“Since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the centre toward X.” Friedrich Nietzsche [1]
In first turning to the problem of modernity we should look at how modern man views himself and his world. This is the base camp from which the ethical, political and cultural effects can be surveyed in depth. It’s only when you understand western man’s reasons for adopting the modern worldview that you can see why they were so compelled to abandon what we now see as archaic, backwards and outmoded. Even if you think they are making a radical mistake right from the beginning you will never make any progress today if you don’t understand the fundamental reasons the old world had to die.
The fundamental problem of philosophy has always been the task of conceiving the relationship between thought and being, appearance and reality, mind and world, knower and known. Indeed the beginning of western philosophy as such was initiated by the Pre-Socratics, who in various different ways pointed to a reality which was radically different from our ordinary world as the truth. Democritus thought that it was atoms and the void, Thales thought it was water, Empedocles thought it was the four elements joined in love and separated by hate. The difference between the ancients and scholastics and the moderns is the conception of how appearance relates to reality.
The relationship between mind and world is the bedrock of epistemology, which isn’t being considered here as an isolated starting point of philosophy, but as the first impulse of philosophy. You can’t inquire into what knowledge is without presuppositions about the relationship of mind to world, of what the knower is and how it relates to the known, of how appearances are to be distinguished from reality. The broad story of modern philosophy is the breaking down of a standpoint which posits a primal unity of thought and being into one which mediates the relationship with science. We lose a primal connection through our intellect into the structure of reality, and instead science, rather than a priori reasoning based on theological starting points, becomes the only legitimate form of epistemic enquiry.
The 17th century is the biggest revolution in thought since the Axial Age. The scientific revolution inaugurates a new question for philosophy then, namely what is the reality which the sciences purport to describe, and how do we relate to it? In other words the central problem of the enlightenment, at least in its epistemological dimension, was first to understand the implications of the rise of science and secondly to establish the place of subjectivity within this.
Galileo suggested taste, colour and all the things which fill the world with wonder and significance were projections of the mind and the world was simply described by mathematised formulae overlaying geometric phenomena which mechanically move in determined patterns[2]. The real world as described by science was cold and lifeless, alien to our interests and bereft of meaning. Copernicus famously overturns man at the centre of the universe and points to a reality where we are radically decentred in a vast expanse of empty space. The fact was though: these ways of seeing the world were massively productive and successful. However, there is a huge epistemological problem here, how do we know about this alien world and how does it relate to our lived experience?
Descartes is the most important philosopher to understand in this context and will be the starting point. Cartesianism as the paradigm of modernity is perhaps overplayed, but he captures the dynamics of the shift of ancient to modern better than anyone with the possible exception of Hobbes. However, unlike the typical presentations of Descartes where one jumps straight into the radical scepticism of the meditations, I take Cartesian physics and contributions to maths with analytic geometry to be the starting point, and that the meditations only ultimately make sense within this broader context. I also argue that the mind-body problem is a red herring as the central problem from Descartes.
John Haugeland [3] describes the conception of how appearance relates to reality in the ancient world as the resemblance theory, and modernity as representationalist. The former picture I shall baptise “Organic Resemblance” [4]. Organic Resemblance is the metaphysical picture of the world which stretches from Plato to Aquinas. Both Platonism and Aristotelianism, in different ways, hold a version of this view. The foundation of this worldview is that the structure of reality mirrors the structure of thought, or, in the idea that being is synonymous with intelligibility: to be is to be intelligible. Every thought is a thought of being and being only exists insofar as it exists for thought. In Plato this is Being as form intelligible though anamnesis and in Aristotle Immanent substantial form accessible through sense impressions.
Let’s take the example of the form of a circle. How form is conceptualised is abstracted here, whether it’s a divine idea, substantial form, or platonic exemplar doesn’t matter: what’s relevant is the method by which we distinguish a real versus a false participant in the form. The shared notion the ancient world invoked ultimately was resemblance. The closer an appearance resembles the true reality the better it is. Think of a computer generated approximation of a circle, a trained drawing of a circle, and a sketch you try yourself: a true appearance which relates the the form can be judged through close or far resemblance, because it provides a paradigm for error and success. Resemblance is based on the idea of shared properties, this is most obviously understood in the example of say, the shared properties captured in a portrait and the person it’s a portrait of.
What convinced the moderns to abandon this picture was its radical untenability in the face of science. What’s the resemblance between our experience of a static earth and a moving sun and the reality of heliocentrism?
