certain Truths. In this way, Bacon straddled the old medieval world that sought certainties, and the new “modernist” world that abandoned certainties in favor of provisional, stepping-stones to truth. The Significance of the ‘Four Idols’Part of Bacon’s “Great Instauration” involved identifying the sources and types of error that prevented people from getting at true knowledge. He classified four idols: (1) “Idols of the Tribe” by which he meant innate racial or genetic tendencies to obscure the truth. Although he proposed empiricism as the way forward for science, Bacon still acknowledged that the human sensorium was fallible: “For man’s sense is falsely asserted . . . to be the standard of things” (1964/1620). Because of this, Bacon did not propose a pure empiricism unguided by the faculties of reason; inductive logic would be needed to aid observation. As a source of epistemological error, Bacon’s “Idols of the Tribe” are essentially biological. In this, they anticipate a Darwinian or neo-Darwinian approach to the mind as something genetically conditioned. Such an approach to understanding the mind foreshadows biologically-based neurosciences and functionalism in philosophy of mind. Next, (2) “Idols of the Cave” referred to errors of observation and thinking peculiar to individual people. “For every one . . . has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature” (1964/1620). Individual character traits and idiosyncrasies distort our perceptions and reasonings. These idols are psychological. Bacon’s “cave” may be understood as a metaphor foreshadowing the Freudian unconscious which determines our prejudices in thought and behavior. The third (3) “Idols of the Marketplace” recognizes the power of language and conversation to shape people’s minds and their understanding of reality. When the language of the crowd—consensus or rumor—is taken as truth, people may be deceived. Here, Bacon echoes the Confucian notion of “rectification of names” where it is important to be precise and accurate in our use of words. These idols are linguistic, and may be seen to anticipate movements in philosophy such as linguistic analysis, and deconstructionism, as well as cognitive approaches to the science of mind. The final (4 ) “Idols of the Theater” likens grand philosophical systems of thought to the inventions of stage-plays: They may well be elegant and dramatic, but “not true stories out of history.” Ultimately, Bacon says, our confusions arise from the combined errors of institutionalized dogma and delusion. To counteract these, he offers his scientific method of empiricism and induction, a forerunner of sorts of Descartes’ method of doubt. Bacon says: “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties” (1964/1620). These latter idols are institutional, or contextual; they represent knowledge embedded in an inevitable matrix of cultural, historical, emotional, and dramatic determinants. They are a natural extension or corollary of the linguistic idols of the marketplace, and foreshadow the so-called postmodern philosophies of conceptual relativity and context-dependence exemplified in structuralism and deconstructionism. An epistemological perspective such as this leads to a view of the mind as a social construction, without any secure ontological foundation. What is noteworthy about Bacon’s empirical philosophy is that it implicitly assumes a restricted application of the empirical method. For Bacon, as for numerous subsequent philosophers and psychologists, empiricism meant experience mediated exclusively through the senses—empiricism, in other words, was sensory-based knowledge. Therefore, despite Bacon’s emphasis on empiricism, his philosophy and science did not focus on experience as such. The actual experiencing subject—the consciousness or mind of the knower—did not figure in Baconian science. Bacon’s empiricism was sensory empiricism. In contrast to this, William James (1903; 1912) nearly three hundred years later, proposed what he called radical empiricism—an approach to knowledge that would include all data in human experience, whether mediated by the senses or not. Radical empiricism would embrace, for example, religious or mystical experiences and various forms of extrasensory perception. Bacon’s limited sensory empiricism could lead only to a “science of mind” that treated mind or experience as abstractions from the senses, and was therefore implicitly a form of materialism. This approach led to the empiricist and sensationist traditions in Western philosophy, exemplified by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) David Hume (1711-1776), and, to the extent he accepted sensationist empiricism, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)—and, eventually, to their derivations in behaviorist and cognitive psychology. Bacon’s concern, however, was with nature, not with the human mind. The future of science, he believed, lay in