How Hegel develops platonic idealism in the Phenomenology of Spirit (talk given to Kingston Philosophy group 21/9/11)

My last talk on the purpose of philosophy was in essence a defence of Platonic idealism.    To recap briefly, the question was where do our ideas come from?   For modern philosophy there are only two possibilities: reason, and experience.    As Hume said, all propositions are either relations of ideas, or matters of fact, and anything else is ultimately metaphysical and for him this means without meaning.    So take the idea of beauty for example.    Clearly you can't deduce beauty, so can it come from observation?   Do we see beautiful things, recognise that they have something in common, and through the process of learning language learn to give this shared property its conventional name, beauty?    Do we abstract the notion of beauty from experience?    This is the view of modern philosophy - Locke in particular - and is also the view of common sense.    There is however a simple problem with it.    How can I experience beauty, if I don't first have the notion of beauty?    Imagine if you can a being which has no concept of beauty.    That being will never experience beauty; and we will never be able to teach it what beauty is.    The truth is that far from abstracting beauty from experience, it is the concept of beauty that allows us to have the experience of beauty.     Locke's mistake is that he confuses sense-data with experience.     Sense data in fact are just that, data, numbers, readings from our sense organs.    In order to turn them into experience we have to apply ideas to them, and the ideas are not part of the data.   We cannot therefore say that we take the notion of beauty from experience.    This is why Plato said that appearance - in this case of beauty - is illusion, and that the truth of beauty is not the individual appearances of beauty, but the idea of beauty itself.   Beauty exists independently of experience and is what allows us to have experience of instances of beauty.    This is idealism, the notion that ideas are logically prior to experience, and it is the cornerstone of classical philosophy.

Now, that's all very well, but when we read Plato today we have a problem.    His major work, the Republic, describes an ideal state which looks like a cross between a hippy commune and a fascist boot camp, and I don't know of anyone who would seriously suggest that we should follow Plato's political advice today.    The trouble is that in turning our backs on this we seem also to have turned our backs on Plato's great insights into the nature of truth and the foundation of philosophy itself.    Modern philosophy seems to have started again from scratch with Descartes and arguably never again reaches the heights of classical thought, remaining stuck at the level of sophism and failing to grasp the basic principle of idealism.    I know Whitehead famously  described modern philosophy as merely a series of footnotes to Plato, but this really doesn't seem to me to be the case and Whitehead too does not seem to grasp the basic principals of classical idealism.

I know of only one philosopher who has tried to deal with the question of how we can avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater and retain the valid insights of classical idealism without taking on Plato's apparently totalitarian politics, and that is Hegel.  There must be others, but I'm not aware of them.    Hegel's criticism of Plato can be expressed very simply:   in Plato, the principle of subjective freedom is absent.    This is not so much because Plato neglected it, but because it hadn't yet come on to the historical scene.     This in itself is an odd think for a philosopher to say, especially one who talks freely about the absolute.    If there is such a thing as truth, then it must apply always, otherwise it is only true in certain situations which means that there are others in which it is not true, therefore it is not truth.     Hegel's response to this is to say that Freedom, which he equates with Spirit, and hence with what we today might call the whole of humanity, is a kind of Platonic ideal and while it exists eternally, we are not necessarily aware of it and history is the process of us achieving this awareness.    Like Meno's slave, who knew a geometric proof but was not aware of it until guided through it by Socrates, we have the same implicit knowledge of freedom but it takes history for us to become aware of it explicitly and for Hegel awareness of subjective freedom in the classical period had not yet become explicit.

So there is a simple formula for Hegel.   Take the classical theory of forms, add the principle of subjective freedom, and you have a modern theory of form.    The Platonic Ideal plus subjective freedom equals what Hegel calls simply The Idea, or The Concept.    Classical idealism plus the subjective principle equals modern idealism.

