Philosophy - Resources

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:54:14 +0000

By Robert P. Taylor (2007)

It would not be amiss to compare the mystery of time with the mystery of the divine (should any such thing exist). On the one hand, it seems everyone is aware of it. The transition from morning to afternoon conveys a sense of time. The ongoing aging process conveys a sense of time. Change, or rather the perception of change, conveys a sense of time. Yet, in spite of all this, and when even the simplest and the most brilliant minds agree that there is at least an inference of what might be called ‘time’, it is not at all apparent what time is. More interestingly still, it is not at all obvious that time itself even exists.

The Non-Existence of Time

It is not uncommon for philosophers to use spatial analogies when describing issues relating to time, and I think one would be apt here. Consider that there is a room with no doors and a small window looking in. When you look through the window, you see a red cube; and yet, you later discover, the cube is not there at all. What is there is a trick of the light - a result of mirrors and infrared light-waves and a host of other things that create the illusion.

From the experience, two things should be clear: first, it is obvious that there is no actual red cube; and second, if there is no red cube, then there must exist some sort of entity that is capable of producing the illusion of a red cube. At the macroscopic level, and by ordinary experience, the illusion of an object is bound to the same physical laws as an actual object. Hence, if there is nothing to determine the existence of the object (mass of particles formed in such a manner as to create a solid, liquid or gaseous form of certain size, shape and structure) then there is no object. Likewise, if there is nothing to create the illusion of an object (refracting or reflecting light-waves, distorted light-beams, hallucinations caused by psychological defects, et cetera) then there is no illusion. As it were, nothing comes from nothing.

As to space itself, Solipsists contend that the world is illusionary: it does not exist, at least not as perceived. Taking this to the extreme level, one might assert that space is not real, and this would apply whether space is a substance or a relation between spatial objects. If space is a substance, then the laws of illusion apply to it as well as to spatial objects: something creates the illusion. It might be cognitive processes going on in a brain imprisoned in a vat, or it might be an elaborate computer code. On the other hand, if space is a relation, then the exposé of spatial objects as illusions themselves should be enough to deal with the apparent existence of space. Quite simply, there cannot be an existing relation between two non-existent objects. As with spatial objects, the illusion is there because it has a source. Either the thing that makes one perceive spatial objects is the thing that makes people perceive space, or space is a coincidental consequence of the perception of spatial objects.

For example, in the room with the red cube, suppose that another object – also an illusion – exists. Anyone looking through the window will perceive a red cube and (say) a blue cube. One will also perceive a fixed distance between the two cubes. When the illusions end, the distance will no longer exist, because distance, being relational, requires spatial points to relate to. If there are no cubes, there cannot be distance between the cubes.

What about time? Is the illusion of time possible even without a source for the illusion? If so, then one must ask what the illusion is. How do we differentiate between actual time and perceived time, if either of them exist? If we cannot differentiate, how can we say time is illusionary? On the other hand, if there is a source for the illusion of time, what is its nature? Is there a super-time so beyond human comprehension that a simpler form of time is required? Is time the consequence of a fallible perspective of reality? Is it necessary to posit entities or phenomena to explicate time?

Already, just by asking if time exists, I have been forced to compare time with space and ask, if time does not exist, what gives us the perception of time? If time is real, what is it? If time is not real, what do we perceive, and is that thing externally located or internally located? If it is internally located, does it bear relation to external entities or phenomena, or internal brain states? If it is externally located, is it spatial, or does it stem from something altogether unfamiliar? These are the sorts of questions asked by philosophers interested in the subject of time.

A- and B-Theories

The A-theory, put in simple terms, states that time flows. The theory also states that there are tensed propositions relating to unfixed temporal points. That is, there is a past, there is a present, and there is a future.

What exactly is meant by the proposition "time flows" is a complicated issue, and some philosophers would even reject the notion of the flow of time as ridiculous: if time does flow, then how fast does it flow? A second per second? A second per supersecond?

With the A-theory, truth-apt statements such as "Hitler stole power in the past", "I am typing an essay about time now" and "There will be a seminar on Quantum Existentialism in the future", have their truth values determined by their position in the time-line. That is, the state of a proposition is determined by its referent being in the past, or in the present, or in the future.

The B-theory states that time does not flow, and that time is tenseless. The implication of this is that there is no past, no present and no future. That is not to deny any of the events in time; rather, it is to claim that "past", "present" and "future" are indexicals. Points in time are more like "here" and "there" than fixed geographical locations like "Liverpool", "New York" or "Melbourne".

According to B-theorists, the proposition "In the past, Hitler stole power" would actually mean "At some point in time prior to the one I presently occupy, Hitler stole power", and "I am typing an essay about time now" would actually mean "From my perspective I am now typing an essay about time". However, it would not be contradictory to say "Hitler is now stealing power and I am now typing an essay", given that the scope of "now" is not constrained to any one perspective. In other words, in relation to my position in the time-line, Hitler is not now stealing power, and in relation to his position, I am not now typing an essay. In a similar sense, a person in Manchester is "here" as much as a person in Liverpool is "here", but neither one of them could honestly say "We are both here", for the referent of "here" is not identical in both cases.

The A-theory, and the B-theory, are often confused with related theories. Perhaps this confusion is down to a subconscious insistence that a theory needs to be complete, and that neither the A-theory nor the B-theory are complete. Perhaps the confusion stems from the fact that many ideas relating to time potentially overlap, or are contrary to one another. Since, for example, Presentism makes claims contrary to claims of the B-theory, it is understandable that Presentism might be confounded with the A-theory. Likewise, since the B-theory is often explained with spatial analogies, and since Four-Dimensionalism goes some way in making such analogies less unclear, it is understandable that the B-theory might be confounded with Four-Dimensionalism. I will now look at each of these in turn.

Four-Dimensionalism

Four-Dimensionalism may refer either to the view that time consists of real parts, like spatial parts (this contrasts with such views as Presentism), or to the view that spatial objects have temporal parts (such that the objects are extended through time, as well as through space). For the purposes of this essay, the view that time consists of real parts will be referred to as Eternalism, while the view that objects have temporal parts will be called Perdurantism. One should note that Four-Dimensionalism is not identical with the B-theory, though the two are compatible.

Eternalism

Eternalism states that, just as all spatial points are equally real, so too are all temporal points equally real. This view is compatible with both the A-theory and the B-theory.

Under A-theoretic Eternalism, an event in the future will flow from future, to present to past. It exists in all three temporal states – what that means, exactly, is unclear – rather than coming into existence in the present. For example, consider that a sprinter is being observed running past a slit in a wall. The observer can only see a slice of the racing track. As the sprinter passes the slit, the observer sees the sprinter, but the sprinter exists on the track even when he is not being observed. Obviously this analogy does not distinguish between past and future events, but it is sufficient to differentiate Eternalism from the view that only present events exist.

Under B-theoretic Eternalism, all moments are equally real, and have equal validity in terms of their status as a temporal frame of reference. This contrasts with A-theoretic Eternalism, which contends that past and future events are real, but have a less valid reference frame than present events. Often, Eternalism is simply equated with the B-theory, since both theories present a view of time that grants equal ontological status to all temporal points. Furthermore, it is not obvious what an Eternalist A-series would entail. What does it mean to grant equal ontological status to the past, the present, and to the future, but give ontological importance to the present? This question has been explored in philosophy, though not always (if at all) successfully.

Presentism

In brief, Presentism contrasts with Eternalism, in that where Eternalism posits existing temporal moments beyond the present (such that the past and/or future exist in addition to the present), Presentism posits that only the present exists.

An A-theorist Presentist might state that time flows: a potential future moment t3 becomes an actual present moment t2, and then a conceptual moment t1. This t3 is potential: it has the potential to become an actual moment. For instance, a driver speeding towards a wall will either crash or will not crash. Both the crash and the aversion of the crash are potential moments in the future. The t2, being present, is an actual moment. For those who understand Modality, t2 exists in the actual world; it is real. Therefore, the driver may crash. The event of the driver crashing into the wall is an actual present moment. The t1 is, for lack of a better term, a conceptual moment; it does not actually exist (any more) but can be conceived through memories, historical documents, and the like. One may thus remember being in a car crash. This memory is a conceptual representation of a moment that did exist, but does not now. The flow of time, then, is the passing of temporal points in and out of actuality.

It might be objected that the potential future and the conceptual past have no place in the ontology of a Presentist. However, Presentism does not need to abandon any of its premises to acknowledge the existence of potential/conceptual temporal moments. All that needs to be done is to establish that the past and the future do not have the same ontological status as the present. The future can, perhaps, be foreseen. The past can be remembered, but these are no more real than a notion of an object being as real as the object being thought of. That is, representations of the past, and of the future, can certainly exist without contradicting Presentism.

I have distinguished between past and future moments as "potential" and "conceptual" moments. However, some cases suggest such terms cannot be so readily applied. Fatalism, in conjunction with the notion of accurate prediction (e.g. infallible foreknowledge), would make the future conceptual, rather than potential. Likewise, backward causation or backward counterfactual agency could make the past potential, rather than conceptual.

[A brief note: counterfactual agency takes the logical form "If P had occurred, then Q would have occurred". The antecedent of a counterfactual conditional necessarily involves some event that did not occur, but could have. Therefore, "If Hitler had not invaded Russia, he would have taken Europe" would be a counterfactual.]

It is apparent that no B-theorist can adhere to Presentism, since by its nature the B-theory denies the existence of the present. Certainly, denying the status of "present" to what we experience to be "now" would not work, because without some other time to reference, "now" would not be "now" indexically, and this is precisely what the B-series depends on. It makes no sense to deny status of present to a point in time that has ontological precedence over other points in time.

Endurantism

Endurantists maintain that objects simply are three-dimensional entities extended through the three dimensions of space. Further, objects persist through time in that one is wholly located at some point in time (t1), and passes to other points in time as a whole entity.

Perdurantism

Perdurantism states that objects extend through the three spatial dimensions, as well as through a fourth dimension. Therefore, objects have both spatial and temporal parts. This means that while a temporal part of an object may exist at t1, a distinct temporal part exists at t2, and another temporal part exists at t3, which is distinct from the temporal parts that exist at t1 and t2.

Perdurantists can be divided into two main subclasses; viz. Worm Theorists and Stage Theorists (Exdurantists). Worm Theory states that temporal parts are segments (analogous to segments of a worm). If one imagines the entirety of an entity as a worm extending from future to past, then each segment of the worm would be a temporal part, suspended in a temporal moment. Stage Theorists hold that each temporal part of an entity is, in fact, a temporal counterpart to the same entity. Consequently, an entity, under Exdurantism, exists only during a single moment. In the next moment, a different, but identical entity exists as a counterpart.

Exdurantism is a relatively novel theory, which appears to be an attempt to reconcile Endurantism with Perdurantism, by positing temporal counterparts rather than temporal parts per se.

Ender

With this section of the essay, I hope to have provided the reader with a basic overview of some of the ideas tackled by philosophers interested in the metaphysics of time. Consideration, and indeed, discussion of these ideas is to be encouraged, and suggestions for research are always welcome.

Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Part 2

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:21:28 +0000

By Awet Moges (2006)

(Continued from Part 1...)

Book IV

The fourth book, regarding ethics in general and particular context, is the "most serious" discussion, largely because it is the most relevant for everyone. However, Schopenhauer is perceptive enough to recognize how ineffective systems of morals are in the production of virtuous folk, just as poorly as aesthetic theories are capable of generating geniuses in art. Consequently, "philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is present... " (WWR § 53 p 271). The only true method of philosophy asks about the what, instead of the whence, the whither, or the why - what lies beyond phenomena, beyond the PSR, what is the inner nature of the world (p 274).

Schopenhauer then launches into a discussion about time according to phenomena and explains how the "now" is the only actual aspect of temporal existence while the past and the future are mere phantasms. Like Epicurus, but with a more sophisticated argument, Schopenhauer argues against death as a source of anguish. While the idea of death inspires a holy terror in most people, if we realize that only the "now" matters - because the present is the only true form of the phenomenon of the will - then we can dismiss death as a "false illusion" and an "impotent specter", and both the past and the future are "empty mirages" (p 284). The fear of death relies on our anticipation of the future, and the future is an aspect of time. Death concerns us only as individuals, and since our existence as individuals is only an illusion from the world of appearance, therefore death has no ultimate reality.

If the phenomenon is completely conditioned by the PSR, which entails necessity, then the will as the thing-in-itself is utterly free. But the freedom of the will as thing-in-itself cannot and does not extend directly to phenomena, and especially not in the highest grade of phenomena - man - for he is already conditioned by the form of all phenomena, the PSR. We consider ourselves a priori free, once we consider the number of potential choices available to us, but it is only after experience and reflection, a posteriori, that our action does follow our character and motives with necessity (WWR p 289).

The appearance of freedom of individual action comes from the point of view of the intellect. the intellect knows the conclusions of the will after the fact, empirically. In other words, the intellect cannot predict the choices of the will. Rational deliberation takes place once a hypothetical situation is entertained, and oftentimes promotes a solution, but direct inclination usually leans towards another solution, and always overpowers rational deliberation once the opportunity of action actually arises. The intellect can only meditate between the possible solutions, and then it passively awaits the true decision of the will. From the view of the intellect, both choices are equally possible, and this potentiality inspires the appearance of the empirical freedom of the individual. Nevertheless, since the will is inscrutable and impenetrable, the intellect, which is little more than the examination of the motives of different point of views, cannot determine the will.

The assertion of an empirical freedom of will depends on the presumption that man's inner nature is a knowing and abstract thinking entity, and consequently, this abstracta becomes a willing subject. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer thinks the will is the primary and original aspect, and knowledge is the by-product of the phenomenon of will - just an instrument. Then people are what they are according to their will, and they learn of themselves only through experience - experiencing what they are - and they discover their character after the fact. For the free will advocates, the individual wills what s/he knows, but for Schopenhauer, s/he knows what s/he wills (WWR p 293). Motives, however, can influence character through knowledge, and that is how a person's manner can change while his/her character remains the same. Motives can influence the will, alter its direction, but not change the will. Therefore, pace Seneca, willing cannot be taught, and always remains inscrutable. Motives themselves are concepts, abstract representations of reason, and through the conflict of several motives, the strongest emerges and determines the will with necessity.

Schopenhauer also notes that the ability to discern motives, deliberation, is precisely not only what distinguishes the human from the animal; it is also what makes human existence much more agonizing and tortuous than the animal. The greatest suffering isn't limited to the immediate present as representations of perception, but as abstract concepts that haunt thoughts and cause mental anguish and suffering. The animal has no such troubles for it lives in the present.

After elaborating on the intellect and the empirical character, Schopenhauer begins analyzing the third aspect of human behavior, acquired character, which is social - something articulated only within society - where someone is praised for having character or condemned for lacking any. But the acquired character is not like the empirical for it isn't unalterable or consistent. From the second book, where the will is described as a ceaselessly striving universal force, doubly omnipotent and omnipresent, and in human beings, the will underlies everything - actions, desire, beliefs, etc. The foundation of all willing is need, lack and once something is deficient or found to be dissatisfactory, striving ensues, and as long as this striving desire isn't satisfied, this is suffering; otherwise, the achievement of the goal is called satisfaction. But since satisfaction is always temporary, finite, and always yields to a new desire, then there is no final resolution of desire, no ultimate goal, and suffering is ineradicable. Therefore, all life is essentially suffering (WWR § 56 p 310).

Even though from birth, life is a "continual rushing of the present into the dead past" (WWR § 57 p 311) human beings live vicariously, just as much as a soap bubble is blown as large as possible with the full knowledge that it will pop. To will is always to desire and, in extreme cases, to desire the perfect satisfaction is a matter of delusion. Both excessive joy and extreme pain are erroneous, delusions, for they are the anticipation of the future; but pain is essential to life - excessive joy comes from the belief that permanent satisfaction of the desires has been achieved, inasmuch the nadir of sorrow comes from the vanishing of such potential "perfect" satisfaction. Schopenhauer, along with the Stoics, suggests equanimity whether the situation is horribly adverse or exceedingly fortuitous.

All happiness is essentially negative, for satisfaction is merely the absence of desire (WWR § 58 p 319) for gratification delivers us from a particular desire. This indicates that suffering is the immediately given, the positive aspect of willing. Schopenhauer points out that the great poems illustrate a struggle for unattainable happiness, and even once the hero, in the epic poem, actually achieves his monumental goal, happiness remains elusive and he remains no better off than before. In other words, true happiness, because it is impossible, cannot ever be the true object of art.

There are three extremes of human life, Schopenhauer notes: the great passions, found in the historical characters that populate epics and drama; the life of genius, those who achieve pure knowing and comprehend the Ideas by emancipating knowledge from its slavery to the will; and the empty longing of the bored. People, at very rare times, if ever, do find themselves close to one of the aforementioned extremes but rush back to the average everydayness of life (p 321).

When observing an individual's life in its entirety, at a distance, it becomes a tragedy, and up close where the trivial facts are magnified, it is a comedy (WWR § 58 p 322). As for the self-conscious person reflecting upon him/herself, Schopenhauer adds that "as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but.. Are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy" (p 322).

That life is essentially suffering is reflected in the great work of Dante Alleghri, Inferno, where he easily acquires material for his description of hell. Unsurprisingly, when it came to heaven, Dante found the attempt far too difficult, for there is no Paradise anywhere in existence. Instead, Dante fell back on the attempts of other saints and offered a botched composite.

Schopenhauer also goes after optimism, and found it a "wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind" (WWR § 59 p 326). While it is true that entropy is irreversible, that nothing lasts forever, people live as if they will never die. Schopenhauer is remorseless when he insists the true and sole hope of humanity is to achieve the insight that existence, as an individual, is worthless. Despite being an atheist, Schopenhauer recognized the truth of the major religions (Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism) that ordinary existence is overrated, that their ascetic practices actually denies the purposeless will by stifling the desires and needs of the body. The ascetic is just one step away from self-renunciation, which is actually a more powerful version of the aesthetic experience that serves as a repose from the will. Once the tyranny of the desires of individuality is abandoned then one gains a viewpoint on the world that recognizes the fundamental unity between the subject and the external world. "The double sided world is the striving of the will to become conscious of itself so that, recoiling in horror at its inner, self divisive nature, it may annul itself and thereby its self affirmation and then reach salvation" (John Atwell). Prosaically stated, cognitive self-awareness turns into self-destruction.

The first and most basic/primary affirmation of the will to live is the affirmation of the physical body, where the will manifests itself through action (WWR § 62 p 334). It follows that the principle morality of the majority is egoism, for their will to live predetermines the choices they make and conditions the actions. The concept of what is wrong describes when the individual extend the affirmation of his will far enough that it becomes the denial of the will in others. What is "right" is merely the negation of "wrong," which is original and positive. Ergo, what is right is merely the lack of denying another's will for the sake of the affirmation of one's own will (WWR § 62 p339).

Temporal justice resides in the state, or precisely within its power of punishment, and is intended to prevent such actions from recurring in the future. The conception of retaliation implies time, and so, temporal justice is fundamentally concerned with the future. On the other hand, eternal justice is free from human institutions, free from chance or change, and "infallible, firm and certain" (WWR § 63 p 350).

A person who lives in the moment, utterly within the folds of the veil of Maya, sees only phenomena, individual and particular objects, innumerable dichotomies: pleasure is distinct from pain, the murderer is distinguished from the victim, yet the person seeks justice or retribution. Mired within Maya, the superficial person, a prisoner of the will, is incapable of realizing that wickedness is actually an aspect of the will to live, for s/he thinks such evil must be opposed to nature. In other words, the veil of the Maya is the metaphysical underpinning of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuality.

Yet at the bottom of his/her consciousness there lies an "obscure presentiment" that there is a connection between him/her and everything else, and this very connection inspires a "dread", a fateful terror that undermines their presumptuous individuality. Once the illusion of such temporal happiness and other temporary pleasures cracks and shatters, the global miseries and relentless suffering of life is grasped, and then the optimistic faith of redemption is finally exposed as a pretense, a very effective self-deception that is necessary for the will to live. Beneath the pretense, there are no dichotomies, for the will encompasses both pleasure and pain, both the sadist and the masochist, the tormentor and the prisoner, cause and effect, for it "buries its teeth in its own flesh". Schopenhauer notes the great insight of the Upanishads, where the formula for each individual is as follows: "tat tvam asi" (This art thou).

Eternal justice surpasses the temporal limitations of phenomena, the particular instances of suffering, far beyond all individuality. While it remains inaccessible for most people, myth can translate the profound truth of eternal justice into native language, within the bounds of the PSR, in the form of religious teachings, especially those of Vedas and Buddhism. Christian ethics, in particular, indicates a special class of knowledge consisting of virtue and nobleness where retaliation is conspicuously absent. It is worth noting that "eternal justice" is often misunderstood and falsified by the individual once s/he fails to realize that the offender and the offended are one, and instead, desires to return the pain of the offended to the guilty party. Yet Schopenhauer is careful to detect a distinction between common revenge and the mania of retaliation that also stakes the individual's life with that of the perpetrator. The goal of common revenge aims at punishment in order to mitigate suffering, while the avenger goes far beyond self-love in order to prevent such outrageous acts from happening ever again (WWR § 64).

Whatever is agreeable to the will and achieves its goals is considered as good. When something is taken as good, such as good food, good books, good weather, good people, we are indicating two things at once: agreeable, the immediate satisfaction of the will in each case, and useful, the delayed satisfaction that concerns the future (WWR § 65). When we call someone "just," we are identifying a person who, in the affirmation of his will, never denies the will that manifests itself in another person (WWR § 66).

On the other hand, we attribute detrimental objects as bad, and in abstract cases, evil, when that object detracts from the striving of the will. When a person goes too far in the affirmation of his/her own will to live by denying the will in other individuals, and demands their abilities to serve his/her will or else they will be eliminated, he is called "bad," even though the source of such activity is egoism. The excess of affirming one's own will to live and the slavish devotion to one's own individuality that demarcates his/her own person from all others are "two fundamental elements of bad character" (WWR § 65).

The wicked takes pleasure at the suffering of the others disinterestedly, and the extreme cases are instance of cruelty. The suffering of another is no longer a means to the ends of the malicious person, but an end in itself. Wickedness is similar to vengeance, but vengeance at least has the semblance of right, that if the same action of revenge is mandated by the law, and sanctioned by a society, then it would be just punishment.

Despite the omnipresence of the veil of Maya, guilt or the pangs of conscience take place because deep within the consciousness of the person, s/he knows that everything is one, and the distinction between the sufferer and the tormentor is a superficial one, even though space and time separate him/her from all other individuals. Guilt is an "inward alarm" of the wicked's own actions, and contains a faint sentiment of the intensity of the will, of the potency of the death grip the wicked has on his own life, and, simultaneously, the recognition of the misery of the oppressed and that s/he remains a part of the same force that inflicts pain upon itself. The stronger the person's affirmation of life, the further s/he is from the surrender and denial of that self-same will.

The person who offers help, support, and approval is considered as good, and relatively so. Nevertheless, when a person has a character of benevolence, friendliness and charity, on account of their choice of conduct to the will of others, they are also called good as well. Yet Schopenhauer does not consider "absolute good" as anything but a contradiction, for it is the highest good, the final satisfaction of the will where, once achieved, no new willing takes place, for the satisfaction has become imperishable. Once the will is satisfied, the cycle of desire and satisfaction restarts, and craving begins anew, making the "absolute good" an impossible fantasy.

Schopenhauer insists that morality absent of reason is mere moralization, and persuades nobody. The only motivation comes from self-interest, but virtue never comes from such origins. Therefore, abstract knowledge can never produce authentic virtue. Faintly echoing Plato, the concept of virtue lacks the tangible effect of the intuitive knowledge, and virtue can never be taught. All abstract knowledge is capable of is identifying the motives, and perhaps redirect the will, but never the will itself.

The only possible means of virtue is the reorganization that the inner nature of all individuals are the same. That is why there is no difference between the pious inquisitor who burns the heretic and the assassin who earns his pay by killing a high profile target. People delude themselves with customs and dogmas as the chief reason behind their deeds, but good actions are exceedingly rare, for they do originate in a "direct and intuitive knowledge that cannot be... arrived at by reason" (WWR § 66 p 370). Here, Schopenhauer admits the limits of philosophy and claims that the concept can only express the conduct in the abstract, but never supply the intuitive knowledge itself. More interestingly, Schopenhauer shrewdly points out that since it isn't necessary for a sculptor to be beautiful in order to create beautiful art, nor isn't it necessary for the moralist to possess the very virtue he theorizes, and the philosopher doesn't have to be a saint. I leave the ironic conclusion for the reader to draw him/herself.

Whereas the wicked is incapable of seeing past the distinction between himself and another, the altruist immediately recognizes that his individuality is a "fleeting, deceptive phantom" (WWR, § 66 p 372) and intuitively knows that his essence (inner being) is the same as that of others, and extends this "essence" to all other living creatures. Thus, he will refrain from causing suffering to anyone, and forgo himself comfort and pleasures in order to alleviate the sufferings of others. The veil of Maya does not deceive the just, for he recognizes himself in every creature.

Good conscience is the satisfaction felt at the completion of a disinterested action, which takes place only with the recognition that one's own inner being in itself is also another's. If egoism merely limits the interests to the phenomenon of a particular individual, then shared inner being enlarges the interests to all living things, and nurtures a calm and serene perspective. The egoist will be suspicious of everything, and puts everything in one basket - his/her well-being - and constantly be anxious. Therefore, the direct path to salvation is the formula of the Veda - "this art thou!"

Love is essentially compassion and nothing else. The Italians call pure love pieta, which is also the word for sympathy. Unlike Kant, who claimed that all good and virtue originate in abstract reflection (duty and categorical imperative) compassion is the sincere participation in the other's suffering and includes the disinterested sacrifices required. Schopenhauer distances himself from Kant when he argues moral laws are not independent of institutions and customs.

Schopenhauer defines "weeping" not as a positive instance of pain, but sympathy with ourselves, when we cry we are repeating the pain during reflection. "Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture ...of it; then we find our own state so deserving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him" (WWR § 67 p 376).

The difference between the egoist who is wedded to the principium individuationis and the person who is aware of the inner nature of everything is that the former knows only particular objects and their relations to him/herself, and renews motives of his/her will, and the latter quiets the will by shuddering at the pleasures that affirms life and turns away (WWR § 68 p 379). Most of us desire the end of such suffering, but the veil of Maya is very potent, for its illusion of hopes and pleasure restarts the cycle of the will and traps us. Those of us who are no longer fooled by temporary reprieves will withdraw from the vicious circle and denies the inner nature of all things by becoming an ascetic. In this renunciation, the ascetic stops willing, resists bodily impulses of thirst, hunger, sex, avoid making new attachments, and becomes utterly indifferent to everything.

The first stage of asceticism is found in the Gospels, where we are commanded to love others as we love ourselves, return hatred with good actions, patience and the endurance of all insults and injuries without resistance. At the next stage, the Christian saints and mystics added complete resignation, voluntary poverty and utter indifference to all earthy matters, which will resolve in the annihilation of the will while in the throes of the contemplation of God. Meister Eckhart's Theologia Germanica is a profound example of the denial of the will-to-live. However, a more sophisticated example is found in the Vedas, Puranas, and other poetical works of Hindu literature where the love of others is extended to all life, resistance to animal food, and, among others, a "deep unbroken solitude spent in silent contemplation with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the complete mortification of the will..." (WWR § 68 p 388).

That the biographies of the saints are full of conflicts, temptations, and failure should reflect the fact that their struggle with the will to live is a perpetual one, a constant wrestling match with the indefatigable force of the universe. Usually, these sort of enchanting temptations are seen as the devil's snares, and the more intense the will is, the more obvious the conflict, and thus, the more profound the suffering. However, if and only if the sufferer stops and observes the entirety of his life as a series of sufferings, and goes beyond the surface level where those individual sufferings were caused, from the individual to the universal where his pain is merely an instance of the whole, he is brought to resignation and becomes revered.

Schopenhauer insists that this portrait is no "philosophical fable", but the actual inner, direct and intuitive knowledge of the great saints of Christians and the distinctive Hindus and Buddhists, despite the superficial differences between their dogmas. Therefore, the conduct of the ascetic comes from their intuitive grasp, not their professed dogmas. Although there is a huge chasm between this intuitive knowledge and the abstract kind, philosophy can bridge such and only the philosopher can articulate the concrete truths of intuition in abstractions, through reflection (WWR § 68 p 383).

Suicide, Schopenhauer is careful to note, is not identical with resignation, for it is actually an instance of the affirmation of the will. Where resignation gives up the pleasures of the will, rather than its sorrows, the suicide is expressing dissatisfaction with the conditions of his/her life and ends his/her own life. Since the thing-in-itself is not affected, and suicide is merely the termination of the life of an individual, Schopenhauer considers it a futile and foolish act. (WWR § 69 p 400) Since the individual cannot stop willing or stop suffering, he quits life. Yet the act of suicide actually affirms the will itself. The only thing that can abolish the will is knowledge, which means the road to salvation is the unchecked manifestation of the will for the sake of discovering the inner nature of phenomena.

Although freedom belongs only to the will itself, and not phenomena, once the will arrives at the knowledge of its own inner nature, it gains a 'quieter' and that eliminates motivations or at least subsumes them into the background. Even though the self-suppression of the will comes from knowledge, yet the denial of the will cannot be planned. This great insight comes from out of the blue instead, and as the actual example of the freedom of the will it transforms the individual's entire inner nature, and turns him/her into a new person. Here, Schopenhauer applauds the Catholic Church's distinction of grace or salvation and the natural man. Where Adam as the affirmation of the will forever cursed everyone with original sin as suffering and death, Christ symbolizes the freedom of sin as the denial of the will to live. Thus, we ought to interpret Christ not as the individual in the Gospels, but as the universal personification of the quieter (WWR § 70 p 405).

Schopenhauer closes the first volume with an objection that he cannot redress: the denial of the will is a transition from existence to nothingness (WWR § 71 p 409). He asserts that the idea of nothing is relative, and is a reference to a particular something that it negates. Of course, the idea of an absolute nothing cannot even be conceived. Therefore, the idea of nothing is always a relation to something else.

The permanent solution to misery is once there is a naked, honest and complete awareness of the abject wretchedness of life the person loses the desire for existence and gratification. This takes place with the saint or ascetic who doesn't have any concerns with life or prosperity. The will to live, through him, has denied itself, or is greatly reduced to a faint whisper that no longer maintains a concept of reality composed of spatiotemporal objects. Upon his death, this whisper will vanish as well as the world/reality of his consciousness. Therefore, since this concept of world/reality is merely the Will's delusional artifact of itself, it comes to an end once the Will ceases to desire.