Not only was this proposal destined to transform astronomy, but it also (eventually) threw the rest of accepted science into disarray. For now the natural places, which were the basis of the account of all mundane movement and decay, were totally dislocated. Which directions were up and down? Why would the four elements of the universe (besides the quintessence) have their natural "tendencies" tied to some peculiar moving point inside the Earth? Where, indeed, were Heaven and Hell? The questions for the theory of motion were equally serious. Why didn't loose objects whirl off the spinning Earth and then get left behind in space as we sailed on around the Sun? Or why, at least, didn't a falling stone come down slightly "behind" (west of) its original location as the Earth rotated out from under it? These were extremely hard problems, and it was many years before the laws of inertia, force, and gravitation were all worked out to solve them. [5]
Flat earth is the ur-conspiracy for this reason, a complete and total denial of science going back to its most ancient formulation: astronomy. The convoluted non-predictive models they cook up are post hoc rationalisations of their absolute conviction in face value appearance. Anyone overturning that conviction must also be responsible for all social evils imaginable.
The resemblance model broke down for even more profound reasons than counter-intuitive scientific discoveries though. Maths was no longer something with a domain of simply lines and compass to figure out geometry and numbers conceived as objects but a language which abstractly relates to reality. Mathematics was used to successfully create laws which were incredibly potent at describing reality in a far wider context than the ancient Greeks. The question is, how do we replace the resemblance model with something adequate to the tasks of Copernicus and Galileo? Brandom, following Haugeland, describes the situation with supreme clarity:
Descartes came up with the more abstract semantic metaconcept of representation required to make sense of these scientific achievements—and of his own. The particular case he generalized from to get a new model of the relations between appearance and reality (mind and world) is the relationship he discovered between algebra and geometry. For he discovered how to deploy algebra as a massively productive and effective appearance of what (following Galileo) he still took to be an essentially geometric reality. Treating something in linear, discursive form, such as “ax + by = c” as an appearance of a Euclidean line, and “x^2 + y^2 = d” as an appearance of a circle, allows one to calculate how many points of intersection they can have and what points of intersection they do have, and lots more besides. These sequences of symbols do not at all resemble lines and circles. Yet his mathematical results (including solving a substantial number of geometric problems that had gone unsolved since antiquity, by translating them into algebraic questions) showed that algebraic symbols present geometric facts in a form that is not only (potentially and reliably) veridical, but conceptually tractable.
In order to understand how strings of algebraic symbols (as well as the Copernican and Galilean antecedents of his discoveries) could be useful, veridical, tractable appearances of geometric realities, Descartes needed a new way of conceiving the relations between appearance and reality. His philosophical response to the scientific and mathematical advances of this intellectually turbulent and exciting time was the development of a concept of representation that was much more abstract, powerful, and flexible than the resemblance model it supplanted. He saw that what made algebraic understanding of geometric figures possible was a global isomorphism between the whole system of algebraic symbols and the whole system of geometric figures. That isomorphism defined a notion of form shared by the licit manipulations of strings of algebraic symbols and the constructions possible with geometric figures. In the context of such an isomorphism, the particular material properties of what now become intelligible as representings and representeds become irrelevant to the semantic relation between them. All that matters is the correlation between the rules governing the manipulation of the representings and the actual possibilities that characterize the representeds. Inspired by the newly emerging forms of modern scientific understanding, Descartes concluded that this representational relation (of which resemblance then appears merely as a primitive species) is the key to understanding the relations between mind and world, appearance and reality, quite generally. [6]
The relationship between acceleration to the area of a triangle, of a timeline to time isn’t clear under resemblance. Pythagoreanism, or a mathematical view of the nature of reality isn’t dead, but it’s conceived in a radically new way. A circle doesn’t need to be considered as resemblance to an ideal form; its properties can be rationally deduced from its discursive rules of production. The questions of philosophy then become the conditions by which we can manipulate our representings such that they are true in relation to what they represent.
It’s at this point that we can reconstruct the thought process behind Descartes’ infamous Cogito. If we know about the world via representation then how do we relate to representation? If we know about representation by representing it then this seems to fall into an infinite regress. The solution for Descartes is that representational knowledge rests on a non-representational foundation. We experience our own subjectivity directly. We look at the tower from afar and we think it is square, we approach and we realise we had misrepresented it and it’s round. However, we can’t be wrong about the fact that it seemed square to us. Our own experience is transparent to us and our knowledge of it is incorrigible. Just by having a Pensée we must also know we’re having a Pensée.