This is all very well, but subjective freedom is scarcely a simple bolt-on.    Properly understood, the subjective principle seems to be the opposite of idealism.    There are two opposed views of what the truth is.   The one says it is something real, to be found in the world of ideal form which exists independently.    The other says that truth is a property of statements and that it is created by the human subject through reason or observation.    The true for one is Substance, the platonic ideal, and for the other it is the human rational Subject.   To illustrate this with an example, let's take a quick look at political theory.     Aristotle, in the classical corner, says, with his usual economy, "It is clear that the state is both natural and prior to the individual".     We may all be particular people, but we become individuals only by participating in the state or community, by being citizens.    The community exists first and is absolute while we as individuals are secondary and relative.    Modern political theory reverses this and sees the individual as absolute, the community relative.     The state exists only as a result of relations between individuals who create it through a "social contract", which is the metaphor for almost all modern political theory.    The state is both artificial and secondary to the individual, the exact opposite of the classical view.     I don't want to get further into this debate though I will just comment that the social contract is explicitly fictional, and last time I checked philosophy was about truth not fiction, but the important point is that the classical view and the modern seem to be directly opposed to each other and it seems that you can't have it both ways.     This however is exactly what Hegel sets out to do.     He says in the preface to the Phenomenology that "everything depends on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject".    It's a big ambition and what I want to do now is to show how he goes about this in the Phenomenology.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel's first major publication and is seen by almost everyone except perhaps Hegel himself as his great work.  Whereas other writers who talk about phenomenology, Husserl for example, seem to be rather keen on phenomena and want to limit their discussion to them, Hegel's aim is the opposite, to prove that phenomena are not real and that the true reality is the Idea.    He does this by taking a naive or common-sense figure he calls "natural consciousness" and guiding it through a process of directed questioning towards the realisation that its common-sense view is wrong and it's claim to truth inadequate in its own terms, that is using its own criteria rather that counterposing our own.    It's just like a Socratic dialogue, except that where Plato could simply point to the ideal, Hegel, because he has adopted the enlightentment principal of subjective freedom, has to show its necessity, which means that the Hegelian dialectic is rather more structured and systematic than Plato's.

The truth, for Hegel is the Whole.   I'm going to represent it as a circle ( see figure below).    It's also the good, which for Plato is the highest object of knowledge, the point of philosophy.    Plato divides the good into four parts, the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperence and justice.    These are also linked to Aristotle's four causes.    According to Aristotle, if we want to give a complete account of anything we need to include each of the four causes, material, efficient, formal and final.    If we miss any of these out our account will be incomplete.    In the case of the good, these are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice.   Without wisdom, or knowledge, there would be nothing, so it is the material cause, the building blocks the good is made from.    Without courage there would be no energy, so courage is the efficient cause, which makes the good happen.    Without temperence or discipline, the good would have no shape, so it is the formal cause.    Without justice, there would be no point, so that is the final cause.    Hegel follows the same scheme exactly, but because he needs to include the subjective element, he redefines them in terms of relations of subject and object.   Wisdom becomes Consciousness, Courage Self-Consciousness, Temperence Reason, and Justice Spirit.   Consciousness is a relation of subect to object, I:O;   Selfconsciousness a relation of subject to subject, 1:1 or as Fichte had it, I=I;   Reason is a relation of a self-conscious subject to otherness, (I:I):0;    and Spirit is Reason grasped as real or as an object, I:((I:I):0).   Now, to add a bit more detail to the sketch, for Hegel each of these quadrants is divided again into three parts.    Consciousness divides into Sensation, Perception, and Understanding;  Self-Consciousness into Desire, Master and Slave, and Freedom of Self-Consciousness;  Reason into Observation, Passion, and Judgement;  and Spirit into Ethics, Culture and Morality, to give the following picture:

There isn't time tonight to go through each of these, you will probably be relieved to hear, but I do want to spend some time talking about each of the four quadrants.

Consciousness it the stuff of which Spirit (or the good) is made.    In a sense as well as being one quarter of the picture, it is also all of it, because the other three quadrants are also shapes of consciousness, types of awareness, and all knowledge is consciousness.    When we look at Consciousness as a part, we are abstracting from the whole and imagining it as awareness without self awareness, reason or spirit, a passive and uncritical reception of external data.    Hegel begins at the beginning, with a "natural consciousness" that not unreasonably believes that the truth is what is immediately apparent to his senses, and it's worth summarising the argument briefly because it's quite simple and shows the procedure Hegel follows throughout the Phenomenology.    Without importing any criteria of our own, we ("we" in the phenomenology means we the philosophers who are already initiated into idealism, in contrast to the natural consciousness which has yet to make this discovery) say, OK so write it down,     What is immediately present to you in its simplest form is This, Here, and Now.    Now turn around.    What is true now?    Also This, Here, and Now.   In fact every experience is This, Here and Now.    The immediate experience seems inexpressible, and the words we use to describe it are the most univeral of all and apply at some point to every experience.    We have discovered the universal, and sensation mediated through the universal is Perception, the domain of Locke and Berkely in particular.    So  we have shown a necessary connection from Sensation to Perception.    It's important to understand that this is not the necessity of a Cartesian deduction, a purely rational necessity.    We haven't deduced Perception, we have discovered it, or to put it another way, we didn't create it;   it already existed and we just became aware of it.    As always in Hegel (and Plato) we don't create the truth, it exists independently of us and we simply discover it.