Yet even if I, as a manifestation of the will, including reality-for-me, vanishes upon death, irrespective of achieving the level of the ascetic, the Will continues in the life of others. Then, given the ascetic's death, his particular grade of Will expires, whereas the ordinary Joe's death does not entail the expiration of his grade of Will. Therefore, suicide is pointless and self-defeating, for it is a superficial complaint about the current conditions based on one particular grade of Will. If all men became ascetics, will everything cease? Sometimes, Schopenhauer seems to hint that something inconceivable to most excepting the ascetic (mystical contemplation) will be left. Schopenhauer admits that whatsoever remains after the complete abolition of the will is nothing. Yet, the same also goes for those where the will has turned against itself - "this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is - nothing" (WWR § 70 p 412).[

Appendix: Critique of Kantian metaphysics

Schopenhauer devoted the final section of the first volume to a thorough critique of Kantian metaphysics. The critique was intended in order to highlight the greatness of Kant and the quote by Voltaire said it all: It is the privilege of true genius, and especially genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity. Plato and the Hindu are the other intellectual muses, but Kant is the chief golden calf Schopenhauer genuflects before in the majority of the World as Will and Representation, and at the end of the book, he wields the hammer of Uru to clear away the rusty flakes. It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a clear and complete exposition of its value (WWR p 415).

Interestingly, Schopenhauer often laments Kant's decision to edit his great work, The Critique of Pure Reason, in an overreaction to the charges of naïve idealism. As explained in Book I, representation is compatible with Kant's transcendental idealism, where the spatial, temporal forms are how the objects in experience are (re)presented, and the basic structure of the concepts we think and judge with and the category of causality are the reflection of the structure of our perception or concept of reality. Nonetheless, when Kant argued that TI prevents us from having any knowledge of the thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer disagreed and insisted that our experience of willing is actually the mode of access to the nature of reality that complements our spatial/temporal/causal framework for representing objects.

The chief reason for the disagreement between Kant and Schopenhauer lie with their choices of method: Schopenhauer agreed with Kant to the extent that we do have transcendental knowledge of the fundamental conditions of experience, but did not share in Kant's convictions that transcendental knowledge is dependent on transcendental proofs or arguments. That is why Schopenhauer says we are not bound by Kant's conclusions about the limits of knowledge and advocated a more practical method that dances close to Hume's empiricism and Husserl's phenomenology where direct experience indicates a dual approach to understanding it: the representations of spatiotemporal objects, and the capacity to will. Kant's method of discovering the fundamental principles of knowledge as a special sort of reflection is mistaken, for we can know this through direct and immediate scrutiny of our experience.

"An essential difference between Kant's method and that which I follow is to be found in the fact that he starts from indirect, reflected knowledge, whereas I start from direct and intuitive knowledge. He is comparable to a person who measures the height of a tower from its shadow; but I am like one who applies the measuring rod directly to the tower itself." (WWR I pp 452-453)

Thus Schopenhauer's transcendental philosophy dispenses with transcendental proofs. Schopenhauer continues: "Philosophy, therefore is for [Kant], a science of concepts but for me a science in concepts, drawn from the knowledge of perception, the only source of all evidence and set down and fixed in universal concepts" (ibid, p 453). Once Kant abandoned the realm of perception, he errs magnificently especially when he insisted that all the abstract categories of logical theory must be present in our knowledge of objects.

The main charge Schopenhauer lies at Kant's feet is the complete lack of any distinction between abstract and discursive knowledge and intuitive knowledge (WWR I p 473). Yet, later on Schopenhauer then criticizes Kant for making that very distinction. Recall the famous dictum, "thoughts without content are empty; intuition without concepts are blind", which means there is no possible cognition of objects unless the two are combined. Schopenhauer says Kant blundered by bringing "thinking into perception", meaning an object is not perceived meaningfully until it is thought. Nevertheless, we do not think in order to see an object, for no reflection is required at all. Yet Kant actually says that the concept emerges spontaneously, not deliberately.

Schopenhauer is quick to dismiss Kant's categories as a sham; given the sole function of the understanding is causality. Moreover, Schopenhauer argued that all twelve categories are reducible to causality. This seems problematic, for we cannot think about causality without the notion of substance. The thought of something being caused already includes a substance of some kind. We are also incapable of thinking of causality without the assumption that all substances must behave in the same way under the same circumstances. we cannot think of causality without having the notion of quality. One could argue that Schopenhauer did not reject the categories altogether, but instead he took causation as the function that connects separate perceptions of distinct objects, a function that conditions perception of objects. The categories or the capacity of making judgments is secondary to perception because they are aspects of reason, which is in itself entirely parasitical on the originary cognitive activity of perception.

Animals do have knowledge of objects via perception, despite lacking the ability of making judgments. Therefore the forms of judgments are structured by reflection, a secondary cognitive activity.

"Forms of categorical judgment is nothing but the form of the judgment in general", i.e., the form of the abstract expression of the knowledge of objects, which is founded on perception. "Disjunctive judgments spring from the law of thought of the excluded middle... therefore entirely the property of reason." (WWR I p 459) They show the basic form of the activity of comparing objects in the abstract. Schopenhauer concludes that all forms of judgments and the categories are the inherent structures of the activity of abstract thought, to which Kant might have conceded that the expression of abstraction is secondary to perception of the object, but he would have argued that we are capable of making judgments because of the synthetic nature of our conscious perception of objects - that which forms sensations as well as the conceptual structure.

Schopenhauer's most enduring criticism of Kantian philosophy is on causation. For Kant, the knowledge of the determinate temporal order of objective states of affairs depends on the knowledge of causal laws, whereas for Schopenhauer the knowledge of the temporal succession is independent of any such condition because it is already immediately given. This issue about the relation between the phenomenology of our experience of temporal order and the transcendental conditions of our experience remains unresolved today.

The Kantian scholar Paul Guyer indicated (in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer) three of Schopenhauer's objections to Kant's treatment of causality, that it marginalizes immediate perceptual knowledge for the sake of conceptual elements of the understanding:

1. The sequence of perceptions are events and our knowledge of the sequence of these perceptions cannot and do not depend on the causal laws that entails change in these represented objects.
2. The knowledge of the succession of states of affairs contain some earlier events that did not cause the later ones, so, the knowledge of succession does not depend on the knowledge of causality.
3. Kant's treatment of causation: Schopenhauer said that if the knowledge of temporal succession wasn't immediate, but actually depends on the knowledge of the laws that determine the speed and timing of those successions, then we must have nearly unlimited knowledge of the causal laws.

Guyer defends against the first two objections to rest on a misunderstanding of Kant's argument, and a failure of distinguishing between the phenomenological method and Kant's transcendental method. Nevertheless, he admits that a reconstruction of Kant's position must deal with the aforementioned third objection.

Criticism

The philosophy is, of course, not free from criticism, and the following instances are among the best.

The mathematical critique:

The will is supposedly "singular", or more precisely uncountable because numbers in arithmetic, which is an operation of the intellect, apply solely to the world of appearances. This limitation implies that numbers are inapplicable to the essence of reality. Now, since the Will is uncountable or numbers are inapplicable then it does not follow that it is singular. Schopenhauer could have said that since causality does not apply to reality itself, then it can no longer be considered as the "cement of the universe" and that the unity of the cosmos does not depend on the external relations between its components. Other philosophers have attacked the singular conception of the will. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche points out that the very word "will" is merely a concept that implies unity-as-a-word, while referring to something very complicated - a plurality of sensations, often conflicting and struggling - that either affirms or negate. A thousand pinpricks of quanta fluctuating at all times...

Knowledge of the will via inner sense:

If the thing-in-itself is will, and we know this through "inner sense" given that there are less phenomenal forms between the thing-in-itself and the knowing subject, then this presupposes that a lower number of phenomena reveals the true nature of reality better or truer than a higher number. Schopenhauer does realize this difficulty in his later writings.

Moral judgment of existence:

Another problem is the entire metaphysical interpretation of existence as will: it seems plausible that an alternative rendition could be cast differently, where the will is not necessarily an evil force, but a dynamic force of power, of difference, something worth affirming. Instead of the solitary hermit who starves himself into unconsciousness, the brave and the defiant warrior who struggles against the overwhelming odds of fate could actually withstand the heaviest burden, a Sisyphean hero who pauses and wipes his brow. Affirmation as the inverted attitude of pessimism remains possible, even if the will is insatiable as the present is a continuous vanishing. Schopenhauer is easy prey for Nietzsche's criticisms, where the fatal error of subjecting existence to a moral judgment has merely repeated the error of the past metaphysicians. "A pessimist who negates both God and world but stops before morality - who affirms morality and plays his flute, affirms laede neminem morality: excuse me? Is this really - a pessimist?"

Music as the copy of the will:

Could the copy of something so purposeless and evil ever be anything but the same? How can music possess an anesthetic quality that "quiets" the raging torrent, when it is already a copy of that inferno? Perhaps Schopenhauer should not have eliminated the representation aspect of art when it comes to music.

Summary

There are two readings of a text: the surface, where the actual words of the text are analyzed, and the symptomatic, where the problematic that enlighten or regulate the actual meaning of the text is identified and clarified. The text's problematic is the horizon of the text, of its thoughts, the "forms in which problems must be posed". This horizon is the limit of the language and the concepts that were available for Schopenhauer at a certain historical period. What makes symptomatic readings very insightful is its transcendental status, for the problematic constitutes the definite condition of the possibility of the theoretical structure of the text. Schopenhauer was limited to the concepts and the language that is derived from the problematic that was already present.

However, given the mastery of the German language and the relentless precision of the thought, identifying what Schopenhauer meant by looking at what he did not say seems a fruitless exercise. As a "thoroughly explicit writer", Schopenhauer maximized the style and the significance of his language in order to deliver the philosophy. In the introduction to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, George Simmel is correct that a "creative interpretation" of Schopenhauer is not possible, unlike Kant, Spinoza and Leibniz and others.

Volume 2 contains more technical elaborations and extensions. There are several reasons why Schopenhauer's philosophy is breathtaking and a fascinating reprieve from the staid and stodgy crap peddled in the universities. He wrote very clear, simple, directly, and never without force, always animated and suffused with personality. On top of such loquacity, he also was erudite, possessing a remarkable grasp of the classics. Schopenhauer arrived at the same conclusions as the eastern thinkers but through the road of the western philosophers, and was the very first to actually represent their insights to the western audience but clothed in the garb of philosophy rather than mystic balderdash. The philosophy's central concern was with existence, the tragedies and the problems of life, which is far more significant than the scholastic quibbles of ivory tower residents. Instead of chickening out like most thinkers by painting an all-harmonious portrait of the universe that resolved the petty differences into a shallow smudge, Schopenhauer took the actual sufferings of people seriously, all the brief instances of passions, emotions, all the eating, the fighting, the drinking, etc. He corrected the mistakes of the last great thinker, Kant and made several advances beyond his epistemology by claiming that inner experience is the key to knowing the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer replaced Kant's labyrinthiine program of concepts with a plausible model of the understanding: the principle of sufficient reason. The theory of aesthetic seems more penetrating than those of the other philosophers, except probably Nietzsche's, and possibly because he did not succumb to the temptation of reducing art to superficial functionalism. Schopenhauer's sense of morality and philosophy of religion retains much of the insights of the major religions, yet he was a staunch atheist, and the first of all philosophers to be openly so. The previous ones, Hobbes and Hume, could not afford such political suicide, so they kept quiet or spoke cryptically. Most importantly, the pessimist's philosophy anticipates a great deal of Darwin and Freud and Einstein, where he recognized that nature always favored the species over the individual (because the species is everything and the individual, nothing), that the sexual impulse was omnipotent, that the consciousness was a latecomer to the scene of evolution - just the tip of the iceberg of the psyche - and that everything in the universe is fundamentally a force, since energy and matter are indistinguishable at the subatomic level. Finally, Arthur Schopenhauer was none other than the greatest philosophical influence of the two major thinkers of the 20th century, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. In order to understand both, we must read Schopenhauer.

After completing the first edition, Schopenhauer summed up the reception of his book: "I dispatch [the world as will] calmly resigned to the fact that it, too, will fully endure the fate which truth has suffered at all times, with only a brief victory celebration between the two prolonged periods where it is condemned as paradoxical and disparaged as trivial" (Preface, first edition). The paradox is that in his era the metaphysicians of the absolute actually resurrected the thing-in-itself and, in doing so, they regressed from the transcendental critique to transcendent sophisms. Instead, Schopenhauer turns from transcendental philosophy but away from transcendence and towards a nihilistic conclusion where existence, or being, is essentially the blind will, utterly purposeless. The triviality is the obvious reductionism of the natural sciences where nothing lies beneath the phenomenal world, and Schopenhauer's discovery of the metaphysical answer, the will, is all-too-often misunderstood.

In closing, I leave you with the words of the "Last German": "A philosophy in between the pages of which one does not hear the tears, the weeping, the gnashing of teeth and the terrible din of mutual universal murder is no philosophy."

"Consciousness... the dagger in the flesh”

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:18:22 +0000

By Awet Moges (2010)

After 7 years, I was burned out by philosophy, yet I continued to haunt the philosophy section in search for anything radical and profound. Amidst the expected titles commonly found at any bookstore, sat A Short History of Decay. I pulled it off the shelf in the faint hopes of killing time until the cigar shop opened in 20 minutes. After a couple of hours disappeared savoring the salacious prose, I begrudgingly closed the book and hurried to the checkout counter, cackling in glee in the wonderful fortune of uncovering a new thinker that spoke blasphemous music to my eyes.

Within a year, I had acquired the remaining books of Emil Cioran, and devoured them with extreme relish. In Cioran not only had I found a thinker after my heart, but also a kindred spirit who experienced chronic insomnia for 7 years, and poured the results of long white nights on page after page. I myself experienced severe insomnia where I could not tell the difference between being awake or asleep, and nothing ever felt real. When I go to sleep, my consciousness is at rest, and I begin a new life the next day. But when I stayed awake all night, there was no interruption of being conscious. No new life. In the morning I'm exactly the same as I was last night. Some of his writings cut cleanly through the flesh to the bone:

Quote

“…Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture... the hours without sleep are at bottom an interminable rejection of thought by thought itself.”1

A genius of apothegms who also doubles as a “monster of despair,” Cioran (1911 – 1995) remains the best-kept secret of intellectuals today. A self-exiled Romanian who wrote his best work in French, Cioran has carved a niche on the bookshelves as a “fanatic without convictions” with a wry wit and stylized prose that savages rationality with trenchant irony.

First, I will highlight existentialist elements in Cioran's works to argue that he belongs in the canon of existentialism. Then I will expand on boredom and insomnia, the major concepts that pervades Cioran's books. Finally, I will juxtapose Cioran's thoughts against those of the other existentialists.

For existentialism

Many of the modern themes that recur in Cioran's work come from the garden of existentialism: despair, absurdity, alienation, irrationality of existence, the need of self awareness. His gnomic tone oscillates between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – Cioran explodes with the lyricism of the former in his early works (Tears & Saints, On the Height of Despair), and gravitates towards the depraved cynicism of the latter in his mature works (A Short History of Decay, Temptation to Exist, Fall in Time, Drawn & Quartered, The Trouble with being Born). However, there remain deep differences: Cioran refrains from heroic postulations like the Ubermensch and Amor Fati of Nietzsche, or the metaphysical speculations and the slightly hypocritical recommendation of resignation of Schopenhauer.

The decline of system building in philosophy in the early 19th century opened the way for new forms of discourse: ideologues and the reactionaries. Ideologues wrote anti-philosophical systems in the form of human sciences. Reactionaries on the other hand were a new kind of philosophizing that took autobiographical forms: personal, aphoristic, lyrical and anti-systematic. Cioran is the best example of this new way of writing of the 20th century.2

I think it is legitimate to include Cioran with the other existentialists because he has carried out the premises of Existentialism Proper to its logical, if outrageous, conclusion. His early nihilistic work, On the Heights of Despair, deals with despair and lucid suffering in a way that evokes the bitter ravings of the Underground Man from Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. Written under the duress of suicidal insomnia, Despair embraces suffering, resignation, knowledge as sickness, and the absolute subjective experience.

In a nutshell, Cioran's early philosophy is an “absolute lyricism” where his lucidity allows him to “discover and mercilessly expose the hollowness of all philosophical systems.”3 The opening essay of Despair, titled “On Being Lyrical” Cioran argues that one is being lyrical when “one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality. What is unique and specific in us is then realized in a form so expressive that the individual rises onto a universal plane.”4 One of the earmarks of existentialism is its reduction of philosophy to biography, and lyricism is an effective prose.5

Cioran's relentlessly self-conscious writing deliberately opposes civilized writing where organic fears cannot be canceled by abstract constructs. Similar to Nietzsche's distinction between the Dionysian and the Socratic person, Cioran privileges the organic, suffering thinker over the philosopher or the abstract man: “Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.”6 The organic thinker transforms his passions into obsessions. “I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction.”7

As Cioran matured, his nascent skepticism ripened and, in mercilessly demolition of his earlier idols, he criticized language itself. The main focus of Temptation to Exist was the complete severance between language and reality, and that shares much in common with Sartre's concept of nausea.8 The notion that concepts in language correspond to objects of reality is the foundation of western thought. However, Cioran instead saw language as a “sticky symbolic net,” an infinitely self-referential circular recession that distanced people from reality.

Cioran expanded this focus in Fall in Time, where language exacerbates our metaphors for experience and gets in the way of being truly alive in the moment. Split off from originality, we can no longer exploit what made us different from animals:

Quote

“Consciousness is not lucidity. Lucidity, man's monopoly, represents the severance process between the mind and the world; it is necessarily consciousness of consciousness, and if we are to distinguish ourselves from the animals, it is lucidity alone which must receive credit or the blame.”9

Thus, language has become an ouroboros, a vicious circle that signifies nothing but itself and has become the ultimate condition for man: “all speech hyperbole, all prose rhetorical, all poetry prosedemic, and all thought proleptic.”10 It is then obvious that a stylist like Cioran was too elusive to be frozen and packaged in convenient categories, as well as too complex and precise due to a decisive style that both emphasized and contradicted the ambiguity of his message. We can only highlight themes instead.

Boredom / insomnia

Throughout his work, Cioran never tires of boredom as a topic, which is paradoxically, an inexhaustible source of creativity, and a preliminary to his fatally incurable insomnia. Boredom is a baseline of "bare human existence" that demonstrates how we are all "embedded in time." Once we lose the comfortable illusions that shield us from the effects of experiencing the passage of time, boredom sets in and smears everything into undifferentiated blobs of drab grey. "Life is more and less than boredom, but it is in boredom and by boredom that we discern what life is worth"11 Boredom for existentialists is a fundamental mood that emphasizes the finitude of existence, and both Heidegger and Sartre claim boredom is the naked access to being. 12

If you're not in pain, or happily distracted by some goal you've given yourself, you're left alone with life at its bare minimum. This mundane existence consists of absolutely nothing interesting, and nothing to do. "Boredom will reveal to things to us: our body and the nothingness of the world."13 In order to escape this experience of nothingness, we forget that we are merely physical husks and hurry to busy ourselves in any activity. For Cioran, boredom is one extreme swing of the pendulum; once there, we are compelled in the opposite direction, desperate to find anything to paper over the emptiness. "Life is our solution to boredom. Melancholy, sadness, despair, terror, and ecstasy all grow out of boredom's thick trunk."14

However, even if something interesting or satisfying is found, it will eventually inspire feelings of futility and meaninglessness, and boredom returns with a vengeance. “No matter what you do, the starting point is boredom, and the end is self destruction.”15

The first aphorism of The Trouble with Being Born: "3 in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up a balance sheet for every minute. And why all this? Because I was born."16 Everything that follows is framed by that experience: we are born into time, and we only realize that, once we take a step back from our mundane activity, time is the baseline of all experience. "What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It’s all too little."17

There are experiences that amplify the dull echo boredom resonates through life, such as insomnia. It is true that boredom isn't identical to insomnia, but they both are pure access to the bare flow of time. Although Cioran focused on many other themes of existentialism with ennui, solitude, infirmity, and suicide, I think insomnia is his muse, and the key concept of his oeuvre.

Cioran is probably the exemplar of insomnia, a walking poster boy of insomnia, having suffered it throughout his life. He even claims to not have slept for 50 years! In an interview with Michael Jakob, Cioran claimed his insomnia was the “greatest experience” of his life, for it was his defining insignia and his intellectual crucifixion.18 The only solution Cioran found for his severe insomnia was exhausting himself with long bicycle rides throughout the French countryside.

While his books are merely autobiographies masquerading as analyses of decay, they explore the very personal fact of insomnia as a “form of heroism..[that] transforms each new day into a combat lost in advance.”19 The early Cioran regarded insomnia as a noble affliction, a disease of hyper-consciousness. The later Cioran glorified it: “To save the world 'grandeur' from officialdom, we should use it only apropos of insomnia or heresy.”20

Cioran found sleeplessness instructive, in which it helped undo all certainties. But insomnia is hardly ever pleasant. Anyone who's stricken with it tries their damnedest to find a cure. Had pure conscious existence been a good in itself, then we would hardly be in a hurry to cure insomnia. If consciousness was truly pleasant we would regard insomniacs as fortunate, or even sacred.

Quote

“You will suffer from everything, and to excess: the winds will seem gales; every touch a dagger; smiles, slaps; trifles, cataclysms. Waking may come to an end, but its light survives within you; one does not see in the dark with impunity, one does not gather its lessons without danger; there are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover.”21

In opposition to Aristotle, Cioran claims that we are the animal who cannot sleep: “Why call [man] a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep but yet cannot.”22 At other times, Cioran regarded insomnia as a demon:

Quote

“To discern in the depths of oneself a bad principle that is not powerful enough to show itself in daylight or weak enough to keep still, a kind of insomniac demon, obsessed by all the evil it has dreamed of, by all the horrors it has not perpetrated.”23

Other philosophers argued that boredom proved that existence is inherently miserable,24 and Cioran appropriated this argument for insomnia. Given this, insomnia can also be seen as the secret of tapping into the pure feeling of time.

Quote

"Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions. What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!"25

At the end of A Short History of Decay, Cioran suggests that insomnia is an induction to a secret society of thinkers:

Quote

"Each night was like the others, each night was eternal. And I felt one with all those who cannot sleep, with all those unknown brothers. Like the corrupt and the fanatical, I had a secret; like them I belonged to a clan to which everything could be excused, given, sacrificed: the clan of the sleepless."'26

Not only did Cioran survive insomnia, he took advantage of his conquest by making something of it. “When you waken with a start and long to get back to sleep, you must dismiss every impulse of thought, any shadow of an idea. For it is the formulated idea, the distinct idea, that is sleep's worst enemy.”27 Instead of going back to sleep, he got up and poured his thoughts on paper, in essays and aphorisms.

Against existentialists

Despite the preceding claims, Cioran is not a conventional existentialist. He often questions the validity of existence, even though he employs existential themes, and unleashes a bottomless pessimistic streak that would blanch even Schopenhauer. Cioran said most of us, throughout our lives, attempt to "keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing."28 Institutions like education or religion, systems of thought like philosophy or science, works of expression like art or music are all ways of masking this inescapable truth, for they all seek to divert our attention from its shattering impact. So, how then can we live with it?

Contra Schopenhauer, Cioran says we cannot escape agonizing ourselves with the awareness of the malady or mortification or curse of our existence. Our inquiring and scrutinizing mind give us no peace; only those living in frivolity and fabrication can avoid the constant agony. Observe your happy and content friends, and you'll draw no other conclusion. Once skepticism or nihilism takes prominence, this is the inevitable disease that follows: the symptoms, the existential feeling of this crisis of life. On the other hand, once Nietzsche freed the passions and imagination from subservience to reason and by restoring art to its rightful place, the universe became tolerable, even romantic.

Contra Albert Camus, Cioran says we all should indeed kill ourselves. That is the only consistent way to accept the absurdity of our lives. Yet we foolishly aggravate the absurdity by cowardly refusing to commit mass suicide. Whoever attempts suicide has that flush of certainty that release is imminent, but it won't because absurdity lasts until the very final moment, and if the absurdity isn't followed through to its conclusion, the ensuing shame of being a failed suicide is even worse.

Contra Sartre, Cioran says "the intoxication of freedom is only a shudder within a fatality, the form of [our] fate being no less regulated than that of a sonnet or a star."29 Freedom of will is another self-deception, an artifice of modernity that seeks to invert the void within ourselves. For people born only to experience the crushing inevitabilities of disappointment, suffering and death, a freedom defiantly thrown against the void is no answer at all. We are stuck between two irreconcilables – life and idea – and this ambiguity becomes our second nature. Thus, we suppose ourselves free, above and beyond the laws of nature or the mind.

From “spermatozoon to sepulcher” we are pawns of a taunting fate that selects for some good fortune and others for bad by chance.30 Each life is a useless hyphen between birth and death. As evolutionary biology and scientific cosmology show, Homo sapiens is one more organic species doomed like the rest to extinction, and a mere fleeting flutter in the universe's surge to heat death. Much like Sartre's nausea, Cioran acknowledges a revolting disgust surging up from such realizations: "that negative superfluity which spares nothing... [and] shows us the inanity of life."31

Cioran keeps lacerating the reader until she confesses her beliefs are tired myths, and in his remorseless destructions of such expired myths, he enriches and edifies the reader. When philosophy itself was young, Plato needed youth and beauty to advance the cause of philosophy, or he would have dismissed Socrates as just another sophist. He needed a martyr myth, because creation always involves destruction – whatever is introduced as new needs a martyr, especially when it promises change. Nowadays, philosophy has decayed and expired, and is in dire need for new myths and new martyrs to resurrect a new beauty, like a phoenix out of the ashes. Cioran, in his paradoxical way, has ignited the flames with his own intellectual crucifixion.

Works Cited

Cioran, Emil. Pe culmile disperarii. Bucharest: Fundatia Pentru Literatura si Arta “Regele Carol II,” 1934. Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston as On the Height of Despair. (1996) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__________. Lacrimi si sfinti. Bucharest: Humanitas (1937). Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston as Tears & Saints. (1998) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__________. Précis de décomposition. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.Translated by Richard Howard, Richard as A Short History of Decay. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.
__________. La Tentation d’exister. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.translated by Richard Howard as The Temptation to Exist. (1998) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
__________. La Chute dans le temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.Translated by Richard Howard as The Fall in Time. (1970) Quadrangle Books.
__________. Ecartèlement. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Translated by Richard Howard as Drawn & Quartered. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.
__________. De l’inconvénient d’être né. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Translated by Richard Howard as The Trouble with being Born. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.
__________. Aveux et anathèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.Translated by Richard Howard as Anathemas and Admirations. (1998) New York: Arcade Publishing.

1. On the Heights of Despair, Preface to the French translation
2. Sontag, Susan. Introduction to Temptation to Exist, p. 11
3. Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca. Introduction to On the Heights of Despair, p. xviii
4. On the Heights of Despair, p. 4
5. Nietzsche claims that all philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.
6. On the Heights of Despair, p. 22
7. On the Heights of Despair, p. 22
8. Sartre's concept of the experience of absolute contingency, presented rather vividly in his seminal work, Nausea. For Sartre, nausea stresses the absurdity of contingency, where objects lose their labels or labels fail to attach themselves to objects. Words and objects are divided, and the object becomes strange, dense, and absurd. The experience of nausea leads to the realization that labels, words, are all human inventions that have very little to do with existence, other than practical purposes.
9. Fall in Time, p. 133
10. Newman, Charles. Introduction to Fall in Time, p. 13
11. Drawn & Quartered, p. 139
12. Heidegger says boredom “reveals what-is-in totality.” In other words, boredom removes the normal focus and cares about particular beings and diffuses one's awareness into a sense of Being-as-a-whole being revealed. For Sartre, profound boredom is a special type of nausea where it provides an access to the very being of things, and leads to the awareness of oneself as the source of meaning.
13. Tears & Saints, p. 88
14. Ibid, p. 89
15. Ibid, p. 86
16. The Trouble with Being Born, p. 3
17. On the Heights of Despair, p. 43
18. “What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?” Trouble with being Born, p. 14
19. Cioran to Gabriel Liiceanu, Continents, p. 92
20. The Trouble with Being Born, p. 81
21. A Short History of Decay, p. 170
22. On the Heights of Despair, p. 85
23. Drawn and Quartered, p. 123
24. Arthur Schopenhauer.
25. On the Heights of Despair, p. 83
26. A Short History of Decay, p. 169 - 170
27. Anathemas and Admirations, p. 199
28. A Short History of Decay, p. 105
29. A Short History of Decay, p. 69
30. Ibid, p. 46
31. A Short History of Decay, p. 12

Sisyphus Shrugged

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:17:16 +0000

By Awet Moges (2010)

At the end of the 1949 film, Sands of Iwo Jima, after the US soldiers survive a battle, Marine Sergeant John Stryker (John Wayne) tells his fellow comrades in the trench that he's never felt so good in his life. He asks them if they want a cigarette, and then he gets killed immediately by a sniper. Later, the others find a letter on his body that contains many things John Stryker planned to say, but never did. Absurd, I thought, when I first saw this movie. I was expecting a happy ending to the movie because the protagonists always survived the climax. I couldn't help but be reminded of that scene when I read Albert Camus’ essay on the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus. In this essay I will break down the concepts of the absurd, suicide and eluding, and make a few observations of my own.

Absurd

In 1940, Albert Camus published one of the masterpieces of the 20th century thought in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he developed the concept of the absurd in order to grapple with the meaning of life. The absurd entails three things. First, the world is characterized as irrational1 , and secondly, human beings yearn for clarity through reason or meaning. Third, the conflict between these two irreconcilable observations is known as the absurd. Fundamentally, the world is a product of random combination of events and circumstances, and we desire it to be otherwise. To be precise: the world is not absurd itself; instead, it is absurd that we seek rationality in an irrational world. Man tries to project sanity, order, or any form of rationality, on the world but always fails – and the absurd is the incontrovertible outcome.