So we have knowledge of the world by manipulating mathematised representings of a geometric reality which is physical and deterministic, but we have an immediate knowledge of some representings simply in virtue of having them, namely our own thoughts. The essence of the Cartesian picture is summed up by DeVries and Tripplet:
The resulting image is of the individual mind as an essentially isolated island, the internal economy of which is transparent to itself, but which gains information about everything else in the world by extrapolating from changes in the internal state of the island. [7]
Enlightenment rationalism tried to find even more radical starting points and pick apart descartes for not going far enough; empiricism questioned the project entirely. Idealists like Berkeley denied the existence of matter, Materialists like Hobbes denied the existence of a mind. What they all have in common however is that they’re all focused on precisely this dualistic contrast between the self and how it gains knowledge of the material world. The primitive connection to the structure of the world isn’t necessarily lost in the enlightenment, as Descartes reads off the causal principle in the same way he reads off the cogito, but the starting point has to be grounded temporally on the more basic intimate connection to one’s own subjectivity, rather than being. The empiricist for her part denies the grandiosity and arbitrariness of the great rationalist systems to make grand claims beyond the level of the finitude of human experience. Nonetheless we have access to the intrinsic intelligibility of our own experiences themselves from which we build up knowledge from a blank slate.
The prime importance of Descartes is as an epistemological dualist. This dualism affects all enlightenment thought and which turns philosophy decisively towards the individual. The strict mind-body dualism he employed isn’t historically interesting at all.
The mind-body problem as it’s understood today goes back to Emil Du Bois-Reymond. Du Bois-Reymond was a physiologist who co-discovered action potential, making abundantly clear that a vitalist [8] understanding of the organism would fail and that there was an electro-chemical structure which underpinned cellular operation. As a major public intellectual, an early proponent of Darwinism, and a butcherer of major hopes of an anti-naturalist understanding of life, it’s very surprising to see him to give an extremely important speech on the limits of science.
By this point Newtonian mechanics had been greatly advanced to Lagrangian and Hamiltonian varieties and had many achievements under their belts, Darwinism was coming to be increasingly recognised as the winner in biology, and vitalist hopes for an anti-reductionist understanding of living organisms were looking increasingly implausible. Psychology as a systematic discipline was in its birth and some counter intuitive discoveries about the mechanics of cognition were coming to be discovered. The paradoxes of dualism were becoming increasingly apparent as disastrous, only living organisms have consciousness, and with Phineas Gage suffering his famous railway accident and having his personality completely changed, and early forays into neuroscience with Broca and so on, the idea that there wasn’t some very close link between how the material processes going on and the phenomenon of “consciousness” was falling under serious doubt.
But Du Bois-Reymond wanted to stop and take stock of the situation:
Just as a world-conqueror of ancient times, as he halts for a day in the midst of his victorious career, might long to see the boundaries of the vast territories he has subjugated more clearly defined, so that here he may levy tribute of some nation hitherto exempt, or that there he may discern some natural barrier that cannot be overcome by his horsemen, and which constitutes the true limit of his power, in like manner it will not be out of place, if Natural Science, the world-conqueror of our times, resting as on a festive occasion from her labor, should strive to define the true boundaries of her immense domain. [9]
Du Bois-Reymond pointed to two fundamental problems which he famously shouts “Ignorabimus!” We will never know. He takes the now infamous Laplace demon thought experiment: what if there was a demon, which knew the exact current positions of all matter-points, and knew all of the physical laws, thus being able to calculate the future positions and trajectories of everything that existed. Du Bois-Reymond is convinced that this ideal knowledge would not be able to answer this fundamental question: why do living organisms have subjective experience?