The last part of Consciousness is Understanding and in some ways this is the paradigm for all consciousness and Hegel often uses the terms Understanding and Consciousness interchangeably.    It is the attitude of natural science, which explains things by showing us their cause.    Where something is caused by external forces, it will always be so and there is no point in us having an opinion about it, so it is appropriate that the scientist represses his opinions and wishes and confines himself to reporting the results of his experiments and theories.   "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" (to understand is to forgive), but actually the understanding doesn't so much forgive as it refrains from judgement.  

Moving on to the second quadrant, this is the area of efficient cause, the drives and motivations of Spirit.    The first of these is, obviously enough, desire.    Hegel has little to say about this and after all while desire is clearly a prime mover for us, very little of what we do can really be explained as the result of desire alone.   And when a desire is satisfied, we are no longer motivated to action.   But what if we desire something that can not be consumed?    Not an object, but it's opposite, a subject?    This for Hegel is the desire for recognition, a kind of sublimated desire that is also found in Freud playing a similar role.    It's the basis of the virtue of courage, which by the way is itself a problem for enlightenment moral theories which ground the good in reason, because courage, which we use loosely to mean risk taking but which really means risking ones life in battle, and which we all agree is a virtue - nobody wants to be a coward - seems irrational.   If the absolute for enlightenment is the Subject, Courage involves the destruction of the absolute which is supposed to be the measure of all things, the basis of reason itself, and it is very hard to see how you could give a rational ground for this.

The desire for recognition fuels the second part of self-consciousness and perhaps the most famous passage in all of Hegel's writing, Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness, Master and Slave.    In consciouness, I am constrained to be conscious of what is present to me, but in reflecting on myself I depend only on myself, so I have independence, which is not quite yet freedom, but is a step on the way to it.     But what if I come across another self-consciousness?    This is also independent and therefore could limit my independence, and this in Hegel's account leads to a life or death struggle which if it does not end in death, ends in the enslavement of one by the other (Hegel is clearly thinking of actual practice in warfare in the ancient world).     Courage, which for Plato was simply a virtue we should aspire to, becomes in this way a necessity derived from the nature of self-consciousness itself.    The winner in the battle becomes master and retains his independence while the other, who has shown by his submission that he "feared death more than slavery" (to paraphrase Plato who defined a free man as one who feared slavery more than death, neatly summarising objective but not subjective freedom) loses his and devotes his life to ensuring the master's independence by providing for his needs.    But there is a catch, because the master wanted recognition from another independent being, and what he has achieved is recognition from a being that is no longer independent.

This passage is seen by many as the centre piece of the Phenomenology.   There is a whole branch of philosophy associated with self-consciousness, or rather with the reduction of Spirit to self-conscioiusness, called existentialism.     There's a wonderful book on Hegel called Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojeve which begins with perhaps the shortest and most concise sentence of any work of philosophy:   "Man is self-consiousness".     It's entirely wrong about Hegel, who would reply that Spirit (rather than man) is consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and that reduction of Spirit to just one of these is exactly the kind of error that the Phenomenology is trying to protect us from;    but it is a very neat encapsulation of the whole attitude of existentialism, which does make much of this passage, but not of other aspects of Hegel's work.    If you want to learn about existentialism Kojeve is highly recommended, but unfortunately he is not a reliable commentator on Hegel who is most definitely not a closet existentialist.

Let's move on to the third quadrant, Reason.   Rationalism, the belief that truth can be found in reason, is entirely dominant in modern philosophy.   It's rarely a self-conscious belief chosen from many possibilities, and more an unquestioned assumption;  and the question of what reason is is rarely raised.    For most modern philosophers, and certainly Hume, Ayer, and the analytical tradition generally, it is equivalent to mathematics and its ideal expression is in number.    The certainty of mathematics is equated with truth and the aim is to achieve that certainty in philosophy.     The problem that mathematics gains its certainty by being abstract, and that truth is about the concrete, i.e. that truth and certainty are not at all the same thing in reality, is overlooked.

Hegel has an entirely different conception of Reason.    Following Kant, he opposed it to Understanding.   However where Kant sees reason as a tool, a faculty, in other words a thing, Hegel sees it as part of the nature of reality itself and defines it as a self-conscious attitude to objective reality.    (He doesn't quite use those words.   His actual formulation is that reason "is the certainty that it is all reality", but I would argue that it comes to the same thing).    This means that it asks the question that the scientist could not - what does this mean for me?    Where other thinkers see reason as to do with universals, generalisations and abstractions, for Hegel it is much more concrete and critical.   For a Kantian, the very act of having an opinion or a personal desire is irrational and to be repressed or at least subordinated to the universal, where for Hegel, the act of having an opinion is what constitutes rational thought.     There are two words that for Hegel encapsulate reason.   One is Judgement (this follows Kant) and the other is Interest.    What does this mean for me?    Am I bothered?   Is this interesting?   This is the unifying theme of reason for Hegel.