The feeling of the absurd can strike any time.2 We live our lives with goals and purpose, and the conviction that we're doing the right things. For the most part, we are content with this presumption of rationality. But every now and then, we become overly self-aware and horribly reminded of how much creatures of habit we all are. Our predictable actions become ridiculous, and we start to doubt whether we are free agents. The most familiar person we know suddenly becomes a stranger, and the world has become dense and strange.3

Man is inclined to impose order, yet nothing about his projects has any justification, because the world does not provide support for what he does. The world is wholly indifferent to man's schemes, irrational, although man continues to try to make sense of it. Absurdity is the juxtaposition of two incompatible things, for it is “born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”4

It seems that Camus has exaggerated the duality to the point of a paradox and called it the absurd. More importantly, the dichotomy between the world and man rests on three assumptions: the universe needs to have a “human face” or it must be divinely ordered or that science is the final word of the world. More importantly, because science is a descriptive activity, then the world must be value-free. If one can contest any of these assumptions, then the Absurd is probably not a fundamental feature of human existence.
Camus says the absurd forbids all attempts to find the meaning of life. There is no possibility for a meaning of life to be discovered, but that is not necessarily a depressing view. Life as absurdity makes sense when it is seen as a claim about the lack of compatibility between people and the world they live in. What are the consequences of living with the absurd? What logically follows from the idea of the absurd? There are two obvious options: self-destruction or self-preservation.

Suicide

The Myth of Sisyphus opens with a clear mission: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem5 and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”6 The absurd is Camus’ philosophical attempt at a solution for suicide. If life is truly meaningless, then how can anyone continue to live? What are the options for the person whose life has no meaning? He/she either commits the suicide of thought by inventing a world of meaning, of hope, of God, or commits physical suicide. Camus adds a third option: the absurd hero who accepts a world without meaning, without hope, and lives.7

There are two aspects of suicide: one is the realization that life is absurd and the other is the destruction of the attachment to life. Camus notes that the body shrinks from annihilation. In order to destroy the attachment to life, there has to be a powerful rationale strong enough to blot out self-preservation, and they can number from humiliation, debilitating disease or despondency.

Although Camus was interested in these obvious types of suicide,8 I found the metaphysical or virgin suicide far more fascinating, because “rarely is suicide committed ... through reflection.”9 The virgin suicide that lacks the aforementioned rationales is a “logically disposed” suicide because it is not motivated by some kind of emotional depression or even the fear of death. Camus devoted a chapter to Kirilov, from The Possessed, since the author Dostoevsky was also preoccupied with absurd reasoning, and how it affected the lives of his characters.
Kirilov became disenchanted with the immortality of the soul and was researching on why people did not kill themselves. Kirilov said he wanted to take his life because that was his idea. Having an idea implies a motivation. Kirilov arrived at his idea with absurd reasoning by maintaining two contradictory beliefs: “I know God is necessary and must exist... I also know that he does not and cannot exist.”10

Apparently, the paradoxical existence of God entails a logical suicide. For Kirilov, this realization was enough to kill himself, because he inferred that he was God: “If God does not exist, I am God.”11 However, Kirilov was not content to believe that he was God, for that was insufficient. To be God required Kirilov to kill himself. Absurd, indeed, but this is the crux: Kirilov realized divine freedom by bringing it down to earth. For several years he had sought the attribute of his divinity and he found it at last. The attribute is freedom. Drawing the final consequences of his divine freedom ended his slavery to immortality. He refused to maintain the universal delusion that everyone up to him in history, all men and women, had invented God in order not to kill themselves.12 Kirilov thought that was the summary of the entire history up to the moment of his metaphysical suicide.

In short, Kirilov wanted to demonstrate his suicide to show others the yellow brick road. Not only was the suicide a metaphysical suicide, it was also pedagogical. Since Dostoevsky was a Christian whose Christian beliefs forbid suicide, because it is sinful, then Kirilov’s act was intended as a lesson. In the end Dostoevsky backed away from the absurd consequences, due to his faith in God. Camus forbids suicide for different reasons and gave us a solution: maintain absurdity by not denying it or adopting metaphysical delusions.
Suicide is legitimate if the first premise of the Absurd is rejected. If the world is inescapably absurd, then to kill yourself is to act as if your suicide has meaning in a meaningless existence. Suicide confirms the absurd by agreeing to it.13 To live instead is to experience the absurd at all times, but never be reconciled with it. Camus insists that if we never reconcile with the absurd, we will never be free of it, but that will rule out suicide as the genuine experience of living an absurd life. If the absurd is not conceded, it is meaningful. Life has no meaning; it is inescapably absurd. The only thing is whether we can live with it or die with it.14

Eluding15

The instinct of self-preservation usually prevails, and although we live, we deny the absurd. Camus calls this avoidance the “act of eluding.”16 This eschewal manifests as hope: the hope for life after death or the hope that there is a meaning of life – but they both only delay the absurd. We elude the Absurd in order to avoid from being overwhelmed by it.

When we experience the absurd, we continue to live – as long we convince ourselves that there is a divine mysterious plan, or agree that this world is absurd but there is a rational world after this one, or the world is absurd but only until science finds all the answers. Religions, science, philosophies all try to provide reasons and purposes for the universe, and explain away its irrational character.

Scientists and rational philosophers favor the rational schemes of man in their nostalgia for certainties as they stand before the abyss. Religious thinkers instead point at the indifference of the world and they take a leap of faith. Camus credits existentialists like Leo Chestov, Soren Kierkegaard, and Karl Jaspers for recognizing the absurd, but in the end, they are too eager to flee towards transcendence in relief. For instance, when Chestov realized the “fundamental absurdity” of existence, he declared it to be God.17 Reason has failed, thus, we must trust God. Kierkegaard makes the same escape with his “leap of faith” from the starting blocks of the absurd. The intellect is sacrificed to an irrational God. Jaspers points at the numerous failures of reason, but only to conclude in a paradox, that this failure is transcendence itself. There is no meaning; therefore, there is ultimate meaning. These existential philosophers have raised the specter of the absurd, but they attempt to resolve this absurdity by taking a suicidal leap into transcendence.

The aforementioned comfortable solutions reinstate the absurd because they prevent us from true authenticity by misrepresenting what we truly are. These denials are all philosophical suicide. Such denials are philosophical which means they are fictitious and illusory that hides the fact that life is absurd. They are suicidal, similar to physical suicide, for they deny or renounce life as absurdity. "Doctrines that explains everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relive me of the weight of my own life yet I must carry it alone." 18 Since the absurd is inherently a contradiction, every attempt to ignore or explain it away only tries to elude it. “[The] important thing... is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments."19

Camus' criticisms of the existential philosophers do not seem to be true refutations, for they seem to be complaints that their solution to the absurd only fail to meet his criteria of authenticity. This hardly persuades anyone of the cogency of his philosophy of the absurd. It seems to me that Camus does not seem as interested in their arguments, whether or not they are true, but whether one can live by them. He is more concerned with how one lives with his/her fundamental relationship with the world, the absurd. Thus, Camus avoids the more challenging task of proving the cogency of his case over rival philosophers. But that is irrelevant, as long the concept of the absurd is persuasive in itself, and whether it helps us to decide how to live.

Absurd hero

The philosophical and physical suicide both flee from the absurd. Instead, Camus insists upon a third option: embrace absurdity by refusing to commit suicide and live without a future or hope or illusion, or resignation as an absurd person. In other words, we ought to vigilantly maintain the absurd in order not to be crushed by it, and become “absurd” ourselves. He illustrated several examples as the absurd man20 and concludes the book with a chapter on Sisyphus from Greek mythology as the absurd hero. When Sisyphus was alive, he often defied and tricked the gods, and cheated even death. So they punished him by having him roll a boulder up a mountain over and over for all eternity.21

Each time Sisyphus finally reaches the top of mountain, the boulder falls back down. Camus imagines him standing there. He is thoroughly conscious of the utter hopelessness of his situation. He has a choice: give in to despair? Let gods win? Mope over his fate? Or thumb his nose at the meaningless task and refuse to see it as punishment? Camus says he is saved by his scorn. He overcomes his situation by standing in revolt of it. Given that he does not accept anything more to life than the absurd situation, Camus says he has found happiness.22

Conclusion

On one hand, I am sympathetic to the dichotomy between the hopes of man and the indifferent universe, but at the same time, I could easily envision a far more horrifying existence. We as the human species may not have arrived at a perfect understanding of our world, but what would be the consequences if that ideal did become a reality? If we knew everything, won't life be utterly boring, and consequently, intolerable? There won't be any more challenges or excitement from life. Everything is already ordered down to the last minutiae, all future events already known in advance. A bottomless, infinite, and obscure world may cost us confusion and frustration, and the impossibility of ideal knowledge. But the cost of a perfectly known world might be infinitely greater. Since Camus is not interested in possible hypotheses that are even more absurd, but whether we in our current condition can live with the absurd, then this scenario is probably irrelevant.

I am somewhat conflicted at this point. Despite the persuasiveness of Camus' arguments, I find the about-face from the Absurd as a paradox to a solution a dissatisfactory move. It seems far too similar to how the existential philosophers themselves escaped the absurd. Thus the assertion that we need to live with the absurd is an equally arbitrary move, no less another "leap of faith". The very rejection of suicide may be a compromise with the absurd, but at the same time, it seems a matter of choice, not a logical conclusion to a philosophical system. In the end, Camus stands tall as an existential thinker, despite his protests to the contrary.

Footnotes

1. Donald Crosby (1988) has characterized this as cosmic nihilism, where the universe lacks any sort of intelligibility or meaning. Camus is on the verge of making an existential nihilistic judgment that human existence is absurd, but his precise formulation of the concept of the absurd doesn't fall neatly into that category.
2. Camus lists four types of feelings of which I mention one (mechanical and routine behavior). The other three are: the burden of time and the inevitable grave, the contingency of existence and the alien nature of things, and the fundamental isolation from other people.
3. Camus, Albert (1983) p. 14
4. Ibid, p. 28
5. It's true that none of the arguments in philosophy come anywhere close in importance as finding a reason to live, or more precisely, the condition a person find him/herself in when he/she fails to find satisfactory reasons for living. This opening move has moved Camus beyond Philosophy Proper, towards theology and morality, in a religious direction.
6. Camus (1983), p. 3
7. Ibid, p. 10
8. Ibid, p. 50. Camus is less interested in philosophical suicide than he is in physical suicide.
9. Ibid, p. 5
10. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Devils, p. 690
11. Camus (1983) p. 106
12. Ibid, p. 108
13. Ibid, p. 54 “Suicide, like the leap [is not the overcoming absurdity] is acceptance at its extreme…”
14. Ibid, p. 50
15. The French term, “l’esquive” is more forceful than the English translation, “eluding,” (for it also means ‘dodging,’ ‘ducking,’ as well as ‘evading,’ or ‘escaping’) but unfortunately, there is not a better word available.
16. Camus, (1983) p. 8
17. Ibid, p. 34
18. Ibid, p. 55
19. Ibid, p. 38
20. Don Juan, the actor, the conqueror and the creator.
21. Long before I ever read The Myth of Sisyphus, I encountered an absurd hero in a video game called Chakan, the Forever Man. The main character was Chakan, a great warrior who challenged Death when it was his time to die. Death bet that if Chakan beat him, he would gain immortality. They fought, and sure enough, Chakan prevailed. However, his victory came with a curse: he would not be able to sleep, because every night, he would witness the pain he inflicted on his victims. Chakan would finally gain eternal sleep only after he had eradicated all evil. That was the game's premise, and after I defeated the game, gotten rid of all evil in the world, I awaited the final prize. Chakan tried to kill himself, only to hear the mocking laughter of Death. Death pointed at the countless stars and each of their planets was overrun with the same evil. Chakan was stuck on his world forever, alone. However, despite the absurd fate, I can imagine Chakan happy in the same fashion.
22. Camus, (1983) p. 123

Bibliography

Camus, Albert. (1983). The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage International
Crosby, Donald. (1988) The Specter of the Absurd. New York: State University of New York Press
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Tr. Katz, Michael (2008) The Devils. New York: Oxford University Press

A Taxonomy of Fundamental Ontologies, Part 3

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:22:07 +0000

By Brian Morton (2009)

3.1 Fundamental Historicism

Another position one could take is that being in its most fundamental nature is different in different periods of history. Perhaps being looks very type-like in the early moments of being, but once substances evolve substances dominate the rest of the history of being. Rather than thinking of any period as being a hybrid in which types and substances are equi-fundamental, we might think that types are more fundamental than objects in one epoch, but that objects are more fundamental than types in another epoch.

This is one plausible way of trying to interpret medieval Chinese Neo-Confucianists, but I'm not convinced it's the right one. Contemporary pictures of the Big Bang, in which the first second of the universe is divided into epochs could be another good example of this kind of approach. For example, during the Grand Unification Epoch (say from around 10E-43 to 10E-35 seconds into history) it would make little sense to think of the world in terms of particles, and not much in terms of fields (there are still only 2 fields!) even if these are apt metaphors for later on, but gauge groups are already apt. But by the Quark epoch (say 10E-12 to 10E-6) the four fundamental fields have all become distinguishable (although the temperature is still too high for stable hadrons), thus field ontologies are apt, but thing ontologies are still probably not very appropriate (certainly hadrons are vastly more thing-like than quarks). But by the 2nd second, even thing-ontologies begin to become apt ways to describe reality.

Still physicists don't seem to usually talk or think this way. Their goal is to examine "laws" of physics, thus those features which are invariant from epoch to epoch, so they don't like to think that being itself might alter fundamentally from age to age. That would bring into question a lot of the uniformitarian assumptions they need to make their observations in this age salient for making retrodictions about past ages. So you could interpret stories about the moments just after the Big Bang, as examples of historicism at the level of fundamental ontology, but it is not at all clear that that is the best way to understand why physicists are telling these stories.

Another example of fundamental historicism might be the thought of Hegel. Again he's hard to interpret, and smart people fight about exactly what he is trying to say. But one way to read him is as a consummate historicist, for whom the philosophical categories, even knowledge, logic, and right, are evolving through time, so that what ought to count as knowledge varies from world historical age to world historical age (and in somewhat parallel from stage to stage in the evolution of the phenomenology of spirit). This appears to be true for Hegel, even of being at its most fundamental.

Hegel believes in a single existing ultimate Being, the Absolute, which can make him look like a Monist. But for Hegel the Absolute is in actuality only in the future, world history is the process of the Absolute attaining full concrete actuality. Hegel is a monist-ontologist, but only about the future. Prior to the absolute embodiment of the Absolute, Hegel might appear to be a more traditional substance-ontologist, but this is misleading. "The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself . . . it is the process of its own becoming (Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 10)." So is he a process-ontologist? His notion of "principle" makes him look like a type-ontologist. He elsewhere makes it look like the process of phenomenology or of world history are the coming-to-be of knowledge or consciousness of the Absolute, rather than the coming-to-be actual of the Absolute itself. So perhaps, being is fundamentally a Monist-ontology all along, but consciousness of being is a process of coming-to-be conscious of being, which progresses in stages.

In the end, I'm not sure that Hegel is really a fundamental Historicist, any more than the physicists, or Neo-Confucians are. But if not this is a logical space in fundamental ontology that someone could move into if no one else already has.

3.2 Fact-Ontologies

Like Heidegger's 1926 aborted attempt at fundamental ontology, three other important 20th century approaches were pioneered in the 1920s: early Wittgenstein's 1921 fact-ontology, A.N. Whitehead's 1927 process-ontology, and Bohr and Heisenberg's Copenhagen ontology of 1927.

For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, objects are real only as they actually exist and that is as components of states of affairs. The world at its most basic level is a collection of facts or states of affairs.

[indent]"2.011 It is essential to things that they be possible constituents of states of affairs."[/indent]

If substances are basically noun-like beings, then states of affairs and facts are sentence-like beings.

[indent]"2.06 The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality (we also call the existence of a state of affairs a positive fact, and their non-existence a negative fact.)"[/indent]

States of affairs, or facts, can also be called situations or even pictures. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, a grammatical statement is a kind of picture of a state of affairs. A sentence or state of affairs can be broken down into smaller components, names, predicates, functions, objects, positions, etc. But these smaller components only have meaning, sense, reality, or even possibility in the context of the sentences or states of affairs of which they are components (3.3).

Anything smaller than a state of affairs is only real in a fact-ontology in the context of a state of affairs. Properties, for example, are perfectly sensical forms of being, but they are dependent in their being on states of affairs:

[indent]"2.0231 The substance of the world can only determine a form, and not any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that material properties are represented - only by the configuration of objects that they are produced."[/indent]

What makes a rose red are the configurations of objects which the rose figures in, or indeed could possibly figure in. Fact-ontologies also explain the phenomenon that motivated type-ontologies, that the concept of circle or mammal can be predicated of other things, or have other things predicated of it. All humans are mammals, and all mammals are animals, both make sense, but "mammals" is not a subsisting thing playing both roles; it is a commonality of our language being used in both pictures or statements asserting possible states of affairs do in fact obtain. Nor is a fact-ontology Monist. It makes sense to talk about the one-great-fact, "all that is the case," but Wittgenstein is confident that "1.2 The world divides into facts." There are other facts besides the one great all-encompassing fact.

What the later Wittgenstein thinks is a source of controversy, but it sure looks to me like he partially backs away from a fact-ontology. What is supposed to be special about facts or states of affairs is that they are the locus of meaningfulness for names, and of sensicalness. But later Wittgenstein seems to worry that even a proposition is not enough context for sense and meaningfulness; you need a language-game and indeed, a language-game needs to be embedded in a way of life.

Wittgenstein takes the attitude that thus we should live our ways of life, and try not to get too hung up on the anomalies created by the ways we talk about our ways of life. One could instead have argued that since facts and properties and types and functions and names and such are all non-fundamental aspects of being, derivative on ways of life, it is the ways of life which are the fundamental level of being. But I don't think he draws that conclusion, and I've never seen anyone assert a lifestyle-ontology (although come to think of it, Heidegger was drifting that way before he gave up).

Another problem with fact-ontologies is how little they have to say about time and temporality. Wittgenstein is mostly interested in formal logic, where time does not really matter because, as he argues the process is always identical to the result.

Fact-ontologies did not die with Wittgenstein though, later ontologists like Menzies 1989, Mellor 1995, etc. are all pretty close to the fact-ontologist picture. For Wittgenstein a fact is not a true proposition, but the aspect of the world that makes a true proposition true. Since the word gets used both ways in English, fact-ontologists usually need to make a terminological distinction to disambiguate. Mellor calls a true proposition a fact, and what makes it true a "facta." Menzies calls these abstract situations and real situations.

3.3 Process-Ontologies

It is traditional to attribute the beginning of process-ontology to Heraclitus. He does say "all things are in process ...", but he also says, "all things are One ..." and "everything taken together is whole but also not whole ..." and "to God all things are beautiful, good and just ..." and several other sayings about all things. On the question of Heraclitus' ontology I always recommend Richard Geldard's nuanced Remembering Heraclitus. Like Aristotle, Heraclitus is too nuanced to pigeon-hole comfortably.

The ancient Chinese are far more plausible early process-ontologists, but they have little influence on the West in this regard until recently. Likewise, Leibniz is making some real stabs away from the substance and type-ontologies he is familiar with, but doesn't really wind up with process as his key notion. Henri Bergson, early Whitehead, and even Pierce and James have some foreshadowing of process-ontologies, but their formulae are often quite clunky. Bergson argues for duration as a form of qualitiative multiplicity. Early Whitehead, coming from a math background argues for a field-ontology in which objects are actually fields with both spatial and temporal extensions. I'm not going to pretend to understand Pierce's obsessively triadic story here. James, too, is clearly rebelling against substance-ontology in many places, but he doesn't really have anything coherent to replace it with.

You can find other precursors. The Stoics insist that all existents were either actors or acted upon, but then asserted that all and only physical things fit this criterion, and fell back to substance-ontology. The Chinese reflection is sometimes interpreted as putting processes of change at the center of reality rather than categories of static being like nouns or adjectives. I've already mentioned the Yin-Yang school, the 5 elemental processes, and the Yi Jing. The text called Hung Fan ("Great Norm") does have some of this and it is expanded by Zou Yan. But, by the time the Yi Jing is interpreted by the Neo-Confucians, we have two distinct but inter-related layers of reality "the tao of every class of things" and "the tao of the transformation of all things." Change is one of the central metaphysical concerns for the Chinese thinkers, but so is type, its hard to say if we have quite a process-ontology even here, although maybe we do. At least by Whitehead's 1929 masterpiece Process and Reality, there can be no doubt that we have a distinctive process-ontology approach. Later folk like Hartshorne, Weiss, Samuel Alexander and C. L. Morgan and A. P. Ushenko are cited by Nicholas Rescher as process philosophers in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on "Process Philosophy" as well.

The idea is that, rather than temporally enduring substances being the fundamental (along with ways for substances to be), the fundamental beings are processes and ways for processes to change. Change and temporality are constituent factors in some way of being, along with their neighbors, alternation, striving, novelty-emergence, and contingency. Field-Being thinker Lik Kuen Tong puts it well, "The world is not an assemblage of independent, substantial entities; nor is it reducible to a determinate totality of atomic facts. It is rather a Great Flow or Great Ocean of Becoming ..." or elsewhere "Field-Being philosophy is based on the fundamental intuition that Reality is Activity, not Entitivity."

For Process-ontologies being is verb-like, it happens rather than is. Other ontological categories, like objects, properties, fields, functions, types, facts, etc., can all exist, but need to be re-worked as ways for processes to change. So, for example, my coffee cup on process-ontology is a stable pattern in the changes of the processes making it up. It is a collection of atoms moving, but moving in ways that constitute its temperature, crystalline structure, motion relative to my desk, etc. These atoms are themselves relatively stable patterns in the changing of the processes that make them up, the orbit of the electrons, the motion of the protons and neutrons, etc. Until we get down to a level of description where the patterns aren't even regular enough to make object-like metaphors tempting. Likewise, even on large scales, we can be tempted to object-talk when processes are behaving nice and predictably, but the more novelty emerges, the more tempting it is to revert to the process talk that is fundamental. Living animals, and trains of thought, are especially process-like because they are unpredictable, or we might say creative or surprising. Properties will then be relatively stable patterns in the behavior of the more object-like processes. My Coke can is red, and by "red" a process-ontologist means, "looks red to me" that is tends to make me alter my thought-processes in ways I have come to habitually label as red. But properties, too, depend on stability of the behavior of processes. If the processes start behaving especially novelly, I have to create new conceptual categories for properties. Suppose that, much to my surprise, my Coke can starts exhibiting the following behavior, it seems red to my right eye, but seems green to my left eye, so that my brain starts flummoxing around with how to interpret the visual signals in terms of my categories. In this case, process-ontology says I need to revise my system of approximation of processes into property-like stable patterns, because the patterns aren't quite as stable as I had previously thought.

Process-ontology is motivated partly by 20th century grappling with the weirdness of sub-atomic "particle" behavior (which isn't very particle-like at all), but it's got lots of other motivations too. It's a way to try to take evolution seriously and build evolution into the overall picture of being. After all, natural kinds like species or genuses seemed like great exemplars of changeless ultimate being to advocates of Plato's theory of the forms, but the understanding that they change too, is part of what undercuts type-ontology in modern days. It's been tempting to theologians trying to reconcile God as being, with evolution and human freedom. It gives free-will a metaphysical basis that is hard to match in more deterministic ontologies.

3.4 Trope-Ontologies

In 1953 Donald Williams coined the term "trope" as a metaphysical category. Tropes have been described as "abstract particulars" (by Stout in 1923!) and "concrete universals." To use Michael Moore's example (Causal Relata, 2004), consider the claim "This dog is white." On a thing-ontology we are going to have two entities participating in the truth making of this claim, a particular, concrete thing, "this dog" and an abstract universal property "being white." A tropist asserts that there is another entity here, which is part of the truth-making of the claim, the particular whiteness of this particular dog. It is abstract in a sense (it is the whiteness of the dog, not the whole of the dog) and particular in a sense (it is the whiteness of THIS dog). It is concrete (not just any whiteness but a concrete whiteness) but still universal (it is inherently related to all other whiteness despite its concreteness). A weak tropist might think that the object, trope, and property are all truth-makers of the claim, basically just adding tropes into the traditional object/property ontology. But an "ardent tropist" thinks that tropes are the fundamental layer of being, and that objects and properties are derivative upon them. Objects become, on this account, collections of tropes, the dog is the sum of that dog's particular features. Properties become patterns of resemblances between tropes, whiteness is an abstraction of the similarities between all the different particular white tropes. Ardent tropists include D. Williams, K. Campbell (1990) and D. Ehrling (1997). Tropes are nice for trying to make sense of causality. As Campbell puts it "when you drop it, it is the weight of this particular brick, not bricks or weights in general, which break the bone in your particular left big toe." On the other hand, trope-ontologies have some trouble differentiating themselves from fact-ontologies. How is the particular whiteness of this particular dog, metaphysically or ontologically distinct from the fact that this particular dog is white?

3.5 Coping-with-Quantum Ontologies

The last great family of ontologies were also born in the 1920s the many attempts to cope with the weirdness of quantum mechanics results in formal ways. Heisenberg and Bohr, collaborating together in Copenhagen around 1927, became convinced that in order to make sense of quantum mechanics it was necessary to re-envision the fundamentals of ontology away from a pure object/predicate picture. Recent polls show that the Copenhagen interpretation is still the most popular interpretation among quantum mechanicists, but that it does have real competition.

The main idea of the Copenhagen interpretation is that there is a "wave-function" of relative probabilities of any given physical system being in various alternate states of being. The wave function is a way of mathematically modeling several distinct ontological notions together, that of a system, a set of possible states of being for the system, and relative probabilities of being in those states of being. It assumes that descriptions of nature ought to be probabilistic all the way down, all the way to the most fundamental descriptions possible. However, the Copenhagen interpretation also assumes the fundamental reality of "wave-function collapse." It assumes that measuring devices are classical, and that they have and impose classical object/property metaphysics. When I measure the position of an electron in the system, its position goes from being a wave-function of various possible locations at various probability-levels, to being a specific definite location, at probability 1, although at the same times its wave-function for vector of motion becomes immeasurable. So, in the Copenhagen interpretation, being normally resides in an undifferentiated, highly probabilistic state, lacking in objects or properties, but when it is measured it becomes object-like and takes on traditional properties. In this picture properties are momentary results of measurement activities, and the normal state of things is to have a range of property-probabilities instead. It is unclear exactly to what extent the Copenhagen interpretation was intended to be an ontological position, rather than say an epistemological one (although it was intended to be fundamental). Bohr, for example, claimed "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." But he also said, "Nothing exists until it is measured." Likewise, Bohr and Heisenberg were not completely on the same page, and there are real disputes in how to interpret Bohr. Just how much of a Positivist was he? Just how far down the subjectivist road was he willing to go with Heisenberg? Jan Faye's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Bohr argues for a roughly Kantian interpretation of Bohr's thought. Indeed, Bohr seems to change his position over time, early on he speaks of Heisenberg's "uncertainty relation" as if the probabilities waves represented epistemic limitations, but later (after the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen objections are raised) he speaks of the "indeterminacy relation" as if the problem is ontological rather than just epistemic.

So regardless of what exactly Bohr or Heisenberg thought, there are a variety of ontological positions in the rough vicinity of their thought which have all become populated since their time, by people trying to cope with the results of quantum mechanical experiments. You could treat the wave functions as genuine descriptions of the being of nature (rather than just our knowledge of nature), or be agnostic on this point. You could treat the collapse of the wave-functions as a genuine ontological change in the structure of being, or merely as an alteration in our knowledge of being. You could even interpret wave-function collapse as being caused by the presence of a conscious observer, often called the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation.

There have been many attempts to square the results of quantum physics with more traditional ontologies. If we give up the notion that the wave-functions are complete descriptions of the system, there might be a hidden variable which determines which of the outcomes occurs (including the Bohm-deBroglie version), and we can re-admit determinism into the picture, and rest with a traditional substance-ontology. Indeed, the null interpretation, and pure instrumentalist interpretation can probably be thought of as leaving all the ontological possibilities open, including traditional substance-ontology. If we take the ensemble or statistical interpretation, the probability claims of the wave-function only hold for large groups of systems, not for each case; we can give a Frequentist reading of the probability claims and again we can have a traditional substance-ontology. Other pictures leave us in mildly non-traditional substance-ontologies. The Many Worlds and Many Minds interpretations of quantum mechanics, suspect that all the outcomes of the probability wave-functions occur, but that they do so in separate worlds or mental spaces. This obligates us to an awful lot of worlds (or mental locations), more than in many substance-ontologies, but it allows the ontological make-up of each world to be normal old objects and properties.

But there are, so far, at least five other interpretations of the quantum mechanical results which leave us in fundamental ontological positions other than substance-ontology or Copenhagen ontology: consistent histories, Quantum Logic, Cramer's transactional interpretation, Van Fraassen's modal interpretation, and Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics. The Consistent histories interpretation advocated by Hartle and Gell-Mann in the late 20th century, and is often thought to clarify the Copenhagen interpretation, without being distinct from it. Here systems have multiple possible past-states (histories), but not all possible histories are consistent (i.e., obey the laws of classical probability). Quantum mechanics then becomes a set of constraints on the possible consistent histories of a system. In this picture, the issue is not so much that measuring causes a change in the system, as that measuring changes which of the possible histories are consistent with our information. Consistent histories allows objects to exist and to have properties in the present, and in each specific pasts, but which past is "the" past of an object becomes underdetermined, which is a fairly major departure from substance-ontology. Whether it is distinct from Copenhagen ontology or not is a trickier question.

Quantum logic approaches were pioneered by Von Neumann and Birkhoff in 1936. In many ways it looks to me like a different formal approach to roughly the same picture as the consistent histories picture. We extend the Hamiltonian definition of an observable (a property) in light of the gauge group results since Hamilton's time and get a densely-defined self-adjoint operator A, on the Hilbert space of the quantum state (what is often called a spectral measure, the equivalent of an eigenvector for an arbitrarily large square matrix). Measurement yields a real number in a range. So imagine we ask for the velocity of a particle, we get a real number answer. So far, we have basically properties and states, with a slightly different underlying algebraic basis. But if we set up an array of propositions asking yes-no questions about the quantum state, and then look for the orthocomplement we get a weird result. For what solutions of q are (p or q) =1 and (p and q) =0? For a classical proposition system, only the set-complement of p, not p, fits these requirements. In a sense, claims have a unique negation. But for a lattice of projections in Van Neumann's definition of "property" there are an infinity of distinct solutions, "negations" of p. We have an infinity of distinct ways to deny a proposition. Or, to put the point in consistent history terms, we have an infinity of distinct ways for possible histories of the system to be inconsistent. It is as if we have a property p, but there are many logically distinct ways to fail to consistently have property p. Properties, in this picture, are not primary features of substances, but instead are features of worlds or histories or states, and this turns out to make a subtle weirdness in their logical and ontological structure.