It certainly would be a “lofty triumph” if science could correlate mental phenomena with physiological activity.We could note with interest “what play of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus corresponds to the bliss of hearing music, what whirl of such atoms answers to the climax of sensual enjoyment, what molecular storm coincides with the raging pain of trigeminal neuralgia.” But even perfect knowledge of the brain would tell us nothing about experience, for “no imaginable movement of material particles could ever transport us into the realm of consciousness.”The same could be said of attempts to answer the question psychologically, since perception, association, and memory could never substitute for awareness. Du Bois-Reymond laid out the difficulty: “What conceivable connection exists between definite movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand such primordial, indefinable, undeni- able facts as these: I feel pain or pleasure; I taste something sweet, or smell a rose, or hear an organ, or see something red, and the certainty that immediately follows: Therefore I am?” Even if the atoms of the brain were mindful of their own existence, science would be at a loss to explain how consciousness followed from their combined action.“In a world made up of matter in motion,” he declared, “the movements of the cerebral molecules are like a dumb show.” [10]
The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” as we conceive of it, goes not to the paradox of dualism, how does consciousness affect the material body, but rather how does the brain relate to the mind: this is a 19th, not a 17th century problem. The problem stems from the intrinsic paradoxes and unsatisfactoriness of dualism, and the straight up refutation of the empirical notion of vitalism. This leaves us in a very tricky spot, because consciousness is of course a real phenomenon, this lead Du Bois-Reymond simply to the conclusion that a scientific explanation was impossible and it would forever remain a mystery. How can we reconcile the fact that our states of mind are affected by drinking alcohol, cognitive functions in many cases can be closely individuated to neuroanatomical correlates, and that only organisms which have been through the process of natural selection have any sentience with the reality of consciousness? You don’t.
Of course many will find this deeply troubling, and I understand this, there are some materialist and idealist recourses here to dissolve many of the problems as they are formulated here, but nonetheless this is a great puzzle which has been ongoing ever since Du Bois-Reymond and a period of active and intense debate to this day. The problem is summed up here:
As du Bois-Reymond saw it, the mind depended entirely on the brain. Ideas derived from the senses, morbid states altered thought, and animals experienced the world, all of which indicated that intelligence had emerged as a consequence of natural selection. In this regard, the scholastic presumption that separated mental phenomena from material conditions was “so plainly in conflict with reality” that it supplied an “apagogical demonstration of the falsity of its premises.” The mystery of consciousness couldn’t excuse the error of dualism. [11]
This dialogue is but one problem in modernity and not the fundamental one, it is one consequence of the success of reductionist science and a place for technical debate. The fundamental result from the scientific revolution under its enlightenment interpretation is individualism, it’s the rational subject with safe internal knowledge as a model builder which has profound implications much wider than the mind-body problem in academic philosophy, it lead to an ethical and political upheaval. If the individual is fundamental, then ethics becomes the task of grounding a universal morality according to the laws of reason, rather than taking them from god or nature, politics becomes about grounding civil society on the basis of individuals coming together in a way which is mutually beneficial rather than as a fulfilment of the divine will.
Two points of clarification before we finish though. I’m not claiming at all that in any direct sense liberalism and modern ethics more broadly are a consequence of Descartes or even the broader scientific revolution, tracing the origin of liberalism is a historical task which primarily will focus on the political-economic context, and there are many broader cultural trends in which Descartes is a late explicit expositor of, these topics are what will be discussed in the next blogs.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufman, New York: Vintage, 1967, §1.
[2] “I believe that for external bodies to excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds, nothing is required in those bodies themselves except size, shape, and a lot of slow or fast motions [namely, of countless "tiny particles"]. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were taken away, then shapes, numbers, and motions would well remain, but not odors, tastes, or sounds. The latter are, I believe, nothing but names, outside of the living animal-just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names, apart from the armpit and the skin around the nose.” Galileo
[3] Chapter 1- Haugeland, John. “Artificial intelligence - the very idea.” (1987).
[4] Arguing both for the unity, internal incoherence, and use of the Organic Resemblance paradigm to understand ancient philosophy in this tradition, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle and the scholastics, is something which requires its own exploration, which I will do in the future, going into detail with both Platonist and Aristotelian varieties of this.
[5] ibid p.18
[6] Robert B. Brandom. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's ‘Phenomenology’. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. PP 39-40
[7] deVries, Willem A. and Timm Triplett. “Knowledge, Mind, and the Given : Reading Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," (2000). P.xix
[8] To be clear I don’t mean what’s usually meant by vitalism on the internet, what’s strictly meant is a conception where life is a special category over and above inanimate nature which cannot be reduced to it.
[9] Emil Du Bois Reymond: The Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature Popular Science Monthly, vol. 5 (1874), 17-32
[10] Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Gabriel Finkelstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. p.267
[11] ibid p.268
I don't believe that heliocentrism was ever "proven", it's simply a reference frame that is cognitively easy to grasp. A reference frame outside our solar system has the sun hurtling around the milky way and the orbits of the planets around it are significantly more complicated from the 2D disc-plane that you might remember in school. In order for it to be "correct" the sun must be the actual dead center of the universe, rather than the earth.
Good work lad. I will recommend the blog.