I'm going to skip to the final section of Reason which is about Kant and the Categorical Imperative, the idea that reason alone can give the grounds for moral judgement.    Or perhaps we could say can replace moral judgement with rational judgement.    The good, in enlightenment moral theories, disappears and is replaced with something else, usually, as in this case, the rational.    A lot has been said about the categorical imperative, which does seem to be rationalism's best shot at accounting for ethics, but Hegel makes short work of it along the lines that you can't get something from nothing, a concrete ethical position from abstractions and generalisations.   He doesn't even buy the line that you can subject moral law to a rational testing, that whatever morals you have in practice they ought to conform to principles of reason.    But remember it's not just a criticism of Kant, but a voyage of discovery, and what Hegel says natural consiousness discovers as a result of considering Kant is that moral law cannot be deduced from reason and therefore exists independently of it.    He quotes Sophocles on moral laws:  "They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, though where they come from none can tell".     With this realisation we move from Reason into the fourth phase of Spirit, Spirit itself or Justice, where we intuit the rational - the moral law - as real and independent, not as a product of our subjective reason.

Spirit for Hegel divides into Ethics, Culture, and Morality.   I'm going to leave out Culture and focus on Ethics and Morality.     The difference between the last two is that morality includes the notion of conscience, while ethics, which in part refers to ancient greece, is immediate and lacks the principle of subjective freedom which is peculiar to the modern period.   The Greeks, Hegel said, have no conscience.     They do what is right because it is right, not because subjective reason tells them to.

For me, the Phenomenology really comes to life with Ethics.    It's a discussion of Greek tragedy, centering on Sophocles Antigone, with a bit of Euripedes thrown in and Aristotle's Poetics firmly in the background.    It begins with the notions of human and divine law.   The human law is the law of the community and the divine law the law of the family (don't be put off by the word divine, it's not particularly about gods and both the human and the divine law have their specific deities) and its purest expression is in funeral rites.    The main dramatis personae of the Antigone are Antigone, her sister Ismene, her brothers Eteocles and Polynices, all children of Oedipus and Jocasta, and Creon, their uncle and king of Thebes.    Polynices has joined a neighbouring city state and made war on Thebes, and both he and his brother have fallen in battle.    Creon decrees a military burial for Eteocles but that Polynices as a traitor must be left where he fell.     Antigone decides to defy this ruling and to perform a proper burial ceremony for her brother, while Ismene decides to obey Creon.    Both Antigone and Creon are acting from high moral principals and are in their own terms entirely right.   Creon upholds the human law quite properly, and Antigone the divine.    The two conflict.    This conflict doesn't have to be tragic, and Aritophanes' Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on sex strike to persuade their husbands to stop going to war shows the same conflict in a comic light;   but in Antigone fate takes over and pathos and catharsis result.    The upshot is that both Antigone and to a greater extent Creon end up experiencing that while they were right in terms of their respective laws, they were wrong in terms of the other and experience this by the suffering they bring on themselves.   Creon's family is destroyed, and in his suffering because of this he experiences the power and value of the divine law, while Antigone realises that a life without the community is not work living so she acknowledges the power and value of the human law.

So two highly principled and moral people experience with complete certainly that they were wrong.   We began this discussion with the notion that the moral law is real, not an abstraction.    We end it with an additional discovery, that the good and the bad are real in all of us, and that no matter how moral we may try to be, we are going to do wrong.     This is the notion of the fall, of original sin, and it is key to any moral view of the world because it is the fact that we have a real choice between good and bad that makes moral choice possible.    This choice doesn't exist for enlightenment moral theory, which reduces the good to the rational and the bad to the irrational or selfish, so your only choice is to be rational, in which case you should be perfectly good, or to be selfish.    Real moral choice doesn't exist.