Cramer's Transactional interpretation of 1986 is a refinement of the Feynman, Wheeler 1945 position, and involves causality breaking down so that there are waves of information going forward in time and backward in time. In effect, before an event is about to occur (say a photon being detected by a detector) the photon makes an "offer," information going forward in time, and the detector makes a "confirmation" information going back in time, and the standing wave created by these two is the event. Objects and properties work fairly normally, but the holding of a property by an object, (the collapse of the wave-function) is temporally non-local and occurs along the whole "transaction" the temporal range over which the offer and confirmation waves are interacting.

In Van Fraassen's "modal" interpretation from the early 70s is also quite distinct. Here the idea is to divide the notion of "state" into two distinct types, the "value state" and the "dynamic state." The value state determines the properties of the system, but it does not determine the possible future value states. The dynamic state determines which future value states are possible (and how likely they are) but does not determine the properties of the system if measured. The dynamic state wave-function never collapses, the value state wave-function never projects. The being of states is simply decoupled from the possibilities of becoming of the states. But when others turned to fitting this philosophical picture into the details of the current physics notation, they often strayed a bit. Kochen, for example, tried to tie his 1985 modal interpretation to the failure of the polar decomposition theorem, but winds up giving up on all intrinsic properties (value or dynamic), analyzing all properties in terms of relations (and thus pre-saging our next picture).

In Rovelli's 1994 relational quantum mechanics the key idea is to do away with properties entirely and make due with relations instead, and let them be governed by Wheeler's quantum information theory. As Rovelli puts it "Quantum mechanics is a theory about the physical description of physical systems relative to other systems, and this is a complete description of the world." Indeed, even the notion of "state" gets cashed out in purely relational terms. Unless I am mistaken, Rovelli is arguing for what I call a lattice-ontology, and claiming that this move allows us to side-step the apparent problems with quantum mechanics.

How to adjust our ontologies to cope with quantum mechanics is definitely still an on-going project. There are open research questions in many of these pictures, both on the algebraic and experimental fronts.

3.6 Event-Ontologies?

Events are things that happen. They are the ontologically equivalents of substantivized verbs, that is verbal forms that have been turned into nouns. A wedding is a great example, both ontologically and linguistically. The activity of "wedding" has been transformed into a noun "a wedding." As such events are not quite on a par with objects, properties, types, facts, or processes. A thing like a stone or a chair exists, it might exist over a duration of time, but it doesn't "happen" whereas a wedding or a battle "happens" rather than existing over a stretch of time. If you say, no actually the rock is really undergoing changes, chemical reactions, erosion and so on, over the time period, then you are in effect arguing for a process or event account of the rock, rather than a substance-ontology of it. Objects can move, events can't. Objects resist co-location in space (you can't have two different objects in the same spatial location), but events tolerate it (on most accounts). Likewise events don't seem to behave quite like facts. Caesar's death in 44BC in Rome was an event with temporal and spatial boundaries (perhaps fuzzy ones). But the fact that Caesar died in Rome in 44BC, is as true and existent today as it was then, it's atemporal in a funny sense. Its also vastly less determinate (its far more abstract) than the actual event of which it is a picture. Indeed, especially after Wittgenstein, it is very natural to think of facts as linguistic pictures of events. Nonetheless it has been very tempting for Analytic philosophers to give accounts of events or of facts which amount to assimilating or all but assimilating the two. In a sense, one of the big problems with Wittgenstein's fact, state of affairs, and situation talk, is its insensitivity to issues of temporality. So events become ways to try to compromise between quite atemporal fact-ontologies and even more temporal process-ontologies.

There is lots of dispute on how to differentiate events, and these can lead to radically different pictures of events. Michael Moore likes to divide accounts events into 5 rough sub-varieties (Causal Relata 2004): extremely course grained (D. Williams 1953, Quine 1985), course grained (Anscombe 1963, Davidson 1980), Moderately fine grained (J. Thomson 1977, Thalberg 1977), fine grained (Goldman 1970, Kim 1973) and extremely fine grained-grained (Dretske 1977). For Kim for example, an event is just the exemplifying of a property by an object over a duration of time. Thus there are for Kim exactly as many distinct events in particular region of space/time as there are properties exemplified. For this picture, the object/property distinction will be central to ontology so we'll have more or less a thing-ontology, and events will be just a special class of things, the exemplifications of properties. Indeed, if you ask Kim how is an event: i.e., the exemplification of property P by object O, at time T and location L, ontologically or metaphysically distinct from the fact that "object O exemplified property P, at time T and location L" he has no answer. The two are identical. Events map one to one to facts, in metaphysically indiscernible ways for Kim. On the other end of the spectrum, Quine individuates events purely by their spatio-temporal boundaries. So the earth's spinning during duration D, is exactly the same event as the earth's cooling during duration D. For Quine too an event is basically just a kind of object, a region of space/time, and it has properties like any other object. If you think events can re-occur (say for example the sun rising every morning), then it looks like events are just a kind of property of some sort, perhaps a property of moments and intervals of time (Montague, 1969) or of cross-world classes of individuals (Lewis, 1986). An ardent tropist can even reduce events to tropes without requiring re-occurrence of events, perhaps the sun rising this morning is a simply a trope of the sun.

In short, most 20th century Western pictures are going to want to have some role for events, but they often disagree wildly on what, and it is very easy to reduce events to other kinds of entities. I'm not aware of anyone trying to make events fundamental to ontology, but I can't think of any reason to rule it out. T. Parsons' brief 1991 "Tropes and Supervenience" briefly sketches a way to build tropes out of events and states, but doesn't get as far as claiming that events are fundamental.

I hope you have enjoyed my brief survey of professional philosophical reflection on fundamental ontology. It is easy for Westerners to get trapped into some variation on a very old very standard fundamental ontology involving objects, properties and predicates, that probably goes back at least to the pre-historic proto-Indo-Europeans. Indeed, a traditional short taxonomy of fundamental ontologies simply distinguishes substance-ontology from all other pictures. I think there is a lot of robust variety in the other pictures, both those actually advanced by folks over the centuries, and those which are logically possible but where it is unclear if they have actually been advanced. And there are a lot of motivations for questioning or opposing the substance ontology: from theology, to multi-culturalism, to quantum physics, and beyond.

A Taxonomy of Fundamental Ontologies, Part 2

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:21:11 +0000

By Brian Morton (2009)

2.1 Substance-Ontologies

Probably the most familiar ontology in my typology, and the most natural to English speakers, is a substance-ontology. The idea is that being has a basic structural dichotomy, noun-like substances, and predicates - things said of substances. My coffee cup is a substance, and it has properties like being mostly empty of coffee, or being black and silver; locations - on my desk, in Indiana; states - not in motion relative to my desk, legally owned by me; relations - smaller than a breadbox, larger than a coffee bean, and so on. On this picture the world is basically divided into a variety of things, and ways for things to be. Aristotle, one of the great examples of a substance-ontologist, says it well:

[indent] "Thus everything except primary substances is either predicated of primary substances, or is present in them, and if these last did not exist, it would be impossible for anything else to exist." (Categories 2b: 4-5, McKeon's translation)[/indent]

Substance-ontologies are divided into several kinds, thing-ontologies, stuff-ontologies, bundle-ontologies, lattice-ontologies, and maybe some others.

In a thing-ontology, the world is primarily made up of things and ways for things to be. That is - substances are like count nouns: chairs, humans, coins, lizards, trees, and so on. Things carry individuation criteria with them in their own being. One lizard and another lizard are two separate things, and things are importantly countable, and individuatable.

In a stuff-ontology, substance works more like mass-nouns: water, bronze, money, justice, thought, etc. Water is not countable or individuatable, it's just too liquid to be discrete. We can say "three cups of water" but "three waters" sounds like a grammar error. Its not that stuff can't be individuated or counted, its just that it doesn't come that way already, you need a measure or an individuation criteria to do it, because that isn't inherent to its own nature.

A thing-ontologist might be very comfortable saying that my coffee cup is a substance; a stuff-ontologist might say that the metal and plastic in my cup are genuine substances and that my coffee cup is made out of them. Things are often called objects, stuff is often called material, or by Aristotle's term, hyle. In either case, properties are going to be ways for substances to be, rather than themselves beings (and it can get tricky to differentiate properties from relations, states, locations, and other ways for substances to be).

Stuff-ontologies go back at least to Anaxagoras among the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, and even earlier arche theorists like Thales look pretty stuff-like.Ancient Greek atomism, such as Democritus, is a great example of a thing-ontology and atomism was present in ancient India too, under both Carvakan and Vaisheshikan styles. It seems that Aristotle's own position on things vs. stuff is too nuanced to fall snugly in either camp, but there are certainly interpreters who read him as a thorough stuff-ontologist. Some later Aristotelians are basically thing-ontologists with only a few nods to stuff, though. The Stoics are basically thing-ontologists or Monists; the world is divided into things which exist, and other ways of being which subsist. By the 1600s the West had swung back mostly to thing-ontologies, and the rise of atomic theory certainly supported this trend. Descartes, Berkeley, and Fichte are all basically thing-ontologists.

Bundle theory, which is well-developed in Hume, and (disputably) already present in Locke presents us with a somewhat tricky case, and my current temptation is to lump it as 3rd kind of substance-ontology distinct from both object based thing-ontologies, and material based stuff-ontologies. The idea here is that properties (or at least some primary properties) are genuine ontologically primary beings, but that substances only have a kind of derivative being as the locus of a collection of properties. As Locke says "... a philosopher ... whatever substantial forms he may talk of, has no other idea of those substances than what is framed by a collection of those simple ideas which are found in them ..." It is still the case for this picture that the world at its most basic levels is divided into things, and ways for things to be; but here the things are but placeholders for habitual patterns of collections of properties. Similarly, it is possible that what I will later describe as lattice-ontologies are really best thought of as a subvariety of substance-ontology similar to Bundle theory where substances are constituted by relations rather than by properties. Or perhaps both should be seen as distinct from substance ontologies, because they privilege properties or relations over substances.

Patrick Suppes in Probabilistic Metaphysics argues that old Aristotelian stuff-ontology makes better sense of 20th century physics than many other pictures. But even fairly recently, thing-ontologies have been tempting to high-end philosophers in the West. Frege's logic assumes two kinds of beings, objects and functions, which fit the basic substance division, of things and ways for things to be. Substance-ontologies make a lot of sense for speakers of a subject-predicate language, and my guess is that most speakers of Western languages use common-sense substance-ontologies of some kind unless they get exposed to a lot of philosophy. It is still common to refer to substance/property ontologies as "traditional" metaphysics.

2.2 Type-Ontologies

The most famous of what I'm calling a type-ontology (in the West) is Plato's theory of the forms. The idea is that forms, or types, or categories are the most fundamental layer of being: human, red, just, circle. The goal is to efface the noun-like/predicate-like distinction, and imagine the important beings as able to stand on either side of it. A type or form is amphibiously noun-like and adjective-like. We can say of a rock that it is circular, or of a circle that it is red. The form circle can be said of other beings, or other beings can be said of it. This seems grammatically counter-intuitive in Germanic languages, but in Greek and in Romance languages it is common to have terms that are amphibiously adjectives or nouns. "Alba" can mean "white" the adjective or "white thing" with equal ease in Latin. In the Platonic theory of forms, what really ultimately exists, are the forms: the white, the circular, the red, the just, the good, and so on. Or perhaps we might name them whiteness, circularity, redness, justice, goodness, and so on. My coffee cup will then be a derivative being, dependent for its being on the many forms in which it participates, cupness, circularity, blackness, particularity, and so on.

It would be tempting to think of a form or type, say the red or redness, as the set of all red things, as if types were built out of tokens, but that would be to use a thing-ontology instead of a type-ontology. In a thing-ontology there are things which have the property red, and then another thing, a set, which contains all red things. But, for a type-ontology, red things are only red because they participate in the form of the red; the form is fundamental and the things only derivative. Tokens are built out of types. The red is the being it is on its own, and causes red things to be red, or well if not "cause" then the form "constitutes" red things as red, or even better "red things depend in their being red on the being of the red."

Thus, instead of a fundamental divide between beings and ways for beings to be - type-ontologies have every being also being a way for other beings to be, the cosmos is an array of combinations of beings.

Type-ontologies also do a good job with category hierarchies, because types participate in other types. The human is a variety of the mammal, which is a variety of the vertebrate, which is a variety of the animal, the living, the physical and the existent. Type-ontology is a kind of anti-atomism, instead of the world being built up from tiny basic things, into larger and larger collections of things which are themselves things of a different kind, it imagines the whole of being being sub-divided into types, and sub-types, and sub-sub-types, until reaching the level of particularity.

Properties exist in their own right on this picture, but there is no real dividing line between properties and things, things are just particular properties.

In the West, Pythagoras develops a type-ontology by extending Anaximander's thought that the unlimited is the arche, by asserting that the unlimited and the limited are jointly the arche, and that number and ratio are the primary layer of being. Plato modifies the role of the limited, to get a less numerical picture of form. Type-ontologies of Pythagorean, Platonic, or Neo-Platonic styles are interacting with substance-ontologies in the West until modern philosophy when they fall out of favor.

I can't think of any Indian type-ontologies off-hand. But normal Chinese thought is type-ontological at least until philosophers get involved. Confucius appears to think type-ontologically, without highlighting this fact. Logician Kung-sun Lung appears to have directly advocated this kind of picture in ancient China, perhaps even against the thought of logician Hui Shi.

In much the same way that substance-ontologies just seem like normal common sense for languages that have rigid subject-predicate distinctions, type-ontologies just seem like common sense for languages that conflate nouns and adjectives, like Chinese. Even after philosophers start proposing other options in China, many Chinese philosophers retain allegiance to type-ontologies until the 20th century, (and probably do unconsciously still when they aren't being careful).

2.3 Monist-Ontologies

Another thoroughly ancient approach to ontology, is to insist that being is united and singular, that there is really only one being, which might be called Being, or The One, or The All, or Nature, or the Cosmos, or Brahman, or God, or Prakriti, etc. If being is radically one, then it doesn't really matter "one what?" Monists can say that the one being is the only substance, or the over-type, of the total event, or the one great fact, or the field of all being, or whatever. Monism becomes a kind of end-point for all other ontologies. However, everything else, becomes a secondary existence, of non-ultimate existence of some kind. Everything else that is, is a way for the one being to be. As Spinoza puts it in Ethics, Prop 6:

[indent]"the modes of any given attribute are caused by God, in so far as he is considered through the attribute of which they are modes, not so far as he is considered through any other attribute."[/indent]

Everything that is, is a part of God, and is caused by God, as a mode of the being of God. But this is so, of people, and circles, and redness, and events, and so on. One danger is that our categories of being will be swamped by the single distinction of ultimate being vs. everything else, and so any Monist that wants to do metaphysics (like Spinoza or Plotinus) will need to try to rescue differences within the "everything else" category to some extent. In this account, properties will be non-fundamental beings, modes of the being of the one true being at best, and there isn't much reason to hope for properties to be very distinguishable from relations, or events, or things, unless the particular Monist-ontologist does a lot of work.

Monist-ontologies are very old in India. They go back at least to Parmenides in Greece. Both in the West and in India they received both religious and naturalist elaborations. Plotinus and some later Christians and Muslims, think of the one true being in God-like terms, as does Sankara (opening them to charges of pantheism). Thinkers like Parmenides or Sartre think of the one being in fairly naturalistic terms (opening them to the charge of atheism). Thinkers like Spinoza, the Stoics, Einstein, or the Samkhya-darsana are willing to admit that the one being is an appropriate target of both religious and naturalist impulses. It is worth mentioning, that four-dimensionalist pictures of the cosmos even from physicists often wind up sliding into Monism if they aren't trying hard to resist it. After all they make the whole of time look like what is, and all events, facts, things, properties, etc., look merely like modes of being of the whole of the cosmos. Monism has been popular in India in some times, but it is at least present if not popular, in almost all times and places, because it is a sort of end-point for any other ontology.

2.4 Aporetic-Ontologies

Another classic strategy on fundamental ontology is to give up, refuse to answer, or retreat to perplexity, what the Greeks call an aporia. As Plato says in the Sophist:

[indent] "For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression 'being.' We, however, who used to think we understood it have now become perplexed." (The Sophist, 244a)[/indent]

The Skeptics suspended judgment on the question of the most fundamental being as they did on other topics. Skepticism of the fundamental nature of being was present in ancient India too. In ancient China, Zhuangzi argues that fundamental ontology is the wrong project to pursue throughout chapter two of the book named after him. Some ancient and medieval aporetic-ontologists were not skeptics, and were willing to make lots of claims on many topics, but as one approached the fundamental layer of being, they retreated into negative theologies, apophatic theologies, and other elaborate devices to avoid logizing the ontos. Pseudo-Dionysius and Maimonides are good examples. Kant develops elaborate metaphysics, but his price for doing so is giving up on the question of fundamental ontology, even claiming that "it is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy exists."

Even Heidegger is in this camp. His famous Being and Time, raises the question of the meaning of being, and seeks to once again tackle a question he feels has been covered over and forgotten by the philosophical tradition, the question of the most fundamental meaning of being. He argues that our being, which he calls da-sein, is the being to be interrogated to pursue the question of the meaning of being, and that "thus, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can originate, must be sought in the existential analysis of da-sein" (Being and Time, p. 11).

But Heidegger sees his task has having two parts each with three divisions. Part two would be "destructuring of the history of ontology on the guideline of the problem of temporality (p. 35)." He never wrote part two of Being and Time, but didn't really need to for his project to work. Part one was "The interpretation of Da-sein on the basis of temporality and the explication of time as the transcendental horizon of the question of being (p. 35)." And it was to have three divisions,

[indent]1) the preparatory fundamental analysis of Da-sein,
2) Da-sein and temporality, and
3) Time and Being.[/indent]

So the idea was we try to understand our being in division 1, use that to understand temporality in division 2, and use this to understand the meaning of being (as opposed to just our being) in division 3 (and then argue against three rival pictures in Part 2). But Heidegger never wrote Division 3! Thus Heidegger's REAL answer to the question of the meaning of being, is to work diligently on the project for 400 pages, and then give up 2/3rds of the way to the answer! He just never found a way to make his mediations on the relation between our being and temporality shed any light on being in general. It is possible, but controversial, that even the later works of Wittgenstein are ultimately aporetic with regard to fundamental ontology.

2.5 Factor-Ontologies or Dharma-Ontologies

The Buddhist tradition develops a different picture of fundamental ontology early on, traditionally called dharma theory, or Abhidharma theory. Within a few centuries of Buddha's teaching a series of texts called the Abhidharmas (roughly, "advanced teachings") arises. In the words of Paul Williams, a scholar of Buddhism, they are "lists which enumerate with maximum possible exactitude what is actually occurring in a particular psychological or physical situation spoken of in the Sutras or in life generally. The lists are lists of what is seen to be the case by one who sees things the way they really are (Buddhist Thought, 2000, p. 88)."

We have a reduction program in which normal and unusual "occasions" are to be analyzed into their components, the skandas or "heaps", which are in turn to be analyzed further until we reach the ultimate level of being. Those elements which remain even at the ultimate level are called dharmas, a Sanskrit word that elsewhere means everything from "thing" to "truth" to "teaching" to "factor" to "topic of discussion." So for example, "eating a strawberry" consists of some volitions or habits (samkhara), consciousnesses (samjna), sense-consciousnesses (vijnana), feelings (vedana), and physical forms (rupa).

The vijnana will further divide into particular strawberry-taste-consciousnesses, strawberry-mouthfeel-consciousnesses, and so on. The material form of the strawberry will divide into solidity, fluidity, energy, and motion, and perhaps some other physical factors dependent on these. But the particular solidity of the strawberry cannot be analyzed any further. Solidity is simply one of the basic factors in physical occasions.

Dharmas are primary existents (dravyasat) and are what all other existents are composed of. They have "own-being" (svabhava), which is how they differ from secondary existents, like chairs, or persons which do not have own-being. Each dharma has an "own-mark" (svalaksana), which is how it differs from every other dharma. A dharma is a genuine factor in the ultimate ontological analysis of complex occurrences. Later Buddhist schools disagree with each other over exactly how many kinds of dharma there are, how to categorize them, what the best way to analyze particular occurrences into dharmas is, and what dharmas themselves are like.

In the Sautrantikan school, dharmas look a lot like short events, or even what Dretske calls event-aspects, and they exist only in the present. For them what it is to be is to exert activity, and only present factors do that. Whereas in the Sarvastivadin (literally "everything exists") school, dharmas in the past and future do not exist in quite the same way that present dharmas do, but they do nonetheless still exist. Sarvastivadins do, however, admit that present dharmas, and not past or future ones, have a sakaritra, or "characteristic activity," which is the present form of its own-mark, or characteristic feature. Many of these schools die out; only Theravada, retains this picture of Buddhism today.

Where does this leave us for properties? Well some things that look like objects do wind up being dharmas: space, greed, pleasure, attention, and so on. But other dharmas look more like properties, red, for example, is a particular visual-sense-consciousness, or in most cases a particular visual-sense-contact, but it is a real factor in the ultimate analysis of occasions. Contrariwise, many properties will wind up being secondary existents, rather than dharmas; personhood is a real existent, but it is a secondary one, not a dharma at all (for most schools of Buddhism).

What is ultimately real of beings on this picture, comes in many varieties, and these varieties combine to give us the complex occasions we encounter. Factor-ontology winds up being a kind of logical atomism, that isn't much like physical atomism, or any of the metaphysical pictures of the West, except perhaps the event-aspect metaphysics that is beginning to be explored now.

2.6 Prajnaparamita-Ontologies

Somewhere around 0 BCE, a newer form of Buddhism develops which calls itself Mahayana, or the great vehicle. One of its chief characteristics is to reject the dharma-ontology discussed above and replace it with something called prajnaparamita - "the perfection of wisdom." At least early on, the point does not seem to be that dharma-metaphysics is wholesale wrong, but rather that it, too, is not the most deep or fundamental truth of things; that it is a metaphysics but not really an ontology.

Exactly what was supposed to replace the dharma picture as our understanding of the deepest reality of things, was taken even by the Mahayanists to be a mysterious, difficult picture to express. See my longer work "Logical Atoms and the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra," for a fuller discussion. But the basic story goes like this.

Give up all talk of dharmas, or factors, or things, or properties or occasions, none of that is ultimate. Being is "empty" of all that. Things just are the way they are. "Thusness" or "suchness" is the main feature of genuine being. Being is "just like this." If we are to speak with precision (such as in a merit dedication formula) we say "let the merit, such as it is, generated donating this book, understood as the Buddhas understand it, to this monastery, understood as the Buddhas understand, be dedicated to the leading all beings, taken as they are seen by the Buddha, to ultimate enlightenment, as it is understood by the most holy ones."

The danger is that we will falsely reify such concepts as merit, book, monastery, all beings, or enlightenment. Dharma metaphysics allows us to avoid reifying books, or selves, or monasteries, but at the cost of reifying the ultimate factors, space, sense-consciousness, etc.

Prajnaparamita metaphysics says avoid reifying anything by your verbal expressions, let being be as it is. The solution is to repeat, "such as they are," or "such as they are understood by the Buddhas." The ontological picture is not intended to amount to Monism or nihilism, but to walk a middle path between falsely reifying what does not exist, and denying the existence of what does. It is almost as if the ancient Buddhists agreed with Wittgenstein's first claim, "the world is all that is the case" but disagreed with his second claim "the world is the totality of facts, not of things" instead thinking "the world is not the totality of facts, or things, or properties, or factors, or dharmas, or activities; it simply is as it is."

Prajnaparamita-ontologies do not reject properties or things entirely, they are among those things that exist conventionally, but they are simply not present at the deepest level of reality. For these pictures, it is often appropriate to speak of properties or things or factors, when our goal is not to speak about ultimate reality, or not to speak with aching precision, but instead to converse with people on day to day matters or to introduce them gradually to the deeper aspects of reality.

2.7 Lattice-Ontologies

Tu Shun lived from 557-640 CE in China, and was the first Patriarch of the Hua-Yen or Flower Garland school of Chinese Buddhism, which focused on the interpretation of the Sanskrit Buddhist text the Avatamsaka Sutra (which existed by 420 CE and parts or all of it are probably earlier than that). Tu Shun thinks he is just interpreting the Avatamsaka Sutra, and that may be so, or perhaps his commentary is improving or systematizing the ideas of the Sutra. His school teaches that we come to understand reality in a series of stages.

Tu Shun's succinct formulation is: 'First, one in one. Second, all in one. Third, one in all. Fourth, all in all.'" (Buddha Boogie, "The Tautological Paradigm", pg 305).

Object/property metaphysics, Monism, and the prajnaparamita picture, are each correct stages of understanding, but none are the ultimate layer of being, which is the "all in all." The Avatamsaka Sutra uses the metaphor of the Jeweled Net of Indra (the king of the gods). Imagine a vast net (that is a lattice) with a jewel at each juncture. Each jewel reflects every other jewel in the net, so that every jewel stands in "relation" or "connection" with every other jewel, so that any change in any jewel is reflected in some way in every jewel. Now let each jewel represent an individual life form, cell, atom or unit of consciousness. For the Avatamsaka Sutra, and Tu Shun reality at its most basic is a vast array of inter-relationships. Individual objects are constituted by their pattern in the whole, and indeed their distinctness and independent existence is fairly suspect. They are at all only because of their network of interrelationships to all other beings.

In Bundle theory, we saw a picture where substance is dependent in its being on primary properties which are ontologically fundamental. A lattice-ontology imagines relations, rather than properties or objects to be fundamental, and properties and objects to be derivative upon the relations.

Interestingly, Leibniz in the West advances almost exactly the same picture in his Monadology. One of the principle features of monads is that each reflects the entire universe. In Leibniz, though, monads are thought of as "substantial forms of being." So probably it is best to think of him as a substance-ontologist, who is trying to resist both thing and stuff pictures. It is only if one goes one step further and says that interrelations are the fundamental beings, and substances are merely modes of interrelation that the ontology starts looking distinct from substance-ontology. My guess is that this kind of picture is going to become slowly more popular. Substance-ontologies work great for mechanical views of the world, but Vitalist and ecological views tend to fit better with process-ontologies or lattice-ontologies. Also from a modern mathematical perspective it is very natural to think of properties as unary relations, and to think of k-ary relations as interpretations of k-ary predicates, so it is fairly easy to think of properties and predicates as degenerate cases of relations.

2.8 Adverbial-Ontologies

If we think of substances and properties as nouns and adjectives, then it is natural to look for a metaphysical category for verbs or adverbs. Western traditional metaphysics has a lot of trouble with verbs and verbal phrases. It tends to assimilate, adjectival phrases, prepositional phrases, and verbal phrases all to the broader metaphysical category of predicates, and then have troubles distinguishing them again.

In Aristotle, for example, action is categorically parallel to quantity, quality, relation, place, position, state, time, and even affection. How exactly verbs are supposed to work is a source of controversy and confusion in India, too. But you could, in theory, make verbs or adverbs the primary layer of being, and try to make noun or adjective-like modes of being look derivative. Modernly, this is the goal of Process-ontologies. It has been suggested that some parts of ancient Chinese thought look a lot like process-ontologies or precursors of them, especially reflection on the Yi Jing (the Classic on Changes), or Yin-Yangist reflection on the wu hsing (5 elemental processes).

But even trickier is the thorny question of how to interpret early philosophical Taoist thought, such as the Daodejing (the Classic on the Way and the Power) attributed to Laozi. Here the fundamental ontological category is the Dao or Tao or "Way." It is the origin of heaven and earth, and the mother of all things, but is not itself very thing-like. The very first line of the text (in its modern versions) is "tao k'o tao fei ch'ang tao" or "The 'way' that 'can be' 'wayed/walked' 'cannot be' the 'unchanging' 'way.'" The word "dao" appears 3 times in 6 words: as a noun, a verb and a modified noun. It is a path and a walking of a path, a river's course and its coursing of its course. And changing is essential to it. Exactly what this text is trying to say is a subject of much contention and interpretation, but it is pretty clearly rejecting substance and type ontologies.

Maybe it too is advancing a process-ontology of some kind. Maybe it is essentially a kind of verbal-monism, in which all things are modes of the way. But this can be interpreted as a kind of adverbialism where all things other than the way are at root adverbs, ways for the way to way. One of my old colleagues liked to put it like this: The world is appearing to me treely. The world is happening stop-the-war-in-Iraqly. The world is appearing to me confusedly. The world is happening driving-down-the-roadly.

If adverbs are the fundament of being, then processes would merely be constituted by the more fundamental ways to process, and objects and properties would be merely odd ways of trying to express adverbial realities. A property like being red, winds up being a way of happening redly. I'm not entirely convinced that anyone, even the Taoists, have actually advanced an adverbial-ontology, and its not clear to me what you buy yourself ontologically by making adverbs fundamental, but its possible that this is what some Taoists are trying to do, and even if they aren't it's a logically possible form of ontology.

2.9 Hybrid-Ontologies

There is no real requirement to say that at the basic level reality is of one grammatical category. Even traditional western ontology usually acknowledges both substances and predicates as jointly fundamental. You could, in principle, hold that objects and factors are both fundamental, or that processes and types are, or that the one substance (Nature) and variety of ways for the subject to behave are jointly fundamental. You could even say that all these ontological categories are among the ways for being to be, and plenty more besides, and that forms of being are not typically built up out of more basic forms of being, but rather that there are lots of varieties of primitive or fundamental being. But this is not usually popular.

There is some kind of powerful reductionist impulse in the history of world ontologies, whereby most ontologists seem to want to reduce other categories of being to some one or two fundamental ones. Perhaps this is because people are reductionists at heart, or because one's native language has a kind of trump, or maybe it is because Unificationists are right about how explanation works.

Medieval Neo-Confucians in China, (Like Zhu Xi) interpret the Yi Jing as describing two distinct but inter-related layers of reality "the tao of every class of things" and "the tao of the transformation of all things." Maybe Zhu Xi is best thought of as hybrid-ontologists who admit the fundamental reality of both process and type. Maybe. Similarly, contemporary western thinkers Casati and Varzi grant that you could think of events and objects as equally ontologically fundamental (in their Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article "Events"), but they don't give any examples of thinkers who actually do. Hybrid-ontologies seem to be theoretically possible, but simply not very tempting, both anciently and contemporarily.