a rigorous development of empirical observation of nature, not in epistemological questions about the nature of the senses or of the mind. Reason, or the mind, he had declared was a poor guide to knowing nature. He wanted to move away from speculative metaphysics and theologies—“idols of the theater”—that had preoccupied the Scholastic philosophers of the previous era. Philosophic deduction based on logical premises would never lead to the kind of scientific knowledge he was aiming for. Deduction: A problem for scientific method. The main problem with deduction, Bacon pointed out (and as indicated above), is that syllogisms do not lead to new knowledge. The conclusion is always a restatement of information already contained or implied in the premises. Deduction, unarguably, yields logically valid conclusions, but is not necessarily relevant to any truth beyond that system of logic. Therefore, even a combination of observation and deduction will not lead to new science. As Bacon says: “The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding . . . neither does the logic which we now have [deduction] help us in finding out new sciences” (1964/1620). Induction, on the other hand, does not contain the conclusion in the premises and allows for prediction—essential for the ideal of control which Bacon envisioned the new science providing. Advantages of an empiricist approach to science. Empiricism, according to Bacon, helps to avoid the distortions of the “four idols.” It involves observation of natural phenomena, and (ideally) avoids basing knowledge on ungrounded assumptions. By using information gained through the senses, the empirical method opens the way for the criterion of “objectivity” in science. Meanwhile on the Continent, another philosopher was preparing for his own assault on the authority of the Scholastics. René Descartes wanted to lay an unequivocal foundation for knowledge by developing a philosophy based on axioms as solid as those in Euclidean geometry. His starting point was an exploration of his own thinking self. The ‘Eight-Fold Way’ of Cartesian DoubtTwo-and-a-half thousand years ago, Siddartha Gautama, an Indian nobleman, sat down beneath the Bodhi tree, and meditated. Moving progressively deeper into experience, he finally discovered that the notion of “self” is a fiction, which he expressed in the doctrine of anatta. With this, Gautama achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha. As a result of his meditations he discovered the “Four Noble Truths” of Buddhism, of which the fourth is the “Eightfold Path”—the way to mystical enlightenment. About three hundred years ago, René Descartes, a French philosopher, also looked inside his consciousness, and through a process of introspective reasoning—which he called his Meditations—discovered a single certainty: the indubitable fact of self. He, too, developed an eight-step method—though for a different kind of enlightenment: rationalism. As an approach to exploring the problem of “self,” Descartes’ method and conclusions may be compared with the Buddha’s. In one case, philosophy leads to a Cartesian psychology of self; in the other, spiritual practice leads to a Buddhist psychology of no-self. Both systems of exploration have profound implications for our knowledge of the nature of the experiencing self, and the relation between matter and mind, substance and activity. We can also look at Descartes’ method as a way for exploring how to arrive at a firm foundation for natural science. And here we may compare Descartes’ approach with Francis Bacon’s. As we saw above, these two men created the framework for shaping the development of modern science and modernism in general—a change in philosophy and science that deeply impacted our views on mind and matter during the past few hundred years. Method for a new science. Descartes is to Continental philosophy and rationalism as Bacon is to Anglo philosophy and empiricism. Both men broke with the traditions of the past and attempted to “clear the slate” of philosophy and, from first principles, lay the foundations for the “new science.” They differed significantly in their methods. On the one hand, as we have seen, Bacon proposed that empiricism/induction was the way to go, while on the other, Descartes mistrusted the evidence of the senses, and stressed a combination of reason and deduction. However, both men shared in common a strong belief that the way forward for natural philosophy, or science, lay in the purity of method. Descartes’ starting point was simple: Empiricism is unreliable because our senses may misinform us. All beliefs or opinions based on sensory data may be mistaken. Instead of looking outward, we should look inward. However, even reason itself (if we allow for the possibility of a cosmic Deceiving Demon), may lead us astray. Thus the first step in the process of Cartesian doubt: 1. ‘Doubt everything that is not certain.’ This was the “Cartesian Eraser” that wiped clean the philosophical slate. His next move was to question his physical existence. “Can I be certain that my body exists?” And his answer was, “No. My senses may deceive me.” And reason, vulnerable to the tricks of the hypothetical Demon, may be no more than hallucination—so it couldn’t help establish the existence of the body, either. “I cannot be certain that I have or am my body.” And, by extension, he arrived at the same conclusion for all physical things. Therefore step two: 2. ‘Reject the certainty of all physical things.’ Then came Descartes’ trump card. He examined the very process of doubting itself, and concluded that he could not doubt that he was doubting. He reasoned: “If I doubt that I am doubting, I am still doubting.” The very operation of doubting confirmed its own existence. It was self-validating. Therefore, Descartes could be certain of at least one thing: that while he doubted the existence of everything else, he could be certain that he was doubting. And since doubting requires thinking, he could say: “I think” (in Latin,cogito). But to say “‘I’ think” means “I” must exist. And so we arrive at perhaps the most memorable slogan in the history of Western philosophy: 3. ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The famous Cartesian cogito, ergo sum. This was Descartes’ “Archimedian fulcrum,” the single fixed point of certainty by which he believed he could move out of his world of doubt. This was his “eureka,” his “open sesame” to a philosophy and science of certitude. However, momentous as this discovery was, he still had a long way to go. He had established that he was, but what was he? Since he had already rejected that he was his body or any material thing, all that was left to conclude (he believed) was: 4. ‘I am a thinking thing.’ The self is a thinking substance—res cogitans—without extension or materiality (which are the attributes of bodies). Descartes had now established that he existed as mind distinct from any extended body—res extensa. And with this distinction—the infamous “Cartesian mind-body dualism”—the fate of Western philosophy, science and medicine was set for the best part of the next four hundred years. Having established to his satisfaction the reality of his subjective self as “thinking substance,” a major difficulty now confronted him: “How do I establish the existence of an external world?” It was one thing to wipe the slate clean and discover a conscious self as an indubitable point of certainty in a sea of doubt; it would be another thing to move beyond the barrier of this solipsist cogito. Pursuing the trail of his deductive logic, Descartes reasoned that since he existed as a thinking substance that doubts, and since doubting is less perfect than knowing, he must be less than perfect. His next move was to conclude: 5. ‘I am not a perfect being.’ And this posed a puzzle: How is it that an imperfect being can have a idea of “perfection”? Where did that notion come from? Examining the contents of his mind he discovered a clear and distinct idea of “perfection.” But since what is imperfect cannot cause what is perfect, and having established his own imperfection, he concluded that the cause of perfection must be something other than who or what he was. The cause must be external. And with this, the magic of rationalism burst through the solipsist bubble and created an opening for “other.” 6. ‘The cause of perfection is external to my self.’ For his next move, Descartes revealed his medieval “stuckness” by appealing to the Scholastic arguments for the existence of God. Like Bacon, Descartes was a pioneer braving the transition from the medieval world of the Church, a world steeped in Thomism, Augustinianism, and Aristotelianism. However, he emerged from that world still dripping with the metaphysical assumptions of his age. He was amphibian: leaving the deep waters of Scholasticism for the shallows of modernism, but remaining a creature adapted to both worlds. Clinging to him were strands of the old paradigm, such as the “Cosmological Argument” that proposed the idea of a Perfect Being could be caused only by a Perfect Being, and the “Ontological Argument” that the very essence of Perfect Being is that it necessarily exists. Given these hand-me-down metaphysical assumptions, Descartes believed he had proved the existence of God as a direct result of his initial cogito. He believed he had established, on rational grounds, the existence of a Perfect Being external to his own thinking substance. However, Descartes’ revolutionary rational method was flawed—infected by traces of the very superstition he believed he was replacing. He reasoned: 7. ‘God, being perfect, assures the veracity of “clear and distinct” reason.’ God, a Perfect Being, perfectly benevolent would not deceive. He would not endow his creatures with a capacity for “clear and distinct” ideas yet maliciously make these ideas false. Therefore, the existence of God guarantees the correspondence between the ideas and the objects of reason. Reason was pure, given to humans by God. Error, according to Descartes, results from inappropriate exercise of free-will, which may choose to assent to judgments composed of confused ideas and/or to those resting on unquestioned evidence of the senses. By this stage, Descartes’ method had succeeded in establishing the existence of the subjective self—an internal thinking thing—and an external God. What about the world of Nature? How could humans know the external world—the world of extended substance, of material things, the world of natural science—including his own body? Well, given the previous steps in his method, the rest was now relatively easy: 8. ‘We can know the natural world of external, extended things by the correct application of reason.’ Reason, pure and innate, given to man by God, applied with the precision of geometry and mathematics to extended substances, would lead the human mind to certainty about the world. Descartes believed his method laid the foundations for a reliable science of nature, based on mathematical reasoning. Mathematical physics, Descartes believed, discloses the truth of the properties of bodies in motion, of objects in space (res extensa). With this eight-fold Cartesian method, the future course of philosophical and scientific modernism was set. Descartes’ rationalism counterpointed Bacon’s empiricism. Entwined in a methodological dance, these ideologies swept up the great minds of Western philosophy and science for the next three-and-a-half-centuries—Newton, Hume, and Kant, Mach, Planck and Einstein, all, in one way or another, responded to the hypnotic dance. The hegemony of determinism, mechanism, and materialism was established, culminating in a radical positivism that stood proud till twentieth century deconstructionism and quantum-relativistic science ushered in the postmodern age. The Age of IndividualismThe founding fathers of modern science, then, set out to wipe the slate clean, and to approach gaining knowledge of the world through a method of individual, personal inquiry. In Bacon’s case, this method was empiricism, the acquisition of knowledge through careful observation of nature as presented to our senses. Sensory experience, not authority of scripture or philosophical-theological exegesis, was proposed as the correct foundation for true knowledge. In Descartes’ case, the method of inquiry that would lead to true knowledge was rationalism, the disciplined application of intellect and introspection that would arrive at “clear and distinct” knowledge. These two distinct methods together formed the foundations of the modern scientific method—a combination of empirical induction and rational deduction. In philosophy, Bacon’s method opened the way for the British empiricists—John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume—while Descartes’ method paved the way for Continental rationalism, exemplified by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The modernist era, with its emphasis on the discovery of knowledge by individual effort and application of rigorous empiricism and rationalism could also be characterized as the “Age of Individualism.” This sense of individualism was reflected not only in philosophy and science, but in the wider society as a whole. The modernist zeigeist of individualism was also reflected in politics, arts and education. For instance, during this time universities began to set up distinct academic departments, moving away from interdisciplinary studies in mathematics, natural philosophy, theology, history, arts and letters. Instead, each began to subdivide into its own subdisciplines, for example the natural sciences becoming physics, chemistry, and natural history. This fragmentation of knowledge was a natural consequence of the individualism of the age, with so much emphasis on empiricism and rational analysis. Hence, the modern era may be further characterized by reductionism. Newton’s World MachineBehind this fragmentation and reductionism lies the third component of the modernist triad: mechanism. Following Bacon and Descartes, Newton’s program for philosophy was to combine empiricism and rationalism to build a truly mathematical science. Descartes had prepared the ground for mechanism by declaring that all the world beyond the human soul was insentient matter. All material bodies operated like machines, analyzable into their component parts and understandable through the application of geometry and mathematics. Newton, through his laws of motion showed how these parts or “particles” of matter could interact mechanically without any need to refer to anything like mind our soul. The combined effect of this Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic paradigm was to |
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