Morality adds a third observation to this by introducing the notion of forgiveness.    If we are asked for forgiveness, we have to respond positively because we know that we too are capable of wrong and that morality consists in aspiring to improve, not in being perfect.   Forgiveness, which for understanding was just a suspension of judgement, becomes not only a real option but a commandment.    The act of forgiveness, the sacrament actually of forgiveness, is the final event that closes the circle and at last makes it one.    We achieve reconciliation or better, atonement, with the clear connotation of making something that was divided whole again.    The book isn't finished, because we still have to consider certain things that belong to spirit as a whole, rather than any of its parts, which are art (beauty) religion (god) and philosophy (truth), but in a sense the phenomenology is over from this point.    We have proved that the ideal, the good, is real and logically prior to phenomenal existence, and since we have done that we can leave phenomena behind and go on to pure philosophy.     The Phenomenology was paired with Hegel's next great work, the Science of Logic, a study of the Idea as it is in and for itself and without any need for experience.    Lest there should be any doubt about the depth of his idealism, Hegel described it as the thought of God, prior to the creation of the universe.    I can't think of a stronger way of expressing the logical priority and independence of the Idea.

Now, that closes the circle, but there is just one more thing I wanted to say before I finish.   There's a question about originality in philosophy.     For a modern philosopher like Bertrand Russel for example, if you want to be anybody in philosophy you have to come up with something new.    It's the same for a mathematician, as I think Russel was.   It's no good just being good at sums:  if you want to make a name for yourself you have to come up with a new theorem or proof to hang your name on.    If on the other hand you are a philosopher in the classical mode and believe in the objective existence of the truth, originality is a bit embarrassing.    It would be a poor truth that had never been thought of before.   In this scheme of Hegel's you can certainly see the influence of other thinkers, Plato, Aristotle and Kant in particular, but nobody has put it together in anything like this way before.    Or have they?    Does the diagram I have draw look familiar to anyone?      What if I add in this?:

If we put the signs of the Zodiac around the edge, it starts to look like a horoscope.   Now, leaving aside the question of whether astrology has any predictive power, it is clear that like Hegel's Phenomenology, the Zodiac is an attempt to encapsulate all the possibilities of Spirit, and it is reassuring to an idealist that there are strong similarities between their descriptions.   The correspondence in fact is extraordinarily precise, though we don't have time left to go into detail here.     Was Hegel aware of it?   It's possible, though I rather doubt it.    I don't even know for sure that he consciously based his four main subdivisions of Spirit on Plato and the cardinal virtues.     I'm not aware of anything he wrote that spelled this out.    This may be because Hegel is a great thinker, but a poor communicator.    It's certain that Plato was in the forefront of his mind when he wrote the Phenomenology, which is in good part a work of self-criticism of his own early romantic idealisation of classical culture, and it seems hard to believe that he would not have noticed such an obvious connection.    But it could be just that both Hegel and Plato are portraying the same basic truth and that it is inevitable that their portraits will share features in common because of this and not because they influence each other.    The same goes for the Zodiac although in this case it is much more likely that the confluence of ideas comes from the fact that they are both portraying the same object, Spirit, rather than from direct influence, and more reassuring too.

So there you have it.    You can stick with modern philosophy, which does not believe in truth or think that philosophy can teach you anything about the deeper meaning of life and remains forever stuck in abstraction, or you can turn to real philosophy, idealism, which does believe in the truth, and which through pure speculative thinking can bring you to real, concrete revelations about the nature of truth, Spirit, God, and the rest.    I know which I prefer.

What is the point of philosophy?   (Text of a talk given to Kingston Philosopy Cafe May 2011)

I was very pleased to get the opportunity to introduce a session on “what is the point of philosophy?”  because I think it’s a very important question which many contemporary philosophers neglect to ask, together with another closely related question, “what actually is philosophy?”  

In the modern view – and by that I mean roughly since Descartes, in the last 500 years or so – philosophy is actually a pretty pointless excercise.    Contemporary  philosophy no longer believes in the truth, and if philosophy is love of truth, then it doesn’t believe in its own purpose     This may sound like a rude thing to say about an entire academic discipline, and it is, but it’s not really controversial and in my experience most contemporary philosophers are quite comfortable with this point of view.    They think that belief in the truth, and with it the idea that philosophy can throw light on deep questions about the meaning of life, the good and so on, is an archaic idea and that we now know better than to expect that philosophy can provide us with answers.   At best philosophy is a kind of mental gymnastics, a training in abstract thinking that may help us to achieve clarity in argument, but cannot take us any closer to truth.     Fundamentally it has about as much point as doing crossword puzzles.

   

Although this is the orthodox view, I don’t agree with it and instead hold to the more old fashioned view that philosophy is ultimately about the “meaning of life” and that there is a fundamental truth that philosophy can help us to understand and that’s why I thought it would be fun to have a go at this topic.    This view goes back two and a half thousand years to the foundation of the discipline of philosophy in ancient Greece.   