2.10 Hamiltonian mechanics, Field-Ontologies, Group-Ontologies and Others

By the 1800s Western mathematicians are inventing ontological categories left and right, but not generally arguing for them as being fundamental. In 1788, LeGrange had found a way to mathematically reformulate Newton's mechanics, so that the results were all the same, but the equations were (sometimes) much easier. Legrangian mechanics did not and does not seem to have altered anything important at the ontological level. William Rowan Hamilton invents quaternions in 1843, and then some of his allies such as Peter Tait argue for restating the claims of physics in terms of them. Maxwell's famous equations are stated in quaternion notation in 1865 in his own research, but the quaternion notation isn't really that far from our normal intuitions about objects as occupying space and time. Indeed, a big chunk of Hamilton's goal is to show why the one dimension of time seems to work so differently than the three dimensions of space.

Hamilton's ontology leaves objects and properties intact, and merely tries to situate them in a 4-space in which three of the dimensions work differently than the fourth. In a Hamiltonian formulation of a classical mechanical system we have three basic ingredients, states (which in many ways are algebraic precursors of Wittgenstein's states of affairs), observables (which work just like properties), and dynamics (by which we can represent conjugate momenta, via only 1st order differential equations.) Hamilton is trying to re-understand space and time, and he doesn't think he is shaking object-property metaphysics at all. But in order to make equations for figuring out object-property physics easier, he is taking short-cuts through quite different ontological categories, such as "states" and "dynamics" which are probably setting the stage for later fact-ontologies and process-ontologies.

But by the late 1800s other mathematical physicists are moving to a more radical position, that fields, especially vector-fields or later tensor-fields or spinor-fields, are fundamental. A vector-field is an assignment of a vector (a quantity + direction) to every point of an N-space of some kind. So, for example, the gravitational field of a single large mass (say the earth), would be a collection of force vectors pointing towards the center of the earth, with magnitudes depending on (roughly) the inverse square of the distance to the center of the mass. The gravitational field of a two mass system, (say the earth and moon) is more complex, but still quite mathematically tractable.

Newton imagines gravitational attraction as a thing, namely a "force" with properties like magnitude and direction. You could think of a field as an infinite array of possible forces depending on one's location. But it is more natural to think of a field as a single entity, but one that isn't very thing like. It spreads over a whole space and can be fully co-spacious with other fields. It is natural to think of the two-body gravitational field as the product of two distinct one-body fields.

During the 1800s fields are becoming more and more prominent in physics. Electricity, magnetism, gravitation, hydrodynamics, and meteorology all start using them. They begin as notational devices, but increasingly become ontological categories. Mathematical physicists like Gibbs, Heaviside, and Lord Kelvin, argued for physical theories to be expressed in field notations. Gibbs, for example, believed that mathematics IS a language, and thus that the job of the theoretical mathematical physicist is to improve the language in which we can express physical truths. Thus moving to vector-field notations amounted in Gibb's mind to linguistic-ontological reform in how we think and speak about the fundamental ontology of physical entities. The Gibb-Heaviside field picture of physics is powerful, flexible and extremely abstract, relying (intentionally) heavily on high end algebra and analysis. It is intended to be as general to matter as possible and to work well on many scales and contexts, rather than to focus on matter's structure at very-small scales, or very large ones. I'm inclined to think it is a departure from traditional object/property metaphysics (fields aren't really either) and from natural language (preferring the artificial language of algebraic analysis). The Gibb-Heaviside picture is still used a lot, especially for physics and engineering at super-atomic scales, but it's rare to find folk who think it is fundamental anymore. It is certainly also possible to use field notations in physics without particularly subscribing to a field-ontology. Einstein, for example, described his theories as "A true triumph of the methods of the general differential calculus founded by Gauss, Riemann, Christoffel, Ricci, ... p. 626." Thus, for him, the fields used in differential calculus were methodological innovations, not insight into how things are.

Field-ontology isn't the only attempt to make 19th century mathematical entities fundamental constituents of being. My old differential equations teacher, Pimon Ajanapon, an ex-Buddhist monk and mathematician, was trying to build an ontology in which sets would be the only fundamental beings, but as far as I know he never got very far.

More importantly, Max Klein began a project in algebra called the Erlangen Program which wanted to use group theory to look at invariants over transformations. After the success of the Lorenz transformations, this started looking like it might be the path to fundamental physical ontology, and motivated a lot of the work of the 1930s and 1940s.

The Weyl-Fock-London gauge theory was popularized by Pauli in the 1940s. By 1947 Hungarian physicist Cornelius Lanczos is arguing that all physical laws are self-adjoint variational principles, in effect that gauge groups are the presence of physical laws at the level of fundamental ontology. Yang and Mills explored non-abelian gauge symmetry groups in the 1950s and later models, such as the Standard Model and string theory continue to have a hefty gauge group component today. If I am understanding correctly, and that's a big if, particles (that is objects with properties using the traditional ontology), fields (now often tensor or spinor fields, rather than the more basic vector fields), and gauge groups are all used in many formulations of physical theories. The Standard Model, for example, is expressed in gauge group notation, but can derive particle-notations and field-notations with a fair bit of ease.

It seems that some physicists think of the particles as fundamental and the fields and gauge groups as notational schemes to make the math nice, whereas others think of the fields, or gauge-groups as fundamental. On the other hand, "the Standard Model" is probably not all the way to fundamental yet. The question is, if it could be extended to a model that included gravity as well as electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear interactions, would it rely on particles, fields, gauge-groups, all three or something else? Gauge groups are, or perhaps are close to being, sub-species of the forms that Plato was on about, they are invariants over local and global transformations. It is possible that gauge group ontologies are really best thought of as a contemporary sub-variety of type-ontology, but I'm suspending judgment on that at the moment.

There is an active contemporary group called the IIFB, the International Institute of Field-Being, it was formed in 1996 and holds symposia and meetings in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association. Its goal is the study of non-substantialist ontologies in both the East and West, and has roots in American study of Chinese thought and Chinese study of American thought. While fields are part of Lik Kuen Tong's ontology, the IIFB are really pretty clearly what I'm calling process-ontologists. See http://www.iifb.org/. They categorize all ontologies into two kinds, substantialist and non-substantialist, which seems to me to be running together a lot of alternatives, but gives a feel for where the current thinking on typologies of fundamental ontology is prior to this paper.

Continued in "A Taxonomy of Fundamental Ontologies, Part 3"

A Taxonomy of Fundamental Ontologies, Part 1

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:20:04 +0000

By Brian Morton (2009)

Introduction

A colleague once asked if I could give him “a taxonomy of ‘forms of ontology’ and where properties fit within it.” This paper is a preliminary attempt at filling that tall order. Since the history of human thought about ontology is so greatly diverse, it is really beyond the scope of this paper to do anything more just sketch out the basics of over about a dozen forms of ontology in order to give a rough survey of philosophical reflection on ontology fundamentals. But, this is not just a history of ontologies paper, because, in some cases, I am trying to point to a way in which one could attempt to construct an ontology – especially when I am not entirely convinced that anyone has actually yet attempted to fully develop some particular form of ontology.

The West’s traditional picture of the world imagines particular objects – things - to be the central reality of our world, and for these things to have properties - adjective-like modifiers of exactly how they are. Wittgenstein however disagrees. He begins his Tractatus:

[INDENT]1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.[/INDENT]
For Wittgenstein, being at its most basic level is composed of facts not of things. He is advancing what I will call a fact-ontology, rather than a thing-ontology which itself, according to this preliminary taxonomy, is a sub-variety of a substance-ontology.

According to some substance-ontologies, substances are all physical; according to others, substances are all mental; for still others, substances come in both kinds, or come in exactly four kinds, or an infinity of kinds, etc. But, for all substance-ontologies, being is noun-like at its most basic level, regardless of substances having properties of some kinds and perhaps other predicables, such as relations or locations or states. There are many good questions of ontology and metaphysics, besides the ones we are exploring here, but in this paper my goal is to explore the question “what grammatical categories is being most like at its most fundamental?”

The thing-ontologist answers “nouns.” The fact-ontologist answers “complete sentences.” But what other answers have tempted people over the years? Not everyone is going to be happy with this analogy to grammar, but it will work well for many of the pictures. Personally, I suspect that much of ontology is merely unconscious following of the prejudices of the grammar of one’s native language, and much of the rest of ontology is conscious reflection on what the grammar of a more ideal language would be like.

It currently looks to me like the rough history of fundamental ontology goes in three basic periods: classical development from ancient times to the 1800s; a period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th century; and a great rebirth of fundamental ontology in the 1920s leading to the contemporary situation.

In the West, substance-ontologies of one variety or another have dominated from pre-Socratic days until now; so much so that Heidegger complained that the tradition covers over the very possibility of dispute on fundamental ontology. I disagree. It seems that Platonic form-theory, styles of Monism (especially Neo-Platonic ones), and aporetic approaches have been important competitors with the standard picture throughout Western history. The Islamic world seems to fit the European experience pretty closely on ontology.

In India, both Monism and substance-ontologies have old roots, (as probably does the aporetic approach). The Buddhists also develop 3 newer positions, factor-ontology (circa 300 BCE), prajnaparamita-ontology (circa 0 BCE), and lattice-ontology (by circa 600 CE), all of which also find their way into China by the 700s.

In ancient China, a type-ontology similar to Plato’s form theory seems to be the normal default position. However, it is arguable that the later Mohists advanced something quite like a substance-ontology, and Zhuangzi and Hui Shih advanced aporetic pictures. Sometimes Taoist philosophy is interpreted as advancing an adverbial picture and the Yin-Yang school is advancing either a process-ontology or the beginnings of one, or something like it. Medieval China perhaps sees hybrid fundamental ontologies trying to integrate type and process.

In the West it is surprising that the revolutions of modern philosophy don’t shake up pictures of fundamental ontology much, but they don’t seem to. Descartes tries valiantly to doubt everything, but winds up importing medieval substance/property metaphysics pretty much wholesale, but fiddles with the boundaries of the mental and physical. Idealism, Empiricism, Romanticism and so on, challenge much of epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, but leave the basic substance/property picture more or less untouched. Leibniz is trying to break out of the pattern here, and creates something much like Tu Shun’s picture (see section 2.7 in Part 2 of this essay). Maybe this is just a new wrinkle on substance-ontology, or maybe it is something more fundamental. Likewise, perhaps Hegel has something new to offer here too, maybe.

But by the 1800s mathematicians are inventing all kinds of stunning new ontological entities: groups, fields, rings, functions, sets, non-standard geometries, matrices, etc. Of course, they aren’t (generally) claiming them to be fundamental constituents of being; that comes later. Hamiltonians in 1860s, argue that the discovery of quaternions are fundamental and that physics should be re-phrased in terms of them, and in the process of doing so give us early versions of modern notions of state and process. Likewise in the 1880s physicists rephrase everything again in terms of vectors and vector-fields. This seems to often be a shift in thinking about fundamental ontology rather than just a methodological issue to many of them. Discoveries about the behavior of electricity and magnetism have simply made fields more plausible as underlying beings, and shown how fields aren’t really that close to traditional substances. Neither Hamilton, nor the field and vector advocates are really setting out to alter fundamental ontology; they are setting out to try new mathematical formalisms. But they and later folk are slowly convinced of the deep reality of their formalisms.

Things really heat up from 1887-1920s as the Michealson-Morley experiments, Einstein’s relativity theory and the quantum mechanics results start pouring in, making classical ontologies look inadequate. At the same time, more purely philosophical innovations from Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and Heidegger are re-opening the question of fundamental ontology directly, typically by explicitly disagreeing with the traditional ontology. In the 1920s it looks like ontology is a question that can be re-examined, and one that needs to be (although some conclude upon examination that the old ways are still best). Fact-ontologies, Process-ontologies, Trope-ontologies, and the Copenhagen ontology all emerge during the 1920s. These as well as many further variants of the “cope-with-quantum” strain have continued to develop over the 20th century, as (perhaps) have event-ontologies.

Table of fundamental ontologies:

Continued in "A Taxonomy of Fundamental Ontologies, Part 2"

The Omniscient Book

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:13:41 +0000

The Omniscient Book
By David Misialowski

Oct. 3, 1991, San Francisco
This morning I fed yellowcake to the pigeons in the park. They strutted about like diplomats, obsequiously bobbing their heads up and down at my feet as if I were a potentate to whom they were presenting their credentials and paying homage. But sometimes they cocked their heads and scrutinized me with their beady little eyes, as if they wanted to tell me a secret. Yet they never spoke. As always, the eyes of the statues followed me. Perhaps I am under surveillance, but why? I love America, the land of the free, and would never harm her.

I saw Nadia again last night. Nadia! A Slavic name. She occupies the room down the hall. I must get her aside and tell her, as a friend, that her skirts are too short.

Whenever she sees me coming, she seductively twitches her nose. I know what she is after! But whenever I walk up to her, she always closes the door in my face. Strange!

I confess I do not understand women: for a long time in Poland I practiced celibacy while I studied for the priesthood, before renouncing God and profaning a statue of the Virgin Mary in Warsaw.

By dark routes I wound up in Moscow as a spy, and I was able to buy my freedom from the crumbling Soviet bloc by selling fissile materials to a shadowy group in Afghanistan for a small fortune. I assumed that the Afghans, who called themselves jihadists, planned to use the yellowcake to fashion nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Army, then in its waning days of occupying Afghanistan. Unfortunately, that never happened.

Now I am in San Francisco in a cheap hotel, but the money is running out. It turns out that in the land of the free, one is free to starve in the street. Who knew? At night, the foghorns reproachfully low my name: “Veee-toooold … Veee-toooold…”

What are they trying to tell me?

Oct. 20, 1991
Today I had an extraordinary experience.

I came across a bookstore called “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books.” But the place was dirty and dim, with a cranky old man behind the counter.

I found a fat black book. Written in bold, gold letters across the front of it were the words, “Book of Predestynaski.”

Predestynaski!

I am Predestynaski.

Witold Predestynaski.

I opened the book, and turned to the first page. I read:

Oct. 3, 1991, San Francisco
This morning I fed yellowcake to the pigeons in the park.

I was poleaxed. It was my diary entry of Oct. 3. More: I quickly ascertained that the book was all about me; it had all my diary entries reproduced for the last couple of weeks, since I started keeping my diary.

Around Page 50, I read this:

Oct. 20, 1991
Today I had an extraordinary experience.

“Buy or fly!” the old man behind the counter snarled.

I flew out of the store in terror, went home and scribbled in my diary:

Oct. 20, 1991
Today I had an extraordinary experience.

Nov. 11, 1991
Ran into old Moses Maimonides up in North Beach. We had lattes.

“Moses,” I said. “How can you be here in North Beach, having a latte? You’ve been dead for centuries.”

“I suppose I am immortal through my work.”

“What are you reading?”

It was the racing form.

“What horse do you like?”

He pointed to name, a very long one:

“Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest ‘He knows’, then it necessarily follows that that man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God’s knowledge would be imperfect.”

And that’s the problem!

If God knows in the past that in the future, I, Predestynaski, will sell yellowcake to jihadists, then I must sell it -- whether I want to or not.

For if I did not sell it, then God would be wrong; but God cannot be wrong about anything, and still be God.

But because God’s knowledge of the future is absolute, all human activities are necessitated by His knowledge. Men are mere puppets: no free will. Thus there can be no moral accountability, and religious belief is useless. No one can be blamed for anything: they should empty the prisons! Even Hitler’s Holocaust was morally indifferent, for God’s foreknowledge of it, and not Hitler’s actions or intentions, had made the Holocaust happen.

Thus was I forced to renounce God and give up my priestly aspirations, for it was not possible to worship that entity Who is the author of all iniquity. He sold the yellowcake, and not I!

As it is written in Isiah 45:7: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

Earlier I spotted Nadia. She wrinkled her nose at me and I said, “Nadia! Let’s discuss the fraught problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge with human free will!” But she closed the door in my face. From Nadia, nothing.

I guess she’s not very intellectual.

Here is my problem: It seems that the Book of Predestynaski in the bookshop contained an exact reproduction of all that I had written up until now. What is more, it is fat: evidently thousands of pages long.

Reasoning inductively, I must conclude that the rest of the book contains an infallible account of the future history of my life: the parts of my diary that I have yet to write. If so, then the book itself is omniscient.

If like God the book is omniscient, then I am unfree, for all my future acts have already been infallibly written down. But I must be free; the desire for freedom motivated my escape from the Soviet bloc!

Wait, I will test my theory. I will keep my diary for a month or so, and then compare it with the book in the store.

Dec. 13, 1991
I went back to the bookshop, found the damned thing and read past Page 50 and there they were: all of my previous diary entries for the last month.

“Buy or fly!” the old man behind the counter snarled.

Back in my room, I brooded. Finally I slapped my knees and said: “Witold! The book is either God Himself, or God’s revenge. Perhaps it is His punishment for my renunciation and profanation.”

Concluding that the book is the infallible chronicle of my life, it now behooves me to attempt to prove that free will can indeed co-exist with divine (or biblio) omniscience. If I can succeed in doing this, then God (or the book) can know everything in advance, and I, Witold Predestynaski, can still be free!

But, how shall I do it?

Hm!

Dec. 24, 1991
Christmas Eve. The Soviet Union has collapsed! Yeltsin stood on a tank, and now the Hammer and Sickle is being lowered from above the Kremlin! What a glorious day! The end of the damned Reds!

Still, it means nothing. It was all foreordained by God, if God exists. And if He doesn’t, then what is the basis of morality? Why the Yeltsinites, and not the Reds? Hm!

No answer.

Sometimes I think about that yellowcake I sold. I wonder what happened to it.

No answer to that, either.

Jan. 5, 1992
I checked out a lot of philosophy books from the San Francisco Public Library, while making an important discovery: the library has a secret shelf that no one knows about, except for me. It has a nose on it, and one can hide books in its nostrils.

In addition to Maimonides there is Aquinas, Boethius, Occkam, Molina, Plantinga, pah! Who can follow the labyrinths of their reasoning? Still, it seems that this subject, the problem of reconciling divine omniscience with human free will, also known as the problem of theological fatalism, has been around for ages. But that’s the problem with philosophy! No problem ever gets solved.

March 26, 1992
I have solved the problem of theological fatalism.

I pounded on Nadia’s door, wanting to share my discovery with her. But she did not open it. Oh, I knew she was in there –- I could hear her stirring when I put my ear to the door! But she pretended to be away. Why is that? Maybe, in spite of her overtures to me, she is fundamentally shy?

“Nadia!” I screamed. “Open the door!”

“Go away, you filthy pig!”

Yep, she’s shy, all right. That’s the problem.

Here’s the solution:

God’s foreknowledge does not necessitate my action (in this case, selling yellowcake) in the future. Just the other way around! My free act in the present is what necessitates God’s infallible foreknowledge in the past!

It was not necessary for me to sell yellowcake: in fact, assigning necessity to the consequent of the antecedent, in cases where the consequent is metaphysically contingent, is a logically fallacious move. All that was necessary was the conjoint state of affairs in which: necessarily (if Predestynaski sells yellowcake, then God will foreknow this act).

Suppose I had declined to sell it? Then: Necessarily, (if Predestynaski declines to sell yellowcake, then God will foreknow that he declines to sell).

The traditional problem is formulated as: If God knows x in advance, then x must occur. But I have discovered that this is wrong. The proper formulation is: If God knows x in advance, then x will occur. Yes, it will occur, but it does not have to (must) occur!

Whatever I do the infallible God (and the infallible book in the bookshop) will foreknow, but what I will do is up to me. God’s foreknowledge of our future acts no more forces our actions, than my watching Nadia try to seduce me, forces her to try to seduce me. Freedom!

May 10, 1992
Last night I had a nightmare. I was about to sell yellowcake. Suddenly the sky brightened, and the clouds parted. To a blast of horns a host of angels descended from the heavens, flanking a dazzling light that resolved itself into the actor George Burns.

He was smoking a cigar. Just as he was about to touch down he tripped and fell, landing on his face to a sour blat of the horns. The cigar was mashed, and the angels were chagrined.

He arose with wounded dignity, clapping the thighs of his trousers to clean them. Then he lighted again his mashed cigar, and sat down on a lawn chair. In his gravelly voice he said with a wistful sigh: “So much for instilling a sense of awe in one of my humble servants, eh, Witold?”

“God,” I said, “Do you expect me to believe that you have infallible foreknowledge of all future acts, if you can’t even descend from Your heavenly throne, guided by Your heavenly hosts, without falling flat on Your face?”

“Believe whatever you like,” he said, sounding cross. “You think it’s easy upholding all of creation from nanosecond to nanosecond, across the foggy ruins of time? You try it sometime, Witold, and see if you don’t trip and fall every now and then.” The Lord was snappish.

“Sorry, Lord.” I was sheepish.

“By the way,” God said, in his gravelly voice, pointing the cigar at the fissile materials. “With respect to that yellowcake, in just a moment you are going to –-“

“Wait, wait!” I protested, clapping my hands to my ears. “Don’t tell me! You’ll spoil everything!”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I have solved the foreknowledge problem, but now I realize that there is a further problem: the foretell conundrum. If you tell me what I plan to do, and then I don’t do it –-“

“Yeah?”

“But that’s impossible, don’t you see! If I defy Your prediction, it would mean either that You are not omniscient after all, in which case You are not really God; or it would mean that You both have, and fail to have, infallible certain knowledge about all future acts, in which case a violation of the Law of Non-contradiction occurs.”

“I hear they can put you in jail for that,” God observed wryly.

“The only option that I can see is that whatever you predict to me that I will do, I will do whether I want to or not; so I am back to Square One! No free will!”

Just then God vanished in a blaze of light and a puff of smoke, leaving behind, on His chair, a pierogi. I saw old Maimonides smirking at me; no doubt he was amused by my presumption in claiming to have solved an ancient philosophical riddle that has bedeviled the best minds in history. He slapped me upside the head, and I awoke in a cold sweat.

So my solution to the omniscience/free will problem has been sabotaged, dear Book, but that is not all: I realized that the problem exists in reality, in the form of the Book of Predestynaski in the bookshop.

Suppose I were to read the future part of it: my as-yet unwritten diary entries. To do so would be to have my future infallibly foretold; but what would happen if I tried to contradict the book’s infallible predictions? In that case, then, why … pah! All this stupid thinking makes my head hurt!

And worse still: last night, while coming home, I stopped on the threshold of the hall, and backed up into the shadows. I watched Nadia escorting some man to her room. He was talking gibberish, in the rapid-fire voice of a life insurance salesman, and she was giggling like a schoolgirl. What’s so funny about life insurance? He had his arm around her waist, too. Why? They went into her room, and I heard her lock the door. Then more of her giggles from behind it.

Hm! What can it mean?

May 24, 1992
Glorious day!

I have solved the foretell problem, and in so doing reconciled without doubt omniscience and free will.

The solution is to recognize that it remains logically invalid to assign necessity to the consequent of the contingent antecedent.

If God had told me ahead of time that I were to sell yellowcake to jihadists, it would still not be necessary for me to do that; all that would be necessary would be for His infallible prediction to match my free act, hence:

Necessarily (if at time x God tells Predestynaski that Predestynaski will at future time y sell yellowcake, then Predestynaski will sell it at y).

Suppose I had decided to defy God, and not sell the materials?

Then, free will would be preserved in one of the following ways: either God would not have disclosed his prediction in the first place; or, if He had, perhaps I would have misunderstood His words, or forgotten them. Either way, I would have gone on to sell the stuff, but would have done so freely.

What does it mean for the book in the store? It means that my free will shall remain intact, provided that I never read the future part of it.

Or, if I did read it, and decided to defy its predictions, I would either forget those predictions, or misunderstand them, or –- or something, damn it, would happen to make my actions match the book’s forecasts, without sacrificing my freedom.

Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

The new problem, though, is that Nadia and that life insurance salesman are meeting rather frequently in her room. My God, how many meetings does it take to buy life insurance? And why all the giggling? I don’t see what’s funny about life insurance; I think one’s mortality is a fairly grave topic, don’t you?

Moreover -- let’s face it! –- other men visit her, too. Lots of them! I am beginning to wonder whether Nadia is running some sort of small business out of her room. If so, it would behoove her to dress more professionally, wearing longer skirts. A pantsuit would be best. I wonder what she is selling.

Now it has occurred to me, Dear Book: I might find out what the future holds for me and my wife to be, Nadia, if I buy the Book of Predestynaski in the bookstore, and … and read my future diary entries in it!

May 27, 1992
Today I bought the book.

“That?” the gnome behind the counter railed with a grimace of disgust. “You want to buy that? It’s some old fool’s diary! I don’t even know how I came by that thing.”

Some old fool’s diary! If only he knew! By now I had concluded that the book was God Himself, the Word made words.

“How much?”

“You can have it for a dollar … no, wait! I’ll give you a dollar, to take it off my hands.” And he did.

A dollar! The dullard.

He had paid me to remove God from his bookstore.

Back in my room, I compared my diary with the book. My diary filled maybe a hundred pages, while the bookstore Book of Predestynaski was enormous. This meant, I decided, that I am destined to live a long time.

I cracked open God, but then paused, and thought back on my resolution of the foretell conundrum.

Did I dare test my theory?

I slammed the book shut. Maybe it was not God –- maybe it was the devil!

But I opened Him again … and found the page with the latest entry in my own, ongoing diary. Beyond that page lay the future, veiled in mist …

I thought about Nadia. I had been thinking of paying her a visit, to see if I could help her pick a life insurance policy or at least improve her wardrobe.

Just a peep, I thought, a quick peep can’t hurt. I read a little way ahead, a few hours into my subjective future: my future diary entries.

The following words popped out at me:

…“Nadia,” I pleaded, “Nadia! All the time I see you in the hall, and you give me that come-hither nose twitch, but when I try to respond to your overture, you slam the door in my face! Why, why?”

What she said just about floored me:

“I twitch my nose when I see you coming because you stink like a bum in a Dumpster!”

Then she slammed the door in my face.

I slammed shut God.

“Impossible!” I shouted at Him. “You’re lying! That can’t happen! I shower! Sometimes! I’ll prove it’s impossible!” And I burst out of the room, stormed down the hall and hammered on Nadia’s door until she finally opened it and wrinkled her nose at me.

“Nadia,” I pleaded, “Nadia! All the time I see you in the hall, and you give me that come-hither nose twitch, but when I try to respond to your overture, you slam the door in my face! Why, why?”

What she said just about floored me:

“I twitch my nose when I see you coming because you stink like a bum in a Dumpster!”

Then she slammed the door in my face.

Shaking with humiliation, I went back into my room and scribbled this traumatic account down in my own diary, and when I finally quit writing I slapped my hand on my forehead and was completely amazed.

My diary now precisely matches up with the predicted event inside of the book; moreover, the book’s prediction had not forced me to confront Nadia; I had done that freely; indeed without even thinking about it.

But more: I had only wanted to do what I did -- confront Nadia -- because I had read that I was going to do it! Otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it!

Does this mean that if I hadn’t read the book, the entry in it would have been different?

I swooned, positively paralyzed by the potent poison of paradox.

Then I realized that, yes, of course, had I not looked inside the book, then its contents would indeed have been different, to correspond with what I actually did, or would do! This fact gave me an eerie feeling, yet it was perfectly consistent with the logic of the whole situation.

I gazed at God in terror and awe. “It will never do to have you around,” I finally stated with firm conviction.

I resolved to destroy Him by fire.

I tucked Him under my arm, left my room and went out into the street. At a vacant lot at the end of the road, I dug a hole in the ground, placed Him in it and took a cigarette lighter from my pocket.

Just as I was about to set fire to Him, it occurred to me that to immolate Him would be to destroy the universe that He upheld. Consequently, instead of burning Him, I hid Him inside one of the nostrils of the nose that I mentioned earlier, the one on the secret shelf at the San Francisco Public Library.

Queen Nadia IV
I showered today, in the communal bath. Then, leaving the shower with a towel tied around my waist, I spotted Nadia in the hall.

“Nadia!” I cried, reaching for her, which caused the towel to slip from my waist and fall to the floor. “I am clean!” But still she shut the door in my face. There is no pleasing that woman!

In my room I lay on the bed, watching the weather report on TV. The weatherman is named Edison Clowds.

“In August” Clowds forecast, “on a Thursday, it will be foggy, foggy, foggy, Witold, and this fog will leave you so depressed that at one minute before midnight, you will …”

I ran out the door, and into the street.

A flock of pigeons were eating pierogis. They looked up at me with their beady little eyes. I have known for a long time that they wanted to tell me something, and now the patriarch of this clan warbled, “Where is our yellowcake, Witold, to go with our dumplings? You Russians have a saying: ‘Yellowcake is the beginning of everything.’”

“I am not Russian, but Polish,” I retorted angrily, but already I was patting my pockets for the yellowcake that I usually keep wrapped in plastic, but found nothing because I no longer had pockets. Then I remembered that I had neglected to dress after showering; I did not even have my towel. I backed away from the pigeons but then the patriarch said, “Predestynaski, it is written that next Wednesday morning, just before 11, you will…”

Then all the pigeons started flapping their wings and squawking at me, quoting from the Hidden Book; I ran away screaming with my hands covering my ears. The statues that always follow me with their eyes were now moving their lips, trying to tell me what the future held for me; department store mannequins, TV transmission towers and even small children with the voices of adults were reciting passages from the hidden Book of Predestynaski! It seems that in hiding it, I had somehow freed, Pandora-like, its contents. Fortunately, because all of them were reciting different passages from the book, all I heard was white noise.

But suddenly the foghorns started up: “Veee-told! Veee-tolld! Next Wednesday, you will -–“

I again clamped my hands over my ears and began loudly singing the Polish National Anthem to drown out the foghorns. At that moment men in uniform, just like those in Poland before the fall of Communism, cudgeled me, and all became dark.

Date Uncertain
I am better now. I have bought my room, and lined it with soundproof rubber padding. I have locked the door with big bolts, and never leave it. Attendants slip food trays through a slot at the bottom of the door. When I am feeling up to it I scribble in my diary.

I had decided, after my encounters in the street, that to preserve my free will, I would have to kill it. All my tormentors were trying to recite to me passages from the hidden Book of Predestynaski. But now the padded walls muffle their prophetic voices; the TV is gone, the window sealed. Now, no one can get at me. As for Nadia, to hell with her! Let her buy life insurance from someone else.

July the Infinite
White pigeons flowed out of the muzzle of an extinct volcano, and I counted them. Their numbers approached infinity, and they wheeled about in the azure sky like iridescent angels, perhaps in homage to me.