What I want to do this evening is simply to contrast the classical and modern views of the truth (i.e. the point of philosophy) and to show how deeply opposed to each other they are.    I’m going to do this under six headings:    Truth, Illusion, Experience, Reason, Recollection, and Initiation.

Truth

In the classical view (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) truth is something real and independent.   It exists, much like a person exists, and deserves the same kind of respect, and can be loved.   In the modern view truth is not independent.    It’s a property of statements which are either true or false.    This is generally not a position that is argued for or consciously held in contrast to other possible views such as the classical one.    It is just taken as self-evident.   And who would want to quibble with such a straightforward point of view?    But I want to argue not only that it is wrong, but that finding a valid purpose for philosophy depends on understanding that this position is wrong.

The first thing I want to note is that reading classical philosophy, one does get, or at least I do, a feeling that one is being treated with respect by the author, a feeling of being invited to participate on equal terms, and this seems consistent with the view that our object, the truth, is real and independent and that we share the aim of getting better acquainted with it.    With most modern philosophers, and all those operating within the empiricist/rationalist paradigm (as nearly all are), I get a different feeling.     Their aim seems to be to produce arguments that brook no opposition, and to put any such opposition in place by superior reasoning.    As a reader you can feel like a schoolchild, being beaten about the head for daring to question teacher’s authority.   This may be because the modern philosopher does not respect the independence of the truth as an object.   On the contrary, he thinks it depends on human qualities such as reason and perception and that with good reasoning it can be dominated and controlled.   It could be correct (I am going to argue it’s not) but if the relationship to truth were a human relationship, and the use of the term “love” suggest it might be something like this, then you could say that the ancient version of philosophy represents a healthy relationship between free equals while the modern version represents a dysfunctional relationship where one party doesn’t respect or trust the other and tries instead to dominate or control.

Now, for modern philosophy, if truth is self-evidently a property of statements, further analysis shows that statements are of two kinds, analytic or synthetic, or as David Hume said, they are either relations of ideas, or matters of fact.  Nothing else is permissible and any statement that is neither a relation of ideas, that is purely rational and independent of any outside influence, nor a statement of fact based on observation, is metaphysical and meaningless.   Rationalism and empiricism, the cornerstones of contemporary philosophy at least in Britain, develop from this distinction, rationalism believing that truth is to be found in pure reason (which in this conception of reason boils down to mathematics) and empiricism believing that it is found in observation.   There’s no problem in holding both positions together  – except that as I will argue both turn out to be profoundly wrong.

Illusion

Plato thought that the world of appearance was illusory.    It is constantly changing, as the term “appearance” suggests.   Things appear, then disappear.   But where do they appear from?   The classical view says that they appear from the world of forms, a third place where ideas exist independently of phenomena.   This is reality, and the embodiment of an idea in a particular experience is just appearance, an example or instance of the idea but not its reality.

Modern philosophy rejects this view, or rather it puts forward another, that appearance is reality.    Ideas don’t come from a third place but straight from appearance.   So, either Plato was wrong (in which case you would expect to find some critique which explained what his mistake was), or modern philosophy has just fallen for the illusion that appearance is reality and failed to notice what Plato pointed out, which is that this view doesn’t bear scrutiny and that reflection shows that ideas come from somewhere else.    So now I want to go on to look at this from two points of view, the empiricist and the rationalist, under the headings of Experience and Reason.

Experience

For modern philosophy, experience is really the same as sensation, that is, it’s what we get from our senses.    As Locke put it, our mind is like an empty house which we fill with furniture, and all the furniture comes from experience.   The idea here is that we get ideas by generalising from things we experience and an idea is a universal which we find common to several experiences.     We learn or are taught the meaning of terms as we learn to use language.    But as Plato realised two and a half thousand years ago, there’s a problem with this common sense approach.    Locke confuses sensation with experience.   Sensation just gives us raw data.   It’s true that Locke understands that perception is more than sensation;  it is sensation ordered by ideas.    This however just begs the question, as in Locke’s view the ideas were abstracted from sense-data.    The problem is that there are no ideas in data.   They are just numbers with no meaning.    If in the data we sense we find an idea, say beauty, where does that come from?    If we fall for the Platonic illusion, we say that it is out there in the world we experience and we just recognise it and classify that experience together with other experiences we have found to have the similar quality.    But what really is the thing that beautiful experiences have in common?   What links a beautiful day with a beautiful theorem and a beautiful picture?    It can’t be a physical property.    The point to grasp is this:   we cannot have an experience of beauty unless we first have the idea of beauty.    My dog, for example, doesn’t so far as I can tell have any notion of beauty.   She seems to have many ideas but this is not one of them, and I will never be able to teach it to her, because she doesn’t have the idea in the first place.    For her, beauty doesn’t exist.    It exists for us only because we have the notion of beauty and are therefore able to recognise it.    The idea is logically prior to the experience.    

This can be expressed in general terms as the eristic paradox, which asks the question not of beauty but of all knowledge, if we agree that it is a good thing worth pursuing, how are we going to recognise it when we find it?     If we recognise it because we know what it is, then there is no point looking for it because we have it already, while if we don’t, there is still no point looking because we will never recognise it.    This paradox is no word game and if you take the empiricist view that ideas come from experience there is no way to resolve it.   To go back to the example of beauty, it means either you go to experience equipped with the notion of beauty, which allows you to experience it, or you go without it in which case you will never find it.    It’s impossible to “build” the notion of beauty from experiences because if you don’t have the notion you can never have the experience.   

Experience then in the common sense or modern view comes to us through our senses.   In the classical view this is mistaken and experience is constituted by ideas.    Sense data have no meaning and meaning only comes through us asking questions of the data, which means applying ideas to them.    The ideas cannot originate in the data.   They must come from somewhere else.  

 

If we take this back to David Hume’s proposition that one half of truth is matters of fact, we have to reply “no it’s not”.    The idea that matters of fact are true collapses under its own weight, as do all sophist arguments (a sophist argument is one that claims to possess the truth, in contrast to a philosophical view that seeks the truth but does not claim to possess it).   A matter of fact in this view is just a datum that has no significance at all, and the idea associated with it that gives it meaning and significance comes from somewhere else, not from the data.    In the classical view the idea that matters of fact are true is the exact opposite of the truth, and it is understanding that ideas cannot come from sensation that makes possible the philosophical attitude.

  

This may seem to defy common sense, but it is a view also supported by natural science, which is the body of knowledge based on “matters of fact”.      Science cannot prove anything, it can only disprove.   Science proceeds by making conjectures or hypotheses, which it then tests by experiment.    The experiment may show the conjecture to be wrong in which case we can say that we know something but only in the negative sense that we know for sure that a conjecture is false.    If the experiment doesn’t show the conjecture is wrong we say that it is consistent with our conjecture and the entire body of scientific “knowledge” consists of conjectures that have not yet been disproven, so we believe that they must be true.   This may be very useful and valuable information, but to call it knowledge is incorrect.   It is belief, and it’s wrong to use the word truth in connection with it.    Nor is this just semantics.   Not only does the whole body of scientific knowledge depend on this view, but also it is littered with conjectures once thought unassailable that have now been shown to be false or inadequate – Newton’s laws of motion for example.    If we are looking for truth, we can’t find it here.

Reason

Let’s turn then and look at the other pillar of Hume’s theory of knowledge, the relations of ideas.    Here we seem on more certain ground.    Philosophers have always distrusted experience anyway as our senses can always be mistaken and this is no good if we are looking for truth.    The realm of pure reason seems surer ground.   Here we can find certainty at least.    Two and three are five and always will be and we don’t need any experience to check this.   If follows directly from the meaning of the numbers themselves.   But is this true?   For Descartes it is, and he is quite explicit in identifying truth and certainty, but there’s a simple problem.    A mathematical certainty may not be false, but it is pure abstraction and has no content.    If truth is limited to mathematics, is it telling us anything at all?    It seems that pure reason just because it is pure, and therefore capable of being certain and correct is for the same reason incapable of being true because it cannot express anything in particular.    Descartes wrestled with this problem and produced the ontological proof whereby he claimed to have derived the existence of God from pure reason alone and thus escaped the pure abstraction of the system of mathematical reason.   Certainly something like this is needed if there is to be any place for truth within the rationalist paradigm, but the ontological proof is scarcely convincing.    You can argue that all modern philosophies are based on some kind of device for connecting the certainty of pure reason to reality through some kind of judgement which though not purely rational, seems so certain that it would be churlish to disagree with it.     And example would be the utilitarian idea that pleasure or happiness are ends in themselves always worth pursuing so we can base a rational philosophy on one or other of these goals.     There is nothing irrational about pursuing unhappiness, so there is no necessity or certainly that happiness must be our goal, but if we accept what seems an innocuous suggestion we can start making rational generalisations based on it.

This Plato had also thought about two and a half thousand years ago, and his view is clear.    Reason cannot create truth.    Reason is a tool, a useful one and one of the three component parts of the soul.   It can help us to look for truth, but it cannot create it.    And this seems clearly to be true because reason, where it is pure and capable of certainty, is at the same time empty and incapable of expressing any concrete truth.  