I inferred that forevermore none but white pigeons would fly forth.

But then that damned Phillip Osoffee visited me (“You can call me Phil”) wearing his beret and his tweed jacket with the elbow patches, and puffing on his pipe. He ground his staff into my belly and said, “What about the problem of (puff-puff) induction, Witold, eh? What about (puff-puff) that?”

I realized with a flash of insight that one cannot logically conclude that because all pigeons heretofore have been white, then all future pigeons will be white, too. The next one might be black.

Inductive reasoning fails!

This meant that the hidden Book of Predestynaski, the book that has ruined my life and from which my tormentors were lately quoting, might in fact have nothing to do with me at all! There is no valid inductive inference from the contents of the book so far matching up with my own life, to the conclusion that the rest of the book is a replica in advance of the diary that I have yet to write!

The volcano rumbled to life, spewing burning embers and boiling lava. The sky became tremulous with redness amid blinding bands of yellow yelling. Then out of that stinking muzzle black pigeons flew like bats out of hell. The whole world shook and shattered, and the stars and the moon fell from the sky into churning seas of fire and blood. Note to self: from now on, it’s decaf for me.

Happy Birthday to Me
Today I had visitor.

Nadia!

And on my birthday, too!

I had to fold her in two and pull her in through the food tray slot at the bottom of the door. She had a birthday cake with her, decorated with a single candle.

“Nadia, you shouldn’t have!” She lighted the candle. “And it’s lemon! My favorite.”

“Wait,” she said, “don’t blow it out.”

I watched the fire run down to the cake. She was counting down: 10 … 9 … 8…

Just before the fire consumed the fuse on the yellowcake, she stunned me by saying, “Yours is the kind of stink that can’t be washed off with soap and water.”

Zero.

Augustus Caesar
I have hit upon a solution to prove that the book is an impostor, a fraud; neither omniscient, nor yet God nor even the devil: My own diary, if published, would take up about 150 pages; by contrast the hidden book is vast. Therefore, to prove that it is not all about me, I will kill myself, making my diary half vast.

It is foggy, foggy, foggy, and it is one minute to midnight. Let loose the sluices of my veins, to replenish, with blood atonement, the flowers of Time.

Thus ends (almost) Witold Predestynaski’s diary, which we have excerpted here. Did he really take his own life to prove that the hidden book was a fraud? Or was there a deeper reason? Here are his final writings; judge for yourself:

“If God does not exist, life is meaningless.”

“If God exists but His infallible foreknowledge renders all our actions unfree, life is meaningless.”

“If (as I now believe) God exists, but His infallible foreknowledge comes about as a result of our free acts, then moral accountability is real.”

“If moral accountability is real, then I am a moral monster for selling fissile materials that could be used to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Could it be that the statues in San Francisco followed me with their eyes, to press upon me my unabsolvable guilt?”

The final word he ever wrote trailed off in a hopeless scrawl of blood: “yellowcake.”

It would seem that this unfortunate man, though liberated by the discovery that he had free will in spite of God’s infallible foreknowledge, was destroyed by the very same discovery, because he could blame not God, but only himself, for the monstrous sale of fissile materials.

By various circuitous routes, his bloodstained manuscript (how he managed to smuggle a razor into the cell at the asylum to which he was confined is unknown) made its way to us, scholars at the San Francisco branch of the United States Department of Metaphysics (Bureau of Ontology). We dispatched a team of analytic philosophers to search the San Francisco Public Library for the secret shelf where Predestynaski hid the finished Book of Predestynaski inside a nose. Initially our efforts were stymied because we were looking for a nose; it turned out, though, that Predestynaski had stashed the volume inside a knows, apparently having confused the two words because they sound alike (English being his second language). Once we realized this, finding the book was easy.

The bookshop Book of Predestynaski is not only long, it is infinite. It does not exist solely in our familiar 4D Minkowski spacetime, but orthogonally in Hilbert’s n-dimensional mathematical configuration space. It contains a branching story line wherein every possible outcome of Predestynaski's life is chronicled. It is the ultimate hypertext. It is, of course, not God at all, but the quantum wave function of the universe, the true ground of reality.

On some quantum branches he never leaves the Soviet bloc; in others he does, ending up not in San Francisco but elsewhere. In some branches his opprobrious dealings in fissile materials are replicated, but in others they are not. Moreover, in many story lines he commits suicide, but in others he lives on.

More:

The book contains the stories of all people, and all dreams, and all possible variations of lives and dreams.

It seems, in reading the early parts of the Omniscient Book that matched the events of his own life, Predestynaski, in his boundless self-absorption and his guilt, suffered from a form of epistemic tunnel vision: he was able to perceive, in the book, only those events that he had experienced in his particular subjective branch. Had he been able to read the branching (hypertext) book, he would have understood that it is about everything and everyone, and hence about nothing and no one –- and therefore harmless, because in containing all possible information, it contains no specific information.

That is, in knowing everything that could possibly be, the Omniscient Book actually knows nothing at all.

Like so many dilettantes, Predestynaski dipped his toe into the quicksand of philosophy in a futile effort to understand the big picture, and got sucked under. We here know only too well how vile that vortex is. We conclude that Predestynaski was suicided by philosophy.

Postscript: In 2015, in one story line, the fissile materials that Predestynaski had sold to jihadists a generation earlier were used to immolate San Francisco in history’s worst terrorist attack. The fireball effaced the rooms in which he had lived and streets on which he had trod, and it also vaporized the Department of Ontology and the Omniscient Book, just as if they had never been. It also destroyed this manuscript, which therefore must now end.

Theological Fatalism, Part 3: Reply to Robert P...

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:11:55 +0000

By David Misialowski (2006)

In the third chapter of his dissertation, Robert considers the Molinist solution to the alleged foreknowledge/free will incompatibility. It is proposed that God has Middle Knowledge, which lies roughly between God's natural knowledge (of all necessary truths and possible truths) and free knowledge (of what God Himself will freely do, and hence the actual conditions of His creation). As Robert explains, this supposed new type of knowledge is intended to make it possible for God to be omniscient and for agents to be free. The concept of middle knowledge introduces the concept of counterfactuals.

The idea, roughly, is that while God knows what I will do at some particular time in some particular scenario, he also has counterfactual knowledge of what I would have done had I been placed in a different set of circumstances. Apparently this is intended to preserve free will on the ground that depending on the particular scenario, I can freely choose my response. God just knows, given any particular scenario, what I would, or wouldn't, do.

There is an extensive literature on Molinism, which was forumulated by the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina. What Molinism boils down to, though, is this: The Molinist wishes to say that the formulation, If God knows I will do p, then I will do p, is wrong; rather it is correct to say: If I do p, then God knows I will do p; where I do p freely.

This is, of course, the point I have argued for all along. So I agree with the Molinist take insofar as it embraces the content of God's foreknowledge as a semantic but non-caused result of human free will.

As I have tried to argue, rightly or wrongly, well or badly, modern interpretations of modal logic can give us a lot of confidence in the claim that, If I do p, then God knows I will do p, where I do p freely. Molina, though, did not have access to those logical arguments, and it seems that he felt compelled to elucidate a big superstructure of ideas to accommodate his (correct) intuition that God's infallible foreknowledge entailed nothing, but instead was entailed by the free acts of moral agents. One of the reasons he felt obligated to do this was that, in addition to making God's omniscience compatible with human freedom and moral responsibility, he wished to preserve God's sovereignty, the notion that God, so to say, ruled the world, and no scenario played out without his willing it. At this point the Molinist doctrine seems to go adrift (at least that is my impression), but this doesn't worry me because I am not concerned with God's sovereignty, or for that matter, with whether God exists at all. (Maybe I should note that I am an agnostic atheist and Robert is an agnostic theist, so perhaps we make good bookends.) I'm currently only concerned with the logical problem of some essentially omniscient agent (who might not even be God) coexisting with human freedom. To the extent that Molinism goes beyond the flat claim that human free acts determine God's foreknowledge, I find Molinism superfluous.

Nevertheless it is interesting because it raises curious questions about counterfactual conditionals that I will briefly examine.

Before getting to that, however, let's look at this issue of making God's sovereignty and our freedom work together. How does Molinism try to do this?

It does this by positing the idea that in addition to knowing what I will freely do given some particular scenario, God also knows what I would freely do in every possible (though not actualized) scenario; i.e. God knows the truth value of all counterfactual conditionals. To return to my ongoing example - the case in which I kill my neighbor because he subjected me to the repetitive barrage of Night Fever by the Bee Gees - God knew, even before He created the world, that should I be placed in the particular scenario of besiegement by the Bee Gees, then I would kill my neighbor in retaliation for his subjecting me to that besiegement. But this raises a potential problem, as Robert notes in his dissertation: "How does it follow that I make a choice in a scenario freely, if my choice is determined by the scenario I am in and yet I do not get to choose my scenario?"

From the standpoint of modal logic that we have considered, the fact that I did not get to choose my scenario might or might not be a problem. But for the Molinist, it is important that God choose the scenario, because this ability to choose preserves God's sovereignty. In essence, according to the Molinist, God knows, in advance of His creation of the universe, every logically possible outcome of every scenario; and then He chooses to actualize a single universe - one that includes, among a fabulous wealth of detail, a scenario in which my neighbor bombards me with Bee Gees bombast, and I return the favor by (freely) killing him.

Here's the problem: What grounds God's infallible foreknowledge of counterfactual conditionals? Well, God is God, and so knows all things. But how can even God know the outcome of events in worlds that do not, and did not ever, exist? This raises the general problem of what provides the truthmaker of counterfactual statements. But however daunting the problem might be, it seems the Molinist must argue for God's infallible foreknowledge of the outcome of all counterfactual conditionals, because unless God possessed this kind of knowledge, then His creation of the actual world would be a kind of crap shoot. How would God know, for instance, that the world He actually created was the best of all possible worlds (assuming that this was His goal) unless He also knew what all other possible worlds would be like?

The logical problem of treating counterfactuals was not well understood in Molina's time, but it has to do with the weakness of standard propositional logic in dealing with non-instantiated events. A summary explanation may be found in Christopher G. Small's Reflections on Godel's Ontological Argument, which is the subject of a thread in the Explore Forum. Small writes:

[INDENT]The weakness of propositional logic in formulating counterfactual arguments is one of the main reasons for modal propositional logic. As is well known, the statement x -->y that x implies y, is formally equivalent to the statement (x)vy. Thus a false statement can be said to imply any statement at all, regardless of its truth value. So in propositional logic the statement "If Rome had not fallen, then computers would be using Roman numerals today" is in a certain sense true if truth values are assigned naively, because the antecedent is false.[/INDENT]

It is beyond the scope of this reply (and perhaps also beyond my current competence) to discuss in detail modal and propositional logic, but in his dissertation Robert raises the challenge of what is called modal realism, sometimes also known as extreme modal realism, which was introduced in the late 20th century by the philosopher David K. Lewis. Modal realism presents new challenges (threats?) to Molinism and even to standard belief in God. I will briefly to examine those challenges.

Lewis proposed that there is an elegant solution to the problem of what makes counterfactual statements true. The truthmaker of counterfactual statements is that counterfactual statements are true at concrete worlds that are not actual worlds. That is, these worlds are not actual to us, inhabitants of this world (those of us who are exchanging views at The Galilean Library, for example). But the worlds that are counterfactual from our perspective are actual from the standpoint of the inhabitants of those worlds. As Robert writes in his dissertation:

[INDENT]The Lewisian account of possible worlds (genuine possible world realism) proposes that 'actuality' is modally indexical. Hence, rather than there being one world that is the actual world, and perhaps other worlds that are merely logically possible, each world is, from the perspective of the world's inhabitants, actual. My doppelganger in his world and I in my world may both accurately declare "I am part of the actual world" despite uttering our statements from different worlds. Genuine possible world realism also proposes that worlds are causally and spatiotemporally isolated from one another.[/INDENT]

Lewisian worlds exist in what might be called Logic Space. Hence, under this thesis, it follows that all logically possible events, outcomes or entities are actual somewhere in Logic Space. Since it is logically possible that talking donkeys exist, then talking donkeys do in fact exist (just not in our world).

It has been famously noted that Lewis's hypothesis, when grasped, generally elicits "the incredulous stare". Of course, since these worlds (of which their potentially seems to be infinitely many) are causually and spatiotemporally isolated and exist only in Logic Space, their existence (or non-existence) can never be empirically verified or refuted even in principle. Nevertheless, Lewis and other exponents of modal realism argue that they hypothesis is serviceable because, among other reasons, it answers the question of what makes counterfactual statements true. But in his essay, Robert points out the problem that this thesis (which, obviously, Molina never contemplated) presents for Molinism:

[INDENT]Since Lewisian worlds are all actual, it is not clear which propositions would be known by God's free knowledge, given that this sort of knowledge is distinct from natural knowledge. Further, the fact that Lewisian worlds are isolated from one another suggests both that God cannot exist across worlds and, more worryingly, God cannot obtain knowledge of worlds He does not occupy, since to obtain knowledge of something, there must be some sort of relation between the knower and the object of knowledge. Yet for this relation to be established requires the abandonment of the principle of isolation maintained in Lewis's theory.[/INDENT]

If Lewis's account of modality is right, Molinism collapses into incoherence on any number of grounds. Again, suppose that my neighbor bombards me with the Bee Gees, and I kill him in response. The Molinist account is that God knew, in advance of His free act of creation, that if I were placed in a Bee-Gees bombardment scenario, then I would (freely) respond by killing my neighbor. Choosing among all possible worlds, God, for whatever reason, created the actual world in which I was placed under Bee Gees bombardment, and responded by killing my neighbor.

But, if the Lewisian account of modality is correct, there is a logically possible world in which, in response to being placed under Bee Gees bombardment, I decline to kill my neighbor (no matter how much he deserves such punishment). Instead, I merely punch him out; or maybe I give him a stern talking-to, or whatever. The point is that, logically, there are perhaps an infinite number of responses I could make to Bee Gees bombardment, and if actuality is indexical - akin to the indexical "here", where "here" is New York City for me, but "here" would be Melbourne, Australia for someone in Melbourne - then in fact I do make all those responses. So it can't be the case that God knows in advance that if placed in scenario S I will respond by doing p; on the contrary, I will respond in every logically possible way to scenario S, though each response will happen in a different, concrete world, where each world is spatiotemporally isolated but exists in Logic Space.

But, putting God aside for a moment, the Lewisian account of possible worlds raises the problem of trans-world identity. What does it mean to say that in this world, I killed my neighbor, but in another world, I merely punched him out? How can it be that the "I" in this world is the same as the "I" in the other world? Lewis contends that strictly these two versions of me are not the same; rather they are counterparts of each other. Perhaps this offers some wiggle room for Molinism: strictly, the "I" who kills my neighbor is a different entity, in some baroque logical sense, from the "I" who merely punches out my neighbor; and God is able to differentiate between the two.

Unfortunately, this won't rescue Molinism, because other problems surface. If all logically possible worlds are actual worlds, this makes a hash of the notion that God freely chose to actualize one world only. But then, did He actualize all possible worlds? Or does God, as Robert discusses, Himself have counterparts at all possible worlds? And did each counterpart actualize the particular world that the counterpart God finds himself in? Another possibility is that there is one God only, and that he transcends Logic Space, in the same way that he supposedly transcends ordinary time and space. Whether this account can be made compatible with extreme modal realism is unknown (at least to me). And even if that is the case, we are back to the problem of why God actualized all possible worlds, when presumably he actualized this world (the world in which we happen to find ourselves) for some particular reason - that it proved to be the best of all possible worlds, for instance.

In closing I would note that according to Lewis himself (or at least according to interpretations of his thought; I'm not sure I have come across any unambiguous claim by Lewis on this matter) God really does exist, but not at our world. This thesis demotes God from a necessary being to a possible being. The thinking goes that since it is logically possible that God exists, then He just does exist at any number of possible worlds in Logic Space. Both theists and non-theists are likely to find this conclusion deeply discomfiting: the theist because modal realism demotes God from necessary to possible, and the non-theist because the non-theist (or some of them, anyway) wishes to deny that God is possible at all. One non-theist rejoinder would be to argue that God is, for example, a physical impossibility; nothing in the nature of our world gives support to the possible existence of an "omni" being. But to argue in this fashion would be to misinterpret Lewis: He is not interested in physical possibility but logical possibility. Hence, while talking donkeys, too, are physically impossible in this world, they are logically possible at some world and hence do exist at some world (where the laws of physics are different, for example). As the philosopher John Leslie has noted, Lewisian modal realism embraces not just God, but all kinds of Gods; for instance, here is a concrete world, indexically actual to its inhabitants, where the Greek Gods literally exist.

Of course, modal realism might be wrong, and logicians certainly do not uncontroversially embrace it. But from a philosophical standpoint it has something to recommend it, and if it is right, Molinism seems incoherent. More, reconciling modal realism with standard accounts of God would seem to present a theological challenge that needs to be addressed.

Theological Fatalism, Part 2: Reply to Robert P...

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:10:51 +0000

By David Misialowski (2006)

In Part I of my response to Robert P. Taylor's dissertation on the philosophical problem of theological fatalism, I introduced my noisy neighbor – let's call him Sam – who assailed me with 51 consecutive iterations of "Night Fever", prompting me to murder him. At trial, I was acquitted by reason of insanity, after my lawyer bombarded the jurors with the same musical assault, 51 consecutive times. Afterwards, as I recounted, the jurors lined up to shake my hand, and one of them even asked for my autograph.

The upshot of my little tale was that the jurors had decided that I had lacked the capacity for free choice when I committed the murder, and hence was not morally culpable. The bombardment by the Bee Gees had prompted an involuntary and, as it were, instinctive response on my part, one that I could not control.

However, what we are trying to find out, in the context of the foreknowledge/free will debate, is whether any of our acts are free in the presence of an essentially omniscient agent, one that foreknows, infallibly, the truth conditions of all events, including those that occur in the future. In this context, even if the jurors had found me guilty, the theological fatalist might protest that I was foredestined to commit the crime by God's infallible foreknowledge of it – indeed, that Sam was foredestined to play the "Night Fever" 51 times in a row on that fateful New Year's Eve night.

In Part 1 of my response, I tried to show that this sort of argument fails. Briefly, it constitutes a modal fallacy, assigning necessity to a contingent event. In modal logic, events are necessary if they occur at all possible worlds, and contingent if they occur at some worlds and not at others. They are possible if they occur in at least one world. Since the modal status of events cannot change – they are logically fixed – it follows that Sam's playing the Bee Gees, and my killing him in response, were timelessly contingent events. From this it follows that God's foreknowledge did not entail these occurrences; on the contrary, the occurrences entailed God's foreknowledge.

More, I argued against the two forms of the Transfer of Necessity Principle that Robert invoked, hoping to show that the supposed accidental necessity of the past, and the alleged transfer of necessity of God's foreknowledge of an event to that event, are mistakes. The past, like the present and the future, does not have any accidental necessity about it, but rather timeless modal truth conditions involving, as always, necessity, contingency and possibility. Under this argument, God’s past infallible foreknowledge of my killing Sam was, and remains, a contingent fact of history, contingent on what Sam did, and what I did. That is the bare outline of my argument. If my argument is right, there is no problem of theological fatalism. Further considerations would seem to be moot.

Of course my argument could be wrong, but one would have to try to show where it goes wrong by a detailed analysis of it, and one would then have to present a counterargument to defeat it. In his dissertation, Robert, although initially broaching the modal fallacy, appears to believe that the transfer of necessity principle and the accidental necessity of the past are real roadblocks to resolving the supposed dilemma of making infallible foreknowledge compatible with free will. While I don't share this belief, let's look at the other solutions he proposes.

The Atemporal Solution

In the second part of his essay, Robert considers the atemporal solution. He begins by writing:

[INDENT]The status of past events as being accidentally necessary is significant to the Foreknowledge Dilemma, since it is reasonable to believe that if A precedes B, and A entails B, then A is causally responsible for B.[/INDENT]

I must emphasize that we are in complete disagreement here, since I have hoped to show that A (presumably, in this context, God's infallible foreknowledge of all truth-apt future propositions) in no way entails B – in fact, the case is just the opposite. But, having said that, how would the case if be God was atemporal?

The idea here, as Robert presents it, as that the accidental necessity of God's knowledge in the past can be circumvented by appeal to God as existing either at all times, or transcending time, or in some fashion, both ways. Robert provides a series of detailed definitions for how his would be, which I will sidestep. Instead, let's look at the crux of the solution: which, as Robert writes, "posits a God who, despite having full knowledge of any event at any given point in time, lacks foreknowledge due to His being timeless and thus not located at any temporal point. ... God knows eternally what I will do at t3, but it is not the case that God knows, prior to my act at t3, what I will do at t3, since this would require God to be temporal."

This seems fair enough, but we must be careful to distinguish whether this constitutes a rebuttal of the (supposed) foreknowledge/free will dilemma, or an attempt to define it out of existence, in the same way that the problem can be defined out of existence by saying that since the future has not yet occurred, God has no knowledge of it (his omniscience being restricted to propositions that are truth-apt. An open future would have no truth-apt propositions to know).

In any case, I do not see how positing an atemporal or omnitemporal God defeats the dilemma, if there is a dilemma. An immediate problem may be found in the observation by Aquinas that Robert quotes:

[INDENT]... he who goes along the road does not see those who come after him, although he who sees the whole road, from a height, sees at once all traveling by the way.[/INDENT]

In short, God sees everything at once – all the roads, and those who travel them. This introduces the problem of how God has certain knowledge of the past, present and future, and, as Robert notes, "...it is not clear how God could know which routes people will take, unless their routes are fixed."

Of course, this problem of how God infallibly knows the future, or infallibly knows anything at all, might be a problem for my solution as well - my solution holding that the entire conception of an incompatibility between foreknowledge and free will rests on a fallacy of modal logic. The various analogies that Robert offers – time as the circumference of a circle, with God as a central point within it, seeing all points in time with no single point taking precedence over any other; or God as an all-seeing point at the center of a sphere, seeing, simultaneously, all events that actually take place, as well as all events that might have been – seem, to me, unsatisfactory, for this reason: These solutions imply that the universe, including all spatial and temporal locations within it, just is, and we would have to agree with Parmenides that time, change, and physical separation are illusions: that reality is a single, unchanging, indestructible whole.

The problem is illustrated by Robert's discussion of the A and B theories of time. It is unclear to me whether very many people are familiar with these conceptions, so let me try to explain them in my own terms, and in so doing, we shall find that the ancient, pre-Socratic Parmenides seems to have been remarkably prescient. In fact, the problem is such a general one that it could be the subject of a dissertation all its own, for it could be the case that a Parmenedian conception of space and time rules out free will (rules out a lot of things!) even in the absence of an omniscient agent.

Let's return to my confrontation with the odious Sam and his Bee Gees bombardment. Initially I had presented this scenario as happening in the future – next New Year's Eve, in fact, the day before Jan. 1, 2007. But I have been speaking of the killing in the past tense – as though it had already happened, and that my trial and acquittal by reason of insanity were events of the past. In fact, talk of tensed temporal relations only makes sense under the so-called A theory of time, which is also known as presentism. Presentism holds that only the present is real. The past used to be real, but it no longer is; and the future is open.

The B theory of time does away with tensed relations, and makes the present an indexical property of existence, rather like "here" is indexical. That is, if I am in New York, then New York is "here" for me; and if you are in London, then London is "here" for you. There is no objective fact of the matter about "here". The same would be true for time, under the B theory. Robert captures the essence of this nicely when he writes: "Consequently, just as I can say 'I am listening to my iPod' and Socrates can say 'I'm learning that I know nothing', it is also true, under the B-theory, that I can say 'I am listening to my iPod now' and Socrates can say 'I'm learning now that I know nothing', where 'now' depends upon the temporal location of the speaker."

He might have added that under this conception someone in the future, relative both to the iPod-listening Robert and the knowing-nothing Socrates, can say, with equal justification, that "I am now doing x" and he would be right, also. In contrast to presentism, this conception of time is often called eternalism, and under it tensed talk of temporal relations is merely conventional or indexical. Under presentism, people and events are said to endure through time, while under eternalism they are said to perdure within it. Under the B theory, it is said that people and other objects in the universe have temporal parts, in the same way that they have spatial parts. To see how this analogy works, we could say that a person's spatial parts, on the vertical axis, are delimited by the soles of his feet and the top of his head. In a like fashion, a person's temporal parts are defined by the boundary conditions of her birth and death.

The B theory of time would explain how God comes to know all the facts of history. He could, so to say, stand outside the spacetime continuum, and look down upon it and see every place, and every when, all at once. But is the world really like that? And if it is, can free will survive in such a place, whether God exists or not?

This is a very problematic situation. The B theory, in effect, spatializes time. No one doubts that Mars (and all other points in the universe) have an independent existence, an indexical "here". If time is like that as well, then the past, present and future are all ontologically on par, and if that is the case, then how can anything I do now change a future that already seems to be fixed by virtue of the fact that it is indexically actual? In point of fact there are many eerie parallels between time and space, and in Chapter Eight of his book, Metaphysical Theories and Philosophical Constraints, Professor Norman Swartz discusses them in detail.

Why should we think that the B theory of time is correct, or even coherent? After all, this is nothing like what we actually experience. In human experience, time flows, and only the subjective present is real. Human intuition accords with the presentist, or A theory, account of time. And if the presentist account is right, free will seems maintained, and it could be argued that since the future is open (no truth conditions obtain) then God has no foreknowledge of it.

Bearing in mind that human intuition is often a poor guide to many of the apparent facts of reality (or at least the theories that we construct to interpret those facts, theories that themselves might be instrumentally useful, though not necessarily depicting reality as it actually is but instead models of it), there are two arguments against the A theory of time. The first is that the notion of time flowing from past to future is incoherent, no matter how intuitively plausible it seems. If time flows, how fast does it flow? One second per second? That makes no sense. For flowing time to make sense, it seems that its rate of passage would have to be measured against some meta-time, and then that time would have to be measured against yet another meta-time, leading to infinite regress. And the second reason that the A theory of time seems false is because of the special theory of relativity, which shows that there is no universal Now. What we call Now is relativized to reference frames, and in general two observers, depending on their relative rate of motion, may wildly disagree on what is past, present and future.

Einstein's relativity seems strongly to support a B theory conception of time, though some philosophers have disputed this.

I must admit I am not sure how Robert, in his dissertation, concludes that the atemporal solution is not compatible with the conventional understanding of the B theory of time. I happen to agree with Craig, who, as Robert notes, thinks that the atemporal solution is committed to B theory. And I think that the atemporal solution is incompatible with the A theory.

Be that as it may, if we accept the B theory of time we can go much further, philosophically, and posit a reality that is strange indeed. For example, Julian Barbour, a British theoretical physicist, believes that time does not exist, that all motion and change is an illusion, and indeed that our memories of the past are themselves illusions. We are all, he writes, timelessly existing "time capsules", and those entities that just happen to have coherently ordered illusions of an asymmetrical past (time's arrow flowing from past to future) will be those entities that have the illusion of sentience.

For our purposes, this is a digression, so let me finish up my analysis of the atemporal solution. Robert worries (I don't, for reasons already stated) that the accidental necessity of the past (i.e. God's foreknowledge) obliterates free will. He worries that:

[INDENT]If at t1 God knows I will do p, then:
It is accidentally necessary at t1 that God knows I will do p[/INDENT]

The atemporal solution, allegedly, offers a way out of this conundrum by asserting that it is timelessly necessary that God knows I will do p. But he worries that this does not defeat the problem of accidental necessity, writing, "Instead, the scope is shifted such that the proposition that is the object of God's knowledge is accidentally necessary, rather than God's knowledge per se being accidentally necessary."

Since I don't agree with the formulation of the accidental necessity of the past or of the transfer of necessity principle, holding that both arguments arise from a failure to incorporate modal logic, I will pass over this. Next, he worries how an atemporal being could observe or interact with temporal events. This is a very justified worry, in my estimation, and one that is often at the core of atheistic objections to traditional conceptions of God. We must admit that the nation of an atemporal God also having temporal interactions could be self-contradictory and therefore incoherent, and if that is right, the atemporal solution fails for that reason alone. Robert writes: "Sorabji, for example, suggests that a timeless being cannot differentiate between 'x occurs' and 'x occurs at t' God will hence observe me typing this sentence, but my typing the following sentence will also be observable to Him."

This idea seems passing strange, and cannot, in my view, succeed. In fact, it seems self contradictory on the face of it. How could it be that an omniscient being can't even tell what time it is? If God cannot tell what time it is, then God is not omniscient.

Robert then discusses "eternal simultaneity" and "temporal simultaneity", or ET-simultaneity. This is an attempt, it would seem, to explain how an atemporal omniscient being can observe or interact with temporal events without the absurdity of suggesting that an all-knowing God can't tell what time it is. The idea here, as I understand it, is that events may be simultaneous with respect to the so-called Eternal Present (God's eye-view) but not with respect to each other. Robert writes:

[INDENT]... it is by this that an atemporal observer is able to perceive all temporal events at once, while recognising that, in the temporal reference frame, they do not all occur at once. Perhaps an apt comparison would be with a film reel, in which each image can be viewed in succession, by watching the film, or together, by observing the reel. In either case, the successive order of the images is apparent to either observer.[/INDENT]

I guess, by this analogy, God sees the whole reel, and we see the successive images, one following the other. But does analogizing existence to a movie reel make any sense if we wish to keep free will? Implicit in this conception is the notion that the "movie" has already been scripted.

Robert worries that under ET-simultaneity, a questions arises as to how God distinguishes what might happen from what does happen. He writes: "How does God, being atemporal, determine what will happen and what might happen, and if He is able to determine what will happen, as opposed to what might happen, then the problem raised by accidental and timeless necessity, viz. that what God knows must happen, is not defeated."

I'm not sure I understand the difficulty here, because again, by way of analogy we have just said that while we see the successive frames of the movie, one coming after the other, God sees the whole reel at a glance, as it were. Again, though, if this account is right, it implies (or so it seems to me) that we must be ontologically committed to a B theory of time, and the B theory of time, by itself, poses threats to free will that need to be addressed.

I will conclude by saying that the atemporal solution has real problems, but I believe these problems are outside the scope of the alleged foreknowledge/free will incompatibility. I personally do not see how an atemporal God can consistently interact with, or observe, temporal events. As has been noted, taking atemporality seriously can lead to bizarre conclusions, like saying that a God who knows everything that there is to know can't even tell what time it is. It seems to me that a more plausible picture (which might itself be just a restatement of atemporality, but whether it is or not, it is easier to grasp) is that God is omnitemporal, just as he is omnipresent: he is at all points in space and all points in time, simultaneously. This would explain his infallible true beliefs of all truth-apt propositions, but a problem immediately presents itself: the concept of omnitemporality seems, at least on the surface, to return us to a Newtonian conception of time and space in which time and space are fixed and absolute, a stage, as it were, on which objects exist and events play out. The radically different conception of space and time presented by Einstein does not seem to be compatible with an omnitemporal agent, but that is a subject for a different discussion.

Theological Fatalism, Part 1: Reply to Robert P...

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:09:01 +0000

By David Misialowski (2006)

It is Jan. 1, 2007. All night, my inconsiderate neighbor has been throwing a raucous New Year's Eve Party. What is especially galling is that he is a fan of 70s disco, and has been blasting the Bee Gees at top volume on his CD player, the din reverberating through the thin wall that separates his apartment from my own.

I decide that his liking the Bee Gees reflects poorly on his worldview, and calls into question the very existence of his soul. Moreover, I decide that if I am forced to listen yet again to "Night Fever", which he has already played 50 times, then I am going to strangle him. Sure enough, he plays "Night Fever" for the 51st time. I wait until the morning when all the guests have departed, break into his apartment and strangle him dead.

I am later arrested. It turns out that my neighbor had installed a videocamera in the wall of his apartment to record the party, and it made a videotape of me killing my neighbor. When I am brought to trial, my lawyer mounts an insanity defense. The repetitive throb of Night Fever, he argues, robbed me of my free will. I did not freely commit the murder, but rather was driven over the edge by the repetitive bombardment of lyrics like these:

[INDENT]Night fever, night fever.
We know how to do it.
Gimme that night fever, night fever.
We know how to show it.[/INDENT]

Craftily, my lawyer plays "Night Fever" 51 times in a row for the jury. I am acquitted in 30 minutes. After the verdict is read, the members of the jury line up to shake my hand.

The insanity defense is often mounted in murder cases. It raises the general question of free will. Are all our acts free, or are they determined in some sense?

It is probably true that most of are acts are not entirely free, but let us, for the sake of discussion, stipulate that in some important sense, we do have free will: Options are available to us, and we can choose among them, exercising independent judgment.

Now let's return to my trial. Suppose, instead of mounting an insanity defense, my lawyer had argued like this: The reason I committed the murder is that I was being watched by a videocamera; and this camera entailed my action. In a like manner, my lawyer argues, the sun rises every morning because people watch it rise.

What's more, my lawyer continues, I committed the murder in the past. Hence, it is now an accidentally necessary fact about the past that I committed a murder! If it is now necessary that I killed my neighbor, it is not possible for me to have done otherwise. Hence, because of the presence of the videocamera, and because of the accidental necessity of the past, I had no choice - no free will - in killing my neighbor.

Do you think the jury would have bought an argument like that?

I don't think so, either.

I will now attempt to show why the argument to theological fatalism fails. What is that argument? It is that the existence of essentially omniscient agent (whom we shall take to be God) and human free will are incompatible. This argument is the topic of Robert P. Taylors's dissertation, and this essay, and the succeeding one, constitute a response to it.

Let's again consider my New Year's Day murder. Most people would see, intuitively, how bizarre it would be to argue that I committed the murder because I was being watched (by a videocamera) and that this watching entailed my act. Most people would also understand that it would be strange to argue that my act was unfree because it is now an accidentally necessary fact of the past.

But suppose my lawyer offered the following argument: God exists. God is essentially omniscient: he has infallible true beliefs about all contingent future propositions. It follows from this that God knew, before Jan. 1, 2007, that on Jan. 1, 2007, I would kill my neighbor. In fact, God knew that I would kill my neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007, before I was born. In fact, God has known that I would kill my neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007, for all eternity.

Question: if God knew for all eternity that I would kill my neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007, then how could I have done otherwise?

The question of theological fatalism seems academic to some. Many people say the problem is a non-starter because an essentially omniscient agent does not exist (there is no God). Others say that we lack free will even if there is no God - that determinism is true, for example.

However, such blasé stances assume atheism or determinism, and we are going to assume, for the sake of argument, that God exists and that humans are not governed by determinism. Although the discussion might be academic to the atheist, for the theist or the agnostic theist it has profound importance. That is because if I must kill my neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007, because God's infallible true beliefs about all future contingent events entail this act, then it seems to follow not only that I lack free will, but also that I lack moral responsibility. For how can I be morally responsible for an act that I cannot avoid doing? For the theist who believes in God's infallible foreknowledge but also believes in human free will and moral responsibility, defeating the argument to theological fatalism becomes an urgent necessity.

Most people would reject, with hardly a moment's thought, the idea that the presence of the videocamera entailed my committing murder, and most would also reject the argument that because that murder that I committed is (supposedly) an "accidentally necessary" fact of the past, I had no choice but to commit it. Yet somehow, foreknowledge of an act seems to be in a different category, and one has the uncomfortable sensation that if an act is infallibly foreknown, then it is entailed.

I argue that this is false. In fact, I hope to show that foreknowledge - even infallible foreknowledge - has no more bearing on the truth value of a proposition then does present knowledge of it (the videocamera example) or the memory of it.

Early in his dissertation, Robert writes: "An obvious escape for the theist is to claim that God does not know the truth-values of contingent future propositions, since such propositions have no truth-values." But, again, we just want to assume, for the sake of argument, the God does foreknow, infallibly, the future; otherwise there is no problem to consider! So we shall stipulate that contingent future propositions have truth values, and that God's prior knowledge of these values is infallible.

In his dissertation, Robert explores and discards several possible answers to the problem, and eventually gives a solution of his own. I would say he has made an admirable study of the problem. But I would like to suggest that all one needs to do is find a single solution early on (if possible), and if one is able to do that, then all other considerations evaporate. Of course, the solution could be wrong, but then it would be incumbent to demonstrate precisely why it is wrong.

The solution I have mind was expressed, in fiction, in my story The Omniscient Book. However, fiction is not an ideal vehicle for working out philosophy problems in detail, though it can be a vehicle for philosophy in general.

In the introduction to his dissertation, Robert writes:

[INDENT]Since God is omniscient, it may be asserted either that if God knows p to be true, then p is true, or that if p is true, then God knows p to be true. In the first instance, p is dependent on God's knowledge, which may lead to the idea that p is determined by God's knowledge; p will occur because x knows p will occur. In the second instance, God's knowledge is dependent on the truth of p, which may lead to the idea that x knows p will occur because p will occur.[/INDENT]

This, in my view, captures the essence of the problem. The issue is that somewhere, entailment resides; the question is, where, exactly? There must be some kind of entailment somewhere, because God has infallible true beliefs about all future contingent events.

As I hope to show, and tried to demonstrate in my story, the argument to theological fatalism grasps the wrong end of the stick. It assumes that God's infallible true beliefs about all future contingent events entail those events, thus dooming free will. However, the events are contingent; how can contingent events be entailed? The right question, in my view, is not what makes x do p at some time t, but rather, what makes God's belief that x will do p at t true?

What makes God's belief in this matter true, I argue, is the fact that x freely does p at t; and if that is right, the problem of theological fatalism is dissolved. Under this account, it would turn out that God's infallible foreknowledge of an event - killing my noisy neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007, for instance - is just a special case, but not fundamentally different from, God having an infallible memory of this act, after it has happened. No one, I think, would argue that God's infallible memory would make a past event true, and I would hope to show that for the same reason, God's infallible foreknowledge does not make events true, either. I would argue instead that propositions like "I kill my neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007" bear truth values, and that these values are timelessly true, because propositions are abstract entities and hence do not exist in space and time. (This accords with the views expressed by Prof. Norman Swartz, who briefly joined our discussion in the thread, What Is Free Will?

However, to say a proposition like my homicide on New Year's Day is timelessly true, does not mean it is fated or predestined to be true. If that were the case, then we would have no free will even in the absence of an all-knowing God. Rather, my actions, while timelessly true, were chosen by me from a range of options; and had I chosen other options, then those acts would have been timelessly true instead. In the case of an omniscient God, He just sees, by this account, the truth of the choices that we make. But His foreknowledge, knowledge, or memory of this actions (or some other, atemporal kind of knowledge) does not force, necessitate or make propositions true, any more than to watch the sun rise, makes the sun rise; any more than a watching videocamera makes me kill my neighbor.

In the introduction to his thesis, Robert presents the formal argument this way:

P1. Necessarily, if God knows I will do p, then I will do p.
P2. God knows I will do p
C. Necessarily, I will do p.

The conclusion does not follow from the premises. Why is that? Imparting necessity to the conclusion constitutes a fallacy of modal logic. As Robert writes: "...the assertion that God knows I will do p only allows one to conclude that God knows that I will do p contingently. Since I will do p contingently, it is not the case that I must do p, and since it is not the case that I must do p, my free will is not endangered."

It's worth looking at this a little more closely. For those who wish an extensive discussion of the modal fallacy, I direct them to Prof. Swartz's Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism, in which he dissects not just theological (or epistemic) determinism but the two other standard versions, causal and logical determinism, and concludes that they all fail for the same reason: they involve a fallacy in the use of modal logic.

To take one example due to Prof. Swartz, suppose we reason like this:

If Paul has two sons and a daughter, then he has to have at least two children.
Paul has two sons and a daughter.
Paul has to have at least two children.

Compare the above argument to the one previously given for God's omniscience entailing a conclusion of, necessarily, I will do p. They both bear the same logical structure, and so if one is both valid and sound then so is the other. But in both cases, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. It might be easier to see why this is so in the case of Paul and his children.

Again, for a detailed discussion, I recommend Prof. Swartz's paper, but for now just notice that in the case of Paul, although he does have at least two children (in fact), there is no logical entailment that he must have at least two children. That is, it is not necessary ("has to" is false) that he have at least two children. Like anyone else, Paul could choose to have one child, or no children.

The fallacy of modal logic lies in drawing the false conclusion that Paul must have at least two children, from the premise that states that in fact he has two sons and a daughter (at least two children) The fallacy of modal logic (modal logic involving the study of modes of being) resides in imparting the mode of necessity to the conclusion, when in fact the conclusion involves contingency or possibility. In modal logic, a proposition can be necessary, or it can be contingent, but it cannot be both.

Consequently, the initial argument to theological fatalism must be rewritten as follows:

P1. Necessarily, if God knows I will do p, then I will do p.
P2. God knows I will do p
C. I will do p.

The revised version of the argument is identical to the initial version of it, with one crucial exception: The word necessarily has been omitted from the conclusion. Now, it just happens to be the case that I will do p - that I will, for instance, murder my noisy neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007. But it's not necessary that I do this, even if God knew, before I was born, in fact for all eternity, that I would commit this act on Jan. 1, 2007.

But, if it wasn't necessary that I commit this act, then how could God have known for all eternity that I would commit it? The answer, as indicated, is that acts, or propositions, bear truth values (some dispute this). If that is the case, then God's foreknowledge of acts is irrelevant; or, it is no more relevant, to the act itself, then His memory of the act would be. If p stands for "Kill noisy neighbor on Jan. 1, 2007", let q stand for "Not-Kill-Neighbor". Under the modal account, if I declined to commit p, then the above argument can be recast as:

P1. Necessarily, if God knows I will do q, then I will do q.
P2. God knows I will do q
C. I will do q.

We see that God's foreknowledge is still accurate: it must be accurate, because God has infallible true beliefs about all future contingent events. However, since what I do at any given time is in fact contingent (not necessary), then God's beliefs about future acts will just happen always to correspond with what I freely choose to do, given God's infallibility concerning His beliefs. There is a necessity entailment in this argument, but it is not in the conclusion. The necessity always resides in the conjoint state of affairs, as indicated in Premise 1. Necessarily (If God knows I will do p, then I will do p) is logical and correct. It denotes (given God's infallibility) the necessity of the compound relationship of God knowing what I will do, and I then doing what he foreknows. But what I actually do is entirely up to me, assuming that I do not lack free will for some other reason, a proposition that we are assuming to be true for the sake of argument.

At this point I am going to argue (though I will certainly consider Robert's other arguments, as well as his own proposed solution) that the whole problem is dissolved before it ever gets off the ground. Robert would not appear to agree, but if I can show that the argument to theological fatalism rests on a modal fallacy straight through, then I have no need to consider any further argument to reconcile foreknowledge and free will because the problem has been dissolved as a straightforward consequence of logical analysis.

For example, suppose we revise the original account to read like this:

P1: Necessarily (If God knows p, then p)
P2: Necessarily (God knows p).
C: Therefore, Necessarily (p)

We have now imported necessity into P2, from which it seems to follow that the conclusion is necessary, and my free will is negated. But this is not, in fact, the case.

In this post in the What is Free Will? discussion here at the library, Prof. Swartz dissects the flaw in the above revised argument. He writes:

[INDENT]The argument is valid. But it is unsound. The second premise is false.[/INDENT]

I think that the author of this argument is trying, in the second premise (P2), to capture the claim that God knows everything. (Or, to be more exact, that God knows everything that is TRUE.) But P2 does not say that God knows everything that is true.

Let's use the possible-worlds idiom to explicate necessity. In that idiom "necessarily" is explicated as "in all possible worlds".

The first premise, P1, is fine as written. It says that in all possible worlds, if God knows that p [is true], then p [is true].

But in those cases where p is contingent (i.e. true in some possible worlds and false in other possible worlds), P2 is false. For it says that in all possible worlds God knows that p is true. The falsity is easily laid bare by letting "p" stand for the proposition "In 2005, the entire ice cap in Greenland melts". The proposition, p, is actually false (i.e. is false in this, the actual, world); it is false (in this world) that God knows it to be true; and thus it is false that in all possible worlds gKp.

What, then, is the correct symbolization for the theological claim that God knows everything [that is true]? Simply, it is the inverse of P1, i.e. the corrected second premise should read:

P2': Nec (if p, then gKp)

From P1 and P2', taken together, the conclusion, C, does not logically follow; i.e. such an argument, while having true premises, is invalid.

Now let's look at the transfer of necessity principle that Robert discusses in the introduction to his thesis.

Transfer of Necessity Principle.

At the conclusion of his introduction, Robert discusses the transfer of necessity principle, or TNP, which principle, he says, provides a rejoinder, or a stronger argument, to defeat the modal fallacy: i.e., it again raises the possibility that God's foreknowledge precludes human free will.

I do not think this to be the case. I think the TNP does not succeed in providing an argument for theological fatalism, either in the forms that Robert lays out or in the way it was considered by Zagzebski in her discussion of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

What is this supposed principle? It arises from the principle of the fixity of the past, which itself is easy to understand: the old saw, "There is no use crying over spilled milk" captures the essence of it. After the milk is spilled, there is nothing to be done about it except clean it up. You can't unspill it, because you can't change the past. The past is fixed.

In the case of God's foreknowledge, we can say that at T1, God has a certain infallibly true belief about some future proposition. Let's continue with my example of the murder that I will commit on Jan. 1, 2007, which I will call p. Now, at t2, it is the case that at t1, God believed that I would commit the murder (p) at, let us call it, t3. Due to the principle of the fixity of the past, we would say that at t2, it is now necessary that at t1, God believed p at t3. The argument seems to go that since God is infallible, and since it is now necessary that at t2 that he believed p at t1, then necessarily p at t3. The supposed necessity of God's belief is somehow transferred to the act at t3, making p at t3 necessary.

Another way to understand the situation is to invoke, as Robert does, the idea of accidental necessity. A necessary proposition must be true; a contingent one may possibly be true or false. So before an event takes place, it might have no truth value; but after it does it acquires such a value, and because the event is now in the past, it is accidentally necessary that it has just the value that it does, because the past is fixed (or so the argument goes). We would have to use this account of accidental necessity to replace modal contingency. As we have seen, the conclusion in the initial argument as presented was modally contingent, and it was a flaw of modal logic to assign necessity to it. The TNP, evidently, is offered as a way to get around this objection and reinstall necessity to the conclusion.

Robert offers two versions of TNP. They are:

TNP 1

P1. []f
P2. [](f -> y)
C. []y

TNP 2

P1. []f
P2. [](f <-> y)
C. []y

The symbol [] denotes the condition of necessity; the symbol --> denotes "then", as in, if x happens, then y will take place; and the symbol < - > is the bi-conditional operator, which tells us that antecedent and consequent may each depend on the other. How does this translate into foreknowledge/free will talk? Under TNP 1, we might say as follows;

Premise 1: Necessarily, God knows that I will do p.
Premise 2: Necessarily, if God knows that I will do p, then I will do p.
Conclusion: Necessarily, I will do p.

TNP2, as Robert explains it, is the same, except that Premise 2, which uses the bi-conditional operator, tells us that if I do p, God knows I do p and if God knows I do p, then I do p. In both cases, the reason why P1 is necessary, under TNP, is because the fixity of the past.

At this point I am going to skip over the details of the various arguments that Robert offers concerning TNP in his introduction, because I think all versions of TNP are wrong. So I'll cut to the chase.

At the conclusion of his Introduction, Robert writes that the full argument goes like this:

P1. Necessarily, if God knows at t1 that I will do p at t3, then I will do p at t3
P2. Necessarily, if I will do p at t3, then God knows at t1 that I will do p at t3
P3. God knows, at t1, that I will do p at t3
P4. It is accidentally necessary at t2 that God knows at t1 that I will do p at t3
C. It is accidentally necessary at t2 that I will do p at t3
P5. If my act at t3 is accidentally necessary, then it is not free
C2. I do not freely do p at t3

Robert goes on:

[INDENT]Whether my act is dependent on God's knowledge, or God's knowledge is dependent on my act, the same conclusion is reached - I do not freely do p at t3. This is evidenced by the roles of the TNP 2 and essential omniscience as discussed beforehand: my act at t3 is fixed at any given point in time, since God's knowledge that I will do p at t3 is itself fixed, and not contingent on my doing p at t3.[/INDENT]

The above argument looks pretty strong. It seems to circumvent the modal fallacy already discussed. But I argue that it does not. Premise 4 is false. P4 is false because it is incoherent. It is incoherent because it smuggles the modal fallacy into the picture through the back door. Let me state plainly: There is nothing necessary, accidental or otherwise, about the past, except those propositions that are in fact necessary, and such propositions are timelessly necessary.

Under modal logic, necessary propositions are said to be necessary at all possible worlds, while contingent propositions may occur at some worlds but fail to occur at others. If a proposition is necessary, it is necessary at all worlds and at all times. It is a timelessly necessary proposition that one cannot square a circle. It is timelessly necessary that 2 + 2 = 4. It is timelessly necessary that certain numbers are prime. And so on. At all possible worlds, such propositions are true.

Now let us look at a certain fact about history: The south lost the Civil War.

For us to accept the argument given above, involving the fixity of the past and the TNP allegedly defeating free will, we would have to say, by parity of reasoning, that it is now an accidentally necessary fact about the past that the south lost the Civil War. I hold that such a claim is incoherent, a misuse of language. (Think about the example of my trial, and how strange it would sound for my lawyer to argue that my committing murder was accidentally necessary, because of the fixity of the past.) For one thing, the Civil War isn't being fought now, it was fought in the 1860s. What we should say instead, is this: It is a contingent fact of history that the South lost the Civil War. Explicating the Civil War in possible worlds (modal) terminology, we just see that logically, the South could have won the war. This means that there are possible worlds at which the South prevailed. This contingency is timelessly true, and we see how it differs from a necessary proposition, such as 2 + 2= 4, which is true at all possible worlds and which is also timelessly true.

Consequently, I hold that we have to amend P4 to read as follows:

P4. At t2 God knows at t1 that I will do p at t3

All talk of necessity is dropped! And it must be dropped, for the same reason that we dropped talk of necessity in the conclusion of the original argument to theological fatalism: such talk of necessity is a modal fallacy.

With P4 amended, we understand that God's knowledge at t1 that I will do p at t3 is a contingent fact of history, like the South losing the Civil War. And what is it contingent on? On what I freely (i.e., contingently) do at t3!

There is, however, a certain necessity in all these arguments. As I have already indicated, it resides (and only resides) in the conjoint state of affairs of God's foreknowledge corresponding 1:1 with what I in fact do. This must be the case, because an omniscient agent with infallible true beliefs about all future, contingent, truth-apt propositions cannot both know, and fail to know, the truth of these propositions. That would violate the Law of Noncontradiction.

Let me quote myself, from a post I made in the What is Free Will? thread:

[INDENT]I hold that your act at t3 is not accidentally necessary due to God's foreknowledge, but again, all that becomes accidentally necessary is the conjoint state of affairs in which God's foreknowledge matches what you do. Thus, you could do anything you want (within the bounds of logic and physical possibility) and whatever you did, God would foreknow that thing. In the Swartzian [a reference to Prof. Swartz] modal lexicon, necessities of this sort are always paired. However, if you reject this, then the atemporal argument presumably offers another solution, but notice that all it really does is deny, strictly, God's foreknowledge, but God's foreknowledge, presumably, is what we wish to make consistent with free will in the first place. So if you've denied the possibility of foreknowledge, you've merely defined the problem out of existence.[/INDENT]

The above is by way of introducing the atemporal solution, which Robert considers in the next part of his dissertation, and to which I will turn in the next essay. Strictly, though, in my judgment, there is no need to invoke the atemporal solution, or any other solution, to the foreknowledge/free will problem, because the problem has been solved, and no theist need fear the argument, heard so often from atheists intent on discrediting religious belief, that an omniscient God cancels human free will and moral responsibility. God's omniscience does neither, and the argument to theological fatalism is, I believe, a dead duck.

Is Human Free Will Compatible With Divine Omnis...

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:06:37 +0000

By Robert P. Taylor (2006)

This paper aims to determine whether human free will can exist in the presence of a divine, omniscient being. In doing so, the Foreknowledge Dilemma (that God's foreknowledge precludes human free will) is explored and some attempted solutions to it examined before I provide a solution of my own.

Introduction (PDF)
The Atemporal Solution (PDF)
This chapter explores the notion of an atemporal, or timeless, God and its success in addressing the Foreknowledge Dilemma.
The Molinist Solution (PDF)
This chapter explores the theory of middle knowledge, as proposed by Luis de Molina as a solution to the Foreknowledge Dilemma. The implications of Lewisian modal realism for Molinism and the theory's use of counterfactuals are also explored.
A New Solution (PDF)
This chapter examines two concepts that are significant to the Foreknowledge Dilemma, after which a new solution is presented.
Conclusion (PDF)
Bibliography (PDF)

(Download Adobe Acrobat)

-----
The Omniscient Book, a fictional response by David Misialowski.

Theological Fatalism, Part 1: Reply to Robert P. Taylor, by David Misialowski.
Theological Fatalism, Part 2: Reply to Robert P. Taylor, by David Misialowski.
Theological Fatalism, Part 3: Reply to Robert P. Taylor, by David Misialowski.

Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Part 1

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:03:38 +0000

By Awet Moges (2006)

In The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer spoke as a Teutonic philosopher, with mighty prose and thunderous proclamations from the lofty heights of classic Sophia and utterly uninfected by the pretentious delusions of grandeur that afflicted his German contemporaries. His distinctiveness among the early 19th century thinkers inspired Nietzsche to call him the "un-German to the point of genius," (Beyond Good and Evil, p 204) and Thomas Mann in turn called him the "most rational philosopher of the irrational."

Schopenhauer possessed great literary and rhetorical skills in his presentation of a bewitching philosophical construct with perceptive metaphors and penetrating insights that have been echoed, reinterpreted and elaborated by subsequent thinkers and artists in the late 19th and 20th century, and indeed far beyond the tiny circle of the professors of philosophy. In the rogues gallery of intellectuals and artists we find Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, Richard Wagner and Mann, both Russian novelists Turgenev and Tolstoy, Proust, Zola, Mallarme and, most of all, Borges. The World as Will and Representation contained a philosophy starkly different from what Schopenhauer dismissed as the "meaningless verbosity of the newer philosophy school" (Gessammelte Briefe, p 29). Jargon-free writing made this masterpiece accessible to audiences outside of philosophy, and further cemented Schopenhauer's reputation as a major visionary.

Schopenhauer's philosophy describes a metaphysical portrait of reality, a "hermeneutics of existence" (Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, p 214), and solves the problem of existence. The solution to the riddle of the world is the appropriate connection between the outer and the inner experiences - and for Schopenhauer it is representation and will. We should not mistake his philosophy for an alternative interpretation that competes with those of the natural sciences, for it emphasizes the internal essence of the experiential life against the external world. The foundation of this metaphysics lies within the concrete, the physical and the tangible, because concepts, according to Schopenhauer, must have some foothold in the visual or the firm ground of reality wherein they were originally abstracted from. Otherwise, such concepts as the "absolute" or "the infinity of being" are little more than paper money: "With concepts of these sorts, the firm ground that supports the whole of our knowledge trembles as it were. Therefore philosophizing may occasionally and in case of necessity extend to such knowledge, but it must never begin with it." (WWR II p 85) Much like David Hume, Schopenhauer baptizes meaning at the altar of direct perception.

Schopenhauer's original contribution to philosophy is the assertion that will is more fundamental than thought in both man and nature. In a "single thought" (WWR I xii), Schopenhauer put forth a holistic/unified/unitary and systematic metaphysics that hearkened back to the old school philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz. The scholar Rudolf Malter summed up this single thought: "the world is the self-knowledge of the will." The world, according to the language of reason, history and morality, is not the true world, for its sole essence, the very substance of the world, of life itself, is the will that roars underneath. This will is the ubiquitous instinct of the universe, consisting of forces, impulses and dark urges that are all dynamic yet purposeless, thus dispatching modes of explanation such as reason or logic to secondary status.

Besides not being in competition with the natural sciences, neither is the notion of the will merely a stop-gap measure for possible holes in reasoning. "We are as little permitted to appeal to the objectification of the will, instead of giving a physical explanation, as to appeal to the creative power of God. For physics demands causes, but the will is never a cause." (WWR I p 140) However, in spite of its omnipotence, the transcendence of the will is possible, and is termed as the "negation of the will". This is not to be confused with the transcendence of religion, the visions of God, but the very assumption of the attitude that "quiets" the imperatives of the will and goes beyond the default egoistic disposition of the individual.

Schopenhauer's philosophy is a version of transcendental idealism, and provides the solution to the "riddle of the world" where the physical world is composed of phenomena that exist only for "the subject of knowledge." After recognizing this, then, we can explain the possibility of the knowledge of synthetic a priori truths. Man's cognitive functions construct reality according to the four characteristics of the "principle of sufficient reason." The World as Will and Representation demands a healthy acquaintance of Schopenhauer's interpretation of the understanding, the principle of sufficient reason (PSR hereafter), which was the subject of his dissertation work On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In the WWR, Schopenhauer makes many references to this work, but since he obstinately refuses to repeat himself the reader is required to read that first and use it as a lifeline before plunging into the depths of the WWR. The Fourfold is decidedly Kantian where it extends the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment to the assertion that thought is already conditioned by cognizing objects to be determined by other and distinct objects in four different ways. Essentially, the PSR means that there are four classes of objects in the world, and they are all representations. "Real objects" make up the first class, concepts the second class, space and time for the third and the fourth consists of human action. Schopenhauer listed four species of "groundings""

A cause is the ground of its effect: the understanding always assumes the law of causality that allows for the perception of a physical world, which seems to be the cause of our sensations;
A conclusion is grounded in a premise: reason, which consists of conceptual representations, secondary to representations of the understanding formed in and abstracted from perception, functions on the assumption that every judgment contains a justification;
A geometrical truth is determined by the nature of space: sensibility functions with the principle that all things are located in a space of Euclidean geometry and in a time of arithmetic;
The ground of every action is its motive: motives determine all human actions.

Since Schopenhauer's phenomenological method of philosophy bases abstraction in perception, then we should consider the PSR as the abstract expression of what is already evident in perception. Schopenhauer appears as a severe and rigorous skeptical empiricist in the Fourfold and presents a fully-fledged systematic idealism in the WWR. However, the PSR merely explains the "connections and combinations of phenomena, not the phenomena themselves." If everything in the world is mere representation, then we are incapable of drawing inferences from phenomena towards the nature of the thing in itself. Consequently, any knowledge of the thing in itself must be non-inferential.

The book is divided into 5 sections: 4 "books" and an appendix on Kantian metaphysics. The first two "books" deals with the dual aspects of the world as representation, and then as will, in the language of epistemology and metaphysics; and the latter two books resolves the aesthetic and ethical consequences. Book I contains a systematic account of the world of objects: where objects are objects of experience for a representing subject and consequently, there is no object without a subject, nor subject without an object. Book II unravels the riddle of the world, which indicates the inadequacy of the cognitions of the relations between representations, and the inner nature is missing; hence, the riddle is the inner nature of things, and lies beyond the orderly relations among representations.

Book I

Schopenhauer opens with the simple, austere and bold declaration of the world as "my representation", which actually means the world is given to ordinary perception, a world that consists of particular and concrete objects and is open for investigation. However, these objects are always representations for the subject, because the intellect of the subject conditions experience. That is why there is no such thing as an object without representations for a subject - which means a theory of independent, self-existing substance such as materialism is not only false but also already impossible from the get-go. Pure matter, independent of all attributes, may be conceivable, as an abstracta of an abstraction, but cannot be perceivable in experience. The statement 'the world is my representation' inaugurates transcendental philosophy where the representation always comprises both the subject and object.

The universal condition of everything that appears is the subject, a necessary presupposition, already presupposed by the forms of knowledge (space, time, etc). All knowledge of objects comes from phenomena, which is what appears for a subject. Therefore, there is no object in itself, an object existing independently of a subject. The subject's body is already an object of knowledge, and the subject-as-body is a representation. Representation presupposes (as well as contains) both the subject and the object, "for the division into object and subject is the first, universal and essential form of the representation" (WWR I § 7). From the Upanishads, Schopenhauer develops the insight that the subject of knowledge is the unknown knower and is distinct from all objects of knowledge, which means it is also independent of the principle of sufficient reason.

In direct experience the subject perceives "representations", and Schopenhauer describes two types: the intuitive (anschaulich) and the abstract ; the former is perception, and the latter consists of concepts. The universal forms of perception are the properties of space and time and are known a priori, which means they are always presupposed within every perception. Schopenhauer insists that time and space in themselves both belongs to the special class of representations that exist by themselves, and the PSR configures and entrenches representations.