Recollection

So in David Hume’s scheme, which represents most of modern philosophy and certainly all of the analytic tradition that is dominant in British universities, the truth has evaporated.    Neither matters of fact nor relations of ideas are capable of producing truth, and he says that these are the only possible places it could be found.  Modern philosophy is left without any notion of truth at all and if truth is its purpose, then modern philosophy has no purpose.      Although this might seem a disappointing conclusion, in general contemporary philosophy takes in on the chin and agrees that the notion that philosophy has any grand purpose has gone by the board.    It is seen now as just an academic exercise, which won’t lead to any grand conclusions but might help you to think more clearly, a kind of mental PE.    Most students of philosophy now feel quite comfortable rejecting the notion of “absolute truth” (as if the idea of relative truth made any kind of sense) and if they talk about truth at all they talk about many individual truths that may conflict (as if a truth that conflicted with another could still be true).     In view of the history of the 20^th century and the triumph of pluralist politics over absolutist totalitarian regimes,  a pluralist approach to philosophy may be comforting, but that doesn’t mean that it makes sense.    Many talk of truth as a social construct, which just the same as saying that it doesn’t exist, is not real.

    

The classical view is quite different.    It takes off from the understanding that truth cannot come from either of the two places common sense looks for it, reason and experience.    Instead it says that it can’t come from experience, because our ideas are logically prior to experience.    They make experience possible, but they don’t come from it.    And ideas can’t come from reason because reason is empty.    You can’t deduce the notion of beauty from reason for example.    It follows that since ideas exist, they must come from somewhere else, and Plato calls this the world of forms.    So how do we access the ideas?    Plato’s answer is that we remember them.    We may not always be conscious of them and are not born knowing everything, but we carry them within us and what we call learning, which seems to us to be the addition of new knowledge, is in fact just remembering, becoming conscious of what we already know implicitly.

Initiation.

Now, all of the classical ideas I have discussed here are profoundly counterintuitive and seem to defy common sense.    I have argued.

1.    1    Truth is not a property of statements but a real independent existence

2.    2   Neither analytic nor synthetic judgements are capable of producing truth and though these seem to common sense to be the only things capable of expressing truth, the reality is that truth exists in a third place separate from experience and reason which Plato called the world of forms.

3.     3    The phenomenal world we experience is illusion and only the ideal is real and true

4.     4   Experience does not lead to ideas.   It’s the other way round, ideas make experience possible and are logically prior to experience

5.     5    Reason is empty and while it has certainty, it can’t express truth.

6.     6   Perhaps most confounding of all, we can’t learn anything new.   All learning is remembering and we can only become aware of what already exists in the world of the ideal

The good news is that if you accept these apparently bizarre ideas, then truth exists and philosophy

has a purpose after all.  The bad news is that because they are so contrary to common sense, you have to go through a process of initiation to understand them.     It’s not completely impossible to get there on your own.   By Plato’s account Socrates did, but for the rest of us it is unlikely that we are going to get there without some prompting and guidance.   And you need to go through such an initiation to become a philosopher.    Only someone who understands that ideas are real can be a lover of truth.   All philosophy is idealism, and a materialist philosopher is a contradiction in terms.

Modern philosophy is founded on rejection of this view.    It’s rarely a conscious rejection however.   For the most part modern philosophers start from scratch, thinking in isolation, like Descartes in his “stove”, and they simply never get to the realisation (that it is the ideal that is real) that is necessary if you are going to become a philosopher, a lover of wisdom.    They call this “Enlightenment” which is perhaps the most perversely named intellectual movement ever as it is precisely the opposite of what it calls itself.   It’s a retreat from the great insight that founded philosophy as a worthwhile discipline in Ancient Greece into the prephilosophical darkness of sophism.     Nothing could be more natural than the assumption that as time passes our knowledge increases, but in the case of philosophy “modern” enlightenment style thinking is a huge backwards step and enlightenment thinkers know much less than the founders of philosophy, and arguably know nothing at all.    Socrates was at least aware of his own ignorance, but the thinkers of the enlightenment have not achieved this level of awareness, and naively believe that “common sense” is true.    If it were so, then there would be no need for or purpose to philosophy, but it is not and that is why philosophy is a noble and valuable pursuit.    And because so much of contemporary thinking especially in political life consciously or more often unconsciously adopts the Enlightenment or common sense paradigm, this is not just an academic matter and there is immense practical value to understanding why this paradigm is wrong.