In this exposition, Schopenhauer describes a phenomenology where perceptions are consciousness of objects, and the concept of causation is the only essential aspect of perception because the judgment that grants an object to another as its cause is the act of thought that is phenomenologically distinct from the independent and antecedent perception of the object itself. It then comes as no surprise that Schopenhauer is not charitable to other views - such as Kant's - where all judgments are derived from the logical functions of judgments (i.e., quantity, quality, relation) and all concepts of objects must include those categories.

The abstract representations - concepts - are derivative of intuitive representations because they are representations reflected, or "representations of representations". Concepts are neither perceptive nor individual elements in space and time, but since they emerge from reflection they are necessarily repetitions of the original world of perception and invented by reason as a convenience. A concept is essentially related to another representation, which serves as its ground of knowledge and this series of relations ends with a concept that has its ground in the knowledge of perception. Therefore, all abstract knowledge depends on the world of perception as its ground of knowledge. Those concepts that are related to other concepts are abstracta, while concepts that are directly related to knowledge of perception are concreta. Relation, virtue, beginning are some examples of abstracta; and examples like man, stone, or horse are examples of concreta. These abstractions are provisional short cuts that allow human beings to reason and use language. It is with abstraction that people are capable of perceiving the future and the past, and consequently, being self-conscious of the decisions to be made and being deliberate in actions.

Since concepts are essentially distinct from intuitive representations, Schopenhauer does not think we can ever perceive or truly know anything evident of the essence of concepts. They remain at the discursive level, or at abstraction, and stunted by their nature as generalizations, which prevent them from being an ideal representation. Schopenhauer uses the metaphor of a mosaic to a painting to refer to the relationship between a concept and the experience it refers. Then, the acquirement of language grants the ability to conceive thoughts through abstractions. Yet language can never truly represent experience exhaustively, which leads to the following conjecture: experience consists of extra-linguistic character. This implies that rational knowledge itself cannot truly add to our knowledge because its function is to render existing knowledge in a new form, a form that communicates ideas within a community. Incidentally, since concepts are by-products of reflection, they serve as obstacles in the creation of art - and Schopenhauer notes this in different artists: the singer, the composer, the painter, and the poet as well. With concepts, one can polish his technique in art, and no more.

Continuing as an epistemologist, Schopenhauer distinguishes reason from the understanding, which is the faculty of the mind that produces and compares representations of perception. These representations are objects of perception, which contains and presupposes causality because they are mediated through our sense organs and intellect. The formal and categorical framework of the mind conditions representations in perception. All perceived objects already conform to and are conditioned by the human senses and conceptual apparatus. Then all representations necessarily imply an object and subject, for they are always "object-for-a-subject". Each and every representation of perception presupposes the law of causality, or cause and effect, which is the sole function of the understanding. The modern reader is advised to interpret Schopenhauer's term, the understanding, as brain function, or what the brain is for and what it does in its every day activity as a biological organ.

Unlike the majority of philosophers, Schopenhauer does not hold reason in high regard. Reason is the higher function that creates, stores, and utilizes the abstract concepts, making thinking possible by dealing with abstractions in reflection. These abstractions are concepts that have been made possible by the ability (with the aid of language) to formulate a generalization of many particular instances, or philosophically speaking, the mental activity of abstracting concepts from the representations of perception. These concepts are objects of reason, conceived and articulated via language; i.e., a car is a general representation devised to stand for many individual objects of perception - say, a Dodge Durango; but the concept of car always leaves out many detailed elements of what is perceived or experienced in each particular case.

However, the perception-attuned function of the brain is primary, in both the evolution of the species and the development of the individual. As the "lower" function of perception, the understanding in the brains of all animals operates involuntary and independent of consciousness. For instance, all the concentration in the world can never ever raise consciousness to the level of biological functions, such as hair growth, or lymph glands manufacturing blood corpuscles, and regulate them. These functions are automatic, autonomous, and wholly inaccessible. Therefore, reason, while considered "higher," is actually secondary in the greater scheme of things.

The moon appearing larger at the horizon, the apparent motion of the beach while sailing past it, and others are some of the many examples of perception that turns out to be an illusion (the deception of the understanding). Yet the illusion remains entrenched, despite the most sophisticated appeal of reason, because the understanding is distinct from reason. Perception is immediate in two ways: instantaneousness (time) and direct contact (space). The immediacy of time seems, at the level of perception, not to have taken any time at all, despite our scientific knowledge that there is an elaborate process that actually takes time; and for the immediacy of direct contact, there is no awareness of any perceptual apparatus being in the way between us and the object of perception. The senses are taken for granted. The understanding, because its knowledge already precedes reason, is utterly inaccessible to reason.

However, "if in the representation of perception illusion does at moments distort reality, then in the representation of the abstract error can reign for thousands of years, impose its iron yoke on whole nations, stifle the noblest impulses of mankind; through its slaves and dupes it can enchain even the man it cannot deceive" (WWR I § 8 ). Errors have a greater staying power than illusion, and the very possibility alone charges the history of abstract thought guilty of inertia.

Given that logic (or more precisely, the propositions of logic) does not contain empirical content, it cannot contribute to experience or perception. Consequently, knowledge, for Schopenhauer, already exists prior to demonstration. Schopenhauer further elaborates this argument by claiming that the value of a philosophy lies within its insights, not the logical validity of its argument, for these insights consist of judgments, perceptions, choices or formulations that make up the premises. Granted, philosophy contains arguments that articulate its own position in order to persuade others of its truth/cogency, so they are only a method, a mode of communication, the form, never to be confused as the actual substance.

Like a good Kantian, Schopenhauer avoids naive empiricism when he insists that perception is not only limited to the senses, but also actually includes the intellect, because the intellect already presupposes causality. Thus, all perception is already conditioned by the intellect through its presupposition of causality, which means all experience demonstrably depends on it. This is why, contra Hume, the knowledge of cause and effect does not come from experience, for perception already contains causality. If causality precedes experience, which includes knowledge, then that means both the subject and the object also precedes experience as necessary presuppositions. Otherwise, we have to deal with Hume's unpleasant conclusions in the Treatise on Human Nature.

Schopenhauer describes the experience of empirical reality as representation and analyzable under the subject and object categories, but he does not think they are independent categories; they are dependent correlates. The old squabble between the advocates of realism and idealism overlooks the fact that both doctrinaires begin with pure abstractions, or objects that transcend experience. The realists postulate a transcendent object independent of all attributes, whereas the idealists counter with the transcendental subject wholly independent of all modes of apprehension. Both postulates are independent of experience, yet experience or all representations already include causality. This leads Schopenhauer to reject both idealism and realism (as well as any other loaded questions about the reality of the external world), for neither can maintain a relationship of the PSR between the subject and the object. Every attempt at explanation institutes a causal relationship between two entities, but if the entities are independent of experience and causality is already a necessary structural feature of experience then both of these attempts at metaphysical explanations are impossible by default.

However, representation does not exhaust the world completely, for the world includes something else. The self is "doubly conscious" of the world: on the one hand, externally, as representation; and on the other, internally, as will. This immanent metaphysics is the consequence of inheriting Kantian baggage. Schopenhauer institutes a basic distinction in metaphysics between representation and the thing-in-itself, even though he does not employ Kant's proofs and has arrived at the distinction by a different road.

Book II

There are two aspects of the world: representation and will, which is the thing-in-itself in appearance. The world as representation consists of individual objects that are spatiotemporally and causally connected. We know representation empirically, including its a priori forms. The world as will is the undifferentiated inner nature of all objects. We know the will immediately and intimately, in each individual case; and for other objects, this is known by philosophical reflection and inference. However, the world as the absolute and ultimate thing in itself is utterly unknowable in principle. Ergo, there is no contradiction when Schopenhauer claims the thing in itself as will.

Thus the answer to what exactly the essence of the world, or what it is in itself, is will, which is not to say that it is not representation, but a "presentation" of another aspect of the same world. A reality that consists of representation already includes a subject that represents objects. However, this subject can never be its own object, and is not located anywhere within either space or time. Thus, the subject, as the pure transcendental self of cognition, is, pace Kant, the a priori condition of the possibility of experience. Schopenhauer tries to marry this philosophical conception with the fact that every individual person is already entrenched within a material world by having the exclusive and private awareness of his/her own body. People are more than just mere transcendental selves. Thus, one knows oneself as embodied will. The understanding of the world as "will" is not to be confused with exposition, where causes are sought and investigated.

It is also important to understand that this "will" is not to be confused with the traditional meaning of the human will, which imports rationalistic baggage, because animals do not will something because they think it is good; for rather, it is good because it is something that some animal wills. Therefore, willing is more fundamental than rationality and is beyond consciousness. Moreover, we should avoid the misconception that individuals have a direct and unmediated access to the thing-in-itself whatsoever.
The Schopenhauer scholar Bryan Magee lists two conventional definitions of the word "will":

1. Will as "Inner sense": acts of will (feelings, emotions, moods)
2. Direct knowledge of empirically observed movements of physical objects in space and time that are known simultaneously and directly from within that is not mediated through the senses. Take away all the empirical, observable features from your body's movements and what is leftover are the acts of will. Therefore, the total sum of the observed data composes one aspect of existence. The second definition of the will includes all that the subject of knowing can know in its inner sense, not including the detached, neutral processes of conceptual thought.

Schopenhauer praised Kant profusely for making the revolutionary philosophical distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself, and for not attributing the cause of phenomena/sensations to the thing-in-itself because causation is limited to the phenomenal world alone. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer departs from Kant by insisting that we can form an idea of the nature of the thing-in-itself, since our experience is not limited to the perception of the phenomenal world of objects in space and time: we know ourselves, not only perceptually as external objects, but also "from within", as will or the will to live. The will is not to be the cause of phenomenal behavior of the external objects, for it is actually the same thing, both externally and internally.

Many scholars often interpret the will, as the individual's inner essence cognized in bodily action, as the will to live (Wille zum Leben). The entire body is will by being the manifestation of the means for achieving the ends for the organism. Some scholars think this phrase is misleading because it fails to include the sexual impulse, which plays a much greater role than consciousness; and moreover, the phrase implies a conscious intent to live, whereas the will actually operates by originating and shaping the organism before the emergence of thought, desire, intent, purpose. Since the will is more fundamental than reason or consciousness, it even precedes desire. "Against the mighty voice of nature, reflection can do little." (WWR I 281)

Given that the will is fundamentally one's own inner essence, and sheds light on existence and behavior, Schopenhauer thinks it is possible to extend this insight to the external world by a philosophical reflection. The will extends from the microcosm of the individual to the macrocosm; and thus, the entire universe itself is will. Given the idea of myself as thing-in-itself, I can deduce something about the nature of the physical reality. Although it is not possible to prove that reality is more than appearance, as something-in-itself, the alternative - the denial - collapses back into solipsism. If it is true that my body is, internally, Will in its true being, then, given that the physical reality is externally constant/homogeneous with it and belongs to the same unison of reality (external and internal), it follows that the same is true for everything in nature. It depends whether Schopenhauer is correct in asserting the will is actually the internal being of my body and behavior, instead of claiming it as the justification for extending this conclusion to other things in reality.

The obvious ramification of the will as the fundamental essence is its presence within humanity. Man is, at bottom, driven by "something" to maintain life, engage in sex, and participate in goals; but people pursue those goals according to purposes completely hidden from their consciousness. For instance, the will, in other words, "uses" individuals when they perceive a certain person to be an excellent object of sexual desire, all for the sake of perpetuating itself. Despite the apparent choice or conscious level of attraction, this indicates a fundamental impulse that predetermines behavior, the presence of a biological programming. The real focus of the will lies in the loins, the genitals, where nature relentlessly pursues the propagation of the species, and manifests itself to human consciousness/perception as the emotion of being "in love". Therefore, the individual's actions are not truly free, despite the consciousness' apparent role in "choosing" its actions.

Given that the genitals are the real focus of the will, the life preserving principle, the sexual impulse is the strongest example of the affirmation of life; and for man, as a biological organism, procreation is every individual's highest goal. For nature, the preservation of the species is its only goal, and once the individual submits to the will of nature by procreating, s/he is superfluous.

"Nature... With all her force impels both man and the animal to propagate. After this she has attained her end with the individual and is quite indifferent to its destruction; for, as the will to live, she is concerned with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her." (WWR I pp 329-330) If we are more than just biological units, and our essence is will, then the entire universe is will as well, which continues to manifest itself in billions of individuals (at least on earth) while constantly struggling, growing, fighting, eating, ecreting, breathing, dying; or, basically, suffering. Everyday we "awaken to a life out from unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in a limitless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering and erring, and as if troubled by an old dream it hurries back to unconsciousness".

The inner necessity of the gradation of the will is expressed by an outer necessity in phenomena (WWR § 28 ), which means things are dependent on other things: men depend on animals for sustenance, animals on one another, and the plants on soil, water and other nourishments, the planet on the sun, and so on. This indicates that will lives on itself, because there is nothing else, and its cannibalistic state is perpetual. "Yet till then its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its craving, set a final goal to its demands and fill the bottomless pit of its heart." Schopenhauer has unleashed a daemonic mythological fable from atheology.

The will never stops in its striving, nor does it ever become satiated. This terrifying force leads Schopenhauer to conclude it is purposeless as well as pointless. There is no redemption for the suffering of individuals. Life is completely deceptive, and if it makes promises, it never keeps its word. People are inclined to conceive of the world in rational terms by creating purposes in vain and continue under false pretenses in order to maintain the appearance of rationality. These pretenses serve as layers of contentment, but instead of containing happiness (which in itself cannot and does not exist) they are actually masks of emptiness, a yawning hole of nothingness. Only during moments of boredom, people are capable of seeing past the pretense and begin to realize the futility of their lives. Being bored is lacking fulfilled desires, as well as lacking immediate ones. When a person is pursing his/her desires, time rushes by. But when s/he is bored, time barely moves, and that reveals the existence of the individual being embodied in time. Most people are incapable of dealing with this, so they hurry towards something to fill the emptiness.

The wretchedness of the world and vicissitudes of humanity are evidence for pessimist beliefs, but pessimism is necessary due to the nature of the "underlying reality", the Will: for it is in constant search for a solution that is possible only by the very annihilation of existence. This accounts for pleasure as a negative, a lack, the cessation of suffering, which is the normal state of existence. Every part of the phenomenal world is driven to survive at another's expense so there is a universal war of all against all. Because desire can never bring contentment but increase desire, the Will is the source of suffering. We are condemned to an endless pursuit of satisfying desires, for "we blow out a soap bubble as long and as large as possible, although we well know that it will burst". However, Schopenhauer's pessimism is not a necessary consequence of his metaphysical insights, for it is possible to find a ceaselessly striving dynamic reality as delightful, despite the attendant miseries. This sort of pessimism is on the verge of nihilism, for it presupposes that there ought to be some type of order or external purpose in the world. Moreover, the disappointment ensues once no such purpose is found; however, the presupposition of order is the cause of this disappointment.

The lowest grade of the will's objectifications are the universal forces of nature. Considered as qualitates occultae, the laws of nature - the force of gravity - are neither the cause of an effect nor the effect of a cause, for they transcend causation (which in itself presupposes time, and is meaningful only within time) and as well as time, because the cause of a stone's falling is its nearness to the earth, which attracts the stone. If the earth is not there, the stone will not fall, but gravity is already present. Therefore, since the laws of nature are independent of causation, outside of the PSR, they are groundless.

Schopenhauer agrees with Malebranch's doctrine of occasional causes, where every natural cause is only occasional, where the will is given an opportunity to become objectificated by becoming visible in space and time, and partially dependent on phenomena. A piece of rock expresses gravity, solidity, electricity, chemical properties at a particular time that depends on causes or external impressions. However, the very inner being of these properties, existence of the rock in itself, has no ground, but is actually the "becoming visible of the groundless will". Therefore, each and every cause is an occasional cause.

Since the limits of science lie within the limits of explanation and the nature of phenomena, then the explanation by causation goes only so far. However, Schopenhauer avoids claiming the will as a cause, because its relation to the phenomenon is not configured by the PSR. "That which is in itself will, exists on the other hand as representation, that is to say, is phenomenon." (WWR I § 27)

Then each phenomenon obeys the laws that constitutes its form, and has a cause that is explained only within a definite time and space, always as a particular phenomenon, and never according to its inner nature (WWR I § 27). In this section, Schopenhauer argues against reductionism, which presupposes that physical objects are only the conglomerate of the "phenomena of physical, chemical and mechanical forces that have come together in it by chance" (WWR I § 27 p 142). He does not think natural science has any right to "refer the higher grades of the will's objectivity to the lower ones", (WWR I § 27 p 143) because in doing so, the reduction to the phenomena of physical and chemical forces makes the Platonic Ideas impossible.

The knowledge of the will as the thing-in-itself, despite all the myriad differences between the manifold individuals and the multiplicity of phenomena, explains the interrelatedness, connection, or harmony of everything, and the subsequent gradations of the Ideas. Schopenhauer calls this suitability, and defines two aspects: internal (the inner economy of the organisms) and external, where the entire world, all phenomena, is the "objectivity of the one and indivisible will" (WWR § 28 p 158). The inner suitability indicates the ordered composition of the individual organism, as well as its manifestation as the purpose of its species. The external suitability indicates the relationship between inorganic and organic nature as well as that of between individual organisms.

The inner teleology of nature is manifest in the foresight of animals that behave in anticipation of future events (the beaver erecting a damn, spiders and ant lions creating snares for their prey, birds that build nests for its future younglings, etc.), all testify the phenomenon of the unity of the one will in agreement with itself. (WWR § 28 p 161)

Instead of Kant's thing-in-itself, which he arrived at by inferring from what is grounded to the ground, the will signals Schopenhauer's departure from Kant. The final section of the book, criticism of Kantian philosophy, reveals the differences between these two thinkers in a more pronounced way, and will be discussed in the fifth section.

Book III

"Philosophy has so long been sought in vain because it was sought by way of the sciences instead of by way of the arts."

Schopenhauer is the first thinker to grant art the highest philosophical rank and constructs an aesthetic metaphysics in book III. Contra Kant, Schopenhauer claimed that the aesthetic experience, instead of revealing to us our moral vocations, is the vehicle for escaping the conditions of the Will. Like the message of the great modern religions, perfect resignation is the "giving up of all willing, turning back, abolition of the will and with it of the whole inner being of this world and hence salvation" (WWR § 48 p 233). The function of the arts is the "expression and representation" of the Platonic Ideas. The more efficient the Will manifests or "objectifies" itself in an Idea, the more valuable it becomes; since the art form reveals the nature of reality - a standard Neoplatonist claim that art represents Ideas by virtue of representing the imagined essential as opposed to the imitation of the inessential material.

In this Book Schopenhauer's aesthetics is the attempt to subsume a modified form of Platonism within the esoteric version of Kantian metaphysics outlined in the first two Books. Briefly, the genuine aesthetic experience is the precursor of the apprehension of metaphysical truth. Philosophy consists of articulating in abstracta inasmuch what the artist does in concreta. Thus, philosophy is the articulation of concepts. Both the arts and philosophy are engaged in the same task, and both "work at bottom towards the solution of the problem of existence" (WWR II p 406). Schopenhauer concedes that, given its "ineluctable generality of concepts", philosophy can never provoke as well as art.

The third book opens with a further exposition of the Ideas as the definite grades of the objectification of the will, the original unchanging forms of all natural objects as well as the natural laws themselves (WWR § 30). Although the ideas are "present" in countless examples and instances, their relation to particular instances is that of an archetype to its copies (WWR § 30). All particular concrete individuals in space and time are nothing more than the Ideas filtered through the PSR. However, Schopenhauer maintains that while all the instances and aspects are beholden to the PSR - plurality and change - the Ideas are wholly independent of the PSR, and outside of knowledge, for they remain immutable. The only way for the Ideas to become an object of knowledge is through the destruction of the individuality of the knowing subject.

Schopenhauer admits that the Ideas of Plato and Kant's thing-in-itself are not the same thing, for the former was merely "immediate" while the latter was the unobjectified will. The Idea "retains the first and most universal form...of the representation in general, that of being object for a subject" (WWR § 32 p 175). This characterization is the only form of knowledge, and so, it is "the most adequate objectivity possible for the will" (WWR § 32 ibid).

Schopenhauer beautifully describes the relentlessness of the desires of the will, irrespective of whether the person is pursuing pleasure or fleeing pain, for everyone is "constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion, always drawing water in the sieve of the danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus" (WWR § 37 p 196). At least such relentlessness is not immutable, for there are breaks or momentary repose - and that is the moment of "pure contemplation, absorption in perception, being lost in the object, [and] forgetting all individuality" (WWR § 37 p 197).

The temporary suspension of the will takes place when a person contemplates the aesthetic as a pure, will-free subject of knowing, and in doing so, the pleasure of the beautiful is achieved. During the moment of aesthetic experience, the striving of the will slows down, and momentarily frees the subject from the constant suffering. In a nutshell, everyday life is restless torment and the aesthetic experience is the momentary respite. Schopenhauer did not stop here, for he also recognized that the aesthetic dimension of experience contained a means of perceiving beyond the veils of reality. With typical chutzpah, Schopenhauer goes beyond Kant's conservative formulations with the assertion that art is cognitively superior to either empirical perception or the sciences, and that the intelligibility of art depends on the accuracy of metaphysical insights. However, it would be a mistake to read this section on aesthetic as a critique of the arts themselves, for Schopenhauer merely offered a conception of the value of art, and nothing else.

"Knowledge in general belongs to the objectification of the will at its higher grades." (WWR § 33) Therefore, knowledge is subservient to the will, and consequently, representation serves as a means for the will. Schopenhauer shrewdly describes the exception to this restriction of knowledge when the subject disintegrates its individuality and pries knowledge loose from the will, and becomes a "pure, will-less subject of knowledge" (WWR § 34). This anarchic knowledge is also independent from the constraints of the PSR. The ability of the mind to focus completely on the object of perception will lead to the dissolution of the individuality and devolve to a pure subject, a "timeless subject of knowledge" (WWR § 34), or a "clear mirror of the object" (ibid, p 178). Once the subject is free of the will, the object is no longer an individual thing but the Idea or the "immediate objectivity of the will" (ibid, p 179). Since the perceiving individual is limited to knowing particular objects, for he knows objects in particular locations and at particular moments, from a series of cause and effect, then only the pure subject knowledge can know Ideas.

While the other fields of knowledge (science, history, mathematics) are beholden to the PSR, art is concerned with what exists independently of all relations, yet is truly essential and contains the actual content of phenomena, incorruptible, eternally true: the ideas, which are the immediate and adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, the will (WWR I p 184). Schopenhauer thinks art is a second type of knowledge, completely independent of all relations, and yet retain the essential and true content of the world. Basically, art is the work of the genius. This knowledge in art repeats the Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, which is the "way of considering things independently of the PSR" (WWR § 36 p 185). While the PSR is rational, and completely essential for practical life, the method that wrenches free from such rationality is that of the genius, and is valid in art alone (WWR I p 185). Only the Genius has the ability of pure contemplation, which is being completely absorbed in the objects, sever his service to the will and be in a state of pure perception and eventually, the comprehension of the Idea. Once the individual will - the personal interests and goals - are dropped, the pure knowing subject emerges.

Even genius has its limits. If the genius is deficient in his grasp of the PSR (consequently the sciences and rationality) his individual genius will be severely curtailed. On the other hand, the genius' singular brilliance is due to a "preponderance of knowledge from perception through the senses and the understanding over abstract knowledge" (WWR § 36 p 19). A Dionysos instead of an Apollo. The genius tends to grasp the Idea in things, which transcends the knowledge of relations or the connection of things, and see the one thing that represents its entire species adequately. "The individual object of [the genius'] contemplation... Appears in so strong a light that the remaining links of the chain ...to which the belong, withdraw into obscurity" (WWR § 36 p 194). This ability exaggerates the genius' perception to extremes, and consequently, his actions as well. Striking a moderate balance, the golden "means" is utterly a foreign concept...

Schopenhauer often visited patients at the mental hospital, and his experiences resulted in amazingly prescient insights in psychology. One of them was a relationship between the genius and madness, not because of some defect of reason, but the "unusual energy of that whole phenomenon of the will" (ibid). Schopenhauer also argued against the distinct demarcation between the sane and the insane, because the mad are not deprived of either of the faculties of reason or the understanding. Many of the insane Schopenhauer had visited in lunatic asylums possessed great gifts, but he noted that the root of their maladies lie in the memory where a naturally continuous thread is shattered. Among the individual portions of their memories that took place, the gaps in the broken chain have been patched over by the imagination, which turn the fictional episodes into a "fixed mania" or momentary fancies. The more intense the insanity is, the worse off the memory. Here, Schopenhauer offers an explanation for why madness takes place: if the person's suffering continues beyond the moment it took place and is located with his memory, and has become utterly unbearable, then nature in the throes of self-preservation destroys the thread of memory. This insight moves very close to those of early psychology, particularly that of Freud.

Only the genius has the capacity for utter and absolute objectivity. He can lose himself in his own perception by becoming the pure knowing subject, escape the ubiquitous will, and consequently, the knowledge that always accompanies the will. The utmost concern of the genius is the Ideas, the eternal forms of the world, of phenomena, and through perception the genius knows ideas, for they are not abstractions. Thus, the genius require a healthy amount of imagination to see beyond the immediate objects of perception - the representations - and toward the archetype. The genius uses art to communicate others the Idea he has apprehended, grasped, or glimpsed. On the other side of the spectrum is your Average Joe/Jane who lives in the present, pursuing a life of comfort and ease. S/He is incapable of directing his/her attention to anything other than what has immediate relations to his/her will, and is quick to satisfy him/herself with the abstraction of the object of perception.

Even the most obstinate, stubborn and insensitive philistine is capable of experiencing aesthetic pleasure. The subjective aspect of aesthetic pleasure is the experience of the sublime. If the observer moves from the knowledge of the relations that obey the will and towards aesthetic contemplation, then the observer experiences the feeling of beauty. This takes place only once the observer wrenches himself loose and free from serving the vicious desires of the will. The transition from the feeling of beautiful to the sublime involves the transcendence of all interests of the will.

The aesthetic presentation is a certain disinterested knowledge that takes place once the observer loses him/herself in the object and ceases to think or feel as, be an individual, and then the observed representation becomes a representation of an essence. However, the aesthetic representation differs from the perceptual representation, in the sense that establishes the centrality and moral purpose of aesthetics. Like Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer claims art is the presentation of appearance as pure appearance, once art apprehends the Idea by muting the will.

The opposite of the sublime is the charm, where we are lured into the illusion that satisfaction in human life is possible by inducing a false sense of fulfillment. Charm, or attraction, is the excitement of the will in the form of satisfaction or fulfillment, whereas the sublime feeling emerges from the transformation of something unfavorable to the will into an object of pure contemplation (WWR I p 207). On the other hand, attraction, by stirring his will, prevents the beholder from pure contemplation that is necessary for the sublime.

Schopenhauer dismissed the realist's prejudice that the artist's ability to create art depends on how well s/he imitates nature, because that fails to explain how the artist can recognize what is beautiful. The only way the artist can create according to the standard of beauty is if he anticipates the beautiful prior to experience, before he begins the creation of art. This a priori anticipation is a different sort of knowledge than the forms of the PSR, where the universal forms of the phenomenon explains the "how" of appearances, which in turn develops the fields of mathematics and the sciences. The a prior knowledge of the artist, which "makes the beautiful possible," is concerned with the content of phenomena, not the form - the what instead of the how. By anticipating the beautiful, the artist recognizes the Idea of the particular thing, and "understands Nature's half spoken words" (WWR § 45, p 222). If the artist merely created the objects of art solely based on his experience, then greats like Shakespeare invented all the characters in his play solely from his experience of people. Schopenhauer finds this too far-fetched and incredulous, and insists that the genius creates according to the anticipation of the beautiful, even though some experience is necessary.

For Schopenhauer, the function of art is to provide us the cognition of platonic ideas through the representation of individual phenomena that "instantiate" them, and the phenomenal world instantiating the platonic ideas composes of four distinguishable grades. At bottom is the lowest grade of the will's objectification, the inorganic elements of nature - earth, water, air - which is what architecture does best. None of the other arts can equal architecture's command of the natural elements - the open air, space, light, material, - and moreover, there are no symbolic representations. The second grade of the will's objectification is flowers, trees, plant life, and painting is the appropriate medium. The third grade is animal life, where the two-dimensional nature of painting is insufficient, and sculpture can capture the physical body of the animal, especially its mass, weight, bulk, balance and poise.

The three-dimensional sculpture cannot truly represent human life - the feelings, emotions, characters and relationships require a fourth dimension - time - and all these attributes may be captured in a lyric poem, but the full scale panorama of human life is best expressed in drama, which itself can incorporate poetry. The great tragedies of ancient Greece and the plays of Shakespeare are excellent examples. "Human beauty is an objective expression that denotes the will's most complete objectification at the highest grade... namely the idea of man in general" (WWR, § 45, p 221). Nothing else inspires the purely aesthetic contemplation as fast, and as directly as the image of the most beautiful human being.

The Idea that the great works in poetry expresses is the "man in the connected series of his efforts and actions" (WWR, I p 224). Through poetry, the will expresses itself most clearly of all the representational arts. The summit of poetic art is tragedy, because it describes the most important aspect of life - the terrible side of life - much better than anything else, and ever beautifully. Tragedy encapsulates "the unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance and the irretrievable fall of the just and innocent..." (WWR, § 51, p 253).

At the highest peak of aesthetics Schopenhauer places music, for it does not copy or repeat anything of phenomena - it actualy surpasses the world of perception itself - nor does it copy the Ideas themselves, for it is the copy of the will itself. Therefore, music is much more potent than all the other arts. True music is purely abstract, and doesn't represent anything in the world of phenomena, and therefore it doesn't present the cognition of the Platonic ideas through concrete particulars. Music bypasses both the Platonic ideas and representations of phenomena altogether. If all this is the case, then movies are at least at the level of drama, for they are frozen plays, ideally captured and maximized by the most appropriate camera angle, and augmented by special effects where needed, etc.

Since music does not express phenomena, for it is the inner nature of every phenomenon, the will itself, then it never express a particular emotion or passion - a specific sorrow or joy - instead those emotions themselves, their essence are expressed in music. Because music expresses the quintessence of existence, as opposed to the individual and particular instances, it is the universal and homogeneous language, as well as the oldest, and intelligible to all people, yet impossible to translate into another medium. Schopenhauer credits melody as the disclosure of all the deepest secrets of human willing and feeling, and the invention of such is the work of genius.

(Continued in Part 2...)